Copyright 1995 American Academy of Arts and
Sciences
Daedalus
September 22, 1995
SECTION: Vol. 124 ; No. 4 ; Pg. 1; ISSN: 0011-5266
LENGTH: 16077 words
HEADLINE: Where is American education going? Report on a convocation.
BYLINE: Holton, Gerald ; Goroff, Daniel
BODY:
POLITICS OF EDUCATION
IF, AS ALL MEMBERS OF THE CONVOCATION AGREED, the education of America's
children needs to be placed high on the nation's agenda, the most pressing
problem is how this can be done. It is clearly not enough to debate the
respective roles of federal, state, and local authorities, nor to believe that
the current national political climate will last forever. Indeed, given the
authority that exists in educational matters in states and local communities and
the seriousness of the social problems that afflict American society, education
must soon again figure prominently. Madeleine Kunin, Deputy Secretary, US
Department of Education, in her opening remarks, voiced a theme that would
reverberate through the next three days: "We are dealing with the most important
responsibility of any society--of any species for that matter. The primary
responsibility is the education and rearing of the young in order to continue
the life of the species." In the United States at this moment the political
debate, at least as seen from Washington, revolves around the question of
whether all children can be educated to a high standard. In Kunin's words,
"Those who say no' really envision a very different kind of democratic and
economic system than those who say yes,' and that is why the voices for yes'
have to be heard." Because the "yes" voices are not being heard sufficiently,
and seem for much of the time to be almost mute, Paul Schwarz, Co-director of
the Central Park East Secondary School in New York, spoke of the need to "make
the arguments resonate across a substantial portion of the American population."
Schooling in "fundamental democracy" seemed a prime obligation to Schwarz,
as it was to Roger Soder, Associate Director of the Center for Educational
Renewal at the University of Washington, who spoke of the moral, social, and
political dimensions of teaching in a society that relies on civil discourse,
that knows itself to be a pluralistic society. Lauren Resnick, Director of the
Learning Research and Development Center and Professor of Psychology at the
University of Pittsburgh, understanding the importance of devising a "compelling
vision," warned that in its absence the opportunity for a "historic convergence
of educational goals--a just society, a sound economy, and personal
fulfillment"--would be lost. "Were that to happen," David Gardner, President of
The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, said, "the consequences would be
grave." He believes that if the general public perceives that there is in fact
an unrelieved decline in the purposes and quality of American education, support
for the public schools, particularly in the middle class, would be withdrawn.
The "divided society" that so many Americans have warned against
for several decades would indeed become a reality.
ECONOMIC CONSIDERATIONS
Very early in the discussions the issue of work--employment--came to the
fore. If, as so many argue, jobs are certain to be more demanding in the future,
calling for greater skills, something like a lifetime of continuous learning has
to be contemplated. Robert Semler, Regional Administrator for Employment and
Training at the Department of Labor, believes that such a program will have to
look "far beyond the classroom walls to integrate all--the business community,
teachers, educators at the university level, and the family itself." Resnick
warned that "the promise of future jobs may turn out to be just a hoax" if
communities do not strive to inject rigor in their educational offerings, making
it possible for graduates to move about, to profit from the opportunities
presented by this society. Paul Dimond, Special Assistant to the President for
Economic Policy, was no less explicit when he said, "You can look at any number
of studies that show that the ticket to higher wages in this country, to higher
living standards, is higher skills. Studies shows that for each year after
secondary education there is a 6 to 1 2 percent increase in earnings. " Arguing
that there is now too little connection between skills learned in school and
those required in the workplace, Dimond contrasted this situation with the one
that prevails in Europe, where apprenticeship systems are common. In his words,
"We must build bridges between employers and future employees so that the latter
can in fact understand what is out there in the real world and see that their
learning has some relevance."
PARENTS' ATTITUDES
If the theme of employment opportunities figured early, and if others
returned to it frequently, that opened by Albert Shanker, President of the
American Federation of Teachers, proved to be no less compelling. Shanker,
concerned with what parents think of their children's schools, noted that recent
studies, including those of the Public Agenda Foundation, suggest that despite
instances of highly visible explosions, often noted and commented on by the mass
media, "there really are no multicultural wars among parents." Their wishes are
very precise; in Shanker's words, "Parents are clear about what they want: safe,
orderly, academically rigorous schools--traditional schools--with consequences
for students who fail to meet standards." Also, contrary to what some believe,
"there is a very high correspondence," he said, "between what parents and the
public want and what teachers want." This is not to suggest that existing
conditions are satisfactory, nor that the relative equilibrium that now exists
will be continued into the future, but it does say that there is no fundamental
disagreement about elementary and secondary school education between those who
are professionally delegated to provide it and those whose taxes support it.
Harold ("Doc") Howe II, Senior Lecturer Emeritus at the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, listening to all this, reminded the Convocation that
"schooling and education are very different things." A child's education is made
up of many activities, most of them occurring outside the school. The teacher
cannot fail to be concerned with all of them, seeing the student as an
individual, seeking to understand something of his or her family life, of the
communities to which he or she returns each day. The child's performance in
school, and not only on tests, is to a significant extent determined by these
external factors. A child's opportunities, or lack of them, relations with
parents and others--these are data that a teacher cannot ignore.
What makes the teacher a "professional," Howe said, is precisely
that such matters are
recognized to be relevant. In his words, "You can bet your life that the scores
that the kids get on tests have a lot to do with, or are even controlled in a
high degree by, the family situation, by the community situation." While having
no interest in lashing out at "school reformers," he went on to say, "The
school reform movement has tended to operate on the false assumption that you
could fix the schools, so that the schools can fix the kids, no matter what the
hell is happening in their families and communities." Howe lived under no such
illusion. Something more than "school reform" was needed in America. That theme,
with numerous glosses, would be repeated many times in the next days.
Among those attending the Convocation who had written extensively on the
theme of motivation--another subject that figured prominently--was Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, Professor of Human Development in the Departments of
Psychology and Education at the University of Chicago. Insisting, as he had in
many of his published works, that schooling was only one element in determining
how children develop and grow, he reinforced the points made by Howe. His
initial interventions, concise and pointed, admitted of only a single
interpretation: families and communities matter immensely in the education of
children. "How motivated children will be in school, how curious they will be,
how interested they will be, and how much they will be permitted to learn
depends on how supported they are in the home and how safe they feel in the
neighborhood." The theme of "safety" was one that came to be talked of
repeatedly, though it was not always apparent how the issue of violence could be
dealt with, and whether the schools could in fact make any significant
contribution towards reducing what all recognized to be the disordered and
dangerous condition of America's streets, particularly in the inner cities. If,
as all insisted, the schools were not "islands," protected by invisible moats
from the tumultuous conditions outside, what messages did they need to
communicate that were not being sent by others, least of all by television?
R. M. Latanision, Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and
Chairman of the Council on Primary and Secondary Education at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, agreeing with Howe and Csikszentmihalyi that "life
teaches children outside of school," made another point that others would in
time take up. Schools, for him, existed to do more than disseminate information.
They existed to give social understanding, to make it possible for individuals
to live together in amity, working for common purposes. It was significant that
Latanision emphasized how much Bell Labs, one of the nation's premier scientific
enterprises, was concerned with recruiting individuals whose competencies
extended well beyond a knowledge of science. In work, as in life, he said, an
understanding of social purpose, of the different kinds of skills that need to
be prized, the diverse capacities that need to be valued, had to be
acknowledged. In his view, such competencies were as frequently influenced by
the extracurricular activities that an individual engaged in as by the more
explicit instruction received in classrooms. Was Latanision saying, in effect,
that the curriculum of a school, however crucial to the educational enterprise,
was not by itself sufficient? If so, the question of what other values needed to
be inculcated, and how that could best be done, remained.
THE ROLE OF TEACHERS
Nothing said during the meeting in any way denigrated or diminished the role
of teachers--indeed, there was a constant concern to support their central roles
in the lives of children--but this did not lead any to
underestimate the
importance also of the relations of children to other adults, or, as several
would have said, to a community of adults. Recent studies, frequently cited,
that suggest that the average American teenager spends only five minutes a day
alone with his or her father, and that it is the adolescent's peers who
determine what is thought and done, take on additional gravity when one
considers how much the dissemination of information and values in earlier
civilizations and generations depended on the kinds of family and neighborhood
communication that have virtually ceased to exist.
The generational rupture, of great concern to Csikszentmihalyi, also worried
Paul Houston, Executive Director of the American Association of School
Administrators, who spoke of the psychological damage suffered by both adults
and children as a consequence. From his years as a superintendent of schools in
Princeton and Tucson, he recalled the cynicism characteristic of so many
middle-class youth. As for the children of poverty, he noted their nihilism and
wondered what the future of American society would be given these sentiments.
While adults might go on prating about "our children," and politicians might
continue to make their ritual bows to the next generation, even as they reduce
appropriations for schools, the estrangement between the generations posed a
problem that could not be ignored.
