Bridging Differences

Dear Diane,

I’m in the midst of reading a marvelous book by Danielle Allen called Talking to Strangers. I’d love to discuss it with others. Do read it so we can converse about it soon. Her concept of “political friendships” between strangers intrigues me.

Which relates to my unpleasant encounter between NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg that you refer to in your letter yesterday. The New York Post reported that the mayor’s aides claim: Bloomberg demanded that the Senate’s grant to NYU be redirected it to CUNY, because of … Deborah Meier! My critical stance toward the mayor’s educational policies (the story quoted me as regarding the absence of parent voices in school policy) seemed a sufficient explanation. Why the Senate capitulated, and why The New York Times didn’t report it, and why the mayor’s aides “leaked” this explanation to the media I do not know. What’s more interesting to me is that this public attempt to threaten NYU, by one of the most powerful and richest politicians in America, was apparently seen as uncontroversial. It’s clearly an abridgement of academic freedom, an abuse of his enormous power; and, perhaps above all, so petty. (In fact, I’m “merely” an unpaid—hopefully not un-honored—member of the NYU faculty.)

I’ve always loved NYC’s feistiness, a quality of mind that seems often missing in more laid-back sections of the country. But even New Yorkers can be cowed by the kind of power and intimidation that the Bloomberg oligarchy has exercised for so many years.

Which gets me back to Allen’s argument in favor of bending over backwards to encourage reasoned, thoughtful dialogue between political friends—arguments not crippled by fear of retaliation or retribution by the authority of the State. The habits of a democratic citizenry are precious, and schools are the only institution I know of that might be training grounds for such citizenship. They are both the potential lab and think tank for reasoned discourse—in a climate of friendship and mutual respect. The art of listening to each other requires careful nurturing.

And, of course, reasoning requires judgment—and both require knowledge (including experience).

Which leads me to E.D. Hirsch’s latest book (The Making of Americans). He and I even agree on many matters. But I’m intrigued by the unexamined assumptions we disagree about! He does not even acknowledge any risks inherent in a nationwide imposition of a single year-by-year curriculum. Local school boards, parent organizations, and teachers' unions can be a pain in the ass (and I speak as one who has been at both ends of each). But I see democracy resting on our reviving these institutions, not in abandoning them. The ease with which we seek to “overcome” unwelcome citizen voices by pushing power ever higher—or to more elite experts—has a long history. It’s not “unreasonable,” just dangerous. “It’s too important to get this right’” is a cry I’ve heard over and over as respected friends seek to circumvent democratic procedures. “We dare not let them vote on this” is not the defense of just fools or demagogues. Yes, democratically delegating some decisions to experts, as well as recognizing when decisions are best made in collaboration with other governmental units, are reasonable objections to placing authority in local democracies. But years of such rationales have led me to be hard-pressed to find places left where ordinary citizens experience decision-making processes. Surely not in many schools. Even hearing each other out is not something we often do in our schools, although we do grow accustomed to not talking back to the textbook, teacher, or principal—more out of boredom (or its uselessness) probably than courtesy. (How rarely do we confront any passionate convictions in our lives in school.)

We’re bad at imagining other ways of seeing the world—and probably always have been. But it is our unique human capacity. While I think that if we devoted the 13 years from K-12th grade to nurturing and training such capacity we’d get better at it, probably it will always be hard. It takes, as does science, mathematics, and the arts, hands-on-practice in a good old-fashioned “apprenticeship.”

Ah, too much rhetoric! There are some wonderful books out by practitioners that describe how we can organize schools that serve both the academic disciplines and democracy better than a “standardized one-size-fits-all” curriculum. Next week.

Deb

P.S. The health debate is instructive—reminding us of how difficult it is to engage in serious debate when the stakes are high. But the solution is not to invent a behind-the-scenes, pretend consensus where none exist, as Duncan et al seem to be doing with regard to so-called educational “reform.” For more on meaningful school reform, I highly recommend that readers seek out an excellent opinion piece by Dennis Shirley and Andy Hargreaves that appeared recently in The Boston Globe. Among other things, they write: "Why not choose the bolder paths not yet taken in our educational system’s much-hailed “race to the top’’ and join those schools at the top of the world already?"

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Editor's Note: After this week, Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch begin their annual summer break. Their blog will return in September.

Dear Diane,

I’m still amazed at how fast the new educational establishment plans to “revolutionize” our schools. I acknowledge that your support for national testing and curriculum is a bit out of line with the train that’s long since left the station, and I suspect you will end up as dismayed as I am. So, too, will many Americans who have not in any way been consulted by their governors or their president. One look at who’s in charge gives me the creeps—SAT and ACT. Unbelievable! Hardly.

