If you want platitudes about how dedicated and hard-working public school teachers are, do not read Dr. Steve Perry’s book, Push Has Come to Shove: Getting Our Kids the Education They Deserve — Even If It Means Picking a Fight (Crown, September 2011). However, if you want the unvarnished truth, as he sees it, about why your child — Black, White, poor, middle-class, urban or suburban — is getting an inadequate education in public school, this is the book you need.
The author is the founder and principal of Capital Prep Magnet School in Hartford, Conn., an urban school with a track record of sending 100 percent of its graduates to college. He also is a CNN contributor on education seen frequently on “Anderson Cooper 360” and “American Morning.”
Addressing parents directly from the vantage point of an insider, Perry presents an insightful and frightening view of the state of the American public school system, and he places much of the blame on teachers, or more specifically on the unions that represent them. It’s the unions that stand in the way of significant reforms — year-round schools, longer school days, school choice, vouchers — that could benefit students, he argues.
Following are excerpts from his interview with Diverse.
DI: In the book, you seem to be particularly hard on unions. How did you come to your views on that?
SP: What I have found, not just in our city, but throughout the country, is that the teachers unions — or in those states where they don’t have a teachers union, teachers associations — serve one purpose, and one purpose only, and that is to maintain the employment status of their members, and it is not to improve the product, that being education. They are the biggest problem in public schools.
… To me, the biggest crime against our communities is to protect failed teachers and to limit the access the community has to good teachers.
