Mosle on Brill's "Class Warfare"

Sara Mosle has a review today of Steven Brill's Class Warfare in the New York Times.  I generally hold high regard for what reformers like Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein did/are doing for public education, but Mosle does provide a few points of pushback that are worth considering.

Start with the idea that unions are holding back public schools from engaging in real reform.  According to Mosle though, a particularly rigorous 2009 study, which surveyed approximately half of all charters nationwide and was financed by the pro-­charter Walton Family and Michael and Susan Dell Foundations, found that more than 80 percent either do no better, or actually perform substantially worse, than traditional public schools. The study [which she does not link] concluded that “tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception.”

Moving onto the idea of teacher quality, Mosle suggests that Brill conveniently ignores evidence that  most of the variation in student performance is explained by nonschool factors: not just poverty, but also parental literacy (and whether parents read to their children), student health, frequent relocations, crime-­related stress and the like. She suggests that movies like "Waiting for Superman" show less the benefits of Charter Schools, but actually the benefits of academically effective parents: "mothers and fathers who, despite difficult circumstances, read with their children, push them to do their homework and actively seek out exceptional charters, which (unlike the mediocre or failing ones) are oversubscribed and thus rely on lotteries with long odds for admission."

Like I said, I'm very sympathetic to the idea that things need to change in public schools. I think President Obama and Secretary Duncan are on the right track with programs like "Race to the Top" and that if we are going to get a lot of public schools to the "excellent" level we're going to have to have more flexibility than a lot of the unions currently allow.  I also think the issue is a lot more complex than reformers portray (particularly the idea that three years of excellent teachers will eliminate gaps in achievement among poorly performing students).  It seems like schools like KIPP benefit from higher scores as they enjoy a self-selected group of kids who have motivated parents who care about their education. Certainly application of KIPP-like models would seem to raise scores, but it does not seem like that alone is going to solve the problem of poorly performing schools. In short, my instinct tells me this: Parenting. Does. Matter.  So do excellent teachers.  Both are necessary, neither is sufficient for high levels of student achievement.

As for the point about elimination of unions not solving the problem for charter schools, I can only respond that this doesn't surprise me at all.  I am not sure what this is supposed to prove other than the fact that elimination of unions will not alone solve the problem.  I have not heard this argument, but I suppose this pierces the heart of it once and for all.  That said, schools have to have the ability to move in a way that unions often will not allow.