The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice are Undermining Education
What I Learned About School Reform
In the fall of 2007, I reluctantly decided to have my office repainted. It was inconvenient. I work at home, on the top floor of a nineteenth-century brownstone in Brooklyn. Not only did I have to stop working for three weeks, but I had the additional burden of packing up and removing everything in my office. I had to relocate fifty boxes of books and files to other rooms in the house until the painting job was complete.
After the patching, plastering, and painting was done, I began unpacking twenty years of papers and books, discarding those I no longer wanted, and placing articles into scrapbooks. You may wonder what all this mundane stuff has to do with my life in the education field. I found that the chore of reorganizing the artifacts of my professional life was pleasantly ruminative. It had a tonic effect, because it allowed me to reflect on the changes in my views over the years.
At the very time that I was packing up my books and belongings, I was going through an intellectual crisis. I was aware that I had undergone a wrenching transformation in my perspective on school reform. Where once I had been hopeful, even enthusiastic, about the potential benefits of testing, accountability, choice, and markets, I now found myself experiencing profound doubts about these same ideas. I was trying to sort through the evidence about what was working and what was not. I was trying to understand why I was increasingly skeptical about these reforms, reforms that I had supported enthusiastically. I was trying to see my way through the blinding assumptions of ideology and politics, including my own.
I kept asking myself why I was losing confidence in these reforms. My answer: I have a right to change my mind. Fair enough. But why, I kept wondering, why had I changed my mind? What was the compelling evidence that prompted me to reevaluate the policies I had endorsed many times over the previous decade? Why did I now doubt ideas I once had advocated?
The short answer is that my views changed as I saw how these ideas were working out in reality. The long answer is what will follow in the rest of this book. When someone chastised John Maynard Keynes for reversing himself about a particular economic policy he had previously endorsed, he replied, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" This comment may or may not be apocryphal, but I admire the thought behind it. It is the mark of a sentient human being to learn from experience, to pay close attention to how theories work out when put into practice.
What should we think of someone who never admits error, never entertains doubt hut adheres unflinchingly to the same ideas all his 1ife, regardless of new evidence? Doubt and skepticism are signs of rationality. When we are too certain of our opinions, we run the risk of ignoring any evidence that conflicts with our views. It is doubt that shows we are still thinking, still willing to reexamine hardened beliefs when confronted with new facts and new evidence.
The task of sorting my articles gave me the opportunity to review what I had written at different times, beginning in the mid-l960s. As I flipped from article to article, I kept asking myself how far had I strayed from where I started? Was it like me to shuffle off ideas like an ill-fitting coat? As I read and skimmed and remembered, I began to see two themes at the center of what I have been writing for more than four decades. One constant has been my skepticism about pedagogical fads, enthusiasms, and movements. The other has been a deep belief in the value of a rich, coherent school curriculum, especially in history and literature, both of which are so frequently ignored, trivialized, or politicized.
Over the years, I have consistently warned against the lure of "the royal road to learning," the notion that some savant organization has found an easy solution to the problems of American education. As a historian of education, I have often studied the rise and fall of grand ideas that were promoted as the sure cure for whatever ills were afflicting our schools and students.
Chapter Five
The Business Model in New York City
In the first decade of the now century, New York City became the national testing ground for market-based reforms. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his chancellor, Joel Klein, applied business principles to overhaul the nation's largest school system, which enrolled 1.1 million children. Their reforms won national and even international acclaim. They reorganized the management of the schools, battled the teachers' union, granted large pay increases to teachers and principals, pressed for merit pay, opened scores of charter schools, broke up large high schools into small ones, emphasized frequent practice for state tests, gave every school a letter grade, closed dozens of low-performing schools, and institutionalized the ideas of choice and competition (albeit without vouchers). In 2007, only five years after mayoral control of the schools was authorized by the state legislature, New York City won the Broad Prize as the most improved urban school district in the nation.
In the fall of 2001, media mogul Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York City. One of the wealthiest men in the world, Bloomberg had achieved renown as a businessman and philanthropist. As a candidate, he vowed to gain control of the public schools and to make them successful. His campaign literature maintained that the system was "in a state of emergency" and noted, "remarkably, $12 billion -- 30% of our city's total expenditures, a sum greater than the school spending in Chicago and Los Angeles combined -- is not enough to teach 1.1 million public school students or to provide safe, clean and appropriately equipped school facilities." He vowed to remake the system with management reforms, incentives, merit pay, testing, and accountability.
