My thoughts on current trends in education (almost) exactly

by David Safier

There's a new book out trashing teachers' unions and singing the praises of charters — Steve Brill's "Class Warfare." I haven't read it, but it sounds like it sings the same old "education reform" tune.

Sara Mosle reviewed the book in the NY Times Book Review, taking apart its premises beautifully, using the same arguments I've developed semi-independently. Anyone who attended my presentation at Drinking Liberally will recognize the ideas.

Here are a number of quotes from the review.

Brill wants us to believe that unions are the primary — even sole — cause of failing public schools. But hard evidence for this is scarce. Many of the nation’s worst-performing schools (according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress) are concentrated in Southern and Western right-to-work states, where public sector unions are weakest and collective bargaining enjoys little or no protection. Also, if unions are the primary cause of bad schools, why isn’t labor’s pernicious effect similarly felt in many middle-­class suburbs, like Pelham, N.Y., or Montclair, N.J., which have good schools — and strong unions?

More problematic for Brill’s thesis, charter schools, which are typically freed from union rules, haven’t succeeded in the ways their champions once hoped. A small percentage are undeniably superb. But most are not. One particularly rigorous 2009 study, which surveyed approximately half of all charters nationwide and was financed by the pro-­charter Walton Family and Michael and Susan Dell Foundations, found that more than 80 percent either do no better, or actually perform substantially worse, than traditional public schools, a dismal record.

[snip]

Brill cites policy advocates who argue that students who have top quartile teachers several years in a row could (at least theoretically) make remarkable gains. . . . Brill, however, glosses over an important qualifier to such research. Teacher quality may be the most important variable within schools, but mountains of data, going back decades, demonstrates that most of the variation in student performance is explained by nonschool factors: not just poverty, but also parental literacy (and whether parents read to their children), student health, frequent relocations, crime-­related stress and the like.

[snip]

[Note: The film, "Waiting for Superman," picked out the Harlem Children's Zone and the KIPP schools as examples of how schools should work.] At KIPP, for example, students go to school longer each day, each year, and also attend classes on alternating Saturdays and in the summers. Families that don’t embrace this ethos leave or can be asked to leave, an option not available to regular public schools. . . .

In Paul Tough’s laudatory book “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America” (2008), Canada decries KIPP’s approach as a kind of reverse “quarantine, walling off the most promising kids from a sick neighborhood’s contagion,” in Tough’s paraphrase. In fact, though Brill and the filmmakers never acknowledge it, Canada’s philosophy is actually diametrically opposed to KIPP’s. Canada insists such charters can’t succeed, at least not with all inner-city children, including those who may be disaffected from school, without substantially increased investments in wraparound social services, which Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone provides.

[NOTE: Mosle doesn't point out, but should, that KIPP spends an average of $6,000 more per student than surrounding district schools, and the Harlem Children's Zone spends far more than that. So much for the conservative "doing more with less" meme.]

Brill, however, insists that only “union critics of charter schools” believe successful charters “ ‘skim’ from the community’s most intelligent students and committed families,” adding, “None of the actual data supports this.” But in fact, according to Tough, KIPP’s own “internal statistics” show that its students in the South Bronx “arrived scoring better on average on tests than typical children in their neighborhoods.” And not just a little better: on reading tests prior to entering KIPP, Tough writes, “students often scored above the average for the entire city.”

[snip]

By book’s end, even Brill begins to feel the cognitive dissonance. He quotes a KIPP founder who concedes that the program relies on superhuman talent that can never be duplicated in large numbers. And sure enough, an educator whom Brill has held up the entire book as a model of reform unexpectedly quits, citing burnout and an unsustainable workload at her Harlem charter. Then another reform-­minded teacher at the same school confesses she can’t possibly keep up the pace. “This model just cannot scale,” she declares flatly.

Congrats to Mosle for getting it right on so many counts. Too often, people who review books like Brill's don't have the background to rebut the book's false and/or exaggerated premises.

UPDATE: h/t/ to Azazello for alerting me to a lengthy article in the Nation which takes Brill and his book to task in a similar way Mosle does. Interestingly, both reviewers note that Brill has somewhat of a change of heart in the last few chapters, where he admits things aren't nearly as simple as the "reformers" — like him — imply.