Shelf Life: Question Authority.(Book Review)

Three years ago, Encounter Books set out on a crucial mission: Publisher Peter Collier wanted to "enlarge the space for ideas in our culture" by publishing serious conservative nonfiction. And Encounter has more than fulfilled its early promise -- it is, today, one of the most reliable sources of excellent works on politics and culture. Every conservative reader will have his own favorites. Among mine are The Abolition of Britain, Peter Hitchens's devastating account of social and cultural collapse in the U.K.; The War over Iraq, a compelling and timely indictment of Saddam Hussein's regime by Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol; and Heaven on Earth, Joshua Muravchik's magisterial history of the failure of socialism.

That Encounter is thriving is great news, because it is a countercultural enterprise of an especially helpful kind. Today's cultural orthodoxies are not the same ones Peter Collier rebelled against back when he was a Sixties radical, but they are just as deeply entrenched. One of the most harmful is the idee fixe -- by now, more accurately, a folie a millions -- that the way to improve our children's education is to spend more money on the demands of the teachers unions. One of the best new books Encounter is publishing this year will help convince America to renounce this illusion. In Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice (248 pp., $25.95), Sol Stern describes his experiences as a parent of children in the New York City public schools, and outlines what the money-obsessed unions have done to education.

Between 1965 and 1990, average per-pupil spending in the United States increased from $2,402 to $5,582 in inflation-adjusted dollars. . . . Why did American public education go into the tank just as all that extra money was pouring in? To put it simply: Adding powerful unions with exclusive collective bargaining ...