Why School Reformers Are a Menace

Reformers are buzzing about like swarms of mosquitoes on a hot summer night.  The school reformers are the worst of the whole pesky lot.  They are the most cocksure, self-righteous, and determinedly wrong-headed.  There are so many things wrong with their diagnoses and their remedies that I scarcely know where to start.  Let’s start with their general approach toward change, namely, with their general conception that things are so bad that everything must be transformed, yanked up by the roots so to speak.  This is of course what revolutionaries believe.  Now revolutions can succeed or fail.  Most, in fact, fail.  The old count in de Lampedusa’s The Leopard remarks to his radical nephew he is glad that the nephew wants to change everything because the count will then feel reasonably confident that nothing will change.  Even when revolutions succeed in overturning a regime a new tyranny is often substituted for the old.  We don’t need to dwell on the numerous examples of this happening in the twentieth century.  Nor need we pause to trace the intellectual biographies of the many twentieth century writers who moved from utopian beliefs on the left to more modest, and conservative, notions of what can and should be reformed.

          No, we must concede to the current reformers that their revolutionary language is metaphorical; they want reform but what they have in mind is less than overturning the whole order of society.  You never know with some of the reformers though, and that is one of the problems with them.  Some of them do want to use school reform as a wedge to enact a broader left agenda.   However, the school reforms forces currently gather under a banner that includes elements from both the political left and the right.   The reformers agree that the educational system must be changed dramatically since small changes will be fruitless in the face of such vast and deeply-rooted failure.  Never mind for the moment what is meant by the whole system.  Do we mean how teachers are trained, recruited, rewarded, and evaluated, how schools are financed, what students are taught – the curriculum, that is, whether students come from stable homes that encourage studying and learning, whether students actually learn something according to one or another metric, or what exactly?  Would you reform all of these aspects of the system, or only deal with some of them, and if only with some, which ones are the most important?  

     And what are the failures that seem so self-evident to the reformers?  To the rest of us what happens in the students’ lives outside of the classroom, their home circumstances, etc. might appear to do with how much they learn.  Which schools in what locations and according to which criteria fail, and how badly have they failed?   Because the reformers are loose in their methods and prescriptions, we have as a nation a set of elusive, often discordant, and largely rhetorical goals without the wherewithal or anything like a roadmap to reach the target.  It is hard to reach one’s destination when it’s unclear where one is going.  The more we fail to achieve one target, the more we pile new aspirations on top of the old, with the result that policy targets have become ever more vaporous, grandiose, and unattainable.  How did this sad state of affairs come about?

     We can conveniently start with the Supreme Court’s decision in 1954 to desegregate the public schools and declare the old Plessy v. Ferguson doctrine of “separate but equal” unconstitutional.  The Supreme Court called for desegregation to occur “with all deliberate speed.”  The nation largely accepted the justice and wisdom of this decision, although some were made uneasy by the sociological tone adopted by the Court in citing the scholarly literature to show how separated facilities were inherently unequal.  Still, the schools were understood to represent an important social institution, and removing the evil of school segregation would help to ensure the larger social good. 

      The federal courts and the Justice Department would enforce the desegregation of the schools and the public colleges.  Achieving desegregated schools would not be a simple process.  `For, among the problems, schools were (and are) located in neighborhoods, but neighborhoods were (and are) often not integrated.  Thus various programs of bussing, student transfers, etc. were required to achieve racial balance, and many school districts in the South (and in the North) remained for years under federal court supervision.   Desegregation is an unending story for America, but it not our main story line in this essay.  I note for our purposes that the desegregation battle helped put public education in the forefront of public awareness, stirred wider reform impulses that demanded reform in the public schools.

      1955 was a good year for the nascent school reform movement, which now sought to go well beyond the desegregation required by the Supreme Court.  Rudolph Flesch, author of the best-selling The Art of Plain Talk, published a sensational book Why Johnny Can’t Read (Harper, 1955, $3) in which he declared that our students were lagging behind European pupils in reading.  This was to become a favorite chestnut of the reformers who are always discovering that American students were behind Germans, Japanese, Russians, etc.  Flesch was one of those reformers who found answers in rejecting all new-fangled curriculum ideas in favor of the old verities.  The phonetic method of teaching reading was to him the answer.  The movie The Blackboard Jungle, starring Glen Ford and Sidney Poitier and directed by Richard Brooks, also appeared in 1955.  It depicted the heroic struggles of Glen Ford as a high school English teacher in a violence-prone inner-city high school. 

