Vol. 4, No. 4 - Education Next https://www.educationnext.org/journal/vol-04-no-04/ A Journal of Opinion and Research About Education Policy Fri, 19 Jan 2024 15:46:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.5 https://i0.wp.com/www.educationnext.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/e-logo.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Vol. 4, No. 4 - Education Next https://www.educationnext.org/journal/vol-04-no-04/ 32 32 181792879 The Detracking Movement https://www.educationnext.org/the-detracking-movement/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/the-detracking-movement/ Why children are still grouped by ability

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The practice that has come to be known as “tracking” began as a response to the influx of immigrant children into America’s schools during the early 20th century. To educate this newly diverse student population, school officials thought it necessary to sort children into different “tracks” based on their ability or past performance. As school reformer Ellwood P. Cubberley stated in 1909, “Our city schools will soon be forced to give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal, and our society devoid of classes . . . and to begin a specialization of educational effort along many lines.” The advent of the IQ test and standardized achievement tests accelerated this trend by making the sorting process more apparently scientific.

In the early days of tracking, junior-high and high-school students were assigned to academic, general, or vocational tracks. At one extreme students were being groomed for college, while at the other they prepared to enter trades such as plumbing or secretarial work. By midcentury, a majority of secondary schools used some form of tracking. The practice was especially prevalent in large comprehensive high schools.

Today this extreme form of tracking is relatively rare. In the early 1970s, policymakers and educators, fearing that America was in danger of losing its competitive edge, began insisting that all students have access to a rigorous academic curriculum. States passed minimum graduation standards that required students to take a certain number of courses in the core subjects of English, mathematics, social studies, and science. And the 1983 A Nation at Risk report recommended even tougher standards. In the ensuing two decades, the percentage of students taking four years of each core academic subject increased dramatically.

With the new emphasis on preparing every student for college, tracking in its modern form has come to mean grouping students by ability within subjects. In each subject, students are assigned to advanced, regular, or basic courses depending on their past performance. For instance, students in the advanced track might take pre-calculus as juniors in high school and calculus as seniors, while students in the basic track might go only as far as algebra II or geometry. The creation and growth of Advanced Placement courses is perhaps the best example of how tracking has become an institutionalized practice (see Figure 1).

AP Testing on the Rise (Figure 1)
Advanced Placement (AP) courses represent an increasingly popular form of ability tracking. Since 1980, the number of students sitting for AP exams has increased more than sevenfold. The College Board estimates that just one-third of all students enrolled in AP courses actually sit for the exam.
NOTE: The number of exams given exceeds the number of individual test-takers because test-takers may take exams in more than one subject. Totals include a small percentage of non-U.S. students.
SOURCES: College Board; U.S. Department of Education

The Backlash

Educators broadly support the practice of tracking in its modern form. Teachers find that tracking facilitates instruction by making it easier to gear lessons to the ability level of the whole class. Parents of high-performing students also favor tracking because research shows that students assigned to high-ability groups make greater gains in achievement. However, in studies published in 1986 and 1999, my colleagues and I found that students assigned to low-ability groups score lower on standardized tests than if they had been placed in mixed-ability or high-ability groups.

That finding lies at the core of a backlash against tracking that began in the 1980s. Critics argued that tracking, especially in practice, created greater learning opportunities for high-performing students at the expense of their lower-performing peers. Tracking’s opponents alleged that students in lower tracks often had the weakest teachers in a school, an unchallenging curriculum, few academic role models, and low social status. Moreover, they argued, tracking enabled educators to claim that courses were academic or college preparatory in nature when, in fact, the content lacked even the semblance of rigor.

The movement picked up considerable momentum with the 1985 publication of Jeannie Oakes’s deeply influential Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. Oakes provided empirical evidence of the disadvantages endured by students placed in lower tracks. In a similar vein, she revealed that some schools, under orders to desegregate, were promoting internal segregation by disproportionately assigning minority students to lower tracks. Overall, Oakes characterized tracking as an elitist practice that perpetuated the status quo by giving students from privileged families greater access to elite colleges and high-income careers. “Tracking is not in the best interests of most students,” Oakes concluded. “It does not appear to be related to either increasing academic achievement or promoting positive attitudes and behaviors. Poor and minority students seem to have suffered most from tracking—and these are the very students on whom so many educational hopes are pinned.”

At the height of the detracking movement, organizations including the National Governors Association, the National Education Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the California Department of Education came down in favor of detracking. Courts even mandated detracking reforms in some districts as part of efforts to desegregate the schools. For instance, in 1994 the San Jose Unified School District agreed to a consent decree that mandated detracking in grades K–9 and limited tracking in grades 10–12. But the response of school personnel was mixed. While many teachers favored detracking, a large number of parents, politicians, and other teachers resisted. As a result, while the schools became more integrated over time, and remedial classes were eliminated, detracking was never institutionalized as school practice.

Perhaps the most notorious episode in the detracking movement occurred in Massachusetts and California in the early 1990s. Officials in both states mandated that middle schools eliminate or reduce tracking. However, in The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy, Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless demonstrated how schools, possessing a considerable degree of autonomy, were able to implement the new policy in ways that were consistent with local preferences. While neither state withdrew the mandate, the detracking movement could hardly claim victory.

Minor Inroads

To what extent has the detracking movement influenced the practices of schools and teachers? To date, no national longitudinal survey has provided solid information on the extensiveness of detracking and the manner in which it has been carried out. However, the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 asked a representative sample of teachers whether students were assigned to classes comprising students who were above average, average, below average, or ranging widely in achievement. Their responses suggested that, nationwide, 15 percent of 8th-grade students were heterogeneously grouped for English classes, 14 percent for mathematics, 12 percent for science, and 18 percent for social studies. The remaining large majority of students were in classes with students of roughly the same ability level.

A second study, the Survey of High School Curricular Options, sampled 912 secondary schools in 1993 to obtain information about curriculum differentiation. It reported that 86 percent of high schools offered courses in which students were tracked. The data revealed that 14 percent of 10th graders took math courses in groups in which students’ abilities differed widely; the same was true for 28 percent of 10th graders in English.

A 2000 survey of all 174 public high schools in Maryland reported that two-thirds of the high schools used tracking in the four core subject areas, while 13 percent didn’t track students in any of the core subjects (the survey’s response rate was 79 percent). The remaining schools tracked in some but not all of the core areas. Interestingly, all of the 31 low-poverty, low-minority schools in the study used tracking, compared with only 36 percent of the 25 high-poverty, high-minority schools. In Maryland, at least, detracking is more likely in schools with a greater proportion of disadvantaged students. On the whole, however, the evidence suggests that the detracking movement has not transformed the way students are organized for instruction in America’s schools.

What explains the resilience of tracking? For one thing, teaching in a detracked school is far more difficult than in a tracked school. Teachers who have been assigned to detracked classes often report that they must “teach to the middle” or omit some of the curriculum because they don’t have time to instruct students at every different level within a class period. Moreover, detracking necessitates reallocating teachers and administrators, modifying the curriculum, and providing professional training. Schools may find these changes prohibitive for budgetary or logistical reasons. Finally, parents of high-ability students tend to prefer rigorous, homogeneous classes, while other parents are unconvinced that heterogeneous classes will benefit their children.

Subtle Influence

Despite widespread opposition to detracking and the failure of many efforts to institutionalize the policy, the detracking movement has had a major impact on school reform. While most schools still assign students to classes based on ability, the movement has heightened public awareness of the often inadequate resources and underwhelming curriculum provided to students in low-track classes.

Furthermore, the detracking movement has challenged widely held beliefs regarding the notion of “ability” and the role it plays in determining the kind of curriculum to which students will be exposed. More educators are now convinced that nearly all students are capable of mastering a challenging curriculum. New academic standards, state tests, and accountability requirements represent an effort to ensure that all students are given access to a rigorous curriculum. Detracking may never become widespread, but changes such as these are expected to improve the achievement of all students, particularly those who are ill served by the negative aspects of tracking as it is currently practiced.

Maureen T. Hallinan is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity at the University of Notre Dame.

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The Brown Irony https://www.educationnext.org/the-brown-irony/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/the-brown-irony/ Racial progress eventually came to pass—everywhere but in public schools

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Oliver Brown, on behalf of his daughter, Linda, sued a school board, not a public park commission or state-run railroad, though throughout the South these public facilities were no less segregated than schools. Within the private sector as well, discrimination was pervasive.

Yet today we see marked progress toward racial equality in public facilities, industry, and politics–but not in our schools.

In light of the Brown opinion, the irony is all the greater. The opinion accompanying the Supreme Court’s decision barred only school segregation–on the shaky grounds that such segregation harmed the “hearts and minds” of black children (see the essays in this issue by Warren Simmons and Howard Fuller).

Brown nonetheless changed the country’s most basic political and economic institutions. Segregated political rallies, legislative assemblies, and presidential cabinets all went by the boards. Not right away, but eventually.

The workplace, too, is now more often racially mixed than not. When the private sector was told not to discriminate, it complied. Not right away–and not completely–of course. But as younger generations scorned racism and money was to be made by becoming an equal-opportunity employer, private institutions opened their doors. Today, black and white adults with similar scores on standardized tests earn similar wages.

Meanwhile, Brown‘s consequences for education remain ambiguous at best. On the plus side, legalized school segregation disappeared and most school districts have become as integrated as their cities’ demographics will allow.

But the slow march toward further integration was accompanied by bitter conflicts that introduced new problems–involuntary busing that separated schools from families and communities; large, difficult-to-manage school campuses (built to broaden the social mix of the school); tensions between ethnic groups and within-school discrimination; and lowered expectations for students of all social backgrounds. Whites fled bad schools for racially distinctive suburbs.

Worse, African-American students’ learning has continued to trail that of whites. Though the achievement gap narrowed in the 1980s, it opened again in the 1990s, at a time when the principles of Brown should have been firmly entrenched.

