Fighting Against ‘The Blob’
“Troublemaker” may be the nicest epithet ever applied to Chester E. Finn Jr. Though genial and in possession of legions of friends and admirers, Finn, the head of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, has many critics. Leftist academics have nothing but spite for him. Henry A. Giroux, a professor of communications, has called Finn “slimy,” and a fair number of other members of the education establishment, a.k.a. “the blob,” deride Finn as part of a conservative, neoconservative, or capitalist (take your pick) cabal that is hell-bent on privatizing public schools.
In part, this enmity is due to Finn’s brutal candor, which I witnessed firsthand at an education conference in 2001. Early in the program, a sharp reporter of some renown lobbed a half-baked question at Finn. With a few words, “Checker” (as everyone calls him) blew the question from the sky like a clay pigeon. I thought, “Doesn’t he know who she is? He’s going to get hammered in her next article.” Of course, he knew who the reporter was; he just did not care.
Mostly, though, Checker has earned enemies because he is a tireless advocate of school reform—and has been one for four decades now. His relentless questioning of popular shibboleths (“Fewer children in a classroom makes for higher achievement! Charter schools take money from public schools!”) has made him a pariah among many academics and activists.
Checker’s passion for improving student learning comes through clearly in Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik (Princeton, $26.95). His family story is classically American. The Finns arrived from Russia in 1891 and settled in Dayton, Ohio. Checker’s great-grandfather started a “bag and burlap” company. One of his sons, Samuel, Checker’s grandfather, completed high school and sold soap door-to-door while studying law. By age 30, Samuel Finn had passed the bar and started a law firm. The Finn family was ascending. As Checker puts it, “Just three decades after my Yiddish-speaking great-grandmother peddled produce from a wagon, my father matriculated at Yale.”