     There was a problem, however, which blocked progress.  This was the fact that schools were a state and local matter, and the federal government did not have a direct role in public education except to enforce constitutional rights through the federal courts.  I remember, in the course of researching my undergraduate honors thesis at the University of Minnesota on the subject of Federal Aid to Education, that I contrived a personal meeting with Senator Hubert Humphrey during a visit he made to the campus in late 1956 or early 1957.  I asked him about a then pending measure in the U. S. Senate.  Did the Senator think the measure would pass the Senate that year?  No, he said the Senate (and the country) wasn’t ready for a direct federal role in education beyond the desegregation effort and beyond specific grants for research in the universities (the latter being purchases of services for particular agencies, not direct aid to the universities as such).  But within a year or so the picture might change.  Sometimes, he said, ideas have to simmer for a while before they are accepted. 

     The senator was quite right.  In 1958 the Congress passed the National Defense Education Act in the wake of the Soviet Sputniks of late 1957.  Federal policy here was both disingenuous and opportunistic here: national security was invoked as the justification for fellowships for certain fields (e.g., foreign languages, sciences, engineering)       

     Reformers, meanwhile, emboldened by the attention to public education, began to hatch new and more ambitious ideas.  Desegregation could not be achieved and minority pupils helped unless federal aid was provided for inner city schools lacking in a local tax base.  So the Elementary and Secondary Education Act was passed in 1965 as part of LBJ’s Great Society, along with the Voting Rights Act removing state barriers to minority voting and the Civil Rights Act providing for equal access to public accommodations.  The Elementary and Secondary Education provided specially target federal aid for minority school districts, including pre-school programs to prepare students for school.  Public schools still remained largely financed by local property taxes and state aid.  Now reformers pushed a new concept: fiscal equalization.  All public schools would have to spend the same amount per pupil to make sure that the promise of desegregation would achieve the best results and social equity, as guaranteed by the equal protection clause of the 14^th amendment, could be assured for all Americans. 

     But how was one to measure expenditures, which included capital, maintenance, equipment, and instructional costs – and of course these varied widely across school districts and governmental jurisdictions?  The Supreme Court wisely decided in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriquez (1073) that a school system financed by local property taxes was not unconstitutional under the 14^th amendment and that a “strict scrutiny” standard was not required so long as states acted with a reasonable regard for a public purpose.  The Texas case saved us from untold grief in trying to figure out what the concept of fiscal equalization, if embedded in the constitution, might mean in practice.  Most states, however, decided that they would enact some degree of fiscal equalization in their systems of school finance.  They would try to level the poorer schools up, not level the better schools down, but achieving mathematical exactness was not going to be possible since local property taxes were still a large part of school finance.

  The next wave of reform was the so-called community control or school decentralization movement.  This was a scheme hatched in schools of education and in liberal political circles positing that the professionals – that is, the teachers and administrators of the schools – were the culprits and the cause of the schools’ problems. Teachers and administrators should be stripped of their authority and power handed over to the local communities (in practice, given to boards elected by local residents).  The local boards would henceforth make decisions on all sorts of educational issues, including the hiring and firing of teachers and administrators.  Since the locals were the consumers – their kids were in the schools – they would make better decisions than the aloof professionals.

     The academic reformers imagined that the local community was interested in school reform, and to some limited degree this was true.   But what the locals wanted more were the jobs held by the teachers and administer.  In New York City, where I wrote a book (with George R. LaNoue) on The Politics of School Decentralization (Lexington Books, 1971), I was an ally of Albert Shankar, head of the teachers union and one of the great statesman of education in recent times, in the fight over school decentralization.  In practice, this amounted to a fight over the jobs held by Jewish and Italian teachers which the minority groups, with the support of the reformers, wanted for themselves.   Naturally enough, Shankar and the union fought to save the union jobs and to resist the radical and ill-conceived pedagogic ideas of the reformers.

