Books have little direct influence, but that’s generally been the case

One reason is that books have lost their place as primary vehicles for shaping education policy. Just like in other realms, books are being displaced by other media. A film like Waiting for “Superman” can have considerably more influence over education policy than any book. Articles and reports can be released on the Internet as soon as they are written. Even blogs are swaying education policy discussions to a greater extent than books.

Jay Greene, The Education Reform Book Is Dead.

As someone with a blog, I wish Greene were correct, but I'm skeptical. It's not so much that books have lost power in comparison with heavily subsidized documentaries and online materials, but that education books have always had a relatively diffuse relationship with policymaking. What policy change did Kozol's early books directly create? Nothing. Kozol has inspired activists, certainly, but his writing has never been a direct mechanism for change. The same diffusion exists for film and blogging, with greater dilution between original impulse and whatever schools actually do. (Otherwise, someone please tell me what direct policy influence my own blog has had, so I can claim it on an annual report!) 

In the last few years, Diane Ravitch's Death and Life has clearly been the most resonant rallying point for teachers who oppose high-stakes testing regimes. But the audience existed before the book's publication, and serious critics of NCLB didn't spring up early last year where there had been none before. Historians often vigorously debate the effects of one or another idea or expression of an idea, and I think it's especially problematic to make claims in the middle of events. If the NCLB regime collapses in the next few years, Ravitch will deserve considerable but not complete credit. If the NCLB regime staggers on for another decade, that won't eliminate Ravitch's book as a key magnet for debate.