Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

Thanks for the opener; the many ways in which those with no background in public education are shaping its future is truly astounding.

I'm sure many of our current “opponents” think democracy is served through privatization and market place incentives (read: money). Others would argue that you and I are making too fine a distinction between public and private. After all private publishers of textbooks and test makers (usually the same) have made loads of money off of public schooling.

I suspect we came to our work with a definition of public that’s different than mayors Bloomberg and Booker. The notion that we can leave it to the whims of individual parental choice—in marketplace fashion—is problematic. Or worse. Good parents are inclined to put their own children’s immediate interests first. I bent over backward when raising my own kids in NYC public schools, but I notice I’m inclined to use strings on behalf of my grandchildren. At what cost?

Who protects those who can’t pull strings or who can’t get into the increasing array of selective admissions schools?

The Senate passed the latest version of Title I (NCLB)—all thousand unread pages—without considering the side effects of their grandiose ideas. Conservatives used to criticize do-good liberals for this. The Mayor of NYC outdoes them by pronouncing equally major reforms—like placing hundreds of them under private management—in a few sketchy words. Who asks who is most hurt by the gutting of the intellectual, aesthetic and moral pursuits of K-12 schooling in the interest of test scores? Who “coulda/woulda” told them beforehand? Have you noticed that those who propose that we burn down the house and build a new one are not those whose children live in either? NYC no longer even has any school board as a check on absolute mayoral power. (If they could just cut the union down to size, they’d feel a lot freer.}

Despite widespread rhetoric requiring teachers to only use Federally approved “scientifically proven” reforms in their classroom, no one requires the Big (mostly) Boys from trying out their unproven ideas on other people’s children. Of course, I believe that “scientifically proven” methods of teaching is also one of those unproven ideas—a claim you and I might disagree about?

So, I’ve opened up a can of worms, Diane.

Best, Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deborah,

You ended your last entry with the following comment:

"All this leads to my current worry: the threatened future of public education itself. I worry also about the ties that bind my colleagues together through their unions. These two powerful common concerns connect Diane's work and my own. That we still disagree on so many other matters fascinates me; hopefully it will interest others as well."

That is a succinct description of our common concerns. Over the years, we have disagreed—civilly—about curriculum and standards. I don't want to minimize our disagreements, which continue. I still believe in the value of a common (prescriptive, as you would put it) curriculum, one that assures that all children have a genuine education that includes not only reading and math but also science, history, literature, civics, and the arts. I don't mean to put "the arts" last, as I think they might just as well go first. I think you can state your position on these issues far better than I can. I am deeply disturbed, upset, concerned, outraged, that so many schools—under pressure to meet AYP for NCLB (see how easily the acronyms invade our lives?)—have turned into test-prep factories. I am sure you are too, so this is another of our common concerns.

But I want in this early blog to get us started on some of the current challenges to the future of public education. This is a huge field, and it covers many topics. As someone who benefited from the availability of decent (not great, but decent) public schools in Houston, I believe strongly that all children should have access to good public schools.

But I see a growing movement—composed in large part of business leaders and elected officials—that seems to be saying that public education is dispensable (one of their main gripes seems to be with the fact that the public schools are unionized); that we as a nation should replace our current public schools with charters, privately-managed contract schools, vouchers, and almost anything that removes them to some extent from public control.

That was a strong recommendation of the "Tough Choices" report—that all public schools should be managed in the future by independent contractors. Living in NYC, we see this movement gaining momentum as the Bloomberg administration sets up an "empowerment zone" where public schools are allegedly autonomous and managed by "network leaders" and where the administration has just issued a "request for proposals" for private managers of public schools. Since Chancellor Joel Klein was on the "Tough Choices" commission, it appears that he is taking decisive steps to implement its recommendation on independently managed (i.e., privately managed) schools.

By the way, did you see that Cory Booker, the new mayor of Newark, New Jersey, whose schools were taken over by the state, says he wants mayoral control and his model is the Bloomberg-Klein reforms? He is impressed by the empowerment zone, where principals sign a contract and agree that they can be fired if they don't raise test scores. I wonder who will want to be a principal in the future if the job turns out to have a trapdoor under the chair?

Well, let's see where we go with this conversation!

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Since I'm writing my introduction after Diane wrote (and shared) hers, I have a chance to make mine a "reply"—to set the stage for our future blogs.

First of all, Diane and I have been arguing for a lot longer than she mentions. Diane called me maybe 15 years ago to suggest that since I had been a critic of some of her works, why didn't she come and actually see some of mine—the school I was working in. So we met, for the first time, at Central Park East Secondary School in East Harlem. And we bonded thereafter, even as we continued to criticize each other's ideas—especially when it came to matters of education policy. This is easier to do now—many years later—when we are both at New York University.

Second, our histories are interestingly different. I grew up in New York—for 8 years in what was once the rural suburbs, and later in Manhattan. My family were always engaged in politics—liberal, labor-oriented, (my mother once ran for City Council), as well as in the world of Jewish intellectual and social causes. I went to privileged independent progressive schools, then to Antioch and finally the University of Chicago for a Master's Degree in History. So Diane and I are both historians by training, if not in professional focus. I almost went on for a doctorate but instead had three kids and got involved on a semi-fulltime basis in the socialist, civil rights and peace movements of the 50s-60s in Chicago—mostly using my house as the base of operations. I was a founding member with Michael Harrington of a group called Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. (I've always had a penchant for small "schools" of thought.)

