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 Breaking Free
Sol Stern
Encounter Books, September 2002
Sol Stern's Breaking Free is a searing indictment of the failing New York City school system that is constrained
by the "bureacratic rules and rhythms of the union contract."
Review by 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.
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