David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants

world—in the power of teachers and
their unions, and in the peculiarities of
the way schools are funded. But that is
not an entirely satisfactory explanation.
The American public—and the Canadian
public and the British public and the
French public and on and on—wasn’t
forced to spend all that money on
lowering class size. They wanted
smaller classes. Why? Because the
people and countries who are wealthy
enough to pay for things like really small
classes have a hard time understanding
that the things their wealth can buy might
not always make them better off.