Dana Goldstein

"Unquestioning Loyalty"

This is the text of a loyalty oath New York City public school teachers were expected to take in 1917 and 1918. Over the next three decades, teachers across the country were periodically subjected to these sorts of jingoistic fevers. For Quakers and antiwar activists, a particular problem with the pledge was the vow of unquestioning obedience to American military policy, as well as the promise to inculcate such obedience in one's students:

"We, the teachers of the public schools of the City of New York, do solemnly pledge our unqualified loyalty to the President and Congress of the United States in this war with the imperial governments of Germany and Austria. 

 "We pledge ourselves actively to inculcate in our pupils by word and deed love of flag and unquestioning loyalty to the military policy of the government and to the measures and principles proclaimed by the President and Congress.

"We declare ourselves to be in sympathy with the purposes of the government and its efforts to make the world safe for democracy, and believe that our highest duty at this moment is to uphold the hands of the President and Congress in this crisis. 

"We believe that any teachers whose views prevent them from subscribing to such sentiments should not be permitted to teach the youth of our city.”

 Related: Texas state senators object to a curriculum that supposedly sympathizes with socialists, critiques founding fathers.

A Little Glimpse at My Book Research: Red Scare Attacks on Teachers

If there were endless hours in the day, I'd blog about the news much more regularly. But since my book project is pretty much all-consuming at this point, I'm not posting here as much as I'd like. I do want to let you know that over at my Tumblr, Popular History, I'm posting occasional tidbits I find as I research the political and social history of American public schools and teachers, including some fascinating newspaper and magazine reports, photos, and drawings.

Here's today's offering, which displays the paranoid rhetoric surrounding leftist educators during the WWI, WWII and Cold War Years. Though just a few hundred of New York City's 80,000 teachers at mid-century were social activists, those who lost their jobs during periodic red scare witch hunts were some of the district's most inspiring and dedicated teachers, including early advocates for school integration and a black history curriculum. Chapter five of the book will tell their stories. 

Michelle Rhee, Back in the News in a Big Way

I'm looking forward to this evening's episode of FRONTLINE, which will explore evidence of adult tampering with children's tests in certain Washington, DC public schools during the chancellorship of Michelle Rhee, who is perhaps the nation's most controversial school reformer. The allegations are not new. They were first revealed nearly two years ago by my colleague Greg Toppo and his crack reporting team at USA Today, which used a computer algorithim to comb through reams of data, and found a national pattern of manipulated standardized test scores in the wake of No Child Left Behind, which greatly increased test-score pressure on schools and districts. Tonight's documentary, however, reported by John Merrow, will delve more deeply into Rhee's efforts to evade a thorough investigation of statistically implausible test score gains. In a preview interview with the Education Writers' Association, Merrow judges Rhee harshly. "The record is pretty clear that D.C. schools are not better because she was there," he says. "They’re still at the bottom, with the lowest graduation rate in the country."

The FRONTLINE report is especially timely as it comes just a day after Rhee's national advocacy organization, Students First, released a "report card" grading states on how closely they align with Rhee's agenda of tying teacher evaluation and pay to student test scores; weakening teacher tenure; transitioning teachers from traditional pension to 401(k) plans; funding charter schools and private school vouchers; instituting mayoral and state control of schools; and expanding the charter school sector and holding it accountable for results. Doug Henwood notes that states with high grades on the report card, including Louisiana and Florida, have woefully poor student academic achievement, while Massachusetts, with the highest math and reading scores in the nation, earned a D+ from Students First. This is true, but as Matt Yglesias writes, most of Rhee's favored policies are too new to be conclusively judged; the proof will be in the pudding a decade from now, when we can track what effect, if any, school choice and test-score based accountability policies have had on gold-standard NAEP test scores over time. 

That said, Rhee's most influential effort, her push to tie teacher pay and job security to individual students' standardized test scores, is the one element of this agenda for which we already have some powerful, and disturbing evidence, thanks to the investigations of USA Today and FRONTLINE. As I've reported, psychometricians, the scientists who study testing, have been warning for decades that when policy-makers attach ever-higher stakes to tests--first accountability measures targeting schools and districts, and now job security threats for individual principals and teachers--the reliability of test scores is compromised, sometimes due to teaching-to-the-test, and sometimes due to outright cheating. This consistent finding has crucial implications for "value-added measurement," the method, promoted by economists, of using standaridzed test scores as the major proxy for teacher quality and student learning. If we are concerned, as Matt is, about so much economic modeling being backed by poor data, we must deal with the implications this has for education policy. In my 2012 year-in-review, I talk a bit more about what all this means for education research; I want to emphasize that raising concerns about value-added measurement does not mean one is reflexively "anti-testing," it simply means that one is questioning the wisdom of tying high stakes to tests.