     Shankar endured unfair abuse at the time (and after) for supposedly inciting racial tensions in the city.  In fact he had no choice but to oppose community control, which he saw would lead to financial abuse, corruption, disorder in the schools, poorer educational outcomes, and would likely incite violence.  The union opposed the bill introduced into the state legislature to establish local control, and managed to dilute the powers of the local boards. But the legislature nonetheless passed the measure.  Shankar then worked to make sure the union would win the local board elections.  The union did win the elections in all of the districts across the city and undertook to recruit aggressively minority teachers.   The reformers came to understand their underlying premises about community control were mistaken.  They had assumed that school boards in the suburbs had complete freedom of action instead of being subject to numerous state and county regulations as well as union contracts, and they now largely conceded that this mistaken model could not in any case have been simply transplanted to the inner cities.

       Meanwhile around the country the teachers unions saw themselves under siege, and began to play a more vocal role in politics generally.  Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter had pledged to the National Education Association that he would create a Department of Education as part of his campaign for the presidency.  President Carter fulfilled his pledge, creating the Department of Education by separating out the Office of Education from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare where it had been a small bureau (Public Law 96—88, signed into law October 17, 1979).  The cause of education now had a national voice in the form of a cabinet-level official.  Unfortunately for the teachers unions, as it turned out, the powers of the federal government could also be potentially mobilized against them in the name of reform.   

     In the Reagan era a new and unlikely reform hero emerged in the person of Secretary of Education Terrell Bell, a soft-spoken modest Utah educator who was the last cabinet officer named by President Reagan. Bell was widely expected to preside over the dismantling of the department because many Republican legislators were opposed to the idea of an enlarged federal role in education.  Instead Bell persuaded Reagan to establish a presidential-level commission to assess the state of public education in the nation.  The resulting report A Nation at Risk (1983) was a classic document of its kind.  Filled with hyperbole and dire warnings, the report added to the Cold War playbook (we need skills to fight the Communists) an economic rationale.  The nation’s competitiveness was imperiled by “a rising tide of mediocrity.”  The schools were so bad that America was in danger of economic collapse.  Everybody else's schools were much better than U. S. schools, and a jumble of comparative statistics supposedly proved the point. The federal government, in the reformers’ outlook, needed to take the lead role in pushing the states and localities to improve the public schools.  A cottage industry by now had grown up in the in the universities to demonstrate and analyze student test scores and educational outcomes.

     The Bell report’s central argument was absurd on its face.  The nation had developed the West, become an industrial power, fought two world wars, blunted communist expansionism, and led the world economic expansion after WW II all without benefit of the federal control of the schools or the federal government nagging the states to improve public education.  There was a recession in the first years of the Reagan presidency, but this had nothing to do with the schools.  It was the result of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker’s efforts to wring inflection out of the economy.  No one apparently took Secretary Bell’s report too seriously, except for the reformers in the universities and the media voices who are always ready to declare a national crisis.  Bell went around the country warning of the crisis of education, and the President and the Congress kept trying to cut the budget of the Department of Education.  President Reagan’s Secretary of Education during his second term, William Bennett, turned his energies to a more Republican focus of combating leftism and political correctness in the universities.

     But the reformers kept pushing their themes of gloom and doom, hoping that expanded federal regulatory powers and education budgets would follow once the public understood how bad things were.  Democrats in Congress were pushing an industrial policy agenda calling for targeted aid to industries, promotion of generic technologies, retraining of workers, trade protection, and increased aid to education.  The Reagan and first Bush administrations opposed the Democratic proposals, but felt uncomfortable in appearing to pooh-pooh every problem the other party raised.  So they decided to support educational reform so long as the proposals didn’t cost too much and the goals were not too controversial.  Consequently the Congress and President George H.W. Bush signed into law the Goals 2000: Educate America Act (Public Law 103—227, signed into law on March 31, 1991).   The act codified a number of existing goals concerning completion rates, pupil readiness for school, student achievement, US leadership in math and science, adult literacy, and drug-free learning environment, and added new goals such as teacher professional development and parental participation in schools. 

      Consider the two new sets of goals for a moment.  The goals are reasonable sounding: yes, of course, one would want teachers to have assistance in their development as professionals.  In some sense one wants parents to be concerned with what their children do in school.  But look at the first new goal: in the hands of the reformers professional development can degenerate into constant hectoring of teachers.  Evaluations, measurement of effectiveness, and the like are all based on the notion that teachers are incompetent and need to be watched closely.  Terrell Bell said in his memoir that there are three things that are important in good teaching: “The first factor is motivation, the second is motivation, and the third is (you guessed it) motivation.”  He was referring to teachers motivating their students, but one could also say the motivation of the teachers themselves is the key to good teaching.  It’s a little hard to motivate teachers if you are going to fire half of them or if you’re bugging the heck out of them with evaluations, performance appraisals, complicated metrics based on teaching to the test, etc. 

