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Bring Fenty Back
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Buy the Book
Taking Over Lousy Schools
A step-by-step guide for parents from the straight-shooting Dr. Steve Perry.
Push Has Come to Shove:
Getting Our Kids the Education They Deserve —
Even If It Means Picking a
Fight
By Dr. Steve
Perry
(Crown, 272 Pages, $25)
It would be an understatement to say that American families are dissatisfied with the nation’s traditional public school systems. Forty-eight percent of parents and other taxpayers rated their local districts C or lower, according to the 2011 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll. They have good reason. Thirty-three percent of the nation’s fourth-graders read Below Basic levels of literacy, according to this year’s edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the federal exam of student achievement.
It’s not just families in such epicenters of school failure such as Detroit that are up in arms. Twenty-eight percent of fourth-graders in suburban districts are functionally illiterate, as are one in every five 12th-grade young white men from college-educated households. As the George W. Bush Institute noted in its comparison of America’s public schools against those in the rest of the world, only 30 percent of kids attending the tony schools in suburban Fairfax County, Va., outside of D.C., would score higher in math than counterparts in Singapore.
Meanwhile parents, regardless of wealth or where they live, find that they are often treated like afterthoughts and worse in the very schools their kids attend (and they subsidize for a pretty penny). Parents at Leesburg Elementary School in Virginia’s Loudoun County, for example, found themselves in a fracas with the school’s principal after he refused to provide them better accounting of the funds they helped raise and tell them what the school was doing to improve student achievement.
With 13 states launching or expanding school voucher programs, and 509 new charter schools opening this year, more parents can take advantage of the school choice options that have been a cornerstone of the nation’s school reform movement. Still, just one out of every five families has such options available. Nor can parents find out whether the teachers in their children’s schools are worthy of their near-lifetime jobs and costly compensation packages. So other parents are doing it for themselves. In four states, parents have formed parents unions to challenge their school districts and the influence of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. So far, they have managed to pass parent trigger laws in California, Connecticut, and Texas that allow a majority of families to petition for the overhaul of a school, have not been appreciated. And teachers’ unions aren’t pleased. In August, the AFT was forced to offer several apologies to school reformers (including one from its president, Randi Weingarten, during a face to face meeting) after education news magazine Dropout Nation revealed the union’s presentation on how its Connecticut affiliate worked unsuccessfully to kibosh that state’s parent trigger law .
But for those parents who neither have choice nor parents’ unions to count on, they can look to Dr. Steve Perry and his new book, Push Has Come to Shove, for help. A blunt-speaking social worker, he has garnered national acclaim for his work as founder of Capital Prep Magnet School in Hartford, Conn., rated by U.S. News & World Report among the best-performing schools serving black and Latino students. As a CNN commentator and member of a new generation of civil rights leaders, Perry has also emerged as one of the leading critics of status-quo defenders. He has particular ire for his fellow principals and school superintendents, who he blames for paving the “path to public education’s meltdown,” and for the NEA and AFT, whose efforts in making teaching a lucrative public-sector profession insulated from even desultory performance management, for helping to perpetuate bureaucracies that “feed the egos of adults while squashing the hopes of children”.
Perry offers a step-by-step guide on how to negotiate through the school bureaucracies and force school boards to pay attention. A few well-timed e-mails and tweets, for example, will do more to force superintendents to meet with a group of parents and pay them heed than attending a school board meeting (by which time the proverbial fix is already in); as Perry notes, “no district is equipped to combat e-organized parents.” He also instructs parents on how to deal with principals, teachers, and bureaucrats who conveniently blame parents for not being engaged enough in schools — even as they do plenty to alienate them. From where Perry sits, public schools should be more like private schools, which often schedule open houses for families and even grandparents to visit and watch what goes on in schools. And Perry doesn’t let families off the hook for what they should be doing at home. For high school students, for example, it means at least two hours of studying every night so they can be ready to do well in college.
Meanwhile Push Comes to Shove offers an insight on the Kafkaesque cultures of public school districts, especially when it comes to all the hoops principals must jump through to run their schools. In Hartford, for example, it can take as long as two years to for Perry to remove a laggard teacher from his school. Given that teachers are the single-biggest factor in the success of schools in educating kids, a poor-performing teacher can set back 264 kids by the time she is finally kicked out of the profession.
All in all, Perry offers a guide for parents to know why traditional public schools are doing little for their kids and for themselves as taxpayers. Now, it’s time to storm the school buildings — or argue for expanding school choice.
About the Author
RiShawn Biddle the editor of Dropout Nation , is co-author of A Byte at the Apple: Rethinking Education Data for the Post-NCLB Era. He can be followed at Twitter.com/dropoutnation.
