The founder of American Lawyer magazine and Court TV, a pioneering journalist and media entrepreneur, Steven Brill loves nothing more than to take on an important topical issue and make it plain. He did it a few years ago with a terrific book about homeland security, After: How American Confronted The September 12 Era, and last year he did it again with the publication of Class Warfare: Inside The Fight To Fix America’s Schools, a surprisingly gripping narrative about the rise of the education reform movement, its heroes, challenges, and possibilities—which includes a lot of well-reported material about education policy in the city under Mayor Bloomberg and former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

New York Family: Is it fair to say that book’s big insight is that some teachers are much better than others and that given the opportunity they can really make an incredible difference.

Steve Brill: That’s definitely true, but I don’t think that’s not much of an insight. The epiphany that I had, that made me want to write the book, is that we have a system where we act as if that’s not true. We have 3.2 million K-12 public school teachers in the United States. It’s the largest profession in the country by a factor of three. But it’s the only occupation where basically merit, performance, call it anything you want, doesn’t count. Literally the only occupation where the only way you get promoted, the only way you make more money, the only way you get recognized is by how long your stay at it. And, yes, the second part of it is that teaching really does count. It’s more important to have a good teacher in front of the classroom than how much money you spend on education. I saw it with my own eyes in this school building on 118th Street and Lenox Avenue. Half of the building is a public school, half of the building is Harlem Success Academy, a charter. Harlem Success Academy spends less per student, the classes are a little bit bigger, and the kids outperform kids in Scarsdale. Whereas education on the other side of the building, while fine for a public school, still performs with the same rate of failure that you would expect a public school in Harlem to fail.

New York Family: We read the story in the Times suggesting that Harlem Success Academy weeds out some of its weaker students.

Brill: It’s bullshit. . . . That is one of those made up statistics from a group of denialists. They even deny that public education is failing. A favorite part of their argument is charter schools do better simply because the parents who apply their kids to charter schools are more committed than families who don’t. That might be true, but for the fact that a guy named Tom Kane at the Harvard School of Education did a study that tracked exactly that. It looked at kids in Boston where the parents applied to charter schools but didn’t get in versus the kids who made the lottery--therefore accounting for the motivation factor. And guess what? The kids that didn’t get into the lottery did a lot worse in their school than the kids who got into the lottery and went to the charter school.

New York Family: As you see it, what are the key things that Joel Klein did right and wrong in the area of school reform?

Brill: Joel’s work was basically in two areas. The first one, which is at the margins, is supporting charter schools. The important thing he did there was to support co-location. It makes the economic model of charter schools work because you don’t have to buy real estate.

New York Family: What’s your view of Harlem Success gaining footholds in more affluent neighborhoods?

Brill: What Eva Moskowitz [the founder of the Harlem Success Academy] has done—it’s almost diabolically smart—she’s offered the single best way to preserve the middle class in Manhattan. I’ve been to these meetings for parents to hear more about the school. I’ve watched Eva talk about how every kid takes science even in the first grade; every kid gets chess lessons; they get this; they get that—and the parents are very impressed. What Eva’s saying to them is that you can get really great education here—almost a private school education—and it’s free.

New York Family: All that said, you don’t think charter schools are a big part of the answer for the system as a whole, right?

Brill: I think they’re a demonstration of the answer. Mathematically they can’t be a big part of the answer. Of all the ones out there, maybe a third to a half work really well. A higher percentage of the ones in New York work well, because they are supervised a lot better. The other real reason is you can’t take someone who is working a nine to ten hour a day, even on Saturdays sometimes, and expect them to do that for twenty years. They’re not going to. You have to find a way to take intelligent, well-intentioned people and allow them to deliver better services in their classrooms. Wendy Kopp [of Teach For America] has done a lot to move that ball, making teaching a sort of cool prestige thing for a few years. Now we have to create a system that makes it a great career for life.