School Reform

Recently I wrote about school reform mostly as a way to make a point about the current state of political apathy and to make a call for wider and deeper participation in an important discussion. The final paragraph read

          We have to hope that someone will start to move us away from the narrow, specific,
          and moment-bound policy debates and toward a public, thoughtful, and meaningful
          conversation about the role of public schools in a mass, pluralistic society.

Now I would like to attempt to write something coherent and helpful about school reform, not as an object lesson in the importance of political participation, but as an examination and evaluation of some elements of school reform on the merits.

The basic and very frustrating problem with trying to write coherently about school reform is that the topic is akin to 7-level chess; or to some amorphous being which when any part of it is grasped, seven other parts pop out. How, I ask rhetorically, does one make sense of a phenomenon which includes the following:

          a commitment to "providing" an education for all without a complementary demand that
          all students work to acquire an education

          a commitment to sending all students to the same secondary schools because it is the
          "democratic" thing to do when all evidence shows that by adolescence students have
          demonstrated various levels of intelligence, various talents, and various interests

          a teaching corps which deeply desires to be considered professional while demanding
          to be unionized and to have virtually untouchable job security

          public opinion which harshly criticizes public schooling in the aggregate but has affection
          and admiration for the local school

          academic content standards which have been carefully chosen, sequentially ordered, and
          which offer the opportunity to integrate, but which have led to such a rigorous testing
          process aimed at determining accountability that there is less creative, engaging,
          and humane teaching

Such a list could be extended by a lot, but these will suffice: Trying to get a handle on school reform in some general way is extremely difficult, so I won't try. What I will do is to touch on what I think is a key aspect of any beneficial school reform, the role of the Principal.

 As it now stands, the Principal is not meant to be a visionary, decision-making, personally-engaged leader of a single school but rather a mid-level administrator, a middle manager, whose role is to communicate and enforce the policy decisions presented to her by the district for which she works. In almost all districts, the Principal's role is seen as one that can be filled by anyone who has the requisite credentials, the result being a revolving door of ambitious individuals moving in and out as they work their way up the bureaucratic hierarchy.

Recently I taught a course to graduate students in educational administration in "Transformational and Instructional Leadership." As part of the course, I gave a PowerPoint presentation on "instructional leadership." As you can see, the assumption throughout the presentation was that the Principal was an autonomous professional who had both the right and the duty to make thoughtful and creative decisions regarding the curriculum and teacher performance.

Coincidentally, someone from the university for which I was teaching the course was in class that evening. Her response to the presentation was, "Of course the Principal just has to do what they're told."

Besides being professionally deflating, this was representative of the thoroughly bureaucratic and operational understanding of the Principal's role in the school.

The other important thing to understand about the role of the Principal is that she is not trusted by the people who work for her to make sound, honest professional judgments about the people who work for her. This is part and parcel of the unionization of teachers, a furtherance of the industrial factory model upon which the relation of teachers and administrators was based some 120 years ago. In the world of the factory, there was management and there were the workers. For reasons good and not so good, the workers became organized labor in order to negotiate with management, thereby creating a relationship that was inherently mistrustful and adversarial. This was the model adopted by teachers' unions in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries and which continues today.

On this model, the Principal is "management" and the teachers are "labor." They are not professional colleagues who have different responsibilities but are collaborative colleagues in the best interests of their clients.

But if there is to be genuine school reform, this is one of the things that will have to change. In short, the Principal will have to be in charge of the single school and have both the power and the authority to make decisions about the essential activities of the school, primarily curriculum and teachers.

This would be a radical --- and shocking --- shift. Teachers would have to overcome their mistrust of "management" and learn to conceive of the Principal as a collaborative colleague who also had the authority to hire and fire; that is, as a fellow professional who was also the leader, someone who had the responsibility to lead from within but also had the responsibility to decide, in Jim Collins' now famous phrase, who was to be on the bus and who was to be off the bus.

It is not sufficient to point out that this is a successful, effective, and efficient model for most businesses, for schools are not businesses. But schools are not factories either. Schools are places that should be staffed by autonomous, creative professionals, but that statement has implications regarding demonstrated achievement, ethical adherence, and someone having the decision-making power to reward or admonish, to retain or release.

The contention that the Principal should be an autonomous, creative professional with real decision-making power has implications for far more than the relationship between labor and management and the psychology of teachers. It also has implications for the preparation of teachers and for the preparation of principals.

