Conversation : WITH EDUCATION REVOLUTIONARY JOHN TAYLOR GATTO : New State School Plan: ‘The Fox Guarding the Henhouse’

Delaine Eastin wants to free school districts from every rule in the education code. Who could disagree with that? And she made a statement that kids have done so badly because we expect so little of them; that’s right on target. But the soothing phrases are very misleading: What we have masked as school reform is an elaborate attempt to shift power away from state authorities to another set of bureaucrats.

This is exactly the plan the teachers’ union in New York City forced on the five boroughs in 1968. The 1,100 schools and 1.25 million kids were broken up into 32 autonomous school districts. The net result has been a tragedy of centralized schools multiplied 32 times.

If you’re going to have decentralization that works, it has to be down to the individual school, which would have the autonomy to spend money as needs dictate. Put these schools under the control of single school boards, made up of the customers and business neighbors of that school. If the revenue stream were to go directly to the clientele, no matter how bad your position is, you’re not more than half a decade away from a phenomenal Renaissance. That’s the way American schooling worked from 1620 until about 1900. Nobody seems to understand that the mechanism of a one-room schoolhouse was not someone standing at the blackboard with 60 docile children of all ages sitting there listening. The kids were immediately recruited to teach each other. Younger kids came to expect, trust and depend on the fact they could go to anybody older for specialized instruction. Older kids got the tremendous responsibility, which is wonderful thing, not a gruesome duty, of being looked up to as teachers.

Supporters of Eastin’s plan include the California Teachers’ Assn. as represented by Helen Bernstein, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, and Tom Seixas of the Visalia teachers union. Bernstein says she’s in support of the plan, which could increase staff, because Eastin respects union rights. Any teacher knows that means nothing in the interest of the union is going to be affected. Also mentioned is the California School Boards Assn., whose power would multiply substantially since they would have more say over money.

Eastin specifies that new high standards will be developed by the state education department. This has to be like the fox guarding the hen house. Aren’t these the same bozos that developed the standards you currently have? Nowhere is there any talk of what the penalties will be in the event these standards aren’t met.

The nine “challenge districts” in Eastin’s plan have been handpicked so they probably can’t miss. There will an improvement in morale, certainly at the administrative level. And if administrators are happier with their lives, teachers will be happier, too.

Will parents be happier? No, though there’s a token mention that parents will sign some kind of a contract or “compact.” Can you imagine a parent having the ability to negotiate this contract or not signing it [in protest]?

As for students, I don’t think there will be any difference. Individualized programs started as a fad in the 1960s. It meant that of all courses offered at a school, each kid would be tracked in the ones they prefer, assuming there was room. That led to scheduling nightmares and was often abandoned in a year or two.

[Real] school reform is about making everything flexible--time, space, sequencing, texts and assessment. But is that going to be allowed [under Eastin’s proposal]? There’s not a word that suggest that it is.

I used apprenticeships, group projects, independent study, mentorships--practices endemic to the best private schools in the country for over a century. I was close to Columbia University and would shamelessly exploit its faculty members. My kids had regular access to minds that charge $500-an-hour consulting fees.

It sounds like a charitable function, but I guarantee you from having done this for 20 years that there’s a wonderful reciprocity. The students would return with the data they had gathered, which would become the text for readings, writings and presentations. Even the recalcitrant kids become interested in the growth in their own judgment and insight, watching themselves become powerful. And I would get demands from professors for more kids, but the teachers’ union wouldn’t allow the program to get larger.

The funny thing is that there are abundant ways the real world makes judgments about quality, none of which are standardized tests. People who make great scientific breakthroughs aren’t the ones who won the school science prizes and the people who write the novels that make people’s jaws drop aren’t the ones who won student awards.

What made the American economy unstoppable was where Europe had a large proletariat class and a small elite, America converted what would have been proletarians into self-reliant, shrewd people who were perfectly capable of working as a slave for three years for a boss and in the fourth year opening up the identical business and doing it better than the boss did. We had an economy built around independent livelihoods. Modern schooling is designed to serve the jobs being sucked into government and large industrial and institutional pools.

The Eastin plan is not the first step toward deconstruction, though Eastin may very well believe it is. New York thought it was taking a first step in 1968, but the second step was never made and what they have now is like a cancer metastasizing. Charter schools and vochers are by far a better way to go.