Conventional liberals blame “politicians” for inadequate funding or “society” for its abiding, if now hidden, racism. But money has seldom bought progress in education, and it is difficult to claim that racism survives in schools when it is on the wane elsewhere.

Conventional conservatives are more apt to blame the family, suggesting that the child-rearing practices within black households are the root of the problem. Yet this overlooks growing evidence that disparities between the achievement of blacks and that of whites are smallest among preschoolers–the age at which family influences are pervasive and school influence nil (see the article by Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt).

Closer to the truth are those who blame Hollywood, television, and the fashion industry for fostering the drug-infested, anti-learning, “hip-hop” youth culture that burgeoned in the 1990s.

If street culture is the problem, then assigned neighborhood schools are not the solution. Only in rare instances do traditional neighborhood schools acquire the sense of mission that can wall off the seductions of their immediate environment.

Learning is best fostered when schools draw boundaries that separate classroom studies from the opiates of street life. Because good private schools have discovered this secret, African-American students who attend them are much more likely to complete college than are comparable students from public schools. There are signs that charter schools have discovered this secret as well. As schools of choice, not assignment, they have an institutional incentive to do so.

Unfortunately, some still argue for traditional public schools on the grounds that black families are too ill-informed to make wise choices. But over time, knowledge and commitment will come naturally to most parents, if choice is made available. To ignore this is racist in the extreme. School choice is, indeed, the civil-rights issue of today.

– PAUL E. PETERSON

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NCLB in Worcester; multiple intelligences https://www.educationnext.org/nclb-in-worcester-multiple-intelligences/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/nclb-in-worcester-multiple-intelligences/ How many intelligences?

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How many intelligences?

Daniel Willingham’s critique of Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences (“Reframing the Mind,” Check the Facts, Summer 2004) is yet another attempt by a psychometric supremacist to quash other views of intelligence.

Psychometric diehards assume that the correct model of intelligence can be generated by investigating how people think in highly atypical situations. It is true, as Willingham writes, that data from 130,000 individuals enabled John Carroll to produce a three-tiered model of intellect-with g (general intelligence) atop it all. But it is also true that those 130,000 individuals were largely plopped into isolated rows where they frenetically addressed peculiar puzzles and bubble-in answer sheets.

Rather than investigating bubble-sheet results, Gardner sought to illuminate the mental abilities that underlie actual human accomplishments found across cultures. What makes people capable mathematicians and writers as well as teachers, historians, farmers, artists, and even comedians? Gardner tackled this question by drawing on a wide array of evidence from the sciences and social sciences. Since statistical techniques for analyzing this diversity of evidence do not exist, Gardner could not simply use traditional methods. Therefore, he laid out his evidence, criteria, and reasoning-just as, for instance, Charles Darwin did.

Does this mean that all uses of Gardner’s theory are effective? No. Gardner, who had not anticipated the wide use of his theory in schools, initially encouraged broad experimentation with it. Hence there were brilliant and stupid uses. My recently published investigation of 41 schools that use multiple intelligences theory has identified those practices that enable educators to use the theory, not for its own sake, but to enable students to produce high-level work. It remains highly questionable whether psychometric theories, which are neither the whole story of human intelligence nor terribly useful to teachers, can do anything similar.

Mindy L. Kornhaber
Pennsylvania State University

University Park, Pennsylvania

The school that I lead, the New City School, has been implementing multiple intelligences theory since 1988. Our experiences with using Gardner’s theory have been very positive. Multiple intelligences theory is a tool that can be used to enable more children to learn and to enable children to learn more. By considering all of the intelligences as they plan and teach, teachers become student-centered rather than curriculum-focused. Too often, schooling is designed so that the only students who succeed are those who are strong in the scholastic intelligences (linguistic and logical-mathematical). In a multiple intelligences school, all of the intelligences are used as tools to facilitate and support students as they learn the requisite curriculum and skills. Our program is no less rigorous because of our use of Gardner’s theory; instead, our use of multiple intelligences gives our students richer and wider ways to learn.

Thomas R. Hoerr
New City School

St. Louis, Missouri

Many educators object to the unitary view of intelligence because it tends to narrowly circumscribe the measurement of intelligence and to emphasize verbal and mathematical (and related) skills. It is assumed that even if one could measure a broader range of abilities, the results would not alter any particular child’s standing on a combined intelligence scale. Verbal and math skills have traditionally been the focus of intelligence tests because these skills were the focus of schools; hence inquiry into understanding children’s intelligence was limited to those skills viewed as essential to learning. As Willingham says, “If it was important in school, it was important on the intelligence test.”
Educators have good reasons for seeking alternative views. If by reconstructing our views of children’s intelligence we can successfully teach a wider range of students, teachers should not be accused of being confused for doing just that.

Laura Rogers
Francis W. Parker Charter School

Devens, Massachusetts

Worcester responds

William G. Howell concludes that the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) has had “little impact at all” on the Worcester Public Schools (“One Child at a Time,” Feature, Summer 2004). He bases this conclusion solely on the fact that few parents in Worcester chose to exercise their rights to switch schools or to choose a for-profit vendor for after-school tutoring-options they possess under the federal law’s school choice and supplemental services provisions.

But should we be surprised that few parents chose to move their children to other schools? Howell reports that 80 percent of the Worcester parents he surveyed indicated that they were satisfied with their child’s school. Satisfied parents do not transfer their children out of a school.

Howell neglects to mention that among the 14 largest urban districts in Massachusetts, Worcester had the second highest percentage (68 percent) of schools meeting state targets for making “adequate yearly progress” under the law; the statewide average was 48 percent. As a district, we met adequate yearly progress targets in English for all economic and ethnic subgroups of students.

Howell also downplays the fact that the Worcester school district is a state-approved provider of tutoring services to more than 800 students. Competing against for-profit tutoring firms, our highly qualified teachers have offered more services to more children for less money.

The major problem with No Child Left Behind lies with the accountability system and the definition of adequate yearly progress. Adequate yearly progress is an Enron-like mess based on different students in different years and different state cut-offs regarding when students are deemed “proficient.” Rather than focus on the real problem, Howell pursues the red herrings of choice and supplemental services.

James Caradonio
Superintendent, Worcester Public Schools
Worcester, Massachusetts

William Howell responds: In Worcester, one child has taken advantage of the choice provisions of NCLB in order to seek supplemental tutoring services from a private provider, and one other child switched out of a school deemed in need of improvement in order to attend a higher-performing public school. Yet thousands of students qualified for both educational options. The purpose of my essay was to explain how this happened.

I identified numerous factors that contributed to the low take-up rates in Worcester, ranging from the district’s practices and students’ demographics to parents’ interests in alternative schooling options. Nothing in Caradonio’s response rebuts any particular observation. Instead, Caradonio highlights those that compliment his district and dismisses the rest. By his account, it is immaterial that few parents even knew about their options; that the district created a cumbersome process for exercising those options; or that private providers had few means by which to communicate directly with eligible students.

Abolish school boards?

The continuing battle for control of the New York City schools shows why school boards are a valuable part of public education (see “The Future of School Boards,” Forum, Summer 2004). In 2002, the state legislature eliminated the school board and gave total control of the school system to Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Over the past two years, however, many who wanted to see the board abolished have grown unhappy with Bloomberg’s handling of the public schools.

Brookings Institution scholar Diane Ravitch and United Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, both of whom supported mayoral control, wrote recently in the New York Times that Bloomberg’s powers are “unchecked” and the city’s education department operates in secrecy, denying “the right of the public to have a say in important decisions.” In their words, it is time to allow a “board of respected citizens to set policy for the schools” and to “reestablish the role of the public in public education.”

This sounds like Ravitch and Weingarten want a local school board.

In Canada, the government of New Brunswick abolished elected school boards in 1996 in favor of a corporate governance structure that gave absolute power to the Minister of Education. Four years later, the parents, the public, and school administrators were frustrated at being left out of the decisionmaking process. They vented their anger at the polls and voted out the ruling party. The new government immediately reinstated elected school boards.

That’s because school board members are the public’s voice in public education. For generations, the public has trusted school boards to balance community goals and values with the needs of children. School board members are accessible to parents, advocates for children, and accountable for student performance. They are an essential component of the future of public education.

Anne Bryant
Executive Director, National School Boards Association
Alexandria, Virginia

 

In arguing for the elimination of the local school board, Chester Finn and Lisa Keegan (“Lost at Sea“) state, “[State-level child-centered funding] would create not only a more equitable system, but also more effective schools.”

I agree that a child-centered funding system would be more equitable. I also agree that our large city school districts are examples of monopolies at their worst. Yet it is not clear that a complete move to a state-funded, child-centered funding system would lead to more effective schools. For one thing, taxpayers might be less likely to support the current high levels of education funding if such funding were completely centralized.

In researching the effects of school-finance centralization in California, Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby found that increased centralization of school financing led to lowered per-pupil spending. This isn’t surprising given that many individuals support local school taxes because doing so will increase the resale value of their home. No such incentive exists in a world of centralized funding.

Joshua Hall
The Buckeye Institute

Columbus, Ohio

Reform in Britain

No doubt readers of Christopher Woodhead’s article (“The British Experience,” Feature, Summer 2004) will have figured out that this is a polemic rather than a balanced discussion of the pros and cons of recent education reforms in England. For instance, Woodhead’s claim that the examination agencies in England lack real independence has never been substantiated by any of the many independent investigations carried out from time to time in response to accusations of the “dumbing down” of exams.
The “exhaustion and anger of teachers” referred to in the article is seldom directed at the “educational establishment” but more often at policymakers-and most frequently at those who offer unbalanced and poorly substantiated criticism of the education system and whose own policy ideas are so obviously ideologically driven.

Peter Robinson
Institute for Public Policy Research

London, England

Consequences of Brown

Thomas Dee’s finding (“The Race Connection,” Research, Spring 2004) that both white and black students learned more when taught by teachers of the same race has implications that go far beyond his discussion.