Letter to the Editor View all comments (29) | Leave a comment
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Chef Schnauzer| 12.2.11 @ 7:41AM
EXCELLENT! Thank you for a review of what could be the most important book I have read about this year. Thank you. God Bless Dr. Perry.
Gary B| 12.2.11 @ 12:18PM
Ditto! Can you imagine the difference it would have made if the Gates Foundation had chosen to focus on education in America instead of throwing their money down an African rat hole?
If I had their money, I'd shame selected public school districts by establishing competing schools nearby and offering free tuition.
What a firestorm that would create! That's one of my definitions of fun.
Tina B| 12.2.11 @ 8:39AM
I am looking for a good new read on my third favorite topic, education in America. The first two are God and mathematics. Solving mysteries is woven in there somewhere, and all three actually are mysterious :^)
cowgirl| 12.2.11 @ 12:00PM
Home School. Home School. Home School.
Gary B| 12.2.11 @ 12:19PM
Exactly! Exactly! Exactly! For two reasons...
1. The results are excellent.
2. It defunds the nearby public school.
Layne S| 12.3.11 @ 10:10AM
3. It builds relationships between parents and their children.... hopefully good ones.
Intelligent Design| 12.2.11 @ 1:57PM
Education at all levels should be private. The federal Department of Education should be dismantled. State and local governments should put all of their schools up for sale, to be owned and operated by competing private education companies. This would increase quality and availability, and decrease the cost. It would result in state and local tax cuts of as much as 50%.
Private enterprise has given us the best medicine, the best technology, the best housing, the best food, the best clothes ........ It can also give us the best education.
Pat| 12.2.11 @ 3:50PM
More of the same boilerplate “Take Back Our Schools” nonsense. Detroit’s schools have less in common with “tony” schools in Fairfax county Virginia than Mongol yak herders have with Wall Street bond traders. Riddled with corruption at all levels, burdened with all the many social problems of the black underclass and waiting in their normal state of perpetual helplessness for some outside agency to save them, the issues within America's inner city schools are totally unrelated to the problems within suburban or rural schools.
Suburban schools today are subject to long standing problems which magnet, charter or the teachers at Hogwart’s can’t solve – magical solutions have been tried for decades and play straight into the Union’s hands. The preferred solution will always be some mystical reorganization of the normal one teacher + a classroom full of kids education model we have used for the past 200 years. As long as lots of teachers have jobs and lavish related benefits, why would the Teachers’ Union object to re-organizing that same historic school model under a new and trendy label? Throw in the added benefit of recently allocated millions in taxpayer funds needed to “launch” the designated latest trend in school re-organization and you have a Union full of contented pigs in slop.
If test scores are continuously on the low side or if comprehension is abysmal, why aren’t parents poring over course catalogs, examining curriculum content and analyzing how effectively teachers spend their time? If there isn’t a lot of excess fat in course content, scads of wasted teaching hours in our schools, then the Union isn’t doing its job – and the Teachers’ Union does a very fine job indeed. What parents fail to grasp is that these are children we’re talking about, not programmable, complex, industrial robots. Kids are genetically hard wired to learn and learn rapidly, they always have been and all this mysterious “education science” is a Union scam to hire and retain their members. Cutting through the bull is what’s needed, not reinventing the wheel.
Suburban schools, tony or otherwise, are deliberately designed as the perfect wombs for kids to spend 12 years being supervised by over educated babysitters who impress parents by assigning reams of homework. Of course children will have their favorite teachers, but should kids enraptured with young Miss Dedicated be the quality control factor parents use to rate teacher effectiveness? Combine comfortable physical plants, teachers with the ability to charm children and lots of homework keeping kids occupied when not in school and you have the blueprint for a typical suburban school today. But if the pint sized products of suburban schools can’t compete score wise with children in other countries, then changing the school’s designation to magnet or charter or even galactic isn’t the solution.
LaToniya A. Jones | 1.11.12 @ 9:14AM
"Kids are genetically hard wired to learn and learn rapidly"
POST American| 12.2.11 @ 9:24PM
"DO you understand? ---less than
5% of the REAL knowledge and REAL
archives and research is EVER shared,
even with the average Phd."
----------DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
---------------HUAC/ Nuremberg 2012----------------
Naturalborn Texican| 12.2.11 @ 9:55PM
I teach 6th graders in a small school in Texas. I'll tell you what's wrong with education these days....
Most...I repeat MOST parents are too busy with their own agenda/social lives to worry much about their child's academic welfare. Gee, if there's a meeting at school and it's scheduled during the time mom has to go to the gym for her daily workout, or dad has to meet the guys for a beer or two...guess who looses.
