I very much enjoyed Sara Mosle's review of Richard Kahlenberg's new biography of Albert Shanker, but disagree with something she wrote: "At the core of Shanker's prescience was a single, revolutionary, but astoundingly commonsensical, insight: Poverty causes bad schools rather than the other way around."

I don't think that was Shanker's key insight at all. Shanker's key insight--and he wasn't the first to have it--was that public education could provide poor kids, like himself, an avenue out of poverty into a world of the mind and a more general, varied world than the isolation that poverty generally imposes. Moreover, he knew that public schools should be the engine of democracy, giving all children the opportunity to become educated citizens. He recognized that too often the schools we as a society provide to poor children--and even middle-class children--do not fill that role because they are poorly organized and inadequately supported by money, good training, good curriculum, and good assessments.

To think that he ascribed bad schools to poverty in such a simplistic way is to completely misunderstand him. Kahlenberg's book gives readers a much more nuanced view than that.

Karin Chenoweth

Author, It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools (Harvard Education Press, 2007)

In much of academia, Chenoweth's view of "nuance" holds: nuance means not taking a definable position. Note that she takes a single sentence about what's wrong with schools and turns it into a paragraph about how schools are good. (Oh - and how they need more money!! lol - she doesn't even have enough of a basic background in education to know the statistics that performance is uncorrelated to money, see e.g., Washington DC).

The fact it that the schools are not good; they are worse than they have ever been and getting worse still. Karin adds nothing but the usual pablum to that.

Thanks for the misreading and your boring talking points Hyperion. You can take your nap now.

I'd ask you to back up your claim that funding doesn't affect performance, but hey, why beat around the bush, let's just abolish all public schools and let the Catholic Church run everything. That's what you're driving at isn't it?

Back here in reality land, several of my friends participated in Teach for America, and without fail, every one of them said that the problem was teacher to student ratios (or to put it simply: class size). Now, it's possible to accomplish smaller class size without extra funding, but it doesn't seem too ridiculous to say that the best way to accomplish it is by hiring more teachers and paying enough of a salary to draw more qualified people to the field.

Small class sizes are most important when the teacher cannot command discipline. Fewer students per class means fewer behavior problems demanding her attention.

The NYC public schools were excellent in the 1950s despite large class sizes. But students were punished for talking out of turn.