Here we go again. These high-profile ed reform champions all share certain similarities. They all love attention, they all have very little to no experience in education (usually zero), they all seriously downplay the effects of poverty, and they all believe that our educational problems can be solved relatively easily with the application of business principles. Google Gary Rubinstein's TFA Blog to read a teacher's critique of Brill's book.

It already has. Watch as he goes toe-to-toe with Ravitch -
http://c-spanvideo.org/program/StevenB

I guess she is the current litmus test for anyone hoisting different theories.

Well, I guess we should all just team-teach a couple of years, pretend to eat a bee, fudge a resume and take over an unsuspecting urban school system, until they get tired of our faux tiger-mom nonsense and send us packing.

Then we could make a third career of trashing teachers and unions, two of the most important reasons why our miserable little butts weren't working for pennies a day in a sweatshop somewhere in Siberia in the first place.

But I digress...

Check out Diane Ravitch and Brill going head to head on CNN Book talk. Also on YouTube.

It tells you something that the Wall Street Journal is orgasmic about the book. The lede book review in the NY Times this last Sunday appropriately pretty much trashes it.

John Thompson on Brill's Re-write of Teacher Union History
By Anthony Cody on August 23, 2011 10:39 AM | post by John Thompson.

It is a truism that when an attorney does not have the evidence, he or she argues the law. When lawyers do not have the facts or the law on their side, they tell a good story. Steve Brill's new book, Class Warfare, exemplifies that principle when indicting teachers and unions.

According to Brill's brief, teachers unions have a long history of outsmarting school systems. So, New York City Chancellor Joel Klein persuaded the union to streamline the dismissal process. Then, Klein and a Wall Street lawyer, Daniel Weisberg, recruited a "squad of lawyers to help principals paper their files." It should only take a "preponderance of evidence" to terminate a teacher, but the union lawyers still continued to defeat Klein's and Weisberg's elite team. Rather than evaluate the evidence that arbitrators found persuasive, Brill just cites Klein's opinion that the real standard for dismissal had become "beyond a reasonable doubt."

According to the evidence, however, the American Federation of Teachers has a long history of working with collaborative school leaders. Since 1981, the AFT has taken the lead in using peer review, known as the Toledo Plan, to mentor and efficiently remove ineffective teachers. From 2003 to 2008, 8% of educators evaluated under peer review were removed. In July of 2009, Brill "happened to read The Widget Effect," a report by The New Teacher Project (TNTP), which falsely claimed that only .9% of Toledo teachers were removed for performance. It also happened that the misleading and inaccurate report was authored by Dan Weisberg, the Wall Street lawyer hired by Klein to battle the AFT.

The facts are that the TNTP "reconciled" its numbers and promised to change outright inaccuracies in a new edition of the report, although they were not very gracious in correcting either their mistakes or their mis-characterization of the Toledo Plan. Brill, however, ignores the evidence and changes his story line so that it can conclude with an argument with a Harvard professor who he claims hung up on him.

On the next page, Brill writes, "Toledo might have been a mirage. Pittsburgh (which also adopted peer review) wasn't." Brill then praises peer review and other innovative evaluation systems developed by the AFT and the National Education Association. This raises the question of why Brill slanders the granddaddy of teacher accountability systems, and then lavishly praises the reforms it inspired.

Brill's story is that AFT President Weingarten would have never stopped protecting incompetents had she not been forced to do so. So, he rewrites history and, thus, denies the legitimacy of longstanding reforms undertaken by the union.

It is a shame that Brill dismisses the history of education that preceded his introduction to school reform. Brill's story would have been more rich had he looked into the nuance involved in peer review. He could have started with Anthony Cody's account of his two years as a peer review evaluator. Cody wrote of the teachers who he mentored:

In many cases the teachers were, in fact terminated, or forced to retire. As a union member I felt it was my responsibility to make sure that the teacher was evaluated fairly and given a chance to improve. But my top priority as a PAR (peer review) coach was to make sure those students got the education they deserved.

Brill used the same spin to mis-characterize the battles between Klein and Weingarten. According to Brill, Klein went for the kill because he knew that a woman as smart as Weingarten must know that she is damaging kids. Or at least that is their story ...

Weingarten, however, says that she initially tried to work with Klein, just as she has done with other district leaders. Weingarten played hardball in opposing Klein's effort to use test scores to evaluate teachers because, "no one trusted that Joel Klein would use them to measure performance in a fair way."

