My More Moderate Views on Education

I enjoyed my rant the other day, but find that I want to say a few words about my more measured opinions about education and the schools.

1. I have been a teacher. Not in the public schools, but in their closest collegiate analog, the community college. In addition, I taught a class (freshman composition) that was required of all incoming students but which almost none of them wanted to take or expected to enjoy. From this, I have first-hand knowledge of how impossible it is to teach students who are in your class by compulsion. I also know first-hand that a system can be less than the sum of its parts; that is, it can be full of mostly-competent people doing their best according to their lights and with as much goodwill as they can muster, and the system overall can still be failing (in my department, after we instituted a portfolio review process, we had a failure rate of about 1/3--and this was of the students who made it to the end of the semester. Another sizeable chunk tended to disappear partway through). So I have tremendous sympathy and respect for individuals in the schools, doing their jobs. And sympathy for the ones who, like me, burn out and leave.

2. I homeschool for what seem to me like good reasons, but I think the truth is that my kids, and the kids of people like me, would probably do OK either in school or homeschooled. There are some reasons of temperament that I think this is less true for Eric than for most kids, but in general the children of middle-class and upper-middle-class families, with educated, involved, loving, functional parents and resources for books, travel, trips to museums, and so on, seem to learn what they need to learn and do all right. You hear a lot about how the American school system is failing--all those media reports that we're second-to-last in some international test of math skills. But we really have at least two different educational systems in American, and my kids (and your kids, probably, if you're reading this) are in the one that works pretty well.

A few years ago I read a book whose title I can never remember, something like Making Sense of Research in Education. It looked at some of the typical education headlines and examined the research behind them. One I remember is those international tests. According to the author, most countries have more explicit tracking than the US does, and when they participate in these tests, they choose students from specific schools to participate. In some cases, they choose the students individually. IIRC, only the US and Canada actually provide random, national samples. So "America came in 26th out of 29 countries," for instance, might be a statistic that compares all American children to only the children who've been tracked into academic schools in other countries, or an even smaller sample than that--like comparing all American kids to the equivalent of kids at the High School of Science and Technology. When the American sample is sorted by race, the white kids move up to second or third; the black kids drop even lower in the rankings.

So, when people urge me to put my kids in school and get involved in my local school district: well, I know my local school district has problems (I've heard the kid culture is unusually toxic, for instance), but for the most part, that school district doesn't need me, or my kids. There's a case to be made that Lansing does, and I know that one woman in my Quaker meeting carries a concern about Quakers taking their kids outside the Lansing school district. But there are bigger problems with education for working-class people, poor people, people of color, immigrants. I don't know what to do about those problems, either as an individual or as a society. But I do think both I and society could be doing better in this regard.

3. For all my bluster, I am not a zealot about home education. I don't think it's necessary or right for all kids (or their parents)--not even necessarily for all of mine. Yehva, for instance, is so high-energy and extroverted that I will not be surprised if we put her in kindergarten just to see how it goes (yes, I know extroverted children homeschool...but poor Yehva was born into a family of introverts, and I think it will always be a challenge to get her enough stimulation if she's stuck with us most days. But we'll see). I am also less sure about what I'm doing than it might seem from my writing; one of my weaknesses as a homeschooler, I told a friend recently, is that I am always second-guessing myself. It's actually one of my weaknesses in general; I'm more likely to have questions than opinions, about a lot of things.

That's all, really. I have my ranty moments, and I have my moderate, see-all-sides moments. I shared one the other day, thought I'd share the other one today.

What It Looks Like When I Finally Snap

Last night, I took an allergy medication with a decongestant in it too late in the evening, and couldn't get to sleep. At 1:36 a.m., on a website I hang out at, I came across someone making a very familiar argument, that people who opt out of the pubic school system (homeschoolers were mentioned specifically) are exercising privilege in an unacceptable way. Why don't they stay in the school system and work to improve? Why do they criticize without proposing solutions to the problem? "I don't see anyone with an alternative, besides pulling out of the system.
I just see a bunch of people who are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative, whether it's having someone homeschool their children, or a private school, dump on the system without giving any kind of path to change," this person said.

I am so tired of this argument. I don't know why my decision to homeschool my children seems like an intolerable expression of my privilege to so many people (including some I've met in real life, and including some friends of mine, as well as various internet commentators), or why they think it's my job but not theirs to fix public education. And last night, sleep-deprived and wired, I snapped at hearing it one more time, and I got ranty. Here's what I wrote:

[name redacted], I think I would fall into your category of people who "are privileged enough to be able to have an alternative," in my case homeschooling my children.

