Steven Brill: "Class Warfare"
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-08-16/steven-brill-class-warfare
American students rank 15th in the world in reading literacy, 25th in math and 17th in science. Frustrated parents in urban areas have turned to charter schools led by young, idealistic teachers. Education reformers have found an ally in President Obama, whose “Race to the Top” program rewards states that measure teacher quality and tie salaries to student test scores. But the program has met resistance from teachers’ unions, who form the backbone of the Democratic Party. Veteran journalist Steven Brill, who investigated New York's infamous "Rubber Rooms," reports on the education reform movement and the great struggle it has set off within the Democratic Party.
Guests
Steven Brill
journalist and author of "After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era," and "The Teamsters"
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Read an Excerpt
Excerpted from "Class Warfare" by Steven Bill. Copyright 2011 by Steven Brill. All rights reserved. Excerpted here by kind permission of Simon & Schuster:
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Mr. Brill should try to work with Unions and see how far he gets. He is a great writer but seems to fail when he gets into working with real people. Look up his failures in business. Just because he writes a negative conclusion about teacher's unions and teachers does not make it true.
He should stick with academics where he can stay in his ivory tower.
I do not know what happened to CPS. My four sisters and i are graduates with degrees from associates to Masters. OUR children, six of seven have graduated and have degrees in progess to BA or BS. My sone just received his Mechanical engineering degree. My daughters have business from BGSU and another criminology from CSU. Our parents went to open houses, etc. We did the same. We are a strong hands on family in the Hough area over 50 yrs. Now, the third generation is in school. My grandson reads on a 9/10th grade level. His sister has not srted school and reads on a third grade level and absolutely insulted she has to start with KDG this year. If she does not know a word, she looks it up on her mini pc dictionary, practices it and it becomes part of her daily vocabulary. When my grandson was in kdg, at his first open house, in a class of thirty kids there were 20 people who came. 15 were for my grandson. That is your major problem. Not the teachers. Parents who don't care. My daughter, when she tells people what her children are doing is congradulated by asians, whites, latins. The black people she works with? Why are you doing that? Let the teachers do it.
I do not know what happened to CPS. My four sisters and i are graduates with degrees from associates to Masters. OUR children, six of seven have graduated and have degrees in progess to BA or BS. My sone just received his Mechanical engineering degree. My daughters have business from BGSU and another criminology from CSU. Our parents went to open houses, etc. We did the same. We are a strong hands on family in the Hough area over 50 yrs. Now, the third generation is in school. My grandson reads on a 9/10th grade level. His sister has not srted school and reads on a third grade level and absolutely insulted she has to start with KDG this year. If she does not know a word, she looks it up on her mini pc dictionary, practices it and it becomes part of her daily vocabulary. When my grandson was in kdg, at his first open house, in a class of thirty kids there were 20 people who came. 15 were for my grandson. That is your major problem. Not the teachers. Parents who don't care. My daughter, when she tells people what her children are doing is congradulated by asians, whites, latins. The black people she works with? Why are you doing that? Let the teachers do it.
Its because we treat our teachers like CRAP, Andrew. That's the honest truth. That's why none of the "best and brightest" want to become teachers....
Please ask your guest.
Management is the fundamental problem. How would you improve management of the teaching profession?
What other professions could you look to for guidelines of how to manage?
Teaching and medicine are arts and that is a fundamental problem for effective management.
Schools are funded from real property taxes. This means that wealthy school districts are funded well, while poor districts have inadequate funding.
The funding should be from general revenue and equal for all schools.
I taught 14 years in the public schools, 1 year in a private school for the gifted, 5 years in community colleges, now retired. Maybe human beings are made differently in New York State, but out West I learned very quickly that teachers don't teach for the security for the simple reason that they wouldn't last one year in the classroom if they didn't have stronger motive than pure selfishness. Kids have no mercy-- they find your weakness very quickly and drum you out even quicker. If you don't have certain basic skills, or at least a passion for the job that carries you through apprenticeship, you don't make it. Has Stephen Brill ever taught? Doesn't he know the facts of life?
The problem is that public schools are financed with local tax revenues. Rich neighborhoods: high tax revenue, great schools. Poor neighborhoods: low tax revenue, crappy schools. This system perpetuates the gap between rich and poor.
It is not the teachers' unions that are to blame for failing education in America; kids today essentially raise themselves, as both parents work long hours to make ends meet. Parents do not raise their kids to care about education or to care about anything but the technological gadgets they spend huge fractions of their money on and with which they spoil their kids who not only get everything they want, but who are being brought up on violent video games, smart phones, Ipods, web cams, Ipads, Facebook, YouTube, reality TV, etc. etc. Stop blaming unions and instead blame our messed up education system on our obsession with all the latest social networks and particularly our obsession with all the latest techno-gadgets that cannot lessen our hours worked to pay for them and the social, and other, consequences that arise from this new reality.