This is the phenomenon I touched on at the beginning: There is a complex of incoherent and conflicting ideals, ideologies, and mind-sets. It appears to be a Gordian knot, impossible to unravel. Perhaps a more congenial metaphor would be a log jam, in which there is always a key log, which when removed allows the logs to move freely again down the river. In this case, I will choose the role of the Principal as the "key log." Let's see what would happen if we start with a new definition of Principal. What would be necessary? What would have to happen to the preparation of teachers? To the preparation of principals? To the organization of schools? To the thinking about class size and school size? To the concept of accountability?

School reform is dependent on a re-conceiving of what schools are for and how they're organized. In this process of re-conceptualizing, let's start with one thing that we know would be good if it were to be effected and then see what else would have to happen to ensure that. I suggest we start with the re-definition of the Principalship.

       





     

Civilized Behavior

It is possible to define civilization as opposed to other terms that signify groups of people: tribe, clan, gang, society, culture. While there is some disagreement about the precise definition of civilization among those who worry about such things, it is possible, I believe, to understand it as something distinct from those other kinds of groupings. Or, to put it in negative terms, one does not have to conflate all those terms as if there were no distinctions to be made.

The most helpful definition I have encountered is the one that says civilization requires three things: learning, religion, and law. To be blunt about it, this is to say that to the extent that a social group lacks any or all of these three things, that group is, to that extent, lacking in civilization. This obviously implies a continuum, with social groups that are more or less civilized at one end and those that are not civilized at the other.

(Not that this is an argument-settling example, but new towns on the Western frontier saw themselves as having passed over into something better when they had added a church, a school, and a law enforcement officer.)

It is important to note that all three of these qualities --- learning, religion, and law --- are not natural; that is, not instinctive. A group of people has to decide to devote time, energy, and money to learning; to set it as an ideal; to push for it for as many people as possible; to honor it; to create the resources necessary to learning, the books and libraries and museums and schools and teachers without which learning is close to impossible. A group of people has to decide to institutionalize religion and use it to give meaning to existence, to provide moral guidelines, to provide common beliefs and common practices. And a group of people has to decide that there will a code of law, derived from a moral code, that will help people refrain from acting in ways that may be "natural" but are also destructive both to the individual and to the society. They have to decide to do these things because they recognize that it is better to do so.

It is this last --- the importance of law --- that has been on my mind recently. Maybe this is nothing more than a function of aging, or maybe I'm reading the wrong daily publications, but it seems to me --- and I will claim nothing more than "it seems" --- it seems to me that there are more and more instances of people acting in ways that can be described as "natural" but are profoundly destructive of themselves and the people around them.

These are the parents who beat and torture their infant children, often to death, because the child has disturbed or interrupted or annoyed them. This is the mother who drives herself and her children into the lake so that they all drown because she feels bad. This is, apparently Jodi Arias, who seems to have felt entirely justified in doing what she did to her erstwhile boyfriend because he rejected her. This is the aggrieved former husband (or, more and more often) boyfriend who kills his ex and their children and, usually, himself as a way of punishing the ex for having caused him pain.

And there is the phenomenon of gangsterism that is so common in some urban areas that we hardly even mention it anymore. Within that world, the logic is clearly that the world is a war of all against all, that the end justifies the means, that the end is that I want something, and that preventing my getting that deserves death.

And there are the mass killers of Columbine and Viginia Tech and Aurora and Newtown. Whatever their mental health diagnoses, on some level of their interior life they "knew" that what they were going to do was justified.

And, perhaps most pertinent, the rapist: I have sexual desire and you will satisfy it, whether you want to or not.

I have never been a watcher of reality TV but I will confess that recently I have found myself staring in slack-jawed amazement at Harcore Pawn. There are several kinds of behavior manifested in these episodes that rightly provoke dismay, but the one that fits here is the person who demands that the pawnshop give him or her money, no matter what. It doesn't matter that there is no ticket, that what the person wants to do is against store policy, or in contradiction to the contract that he or she signed. It doesn't matter; they don't want to hear it.

On some unattractive level, this is amusing. And we can pass it off as simply weird, even aberrant. But I think that both of those responses miss the point: There is a profound sense of self-righteousness in these people which is something like "Because I want it you have an obligation to give it to me. And if you thwart my desire, you deserve to be punished."