When Bloomberg ran for mayor, the schools were overseen by a seven-member Board of Education which was appointed by six different elected officials. Each of the city's five borough presidents (from Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island) selected one member of the central board. The remaining two members of the board were appointed by the mayor. Since this arrangement became law in 1969, every mayor had sought to regain the power to select the Board of Education. For nearly a century prior to l969, the city's mayors had appointed every single member of the Board of Education; usually the members of the board were distinguished citizens and community leaders. Once appointed, however, the board was an independent agency, and its members had fixed terms and the power to hire the schoo1 superintendent and oversee his policies and budget.
Mayor Bloomberg did not want an independent board. He wanted full, direct control of the schools, with no meddlesome board to second-guess him.
In June 2002, the state legislature turned control of the public school system over to Bloomberg, who promptly established the New York City Department of Education (DOE) to manage the schools. The legislation continued a central board of education, while giving the mayor of appointness, who would serve at his pleasure; Bloomberg renamed it the Panel for Educational Policy and made clear that he considered it of no importance. When he introduced the members at a press conference, he said, "They don't have to speak, and they don't have to serve. That's what 'serving at the pleasure' means." He sold the Board of Education's headquarters in Brooklyn to a real estate developer and moved the new department's headquarters to the Tweed Courthouse, adjacent to his offices at City Hall. Henceforth, the shorthand term for the New York City Department of Education was simply "Tweed."
Thus, the DOE was housed in a magnificent building that system bolized the infamous Tweed Ring. Moreover, there was this irony: William Marcy Tweed, are the boss of Tammany Hall, had let the effort to abolish the New York Board of Education in l87l and turn the school system into a municipal department, making it easier to control and loot. Boss Tweed's Department of Public Instruction banned the purchase of books from the Harper Brothers publishing company as punishment for Thomas Nast's cartoons lampooning the Tweed Ring in Harper's Weekly. In 1873, after the Tweed Ring was exposed, the state legislature reestablished an independent Board of Education, appointed by the mayor. And from 1873 until 1969, the mayor appointed every member of the Central board.
A few weeks after he gained control, Mayor Bloomberg offered the top education job in the nation's largest city to Joel Klein, a lawyer who had served as assistant attorney general in the Justice Department during the Clinton administration.
What Would Mrs. Ratliff Do?
My favorite teacher was Mrs. Ruby Ratliff. She is the teacher I remember best, the one who influenced me most, who taught me to love literature and to write with careful attention to grammar and syntax. More than fifty years ago, she was my homeroom teacher at San Jacinto High School in Houston, and I was lucky enough to get into her English class as a senior.
Mrs. Ratliff was gruff and demanding. She did not tollerate foolishness or disruptions. She had a great reputation among students. When it came time each semester to sign up for classes, there was always a long line outside her door. What I remember most about her was what she taught us. We studied the greatest writers of the English language, not their long writings like novels (no time for that), but their poems and essays. We read Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, Milton, and other major English writers. Now, many years later, in times of stress or sadness, I still turn to poems that I first read in Mrs. Ratliff's class.
Mrs. Ratliff did nothing for our self-esteem. She challenged us to meet her exacting standards. I think she imagined herself bringing enlightenment to the barbarians (that was us). When you wrote something for her class, which happened with frequency, you paid close attention to proper English. Accuracy mattered. She had a red pen and she used it freely. Still, she was always sure to make a comment that encouraged us to do a better job. Clearly she had multiple goals for her students, beyond teaching literature and grammar. She was also teaching about character and personal responsibility. These are not the sorts of things that appear on any standardized test.
She loved her subject, and she enjoyed the respect the students showed her, especially since this was a large high school where students did not easily give respect to their teachers. Despite the passage of years, I still recall a class discussion of Shelley's "Ozymandias, " and the close attention that thirty usually rowdy adolescents paid to a poem about a time and a place we could barely imagine. I wonder if Mrs. Ratliff has her counterparts today, teachers who love literature and love to teach it, or whether schools favor teachers who have been trained to elicit mechanical response from their students about "text-to-self connections," "inferencing," "visualizing," and the other formalistic behaviors so loved by au courant pedagogues. If Mrs. Ratliff were planning to teach these days, I expect that her education professors and supervisors would warn her to get rid of that red pen, to abandon her insistence on accuracy, and to stop being so judgmental. And they would surely demand that she replace those dated poems and essays with young adult literature that teaches adolescents about the lives of other adolescents just like themselves.
At our graduation, she made a gift of a line or two of poetry to each of the students in her homeroom. I got these two: "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," the last line of Tennyson's "Ulysses," which we had read in class, and "among them, but not of them," from Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," which we had not read in class.