Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity
by Laura Meckler
Macmillan, 2023, $31.99; 400 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

Laura Meckler has written a deeply engaging account of Shaker Heights, Ohio, a Cleveland suburb and planned community founded in 1909, whose current population totals some 29,000—roughly one-third Black and half white. Embracing some 70 years of history, Meckler’s early chapters focus on the struggles to keep the town desegregated—an often-fraught process in which Black inhabitants of Shaker found themselves criticized by other Blacks for trying to limit the number of new Black residents.

The latter portion of the book shifts to K–12 education. Here the focus is on school administrators who have continually tried to allay the fears of affluent white parents keen to preserve tracking and of Black parents rightly convinced that tracking locks most of their children into a less-effective education. An underlying theme of the book is the steady impoverishment of the Black population, creating increasing housing and educational challenges. The final chapter describes recent initiatives in the long quest to reduce Shaker’s opportunity and achievement gaps. This effort focuses on providing universal pre-K education and on eliminating tracking once and for all.

If this summary strikes the reader as rather anodyne, I recommend reading Meckler’s book as the perfect antidote. It is anything but dull. What otherwise might have been a linear history of town and school policies is broken up by stories and vignettes of individual characters whose perspectives and actions will long stay in the reader’s mind. For instance, Meckler’s account of the origins of the community of Shaker Heights is a true page-turner, with the colorful brothers O. P. and M. J. Van Sweringen at its core. But it is the later portraits of those engaged in schooling that are the most arresting—none more so than Meckler’s disturbing account of a Black student, Olivia McDowell, and her interactions with Jody Podl, her white English teacher. The entire episode is immensely revealing about the racial politics in which American public schools find themselves enmeshed—a politics characterized by distrust, miscommunication, and prejudice.

The memorable portraits in the book are many: they include a hubristic superintendent (his initial hopes of becoming U.S. secretary of education chastened by years in Shaker) and a pair of distinguished academics—John Ogbu and Ronald Ferguson—drawing contradictory lessons from their research on Shaker’s schools. We also encounter a diverse assortment of parents whose hopes and frustrations and sometimes headstrong actions are vividly and sympathetically portrayed.

The basic outlines of the education story will be familiar to many readers. The intersection of poverty and race in Shaker, as elsewhere in the United States, created (and continues to create) vast differences in educational achievement between Black and white students. In Shaker, disparate educational outcomes were already a painful issue in the 1990s. Data show that 95 percent of Black students were streamed into the lowest education tracks. The 50 percent of Black students who took the SAT scored an average of 813 out of a possible 1600. For the 90 percent of white students who took the same test, the average was 1118.

Meanwhile, Black families in Shaker were becoming poorer. Comparing 1990 to 2020, the proportion of Black Shaker families living in poverty nearly tripled to 14.7 percent, while the suburb’s white poverty rate in 2020 stood at 3.8 percent, a tiny increase over the earlier decades. As Shaker’s Black families became more impoverished, their children did more poorly in school than their earlier Black peers, while also taking less demanding coursework.

Meckler, who is herself from Shaker Heights, does a very fair job of rehearsing the debates (in Shaker and around the country) about what produced the discrepancies in educational achievement. She invokes background conditions at home, lack of access to quality pre–K, longer busing routes, teachers who didn’t believe their Black students could excel (a self-fulfilling prophecy), peer pressure, and inferior educational facilities for Black students. Meckler references Ferguson’s findings on the impact of poverty and parental income on Black students’ academic performance while not shying away from citing the more controversial explanations that Ogbu offered, which focused on Black family culture and a purported lack of effort on the part of Black students (a finding that other researchers have disputed).

The author takes us—in telling and sometimes granular detail—into the endless efforts of superintendents, principals, teachers, and families to close the educational achievement gap without alienating the affluent white families (and the few affluent Black families) who would otherwise leave Shaker, as some did. The district instituted double busing—white students into majority Black schools and vice versa—to try to keep schools integrated; it tried to recruit more Black teachers; and it created a variety of support programs to assist Black students. Meckler also chronicles the constant efforts of Black mothers to organize and to pressure the district to improve their children’s education.

Inevitably, in a book of this scope, there are some frustrating gaps. Given the importance of neighborhoods and their demographics, a map of Shaker Heights would have been very helpful. Data such as the SAT scores cited above are given without dates, leaving the reader to infer approximately when they were recorded. The interweaving of policy and personality, character portraits, and stories leads at times to a choppy reading experience. While the book references events as recent as the summer of 2023, there is no summary of exactly where the school district stands today—either in terms of its academic trajectory or in any comparison of overall performance or subgroup performance to similar subgroups nationwide. There are periodic references to the fact that for all its challenges, Shaker Heights has at times recorded better academic results for its Black students than the nation manages as a whole—but once again, there is no systematic reporting of those results through time, nor of whether such scores are routinely higher or just periodically so. 

