Heroes of Education Reform
From Common Knowledge, Volume 11 Number 4, 1998
© 1998 Core Knowledge Foundation. Not to be copied or reproduced without permission from the Core Knowledge Foundation, 801 E. High Street, Charlottesville, VA 22902.
The theme of today’s event is heroes of education reform. I’ll start by naming two heroes of my own who may be unknown to you. The first is a man in my hometown of Charlottesville named Gerald Terrell. In the early 90s, in the midst of the semi-hysterical reactions against Core Knowledge and E. D. Hirsch in the local schools led by the University of Virginia School of Education, saying that it was traditional, Eurocentric, rote memorizing, racist, and developmentally inappropriate — in the midst of intense social pressure within the schools to stay away from all that, despite parental interest, Gerald Terrell, who is an African-American principal of one elementary school, said “Hell, this Core Knowledge makes sense to me. What we’re doing now works okay for my rich kids, but not for my kids from the trailer park. Might as well give it a try.”
He then proceeded to persuade his teachers, all of whom began to feel the disapproval of their colleagues, but they bucked each other up. Whenever Gerald entered a room with other principals, the room would fall silent. He was ostracized. So were his enthusiastic and persuaded teachers.
I once asked Gerald Terrell how he had the guts to stand up to that sort of professional and social pressure. I won’t forget his answer. He said: You know I grew up in Florida. When I was a kid somebody dared me to swim across a pond that had alligators. I swam across that pond, and I haven’t been scared of anything since.” There you have the makings of a hero. Gerald Terrell’s epic is still going on. A couple of years ago, a statistical analyst at the district office ran some data on its elementary schools. One graph plotted the scores of the various schools along one coordinate and the percentages of its students on free and reduced-price lunch along the other. To no one’s surprise, the dots representing the schools formed a neat slanted line — except for one dot. There was Gerald Terrell’s school — way up there, achieving way above the line in splendid isolation from the rest. His poor kids were scoring as well as the rich kids in other schools. Needless to say, the district has now stopped making these graphs, and Gerald’s school remains the only one in the district which follows Core Knowledge. But despite the continued resentment against Gerald and his teachers, his poor kids continue to flourish. So Gerald is my first nomination for a hero.
My second is Glenn Reynolds, a name I doubt you have heard. He is the elected superintendent of the Polk County Public Schools in Florida, a district about the size of Nashville, with some 68 elementary schools. What Gerald Terrell managed to accomplish in a single school, Glenn has accomplished for a rather large and hugely diverse public school district. This has taken political skills of a high order, and, as usual with Core Knowledge, a lot of courage. If I were at a certain Oxford college where they write bets in a book about what will happen in five years, and then actually pay up, I would bet that Polk County, adjusting for demographics, will be the highest achieving and most equitable school district in the nation — not least because it is starting at the beginning with Core Knowledge pre-school then Core Knowledge Kindergarten, all the way up. The teachers are immensely enthusiastic, as are the parents and press. To lead a whole district into such a pitch of activity and optimism, into a state of mind where everybody, including the children, plan to work cooperatively and hard — that is an epic, heroic accomplishment.
There are many unsung heroes in the Core Knowledge movement — parents, principals, brave teachers, exercising leadership and common sense against social ostracism. I have chosen those two names, because I want to make a more general point. There are several interesting features of these two examples. First, note that both of them are in the ordinary public school system. The children in those schools are receiving a first-class and fair education without our having altered the bureaucracy or the governance structure. This is actually a promising sign for the various structural reforms in governance structure such as charter schools, privatization, vouchers, public-school choice, because it shows that the ordinary schools can be reformed, not just replaced. For most of us the hope for the reforms in governance is that they will induce competition, and scare the sleeping giant into giving a good education to all children — even those in the non-charter, non-privatized, neighborhood schools. That is the theory — let’s get competition going to rouse the sleeping, lazy, inept, and wrongheaded giant.
I agree wholeheartedly with that aim. I agree with the charter movement. How could I not? Nineteen percent of the charter schools in the nation are Core Knowledge schools. But I also think we should pay close attention to schools like Cale and districts like Polk County, because nobody has been tempted to propose a charter school in either neighborhood. One of my friends visiting Denmark was shown a public school near Copenhagen that had graduated a lot of distinguished Danes including Niels Bohr. “Gee, that must be a specially fine school,” he suggested. “No,” came the answer, “nothing special. We tr y to make all our schools equally good, and we largely succeed.” The data from Denmark bear out that claim. If we over here want to give all of our children a square deal, that Danish ideal is the one ultimately we should aim for — no matter what roads we take to get there. Some of you may be thinking: “That’s Denmark. The U.S. is not like little Denmark.” True enough. But Rhode Island is like little Denmark. So is Polk County. If it can happen in one place in the U.S. it can happen in another. We reformers need to be interested not just in special but in ordinary success stories, if we want to get the whole system on track. After visiting elementary schools for a decade, I know that most teachers want the best for their children. They are thwarted not by laziness but by inadequate preparation, inadequate ideas, and an incoherent curriculum.