One of the unfortunate results of Brown v. Board of Education was that many black teachers and principals throughout the nation lost their jobs, as white administrators refused to hire them for the newly integrated schools. As a result, most black and Hispanic students still have white teachers. In 2000, 38 percent of public schools had not a single teacher of color; nationally, only 6 percent of teachers are black. Even in large urban school districts, where the student body is largely minority, only about 18 percent of teachers are black and 9 percent Hispanic.

To some extent, then, the racial disparity in the teaching force that has been an unfortunate consequence of Brown has probably contributed to the survival of the achievement gap that integration was meant to solve.

Leonie Haimson
Class Size Matters

New York, New York

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Selective Memory https://www.educationnext.org/selective-memory/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/selective-memory/ The post Selective Memory appeared first on Education Next.

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Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left
By Susan Braudy
Knopf, 2003, $27.95; 460 pages.

Reviewed by Diane Ravitch

While reviewing several American history textbooks, I was taken aback by the descriptions of the late 1960s. It is of course somewhat startling to see the events of one’s own lifetime described as “history,” but it is even more surprising to read admiring, uncritical accounts of the radical movements of that era. The texts now in use in American high schools never suggest that there was an antidemocratic, violent impulse at work in the most radical groups. In the conventional narrative of the era, even the “hippies” are portrayed as the vanguard of positive social change, without questioning whether a society can function when its potential leaders are “turning on and dropping out.”

This mythologizing of the Sixties is not good history. The consequences of that era continue to be felt in our schools, particularly in the disintegration of adult authority and in the fear of setting limits on students’ “rights.” Gerald Grant’s superb The World We Created at Hamilton High chronicles the dramatic and corrosive changes in the American high school that can be traced to the Sixties. Other excellent books-such as Todd Gitlin’s The Sixties, Hugh Pearson’s The Shadow of the Panther, and Thomas Powers’s Diana: The Making of a Terrorist-tell the story of that era without sugarcoating the deeds of the radical youth who wanted to impose a social revolution.

Yet a full, accurate representation of these events is missing from the most widely used textbooks. A History of the United States, a fine textbook written by the late Daniel Boorstin and Brooks Mather Kelley, was in fact criticized in professional journals for its less-than-admiring treatment of the Sixties revolutionaries. Their textbook is now out of print, in part because of its allegedly old-fashioned telling of American history.

Family Circle: The Boudins and the Aristocracy of the Left, a biography of Kathy Boudin and her comrades, is a cautionary tale that reminds us how lucky we were to escape the demented ambitions of the radical youth movements of that tumultuous era.

Boudin was one of the most famous members of her generation, but her name does not appear in any of the most widely used history textbooks. The reason is obvious: Her direct involvement in bombings and murder gives the lie to the textbooks’ fawning portrayal of her generation.

Boudin grew up in a leftist milieu, surrounded by luminaries of radicalism. Her father, attorney Leonard Boudin, represented prominent radicals, including accused spy Judith Coplon, Fidel Castro, and Paul Robeson; Boudin’s law partner represented Alger Hiss. Kathy’s uncle, I. F. Stone, was a celebrated left-wing journalist. Her mother was a poet and self-described “parlor revolutionary.” Much was made in Kathy’s family of the fact that she was born on May 19, the same birthday as Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh. The “family circle” included many famous artists, writers, and academics.

Kathy attended the parent-run progressive Downtown Community School in lower Manhattan, founded by her father and Margaret Mead; parental meetings were rocked by fights between Trotskyites and Stalinists, Stalinists and liberals. At her private progressive high school, classmates included future revolutionary Angela Davis and Michael Meeropol, son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

At Bryn Mawr, the elite women’s college, Kathy created a student-run dorm to escape the dress code and parietal rules. She radicalized some fellow students, led civil-rights protests, and demanded higher wages for the dormitories’ black maids (the college administration responded by phasing out the maid system, which eliminated the maids’ jobs). She spent her senior year in Russia, where her leftist political views deepened.

Heightened Radicalism

After graduation in 1965, Kathy entered a life of protest activities and community organizing among the poor. She spent time in Newark, where Tom Hayden of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was trying to forge an “interracial movement of poor people and students in northern cities.” She joined a similar project in Cleveland, where she organized welfare mothers. At the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, Kathy and fellow SDS radicals planned violent clashes with the police and telephoned bomb threats to hotels. Kathy’s father had to bail them out of jail. Kathy and other radicals formed the Weathermen, a group devoted to violent revolution. In his biography of Diana Oughton, Thomas Powers wrote that she and Kathy wanted to be “this country’s executioners.”

Boudin and her fellow well-educated, upper-middle-class revolutionaries had numerous ridiculous ideas. One that they put into practice was called “smash monogamy,” which meant that no one should have an exclusive relationship with anyone and everyone should sleep with everyone. They engaged in intensive sessions of criticism and self-criticism to ward off counterrevolutionary deviations. They admired violence, especially when committed by those like the Black Panthers and Charles Manson, who were willing to kill for their beliefs, no matter how bizarre.

Then came the fateful day in 1970 when Kathy was staying in a luxurious townhouse in Greenwich Village with four friends. One busied himself in the basement, assembling a powerful bomb packed with hundreds of roofing nails so as to inflict maximum damage. Possible sites for detonation included a department store, an army base, or the Columbia University campus. But the bombmaker erred; the bomb exploded, killing him and two other revolutionaries. Only Kathy and the daughter of the townhouse owner escaped.

Kathy went underground for the next decade, advancing her cause with an occasional bombing, living in the actor Jon Voight’s houseboat, finding shelter in safe houses wherever she went. In one ludicrous scene, Kathy and Bernadine Dohrn set a bomb in the ladies room of the U.S. Capitol, on behalf of the revolution. Kathy, her biographer says, found this clandestine existence “exciting.” While underground, Kathy and her group managed prison breaks for Timothy Leary, the Harvard psychology professor famous for experimenting with LSD, and for Joanne Chesimard, a black radical who had participated in the murder of police officers in New Jersey.

This fugitive lifestyle ended in 1981 when Kathy left her 14-month-old baby with a sitter and said she would return that afternoon. She and the child’s father, fellow revolutionary David Gilbert, had agreed to drive the getaway van for a group of heavily armed bank robbers who planned to rob a Brinks truck. (The robbers claimed to be black revolutionaries but actually used proceeds from their heists to buy drugs.)

They drove to a suburban shopping mall north of New York City. While Kathy and David waited in a rented U-Haul truck, the “revolutionaries” cornered the Brinks truck and gunned down its guards, killing one of them and snatching canvas bags of money. The gang drove to the getaway van and piled into the back; the plan was that police would be looking for black robbers, not a middle-aged white couple driving a U-Haul van.

But the police did stop Kathy and David at a roadblock. Kathy got out and told the police to put down their guns. Foolishly, they did. The robbers hiding in the back of the van sprang out firing; two police officers were killed. Kathy was captured and convicted and eventually spent 20 years in prison for her role in the Brinks robbery and murders (she was released in 2003). David Gilbert got a life sentence.
One reads this book with a sense of disbelief that men and women who led such privileged lives could have been so stupid and hateful, could have thought themselves revolutionaries acting on behalf of “the people” when they had nothing but contempt for ordinary working people. Encountering their petulance, their hatred of democratic institutions, and their isolation from reality, one can only imagine the terror they would have inflicted if given the opportunity.

Surely these are lessons that our own children should study when learning about the 1960s.

Diane Ravitch is a research professor at New York University and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution.

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The Newest Americans https://www.educationnext.org/the-newest-americans/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/the-newest-americans/ Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity By Samuel P. Huntington

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Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity
By Samuel P. Huntington
Simon & Schuster, 2004, $27; 428 pages.

Reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Samuel P. Huntington’s earlier, prescient work, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, shaped much of the discourse on international conflict in the post-Cold War world. Now, in Who Are We? Huntington turns his attention toward what might be termed a domestic clash of civilizations-or at least a clash of cultures.

Huntington’s central concern is that 35 years of heavy migration has established a large Hispanic population in the United States that is substantially different from earlier immigrant groups. He asserts that Hispanics are geographically more concentrated-in California, the Southwest, and Florida-than their predecessors, many living in states that border Mexico. In these enclaves, they retain many aspects of Mexican culture and assimilate into American society at a slower rate than previous ethnic groups did; Mexican-Americans have been relatively slow to become citizens, and their children continue to underperform academically.

Furthermore, the large group of Hispanic immigrants who came to America from Mexico has the unique feature of emigrating to lands that were once part of their native country-and were acquired by the United States through conquest.

These attributes, Huntington argues, have combined to make Hispanics less likely to adopt American values and American culture, especially in a nation whose elites have embraced a multicultural ideology that makes assimilation ever more difficult. To Huntington, these factors suggest the possibility of a second Spanish-speaking nation within the United States that is at odds with the dominant American culture.

Thus far, schools have served as the main battlefield in this potential clash of cultures. The debates over bilingual education, multicultural curricula, and textbook accounts of American history are evidence of a nation’s struggle to define itself in the face of a shifting population. However, Who Are We? does not have much direct discussion of education issues; Huntington more or less assumes the victory of a patriotism-reducing multiculturalism in the schools and worries about its consequences.

The American Creed

Huntington does not criticize the scale of immigration per se-at least not directly. Nor does he bemoan-again, at least not directly-the changing racial and ethnic composition of America. Instead, he argues that the values brought to America by the new wave of Hispanic immigration represent a challenge to the values established by the original Anglo-Protestant settlers as the core of America’s national identity.

That identity, Huntington believes, is based on a set of ideas-a unique American creed that people of any race or ethnicity can adopt. Yet, he writes, that creed “was the product of the distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of the 17th and 18th centuries. Key elements of that culture include: the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to try to create a heaven on earth.”

