I hope you will buy and read Andrea Gabor’s After the Education Wars: How Smart Schools Upend the Business of Reform.

It is ironic that Gabor is the Bloomberg chair of business journalism at Baruch College of the City University of New York, because her book stands in opposition to almost everything Mayor Michael Bloomberg did when he had control of the New York City public schools. Bloomberg and his chancellor Joel Klein believed in carrots and sticks. They believed in stack ranking. They believed that test scores were the be-all and end-all of education. They believed that teachers and principals would be motivated to work harder if their jobs and careers were on the line every day. They created a climate of fear, where people were terminated suddenly and replaced by inexperienced newcomers. If they had brought in W. Edwards Deming—Gabor’s guiding star— as an advisor, their strategies would have been very different.

Gabor is a proponent of the philosophy of management of Deming, the management guru who is widely credited with reviving Japanese industry after World War II, by changing its culture and making it a world leader. If Bloomberg had hired Deming as his lead adviser, his strategies would have been lastting, and he might have really transformed the nation’s largest school system and had a national impact.

I first learned about Deming’s work by reading Gabor’s book about Deming titled The Man Who Discovered Quality. I read the book in 2012. I have repeatedly gone back to re-read chapter 9, the chapter where she explains Deming’s hostility to merit pay and performance rankings and his emphasis on collaboration and teamwork.

Describing his views, she wrote:

“The merit rating nourishes short-term performance, annihilates long-term planning, builds fear, demolishes teamwork, nourishes rivalry and politics…It is unfair as it ascribes to the people in a group differences that may be totally caused by the system that they work in.”

She wrote, citing Deming, that performance pay (educators call it merit pay) undermines the corporate culture; it gets everyone thinking only about himself and not about the good of the corporation. Everyone focuses on short-term goals, not long-term goals. If the corporation is unsuccessful, Deming said, it is the fault of the system, not the workers in it. It is management’s job to recruit the best workers, to train them well, to support them, and create an environment in which they can take joy in their work.

Deming understood that the carrot-and-stick philosophy was early twentieth century behaviorism. He understood that threats and rewards do not produce genuine improvement in the workplace. He anticipated what twenty-first century psychologists like Edward Deci and Dan Ariely have demonstrated with their social experiments: People are motivated not by incentives and fear, but by idealism, by a sense of purpose, and by professional autonomy, the freedom to do one’s job well.

In After the Education Wars, Gabor takes her Demingite perspective and writes case studies of districts that have figured out how to embed his principles.

She writes about the “small schools movement” in New York City, the one led by Ann Cook and Deborah Meier, which relied on performance assessment, not standardized tests; the remarkable revival of Brockton High School in Massachusetts, a school with more than 4,000 students; the Leander school district in central Texas, which embraced Deming principles; and the charter takeover of New Orleans.

The chapter on New Orleans is the best account that I have read of what happened in that city. It is not about numbers, test scores, graduation rates, and other data, but about what happened to the students and families who live in New Orleans. She describes a hostile corporate takeover of a city’s public schools and a deliberate, calculated, smug effort to destroy democracy. Her overall view is that the free-market reforms were “done to black people, not with black people.” She spends ample time in the schools and describes the best (and the worst) of them. She follows students as they progress through charter schools to college or prison. She pays close attention to the students in need of special education who don’t get it and who suffer the consequences. She takes a close look at the outside money fueling the free-market makeover. She explains the role of the Gates Foundation, New Schools for New Orleans, and other elements of what was essentially hijacking of the entire school system by venture capitalists and foundations who were eager to make a point about their own success as “gatekeepers” of reform. She finds that New Schools for New Orleans “functions more like a cartel than an open-source project.” It prefers “no-excuses” charter schools like KIPP. Gabor is critical of the Education Research Alliance at Tulane University for ignoring the “no-excuses” discipline policies, saying “ignoring no-excuses discipline practices at New Orleans charters is like covering the New England Patriots and ignoring Deflategate…[Douglas] Harris bristles at the suggesting that his research organization is anything but neutral in its assessments of the city’s charters. Yet ERA’s job must be especially difficult given its co-location with NSNO and the Cowen Institute on the seventh floor of 1555 Poydras Street.”

She writes wistfully of a New Orleans story that never was: “a post-Katrina rebuilding–even one premised on a sizable charter sector, albeit with better oversight and coordination of vital services like those for special-needs students–that sought to engage the community in a way that would have helped preserve, even enhance, its stake in their children’s education. What if, instead of raising the performance scores so as to lasso the vast majority of New Orleans charters into the RSD, the city had taken control of the worst schools while encouraging community groups…to lead by example. What if it had made a concerted effort to enlists dedicated, respected educators and involved citizens and parents…in the school-design and chartering process?”

Gabor’s chapter on New Orleans is a masterpiece of journalism and investigative reporting.

She concludes that “Contrary to education-reform dogma, the examples in this book suggest that restoring democracy, participative decision making, and the training needed to make both more effective can be a key to school improvement and to imbuing children–especially poor and minority children–with the possibilities of citizenship and power in a democracy.”