April 2007 Archives

Dear Deb,

It is valuable to reconsider the history of progressive education not just as an arcane matter, but to see how good ideas go astray. You identify with the Deweyan tradition, but it is informative to see how much trouble Dewey had trying to keep his followers from distorting his ideas. One of the things that we learn from history is how easily the best of ideas gets distorted, hijacked, misinterpreted.

This is one reason that my favorite book of Dewey's is "Experience and Education," where he tries to correct the misunderstandings of his writings, especially among his disciples. In the concluding paragraph, he says that "...the fundamental issue is not of new versus old education nor of progressive against traditional education but a question of what anything whatever must be to be worthy of the name education. I am not, I hope and believe, in favor of any ends or any methods simply because the name progressive may be applied to them." A book well worth re-reading, in my view.

Even earlier, in an article in 1926, Dewey chastised those progressives who said "let us surround pupils with certain materials, tools, appliances, etc., and then let pupils respond to these things according to their own desires. Above all, let us not suggest any end or plan to the students; let us not suggest to them what they shall do, for that is an unwarranted trespass upon their sacred intellectual individuality...Now such a method is really stupid. For it attempts the impossible, which is always stupid; and it misconceives the conditions of independent thinking." His point was that experienced adults were responsible for guiding children, not leaving them to educate themselves.

Dewey knew quite well how hard it was to reign in or redirect those who claimed to be working under his banner. Despite his best efforts, all sorts of ideologues created schools where they invoked his name and violated his principles.

I mention the well-known problem that Dewey had in keeping his ideas from distortion because it brings us back to contemporary affairs. Both of us, I think, have had the experience of seeing ideas that we championed picked up by others and turned into something quite different from what we intended. I have supported testing as a means to see whether children were learning what was taught, but now see testing turned into a blunt instrument to denude the rich knowledge-based curriculum that I prize. Testing has become an end in itself and a means to punish students and teachers, rather than a diagnostic tool for improvement. You have championed small schools, but I doubt that you can be happy with recent and current efforts to turn them out in cookie-cutter fashion, with inexperienced leaders and inadequate planning.

Now we see in the past few days that two of our billionaire philanthropists—Bill Gates and Eli Broad—have created a fund of $60 million to advance their ideas about curriculum, the length of the school day, and merit pay and to make sure that the Presidential candidates in 2008 listen to them. I don't question their right to do this, but it disturbs me that their financial resources are so vast that they can set the nation's agenda. This is fundamentally anti-democratic. This really goes to the heart of another discussion that we have had, and that you in particular have stressed, about the need for democratic, public engagement in shaping the means and ends of education. How can there be a dialogue when one set of participants has such enormous sums of money and is ready to spend whatever it takes to push its program? Are these two men our nation's leading education thinkers? How do they know what is most needed to improve education?

I also noticed that Congress is now considering new legislation to "reform" the high school. This scares me because Congress doesn't have a clue about how to reform high schools. Whatever they pass will mean more mandates and regulations. This is a great flaw in NCLB. Presumably, the myriad people who wrote that legislation thought that they were doing the right thing when they wrote detailed sanctions for schools that don't make "adequate yearly progress." But none of the sanctions, to my knowledge, is based on research or experience. They represent hunches, guesswork, hopes, fears, whatever. Yet, now those sanctions have the power of law, the power to stigmatize schools and misdirect the energies of educators, and that is frightening.

I still think we would be better off with national standards and national tests, instead of fifty state tests. But I would couple such a system with a flat prohibition on any federal sanctions tied to those tests. The federal role, in my view, should be limited to supplying information; information, please, and good data, of which we don't have nearly enough. That is what was written into the first legislation enacting the U.S. Office of Education in 1867, that it should supply reliable information and research on "the condition and progress" of education in these United States. That is still, I believe, the right role for the federal government, in addition to providing additional funding to help educate specific groups of children who have unusual needs and enforcing our nation's civil rights laws. The federal government should not be in the business of telling schools how to teach or how to organize themselves. Decisions about how to help schools should belong to states and localities. That would preserve our federal system of education, and place responsibility with those who know the schools best.

Best,

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:25 AM | Permalink | 11 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I’m reminded that for 50 years the USSR claimed to be a democracy (and its rulers socialists), and so did England (for some of that time), Sweden, and … Dewey. In other words, studying the common roots of progressivism historically is valuable, yet it leads us only so far—it risks lumping together disparate meanings and movements. That does not negate the value of books (like yours) that try to track their common and uncommon histories. It’s well to remember that Progressive was a word used by Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, the inventors of standardized testing, populists, both the leaders of industry and early labor union leaders—including some virulent racists, xenophobics, etc. But it’s also critical to make distinctions in talking about this disparate group.

By this same measure, of course, all of western civilization—including the history of the term democracy—has to be read keeping in mind the racial and class biases embedded in their usage.

Even the progressive schools that most closely allied with Dewey’s ideas in education had very different interpretations of how best to implement them. Partly because they were fascinated by different concerns, partly because their kids and families and communities were different, the worlds around them differed, and the knowledge base about human learning didn’t stay the same. And yes! Virtually all of the schools of the pre-WWII era—including both progressive and traditional—were infected with racism and class’ism in ways that seem shocking to us today, as well as what I guess I might call, “smart’ism.” Many of those private schools weren’t then nor now open to all kids, not even all rich white kids, but only to rich white so-called academically smart ones.

I shall reread “Left Back”. I think I got so mad at some points that I began to skim it. Did you do the same with mine? But I read, as you know, with some praise and criticism, other works of yours. It’s worth also re-reading the work of those who tried to introduce progressive (in my sense) ideas into settings for poor and working-class kids—Maria Montessori, the work of Leonard Covello in East Harlem, the accounts of early freedom schools in the south, a wonderful book called “The Boys of Barbiano”.

Re Charters and Bobbitt—I was only responding to the quote you included. Their claim that if we require the young to study “academics” for 12 years we need to defend its utility seems reasonable. To be “useful” does not need to mean that it can immediately be put to use to get rich, powerful, or famous.

