Mercedes Schneider is an amazing person, a keen-eyed researcher, and a gifted writer. She has a Ph.D. in applied statistics and research. She could have been a college professor, but she preferred to be a high school teacher. She understands the work, and she understands the students. That’s way different from journalists, who write best-selling books about schools based on their cursory experience, or scholars, who write their books based on data, not the lives of teachers or students.

I met Mercedes in the early days of the corporate reform movement, the one led by billionaires. With her sharp intellect, she saw through the hoax immediately. She saw what happened in New Orleans; she observed the influx of TFA teachers to staff the new charter schools. She was never taken in by the grandiose rhetoric of the reformers. She understood that the real goal of the so-called movement was not to improve public schools but to privatize public funding of schools.

In a remarkable burst of energy, she wrote three books in three years:

A Chronicle of Echoes: Who’s Who in the Implosion of American Public Education (2014).

Common Core Dilemma: Who Owns Our Schools (2015).

School Choice: The End of Public Education? (2016).

And she is still in the classroom.

I am now honored that Mercedes has reviewed my memoir. As you would expect, the review is insightful. She understood what I was trying to do: to pull away whatever artifice or cover there might be, and to lay my life bare. It’s not easy to do. She understood.

I urge you to open the link and read her perceptive review. It’s vintage Mercedes.