I am very interested in education issues, and over the last few years have read probably 60 to 80 books on the subject (that's a guess that may be wrong, but kind of totting up in my head--if anything it's probably low), including Alfie Kohn's stuff and Diane Ravitch's stuff and books about the history of education in the US and books about how schools shortchange boys and books about how they shortchange girls and every Respected Scholar's theory on the subject and every Nutcase Crank's theory on the subject. I also regularly read journalism on the subject, like Education Next, for instance, which I've found very informative. I did a whole reading project a couple of years ago on school finance, and another on the teachers' unions. I have done some freelance writing and editing work in the field of education and school improvement.

I could list what I see as the major problems with schooling today, and it would range from, oh Jesus, incompetent teachers to testing to a general disrespect for kids that means nobody cares if their time is wasted; from funding problems (both the problem of under-funding and the problem of funds coming from multiple sources for specific purposes so that a school might have the money to put in a swimming pool but not to buy the updated textbooks they need more urgently) to an over-powerful union to parents who protect their children from failure; from the progressive myth that every child under the right circumstances can be an intellectual to, at the other end of the spectrum, rigid tracking; from inadvertent sorting by social class that begins with what first-grade reading groups kids are placed into, to city schools that are so understaffed that one book I read about the Chicago school system said that on any given school day there are dozens of classrooms in the system that literally do not even have an adult presence; from bloated administrations to decaying infrastructure to technology initiatives that throw resources at putting computers at every desk, say, as if that will somehow magically make learning happen with joy while never asking teachers what they really need in their classrooms in order to do their jobs.

How's that for a start? If I put more thought into it, I could come up with more.

Solutions? Well, if I were the Great Omnipotent Being Of The World, I'd start by eliminating poverty, drug abuse, bad parenting in all its guises from neglect and physical abuse to pressuring kids to excel in parent-defined ways. I'd provide so much support for teachers, in the form of grading assistants, say, or a schedule of only 4 contact hours a day, and pay them so much that the profession would attract the very best, enthusiastic young people and not burn them out or spit them out. I'd lavish money and resources on some of the nutcakes who want to try radical alternatives; I'd seed Sudbury Valley-model schools all over the place, and same-sex academies, and year-round schools, and Montessori schools, and Reggio Emilia schools, and I'd make them all free so every parent could try the school she thought would work best for her particular kid. I'd turn the American workplace into a Dolly Parton/Jane Fonda utopia of job-sharing and on-site daycares and sunny little elementary schools right next to the corporate enterprise parks so that parents could be involved with their kids' educations and have the time and energy to also just hang out with them and enjoy them.

Read a little on the subject and you will find that the problems with schooling are many and varied and intractable. I get so tired of people jumping on my back for homeschooling my kids, as if I'm not entitled to do that unless I am somehow the one magic person who knows the secret solution to a decades-old problem.

I know it's an expression of my privilege that I get to be home with my kids full-time and homeschool, but practically everything in my life is an expression of my privilege, from waking up in a warm bed in a home with intact windows in a nice if modest suburb of a decent-if-declining small city, and driving a reliable car, and feeding my kids three meals plus snacks every day. Nobody has ever suggested that I stop feeding my children until I solve the problem of childhood hunger, and yet I'm supposed to know how to fix the American education system before I'm allowed to be critical of it, I'm supposed to somehow make my local schools an edutopia before I'm allowed to sit down and work a few math problems with my kids.

(I forgot to mention bullying, homophobia, sexist teachers, meaningless busywork, the resemblance between American high schools and minimum-security prisons, incoherent curricula, constantly-changing standards, educational fads, excessive oversight of teachers except where they are neglected, declining resources for gifted & talented programs, the over-medication of elementary school children, and a dozen other things, I'm sure, which will come to me later.)

Book Report: Diane Ravitch Changes Her Mind

A few years ago, I did a big reading project on education issues and education funding. As part of that project, I read a couple of things by Diane Ravitch, who has been writing about education in the US for forty years. Ravitch is a historian of education; her book Left Back: A Century of Battles Over School Reform is very good if you like that kind of thing, and I remember The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn as my introduction into the scandal that is textbook selection in the United States.

In The Language Police, and in other places, Ravitch championed school choice and local control. She wanted schools to have autonomy over curriculum and funds, and teachers to have autonomy in the classroom. In other writings, and in her work in the Department of Education, she has been a passionate advocate of vouchers, school choice, and charter schools, as well as of standards. She thought parents would embrace the opportunity to send their children to better schools, that charter schools would be like 1000 little petri dishes where educational theories and practices of all kinds could be tested and the best ones then raised up. She thought testing programs would be founded on clear and robust curriculum standards, that the curriculum would be the driving force, and what harm could then be done by students being tested over their knowledge of that curriculum?