Klein's and Brill's evidence-free story-telling has poisoned our educational politics. Klein explains, "part of me thinks it's a good thing if the mujahideen come in and polarize this debate so we can win this once and for all." Klein says, "collaboration is the elixir of the status quo crowd." And Brill can spin Klein's outrageousness as a service to kids. After all, it makes for a more exciting narrative. If we really want to improve our schools, however, we need to respect facts, honor the law, and tell a different type of story.

What do you think? Were there teachers trying to improve schools before Brill came on the scene? Did unions start to collaborate just because Bill Gates brought a bigger war chest to the struggle?

John Thompson was an award winning historian, with a doctorate from Rutgers, and a legislative lobbyist when crack and gangs hit his neighborhood, and he became an inner city teacher. He blogs for This Week in Education, the Huffington Post and other sites. After 18 years in the classroom, he is writing his book, Getting Schooled: Battles Inside and Outside the Urban Classroom.

Teachers provide the following services in addition to teaching; social work,
counselor, mentor, protector, baby sitter when parents do not pick their kids up from school on time, provider....yes, I have purchased my students clothing, shoes,
gifts, school supplies, and whatever it may take to help them. Until the lawyers, politicians, lawmakers walk in the shoes of the teachers of our lowest performing and poorest schools, they all
need to just keep their comments to themselves!

Steven Brill has become quite the firebrand these days. His book "Class Warfare" has become a complimentary text to the movie Waiting for Superman. I'm currently working towards my Master's of Education online at this site: http://www.cu-portland.edu/ and I too have found a number of faults with the unions of today. Maybe it's time we roll back some of the power they have unfairly achieved.

@Ryan Winston
Do tell! What are these faults you have found in your groundbreaking research? What do you mean by "power," and how have unions "unfairly achieved" it?
Have you actually taught, or are you just a grad student? Why are you posting on Inside Ed if you live in Portland?
I have a great idea for some hands-on research for your education mastery. Come to Baltimore City and teach. See firsthand how difficult it is. When you've finished crying and questioning your worth, take a look at the union contract and try to imagine how much harder the job would be without the union.
If all of that sounds too hard, then try reading an entire book. I suggest The Death and Life of the Great American School System by Diane Ravitch.
There are also excellent blogs by REAL EXPERIENCED TEACHERS like Anthony Cody, Renee Moore, Jose Vilson, and Marion Brady - just to name a few. These are all people who don't alter reality to fit a preconceived narrative. They don't pander to the gullible and uninformed. They know the difference between complimentary and complementary (low blow by me, but I never claimed to be a nice guy).

From Liz: We welcome comments from around the nation and the world, no matter what the view of the person commenting. And I encourage everyone to be civil. Our society has too little of it.

@Liz -

A healthy dose of civility would go a long way in encouraging discussion on issues as opposed to declarations followed by lots of "I agree" comments, or the snarky retort (see "walking around arse-out" or "Do tell!" or "Have you listened to us AT ALL?" comments in just the last few days). Honestly, I don't think I've seen a civil discussion between people with differing views on this board for a very long time.

It makes me sad.

I had resolved to read and not post until I saw a change in this atmosphere, and I know this comment is breaking that resolution, but I couldn't help myself.

@Liz and a parent: Try having your entire career trivialized with a flippant "Lazy teachers are paid too much, and unions are the devil."
See how civil you would be if you felt betrayed by a journalist you thought was actually listening to you for years.
Try having a grad student at a Christian liberal arts college in Portland give you his expertise gleaned from spending two hours of his life watching an awful documentary, while YOU have have spent five years teaching in a high-poverty school.
My fellow teachers and I are being scapegoated for a societal problem hundreds of years in the making, and SOME of us are tired of being civil to people who don't know what they're talking about!
You want civil? Read Diane Ravitch. I don't know how she does it, but she will inform you of the truth while refraining from snark or physical violence. I do not have her unending patience, and I don't even think I want it.
You think I'm moved by your new Dundalk letter? I'm not. All those fired teachers were teachers who needed guidance and a plan. I don't know any of them, but I can tell you from experience that their perceived apathy (exaggerated by those who would justify their firing) came from years of confusing leadership and contradictory messages.
Those teachers heard about "change" for years and were consistently let down. I'm sure most of them looked at that new principal with eyebrows raised because they'd heard it all before - the hero principal come to save the day.
When principals come in and fire teachers so that a school can "turnaround," what they're really doing is dumping the skeptical and hiring the youngsters too obedient to know better. Obedience does not make a great teacher - research that.
You can call what you do "civil" all you want, but when you write an article praising the mass firing of teachers, I say that is not civil.
So you can excuse my snark or not, I don't really care because I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore!