November 04, 2015
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The third progressive reformer highlighted in The Long Crusade is Ted Sizer, the headmaster of the Phillips Academy boarding school in Andover, Mass. Sizer, a rare Brahmin in a heavily Jewish field of ed-reform superstars, was the leading spokesman for replacing the giant comprehensive high schools promoted by Harvard president James B. Conant during the Sputnik era with “small learning communities.”
This was all the rage a decade ago when Bill Gates was pouring huge amounts of money into reconfiguring American high schools to fit Sizer’s vision. But then in 2009 Gates announced he”d wasted $2 billion on small learning communities and other boondoggles and the fad faded.
Wolters then focuses on three back-to-basics conservative reformers. Actually, both Robert Slavin and E.D. Hirsch were men of the left, but their old-fashioned egalitarianism led them to focus productively on trying to make things simple for minorities. The fundamental problem of progressive education is that by making dogmatic the belief that poor black and Hispanic children are on average just as intelligent as prep school students, progressiveness offers educators excuses to skip the drab fundamentals that minorities actually need to succeed.
For example, Slavin campaigned for phonics and against the fashion for the “whole word” reading method that is used by the best readers but is unsuitable for many first graders. Wolters points out that phonics truly is more reliable at imparting basic literacy in first grade. On the other hand, the advantages of Slavin’s Success for All phonics program rapidly faded as students got into higher grades, where the whole-word reading method has its advantages and innate differences in IQ increasingly matter.
Hirsch is the U. of Virginia English professor behind the Core Knowledge campaign and the 1987 Cultural Literacy best-seller. His insight was that one roadblock to reading comprehension is a lack of relevant factual knowledge. For example, how fast can you make sense of this sentence from The Telegraph‘s coverage of last summer’s big England vs. Australia cricket match?
Moeen, Moeen, Moeen, Moeeeeeeeen as Dolly Parton calls him, finishes his over with three dot balls at the Australian captain, the first of which is driven full-bloodedly into Gary Ballance at silly mid-off, hots him on the foot and almost “Allan Lambs” up to become a caught and bowled, but drops short of the bowler.
Abstract reading skills aren”t much use in comprehending this if you don”t know what “silly mid-off“ is (a defensive position?) or haven”t heard the Dolly Parton song “Jolene.”
Hirsch’s solution was to make up lists of basic facts that all American children should be taught because they come up over and over again in reading. But in the 1980s, teaching children about, say, the Mayflower was widely considered racist, so Hirsch’s ideas were only spottily adopted.
I suspect the latest fad, the Common Core, is intended by Bill Gates and David Coleman in part to covertly revive some of Hirsch’s Core Knowledge ideas.
The third conservative reformer, Chris Whittle, is a once glamorous entrepreneur whose attempt to start a national chain of for-profit schools was fashionable with Wall Street during the Internet bubble. But his for-profit Edison Schools turned out to be nonprofits, losing $354 million in a decade. We haven”t heard much about private-enterprise K”12 schools since.
Then Wolters turns to the new generation of ed reformers who emerged in the 1990s and 2000s when the obsession shifted from finding the magic curriculum to hiring wizard teachers and firing dastardly ones.
Wendy Kopp is a superachiever who invented Teach for America to be an elite cadre of college graduates who devote two years to parachuting into black or Latino schools. Kopp claimed that closing The Gap was “this generation’s issue.” But as Wolters points out, while she dismissed the importance of IQ in student performance, she relentlessly marketed the high IQs of her recruits by publicizing their SAT scores. Wolters writes:
At Harvard the number of applicants increased from 100 in 2007 to 293 in 2010…. Even when choosing at Harvard and Yale, however, TFA selected only a minority of the candidates. This led one wry journalist to say that the solution to America’s educational problem was at hand: “Evidently, all we have to do is to fire all the schoolteachers and replace them with the best Harvard graduates”but not the run-of-the-mill Harvard grads. Just the best Harvard graduates.”
Wolters also covers Michelle Rhee’s celebrated campaign to fire black lady teachers in Washington, D.C., which excited white gentrifiers, but which got her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, fired by black voters.
The Long Crusade concludes with three contrarians, beginning with historian Diane Ravitch’s reversion from antiprogressive to socialist scourge of the billionaire ed-reform donors. It wraps up with a couple of chapters on the insights of those of the racial-realist school, including Robert Weissberg, author of Bad Students, Not Bad Schools, and John Derbyshire, author of We Are Doomed.
After the ed reformers” endless claims that the schools are in crisis, Wolters” last paragraph offers a fairly novel conclusion: We Are Not Doomed (unless we doom ourselves).
After America’s misadventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the denouement of deregulating the financial industry, we should understand that breaking up large systems can create more problems than it solves. We should be on guard, lest the effort to uplift weak students has the unintended effect of destroying an educational system that, all things considered, has served the nation well.
Don”t fix it if it’s not broken. In particular, don”t smash it up if the main thing broken about it is the one thing nobody has ever figured out how to fix: that blacks and Hispanics aren”t, on average, as smart as whites and Asians.