On the other side of the page....the educational system CAN NOT allow students to fail. It would just ruin the poor little kid's self esteem! SO kids have learned it doesn't matter if they fail. The state will test them multiple times and/or send them to summer school....but in the end they WILL be passed to the next grade, regardless of the lack of any measurable academic progress, mainly because they have aged out of their grade level, and well , room needs to be made for the incoming class.
This used to be the oddity...today it's becoming the common procedure.
Don't get me wrong, there are still parents (thank GOD!!!) who are very involved in their child's academic endeavors. BUT, these days there is so much JUNK that takes precedence OVER a child's academic success.
The fact is...teachers can only do so much. The parents are first and foremost the MAIN motivator for academic success where their child is concerned.
I believe we do a disservice to pass along a child that knows he/she only has to wait out the school's procedural process.
So be/get involved! Don't let your child come in second because you are too "busy" to bother, so you allow things that make no difference in your life in the long run to HURT your child's future...........
Failure can be a great motivator. If you don't agree, look at some very well know, successful people who were propelled by their failure(s) to take the bull by the horns and PROVE they could succeed. They just had to decide within themselves the kind of future they wanted.
Layne S| 12.3.11 @ 10:29AM
While I agree with you that many parents are not as involved in their children's lives as they should be... many not even spending time talking to them, but letting them entertain themselves with the latest techno gadget. This leads to kids not having basic vocabulary, not having a base of knowledge about the natural world, nor understanding basic connections between actions / reactions.
However, I don't think educational institutions should be let off the hook! When we do not teach children how to read / spell / write in the early grades, we handicap them for the rest of their years in school. And what in the world can an English teacher in 8th grade do to help kids who have never learned to read / write? We MUST focus on teaching to read in the early grades. While some may still not learn to read because of a traumatic homelife, many can and will learn if we do the right things!
DGinGA| 12.3.11 @ 1:12PM
I agree that too many parents are willing to turn the raising and educating of their children over to the schools. However, have you seen what's going on in the classroom lately? I no longer have children in elementary school, but I recently visited the classroom of my first-grade nephew. It was difficult to figure out which of the adults in the room was the teacher, and once I figured that out, I was hard pressed to determine who the other adults were and what they were supposed to be doing. The classroom appeared to be completely disorganized, with groups of children doing many different things, running around, the desks not set up in any kind of orderly fashion. One group of kids was being read to in a corner, another was cutting things out at a table, another group was just running around. How on earth can you teach anyone anything with all of those distractions going on, especially when the kids are only 6 years old? The teachers unions complain that each teacher only has TWO aides per class in this school district. For heaven's sake! When I was a kid we had one teacher for 25 - 30 kids! And the desks were set up in an orderly fashion, we were seated at those desks and we were expected to behave ourselves and pay attention!
I visited this classroom because I was told my nephew was being disruptive. His mother works full-time, so she can't go and sit in the classroom. I asked the teacher if I could sit quietly in the back of the room and observe so I could figure out how to help her help my nephew behave. She said no, because in her opinion my nephew would consider me an authority figure and would not misbehave if I was in the room. I asked her why he did not consider HER to be enough of an authority figure to get him to behave, but she did not have an answer to that. All I had to do was look around me and I had THAT figured out.
LaToniya A. Jones | 1.11.12 @ 9:20AM
It seems as though the teacher in your nephew's classroom needed someone to quietly observe her... She needs a mentor--pronto! The administrator, master teacher, team leader, or even a video of herself for reflection and discussion would have helped the situation significantly. While reporting the disruption to the parents is protocol... as the supposed "authority" figure in the room, she should have had a few resources/strategies available to diffuse the situation. That's one of the biggest issues with burnout, fatigue, and the thought that teachers are baby-sitting students... several are not equipped/prepared to read the body language of students, address their needs with minimal disruption, and demand respect and high levels of performance. This seems like another case of "big egos". What was your next step after her comment about your presence taking her authority away?
anomaly| 12.3.11 @ 5:06PM
The education of a child is far, far too important to leave in the hands of an "educator."
When I was in c0llege if you couldn't hack the math, the physics and chemistry to be an engineer you transferred to the "college of education" and became a teacher.
Naturally I screwed that all up. I could have been a school teacher, the state would have paid for my masters and doctorate, there are four doctorates in my family. I could have had my summers off, retired after twenty years, got paid for my accumulated sick time then re-entered the "workforce" as an assistant principal or administrator, accumulated another twenty years of sick time, retired again and got paid for the sick time again and would up drawing two retirements.