While a reviewer shouldn’t require that an author write a different book, it may be helpful to point out what is not attempted here. Meckler is an excellent journalist and is careful not to take on the role of political scientist, educational theorist, or philosopher. Thus, this is not a book for readers expecting grand arguments or conclusions about the best ways to improve education. There is no attempt to adjudicate between different theories or policies of education reform (although there is clearly sympathy for constructivist teaching). And Meckler is careful to avoid sweeping judgments about identity politics or human nature.

What we get instead—to our immense benefit—is a wealth of historical detail, a finely written portrait of the realities in the field, a sensitive treatment of key protagonists, and an acute awareness of the complex nature of human interactions in a desegregated community. It is important to be reminded—through vivid real-world accounts—that reaching across racial lines takes sustained commitment and courage in the face of inevitable setbacks. To give but one example, Meckler’s journalistic acumen serves her well throughout a short account of a Black parent expending vast efforts to organize and publicize a community celebration, only to experience a tiny attendance. The tale is poignant—a powerful commentary on where this nation finds itself when it comes to race.

In the end, the author reminds the reader that from the perspective of public education and race relations, Shaker may well be about as good as it gets—a community that has, against the odds, maintained racial integration across many decades. Meckler’s story is full of brave individuals—parents, teachers, community leaders, and even policymakers—who in each decade pushed for the town and its schools to do better for its children. All of this makes the record of enduring failure to substantially reduce racial disparities in academic outcomes immensely sobering. It may not get better than this, Meckler implies, but there is still very little to celebrate when it comes to the education of Black children. The most recent efforts focused on detracking the system may only embody one more flawed effort to remediate inequalities in readiness-to-learn that are already entrenched in the pre-kindergarten years.

Meckler cites Ron Ferguson’s observation that Shaker Heights is building a sandcastle by the ocean’s edge. Ferguson points out that thanks to the good offices of fine people, the sandcastle, periodically washed away by forces it cannot withstand, is repeatedly rebuilt. But, one should add, the castle is still made of sand.

Educational Goods: Values, Evidence, and Decision-Making
by Harry Brighouse, Helen F. Ladd, Susanna Loeb, and Adam Swift
University of Chicago Press, 2018, $27.50 (paperback); 192 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

School superintendents and state education chiefs often find themselves in a peculiar position when making policy decisions that could deeply affect children’s lives. Although these local and state officials are besieged by a cacophony of opinions from those who hope to advise, influence, undermine, expose, or (rarely) applaud them, they must ultimately act alone, realizing that every major decision is made with incomplete information, involves tradeoffs, and inevitably bears unintended consequences. Given the emotional and political investment of parents, legislators, and taxpayers in these decisions, these officials are acutely aware of how radically imperfect their policy choices are.

Guidance for those charged with these weighty decisions has come in the surprising form of a calm, judicious tome written in the style of a polished essay in analytic philosophy, replete with Aristotelian-like categories and topped off with citations from contemporary empirical research on the impact of specific educational interventions. In Educational Goods, the authors—two philosophers and two social scientists—offer “a framework for thinking about the goals of education” and for making decisions based on those ends. In an Oxford University–style tutorial, they present the concepts of “educational goods” (the knowledge, skills, dispositions, and attitudes we hope to instill) and the “capacities” built by these goods (such as economic productivity, democratic competence, and personal fulfillment) that allow an individual to flourish. In reflecting on these desired goods and capacities, the authors also factor in normative values (such as equality and how goods should be distributed to serve social justice) and ultimately analyze the multiple relationships and tradeoffs among all of these goods, capacities, and values.

Also factoring into this framework are what the authors term “independent values,” which they define as worthy ends that sometimes compete with educational goods for resources and public priority. For instance, the interests of parents in how they rear and shape their children might be at odds with what is “good” educationally. And “childhood goods”—certain experiences of childhood, such as purposeless, carefree play—have intrinsic value, independent of what kind of adult the child will become.

The authors intend the book for “decision makers in the field of education policy,” which prompts the question: How many such individuals will be willing to read a text that demands sustained attention to political theory? As a former state education commissioner (perhaps the only one who ever studied political theory at Oxford), I hope that many of them will. The book is at times esoteric, to be sure, but my tenure in Albany would have benefited from having taken more time to distinguish (as the authors do) between decisions that are “data driven” and those that are grounded in appropriate educational values and then “data informed.” Pressing the reader-policymaker to distinguish carefully between educational goods and values, and the crosscurrents of implicit tradeoffs between them, is salutary. It slows one’s thinking and renders it more disciplined and possibly improved. Even the deceptively simple admonition to “Assess the options in the light of the [relevant] values and evidence” would be worth pasting onto the computer screens of education policymakers. To give but one of several examples, the authors offer a nuanced discussion of ability grouping in schools that highlights the potential tensions between the value of improving the performance of the weakest students and the consequences of increasing the gap between them and the most gifted, since the latter are likely to reap the greater gains from ability grouping.

