>> coming up at 10:00 eastern, that went on for some seven, eight minutes, we will be talking live to katt williams, he will be joining me, hear about the incident, what that heckler was saying that got him going. katt williams at 10:00 eastern time. time for "your bottom line." back with you at the top of the hour with more live news. the class of 2015, i can't believe i'm even saying it. ferris bueller could be their dad. what kind of school dad would he be? we examine the role of parents on student achievement. i'm christine romans. the bitter debate over reform in american public schools, are

unions part of the solution or part of the problem? there will be more than 19 million students in college this fall. how to make sure that pricey investment pays off. we begin with a passionate debate over public school reformp. with me steven bril, and he spent two years immersed in thousands of pages of documents and hours in the classroom in an interviews for his book "class warfare." take a look at this poll from 1976 asked if teachers unions, helped, hurt or made no difference in the quality of public school education, 38% said unions hurt it. fast forward to today. that number has grown to nearly 50%. steven bril, are you surprised? >> i'm not surprised. the battle has been worth it for the reformers and unions because i see a place where they can come at and where the politicians and the reformers can get the unions on their side which is the only way we're ever going to fix america's schools.

>> you came at this as a journalist, with no dog in the fight. you started looking at the rubber rooms, where teachers were put on full pay and sitting on a beach chair playing cards on the public dime. what did you find about what the impediments are to real reform in the schools? >> the pendulum had clearly swung too far. when the teachers unions were first organized in the '30s, the '40s and '50s they were needed. teachers were abused, they were sexually harassed, it was a mostly women profession, discriminated against. then, in the '70s and '80s i think you could argue that they succeeded too well, so that by the time you got to the '90s and end of the last decade you had hundreds of pages of union contracts that guaranteed all kinds of protections and most important of all took 3.2 million teachers, which is the largest occupation, you know, of anyone in the united states except for sales clerks, and

told those people your performance does not count. it doesn't count in how you get promoted, paid, or whether you keep your job. once you do, that it has a corrosive effect on the whole process. >> you have an op-ed this week, the school reform deniners. >> they have been largely deniers, first denying there's a problem and then denying or claiming the only work place in the united states where performance shouldn't count is arguably the most important work place which is the nation's classrooms. >> all right. steven bril don't move. we'll talk more about this. want to bring in randy weingarten, president of the american teacher of federations, has spent her career in education and supporting teachers. randy, tell me about the position here of certainly you've heard from steven bril and others who say that until now, unions have been school reform deniers. how can unions be part of the

solution and uphold teachers but also address some of the concerns and criticisms? >> well, look, i think that i want to just step back one second to say, in this country, about half the teachers have union management contracts. the rest of the teachers in this country do not. in countries that outcompete us, they are mostly unionized. so it becomes an easy issue to scapegoat but is not the real issue. having said that, i think where steve is right is that we, the people who have been edge gauged in schools, whether it's management or whether it's teachers or our unions, is that we did not focus enough on quality. performance was always important. it's always important to an individual teacher, it's always important to a school system. we did not make it clear that the notion of quality has to be

first and foremost. and that has changed over the course of the last couple of years. where i think that steve is wrong, is that this new group of billionaires and millionaires that have been involved in education, don't look at this in the way in which they ought to. there's lots of complexities in terms of how we help all kids, not just some kids, have the skills that they need in this fast paced changing economy and we do that at a time when the bottom has still fallen out as you and i both know we've talked about it before, where parents are poorer than they've been before, where we see lot more poverty and a lot more complexity. and it ultimately comes down to a teacher unless we have the help and support of others and we can't do it ourselves. >> let's talk about you talked about quality. the quality of the teaching, the quality of the education. measuring that quality, is

something that is just rife with division and different opinions about how you measure it. standardized testing, cheating scandals because of standardized testing at the same time. how do you measure the quality of a teacher when sometimes it's not a tangible thing. >> exactly right. >> and address the concerns that maybe the teachers union stand in the way of being able to get a good teacher, compensated and recognized? >> all right. let me take both of those as simply as i can. on the issue of money, teachers are entitled to get a decent wage. that doesn't mean that every single wage should be lock step, but we should have and teachers should have competitive salaries. there's a role for differentiated pay. but the kind of differentiated pay meaning some call it merit pay, performance pay, what we seen to have worked is if we pay

people additional dollars on top of competitive pay for things like going to hard to staff schools, that seems to work. if we pay them based upon test scores of their students, that doesn't work. there's studies now, including about an experiment that mayor bloomberg and i did in new york city. so that's number one. that's why we keep saying let's look at the evidence. number two, on the whole issue of quality, let me get right into the issue of tenure. tenure is supposed to be a due process proceeding. but what has happened is in the absence of a evaluation systems that really measure what a teacher is doing, and how kids are reacting or how kids are learning, in the absence of that, what has happened is these due process procedures have become the proxy for competence and that is -- doesn't work and so what we've done as a union,

since 2010, is to say, let's look and make sure we really are evaluating teachers in a mull penalty measured way, bo -- multiple measured way in looking at their practice as well as looking at what kids are learning, and then also make sure that teachers get the tools and conditions theys need so that they can do their job individually and collectively. >> randi weingarten, always a pleasure to talk to you about the incredibly important issues. thank you. next more on whether teachers unions help or hurt reform and plus, this question, is the reform debate demoralizing to teachers and their profession? that's next. that's why i like glucerna shakes. they have slowly digestible carbs to help minimize blood sugar spikes, which can help lower a1c. [ male announcer ] glucerna. helping people with diabetes find balance. backed by the superguarantee®? find a business [ male announcer ] glucerna. only& suonline.s®. on your phone. or in the book.

