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Stern, Sol. (2003). Breaking
Free. San Francisco: Encounter Books.
Pp. 237
$25.95 ISBN 1594030588
Reviewed by Andrew Brodsky
University of Colorado, Boulder
August 10, 2004
The neoconservative philosophy of school
reform holds these truths to be self-evident: public schools are
a bureaucratic nightmare, misguided progressives are largely
responsible for the test-score gap between advantaged and
disadvantaged students, and school choice is the panacea. In
Breaking Free, Sol Stern continues in this contemporary
conservative tradition, drawing lessons from the New York City
public school system. Stern is a journalist who has written for
the New York Times and is currently a contributing editor
for the conservative Manhattan Institute’s City
Journal. Throughout Breaking Free, he combines his
own observations as a parent with interviews with teachers and
administrators throughout the New York school district, summing
with a plea for school choice. Though Stern tackles an important
subject with pointed enthusiasm, he ends up veering from the
reasoned argument to which he seems to aspire into a series of
ad hominem attacks at liberal education reforms.
Ultimately, Stern’s undoubtedly well-meaning cries for
public school reform fail to convince, lacking the nuance and
balance so desperately needed in the field of education
reform.
Stern’s treatise comes in the
midst of a decades-long struggle to solve the nearly universally
accepted truth about public schools: they are vastly unequal.
Whatever the metric – test scores, funding, career
opportunities – poor kids fare worse than rich kids and
black and Latino kids fare worse than white kids. To those on
the left, the public school system has traditionally been seen
as one dependent cog in the greater wheel of socioeconomic
inequity. In this view, disparities in education can only be
resolved by addressing these inequities – by improving
social programs in inner city neighborhoods, for example, or by
increasing funding to disadvantaged kids. Conservatives, on the
other hand, have striven to force schools to participate in what
they see as the great success of America – a free market
system in which institutions prosper which provide the greatest
value for customers at the lowest cost.
Over the past decade and half this
neoliberal view has taken root in a series of influential
treatises. For example, Chubb and Moe (1990) saw schools as
buried beneath layers of bureaucracy reinforced by stubborn
teachers’ unions, and claimed choice mechanisms could break
this public school monopoly. School choice could allow parents
to circumvent the self-serving power structure of public schools
and would serve rich and poor students alike. Throughout the
1990’s and into today, this conception of schooling has
gained momentum, encoded into national reforms like George W.
Bush’s No Child Left Behind policy and the state-level
policies enacted in its wake. Now, school choice options must by
law be encoded into each state’s accountability system. In
this increasingly politicized debate, choice not only serves to
streamline administrative structures, but also allows parents to
avoid the public schools they see as sites of indoctrination into
a set of liberal values not shared by Americans as a whole.
Enter Stern and his two sons, Jonathan
and Dani. In the first section of Breaking Free Stern
traces the progress of his sons through a series of public
schools, each of which ultimately disappoints. The first chapter
opens with a description of P.S. 87, considered the “Holy
Grail” of urban public education for its diverse student
body and high academic standards. Despite Stern’s high
hopes, P.S. 87 is a failure, its promise stifled by
teachers’ unions and the doctrine of “child
centered” education. Bad teachers can’t be fired;
good teachers are not retained. Dani transfers to Wagner Junior
High, but finds it rife with narcoleptic French teachers and
incompetent social studies teachers. Meanwhile Jonathan enters
Stuyvestant, a gleaming $150 million palace in lower Manhattan.
But Stuyvestant’s teaching staff is similarly burdened with
unqualified math teachers and elderly, disorganized music
teachers. Key jobs at Stuyvestant, one of the “last
bastions of pure meritocracy in American education,” were
reserved for the school’s “old-guard teachers,”
constrained by the UFT to prevent qualified new teachers from
taking root. According to Stern, union bureaucrats invariably
favored mediocrity and seniority over quality, concerned more
with protecting their own power structure than the education
students received.
In the second part of the book, Stern
delves deeper into his criticisms of the teachers’ unions.
Not only do unions such as the NEA promote bureaucracy and
strongarm politicians with huge sums of money, he claims, but
they assault the “common ideals that were the historical
justification for the creation of a public school system in the
first place.” For example, the NEA supports Afrocentric
curricula, bilingual education, and the movement toward self
determination among Native Americans, and opposes efforts to
legislate English as the nation’s official language. In
other words, implies Stern, the NEA indiscriminately promotes a
set of left-wing values not in line with mainstream educational
thought. Meanwhile, a bureaucratic logjam extends all
the way to New York City’s Board of Education and the
chancellor of the public schools. Even the former corporate
lawyer hired to run the school system – one with no public
school experience – fails to overturn the district’s
hiring policies, harping instead on the distractions of budget
shortfalls. And so we are left with schools like Intermediate
School 59 in Queens, where one tenured teacher refuses to work
more than the contractual minimum of six hours and 20 minutes per
day for his $70,000 salary, while a “master teacher”
is mired at the bottom of the salary scale, making $32,000 per
year.