She wasn't just some writer blathering about these things. She influenced policy. She was a Big Name.

Her latest book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education is her mea culpa. "How could I have been so wrong?" she asked herself. This book is her answer.

Much of the content was familiar to me, since I've been following these issues for awhile. I also loved the idea of school choice, of vouchers allowing poor parents to get their kids into schools that could serve them better, of charter schools offering parents a variety of educational options, so that they could choose the school that would best serve their own individual children.

But I was too cynical to let myself hope much. In this, I was wiser than Ravitch, but I am sorry to have been right about it.

Schools of choice? Turns out that in most places, fewer than 1% of parents choose to send their kids to a school that is not their neighborhood school. The reasons vary: people like their neighborhood schools; some parents aren't all that motivated to take an active part in choosing their children's school; many parents find the travel to an out-of-neighborhoood school prohibitive for them or their children (I remember reading a story a couple of years ago about a girl who spent 90 minutes on public transportation at the beginning and end of her school day so that she could attend a choice school. Who would wish that on their child?); it is hard to participate in extracurriculars at a school farther from home.

Ravitch said she thought there'd be a flood of discontented parents eager to move their kids to better schools if they could. Nope. No flood. 1% or fewer of eligible kids.

Charters? Turns out, in most places, they really do skim the best kids from local public schools. Kids who have parents involved enough to enroll them in charters are the same kids who are likely to do well even in a weak school, so selection bias plays a role. Also, it turns out that charters do expel problem children, who are dumped back on the local public school. (Yes, I know charters are public schools, too--but I think this language is parsimonious for my purposes.) Or they make sure they only get the most motivated kids by setting up subtle barriers to entry that nonetheless screen out the kids with less-supportive families, for instance by requiring an in-person meeting between parents and educators prior to enrollment.*

And, in most places, what they do and how they do it doesn't really look all that different from what other schools are doing. This is borne out in my very limited experience; one of my friends had her son in a charter school, for instance, and she felt that the benefits were subtle, like the kids not having to ask permission to use the bathroom.

Ravitch was dismayed and disappointed by No Child Left Behind, which focused on testing, plus rewards and sanctions for better or worse performance, without defining any curriculum standards. She had assumed there'd be curriculum standards; how could there not be? But there weren't. It was high-stakes testing divorced from any grounding in clear objectives about what children should learn.

Math and reading instruction began to edge out other subjects; test-taking strategies became a school subject; corruption and cheating were rife; state standards were watered down (in some states, the bar to be considered adequate on the tests is now as low as getting 17% of the questions right. That's an extreme example, but it's not a typo: 17% is a passing grade. This is why we have many states that claim 80-90% of, say, fourth graders are proficient in math and reading, while only 20-30% get that kind of score on the NAEP ).

All of this was entirely predictable. The problem with high-stakes testing, she quotes one researcher as saying, "is that it corrupts the tests as measures of student performance" (160). Turns out this is such a well-known thing that there's a term for it and has been for over 30 years: Campbell's Law, formulated by a sociologist in 1975, which says:

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (qtd. on p. 160)

NCLB is apparently the poster child for Campbell's Law.

There's more; Ravitch has a lot to say about the failures of the market-style approaches she had championed, and about her concerns that so much education funding is now coming from the foundations of people like Bill Gates and the Walton family (of Wal-Mart fame), who are trying to impose the business models that have made them so successful. She is concerned that the Gates foundation in particular has given so much money to almost literally every institute and publication that studies and monitors education and shapes policy that there is no one left who is enough of an outsider to offer a critique. And she does a very good critique of the current New New Idea, the idea that excellent teaching is the solution and that we can create a corps of excellent teachers by studying what excellent teachers do and then filling the schools with people who do that, too. (I like the part where she says that the problem with this plan becomes obvious if you take a moment to ask yourself why baseball teams don't just fill themselves up with .300 batters who are also great basemen and fielders.)

So, it's bad. What's Ravitch's solution?

Hell if I know. I do know she's a big fan of content and curriculum standards; she's a board member of the Core Knowledge Foundation, which advocates nationwide grade-based content standards. But beyond that, I don't know. The book concludes with a whole bunch of high-falutin' language, a veritable cascade of Glittering Generalities:

As a nation, we need a strong and vibrant public education system. As we seek to reform our schools, we must take care to do no harm. In fact, we must take care to make our schools once again the pride of the nation. Our public education system is a fundamental element of our democratic society. Our public schools have been the pathway to opportunity and a better life for generations of Americans, giving them the tools to fashion their own life and to improve the commonweal. To the extent that we strengthen them, we strengthen our democracy.

