More Waiting for Superman?

In The New York Times, Sara Mosle has an interesting review of Steven Brill's just-released book, Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America's Schools. Based on Mosle's read, Brill—perhaps best known for his Court TV and his New Yorker article that called out the Big Apple's "rubber rooms" for rotten, unfireable teachers—places the burden of guilt squarely on America’s teachers’ unions. As the book explains, it’s the heroic story of an "unlikely army—fed-up public school parents, Ivy League idealists, hedge-funders, civil rights activists, conservative Republicans, insurgent Democrats—squaring off against unions that the reformers claim are protecting a system that works for the adults but victimizes the children." But as to be suspected, there's no happy ending in sight and no side is totally innocent—or guilty. In fact, the book seems pretty reminiscent of the divisive film Waiting for Superman.

Mosle, who once riled teachers unions herself, points out that, well, things are complex. She ponts out that while teacher quality may be the most important variable within schools, there's plenty of research showing that that "most of the variation in student performance" is a result of factors outside the school: "not just poverty, but also parental literacy (and whether parents read to their children), student health, frequent relocations, crime-­related stress and the like."

As a teacher herself, Mosle points to one well-known study from 2009, which surveyed approximately half of all charters nationwide and was backed by the pro-­charter Walton Family and Michael and Susan Dell Foundations. The study found that more than 80 percent of students either do no better, or actually perform substantially worse, than traditional public schools—not a great record and perhaps a reminder that charter schools were not started to outperform traditional schools necessarily. The study concluded that “tremendous variation in academic quality among charters is the norm, not the exception.”