John D'Auria, Principal of Wellesley Middle School in Wellesley,
Massachusetts, responding to this discussion of adults and children, noted the
existence of two myths that he thought particularly pernicious: that parenting
is not work and that teaching is easy. The view that people on welfare "do not
deserve benefits if they are not working--the assumption being that taking care
of children, in the case of a single mother, for example, is not work"--is
constantly repeated in the recent debates on welfare policy. A comparable
sentiment, D'Auria said, exists in respect to teaching: "What we must figure out
is how to convince the American people, including parents and teachers, that
parenting and teaching are incredibly complex and important tasks."
INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS
Taking his cue from this discussion, Albert Shanker asked why Americans, in
considering their educational institutions, are not more circumspect, comparing
their own achievements with what others accomplish abroad. If, he argued,
American businessmen became aware that others were doing better, they would feel
some need to learn from that foreign experience. Why do American educators not
feel the same compulsion? Why do they pay so little attention to what others are
doing, particularly when those countries seem to be achieving better results?
Shanker said businessmen would be aggressive, perhaps to the point of seeking to
recruit some of their foreign competitors, engaging in a kind of espionage. But,
he noted, we do "little educational espionage." "In spite of a number of
revisionist accounts," Shanker continued, "there is overwhelming evidence that
other democratic industrial countries are doing much better than the United
States with their students--top, middle and bottom. What are we doing about it?
Mostly foolish things, like looking to vouchers, privatization, or changes in
school governance to improve student achievement. There is no evidence that
these will work. What we are not doing is looking to see what all the successful
countries are doing that we do not do. They all have a common curriculum,
assessments that measure whether students have mastered the curriculum, and high
stakes for students. Those who make it get into college or technical school.
Those who fail, do not. High stakes make students work hard and achieve more.
Students in the United States do not work hard because they do
not have to in
order to get into college or get a job."
On the question of how well American children perform in comparison with
what is achieved abroad, there was some disagreement. Howe, for example, urged
caution in looking at comparative test scores. In his view, any comparison of
schools had to be accompanied by a comparison of the respective societies, with
attention paid also to the accuracy of test scores. Noting the immense
difficulties of making such comparisons, he observed that "the most recent tests
have been more accurate, even if accompanied by a whole lot of footnotes that
nobody ever reads." Latanision, agreeing that the differences in achievement are
very much in dispute, noted that no one seriously questions that America's
children are underachieving, that they are not in fact being led to reach for
even the diminished standards that now exist. In his view, this was in some
measure a cultural issue, and ought to be looked at in that dimension. John
Jennings, Director of the Center on National Education Policy, made the matter
even more explicit when he said, "American kids spend less than half as much
time on basic subjects, compared to those in other industrialized countries. If
this is true, one need not wonder why they are not doing well. There really is
no mystery."
NATIONAL CONSENSUS
Robert Schwartz, Director of the Education Program at The Pew Charitable
Trusts, responding to this discussion, said, "I really do believe that we need a
national strategy in education. And the question is how, in a country where 95
percent of the dollars are at the state and local level, where statutory
authority and the weight of local tradition determines so much of what is done,
we can develop a national strategy." Schwartz observed that the country may be
beginning to build nationalizing institutions outside the federal government and
spoke approvingly of what two of the conference participants--Lauren Resnick and
James Kelly--were doing to achieve that purpose. If tensions might be expected
to result from such efforts, and he believed they would, he thought the phrase
used by Dimond--"bottom-up reform with collegial national
inspiration"--exceedingly apt. It was essential, he argued, that the national
commitment to education be preserved. In his words, "we need to keep public
money, not just the local money in Roxbury, flowing into Roxbury's schools. The
public must feel that it is worth making such a commitment." Should the
funding become entirely local, this would be a disaster for equity. While local
decision-making was possible, it ought to be guided by an agreed-upon set of
outcomes that the society as a whole approved of and adopted.
James Kelly, President of the National Board for Professional Teaching
Standards, like others in the room, saw the need for such a commitment, but
worried about the growth of anti-intellectualism in the United States, which he
thought exceedingly dangerous: "At the same time that we are trying to build
academic strength in schools and other educational institutions there is a very
strong resurgence of anti-intellectualism in American society that is
undermining it, pulling out the cultural basis for life." Lest his remarks be
thought simply a criticism of those outside the schools, Kelly remarked also on
the sentiments within: "There is a self-indulgent, narcissistic group of people
that we are trying to deal with in school. To them, entertainment is
everything." To make matters worse, Kelly suggested, "drugs are more pervasive
in schools than we would like to acknowledge." Schwartz, following on this,
said, "It is a continuing mystery why there seems to be so much complacency,
particularly in middle-class communities, about the schools. I
think we need
to frighten the American electorate in a more effective fashion about the costs
of simply continuing on the path that we are on. The dilemma is how to do that
in this current environment without stampeding people away from the public
schools and giving aid and comfort to the various kinds of privatization schemes
that are out there."
Because there is so much criticism in certain circles of how teachers
perform, of what they do or fail to do, the intervention of Thu-Hang Tran, a
kindergarten teacher at the Mather Elementary School in Boston, was immensely
telling: "I would like to be able to work toward clear goals. I am willing to be
accountable for my pupils' performance, if I can be clear about what society
wants. I am not producing cars or shoes; I am having a hard time understanding
how to produce products capable of individual learning, with social and moral
values, able to compete in the international economy, speak two languages, and
get on the Web and communicate with other people. Society has to agree on a set
of goals. I want to meet them."
DISCRIMINATION
Among the many responses to this cry from the heart--and they extended over
the whole of the Convocation--that of Jeff Howard, President of The Efficacy
Institute, had particular salience. Describing what goes on in the Chrysler
automobile plant in Detroit, he spoke of "the two products of an automobile
manufacturer." In his words, "Only one is good cars, and the other is a group of
workers who can make good cars, with the skills and capabilities that a
manufacturer requires to turn out a good car. What that means, essentially, is
that they have worked out a human resource development system, no small feat in
itself. In Detroit, at Chrysler, it is being done in an inner-city plant with a
largely black work force. They have a clear, simple, and compelling objective."
For Howard, what has been missing in many of the proposals for education reform
was precisely a "consensus" about the objectives to be achieved by such reform.
In the absence of such explicit agreement not very much could be accomplished.
Howard had raised two fundamental issues: the absence of consensus and the
relevance of race. Linda Nathan, Co-director of the Fenway Middle College High
School in Boston, saw the need to extend the matter: "We have not come to a
consensus about the importance of certain issues: how racism and sexism still
pervade our schools." Joyce Justus, Assistant Director for Social and Behavioral
Sciences, Office of Science and Technology Policy, was even more emphatic: "We
need to think about what race, class, and ethnicity mean to our teachers, what
it is to be a white teacher in an African-American school, how to help the
teacher in that situation." In a comment that moved the group both by its
passion and its truth, she said, "Race is a dominant factor, and let's not
pretend that race, class, and ethnicity are interchangeable, because they are
not. And those of us who happen to be nonwhite, know that they are not. And when
you tell us that they are, we stop talking to you." Nathan, responding to this,
spoke of how the tracking of children, ostensibly for other reasons, often ends
up resulting in "color-coded classrooms."
THE TONE OF THE DEBATE
Madeleine Kunin, in her opening remarks, had alluded to the problem of
discrimination, knowing how serious it was. She, however, had also noted another
situation, less serious perhaps, but no less galling. Even when the educational
news was not all bad, when certain progress was registered, it
received little
attention in the mass media. "As we look at the trends in the United States
Department of Education," Kunin said, "in addition to individual success
stories, which we do talk about a great deal, we look at the overall views, and
we actually see some very positive trends. The gaps between African-American and
white students in math, for example, has actually been cut in half between 1970
and 1990. Certainly, it is not yet where it should be. But the fact is, it is
narrower. And when the Secretary of Education gave his State of Education speech
several weeks ago, his message was, we are turning the corner.' Well, as you
might imagine, that elicited a hohum response, as if we were only justifying our
own existence. If you listen to the news, or read the papers, almost all the
pronouncements are made by those out of power. They are being seen and heard;
when those in power are asked to respond, they too often do so in a rather
modest way. The critics play on and confirm public anxiety about education, and
it is difficult to face them head-on." In an educational debate that has become
increasingly shrill, it is difficult to represent fairly the historic
achievements of public schools. Patricia Graham, Charles Warren Professor of the
History of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and President
of The Spencer Foundation, seeking to render that accomplishment in very
concrete terms, explained how much American society, in the twentieth century
alone, changed its views about what schools should be asked to do: "In the first
quarter of this century, American society expected schools to assimilate the
children of immigrants. The second period, roughly 1925-1955, was the era of
progressive education, when we were trying to counteract some of the academic
lockstep that had characterized the assimilation. From 1955-1983, we were mainly
concerned with problems of access. In 1983, we had a new agenda. A Nation at
Risk argued--I think appropriately for the time--that what we really needed were
high levels of academic achievement for all children. I would point out that
this fourth goal, coming at the end of the twentieth century, is the first one
that has to do chiefly with academic achievement. The others were all social
goals, which the society believed to be necessary, which the schools, to a
significant degree, achieved. The schools, in the past, have met the goals set
before them. I believe they will do so again, but it will require a strategy
that focuses not only on the schools, but on the broader needs of children."