At the present time, public education is in peril. Efforts to reform public education are, ironically, diminishing its quality and endangering its very survival. We must turn our attention to improving the schools, infusing them with the substance of genuine learning and reviving the conditions that make learning possible.

I don't know about you, but I can't read that without picturing a waving flag and hearing some stirring martial music. But I still don't know what the heck Ravitch thinks the answer is. "Strong...vibrant...do no harm...pride of the nation...improve...infuse...revive." Got it! No problem! My friend Joann works in the field of school improvement; I'll send her those two paragraphs and she will thank me for making her job 100% easier.

*A little side note: Two years ago, I edited the annual report for the Michigan Legislature on the status of charter schools in Michigan. About a thousand pages of, "17% of students here versus 13% there on practically every measure possible. One of the things that rose up from that data that has stayed with me was that in Michigan, charter school students do about as well academically as their public school counterparts. The exception is African-American students in urban districts, who do somewhat better that AA kids in the public schools. I found it interesting.

Four Quick Book Notes

The Coming Population Crash: And Our Planet's Surprising Future, by Fred Pearce.

I have found books about population and demographics very interesting in the past, so I grabbed this one at the library. I thought I might be hitting the point of diminishing returns on the topic; I already know a lot about the declining birthrates we're seeing all over the world, and suspected I might end up skimming this because it was all too familiar. What Pearce does that made this worthwhile for me, though, is devote chapters to exploring the cultural forces that drive lower birthrates in various parts of the world. For instance, I was interested in his discussion of industrial ghost towns in the former East Germany. For reasons I can't quite remember, young women are more likely than young men in these areas to leave for cities in the west, seeking education and professional employment. So Germany has a demographic skew, with 120 or more women for every man [edit: I of course mean for every hundred men. Oops.] in some cities, and the opposite in these depressed former industrial areas. The men left behind are lost in an epidemic of alcoholism, and educated single professional women have low chances of finding a man they consider worth marrying. This leaves a surprisingly large proportion of Germans child-free.

Pearce did a great discussion of forces in India and Singapore, as well. One kind of throw-away line caught my attention because we hear so much about the high academic achievement of children in Singapore, who often attend school for 8-10 hours a day, and have tutoring and enrichment classes on top of that. Pearce mentions a woman who, in an interview, suggested that one reason she and her friends had chosen not to have kids was that, having lived through that experience, they didn't think childhood was worth it. They didn't want to have kids only to push them along that same path, but they didn't think it was realistic to think they could opt out.

This is a book that reminded me, through both historical and present-day examples, that human hunger is rarely caused by actual food production shortages, but is almost always caused by political decisions made by people in power. I have ancestors (supposedly) who came to the US during the Irish potato famine, and I was fascinated and appalled to learn that many poor people in Ireland were forcibly relocated, forced onto crowded ships on which many (do I remember half? That might be too high) would die on the passage, and the rest would simply be dumped on a wharf in the New World with no money or resources. I knew people migrated because of hunger; I had not known they were ejected from their homes en masse and forced out under such circumstances.

His stuff on current-day patterns of migration, and the forces driving it, are very interesting, too. He says Europe's birth rates are so low that Europe finds itself in the ridiculous position of turning away and deporting immigrants it would have to go looking for if they weren't coming on their own. A good read.

A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America, by Patricia Cline Cohen.

I love this kind of history, that points out ways that what we take for granted--like our assumption that a well-educated person will know mathematics--are actually historically-bound. Turns out it wasn't until well into the 19th Century that anyone thought math should be part of a well-rounded liberal education; it had always been seen as something only merchants and traders needed to know, and they only provisionally. Math was treated as a brute-force process of memorization of rules; people weren't even expected to understand, say, multiplication as a concept. Books called "Ready Reckoners" were published for the use of clerks; they were nothing but tables of calculations, so that a clerk selling X yards of cloth at Y price could look it up in a table, rather than be expected to perform the math.

To be sure, this was partly driven by the incredibly complex non-decimal money system, and by a system of measures that seems insane to the modern reader: a gallon of, say, milk had a different number of ounces than a gallon of beer, while a barrel of wine might have 4 more gallons in it than a barrel of maple syrup. There were three or four differing "ounces" used to measure different commodities. The spread of the idea that people should be able to perform math was partly made possible by Thomas Jefferson's drive to standardize measures and convert America to a decimal money system: at that point, ordinary people could figure this stuff out.

