The Excellence Backlash: Sources of Resistance to Educational Reform
Finn, Chester E. Jr.
years in American education, profoundly heartening to those who felt that our schools had gone slack and that one of the most urgent challenges facing the society was to elevate...
...6. First send money...
...And it is the regrettable fact that a great many educators--and elected officials who pander to them--have persuaded themselves that "equity" and "excellence" are antonyms, that "higher standards" is an upper class white male code for invidious discrimination, and that we should therefore either abolish standards entirely or steel ourselves to the fact that some groups cannot attain them...
...Education's "equity agenda" has much to do with participation and completion rates, i.e., with the outward manifestations of educational success, but it has very little to do with how much people actually learn...
...But the sine qua non of education reform is that those with day-to-day responsibility for school management and staffing must possess the professional equivalent of what psychologists term a "sense of personal efficacy": the conviction that they can significantly affect the character of the institutions within which they work, and that this is worth doing...
...And the proliferation of high technology industries and their products is far more likely to reduce the skill requirements for jobs in the U.S...
...So long as the resistance senses that the foreign troops will soon withdraw, who cares whether they first persuade themselves that they have won a great victory...
...Why is he doing that, lzaac...
...Nevertheless, we read in influential education journals that "many of the recommendations [of the various commissions] for improvement must be regarded as simplistic, conservative and unrealistic...
...We are also cautioned not to ignore the possibility that obliging youngsters to "learn harder" will cause more of them to quit school...
...Most will be the products of undergraduate teacher training programs...
...and to hint that the jurors were not fully qualified to render verdicts in this specialized domain...
...The National Commission explicitly denied "that a public commitment to excellence and educational reform must be made at the expense of a strong public commitment to the equitable treatment of our diverse population...
...Among the modifications was a major concession to vocational educators and other professional groups alarmed by the Regents' initial plan to expand the "academic" requirements so substantially as to leave scant room for non-academic courses...
...Excellence, I fear, today has nothing of the sort...
...In Boyer's words, "To expand access without upgrading schools is simply to perpetuate discrimination in a more subtle form...
...Admiral Rickover has compared the exercise to moving a graveyard...
...1 say unequivocally," writes president Ted Comstock of the National School Boards Association, "that American schools and the opportunity for education in this land are the best in the world...
...It is also healthy to seek alternatives to the kinds of "top down" reforms that prize uniformity above diversity...
...Neither will salary increases...
...It can be phrased fancily, but let me state it simply: A lot of people contend that higher educational standards are bad for blacks, Hispanics, and certain other minority groups...
...Many lackluster', school practices could be burnished with no significant dollar cost at all...
...As we increase math and science as a result of the addition of high technology and computer literacy to the curriculum," observes Paul Lindsey, associate commissioner of education in Texas, "it has a tremendous [negative] effect on our ability to provide vocational education...
...But-charge the critics--education is too complicated, too variegated, and too subtle a process to be improved in this manner...
...Not all "minorities," mind you...
...This is both a truism and a mischievous excuse for maintaining the status quo...
...But if unchecked it is apt both to worsen the rivalries within the excellence movement and to leave the schools with a fresh set of "special interests," "categorical programs," and impracticable assignments just as burdensome as the old ones that the excellence movement set out to clear away...
...It will respond only to intricate, comprehensive strategies of a kind that only those long-steeped in the lore and scholarship of the profession can devise...
...The problems have been identified, they have been analyzed, and an array of solutions have been delineated...
...It is when one listens to university professors, the spokesmen for national interest groups, and others--themselves securely in the upper middle class--who purport to be tending the welfare of the disadvantaged that one hears that "adequacy is good enough" and that the "inarticulate" will be "disenfranchised" by increased academic rigor...
...This dispute parallels old and important arguments about the nature of society and the role of government, but its essence can be stated simply: Does excellent education mean the effective induction of all young Americans into a single society, polity, and culture by equipping them with essentially the same intellectual skills, core values, and knowledge...
...7. Whoa...
...First, why not pay more to good teachers than we pay to mediocre teachers...
...for the standards that they set...
...Some parents would not want their children to attend school in July and sit home in February...
...It's never as simple as that, of course...
...Since in his view there is a permanent tension between the "thesis" of "excellence" and the antithesis "that people with mediocre skills should be included," he predicts that the "synthesis and the goal of our schools" will be "adequacy," an aspiration which, he insists, "is good enough...
...Today's teacher salary is generally associated with a 180-day school year, while most Americans work about 240 days a year...
...He suggests--in phrases one might expect to encounter in South Africa--that "there is nothing wrong with differentiating populations into dominant alld subdominant groups so that the special needs of each group may be addressed appropriately...
...Possibly the single biggest risk that the "excellence movement" faces is the unwarranted conclusion that it has succeeded...
...And some of them are easily duped...
...Florida may be a special case, for Governor Graham and the legislature had in fact moved swiftly in 1983 and 1984 to make a number of sweeping changes--on top of others made in the years just before...
...How long," asks a Minnesota school superintendent, "has it been since the experts have been in the foxholes and witnessed first hand what's happening in American education today...
...I n the paragraphs that follow, I undertake to limn ten early manifestations of the "excellence backlash...
...Quarrels within the Ranks...
...It's at least plausible that some youngsters left school because it seemed to them trivial and pointless...
...The turnover in teacher ranks during the balance of this decade will be enormous...