I quote IBM’s Louis Gerstner in a conversation with John Bussey of The Wall Street Journal and Joel Klein : “What I’m going to suggest (to Obama) is that he convene the 50 governors and the first thing they do is abolish the 16,000 school districts we have in the United States." Why? Because “sixteen thousand school districts are what we’re trying to cram this reform through.” With only one—how much easier. (Note: When I was born, there were 200,000 school boards.)

Getting “around” the Constitution is hardly a new practice and, after all, I’ve supported it at times. But even in the case of gun control, I think I’m closer to the Founding Fathers' idea than the NRA is. And I’m glad we didn’t try to squeeze African-Americans et al into the Constitution by legalese. Instead, “we” wrote an amendment. On local control of schools, I’m certain I am on the side of the Constitution, and I think it’s more critical, not less, in today’s world and that no such amendment would survive the American people.

I’ve become more conservative: not in where I hope to go, but in the means for getting there. Rapid changes on a large scale are dangerous—and while sometimes necessary we need to be persuaded. That slows things down a bit I know. It’s one of democracy’s intentional “drawbacks.”

If we were capable of coming up with a list of just one book or idea in each of the disciplines for a “common core” I’d buy it. But that would be a utopian wish—and probably dangerous, too! Maybe I wouldn’t buy it.

The problem with the old “new math” of the '60s was not the mathematics, but the attempt to leap ahead without either persuading or educating those who we expected to carry it out (teachers) or support it (parents).

Possibly we will raise slightly the intellectual content of what kids are presented with a national curriculum. With certainty, we will lower the chances of having an inspiring year with an inspired teacher. It’s a trade-off that seems unnecessary if we took advantage of our schools as places for everyone to learn—for teachers, students, parents, and the community. If we started with where all of these parties “are” and encouraged them—with resources—to dig deeper and more richly, with greater attention to the love of learning, we could have both. In a generation of two.

I liked your list, Diane. I think we could connect each of our lists to the future health of democracy, and by extension not only to a stronger economy, but a real understanding of what an economy is. Schools and the economy have moved lock-step into shoddy conceptions of what a strong mind and economy can be measured by and then substituted the measure for the object itself.

Books to read. There are many good books on education to read. And yes, “Middlemarch” can even help us think about schooling! That’s what I discovered about education—everything feeds it.

For example, I recently read an odd book that tells the story of the author’s encounter with a shelter for adolescents in Russia. Written by journalist Bob Belenky, “Tales of Priut Almus” delighted me. Exactly why? I’m still trying to figure it out.

I’d still recommend James Scott’s “Seeing Like a State” for examining our current situation and Evans Clinchy’s “Reforming American Education: From the Bottom to the Top”—which has an introduction by me (“Supposing That..”) which I still agree with. I recommend my “In Schools We Trust” for a chapter on changing the odds, as an approach to school reform writ large—to those who keep carping that my ideas depend too much on exceptionalism.

Like your rediscovering “Middlemarch,” I rediscovered a collection of essays by physicist David Hawkins in a book entitled “The Informed Vision.” Ken Jones, formerly with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, also edited a useful book, “Democratic School Accountability,” that is only three years old, but totally out of synch with the “latest” Gates Foundation wisdom. Linda Darling-Hammond and colleagues Jacqueline Ancess and Beverly Falk’s “Authentic Assessment in Action” has a lot to show us, including a chapter on the old Central Park East Secondary School that I often refer to. Just this week, friends in NYC—including you, Diane—collaborated in producing a book called “NYC Schools Under Bloomberg and Klein: What Parents, Teachers, and Policymakers Need to Know.”

There are many more, depending on one’s taste. I particularly love accounts by teachers—like Julie Diamond’s “Welcome to the Aquarium.” I re-read Mike Rose’s “Lives on the Boundary” yearly. Ditto for oldies, like John Holt’s “How Children Fail.” Or anything by Frank Smith—including his most recent—“Unspeakable Acts, Unnatural Practices.” An oldie—“Horace’s Compromise” by Ted Sizer—should be read by policymakers every few years, alongside Richard Rothstein’s classic—“The Way We Were?”. Diane, there’s another history of education often forgotten even by the best historians and well-captured in “Roots of Open Education in America,” edited by Ruth Dropkin and Arthur Tobier—with a last chapter by my hero Vito Perrone.

