Back to School

It’s all here. Superintendents who can’t get a straight answer on how many people work at district headquarters. Time-serving instructors whose seniority qualifies them to teach upper-level classes they wouldn’t qualify to take as students. Principals who are hamstrung by mind-numbing personnel rules forced on them by teachers’ unions. Janitors who won’t clean, repair, or maintain buildings because “it’s not in my contract.” Venerable traditions like “passing the lemon,” whereby principals lie on teacher evaluations so they can easily transfer classroom incompetents to other schools and students. Teachers who can’t spell or do higher math, or whose idea of teaching history is to have students construct dioramas of Nazi death camps.

ESPECIALLY DISTURBING are Stern’s descriptions of the mediocrity that infects even high-achieving schools, like New York’s famed Stuyvestant High. Yes, test scores there are way above average–but that’s largely due to the rigor of the entrance exam and the kids’ prior academic accomplishments. In fact, as Stern notes, the teachers could be rotten at Stuyvestant, and “graduating seniors would still achieve average SAT scores of 1,400 points; 99.5 percent of the graduates would go to college; and hundreds would be accepted to Ivy League schools.” Kids come to Stuyvestant as academic high-flyers; there is little evidence that four years at the school adds much to their upward trajectory.

When a new principal at Stuyvestant, J. “Jinx” Cozzi Perullo, unexpectedly decides to challenge the complacency of the school, all hell breaks loose. The school’s union leader bombards the principal with grievances. She lodges official complaints about Perullo’s experiment with block scheduling (doubling up some class periods)–such experiments are prohibited by the district contract with the union, no matter how much sense they make. She complains that the principal isn’t doing enough to shield teachers and the union from critical articles in the school’s student newspaper. Most important, the union leader wages all-out war to defend the tenure and seniority system that has all but stripped principals of their ability to hire good teachers and fire bad ones. As Stern writes, the complaints quickly reach the point of lunacy: “According to Perullo, some students once offered her a large campaign-style button saying ‘Kids First,’ which they had created for an upcoming school celebration. Perullo not only accepted the button, she wore it prominently for several days. When [the union leader] spotted the button, she asked Perullo, in all seriousness, ‘What about the teachers?'” After five years, Perullo retired and was replaced by a time-server who quickly gave in to the union’s demands.

Stern’s investigations into America’s public schools are fascinating and finely drawn, but there’s more here than just a string of absurd episodes. His admiration for New York’s Catholic school system shines through in several chapters where he contrasts its ability to educate poor, minority, and largely non-Catholic kids on a shoestring budget with the inability of the wasteful and outsized public school system. Stern recounts the experience of the writer John Chubb, who once waited weeks for the answer to a simple question: How many people work at the New York City district central office at 110 Livingston Street? An exact answer never came, though it was estimated to be between six and seven thousand. Chubb called the central office of the Catholic school system and asked the same question. An aide told him to hang on, and then Chubb heard counting at the end of the line, “One, two, three…” The answer was twelve.

And Stern lingers for a chapter to eviscerate Jonathon Kozol of “Savage Inequalities” fame–a writer who, more than possibly any other person, is responsible for the spread of two pernicious notions: that schools underperform because they are underfunded, and that education should be first and foremost about raising class-consciousness. This has been pointed out before, but you can never have enough Kozol-debunking, so ubiquitous (and destructive) is he.

BUT “BREAKING FREE” would be just another morbid tale of public education’s woes if it weren’t for the glimpse of paradiso that Stern gives when he talks about “the schools that vouchers built” in Milwaukee, an educational wasteland where more than 80 percent of black males drop out of the public school system. Now, thanks to $5,600 state-funded vouchers, almost 12,000 poor and minority students are educated in private and religious schools that are models of instructional competence, curricular sanity, and order: Catholic schools like Messmer High School, with its charismatic black president, Brother Bob Smith; religious schools like Believers in Christ Christian Academy, located in the most drug- and crime-ridden neighborhood in the city; and secular schools like Bruce-Guadalupe, where 80 percent of the mostly minority student body scores at or above proficiency on state tests. All of them succeed, says Stern, because they are “called into existence” by community members and sustained by devotion to an educational mission. They are also, of course, free of the regulatory and curricular plagues that beset public schools.

Stern, in a self-conscious imitation of Ché Guevara, calls for “two, three, many Milwaukees.” He is still a 1960s radical, though his cause is now school choice to remedy the educational failings of America’s public school system. These failings touch every student–but most especially those who can least afford it, the poor and minority students who have little or nothing in the way of family or community safety nets to make up for their miseducation.

As it happens, school choice is making progress slowly but surely. Charter schools–public schools of choice–are now educating more than six hundred thousand students across the country, despite a backlash from teachers’ unions and the education establishment. Vouchers have gained a small foothold in Cleveland and Florida, and this session of Congress may see the establishment of a federally funded voucher program in Washington, D.C. (Even Democrats like Senator Dianne Feinstein have signed on, so awful are the District’s public schools.) The private-school scene remains robust, and homeschooling has experienced meteoric growth over the past several years. Soon enough, Milwaukee is coming–everywhere.

Justin Torres is research director of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a K-12 education reform organization, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.