And, on another level entirely, there is the Islamist belief that if you don't believe what I think you're supposed to believe, you must die. That's a really big time version of this, but as we say in philosophy, it is not a difference in kind, only a difference in degree.

These are the beliefs and practices that law is meant to protect the society from. Civilized societies know that seeing the world as a "war of all against all," a place where the only ethical code is that the end justifies the means, and that desire defines the end, and that physical violence is the only determiner, is profoundly dangerous to the individual and to the society. And so such societies write law, make policies, and enforce those laws.

But it is obvious to anyone paying attention that the law alone is not sufficient. I believe that we could have as many policeman as civilians and it still wouldn't be "enough." A critical mass of a society has to be self-governing in order for it to be and remain civilized.

And self-governance mostly boils down to choosing to do the right thing rather than the desired thing; to do what is better for the other, or for the group, than what is better for me. To boil it down even further, it means that the parent knows --- deep in his heart, as we say --- that no matter how annoying the child is being, that the parent's primary responsibility is to the welfare of the child. It means that the pawn shop patron knows that no matter how powerful his desire, the contractual and mutally respectful relationship must be maintained. It means that "I want a baby" is not a good reason to have a child. It means that the individual knows that although "the end justifies the means" may result in short-term gain, in the long term it will be destructive to all concerned.

As I said at the beginning, maybe there is no issue here; maybe the vast majority of the American population is effectively self-governing and I should simply stop paying attention to the various sources of sensationalism. I hope that's right.

If it isn't right, then these seemingly separate instances of abberant --- that is, uncivilized --- behavior are harbingers of social breakdown and remedial work cannot begin soon enough,

Democratic Participation

There are two conceptual problems when trying to talk about “school reform.” The first is that those who are already involved in the debate are fighting for specific policies that they want to see implemented now, while lacking any historical or philosophical understanding of American public schooling; in other words, no understanding of how we got here and, therefore, little or no informing background concerning what public schooling ought to be and why.

The second is that the debate is being waged by a relatively small group of people, while the great majority of the population is entirely disengaged from it. It is an extreme example of “inside baseball,” even though the questions and the potential answers affect everyone in the polis, and in serious ways.

These two conceptual problems create a practical problem. Because the debate is focused entirely on the operational, any attempt to place the debate in a larger historical and philosophical context will inevitably be seen as pedantic, inapplicable, and boring.

This has created a classic vicious circle: The people who will be most affected by any such policy decisions don’t want to hear about it thereby allowing the handful of people who do care about it to fight it out without awareness or participation from the larger public. This makes it an excellent metaphor for all the political questions of our time and well our politicians know it. While some pundits decry the lack of honest and intellectual public grappling with important issues, successful politicians and their handlers know that it is much safer to speak banalities and pre-approved catch-phrases, which the larger public is apparently happy to let them do.

It would be helpful to understand that this democratic process --- that is, a political process which engages all citizens so that it can in fact be “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” --- is at the heart of the creation of schools paid for by public funds and then requiring all students to attend them for as long as possible in the context of over 300 million persons. It would not be an exaggeration to say that choosing to do such a thing was and is the greatest experiment in democracy ever attempted.

Although we now take the ubiquitous public school for granted, it was not always thus. During the Colonial Period and well into the 19^th Century, virtually all schools were funded by private money, by tuition. It wasn’t until the 1830’s and 1840’s that states took the extraordinary step of imposing a new tax to support schools for all students. To show what a remarkable step this was, consider the fact that Thomas Jefferson went to the Virginia House of Burgesses three separate times to request funding for a free grades 1-3 education for all students. All three times, his proposal was rejected.

Why, then, did state legislators, then as now leery of imposing taxes, choose to fund schools with public money? The answer is simple and straightforward and easy to understand: By the 1830’s, the United States had committed to a democratic republic form of government, one in which they knew that the suffrage would be extended more and more, and they knew that if citizens were going to be granted liberty, they would have to be taught how to use that liberty well. While they still could take for granted the influence of home and church, the way that the State would form citizens by imbuing them with the right principles and the right practices, would be at school. To put it another way, religious sectarianism and ethnic solidarity were fine in the home and in the neighborhood, but the way young people would all become Americans was in what Horace Mann called “the common school.”

Over time, more and more young people went to school and spent longer and longer there. It happened slowly, but it happened steadily, until by the 1950’s it was taken for granted that (virtually) everyone would graduate from high school. We take this for granted (to the point where those who ‘drop out’ of high school are a scandal) but historically this was not just unprecedented, it was remarkably odd. That everyone should read and virtually everyone should vote was unimaginable through most of human history.