I worked for years in an overpopulated, low income school. The solution is actually that schools need more people! You can not have 35 kids in a classroom and expect a quality education for our kids. Teachers being held accountable in these schools for conditions they can not control (bad home life, no support) will just make great teachers leave the profession. Add more paraprofessionals to the classroom( to support the teachers and kids too) by way of discipline and extra one on one child support. 35 kids is way too many which is becoming a norm. Or lower class size....how many people in the general population have tried to teach a worthwhile subject to 35 kids (who are there by law not choice) 5 times a day! Think about it!
Well, it doesn't look like informed listeners are going to hear anything new on the show today. Here's another resource that people may find useful for getting up to speed on the current state of things with education in America:
Wear Red For Public Ed
First, let me say that I am not a teacher.
I appreciate the topic, but think that the author comes into the discussion with some biases. He makes assumptions that, because of a lack of teacher accountibility and administrative accountibility, schools fail. He uses charter schools to demonstrate the example of how well schools do when the teachers are not union. First of all, charters require parent involvement and the population drawn to them as a concept are more likely to have children who succeed. The children are left in the standard school may be the students with lesser parental involvement, may come from low income families with the myriad of problems that creates, and so on. To me, charter schools are private schools on the public dime.
Expecting schools and teachers to perform perfectly, to make all children succeed, and in the absence of also taking on the problems of poverty, is a disservice to the very people who take on the job for relatively little pay.
I am a teacher who finds your guest's comments to be beyond offensive. Of course, there is a great deal of room for improvement in our schools, but he is stating matters in a biased way, to say the very least.
Just one totally unacceptable remark is his comment that those who want to make a difference in the world would go into another field. Being a teacher is one of the most profound ways to reach a new generation. The notion that competent, intelligent people don't go into teaching because they're not financially rewarded for their superior efforts is patently absurd.
There are, without a doubt, bad teachers, just as there are bad lawyers, doctors and writers. Most teachers, however, are hardworking, caring, intelligent people. I work like crazy with my students, as do most of my colleagues.
The reason no one will want to go into the educational field is people like this author, who is out of his element, as he has not learned enough about the field to make him competent to critique it in the overbearing in which he is doing so.
Diane, you need an educator to respond to his assertions.
Mr. Brill has unfortunately repeated the uninspired analysis of the Us education system that the problem is unionization. He believes unions have outlived their relevance (to bring fair treatment to the predominantly female employee), however he acknowledges that Charter Scool teachers are so over worked that they burnout within 3 years. Performance appraisals are management's responsibility for which they have failed to negotiate fair terms. Union rules that appear extreme are only in response to extreme mistreatment by management abuses. For example, the Rhode Island school district that fired all teachers, including good teachers and those who need to improve. Folks interested in improving education have to face the fact that employees are people with compassion for children and expect fair treatment. Please move on to solutions that reflect cooperation among stakeholders, such as teachers and their union, management, parents and students.
Pisces, you and you children have been blessed with high IQ and the moral clarity to see the value of education. Science tells us that most African-Americans are lacking in IQ compared to other ethnic groups. Your daughters peers are just jealous. We have built a black subculture that promotes intellectual jealously. I think not talking about the racial IQ gap does our community a disservice.
Its time for us to wake up!
I recently graduated from a large Texas state funded college and feel that many of the professors were unengaged and were just as pitiful as the public school teachers you discuss. Not only did I have to pay into these schools with my taxes, I also had to pay a hefty tuition to get this less than stellar education. We have produced students who now are expected to go to college if they ever expect to find any kind of employment yet the education they receive there is just as marginal. Is there any hope for cleaning up colleges as well?
Roland: BINGO!
Your guest needs to check his facts about Teach for America. Their retention rates are much lower than he just led us to believe.
The left has spun testing as a civil rights issue in that they have convinced themselves if high risk kids are not tested rigorously they are not learning. The reality is that those kids who MOST need an enriching curriculum are being drilled on tests. The parents of these kids have come to believe that this is how they can know that their kids are learning. Teaching has been devalued in this approach.
My public school kids have had a great education and I learn VERY little from their test scores but I learn EVERYTHING from talking with their teachers.
The guest speaks about professionalization of the teaching profession in the same breathe as heralding Teach for America which is a program that allows college grads to circumvent the certification process. It would seem that if we want to talk about professionalization in teaching then we need to understand that teachers need in-depth training, such as education degrees, not by taking anyone who wants to be a teacher-tourist (only 1/3 of TFA grads stay past 4 years). So perhaps he should be talking about increasing the training and standards, as well as the pay, rather than pretending that pure will and a summer of training will magically produce professional teachers.