It is no more obvious (or realistic) to assume that all kids must be masters (proficient) at history than masters of the piano (after 8 years of study I failed to come close to mastery in the latter). I’m inclined (some days) to think playing an instrument, even at a merely beginner's level, should be expected of any educated person! Or the visual arts? Or carpentry? Choices must be made. Should it be the same choice for all—regardless of interests, talents, etc?

We probably disagree whether shoemaking—if not exclusively taught to poor and black children—might be as intellectually enlightening (see the Sizer chapter on a high school shop class) as the vast majority of academic courses. When I watch my landscape gardener introduce her interns to the field of gardening I am listening to someone with an acute appreciation of “the habits of mind” I described last Monday. I’m less concerned about exposure to a “common core” than exposure to good intellectual habits rigorously applied to all worthwhile tasks or studies.

Re Summerhill?? I intended to distinguish progressive ed from Summerhill—as far from what Dewey meant as scripted learning is—in opposite directions. My colleague Ted Chittenden, formerly at ETS, maps it out into four quadrants. The two axes represent student initiative and adult initiative. He puts traditional education in the quadrant where adults take initiative and kids don’t, Summerhill where kids do and adults don’t, scripted lessons in the quadrant where neither kids nor teachers do, and progressive education where both do.

It’s intriguing to consider that my progressive forebears were probably closer to your views on testing than mine. My disagreement is far from, as you call it, “out of hand”. I held standardized tests in high regard until I tried them out on the real kids I worked with (including my own kids)—about which I wrote at length in both Dissent (1981) and “In Schools We Trust”. My subsequent research in the field amazed me; and like many of the most distinguished testing experts alive today, I concluded that they do not measure what they are purported to measure and contain inevitable bias. If they were simply used as another piece of interesting evidence, and not prepped for, they could add to our knowledge (especially for large populations versus individuals). But for the past 35 years we’ve been misusing them to the point at which they literally mislead us.

I’d argue that no exams—even our wonderful Portfolios at CPESS (or NYU PhD exams)—are ever more than a clue, sound but inconclusive evidence. Even the driver’s road test is just a small sample of the full range of what it means to be a decent driver. This may be part of a larger personal/philosophical disagreement, Diane than a debatable one. You suggest that “it is because we disagree about progressivism—even in its most exalted form—that we disagree about other particulars”. Maybe it’s the other way around! It’s teasing these out that makes our dialogue interesting to me.

On another front, it’s thought-provoking to notice what kind of schooling issues seem to require zero “scientific proof”. Clearly NCLB is an example of an untested experiment being carried out on all of America’s public school children. And Klein’s various reorganization schemes are another grand untested experiment. The NY Times reported this week that both the Gates and Broad Foundations are pumping $60 million into politicking for their untested theories: national policy dictating longer school days, a national curriculum and teachers paid on the basis of their students’ test performance.

It would be fun if more of our readers would weigh in on these issues! There’s a space somewhere for comments: readers, use it!

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 6:59 AM | Permalink | 9 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

You choose to set aside the "complex idea of nomenclature," but I don't. Not out of orneriness, but because I wrote a book about the varieties of progressivism, as did Lawrence Cremin ("The Transformation of the School"). Educators who saw themselves in the mainstream of progressivism, and who at the time were acknowledged as such, were responsible for the advent and mass production of standardized testing and intelligence testing; for tracking of students into academic and vocational education; and for such extremes as "life adjustment education," where the intellectual stuff was withheld from all but about 20 percent of the students.

You would prefer to stick with only the form of progressivism identified with Dewey's Lab School, and I can understand why. Dewey's Lab School, the Lincoln School, and the Dalton School had a wonderful curriculum, not a Summerhill approach at all. I spent quite a lot of time getting very excited about what was happening in those schools, but it did not pass my notice that the Lab School at the University of Chicago in Dewey's brief time had about 4 students for each adult, and that the students were the children of university faculty and other professionals. Their families were white and professional. Nor were the Dalton School or the Lincoln School (where I believe the student body included children of the Rockefeller family) known for their economic, cultural or racial diversity.

Since I am writing from a hotel computer while on travel, I don't have my books nearby, but I do recall that all of these private "experimental" schools had a wonderful, rich, coherent academic curriculum, augmented by lively hands-on activities and projects, taught by top-notch teachers to very small classes. The children were not doing whatever they wanted to do. Teachers today would have a great time reading a description of the courses at the Dewey school, as described in a book called "The Dewey School" by two of its teachers.

If you don't see anything wrong with the curriculum analyses and recommendations of W.W. Charters and John Franklin Bobbitt, then you need to read some of their studies and proposals. They were as far from the Dewey tradition as one could imagine. Bobbitt, in particular, was an efficiency expert who tried to do a cost-benefit analysis for every course, and concluded that there was nothing to be gained by teaching much more than vocational studies.

I think you never read my book "Left Back," which looks at the ideas of these guys rather closely. Consider along with them the work of their fellow "progressive" Thomas Jesse Jones, widely credited as the founder of the social studies. As a teacher, he introduced the first program in "social studies" at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, a school for native Americans and black students. His idea of social studies was that it would prepare students to assume their future role in society, learning about their place in society (and not aspiring far above it). Jones (who was white and a social worker) prepared a massive federal study of black schools in the South (it may be found in major libraries, titled "Negro Education"). In that survey, which was used by philanthropists deciding what to do about the condition of black education, Jones complained repeatedly about black parents and communities who wanted the wrong kind of education for their children; he complained about schools that were giving their students an academic education and insisted that they should be realistic and should align themselves with "modern," "progressive" education that emphasizes practical skills like making bricks, domestic service, shoeing horses, matwork, canning, and other occupations that were then open to black workers. W.E.B. DuBois referred to Jones' survey as "dangerous" and "sinister."