...Educational excellence has its reformers and its radicals, and even when they agree about what the "ideal" would be they may quarrel fiercely over the best strategies for attaining it...
...And if we treated the school year as having four quarters, with every child attending for three of them, we'd only need three-fourths as many teachers as we have today...
...Iowa asserted that its "high school physics curriculum has been revised to make it more applicable to the needs o f Iowa students...
...Montana said that its "Office of Public Instruction is working with elementary and secondary schools to identify course content...
...They are tempted to turn the quest for higher educational standards into a purge of "secular humanism" from the curriculum, into an occasion to bring teacher certification under the control of teacher unions, or into a scheme for selling more computers...
...Thousands of Americans, including a goodly number of practicing educators, are doing their best in 1984 to build levees against the rising tide of mediocrity, to fortify schools that have been gravely weakened by what the National Cornmission termed "an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament...
...Gordon Cawelti of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (an influential organization of the middle-level school administrators who determine what is actually taught) asserts that one of the "subtle factors that dampen students' motivation to strive for academic excellence" but that the reformers fail to acknowledge is "anxiety about their future...
...for the expectations that they communicate to youngsters...
...The "public interest" in high quality schools for everyone had few spokesmen, leaders, or influential friends...
...That is basically all they can do, but it's an essential first step in the reform process, particularly when dealing with an enterprise so huge, inert, and decentralized as public education...
...Let me briefly sketch five of the most vexing tensions within the ranks of the reformers...
...Neither Levin nor Rumberger (or anyone else I've encountered) denies that sundry non-economic benefits THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 11 might result from a better educated citizenry...
...It is the sad fact that some minority groups have been experiencing distressingly high failure rates on various tests being employed by states and localities to enforce educational standards...
...I f you set up more rigorous requirements for graduation, inevitably you will increase the number of dropouts," predicts an education official in New Jersey...
...Still, the moral suasion and political leverage exerted by a cleverly-stated argument on behalf of "equity" are substantial...
...protect them from anxiety...
...The staunchest proponents of this heterodox view are Stanford professors Henry Levin and Russell Rumberger...
...5. The problems o f American education cannot be solved by means that ordinary mortals can comprehend, much less by those that policymakers can command...
...One of the dangers inherent in all the recommendations for more demanding courses and higher standards," cautions Harold, Howe, "is that these more rigorous requirements will be insensitively applied and will force more young people out o f school altoget her...
...It is not so very different from the self-interested claims and assertions made by teacher unions and colleges of education except that in this case it is framed in terms of what is good for children...
...In this vein, John Goodlad, former dean of the UCLA School of Education, tireless education researcher, and author of one of the most richly textured (and least actionable) analyses of the past two years, cautions against "installed change" and presses for "developing the capability of people who run schools to think about the problems in their schools and to look for remedies...
...That is why premature victory parties are so dangerous...
...Second, the politics of failure...
...years in American education, profoundly heartening to those who felt that our schools had gone slack and that one of the most urgent challenges facing the society was to elevate its educational expectations and school standards for all our young people...
...A majority of black and Hispanic ninth graders in Montgomery County, Maryland failed the state mathematics competency exam in 1983 (compared with 30 percent of white youngsters and 23 percent of Asians...
...The Twentieth Century Fund task force has come in for even more abuse from the multicultural crowd because of its straightforward assertion that "the most important objective of elementary and secondary education in 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 the United States is the development of literacy in the English language...
...The panel convened by the Twentieth Century Fund optimistically asserted that "the skills that were once possessed by only a few must now be held by the many...
...Instead, they reassert what is wel~-known, make exaggerated claims on flimsy evidence, pontificate on matters about which there could scarcely be agreement, and make recommendations that either cost too much, cannot be implemented or are too general to have any meaning...
...The systematic reconstruction of the teaching occupation into an honorable, gratifying, and high-status profession providing full-time work to able individuals who impose "quality control" on their own colleagues would be a long, arduous, and farfrom-certain undertaking even if no one were opposed...
...Abolishing "social promotion" is a lot more attractive in the abstract than when one's own child is told to repeat fourth grade...
...Well, maybe...
...You're trying to do too much...
...Yet the hard part lies ahead...
...It is well to recall that schools are not omnicompetent social reform institutions and that the educators who operate them are not solely responsible for their policies and resource levels, much less for the attitude of their clients or the foreign policies of hostile nations...
...But if we are not to look back on 1983 and 1984 as a temporary phenomenon, a short-lived ray of sun through a permanently overcast sky, we need organizational and institutional mechanisms that do not now exist...
...Though many of the "comprehensive" reformers with the greatest ardor for school-level sovereignty recoil from "vouchers" or any other radical overhaul of the bureaucratic/monolithic structure of public education...
...In perhaps the most thoroughgoing critique of this genre, the Brookings Institution's Paul Peterson wrote that "the studies do not address the most difficult conceptual and political issues...
...This is not the place for a full examination of the complexities and disagreements that snarl any serious attempt to apportion responsibility for sound educational policymaking and financing among the three major levels of government, between the public and private sectors, between professionals and laymen, or between schools and parents...
...After all, a fine textbook costs no more than a lousy one...
...Others, less bold or confident, are inclined to set multiple standards, especially for such things as highschool graduation requirements...
...We disagree...
...Several times in recent months, I have been reminded of former Senator Aiken's infamous advice about how the United States could bring its Vietnam involvement to a rapid conclusion...