Graham, as much as any of her conference colleagues, was acknowledging the
enormous importance of social policy. Education reform, even when it emphasized
the need for academic achievement, had to take account of what children were
experiencing in their daily lives, in their families and neighborhoods.
Kunin, concerned to emphasize how one-sided the representation of school
accomplishments had been, how distorted was the reporting on the effects of
federal legislation, found significant the conclusions of a recent RAND Report
that suggested that certain of the social investments were in fact paying off.
In considerable exasperation, Kunin remarked, "We have been too cowed by the
naysayers who claim that all the money is going down the tubes. Head Start
didn't work; Chapter One didn't work; welfare doesn't work; social programs
don't work." This, she implied, was cheap rhetoric; more objective research
would yield information to correct such unfair judgments. John Jennings took the
same view: "It is not a two-sided debate; it is shrillness on one side without
the middle or the other side coming back. That is not good for the country."
In these and other comparable comments, there was an implicit understanding
that those responsible for schooling were so preoccupied with what were
incontestably real and serious problems that they found little time to inform
the public of the good things that were happening. The result, inevitably, was a
distorted debate. In his own intervention, Stephen Graubard,
Editor of Daedalus, asked whether there was in fact any real
public discussion taking
place on educational issues. In his view, on fundamental questions relating to
children and schooling--those that ought to be preoccupying the country--there
were only silences. David Gardner concurred: "In short, we are less willing than
we should be to take note of the promising efforts that are underway in many of
our schools, and the real progress that has been realized in recent years. We
ought to be bolder about asserting those, to achieve more balance in the debate,
to give people a greater sense of encouragement than they presently have."
THE ROLE OF RESEARCH
Mention was frequently made of the importance of educational research, of
what could be learned both about the past and the present. Linda
Darling-Hammond, William F. Russell Professor in the Foundations of Education
and Co-director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and
Teaching at Teachers College, speaking of the "factory model" of public
schooling, so prominent earlier in the century, said, "In the writings of the
time it was suggested that if you gave people less training they were more
compliant. Their schooling was also cheaper. So, to get low-paid and compliant
teachers, it was better to provide less preparation rather than more, to give
training that was instrumental rather than empowering .... In our school
structures and governance we deliberately separated theory from practice and
decision-making from implementation."
Theodore Sizer, Chairman of the Coalition of Essential Schools, Director of
the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, and University Professor at Brown
University, made an even more explicit demand for using the results of
educational research. "Too often in education," he said, "our discussions go in
the wrong direction. We usually start with existing mechanisms and ask, How do
we do it?,' rather than starting with our increasingly arresting understanding
about human growth and the development of learning, and then saying, Given what
we know, from research but also from substantial experience in areas research
cannot dent, what do we do with that?' Might not basic ideas about learning and
schooling have to be somewhat different from those of the early part of the
century?"
If the disjunction between research and practice was great--and several
acknowledged that this was indeed the situation--it was nowhere more apparent
than in the matter of tracking. On that subject, Shanker made a point that no
one contradicted. He said, "For forty or fifty years we've had anti-tracking
research' showing that tracking is bad. There isn't an educational leader or
education professor I know of who favors tracking. Yet, all the educationally
successful nations do it and get better student achievement than we do. Also, in
spite of the anti-tracking research,' most schools do it and most parents favor
it. Why? Maybe parents and teachers know something the researchers don't."
Howard offered an answer when he said, "Let's talk bluntly .... You have stupid
kids in the classroom and you have a few who are smart. Somebody who did some
research comes into your classroom and says, we think you should teach them all
together.' You know better than that, and as soon as the reformer leaves, you go
back to doing what you know is the correct thing to do. That is what teachers
do, and then you blame them for it." The proposition that parents and teachers
may favor one policy, that researchers frequently argue for another, was not
pursued.
A less controversial matter was raised by Henry Rosovsky, Lewis P. and Linda
L. Geyser University Professor at Harvard University, when he suggested that
research results concerning education were insufficiently disseminated. So,
also, others argued, the experiences of classroom teachers were insufficiently
taken into account.
THE ROLE OF EXPECTATIONS
Patrick O'Rourke, President of the Hammond Teachers' Federation in Indiana,
recalling his own thirty years as a teacher, insisted on a truth no one
disputed: "there is a direct relationship between learning in the classroom and
how kids feel about themselves, about being there, about how the teacher relates
to them." Howard stated the matter very concisely when he argued that innate
ability did not control intelligence. As he explained, "The innate is fixed and
unequally distributed. The new belief system says that confidence controls
effective effort and effective effort controls achievement. Those who believe in
themselves are able to commit themselves. And if they work, they learn. And as
they learn, their confidence is increased .... That is what all great teachers
understand, even if they cannot always articulate it in theoretical terms. They
know that kids can learn, and they spend classroom time building confidence and
shaping effort. The kids do learn and it becomes an upward spiral in that
particular classroom." Daniel Goroff, of the Department of Mathematics at
Harvard University, agreed: "Research in cognitive science shows that if you are
explicit with your students about why you are teaching the way you're teaching,
they will tend to retain and be able to use what you teach them much more
effectively."
John D'Auria told a story that seemed to confirm the view that a child's
learning is intimately related to what teachers believe to be possible: "The
faculty I supervise told me that all kids cannot learn. When I insisted they
could, their response was: You've got to be kidding. That's all well and good
for people to say who have not been teaching. You don't have Johnny here, who is
reading on a first-grade level and is in my eighth-grade class, or Mary, whose
mother is an alcoholic and is known to abuse her daughter. Who are you to tell
me what is possible?' My balloon burst. Later, when watching a girls' basketball
game, I was immensely impressed by their ability. They were passing and
dribbling between their legs, doing left-handed lay-ups, playing incredibly
strategic defenses. How did this happen? How did the girls get to be so good?
And then the answer came to me: the rules for girls' basketball had changed. It
used to be thought that girls could not play as well as boys, and the rules
emanated from that belief. When that belief was suspended, everything changed."
Why was the story important? Because D'Auria used precisely the same principle
in arguing for a curriculum that made demands on all students, that did not
treat some as inferior to others. Over the course of years, he had shifted to
saying, "let's suspend our disbelief and act as if all students can do serious
academic study. Now, in this school all students take what used to be the honors
courses, and there has been no dilution of standards."
Howe, remarking on the old maxim that said, in effect, "Tell me and I
forget. Show me and I remember. Involve me and I understand," stressed the
importance of children becoming "more active learners, planning their own
education and doing something about it." In his view, helping students to
"conceptualize what they will do, rather than just telling them--which they will
forget anyway" was more than just a statement about the role of memory. Howard
Gardner, Professor of Education and Co-director of Project Zero
at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education, concurred: "Content disembodied from understanding
is not worth much. Actually, most facts that we learn are really discipline
neutral. It's no different to know how many miles the sun is from the earth than
it is to know when the Battle of Waterloo was fought. Either is just a
proposition that you learn. But to understand the basis on which these
statements are made, and what kind of a network they fit into, that's what it is
about. Understanding is very hard to achieve. Kids either come into the world
with, or soon acquire, lots of misinformation and lots of very mischievous
notions. We've often assumed that if kids can say the right things to satisfy
us, those notions no longer exist, but they are there, and they are very robust.
So, if we want to school the unschooled mind,' we have to abandon the notion
that we can cover a lot of stuff. While I'm happy to hear that the revised
standards coming out of the National Academy of Sciences have been well
received, my guess is that they probably contain more than anyone could possibly
cover in school. That is certainly true for all the other standards I've read
about." The issue of trying to do too much--of cramming too many things into the
curriculum--was one that figured frequently. Patricia Graham, seeing the need to
return always to history, commented on the educational record of the twentieth
century. It was not so much the lack of high academic achievement that concerned
her as the difficulties inherent in confronting children of such very disparate
needs. In words she later incorporated into the essay printed in this issue of
Daedalus, Graham said, "During this century Americans have continued to place
extraordinary responsibility on the schools for a host of matters concerning
children. Like the old all-purpose battleships, schools have attempted to
respond to multitudinous demands put upon them. Their efforts have often been
heroic, but their casualties have sometimes been high. I would argue that in the
end, the schools are not well-equipped or adapted to serve all the many needs of
American children, and that our children require and deserve support from a
varied fleet, not just from a battleship. I say that because I don't want the
conversation focused exclusively upon the issue of schools." To serve children,
those who come from stable families and those who do not, the rich and the poor,
black and white, in all these several categories, is not something that
schools can do by themselves. They need the help of other institutions.
