These kids learned from the best: defeated students, (above), and unfire-able teachers, sleeping it off on your tax dollars in the documentary “The Rubber Room.” (© John Lund/Sam Diephuis/Blend I)
Shipping containers hold more productive cargo: these are the so-called “rubber rooms” in Washington Heights. (
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What is going on inside our worst public schools? Journalist, entrepreneur and gadfly Steven Brill went in them to find out, and the dismal sights he saw may not surprise you. What’s more surprising is that, for all of the incompetence, waste and laziness — for all the futures he saw dissolving before his eyes — Brill still has hope. His new book, “Class Warfare,” is subtitled “Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools.” That fight, as he sees it, is one we might be starting to win.
Brill was initially inspired to investigate American education by a 2009 Post series on New York City’s infamous “Department of Education Temporary Reassignment Centers” — a.k.a. the “rubber rooms.” These are the holding pens for lost souls — teachers deemed unfit, but protected by their union at full wages and benefits, as years-long series of hearings slowly resolve their fates.
In one such rubber room, Brill finds an unshaven 50-year-old man sleeping with his head on a card table. Next to him sits an alarm clock set for 3:15, when it’s time to go. Of the 15 people in the room, three others were also asleep. Two were arguing over a folding chair. Others were knitting or chatting.
At the same moment, about 600 other teachers around the city were in similar rubber rooms, all of them collecting your tax dollars and creeping toward generous pensions.
“In this whole discussion of education reform, there is very little reporting and just a lot of opinion,” says Brill, former chief of American Lawyer magazine and Court TV. These days, he teaches journalism at Yale and also is CEO of Press +, a service for publishers. “The idea of education reporting is to just quote someone from one side and then quote someone from the other side. I decided to skip these glib, hypothetical debates and just go out and do reporting.”
And how did he manage that, since public schools — especially in New York City — are notoriously closed to reporters? “Among the less enthusiastic members of the staff are the security guards,” he says. “If you’re well-dressed, you can just walk in.”
So Brill walked into, for instance, P.S. 149 at Lenox Avenue and 118th Street in Harlem, one of the city’s more interesting test cases. The same building houses both a conventional (read: dysfunctional) inner-city public school, grades K-8, as well a charter school — privately operated, but free for students and funded with both public money and private donations, called Harlem Success Academy I.
A fire door and some staircases are all that separate the two schools.
In P.S. 149, Brill observed a slack-jawed teacher in jeans and sweatshirt, rocking back in a chair in front of 18 fourth-graders. Feet on his desk, he would yell out such lessons as, “How many days in a week?” Receiving no answer — from a roomful of kids sleeping, chattering, or in the case of two children, wrestling on the floor — he shouted his query again, then gave up.
“OK,” he said. “Let’s move on to something else.”
At Harlem Success Academy I, a 15-second walk away, teacher Jessica Reid was relentlessly pushing her kids, encouraging them, getting them to focus, specifying expectations and eventually nudging them into producing “44 pieces of nearly flawless writing” — personal essays proudly hung on a bulletin board. Her classroom is festooned with “juicy words” — vocabulary builders that tell the children to try “tedious” instead of “boring,” “stout” instead of “fat.”
The principal of P.S. 149 moans to Brill that at least 10 of her 40 teachers are incompetent. “Give me the ability to hire and fire the ones I want, and give me a school day from 8 to 5 like they have on the other side [instead of 8:30 to 3:25], and I’d have hundreds of little Einsteins running around here, too,” she says.
Yet “the charter school actually spends less money per student,” Brill points out. His reporting flatly contradicts the teachers union line that failing inner city schools can be blamed on lack of resources and the euphemism “demographics” (i.e., don’t blame us — these black and brown kids are poor and doomed). Not all charter schools are success stories, but enough of them are to convince Brill that “demography is not destiny.”
He adds, though, that “teaching is really hard.” The best teachers at the best charter schools put in “11 hour days, six days a week.” At Harlem Success Academy, they’re issued cellphones and required to answer queries from parents at night, in stark contrast to unionized teachers whose contract forbids forcing them to give parents their phone numbers. Star teachers (like Jessica Reid) often burn out and quit, saying they have to save their marriages or their health.