(And as soon as I send this off, I’ll feel terrible about having left off mentioning x and y—like Seymour Sarason! Maxine Green!—and Linda Nathan’s not-yet-available book.)

Have a joyful summer—living the alternate life we didn’t live from September through June. Which is why I reject the idea of a longer school year. What kids need are fascinating alternate life experiences for two summer months. We owe them that, as we owe it to ourselves.

Deborah

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Editor's Note: After this week, Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier begin their annual summer break. Their blog will return in September.

Dear Deborah,

We have had fun these past couple of years exploring our differences and our agreements. It is clear that the point where we diverge most strongly is whether anyone should set common standards or curriculum outside the individual school. And the point where we agree most strongly is on the role that schools should play in advancing our democratic purposes as a society.

This past week’s events in New York City have caused me, as well as many education advocates and parent activists, to despair about the prospects for democracy in education. The law that granted sole control of the public schools to the mayor expired on June 30, and many advocates hoped that this would provide an opportunity to rethink control of the public schools to expand democracy. For seven years, the mayor has run the schools without any checks and balances, which we know are integral to any democratic functioning. The law provided for a board of education, but our mayor renamed it the “Panel on Education Policy” and turned it into a rubber stamp.

The reason the law expired was that our state’s legislature has been tied up in knots for weeks. The lower house—the Assembly—renewed the mayor’s unrestricted ownership of the public schools with only a few cosmetic changes. The upper house—the state Senate—did not act, because the Republicans and the Democrats are locked in a 31-31 stalemate and unable to pass any legislation. The customary tiebreaker is the lieutenant governor, but there is none at present, because ours, David Paterson, was elevated to governor when the former governor, Eliot Spitzer, resigned in a scandal.

So, last week, when the mayoral control law expired, the former governing structure was resurrected. It now seems as if a corpse was hauled out of a graveyard. Under that structure, the mayor appoints two people, and each of the five borough presidents picks one. In the past, there was a presumption that the elected officials would each pick a distinguished community leader to represent them on the city’s Board of Education.

So, while parents and advocates celebrated what they briefly dreamed was a new day, the elected officials delivered a stunning shock. Rather than select distinguished community leaders, the mayor picked two deputy mayors to represent him. The borough president of Queens picked the mayor’s deputy for education to represent that borough. With only one exception, three other borough presidents picked one of their deputies as their borough representative. Only one borough president, in the Bronx, had the courage to select an independent person, the former president of Hostos Community College.

The new board, on which the mayor controlled six out of seven votes, quickly voted to vest all of its powers in Joel Klein, who has been running the school system for the past seven years, and to petition the legislature to promptly pass the mayoral control bill, thus preserving the status quo of the past seven years.

What a cynical sham. How shameless. How can we speak of democracy in education when democracy is so easily subverted by our elected officials?

On to happier subjects.

I finished the book on which I have been working for the past couple of years. It will be published by Perseus next spring. Those who are regular readers of our blog will recognize many of its themes. The blog served as a sounding board for ideas that I was working through as I was writing, and many of our readers helped me see things more clearly with their astute comments, questions, and challenges. One of our faithful readers, Diana Senechal, was my research assistant and crack editor these past few months. I was very lucky indeed to have her help.

I plan to catch up with my reading. I have only two books on my table. One was recommended by Mike, one of our readers. It is Gerald Grant’s "Hope and Despair in the American City." As soon as Mike suggested it, I ordered it because I so admire Grant. He is a wonderful writer. His book, "The World We Created at Hamilton High," is one of the best that I have read in many years.

My main summer reading is George Eliot’s "Daniel Deronda." I loved Eliot’s "Middlemarch," as well as "The Mill on the Floss" and "Silas Marner" (the latter is a book that I hated when it was assigned in high school, but loved as an adult). I have wanted to read "Daniel Deronda" for many years, but kept putting it off. The time is now.

Having just completed a book that required me to read dozens of education books, new and old, in the past year, I don’t want to read anything more about education this summer. I want to immerse myself in literature. I expect to read poetry, too, which I love. Every once in a while, I get tired of reading about education, and must attend to my own education in literature and history. I also hope to attend to my health and physical well-being by swimming, biking, and gardening. And I expect to undermine my mental health by beginning a partial renovation of the kitchen.

To you and to our readers, have a great summer!

Diane

P.S. Happy (belated) Independence Day! I took this picture of the Southold Public Library's float in the July 4th parade.

