A definitive book, by a high-profile public figure, explaining how kids—especially poor kids and kids of color—lose out in the political and policy debates about schools is long overdue. "War Against Hope" by former Secretary of Education Rod Paige isn't that book.

Instead, Paige, who served as a school superintendent in Houston, Texas, before becoming President Bush's first secretary of Education, has launched a broadside against the teachers unions, which he sees as the primary villain in American education. As a result, Paige again manages to make the teachers unions look sympathetic just as when he characterized the country's largest union as a "terrorist organization" in 2004.

How ironic, given the book's goal and because teachers unions are often anything but helpful partners in school reform. As Jane Hannaway and I showed in our book, "Collective Bargaining in Education," some common practices championed by the unions do clash with students' best interests.

Yet teachers unions are hardly the only impediment to improving American education. Any analysis must carefully disentangle the extent to which they are the cause of problems or merely symptoms of more fundamental issues.

Paige gives readers a history of teacher unionism and some examples of problems today. He describes Caprice Young's battle to improve the public schools as part of Los Angeles' school board or former San Diego School Superintendent Alan Bersin's struggle to introduce greater accountability in that school system. These are useful episodes because they illustrate how school systems can be tenaciously change-averse. But such examples get lost amongst Paige's full frontal, and often misleading, assault on teachers unions.

The political history Paige provides can only be described as tendentious. "The NEA was so powerful that even [President Ronald] Reagan knew better than to try to tackle both the Soviet empire and the teacher unions grip on their educational monopoly at the same time," he writes. Compelling rhetoric but, as Reagan biographer Lou Cannon has noted, President Reagan just wasn't that interested in education policy. That, rather than a fear of the teachers' unions, prevented his taking action on schools.

Likewise, Paige describes President Bill Clinton as a hopeless hostage to the unions. Nowhere does he mention Clinton's partnership with President George H.W. Bush to raise academic standards or Clinton's 1994 Improving America's Schools Act, which laid the groundwork for No Child Left Behind and was hardly beloved by the unions. He also omits Clinton's strong support for charter schools that, as Paige notes, the unions loathe.

"War Against Hope" misses an opportunity. Invariably, when education decision-makers have to choose between the interests of adults and those of children, the former win out. While the teachers' unions are part of that dynamic, they aren't entirely to blame. The various interest groups on the political right and left, as well as the various stakeholder interests in the education system are also at fault.

It would have been more powerful for someone with Paige's history to explain these complications. Instead, the teachers' unions look like victims and the real issues are clouded rather than clarified.