Despite the clear association of Huntington’s creed with Anglo-Protestants, he is careful to make it clear that he does not want to resuscitate race and ethnicity as the foundation of America’s identity; he writes that his argument is “for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not Anglo-Protestant people.” But he no longer seems to think-as he stated in a 1981 book-that a common commitment to the political values enshrined in the Constitution can serve as the basis of American identity. “People are not likely to find in political principle,” Huntington writes, “the deep emotional content provided by kith and kin, blood and belonging, culture and nationality”-an argument that, of course, comes perilously close to resurrecting race and ethnicity.

The question is, Are Mexican-American values so different from “Anglo-Protestant” values as to pose a problem? At one point, Huntington quotes a Mexican-American arguing that Hispanics are indeed different. Huntington writes, “Lionel Sosa, a successful Texas Mexican-American businessman, in 1998 hailed the emerging Hispanic middle-class professionals who look like Anglos, but whose values remain quite different from an Anglo’s.'”But if we were to inquire into the nature of those values, I bet we would hear reference to family, church, community, and the like. And how different would that be from Anglo-Protestant values? It is common for ethnic groups to proclaim that their values are distinctive, just as their mothers are sui generis. But when they are asked to articulate the differences, the values and the mothers turn out to be very similar.

Talking about culture and religion is a tricky business. If we take Anglo-Protestantism as the root of American national identity, we have to consider European Catholicism, which we all consider fully assimilated into whatever the American identity may be. Huntington argues that Catholicism has been “Protestantized” in America. But then why the problem with Mexican-Americans, who are largely Catholic? At one point, Huntington notes: “Unquestionably, a most significant manifestation of assimilation is the conversion of Hispanic immigrants to evangelical Protestantism.” Here the head reels. Is Huntington suggesting that to remain Catholic is to remain unassimilated, but to become evangelical Protestant is to become more assimilated?

But the evangelical Protestantism to which many Hispanics are attracted is deeply rooted in their distinctive homeland experience. It shows strong growth in Latin America; thus converting to evangelical Protestantism means accepting religious leaders who are far less “assimilated” than American Catholics. Catholicism opens Mexicans to the influence of the American hierarchy and American priests-in short, to the influence of American culture. Here Huntington’s commitment to the Protestant roots of American identity leads him into confusion.

In general, Huntington overestimates the place of religion-specifically Christianity, and more specifically Protestantism-in American identity today. Certainly Protestantism played a key role in shaping American values. But origins are overtaken by subsequent events, and in a changing society they do not maintain the same role they played in shaping it. Nor does the current political weight of evangelical Protestantism change the fact that our political and constitutional development has pretty much reduced religion to a private matter, even if there remain energetic efforts to make religious concerns play a larger role in public affairs. I do not see why a book asking, “Who are we?” should conclude with a chapter on the role of religion.

Huntington is right to argue that our legal and political system, and in large measure our culture, were defined by the original settlers from England, not by later immigrants. We are not quite a melting pot, but neither are we-to continue the culinary metaphor, as Huntington labels the melting pot (though it originally referred to the smelting of metals)-a salad of distinct components, each maintaining its difference, as multiculturalists would have it. Huntington proposes “tomato soup” as his culinary metaphor for U.S. culture: The immigrants have added “celery, croutons, spices, parsley, and other ingredients that enrich and diversify the taste, but which are absorbed into what remains fundamentally tomato soup.”

However, Huntington fears that we are getting much closer to the salad-and that some elements of the salad are going to concentrate in one area of the bowl, separating themselves from the rest. No one can predict how matters will turn out: We are still in the midst of the huge immigration wave that began to pick up in the 1960s, and we do not see what circumstances might lead to its diminution. That is indeed a problem. But Huntington is too alarmist in his expectations, as when he writes, “If each year a million Mexican soldiers attempted to invade the United States and more than 150,000 of them succeeded, established themselves on American territory, and the Mexican government then demanded that the United States recognize the legality of this invasion. . . . ” Well, even illegal immigration is not quite like that.

Fears very similar to those Huntington expresses were raised about the Irish Catholic immigrants of the 1840s, about German immigrants, Italian immigrants, Jewish immigrants, Slavic immigrants, and so on. These fears have proved groundless. Despite Huntington’s thorough presentation of the evidence, I am not convinced that the research shows that the process of assimilation-in particular, the acquisition of language and improvements in student achievement-is proceeding any slower among second- and third-generation Mexican-Americans than it did among other immigrants from peasant and village and small-town backgrounds.

True, today’s American immigrants enter a much different cultural environment than did past waves. The celebration of diversity, acceptance of multiculturalism, and the more modest place of patriotism and nationalism all make assimilation a different, if not necessarily more difficult, process. But is the assimilatory process fatally damaged as, for instance, American schools begin to recognize minority heroes and tell the stories of past discrimination? Here it is important to remember that the changes that so concern Huntington are motivated more by the demands of African-Americans and the need to better integrate them than by concern over immigrant minorities. To date the content of American education has been more profoundly affected by the nation’s most enduring internal division than by immigrants from abroad, then or now, Hispanic or Asian.

Huntington has written a brief for a possibility. It would stand to reason that Mexican-Americans, so different from other immigrant groups, should encounter greater difficulties and pose greater problems. But matters that stand to reason have to be tested on the ground. This past Memorial Day, the New York Times published a picture of a grieving Dominican mother. Her son had been killed in Iraq, and his comrades had sent her a Dominican flag they had all signed. One assumes that the son, who was granted American citizenship posthumously, had been carrying it. Multiculturalism run amok? Perhaps. But I think that assimilation is becoming a different matter from what it was, at a time when our ideas of citizenship, patriotism, and sovereignty are all undergoing surprising changes. But I also think the capacity of America to change people, to make them Americans, is undiminished. It is simply being done in different ways, and it is making rather different Americans.

Nathan Glazer is a professor emeritus of education at Harvard University and the author of We Are All Multiculturalists Now (Harvard University Press).

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Technology in Education https://www.educationnext.org/technologyineducation/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/technologyineducation/ Will it be more than just a promise?

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Over the past decade, school districts across the country have invested billions in creating wired classrooms and schools, with significant financial and moral support from government at all levels. At the same time, the rush to infuse schools with the latest technology has provoked critiques from a number of observers, with titles such as The Flickering Mind and Oversold and Underused. These typically paint a portrait of computers gathering dust in the back of classrooms or used primarily as extraordinarily expensive typewriters.

The question is whether, if put to more productive use, educational technology will live up to the transformational dreams of its loudest promoters. In the following essays, Lowell Monke and Frederick M. Hess, both former teachers, explore the distance between today’s pedagogies and the classroom of tomorrow and ask how to bridge the gap.

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The Days Before Brown https://www.educationnext.org/the-days-before-brown/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/the-days-before-brown/ Growing up in segregated schools

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During the early 1950s, in the era before Brown v. Board of Education, I attended W. S. Creecy High School in Rich Square, North Carolina. Because of the state’s segregated school system, W. S. Creecy’s students were all black.

W. S. Creecy was separate from but certainly not equal to the all-white schools in Rich Square. The school enjoyed less funding than the all-white schools, meaning that our teachers earned lower salaries and that money for lab equipment and other facilities was scarce. Each teacher had to put the funds that were available to their best use. Thus our equipment and books were not substandard; we simply needed more of them in order to bolster the curriculum.

I still remember the county’s school superintendent, who was white, being accused of embezzlement. He denied the allegation but committed suicide. The word was that he had stolen money from the county’s black schools in order to build his palatial house.

Nevertheless, W. S. Creecy was blessed with an abundance of teaching talent. Our teachers often held master’s degrees, perhaps because teaching was the only profession open to educated blacks at the time. The discrimination they faced was our gain; they were excellent teachers who inspired us to go to college and beyond. Most of the students in my graduating class earned bachelor’s degrees. All students had to pass courses in the traditional core curriculum, designed to prepare us for college; we did not have electives, as many students do today.

My teachers were my role models. Mr. W. S. Creecy Jr., the principal, also taught me economics and sociology. (The school was named for his father, who had served as the previous principal.) Mr. Creecy and Mrs. Theola Moore, my English teacher, urged me to pursue further studies. Their standards were rigorous, and they recognized my potential.

My high school was reduced to a middle school in the 1970s, as black and white students merged into one large high school. Some white students, rather than study with black students in an integrated high school, chose to attend private academies, which still exist today.

I wonder how my parents were able to send nine children to college during those days of segregation. They had adjusted to segregation before I was born. They never let hardships or inequality prevent them from pursuing their dreams for themselves and their children. With a strong spiritual base (we went to church every Sunday) and with tremendous respect for the work ethic, Mom and Dad were determined that their children’s lives would be better than their own. At one point, they had three of us in college at the same time. They made sacrifices, not excuses. They expected us to study hard and to do our best.

I remember plowing behind a mule, chopping cotton on our farm (which Dad paid for in three years), feeding the hogs, picking cotton, harvesting peanuts and corn, cleaning my room every morning, studying hard late at night, and making the honor roll in school.

Segregation oppressed us in North Carolina. Despite, or perhaps due to, the disadvantages of attending a segregated high school, students were determined to excel. Hardships can build character. The trials, tribulations, and rebuffs enabled me to be self-motivated and to become a true professional. The beauty of living in America is that we can all learn from our mistakes. Our country continues to make right our wrongs. As Langston Hughes once said, “I too, sing America,” because “I, too am America.”

-Leonard A. Slade Jr. is professor and chair of the department of Africana studies at the State University of New York at Albany.

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The Human Touch https://www.educationnext.org/thehumantouch/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/thehumantouch/ In the rush to place a computer on every desk, schools are neglecting intellectual creativity and personal growth

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In the rush to place a computer on every desk, schools are neglecting intellectual creativity and personal growth.

In 1922 Thomas Edison proclaimed, “I believe the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.” Thus began a long string of spectacularly wrong predictions regarding the capacity of various technologies to revolutionize education.