And I can't let John Dewey off the hook altogether. If you go back and re-read his "Schools of To-Morrow" (1915), you will find a chapter praising a segregated black school in Indianapolis that was teaching its students how to be shoemakers. That chapter, surrounded by descriptions of schools where children were doing exciting, mind-opening explorations, is an embarrassment. And it reminds me how many progressive educators thought that vocationalism was the same as progressivism.

I love your emphasis on learning how to think, thinking about evidence and its credibility, looking for patterns, etc. I associate this approach with you and Ted Sizer. This is NOT, however, what I associate with Summerhill. As you know, A.S. Neill said again and again that children should get lessons only when they wanted lessons. If they didn't want them, it was okay with him. He reveled in the fact that some children in his "school" went for years without a lesson. Forgive me, but I think that the Meier/Sizer strand of progressivism is not only different from Summerhill, but suffers embarrassment when linked with Summerhill. Summerhill is the form of progressivism that is the basis for the New Yorker cartoon where a child plaintively asks his teacher, "Do we have to do what we want to do today?"

So, yes, we continue to agree and disagree. We may never actually "bridge our differences," but it helps to air them.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 7:37 AM | Permalink | 6 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Amen. Right on target. And well said, to boot.

So, let's leave Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg for a while, although it's hard to do. The amazing thing is—as you note—the complete lack of accountability behind their schemes. Like many a revolutionary the object seems to be to ensure that the past is smashed and cannot be put together again, in the hopes that something new and glorious will emerge out of the ashes. The only hint we have about the "new" is that it should be market driven, "competitive", and rest largely on test scores—or whatever some future Mayor chooses to believe in?

Enough on them for a moment.

Let's go back to your earlier critique of progressive education, and then, another day to the idea of a national curriculum and assessment system.

Let's take it more slowly—separating for the moment the complex idea of nomenclature (the history of the word progressive—which has meant so many different things to so many different people)—from the form of progressivism largely identified with John Dewey's efforts, and those of his "ilk". It includes the interesting crowd that gathered around schools like Chicago's Lab School, Lincoln, Parker, Dalton, Ethical Culture and Bank Street, founded to think through the connections between democracy and education. A concept of progressivism central also to the work of Jean Piaget, the post WW II Infant School movement in England, Ted Sizer, etc. There's a strong and common thread that runs through this list. It borrows probably from both traditional ideas and those that grew out of what's sometimes called "free schools" (Summerhill, etc). Schools inclined to Dewey's form of "progressivism" were seeking classrooms and schools that were simultaneously highly respectful of teacher and adult initiative and judgment, and the importance of the child initiative and judgment (what was called in early-childhood-education jargon—the agency of the child.) Probably, too, these were school people with a foot in academia and another foot in the social and political movements of their time.

This tradition contrasts to equally "innovative" reform efforts that script both teachers and kids—which seem popular again these days. Some reformers saw teacher and kid as empty vessels, some one, some the other, and some neither. (Even those who saw children as empty vessels often wanted to fill them with different things.)

The question Dewey asked was: What must we do to prepare the young for a society that proclaims everyone a member of the ruling class, that rests on the fragile and new idea that being a citizen is every one's vocation? Does this simply translate into claiming that every member of the ruling class needs to become an academic expert, or that whatever the small ruling classes of the 19th Century taught their male young is right (only now for everyone)? You refer, I suspect (?) disapprovingly, to a Charters and a Bobbitt who wanted to replace academics with "activities and tasks that would be useful in the adult world." What concerns you with that Bobbit/Charters aim?

What's wrong with demanding of Academics that they persuade us of their utility? Alas, when parents and average citizens applaud the importance of academic subjects it's generally because they misunderstand (confusing them with the 3 Rs), or because they fatalistically accept the proposition that it's a game that must be played in order to get a diploma, which in turn is a license to pursue utterly unacademic ends. There is no love affair between the American public and "the academy"—as Bush (like many a past politician) takes pains to remind us. I want a love affair.

The American public has, I contend, always viewed "academics" in one of the three ways I heard it used on the radio on my way to the airport. (Once again the car is one of my favorite solitary think tanks.) One time it was used to mean irrelevant—no longer pertinent, once it was used to mean boring, and finally to mean obtuse.

You and I have a much higher regard for academia, its history, traditions and importance; you are an eminent member of the academy.

I make a distinction between being academic and being intellectual, "smart", etc. And since I believe that "all children" rhetoric, I assume human beings with some exceptions are all potential intellectuals, but not all potential academics (or all any other form of "smarts"—except a common "citizen" smarts.) Fortunately, one can embrace multiple smarts. I think all citizens should be people who accept responsibility for their ideas and who, on the whole, enjoy the responsibility. This includes the "play of ideas" which does not always take academic forms.

The "five habits of mind" (see below) were a rough, unfinished attempt to get at what such "play" might look like at some Sizer-led schools. These "habits were an effort to describe the essential responses of adults in their vocation of citizenship (and, fortunately, useful for a lot else as well). Such habits were, as Sizer noted in "Horace's Compromise" (1985), better exercised in the shop class he described and not at all in most high school academic courses he observed.

I've a lot to say about why having a national course of study and national exams to go with them are a bad idea, some of which flows from the preceding. But, first, let's see where we part company on this description of progressivism.

(It's eminently clear that Bloomberg and Klein are counting on NYC citizens not exercising such habits of mind, for example.)

Best,

Deborah

p.s. Briefly, the five habits that defined "using one's mind well" in some of the Coalition "progressive" schools are summed up as follows. Being in the habit, whenever confronting something of interest and importance, of asking:

(1) How do we know what's true or not true? How credible is our evidence?
(2) Is there an alternate story? Perspective? How might this look from another viewpoint?
(3) Is there a connection between x and y? A pattern? Have I come across this before?
(4) What if... supposing that…? Could it have been otherwise if x not y had intervened?
(5) And finally, "who cares"? Does it matter? (And, perhaps, to whom?)

Posted by Deborah Meier at 7:48 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deb,

I hope you won't hold my Texas origins against me. I have lived in NYC since 1960—save for a 3-year detour to Washington, D.C.—and my first book was a history of the New York City public schools. I have been writing about these schools for about half my life, so, yes, I have a strong and continuing interest in what happens here. We don't usually say, "As New York goes, so goes the nation," but this is one of those instances where it might be appropriate to do so.

