9781451611991

A hard-hitting look inside America's K-12 showing why children are failing, who is standing in their way, who is helping, and what needs to happen.

Steven Brill is the CEO of Press+, which has created a new business model for journalism to flourish online. He teaches journalism at Yale and founded the Yale Journalism Initiative. Brill founded and ran The American Lawyer magazine, Court TV, and Brill’s Content magazine. He is the author of After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era and The Teamsters.

The Race	p. 1
Juicy Words	p. 10
The Epiphanies	p. 19
ôBe Obedient. Be Good. Keep Your Mouth Shut.ö	p. 31
ôIf an Unfriendly Foreign Power Had Attempted …ö	p. 42
A ôHopelessly Naïveö Thesis	p. 51
A Governor and a President Take Center Stage	p. 58
Payroll to Payroll	p. 61
Lighting Up the Capitol Switchboard	p. 64
The Backlash	p. 68
Schoolyard Classroom	p. 72
The Discovery: ôGood Teaching Mattersö	p. 77
The Network	p. 80
No Child Left Behind	p. 84
ôDon't Worry, It's Just a Parentö	p. 86
ôThe Union Won't Allow Itö	p. 95
ôThe Idea Wasn't Just to Keep Them from Killing Somebodyö	p. 109
ôHow Could the Democrats Be Against This?ö	p. 111
Seeing George Soros's Apartment	p. 115
New York Realities	p. 119
ôOur Party Has Got to Wake Up on Thisö	p. 131
The Co-location Trap	p. 133
Creating a New School System the Hard Way	p. 136
ôColorado Says Half of You Won't Graduateö	p. 139
The Pol and the Moneymen	p. 141
Foxes in the Henhouse	p. 147
Mounting Evidence	p. 150
ôThis Just Seemed So Obviousö	p. 155
More Money, No Hassles	p. 158
Building Harlem Success	p. 161
ôThis Is Not a Self-Esteem Movementö	p. 170
ôYou Really Don't Want to Hire Meö	p. 173
ôPulling the Rug Outö	p. 176
Money Meets Data	p. 178
Hillary for Teachers, Teachers for Hillary	p. 181
Forward, Backward in New York	p. 185
$45,000 Well Spent	p. 188
ôFaceless Bureaucracyö	p. 190
Back in the Classroom	p. 192
Quarantine the Data	p. 194
Climbing the Ladder	p. 196
Rhee's Choice: Your Union or $130,000	p. 199
Turning Around the USS Gates	p. 201
The New Democrats	p. 206
Two Returns to the Classroom	p. 210
ôWake Up, Obama Just Talked About Youö	p. 216
ôInside Baseballö	p. 219
ôWhat Do You Guys Think You Could Do with a Hundred Billion?ö	p. 227
The Chosen Four	p. 229
ôThey'll Do Backflipsö	p. 236
ôThings I Can't Change from This Buildingö	p. 245
Widgets	p. 247
Agreement in Pittsburgh	p. 252
The Opposite of Venture Capital	p. 254
ôOutcomes, Not Achievementö	p. 265
ôObfuscating the Issue … Fooling the Reviewersö	p. 268
A Shriek on Park Avenue	p. 270
The Feinberg Gambit	p. 278
School Reform: The Movie	p. 281
Firing Everyone	p. 287
ôMy Baby Is Readingö	p. 289
Going Over to the Other Side	p. 302
A ôBafflingö Round One	p. 306
ôVarnish on a Sinking Shipö	p. 313
Two Winners	p. 315
Back on the Horse in Colorado	p. 321
Billionaires Trapped in an Elevator	p. 324
Rhee's Breakthrough	p. 331
ôHe Met with Everyoneö	p. 334
A New York Breakthrough-or Mirage?	p. 337
Rocky Mountain High	p. 342
ôHonored, Humbled, Hopeful-and Horrifiedö	p. 345
ôShe's de Klerk in South Africa. We Have to Help Her.ö	p. 350
The Quiet Revolution	p. 353
ôTeach Like Your Hair's on Fireö	p. 355
Klein's and Mulgrew's ôWonderful Negotiationö	p. 359
From Inside Baseball to Public Accountability	p. 363
ôArne, Here's the Column You've Been Missingö	p. 371
Soaring Dreams, Street-Level Politics	p. 379
Rhee Rejected	p. 384
I'll E-mail Your Dad and Tell Himö	p. 387
The ôMujahideenö and the Moderates	p. 392
Punch, Counterpunch	p. 402
A Marathon, Not a Sprint	p. 421
Acknowledgments	p. 439
Sources	p. 443
Notes	p. 451
Index	p. 463
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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The Race
January 29, 2009, 1:15 p.m.,
Oval Office, the White House

As he filed into the Oval Office behind the power players who were already household names in Washington—top presidential adviser David Axelrod, chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan—Jon Schnur thought that he had spent years waiting to have this meeting.* Until now he had been jilted. The Democrats he had worked for had always backed away from the education reforms he championed. And they hadn’t been elected.

