Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

You've put it neatly—whose expertise is running the show? Except for one flaw. How come, since there are more teachers than policymakers, we give up and not them?

There are lots of reasons, of course, including the fact that teachers (and parents) tend not—as we noted once before—to "see like a State" (ala James Scott's wonderful book). Policymakers seem to do it naturally. But, of course, it's also because they represent people who are more powerful. And also people who, alas, take themselves more seriously.

When I first got into being a kindergarten teacher (as more than an idle past time), my family of origin was a bit disappointed. It was clearly a status step down. While I stuck with it because I got fascinated, part of it stemmed from another family trait—a kind of knee-jerk anti-snobbism. Of course, I had the luck (in retrospect) of being turned down for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in 1951 because I was a married woman! Perhaps I was also lucky in finding substitute teaching the most challenging thing I'd ever done; and alongside it getting credentialed in Chicago's school system the most humiliating. It produced a kind of feisty "I'll show 'em" response.

But I knew from the start that being an early-childhood public school teacher did not make me very interesting to important people or give my ideas much prestige. Since I wrote articles I was occasionally invited to speak publicly. But not as an expert. I was the "voice from the field", invited to add some spice. Receiving the MacArthur changed it—suddenly I was an expert; the Wizard had given me a brain.

It did help me. I had "an idea" that I thought could impact more widely on public education; so being taken seriously would be useful. I was deeply influenced by Ted Sizer's work on school reform writ large, and thus tried to "think like a State". The idea, as you noted, was the "small school movement". I saw it as an avenue for getting teachers to seriously think through and change their practices, by creating settings designed for such work. I wrote an Op Ed in 1988 for The New York Times ("Small is Beautiful", more or less), and a few years later we got $50 million from the Annenberg Foundation to take our "idea" citywide.

The idea was that all else being equal, it would be easier, faster, and more powerful to change the way schooling took place if we had small schools (under 300 students), self-governing schools (with a few exceptions), in which the constituents were there by choice. It took a decade, but the idea has clearly had an enormous impact: on everything but what we originally had in mind.

In part because it was translated by people who were better than we were at "thinking like a State". Their translation read as follows: small (under 600), with more power in the hands of principals in return for less autonomous classrooms and schools, and in which schools had more choice over whom to accept. They saw it as a way to better monitor top-down mandated change, not to foster a bubbling up of change. (e.g.: I read this week that small schools in Portland can't decide if they want their kids to be able to take electives in their sister small schools.)

If you want to be an innovator? Go private or charter, the policymakers advise. (And even most of the charters soon were looking more and more like top-down corporate enterprises designed by policymakers.)

NCLB didn't invent this, and getting rid of it won't stop it. What is needed is a serious discussion of what's best done by whom? And for what purpose? I think I've a natural paranoia for centralized decisionmaking that's usually pretty healthy. My default is always, "so why not let those most involved in having to live with decisions make them?" But I also know that if my forebears hadn't taken on racism, leaving it to the locals wouldn't have brought us as far as we've gotten. The same for global warming. And a lot in between.

Where power is unequally held, unequal outcomes are not surprising—intentionally or not. Local or federal. Still, we can't help but try.

We're left with thinking aloud about what the federal government can do to level the field (resources, for one thing), what is best left to the state, and what to the local community, school, family, individual teacher, and student?

Deb

P.S. Do you ever read Mike Rose's blog? It's great. His column this week is on a topic that has kept me in the schoolhouse for 43 years.

Posted by Deborah Meier at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (13) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Deb,

You raise important questions about the trustworthiness of the data that government agencies release. I would hope that every math course, not just advanced courses, would teach students how numbers can be interpreted in different ways for different purposes. I have always thought that one of the truly impressive qualities of athletics was the honesty of the numbers. If the score at the end of nine innings in a baseball game is 9-2, you know who won the game. In a basketball game, the basket is set at a certain height, and the ball has to enter the net and drop through to score points. In football, the field is 100 yards long, and you have to enter the end zone to score. There is something refreshing about this transparency. I grant that umpires make mistakes and bad calls, but most of the time the spectators and the players know the score.

We are bombarded with numbers from government agencies on a daily basis. If we can't believe what they are telling us about the unemployment rate, the interest rate, the rate of housing starts, and a zillion other things, then we are in deep trouble. I have never believed in conspiracy theories, and I tend to trust that people are telling the truth: It is just too much trouble and too improbable to get lots of people (especially career government employees) to collaborate in a giant lie.

I agree that we all need to arm ourselves with knowledge, information, and analytical skills to judge for ourselves whether the information we receive in the daily press is logical and reasonable. The other danger—aside from government mis-information—is an excess of public skepticism, the sort that feeds zany conspiracy theories. Whenever pollsters ask, they discover that large numbers of people believe very strange things, for example, that AIDS was unleashed in minority communities by the CIA or that aliens from other galaxies kidnap people and take them to their space ships to conduct experiments on them and then return them home.

We educate people with the hope that they will be prepared to think critically and skeptically about the ideas and information that they hear. We can't afford to lose this battle.