Before I leave the subject of Michelle Rhee, it's worth noting that Students First has had a very difficult time coming up with a consistent position on the rights of teachers to collectively bargain, even just for pay.  (Most recently, it seems that they are against collective bargaining -- for everyone.) Now, as Joy Resmovits reports at the Huffington Post, many of the well-connected Democrats who worked for Rhee have left her team, and are being replaced by former staffers from Americans Elect, a hedge fund-backed effort to elect third-party independents. 

I'm not questioning Rhee's personal commitment to certain progressive aims. I was impressed, for example, with her genuine efforts to better integrate public schools in rapidly-gentrifying DC neighborhoods, by working hard to convince college-educated parents to enroll their kids in local schools. But as her career advances nationally, she is more and more allying with Republican, even Tea Party-type conservative governors and state legislators. I'm midway through writing a book on the history of American education, and from this vantage point, I'm very skeptical about relying upon an anti-government political movement--one almost totally indifferent to social and economic inequality--to invest in and improve the schools poor children attend.

2012: The Year in Review, Education and Beyond

Education story of the year: The Chicago teachers' strike. American teacher unionism was founded in Chicago in the late 1890s, as female, largely Catholic elementary school teachers resisted centralization policies--standardized testing, a uniform curriculum, numeric teacher evaluations--pursued by a male, Protestant bureaucracy. So it was fitting that the loudest cry of protest against contemporary standards-and-accountability school reform emerged in the Windy City this September, as teachers resisted professional evaluation tied to student test scores, closures of neighborhood schools, and the expansion of the charter school sector. You can read my history of Chicago teacher unionism here.

The strike has had a few interesting results. First, it raised the profile of Chicago Teachers' Union leader Karen Lewis, who is a less compromising and more leftist figure than Randi Weingarten, president of the national American Federation of Teachers. Second, it brought to the public's attention the tension bewteen increasing test-score pressure on teachers and schools while cutting budgetary support for art, music, counseling, school psychologists, and the many other crucial, yet more holistic services schools provide. Third, it resulted in a compromise contract with both progressive and regressive features. More funding for social support services, especially in high-poverty schools, is a good thing. Continuing to backload teacher salaries and bonsues, though, will not make the profession more appealing to ambitious young people or career-changers. Yet it is encouraging that CTU agreed, at least in theory, to professional evaluations that include evidence of student learning. Now the devil will be in working out the details, particularly on what role standardized test scores will play, and how to evaluate teachers of currently non-tested subjects and grades, like art, music, PE, and kindergarten.

 

Magazines of the Year: Tomorrow and Jacobin.
 

Education research-finding of the year: Teachers matter, and not just for academics. A study by economists Raj Chetty, Jonah Rockoff, and John Friedman found that teachers who consistently improve their students' standardized test scores also help children avoid teenage pregnancy, get to college, and earn higher incomes. But there is a crucial caveat to this finding: The study was conducted in a low-stakes setting, in other words, among teachers whose pay and evaluation were not tied to test scores. The researchers admitted in their paper that when tests do become high-stakes, there is an increased risk of score manipulation, which can occur either through teaching-to-the-test or outright cheating. In high-stakes settings, test scores become less reliable and, therefore, their link to better life outcomes for kids could be compromised.

 

Under-reported education trend of the year (and decade): Sociology used to be the academic discipline with the most influence over public education policy. Today that discipline is economics. On the upside, we now have more data about children's academic and life outcomes. On the downside, education policy-makers are paying less attention to aspects of children's lives that are more difficult or impossible to quantify, such as parental involvement and comfort with diversity.

 

New York restaurant of the year: Pok Pok. We only had the patience to wait in line for this place once, but it was so, so, so worth it. A close runner-up is Battersby, where I had two wonderful meals. Another year, another few reasons never to leave Brooklyn. 

 

Book of the year on How We Live Now. Twilight of the Elites, by Chris Hayes. This bracing book about "America after meritocracy" has implications for every area of policy-making, but is especially sharp at deconstructing myths we tell ourselves about education: that test scores measure aptitude and that elite schools serve the common good.

 

Education story to watch in 2013: The roll-out of the Common Core. Will the movement to implement shared national academic standards remain bipartisan, or will conservatives and Republicans increasingly turn against it? Will schools implement the Core faithfully, or will myths about the standards--like the false idea that they cut out fiction reading--persist?  

 

Albums of the year: "Break it Yourself," by Andrew Bird. "Sun," by Cat Power. "Channel Orange," by Frank Ocean. "The Idler Wheel..." by Fiona Apple. "Shields," by Grizzly Bear.

 

Education book of the year: My favorite was Saving the School, by Michael Brick.

 

A book to pounce on in 2013: The absolutely masterful Hope Against Hope, by Sarah Carr, the definitive account of education reform in post-Katrina New Orleans, told through the eyes of a student, a teacher, and a principal. A gripping narrative with deep historical and political ramifications. 