As you know, and our readers probably do not, the state legislature handed over control of the school system in 2002 to the Mayor, and he converted it to a city "Department of Education." He sold off its historic headquarters (110 Livingston Street in Brooklyn) and moved it to the notorious Tweed Courthouse, next door to City Hall. (It was something of a delicious irony that Boss Tweed himself had persuaded the State Legislature to eliminate the independent Board of Education and establish a NYC Department of Public Instruction in 1871.) The 2002 legislation abolished the central board of education and all community school boards. Although the legislation was silent on the structure of the school system, the Mayor abolished the city's 32 community school districts and replaced them with ten regions, each with a superintendent in charge of about 100,000 children.

Since 2002, there have been three reorganizations of the school system. The first totally centralized the district, so that all instructional mandates came from "Tweed" (as people now call the DOE), and everyone was expected to be on the same page with balanced literacy, Everyday Math, and the workshop model. In the second reorganization, the DOE created something called the "Empowerment Zone," where schools could escape the micromanagement of the first reorganization—and 332 schools, about one-fourth of the total, chose to escape and become autonomous of the regions.

Then this past January came the third reorganization, and this one was a doozy. The Mayor and Chancellor announced that they had decided to abolish the 10 regions (that they had created in 2003) and re-establish the 32 school districts (that they had abolished fin 2003). They described this as a natural evolution of their plans. Now every principal is tasked with choosing one of three options: 1) become an empowerment school and be sort of autonomous (the pedagogical mandates are still in place, even for "empowerment" schools); 2) affiliate with one of four "learning support organizations, each headed by a former regional superintendent who has no power to supervise the principal; or 3) affiliate with a private management organization to help them achieve their goals.

There is no template for the new structure. Apparently what is intended (though it is hard to know what is intended) is to abolish the school "system" and to rely on principal ingenuity and hard accountability to produce hundreds of quasi-independent schools, all meeting performance targets. The threat of firing hangs heavy over the heads of the principals, as this sanction has been repeatedly invoked for those who don't get the right test scores.

You quite rightly noted that the Mayor, in his press conference, belittled people who preferred his first reorganization to the last one. It has become something of a mantra in this regime to belittle critics, to castigate them as "defenders of the status quo," and to dream up other choice epithets for anyone who is not completely supportive of the leadership, whatever it may do.

You also rightly noted that the Mayor and Chancellor have mobilized quite an impressive base of foundations, universities, and business groups, in part because so many of these organizations have contracts or charter schools or want contracts or charter schools. The only groups that they have thus far been unable to bring into line are parents, teachers, and administrators. The administration thinks that these are "special interest groups," and of course they are; parents, teachers, and administrators do have a very special interest in seeing the schools get better, far more special and urgent I would say than the foundations, universities, and business leaders.

The sad fact is, Debbie, that dissent has been all but silenced in this city while our school leaders dissolve what used to be known as the New York City public school system and take a bold leap into the unknown. Apparently they hope that letting 1,500 or so flowers bloom will work. One need not be a seer to predict that the Matthew Effect will take hold in this educational marketplace, that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.

It is all very sad.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 10:20 AM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

I wrote the following after reading the NY Times piece you sent me last week. Meanwhile my earlier effort to lay out our differences has led to a lively response from you on progressive education and the rationale for standardized national tests. I'm already preparing my counter-arguments. But before I blast back on either one of these subjects where we appear in great disagreement, I thought it interesting to talk a moment about where we are intellectually and viscerally on such common ground—on the educational system in NYC. I find that interesting—since one naturally imagines that one's day to day responses on the ground are the "natural" outgrowth of one's deeper positions. So while I want to explore the nitty-gritty of the larger disagreements you have responded to so eloquently—it will have to be postponed because this NYC contretemps will be old hat soon.

As to The New York Times piece "Mayor Attacks Critics of Plan to Fix Schools," (April 10, 2007), what an amazing photo, to start with. That grim crowd surrounding Klein, following a smug-looking Bloomberg to the podium, are determined to stop the enemy. But looking somewhat confused, too.

Photographers have the capacity to make us all look foolish if they want to. But that photo nicely captured it. Plus the quote in the story: "You are either with the children, or you're against them"

The existing system of 10 regions that the naughty "opposition" is supporting—by demanding that the Mayor and Klein not make still another overhaul so fast—was Klein's plan. It is not the "status quo" any more than his new plan—which virtually no one understands—will be ten minutes after he inaugurates it.

The "status quo" is, in fact, the great revolutionary upheaval he instituted two years ago to get rid of the old 32 districts and the complacent central bureaucracy. Now the last revolution is labeled the status quo and those who support sticking with it for a while called supporters of "failure, indifference and paralysis." If you aren't for my "new season of hope" you must be against children.

The most astounding thing, Diane, is that the Mayor may really be sincere in his amazement —"sadly and incredibly, I think, there is a small chorus of people" who aren't with me, he proclaims. Given his relentless and successful drive to marginalize any opposition base, and his overwhelming support from the business/foundation/university community, the abolition of all even semi-representative school boards, and the aura of secrecy that surrounds each new reorganization, it's amazing to me that parents and teachers have gotten organized at all, but probably equally amazing that it took them so long.

The juxtaposition—"you are either for or against"—is after all part of our political landscape. The "opposition" merely asks that he postpone the next revolution until folks can figure out what it is.

The nerve! Those folks standing behind him may be a bunch of well-meaning New Yorkers, folks who hope and expect that the institutions they represent will be able to do great things for kids if his latest set of reforms goes through. They would have been wiser to stay out of this since neither they nor anyone else knows exactly what it is that the next plan is—except that principals have to choose one of a prescribed set of new "bosses" within the month.

This is not just teachers lives that are being remodeled every year, but parents and kids too. It is hard to tell any parent in NYC where to go for advice or even—dare I mention it—to protest a decision.