When math first became part of a standard education plan, it began as a single course taken during a student's final year of college. As it moved into earlier stages of education, the idea persisted for a long time that boys under 12 were simply not capable of grasping mathematics. We expect so much of elementary-aged children these days that I find it interesting to learn about how different expectations were not really that long ago.

Finally, I love stories of people resisting inevitable change. In the middle ages, as Arabic numbers first came to Europe, they were strongly resisted. Roman numerals had always been good enough, and even though the only thing you could do with them was count and record quantities, who needed to do more? Arabic numerals were seen as dangerous because they lent themselves to fraud: a 0 could easily be changed to a 6, for instance, or 412 to 1412. They evoked so much anxiety that in the late 13th century, the city of Florence actually outlawed their use. Like Canute commanding the tides.

Mennonite in a Little Black Dress by Rhoda Janzen.

I love spiritual memoirs. Sadly, despite its title, this isn't one. Janzen isn't a very good writer or a very deep thinker, and this book wanders around and skims the surface of what could have been some very interesting and meaty stuff. On the other hand, she can be wickedly funny. I'd be trying to read passages out loud to David and laughing too hard to finish them. A light read, kind of disappointing in some ways (I was thinking so often, "Wow, I'd like to hear more about that," and not getting it.), not too bad for passing an evening. Very glad I got it from the library; I wouldn't have wanted to pay good money for it.

Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto.

I am an old fan of John Taylor Gatto for his essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher, which has always seemed to me like a valid critique of school systems, and a good reminder that while we think we are teaching children content, our actions and words and expectations and use of time are also teaching them things we may not be aware of and wouldn't like if we were.

Gatto was a teacher in the New York public schools for 30 years, and he resigned in the year he won New York State's Teacher of the Year award, becoming a vocal critic of public schooling. I would like to give him an award, too: crappiest book I've read this year.

First, the book is not coherent. Oh, on the sentence level, it's fine. But I often could not figure out what he thought the connection between two ideas was. He'd talk about X for three paragraphs, and Y for the next three paragraphs, and I'd be mystified about why he put X and Y next to each other, what larger point he thought they made, why a juxtaposition seemed useful. The book is organized into chapters, but their content seems almost random.

But worse, Gatto's argument is founded on two bases, both of which are very weak. The first is anecdote. He loves a good story about a bad teacher, principal, superintendent, or school board. I think such stories can be useful, especially when they come from "good" schools--Gatto himself taught in a school in a very affluent neighborhood, and his students were the children of well-off, highly-educated parents. When he tells a toe-curling story and you know it comes from a school that might be held up as a model rather than a school everybody knows is broken, that does have impact.

But, as the saying goes, "the plural of anecdote is not data." There were 95,726 public schools in the US in the 2003-4 school year and 76.6 million children enrolled in 2006. With that many schools to draw on, it would be astonishing if I couldn't fill a book or six with crap anecdotes. Anecdotes are evocative; they are compelling; they are illustrative; they raise questions. They are not strong enough to support an entire argument about policy.

Fortunately, Gatto does not have only anecdotes in his toolbox. He has one other thing: The Genetic Fallacy. The genetic fallacy is the rejection of an institution or idea because of perceived problems with its origins, and critics of American public schooling have a lot of temptation for falling into this, because the genesis of our system is ugly, ugly, ugly.

You can find philanthropists, education experts, founders of the movement for public education, and even the occasional US president saying in so many words that public education's purpose is to fit the mass of people to accept a life of repetitive manual labor for the benefit of the few who will be allowed a true liberal education; to remove children from the home for so many hours and days that family ties will be weakened, replaced with loyalty to external authority; even to deliberately suppress children's innate genius, because, as one person Gatto quotes says (a president of Harvard, IIRC), we have more statesmen, entrepreneurs, and potential leaders of industry than we need already.

The first time you learn this stuff, it's pretty shocking. And I think it can be worth examining whether, given public education's ugly birth, there are legacies in our system that should be examined, that perhaps continue to work against the kinds of goals we have today, for student achievement and the fulfillment of potential.

But somebody needs to tell Gatto that repeating that one thing Woodrow Wilson said in 1909 in four different places in your book does not actually constitute a critique of public education as it is practiced today. None of his sources were written later than 1920, I don't think--the only time he dips a toe into more modern ideas, it's to compare something to "one of the first laws Hitler passed." Early 20th century eugenicists plus Hitler: a toxic combination, indeed, but not one that any rational person could think had a lot to do with 21st century schools.

[Edit: on re-reading it, I find The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher a bit overwrought as well. The six lessons are worth paying attention to; the rest of the essay, not so much.]