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Teachers Get Little Say in a Book About Them

By MICHAEL WINERIP

Can an education reform movement that demeans and trivializes teachers succeed? It’s hard to imagine, but that is what is going on in parts of America today.

In Steven Brill’s new book celebrating the movement, “Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools,” teachers are literally the least of it. Of the three million who work in traditional public schools, three are interviewed by Mr. Brill on the record; their insights take up six of the book’s 437 pages.

Nor do charter school teachers fare much better. At Harlem Success Academy 1, which produces top scores on state tests, Mr. Brill describes how teachers working around the clock continually burn out. Like kitchen appliances, they last a few years and then need to be replaced. One teacher describes being “overwhelmed, underappreciated and underpaid” and tells Mr. Brill, “There is no way I can do this beyond another year or two.”

Mr. Brill has little positive to say about teachers. Veterans “hanging on for 20 or 30 years caring only about their pensions and tenure protection are toxic.” While he admits that there are thousands of teachers who are skilled and highly motivated, “increasingly” there are those who put in an “8:15 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. workday with a civil-service mentality.” (How Mr. Brill could possibly know whether the number of these teachers is increasing is unclear, since he provides no statistics or attribution.)

Until this project, Mr. Brill, 61, had rarely written about education. Nor was he well acquainted with public schools — he graduated from Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and sent his three children to private schools.

The book grew from his New Yorker article two years ago about rubber rooms, where the city’s most dysfunctional teachers spent idle days, collecting salaries while waiting months or years for their cases to be resolved. “I see a guy asleep with his head on a desk and alarm clock,” Mr. Brill recalled in an interview. “I see another guy, if he were in a room with my daughter, I’d call the police.”

There were 744 teachers in rubber rooms at the time. For some, that is understandable in a system of 77,000 teachers; to Mr. Brill, it was a prime example of a union more interested in protecting its members than in educating children.

Mr. Brill, a writer (“Teamsters,” 1978), lawyer (Yale ’75) and entrepreneur (founder of Court TV and the American Lawyer publication), knows that every story needs a villain or an evil force. In “Class Warfare,” the problem is not the poverty the children experience, the violence they see in their homes and neighborhoods or the lack of vocabulary that the sons and daughters of adults who did not finish high school often take with them to kindergarten.

The villains of Mr. Brill’s story are bad teachers coddled by unions.

With his legal training and business background, Mr. Brill is expert at chronicling the union’s failings. He documents the growth of the New York City teachers’ contract from 39 pages in 1962 to 200 today, along with work rules that can be used at every turn to obstruct principals from improving schools. He details the case of a Stuyvesant High School teacher who was so drunk that she passed out at her desk, only to have the union claim on its Web site that she was disciplined as part of a scheme to harm senior teachers.

He goes a lot easier on the reformers who have spent recent years pushing the expansion of charter schools and standardized tests. Mr. Brill identifies the millionaires and billionaires who attack the unions and steered the Democratic Party to their cause. There is Whitney Tilson, who parlayed $1 million of his parents’, relatives’ and own money to build a hedge fund that he told Mr. Brill was worth $50 million; Ravenel Boykin Curry IV, who works for the family’s money fund and has homes in Manhattan, East Hampton and the Dominican Republic; and David Einhorn, who at age 38 “was already one of Wall Street’s successful short sellers.”

The book is called “Class Warfare.” I expected Mr. Brill to explore why these men single out the union for blame when children fail. If a substantial part of the problem was poverty and not bad teachers, the question would be why people like them are allowed to make so much when others have so little. I hear this all the time from teachers, but when I asked Mr. Brill, he said, “I didn’t see it as the rich versus the union guys, although now that you say it, I can see how you could draw that line.”

Harlem Success 1 shares a building with a traditional public school, P.S. 149. Mr. Brill presents numbers that show the charter school is far superior: 86 percent of Harlem Success students were proficient in English in 2010, compared with 29 percent of P.S. 149’s. He notes that charters are criticized for having fewer children with learning challenges, but “none of the actual data supports this.”

Actually, it does. According to the city, in 2010 P.S. 149 had more children poor enough to receive free lunch (76 percent vs. 67 percent for the charter); more children for whom English was a second language (13 percent vs. 1.5 for the charter); and more children with disabilities (22 percent vs. 16).

And that is what so scares those of us who see traditional public schools as vital to democracy: that they will become repositories for the poorest, most troubled children.

Reviewers have criticized Mr. Brill for making what seems like a bizarre turnaround in the book’s final chapter. When I asked him about it, he said the two years spent reporting had changed him.

In the book’s first 420 pages, he bashes the union and its president, Randi Weingarten, is dismissive of veteran teachers and extols charters.

