‘F’ Is for Failure

My father, who is 90, recently complained about the current state of public education and claimed he knew how to reform it: a good dose of Latin, Milton and strict discipline. I reminded him that he hated Latin when he was in school, memorized Milton but never understood a word of his poetry and hadn’t been in a public school since 1929 (except in 1943 when I was causing trouble in the first grade).

Ironically, he’s not that wrong in his thinking. Just about everything, it seems, that one can throw in the pot nowadays--even Latin, Milton and discipline--falls under the rubric of school reform, and everyone fancies himself or herself a school reformer. Teachers, parents, students, business people, foundations, community groups, politicians and educational experts all have ideas on how schools need to be changed. Some advocate vouchers and the privatization of schools. Others talk about returning to phonics, arithmetic drills, memorization of facts in history and constant testing. Yet others talk about the need for spirituality in the schools, prayer and the Ten Commandments or argue for schools centered on multiculturalism, social justice, whole language, cooperative learning and inquiry.

But there is some middle ground. Conservative, liberal and progressive visions of public school reform share a few basic premises: developing learning standards, holding teachers accountable for student performance, assessing student performance and preparing students to live and work in a technologically oriented society.

Diane Ravitch, former assistant secretary of education during the Bush administration and currently senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and research professor at New York University, identifies herself as an intellectual progressive and a liberal traditionalist. However in her new book, “Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform,” she reveals herself as a conservative who believes that society’s only responsibility to its children is to provide the occasion for education. According to Ravitch, it is the role of schools to provide one curriculum, based in the classics of Western literature, to all children, and it is up to the children and their parents to apply themselves, no matter what resources for learning they have. She places the burden for success upon the children and their parents and disregards both the desire of many people to determine the content and nature of their children’s schooling and the difficulties faced by educators who work in undersupplied schools in poor communities.

In “Left Back,” Ravitch takes a look at the last 100 years of public education through these lenses. She documents the conflicts between what she calls progressivists and traditionalists and provides a useful account of their disagreements over the role of education. Her basic dichotomy is between those progressive educators who believe schools should teach thinking skills, community involvement and social responsibility and those traditionalists who see intellectual rigor and the mastery of a traditional curriculum as the core of education. Though at times she indicates that there may be no necessary contradiction between these two goals, she comes down strongly on the side of a Western-oriented curriculum grounded in, as she calls it, “the cumulative experience of the human race”; it is the equivalent of a national curriculum mandated from the top. She identifies the curriculum she advocates as part of the democratic tradition of one academic education for all and contrasts it with the diverse approaches to learning, work and citizenship that characterize the Progressive Education Movement. By implicitly attacking multicultural education, community-based learning and other forms of learning that relate more closely to the needs and wishes of individual communities, she assumes that it is democratic to provide everyone with the same education no matter what resources they have or don’t have.

Ravitch is an intelligent and sophisticated thinker who manages to blur the boundaries between progressivism and conservatism. She seems to ignore the complexity of growing up poor, the diversity of cultures within our society and the variety of choices of educational programs and needs for our children. For Ravitch, democracy means everyone’s getting the same opportunity to fail or succeed. It is free enterprise education. If you make it, fine; if not, it is no one’s responsibility but your own. But Ravitch does not acknowledge that the system of public education that she envisions is biased toward families of the educated and privileged; there is an implicit assumption in her argument that all people, rich and poor, have equal opportunities to buy encyclopedias and computers for their children, and register them for SAT tutoring classes. But not everyone has the resources to take advantage of these so-called equal opportunities. One of the goals of public education is to provide equal opportunity, yet in the midst of her often well-articulated and appropriate criticisms of some aspects of progressive education, she seems to forget that goal.

In an analysis that leans on the personal (the book is filled with snide asides and judgments masquerading as fact; she says John Dewey was “far too tolerant of fellow progressives who adored children but abhorred subject matter”), Ravitch simplifies and stereotypes the late 19th century Progressive Education Movement, vestiges of which can still be seen in schools throughout the country. She attributes to it today’s obsession for standardized tests, the child-centered education movement (which created educational methods to meet the needs and nature of young children), the philosophy that schools should create programs to help children prepare for work in an industrial society and the belief that democratic schooling could reform society by freeing children’s creative spirits and by preparing them to participate in a compassionate society. Yet now, as the divide between rich and poor steadily grows and as standards of living increase at the same time that funding for schools in poor communities diminishes, a progressive education movement is critical for the future of our children.

Ravitch describes these progressive goals as “indoctrinating [children] for life in a planned society.” This fits with her description of education in the 1960s as having a “hedonistic, individualistic, anarchic spirit . . . [that] was good for neither the educational mission of the schools nor the intellect, health, or well-being of young people.” She conveniently forgets that progressive education in the ‘60s led to Head Start, was deeply involved in the civil rights movement and was instrumental in efforts to improve neglected urban schools.

Ravitch describes education in the 1970s in a similarly dismissive way: “[T]he schools withdrew from their responsibility to teach knowledge, good conduct, and responsible behavior.” Ravitch, an academic historian, does not bother to footnote or document these broad claims. Still, despite her biases, she usefully challenges those concerned with the future of public education. Indeed, a small number of educators misinterpreted open education as freedom for children to do whatever they liked, for discipline to be lax and for self-esteem to be emphasized over intellectual growth and development. But these negatives were not at the center of the attempts to provide equitable schooling that characterized the work of many educators in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Ravitch suggests that providing the single academic curriculum she advocates for all students will not be harmful. Yet now that there is a movement toward an elimination of vocational and general educational tracks in high school, educators and society must develop some strategies for children who will not or do not want to climb what Ravitch calls “the educational ladder.” In New York City, 30% to 40% of high school students are not expected to receive high school diplomas, given the elimination of nonacademic diplomas. According to a recent report by the Children’s Defense Fund, across the country every day nearly 3,000 students drop out of school, 5,000 children are arrested and 17,000 public school students are suspended, and close to one-third of these students live in poverty. The kind of “educational ladder” Ravitch suggests is as likely to increase downward mobility as it is to enhance learning and a climb up the social and economic ladder.

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We must abandon the simple notions of school reform that Ravitch dresses up in the guise of history. “Left Back” is a long argument for a single curriculum and, no matter how many people she quotes or how many texts she cites, what her argument comes down to is that there should be one way to success: through academic schooling as defined by self-styled professionals such as herself. There are many ways to fix public education, but what is needed most is commitment to provide the financial and human resources necessary to build upon the best practices that currently exist and avoid those that have not worked. Educators need to know and respect the communities they serve and listen to parents and community leaders.

Perhaps, as we make our way through school reform, we should take to heart the words of the educator Deborah Meier, one of the few progressives Ravitch admires, whose proposals for school reform neither romanticize nor simplify the issues at hand: “We have the resources, the knowledge, and plenty of living examples of the many different kinds of schools that might serve our needs better. All we need is a little more patient confidence in the good sense of ‘the people,’ in short a little more commitment to democracy.”