What betrayed Edison and his successors was an uncritical faith in technology itself. This faith has become a sort of ideology increasingly dominating K-12 education. In the past two decades, school systems, with generous financial and moral support from foundations and all levels of government, have made massive investments in computer technology and in creating “wired” schools. The goal is twofold: to provide children with the computer skills necessary to flourish in a high-tech world and to give them access to tools and information that will enhance their learning in subjects like mathematics and history.

However, in recent years a number of scholars have questioned the vast sums being devoted to educational technology. They rarely quibble with the need for children to learn how to use computers, but find little evidence that making technology more available leads to higher student achievement in core subjects. As Stanford University professor Larry Cuban writes in Oversold and Underused, “There have been no advances (measured by higher academic achievement of urban, suburban, or rural students) over the past decade that can be confidently attributed to broader access to computers. . . . The link between test-score improvements and computer availability and use is even more contested.”

While it is important to examine the relationship between technology and learning, that debate often devolves into a tit-for-tat of dueling studies and anecdotes. The problem with framing the issue merely as a question of whether technology boosts test scores is that it fails to address the interaction between technology and the values learned in school. In short, we need to ask what kind of learning tends to take place with the computer and what kind gets left out.

The Need for Firsthand Experience

A computer can inundate a child with mountains of information. However, all of this learning takes place the same way: through abstract symbols, decontextualized and cast on a two-dimensional screen. Contrast that with the way children come to know a tree–by peeling its bark, climbing its branches, sitting under its shade, jumping into its piled-up leaves. Just as important, these firsthand experiences are enveloped by feelings and associations–muscles being used, sun warming the skin, blossoms scenting the air. The computer cannot even approximate any of this.

There is a huge qualitative difference between learning about something, which requires only information, and learning from something, which requires that the learner enter into a rich and complex relationship with the subject at hand. For smaller children especially, that relationship is as physical as it is mental. Rousseau pointed out long ago that the child’s first and most important teacher is his hands. Every time I walk through a store with my sons and grow tired of saying, “Don’t touch that!” I am reminded of Rousseau’s wisdom.

What “Information Age” values tempt us to forget is that all of the information gushing through our electronic networks is abstract; that is, it is all representations, one or more symbolic steps removed from any concrete object or personal experience. Abstract information must somehow connect to a child’s concrete experiences if it is to be meaningful. If there is little personal, concrete experience with which to connect, those abstractions become inert bits of data, unlikely to mobilize genuine interest or to generate comprehension of the objects and ideas they represent. Furthermore, making meaning of new experiences–and the ideas that grow out of them–requires quiet contemplation. By pumping information at children at phenomenal speed, the computer short-circuits that process. As social critic Theodore Roszak states in The Cult of Information, “An excess of information may actually crowd out ideas, leaving the mind (young minds especially) distracted by sterile, disconnected facts, lost among the shapeless heaps of data.”

This deluge of shapeless heaps of data caused the late social critic Marshall McLuhan to conclude that schools would have to become “recognized as civil defense against media fallout.” McLuhan understood that the consumption and manipulation of symbolic, abstract information is not an adequate substitute for concrete, firsthand involvement with objects, people, nature, and community, for it ignores the child’s primary educational need–to make meaning out of experience.

Simulation’s Limits

Of course, computers can simulate experience. However, one of the byproducts of these simulations is the replacement of values inherent in real experience with a different set of abstract values that are compatible with the technological ideology. For example, “Oregon Trail,” a computer game that helps children simulate the exploration of the American frontier, teaches students that the pioneers’ success in crossing the Great Plains depended most decisively on managing their resources. This is the message implicit in the game’s structure, which asks students, in order to survive, to make a series of rational, calculated decisions based on precise measurements of their resources. In other words, good pioneers were good accountants.

But this completely misses the deeper significance of this great American migration, which lies not in the computational capabilities of the pioneers but in their determination, courage, ingenuity, and faith as they overcame extreme conditions and their almost constant miscalculations. Because the computer cannot traffic in these deeply human qualities, the resilient souls of the pioneers are absent from the simulation.

Here we encounter the ambiguity of technology: its propensity to promote certain qualities while sidelining others. McLuhan called this process amplification and amputation. He used the microphone as an example. The microphone can liter.ally amplify one’s voice, but in doing so it reduces the speaker’s need to exercise his own lung power. Thus one’s inner capacities may atrophy.

This phenomenon is of particular concern with children, who are in the process of developing all kinds of inner capacities. Examples abound of technology’s circumventing the developmental process: the student who uses a spell checker instead of learning to spell, the student who uses a calculator instead of learning to add–young people sacrificing internal growth for external power.

Often, however, this process is not so easily identified. An example is the widespread use of computers in preschools and elementary schools to improve sagging literacy skills. What could be wrong with that? Quite a bit, if we consider the prerequisites to reading and writing. We know that face-to-face conversation is a crucial element in the development of both oral and written communication skills. On the one hand, conversation forces children to generate their own images, which provide connections to the language they hear and eventually will read. This is one reason why reading to children and telling them stories is so important. Television and computers, on the other hand, generally require nothing more than the passive acceptance of prefabricated images.

Now consider that a study reported in U.S. News & World Report estimated that the current generation of children, with its legions of struggling readers, would experience one-third fewer face-to-face conversations during their school years than the generation of 30 years ago. It may well be that educators are trying to solve the problem of illiteracy by turning to the very technology that has diminished the experiences children need to become literate.

Obsolete Lessons

But students need to start using computers early in order to prepare for the high-tech future, don’t they? Consider that the vast majority of students graduating from college this past spring started kindergarten in 1986, two years after the Macintosh was invented. If they used computers at all in elementary school, they were probably command-line machines with no mouse, no hard drive, and only rudimentary graphics. By the time these students graduated from college, whatever computer skills they picked up in primary school had long been rendered obsolete by the frenetic pace of technological innovation.

The general computer skills a youth needs to enter the workplace or college can easily be learned in one year of instruction during high school. During the nine years that I taught Advanced Computer Technology for the Des Moines public schools, I discovered that the level of computer skills students brought to the class had little bearing on their success. Teaching them the computer skills was the easy part. What I was not able to provide were the rich and varied firsthand experiences students needed in order to connect the abstract symbols they had to manipulate on the screen to the world around them. Students with scant computer experience but rich ideas and life experiences were, by the end of the year, generating sophisticated relational databases, designing marketable websites, and creating music videos. Ironically, it was the students who had curtailed their time climbing the trees, rolling the dough, and conversing with friends and adults in order to become computer “wizards” who typically had the most trouble finding creative things to do with the computer.

Certainly, many of these highly skilled young people (almost exclusively young men) find opportunities to work on computer and software design at prestigious universities and corporations. But such jobs represent a minuscule percentage of the occupations in this nation. And in any case, the task of early education is not merely to prepare students for making a living; it is to help them learn how to make a life. For that purpose, the computer wizards in my class seemed particularly ill prepared.

So why is it that schools persist in believing they must expose children to computers early? I think it is for the same reason that we take our children to church, to Fourth of July parades, and indeed to rituals of all types: to initiate them into a culture–in this case, the culture of high technology. The purpose is to infuse them with a set of values that supports the high-tech culture that has spread so rapidly across our society. And this, as we shall see, is perhaps the most disturbing trend of all.

The Ecological Impact of Technology

As the promise of a computer revolution in education fades, I often hear promoters fall back on what I’ll term the neutrality argument: “Computers are just tools; it’s what you do with them that matters.” In some sense this is no more than a tautology: Of course it matters how we use computers in schools. What matters more, however, is that we use them at all. Every tool demands that we somehow change our environment or values in order to accommodate its use. For instance, the building of highways to accommodate the automobile hastened the flight to the suburbs and the decline of inner cities. And over the past 50 years we have radically altered our social landscape to accommodate the television set. In his seminal book Autonomous Technology, Langdon Winner dubbed this characteristic “reverse adaptation.”

Consider the school personnel who already understand, intuitively, how this principle works: the music teacher whose program has been cut in order to fund computer labs; the principal who has had to beef up security in order to protect high-priced technology; the superintendent who has had to craft an “acceptable use” agreement that governs children’s use of the Internet (and for the first time in our history renounces the school’s responsibility for the material children are exposed to while in school). What the computers-are-just-tools argument ignores is the ecological nature of powerful technologies–that is, their introduction into an environment reconstitutes all of the relationships in that environment, some for better and some for worse. Clinging to the belief that computers have no effect on us allows us to turn a blind eye to the sacrifices that schools have made to accommodate them.

Not only do computers send structural ripples throughout a school system, but they also subtly alter the way we think about education. The old saw, “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail,” has many corollaries (the walls of my home once testified to one of my favorites: to a four-year-old with a crayon, everything looks like drawing paper). One that fits here is, “To an educator with a computer, everything looks like information.” And the more prominent we make computers in schools (and in our own lives), the more we see the rapid accumulation, manipulation, and sharing of information as central to the learning process–edging out the contemplation and expression of ideas and the gradual development of meaningful connections to the world.

In reconstituting learning as the acquisition of information, the computer also shifts our values. The computer embodies a particular value system, a technological thought world first articulated by Francis Bacon and René Descartes four hundred years ago, that turns our attention outward toward asserting control over our environment (that is essentially what technologies do–extend our power to control from a distance). As it has gradually come to dominate Western thinking, this ideology has entered our educational institutions. Its growing dominance is witnessed in the language that abounds in education: talk of empowerment, student control of learning, standards, assessment tools, and productivity. Almost gone from the conversation are those inner concerns–wisdom, truth, character, imagination, creativity, and meaning–that once formed the core values of education. Outcomes have replaced insights as the yardstick of learning, while standardized tests are replacing human judgment as the means of assessment. No tool supports this technological shift more than computers.

In the Wrong Hands

There are some grave consequences in pushing technological values too far and too soon. Soon after my high-school computer lab was hooked up to the Internet, I realized that my students suddenly had more power to do more damage to more people than any teenagers in history. Had they been carefully prepared to assume responsibility for that power through the arduous process of developing self-discipline, ethical and moral strength, compassion, and connection with the community around them? Hardly. They and their teachers had been too busy putting that power to use.

