Steve Brill’s Report Card on School Reform

This from Sara Mosle in the New York Times Sunday Review of Books: Review of CLASS WARFARE: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools, by Steven Brill

Steven Brill is a graduate of Yale Law School and the founder of Court TV, and in his new book, “Class Warfare,” he brings a sharp legal mind to the world of education reform. Like a dogged prosecutor, he mounts a zealous case against America’s teachers’ unions. From more than 200 interviews, he collects the testimony of idealistic educators, charter school founders, policy gurus, crusading school superintendents and billionaire philanthropists. Through their vivid vignettes, which he pieces together in short chapters with titles like “ ‘Colorado Says Half of You Won’t Graduate’ ” and “A Shriek on Park Avenue,” Brill conveys the epiphanies, setbacks and triumphs of a national reform movement.

Some of his subjects, like Wendy Kopp of Teach for America, are by now household names; others, like Jon Schnur, an adviser to the Clinton and Obama administrations, are more obscure. But in Brill’s telling, they have all come, over some two decades, to distrust or denounce the unions and to promote the same small set of reforms: increasing the number of charter schools and evaluating and improving teacher quality through merit pay and other measures that rely heavily on student test scores.  

Throughout, Brill reminds us he’s just an objective reporter. Disinterested, however, is not how he comes across. He recounts an educator’s motto to “teach like your hair’s on fire.” For most of the book, Brill writes like his hair is on fire. His sympathies clearly lie with the unions’ most adamant critics, like Michelle Rhee, the controversial former superintendent of the District of Columbia public schools, and Joel Klein, the combative ex-chancellor of the New York City system.  

I say this as someone whom Brill might pick for a jury pool. I taught for three years in New York as a charter member of Teach for America and had my own run-ins with the union. (An article I wrote, which praised Kopp’s then-­fledgling organization and made some of the same criticisms Brill does, angered my union representative.) This fall, my daughter will be attending public school, and I’ll be teaching at a private, reform-­minded urban academy in New Jersey.  

Yet, after reading “Class Warfare,” I can’t convict — not least of all because in the book’s final chapter, Brill undercuts much of his witnesses’ prior testimony in an abrupt and jarring about-face. This chapter isn’t wrong. But it underscores a truth Brill spends most of the book trying to avoid: his case is not airtight, and reasonable doubts remain about his subjects’ prescriptions for reform...  

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. The study concluded that “tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception.”  

Brill obliquely refers to such research in half a sentence. He then counters that other studies have shown better results for charters, without clearly indicating what these studies are or explaining why they should trump a comprehensive, national study. He then points to the “central evidentiary value” of the Knowledge is Power Program, KIPP, the chain of roughly 100 charter schools, founded by two Teach for America alumni, that has produced consistently high student test scores and become a media darling.  

Yet such exceptions to the rule still don’t explain why, if unions are the crucial variable, a vast majority of charters haven’t equally thrived. At the heart of Brill’s book is a belief that “truly effective teaching” can “overcome student indifference, parental disengagement and poverty.”  

For too long, Brill’s reformers argue, union leaders have used such factors to excuse failing teachers protected by tenure. Certainly many adults, not just those in unions, have written off economically disadvantaged or minority students far too readily. 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. Absent other proven criteria for determining the most effective teachers, these reformers conclude that schools should base hiring, firing and promotion decisions, at least in substantial part, on teachers’ ability to generate year-to-year gains on their students’ test scores.  

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...

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. After relentlessly criticizing Weingarten, Brill suddenly suggests, in a “Nixon-to-China” move, that she become New York’s next schools chancellor. “The lesson,” Brill belatedly discovers, is that reformers need to collaborate with unions, if only because they are “the organizational link to enable school improvement to expand beyond the ability of the extraordinary people to work extraordinary hours.” But isn’t this merely what the reform movement’s more thoughtful critics have been saying all along?

Brill likens the battle over the nation’s schools to “warfare,” but the better analogy may be to the war on cancer. For years, scientists hoped a magic pill would cure this ravaging disease. But increasingly, doctors have recognized that they will have to fight a multifronted war, as cancers (like failing schools) aren’t all alike. Each comes with its own complex etiology. Improving teacher quality and working to create better schools, like charters, are part of the arsenal. But such efforts, alone, are unlikely to boost long-term survival rates without a continual, dispassionate look at the incoming data, no matter how counterintuitive, and a willingness to revise tactics midtreatment as we pursue multiple paths in a race for the cure. Although Brill doesn’t say so until the book’s last few pages, he finally acknowledges just how much we still have to learn.