If time permits, please speak to the movement to mainstream ALL special-needs students. My observation is that in many districts the special-needs child is not being serviced well in the "least-restrictive environment." Also, the teacher is often not sufficiently trained to educate the SNC, and the support teachers/aids spend very little time with the child.
Jon, I love you. they keep saying this but it's a pipe dream. if a kid is not taken to school, I don't care if you have a professor laureate teaching the class, that kid will not learn. How? through Osmosis. i know of people whose children have repeated kds(before nclb) kdg 3 times, not because they could not learn, they were not there because the parents will not take them. My five yr old granddaughter was amazed her paternal first cousin could not read in the 2nd grade. She is blunt and to the point and she asked why he could not read because she was only five, never been to school and could read. We have one more left in school and she honors, also.
Isn't the breakdown of the family a big factor in how good a child does in school ? It seems to me there is a correlation between the increase of single parent households in the past 40 years and the decrease of student performance in this country.
What about Parental and Administration Involvement? My daughter teaches in one of the worst Charter schools in Chicago. Last year over 1/3 of their teachers left in the middle of the school year, not because they were not dedicated or qualified. First, he CEO doesn't have a background in education. Secondly, the majority of her time is spent on disciplinary issues - not education. Thirdly, less than half of the parents have ever shown up for a teacher conference or ever made contact with the teacher or school regarding their child's performance. I must disagree with your guest's perception!
Union contracts set MINIMUM wages and benefits and do not prevent excellent teachers from getting bonuses or better pay or benefits! I used to be Union rep and managers and owners always use the Merit Pay argument to defeat the unions.
Dana Goldstein writes in The Nation ("Can Teachers Alone Overcome Poverty? Steven Brill Thinks So"):
"...the work of the many researchers Brill approvingly cites—including Kane, Staiger and Stanford’s Eric Hanushek—shows that while teaching is the most important in-school factor affecting student achievement, family and neighborhood characteristics matter more. The research consensus has been clear and unchanging for more than a decade: at most, teaching accounts for about 15 percent of student achievement outcomes, while socioeconomic factors account for about 60 percent."
Goldstein points out many of logical fallacies and glaring errors in Brill's work. That Brill remains committed to the problematic concept of charter schools as a solution, that he continues to blame teachers' unions for the ills of the schools (remaining conveniently unaware of the union's evolution), despite the evidence--well, his work is irresponsible, counterproductive, and frankly, appalling.
http://www.thenation.com/article/162695/can-teachers-alone-overcome-pove...
I have some concern about Mr. Brill's constant use of charter schools as part of the solution. Charter schools can choose not to accept students. As an educator of children in special education, I see students who require more services (and money) than many charter schools are willing to pay for.
I have some concern about Mr. Brill's constant use of charter schools as part of the solution. Charter schools can choose not to accept students. As an educator of children in special education, I see students who require more services (and money) than many charter schools are willing to pay for.
origen01 IQ argument is racist. We don't see too many rocket scientists coming from white appalachia. West Virginia is actually on bottom of educational system. Poor whites from dysfunctional families do nor perform any better than poor minority students.
I'm extremely saddened to hear Mr. Brill characterize teacher's unions as the most negative factor affecting today's schools (which I refuse to label as "failing"). I don't know if I'm naive or he is regarding the power of the union. I have taught for 27 years in Virginia. I do belong to our association (we don't have true unions in Virginia). Teacher's jobs are not guaranteed - you can get fired for substandard performance, etc. There is no "union" contract here. In my experience- it is the school system administrators that seem reluctant to fire teachers. They seem to move them around, rather than go through the steps to terminate their contracts.
Secondly- when I was 19-20 years old and deciding what I wanted to study at college, I can assure you that none of the factors stated by your guest went through my mind. I did not say to myself, "do I want a job where I get paid the same as everyone else with my level of experience no matter how hard I work?" Rather- I asked whether I enjoyed children and if liked trying to make a difference in their lives by educating them. Job security was not something my 19-year old self thought about.
We work hard whether we get paid more or not. However- as Mr. Brill stated himself, we cannot work at a breakneck pace for more than a few years. Unless you want to have even a higher level of turnover- it is the demands of good teaching that need to be addressed- not anything else.
I can understand some of the points that the author makes. However, my experience with Fairfax County Public Schools in Fairfax County, VA, shows the author's words to be generalizations. Generalizations that may be true somewhere should not be taken as fact everywhere.
I also think that administrators have a huge responsibility to use every tool available to rid a school of a bad teacher. I have seen more than a few administrators not deal with a bad teacher because the process can be onerous. That does not mean impossible, just hard. Teaching is hard, and plenty of teachers show up to do their hard work. I think that administrators should as well.