Samuel Abrams is director of the Teachers College, Columbia University, Center on the Study of Privatization of Education. He wrote a wonderful book called “Education and the Commercial Mindset.” Most of the book is focused on the haplessness and failure of the for-profit Edison Project, which became Edison Schools, which became EdisonLearning, and which lost money, a lot of money. Abrams’ book represents deep scholarship into the consistent failures of for-profit education.

I reviewed it in the <em>New York Review of Bookss, along with Mercedes Schneider’s superb “School Choice.”

Barron’s just posted a negative review of the Abrams’ book by a reviewer who has made a career of besmirching public schools, teachers, and unions. He hates them all, so of course, he hates Abrams’ elegant expose of the profit motive in education. The reviewer is a polemicist, not a scholar, so he probably didn’t understand the book.

I don’t subscribe to Barron’s so I can’t post the review. You probably don’t subscribe either. I wish I could quote it but I can’t. I know it is hostile to Abrams’ scholarly work because the title of the review is “Slurring Charter Schools: A skewed defense of our failing public schools, and a hit job on Harvard Business School.”

But I know a great deal about the reviewer, Bob Bowdon.

Bowdon wrote and produced a “documentary” called “The Cartel,” in which he compared the teachers’ union in New Jersey to the Mafia. He is a familiar figure on far-right TV shows, where he bashes teachers and public schools.

Read his Wikipedia entry, where it says:

Bowdon directed The Cartel, a 2009 documentary film about corruption in American public education that was distributed by Warner Brothers.[1] The film views the current state of public schools in the U.S. as a “national disaster for the workforce of the future.” Bowdon notes that the U.S., by many measures, “spends more on education than any country in the world,” and chooses to concentrate principally on his own state, New Jersey, which spends more per student on public education than any other state, but where average standardized-test scores in public schools are very low. In an effort to explain where all the money allocated to public education is going, Bowdon portrays a union-dominated institutional culture in which bureaucracies are overstaffed by highly paid administrators, expenditures on school-construction projects are unsupervised and out of control, corruption and patronage are rampant, incompetent teachers cannot be fired, and excellent teachers cannot be rewarded. As a solution to the problem, Bowdon proposes school choice and charter schools.[3]

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who watched The Cartel twice, has praised it as an influence on his own ideas about school reform.[4][5]

When my book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education” was published in 2010, I was invited to be interviewed by Judge Napolitano. I learned when I got there that I was going to debate Bob Bowdon. Judge Napolitano was on Bowdon’s side, and he said snidely, “would you allow any child of yours to attend a public school?” I vowed never again to appear on any show on FOX, as my experience left me feeling deeply outraged by their hostility to the views I had formed over 40 years of study. Bowdon knew nothing whatever about education, nothing whatever about teaching. All he knew was that privatization was good, public schools bad.

It is an ugly experience to get into the ring with someone who literally doesn’t know what he is talking about but is sure of his opinions.