...Radicals-of both left and right--are queasy with marginal improvements that may mollify the discontented and thereby delay the "revolution...
...and for the values that they emphasize...
...The American public is not stingy toward education--we spent 7 percent of GNP on public education in 1980, while Japan spent 5.8 percent--but the extra outlays it is now making are contingent on major policy reforms...
...As school reopens in September, the premier issue is not whether we know how to strengthen teaching and upgrade learning, nor whether the public has the will to do so...
...and so forth...
...To fault them for not supplying the detailed blueprints is like criticizing General Eisenhower for not having personally supervised the fueling of the landing craft for the Normandy invasion...
...They merely assert that the single most influential reason for the reformist zeal of the nation's governors and business leaders is null and void...
...As Education Week summarized the explanations offered by the Illinois State Board of Education staff for why academic achievement of within their walls...
...the same principal could spend his time evaluating and strengthening the classroom performance of teachers rather than policing the corridors and writing memos to the superintendent...
...So, the conventional wisdom holds, all teachers must be paid substantially more, and the public must be prepared to foot that immense bill if it wants better schools...
...But it was in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly a few months back that the standards-are-bad-for-children sermon was preached with maximum solemnity by the high priest of permissive child-rearing, none other than Benjamin Spock, M.D...
...But the assertion that such an expansion was detrimental to "inner city" youngsters prompted a telling rejoinder from a community group in Brooklyn...
...insulate them from competitiveness...
...It does no good to point out that the nastiest of all forms of subtle racism is the suggestion that members of some groups simply cannot be expected to do as well as others and must therefore be held to lower standards--or to none at all...
...For every educator who regards a child as a diamond-in-the-rough, needing to be sorted, cleaned, carefully shaped and polished in order to bring out its brightest glow and greatest value, there are ten who perceive children as flowers: fragile shoots, needing shelter, nutrients, sunlight, and lots of unhurried time in which to ferent policies and practices...
...Still, the damage is varied and extensive, while the edifice is large and complex...
...Harvard eOucation professor Charles Willie writes that "elitism has taken over where racism and sexism left off and is performing some of the racist and sexist 'dirty work' under the banner of maintaining high standards...
...Encouraging them to think so may even hasten their departure...
...Yet consider some of the responses: At a meeting of the World Future Society, according to an education news service, Sarah Melendez of the American Council on Education said that "colleges and universities must increase their access rather than their admissions standards . . . . She called for open admissions policies at postsecondary institutions...
...There is an obvious rejoinder: The drop-out rate has crept upward as school standards have declined...
...A variation on this theme is that professional educators were already quite familiar with the shortcomings of the schools, thank you, and were doing their level best to redress them, that the critics haven't really said anything new, and that they don't begin to understand how tricky these problems are anyway...
...Whenever a public policy train gets moving, all sorts of folks are apt to try to clamber aboard with their own favorite baggage...
...Observe how the Department of Education has already trumpeted the impact of the National Commission...
...Thus Vanderbilt education dean Willis Hawley warns that " I f our efforts to improve the schools for all children are not accompanied by attempts to reduce the incidence of poverty, we should not expect the changes advocated by such estimable groups as the National Commission on Excellence in Education to amount to m u c h . . . " Even schoolboard members, who may be regarded as the main bridge between the professionals and the general public, are given to wails and lamentation over eleventh graders in that state slipped markedly between 1970 and 1981: "The reasons for the decline lie mainly outside the classroom . . . . The decline can be traced more to the students' attitudes and their family life than to the schools...
...and delay as long as possible the realization that the world is full of goals and expectations, standards and requirements, rules and obligations, and situations where success results from a mixture of ability, effort, pluck, and luck...
...Now there is nothing much wrong with comprehensiveness as a reform goal, and there is something to be said for recognizing that the school is a complex institution with many moving parts that have to be reasonably well synchronized with each other...
...4. The commission reports are vague and impractical...
...I t ' s a requirement and let's face it . . . . It's going to be with us for a long time, and our students have to pass it along with everyone else's...
...It is whether the nascent backlash will halt the excellence movement before anything much has actually moved...
...High school students," Cawelti says, "tend to be much more concerned about the threat of nuclear war than adults believe them to be...
...It is, of course, entirely predictable that if the commissions had set forth meticulously detailed "action plans" they would have been faulted for overweening authoritarianism, for excessive standardization, for not appreciating the subtle processes of organizational change, and for trashing the historic American philosophy of local control of education...
...Or, as an education adviser to the president of the Florida State Senate noted, explaining the reasoning that led that legislature to raise high, school graduation requirements: "We were aware of the problem of increased dropouts...
...Accordingly, we are informed that the test score data are obsolete, that 10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 some of the averages have (depending on your point of view) "turned up" or "bottomed out" in the last two years, and that the surveys on which international comparisons are based do not really lend themselves to clear conclusions...
...The state board's analysts have concluded that the family environment and a student's 'thirst for knowledge' have at least as much impact on achievement as certain elements of the school s e t t i n g . . . " And in a column that ranks among the most disingenuous public utterances of our time, a quondam senior player on the Carter White House team that did as much as possible to transfer traditional family responsibilities to governmental agencies, none other than Jody Powell, opined that "the schools are not educating our children in large measure because parents are doing an increasingly lousy job of raising them...
...But there's a night-and-day difference between the familiar demand of the education profession that the public supply additional money "up front" for what sounds awfully like "more of the same," and the insistence of the excellence movement that any added resources hinge on bold changes in policy and practice that hold substantial promise of yielding different results...
