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.
