The Fourth “R”

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.