We must help our young people develop the considerable moral and ethical strength needed to resist abusing the enormous power these machines give them. Those qualities take a great deal of time and effort to develop in a child, but they ought to be as much a prerequisite to using powerful computer tools as is learning how to type. Trying to teach a student to use the power of computer technology appropriately without those moral and ethical traits is like trying to grow a tree without roots.

Rather than nurture those roots, we hand our smallest children machines and then gush about the power and control they display over that rarefied environment. From the earliest years we teach our children that if they have a problem, we have an external tool that will fix it (computers are not the only tools; Ritalin, for example, is a powerful technology that has been scandalously overprescribed to “fix” behavior problems). After years of this training, when our teenagers find themselves confused, angry, depressed, or overwhelmed, we wonder why so many of them don’t reach out to the community for help or dig deep within themselves to find the internal strength to persevere, but rather reach for the most powerful (and often deadly) tool they can find to “fix” their problems. Our attempts to use powerful machines to accelerate or remediate learning are part of a pattern that sacrifices the growth of our children’s inner resources and deep connectedness to community for the ability to extend their power outward into the world. The world pays a high price for the trade-off.

The response that I often hear to this criticism–that we just need to balance computer use in school with more “hands-on” activities (and maybe a little character education)–sounds reasonable. Certainly schools should help young people develop balanced lives. But the call for balance within schools ignores the massive commitment of resources required to make computers work at all and the resultant need to keep them constantly in use to justify that expense. Furthermore, that view of balance completely discounts the enormous imbalance of children’s lives outside of school. Children typically spend nearly half their waking life outside of school sitting in front of screens. Their world is saturated with the artificial, the abstract, the mechanical. Whereas the intellectual focus of schools in the rural society of the 19th century compensated for a childhood steeped in nature and concrete activity, balance today requires a reversal of roles, with schools compensating for the overly abstract, symbolic, and artificial environment that children experience outside of school.

Technology with a Human Purpose

None of this is to say that we should banish computers from all levels of K-12 education. As young people move into subject areas like advanced mathematics and chemistry that rely on highly abstract concepts, computers have much to offer. Young people will also need computer skills when they graduate. But computer-based learning needs to grow out of years of concrete experience and a fundamental appreciation for the world apart from the machine, a world in which nature and human beings are able to speak for and through themselves to the child. Experiences with the computer need to grow out of early reliance on simple tools that depend on and develop the skills of the child rather than complex tools, which have so many skills already built in. By concentrating high technology in the upper grades, we honor the natural developmental stages of childhood. And there is a bonus: the release of massive amounts of resources currently tied up in expensive machinery that can be redirected toward helping young children develop the inner resources needed to put that machinery to good use when they become adults.

There remains a problem, however. When Bacon began pushing the technological ideology, Western civilization was full of meaning and wretchedly short on the material means of survival. Today we face the reverse situation: a society saturated in material comforts but almost devoid of meaning. Schools that see their job as preparing young people to meet the demands of a technology-driven world merely embrace and advance the idea that human needs are no longer our highest priority, that we must adapt to meet the demands of our machines. We may deliver our children into the world with tremendous technical power, but it is rarely with a well-developed sense of human purpose to guide its use.

If we are to alter that relationship, we will have to think of technological literacy in a new way. Perhaps we could call it technology awareness. Whatever its name, that kind of study, rather than technology training, is what needs to be integrated into the school curriculum. I am currently working with the Alliance for Childhood on a set of developmental guidelines to help educators create technology-awareness programs that help young people think about, not just with, technology. This is not the place to go into the details of those guidelines. What I want to emphasize here is that they share one fundamental feature: They situate technology within a set of human values rather than out in front of those values. They do not start by asking what children need to do to adapt to a machine world, but rather, which technologies can best serve human purposes at every educational level and how we can prepare children to make wise decisions about their use in the future.

The most daunting problems facing our society–drugs, violence, racism, poverty, the dissolution of family and community, and certainly war–are all matters of human purpose and meaning. Filling schools with computers will not help find the answers to why the freest nation in the world has the highest percentage of citizens behind bars or why the wealthiest nation in history condemns a sixth of its children to poverty.

So it seems that we are faced with a remarkable irony: that in an age of increasing artificiality, children first need to sink their hands deeply into what is real; that in an age of light-speed communication, it is crucial that children take the time to develop their own inner voice; that in an age of incredibly powerful machines we must first teach our children how to use the incredible powers that lie deep within themselves.

Lowell Monke is an assistant professor of education at Wittenberg University.

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Technical Difficulties https://www.educationnext.org/technical-difficulties/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/technical-difficulties/ Information technology could help schools do more with less. If only educators knew how to use it

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In 2000, at the height of the technology boom, Maine governor Angus King made a splash by proposing to give laptops to all of the state’s 7th graders. His stated purpose was to “do something different from what everybody else is doing.” Missing from the $50 million proposal, however, was any rationale related to school performance. No evident thought had been put into how this major investment in new technology would make schools more efficient, produce future savings, or enhance the learning process.

King’s proposal was typical of the way in which technologies like the personal computer and the Internet have been used in public education. The tendency has been to sprinkle computers and Internet connections across classrooms in the pleasant hope that teachers will integrate them into their lessons. The purpose is seldom to make teachers more productive or to rethink the way in which lessons are delivered. Indeed, PCs often serve as little more than high-priced typewriters, sitting in the back of classrooms unused for most of the school day.

This state of affairs stands in sharp contrast to how technology is used by business and government enterprises that engage in competition with other manufacturers and service providers. To them, technology is not an end in itself, something to be adopted merely because it exists, but a tool for self-improvement. A competitive enterprise adopts new technologies when these enable workers to tackle new problems or to do the same thing as before, but in a cheaper and more efficient fashion. For example, technology investments enabled the U.S. Postal Service, under heavy competitive pressure from United Parcel Service and Federal Express, to trim its workforce by 16,000 in 2003. These cuts followed layoffs of 23,000 employees over the preceding two years. The cuts were made possible not by reducing service, but by substituting technology in areas where people were performing either routine tasks or roles that automated machines could handle more efficiently.

At a broader level, in recent years the nation’s 100 largest companies improved productivity so rapidly that in 2003 it took only nine workers to do what ten workers had done in 2001. Economists have long recognized that the potential for growth in productivity is more limited in service sectors like education than in manufacturing or retail. Nonetheless, even the service sector has witnessed productivity gains of about 1 percent a year during the past three decades.

Public schools, by contrast, have steadily added to the ranks of teachers and reduced class sizes even as they make ever-larger investments in new technologies. Spending on technology in public schools increased from essentially zero in 1970 to $118 per student in 2002 and $89 per student in 2003, according to Education Week. In 1998 there were 12.1 students for every computer connected to the Internet; by 2002, the ratio had dropped to 4.8 students per computer, according to the Department of Education. In the past five years alone, the nation has spent more than $20 billion linking schools and classrooms to the Internet through the federal E-rate program with little to show for it in the way of instructional changes or improved outcomes. Meanwhile, despite these huge new investments in technology (see Figure 1), massive increases in the workforce of teachers drove the student-teacher ratio from 22 students per teacher to 16 students per teacher between 1970 and 2001.

Investing Without a Return (Figure 1)
Since 1997, the federal government has appropriated morethan a total of $4 billion to make grants to the states for thepurchase of educational technology.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education

Cultural Bias

Why have public schools failed so far to put all this fancy new technology to good use? One clear reason is that they face no pressure to do so. Organizations like the Postal Service make effective use of technology because they must keep up with FedEx, UPS, and other delivery services. Competitive enterprises are on a constant search for ways of boosting their productivity, holding down their costs, and developing innovative products–because they know that their competitors are always on the lookout for similar advantages. No executive wants to adopt a painful course like downsizing the workforce or imposing wrenching change. They take these steps only when compelled.

Public schools, however, are insulated from the pressures of competition. They thus have no reason to regard technology as a tool to trim their workforce or to rethink the ways in which they deliver education. This problem is compounded by the fact that collective-bargaining agreements between school districts and employee unions have made using technology to displace workers or reinvent processes extraordinarily difficult.

There is also a bias within the culture of education against ideas that seem too “businesslike.” Indeed, the very words “efficiency” and “cost-effectiveness” can set the teeth of parents and educators on edge. Proposals to use technology to downsize the workforce, alter instructional delivery, or improve managerial efficiency are inevitably attacked by education authorities as part of an effort to, in the words of Henry Giroux, “Transform public education . . . [in order] to expand the profits of investors, educate students as consumers, and train young people for the low-paying jobs of the new global marketplace.” The notion that the responsible use of public money is the work of some shadowy global conspiracy evinces a fundamental lack of seriousness about educating children.

Traditionalists insist that it is impossible to educate children more efficiently, that there is no way technology can be substituted for anything that educators do. They frequently compare the act of teaching to the arts: where the act of creation itself is the end product, it can be difficult or impossible to use technology to improve performance. As the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the legendary U.S. senator, was fond of saying, producing a Mozart quartet two centuries ago required four musicians, four stringed instruments, and, say, 35 minutes. Producing the same Mozart quartet today requires the same resources. Despite breathtaking technological advances, productivity has not changed.

In the case of schooling, however, this analogy is incomplete and ultimately misleading. In the arts, what has changed over two centuries is that, through radio, CDs, television, and digital media, the number of people able to hear and appreciate a given performance has increased dramatically, at an ever-decreasing cost. Improved technology has now made available to the general public what was once the preserve of the elite.

The spread of the Internet and other technological advances has created similar opportunities in education. For instance, during the 2002-03 school year, the Florida Virtual School enrolled more than 6,800 students in its 75 course offerings. Florida Virtual is a public entity that provides instruction to students in schools and districts throughout the state. The school provides web-based classes, instruction, and assessments to students in a variety of academic subjects and electives. Like virtual schools operating in 15 other states, Florida Virtual allows faculty to provide courses to a scattered student population. Programs like Florida Virtual may make it possible to provide some academic instruction more cheaply and more effectively, freeing up resources for other needs.