Third, when my kids were about school age, I tried to earn a little money the easiest way I could: as a substitute teacher on Chicago's southside. It turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done, and I had no natural talent for it. But it was an extraordinary experience. These schools, it struck me, were hardly designed in ways that would help produce a feisty, smart, compassionate citizenry. Fortunately our democracy has survived as well as it has despite schooling that was more oriented toward compliance than democracy. What could it be if... I wondered.

One thing led to another and I'm still wondering.

For the next 40-something years I've been wondering from inside schools: as a parent of publicly educated urban kids, as a kindergarten (and Head Start) teacher, a founding member and sort-of-head of a number of new small democratically-governed public elementary and secondary schools in NYC and Boston. Always looking for the cracks that could expand the democratic nature of classrooms and schools. Along the way I got the necessary credentials and began to write about my work-mostly for the families of the kids in the schools in which I worked, for Dissent and The Nation, among others, and finally wrote a few books, starting with "The Power of Their Ideas" in 1995. My political “organizing” largely focused on trying to get networks of teachers and parents together—being a rep to NYC’s AFT local, forming the North Dakota Study Group, The Center for Collaborative Education, the Coalition of Essential Schools, The National Board of Professional Teaching Standards, and lately the Progressive Ed Network of New England and a Campaign for Children to demand that we support playfulness at least for our youngest children! It helped to receive support from the prestigious MacArthur Foundation, in the form of a hefty award in the late ‘80s.

If only our voices, those closest to the children, would be heard in the halls of policy makers how much easier it would be to do good work on the ground, we thought. Even when we weren’t being heard, being in the midst of vibrant, living and complicated schools sustained my hopes. I'm missing that now.

All this leads to my current worry: the threatened future of public education itself. I worry also about the ties that bind my colleagues together through their unions. These two powerful common concerns connect Diane's work and my own. That we still disagree on so many other matters fascinates me; hopefully it will interest others as well.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 5:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Hi, I am Diane Ravitch and I am really excited about the opportunity to blog with Deborah Meier. Deb and I had quite a lot of fun writing an article that was published in Education Week (May 24, 2006) as "Bridging Differences." We started writing the article after we shared a platform at New York University, where we discussed and debated the current era of school reform. We met before the session to hash out what we would say and had the startling discovery that there was a bunch of things that we agreed upon. After the public forum, we continued to email each other, exchanging ideas. Eventually we hit upon the notion that out of this exchange might come an article. For many weeks, we wrote each other, agreeing, disagreeing, arguing, editing each other's words. And the article did appear.

Then a few weeks ago, someone at EdWeek decided that it might be fruitful to continue the discussion, in relation to real-time events of the day. We decided we would give it a go.

So here are the things you should know about me before we start. I was born in Houston, Texas, where I attended public schools from kindergarten through high school, along with my seven brothers and sisters. I then went to Wellesley College, where I graduated in 1960. A few weeks after college graduation, I married. For a time I worked at the New Leader magazine, a wonderful publication where I learned about democratic socialist politics. (At the time and for most of my life, I was a registered Democrat; for the past decade, I have been a registered independent.) Then I started having children. The first, Joseph, was born in 1962. The second, Steven, was born in 1964. Steven died of leukemia in 1966. Needless to say, I was devastated. This was a traumatic event in my life and the life of my family. I had another child as soon as I could, another son, Michael, in 1967.

Soon after Michael's birth, I embarked on writing projects for the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Since I was young and inexperienced, I worked at what is known in New York labor circles as piece-rates, for $5 an hour. One of those projects involved reporting back to Carnegie staff about the Ford Foundation's support for experiments in school decentralization in NYC. From what I learned, I decided I wanted to write a history of the New York City public schools. No master's degree, no doctorate, just a passionate desire to write this book. Through the good offices of the Carnegie Corporation, I met Lawrence Cremin of Teachers College, the most eminent historian of education of that time, who set me on the path to becoming a historian and also to earning a doctorate (bypassing the master's degree) at Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Long story short: I did write that history. It is called "The Great School Wars: New York City, 1805-1973." I joined the faculty of Teachers College as an adjunct, rising from an assistant professor to full professor, while I continued to write books, reviews, articles, essays. One highlight of that period of my life occurred in 1989-1990, when I traveled to Poland, Hungary, Romania, and Czechoslovakia at the behest of the American Federation of Teachers, encouraging nascent teachers' unions in countries that were emerging from a long era of totalitarianism.

In 1991, much to my surprise, I received an invitation from Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander to join him as Assistant Secretary of Education in charge of the Office of Educational Research and Improvement at the U.S. Department of Education. That was in the administration of President George H.W. Bush. I had a wonderful, exciting experience and learned an incredible amount about federal education policy. While in office, I strongly advocated on behalf of voluntary national content standards in all subjects: English, history, science, mathematics, the arts, geography, civics, economics, even physical education (and signed the contracts to fund many of them).

After I left government in 1993, I went to work at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., an incredibly vibrant think tank, where I wrote a book about national standards in education.

I returned to New York City in mid-1994 and accepted an offer to become a research professor at New York University. Since then, I have written several more books, including "Left Back," "The Language Police," and a recently published anthology "The English Reader," which I edited with my son Michael (a great experience!).

That's a start towards knowing who I am. Oh, one more thing, I live in Brooklyn, New York, which is a great place to live, and I have an abiding interest in the New York City public schools.

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)