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classrooms this fall may look and feel a whole lot different than last because of budget cuts. fees to join sports, music programs, art classes, fis ed gone in some districts, some are putting ads on school busses, lockers and football fields to raise money and the fight over reform that many teachers say is demoralizing to them and their professi profession. welcome back to school. steven bril, get to you first in your book, you wage a case against american teacher unions and sat in successful schools

and unsuccessful schools, from your observation what is it about randi weingarten's case, you have an issue with? >> make one observation, randi, i've come to like her, respect and like her a lot as i've been doing the book, she favors a flexible, multilayered system for evaluating teachers that includes peer observations, some attention to test scores, the principal's observation, et cetera, her union won a lawsuit in new york state to block exactly that system. >> there you go. you say that it's just the union says one thing and does something else? >> in many cases they're starting to slide toward reform not happily, but i think we should take whatever progress we can get certainly of the reformers, welcome the fact that they -- that the unions seem to be becoming more flexible but every once in a while still they

do lawsuits and other things that take a step back. >> it's the fall, who's going back to school, 55 million students from kindergarten to the 12th grade. this number surprised me, 11% of the kids are enrolling in private school. steve perry is a cnn education contributor. steve you founded and run a school. is that 11% going to get bigger as parents opt out of putting their children's education into uncle sam's hands? >> i don't know if it's going to get bigger but it's always been important to take a look at what's happening in our public schools. we've seen too often that our children who are forced to go to failed schools, spend their lives trying to make up for the failures of that school. we can talk about what the the unions say, i just know what they do. they've created a set of circumstances which allowed the least effective teachers to stay employed longer than they're supposed to. >> i want to bring in another contributor, elsie granderson, we hear about effective teachers, teachers who aren't effective, unions as road

blocks, partners to change, and then parents. you're a dad. parents are incredibly important for the kind of environment and the expectations they're setting for their children. are we letting parents off the hook when we talk about public school reform? >> we let the parents off the look for a lot of things. education and public education reform is one of those things. we're in a pickle and throwing money at the problem isn't going to solve the solution. what we need to do is get back to basics and it's the home and what's happening with parents and the relationship with children and parents emphasis on education through their lifestyle as well as what they tell the child. my son was at private school, now back in public school. i'm trying to get him in the best possible situation to be a good learner and it gets more difficult. the more difficult on the outside, the more important parents are on the inside. >> you're shaking your head. >> it's easy to say the parents

aren't doing their job. if you're the best parent you could possibly be and send your child to a failed school your child is not going to be as successful as someone who goes to a better school. we pay and educate teachers to prepare children for a better life. parents are doing what they can. we very often pound on parents and tell them, you should do more, do more, more than what? if a child comes home with a spanish assignment and you don't speak spanish how will you help your child with spanish? the expectation is we're paying you, me, as a principal, we're being paid to educate your children. >> steven bril, the book "class warfare." steve and elsie stick around, more parental pressure on students, not enough, too much, does it make a difference on how students perform in the class rope. we'll talk about that next. with diabetes, it's tough to keep life balanced.

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all right. a heated debate about education. elsie granderson and steve perry back. steve, most americans say parents are not putting enough pressure on their kids to do well in school. take a look at this survey.

you won't believe it. a majority of americans think parents are not putting enough pressure on their kids. in china, it's a mirror. 68% of parents think they're putting too much pressure on their kids. call it pressure, call it expectations, steve perry, do we need to get tougher out there? >> i think many of our parents are too easy on our children. in fact, one of the strangest things that i've seen is, we have had parents complain that we give too much homework. that i find to be peculiar because the expectation is that the children will, in fact, go home and practice that which they've learned in a school. >> all right. elsie, parents have leverage, pressure expectations, they have leverage here. they have the money and annual survey by fidelity investments say two-thirds of american parents say they're only going to pay for their kids college education if they maintain a "b" average. i know a "b" average isn't good enough for elsie granderson in his house. we coined the phrase tiger dad to talk about him because he made his kid get out of

basketball for getting a "b." should parents be using the money as leverage? >> no. they should be using the -- see, that's where we get into the problem, right. we keep dangling carrots trying to get our kids to learn when what we should be doing is inspiring them to learn for the purpose of learning. and then allowing what happens from them being inspired to learn whether to go to school, what kind of school to go to, which extracurricular activities to get involved with. i don't bribe my son to do well in school. >> the baseline expectation, ppp you're framing it in a way that shows even asking a question like that like that shows what sort of the american parental psyche about kids. you guys, parents are having a hard time letting go when it comes to letting their kids manage than their own college education. in 2007, more than 95% conducted parent orientations.