That schooling in the United States has become more and more democratic --- that is, more and  more inclusive --- is a straightforward story, based on a kind of faith that more schooling makes for more personal and social success.

Where the story has not been straightforward but, rather, full of contradiction and conflict, has been in our definition of the deep purposes of publicly-funded schools.

From the time of the Colonial one-room school house until the end of World War I in 1918, there was a remarkable consistency in the publicly understood purposes of schooling. To review the history of this period of some 300 years is to reveal what seem like big changes, but the common element, despite huge changes in circumstance, was the belief that public schools were meant to form students as American citizens. But, as with so many things, that was no longer the case after 1918. From that time to the present, there have been deep and powerful conflicts within the American public over the role and purpose of public schools. Rather than a commitment to a fairly consistent set of principles, the period since the end of World War I has seen dramatic shifts in our thinking about the purposes of public schooling: progressives vs traditionalists; essentialists vs those who believed in a child-centered curriculum; scientific curriculum-making vs social meliorism; life-adjustment vs back-to-basics.

This is a frustrating story, at least for those of us who believe it’s possible to settle on a set of right purposes and figure out how best to achieve them. But here is the comforting or confounding thing about this story (depending on how you look at it): Our commitment to democracy has led to our inability or unwillingness to commit to a form of schooling specifically aimed at preparing young people to be thoughtful, active, and principled citizens of a mass and pluralistic democracy. 

Within the great democratic conversation, there is so much disagreement that we have not --- for good or ill --- been able to come to a consensus about what the deep purposes of school should be. As a result, our default setting is to think of schools as places that are relatively safe, where a reasonable number of academic and other activities are available, and where young people can be free to “develop” without attempts by teachers, administrators, or the State to “form” them.

Currently, the battle over the purpose of public schooling is dominated by the conflict between what we can imprecisely call the “standards” people and those who represent the “ante-standards” people. These are shoddy descriptors that would rightly offend both sides, but some kind of shorthand is needed.

After the institutional self-immolation of the ‘60’s and ’70’s, there was first a public outcry against what was happening in public schools, and then the Federal pamphlet “A Nation at Risk,” and then the governors of the several states committing to a re-definition of public school curriculum, and then to each state creating a set of academic content standards.

Logically, having standards in any field of human endeavor implies having an assessment to find out if those standards have been met, so there had to be some form of testing and given the many millions of students, that testing would have to be standardized. With the involvement of the Federal government in the “No Child Left Behind” act, given the immense amounts of money that almost every school district depended on, standardized testing became the tail that would wag the dog.

The not necessarily wise but logical development of this process has brought us to “Race to the Top” and the  Core Content Standards, both of which have provoked a reaction, mostly by teachers but apparently by more and more parents. Anger over the dominance of standardized testing, a frustration which has been growing greater and greater over the last dozen or so years, has led some teachers and others outside the system to contend that students, parents, and teachers should “opt out,” which would amount to a kind of passive resistance movement.

Anger over the Core Content Standards is a whole other kettle of fish, but is related because of its connection to and its dependence on the standardized testing industry.

I think it is essentially important to see the current conflict in two larger contexts. The first is that it is just the current manifestation of the on-going and ever more complicated debate since 1919 over what the purpose of public schools is and how that purpose should be pursued.

The second is that everyone involved on both sides of this conflict is convinced that they are right and the other guys are wrong. This is at the very heart of the great democratic conversation and so is entirely understandable. Both sides are involved in an incredibly varied, rich, frustrating, and engaging democratic process, and the stakes seem incredibly high.

Bu like all the battles fought before it in this on-going war, this will be resolved, one way or another and life will go on.

There have been so many ebbs and flows, triumphs and failures, in this process since 1919, that I’m less worried about the specifics of the current iteration and much more worried about the apathetic self-removal of the larger public from the conversation.

We live in a time where self-interest and self-importance predominate. If I don’t have children in public school, I don’t care. Even if I do have children in public school, I care only about them and their experience.

But this conflict requires that eventually the public come to a meaningful conclusion about the deep purposes of the most “public” institution in the United States.

We have to hope that someone will start to move us away from the narrow, specific, and moment-bound policy debates and toward a public, thoughtful, and meaningful conversation about the role of public schools in a mass, pluralistic democracy.