Susan Adler Kaplan, Supervisor of English in the Providence, Rhode Island
Public Schools, found the argument compelling. She spoke of the public schools
of Providence, where 23,950 children were enrolled, coming from families who
spoke some sixty-seven different languages, with twelve students, on the
average, being added each day. One-third were not in the country three years
before. Absent cooperation from parents, health service agencies, or
universities, there was little teachers could do to help their students.
The same view was taken by Paul Houston. Observing contemporary America,
seeing a society that "in large part has abdicated its responsibility and handed
it on to the schools," he asked whether schools could in fact perform all these
myriad tasks. In his view, they could not. Schools, required to take on certain
functions because others no longer cared to do them, were being told "to fix all
sorts of problems that no one else is fixing" and that they cannot always fix
either. Howe concurred. The great error, he said, was to believe that
"everything can be done at school."
Shanker, contrasting the ways in which schools handled waves of immigrants
earlier in the century with their more recent efforts to accommodate large
numbers of foreign children, coming from every corner of the world, raised the
fundamental issue of whether the effort should be to change the
students to fit the schools as opposed to changing the schools to
fit the students. As he
explained, "If you keep the traditional school and let kids sink or swim, many
will sink. As a result, there are calls to change the schools radically. But
other countries have shown that students can succeed in traditional schools if
they're given help."
STANDARDS AND EQUITY
The discussion of changing student populations, but also of the possible need
for institutional innovations, led to a lengthy consideration of teaching
practices and curricula. With respect to the latter, the recent introduction in
many academic subjects of voluntary National Standards, intended to improve the
school curriculum by making for a more uniform assessment and, in the minds of
its supporters, assisting in teacher preparation, not surprisingly saw the
Convocation divided. While a majority acknowledged both the need for and the
potential usefulness of standards, a minority expressed concerns of one kind or
another. Resnick, an ardent advocate of standards, put the matter very
concisely: "Success lies not in the standards themselves but in how you use
them. But you can't use them if you don't have them." Others, however, saw the
movement as a vote of "no confidence" in teachers, an unwillingness to allow
them the freedom to fix their own requirements, to make their own choices, in
consultation with colleagues, about texts and methods. In one way or another, at
least some seemed to be arguing for the teacher remaining sovereign in the
classroom, not forfeiting valued professional independence.
Shanker, understanding their concern, sought to reassure them. He
acknowledged that there are "a number of highly publicized schools with
exceptional leadership and lots of creativity." He knew also that there were not
many such schools, nor will there ever be many: "History shows that such
schools don't last long. Nor are we sure that they get results. But we use this
relative handful of schools as a model' and, sometimes, as an argument against
standards." Being familiar with conditions abroad, he noted how often their
success was linked to some system of standards: "Countries that have successful
school systems don't base them on individual creativity but on common standards
and a common curriculum, grade by grade. Each grade builds on the last. But in
the United States, where student mobility is very high, we almost never know
what the kids have learned before, and teachers have to spend huge amounts of
time making sure students have the background for this year's work. American
reformers emphasize creativity, while successful systems elsewhere have much
more constraint. Moreover, standards don't stifle creative principals and
teachers, but they do help to shape up more average ones."
That prospect appealed to Rosovsky who raised the question whether it makes
sense for students to graduate from high school not knowing the basic chronology
of American history, let alone European history. Might standards not help to
prevent such obvious omissions? Accepting that tests do often drive the
curriculum, though they appear to have little influence in inner-city schools
where the concern is principally with keeping children in the classroom, he
asked what could be done to make others treat teachers as professionals,
acknowledging the critical nature of the work they do. This, again, was an issue
constantly alluded to.
Describing what happened after World War 11, when many industrial countries,
including the United States, decided they needed a better-educated citizenry,
seeing good reason to encourage great numbers to seek university
admission,
Shanker indicated how different were their several approaches to the issue of
expansion. While some asked, in effect, "What can we do to help more students
meet the standards, graduate from high school, and then go on to university,"
the United States felt no compulsion to lift its schools' standards to
accomplish that goal. Today, some of the same attitudes persist. Given the
number of university places available, and the extreme competition between
colleges and universities, few are inclined to ask the schools to do more, to
prepare their students more adequately for post-secondary instruction.
Because, among those who oppose "standards," there is a legitimate concern
with what the imposition of authority from the top will do, how weaker and less
able students will fare under such a system, some worry that the older equity
agenda will be sacrificed to one that emphasizes competence, that ignores all
other factors. The two, equity and competence, Schwartz insisted, must "not
become competing goals." Richard Elmore, Professor of Education at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education, reminding the group that the retention rate to
high school graduation did not pass 50 percent until well into the 1950s,
acknowledged that if a serious effort to educate everyone to a "much higher,
more sophisticated, more diversified level" is to be made, a major
transformation of institutions will have to be contemplated. The proposition
that there could be "some kind of trade-off between standards and equity" was
one that Elmore refused to endorse.
Darling-Hammond, in her remarks, indicated the complexity of the matter,
seeing it as something other than simply being for or against standards. "It is
often said that if we had clear standards we would not have inequality," but
there is another view, that if you have "greater equality and capacity you may
be able to use standards more effectively." Most other countries, she explained,
have standards on the state or provincial level, and not on the national level.
Also, they start with equally funded schools and a system in which virtually all
teachers are qualified and have gone through a rigorous system of preparation.
None of these conditions exist in the United States. Abroad, where the
incentives for preparing for a teaching career are substantial, there are good
reasons for able people to do what is necessary to qualify as teachers. The
additional distributional incentives (i.e., higher salaries) to persuade
teachers to accept posts in inhospitable places, such as the rural isolated
regions of Australia, create conditions substantially different from any that
exist in America. In short, those countries "start with a much more equal system
and then add standards."
Those who argued that standards will produce greater equality did not
persuade Darling-Hammond; the evidence, she says, does not confirm any such
hypothesis. New York State, for example, she said, "has more explicit standards,
with more explicit consequences than any other state in the country," but this
does not translate into higher performance. "We have Regents' exams for
higher-level diplomas. We have tests that every kid has to pass in order to
graduate; there are other tests that allocate sanctions to schools, registration
review, and all of those things. There are sanctions for kids; there are
sanctions for schools. But there is also greater inequality in school spending
in New York than in almost any other state in the country. We have more kids who
are overage in grade and more dropouts than almost any other state. The rate of
placement in special education has increased. I see no reason to expect that new
or different standards will change that. They might raise a more appealing
vision of education, but the equity side of it will not be improved. Rather, the
biggest hope is in building teacher capacity, building teacher
knowledge, and
then building settings in which professional development and educational
equality can occur. We can then use the standards well and actually get some
greater student learning out of them."
STANDARDS AND AUTONOMY
The issue of what standards will do to increase or diminish the individual
teacher's authority was constantly raised. Some imagined that they would help to
give greater authority to teachers, but others saw it in a very different light.
Sizer made his own position very explicit when he said, "Strong people want job
authority over important things. Therefore, if you want strong people who will
cause the kind of conditions to be provided that are needed, you will have to
give them authority to make decisions over the heart of their work, which is the
basic curricular enterprise." In Sizer's view, the issue of teachers' autonomy
was central. Where teachers were denied that privilege, the most gifted tended
to leave the profession; where they enjoyed it, they remained at their teaching
posts. Praising the Fenway Middle College High School, he noted that it
attracted the kind of people who were a credit to the teaching profession. "The
school," he said, "is respectfully obstreperous in that it does its own thing,
helped by its own sense of what is right for the kids."
Linda Nathan, listening to praise of her own school, said quite simply, "I
want performance standards to emanate from the school building. I don't approach
that by talking about standards at the national level. Teachers are insulted by
these performance standards that are telling them that they are stupid. Teachers
need the time to look at student work, to help kids individually. And they need
the resources to do that, so that they can bring kids in under those very
standards that they know exist. You've got to trust them as professionals." A
comparable view was expressed by Joan First, Executive Co-director of the
National Coalition of Advocates for Students, who said, "The basic assumption is
that if you raise standards, you are automatically going to have higher
expectations for students. I don't think that's true at all. Kids tend to know
that they are being confronted with high expectations when they are confronted
with a teacher who believes in them. I don't know how a top-down imposition of
standards, unaccompanied by better opportunities to learn, will result in
changes."
Gordon Ambach, Executive Director of the Council of Chief State School
Officers, recognizing that the standards movement has resulted in a variety of
authorities issuing their own notions of what the standards should be, asked who
would make the final decisions. Would it all be a matter of local decision? For
Sizer, the more serious problem was the lack of anything that indicates
attention to interdisciplinarity. In his view, "A student in a high school
should have an intellectually coherent program. One of the curses of the current
system is that it is incoherent. Even the physics course has initially nothing
to do with the math course, much less art and English. The current debate over
standards assumes the fixed position of the well-established, one hundred
year-old subject matters. There is the source of the intellectual incoherence.
