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We have met the enemy and he is us
The latest addition to our lending library, Class Warfare: Inside the fight to fix America’s schools by Steven Brill, tells the story of the education wars currently raging in the United States, along with some history. The author uses the Race for the Top competition (to which he attributes the recent tectonic shifts in state legislation) as the narrative structure. No dry historical tome, Class Warfare is full of personal information and anecdotes about the various individuals who are trying to reform American education - a widely-assorted cast of characters indeed. With each chapter short, typically only two or three pages, reading the book is like eating salted nuts – you read one chapter and you just have to read one more.
This excerpt (pp. 111-113) reports on a 2004 conversation between hedge-fund manager Whitney Tilson and KIPP co-founder Dave Levin.
“By now, the KIPP charter school in New York had twelve classes in three middle school grades, and the students were thriving, out-performing the city’s averages on all proficiency scores and blowing completely past the performance of children in similarly challenged communities.
“On this January morning that Tilson visited with him, Levin was poring over an application for two more KIPP charters that he was planning to start.
“‘Well, that certainly can’t be much of a problem,’ Tilson remarked. ‘Everything is going so well, I assume this is just a formality.’
“Levin stopped and looked up. ‘Are you kidding?’ he replied. ‘The better we do, the harder it gets.’
“Tilson was about to get his first lesson in school reform politics.
“Levin patiently explained that although he already had far more applications for the new schools than seats and would have to resort to a lottery, ‘they are going to try to stop us.’ Some local politicians in the communities where he wanted to launch, Levin continued, had already come out against KIPP and more were certain to do so. They would be likely to circulate petitions urging the city to block him. Thus, Klein’s department of education was making him fill out laborious forms and answer, then clarify, then reclarify, all kinds of absurd quesitons to make his applications bulletproof. (One asked him to change the punctuation on the name of the proposed school listed on one of the forms to conform to what had been written on another.)
“‘Who’s ‘they’?’ Tilson asked. ‘I thought all the politicians around here were Democrats.’
“‘They are Democrats,’ Levin replied. ‘They’re the problem.’
“Levin explained how the teachers’ unions had a stranglehold on local Democrats. How they funded a splinter political party, called the Working Families Party - which Democrats in close races depended on to get an extra line on the ballot - so that the union could use it almost as a subsidiary to do the union’s bidding. And how Working Families could deploy its allies in community groups, such as ACORN, to circulate petitions or deploy troops at charter opposition rallies.
“‘For me, that was a total revelation,’ Tilson recalls. ‘Here I was, a lifelong Democrat whose parents were lifelong Democrats, thinking I was fighting the next great civil rights fight - for equal education in these communities - and Dave Levin is sitting there telling me that my party is what is standing in his way.’”
Amazing,yet nothing surprises me!