...It used to be known as "equality of educational opportunity," but a decade or so back that phrase lost favor with those who demanded equality of results among groups instead of merely the chance for every individual to do his best...
...Just see what the Department of Education listed as "approved initiatives...
...education commissioner Harold Howe II: The most glaring omission from the new studies of the shortcomings of education and recommendations for reform is any detailed estimate of attendant costs and how they are to be met . . . . A very rough estimate suggests that at least $20 billion to $30 billion a year in new funds will be needed to put the schools on an upward course...
...Rewards of various kinds will follow them when these standards are achieved, and there will be some price paid for failure...
...Suffice it to say that people who may concur completely about what children ought to learn and what qualifications ought to be expected of teachers may come THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 15 to blows when they try to determine where the authority to set these standards should reside and on whose shoulders the burden of paying for school improvements should rest...
...then to sketch five dilemmas that plague the reform movement itself...
...Introducing a special issue on "higher standards" of the journal of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, editor Ronald Brandt analogized the present push for greater educational rigor to a scene he had witnessed in Nigeria years earlier: Six little boys about nine or ten years old were sitting cross-legged in a row on the ground, holding their wooden slates...
...Fifth, premature declarations of success...
...In truth, the child is surely a bit of both, and the total process by which he moves from infancy to adulthood must deal with this dualism...
...But nowhere have these solutions actually been put into place and carried out, let alone been checked to see whether they work as intended...
...Two other ways to think about teacher pay might yield different conclusions...
...The friends of educational quality are not invariably friends of each other...
...then talk to us about improvement...
...The commonest reaction to an unwelcome accusation is denial...
...Some of it attests to the authentic difficulty of repairing a large piece of complex policy machinery that must continue to function while it is being fixed...
...But platoons of educators and child developers think otherwise...
...It will dig deeper to pay for markedly better education, but it seems no longer to believe educators who insist that spending more on the current system will produce more learning...
...for the examples they set of the interdependence of liberty and order...
...The Task Force on Education for Economic Growth insisted that "we must improve the quality of instruction of all students-not just for an elite, but for all...
...Roughly a million of the 2.2 million people who will be teaching in our schools in 1990 are not teaching there today...
...2. The fault is not in ourselves, dear educators, but in our stars...
...Instead, the NEA suggested a huge across-the-board salary increase...
...That, most people would quickly add, is also what life is all about and giving youngsters any different impression while they're in school does them no favor...
...for the caliber of teaching in their classrooms...
...We would no longer regard teaching as poorly paid...
...Of course, if there are no meaningful standards for anybody, this problem does not arise...
...One may be gratified when the principle of "merit" gains a toehold in the new teacher "career ladder" adopted by a city or state while another sees that as "window dressing" on a system that continues to employ mediocre teachers...
...Ten Strokes of the Backlash 1. Things aren't so bad as the critics charge...
...Only 24 percent ranked "finding good teachers" among their premier concerns and just 15 percent listed "poor curriculum/standards," though these latter two problems command the top of the reform agenda of the excellence movement and are both matters on which a determined local school board could have an immense impact...
...If there is any message to be derived from the populist character of the excellence movement, it is that education is too important to be left to the educators...
...I refer not to professional Cassandras who revel in disaster and are discomforted by progress, but rather to the political risks of enforcing standards by which large numbers of children are made to repeat subjects, are denied their diplomas, or are barred from the colleges of their choice by virtue of low grades, test scores, or whatever...
...But a lot of tinsel accompanies the real ornaments...
...8. Pressing children to learn more is not good f o r them...
...But all is not harmonious within the vestry of the excellence movement, either...
...Today's education reformers are tempted to mistake words for action, activity for accomplishment, and enthusiasm for results...
...Levin disputes the widely held assumption that transforming our smokestack economy into a sleek "high tech" system demands a more thoroughly schooled workforce...
...Note, however, that this scheme would require just three-fourths as many classrooms as we use now...
...Third, the dearth of relialale mechanisms to maintain public pressure for better schools...
...Even those reforms that are assumed to be very expensive might turn out not to be...
...Nor breaking the stranglehold of the colleges of education...
...Who is responsible...
...This is the essence of the merit pay and "master teacher" proposals so popular with the public and so hated by the NEA...
...Finally, there is the scholarly observation by economists and sociologists--James Coleman and Christopher Jencks come to mind--that available evidence gives scant ground for expecting normal-sized alterations in the nature of schooling to yield big differences either in how much children learn or in their life prospects...
...It is generally agreed that the average beginning wage ($12,000 to $15,000 a year in mo~t places) is insufficient to attract able men and women into the classroom,'and that the pay given to experienced teachers (averaging about $22,000 in 1983-84) is not enough to keep them...
...Meanwhile, state after s t a t e - - including poor jurisdictions such as Mississippi and Tennessee, as well as such wealthy ones as California--is appropriating additional funds, even imposing new taxes to pay for its school reforms, and there is every reason to expect that pattern to continue...
...In New York this past year, the Board of Regents stiffened its highschool exit requirements for all students--but over the protests of Kenneth Clark it retained its pattern of two separate tracks, one leading to the celebrated "Regents' Diploma," the other to a less prestigious "local" certificate...
...A number of states indicated more substantial and specific changes in curriculum...