Stern reserves much of his ire in this
section for Jonathan Kozol and his “standard Marxist
line” about class bias: “Kozol’s destructive
idea that inner-city schools were failing because they were
segregated and then starved of resources by a heartless and
racist society . . . is spectacularly wrong.”
Kozol’s legacy, says Stern, is promoting the notion of
white educators wantonly destroying the minds of black children.
Kozol and his ilk are responsible for institutionalizing
Afrocentric curricula that “stuffs the minds of black
children with racialist humbug about a mythical glorious African
past in which black people flew gliders in the shadow of the
pyramids.”
In Breaking Free’s final
section, Stern develops his criticisms of public schools into a
rationale for school choice reforms, concluding with a defense of
voucher programs. He begins this line of argument by reviewing
the history of Catholic schools, which are described as
transformative institutions in the lives of millions of poor
black and Hispanic children of various religious convictions.
Citing a 1990 RAND study, Stern concludes that students attending
Catholic schools experience academic benefits well beyond those
realized by students mired in the public school system. Stern
lauds Catholic schools for their “admirable tones of
civility and seriousness” and “traditional”
curricula.
In the book’s last two chapters,
Stern identifies vouchers as the best escape valve for
disadvantaged students. In Milwaukee, for example, vouchers
allowed students a way out of “hellholes” like North
Division High School, where kids ran wild and teachers read comic
books in class. Meanwhile voucher opponents threw their
political weight around to create a legal wall of separation
between public and religious schools, a “fortified
barricade behind which the monopoly school system remained
sheltered . . .shielding the nation’s public education
system from outside competition.” School choice
“challenges the coercive and bureaucratic culture of public
education” much as the student protest movements of the
sixties took on authoritarian, top-down universities.
Throughout Breaking Free, Stern
maintains a personal, conversational tone that remains engaging
even when his argument begins to falter. Acknowledging
that “the personal is political,” Stern injects the
jargon-free text with colorful anecdotes drawn from interviews
with administrators and teachers. A strength of the book
throughout is copious quantities of vignettes, like the horrific
tale of P.S. 87’s “Mr. B.”. This “bent,
middle-aged” man, easily mistaken for a derelict, was fully
certified and had received a satisfactory performance rating, and
was therefore unfirable. Protected by the union, Mr. B. lingered
in P.S. 87 for several years despite complaints of students and
parents.
While Stern obviously draws from
impassioned personal motivation, he occasionally comes across as
the world’s most nightmarish parent, issuing nasty letters
to unsatisfactory teachers and inept administrators. Stern
reacts with a whiff of entitlement at the indignities his gifted
children must suffer as they endure the “progressive”
reforms that the naïve teachers and administrators foist
upon them. Still, Stern is generally effective when chronicling
the deleterious effects of bureaucracy. Public schools
consistently fail to groom and retain talented teachers, who
inevitably are lost via bureaucratic loopholes and are supplanted
by inferior tenured hacks.
But Stern falters when he attempts to
develop his argument by combining his measured, “common
sense” approach with the conservative value framework that
underlies his claims. Stern consistently dismisses educational
policies he considers progressive, employing “scare
quotes” luxuriously to everything from
“diversity” to “learning to learn” to
“critical thinking skills.” Unfortunately, Stern
never moves beyond the scare quotes to separate mere ideology
from warranted research claims. Thus, the “the grain of
the latest research” invariably supports his agenda, though
little literature is actually cited for such claims. Rather than
“be shunted into bilingual ed classes,” teachers
ought to be “drilling students in the English
alphabet.” One principal’s statement that his school
“believes that all children are gifted, talented, curious,
capable and accomplished” is “fatuous.”
Throughout Breaking Free Stern
seems to rely on the following tenuous chain of reasoning:
bureaucracy causes “liberal” pedagogical
approaches (whatever those are) which cause bad
instruction and poor test scores. Such oversimplification is
unfortunate, because it obscures legitimate complaints about
bureaucracy, teachers’ unions, and achievement gaps that
progressives often dismiss out of hand. For example, Stern
suggests that progressive pedagogy overshadows the basic skills
and core knowledge that poor minority children desperately need.
