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Class Warfare: Inside The Fight To Fix America's Schools (2000)

by Steven Brill(Favorite Author)

3.67 of 5 Votes: 3

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English

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review 1: This book would be a compelling read if you hadn't read or known anything else about education reform in the United States in the past twenty years. The narrative is strong, the tone is righteous and angry, and he presents strong evidence for his case (that charter schools and Teach for America work and are the best hope for public education, because unionization prevents anything good from happening in public schools. Joel Klein in NYC, Michelle Rhee, and the Gates Foundation are the heroes). The problem is that there's countervailing evidence that he doesn't address.Yes, there are lots of ways that bad teachers can hid behind union contracts -- and that the union structure (and defined benefit pension plans) siphons resources away from kids. But he never offers any e... morevidence that unionization per se is what is preventing kids from learning. From other sources (Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System), I know that heavily unionized states (such as Massachusetts) have some of the best outcomes in the nation (though likely because they have a strong curriculum, not because they are unionized). Some non-union, right-to-work states (mostly in the south) have some of the worst outcomes. Correlation is not causation, but you wouldn't guess that from Brill's book.Yes, kids do better when standards are high and school days are longer. These would certainly be a benefit. But everyone recognizes that the attrition rate of teachers at many of the charter schools Brill describes is quite high -- people can't keep up that level of intense 20/7 involvement in their students' lives. (In districts that are spending a lot of money already, one wonders whether that money couldn't better be poured into more teachers, so the burden could be spread more sustainably). At the same time, some of the results of the charter schools he discusses have to do with selection bias -- families have to be relatively healthy/functional to navigate the multi-step recruitment process, and to keep with the stringent behavioral and participation guidelines once students are in. Students who stay do well -- but many, many students don't stay. You won't hear from Brill that, overall, charter schools have no better outcomes than public schools, and in some ways, they're worse. Even when they're marginally better (in particular scores in particular grades, for example), they're not that much better.Brill says clearly and in detail that we now have the data to match student performance to the teachers who taught them in a given year. But he doesn't go into detail, as Ravitch does, about the complexities of that data -- that teacher performance by that measure varies from year to year, and that teacher performance pre-tenure does not necessarily match teacher performance post-tenure. He cites data that there is little performance difference between certified and non-certified teachers (the primary argument in favor of Teach for American) (152) but doesn't detail data that shows that TFA teachers _after two years_ tend to perform about the same as certified teachers in the same low-performing schools. The trick is that more certified teachers stay and improve, whereas single digit percentages of TFA recruits stay -- so poor students, who can least afford poor/learning teachers, end up being churned through an endless stream of new/less experienced (and therefore less well-performing) teachers.
review 2: WOW! Not only was this not what I expected (very readable), it was not what I wanted to hear (how still stuck in the unions is NYS and how money-wise, Race to the Top pans out). Brill writes in a very fiction-thriller style which makes this book fun to read in terms of learning about the individual characters and scenarios involved. However, he does not sensationalize or trivialize any of the issues. Rather, he boils them down into easy to understand chapters but gives an extensive sourcing at the end of the book. He gives credit where it is due to both sides of the education reform debate, although he clearly sides with the reformers. I liked his end analysis which states that you do need the unions and how best to work with them for long term sustainable solutions. less

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