Originally appeared in Kappan.
Nearly 400 pages into Class Warfare, Steven Brill’s congratulatory chronicle of the past decade’s leading school reformers and their battles with teacher unions, we learn that Teach For America refuses to make public its wealth of performance information on thousands of TFAers who have taught in some of the nation’s toughest schools. Releasing the information would “cause all kinds of morale issues,” a TFA spokesperson told Brill.
This striking moment comes after Brill spends most of his book applauding TFA [Greg: Brill points out that TFA doesn’t explicitly advocate for performance-based employment decisions, so we need to word this carefully] and cheering the reformers and remote jobs (many of whom started in public education through TFA) as they campaign to incorporate performance into public school teacher hiring and firing — including crusades in Los Angeles and New York to make public the test scores of each teacher’s students. That TFA would refuse to reveal the same sort of information illustrates a significant limitation of Class Warfare’s often-enlightening narrative: School reform is considerably more complicated than Brill would have us believe.
Brill, the founder of The American Lawyer and CourtTV, hadn’t done much reporting on public education before 2009, and his background (Deerfield Academy, Yale University, Yale Law School) is far removed from that of most public educators. Like many outsiders who explore the inner workings of public education — read Charles Silberman’s Crisis in the Classroom (1973) or James Koerner’s The Miseducation of American Teachers (1963) — Brill is driven to distraction by the absurdity of “rubber rooms” where teachers spend months doing nothing at full pay while awaiting administrative hearings and by school systems that rate 98% of their teachers satisfactory while most of their students are failing.
And like any good journalist and storyteller, Brill is drawn to the highest drama available to make his point about public education: the now decade-long pitched battle between the teacher unions and reformers who want to transform public education from a rule-bound bureaucracy to a performance-based public service. These reformers want choice, competition, and accountability for performance, a model disparaged by critics as “corporate reform.” On the other side, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have fought to sustain seniority-based staffing and other elements of industrial-style unionism and to slow the spread of charter schools.
Brill thinks he’s got the best of both worlds — a great drama and an important story. He makes a policy case for writing about the battles over teacher employment reforms by pointing to research that stresses the importance of teacher quality in improving the education of poor students. He embraces the reformers’ mantra that with an upgraded teaching corps, demographics need not be destiny for disadvantaged students, a view that has led the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Obama administration, and hedge fund managers-turned-school reformers — all actors in Brill’s drama — to invest heavily in teacher reforms. As the headline of a review of Class Warfare in The Nation put it: “Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So.” Other prominent voices in education, of course, strongly disagree, producing the main ideological fault line in education today.
Brill marshals considerable evidence against teacher unions, information that dilutes union declarations that they’re committed to reform. We learn, for example, about language in New York’s $700 million federal Race to the Top grant that precludes a mandatory teacher evaluation system from overriding existing collective bargaining contracts with weaker evaluations. There’s a middle-of-the-night gambit to kill a bill in the New York legislature lifting a cap on charter schools in that state. Brill discovers that the AFT’s much-touted hiring of Ken Feinberg of the September 11 Victim Compensation Fund to create a streamlined mechanism to get rid of lousy teachers ultimately focused only on teachers who have committed criminal acts and other extreme and rare transgressions. And, of course, there’s the Kafkaesque union-bargained rubber rooms.
Brill also connects the dots between the people and organizations driving reform today. Among them are youngish Wall Street guys, led by TFA alum and hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson, who are bankrolling new reform advocacy groups like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER). Readers learn about Joe Williams, an education reporter turned reform powerbroker as DFER’s executive director, who spends $17 million in political advocacy money from Tilson and others between 2007 and 2010. (Before moving to DFER, Williams did freelance work for Education Sector, a Washington think tank I co-directed. Education Sector’s other co-director at the time, Andrew Rotherham, was a founding DFER board member.)
Brill recounts how leading reformer and then New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein and his allies, wanting to bring a major civil rights player under their reform tent in New York and beyond, partnered with activist Rev. Al Sharpton, eventually launching a new advocacy organization called the Education Equality Project.
Brill writes of the reformers “winning Sharpton over to the reform cause,” but the relationship seemed largely transactional. The New York press reported that one of DFER’s hedge fund angels, Plainfield Asset Management LLC (where Harold Levy, Klein’s predecessor as New York City schools chancellor, was the managing director), paid Sharpton’s organization $500,000 for his involvement. Later, I was told, the reformers eased Sharpton out of the Education Equality Project after he planned a major reform rally in Washington with Klein and was paid to turn out thousands of participants—only to arrive at the event with NEA leaders rather than ralliers.
In another engaging inside account, Brill chronicles the reformers’ campaign to deny Stanford University professor Linda Darling-Hammond an appointment as Obama’s secretary of education. Darling-Hammond, an expert on the teaching profession who had been critical of TFA and the reformers’ brand of accountability, advised Obama during the campaign and chaired his education transition team. The reformers were scared to death that she would be tapped to lead the U.S. Department of Education, a job that eventually went to Arne Duncan.
But, in focusing on the high drama of today’s reformers, Brill gives us a book that’s closer to a made-for-TV movie than an authoritative account of a decade’s worth of reform. In writing that American public education “has collapsed to a point where it is an obstacle to the American dream rather than an enabler,” he misrepresents public education’s historical trajectory. It’s tough to argue that American education has gotten worse when only 50% of white students and 25% of African-American students earned high school diplomas in 1950. Rather, we’re now demanding that public schools educate more students to higher levels because we’re no longer able to ignore civil rights and because the nature of decent-paying work has changed in a post-industrial economy. That’s a different and much more difficult task — one we’re far from achieving — than simply recapturing some long-lost educational glory.
Brill is cavalier in his endorsement of using student achievement as the centerpiece of teacher evaluations, waving off a lot of research suggesting, among other things, that it’s tough to get true readings of teacher performance from the very small numbers of students that many teachers teach.
And reform isn’t just about opening more charter schools and linking evaluations to student test scores, or even teacher quality writ large. The KIPP network of charter schools, which Brill rightly holds up as a national model, contends that great schools for disadvantaged students start with great principals and extend to small, personalized learning environments, much longer school days and years, a relentless commitment to high standards, a strong sense of community, lots of nonacademic support — and strong teachers.
And Brill’s reform narrative omits the vast disparities in spending between and within states that make reform much tougher in many places. Brill notes that total spending on public education has risen significantly in recent decades. But a significant share of that increase has been directed at students with learning disabilities and other narrow populations. And the increases have been distributed geographically in ways that, for example, preclude KIPP from opening financially viable schools in many parts of the country.
Brill tacitly acknowledges the complexity of the school reform equation at the end of Class Warfare, where he declares that there aren’t enough good charter schools to transform public education unilaterally, that traditional school systems have a role in reform. He suggests we can’t hope to staff millions of public school classrooms with TFA short-termers and that the unions must be part of any teacher reform solution. Brill quotes KIPP co-founder Dave Levin: “If you tore up every union contract in the country, that would just give you the freedom to try. It’s a prerequisite, but that’s all.”