On the Defense of Public Schools: Dilemmas in a Conservative Era

...As Rothstein pointed out, corporate leadership had a P.R...

...The furious debates in Congress around national standards reflect the continued saliency of these conflicts...

...There are also many awful classrooms in otherwise good public schools, and some inspiring classrooms in otherwise awful public schools...

...To end on a personal note, even at the height of the free-school movement, I urged radical educators to work in the public schools, as difficult as that task might be...

...basic skills tests are insufficient (but standardized tests are now more "open-ended"), and so on...

...and that tests for basic skills are not sufficient for judging the educational experience...

...But the reformers recognized that, given the relatively brief time that students were involved in the new alternative high schools, major changes in markers like math and reading skills would be difficult to establish...

...There are certainly many awful public schools today...

...Some schools are dull, depressing, even terrifying places, while others are lively, comfortable, and reassuring...

...Rather, we should devote somewhat less political energy to demands that we provide for everyone an advanced education, and more attention to improving the relative wages, benefits, working conditions, and living standards of retail and service workers and their families...

...Even profound criticism of the way a school system actually works and the harm it causes to many of its students is consistent with a commitment to work inside that system for change, even for radical change...

...Rothstein still maintains that the public school system is so successful in its current form and content that no choice should be allowed, that teachers should not be supported in planning and running their own programs, that the radical critique of traditional schooling (from John Dewey to Paul Goodman to contemporary educators like Deborah Meier) has no basis...

...It seems to me worthwhile to see how a defense of the institutional status quo has been taken up by political liberals like Rothstein, and echoed even in unreconstructed radical venues like Z magazine...

...Public school "failure" is one kind of myth and should be clarified...

...Black post-secondary attainment lags far behind whites' but here too there has been substantial progress: 15 percent of young black adults, twenty-five to twenty-nine years old, are now college graduates, for example, compared to 26 percent of young whites...

...Notwithstanding the undeniable gains in academic achievement and equality posted in the last generation, there is unlimited opportunity for those who wish to invest reform energy in conventional public schools, rather than withdraw...

...Unlike the proponents of the 1960s alternative "open school" movement, Dewey and his followers at Columbia Teachers College were fully engaged in regular public schools and always accepted the challenge of incorporating child-centered curricular methods into mass educational institutions, recognizing that this would require compromise with traditional school goals...

...they should introduce collective decision-making in all aspects of the school's life, experiment freely with pedagogical innovations, en92 DISSENT / Winter 1998 courage teachers to work closely with each other, and involve students systematically in the world outside of school through community service projects or internships...

...IN A RECENT essay in Dissent ("The Real Costs of Education," Spring 1996), Richard Rothstein provided an illuminating critique of the contention by many critics of the public schools that budgets have steadily risen over the past three decades while the system has continued on its disastrously failing path...

...In effect, Graubard suggests, the alternative school movement told these parents that alternative schools produce better measured outcomes, even though the school's true goal is only to give children a higher quality experience...

...Often there was also a sincere conviction, with anecdotal support, that in individual cases, impressive progress could be observed, and that significant collective improvement could be seen in commitment to and enjoyment of schooling, expressed in better attendance, less hostile behavior, higher graduation rates, even higher college-admission rates...

...And for the past several years, I have been teaching in innercity public high schools, trying to create, institutionalize, and then multiply the small progressive programs I described in my article, and I find comrades with this perspective all over the country...

...teachers should brag that "we work for the most successful institution of assimilation and mobility anywhere in the world, American public education...

...The difficulty was the same for the "top" students, who were doing excellently in the traditional programs they wanted out of, as well as for the failing students who were attracted to programs developed for "at-risk" populations...

...He is researching a study on secondary-school reform tentatively titled Why High Schools Never Change: Contradictions of Reform...

...Progressives need to focus on incremental reforms taking place in regular schools...

...Remember that Paul Goodman, in his listing of "failed revolutions" in American history, noted progressive education as one of the promising programs still waiting to be implemented...

...I AM SORRY that Richard Rothstein has chosen not to respond to my main points: that the public school system continues its "tracking" functions...

...Skipping back through the history of school reform to Dewey and the earlier progressive school movements, we can see that what motivated reform wasn't the scary perception (unjustified then as now) that achievement scores or graduation rates were falling and economic well-being was threatened by a rising tide of mediocrity...