...and finally to note three sizable problems that would be difficult to solve even if perfect harmony prevailed within the excellence movement and even if there were no significant resistance to overcome...
...The popularity of the ten heresies noted above, particularly among the congregants and theologians of the education profession itself, poses a substantial threat to the simple ancient faith in high quality teaching and systematic learning of worthwhile knowledge and important skills...
...Second, the familiar hostility between incrementalists and revolutionaries...
...But the point is straightforward: Low-cost alternatives can be devised for many of the "big ticket" items on the school reform shopping list, provided we try to think in that mode...
...His colleague Rumberger asserts that continued emphasis on education may even "be injurious to the performance of the economy...
...Mediocrity in American education has a large and resilient infrastructure of its own...
...That is certainly how Senator Aiken reasoned...
...American education is a sprawling, decentralized enterprise with immense momentum--or, if you prefer, inertia - - o f its own...
...So it is naive to suppose that all can be set to rights within a reasonable timetable unless many repairs are made simultaneously...
...We are traveling," he remarked somewhat cryptically, "faster than we can travel," and went on to urge that some timetables be stretched out, some deadlines eased, and some additional reform measures deferred...
...They are employing what some have termed a "command and control" strategy...
...This would not be so bad if resistance to the "excellence movement" were abating and if education professionals were embracing its goals as their own...
...Like everyone else, educators display that normal human response...
...That is why it is so disheartening to see some practitioners and policymakers plead impotency...
...I do not suggest that the Education Department is intentionally deceiving us or that the states have fraudulently represented their actions to date...
...that it's naive to expect them to do much with the illdisciplined, lawless, drug-riddled products of underclass households...
...On the other hand, the "traditionally black" colleges of Virginia, anticipating a high failure rate for their graduates when the Old Dominion imposes a cut-off score for new teachers next year, decided to roll up their sleeves and create special courses drilling students in such problem areas as critical-thinking skills...
...Rather, we find the suggestion that tinkering with such school-level variables won't do much good unless and until other things happen that are way beyond the power of educators to effect...
...Some will be terrific in the classroom and a number will be satisfactory, but many will be people without the ability or motivation to get a better-paid, higher-status job...
...They argue over strategy...
...Easing some of the more stubborn problems in American education will surely entail alterations in established school spending patterns, and in some instances additional funds will be needed...
...To be more precise: We rarely encounter educators who deny that they can influence these aspects of schooling at least a little...
...Such opportunism is not inherently reprehensible...
...First, the sorry state of teacher quality...
...Educational standards are discriminatory and unjust...
...Children are not products...
...But over the Fourth of July weekend the National Education Association again vowed massive resistance to anything resembling higher standards for teachers, peer review of classroom performance, merit-based pay, or career ladders...
...The excellence movement is a movement well-endowed with leaders, with tireless laborers, with ardent enthusiasts and with a handful of genuine heroes...
...Indiana reported that its legislature had "enacted a program to reduce the teacher/student ratio in grades K-3 to 18 students over the next four years...
...So why study...
...Simply stated, it runs like this: Policymakers influenced by the excellence movement are trying to reform American education by mandating standards, by enforcing rules, and by demanding certain kinds of uniformity from schools, from teachers and from children...
...There is a considerable irony here, though it is not unfamiliar...
...The most popular rebuttal, however, is that the success of the United States in establishing universal "access" to education for youngsters of all backgrounds and ability levels is so stupendous an accomplishment that to suggest children aren't learning enough is to cavil and pettifog...
...Exploring this argument in any depth would take us far into the dim reaches where educators engage in complex disputation with one another...
...The next day, in his weekly radio broadcast, the President announced that "we have met the rising tide of mediocrity with a tidal wave of school reforms...
...The childas-tender-bud conception has held sway in most of the education profession for a very long time, but the childas-uncut-stone image underlies the contemporary excellence movement, which begins with the idea of standards that youngsters should be obliged to meet: knowledge they must assimilate, skills they must acquire, habits they must adopt, and so forth...
...You 71 overload the circuits...
...Let's just call the war won," he said "and go home...
...In other states, policymakers have barely left the starting blocks and some of them appear to be in no hurry to get anywhere in particular...
...This may or may not be a good thing to do, but it has precious little to do with "curriculum...
...Indeed, wh~ pay truly bad teachers at all...
...we simply get the by-now-familiar alternative problem, a slack and mediocre educational system for everyone (save for those individuals, of whatever race or heritage, with inner demons that prod them to excel...
...The scores of black and white students on the standardized tests must be equivalent," insists Detroit's school superintendent...
...I asked the driver, lzaac chuckled and answered, "He wants them to learn harder, sir...
...that "the Commission resorted to superficial analysis, distortions of data, and reckless accusations...
...The president of the Minnesota State Board of Education insists that "the long-term goals that our education system must accomplish will only occur when we transform our overall delivery format to one that will serve each learner to his or her optimum-" A Wisconsin high-school principal describes his "frustration" that the "major reports on schooli n g . . , seem to call for 'more of the same' wrapped in a different package, rather than promoting visionary reform that will better prepare students for the astounding changes predicted by futurists...
...It matters little whether this is willful self-delusion, as Senator Aiken appeared to urge, or the unwarranted conclusion that others have come genuinely to share one's views and have actually transformed their shabby old practices...
...Shouting new instructions cannot be assumed to affect the beasts' course...
...Commissions and task forces function primarily as national agenda-setters, explaining what's lacking in the current social edifices and moving us toward consensus about the need for newer or better ones...