You make the interesting reference to Joe and Carol Reich's efforts to assert control over their charter schools in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The Reichs started these two schools in a very poor community some years ago, and the schools are now charter schools, called the Beginning with Children schools. They apparently did not like the decisions of the majority of their board members, so they ousted them, to reassert control over "their" schools.

The Reichs are very public-spirited people, and they started these schools with the best intentions. They have given millions of dollars to support the charter school movement, and they no doubt feel that the schools in some way belong to them, not to the board.

But the story about them raises the important point about who "owns" charter schools. There is a charter school located inside the Tweed Courthouse, which is the headquarters of the New York City Department of Education. It is called the Ross Global Charter School and it is "owned" by Courtney Sale Ross. Ms. Ross, a woman who inherited vast wealth from her late husband, has chosen the board, the curriculum, and apparently the staff as well. In its first year, she booted several principals. This school, though located in a public facility, is hers. New York Magazine published a fascinating piece about the Ross School.

Someone mentioned to me recently that the wealthy used to collect racehorses and yachts; now they start their own charter school! What happens when running a charter school becomes a bore? What happens when they move on to collecting something else? What will they do if they don't get good results?

I read an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on July 11 with this headline: "Pittsburgh schools drop 'public' from name to boost image." The superintendent, Mark Roosevelt, decided that the district would call itself the "Pittsburgh Schools," in an effort at rebranding them. Apparently a "marketing consultant" advised the district that "public schools" have a negative connotation, and they should just get rid of that pesky word. And the leaders of the district (a.k.a., the public school district) agreed to drop it.

This is a small and maybe insignificant step in the direction we are discerning in other districts, towards privatization, towards turning schools over to whoever wants to manage them, towards delegitimatizing the very idea of public education.

What do you think?

Diane

Posted by Diane Ravitch at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Dear Diane,

The disturbing comments in your final paragraph deserve a wide audience. It is always hard to know when we are being alarmists, and when we are understating a dangerous trend. Maybe schools were once less worrisome because they simply played a much smaller role in our lives and life itself was a teacher of common sense. But all roads lead to Rome, so while it may appear that I'm switching subjects, Diane, it leads to the same place.

I read the story a few weeks ago about Carol and Joe Reich's struggle to retain control over the public school they generously created for poor Brooklyn children some ten years ago. I read it with anguish—for them, for us, for the kids of that school. The tragedy is that we have too often forgotten that the distinction between public and private enterprises is that the former belong to "us", not "me." Our good intentions sometimes lead us astray. If the law allows, we can forget what we can and cannot literally "own." But is that less true for foundations? The Mayor? Why pick on just the Reichs?

The Reichs' work coincides with a period in American history when we are having a hard time denying the wealthy and powerful anything, including their right to own our public schools. We've too long given a free pass to rich people who use their wealth to impose their agenda for public education on schools for other people's children. In the latter camp, alas, go some well-intentioned leaders of foundations, like Gates, and various business and corporate conglomerates who control private largesse.

Plus a Mayor with enough private and public muscle to set an agenda without consulting those most affected by it, and then, and this is crucial, to control the data that judges his work.

I'm told, time and time again, that some things are just foolish to rant and rave against. It's just the way "things are." The reason one of our CPE "habits of mind" was called "what if?", was that we wanted young people to realize that other possibilities always existed, and still exist—whether in math, science, or in the history of the past or future. Nothing "had to be." I even tried to forbid the phrase "I had to" from our in-school language. Even with a gun to your head, I chided, there are choices. In some ways science fiction always appealed to me because it reminded me how differently the future might play out if…. Nothing in the future is "writ in stone" until it comes to pass. In the meantime we need to act "as if" our voices counted.

(As I noted to some reader recently, it's why I thought "Walden Two" by B.F. Skinner, was a dystopia—a world in which everything "had to be." Imagine my surprise to discover that it was a utopia to many others. A lesson in perspective—another useful habit of mind.)

I try to be realistic about my "what ifs", and I try to think "strategically". So, if I had to choose just one modest reform on behalf of democracy, what might it be?

Talking about the history of anti-smoking policies in the New York Review of Books (subscription or fee required), the author Helen Epstein notes the damaging effect of public distrust of statistics. In fact, however, what is even more dangerous is our love/hate relationship with statistics. The more ignorant we are the more we both bow down to and resent numbers. I've been arguing for years that instead of advanced algebra and calculus we ought to have a statistics-driven math program. Algebra may be "good for the mind", but statistics—the manipulation of data—is essential for making sense of the world. Still even that depends on the quality of the data one works with. The World Bank, I heard on NPR, is apparently having the same trouble trying to make sense of the data coming out of China as we're having with NYC.

Democracy depends on being informed. Being informed depends on having relatively honest information. As they used to say in the data-processing field: "GIGO"—garbage in, garbage out. For starters then, my modest wish would be to see if we can create a consensus around a set of proposals to de-garbage the information we get about public schooling in, let's say, NYC?

How does that appeal to you as a modest summer task?

Deb

Posted by Deborah Meier at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)