...Achieving one progressive goal may make achieving others difficult...

...Contrary to Graubard's claim, we do know how to assess, to some degree, creativity, "skeptical questioning," and emotional aspects of the learning process, which is precisely why conservatives are so opposed to national tests—they believe these tests reward educational methods that promote such democratic qualities...

...Graubard finds this set of propositions contradictory to "revisionist" analyses with which I associated myself a quarter century ago...

...But, as clarifying as all this is, the inferences about educational reform drawn from the revisionist analysis are, I think, seriously misleading...

...In 1983, on the heels of a period of remarkable school improvement for black youth, a New York Times poll found that only 34 percent of blacks felt that the public schools were better than in the previous generation...

...But I also think that the terms that frame the discussion repress an important perspective on school reform: the family of ideas labeled as "progressive education...

...Then schools could improve on the remarkably good job they are already doing...

...He argued that there is no shortage of educated workers at any level of the American labor force...

...But I don't know how to measure the good with the kinds of statistics that seem to be the only relevant criteria accepted by the mythmakers of school failure and their more accurate but not more imaginative opponents...

...that teachers have all the freedom they need for creativity and are not seriously constrained by the way traditional schools are governed, though bureaucracy does impose some cost in terms of innovation...

...Today, "charters" and choice make essentially private endeavors available within the public system...

...Minority and lower-income parents understand that their children's access to middle-class jobs depends on the acquisition of credentials that reflect minimal demonstrated competence in academic pursuits...

...Reform-minded educators who engaged in policy discussions on schooling had in practice to accept the mainstream framework of debate, even if they were skeptical of its terms...

...The progressive education movement did not arise from a perception of measurable failure to master traditional skills and knowledge...

...The innuendo crops up, for example, in Graubard's characterization of my viewpoint as "approval of . . . public school bureaucracies [including the teachers' unions...

...I conclude that those who wish to continue (and perhaps accelerate) these results would do well to cease attacks on public schools and instead support reforms that seem to have been effective, directing more resources for reduced class sizes and other compensatory programs to schools serving minority students...

...It's not simply good vs...

...These new institutions first arose in notable numbers as small, non-public "free schools," but these were soon followed by a rapid (and much more extensive) development inside the public schools...

...And the programs we recommended have helped minority students wherever they have been implemented—in important and measurable ways, like improved attendance, better attitudes toward learning, greater self-confidence, greater ability to work cooperatively, higher graduation and college entrance rates, and so on...

...His focus in the Dissent article was on the technical issue of how funding levels and needs are to be understood and why the image of increased funding is an illusion...

...progressive" attacks on "traditional" schools have contributed to this loss of credibility...

...Graubard acknowledges these truths, but then makes a breathtaking admission: "Reformminded educators," he says, meaning "open school" advocates like himself, when "applying for grants or writing about their nontraditional ideas and methods . . . trimmed their real beliefs, making claims about increased achievement or reduced dropout rates, noting that their target populations were those students who were not being successful in the regular system...

...It has not been "alternative school" reformers' intent to make common cause with antidemocratic reactionaries...

...If (as is the case) the fastest growing occupations in the American workforce are in unskilled retail and service sectors, we do not escape these trends simply by training everyone to be a software designer...

...During the wave of high-school reform represented by "alternative schools," the frame for discussion was quite different from today's debate between crisis-myth proponents and their revisionist critics...

...Rothstein also advised union leaders (most prominently at that time, the late Al Shanker) to curtail their collusion in the myth of dismal 90 DISSENT / Winter 1998 school performance, undertaken with the mistaken hope that the public will blame the "system" and its administrators while exonerating (and perhaps raising the salaries of) teachers...

...It is too easy for Graubard to misinterpret my defense of public education as disagreement with the pedagogical tradition originally inspired by John Dewey...

...Rothstein presented the revisionist perspective most completely four years ago in "The Myth of Public School Failure," an essay published in the American Prospect...

...that public school achievement has improved in recent years despite very little expansion in the funding of regular educational programs (most of the new money has been absorbed by "special education...

...To get a concrete sense of what gets cut out of the discussion of schools and education reform, it is useful to look back at the wave of radical reform during the late 1960s and early 1970s...