 

Cultural controversy of the year: The battle over the future of the New York Public Library's main branch, at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. Should this world-class research institution ship several million books to New Jersey, and open space for a lending library? Should architect Norman Foster, known for his glass additions to historic buildings, be let loose on this Beaux Arts masterpiece? I work there almost every day, and I still can't decide how I feel about it. 

 

TV Show of the Year: "Girls." Feminists are funny. 

 

#longreads of the year: This past spring, the magazine that launched my career, The American Prospect, experienced a terrifying brush with death. I'm so glad donors and subscribers have helped The Prospect continue its work, because under editor Kit Rachlis, it has published some amazing writing. Monica Potts' "Pressing on the Upward Way" is a compassionate, beautifully-constructed portrait of rural poverty in Eastern Kentucky. Equally stirring was Gabriel Arana's "My So-Called Ex-Gay Life," which not only told Gabe's personal story of surviving "ex-gay therapy," but also broke news by revealing how the psychiatrist who pushed to define homosexuality as a mental illness, Robert Spitzer, has come to regret and retract his previous work.

Documentary of the Year: "Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry," by Alison Klayman.

Personal Highlight of the Year: Pacific Street. With this guy.

Happy New Year, folks. 

The Disability Treaty Debacle and the Republican Education Agenda

Every so often the paranoid rhetoric of the "parental rights" movement surfaces in the Congressional Republican caucus. That's what happened yesterday when 38 senators blocked the United States from adopting the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a treaty largely based on the Americans with Disabilities Act. That celebrated piece of legislation was signed into law by George H.W. Bush in 1990. Both former Bush presidents, Bob Dole, and John McCain all back the treaty, which seeks to prevent discrimination on the basis of disability, and which would do nothing to change any exisiting U.S. law or to prevent homeschooling. Yet anti-internationalist conservative interest groups have organized strong opposition to this treaty and others among homeschooling parents and Tea Party activists, telling them it could prevent parents from educating disabled children at home or using corporal punishment. From the Senate floor, Utah's Mike Lee articulated this position: 

I and many of my constituents, including those who homeschool their children or send their children to private or religious schools, have justifiable doubts that a foreign UN body, a committee operating out of Geneva, Switzerland, should decide what is in the best interests of a child at home with his or her parents in Utah or in any other state in our Great union.

Back during the GOP primary I wrote an essay for The Nation about divisions in the Republican Party over school reform. The GOP education agenda is no longer set by No Child Left Behind moderates, who see school accountability and choice--backed by shared academic standards and enforced through standardized testing--as essentially conservative ideas. Instead, as President Obama and most Democrats have come to embrace that reform agenda, and have implemented it through programs like Race to the Top, the GOP has shifted far to the right, becoming increasingly responsive to activists who see any federal foray into education or children's issues more broadly as an invasion of the sacred parent-child relationship. 

This helps explain what happened in the Senate yesterday, and it explains what the Republican Party will have to resolve, internally, if it really intends to make education a core part of its emerging post-2012 agenda, as Buzzfeed's John Stanton and Zeke Miller are reporting. Sure: Private school vouchers and anti-teachers' union rhetoric can coexist quite comfortably with strong support for unregulated homeschooling. Both sets of ideas are predicated on a certain hostility toward traditional public schools; Jeb Bush and Rick Santorum would agree, for example, that more kids should be able to use their state and federal education funding to enroll in online, for-profit charter schools, which students "attend" from their home computers, and which are much cheaper to operate than brick-and-mortar schools.

But ultimately, authentic school improvement must take into consideration the curriculum and how it is tested or assessed, not just at charter or online schools, but at traditional public schools, as well, in which close to 90 percent of American children are enrolled. The religious right has a long history of opposing state and national efforts to raise academic standards and even to provide high school students with on-the-job vocational training (Michele Bachmann began her career grandstanding on such issues); moderate Republicans like Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels, however, remain comitted to the Common Core and to the basic idea that Washington has a role to play in supporting local schools and holding them accountable for results. 

The intra-Democratic Party debate between traditional teachers' union positions and standards-and-accountability reform was resolved over the course of the past 20 years mostly in favor of reform. The Republican Party may now go through a similar transition. Will the GOP choose centrist standardization and school improvement (which costs money), or conservative hostility toward any investment in public education? 

In Los Angeles, a Promising and Progressive School Reform Plan Is Under Threat

Between periods at Crenshaw High School in South L.A., May 2011.

