IN a reporting tour de force, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America�s failure to educate its children�and points the way to reversing that failure. Brill�s vivid narrative�filled with unexpected twists and turns�takes us from the Oval Office, where President Obama signs off on an unprecedented plan that will infuriate the teachers� unions because it offers billions to states that win an education reform �contest�; to boisterous assemblies, where parents join the fight over their children�s schools; to a Fifth Avenue apartment, where billionaires plan a secret fund to promote school reform; to a Colorado high school, where students who seemed destined to fail are instead propelled to college; to state capitols across the country, where school reformers hoping to win Obama�s �contest� push bills that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It�s the story of an unlikely army�fed-up public school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democrats�squaring off against unions that the reformers claim are protecting a system that works for the adults but victimizes the children. Class Warfare is filled with extraordinary people taking extraordinary paths: a young woman who goes into teaching almost by accident, then becomes so talented and driven that fighting burnout becomes her biggest challenge; an antitrust lawyer who almost brought down Bill Gates�s Microsoft and now forms a partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates to overhaul New York�s schools; a na�ve Princeton student who launches an army of school reformers with her senior thesis; a California teachers� union lobbyist who becomes the mayor of Los Angeles and then the union�s prime antagonist; a stubborn young teacher who, as a child growing up on Park Avenue, had been assumed to be learning disabled but ends up co-founding the nation�s most successful charter schools; and an anguished national union leader who walks a tightrope between compromising enough to save her union and giving in so much that her members will throw her out. Brill not only takes us inside their roller-coaster battles, he also concludes with a surprising prescription for what it will take from both sides to put the American dream back in America�s schools.