...Yet the authors of the various school critiques and commission reports of the past several years actually went out of their way to anticipate and parry any charges o f ' 'elitism...
...The actual steps taken by state and local governments, almost without exception, have been egalitarian and universalistic, designed to raise the educational floor under everyone, not to strengthen the schools of the elite Journalist Carl Rowan writes that "the elitists say America doesn't need so many blacks in colleges and universities, which they think belong to and always were intended for the superior and privileged classes...
...This contention is another sign of the factionalism and interest group politics within education...
...we think it is the responsibility of the public schools and the Board of Regents to make sure that all children in New York State are educated to the level accomplished by the children in communities like Scarsdale...
...Incremental reformers, on the other hand, are tempted to settle for insignificant changes...
...Third, idiosyncratic hangups and secondary agendas...
...Sometimes, however, that approach has greater appeal for the "experts" than for those directly affected...
...Finally, there is the allegation that any kind of uniformity is unAmerican...
...Yet if present trends continue, most of those new teachers will be less able and less well educated than the veterans they replace...
...Many don't expect to live out their full lives...
...The question is whether this "linkage" can be preserved against the plaints and criticisms of the unilateralists who would lighten the public pocketbook first and then--they say--produce something in return...
...Under the heading of "curriculum reform," for example, Secretary Bell asserted that 22 states had "approved" initiatives and that 23 more had "proposed" them...
...that "the case they make takes the form of a polemic, not a reasoned treatise...
...If teachers worked a 240-day year, and were paid at their current rates, the average teacher salary last year would have been almost $30,000...
...As for the thinking of educational leaders about such matters, it is wellillustrated in the words of former U.S...
...Asked by the American School Board Journal to identify their top three "concerns" from a list of thirteen possibilities, most selected "lack of financial support," declining enrollments, and parental apathy...
...You are saying," argued Rose Marie Hernandez on behalf of the United Community Centers, "that the rigorous academic program is fine for Scarsdale, but children from communities like East New York can't handle that kind of work...
...The Inherent Difficulties The blunt fact is that even if the excellence movement remains on the battlefield for several more years, even if the governors and business leaders stay vigorous, even if the newspapers keep watching and the resistance fades, three practical problems persist that would be very difficult to solve under the best of circumstances...
...Some school buildings would have to be air-conditioned before they could be used in the summer...
...The keepers o f that faith are not defenseless, to be sure, for they have a huge number of followers within the ranks of the general populace, and at present they also have many influential adherents...
...Nor ought we be amazed that the teachers of peripheral subjects will defend their own niches in the curricular wall against those who would fill them with more history or geometry...
...These include teachers, principals, superintendents, board members, legislators, businessmen, journalists, scholars, governors, parents and other "ordinary" citizens...
...But the principled, high-minded resistance of those who proclaim fealty to the goal of excellence itself is far harder to refute than overt self-interest or laziness, so we should not be surprised that it takes the nobler form...
...If every curricular weed successfully resists being uprooted, the educational landscape will gain neither discipline nor beauty...
...Then there is the conservative complaint, paraphrasing Lester Maddox's famous crack about prisons, that what the schools need in order to succeed is a better class of student...
...Making new teachers pass tests will not alone rectify this situation...
...Or does it mean freeing individuals, families, and groups to establish and patronize their own schools, to set their own curricular priorities, and to impart their own values through means of their own choosing...
...It also emphasizes special services, programs, and outlays on behalf of groups defined according to one or another need, incapacity, or distinctive circumstance...
...They enter into alliances of convenience around one issue or goal that quickly dissolve into hostility over others...
...Significant educational improvement of schooling," he explains, "requires that we focus on entire schools, not just teachers or principals or curricula or organization . . . . It is essential to realize that all are interconnected and that changing any one element ultimately affects the others...
...You have to go to East New York to be reminded that this last alternative is the most condescending and elitist of all...
...So long as the shortcomings of the educational system are ascribed to cosmic forces and vast societal transformations, those within the schools are effectively absolved of responsibility for the consequences of their own actions...
...Fifty-seven percent of the Florida students failing the state's high-school competency exam in 1983 were black (though just 20 percent of the students in that state are black...
...The problem with enforcing standards is not that failure is immoral, unjust, or evil but that if it is widespread it will cause all manner of managerial dilemmas, administrative snarls, and political pressures...
...Since the inception o f minimum cut-off scores for persons seeking certification to teach school in Louisiana, just 15 percent of the black students graduating from that state's public colleges and universities who took the National Teachers Exam achieved passing scores on it...
...instead they supply the "artist's rendering" of what those structures would look like if the designers, engineers, and craftsmen do their own work meticulously...
...It is not surprising that old-line progressive educators, concerned with such things as "affective" and "developmental" education, find fault with a heavy emphasis on academic learning and cognitive skills...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984...
...Still, the perception that it isn't worth fixing a leaky faucet because the whole plumbing system ought to be replaced is apt to result in no change whatsoever, inasmuch as we never really have the political running-room, the daring, or the funds with which to reconstruct the entire enterprise...
...Board members are not alone in ascribing poor educational performance to parents--or to the youngsters themselves...
...Rather, I suspect, the understandable desire of Secretary Bell and the commission staff to prove that they've had a profound impact (and, just possibly, the election-year impulse of the White House to garner some credit for itself) leads to hyperbole...
