Conflicting Visions of Education

...he is also a professor of history at Harvard...

...one principal asked the Thernstroms, rhetorically...

...Of course we are...

...It will not surprise anyone who follows the education scene that those remedies differ dramatically...

...fewer and fewer people believe what so many did back then, i.e...

...Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind (Random House, 463 pp., $25.95) does the same, using more words: The False Promise of Technology in the Classroom and How Learning Can Be Saved...

...Nearly 40 years and $ 125 billion later, the scores tell the oldbleak story...

...The Thernstroms dismiss the charge that tests hide a "content bias" that discriminates against blacks and Hispanics: "If we define unbiased tests as those that reveal no racial differences at all in educational achievement, no one has yet managed to invent one...

...Their principals have the freedom to hire or dismiss teachers, who in turn receive wide latitude in designing their courses...

...Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom are fellows at the Manhattan Institute...

...What they mean by fundamental reform, though, has almost nothing in common with the measures that are generally put forward as cures for ailing schools...

...What was the effect of these budget choices in classrooms...

...It matters what you show...

...On average, black— and, to a slightly lesser extent, Hispanic—students still significantly trail white and Asian-American students in academic performance...

...now, the Right chants it...

...Increased funding isn't the answer: "Since 1965, the Federal government has poured money into Title I and Head Start in an effort to close the poverty—and, indirectly, the racial—gap in academic achievements...

...Six years ago, in the full flush of the technology boom, his topic—the stampede by educators to install computers in classrooms— was timely, and his verdict—bad idea—contrarian...

...public education...

...The authors buttress such claims with an impressive, if rather daunting, array of charts and tables...

...No Excuses sees signs of hope in the Asian example: "Parental pressure to work extraordinarily hard in school—which is the typically Asian story—is a culturally transferable trait...

...Asians said that anything less than an A would be unacceptable at home...

...Although no one argued that young people should not be schooled, disagreements quickly arose about how and what they should be taught and about what the end result of their education should be...

...etc...

...The answer, the Thernstroms respond, isn't terribly complicated, but it can make people uncomfortable...

...They argued that racial equality in the U.S...

...Student papers researched on the Internet and written on computers tended, in the author's opinion, to be glossy illustrations connected by wispy strands of prose...

...These were almost all charter schools, which receive public funds but are not subject to the dictates of the local superintendent or the board of education...

...No Excuses hedges a bit on the rosy report delivered by America in Black and White...

...The remaining 97 per cent of their contributions was associated with qualities or behaviors that could not be isolated and identified.'" In other words, the study found something that could not be quantified and quantified it anyway...

...This notion seems both self-evident and far too simplistic to address the problem at hand, of a piece with Nancy Reagan's famous solution to the drug problem: "Just say no...

...Both books seem to be addressing quite different topics, but there is more overlap between them than their covers suggest...

...During the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and '60s, "color blindness" was a mantra of the Left...

...He reports on one of the many groups of students he observed: "I glance at what they are doing on their keyboards...

...No Excuses, by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom (Simon & Schuster, 352 pp., $26.00), summarizes its thrust in the subtitle: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning...

...This reaction underscores a curious shift in the American political lexicon...

...They point to the extraordinary educational success of Asian-Americans: "Roughly 4 per cent of Americans today are of Asian backgrounds...

...Well, that would do it, all right...

...This disparity crops up no matter what sort of tests or evaluations designed to measure academic performance have been applied...

...Unlike the Thernstroms, Oppenheimer loathes Bush's No Child Left Behind Act: "If schools are really going to 'leave no child behind...

...etc...

...Now!'" And that's a typical scene when the technology is working...

...Why...

...They visited a number of schools where black and Hispanic students were doing excellent work...

...Nearly everyone would agree on that...

...The results have been crushingly disappointing...

...They concede that the proficiency standards established by each state, as the law requires, differ widely, and may not, if the experiences of Texas and North Carolina during the 1990s are indicative, do much, if anything, to close the racial gap...

...They see promise in the No Child Left Behind Act that President George W. Bush signed in January 2002...