To let history standards be apart from science standards is simply to continue
the confusion. Unless there is some kind of interweaving of subject matter, such
as was suggested in the American Association for the Advancement of Science's
Project 2061, Benchmarks for Science Literacy and Science for all Americans, all
this effort is going to go for naught. I think there is in this whole debate an
intellectual issue of enormous importance that, by and large, has been ignored;
namely the shape and structure of knowledge today. It is not
something up
there' that has nothing to do with public schools. It has everything to do with
public schools, and that's not being talked about nearly enough."
STANDARDS AND PERFORMANCE
Sharon Robinson, Assistant Secretary, Office of Educational Research and
Improvement at the US Department of Education, introduced yet another theme in
the debate about standards: "As we talk about the standards issue, and about
institutional goals, there is a distinct gap: it has to do with results. Does
the standard itself give us enough to understand performance? I doubt it. I
think we've got to establish the standards in terms of student achievement, but
then unpack them, so that we can identify evidence of performance. And then we
can begin to understand what it costs to deliver a unit of performance. Until we
start to see schools as organizations that are performance-oriented, we're not
going to deliver on the promise of reform. We've got to build systems that
require schools to behave like any other competent organization--to have the
capacity to focus on results, defined in concrete terms, using evidence that is
agreed upon as acceptable proxies of performance."
Resnick, perhaps the most ardent defender of standards at the meeting, spoke
with feeling about an incident at a national convention of parents: "A Title I
mother came up to the podium while I was speaking and took the microphone
somewhat roughly. I thought she was going to attack the case I was making for
educational standards. But she told the story of her son who had been getting
A's and B's in the school he went to near a housing project in the inner city.
When the family fortunes increased and they managed to move out to a better part
of town, she learned that the child at age ten couldn't read. They have to stop
lying to us about this stuff,' the mother said, We need performance standards."'
Resnick expressed the hope that eventually "80 percent of the public should be
able to agree on 80 percent of the basic performance standards. For example, an
eighth grader should read twenty high-quality, age-appropriate books and
document that fact. At least five of these should deal with the same issue or be
by the same author. Each school should establish its own recommended reading
list for such purposes."
Others wished to define performance differently. Responding to Resnick, Joan
First said, "I want to talk about it in the context of Beverly Hills High
School, where I understand that 50 percent of the students are not fluent in
English. On the level of logic, I have trouble making sense out of a world in
which I am told that a reasonable standard for these students is to read twenty
books during the course of the school year. Simultaneously, I live in a world
where there is a bill in Congress that would formally establish one language as
the only language of the country, but also numerous state proposals that would
do away with language education. How are we to make sense of this? How do we
have standards, raise our expectations for kids, and fail dismally to provide
the support that will make it possible for them to reach these standards, to
make them work? I don't think you will find anyone in the academic community who
is against high expectations or standards. We just don't know how to make it all
work."
Dimond, in his portrayal of a "high performance place," dwelled on what he
called three essentials: first, that all students become "active learners with
deeper understanding of a fewer number of things"; second, that "smaller groups
of teachers be empowered to coach teams of active players and learners to
achieve such higher standards"; and third that a "diversity of
individual
learning styles be supported, especially through the use of interactive
technologies." Howard Gardner, looking for observable and measurable results,
insisted that "understanding is something that you do publicly. It's a
performance; others see it. It's exhibited. As far as I'm concerned, if you
can't use whatever you've acquired in school to illuminate something new,
something you read about in the paper, something that happens in the street,
something you notice in the sky, then you don't really understand."
SOCIAL CONTEXT
The preoccupation with standards reflected divisions and misgivings that
could not be easily negotiated. It seemed easier to agree with Graham when she
insisted that families and communities have a much greater influence on children
than schools, but that the public wishes to believe that it is the schools that
need to be relied on to form children. She believed that "society and children
would be better served if public policy directed to the young would focus more
on family and community support, television restriction, as well as health and
child care provision." But the focus, as she knew only too well, has remained on
the school. "In a sense, such an emphasis is understandable," she said, "since
defining the issue that way makes the problem containable and assignable to a
certain segment of society, namely the educator. The broader focus, on the other
hand, would necessitate changes from everybody, from all of us. It would not
just be school reform but social reform, which is even more difficult but much
more necessary."
Katherine Merseth, Executive Director of the Harvard Project on Schooling
and Children, considering what teachers were being asked to do, thought it an
overwhelming task: "we ask them to keep track of assessment, think about new
content standards, concern themselves with school organization, and worry about
access and equity." In her view, there was no way for teachers to do all these
things alone. For her, as for others, the only way was for teachers to "connect
with other adults--principals, social workers, health-care providers, and
parents--whose influence on children's learning was profound." The problem,
however, was that these groups were not very effective in communicating with one
another; each tended to treat only a single aspect of the child's life. In
Howe's words, which Merseth quoted approvingly, "everyone treats part of the kid
but no one is looking at the whole kid."
Houston, insisting that American society failed to support its children in
the way it ought to do, imagined that it might resolve its problem by asking the
schools "to step in and take up the slack." Because this was not working, had
never worked, and never would work, Houston saw the need to "find some other way
to re-engage society with schools." The problem was to find that way. Patrick
O'Rourke, reflecting on his twenty-five years as a classroom teacher, knew that
"the culture of a school is a reflection of the culture of the society," that
the societal context in which schools function must always be taken into account
when educational successes and failures are considered, when comparisons are
made with conditions that exist abroad. Houston, making such a comparison with
Japan, noted that "Japan averages about forty kids per classroom, and that
number is about the same, in my experience, in California. Our forty, however,
are very different kinds of children; a third speak something other than the
primary language. The teacher, compelled to deal with gangs and family
deterioration, works in a context very different from any that
exists in Japan."
David Gardner, suggesting that we live in a time of "acute modernity," which
he defined as urbanization, specialization of knowledge, labor
industrialization, mass migration, and technological evolution, argued that many
of the problems afflicting America's schools derive from these trends,
profoundly and predominantly centrifugal in their effects. Given today's
shrunken sense of community, Gardner said, it becomes harder than ever to
generalize, and there is, inevitably, a greater reliance on anecdote. In these
conditions, research findings tend to be suspect.
While accepting that all these factors are indeed crucially important and
may help to explain the present malaise, Latanision believed that the economic
setting in which schools operate is probably the single most important factor in
explaining their dilemmas. On a visit to an inner-city school in Boston, he
"found an absolute sense of despair on the part of youngsters who are convinced
they will never have the means to survive in an environment that is desperate,
economically, but also in other ways." At the other end of the spectrum, he
found that "children in schools of means" had the opposite attitude, which
nevertheless had the same effect: "In their minds, there is no need to work hard
at education because they already have most of what they want. The net result is
that we have youngsters at both ends of the economic spectrum who are
underachieving. What is missing in both is a sense of motivation. That may be
the root cause of our school problems."
Dimond, listening to this, responded by noting that students did not arrive
at this sense of hopelessness without reason. As he explained, "If you look at
the period from 1947 to 1973, all five quintiles in the population had their
living standards double. From 1973 to 1992 they stagnated; only the top 20
percent gained, its income rising by about 25 percent. The bottom 60 percent
actually fell; there was no longer a rising tide lifting all the boats. This is
the real challenge of our time. I don't believe that it can be solved by the old
equity notions that worked for the earlier generation."
Houston, echoing these sentiments, though in a different way, dwelled on
what he called the "lopsided priorities" of the nation, reflected in the way it
spends its money. The economic crunch, he explained, had only exacerbated the
nation's social problems. Using violence as his example, Houston said, "It turns
out that school is the safest place for kids in our society, regardless of what
we think about violence in schools. Statistics suggest that in many areas, if
you wish to be safe, you're better off in school than out on the street."
TEACHING AS A CAREER
Howard Hiatt, Director of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' project
"Initiatives for Children" and Professor of Medicine Harvard Medical School, in
a severe indictment, said, "Whether the topic is education, health, or the life
of children out of school, the situation is abominable in all aspects. It is in
our enlightened self-interest to attend to the condition of America's
children--particularly poor children, although well-to-do children are also in
trouble. There's no such thing as other people's children! If children could be
added to the agenda of every institution in the country, as they have been here
at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, there would be a hope of really
addressing the problem in the proportions it merits; but until we do more to
improve the quality of life of teachers, nothing else we do will
suffice."
Bruce Alberts, President of the National Academy of Sciences, concurring in
this, argued that not only must more serious efforts be made to persuade
talented men and women to choose school teaching as a profession, but they must
be supported in their choice, with colleges and universities reconsidering what
they can do to change the common perception of school teaching as a career.
Latanision noted that significant steps are in fact already being taken by some
in higher education to achieve that purpose. In his words, "I have always found
it ironic that we entrust the education of our youngsters to people we feel are
underachievers. It is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the things
we've done at MIT, at the request of students, is establish a program that
allows our undergraduates to become qualified to teach in the public school
system. There is a very important social message contained in this curricular
decision." Rosovsky, while applauding such initiatives, insisted that
universities are not in a position to control the economic forces that determine
the professions students choose. In his words, "I'm very cynical about what's
been said about how to get more first-class people into schools. We can't rely
on a few idealists to reform a national educational system. How we compensate
teachers, how we treat them, all that is going to have an effect. The market
works."