Let's say a certain school's reform plan has yielded measurable academic gains (especially for disabled students), a decrease in student suspensions and expulsions, and is enthusiastically supported by the principal, teachers, and many parents. The plan has also garnered national interest, attracting funding from a major philanthropy and the Obama administration, too. This school is by no means perfect; Latino students, in particular, need significant help. And the school in question has a history of outspoken activism, with parents and teachers partnering to demand better textbooks and technology, and some teachers closely-affiliated with their union and loudly opposed to popular reform strategies such as merit pay tied to student test scores. Should this school's reform plan be halted by a district administration with a different agenda, or allowed to continue its experimentation? 

This isn't a hypothetical case, but the real story of Crenshaw High in South Los Angeles, which I reported on earlier this year, and which now faces a district-imposed "reconstitution."

Crenshaw is a high-poverty, predominantly African American school that has followed a unique reform blueprint called the Extended Learning Cultural Model. Led by a group of visionary teachers--and financed by the Ford Foundation and a federal School Improvement Grant--the Crenshaw model split the school into several themed academies ("social justice;" "business") and reorganized the curriculum around neighborhood problem-solving. What does this mean in practice? Students worked with university researchers to examine local health and nutrition issues; graphed the relationhip between school truancy rates and incarceration rates; and interned at local non-profits. They read Our America, a book about life inside a troubled Chicago housing project, and openly discussed racism and classism. Interim principal Sylvia Rousseau worked closely with teachers to raise academic rigor across the curriculum and implement the new Common Core standards. But as I wrote in February:

What’s controversial about the Crenshaw reform agenda is that it is explicitly political. It asks students to think critically about the social forces shaping their lives and to work actively to improve their low-income neighborhood. Poor children often hear that they need to do well in school in order to escape their communities. What if, instead, kids understood that doing well in school could help them become more effective advocates for their families and neighbors?

The man who became L.A. schools superintendent in April 2011, John Deasy, has quite a different orientation toward education reform. He has been affiliated with the Gates and Broad foundations, which--while both very supportive of the Common Core--tend to focus more attention on tying teacher evaluation and pay to student performance than on ensuring the curriculum is "culturally-relevant" to poor children's lives. Gates and Broad are also heavily invested in charter schools, while Crenshaw is a traditional, large comprehensive high school--the kind many education reformers believe is outmoded and should be phased out. So in part, it is no surprise that on Oct. 24, Deasy notified Crenshaw that he intends to halt the school's existing reform agenda, divide Crenshaw into three magnet schools, and ask the current teaching and administrative staff to reapply to their jobs.

There are a lot of great things about magnet schools, so I'm eager to hear more about what Deasy and his team have planned for Crenshaw. Deasy also says he wants to see more Advanced Placement and potentially International Baccalaureate classes at the school, which could be excellent ideas, and potentially worked into Crenshaw's existing reform plan. But what's discouraging about this news is that the district seems determined to paint Crenshaw -- in many ways an underdog success -- as an abject failure. Under its Extended Learning Cultural Model, Crenshaw actually met or exceeded state academic growth targets for most of its students, and earned broad-based community and even national support. Its School Improvement Grant is administered at the state level and tied to Crenshaw's current reform plan, not the agenda Deasy hopes to implement, which raises questions about accountability for federal dollars.

Everyone in the field of public education has his or her favored reform methods, from merit pay to vocational education to year-round schooling to giving every kid violin lessons. But if district leaders don't allow other experts' ideas to come to fruition over the course of years, not months, new strategies can never be fully assessed, nor scaled-up if they work. Before its current reform plan was in place, Crenshaw had five principals in nine years. This school is desperately in need of some stability, and as I saw when I sat-in on professional development trainings last year, the current staff is deeply comitted to seeing its reform project through, and unusually self-reflective about the work they are doing. What's more, the explicitly activist, social justice lens through which these educators teach their students is increasingly rare in public schools in 2012. Yet a lot of smart people, from W.E.B. Du Bois to Lisa Delpit, have observed that disadvantaged students learn more when their curriculum reflects, at least in part, their own histories and struggles, and shows them how education can serve not only their own individual interests, but those of their communities, too.

The whole saga at Crenshaw reminds me of the sad story of another creative public high school that bucked the prevailing reform winds of the day: Feinstein High, in Providence, Rhode Island. Feinstein was founded as a Ted Sizer-inspired “Essential School” organized around the principles of civic engagement and volunteer work. Serving just 360 students, Feinstein was highly nontraditional: It stressed long-form writing, not test scores, and there were no sports teams, class periods, or even grades. Every student had every teacher’s cell phone number, as well as a laptop they could carry between home and school. Although test scores were uneven, Feinstein demonstrated consistently impressive graduation and college-going rates compared to other high-poverty high schools in Rhode Island. For awhile, the school was recognized as a rare success story within an otherwise failing district. In 1999, the Gates Foundation gifted Providence $13.5 million to experiment with creating more small neighborhood high schools, using Feinstein as one model.