Nor can what happens outside of school be factored out. A heartbreaking experiment that began in 2009 in India set aside 25 percent of the seats at private schools for the poorest kids, who, in India, tend to come from illiterate families. Result? Disaster. The poor kids were baffled. The rich kids were slowed down, their parents complaining that what used to be taught in a week was now taking three weeks.
Brill’s book focuses on a brighter potential future, featuring portraits of dozens of reformers, from Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel (who, as mayor of Chicago, has insisted on lengthening the school day, which is currently 5 hours and 45 minutes), to Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp to former NYC schools Chancellor Joel Klein and leaders in fundraising.
“The Democratic Party, which used to be owned and operated by teachers unions, has changed a bit,” Brill says. “Party leaders have actually defied teachers unions, and the president is one of them.” Brill speaks warmly of Obama’s Race to the Top initiative — a nationwide contest in which states were invited to institute obvious but necessary reforms, such as linking pay to performance, in exchange for federal money.
New York qualified — but, in the grand tradition of schooling, we cheated. The state can’t institute pay for performance, because the teachers unions won’t allow it. “The promises that the city and state made to get the Race to the Top money are just a total farce,” Brill says. “Mayor Bloomberg told me the promises are not going to be fulfilled.”
Other states, though, “are well on their way to fulfilling their promises,” Brill says. And in places like Pittsburgh and Hillsborough County, Florida, major progress has been made toward linking pay and performance as well as loosening tenure. Unions went along with joint efforts of policymakers and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which gave the Florida county $100 million and the Pittsburgh schools $40 million.
Measuring outcomes has been tricky, though, as seen in testing scandals in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Georgia and maybe Washington, DC, that suggest teachers are willing to simply fill in the right answers on exam sheets if they think their jobs are on the line.
“Sometimes even reformers worry about the adults,” Brill writes. When he asked Teach for America founder Wendy Kopp for her teachers’ performance data, she “replied, uncharacteristically, through a spokesman” who said the data would remain under lock and key because “it would cause all kinds of morale issues” to release them. Yet Brill says, “if you go into any school and ask the fourth-grade teachers who the best third-grade teachers are and who are the worst, they know. They inherit the results.”
The worst, of course, are protected by tenure, which merely amounts, in the infamous words of the counter-reformer Diane Ravitch, to “due process.”
“There’s due process and there’s due process,” Brill says. “Better 10 guilty people go free than one innocent person be put in prison. That’s right — in the justice system. It isn’t like that in education, where we punish the students if we keep 100 or 200 or 300 incompetent teachers in classrooms rather than have one good teacher get fired.”
Unions serve as a praetorian guard for failing pedagogues. “While most teachers don’t care about their union that much,” Brill says, “there is that 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 percent who are just in it for the tenure” — generally granted to anyone who can maintain a pulse after three years, and which makes it nearly impossible to fire even the most inept.
As he points out, these are the very teachers who tend to be most involved with the union. “In union elections,” he says, “the turnout is really low — and those are the people who vote.”
Brill sees community pressure as forcing the unions. He says he was being “somewhat tongue in cheek” when he suggested that American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten be tapped to head the New York City public schools. (Wouldn’t that be like making Michael Corleone police commissioner?)
“She knows exactly where and how to fix the union contract,” Brill writes.
Even Democratic Party leaders can’t ignore what their constituents say. Harlem state Sen. Bill Perkins, for instance, is under fire for continuing to sing from the union songbook in a district where “35 percent of their kids are in charter schools,” Brill says. “You ask those parents whether their kids should be held back and limited.”
Now that another charter school run by reformer Eva Moskowitz is opening this fall on the Upper West Side, and parents are clamoring to get their kids in, Brill wonders how much longer Democratic mayoral candidates can keep public opinion dammed up behind a wall of union intransigence. He said he couldn’t get a comment about the Upper West Success Academy from the office of publicity-loving, teachers-union-backed Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who for many years has been eyeing Gracie Mansion like a dog eyes a T-bone.
“It has to be the first time in memory,” says Brill, “that Scott Stringer wouldn’t talk to a reporter.”
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com