Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice [Paperback]

Sol Stern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2004

The first book to transform school choice from an abstract policy issue into a question of basic personal freedom--and indeed, for minority children at the bottom of the social ladder, into a question of survival.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Using engaging personal narrative, journalist Stern explores the demand for school choice among inner-city families. He takes readers on his personal journey from left-wing politics in the 1960s, when he edited and wrote for the leftist magazine Ramparts, to his current position as champion for the libertarian right in its relentless crusade to privatize education. Stern excels in presenting historical detail, and his history of the politics of New York City public schools and their teachers' unions is both revealing and instructive. He is also a captivating storyteller, and his point of view, as a parent of New York City schoolchildren, sets his book somewhat apart from other ideological discourses in the annals of think tank-sponsored "school choice" writings. As a leftist turned "educational traditionalist," Stern uses political metaphors cleverly: there is a "Berlin Wall" between private and public schooling that must be broken down for liberty to flourish; teachers' unions are the "ruling class in education" and the school choice movement is "countercultural in the best sense of the word." Stern makes a strong case for dismantling public education and subjecting it to market forces. However, his book grasps educational theories and practices only at a superficial level. He calls well-researched theories of cognition progressive educational "fads" and sees multicultural education as "political correctness" that hurts black children. These weaknesses lessen Stern's credibility, but his account will be of interest to those engaged in the school choice debate.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

When his son Jonathan was accepted at New York's premier elementary school, P.S. 87, city-schools-educated Stern presumed the boy was off to a good start. He was, though not as good a start as Stern's own in 1941. In the intervening decades, the teachers' union (a 1950s innovation) and a mushrooming, politicized education bureaucracy had rendered most city schools ungovernable and scholastically ineffective. Even P.S. 87 and the secondary schools both Stern boys attended--all among the system's finest--were forced by union work rules to tolerate incompetent senior teachers and teachers who wouldn't put in a minute more than the contractual 6-hour-and-20-minute day. Ultimately, Stern and his wife had to resort to supplementary homeschooling to help their sons attain the highest scholastic levels. They succeeded at that, but what, Stern tellingly asks, are less well educated and more time-constrained parents to do? Ultimately, Stern advances education vouchers as a means for fostering better schools and argues for them more persuasively, because less ideologically, than do most other voucher-boosters. Meanwhile, he has told his case history in the union-and-bureaucracy-hamstrung New York system and presented a brief against the teachers' unions that vitally supplements such looser, more general arguments as Peter Brimelow's Worm in the Apple [BKL F 1 03]. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 260 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books (December 15, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594030588
• ISBN-13: 978-1594030581
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,344,596 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best book on schools. Period., May 7, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice (Hardcover)

This is a remarkable book. Part of it is the author's own story--how he grew up in NYC in the 1940s and, as the bright son of immigrant parents, attended the best public schools, which taught real skills and civic consciousness; and how his own children now attend the best public schools in the city (Stuyvesant, etc.) and face curricular chaos and the tyrannical incompetence of teachers who consider themselves union members more than instructors. In the second part of the book, the author goes looking for alternatives and stumbles on a Catholic school in his neighborhood where the students are all black. And unlike the underprivileged black kids imprisoned in the horrible NYC ghetto schools, these kids are learning in an orderly, humane environment. Stern completes his odyssey by going to areas like Cleveland and Milwaukee where choice has been institutionalized and he finds there more small educational miracles. He concludes that school choice is a moral imperative, the new civil rights movement of our era. This is an eye opening book. I did some research and discovered that some of the articles that Stern wrote while working on this book came to the attention of Mayor Rudi Guiliani and were instrumental in his decision to come out in favor of school choice for New York, a plan that the teachers unions killed. (Naturally).

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cuts through the nonsense and gets to the point..., May 27, 2003

By 

Reform Enthusiast (Connecticut) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice (Hardcover)

It's beyond dispute that America's public schools, particularly in our cities, are failing to provide either an adequate education or an adequate socializing experience for children. The consequences are also well known: low self-esteem, poverty, crime... the gamut of ills attendant to relegating whole communities to the status of "underclass", unable to contribute to a 21st century economy.