If you sense that I am a little skeptical of a too great reliance on structural inducements to competition, you are right. The market is a fickle beast. One of the most famous features of the market is Gresham’s law that bad money drives out good. Gresham knew that if there was a debased coinage and a true coinage in circulation at the same time, people would use the bad stuff in commerce and hoard the good. If you want a different result, then you have to guide and constrain the market, and not leave it entirely to its own devices. Similarly in education, you can’t assume that if people are free to choose, the system will automatically improve, and that an invisible hand will cause our children to be well educated. I call this “free-market romanticism.” It is parallel to the educationist romanticism which assumes that if you let a child’s nature develop at its own pace, an invisible hand will cause the child to read when he or she is “developmentally ready.” Quite the contrary, the way to get all children to read is to understand the details of the reading transaction, just as Gresham understood the details of the market transaction. You have to know the details, you just can’t just leave it to the invisible hand of competition.
Reading is a good place to amplify the point. Everything in modern education depends on learning to read early, and to build ever greater reading comprehension through the grades. It matters not whether a school is charter or choice, public or private, every child ought to be decoding fairly well by the end of first grade. This is not something we can in good conscience leave to the good will of teachers, or to the political exigencies of school-board politics, or even to the invisible hand of the competitive marketplace. Like Gresham, we need to get familiar with the nitty gritty, and understand — as they say — where the rubber meets the road. This means a universal set of requirements regarding the outcomes of reading instruction — and no excuses. And it means a responsibility to supply every school with the information and the means to achieve those outcomes. Many hundreds of thousands of children have already been cheated. We need to intervene in that market. This is exactly what the state of California has done — to the great glory of another hero — Marion Joseph. I can only applaud the interventionist actions of the California State Board of Education — for which I’m delighted to say, Jerry Hume deserves a lot of credit.
Another place where the rubber meets the road is math. Here again, for the sake of the children and the country, educational romanticism and free-market romanticism both have to be met head on and confronted with what we know to be true about math education. The more basic processes have to be learned and made automatic through a lot of practice if our children are to become proficient at arithmetic and later enabled to perform higher levels of math. As with reading, we should certainly permit the free market to rule in methods and in textbooks so long as satisfactory results are being obtained. But since markets are never purely free, I do not think either public bureaucrats or free-market advocates should be permitted to foster methods and practices that cheat our children and fail to get results.
Let me speak more generally about how the nitty gritty of the the child’s mind and the workings of the classroom ought to place definite constraints on what we should ethically permit in any school. We should no longer permit a school to fail to provide some explicit commonality of learning within each grade and from one grade to the next inside the same school building. We should heed the familiar complaint of children that they had Charlotte’s Web three years in a row, and the rainforest four years running, but never did learn the basic facts of photosynthesis. This kind of content-incoherence is ineffective and harmful, especially to disadvantaged children, and it should not be permitted in either a regular public school or a charter school any more than alcohol, drugs, or guns. The surgeon general has determined that curricular incoherence is harmful to your child’s education.
When the governors met in Charlottesville in 1989, the first principle they agreed on was that every child should come to first grade ready to learn — a sound principle — except that “learn” is a transitive verb which requires an object. Ready to learn “what”? Have you noticed that the education world has a weakness for verbs without objects? “Ready to learn.” “Critically think.” And they also like using verbs with indirect objects pretending to be direct ones: like “teach the child, not the subject.”
Better to teach the child the subject. Anyway, the governors’ idea of readiness is sound, in fact it is fundamental. Readiness is where the rubber meets the road for all facets and stages of education. I can learn something new only when I am ready — which means when I can attach it to something I already know. I can understand what a “horseless carriage” is only if know that carriages are drawn by horses. I can understand an allusion to the Nile river, only if I have already learned what it is. Only when the children in a classroom have this necessary mental velcro can they latch on to the new thing to be learned. And if they lack it, as many disadvantaged children do, then they will miss what is going on and fall further and further behind. So the doctrine that all children should come to a grade ready to learn its content is a sound principle. But it must not be limited to first graders. Why should second graders be discriminated against? Or third graders? Every child should enter every classroom ready to learn, which means the verb learn must have an object — ready to learn the things to be learned in the new grade, which in turn will give the child the wherewithal to learn the things that will be taught in the following grade.