...I say "principled" resistance, mindful that more than a little of it is selfinterest, greed, timidity, and sloth masquerading as principle...
...Still and all, schools are responsible--and can fairly be held accountable--for what takes place that which they cannot control...
...The public agrees with the reformers, if some powerful opinion poll data are to be believed...
...Note well that the backlash is not a unitary phenomenon...
...economy than to upgrade them...
...Actual policy changes have been adopted by a number o f school boards and legislatures, and some of these are more imaginative and farther-reaching than anything in memory...
...Thus it is not altogether while ignoring the educations of the mass...
...But which kind...
...We must concede much wisdom in the observation that schools have been asked to take on social problems well beyond their competence and that they cannot singlehandedly lift people out of poverty, heal wounded psyches, or compensate for lousy parents and squalid neighborhoods...
...Some of it bespeaks the ordinary inertia of a ponderous public sector monopoly...
...The Paideia Group echoed Robert Maynard Hutchins's famous conclusion that "the best education for the best is the best education for all...
...But that wasn't all...
...Consider teacher salaries...
...Some simply demand that the tests are themselves the problem and that they must be revised until they yield "equal outcomes...
...to assert that the critics cited the wrong indicators...
...Grades and academic standards were termed "authoritarian" and "coercive...
...Even so, the Board was talked out of some of its most exacting proposals by education groups alleging that these were unfair to "disadvantaged" and " n o n - c o l l e g e " youngsters...
...3. Better education is a bad investment...
...the alternative view--Spock's view--was termed "progressive" and "democratic...
...The closer one gets to the realities of life as experienced by ordinary members of minority groups, inner city residents, and poor people, the clearer it becomes that they understand the importance of high standards, that they expect their children to be held to such standards along with everyone else, and that they are determined that their children will succeed...
...The absence of uniform performance standards is closely associated with what is known in education circles as the quest for "equity...
...We are past decrying the fact that the test is culturally biased," said the education dean of Hampton Institute...
...There is the old radical lament that American society is rotten to its repressive, exploitative, and hierarchical core, and that schools are simply captives of their corrupt environment...
...How much failure can the policy machinery of a free society handle before people conclude that the standards that produced it are too high...
...By turning teaching into a full-time job, we would also do much to modernize an occupational structure designed for spinster ladies in an agrarian age...
...They engage in doctrinal disputes...
...As a reporter for Education Daily summarized a February 1984 gathering in Denver: "State lawmakers should resist rushing headlong into school reform, no matter how attractive the goal, said legislators from 25 states...
...Here we come to the heart of the matter, to the Golden Temple of the resistance, to what Nathan Glazer terms "the most serious challenge to the effort to raise the quality of American education," and to the objection that wields the heaviest moral and political clout...
...Some of it is simple caution...
...The governor, it was said, wanted his state to be the first to enact a merit pay or career ladder plan for teachers--and he had his wish, though the speedily passed legislation left a lot of crucial details unresolved...
...What on earth does that mean...
...Fourth, dissent over who is responsible for what, especially fierce battling over the proper role of the federal government in the quest for higher educational standards...
...Indeed, the schools have absorbed so much criticism over the years that their personnel may be better prepared than most to fight back: to muster data purporting to show that all is well...
...They are individuals who are different and who grow and learn at different s p e e d s . . . " It would, in her view, be a grave error " t o make every child conform to one artificial standard...
...This mode of responsibility-shifting takes several forms...
...The surest way to duck responsibility for the unsatisfactory outcomes of schooling is to establish as "fact" that the root causes lie well outside the school itself and that these are so tough and complex as to be beyond the capacity of educators and educational institutions...
...Rather, he predicts that "the expansion of the lowest-skill jobs in the American economy will vastly outstrip the growth of high-technology ones...
...Blue ribbon panels rarely produce detailed diagrams for wiring and plumbing the structures that they recommend building...
...School "should be concerned with the total development of the child, rather than dealing with them as if their minds were separate from their bodies," insists Alabama education dean Milly Cowles...
...for the quality of the books that they assign...
...He reasons that "workers with more education than their jobs require are likely to suffer more job dissatisfaction," that they will therefore be less productive, and that the frustration kindled by the mismatch between their ample educations and the paltry skills needed for their jobs will yield absenteeism, high turnover rates, and so forth...
...The title and subtitle of his essay convey the flavor: "Coercion in the classroom won't work...
...But if the major education critiques of the past several years agree on anything, they agree that the curriculum has become too diffuse and the standards too slack, and that reform means clearing some of the underbrush...
...Recalling how much of the force behind the excellence movement derives from the conviction that a more thoroughly educated populace is a prerequisite for prosperity--locally, regionally, and in international competition with Such rivals as Japan--it is disconcertirtg to be informed by a small but vocal crew of scholars that the school reformers have misread the economic entrails...
...Since they cannot count on passing the flame to other runners, then, the leaders of the excellence movement need to grit their teeth, pump their arms, and settle in for a long uphill pull...
...Well, maybe...
...surprising that a serious push for uniform high standards for everybody, standards to be applied to all iridividuals regardless of their group characteristics, would alarm the ideologues of equity and would worry leaders of some of the groups that have profited from special treatment...
...This caution has been most clearly stated by Florida education commissioner Ralph Turlington, who finds himself trying to dig out of a blizzard of school reforms initiated by the governor and state legislature...