Over time, however, Gates, disappointed with stagnant test scores and graduation rates at some Foundation-funded small schools, decided to change his focus. In 2005, he stopped funding non-charter small schools and began investing heavily in school choice and standards-and-accountability reforms, such as charter schools and data-driven teacher evaluation. As the largest private foundation in the world, the Gates Foundation’s priorities are powerfully influential over the entire non-profit sector, and certainly help shape federal and state education agendas, too -- in part through the seeding of Foundation alumni, like Deasy, in important policy-making jobs. It didn’t take long for Feinstein to fall out of favor with Rhode Island’s political and philanthropic elite, and in 2010, despite emotional protests from students and teachers, the Providence school district shut Feinstein down.

Now the same thing could happen to another school with a nontraditional reform agenda, Crenshaw High. But there are as many ways to reform education as there are principals, teachers, students, and parents comitted to doing this very difficult work. The cause of school improvement would probably benefit from a political environment in which educators were more often allowed to break the mold of the most established and popular reform strategies, especially in cases where doing so has already yielded positive change for children.

To learn more about the fight at Crenshaw, check out Crenshaw Cougars Fighting Reconstitution. After the jump, I have posted Superintendent John Deasy's letter to the Crenshaw staff. 

The Real Boston Busing Story

Mayor Thomas Menino says school busing is unpopular and outdated. So why are 10,000 Boston children on a waiting list to be bused to higher-quality schools? 

Check out my report at Atlantic Cities on Boston's contentious school zone reorganization process.

The Chicago Strike and the History of American Teachers' Unions

 

 
Margaret Haley, the "lady labor slugger" of Chicago. She was one of the nation's first teachers' union organizers.

 

It has been difficult to discern what specific details are left on the table in the Chicago teachers’ negotiations. Broadly, we know the union leadership resents Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s enthusiasm for non-unionized charter schools and neighborhood school closings. It is also clear that professional evaluation is a big issue, as it is in states and cities across the country. To what extent should teachers be judged by their students’ test scores, as opposed to by more holistic measures? Job security, especially for teachers in schools that will be shut down, has been eroding, which the CTU sees as a calamity, yet many reformers applaud. And of course, there is pay. Is it fair for teachers to demand regular raises when unemployment is so high, and budgets at every level of government are strapped?

I’m not going to pronounce on these questions today, but I do want to offer a quick history of teacher unionism to keep things in perspective. The modern teachers’ union movement began in Chicago in 1897, and many of the problems back then -- from low school budgets to testing to debates over classroom autonomy -- remain more than salient today.

In 1800, 90 percent of American schoolteachers were men; by 1900, three-quarters were women. The feminization of teaching—a job once filled primarily by transient young men, often saving up to finance a legal or medical education—was, in large part, why education became one of the few white-collar unionized professions in the United States. Here’s how it happened, and why it happened in Chicago.

Around 1830, the American political, business, and intellectual elite began to come to a consensus that state governments should guarantee all children a free, basic education. Businesses wanted literate workers, and there was the idea that education would reduce social ills like intemperance and crime. But more than that, Common Schools reformers believed the young nation’s tenuous experiment in popular democracy required informed citizens, voters able to balance competing claims, judge the character of candidates for political office, and generally put the long term common good above short term, individual gain.  (Like today’s education reformers, Common Schoolers were an idealistic group.)

The inescapable reality, however, was that schools were expensive, and Americans, then as now, didn’t like high taxes. So in order to rapidly open many more schools, states, cities, and towns made the conscious choice to hire mostly female teachers, who were cheaper to employ. To sell that idea to a public wary of women working outside the home, and accustomed to corporal punishment and other stereotypically masculine ways of retaining control over a classroom, Common School reformers like Horace Mann, the Whig politician, and Catharine Beecher, the public intellectual, wrote and spoke ad nauseam about women’s moral superiority. As a schoolteacher, Mann lectured, a woman would be like an angel, “her head encircled with a halo of heavenly light, her feet sweetening the earth on which she treads, and the celestial radiance of her benignity making vice begin its work of repentance through very envy of the beauty of virtue!” Male teachers, Beecher liked to say, were “low, vulgar, obscene, intemperate, and utterly incompetent.”

This bracing rhetoric covered up an ugly reality of pay discrimination. Most female teachers earned just half the salary of a male teacher, and their jobs were getting harder and harder each day. In turn of the century Chicago, classrooms housed 60 students, many of them new immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe who couldn’t speak English. Yet teacher pay had been frozen for 30 years at $875 annually (about $23,000 adjusted for inflation), less than a skilled manual laborer could earn.

