Steven Brill on How to Fix Public Schools
by Reason TV“[Teaching] is the only workplace, the only occupation, where by and large you are not paid, promoted, recognized, measured in any way having to do with your performance, only having to do with how long you’ve been breathing,” says journalist and media entrepreneur Steven Brill.
His new book, Class Warfare, chronicles the rise of a reform movement that’s bringing a measure of accountability and choice to public schools. The book grew out of Brill’s widely read 2009 New Yorker piece about the “rubber room,” a holding pen for New York City teachers who couldn’t be fired after they were removed from their classrooms for poor performance.
Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Brill at his office in New York City.
Approximately 7 minutes.
Camera by Jim Epstein and Anthony Fisher; edited by Epstein.
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33 Comments
Not to mention your political orientation, Mr. Brill. But, you are essentially correct.
You are 100% correct Mr.Brill. However your description applies to basically ALL union positions. If "performance" was a requirement, the majority would be unemployed.
Abolish tenure and declare the teachers union a criminal enterprise [an audit would uncover criminal activity as has been uncovered at LAUSD in Los Angeles]. Stop flooding public schools with non English speaking illegals that ruin the learning environment for all. But education is not the purpose of public schools anyway; it’s to extort the taxpayer for greater and greater salaries and pensions. The kids are just the currency to accomplish these goals. If the Los Angeles public school district were a private entity it would be facing a class action lawsuit and the ownership would be indicted.
Do not hire any teachers who attended Columbia or other like minded institutions.
To all my Ohio BigG/J/P/H peeps, don't forget to vote YES on Issue 2!
Absolutely yes! My wife, the police officer, will also be voting yes
Teacher's unions continue to be the main problem in education kids!
What is the need all liberals have to control every facet of everyones life? Teachers don't teach anyone anymore they indoctrinate into the insanity of liberalism and little johnny gets sent into his life with liberal ideas and a pocketful of condoms and has no idea how to form a logical thought, or read, or write and do math. The best use of his diploma is to have it handy on a camping trip for those awkward moments in the woods. The best success stories generally start with, well he started colllege but dropped out to…?.Bill Gates, Steven Jobs and on and on. On the other hand turn on the news and watch the Occupy Wall Street crowd and there is your collegians and academic airheads
How to fix public schooling: End it.
Seriously, what kind of 'Libertarian" organization can Reason really claim to be? More like Beltwaytarian. Do they really think that you can make public schools more accountable and financially responsible by introducing 'competition'? By their very inherent nature they will not be so. This 'competition' is nowhere near what the competition would be if we eliminate public schooling altogether.
Any publicly funded school system will not function on a large scale, as is evident today, and must be eliminated. It is not just the fact that Unions exist, it is the very existence of the Public School itself.
"There is, in fact, only one solution: the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions."
-Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism
Thomas Sowell has an excellent 2003 book that is still spot on: 'Inside American Education: The Decline, The Deception, The Dogmas'
I don't think it is possible for Dr. Sowell to not be spot on, The man is golden.
Tues, Nov 8… the teachers are counting on you not showing up. The opposition is very organized. Remind and call everyone that you know. They are trying to scare legislators so they won't do this again.
I worked in the public schools for a year, and saw the apathy, disillusionment, and general lack of energy most teachers brought. If you had a desire to excel, the combination of students, parents, and fellow teachers could drive you insane. I escaped instead.
you could just hire babysitters at a hell of a lot less money and still get the same or higher test scores at most unionized schools,without the communist indoctrination??
liberalism doesn't need educated people.
socialism needs them even less.
That, he is!
Good interview Nick, as always.
All public unions should be abolished. They are bankrupting the country.
The liberals all seem to posses the most useless degrees at that, really liberal arts,philolsophy,sociology( a two year degree)womens studies , and my personal fav African american studies, in effect only degrees that would be MSNBC hosts and college professors love. but useless as hell to the workforce.
Privatize education. The public school system was started for one reason – to socially control the population, not educate them. You are seeing the result that was desired from public education in the streets right now. Thousands of mind-numbed robots, crying for "fairness." They have conquered us from within – they're all socialists now.
As our country is on the verge of imploding, we're debating how to fix our broken government schools? Get real people and focus on how we're going to salvage and restore our nation. I so sick of the wall to wall focus on ows, while ZERO orders US combat troops into Uganda??? Thanks a butt-load to George Sore-Azz! There are so many more important battles that we should fight and win before we move outside the perimeter.
Every one of them I had the misfortune would have been, and it was a huge shop. I moved from that company to one half the size, and we accomplished twice as much work with half as many people and equipment. OH and we got paid better too, without being shook down every payday for the bribe money, (AKA Union Dues)
The fact that Brill thinks teachers are the downtrodden, just shows his ignorance of the real world. In todays world and for at least the last 5 years nobody has gotten raises based on anything, because most businesses are down.
Fixing schools is VERY simple. Throw out the unions, and get rid of ALL federal programs. Get a group of seniors to audit the textbooks, if they can't understand them then chances are the kids won't either. Throw out the revisionist and PC writen history books. Teach children the TRUTH not the PC version of it! This is what led us to the idiots in the Occupy groups that don't even understand capitalism or the government. WE CAN DO THIS!