At the university level, nearly 2 million students took at least one course online in the fall of 2003. In a national survey of nearly 1,000 college administrators conducted by the Sloan Consortium, 57 percent of the administrators reported that Internet-based courses were already at least equivalent to traditional courses in quality. And a third of the administrators thought that the web-based courses would be superior to in-class instruction within three years. Such improvements are to be expected among the many colleges and universities now competing for students’ distance-learning dollars. However, efforts to use the Internet in an effective manner are few and far between among K-12 public schools.

SOURCE: Education Week Technology Counts 2004

Technology and Data Management

Used wisely, information technology does have the capacity to help schools become dramatically more effective. Data systems that track information on individual students permit teachers to quickly check the performance of individual students on specific tasks. Information technology can also give school-site personnel unprecedented control over budgets and hiring and can increase their flexibility regarding resource allocation. The Learning First Alliance, a consortium that includes the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, has highlighted how this has worked in districts like Long Beach and Chula Vista, California, and Aldine, Texas.

Outside of schooling, a compelling illustration of how accountability and technology can together improve public services comes from the remarkable success that New York City and other cities enjoyed using new tools to combat crime in the 1990s. The New York City Police Department introduced a system called CompStat, short for “comparative statistics.” CompStat compiled data from police reports, crime complaints, arrests, and crime patterns. Over time, the system was broadened to include 734 categories of concern, measuring even the incidence of loud parties and of police overtime.

In the first five years after the 1993 introduction of CompStat, the number of homicides in New York City fell from 1,946 to 629–a rate of decrease three times that of the nation as a whole. Similar results were experienced in other cities that implemented the system, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Why did the system work? It helped to hold officers accountable, to pinpoint areas of concern, and to provide the information that can help all police focus on using their skills. In New York City, precincts were required to update their crime statistics on a weekly or daily basis, rather than on the monthly or quarterly basis that had traditionally been the norm. New software allowed department officials to precisely map clusters of crimes, correlating them with drug sale sites, areas of gang activity, schools, public housing, and other relevant locations, and to share the information department-wide within seconds.

In K-12 education, by contrast, we generally manage most information the same way stores managed inventory in the 1960s. Almost unbelievably in this day and age, the typical district spends 40 or more minutes a year per student collecting, processing, and reporting the data required by the U.S. Department of Education under the No Child Left Behind Act. That equates to more than 6,000 hours of employee time in a district with 10,000 students. The tremendous delays in processing data and the staff time consumed are the consequence of districts’ having personnel fill out written forms and retyping data from one software package to another. Simply equipping districts to report data electronically and acquire data from existing databases is a daunting challenge.

When principals or teachers are asked for this information, those that have it available almost inevitably turn to large binders rather than more nimble electronic interfaces. When asked if he could pull some data on teacher absenteeism or staff training costs, one veteran principal in a well-regarded district spluttered, “Do you know what I do if I want substitute teacher data? I have [my secretary] go through the files and tally it up. She keeps a running total on a piece of graph paper for me. . . . If I want to check on a supply order, I call the deputy [superintendent] for services because we’re old friends, and I know he’ll actually have someone pull it for me.”

Modern information technology offers a wealth of straightforward, time-tested ways to make the necessary data widely and instantly available. There is an array of systems, produced by firms like Scantron and IntelliTools, that allow teachers to call up simple graphs detailing the performance of individual students at the push of a button. However, using these systems requires the consistent collection of information on student learning. Assigning paper-based quizzes ensures that almost all of the information on student mastery will be lost, while the software produced by a dozen or more firms is able to quickly read the results from electronically administered tests into an evolving portfolio of data that tracks student learning.

Ultimately, to be useful, this information has to be at people’s fingertips. This is an eminently solvable technical challenge. Huge, complicated organizations, from Wal-Mart to the Internal Revenue Service, routinely track productivity figures, costs, and evaluative measures.

A New Role for Teachers

How else can technology support innovation and reinvention in education? Consider that, historically, teachers have been expected to perform a wide range of responsibilities. Each teacher is expected to design lesson plans, lecture, run class discussions, grade essays and exams, mentor colleagues, supervise homeroom, and patrol the cafeteria. Every year our high schools have tens of thousands of teachers giving variations of the same lectures on the Civil War, the digestive system, and the properties of quadratic equations. In fact, the job description of a teacher today is pretty similar to that of a teacher in 1950.

In medicine, by contrast, progress has been marked by specialization. Doctors with different types of training have taken on more precisely defined roles while less expensive professionals like registered nurses and physical therapists are now performing tasks that don’t require a doctor’s training. Similarly, 16-year-old volunteers using handheld scanners are able to track medical supplies and hospital inventory with a precision that would have been unimaginable even in the best-managed enterprise just two decades ago.

Imagine a hospital with no nurses or physicians’ assistants or physical therapists, where doctors performed every task. We would need a slew of additional doctors, each would have less time to devote to any particular specialty, and costs would skyrocket.

How can technology enable teachers to specialize in the same manner as, say, doctors? Let’s consider one classroom example in order to understand how technology can help teachers use their time more productively. Teachers know it is useful to have students write on a regular basis. When I taught high-school social studies, like so many of my colleagues, I required students to write at least three pages a week commenting on what we had read and discussed in class.

The problem is that, at a minimum, this meant my 150 students would turn in 450 pages a week of writing. A teacher who reads, marks, and comments on each student’s weekly work in just five minutes will spend more than 12 hours a week simply providing feedback on such writing assignments. Most of this time isn’t spent providing particularly cerebral feedback, but instead flagging obvious grammatical and structural problems and reminding students to write in complete sentences. Meanwhile, teachers also need to prepare for teaching, assess other assignments, assist and advise students, and lead a personal life. The result is often that teachers provide limited feedback, read student work sporadically, or (most commonly) assign less writing than might be ideal.

Once, such compromises were unavoidable. That is no longer the case. Today, for instance, there is essay-grading software, commercially available from companies like Vantage Learning or the Educational Testing Service, that can quickly and efficiently analyze pieces of writing on dimensions such as sentence construction, language, and mechanics. Several of these programs match the scores given by expert human raters more than 90 percent of the time, which is actually higher in some cases than the rate of agreement among multiple human readers. How can this be? In most cases, we’re not talking about evaluating Proustian prose; we’re talking about helping the typical 4th grader learn to write clearly and effectively. Most of the mistakes that students make and most of the feedback they need are pretty predictable.

Clearly technological tools cannot imitate the full range of skills that a teacher brings when reading a student’s essay. Technology cannot gauge a student’s growth, analytic prowess, possible interests, or unexpected developments. However, assessment software can replicate the routine elements of evaluation, providing more complete feedback on the essentials while freeing up teachers to make fuller use of their expertise. The result is that teachers spend less time on trivia while adding more value. Rather than requiring hundreds of thousands of teachers to spend hundreds of hours a year circling dangling participles or errant commas, the sensible substitution of technology can help ensure quality feedback while allowing teachers more time for preparation, instruction, and tutoring.

Human ingenuity is the most expensive commodity in the developed world. People are costly to employ; no well-run organization hires reams of bodies when it is possible to hire more selectively and use employees more thoughtfully. This is why efforts to reduce class size are a static, unimaginative, and inefficient way to improve schooling. These efforts presume that teachers need to perform all the duties and tasks now in place; helping them accomplish these tasks more effectively thus requires shrinking the number of students they must teach. However, if we were to retool the teacher’s role in a way that used scarce resources like teachers’ time and expertise more carefully, teachers could spend more time on the areas where they add value even while working with larger classes of students. If grading essays or examining student performance on weekly quizzes took only half as much time as it currently does, a teacher could work with more students and still have more instructional time for each student in that class.

A Tool, Not a Miracle Cure

The nation continues to blithely operate schools in a fashion that was dated in the 1970s and that today would be deemed irresponsible in a toothpaste factory. Rather than demand that education dollars be invested with particular care, we pour money into technology with little thought to how these tools might be used most sensibly.

The ability to instantly share full information on student performance, school performance, and costs across vast distances permits a focus on results that was simply not feasible until the most recent decade. The information technology that makes the easy sharing of information possible is the engine that makes tough-minded accountability, school choice, and visionary leadership a possibility.

Using new technological tools to relieve educators of routine functions will help them focus on those roles that add substantial value–enhancing their contribution, making the organization more productive, and thereby increasing both the benefit to the customer and the resources available to reward employees. Reducing rote demands allows people to focus on what they do best and reduces the number of talented workers who need to be hired–which, in turn, allows us to pay employees more.

Ultimately, if leaders lack the tools to increase efficiency, streamline their workforce, or sensibly reallocate resources, they won’t. Technology is not a miracle cure. It is a tool. Used wisely, it can help professionals to take full advantage of their skills, slash the time spent on rote tasks, and concentrate resources and effort where they are needed most.

Frederick M. Hess is the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and author, most recently, of Common Sense School Reform.

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A Stranger in Two Worlds https://www.educationnext.org/a-stranger-in-two-worlds/ Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.educationnext.org/a-stranger-in-two-worlds/ Moving from segregated to integrated schools proved to be a mixed blessing

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Moving from segregated to integrated schools proved to be a mixed blessing.


In 1960 my world changed radically when, as a 2nd grader at P.S. 121 in East Harlem, I learned that I was among a group of students who would help fulfill the integration mandate of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. My principal and teacher announced that from then on my largely African-American and Latino classmates and I would be riding the bus to P.S. 183 in Yorkville, a predominantly white community on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

My inaugural day at P.S. 183 included indignities like having my hair rubbed by one of my new classmates, a white girl who asked how I managed to comb it. I was also informed that while my academic performance had placed me in the highest track at my East Harlem school, I would be educated with the “average” kids at P.S. 183. My new teachers believed that it would be harder for me to keep up with the privileged students at my new school.