...In addition, they resemble each other in their crusading fervor...

...The author witnessed many where the computers kept crashing or the Internet connections were not working and help from the school's understaffed tech support group was days or weeks away...

...It won't disappear, the Thernstroms insist, without "fundamental reform in the structure of public education...

...it replicates itself no matter how the socioeconomic factors are sliced and diced...

...It calls attention to some statistics that occasionally creep into news stories, where they provoke little besides a baffled, embarrassed silence...

...The Thernstroms' remedy for the racial gap actually has as much to do with cultural change as it does with educational reform...

...Still, the story Oppenheimer told in 1997 merits recycling now that the after effects of computer mania can be more thoroughly asssessed...

...Dreamy visionaries...

...Oppenheimer spent three years dropping in on and observing scores of them, of all sorts, sizes and geographic locations, and he nearly always came away puzzled and disappointed: "Almost every time I visited classrooms where the teacher, or someone else, had boasted that great technological learning was going on, the actual exercises staged were almost empty of intellectual content...

...The premise of their jointly written America in Black and White (1997) drew considerable attention, not all of it favorable...

...Perhaps these results should not be surprising...

...Oppenheimer's travels make for diverting reading, and might have been more diverting had they been presented in a much shorter book...

...Please!' one of the class' two teachers suddenly yells...

...Writers & Writing Conflicting Visions of Education By Paul Gray The goal of providing a publicly funded education for all children remains one of the most noble and inspiring ideals of the American experiment in democracy...

...The faith that educational results can be measured and assessed for quality control, that schools turn out graduates in much the same way that Ford rolls out cars, informs and pervades No Excuses, sometimes to a degree that strains credulity...

...In Mansfield, Massachusetts, administrators dropped proposed teaching positions in art, music and physical education and then spent $330,000 on computers...

...It isn't that now...

...The authors cite a study in which students were asked how low they thought their grades could sink before they got in trouble with their parents...

...These numbers do not mean that Asian children are inherently more intelligent: "The assumption that differences in IQ are primarily genetic rather than environmental is one that we reject, and the scanty evidence available does not sustain the argument that Asian students are born with a 'smart gene.' They simply care more about academic success...

...Officials in New York City included in their 2001 education budget roughly $250 million for technology, "a sum," Oppenheimer tartly notes, "that could have bought 10 million hours of tutoring (that's nine hours of one-on-one tutoring for every student in the city...

...Two books from major trade publishers illustrate anew how deeply divisive the subject of education is in the U.S...

...The wish list could go on and on...

...or 7,800 new teachers, which would amount to a 10 per cent increase in teaching staff...

...And yet Asian-Americans made up 27 per cent of the 2000-2001 freshman class at MIT, 25 per cent at Stanford, 24 per cent at Cal Tech...

...or 5 million new textbooks (this would give every student four or five new textbooks every year...

...The problem, as he sees it, does not stem from too little attention paid to the output of schools—as measured by standardized tests—but to too much...

...Conservatives applauded...

...The authors discuss the question of what qualifications responsible school authorities should look for when hiring teachers: "One recent study underscored the importance of teacher quality, but found that only 3 per cent of 'the contribution teachers made to student learning was associated with teacher experience, degrees attained, and other readily observable characteristics...

...Beguiled by the promise—and only the promise—of a glitzy quick fix, school districts around the country poured staggering amounts of money into the coffers of computer and software manufacturers...

...A sign of the present view that occurred too late for Oppenheimer to note in his book can be seen in the education budget President Bush submitted to Congress toward the end of the summer...

...Are we conservative here...

...Journalist Todd Oppenheimer's The Flickering Mind is a vast expansion of a 1997 article he wrote for the Atlantic Monthly that won a National Magazine Award...

...In other words, the racial gap in education would begin shrinking overnight if black, Hispanic and, for that matter, white parents simply started expecting more from their children...

...a lot of people, and not only educators, have been waiting a long time for a diagnostic tool that would make this problem disappear...

...One of its provisions eliminates all funds that had been earmarked for training schoolteachers in computer technology...