The reasons for school failure and how to significantly improve our public schools are frequently debated. Proposals include "raise teacher pay", "get more teachers certified by our schools of education", "build better schoolhouses", and the incredible demand, "send us better kids". With a parent's perspective and a keen eye, Stern sweeps aside all the self-serving nonsense and gets right to the point: if the public wants public schools to perform, then schools must be managed to achieve that performance. Management means a controlling authority (most importantly, a principal) with the power to select teachers and other staff who will collaborate to achieve measurable goals. In today's public schools, the principal's inability to hire, fire, or to define work content and compensation, is a fatal blow to any attempts to dramatically improve school performance.

Stern goes on to document how, with $2 billion in annual dues and unprecedented political power that ranges from the local to the national level, the teachers' unions have dominated the political process. On the national and state level, wielding hundreds of millions of dollars worth of political clout, the teachers' unions have generally dominated the legislative process. On the local level, school districts are forced into signing labor contracts running to hundreds of pages, loaded with provisions that effectively eliminate teacher accountability and the principal's control.

Talented teachers and principals are disgusted and often demoralized when they see their profession become a dumping ground for incompetence, protected by a union that only cares about teacher prerogatives, including the "right" not to be judged, and who actively obstruct any drive for standards of performance. Principals with enough integrity to put students' interests first must struggle with a morass of rules and procedures that would be considered farcical in the private sector. The teacher's classroom is a fief impenetrable to any objective evidence of success or failure.

Stern focuses on the massive New York City public school system, where an antiquated administration is helpless to defend the interests of the individual school. In the case of Stuyvessant High School, where the City's finest students are assembled, Stern documents how an aggressively pro-student principal is "grievanced" into retirement by a diligent union representative wielding nothing more (or less) lethal than the teacher contract.

Stern's primary concern is the fate of students from poor homes, where parents are unable to supplement their children's education, and who attend schools where "to teach" is a process, not a result. These students fall behind early and never catch up. The significance of this academic failure is disputed by faddish school-of-ed-talk about "the inner child" and "learning to learn" and "critical faculties". Nevertheless, in the real world where reading, writing and math really matter, these children are stamped once and for all with the mark of the underclass. Meanwhile, down the street, with half the money, the City's Catholic schools are doing a significantly better job with the same students.

"Breaking Free" is a plea for school choice, to date the only school reform movement that has opened a chink in the Berlin Wall of public education. Charter schools and vouchers have proven the enormous pent-up demand for alternatives to the public school monopoly and the potential to do much better with our education dollars. Both programs, ferociously opposed by the unions, are struggling to meet their potential, hobbled by grossly inadequate state and local legislation. Behind these great public battles lies an even greater battle: to create public schools that work.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Many lessons work, some fail, September 11, 2003

By 

J. C Clark "eanna" (Overland Park, KS United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice (Hardcover)

Breaking Free tries hard to be the one-size-fits-all destroyer of the public school temple. And it comes very close. But its ancestry as a bunch of shorter journalism, and its seemingly complete faith in principals, keep it from being perfect.

Mr. Stern seems to believe that dynamic principals can single-handedly reshape a school. That is true to a point. But there are two problems he fails to address. One is that these dynamic leaders are hard to find, and even harder to identify. I worked for many years in public schools and knew many principals. Among the worst was a charming and pretty lady who knew the jargon, conveyed authority and confidence, and was "for the children." She was a PR prize, known in the community and valued as an "expert." She was also a very bad principal. Cronies were in positions of authority, cronies who were always "downtown" or "at a conference" but never around. She wanted everything to run wonderfully, and did not want to know anything about the details. So details were kept away. I am reasonably certain that standardized tests were "corrected" by the teachers, giving comparatively good scores to very weak students. Even in a world of choice, it would be hard to pinpoint her school as anything other than a success. Good scores, great leadership, happy staff. It all looked good. And it was all a charade.

Principals have plenty of other ways of jiggering the books. And giving them additional unregulated power will only allow those with a deceptive streak to provide jobs for friends and lovers, keep critics away, and create personal fiefdoms where their word goes. So, though a dynamic, dedicated principal, willing to work slavishly long hours for low pay, may be the answer, just how many of those guys are there?

But his devastating critique of the New York City public schools, with their entrenched unions that ultimately make the only rules that matter, and his comparisons with (admittedly selected) private schools doing far more with much less should be required reading for those who believe the Chicken Littles in the education world who run screaming whenever any change is proposed.

Public education is a near-total failure. It is outrageously expensive. Teachers control the language of debate, the politicians pretending to debate, and the future voters, so their terms and their ability to exclude critics make them apparently invulnerable. But enough people are avoiding public schools, even the best ones, that change will have to come. I just hope we don't wait until the entire system is in ruins.