     And yes, parents should be worried about their kids, but should not badger the teachers, yank their kids out of one school and into another, make constant demands and be chronic malcontents.  Don’t wait for Supermen or Superwomen.  There aren’t any.  As for the curriculum, no good educational idea has ever come out of parental involvement in the schools.   

      

       The Goals 2000: Educate America Act further declares that

-- All children in America will start school ready to learn;

-- the high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent;

-- United States students will be the first in the world in mathematics and science achievement;

-- students will demonstrate proficiency in all complex subject matter (I avoid quoting in full to shorten things up a bit!);

-- all adults shall be literate and ready to perform at a high level in the competitive global economy; and

-- all schools will be drug-free, violence free, alcohol-free and gun-free, and every school will provide an atmosphere conducive to learning.

     Now all this sounds great, but how on earth is the federal government supposed to accomplish it all?  Congress, to show how (un)serious it was, decided to appropriate something like $130 million to accomplish everything in 50 states, 5000 counties, and God knows how many school districts.  This 1991 Educate America Act was the granddaddy of all unfunded mandates!

The reformers, however, had their work cut out and their agenda for the 90s laid out for them.  They would fight, and have plenty of help from the Congress and from the Education Department (which – surprise! – did not want to go out of business).  The aim was to expand everything already underway, regulate everything in sight, and add anything new that might plausibly relate to the lofty (and unattainable) goals promulgated in 1991.  Before long a partial list of the federal legislation affecting the schools would include: the Adult Education Act; the Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Applied Technology Education Act; the Elementary and Secondary Education Act; Higher Education Act; Individuals with Disabilities Education Act; Job Training Partnership Act; National and Community Service Act; National Apprenticeship Act; Rehabilitation Act; and the Social Security Act (Title IV, Part 1).

     Yet this recital of expanding actions and efforts merely sets the stage for the Big Show.  President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 (a reauthorization of the original 1965 Elementary and Secondary Act) made everything that went before seem pale by comparison.  The NCLB passed with the enthusiastic support of Senator Ted Kennedy and other Democrats, dwarfed all previous federal involvement, and quite possibly is the most consequential education measure ever enacted into law.  I will not go into detail, but suffice to say that federal powers were vastly e expanded.  There was great focus on teachers, upgrading them, measuring their performance, etc., and on student achievement, testing, measuring, putting standards into place, etc.  Standards, which began with the 1991 Act, became the vogue.  Even the American Federation of Teachers and Al Shankar got behind the idea of national standards in the 90s, figuring that couldn’t oppose all reforms and might as well go for standards.  But with the NCLB the standards had a bite.  If schools didn’t perform well on the tests that incorporated into the tests (the standards were supposed to be incorporated into standard tests but neither national standards nor national tests were ever quite achieved), they would suffer severe penalties, including loss of federal funding and possible closure. 

    Here we have a clear case of punishing the victim.  If poor schools didn’t perform well, they would be closed.  One of the few social institutions that the poorest neighborhoods have would thus be eliminated, and the life chances of the vulnerable diminished.  If students didn’t perform well on the newer and presumably tougher tests they would be flunked out of school and not graduate.  So much for high graduation rates.  Would somebody please explain to parents how it would benefit their children to be denied the high school diploma?  There are obvious absurdities here.  Any test that flunks out one-third or one-quarter of all high school students in a state is not going to be followed.  In the name of combating the tyranny of “low expectations” we are going to slam the door on some of the poorest and most vulnerable of our citizens, and expect them to like it and the public interest to be advanced?  The virus of measurement, performance metrics, accountability, standards, achievement scores, etc. began to creep into higher education, too, spreading the contagion.  Colleges should now be expected to demonstrate the productivity of their teaching staffs, job placement rates of their graduates, put in place systems of learning outcome measurement systems and prove that seniors have achieved “value added” benefits.