...The Thernstroms write: "The employer hiring the typical black high school graduate (or the college that admits the average black student) is, in effect, choosing a youngster who has only made it through the eighth grade...

...he discovered the Waldorf Schools, resolutely antihigh-tech private institutions where every first-grade student is required to learn to play the recorder and then knit a sleeve to store it in...

...Ladies and gentlemen...

...DEFENDERS of the public schools typically clamor for more input—bigger budgets, more teachers, smaller class size—but remain mum, or grow hostile, when the question of output is raised...

...If the level of student work done on computers strikes Oppenheimer as meager, so does the amount of classroom work actually being done...

...In the meantime, millions of American children arise each weekday morning and travel by car, bus or on foot to another session of the vexed but also grand American experiment...

...The divergence between these two books is indeed, as Oppenheimer says in another context, the same old story, the one that has been told and debated throughout the stormy history of U.S...

...Like the Thernstroms, Oppenheimer went in search of schools that pointed the way toward his vision of a model that could transform U.S...

...public schools at the moment...

...I want you in your workstations...

...In those states, test scores rose among all racial groups, but the gap between them was virtually unchanged...

...Hence their most specific suggestion for closing the racial gap: "We would turn every urban school into a charter that would be required to meet tough state standards...

...They find praiseworthy the movement that first surfaced in the 1980s to insist that public schools adapt to the regimen of "standards, testing, accountability...

...that school computers with Internet connections were the long-awaited panacea for everything ailing American education...

...Americans have never been able to make up their minds, en masse, about what their public schools are supposed to do...

...No Excuses and The Flickering Mind posit near mutually exclusive visions of what all the money and time poured into schools by taxpayers, teachers and children should produce: students who can be measured, or those who have been taught to break the mold...

...want you offe-mail...

...It's the same old story: e-mail, chat rooms, Internet sites that offer music, motorcycle products, and various other noneducational artifacts of the new information economy...

...had effectively been achieved, that the playing field for blacks and whites had been leveled, and that the time for affirmative action and racial setasides had passed...

...The racial gap, they argue, does not exist simply between poor black children in the inner cities and white children of affluence in the leafy suburbs...

...He signals his distaste for tests by dropping the adjective "notorious" before nearly every one he mentions: the SAT, the New York State Regents, the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills...

...Technically trained recruits for the nation's work force...

...We teach middle-class values like responsibility...

...The authors doubt whether such conditions can be transplanted to ordinary public schools, which they say are hamstrung by the very restraints the charters have escaped...

...public education across the board...

...A well-informed citizenry, capable of making rational choices at the ballot box...

...These are theoretical trade-offs, to be sure, but in many localities real programs were axed to pay for the machines and their helpers: "The Kittredge Street Elementary school, in Los Angeles, killed its music program to hire a technology coordinator...

...Oppenheimer cites, without comment, a motto of a high-tech school in New York City: "It doesn't matter what you know...

...During his years of research, though, the author developed a theory about what is wrong not only with computers in classrooms but with U.S...

...Students are expected to do their homework and to maintain disciplined behavior at all times...

...He or she will have a high school diploma, but not the skills that should come with it...

...Blacks and Hispanics answered "below C-," whites responded "below B...

...and ifthey proceed to do so on the simple measures that Bush has emphasized, then most teachers will have time and energy for little more than pulling the whole class a foot or two beyond the middle...

...They seized on some highly structured charter schools...

...They also consider the usual objections that arise on those rare occasions when the racial gap is mentioned in public, and they deploy a battery of published, and presumably authoritative, research to dismantle such objections...

...But translating the ideal into reality has proved to be a contentious process almost from the very beginning...

...public education...

...Not, they might have added, for want of trying...

...Some studies suggest that the disparity grows wider as children progress from grade to grade...

...Their authors believe they have found the remedy for what ails US...

...liberals either hooted or sat on their hands...

...That attitude must change, the authors maintain, before the racial gap can be effectively narrowed and eliminated...

...Hard-headed realists...