...I don't suggest that this perversion of public attitude is solely, or even primarily, the fault of the opportunism of the "progressive" open-school movement...

...While in some important ways American society has not desegregated, and while income distribution within the black community and in the broader society has become less equal, there is now a black middle class (no longer only undertakers and ministers in black ghettos) that has been well prepared by public educational institutions...

...Today's public schools are not uniformly the antithesis of progressive education...

...That sounds plausible, and realistic in tactical terms...

...but they both supported teachers and others who committed themselves to public education as a democratic ideal...

...MUCH THAT Allen Graubard writes would be fair if stated with less exaggeration: of course, public schools continue to track (although less than before...

...Initiatives like the Coalition of Essential Schools, with Central Park East Secondary School (the subject of Frederick Wiseman's documentary High School II) as its most visible model, and the New Visions network within the New York City system represent important attempts to reconfigure and revitalize the reform impulses of the 1970s...

...We do not believe that there is any contradiction between our critical perspective and daily work in public schools...

...When Dewey's followers did establish separate "lab" schools, the purpose was to propagandize, not to isolate...

...that there are small school programs that embody such a vision...

...But applied to the realm of education and public schools, I don't accept it, intellectually, politically, or practically—not just as a nostalgic sixties person but as a nineties teacher working in urban public schools and trying to revive the spirit of radical reform...

...Thus, although there is a long journey ahead, there is also a long journey comDISSENT / Winter 1998 95 pleted...

...DISSENT / Winter 1998 99...

...But alternative educators like Allen Graubard are unable to come to progressivism's defense in this debate because they are now trapped holding a caricature of American schools that, apparently, they initially proposed to win foundation grants...

...Despite the existence of free, universal, and compulsory schooling, most poor children become poor adults...

...Recent economic trends have supported the revisionist repudiation of the hysteria about school-caused "illiteracy" producing an incompetent work force...

...many (not all) high schools are authoritarian (though there's variety within schools...

...If we think of school life as an end in itself rather than a means to some other end, such differences are enormously important...

...but not by putting forward a different myth, even when the motives are more decent...

...Finally, I assert that those who wish for a more egalitarian society cannot burden the schools with major responsibility for this goal, notwithstanding schools' contributions to it...

...Although he may not intend to, Rothstein seems to lump together all those who talk about deep and radical changes in the form and spirit of schooling, leaving out of the debate the history of progressive education ideas and the complex connections of those ideas to broader ideas of political and social change...

...It is also ironic that this defense of the public schools has been characterized as "revisionist...

...Comments can be addressed to <rothstei@oxy.edu...

...that public high schools are typically authoritarian and alienating...

...The discussion suppresses the old and well-founded progressive critique of the structures of schooling...

...Conservatives fantasize that John Dewey is hiding in the Clinton White House, ready to emerge and corrupt American youth if given the slightest opportunity...

...Such reforms should be opposed...

...During that reforming period, when there were also numerous nationally discussed reports from governmental and foundation sources providing extensive criticism of high schools, a number of models of radical reform were created and widely publicized...

...The model alternative programs shaped by these concepts look very different from the standard American high school...

...THESE ARE the common themes of the progressive argument: schools should be relatively small in size, with teachers and students often on a first-name basis...

...Causes and effects in these areas are necessarily vague, difficult to pin down with "objective" studies, but these ideas have real content and serious implications for how a school changes and influences young people, how the time in school feels, what sorts of commitment students, teachers, and parents have toward each other and their collective work...

...Rothstein fears that school choice would hurt poor students by increasing segregation, and that decentraliDISSENT / Winter 1998 93 zation would bring about extensive corruption and force teachers to waste time on administrative chores that they would happily leave to central administration appointees...

...I believe that much of what Rothstein and other revisionists claim in their deconstruction of the common wisdom presented by media seers like George Will or Diane Ravitch about how awful schools are—so much worse than they were in the golden past, and so dangerous a threat to the country's economic, cultural, and moral future—is important and true...

...A representative statement of the old revisionist perspective can be found in a widely discussed book by the University of Pennsylvania historian Michael Katz...

...In part, progressive educators, in their realistic and somber moods, affirm the approach that Christopher Jencks sketched in the conclusion to Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America...

