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Article Excerpt
The show opens with words from Meryl Streep. The celebrated actress recounts how important teachers are in our lives, how each of us remembers a very special one like Claire Callahan, her music teacher in high school. She fondly recalls her first stage appearance in a school play portraying Marian the Librarian in The Music Man--another testimony to the greatness of American education. Millions of viewers watched the PBS special televised in fall 2001 on "School: The Story of American Public Education." This was television at its best, a documentary history accompanied by the publication of a well-received companion book outlining how the dreams of Thomas Jefferson and educator Horace Mann were translated into a modern reality. (1)
The show and the book draw from some of the most respected scholarship the academy has to offer. That is their strength; that also is their most glaring shortcoming. This homage to the common or public school is an accurate reflection of the written canon in education research, which is not especially reluctant to admit the missteps of the past but is unwilling to seriously entertain ideas that would alter the common school model that has been the norm for more than a century. The common school is part of the American civic religion. As such, even the most respected scholars accept its basic premises as an act of faith, perpetuating its myths and assumptions; they are unshaken by evidence suggesting that public education has failed a large segment of the population and is in need of fundamental change. As a result, the professional literature on school reform proceeds as a series of detours around the real issues and often dismisses demands for meaningful change as mischievous and ill conceived. The PBS program and book were essentially a history project, but the same pattern is evident in political science and economics. This article is a critical analysis of the research on school reform in all three fields. While it does not purport to be exhaustive, the material examined is representative of mainstream scholarship. It reveals a paradoxical tendency among researchers--some more passionate than others--to resist parental choice in education, all the while seeming to espouse democratic ideals.
The tone of the PBS project is set in the volume's "Introduction," written by the esteemed Stanford University historian, David Tyack. Tyack explains how Thomas Jefferson envisioned locally-controlled public schools as essential democratic institutions, how Horace Mann believed that public schools could help cultivate good character, how Progressive era reformers sought to save education from politics through governance by experts, and how recent social movements have led to better treatment of marginalized groups. But the article ends on a sour note, warning that "some critics--especially various advocates of vouchers and choice--have put a new spin on the concept of democracy." These instigators, we are told, pose a "more fundamental challenge" to our schools than the progressive era reformers who turned education over to professional administrators. They seek to replace politics with markets. This supposedly is an unfortunate development because, as Tyack understands it, "Democracy is about making wise collective choices, not individual consumer choices." (2)
The message is quite clear: Those who run the public schools--professional administrators--are inclined to make decisions that benefit everyone; education consumers--parents with children in the schools--are more inclined to act out of selfish motives. What an amazing assertion, coming from one of America's most highly regarded education historians. Don't educators and school boards have interests? Don't citizens act out of self-interest when they elect school boards? Is democracy an antidote to self-interest? For centuries political theorists have viewed democracy as an institutional mechanism through which individuals and groups pursue their public wants and needs. The hope of American democracy is a Madisonian presumption that the play of interests and counterinterests in politics will result in outcomes compatible with the common good. (3) The American experiment, however, is also an elaborate case study illustrating how the disproportionate distribution of political resources in a democracy can result in disparate outcomes.
DEFINING THE PROBLEM
What is it about markets that is undemocratic? Very much the way the political system is responsive to those who have political resources, markets respond to those with economic resources. And the same folks seem to have both. In this sense both politics and markets have an inherent capacity to be inequitable. (4) Nowhere is this characteristic more evident than in education. Education scholars can quarrel about the overall performance of public schools, but one essential fact is irrefutable: there has been a long-standing gap in achievement defined by race. National test scores indicate that the average black twelfth grader reads at the same level of proficiency as the average white eighth grader. (5) This four-year learning gap holds for all academic subjects. The performance data for Hispanic students are no better. Since racial minorities tend to congregate in urban centers, the failure of the common school is most profoundly evident in big-city school systems. (6) Despite years of political advocacy on behalf of disadvantaged minorities, the political system has failed to produce the kinds of structural and policy changes that are needed to make urban schools responsive to the needs of most students who attend them. This is somewhat perplexing since African Americans and Hispanics have gained a greater share of political power in cities over the past three decades.