...These are not simple matters, to be sure, but it is the failure of many schools and school systems to handle them satisfactorily that fed the present discontent and catalyzed the contemporary "excellence movement...
...This will take a sizable crew of workers and a lot of hard labor, but above all it requires an overall plan and schedule--not just a solitary handyman puttering at one thing, then another...
...Leave aside the obvious fact that all these claims were based on states' own assertions of what they had done, and that the state officials queried were apt to put the best possible face on their activities...
...Educational excellence today enjoys a legitimacy that it has not had for at least a quarter century...
...learning by doing and sensitivity to feelings are the keys to academic progress...
...Indeed, there is little schools can do for individuals who do not assimilate their norms and values and more-or-less voluntarily submit to their routines...
...Most will be drawn from the bottom third of their classes at the least demanding colleges in the land...
...Outside the home, there is always the fear of nuclear war as an excuse for low educational achievement...
...This is not an imaginary concern...
...With such a heavy emphasis on science and math," asks NEA president Mary Futrell, "where will our writers, poets, artists and musicians come from...
...for the curriculum that they select...
...Clearly, equity and excellence cannot be divided...
...But when it comes to formal schooling, we must also understand that these two images of the child give rise to radically difalready have bitten o f f , " he warned Florida policymakers in May 1984...
...Iowa education professor James Albrecht concludes that the National Commission's emphasis on academic learning "will only hasten the disenfranchisement of the inarticulate, those whose children are already unsuccessful and demoralized in our schools...
...The Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development resolved at its 1984 meeting that while there was nothing wrong with math, science, English, and foreign-language study, "schools and school districts cannot neglect those areas of the curriculum encompassing the arts, music, vocational offerings, and extracurricular programs designed to meet the developmental needs of students...
...A favorite thesis asserts that reading and math scores in the early grades have held steady and in certain instances actually risen, meaning that the "only" problem is the decline of knowledge and cognitive skills among older students...
...Need more be said...
...Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the excellence movement has beaten down the first contention and established the proposition that all is not as it should be in American education...
...They would shield youngsters from awareness that the race is to the swift...
...Judging from actual evidence set forth in The Nation Responds, it would be more accurate to say that there have been some decent waves, a lot of ripples, and a great many people standing on the shore yelling at the tide...
...It is also the one reform without which all others can be expected to falter...
...Do not misunderstand...
...First, ideological schisms, of which the most serious is the conflict between education-as-transmitter-of-cultureand-nationhood and education-asextension-of-family...
...But one of the sighificant points that was made was that many dropouts left because they were bored with taking THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 13 too many cafeteria-style c o u r s e s . . . " 9. All this emphasis on academic learning cuts down on other subjects...
...They know full well that a struggle is underway for the soul and spirit of American education and that the outcome of that struggle has the most profound consequences for the 44 million youngsters returning to our elementary and secondary schools this autumn, and for the hundreds of millions who will follow them in the years ahead...
...No "subdominant" status would do for the residents of Brooklyn...
...Nor did these noble phrases lead to policy proposals designed to benefit the few...
...Turning it is like rerouting a herd of dinosaurs...
...That is what standards are all about...
...But a good deal of it has to do with "principled" resistance, not to the abstract goal of education excellence but to the operational implications and policy requisites of that broad concept...
...Second, why not make teaching a full-time job and compensate it accordingly...
...I have yet to hear anyone predict that stiffening graduation requirements or testing teachers would wreak havoc among Americans of Chinese, Irish, or Jewish descent...
...And this threatens to become a self-reinforcing process: If we are, as I fear, heading into the first era in American history when the average parent looking at his child's teacher sees a person who is less intelligent and less well educated than the parent himself, then this occupation will continue to fall in public esteem, and the individuals it "attracts" to its ranks will be people oblivious to such considerations...
...This is not aninsignificant problem, and it deserves a solution...
...We need more time to chew what we develop, to grow, and to unfold their beauty...
...In May 1984, a scant year after publication of the commission's report, A Nation at Risk, Secretary Bell presented President Reagan and the commission members with a 229-page volume entitled The Nation Responds...
...We should bear in mind that the nation took the better part of two decades to batter and vandalize its schoolhouse, and the devastation cannot all be repaired overnight...
...And in surprisingly short order, control of all provinces will revert to the indigenous forces...
...But to push for excellence in ways that ignore the needs of less privileged students is to undermine the future of the nation...
...What a splendid opportunity to weed out inept teachers and to produce a huge salary boost for 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1984 those who remain, all at no additional cost to the taxpayers...
...Though we have always had the illusion of "civilian control" of schools and schooling, in truth a lot of the damage of recent decades can be traced to an informal alliance between interest groups that sought to bend the educational system to their particular purposes and professional educators who were willing enough to collaborate...
...That situation has dramatically altered in the past two years...
...a challenging homework assignment is no harder to devise than a simple-minded one...
...The solo authors--Boyer, Goodlad, and Sizer--were even more insistent that schooling be strengthened for all youngsters...
...In fact, its salient characteristic is its preoccupation with groups and subgroups within the population...
...As we have come to expect from this redoubtable pediatrician, ideological semanticism also reared its head...
...Their "mallam" was striding from one to another, hitting them on the head and shoulders with a rope...
...At a colloquium on the National Commission report, held at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in late 1983, one of the graduate student "respondents" to Commission executive director Milton Goldberg characterized the report as "an attack on pluralistic, multicultural sensitivity...
Vol. 17 • September 1984 • No. 9
