Believe it or not, 2009 is the first year I started using a highlighter for reading a book. Maybe it’s a sign of aging, or my acclimation to getting information fed to me rapidly and succinctly, but my difficulty with concentrating on anything larger than a paragraph has led me to the magic neon-saffron marker. So you can believe my surprise when John Legend, who doesn’t have a leg to stand on in education discussions, forwarded this piece from the New York Times to his fans / followers. New York Times’ contributor Steven Brill perpetuates the idea that the New York Times continues its march to the educational right of center.
Take a look at this selection from Brill’s slanted piece:
On one side there’s the Harlem Success Academy, a kindergarten-through-fourth-grade charter with 508 students. On the other side, there’s a regular public school, P.S. 149, with 438 pre-K to 8th-grade students. They are separated only by a fire door in the middle; they share a gym and cafeteria. School reformers would argue that the difference between the two demonstrates what happens when you remove three ingredients from public education — the union, big-system bureaucracy and low expectations for disadvantaged children.
On the charter side, the children are quiet, dressed in uniforms, hard at work — and typically performing at or above grade level. Their progress in a variety of areas is tracked every six weeks, and teachers are held accountable for it. They are paid about 5 to 10 percent more than union teachers with their levels of experience. The teachers work longer than those represented by the union: school starts at 7:45 a.m., ends at 4:30 to 5:30 and begins in August. The teachers have three periods for lesson preparation, and they must be available by cellphone (supplied by the school) for parent consultations, as must the principal. They are reimbursed for taking a car service home if they stay late into the evening to work with students. There are special instruction sessions on Saturday mornings. The assumption that every child will succeed is so ingrained that (in a flourish borrowed from the Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, a national charter network) each classroom is labeled with the college name of its teacher and the year these children are expected to graduate (as in “Yale 2026” for one kindergarten class I recently visited). The charter side of the building spends $18,378 per student per year. This includes actual cash outlays for everything from salaries to the car service, plus what the city says (and the charter disputes) are the value of services that the city contributes to the charter for utilities, building maintenance and even “debt service” for its share of the building.
On the other side of the fire door, I encounter about a hundred children at 9:00 a.m. watching a video in an auditorium, having begun their school day at about 8:30. Others wander the halls. Instead of the matching pension contributions paid to the charter teachers that cost the school $193 per student on the public-school side, the union contract provides a pension plan that is now costing the city $2,605 per year per pupil. All fringe benefits, including pensions and health insurance, cost $1,341 per student on the charter side, but $5,316 on this side. For the public-school teachers to attend a group meeting after hours with the principal (as happens at least once a week on the charter side) would cost $41.98 extra per hour for each attendee, and attendance would still be voluntary. Teachers are not obligated to receive phone calls from students or parents at home. Although the city’s records on spending per student generally and in any particular school are difficult to pin down because of all of the accounting intricacies, the best estimate is that it costs at least $19,358 per year to educate each student on the public side of the building, or $980 more than on the charter side.
Let’s dissect this for a second.
#1 – If charter school teachers have to work 5-10% more time for 5-10% more money, is that really a raise? No. It’s more working, which renders his $41.98 extra per hour (what teachers call “per session”) inconsequential.
#2 – Can we define levels of experience? What’s the average amount of experience teachers in charter schools have versus public schools? Numerous studies have shown that charter schools suffer from higher levels of attrition rates than public schools do, and there’s multiple factors to that, many of which unions help to address.
#3, as a corollary to #2 – How does a teacher actually get better if they don’t get enough experience to stay in their school longer than 2-3 years?
#4 – Why does Brill keep referring to this contract as the “union contract” when two parties agreed to this and when our union made so many concessions over the last five years, I find it hard to believe the union “strong-armed” anyone into it?
#5 – How does the writer manage to find the appropriate estimate for what’s spent on children when things are so “difficult to pin down?” Isn’t it a logical fallacy on his end to suggest a huge discrepancy in money per student, and furthermore, to blame the discrepancy on a body that DEPENDS on how much money per student is used?
#6 – Cell phones? Car services? That sounds to me like there’s a few benefits we’re not discussing in depth.
#7 – He fails to mention the bi-weekly mandated staff meetings and the extra 40 minutes or so per day that not all principals have integrated into the school day.
#8 – I wonder how many students who don’t fit with the charter school’s “model” get pushed to the other side. Further, I find it deceitful to put a school with as many resources as the charter school right next to the public school. It’s a typical case of the haves versus have-notes.
The rest of the article reads like a 2010 communique to reformers, and that doesn’t bode well for anyone who wants to stay in the profession long-term. I don’t have a problem with parents sending kids to charter schools if that’s the choice they’d like to have. I just see the myriad of reformers falling into the gaping holes of their arguments.
By the time I got to page 9 of the article, I stopped highlighting anything; these are low lights in our profession. And Steven Brill is the prognosticator of the death of public education.
Mr. Vilson, whose between-the-lines literacy is at an all-time high …