In the absence of any lay control, accountability arises only when choosing the mayor—and this one isn't running again.

The frustration and anguish that many parents experience in "choosing" schools is staggering. Figuring out what to do if the system isn't working the way it claims it is requires unbelievable stamina, not to mention free time—assuming one ever finally gets to the bottom of it.

Since who's in charge constantly changes, it isn't even possible to get advice from a neighbor or the school principal! It does make me wonder if I'd have chosen private schooling if I were doing it over.

I think of the tension and potential anguish we all went through last month waiting for my 18-year-old grandson to hear if he got into the college he had his heart set on.

In a city in which parents with kids in public schools hardly represent a serious political threat, demonizing the teacher's union is the best the mayor could offer up. It's a measure of how out of control he feels at the least sign of opposition.

Shame on New Yorkers for having let things get this bad. As a "native" of NYC I take it more personally than perhaps you do, Diane.

But as a native of Texas you can sympathize.

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Leave a comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Well, that was a useful car ride if you were able not only to produce this list but to remember it when you reached your destination. Sometimes I have great ideas in the middle of the night, but I never have great ideas while driving!

You are right that we disagree about the role and meaning of progressive education. You refer to only one variety of progressivism, however, the one that you like, the Deweyan strand, the one that you believe produced greater concern for equity and democracy in education. I would argue that there were many varieties, as I do in my book Left Back, some of them repulsive even to you. For example, the psychologists who invented I.Q. testing considered themselves progressives; they thought they were the very models of modern progressivism, bringing scientific thought to the backwater that was American education. Similarly, men like W.W. Charters and John Franklin Bobbitt thought of themselves as progressives, and they invented the curriculum field. In their version of progressivism, they wanted to oust most academic subjects and replace them with activities and tasks that would be useful in the adult world. David Snedden was a progressive, and he wanted to discard the academic curriculum and put most children into vocational programs. Ellwood P. Cubberley was a progressive educator, and he believed that most immigrant children and working-class children lacked the brains for academic studies; he advised educators to give up their naive democratic ideas and get on with sorting kids into tracks with different life outcomes.

There were non-progressive educators—you would call them believers in traditional academic studies—who were fervently devoted to demcracy and equity in education, no less than John Dewey. The American public—and especially American educators—need to become acquainted with the ideas of William Chandler Bagley and Isaac Kandel. These are men who were quite critical of the extreme romantic individualism of progressives like William Heard Kilpatrick, yet they carried the banner for democracy in education, more surely I would argue, than many of their progressive colleagues. It is still thrilling to read Bagley's debate with Snedden from 1914 over whether the schools should emphasize a liberal education or vocational education. And Kandel takes a back seat to no one in his devotion to democratic ideals in society and education.

It is because we disagree about progressivism—even in its most exalted form—that we disagree about other particulars. Like Bagley and Kandel, I do think that there is a common body of knowledge in the disciplines that is shared by educated people. You are right that I believe there are "particular facts, information and stories that are at the essence of being well educated." In every nation, and in particular cultures, there is a shared body of information and factual knowledge—and yes, stories—that educated people know. In this culture, I can't imagine that someone would call herself or himself educated who had never heard of the civil rights movement, the Brown decision, Rosa Parks, or Martin Luther King, Jr. I can't imagine that such a person could say, "Abraham Lincoln? Who was that?" I can't imagine an educated person who had never heard of Michelangelo or Mozart or what they had done. There are certain fundamental ideas, events, and principles that educated people know; they don't know them by osmosis. They know them because they have been educated. They are not educated by happenstance but because adults have designed a curriculum to teach them "the best that has been thought and said in the world." The "best" is not elitist; we might argue about what is "the best," but I suspect that we might agree more than we disagree, if you weren't so darned insistent that it is impossible to have any agreement on curriculum at all!

I also believe that a large part of the rationale for public education is its mission to build and sustain a shared democratic culture, which it cannot do if every school and every local community teaches its own thing rather than our common democratic ideas.

I am not troubled about the idea that some authoritative group establishes a curriculum. If the decision is left to each school or each teacher, then schools in elite communities and private schools will have a superb curriculum, and schools for everyone else will have a pastiche of this and that. The question for me is not whether there should be a set curriculum (I think there should), but who should set it, and how we can make sure that it does not serve anyone's political or ideological agenda. That is a practical task, and I believe it can be solved, if we can agree that it is worth doing.

My view is that schools have a moral obligation to diffuse knowledge widely, not haphazardly, to the entire population. That is their reason for being. To do that, they need to agree on what knowledge is of most worth. I believe that can be done here, as it is done in many other nations.

Yes, we disagree on the value of standardized tests. I don't condemn them out of hand; I don't think they are invalid on their face. Testing is a part of modern life; testing has been a part of education throughout the past century. Testing is not going away, because there must be a means of determining whether programs are working or failing, whether students are making progress or falling behind. We must do our best to make sure that tests are valid, reliable, and fair, and that they are used intelligently. We must make sure that they include essays, constructed responses, and much more than filling in a box or a bubble. We must also do our best to make sure that schools are not converted into testing factories and that inordinate amounts of time and money are not devoted to prepping kids for tests.

Is our nation in crisis? No, I don't think so. I think we are losing jobs to India and China because employers can get well-educated workers there for far less than they must pay here. But I do think we have serious problems in education. Our kids do poorly in math and science on international tests like PISA and TIMSS. Check out the AIR report showing that we consistently rank about 8th or 9th of the 12 nations that have these tests. What's worse is that the spread of achievement in this country is far too wide, an evidence (I think) of our not having a common curriculum, an agreement about what children should learn in these subjects. I must say I am also disturbed by the steady erosion of the humanities, which I suspect has taken a back seat to the popular culture, which requires no study or preparation to enjoy (mainly as a spectator).

I'll save our agreements for a future posting. I don't want to wear out our readers!