Three people seem to have altered that thinking. First, David Levin, a founder of the Knowledge Is Power Program, the biggest charter chain in the country, told him that charter schools would never be able to train near the number of quality teachers needed to populate all public schools.

Second, Jessica Reid, an assistant principal at Harlem Success who worked night and day to improve the lives of poor children, burned out right before Mr. Brill’s eyes and quit midyear.

And third, against the odds, he came to like Ms. Weingarten. “She really cares about this stuff,” he told me.

The book ultimately concludes that only the union can supply quality veteran teachers on the scale needed.

At a time when education is so polarized, Mr. Brill seems to have found some middle ground. He even suggested to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg that he make Ms. Weingarten New York’s next chancellor to provide the balance necessary for real change.

On Page 426, the mayor responds. “It’s a really stupid idea,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Never in a million years.”

Another view/review from blogger Rick Hess, a self-proclaimed "reformer":

From Education Week...

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The Trouble with Steven Brill's Black-and-White Worldview

By Rick Hess

Steven Brill's Class Warfare is a highly readable, fairly reliable, if incomplete history of contemporary efforts to "reform" American schooling. Kudos on the readability--there's way too little of that. The guy's a terrific writer and really captures the flavor of the debates. I don't think his small-bore errors are a big deal (it's tough to write 437 pages without making a few mistakes). And, while he omits much of consequence, every journalist or historian ultimately is forced to do that in shaping any tale.

But what drove me to distraction is the casual certainty with which he frames the whole question as being "pro-reform" or "anti-reform," and then labels individuals and views accordingly. It's especially problematic because Brill never actually explains what it means to be a "reformer." By page seven, he's talking about Race to the Top being "a call to the barricades for those [like Randi Weingarten] who had held back the reformers" without ever explaining what "reform" is.

I think RHSU readers know that the WaPo's Valerie Strauss and I disagree on much. But I still bristled when Brill casually labels her blog The Answer Sheet as "anti-reform." On the same page, Brill explains that he talked to Diane Ravitch while vainly seeking smart arguments from "the other side of the reform movement." Seriously?

Brill reports that Ravitch spoke to groups in the "anti-reform camp" and that she got paid for speeches (mon dieu!!!) by folks "opposed to reform." None of this, of course, is surprising to anyone who saw Brill's discussion of "school reform deniers" in his recent Reuters op-ed titled, well, "The School Reform Deniers." In that piece, Brill added an intriguing flourish by comparing the "deniers" to those tobacco executives who refused to acknowledge that cigarette smoking helped cause lung cancer.

Brill (fairly, I think) critiques Ravitch for cherry-picking evidence and making facile arguments. But when she argues that charters serve a more educationally engaged population, Brill dispenses with the point with a single cherry-picked study (Tom Kane's well-done Boston evaluation), which focuses on charter schooling in a locale that Brill had just flagged as exceptionally attentive to quality. When Ravitch raises concerns about the effects of excessive testing, his only response is a lengthy, somewhat mawkish quote, from an assistant principal on whom Brill frequently leans, which says, more or less, that poor kids deserve to go to college.

Now, I've been more than a little critical of Ravitch's book. I argued, in March 2010, that Ravitch's post-epiphany thinking was plagued by "the same fundamental mistake, in reverse, that she made previously." But, that said, it sure seems like Brill is trying to have it both ways and doing just what he faults Ravitch for doing. And my head simply spun when I got to his conclusions and realized that, after 400 pages of purple prose, goopy groupthink, and iron certainty, he decides solving these issues is actually pretty complicated.

Even after finishing his book, I'm not entirely clear what Brill means when he labels someone "anti-reform." For instance, I think good teachers should be paid more than bad teachers, but I've been critical of simple test-based bonus schemes. I think value-added metrics based on reading and math tests tell us something valuable, but I'm skeptical of statewide evaluation systems that rely overmuch on those scores. I'm broadly supportive of the Obama administration's education agenda, but have been quite critical of its turnaround schemes, plans for conditional NCLB waivers, and the design and implementation of Race to the Top. I've tried to determine whether all this makes me "anti-reform"--or even a "school reform denier"--in Mr. Brill's eyes? If not, why not?

Brill complains that "it was impossible to tell from her book or our discussions what Ravitch was actually for." I can say the same about him. I know who Brill is for--but I can't figure out exactly what he's for, except that it seems to be anything that his favorites are pushing.

In Brill's telling, the "anti-reformers" and "deniers" are nothing more than a massive obsidian block squatting in the way of his noble (if ill-defined) forces of light. If Brill had been angling to pen anything other than a black-and-white shoot 'em up, he could've told a much more informed, intriguing, and constructive tale, and one which would have made his conclusions feel more like an extension of the narrative and less like an afterthought.