...So, when applying for grants or writing about their nontraditional ideas and methods, they trimmed their real beliefs, making claims about increased achievement or reduced dropout rates, noting that their target populations were those students who were not successful in the regular system...

...Ironically, Rothstein finds himself driven to his approval of the basic soundness of the pedagogy, organization, and culture of the public schools and publicschool bureaucracies (including the teachers' unions) because of his acceptance of a constricted framework set up by his opponents...

...On this, I hope, Graubard and I can agree...

...What is hoped for are daily experiences of teachers and students that are more varied, joyful, engaged, and satisfying than many students and teachers currently have...

...Emphasizing the idea of variety and choice associated with liberal/left proposals for school reform, Jencks wrote the following: Instead of evaluating schools in terms of long-term effects on their alumni, which appear to be relatively uniform, we think it wiser to evaluate school in terms of their immediate effects on teachers and students, which appear much more variable...

...We only had one Bunsen burner and that only worked on Thursdays...

...So he is able to connect reform ideas to Reaganite political culture, "the suspicion of all public institutions and [the] conviction that if public bureaucracy is responsible, performance must be deficient...

...Further, I have contended that the "school choice" programs supported by Graubard and others, while ostensibly designed to create opportunities for quality innovation and incentives to excel, will, if expanded, inevitably lead to greater race and class segregation of American schooling...

...The history and logic of choice programs make clear that the effect, intended or otherwise, of school choice programs is to encourage parents and teachers to choose to associate with people like themselves...

...In the private free schools (the subject of this book) one finds a situation of real independence...

...But to avoid being misused, progressives should repudiate the antipublic rhetoric that has been part of their critique...

...But among themselves, they would affirm what progressive school reformers have always taught: that the quality of the school experience, the development of curiosity, skeptical questioning, zest for learning, and related emotional aspects of the learning process would be better supported in the alternative schools and that traditional schooling was often detrimental to the growth of those qualities, even among students who were quite successful by conventional standards...

...I am more cautious, however, about claiming that Scholastic Aptitude Test scores have risen or will rise significantly in the short time disadvantaged students are likely to spend in such programs—which was part of the point of repeating Christopher Jencks's argument about the importance of the experience itself...

...But Rothstein's larger point is that the generally accepted judgment that public schools have been consistently "failing" is profoundly mistaken...

...There is now a fierce national debate about whether progressive ideas (like authentic and open-ended assessment, "opportunity to learn" standards, multicultural history standards, "constructivist" literacy, and new math) should be permitted and even funded in regular public schools...

...Schools are not the great democratic engines for identifying talent and matching it with opportunity...

...THIS MODEST, realistic, and generous perspective directly undercuts the inference that Rothstein makes in moving from good statistical results to a claim that the desire of teachers, students, and parents to create schools different from the traditional model has no valid rationale...

...Rothstein recently repeated this advice in a piece in the Los Angeles Times calling on the new superintendent of the L.A...

...I think so...

...So "alternative school" advocates have deliberately and consciously maligned the academic achievement of public schools, in the vain hope that by doing so these "reformers" could attract support from those (like minority parents) whose goals were to boost the conventionally defined academic achievement of their children...

...This implies that we will have to accept diverse standards for judging schools, just as we do for judging families...

...Moreover, the students who were attracted by the new programs were often among the highest-achieving students in these highachieving schools...

...This revisionist idea—that the muchmaligned public system is in fact a success, steadily improving and respectable even on those international comparisons that most people believe show America's pathetic educational achievement (especially compared to those scary Asian students in Japan and Korea) —is gaining support in educational debates where the "myth of public school failure" has been dominant...

...He claims that reformers "deliberately and consciously maligned the academic achievement of public schools" and cynically promised to help "disadvantaged" minority students in order to get foundation grants...

...Looking at schooling as an end in itself rather than as a means to some other end suggests that we ought to describe schools in a language appropriate to a family rather than to a factory...

...However, they are necessarily enmeshed in the public school bureaucracy and are under various constraints and pressures because of this...

...But progressive influence within public education has led to an emphasis in testing on "open-ended" or "free response" questions, "authentic assessment," self-expression, inventive approaches to math word problems, and so on, as well as to a demand that standardized testing should be predicated on all children having "an opportunity to learn" the material being assessed...