Teaching is the best con game going.
If I knew then what I know now... I'm far too stupid to be a teacher.
Tina B| 12.4.11 @ 8:46AM
Just fyi, some of us could hack the math, made As in Calc I and II, and still became teachers.
Someone has to teach the engineers, and a--h---s like you. With your attitude, you couldn't have "hacked" the public school classroom anyway, you have to be an optimist, not a cynic.
Rosie| 12.4.11 @ 7:01PM
Thank you, Tina B! Yes, public schools are largely abysmal, but those of us who are overworked, underpaid, and still optimistic enough to be teachers are not the ones to blame. Absurdities like No Child Left Behind are to blame, for starters. Everyone thinks being a teacher is such an easy gig - in reality it's long, hard hours, low pay, and a lot of listening to the GOP bitch about what a worthless parasite you are.
anamoly| 12.5.11 @ 8:44PM
Funny,
I had a math teacher in college that did a research paper on math skills by major. Eight out of ten education majors couldn't compute the area of a square. True story.
Another true story, all of the family members on my father's side of the family are school teachers. Two retired as principals. I know retired plant managers from the private sector that don't make as much as these two.
Last true story, I encouraged both of my childern to be school teachers. There's no better con game running. The problems that you complain about are in you head. A crime was committed at the school involving my daughter and fifteen other girls as victims. I explained to the overpaid, underworked public class parasite, AKA the principal, that if she picked up the phone and called the cops that all would be well. On the other hand if I picked up the phone and called the cops that the perp would be going away and that she would be going with the perp. Not reporting a felony crime is a felony crime. Twenty-four hours later the perp is in custody and the school district's policy regarding crimes committed on school properety had been changed, so there, I can and have fixed the little problems that you whine about. The school principal and the district stuporintendant ran the opposite direction whenever they saw me coming.
In short the problems that you whine about are for the most part of your own creation. In the private sector you'd most likely starve to death. Not to start a flame war or anything but I generate more capital wealth, e.g. I get more done, between the hours of 5:30AM and 8:00Am than you get done all week.
The problem here is obvious. The difference between me and what I do and you and what you do is so large that we can't even communicate. I get paid to solve problems. You on the other hand can't even accurately define the problem but the answer seems to always be to throw more money into the money pit. You expect people to take you seriously when the local school district offers graduation credit classes in floral arrangement and lawn maintenance. Your public school systen, the DoE and the NEA are worn out jokes.
You aren't qualified to pack my lunch.
anamoly| 12.5.11 @ 8:48PM
Sorry, that should read "children" not "childern."
anomaly| 12.5.11 @ 8:54PM
Another typo, anamoly for anomaly. Bad typing day.
Rosie | 12.5.11 @ 10:12PM
"Not to start a flame war or anything," you say, while in the same breath throwing more insults at me than I think I've ever encountered in an actual conversation. You, anomaly, are an appalling human being. You know NOTHING about my life or about me. And yet you feel totally comfortable coming here and claiming that I can't communicate with you, that I can't define a problem, that I don't work, that I am not qualified to pack your lunch. How dare you speak to me that way? Seriously, how DARE you? Have you any idea how insulting you are? I shouldn't deign to answer you but here goes:
First true story: I wasn't TRYING to communicate with you, you pathetic snob. I'm sure it must be wonderful in whatever little world of privilege you live in that allows you to feel so morally superior to the people you apparently nonetheless allow to be responsible for your childrens' education.
True story: I am a teacher, not a principal. I am in full agreement that administrators are overpaid and create more problems than they solve. They control what teachers can do in the classroom, preventing the people actually on the ground doing the work from solving the problems they encounter.
Second true story: I was not an education major - stop making assumptions. I was a Writing major. A straight-A, full academic scholarship-holding, award-winning, nationally published Writing student, also fully capable when it came to math, chemistry, foreign languages, biology, and really anything that I set my mind to. You know why that is? Because I'm not afraid of hard work. True story. I saved rent money by spending my summers soldering motorcycle parts and serving organic deli food to rich yuppie men who stared at my chest and suggested I meet them in their cars on my break.
Yet another true story: I hate the public school system so much that I am back in graduate school so I can teach at a college level. I can't stand the levels of stupidity from the people who run the place, and how much teachers have their hands tied when it comes to making decisions and actually educating their students.
What a world we live in, where the only way that one can get things done is to generate capital wealth. Educating children and young adults, the leaders of tomorrow? Bah - that's nothing. All the teachers should just quit, since they're such parasites. A world without teachers...sounds like GOP heaven. Oh, but then what would you do with all the poor children, the children whose parents don't pay attention, whose parents don't go talk to the principal...that's the trouble, you see - the public school system is a mess, yes, but there are these pesky people who need it.