My son's textbook had 5 pages on Nixon and Watergate and 2 sentences on Stalin's atrocities. The Leftists writing the textbooks are a MAJOR part of the problem.
Students are taught absolutely nothing about the evils of Communism, hence, what we see today among the "Occupier" airheads.
I think the video was advocating privatization. They just used the charter school example to show that even a little competition works wonders.
I'll get anecdotal for a second: Both of my parents are special education teachers in New Jersey. I have actually worked as a substitute aide in some of these classes throughout my parents' district, so technically I am a public servant. I've seen poorer districts refuse to send severely autistic children to specialized schools because they simply cannot afford it, but I digress.
The amount of BS my parents deal with from the state of NJ (stuff that has been going on since Tom Kean's reign) is obnoxious as to what they must do. The state has a particular set of standards that must be applied to each child regardless of their learning (or ability to learn) level or whether they have special needs. There's very few exceptions, so while most special-needs children should be learning skills that are necessary for simple survival once they leave school, it gets compounded with crap like the HSPA (a standardized test which all public school students take in NJ).
I wouldn't trust the state of New Jersey to educate my kid. There's too many God-awful rules that all the good teachers get hamstrung by that it makes their work moot.
Sad state of affairs when a student graduates high school and can't read, write, or do even the simple math to balance a checkbook. Some of the problems can be laid at the feet of the teachers, some at the feet of the principles and district supervisors, lots at the feet of the parents, some at the state legislatures, and a whole bunch at the DOE in DC. It's time to return education to the states and their legislatures. The legislatures should set the pay, merit pay, and whatever other regulations are necessary to graduate quality students.
One day, hopefully soon, more likely not, society will realize how unions have consigned generations of children to the trash heap, metaphorically speaking. All that potential, lost. An entire lifetime of underachievement by students educated by union members who cared more about money than the kids. Don't believe me? Take a trip to some of the inner city schools that are failed schools, yet have NOT been closed. Staffed fully by union employees. Are unions sounding the alarm about all those inner city children that are basically not being educated? Well if you call them asking for bigger raises as a solution (a bigger raise for the teacher's in place that have failed to teach no less), but otherwise the unions only care about quality in the context they can extract higher wages and benefits. The fact that school spending has doubled in the past decade or so, yet test scores haven't budged. We have paid twice as much for no gain, zero. Where is the teacher union outrage over this? You didn't miss it, there was, and is, none.
The 3rd goal of the Progressive party, in the early 1900's was to De-Decristianize American thought.. This was the hardest goal for them to accomplish at the time.
Karl Marx did it by using the sceince and philosophy of evolution, which he promoted to De-Christianize any European thought.
Please realize that Charles Darwin was not a credentialed scientist, biologist, anthropololgist.
So, what is the difference between an American public school and a Russian public school, other than we have more "stuff"?
Time will prove that all leftist ideology,(liberalism,communism,socialism), will lead to misery and poverty beyond belief and that once the destruction has occurred it will be beyond recovery.These are idiots of the first degree. The one thing that has been the main contributer to this is Athiesm. If you choose to reject God as a foundation for truth you have no foundation, nothing becomes real, nothing is right or wrong. I realize athiests don't get the God thing right now but in all fairness they will later.
If they don't learn REAL history…we are doomed to repeat it. Yes the occupy group makes that VERY CLEAR. The fact that the communist leader received cheers at their event should make everyone afraid! These fools have no idea what they are doing.
Right. Atheists reject God as the foundation for truth and make up their own self-serving morality, which can obviously change at any time to suit their purposes, all the while convincing themselves that they are morally superior beings, blinding themselves by their own arrogance. It doesn't take a genius to see where that thinking can eventually lead and more often than not does.
Easy. Abolish the DOE immediately. Forbid federal interference in the public school system forever. Return the schools to local control, and each state pass laws that demand that any lawsuits permitted can no longer be brought by national organizations with nameless plaintiffs….oh, and loser pays.
State governments, representing the PEOPLE, must do away with degrees in "education". They are the biggest joke on the planet- I have one, so I know. ALL teachers should have any post-graduate degrees in their discipline. ALL states should be "right to work" states. Abolish all union activity for government positions. These people are NOT employed by the "government"- they are employed by the PEOPLE, and paid by them, as well. Abolish tenure, for the public schools AND the state colleges and universities.
Allow the states to devise their own graduation testing, and make the outcomes a statement on teachers' abilities. Allow parents to have the greatest say as to how and what their children are taught. Majority rules.
Yeah they are given to making up reality as it suits them. These is no undisputable evidence to support evolution but they hang on to it like it's gospel. But in support of our argument in likemindedness.
2 Timothy 3:2 For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips, without self-control, brutal, haters of good, 4treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5holding to a form of godliness, although they have denied its power; Avoid such men as these. 6For among them are those who enter into households and captivate weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, 7always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth.
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