The nation’s first teachers’-only union, the Chicago Teachers Federation, was founded by two pissed off lady educators, Margaret Haley and Catherine Goggin. They split the CTF from the administrator-dominated National Education Association in 1897. Haley, a sixth-grade teacher, became a national political force after she launched an investigation into the school system’s budget. She found that major Chicago corporations, including the Chicago Tribune and the city’s railroad, gas, and electrical utilities, had been issued 100-year “leases” of land owned by the Chicago public schools for far-below the market rate, and were paying no taxes whatsoever on the land. Haley’s successful lawsuit against Chicago’s leading corporations, and her decision to ally the Chicago Teachers’ Federation with the blue-collar AFL-CIO Chicago Federation of Labor established teacher unionism as a potent force in American urban politics, and earned her the ire of the conservative elite. One businessman called her “a nasty, unladylike woman.” But Haley knew that because female teachers couldn’t vote, they needed the muscle of the male-dominated labor movement to back them up in their efforts to win higher pay and more say over how schools were run.

Amid these tensions, in November 1902, the Andrew Jackson School on Chicago’s West Side hosted the nation’s first ever teachers’ strike.  Superintendent Edwin Cooley had replaced a popular female principal at the school with a man sent from the central district office. On Halloween, Janice McKeon, a longtime teacher with deep ties to the predominantly Irish neighborhood, booted a student from her 55-person class for using profanity against another child. When the new principal sent the offender back to class—and McKeon refused to let him enter the room—she was suspended without pay for 30 days. A week later, on Nov. 7, 400 students, parents, and teachers protested outside the school in support of McKeon, giving a boost to the newly formed CTF.

Political reformers of this period looked at the chaos of urban school systems and concluded that young, non-college educated women weren’t tough, ambitious, or intellectual enough to be effective teachers. Men like Chicago Mayor Carter Harrison, Columbia University president and standardized testing-enthusiast Nicholas Murray Butler, and Harvard president Charles William Eliot vowed to once again attract a higher-class (read: male) professional to the K-12 classroom, and to turn education into a “science” governed by standardized teaching practices and measured by test scores. Margaret Haley, however, saw female educators not as the problem with poverty-stricken schools, but as part of the solution. She wanted to try a different way of running schools, one that increased budgets, but also relied less on technocratic centralization and more on the instincts of individual educators with ties to the communities in which they worked.

For awhile, the early CTF found a partner in Chicago schools superintendent Ella Flagg Young, a fiercely intellectual high school teacher who earned a Ph.D at the University of Chicago and became a disciple of John Dewey, the founding philosopher of American progressive education. Young led the Chicago system from 1909 to 1915, and worked with the teachers’ union to institute a pedagogy based on theories of the whole child, which emphasized a broad curriculum and project-based learning. She allowed “teacher councils” within each school to set priorities, arguing that empowering teachers would help students achieve joy in learning. “In order that teachers may delight in awakening the spirits of children, they must themselves be awake,” Young said. She also resisted attempts by business leaders to direct working class children to a narrowly conceived version of vocational education, and she continuously fought corporate efforts to pay lower school taxes. Ultimately, business interests on the school board succeeded in pushing Young out of office.

There are some obvious parallels between the teacher labor battles of the past and those of today. First, teaching remains an overwhelmingly female profession, one that is often understood more as a romantic calling than as a career like any other, in which pay, autonomy, and working conditions matter. Second, raising taxes is typically a political nonstarter; in a system serving an extremely needy population, there is perpetually the need to do more with far less than would be ideal.

But there are also clear differences. Today’s teachers, though they earn less than other college-educated workers, do make a stable, middle-class salary. They are working within a knowledge economy that rewards worker flexibility and lifelong learning; it would be counterproductive, both for students and for the strength of organized labor, for local teachers’ unions to hang on to old notions of rigid job security and near nonexistent teacher evaluation. (Many teachers’ unions do have their own proposals for how to evaluate teachers, through processes like peer evaluation and portfolios of students' work. There are also good ideas from other quarters, like much more rigorous classroom observations.) And while large class sizes remain a problem, many high-poverty schools in cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles are actually experiencing rapid declines in enrollment, in part because of competition from charters. This help explains the push for school closures and teacher workforce reductions.

Teachers’ unions are among the most controversial institutions in American public life. I hope to demystify them in my upcoming book. There is much more to say, but for now I will stop here.

Recommended reading:

Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley by Kate Rousmaniere

Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900-1980 by Marjorie Murphy

Why Helen Gurley Brown Was A Lot Like Hugh Hefner

To commemorate the death of the iconic and controversial Cosmo editor, I thought I'd pull this article from my archives, which is a joint review of Jennifer Scanlon's biography of Gurley Brown and Masters of Sex by Thomas Maier, about the sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson. 