...But while conservatives (such as William Bennett or Chester Finn) have been effective advocates, it would also be wrong to minimize the roles of Charles Silberman and other more contemporary alternative educators with whom Allen Graubard identifies...

...It was always a stretch to believe that Guadalajara drew investment by GM for a plant rated as one of its most productive because the local Mexican elementary schools are so good, providing a well-trained and literate workforce whose skills are superior to those of badly educated American workers from classrooms in Detroit and Flint...

...I'm especially concerned with Graubard's claim that "choice for parents and students within the public system would support more progressive reform...

...The child in the worst ghetto is getting a better education than I got in Daisy Allen High School in Atlanta...

...No matter how much energy we invest, however, we cannot eradicate poverty and economic inequality with a better pedagogy, however inspired it may be...

...Briefly, one of the major scandals of thirty years ago has been corrected: blacks' highschool completion rates are now nearly identical to those of whites...

...RICHARD ROTHSTEIN is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute and adjunct professor of public policy at Occidental College...

...The progressive argument applies to all students, regardless of their measured academic success...

...It seems clear that the "performance" of public elementary and secondary schools over the past quarter century has not been a factor in changing productivity patterns...

...that the vision of progressive education has not penetrated deeply into the system—though there are many teachers, parents, and students who would want to live out that vision...

...evil...

...These parents (or liberal foundations supporting their goals) would not likely be attracted to schools whose performance, Graubard asserts, can't be measured by statistics...

...HOWEVER, RATHER than mobilize any significant minority adherence to "alternative" education, the drumbeat of undeserved attacks on public schools has undermined the support even of those minority families whose futures are most dependent on the health of public institutions...

...Policy entails trade-offs...

...Their mission was not to establish separate institutions that only like-minded "progressive" parents would "choose" to support, but rather to propagandize the educational establishment in schools across the country, hoping to see childcentered progressive instructional methods spread...

...But instead of arguing about these big issues, Rothstein uses his space to misrepresent what reformers did twenty-five years ago—on the basis of a single remark in my article...

...FI XCITEMENT, COMMITMENT, enthusiasm, disappointments, failures, surprising successes, and other unpredictable happenings can be expected when such opportunities are offered to teachers who want to live up to their own varied conceptions of what schools can be...

...I can provide data showing how the programs succeeded in these ways...

...that only a very small proportion of school resources supports the administrative bureaucracy...

...For those of us committed to the old vision and still working in public education, the growing acceptance of reform ideas—including "choice"—provides a basis for affirming the progressive critique of standardized, bureaucratic schooling...

...As the growing strength of voucher plans and for-profit contractors (such as Chris Whittle's Edison Project) attest, political support for public education has weakened...

...For these purposes, a broader political and economic reform agenda is required...

...the only reasonable policy is to invest enough money in education to equalize school funding, reduce class size, fully fund Head Start, establish a national prenatal health program, improve apprenticeship and workplace training, and raise teacher salaries...

...Dewey never softened his critique of the traditional forms of education, nor did Paul Goodman...

...And I continue to disagree with each of these points...

...Nor does this perspective make us allies of malevolent right-wing forces that aim to privatize major segments of American education...

...They need to acknowledge that publicschool reform is not only possible, but has proceeded in dramatic fashion over the last quarter century...

...But among themselves, they would affirm what progressive school reformers have always taught: that the quality of the school experience . . . would be better supported in the alternative schools and that traditional schooling was often detrimental to the growth of [qualities like curiosity] even among students who were quite successful by conventional standards...

...To which Vernon Jordan properly exclaimed: "Objectively, that's wrong...

...Ironically, one beneficiary of this loss of minority support has been the Catholic system, where instruction is even more "traditional" than in public schools, but which now eagerly volunteers to accept vouchers from minority parents seeking to escape "failing" public education...

...In Class, Bureaucracy and Schools: The Illusion of Educational Change in America, Katz wrote the following: There is a great gap between the pronouncement that education serves the people and the reality of what schools do to and for the children of the poor...

...These in98 DISSENT / Winter 1998 stitutions are built by people who have not asked educational "experts" to design or approve an "experimental program," people who have not waited for the educational professionals to form committees and study groups to evaluate by "cost-benefit" analysis the most efficient and realistic technique of reform...

