Steven Brill’s new book is its title. The phrase “class warfare” has a double meaning, of course, and the book paints very clearly the deep economic cleavages that underlie the fierce education debates within the Democratic Party over such policy issues as charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and the role of poverty in achievement outcomes. In Brill’s telling, the education class war pits a heroic group of entrepreneurial philanthropists, highly successful hedge fund billionaires, and idealistic Ivy Leaguers who join Teach for America against somewhat grubby and grasping rank-and-file public school teachers and their union leaders, who often put their own selfish interests above those of the children. In looking out for what is best for low-income and minority students, Brill contends, Wall Street hedge fund managers are a much more reliable ally than the middle-class teachers who educate schoolchildren every day. Brill’s worldview is important to understand because it is typical of the outlook of the education “reform” community, including leaders of the Obama administration, and the president himself.
Brill’s narrative is almost comically obsessed with the Ivy League pedigrees of many education reformers. Throughout the book, he duly notes the reformers who are graduates of Harvard (Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, John King and Whitney Tilson); Yale (Robert Gordon, David Levin, Ravenel Curry, and Michael Johnston); and Princeton (Wendy Kopp, Jonathan Schnur.) In case we don’t get the point, he notes that the people Klein put in charge of firing bad teachers were “all Ivy League lawyers.”
In fact, social scientists universally agree that family poverty is a far more important predictor of achievement than teacher quality. And even the nation’s very best high-poverty charter school chain, KIPP, which enjoys all the advantages of self-selection, high attrition, and unparalleled philanthropic support, fails to produce college graduates two-thirds of the time.
When hedge fund managers argue that their income should be taxed at a 15 percent marginal rate, they limit government revenue and squeeze funds for a number of public pursuits, including schools. Is that putting the interests of kids ahead of adults, as the reformers suggest we should always to do?
Studies show that teacher turnover is much higher in the largely non-unionized charter sector than in regular public schools. And burnout is much more frequent in high-poverty schools of all kinds than in mixed-income or middle-class schools because teachers feel overwhelmed by concentrations of poverty.
...in his very last chapter, Brill does an about-face and acknowledges some of the serious limitations of the reformer model that relies upon superstar teachers in nonunionized charter schools.
All in all, Steven Brill should be credited for vividly highlighting the class dimension of the education war going on “for the soul of the Democratic Party.” One side, backed by rank-and-file teachers and their democratically-elected representatives, sees poverty and segregation as central issues to be addressed though education reform as well as health and housing programs; the other side, backed by wealthy interests, sees poverty as an excuse and unions as the problem.
What Brill does not explain is how this classic divide, which fairly describes the difference between Democrats and Republicans, has become a Democratic civil war.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is author: Tough Liberal: Albert Shanker and the Battles Over Schools, Unions, Race, and Democracy.
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