Susan Jacoby Bungles Education Reform
On March 14, 2010, the New York Times ran an op-ed by Susan Jacoby on education and federalism. Jacoby has written widely and smartly on many subjects, but why the Times felt she should handle this subject is a mystery to me. Plenty of other thinkers could have done a bang-up job, like Patrick McGuinn, Paul Manna, Rick Hess, or…
But, the editors chose to go with Jacoby, and to disastrous effect. Her op-ed is a classic example of someone clever writing about a topic that they know little about and utterly bollixing it up. That the Times should run it is lamentable, and it is one more piece of evidence of the long slide of the editorial page. (Don’t even get me started on Judith Warner and her mischief-making.)
In “One School from Sea to Shining Sea,” Jacoby accurately observes that federalism is partially to blame for the mediocrity of U.S. public schools. This is indisputable, and certainly not news. If 50 different states and thousands of sub-state governments all create their own schools, well, not surprisingly some are going to be good and many are going to be bad. Different locales, different tax bases, different human capital, etc. It also follows that this fragmentation makes it hard for the federal government to do much to improve the schools. (The same, of course, can be said for other state and local services, like policing.)
But Jacoby goes on to advocate three “reforms” which are utterly hare-brained.
First, even though a national curriculum cannot be imposed, serious public intellectuals of varying political views need to step up and develop voluntary guides, in every academic subject, for use by educators who do not disdain expert opinion. The historians Diane Ravitch and Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who disagreed politically on many issues, advocated for just such a set of national history standards in the late 1990s. These guidelines met with approval from just about everyone but the extreme fringes of the left and right.
Wow—so many gaffes in one short paragraph.
First: Not only were national standards developed two decades ago, a new set of “Common Core” standards recently have been produced. The big newspapers have been covering this latter development for over a year. How’d Jacoby miss this?
Second: Diane Ravitch and the first Bush administration actually funded the creation of standards in the early 1990s. Jacoby only seems to have caught the tail end of the long story of national education standards.
Third: On what issues did Ravitch and Schelsinger disagree? Having known Ravitch for years and read much of Schlesinger’s work, I’d say the two are more like peas in a pod—both are New Dealers at heart and lovers of the public schools.
Fourth: Actually, the national standards created in the early and mid-1990s unleashed a firestorm of controversy amongst political and media elites. The U.S. Senate condemned the U.S. history standards by a vote of 99 to 1. The standards were never presented to the U.S. public for examination and the public wasn’t polled on its feelings, so where does Jacoby get this hokum about the “late 1990s” standards being widely approved?
Aaah, but the horrors do not end there. Jacoby has another brilliant idea:
Second, the federal government must invest more in training and identifying excellent teaching candidates. France, faced with a teacher shortage in the early 1990s, revamped its training system so that aspiring teachers would receive a partial salary in the last year of their studies. Prestigious institutes for teacher training were also set up to replace less rigorous programs, with admission based on competitive national examinations.
Nearly all the teachers in America’s classrooms are trained by teachers colleges. Trying to set up a national competitor to these teacher factories is folly. Really, how would that work? Would we build a giant teacher college in Washington, DC and enroll tens of thousands of would-be-teachers per year? Seriously, what exactly does Jacoby envision? And let’s not forget that France’s centralized system does not well educate all its children. Plenty of nonwhite, and ghettoized French kids are educationally left behind.
As Arthur Levine‘s Educating Teachers 2006 report showed so clearly, if we want better teachers, we need to reform teacher colleges.
Mercifully, Jacoby has just one more education reform proposal, and its more of an ill-read whine than anything else
Finally, the idea that educational innovation is best encouraged by promoting competition between schools and pouring public money into quasi-private charter schools should be re-examined by both the left and the right. One of the worst provisions in the Obama administration’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” program strongly encourages states to remove restrictions on the number of privately managed charter schools. Here again, we have the worst of both worlds: a federal carrot that can lead only to a further balkanizing of a public education system already hampered by a legacy of extreme decentralization.
Am I reading this correctly—we do not want to entrust charter schools with educational innovation. Instead, we want to rely upon… Who? Government-run schools? And is Jacoby implying that we should turn back the clock, and reintegrate charter schools into the government-run school system?
Weirdly, Jacoby’s fails to realize that spawning more charter schools can be a good thing. Not only do these schools give parents more choices, charter schools also are more accountable. Either they produce well educated children or they lose their charter and are closed.(1) Compare that to government-run schools, many of which are permitted to under-educate students for decades while the tax dollars just keep flowing in. And charter schools can be, believe it or not, a blessing to dysfunctional public school systems. Why? Because they reduce enrollment in the school system, which opens the opportunity for the system to be down-sized into a smaller more manageable size. DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s response to rising charter school enrollments and a sliding public school population is illustrative—cut useless bureaucracy, remove lousy teachers, and rationalize the system.
As a final insult to the intelligent reader, Jacoby closes her piece with this bit of highfalutin nonsense:
Daniel Webster, eulogizing Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who both died on July 4, 1826, spoke of “an unconquerable spirit of free inquiry … and a diffusion of knowledge throughout the community” as two of the fundamental requirements of American democracy. He predicted, “If they fall, we fall with them; if they stand, it will be because we have upholden them.” These great principles cannot be upheld if the quality of our public schooling continues to depend more on where a student lives than on a national commitment to excellence.
Webster was a bit of a fanatic for education, and in this instance he was using Jefferson and Adams to push his own viewpoint. If one looks at what Jefferson and Adams themselves thought about education and society, one will find they were anything but egalitarians. Jefferson spoke of establishing schools that would “rake geniuses from the rubbish.” He didn’t think all children should be well educated and expected to much participate in self-governance. And Adams was perhaps even more suspicious of democracy.
The notion that our democratic republic is dependent upon government-operated schools is unproven. Walter Lippmann called out this claim 85 years ago; and reams of political science studies indicates that people seldom vote based on reason or deep knowledge of the issues. Before this country had public schools, it had private schools. When Adams and Jefferson lived, there were few public schools. Yet, the Republic endured. And, it is a fact that private school graduates tend to be more civically engaged than public schoolers.
Here, an old saw seems appro—one is entitled to one’s own opinion, not one’s own facts. And it should go without saying that newspapers, especially influential ones, should not entrust important subjects to dilettantes.
Notes:
(1) Education standards/assessments and charter schools are not antithetical. Indeed, charter schools should be asked to submit their students to the same tests that public school children take. This allows the public to see whether their tax dollars are being well-used.