...94 DISSENT / Winter 1998 ALLEN GRAUBARD notes my claim that the alliance between so-called progressive school reformers and conservative critics who dominate our public education debates serves only the latter's purposes...

...During the 1960s, that word was used to describe a group of historians who were critical of the mainstream view of American public schooling as the unfolding success story of a system that grew increasingly democratic, fair, and inclusive...

...As Graubard put it in his 1972 book, Free the Children: Many experimental alternative schools within the public school system are now beginning...

...To advocate progressive reform within public schools while resisting efforts to destroy the public realm, reformers need to do more than create pockets of creativity that students can choose—even if these alternatives are now publicly funded...

...Indeed, we can even say that diversity should be an explicit objective of schools and school systems...

...The children of the affluent by and large take the best marks and the best jobs . . . [American education] is and was universal, taxsupported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class-biased...

...There is still a gap in the quality of black and white students' degrees, but the gap has narrowed—about 40 percent of the test-score gap has been eliminated...

...incentive to shift attention from policies of its own that did clearly affect productivity (bad management, shortsighted investment, merger mania, and so forth...

...When projects addressing the "educationally disadvantaged" (both minority and white working class) were organized in poor urban areas, the situation was different in many ways from the wealthy "counterculture"-oriented suburban programs...

...This vision continues to have a powerful appeal because it takes seriously deep issues that Dewey and other progressive educators identified a century ago, issues that are still pressing once we move beyond test scores...

...For the students, teachers, and parents involved in these alternative programs, there was no issue of academic failure or low test scores...

...I and others (whom Graubard terms "revisionists") have complained that the attacks on public education mounted by both "progressives" and "conservatives" have obscured a dramatic accomplishment of the last quarter century: impressive attainment gains of minority youth, and considerable narrowing of academic achievement gaps between white and minority students, especially AfricanAmericans...

...Part of the 96 DISSENT / Winter 1998 success of public schools in the last generation is undoubtedly attributable to their adoption of progressive pedagogies...

...The most widely read manifesto of this reform impulse, Charles Silberman's Crisis in the Classroom: The Remaking of American Education, a national bestseller in 1970, included a detailed critique of the standard high school and a concrete account of the first years of a few prominent "alternative schools," as these new projects came to be called...

...That's why progressives who toy with public choice programs find it necessary to restrict them: imposing race/ethnic quotas, giving preference to students from designated neighborhoods, requiring all parents to designate choices, soliciting students from underrepresented groups, and so on...

...Using this frame, it would seem to be a reasonable judgment that the American educational system (and probably the mass-education systems of every other industrialized society) has always been functionally successful...

...The rightward shift of ideological debate, along with the decline of a visible left movement that could defend a utopian vision, makes it unrealistic now to press the radical critique...

...He suggests that, on the contrary, Los Angeles "needs a leader to brag about its success . ." THIS CRITIQUE of the school-failure argument is important for clarifying what the real educational issues are and how they should be discussed...

...Another less easily available text laying out the role of "tracking" in maintaining structures of inequality is Richard Rothstein's essay in a 1971 issue of the radical journal This Magazine is About Schools...

...Speaking for myself and for many teachers I have worked with, I can only say that his informants have not told him the whole story if he really believes that no good teachers want to be part of autonomous schools or programs, where the staff has real power, beyond that which principals may decide to grant them...

...But there was a remarkable similarity in the quality of relations among the participants, the small size that made these relations possible, the commitment to getting beyond the traditional organization of separate unrelated curricular pieces, and the increased role of teaching staff and students in critical evaluation of the program and its processes...

...that choice for parents and students within the public system would support more progressive reform...

...It is important to notice that most of the original alternative high school programs—either free-standing creations or "schools-withinaschool"---were developed in places like Newton High School and Brookline High School in prosperous Boston suburbs, or in Scarsdale and Great Neck, even more affluent New York suburbs...

...In fact, these programs are not what conservative choice-advocates have in mind, so it can be irresponsible for progressives to promote "choice" when it's certain to be misinterpreted...

...That article is still worth reading and provides a provocative contrast to Rothstein's more recent suggestion that L.A...

...Certainly, standardized tests do assess the lower order skills as well, and perhaps still to too great an extent...

...schools to repudiate Mayor Richard Riordan's condemnation of the city's public education as a "failed system...