A beautiful day to celebrate our freedoms! It was my 2-year-old grandson's first parade. He loves books, just like his grandma.

—Diane

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Editor's note: With this entry, Bridging Differences begins its annual summer hiatus. Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch will return in late August.

Dear readers,

We’ll be back in late August; I’m not sure exactly what date. We may be playing around with other ways to have our discussion—more and shorter back and forths? We may or may not be able to do it, since we’re both at heart essayists! But maybe short snippets from “the media” which we both take a whack at?

Meanwhile, everyone has made some good suggestions for what to read. It ought to include everything Diane and I have written. Of course. On my Web site—deborahmeier.com—I have a link to almost everything I’ve written about education (compiled by my son, Nicholas Meier). One of our readers suggested Larry Cuban’s latest book on schooling and business. Top notch, as is all his work.

I’m lately intrigued by two “old” books that tackle the issue of “academics” in similar ways. One is by Mike Rose—"Lives on the Boundary"—and one by Gerald Graff—"Clueless in Academe." (In the latter, there’s even a chapter on the old CPESS.) Rose teaches at UCLA, and Graff is currently president of the Modern Language Association. Mike’s book is an especially helpful response to Tony Waters’ comments about German tracking.

There’s a new edition out of Pedro Noguera’s "City Schools and the American Dream"; and I already mentioned that Garret Keizer’s "No Place But Here" is a great summer read about rural education that rings as true for urban schooling. Mike and Susan Klonsky‘s "Small Schools" book—on the topic Diane and I’ve been blogging on of late is a lively read. Finally, since I want to spend more time in the future on the issue of childhood play, I urge you to read Valerie Polakow. "The Erosion of Childhood" is a good place to start. (Her latest, "Who Cares for Our Children," is also important to read.) And thanks, Diane, for suggesting Daniel Koretz; I shall take your advice and read him this summer, too.

What I discovered 45 years ago was that every article and book I read actually provoked my thoughts about education and schooling. Keeping that in mind, share with us the stuff you read from other fields (fiction and non-fiction) that might feed our discussion, help us go deeper and wider.

Finally, there are many good ed blogs, including one just about NYC—eduwonkette—which we both have exploited for interesting stories and data.

My best,
Deborah

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Editor's note: While Deborah Meier travels in China, Diane Ravitch shares some quick thoughts and recommendations from her summer reading list. The Bridging Differences dialogue will return soon.

With Deborah safely in China, I can now turn to my summer reading.

I am trying to start a new book, so I am reading quite a lot of books about the business model in education and also books about American business. The classic in this genre is Raymond Callahan's "Education and the Cult of Efficiency," which I will re-read. I am currently reading Larry Cuban's "The Blackboard and the Bottom Line: Why Schools Can't Be Businesses."

I have a stack of books that I plan to read this summer, as I am sure all of us do. Of course, some of our summer reading should be pure froth, and—in that category—I just finished reading Stefan Kanfer's "Ball of Fire," a very enjoyable biography of Lucille Ball, one of my favorite comedians.

If you want to learn more about the issues that Deborah and I have been debating, you can read our books. For example, Deborah Meier's "The Power of Their Ideas" or my book, "Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform." By the way, I am often asked why the subtitle on that book is different in the hardcover and the paperback. It is because the editor from Simon & Schuster insisted on the original subtitle ("A Century of Failed School Reforms"). She thought that the word "failed" had to be somewhere in the title, and I didn't want it at all. I thought that the book was about the great debates and controversies in American education in the past century, and she was thinking about marketing. She let me change the subtitle for the paperback. If I had had my way, which I didn't, I would have made the subtitle for the book: "Anti-Intellectualism in American Education," because I saw it as a follow-up to Richard Hofstadter's 1962 classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life." But my editor, a powerful figure in the publishing industry, said that any use of that nine-syllable word would send the book crashing into the remainders pile immediately.

Here are a few books that I strongly recommend: E.D. Hirsch Jr.'s "The Knowledge Deficit." This book does a fine job of explaining why children's achievement tails off between fourth grade and eighth grade. And I highly recommend two books from the wonderful Jeanne Chall: "Learning to Read: The Great Debate" and "The Academic Achievement Challenge." If every educator read Chall's book on reading, there would be no more reading wars. Similarly, her last book, which was published shortly after her death, sums up everything she had learned about the research on achievement. Everything she wrote was leavened by her wisdom and common sense.

Enjoy your summer vacation. When Deborah is back, we'll be in the same place, same time, trading blows and bouquets.

Diane

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