Perhaps certain elements of “traditional” curricula
better serve the disadvantaged kids who need essential academic
skills to escape entrenched class divisions. But rather than
explore the nuances of this interesting issue, Stern lets loose a
whitewashing criticism of the teaching profession in general,
exposing the “dirty little secret” of how little
teachers work. For example, Stern uses a labored calculation to
claim that many New York City teachers earn $70 per hour based on
their actual work time, a conclusion that is dubious if not
outright absurd. We’re left wondering what happened to the
remaining millions of underpaid, overworked teachers in the
nation’s public school system. Meanwhile a thoughtful
discussion about appropriate instruction is bypassed
altogether.
Frequently Stern’s objections to
the horrors of progressive educational methods are more
troubling. For example, Stern decries attempts to celebrate
“Black History, Hispanic Heritage, Asian/Pacific Heritage,
Women’s History, Lesbian and Gay History – which
nearly takes up the entire school calendar, leaving scant time
for plain old American history.” Presumably “plain
old American history” need not include blacks, Hispanics,
Asians, women, or gays. An assignment in which students answer
questions about tolerance is derided as “moronic”,
and public schools are lambasted for inflicting “graphic
and inappropriate sex education lessons or texts such as
Heather Has Two Mommies.” But no reasoned moral
argument is offered for such statements, so we’re left to
wonder whether Stern has some principled objection to addressing
gay and lesbian issues in the classroom, or whether he’s
merely a homophobe.
In his discussions about school choice,
Stern makes the important point that the choice activists he
describes are well-meaning and do aim to serve poor children. He
presents an interesting set of claims about how competition
sparked improvement in the Milwaukee Public Schools following the
initiation of vouchers. Referring to the hotly debated work of
Paul Peterson and William Howell, Stern notes that research by
“respected Harvard scholars” found support for a
so-called voucher effect. But Stern overlooks other research
that has suggested negative side effects to choice programs,
especially increased socioeconomic stratification (e.g. Fiske and
Ladd, 2000; Howe et al., 2001).
In spite of these ambiguities,
opposition to vouchers is simply dismissed as
“sabotage”. And while unions are described (probably
accurately) as having “massive organizational and political
resources,” the school choice movement crawls along with
“virtually no professional staff, no paid political
cadres,” though Stern reels off a list of millionaires and
billionaires who enthusiastically support choice reforms. Given
the immense political weight behind the school choice movement,
from President Bush on down, it’s difficult to swallow
Stern’s portrait of a bunch of ragtag grassroots organizers
nobly struggling to make a difference in the face of overwhelming
odds. Additionally, Stern wholly disregards important questions
about the separation of church and state which should arise in
any school choice debate. For example, objections to vouchers
can be raised on the grounds that taxpayer money should not be
used to promote particular religious ideals, such as those
proferred by Catholic schools. Stern misses the opportunity to
address this issue, and Cleveland’s voucher program is
tossed off as simply “giving a few thousand parents
vouchers.”
With Breaking Free, Sol Stern
joins other conservatives in an increasingly shrill discussion in
which public schools are seen as moral and political battlefields
in the ongoing education wars. But Stern and his conservative
compatriots are by no means alone in the rhetoric wars. Leftists
have been just as eager to point fingers and gloss over key
issues, leaving much hot air in their wake. Witness the
teachers’ unions’ sweeping proclamations about the
abject failures of voucher programs, or fiery preaching about
the absolute evil of standardized testing.
In light of all this, what the field
needs so desperately is openminded debate, objectivity (yes, it
does exist and we ought to strive towards it), and fair
presentation of opposing ideas. In point of fact, many of the
most important questions in education reform are simply
unresolved, too complex or indeterminate to simply resolve with a
resounding “good” or “bad”. Breaking
Free falters because it fails to recognize these nuances. In
the end, Stern’s sweeping claims about the ills of the
progressive movement are never fully examined, and his arguments
for school choice lack adequate attention to potential unintended
consequences of such programs. Though Stern approaches a set of
important questions about contemporary public education with a
clear enthusiasm for the subject and an abundance of
observational data, he forgets that impassioned rhetoric must be
balanced with evenhanded, fair minded discussion, no matter the
author’s ultimate conclusions or political stance. The
result is that Breaking Free becomes a moralistic treatise
wrapped in the camouflage of commonsense straight talk. No
matter our political persuasions, arguments for school reform are
best advanced through reason and balance, not bluster.
References
Chubb, J. E., and Moe, T. M (1990).
Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.
Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution.
Fiske, E. B., & Ladd, H. F. (2000).
When school compete: A cautionary tale.Washington, DC:
Brookings Institution.
Howe, K., Eisenhart, M. &
Betebenner, D. (2001). A crucible of school choice. Phi Delta
Kappan, 83 (2), 137-146.
About the Reviewer
Andrew Brodsky is a doctoral
student in the Research & Evaluation Methodology program of
the School of Education at the University of Colorado,
Boulder.
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