If market forces tend systematically to misallocate resources, taking them
away from education, as Elmore suggested, it is no surprise that such arguments
gained attention. "We chronically under-invest in teachers' knowledge--in three
dimensions," he said. "We do it in the way we create the conditions of work. No
professional could hope to learn across several domains and at ever-increasing
levels of sophistication within the organizational constraints under which
teachers now work. Second, the design of the organizations in which education is
done is fundamentally flawed, particularly in its capacity to allow teachers to
share work, to understand and observe each other. Finally, we reward people for
acquiring academic credits that have no relationship to our expectations of what
they will be required to do or the knowledge we value."
These sentiments were enthusiastically supported by Schwartz, who noted that
"the major source of dollars in the system for continuing education is money
that mindlessly goes into rewarding teachers for the accumulation of credits
unconnected with what teachers and students really need at school." Remarking on
the blurring of the lines between preparing for a teaching career, the work that
goes on in continuing education, and what is achieved through professional
development, he called for more rational policies to effect the preparation,
induction, and support of teachers. Darling-Hammond was even more concrete: "In
every school that I've seen that has bitten the bullet and restructured, they
have said: guidance counselors, come back into classrooms; resource room
teachers, come back into classrooms; department heads, start to teach;
principals teach.' Everyone is working with kids, and that is how they have
gotten class size down. They are building longer-lasting relationships, and now
insist on blocks of time longer than forty-five minutes. They can scaffold
teaching for understanding and build relationships needed to bring students to
high standards. When they've done that uniformly, teaching and learning become
more effective. It is all related. Simplifying schooling is related to
simplifying and enhancing the curriculum. We keep saying that we cannot afford
to buy time for teachers; it is because we're committed to spending most of our
money on things other than teachers."
In much the same vein, Nathan spoke of what teachers need: "I think it would
be really simple for all teachers to have access to an office, a
phone, a computer, and a desk. When a dean of a Graduate School
of Education came to our
school, he asked, What is this room?' It was a room filled with desks,
telephones, and tons of books. Our response: This is the teacher office.' His
reply: It's the most inspiring school space I've been in.' This is what we all
ought to be striving for." Tran, from her perspective as a kindergarten teacher,
agreed: "Along with many of the teachers I know, I feel that teachers need
recognition and confidence from the public even more than money or incentives."
Daniel Goroff added, "All this talk about the 'Information Age' reinforces for
me what most teachers have always understood: that there is a great difference
between information and knowledge. At our best, American educators deserve
respect as true knowledge workers, practitioners and facilitators of lifelong
learning, skilled developers of human potential. This is some of what we are
able to bring to the table in our dealings with other sectors of the economy."
Graham, responding to all this, told a truth that academics are loathe to
accept: "The places in which teachers have the least respect are colleges and
universities. Those of us who work in such places need to examine our
consciences and the culture of our institutions that have created this lack of
appreciation for the people who are preparing our students." Alberts made a
comparable plea: "The bottom line is that we have to make teaching an attractive
career for our young people who are idealistic and able, who would want to do
this kind of thing, if it were rewarded. And if we don't do that, we're not
going to really be successful in education. If they could have their energies
and ideas used effectively, we'd have enormously more young people wanting to
take up teaching careers. We have almost no scientifically-trained people going
into the schools, something we badly need."
Those sentiments were warmly agreed to by Gerald Holton, Professor of
Physics and History of Science at Harvard University, who said, "The time has
arrived to bring the academic and the school teaching professions closer
together. This meeting is an example of it. I think academe is ready for more
than simply getting out of the way while teachers do what they want to do. You
can ask for more from academics, and you can expect more. In terms of teacher
training, for example, you have the examples given by Ronald Latanision of a
program that prepares MIT graduates to become teachers. The same is happening at
Harvard College, involving collaboration between the School of Education and the
departments of physics and mathematics and some others. Producing competent
teachers in this way is new. There are unusual opportunities for collaboration
of this sort." "In my office in the federal government," Joyce Justus replied,
"a discussion is going on about how to produce the finest scientists and
engineers for the twenty-first century. We chose the word finest' because there
was a feeling that it conveyed something other than just the smartest. We are
looking for people who have a sense of the worth of individuals in the society
at large. I think the role of government is to do two things: support the
activities of all teachers in all classrooms and engage us as a nation in a
dialogue about what children are really worth."
If the last comments created a certain mood of well-being, perhaps even of
optimism, that was quickly shattered by Sizer, who said, "Listening to comments
such as, Wouldn't it be nice to have a desk, to have a telephone, we need help,
we'll go out and beg for it,' I was thinking about the temper of our discussion
and others like it in the last few years. The temper was very different in
earlier periods. When you visit some of the schools today and look at the kids,
look at the conditions, you leave blazing angry. What is interesting about our
discussions, and this is a typical one, is the absence of the
anger that ought
to attach to the shame we Americans feel when we allow, indeed tolerate, such
conditions and discuss them in the way we do. What is it about our time that
keeps us so cool?" Howe agreed; in his words, "The issue is one of great
urgency. If this were a medical emergency, it would get attention; if it were a
national emergency, in terms of missiles and ships headed towards Cuba, it would
get attention; but education just does not have that kind of image. The response
time is correspondingly slow or there is no response at all."
EFFICIENCY AND COSTS
For Elmore, as for others, the issue of efficiency and costs seemed very
important: "In school education, we don't know what anything costs. Nobody in
this system can tell you what anything costs. We know what we spend (there has
been a 30 percent increase in real expenditures per pupil since the 1950s, for
example) but we don't know what it costs to deliver a unit of performance. One
of the reasons we have distributional anomalies is that our policies are out of
line with what we think good practices are. Efficiency has to be on the table,
and we have to figure out a way to define it so that we don't lose educators in
the process. We have to define it in terms of what dollars buy. If we do what
we've done in the past, and talk about what dollars buy in terms of teachers,
materials, and Xerox machines, we're dead. We have to talk about what dollars
buy in terms of what students can do."
Howe added an important detail when he said, "Most of the comparative study
done about school finance looks at the full cost of schools, not at the money
going into the classroom itself. It ought to. The numbers are available. The
people who study this love to use the average cost for the whole school
district: personnel, police guards, and everybody else. But if you look at
classroom costs, you get a much more useful result." "In this country,"
Darling-Hammond reported, "50 percent of school personnel are classroom
teachers. In other countries, 80 percent of personnel are classroom teachers.
Since the 1950s, we've added administrative staff at twice the rate of teachers.
So, when you talk about productivity, you have to recognize how very different
are the ways of organizing schools."
"New York City," Shanker told the group, "spends $ 8,000 per child. With the
exception of special education, there are no classes with under thirty students;
that means that close to a quarter of a million dollars is spent in each
classroom. The teacher, with salary, pension, and other benefits, may get up to
$ 70,000 out of that quarter of a million. Then there are the
paraprofessionals--one for six classrooms. Schools don't buy many new textbooks.
There aren't many computers. Where does the money go? We don't know. There
should be a reporting system that would make clear to the public what goes into
the classroom directly for teaching, and what goes elsewhere." Shanker spoke
also of the enormous variation between districts of comparable size, a point
that Schwartz made even more explicit when he commented not only on the
differences in funding, but also on the great variations between school systems,
responding to very different kinds of regulatory patterns: "Even the most
reform-minded people at the local level have not the faintest idea of which
rules, regulations, and requirements come from which part of the system. Between
the provisions in local collective bargaining agreements, the perceptions about
what states require, and the strings attached to a great deal of the
equity-derived federal legislation, there is an enormous sense of being
imprisoned by all sorts of constraints and limitations."
While others talked about the flow of money into the system as a whole, Tran
brought the discussion back to what individual teachers experience in that
system. She said, "I'm shaken when I hear about logging on and communicating
with other people, because I don't have a computer. I don't even have a
telephone to call a parent and say: Do you know what your kindergartner did
today? Do you know how amazingly he did?' Or, to say, your child has a
temperature of 102 degrees. Come and pick her up quickly.' I just want a
telephone. That, as I see it, is technology and equity."
TIME ON TASK
If the discussion had led to comment on costs, it was no less concerned with
time, with how it is used in schools. As Csikszentmihalyi explained, "Time is
not money, but it is life, and so the question of how we use time is crucial. It
has been reconfirmed over and over again that those children who spend too much
time watching television are not going to learn as well as those who watch less.
How much of their free time they spend in active pursuits will have an impact on
how much they learn. So, we cannot separate the way in which time is being used
from what children learn." Graubard agreed, telling about his experience
observing schools in Providence, Rhode Island. "I was struck," he said, "by the
extraordinary amount of time schoolteachers spent keeping order in the
classroom. It was not a matter of preventing students from throwing
spitballs--such behavior might have happened at any time--but of keeping some
modicum of order in the classroom. Making certain that everyone had the paper
and the books required took time. Teach, I don't have a pencil,' cried one boy.