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 8:50 AM | Permalink | 11 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

As I was driving along making lists, I made one on our agreements and disagreements. I wonder if you would agree with me—or if you might put it a bit differently. Here's a try:

1. We disagree about the role and meaning of progressive education—both historically and today. You see it as having had a significant and negative impact on the schooling of America's kids, and I see it as having been largely ignored, but as representing important and useful ideas for what democracy and equity in education might look like.

2. We disagree about the importance of the particulars of this or that curriculum in defining what makes someone "well-educated." You feel strongly that there are particular facts, information and stories that are at the essence of being well-educated. I argue that there are "habits of mind" for approaching subject matter that are of prime importance, and that what we study is of secondary importance. You see "academic" preparation as the key, and I would argue for some broader definition of intellectual preparation.

3. We disagree, in part due to (see #2 above), on where the locus of authority should lie—at least with regards to subject matter, and maybe with regard to other things as well. I feel less uneasy than you at the prospect of providing the local constituency with authority. You are more inclined to look to experts chosen bynational or state-wide authorities. (Related disagreement: you have more respect for the recently invented "science" of education than I do.)

4. We disagree on the merits of standardized tests. We are similarly concerned about the existing testing mania, but have different solutions because we disagree on the potentiality for unbiased, objective "expert-driven" systems of measurement to resolve this disagreement, and on what is most important to measure.

5. We disagree about how much of a crisis we are in as a nation—and whether the real danger is foreign competition. I'd place democracy, as the crisis issue--she may or may not agree with me on this. Of course the status of our workforce and democracy are not unrelated, but we may disagree on whether raising our youth's skill level is going to create well-paying jobs.

What do we agree on?

1. We agree on the essential idea that schooling should belong in the public domain—that it is an essential public good. Further we agree that decisions regarding public schooling should not be made by private authorities, accountable only to themselves.

2. We agree that standardized testing as we know it has not served us well, and that the higher the stakes we place on them the more corrupting they are likely to be.

3. We agree that professionals in our schools cannot do their work well if outsiders make all the decisions guiding their work. (Above all on matters of pedagogy—see above where we divide re curriculum.)

4. We agree that the idea that schools are a "business," and that they can be run with a parallel mindset is a profound misunderstanding of what's involved. We may even agree that good businesses—if they have the long-term health of their business in mind-might not operate quite the way business advisors recommend we operate schools.

5. We agree that Americans should all have the right to organize into unions; and furthermore that the existence of teachers' unions has more often benefited good schooling rather than harmed it and has been a major force on behalf of equity and public accountability.

6. Perhaps we also agree that the inequities facing children and their families outside of the schoolhouse have always been a major factor in the inequitable outcomes of too many of our schools. To produce equity within school, and to truly serve the purposes of democratic governance, we need to tackle inequities in school financing, and those related to the poverty and ill health that so many young people face today.

That makes it 5 to 6. Maybe we should check these out before adding to either list?

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 10:11 AM | Permalink | 1 Comment | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

Were the olden days better or worse? In some ways, they were better, in some ways worse. The answer to every question, I find, is: It depends. Certainly the schools were not the punching bag that they are now. Certainly as we both agree (I think) there was a reverence for the idea of the public school that seems to have seriously eroded. And, for better or worse, both principals and teachers were respected by parents and the general community more than they are today. In this last respect, education may be the victim of its success; half a century ago, teachers were often among the best educated members of their communities. Not necessarily true today.

I have never argued--not here and not anywhere else--that our schools are in decline (although it is true that SAT scores went into a dive from about 1964-1980, and while the math scores have rebounded, the verbal scores never did). No, they are not in decline. In fact, I think that the schools are better today than they were a generation ago. But the world is not standing still. Being better than they were a generation ago is not good enough at a time when many other nations are ratcheting up their education systems and trying to overtake us. That's like saying that our cars are designed as well as they were forty years ago. Who cares? To stay abreast of new technology and new energy needs, they have to be far better than they were forty years ago. A generation ago, we had the highest high school graduation rate in the world. There are now more than a dozen other nations whose graduation rate is higher than ours.

I said in my earlier post that anyone who wanted a good education would find it in most public schools today; the opportunity is there, no question. Are students as willing to work hard for their education as students in China and India and other striving nations? Thomas Friedman, in his best-selling "World Is Flat" book, says they are not. He says that the difference in motivation between our students and students in other nations is obvious.

My personal frame of reference is not the 1930s and 1940s but the 1950s and 1960s (I graduated from high school in 1956). My professional reference as a historian is longer. Again, no question that schools today expect more, teach more, have more resources than they did half a century ago. And, having gone to segregated public schools, I am very glad about the social changes that have eliminated segregation and created a better society for more of us. Nonetheless, I still think we must do better in our education outcomes. Too many kids leave school without graduating. Too many coast through school hardly exerting any effort, just watching their teachers work hard. Too many graduate without the knowledge and skills to make their own way in higher education or the modern workplace. Nationally about a third of all college freshmen require remedial work; in some states, half of all entering freshmen require remediation in reading, writing, or mathematics.

You yearn for the good old days when there were 100,000 school boards. Were those "good old days" better? I yearn for a time that may have never been: a time when teachers are well-educated, well-respected, and imbued with a love of learning; when principals are admired for their thoughtfulness and love of learning; when students come to school eager to learn; when parents provide the support and encouragement at home that kids need. We will never go back to the days of 100,000 school boards; the way things are going, school boards may become obsolete. And we may never realize the utopia for which I yearn. But for me, those are the ideals that guide my work.

Meanwhile, both of us see a wave of change taking place that borrows from ideas that we have both embraced at various times: And as others take hold of what we thought we valued and as they transform these ideas into our nighmares rather than our dreams, we are left to wonder where we went wrong.

Last week the state of Missouri took over the public schools of St. Louis; one shudders to think what "solutions" the state managers will impose and whether they will revive the Alvarez & Marsal cost-cutting model that helped to bring down the St. Louis schools. And just a couple of days ago, the school board in Detroit voted to close more than a dozen schools to try to reduce its deficit. Is public education endangered? Yes. Will it survive? I don't know.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:11 PM | Permalink | 3 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

Time to disagree!

