'Class Warfare' - An Educating Read on the School System

Public education, what is wrong with it (at least in many places), how to fix it, and whether teachers’ unions are politically-adroit hogs at the public trough, or sincere educators who care deeply about our children, or some combination of both, are topics which often attract far more heat than light in public discourse. Our latest superintendent, Mr. Freund, quit because two of the eight Greenwich school board members questioned his devotion to, and spending our money on, the Baccalaureate Program. Further ructions followed.

Although our Greenwich schools are patently better than most around the nation, we still can hardly ignore the national debate among cash-strapped governments, teachers’ unions (which even their admirers must admit are ferociously effective players in the political arena), parents, pundits and journalists. Today’s book Class Warfare, subtitled “Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools,” by Steven Brill, is a new and very worthwhile contribution to this discussion.

Brill is an interesting fellow. Back in 1979, he founded a magazine called The American Lawyer, which brought aggressive yet fact-based journalism to the closed world of the legal business, largely focusing on big law firms in New York and other major cities which had held themselves above public discussion of “private” matters such as income, partnership promotions and ethnic considerations.

Brill was having none of this, and for decades has published details about how much money big-shot lawyers take home, intra-firm squabbles, and the many juicy scandals which occur in the world of mega-deals and in the collapse of huge outfits like New York’s Finley Kumble (which had, as I recall, financial elements of  a Ponzi scheme camouflaged as a law firm). What I suspect mainly outraged the Pooh-Bahs of the legal world – just as this book is sure to outrage many in the public education business – was the accuracy of Brill’s aggressive journalism. I recall being involved in one matter that had attracted his interest, and was amazed that he got it just about all right, down even to the nuances.

A public grammar school alumnus himself in his native Queens, Brill first became challenged by reporting on school matters through a series he did for The New Yorker which acquainted him with the city schools’ famous Rubber Rooms, seven grubby chambers which at the time contained more than 600 ‘teachers,’ all on full pay and benefits, who “had been accused either of misconduct, such as hitting or molesting a student, or in some cases of incompetence, in a system that rarely called anyone incompetent.” Year in, year out, for an average of three years, they punched a time clock and sat, or more usually slept, doing absolutely nothing while the proceedings under the union contract to sack them, which “typically took three to five years and rarely resulted in dismissals,” ground on.

This, Brill says, was his “introduction not only to this Rubber Room but to the metaphorical rubber room that had become America’s public education system,” involving “the most lavishly funded and entrenched bureaucracies in American…supported by an interest group – the teachers’ unions – which, the reformers complained had money and playbooks every bit as effective in thwarting the public interest as Big Oil.” But, as Brill quickly concedes, “teachers are not peddlers. Most really want to teach kids (and) many have become indifferent to, or even embarrassed by, the positions their unions have come to stand for.” So, he concludes, there are really three main ‘camps’ in this fight (not including opportunistic, or even sincere, politicians hoping to profit by one position or the other): “the reformers, the unions, and the teachers.” Not that this is anything new, of course.

Back in 1983, President Reagan’s Commission of Excellence in Education reported that “the educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded.…If an unfriendly power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might have viewed it as an act of war.” Of course, this was during a Republican administration, and Reagan’s Secretary of Education quickly was at loggerheads with the NEA, the national teachers’ group. One of their leaders told him that if “we” (the NEA) didn’t have his “cooperation,” it “will be unfortunate.”  “For whom,” Secretary Bennett replied. “For you. You really don’t want to be in a fight with us,” he was told. “Are you threatening me? You gonna put a horse head in my bed” he asked, referring to a scene in “The Godfather.”

On and on the story goes. A later NEA president in 2010 urged his members to fight the Obama administration in Congress, reminding them “There are 3.2 million of us and 535 of them … 6,000 NEA members for each member of Congress … Imagine every representative getting hundreds of e-mails every day.”

New York City’s then School Chancellor regularly locked horns with his union’s Randi Weingarten whose “spine of iron” did not bend over on getting rid of useless teachers or other issues dear to the reformers. The reduction in Rubber Room money-wasters was just a cheap accounting trick: the 744 occupants in 2010 were reduced to 83 in 2011, but only 33 had been booted. Some were ‘retired’ with full benefits but hundreds more were “still paid to do nothing” on the “Absent Teacher Reserve List.”

But I found the book balanced. After his horror stories, the conclusions were realistic. In one shocker, Brill proposed that the mayor “make Randi Weingarten schools chancellor. She’s smart and almost certainly knows that the way to fix public education is to make the rank and file perform better.” He concludes that it is only from existing – yes, union – teachers that our schools will get better. 

So, while it is surely significant that blurbs praising this book came from Amy Chua (the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother lady) and from Gov. Chris Christie, Brill is too good of a reporter to tell an unduly biased story, and too good a writer to let his book be boring.