     Did matters improve with the Obama Administration?  No, they have gotten worse.  Head reformer and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is that most dangerous of men: he is intelligent, high-minded, and well-intentioned, and is pursuing energetically the wrong agenda.  Now he has huge amounts of new federal money from the stimulus bill to spread around and give force to his reform ideas and force the states into compliance.  He has some $3 billion alone for a competition to induce states to “race to the top” – i.e., to demonstrate that they have bought into the whole cumbersome apparatus of teaching to the test, bean counting all sorts of student achievement scores, firing teachers who don’t perform, closing schools, etc.  

     Look at one of Secretary Duncan’s acolytes, Ms. Michele Rhee, superintendant of schools for Washington, D.C., who got one of the first “race to the top” grants.  Ms. Rhee, also an intelligent and hard-working individual, is a determined reformer who was brought in by Mayor Adrian Fenny to shake up the school system.  She did a number of good things: got the roofs repaired so they don’t leak; got the students textbooks on time to use in class; closed some schools that had virtually no pupils; and other steps.  Unfortunately, she gave the appearance of seeming to enjoy firing teachers.  She talked a lot about making the “tough choices by which she apparently meant picking fights with people.  She even went out and campaigned for the major, something school superintendents aren’t supposed to do, and declared when the mayor lost his reelection bid, that the election of the mayor’s opponent was a “disaster.”  Her plans included giving a cash bonus of $25,000 to high performing teachers, a really bad idea.  Big bonuses have no place in public education or in public service of any kind.  She wanted teachers to opt either for a more secure job tract or for the performance tract which would include more metrics but higher pay.  How can you run a school system where half of the staff work on one set of incentives and the other half on antithetical incentives? 

    It is all wrong.  The whole thing, going back to the Nation at Risk report, is based on the disingenuous argument that the whole economy rests on school performance instead of on the correct idea that our society is a better society if our citizens are educated.  In every walk of life one is going to be evaluated, but usually people are motivated by supervisors with some knowledge of their quirks and aspirations.  The education sector is not for people who want to make money.  You are not going to get the most ambitious and industrious individuals to become school teachers.  That is the reality and that is not going to change, and we don’t want it to change.  Those who want to get rich, found companies, provide jobs – the entrepreneurs – will go into business, and should go into business. 

     School teachers were very good when I went to the public schools in Minnesota years ago, but that was chiefly because the feminist revolution had not yet opened up jobs as doctors, lawyers, business executives, journalists, etc. for the most gifted women.  I remember every one of my teachers, and I know that my fails were not their fault but mine.  I didn’t work hard enough, pay enough attention, or behave myself properly.  The schools didn’t fail me; if anything, I failed them (especially in not studying Latin diligently).  It doesn’t demean my teachers to say that they were hard-working, middleclass in outlook, well-respected members of our small town, raised their own kids and sent them to the same school they taught in, were good parents themselves and role models for many other kids, had problems like everybody else, and were not perfect and were not geniuses.  Most are now dead, but I wish I could tell them how important they were to me over the years.  I’m sure they had to account to the principal, and the principal to the superintendent.  I can’t imagine any of them having to endure the nonsense that is being proposed now.

      Here are a few of the things I want to say to the teachers of today.  Be of good heart, endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, stick to teaching kids, and don’t engage in political games or sucking up to your supervisors.  To parents, don’t let the kids watch so much TV, have dinner together as a family and discuss issues, don’t bug the teachers and complain about everything, don’t shop around endlessly looking for the perfect school, and don’t wait for the Superman.  He’s not there.  It’s just you, your family, your church, and your community, and having to make the best of your life situation. To the kids, cut out (or cut back at least) the texting, the TV watching, the video games.  Respect your teachers, pay attention in class, and study harder.  Don’t be in a hurry to grow up.  You will soon enough be out there in the world, and the world is hard.

     A special word to the politicians: stay out of the schools, you don’t know enough to tinker and fine-tune, lower the expectations that the schools can be the vehicle for every social goal.

        O ye reformers, repent!  Put on a dunce cap and stand in the corner.  Then write on the board five hundred times, “I will not be grandiose!  I will think small, and will strive for humility.  Every day and in every way, I will become more patient, more understanding, and more dedicated to the noble cause of learning and teaching.”

Suggestions for further reading

Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (New York, 2009).

Martha Minow, In Brown’s Wake: Legacies of America’s Educational Landmarks (Oxford, 2010).