First. Of course consistency is not always a virtue, still I am unclear about whether you think that the olden days were better or worse. In your 3rd paragraph you refer to being less nostalgic than I am about the "good old days." In your last paragraph you refer to the hope that we will "once again have a public school system to be proud of." Which? While I am older than you, it seems to me that for both of us "the old days" were the '30s through the '50s. A time before strong teacher's unions and, in many a city (e.g. St Louis) where women were often not allowed to teach if they were married, and where parents may have respected teachers, but surely principals and school authorities did not. And the success of our youngsters was nothing to brag about. At the time of my birth most kids hadn't yet "dropped into" high school, and it was only after World War II that a majority finally finished high school. And data for blacks vs. whites make today's "achievement gap" seem like a distant dream; not to mention the gender gap, and the fact that many special ed kids weren't even allowed to attend public schools, and on and on.

We expected a lot less of our schools and we got a lot less; so we probably were less dissatisfied. Thus the "romance."

The authority of principals rested on arbitrary power and on disrespect for women (whether teachers or mothers) more than on serious respect for intellectual merit.

When I started subbing in Chicago 45 years ago I was appalled at the intellectual barrenness of its schools—except for the most elite. And for the disrespect still shown daily to teachers and parents (read: mothers). And yes, much of this has a history that's very complex, and very "American"—a disdain for school smarts vs. practical smarts, for the Eastern elite vs. the "manly" west, our dumbing down the word "academic" (as in irrelevant, or as in "the 3 Rs"). A big subject—that I'll drop—except to say that it was the reason I got into teaching, because I was intrigued at discovering that our schools provided such a poor preparation for a robust democracy—starting with 5-year-olds!

I think the romantic myth about our "declining" education has been a dangerous myth, that undergirds the privatizers' success. It parallels an equally dangerous myth that I think you unintentionally support in this last piece: about the shortcomings of democracy.

Yes, the histories of school boards, like that of all forms of democratic control, are often a sad story. The people are not always wise. Thank goodness for those peculiar American institutions that have at times tempered their unwisdom—the constitution and the courts—and even states' rights—when it comes to some of our uglier majoritarian inclinations (like racism). But over the long run democracy must and will mirror our beliefs—good and bad. The question then is, when we think the people wrong, do we replace them?

In my youth, Diane, I had friends that took the position that "faith" in democracy was a form of petty bourgeois naiveté; the people had been brainwashed by the ruling class, and until they were unbrainwashed by wiser heads we could not have a true democracy. Thus they argued for the kind of "socialist" state that would be—for a time—a dictatorship, until the people were wiser and the authoritarian state could wither away. You and I know how dangerous that belief was. But, on a smaller scale, that belief lives on among many liberals and conservatives, not just old-fashioned Communists. Why? Because there was always some common sense truth to it!

The answer to school boards that try to bully school people into abandoning teaching about the U.N. or the NAACP—except to demonize them—is not less democracy, but more. The answer is persuasion, political action on behalf of our beliefs, including kids raised hearing a variety of interpretations.

Side note: the Regents in NY State are not merely exams; they are a curriculum, backed by an exam precisely to control what is taught. They DO spell it out. The more specific such state curriculums are, the more likely they are to be controversial and/or trivial. This goes back to an older argument we had—maybe 30 years ago—about whether any serious subject can be thoroughly objective and neutral.

Interpretation—the judging of the relationship and meaning behind the facts as best we know them—is inevitable, healthy and at the heart of a lively intellectual culture. Every time I've seen a state try to "spell it out" I cringe in embarrassment.

Finally, our hope lies precisely in you and I gathering our forces to insist on publicly contesting the vultures that are surrounding our schools. We need the widest alliance, including those conservatives who really believe in conserving, not just privatizing. We can't fight one elite on behalf of another; I think we're stuck having to defend "the people."

I read a piece lately about a new effort to privatize our highways! And our friend Klein in NYC is proposing, or maybe already has mandated, that principals be renamed CEOs. Ugh. And, did I mention, that in Boston they've fined the teachers union for "talking about" a strike? The fight for public education is a fight for democracy—with its warts. There will always be trade-offs, new fights over content, but as long as it's public there's a point to you and me fighting about it. Once "they" own it lock stock and barrel, we're all disenfranchised. It's all then "academic"—short for "boring".

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 1:54 PM | Permalink | 4 Comments | Recommend

Dear Deborah,

You know, I am sure, the old saw about how I knew all the answers when I was 21, and now that I am older, the answers are not so clear. I recall the days when educators lamented that no one paid much attention to the schools. Those days are gone forever. Now every politician, every corporate leader, every college junior, is supposed to have a plan to reform public education in their breast pocket (to paraphrase a line from Ralph Waldo Emerson about a very different reform era). Now we look to the CEO of GE or IBM to hear the latest wisdom on how teachers should teach or principals should lead.

I have nostalgia for a time when principals and teachers were authority figures in their own right. And yes, there was broad respect for the American public school (which you refer to as "the American romance about public education"). On my office wall is a beautiful, hand-tinted poster titled "Our Public School: The Bulwark of This Country." It was created in 1895 and reflected a time when public education was truly cherished in this country and recognized as a national treasure, which it was.

I am less nostalgic about the multitude of school boards than you, only because I associate them with the one that I knew from my hometown, which launched all sorts of cranky, extremist political crusades into the schoolhouse. Mention of the U.N., for example, was forbidden, because the school board thought it was a Communist organization; ditto the Urban League and the NAACP. The only obstacle to their constant interference and efforts to impose a far-right political agenda was the professionalism of the principal and teachers. Going back before my own lifespan, I know that school boards were the ones who demanded religious tests of educators, didn't allow teachers to marry or smoke or go dancing or lead a normal life, and found myriad ways to interfere with the personal lives of teachers and students.

You cannot fairly blame the crisis rhetoric surrounding the public schools on the Bushies. It has a long bipartisan pedigree. Just look at the signers of the "Tough Choices" report, who included Tom Payzant, Joel Klein, Richard Riley and others who served in Democratic administrations.