Out came the pencil, delivered with only a very slight hint of impatience. Other
equally urgent requests were also attended to. Forty-five minutes, interrupted
by more than occasional messages from the public address system, passed very
quickly. The teaching was minimal."
Shanker dwelled on the same subject, giving it greater precision: "The
classroom has become a custodial institution. The school is not a university;
the students are not paying tuition. Forced to go, many of them do not like it.
The school administration will almost never give a teacher good marks because
her students did well academically. But if the principal walks by and the kids
are running around, jumping and making a lot of noise, the teacher is told about
it. You cannot control your class--that is the message. So, the first job you
have is to control the class. If you fail in that, you'll never have a chance to
do anything else. Beginning teachers often find that controlling the class means
not doing anything very interesting or exciting, because the class tends to be
more disorderly when you try to engage them in something that is interesting. A
lot of the boredom that teachers fall back on is actually thought of as a means
of controlling the class."
A very different kind of analysis was offered by john jennings. In his view,
it was time to rethink the school day, and indeed the school year. If schools
became nine-to-five institutions, open all year, many problems would be
resolved. He spoke with approval of the report prepared by the Commission on
Time and Learning, which indicated that American students spent less than half
as much time on basic subjects as many of their foreign contemporaries. In that
situation, was it at all surprising that many were not doing well? To learn to
play the piano, drive a car, do anything that called for skill, required time.
Sizer agreed, saying, "it takes time to do things, and you do not understand
them until you do them. To learn to write well, you have to write and write
again."
Still, what worried Howard Gardner was the time wasted in repeating subjects
already studied: "I think it's staggering that kids take American history four,
five, six times and still do not know it. We ought to ask what is happening."
For Shanker, a large part of the problem came from children spending as much as
60 percent of their school time repeating things they had already done. This was
one of the many reasons why he supported the standards movement. Having
standards implied having greater constraint and uniformity; this did not mean
that teachers would become robots, told what to do by those above them. Citing
Harold Stevenson, he said, "Asian teachers plan curriculum lessons in common,
teach the lessons, then polish' them so that they will be better the next year.
A lot of American education reformers and many of our teachers would say that's
too rigid and not creative. They see teaching as painting on a blank canvas. But
Stevenson points out that Asian teachers also view themselves as creative
artists--performers of a violin concerto. They don't compose the concerto, they
concentrate on interpreting and playing it well."
MOTIVATION
While others in the room emphasized the importance of teachers staying with
their pupils over many class levels--not only because this would allow them to
know their students better, but also because it would help make the curriculum
more coherent--Shanker insisted on seeing the political nature of the school
system. Almost no attention had been given to what Shanker saw as another of the
unique features of the educational system as it had developed in the United
States. He said, "Ours is the only country that basically has a local political
system around schools. It is a job system within the community. It supports
school board members for their reelection. And within the school, there's a
patronage system also. If the principal wants support from his faculty, and many
teachers want time away from the classroom, that time away can be granted by the
principal, providing it to those who support him, denying it to others. At any
one time you may have two, three, or four full-time teachers out of the
classroom in a particular school, performing administrative functions."
Those conditions would not be changed very easily. Nor did Shanker believe
that the introduction of standards alone would cause students to work hard. As
he pointed out, systems around the world depended on developing methods to
motivate the young, using both intrinsic and extrinsic goals. For him, the
United States was the only country in the world that made so little use of
extrinsic motivation. Might this help to explain why, he asked, "ours doesn't
work as well as the others"? What, then, was his recommendation? "If parents,
teachers, communities, and, especially, students see a relationship between
getting into college or not on the basis of reaching certain performance
standards, they may work harder to reach them. And the same with getting good
jobs. I would predict that standards are not going to amount to very much unless
they are connected to something that has to do with motivation, both intrinsic
and extrinsic, not one or the other."
Howard Gardner, listening to all this, wondered what "the relationship was
between what we know about the human mind--learning, thinking, happiness,
intention, and motivation--and what actually happens in the classroom." He said,
"Everybody pays lip service to the notion that there's some connection between
what Lauren Resnick or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered and what ought to
go on in classrooms, but often it isn't well translated and turns out to be
misapplied. In that case, perhaps we'd be better off without it." Was this a
counsel of despair, or did it simply acknowledge that the theme
of motivation
was substantially more complex than was generally acknowledged? Latanision, in
effect, admitted this, saying, "I don't know how you teach teachers to motivate
kids, but if we're talking about social goals, I think this issue of motivation
has to be on the agenda. There's got to be a way of motivating people to inspire
kids to achieve their potential." How is this to be done?
Sizer recognized a vicious circle. "At many schools," he said, "there is no
conversation, and if you arranged one, teachers wouldn't know what to say. So,
maybe we had better just tell them what to do. Or, you do it the other way and
say, We'll take that risk, so that maybe, just maybe, some of the teachers we
most esteem will not drop out, will decide to stay in teaching.' Otherwise, the
first to drop out are often the best qualified in terms of certification and
academic achievement." Schwarz agreed: "I think that some of the impetus for
great change will come when groups of people define themselves as powerful, as
being in control and responsible for and accountable to the students and
families in their schools. As principal and co-director of the school, I am an
active member of this community, but no more than any other staff member in the
school. Hiring teachers, supporting teachers, counseling teachers, rating
teachers, letting teachers know if they need to go and leave teaching, this is
power. And it is a responsibility, an accountability for and to a community.
Conversations about standards and the like by competent teachers can be a model
for the kids in the school, showing what it is to take control of your life. I
want the students in my school, when they graduate, to be in control of their
lives. I want them to be taught by people who are in control of their lives."
STANDARDS FOR TEACHERS
A comparable view, taken by Darling-Hammond, but expressed somewhat
differently, suggested that "teachers can't be effective if they're not in a
structure that enables them to work effectively. Access to knowledge and teacher
preparation in this country should be comparable to what professional teachers
elsewhere experience. Professional standards for teachers and teaching will
allow us to reclaim decision-making for teachers. People think teachers can't be
trusted and thus you have extensive external controls on teaching. But external
controls produce constraints that create problems. The way out is to empower
teachers with sufficient knowledge and ongoing learning opportunities in the
school, so that they can be trusted to make decisions."
Hearing this, James Kelly spoke about the National Board of Certification
system and what its statement "What Teachers Should Know and Be Able To Do"
recommended. Kelly explained that five broad categories of knowledge, skill, and
competence were described that all teachers were expected to have: first,
knowledge of students and the diversity of students, knowing how to help a
diverse group to learn; second, knowledge of subject matter; third, skill in
managing and monitoring student learning, explicitly differentiating this from
the act of teaching; fourth, skill in analyzing, criticizing, and improving
one's own practice; and, finally, working with other professionals and parents.
According to Kelly, specific standards are being developed in some thirty fields
of teaching specialization, very different from the 1,500 or more now considered
by those who offer state teachers' licenses. The intent is to develop also a set
of performance assessments that will help determine the efficacy of what is
being accomplished.
INNOVATION
Kelly introduced another theme that had figured only very incidentally until
that point, the matter of technology. "If there is anything that can help
transform institutions in this century in this country," he said, "it is
technology." Believing that technology had not made "much of a dent in the
public schools up to now," and that the technology in use was "essentially one
hundred years old," he spoke of the ways in which it had "radically empowered
individuals across many institutional sectors of American society, both
economically and intellectually." He warned that "the entire apparatus, goals,
schools, and institutions, are at risk if we can't come to terms with how to
utilize technology to advance student learning." This view was heartily
supported by Dimond, who believes that "we're on the verge of a tremendous
revolution in technology, productivity, and learning that will empower teachers,
students, and parents to be no longer captives of seat time in the classroom.
They'll be free to learn when and where they want."
Without explicitly disagreeing with this account of what technology would
soon be doing to change American education, Sizer introduced a note of caution:
"It's exceedingly inconvenient that all learning is individual. And the economic
question is, given limited resources, how much can you accept that reality? How
much do you have to assume that you are going to lose some kids? Because you
can't treat them one by one." Rosovsky, listening to these comments, was moved
to say: "Everyone says we have to focus on the individual, and there is almost
the implication that education in the future can be tailor-made for the
individual's capacities. This is a wonderful ideal, but it is hardly practical.
As an economist, I ask myself whether, from the point of view of public policy,
tailor-making' makes any sense at all. We may be placing too much hope in
technology. Must we not concern ourselves with what is practical and doable' in
a society where resources are extremely limited and may be even more limited in
the future?"
Sizer, in words that expressed a certain bewilderment about what could be
done to meet the kinds of criticisms expressed in the meeting, said, "We've
talked a lot about the rigidity of the system, and periodically we think we
should just blow up the whole system and start over. And we choke that back,
because we know that will just accelerate segregation. We don't want
segregation, class-based or race-based, or anything else-based. And so we're
caught in the middle. What could replace the current system that would be fair
and democratic? We don't have an option, we don't have alternatives now between
the hierarchy and the unfettered free enterprise system. I think the invention
of that in-between solution is very important."