One-Way Integration

Though the goal of the busing program was to integrate P.S. 183, the students there remained predominantly white and from high-income families. Thus I had to adjust to a whole new set of realities. On a regular basis I was forced to battle my white teachers’ and classmates’ low expectations and negative perceptions about blacks and Latinos. Meanwhile, as one of the relatively few minority faces in the classroom, I was routinely called on to serve as the white person’s lens on the Negro experience.

Likewise, attending school in a well-to-do community aggravated my sense of my own poverty and forced me to engage in multiple, mostly futile attempts to mask it. Each September I dreaded writing about my summer “vacations” and cringed when we were asked if our parents might visit the class and talk about their careers and educational experiences.

To students like me, integration came to mean sending a small phalanx of mostly poor black and Latino children to attend schools in white neighborhoods. I never took the opportunity to learn what integration meant to my white classmates and teachers, but it certainly did not mean asking any of them to take my place at P.S. 121 in East Harlem. Moreover, none of us, including teachers and parents from the sending and receiving schools, was given much preparation. My parents literally prayed that they were doing the right thing. Some of my white teachers and classmates shared their prayers, while others barely hid their discomfort or disdain.

If life as a disadvantaged minority student in an essentially white school was complicated, coming home provided little respite. Time spent away from my East Harlem neighborhood was time lost in the complex negotiations required to maintain one’s social status — that is, being considered someone who could hold his own in sports, street games, adolescent verbal jockeying, and the occasional physical confrontation. Until my freshman year of high school, I attended “integrated” schools where I shouldered the dual burdens of learning a new culture while keeping up my “skills” in the neighborhood.

Don’t get me wrong; the experience had a tremendous up- side. Going to school outside of Harlem exposed me to the successful actors, authors, scientists, diplomats, and artists who were the parents of my white classmates; I was often invited to spend weekends at their homes. We were also taken on trips to nearby museums and universities. And I should mention that I was promoted to the highest track for 3rd grade and thereafter.

Nonetheless, by the time I reached Stuyvesant High School, I was tired of the effort and stress involved in maintaining dual citizenship. I soon reached a mutual agreement with my guidance counselor at Stuyvesant that I would be better off at Brandeis, a comprehensive neighborhood high school located on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Despite its name, Brandeis served a predominantly poor and working-class black and Latino population (at that time schools were named without paying much attention to the culture and history of the surrounding community). I leapt at the chance to attend a school with my social and cultural peers. I must also admit an added incentive of leaving Stuyvesant was exchanging an all-boys school for the enhanced social opportunities at coeducational Brandeis.

On my first day at Brandeis, however, I was shocked to discover that I was being placed in the honors program. I was not amused by the irony that most of my fellow “honors” classmates were white. Within three months, I fixed this problem by performing poorly enough to be dropped from the honors program.

On my graduation in 1969, with a mix of average grades yet perplexingly high SAT scores, I fit the profile that progressive white colleges were looking for in their efforts to integrate higher education. Inspired by Malcolm X–and recognizing the colleges’ recruiting needs–I wrote an admissions essay entitled “Autobiography of a Ghetto Youth.” I decided to attend Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and my essay was later published in the brochure the college used for recruiting minority youth. And just as I was beginning to think about doctoral studies, graduate schools were seeking to integrate their programs. I enrolled at Cornell. My story is not unique; a number of my friends had the opportunity to attend schools like Oberlin, Antioch, Cornell, and Bowdoin. From these elite institutions they often went on to law or graduate school.

However, while integration opened wonderful new vistas for my friends and me, we represented a lucky few. Most children in my neighborhood continued to live lives untouched by the promise of Brown. Indeed, by removing some of the most talented students and involved parents from P.S. 121, the busing program contributed to the school’s severe decline in quality in the ensuing years–a pattern repeated in many urban schools with low-income, minority student populations. Many of the neighborhood children fell prey to the heroin epidemic and the crime and violence it spawned. Many of those who survived these neighborhood wars were drafted to fight in Vietnam. Others, like my two older brothers, graduated from neighborhood comprehensive or vocational high schools, returned from Vietnam, took blue-collar jobs, and began the social and economic trek from Harlem to homes in the suburbs.

The belief that black students could not learn in the absence of whites ignored the countless numbers of segregated schools that had produced the black professionals, farmers, and craftpersons who built vibrant communities despite being fettered by Jim Crow.


Progress and Setbacks

There is no denying what legal scholar Charles Ogletree describes as the symbolic importance of Brown. The decision signaled the beginning of the end of federal strictures supporting injustice. In addition, the concerted efforts to desegregate schools in the wake of Brown, combined with the creation of federal compensatory education programs aimed at low-income households, coincided with a narrowing of the achievement gap between whites and blacks during the 1960s and 1970s.

Yet Brown‘s power was attenuated by subsequent court decisions, policy choices, and social trends. For one thing, in the wake of the Brown decision, it took almost a year for the Warren Court to announce its remedy. Even then, the court ordered that schools be desegregated “with all deliberate speed.” In practice, schools would deliberate without much speed. As Ogletree and Derrick Bell have observed, this remedy lacked the boldness of the original decision and left states and local communities to interpret what constituted adequate progress toward desegregation. This was meant to ease whites’ resistance to integration by allowing states and localities to implement change over time. Perhaps this was prudent, but it enabled many communities, especially in the South, to exercise their prejudices by dragging their heels and resisting implementation of the law. After a decade of delay the federal government was forced to intervene in cities like Little Rock, Birmingham, and Boston, opening school doors with the barrel of a gun.

Moreover, when integration did occur, it usually traveled down a one-way street; white students were rarely asked to ride the bus to majority-black schools. This strategy placed the burden on the victims of discrimination, black children and their communities. Those black students who transferred to majority-white schools encountered a deeply hostile atmosphere where a range of practices kept them segregated, only now within the school’s walls. White school personnel used policies such as curriculum tracking and special-education referrals as a means of sorting students by race under the guise of “ability grouping” or meeting students’ “special needs.” Now the barriers to integration, once visible in the maintenance of separate schools, became hidden behind the classroom door.

This highlighted a major weakness in the Brown decision: the assumption that African-Americans, if they attended integrated schools, would have access to the same high-quality education as their white counterparts. W. E. B. Du Bois presaged the fallacies underpinning this thinking when he observed in 1935:

A mixed school with poor and unsympathetic teachers, with hostile public opinion, and not teaching of truth concerning black folk, is bad. A segregated school with ignorant placeholders, inadequate equipment, poor salaries, and wretched housing is equally bad. Other things being equal, the mixed school is the broader, more natural basis for the education of all youth. It gives wider contacts; it inspires greater self-confidence; and suppresses the inferiority complex. But other things seldom are equal, and in that case, Sympathy, Knowledge, and the Truth outweigh all that the mixed school can offer.

The Warren Court’s belief that black students could not learn in the absence of whites ignored the countless numbers of segregated African-American schools that had produced the black business people, lawyers, doctors, writers, artists, farmers, and craftpersons who built vibrant communities despite being fettered by Jim Crow. By equating integration with equality of education, the Brown decision left all-black schools tainted with suspicions of inferiority while giving all-white schools an undeserved presumption of excellence.

Flawed as the reasoning and implementation of Brown were, the decision is not to blame for the demise of the integrationist ideal. New economic opportunities and the urban riots of the 1960s conspired to propel white families’ flight to segregated cul-de-sacs in the suburbs (see Figure 1). The growing black middle class soon joined the exodus, leaving urban schools with the difficult task of educating the majority of the nation’s poor and minority students. Moreover, the Supreme Court, in its 1974 Milliken v. Bradley decision, ruled that the suburban districts around Detroit did not need to desegregate, on the grounds that they had never practiced explicit state-sponsored segregation. This decision constructed a fence around urban districts, making desegregation a hopeless dream rather than a realizable goal. Majority-minority school districts like Detroit’s have little recourse beyond pursuing voluntary and fairly limited interdistrict busing (usually one-way) or, in a few instances (Chattanooga-Hamilton County and Charlotte-Mecklenburg are examples), consolidating urban and suburban districts.

Where Are We Now? (Figure 1)
Segregation declined throughout the United States, especially in the South, between 1970 and 2000. However, the decline in segregation within school districts was partially offset by a growing degree of racial separation between school districts.
NOTE: The index of segregation can vary between 0 and 1; a score of 0 means that students are randomly distributed among schools, while a score of 1 indicates that students are completely segregated. The index is a measure of segregation of nonwhites from whites. SOURCE: Charles T. Clotfelter, After Brown: The Rise and Retreat of School Desegregation (2004)

Today segregation remains a fact of life in our nation’s schools. According to the Harvard Civil Rights Project, it is also on the rise. Equally if not more disturbing is the fact that the black-white achievement gap began to widen again during the 1990s. The situation is particularly troublesome in urban schools, where performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress of the average black or Latino 17-year-old matches that of the average white 13-year-old. More than half of all black and Latino students in urban schools will fail to graduate from high school; many leave as early as 9th grade.

The achievement gap continues to survive even in some of our nation’s most privileged communities, much to the dismay of the black and Latino parents who moved to the suburbs to acquire immunity from the ills of high-poverty urban schools. Studies show a familiar pattern: middle-income black and Latino students faring worse than their white counterparts with respect to grades, enrollment in advanced courses, and performance on standardized tests. These findings confirm the fallacy of equating integration with quality.

If the 50 years since Brown have taught us anything, it is that inequality has multiple roots that are deeply embedded in the soil of America’s educational, social, governmental, cultural, and spiritual life. Uprooting the problem will require a multipronged approach that addresses inequalities across the board and focuses on improving not just schools but entire communities. We must not abandon integration as a goal, but it is utopian to believe that schools alone can close an achievement gap that is the result of deeper economic and social inequities.

Warren Simmons is the executive director of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University.

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