Because No Excuses often seems more like a disjointed series of sections--on the successful schools, on the academic problems and achievements of various ethnic groups, on money, on the effects or non-effects of racial isolation, on the elusive question of teacher quality, on standards and accountability--the Thernstroms never confront their logical difficulties, and while they seem to have visited the handful of schools they cite as models, they seem only barely cognizant of the problems of other schools and children.

Similarly, the Thernstroms' tone of sweet reasonableness conceals their lack of nuance. It's true that one-size-fits-all class-size-reduction programs like the hastily conceived one in California (it was designed by then-Governor Pete Wilson to punish the teachers union) have had no appreciable impact. But in experiments like Wisconsin's Student Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE)--where smaller classes are targeted to at-risk students, teachers are trained to take advantage of them and students get extra training before and after school, precisely the kind of things the Thernstroms admire in their charter schools--achievement is going up.

The Thernstroms reiterate familiar arguments, often true, about the ineffectiveness of many conventional teacher training and credentialing programs, and about the bureaucratic barriers to people who don't fit the conventional mold. But they don't provide even a clue about how to attract the hundreds of thousands of able, dedicated teachers--the "imaginative, ambitious, competitive innovators" they like so much--to the high-poverty schools that so desperately need them.

Nor do they understand that if the barriers are bureaucratic, they're often created in response to strong community and political pressure. Most places want safe teachers who don't mess too much with secular humanism, witch tales and evolution, or ask too many searching questions. And despite all the talk about high standards, most parents are confident their kids do fine and don't want them treated too harshly by demanding schoolmasters, preferring schools that retain traditional anti-intellectualism and regard jocks at least as highly as brains.

The policy solutions the authors still seem to love best are "choice" and vouchers, but other than declaring that they're a matter of "basic equity," giving low-income children some of the same options that the affluent already have, the Thernstroms don't grapple with any of the tougher fiscal, regulatory and political questions they entail. The academic race gap, as they say, is "the most important civil rights issue of our time," but it's inconceivable that it will be closed without the commitment--in teachers, facilities, materials, health, counseling and preschool programs--that this so-far-intractable challenge requires.

Ever since the early years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, conservatives have tried to persuade Americans that there is no major social problem that the schools can't fix. And maybe they can indeed do it--in part by broadening their mission to include the cultural agenda the Thernstroms focus on. But that, in effect, is to take on social tasks that in most other countries begin long before a child starts school and extend far beyond it. To suggest that schools don't need more resources for that is absurd.

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