Schnur, then forty-three, got interested in education when, as an editor of his high school newspaper, he read a draft of an article by a student who had transferred from a Milwaukee public school to his school in the city’s suburbs. “She was savvier than any of us on the editorial board, but the draft was just so terribly written,” he says. “The more I got to know her, the more I became obsessed with why public education hadn’t reached people like her.”

After he graduated from Princeton, where he had volunteered as a tutor in a nearby high school, Schnur worked in Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign, then landed an education policy job in his administration.

That was when Schnur started to distrust his assumptions about why American public education had collapsed to a point where it was an obstacle to the American dream rather than the enabler. As he studied research trickling in by the late 1990s, he began to believe that failure or success in America’s schoolrooms, especially in its poorest communities, didn’t depend mostly on what kind of home a child came from or whether the school had enough resources, which is what most liberals like Schnur had always assumed. Instead, he concluded, it had to do more with the teacher in front of the class. Truly effective teaching, he came to believe, could overcome student indifference, parental disengagement, and poverty—and, in fact, was the key to enabling children to rise above those circumstances.

However, as the studies and the reports from a new kind of public school called “charter schools” were finding, successful teaching was grueling work. It required more talent, more preparation, more daily reevaluation and retooling, more hours in the class day, and just plain more perseverance than many teachers, and most teachers’ union contracts, were willing or able to provide. In Schnur’s view, the unions and those who ran the nation’s increasingly bureaucratic school systems had settled on low expectations for children, which allowed them not to be held accountable when the children continued to fail. Change those expectations; put good, determined teachers and principals in there; retrain or, if necessary, remove those who were not effective; and “demography will no longer be destiny,” Schnur and his fellow reformers believed. That presented a dilemma if you were a Democrat, because the Democratic Party had come to rely on teachers’ unions as its strongest base of support.

By 1998, Schnur was Vice President Al Gore’s education policy aide. During his boss’s 2000 presidential campaign, he persuaded Gore to give a speech to the Michigan teachers’ union about the need to pay teachers based on how effective they were in boosting their students’ performance, an idea that struck at the core of union contracts that mandated lockstep compensation based only on how many years a teacher had been teaching, or what graduate degrees the teacher held.

Gore hadn’t flinched. He hadn’t even tinkered with some of the language that Schnur had made tougher in anticipation that the vice president or someone else would water it down.

Right after the speech, the air came out of Schnur’s balloon. Within days, the two national teachers’ unions—which donate three times more money to Democrats than any other union or industry group and whose members account for more than 25 percent of all union members in the country and 10–15 percent of the delegates to the Democratic Party convention that chooses the presidential nominee—had complained to higher-ups in the Gore campaign. Without anyone’s informing Schnur, Gore’s education reform positions disappeared from the campaign issues material. Gore never again mentioned teacher quality in his campaign, or any of the other education reforms that Schnur proposed. In the presidential debates between Gore and George W. Bush, the Texas governor talked about how he had pushed to make his state’s schools and their teachers accountable for performance by requiring all students to be tested so their progress could be measured. Gore said testing by school systems should be voluntary and called for more federal aid to hire more teachers and pay them all more.

Four years later, Schnur signed on to help John Kerry, who as a senator had taken an interest in education reform. He drafted policy papers and a speech or two. The Kerry 2004 presidential campaign used none of them.

Now, as he took his seat on a sofa near the fireplace in the Oval Office, Schnur recalled how Obama ’08 had been completely different. Since coming to the Senate in 2005, Barack Obama had been talking about education in ways that would have alarmed the teachers’ unions, if they had cared enough to notice what a junior senator was saying. In 2006, he introduced legislation to provide federal aid to school districts that initiated reforms, such as linking teachers’ pay and promotions to how well their students advanced on tests during the school year. The legislation went nowhere. And just two days after he announced his presidential candidacy, on a swing through Iowa to compete in the state’s bellwether caucuses, he had answered a question about increasing teachers’ salaries by saying that, yes, teachers should be paid more but that “there’s also going to have to be accountability,” and that students’ performance on standardized tests “has to be part of the mix.”

“Such candor is refreshing,” David Yepsen, the influential political columnist for the Des Moines Register, wrote the next day, adding that he had asked Obama after his talk if a “candidate can win if he tells Democratic constituency groups things they don’t want to hear.”