In an adoring new biography, Bad Girls Go Everywhere, Jennifer Scanlon reopens the old debate about whether Gurley Brown can really be considered a feminist. That, of course, depends on one's definition of feminism. Undoubtedly, through her books and in the pages of Cosmopolitan, Gurley Brown encouraged young women to enjoy sex and to embrace, at least during their twenties, the single life. Her frank discussion of sexually active dating was offensive to many early-1960s readers and certainly pushed the culture toward accepting that even "good girls" engage in premarital sex. Considering Gurley Brown's influence, Scanlon, who previously wrote a cultural history of Ladies Home Journal, the staid magazine for housewives, goes to great lengths to portray Gurley Brown as a proto-second-wave feminist -- a sort of libertarian Betty Friedan, more concerned with fun than with whining about women's "victimization."

But it is only after immersing oneself in the back catalog of Ladies Home Journal that one could really mistake Cosmopolitan as radically feminist. Like Hugh Hefner, Gurley Brown was not just a magazine editor but the purveyor of a fantasy-lifestyle brand. The product Gurley Brown sold didn't purport to fix, or even address, the real economic and career anxieties facing midcentury American women. Rather, Cosmo proffered an escapist alternate reality in which every woman could distract herself with a work-related dating life as glamorous as the one Gurley Brown experienced in the Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. For Gurley Brown, Scanlon writes, the office was "a decidedly sexy environment," not the site of daily humiliations for women relegated to serving as "office wives," making coffee and picking up laundry for frequently lewd, condescending male bosses. Knowing that Gurley Brown experienced these privations in her own career only makes her wildly optimistic view of the intersection of sex and work seem more peculiar.

Read the whole piece.

On David Coleman, "Life Writing," and the Future of the American Reading List

Mary Cassatt's "Young Woman Reading." David Coleman believes American kids should read more non-fiction and fewer "stories."

Yesterday the College Board, the organization that administers the Advanced Placement program and the SAT, announced David Coleman will become its new president in October, and will focus on deepening the curricula on which College Board exams are based.

Coleman is controversial, especially among English teachers.

A classicist cum McKinsey consultant cum education reformer, he is (in)famous in education circles as the frantically energetic, hyper-intellectual architect of the new Common Core curriculum standards in language arts, which 45 states have agreed—at least theoretically—to adopt in 2014. Currently, about 80 percent of the reading American students are assigned in school is fiction or memoir, and 20 percent is non-fiction. If Coleman gets his way, that balance will soon tilt closer to 60-40. American children will spend a lot less time reading and writing what Coleman calls, somewhat derisively, “stories,” and much more time reading and writing about the ideas in “informational” texts by the likes of Richard Hofstadter, Atul Gawande, and H.L. Mencken in high school; John Adams, Frederick Douglas, and Winston Churchill in middle school.

Why? “As you grow up in this world," Coleman said at a conference last year, "you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Argument-driven writing about non-fiction sources, Coleman says, is a much better approximation of what students will be asked to do in college courses and at work than are typical public school writing prompts, like this one, for Tennessee 8^th graders:

Most students have a person they want to be like someday.  Who is your role model?

Or this one, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress 12^th grade exam:

Write an essay in which you define heroism and argue who you think our heroes really are--mass media stars, ordinary people, or maybe both. Be sure to use examples of specific celebrities, other people you have heard or read about, or people from your own community to support your position.

These prompts require students to “life-write:” to reflect on their personal experiences, feelings, and opinions. The problem, Coleman explained in a June 2011 talk to the New York State Department of Education, is that “it is rare in a working environment that someone says, ‘Johnson, I need a market analysis by Friday, but before that, I need a compelling account of your childhood.” (Coleman now tells the Times “he should have chosen his language more carefully.”)

Coleman’s message—hey kid, your little life is less important than the big ideas of history, science, and politics—is blunt, funny, and refreshingly free of self-esteem psychobabble. But it also makes many English teachers deeply uncomfortable, because it overturns decades of educational orthodoxy. The identity politics pedagogical theories of the 1970s and 1980s, as articulated in works like Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, emphasized the ability of “personal narrative” to empower students, particularly the economically and racially disadvantaged. This thinking led to classroom reading lists filled with inspirational stories about foster children, abuse victims, drug addicts, and the severely disabled, all overcoming various challenges. Among the most commonly assigned books in American English classes are A Child Called “It,” a memoir about a boy who is horrifically abused by his alcoholic mother, and The Rule of the Bone, a novel narrated by a 14-year old drug dealer whose stepfather is a sexual predator. Writing assignments often encourage children to reflect on their own personal growth.

In 2008 the National Council of Teachers of English released a position paper on “Supporting Linguistically and Culturally Diverse Learners.” The document declared teaching “a political act” and stated, “As public intellectuals and agents of change, we recognize that English teachers…are complicit in the reproduction of racial and socioeconomic inequality in schools and society.” To counteract those inequalities, teachers were directed to “research and share the personal histories of all in the classroom.”