steve perry, helicopter parents, in college? are they just too involved? come on! >> there are times when i hire new teachers, and when the teachers come in -- i'm not kidding -- my grandmother used to say, i swear foreg god, i swear fore god, they come in with their parents and work together in setting up the room. >> i think it's sweet. >> okay, good, next time you hire somebody, let their mom and dad come in and set up their office. >> okay, i get it. i get it. >> i do think we need to let our parents be involved, but they do sometimes go too far, and we've seen it on the negative side when they go to the sporting events and they take it a little too seriously. and it happens in other places. we want our parents to be involved, but in the most meaningful and productive ways. >> there's two americas, or maybe this has four or five

different americas. but lz, i'm not kidding, you have parents who are hovering over their kids and the expectation is always that their kids are going to go to college, and they're worried, am i putting too much pressure on my kid? and then the other end of the spectrum, you've got hard-working people who are probably living in poverty and expecting everything from their education system and they're not getting it. that's what's so sad. >> it is two or three or even four different kinds of americas. i'm really fortunate, because my career allows me the luxury of allowing me to be able to visit my son's school and have meaningful conversations with his teachers about his progress. a lot of america doesn't. 80% of the country is fighting with 20% of the wealth. a lot of parents are in that situation, and they're so dependent on our school systems not to fail. that's not an excuse to say that parents shouldn't be involved, but they just don't have the time. and we really need to find a way, and i'm going to keep saying this over and over again, to bridge the gap between the

haves and the thhave-nots in tes of quality education. something is really wrong. we're getting to the point now where we can't hide the fact that our kids aren't being educated at the level they need to. >> and i think anybody that's been listening to this debate over the past 10 to 15 minutes, they've heard from the top union leader, they've heard from a critic of the top union, heard from both of you with different perspectives. and i think we should all agree that the american education system should be an equalizer. it should be this thing that we do as a society that no matter what your formula is, you can come out on the other side and have that same education. and we're not there yet. and how to do that is the hard part. but gentleman, we'll keep talking about it, and steve perry, lz granderson, you always make it more entertaining to talk about, that's for sure. thank you. you need a money manager to get through school these days and next we'll talk to one. for local maps, deals and more, go to superpages.com®. and let the good guys save the day.

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whether you're shopping for binders and notebooks or shopping for the right college for junior, do you feel like you need a financial planner?

i do. we've got one for you. stacy frances, certified financial planner and president of frances financial is here. let's start big. college tuition and fees at public universities surged almost 130% over the past 20 years. that's according to the college board. 19.7 million kids in college this fall. somehow, i don't think everyone has saved enough money. talk about 529s. >> 529 plans are the key to your savings. you can out money in and take the money out tax free as long as it's for education, tuition, books. there's a lot you can use it for. the most important thing is to see if your state has a plan that you actually get a tax deduction for. if you do get a tax deduction, you have your answer. you want to use your state plan. that deduction is so beneficial. but if not, go to savingsforcollege.com and see the top-rated state and with that, go ahead and invest in that plan. i'm a big fan of grandmothers and grandpas, who put money along the way in 529, who are

investing young for kids. because we know that tuition, we know that a college session the biggest buffer against unemployment, the most important thing you can give your kid. at the same time, it's so expensive. >> it's so expensive, but, yes. every single gift, we actually just had a person, instead of a baby shower, everybody contributed to the 529 plan. >> really?! >> 30 different people contributed. she has thousands of dollars. >> that's a great idea. >> there's so many ways you can beef up those plans, whether for holidays or birthday presents. put it in the 529 plan. >> should your kid have a credit card? 80% of college students have a debit card, 40% have a credit card, 37% of kids have both. the average college student, stacy, has $842 in credit card debt. this is according to a new sallie may survey. if you're under 21, you can't get a card unless you have a cosigner. so the parents need to be involved in getting the card and also need to monitor the spending. >> you get online access.

as the parents go and look at their credit card spending, they log in the -- >> you can get a text message sent to you when your kid uses a debit card. >> it's great. and also to be honest, as a parent, a wonderful way to monitor your children. to see what they're doing. what they're doing with that money. >> love that. >> but a great way to protect. nott too many kids are coming out of college with not only student loans, but credit card debt. >> and mark cantowitz, he says, you have to live like a monk if you're on student loans. this is a way for parents to make sure your kids are living lean in college. more spending numbers i wanted to bring to you. the average k-12 parent is going to spend about $600 on supplies, electronics, clothing. college-bound families, they're going to spend just over $800. of course, that doesn't even include tuition. stacy, you say, shop at home first when you're going back-to-school shopping. >> yeah, shop at home first. a lot of us, we go to the stores and we don't even have a list. you're there, you see the