Final true story: I repeat, you know NOTHING about me and what I get done between the hours of 5.30 and 8 or all week. Not that you deserve to know, but let me tell you how last week went. I teach freshman writing at 8 in the morning three days a week. I have 27 students. They're all writing 5-6 page research papers. After I teach I hold office hours - I deal with a steady stream of students worried about their papers, their final grades, missing class because they were sick, and one with a broken laptop that disappeared the paper she was halfway through writing - I spent half an hour fixing her laptop, and another half an hour talking her through how to easily re-write what she had lost. I take a class at noon on the days that I teach - an incredibly difficult, fast-paced class. In between occasionally sleeping, eating, and fixing computers (students, fellow grad students), I write a draft of a 25-page field research paper for that class. That takes some serious time. On the two days I don't teach, I take a three-hour graduate seminar until 9pm. Before that I spend most of the day in my office conferencing with students, reading through 27 drafts of 27 papers - they all need a lot of work, so I spend a lot of time walking students through how to proceed. In between all of that, I tutor students from all over the university on their papers. Somewhere in that week, I draft a 15-page paper for my other class. And grade daily homework from 27 students. And begin designing my course for the next semester, so I know what books to have students order. And read a total of about 1200 pages of books/articles for my own research. From last Monday to this Monday, I never got more than 4 hours of sleep in a night. And I do this because I love teaching, I love my subject, and I believe in making a difference in students' lives.
If what the private sector has taught you is that it's ok to tell a complete stranger who is devoting her life to something she truly believes in what a worthless, unqualified waste of a human being she is, then I think I'm pretty much ok not being in that sector. I'll go for the old poor but happy option (and no, it is not "my own creation" - at the college level, I will be far, far below the salary of that principal of yours).
Thanks for your sincere lack of respect for my life, my choices, and my work. You are despicable. Have a nice life wallowing in your bitter superiority.
Rosie| 12.5.11 @ 10:18PM
*third true story, not second - there was just so much to say in response to your unbelievably offensive, presumptuous, and mean-spirited post that I added another one in there and overlooked the edit.
D Roamer | 12.3.11 @ 7:07PM
Agree with earlier posts, parents must care and ask questions by notes to the teacher and principal. Everyday at the supper table, papa asks Johnny what did he learn today. Realizing in many homes today, it has to be the uncle or auntie that has to be asking.
Just a thought.
Tina B| 12.4.11 @ 8:49AM
really, what a thought. Many of my students had only grandma, a foster parent or children's home. Nobody cared what Johnny learned today, until he was a week away from failing for the year. Too little too late.
Rosie| 12.4.11 @ 7:05PM
You're a fresh breath of reality on this site, Tina. Thank you thank you! It's so easy to tell others how they should live when you're in a position of privilege. It's so easy to ignore that for many children, teachers *are* the only ones who care what they learn, when you're a healthy, involved parent - but the sad fact is that this isn't always the case.
Tina B| 12.5.11 @ 9:19AM
Don't give up, Rosie, bloom where you're planted, and God bless you.
Richard Baker| 12.4.11 @ 7:09AM
Nuts to negotiation. Close the public schools, fire the teachers and "administrators", and give the parents an educational voucher to find the best private/parochial school possible. Ever other "step" will come a cropper and yield nothing but more uneducated kids going nowhere.
sirbourbon| 12.4.11 @ 12:46PM
Centralized planning via the creation of the Department of Education pushed in congress by Newt Gingrich is behind the decline.
It's interesting that the New York Times and the American Federation of Teachers opposed the creation of a cabinet level centralized bureaucracy.
There were voices like these opposing the Bureaucratic formula of central control pushing the thousands of public schools that used to be called the independent school district of this town and that city.
1979 is a long time ago when the monster bully the DoEd. was plugged into a steady stream of tax revenue. The monster had been created in the labortories of a US think tank that reworked Karl Marx's prototype, then took the blueprints to James Earl Carter to sell congress on the idea. congress bought it with Newt's help.
Ron Paul recognizes the DoEd as a central planning monster that is dumbing down our school children and wants to abolsish it.
Newt helped create it when he voted for it but no amount of evidence of the DoEd's worthlessness will convince him to come out for its abolition.
wedding dresses | 12.6.11 @ 3:33AM
What utter short-sightedness, what utter foolery that they can't even see it. Their utter selfishness, stupidity and hatred blinding them so horribly, that all they could see was that Herman Cain wasn't their man~ so they destroy him, or take part in destroying him.