SCALE
Schwarz, without suggesting that he had the solution, expressed his belief in
small schools, arguing that only in such schools would teachers be empowered to
do their best work. Hiatt spoke about the Tennessee Experiment, where children
from kindergarten through third grade were randomly assigned to classes of
fifteen or twenty-five, and then followed for several years; the study found
that those in the smaller classes did better, not only while they were in those
classes but in later years as well. Darling-Hammond told of other class size
research that demonstrated that smaller class size consistently helped younger
children as well as the economically disadvantaged. Alberts was not wholly
persuaded, recognizing that a price is paid for smallness. As he explained,
"Smallness may mean kids can't study a variety of foreign languages. I'd be a
little concerned about that. Smallness may mean that nobody has
an opportunity
to study physics or calculus. It may just not be available, and you have to
allow for that. I'd be happy to buy into the small schools idea, but for
science, at least, there are problems. You cannot expect a small school to look
at the morass of science materials put out by commercial publishers and decide
what they would be well-advised to use in their own in-service programs. We need
to refine this model of small schools, if it is to be made viable."
It was significant that a number who spoke on the subject of "small
schools" emphasized the need for more research. Kaplan, for example, speaking of
the effort to break down larger high schools into smaller units, called it "a
very messy business." She spoke of the confusion among principals, unit
directors, and others. "In schools like Central Park East or Fenway," she said,
"where the school itself is the smaller unit, that is one thing, but when we
look at the factory school, breaking it down into smaller units may be
difficult. It definitely bears research." O'Rourke described the situation he
knew best: "In Hammond, we have just built three elementary schools. They're
state of the art in terms of technology, pedagogy, and learning. They are big
buildings, intended to accommodate seven hundred to eight hundred pupils. They
are, however, divided into pods--not schools within schools, but pods that are
literally different schools around a center. The community could not afford to
build a large complex of small buildings, and this was the solution we came up
with. We were able to build these new buildings with the consent of the
community, black and white. This is the direction to go. We are using the ideas
of Howard Gardner and Ted Sizer in our educational planning; we have big
buildings but they are not factory model schools."
Listening to this, Csikszentmihalyi said, "I have learned one thing from
this discussion, something akin to the slogan of the environmental movement.
Think globally, act locally.' By think globally,' I refer to the need to
concentrate on what we expect education to be, not only in the schools but in a
wider context, dealing with the flow of information to young people, the next
generation. As for act locally,' I agree with what has been said about small
schools, in charge of their own destiny, in touch with their community."
Without explicitly disagreeing with any of this, Resnick raised a disturbing
possibility: "Some people aren't sure that the change in the workplace is real,
whether it may not all be a hoax. Will there in fact be enough good jobs, or are
we holding out false hopes, especially for minorities? Are the models of the
changed workplace really relevant to the school as workplace? Some of us think
so; others are not so sure." The issue of work, of the relation between
schooling and employment, took on new life when Dimond asserted that "there is
hardly any connection between skills learned in school and those needed in the
workplace. There is an absolute vacuum in this country. Compare it with a
European model of apprenticeships. Let's have some venture capital; let's try
and connect firms and workplaces in contextual learning; let's try and build
bridges in establishing networks between employers and schools so that students
can in fact understand what is out there in the real world, so that learning has
some relevance." Nathan, speaking of the conditions at the Fenway School, where
collaboration with community agencies, hospitals, and corporations are common,
told of faculty meetings and retreats where non-school personnel were welcome.
The interaction, she said, was making everyone learn more.
TEXTBOOKS AND TESTS
While no one deplored such collaboration, a generally shared concern of a
very different kind was expressed by two of the scientists in the room. Alberts
said that in effect science standards have long existed in the country, but they
were "set by textbook publishers and exam makers, and they imposed a tyranny on
teachers. We've been working at the National Academy of Sciences for three years
to try to break that tyranny by going for a completely different kind of
curriculum. A major part of what we have to do is create a market for good
curricula in science and convince some people to produce those curricula, to
produce quality stuff. I believe they will, if there is a market for it. This
would be the way to help teachers out of the bind in which they find themselves
presently. I know hundreds of outstanding science teachers, and they are in a
real box, compelled to prepare kids for biology tests that deal with what is in
those high school biology textbooks. The fact is you can't know it all, given
the amount that is covered. You learn only a list of facts, content-free. We
really have to change the system in some dramatic way. For example, the SAT II:
Biology Subject Test, what was formerly the achievement test in biology, is an
extreme example of a test that forces the wrong kind of teaching. When we
started at the Academy, we went to somebody who was the head of the SAT II at
the Educational Testing Service to explain the situation. None of those people
seemed to believe or know that their test was destructive of the curriculum.
There is a real dissonance, and it is difficult to overcome it."
Holton told a comparable story for physics, where the textbooks, in his
words, "impinge on the quality of learning and the conditions of teaching."
Holton, speaking of his own experience, said, "I was involved in a national
physics school program. We trained a lot of teachers, and 120 teachers around
the country helped to refine the new textbook in use through five drafts. The
first thing one of the prospective publishers said about our manuscript was, You
have to rewrite it. It's a twelfth-grade course, but it has to be on an
eighth-grade reading level.' They also gave us a list of words to omit, starting
with absolute.' I don't know why teachers stand for this sort of thing. If you
want to improve learning and the professional position of teachers, something
has to be done about the textbook monopoly."
Katherine Layton, a mathematics teacher at the Beverly Hills High School in
California, spoke up: "The main thing I want my kids to leave school with is to
be learners. I am at an academic school; we have a set curriculum that we are
expected to get through. It is a race. We have very little latitude. The idea of
being able to reduce the content is something that all our staff is anxious to
do, but we don't feel we can do it. It will penalize our kids down the line when
they take some of the standardized tests for college entrance." Sizer listened,
but insisted, "What you have to do is simplify. If you say that reading and
writing and computational mathematics are important for every kid, then you've
got to figure out what it takes to get there. And, you quickly learn in most
secondary schools that you cannot do too much; you have to drop things. What is
absent in much of the discussion is any toughness about what reductions can be
made. We can't have it all. Serious reform involves losers. The standards
movement, the way some of us have talked about it, never mentions losers. So, we
now have eighty-five standards in the arts, and the arts people say, in effect,
give us more time for the arts. We have lists of standards in science that
demand a great deal of time. Everybody wants more time. No one is prepared to
look at the whole program, examine its intellectual coherence, and say what has
to be cut. There is a wide gap between policy talk and school practice, all of
it very well-intentioned, but it has to be narrowed. Very tough questions have
to be asked about what is more and what is less
important."
CONCLUSIONS
Kelly, speaking almost at the end of the Convocation, tried to devise a set
of principles that could guide educators in their efforts to prepare the youth
of the country for life in a healthy society. For him, a twenty-first century
school had to show eight characteristics: 1) It had to be a community of student
and teacher learners. 2) It would not start with the school as a building or the
school as an organization; such thought disabled all thinking about school
reform. 3) It would assume no common rate of learning for all the adult student
learners; it would take for granted very great diversity. 4) It would require
everyone to teach, students and teachers. 5) However teachers were defined, the
best paid would be paid as much as the best paid in any profession. 6) The only
incentives allowed would be those linked to learning and quality. 7) Technology
would be permitted. And 8) differentiation among students and learners would be
permitted.
The two co-chairs closed the meeting. Holton, in his final remarks said,
"Schooling is a basic component of a healthy democracy, in which education is
taken seriously and is not a subject of pious talk. Democracy is fragile.
Looking at American schools today, we must ask whether they are preparing
children for a healthy democracy. Are they preparing for an alliance between the
older generation and the younger, between different ethnic groups and across
other fissures? Are they preparing for a future in which a job holder will be
ready to learn throughout life? And is the system being strengthened by
dedicated political leaders, or weakened by mere sentimentalized attention?"
David Gardner had the last word. "In 1981," he said, "when Secretary of
Education T. H. Bell called and indicated that he intended to create a National
Commission on Excellence in Education, I asked him why he was doing this, what
was his motive? I pressed him hard on this. He answered that the average
American believes that the quality of the public school has declined and its
capability has eroded, and if that cannot be reversed in a reasonable period of
time, the middle class will withdraw its support from public education and in
its place there will be a system of vouchers, tuition tax credits, and other
inducements to afford the average person the opportunity to move from the public
to the private sector. Many will. And as they move, support for the public
schools will decline. In the end, Bell said, we will have a very divided
society, unhealthy, unhelpful, damaging to the cohesion of the United States. It
is still the case that we have to find ways of addressing those concerns."
Gerald Holton is Professor of Physics and History of Science at Harvard
University. Daniel Goroff is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematics
and Associate Director of the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at