And I have to associate myself with the view that all of our schools must do better. The dropout rate continues to be too high. Ignorance of history and literature continues to be appalling. Achievement in math and science is far from satisfactory. Graduate programs in technical subjects continue to be dominated by students from other nations that care more about these vitally important fields.

Unlike other critics, I don't place the blame—not most of it anyway—on the schools. I got a call the other day from a national television program (Lou Dobbs) asking me to come to the studio to talk about our broken public school system. Knowing that these interviews usually produce 30-60 seconds of on-camera comments, if that, I asked what they wanted me to say. She said, "We want you to say why we have a broken public school system." I said, "That's not what I want to talk about. I want to say that our popular culture is disruptive, seductive, and anti-intellectual. I want to say that many parents have abandoned responsiblity for their children, expecting the school to do everything. I want to say that lawyers have undermined the ability of educators to educate." She was a little taken aback, but said, "come on." So I did, and I said what I wanted to say, including saying that the public schools today were better than they were a generation ago. Anyone who wants a good education will get one, if they are prepared to work at it. Don't know if they used any of my interview as it conflicted with the thesis of the show.

Now, you ask if I think that science, history, and literature should be tested. It wouldn't bother me if they were, in fact, I think it would be a huge improvement if tests were content-based rather than skill-based as they are now. I recall taking tests in all those subjects when I was in school and never thought that the tests were illegitimate or soul-destroying. However, I am not calling for more testing but for a stronger curriculum. Please bear in mind that a curriculum "mandate," as you call it, is not a test or a testing requirement.

I would like to see districts and states that have a well-planned, grade-by-grade curriculum sequence in literature, history, science, the arts, mathematics, and physical education. I would like a school and school system where everyone understood that children must have time for chorus, debate, sculpture, and dancing. I would like to know that educators shared an understanding of what is to be taught in each grade and that teachers are free to teach history or science or mathematics or literature in the ways they think best.

I don't think it is sufficient to say that the state Regents' exams define the curriculum. Why not spell it out so that everyone knows what it is? That works for most countries; it works in most elite private schools; it works for AP and IB.

If we had public schools with a rich, knowledge-based curriculum in the arts and sciences and physical education, with teachers prepared to teach it, we would once again have a public school system to be proud of, one that was not being circled by the vultures from every corporate headquarters, editorial office, foundation boardroom and think-tank in America.

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 5:03 PM | Permalink | 7 Comments | Recommend

Dear Diane,

You might have been wrong, but then even I am allowed to be wrong . For example, I thought small schools was one reform no one could do harm with. I still am hoping I was 51 percent right.

I'm always inclined in favor of steps that increase conversations around common aspirations. It's what makes me a democrat even though democratic institutions are hardly guaranteed to lead where I'm hoping they do. We both imagined charters, like small schools. Places where folks would have to sit down and talk about purposes. I saw them as representing new ideas and new relationships between the constituents to schooling. I thought of Ted Sizer's little Parker School in Fort Devons, Mass, and a half dozen other little schools I immediately loved. I forgot about the little independent bookstores in my neighborhood that have been replaced by the Barnes and Nobles of the world. Most charters became the property of those with capital: who reinvented the same old system without a democratic public base.

We've moved a long way away from the idea behind democracy--which includes voting for our rulers, as well as being respected and involved members of the ruling class.

I didn't figure they could get away with privatizing our schools because of the American romance about public education. But within my lifetime we have gone from the public schoolhouse of old to the modern public post office model. And just you wait and see, soon the post office will be the property of some big private mega. The reality bears no resemblance to the romance. Just to keep up with the increased population we'd have needed half a million school boards if we wanted to maintain the same connection between schools and the public that existed at the time I was born. We have instead about 10,000. While the school population has tripled, we have 1/50th as many citizens involved in their governance.

An alienated voting public can lose the energy it takes to protect itself against greedy corporate giants--not by choice, but by being worn down, step by step. Being shouted at about "crises" and "emergencies" further weakens the will to resist. America's future economy is at stake, say the Bushies, if we don't privatize schools. Although today on the radio I heard Bush wax enthusiastic about America's economic prowess in the world.

Liberals are not much better about the rhetoric of crisis. If the American public likes its schools, it's seen as evidence of their stupidity, one reason why we can't rest power in their hands. Yet on the other hand I've heard the same folks tell me that we have to test our kids to death because the same public won't continue its support if we don't produce better results. The only acceptable proof: test scores.

A few NYC points. . (1) If all goes as planned in NYC, "empowered principal" will have less power than I used to and that only if they produce fairly short-run improvements in test scores in math and "literacy." (2) High school principals have always had considerable leeway in spending their "units"--which was how budgets were once distributed. (3) Tony Alvarado in Districts 2 and 4 had 30-40 years ago shown us how to decentralize budgetary power. (4) Re: your support for more curriculum mandates. Would you be satisfied, Diane, if Klein added tests in science, history, and literature to the K-8 testing schedule? In high schools the Regents exams already provide the fixed curriculum you advocate.

To disparage the human judgment--of teachers, parents and school boards-- in the very institutions intended to educate human judgment in a society that rests on a system of law and governance that depends on human judgment is absurd and self-defeating.

You don't have to predict the future: it is here. A friend who runs a nursery school tells me that some parents want her to prepare their kids, starting at age 3, for NYC's new 4-year old tests for its new gifted and talented programs. Our public reliance on tests to make decisions about children cannot help but turn parents into test-maniacs.

Meanwhile, Diane, let's take the time to visit some of the small schools of choice that aren't middle class havens so we can--maybe--restore our enthusiasm for possibilities, and spread a little cheer. I'm not expecting them to replicate schools like the old CPESS, but maybe just be more respectful, thoughtful and coherent than the ones they were carved out of. Let's make a date.

Deborah

Posted by Deborah Meier at 4:00 PM | Permalink | 2 Comments | Recommend