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Article Excerpt
The Worm in the Apple: How the Teacher Unions Are Destroying American Education
by Peter Brimelow
HarperCollins, 2003, $24.95; 320 pages.
Peter Brimelow aims high. In The Worm in the Apple, he seeks to emulate The History of Standard Oil, the legendary effort by Ida Tarbell that helped to usher in the antitrust movement a century ago.
While Tarbell's villain was Standard Oil, Brimelow's culprits are the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). However, though many of his concerns are valid and well documented, Brimelow is unlikely to earn a spot on bookshelves next to Tarbell. Unlike the self-effacing Tarbell, Brimelow overreaches with his rhetoric, distracting from and often obscuring his message.
For example, Brimelow considers teacher union leaders "commissars of [an] American Red Army." The NEA "has chosen to metastasize into the National Extortion Association." It exhibits a "persistent streak of left-wing loonyism." Brimelow cites the words of "Chairman Mao Tse-Tung" to demonstrate that K-12 schools reflect "the most prominent outbreak of socialism on the American scene."
Framed this way, Brimelow will at best reinforce the sentiments of those readers who already accept his basic premise. At the same time, he will be...
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