The failure of markets to respond to the crisis in urban education is not so difficult to understand. Poor people do not have the resources to prod the market. They cannot afford the tuition to send their children to nonpublic schools. While there is some encouraging evidence that African-American students who attend Catholic high schools exhibit higher graduation and college attendance rates than their public school peers, their numbers are too small to reverse the overall pattern of academic failure in urban education. (7) Because disadvantaged families do not have educational alternatives, new forms of school choice can improve their options in one of two ways: Public charter schools can increase the number of small innovative institutions to which they have access; and vouchers can improve their access to nonpublic schools where tuition rates are ordinarily prohibitive.
This is not to say that choice alone will close the achievement gap. The evidence on the effects of charters, vouchers, and other forms of public school choice remains inconclusive. In order to be effective, choice would have to stimulate meaningful change in regular public schools where the majority of children are likely to be educated in the foreseeable future. Targeted choice designed to free poor children from failing public schools, however, could help level the playing field by offering poor children opportunities more akin to those enjoyed by the middle class. Middle-class families exercise educational choice routinely. They have either the economic means to afford tuition at private schools or the residential mobility to move to communities with decent public schools. Therefore, the central policy question is not whether to have choice in American education, but whether to provide it to our least fortunate citizens. In this sense, the choice debate has a moral dimension involving considerations of social equity. (8)
Notwithstanding all the talk about market forces and their probable effect on education, the voucher programs operable today are limited initiatives designed to benefit either low-income students (as in Milwaukee and Cleveland) or children in chronically failing schools (as in Florida). This is not like the universal voucher scheme envisioned by Milton Friedman fifty years ago that would replace public schools with private schools. (9) Most students who benefit from ongoing choice initiatives--more than 500,000--attend public charter schools. Although charters don't incite the same intense resistance within the academy as vouchers, they are generally greeted with similar suspicion from those who warn against the perils of the market. (10) Charter schools, after all, are not only schools of choice; they function outside the legal jurisdiction of local school boards and therefore compromise the common school model on two counts. Despite their deep devotion to the common school and their instinctive dismissal of alternatives, defenders of the century-old model come up short on ideas about how it might be retooled to resolve the racial gap in achievement. The "inside the box" talk about school reform is empty, with more conversation about what defenders of the status quo oppose--namely markets and choice--than what they would do to improve the system. This proclivity carries across the disciplines.
HISTORY AS APOLOGY
In some ways the PBS project was a warts-and-all history of American education. Each section of the volume is introduced by a distinguished education historian. Carl Kaestle describes how between 1770 and 1790 schooling was converted from a private matter controlled by families, churches, and community groups to a public function supported by local taxes. While generally pleased with the transition, he concedes that it was a "highly contested" and "imperfect development" at the time. (11) In the nineteenth century, the sectarian flavor of local curricula gave way to a generalized Protestant version of cultural conformism, which, we later learn, was oppressive for Catholics, Jews, and nonbelievers. While public funding through local property taxes led to greater access and richer programs in the twentieth century, it was the basis for financial inequities among districts; and it allowed cultural, racial, and gender biases to perpetuate. Thus Kaestle concludes that we should view public education as a work in progress and attempt to fashion ways to make it more equitable, inclusive, and effective.
Writing on the period 1900-1950, Diane Ravitch boasts that one of the great glories of the public school is its functioning as a "portal of opportunity" through which generations of immigrants acquired basic skills and also learned to be Americans. (12) She goes on to explain, however, that IQ tests were used in the 1930s and 1940s to steer certain racial and ethnic groups out of academic tracks into vocational programs, sowing the seeds of educational inequality within the curriculum itself. Thus, although Ravitch celebrates the achievement of universal schooling, she also notes how advances in educational technology legitimized a stratified system of teaching and how intense localism maintained racial segregation and a barrier for meaningful academic standards. James Anderson picks up on the inequality theme with an account of the struggle to desegregate schools that culminated in 1954 with the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v Board of Education. (13) He goes on to describe grassroots political efforts launched in the 1970s and 1980s to reform urban schools and the enactment of federal legislation on behalf of language minorities, women, and children with disabilities.
What is most remarkable about Anderson's chapter, which takes us to 1980, is that its central theme, "Separate...
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