A couple weeks ago, Obama-era “school reform” superfan Steven Brill resurfaced. In an interview with The 74, the journalist popped up after a decade to blithely disown the dogma on the magic of teacher evaluation and charter schools that he’d once championed, in favor of current progressive dogma on the failings of school choice. Brill, author of the influential 2011 Simon & Schuster book Class Warfare, was part of the cast of star-struck, left-leaning media types who made celebrities out of big-city superintendents and the architects of Race to the Top.

It’s not immediately obvious why Brill decided to weigh in on schooling after his long hiatus, but he had lots to say. Asked about New York’s winning Race to the Top bid, he explained that, “To win that competition, New York State enacted certain changes in process that pretty much everybody thought were cosmetic and useless.” Discussing the Race to the Top program that he once did so much to lionize, Brill now allowed that

[Union chief] Randi [Weingarten] helped negotiate with [then-Deputy New York Education Commissioner] John King to get the final Race to the Top application in, and after it went through, I looked through the fine print  and called Joel Klein. We just laughed about it because it was such bullshit. You knew it was never going to mean anything.

Brill conceded that “the unions basically waited everybody out” and asserted that, “In public education, there are no incentives, and the reason there’s no change is that the workers basically get to help elect their bosses.”

Well. Where to begin?

First off, this is the same guy who, when Race to the Top was shiny and new, saw it as a wondrous game changer. As I put it back in a 2011 review of Class Warfare, the book was “rife with the passion (and, alas, bathos) of a high school sophomore’s diary.” Second, the truth is that education is replete with incentives—it’s just that they’re often perverse, compliance-oriented, or impediments to improvement. (The fact that Brill still doesn’t get this is, shall we say, telling.) Third, back when Brill was lovingly detailing the measures he now mocks and the Democratic officials who are now yesterday’s news, he had no patience for those who argued that lasting change required recalibrating the role of unions in running schools.

Back then, I noted that Brill bristled at Republican efforts to narrow the scope of collective bargaining. I pointed out that:

Curiously, Brill reverses course in his conclusion—attacking Republican governors in Ohio, Indiana, and Wisconsin for challenging union influence by battling public sector collective bargaining. In a bizarre turn, Brill the fire-breathing union basher morphs into a soft-spoken peacemaker who declares the unions invaluable partners in reform.

This was in large part a product of Brill’s apparently reflexive commitment to the Democratic camp. For instance, while Democrats for Education Reform co-founder and Wall Street guy Whitney Tilson loomed huge in Brill’s telling (showing up in his book’s index more than three dozen times), Republicans were ignored when they weren’t being impugned. As I noted,

One is hard pressed to find any mention of people like former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Thomas B. Fordham Institute president Chester E. Finn Jr., Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels, or Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. This is school reform as seen from one corner of the political universe.

Then there’s the Brill contribution that I’ve always found most damning: His insistence on introducing the appellation “school reform denier” to the lexicon. My AEI colleague Max Eden put it aptly the other week:

Brill told a Manichean story of the holy and righteous “reformers” trying to “reform” the system in the face of intransigence from the dark and selfish “anti-reformers.” To smear the “anti-reformers” he even went so far as label some of them “school reform deniers”—with that word’s obvious overlay with Holocaust denial.

Max has it exactly right. And just who were these deniers, anyway? Well, Brill never quite explained. Mostly, it seemed, the phrase was a catchy term for teachers unions and their allies. Except that, strangely, Brill declared that he’d gotten to know and like American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten and thought she should be named Chancellor of New York City’s schools. Indeed, his whole shtick turned out remarkably fuzzy. As I noted back then in Education Week:

Even after finishing his book, I’m not entirely clear what Brill means when he labels someone “anti-reform.” For instance, I think good teachers should be paid more than bad teachers, but I’ve been critical of simple test-based bonus schemes. I think value-added metrics based on reading and math tests tell us something valuable, but I’m skeptical of statewide evaluation systems that rely overmuch on those scores.

I could never quite be sure whether all this made me “anti-reform” (much less a “school reform denier”), but it seemed like the answer was yes. A big part of Brill’s problem is that he knew who he was for, but he didn’t really know what he was for. And a lot of that has to do with his ultimate grasp of education being tenuous and episodic, and his disinterest in digging any deeper. In fact, many of those whom Brill seemed to dismiss as “deniers” (or ignore altogether) were those who’d actually been trying to take on the heavy lifting and dysfunctional incentives long before they popped on his radar.

To read Brill during the Obama years was to imagine that the great truths of education reform were only just discovered in the year or two before he published his magnum opus. As I noted back then, wholly absent was “even a nod toward two decades of fights over school vouchers, teacher licensure, or No Child Left Behind implementation; the hard-won battles of private funders to support charter schools; and the struggles of school choice organizations that have long battled the teachers unions.”

And that brings us to Brill circa 2024, and his conclusion that charter schools are overrated and education choice a false hope. Why? It’s not wholly clear. After explaining that there are no incentives in public education and that employees elect their bosses, Brill muses that the only way to improve K–12 education might be to (wait for it) eliminate private alternatives and require that every child enroll in public schools (so that parents can’t opt out). How will mandates change a system devoid of incentives in which employees choose their bosses? Your guess is as good as mine.

Noting the oddity of Brill resurfacing only to “side with the heirs of the ‘school reform deniers,’” Eden reflects that the ideas Brill once lauded have “vanished into the wind. Teacher evaluation? Tenure reform? Last-in-first-out firing practices? Rubber rooms for abusive teachers? No one really talks about any of these things anymore.” Instead, observes Eden, much of the momentum today lies with right-leaning reformers “who always preferred to steer any conversation back to school choice.” It’s a useful insight. And an important one.

If Brill were more curious, he might wonder why that is. Heck, he might even think there’s a complicated, instructive book that could be written about it.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”