Learning is cumulative for all of us. The new has to build on the old. To know the quality of a school it is not enough to make a site visit that lasts just a few hours. Outwardly, most schools look the same. It’s only when you look at multi-year results that you can learn about the quality and equity of a school. Useful, accurate information about long-term results seems to me the reform of reforms, because even for free-market schemes, the competitive principle can only work if there is a free and accurate flow of significant information. When I mentioned the wonderful equity results of Gerald Terrell’s school, I omitted to mention an interesting point. We know those results only by accident. Since
they were released in 1996, the district made two changes. It adopted a new system of tests, making it impossible to trace the pattern of results over time, and it stopped creating demographically-sensitive graphs. I have encountered reluctance to release information in many districts. It must be something that superintendents learn at superintendent school. They change districtwide tests periodically for reasons that may sound super-rigorous, but which make it impossible to conduct long-term analyses. If this information were known, and if the longitudinal results of schoolswere known, then I believe that the charter school movement could be still more effective and that competition could effect more significant school improvement. I think an economist won the Nobel Prize by showing that market efficiency depends on the free flow of accurate information. Several of you here have anticipated me in considering good information an essential principle of reform. I know that is a critical cause to which Checker Finn has devoted a lot of energy. When school boards start requiring the dissemination of accurate longitudinal data — that will be the beginning oftrue reform, because good information is be the most reliable long-term way to change bad practices and bad received ideas. Which brings up my final theme — ideas.
The schools around Gerald Terrell’s school failed to learn from its practices or equal its results not because of laziness or lack of concern, but rather because received ideas are extremely hard to change. Shifts of ideas are hard to accomplish even in the economic sphere — as Maynard Keynes understood when he wrote: “Sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, that are dangerous for good and evil.” He also said: “The ideas of economists and philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. [...] Practical men who believe themselves exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”
The dominant ideas in U.S. education are especially hard to resist, because they are so attractive and child-centered. Young children, it is said, are not ready for hard or abstract schoolwork, which is “developmentally inappropriate” and even harmful. In later grades, factual knowledge is disparaged because “critical thinking” and “understanding” are more important than “rote memorizing of mere facts.” These slogans are doubly attractive because they fit the early-childhood romanticism that has been part of our culture since the 19th century, when Elizabeth Peabody started our first Kindergarten. “Kindergarten” means children-garden — a place to grow children naturally.
American ideas about education were born in the Enlightenment. Jefferson stressed the need for hard work and factual learning at an early age. But most of our ideas were formed by 19th-century romantics who proposed that children should blossom naturally. We are inheritors of both traditions. On the one side we have the hard-work tradition of Jefferson and Horatio Alger — rising from rags to riches by knowledge and hard work. On the other side, we have our romantic individualism: wishing every child to flower in its own natural way. We need a better balance between these two traditions. A first step to that end will be to de-polarize our present educational debates. You are familiar with the polarities that dominate current discussions about our schools:
- Phonics vs. Whole Language
- Learning the Multiplication Table vs. Grasping Math Concepts
- Factual Knowledge vs. Critical Thought
- Memorizing vs. Deep Understanding
- Objective Tests vs. Authentic Assessment
- Extrinsic Rewards vs. Intrinsic Interest
- Objective Achievement vs. Self Esteem
- Uniformity vs. Diversity
- Effort vs. Ability
Each of these polarities merits a book. But don’t you find it odd that one side of these oppositions should be labeled “conservative” and the other side “liberal?” Is factual knowledge Republican and critical thinking Democratic? Are extrinsic rewards Republican, and intrinsic interest Democratic? Is effort Republican? Ability Democratic? The retreat to political labels reflects what one scholar in a different context has called “thought fatigue.” After a while, people just stop thinking and take a stand. It’s tiring constantly to confront the complexities of education with a flexible mind. It’s easier to politicize the debate.
Almost all the reforms that I currently advocate happen to be on the so-called conservative side of the ledger, and some of my colleagues suspect me of being a closet Republican. Yet under different circumstances, I would advocate some of the supposedly liberal slogans. These polar oppositions really exist on a continuum, and many of them merge into their opposites. For instance, academic achievement is not opposed to but leads to self-esteem. Factual knowledge leads to critical thought. The decision about which end of the continuum needs to be stressed depends on the historical moment. Our thinking about education needs to be more contextual. For many decades, our schools have adhered to the the anti-fact, romantic tradition, and now we need a strong temporary, counter-emphasis on stern Enlightenment principles in order to achieve a more balanced approach. In the 1800s I would have advocated romantic reforms. Nowadays, we need to stress the things the romantics were reacting against: book learning, factual knowledge, practice, and hard work.
Especially we need to de-emphasize the romantic overemphasis on innate ability rather than effort. It’s convenient to think that poor children are destined to be low achievers in school because of social forces and innate differences. Yet some schools manage to bring all children to grade level. Effort is more important than ability in school. By starting early enough, and working hard enough, all children can read, write, and calculate at grade level or above. Students’ achievements are not innately determined by their social disadvantages or their different “intelligences” and “learning styles.” Since Jefferson and Horace Mann — our two great visionaries of American public education — levelling the playing field has been and continues to be the authentic aim of public schooling.
I’ll end by quoting Horace Mann:
Enlarging the cultivated class or caste will open a wider area over which the social feelings will expand; and if this education should be universal and complete, it would do more than all things else to obliterate factitious [artificial] distinctions in society.
Today, we know enough to make that vision a reality. But to attain it we will need to overcome thought-fatigue, and renounce the facile political polarizing of the complexities of education.
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Last updated: Thu, May 22 2008