...This contemptuous view of public accountability is identical to words heard today from conservative opponents of all public institutions...

...Will such experiences be good for the individuals involved...

...Rothstein's message to his liberal American Prospect readers was that two prominent reform slogans—choice and decentralization (or "site-based management")—are bad ideas, likely to increase inequality, and unnecessary in any case because calls for extensive reform are based on seriously mistaken ideas about school failure...

...In fact, we deDISSENT / Winter 1998 97 scribed the achievements of public schools circa 1970 exactly as Rothstein does today when he claims that vast improvements have occurred since then...

...But this has not been the consistent message of "alternative school" advocates whose viewpoint Graubard promotes...

...The new revisionists do not address such issues in their defense of public-school success —nor, obviously, do those who advance DISSENT / Winter 1998 91 the "crisis" idea...

...Since children are in school for a fifth of their lives, this would be a significant accomplishment...

...Economic commentators now zestfully celebrate the rise of American productivity to world-leading levels, supporting sanguine appraisals of American superiority to the ailing economies of Germany and Japan...

...I will concentrate on high school reform, since it is in terms of graduation rates, job skills, college entrance, and curriculum debates that the current discussion is most saliently carried on...

...The differences in the frame need to be emphasized in order to see why lumping together all proponents of reform as misguided, misinformed, and perhaps knowingly dishonest enemies of a good public institution succeeding admirably under difficult conditions, oversimplifies the debate...

...Teachers should instead trumpet the astonishing success of the public schools, and argue that even greater progress would follow if the resources needed to carry out Rothstein's very worthy list of policies were forthcoming...

...What I suspect is that Rothstein believes that at this historical juncture, when the left is weak and conservative antigovernment doctrines are hegemonic, the kind of analysis historically connected with progressive education can only add to the destructive attacks of the William Bennetts, Rush Limbaughs, and Ross Perots who trash the schools along with all other public institutions...

...Then, revisionists emphasized the extent to which schools assisted in the reproduction of an inegalitarian social structure by "tracking" students from poor and minority families to occupy subordinate occupational roles...

...We are ill prepared to conduct the former if we pretend the latter never took place...

...As he makes clear, the "alternative school" movement began as a withdrawal to the private domain...

...For both sides of the debate, there is a shared frame that limits evaluation of school results to such collective statistical indicators as graduation rates, Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores, basic skills measured by objective tests, and later, the adequacy of the products of the system to fill the labor needs of the economy...

...Thus, conservatives busily promote a "back to basics" movement of phonics and drilled memorization of arithmetic algorithms, as they attack the Deweyan (now called "constructivist") pedagogies that heavily influence the public schools' teaching of reading, math, and social studies...

...ALLENCummARuistheauthorofFree the Children: Radical Reform and the Free School Movement (1972) and co -author of Saving Remnant: Feeling Jewish in America (1992...

...Deeper than results on standardized tests are the attitudes, self-image, caring, intellectual challenge, and emotional or affective aspects of school life...

...I again urge Graubard and his allies to join in this debate, but they can't do so by claiming that public education produces nothing but evil except in alternative locations...

...For those of us who are deeply dissatisfied with the traditional forms of schooling, there is a difficult challenge—to oppose the mistaken and sometimes malevolent trashing of the public schools and their teachers while maintaining the integrity of a wellfounded and complex radical critique of the system...

...Eliminating these differences would not do much to make adults more equal, but it would do a great deal to make the quality of children's (and teachers') lives more equal...

...Graubard's attempt to appropriate this tradition for the exclusive use of today's public-school critics is unfortunate...

...I applaud Graubard's advocacy of progressive reform within regular public schools...

...The "iconoclastic conclusion" that he found "hard to avoid" is that "the public school system is mostly on the right track and the best way to improve the results, especially for minority children, is to pour more money into it...

...Although the primary emphasis of these earlier studies was correct—that schools cannot themselves be expected to create an egalitarian social and occupational structure and that, so long as inequality persists, it would be politically inconceivable in a democracy for schools to function as purely meritocratic channelers to this structure—the rigidity of these earlier views could be relaxed somewhat, in light of the last thirty years' experience...

...These schools were among the most successful in the country in obvious ways...

...Choice would support more fully progressive schools, but would also segregate (by race, class, ideology, culture...