Are union-bashing charter reformers sobering up?

NYT's Joe Nocera ("Teaching With the Enemy") says Steven Brill was shocked when AFT prez Randi Weingarten held a book party for him at her home. To tell you the truth, I was too. But the real story Nocera tells is about Brill's own attitude adjustment while researching his virulent union-bashing book, ultimately leading him to make a u-turn and actually nominate Weingarten to become Mayor Bloomberg's next schools chancellor.

As most reviews have noted, however, as “Class Warfare” nears its conclusion, it suddenly veers in a different direction. Instead of bashing the union and Weingarten, Brill suggests that true reform is impossible without them. In fact, he proposes that Mayor Michael Bloomberg appoint her to be the chancellor of the New York City school system.When I asked Brill what caused his change of heart, he responded gruffly: “It’s called reporting.” The two years he spent researching school reform had given him a far richer understanding of the complexities involved in reforming the nation’s schools — and that understanding was sobering. 

Sobering, ah yes. That explains everything. 

Nocera himself seems at times to be incredibly naive and starry-eyed about charters schools, somehow imbibing  them as a class of schools where magical teaching and learning always takes place and spouting the usual cliches about unions being out to protect bad teachers.

But in the end, he too jumps on Brill's wagon and declares, "you simply cannot fix America’s schools by “scaling” charter schools. It won’t work."

Washington Post hosts ownership society soiree

Katherine and David Bradley

Steve Brill is this year's Davis Guggenheim. His aptly titled "Class Warfare" book is this year's Waiting For Superman and has become the rallying point for a waning and frustrated clan of anti-teacher union busters, charter school operators, and corporate-style school reformers.

The Washington D.C. branch of the clan, still reeling from the expulsion of last year's hero, Michelle Rhee, gathered Thursday evening, for a soiree co-hosted by Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham at the Embassy Row home of power philanthropists Katherine and David Bradley. The gala was called to celebrate self-described "media entrepreneur" Brill and his not-so-best-selling book. Post ed writer Bill Turque's description of the meeting failed to mention what was served or whether or not the servants were allowed to stay for the proceedings.

But we do know that corporate-reform luminaries like former education secretary Bill Bennett, D.C Council Chairman Kwame R. Brown (D), philanthropist Mark Ein, (Venturehouse Group) and charter advocate Mike Peabody (Friends of Choice) were in attendance. One can only assume that Bennett wasn't making any "abort all black babies" jokes in the presence of Brown.

Turque describes what seemed to be the highlight of the evening:

Brill was preaching to the choir. During a brief Q and A, Peabody, the grandson of Groton School founder Endicott Peabody, asked: “When did the unions get the right to strike, when they could shut down cities without recourse?” 

Reprising some of what was in his book, Brill said that unionized teachers were the product of years of underpayment and mistreatment, including mandatory two-year leaves of absence from the classroom for women who became pregnant. But as their influence grew under union leaders such as Albert Shanker, Brill said, it became “much too much of a good thing.”

The bait and switch of school "reform

David Sirota at Salon.com

Behind the new corporate agenda for education lurks the old politics of profit and self-interest

As Brill and most other education correspondents tell it, those most aggressively trying to privatize public schools and focus education around standardized tests just "happen to be" Wall Streeters -- as if that's merely a random, inconsequential coincidence. Somehow, we are to assume that these same Wall Streeters who make millions off of "parasitic" investment schemes to leech public institutions for private profit couldn't have ulterior motives when it comes to public schools. -- The bait and switch of school "reform"