The other day I picked up a copy of The Adventures of Augie March. I hadn’t remembered that Saul Bellow, writing in the early 1950s, when he was not yet forty, about Chicago in the 1920s, had been in full sympathy with the urban poor, as he definitely was not later in his career. There is a hilarious bit in the early pages in which Grandma Lausch, the March family’s boarder and a master at avoiding bills, including the rent she owes the Marches, expertly intimidates Lubin, the neighborhood welfare caseworker who comes for regular home visits wearing an ill-fitting suit: “He had a harassed patience with her of ‘deliver me from such clients,’ though he tried to appear master of the situation.”

Today’s education-reform movement has something of the venerable dynamic of American social improvement about it. We no longer have caseworkers who inspect poor people’s apartments in person, but we definitely have members of the same ethnic group as the very poor, doing better but not all that much better than their clients, charged with the often exasperating job of performing the functions of betterment: the mainly black teachers at all-black, all-poor public schools, for example. Another category of character in the drama, often just offstage, comprises the well-meaning patricians who designed the system—social work and settlement houses a century ago, charter schools and accountability regimes today—who feel some mixture of moral outrage about “conditions,” swelling pride in the selflessness of their intentions, and frustration over being so often unappreciated by the objects of their largesse.

Like all significant causes, education reform bears the mark of its time. These days we trust markets and mistrust institutions, especially of the state, so education reform proposes to take apart the main structures of schooling in America—a network of districted public schools and a unionized teaching corps. It proposes, as an urgently necessary national project, to replace them with a school system governed by metrics, choice, incentive compensation, and personnel reductions. It is roughly the same prescription that activist investors would apply to an industrial corporation of the same vintage as the education system. And this is no coincidence: many of the leaders of education reform are activist investors. The proselytizing and structure-building proclivities of the social reformers of a century ago are nowhere to be seen in education reform.

In the late aughts, Michelle Rhee, during her brief run as chancellor of the Washington, D. C. school system, became the face of the education-reform movement: a young, tough, impassioned, camera-ready crusader who encapsulated the appeal of the movement for those who find it appealing, and its horrors for those who don’t. As in the case of Lubin and Grandma Lausch, the people she was in business to help did not appreciate her as much as they were supposed to. As Rhee freely acknowledges in her memoir and manifesto, the activities that she understood to be on behalf of poor black people in Washington caused her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, to be unseated by Washington’s black voters, barely three years into her term. That meant she lost her job, too. Rhee regrouped and founded a national organization called StudentsFirst, which lobbies for school reform in state legislatures. Her book is meant more to advertise the new phase of her career than to revisit the old one.

Rhee was born in 1969 and grew up mainly in Toledo, the child of Korean immigrants; by her account, she got her social concern from her father and her run-you-over personality from her mother. She describes a year she spent back in Korea as a child, in a large classroom in which every student was numerically ranked against the others every day, as a season in paradise, because it taught her “that it was not only okay but essential to compete.” (Later on she grouses that her daughters have too many soccer medals and trophies even though “they suck at soccer,” which is an example of the way in which “we’ve gone soft as a nation.”) After college she joined Teach for America, which placed her in an inner-city elementary school in Baltimore, and then she enrolled in the Kennedy School at Harvard. Rhee makes a big impression on people. One of them was Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, who asked her to start a new organization that would supply school districts with new teachers in numbers beyond what Teach for America itself (whose magic in the elite universities where it recruits comes from its being highly selective) could generate. Rhee called that organization the New Teacher Project.