As David Coleman traveled the country teaching educators how to implement the Common Core standards, his attack on this sort of “personal history” writing engendered a backlash. Writing in opposition to Coleman and “in defense of stories,” Steve Zemelman, director of the Illinois Writing Project, argued, “stories are a vehicle by which cultures pass on their history, beliefs, and values.”

As individuals, we tell stories all the time…In telling these stories later, we gain distance and perspective on the events. Sometimes the worse the difficulty, the more captivating the story, and the more satisfaction we get from relating it. This happens because telling stories involves thinking, integrating, and evaluating – i.e., gaining deeper comprehension of a set of events. Thus, stories are about deepening comprehension and dealing with complexity– exactly what the [Common Core] reading standards are about. And this happens not just by reading stories, but also by writing them.

Alice Mercer, a California elementary school teacher with experience in high-poverty schools, noted on her blog that the current California standards for second grade writing focus on narrative and producing “friendly letters,” while the new Common Core asks second graders to write opinion pieces and research papers using documentary evidence from books.

“From friendly letters to writing opinion pieces… that’s a mighty big leap,” Mercer wrote, predicting that in five years, the public will decry that “kids can’t write a decent friendly email.”

Alan Lawrence, an education blogger and former English teacher who was California’s 2007 “teacher of the year,” complained that Coleman “has zero K-12 teaching experience. Should we really be learning how to cook from a person who’s never been in the kitchen?”

Indeed, Coleman has never been a public school teacher. He holds a master’s degree in philosophy from Cambridge, and his mother is the president of tony Bennington College. So perhaps, critics say, Coleman doesn’t fully understand the power of “stories” to reach children—especially poor children—who would otherwise find reading and writing a chore.

As an education reporter, I’ve seen evidence of the power of personal narrative in the classroom. One of the most effective programs in the troubled Newark, New Jersey public schools is the Children’s Literacy Initiative, which teaches basic writing skills by asking kindergarten through third grade students, every day, to draft a short “story” about a life event. Teachers then use these pieces to go over grammar, spelling, and syntax with each student.

The idea is that children are most invested in improving a piece of writing that amplifies their own experiences and feelings. And the Children’s Literacy Initiative works: The Newark schools using its strategies are among the highest-performing schools in the city, and their students—almost all of them living in poverty—routinely exceed state test score averages not only in reading and writing, but also in math and science.

So I’m sympathetic to teachers who are turned off by Coleman’s rhetoric. There’s something discomfiting about Coleman—a white guy with advanced degrees, who earns a living spreading his opinions—sending the message that children’s personal stories and feelings don’t matter, so they shouldn’t write them down.

Yet Coleman is responding to a deeply troubling landscape in American reading and writing instruction. Only one-third of fourth-graders read at grade level. According to a report from Renaissance Learning, the top 40 books read by American high school students have an average reading level of just 5.3—meaning they are more appropriate for fifth graders than for teenagers on their way to college or the workforce. Educators (and journalists) know good writing is informed by high-level reading, which exposes us not only to vocabulary, but also to background knowledge rich with facts and ideas.

If you scratch the surface of Coleman’s incendiary proclamations and dive into the Common Core standards documents, you see he’s making a more complex argument than his critics give him credit for: that when schools don’t require students to interact with difficult, non-fiction texts, they deny them the opportunity to build the skills they need to amplify their thoughts and opinions, by writing them clearly and backing them up with evidence. Coleman is correct that ultimately, most college-student and adult writers are judged less on their ability to reflect on their own lives, and more on their ability to reflect on the world of ideas and events around them—whether they are drafting a final paper about a classic novel, a letter-to-the-editor about a local political race, or a memo outlining their company’s web strategy.

There is something valuable in Coleman’s promotion of non-narrative reading and evidence-based writing, especially in a culture of reality television and Facebook “timelines,” in which the prosaic events of individual lives are opened up to public consumption and critique. Memoir will always be a rich and legitimate literary genre, and teachers shouldn’t stop empowering children to write personal histories. But life-writing, alone, cannot teach students the critical thinking skills they need to develop; it cannot teach them how to add strength to their opinions by backing them with the force of research evidence.

Coleman states it best in a recent essay—free of his usual snark—on “What Kids Should Be Reading.”

Students will not likely choose sufficiently challenging text on their own; they need to be challenged and supported to build their strength as readers by stretching to the next level. ... The books students read should be worthy of close attention and careful re-reading for understanding. To become career and college ready, students must grapple with a range of works that span many genres, cultures, and eras and model the kinds of thinking and writing students should aspire to in their own work.

I expect Coleman will bring these ideas with him to the College Board—as well as his other controversial opinions, such as his interest in developing computer programs that can grade the more sophisticated student essays he would like to assign. I've been fascinated by Coleman for a long time and will be watching with great interest.