The second half of the book seeks to apply the theoretical framework to three policy case studies in the areas of school finance, school accountability, and school autonomy and parental choice. Here, the authors’ effort is somewhat less successful.

First, in the thicket of empirical discussion, one loses track of the through lines from the earlier theoretical chapters. A patient and attentive reader might be able to reconstruct them, but the authors could and should have used tables or other organizing devices to save us the work. Just how, for example, choices about charter-school regulation align with the framework developed in the earlier chapters eludes us far too easily.

Second, the discussion often becomes indistinguishable from a conventional policy debate, at which point one’s antennae go up. For instance, a long discussion of charter-school results cites two of the important CREDO research reports but omits a crucial third one that shows hugely disparate impacts of different types of charter schools (with those operated by nonprofit charter management organizations vastly outperforming “mom-and-pop” and other charter sectors such as for-profit and online charter schools). The inclusion of this report would likely have prompted a more positive treatment of charter-school performance.

To offer another example, much of the authors’ early discussion of school spending assumes a strong correlation between expenditure levels and education outcomes, even though research shows that the two correlate poorly. (Clearly, education spending cannot go to zero and still produce outcomes, but international data make it clear that beyond a certain expenditure level, putting more funds into a deeply dysfunctional system yields rapidly diminishing returns).

The second half of the book also serves to make clear what has been close to the surface all along: careful, analytic thinking can take us only so far in a field so deeply characterized by uncertainty and clashing values. Again and again, the authors bring a section to a close suggesting that a careful consideration of multiple values and empirical evidence will produce “morally responsible decisions”—but then acknowledge that those same decisions remain “always problematic,” since they inevitably involve “trade-offs among valued outcomes.” The implication is that by using a framework such as the authors’, the decisionmaker will at least have acted ethically—and perhaps that is all that can be asked.

The four authors are distinguished academics, and their careful analysis of the goals and values and, to a lesser extent, the current research in education policy, speaks to another era, one in which those trained in analytic thinking at premier universities found themselves entrusted with the opportunity and the time to draw upon that thinking while being somewhat protected from the slings and arrows of political fortune. In the end, because the authors are properly humble about the reach of theory, the policy scope of their book is heavily circumscribed.

Our very finest education policymakers are akin to chess masters—they make their choices with a practiced sense of what evidence must be taken seriously, which values are paramount, which tradeoffs are worth making. They do not analyze the implications of every possible move, because if they did, they would never reach a decision. But such people, and such a combination of skills, are extremely rare. If education policymakers, and indeed the readers of Education Next, are willing, they have much to gain from a dip into the first few chapters of this book. They will breathe the air of careful thinking and acquire a greater understanding of the genuine difficulty of making sound, informed judgments in education policy.

David Steiner is executive director of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy.

The Case for Contention
by Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson
The University of Chicago Press, 2017, $22.50 (paper), $68 (cloth); 144 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

A people who mean to be their own Governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

—James Madison (1822)

In Immanuel Kant’s famous essay, “What Is Enlightenment?” the 18th-century philosopher challenged Western societies to display some courage and “dare to know.” Kant and his contemporaries took it as fundamental that a dedication to understanding, to unfettered empirical inquiry, and to moral reasoning would become the engine of human education and advancement. The so-called Enlightenment Project persisted throughout much of the 20th century; in the 1980s and ’90s, social theorists still maintained that respectful open dialogue on foundational matters would advance truth and strengthen democracy.

In regard to the American public school classroom, Jonathan Zimmerman and Emily Robertson, authors of The Case for Contention, place themselves squarely in this tradition:

Discussion of controversial issues helps students develop an array of skills and dispositions embodying the ability to formulate and evaluate arguments, thus fostering their capacities for rational thought and action. . . . Leading students in discussion of controversial issues can be regarded as essential to effective and efficient education.

The book is divided into two parts. The first is a rapid romp through the history of the teaching of controversies in American education. Here, the basic lesson is that such teaching has always been difficult—constrained by political forces, legal challenges, parental objections, limited class time, and understandably hesitant teachers who are ill-prepared for the complex task of teaching divisive issues.

Among these pressures, it is perhaps the courts that have done the most to limit teachers’ willingness to take risks. Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s finding in Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) that “it can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” the court would later hold in Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006) that teachers’ speech is part of their work for their employers—the public school board—and thus belongs to the board. Post-Garcetti, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit found that “the school system does not ‘regulate’ teachers’ speech as much as it hires that speech.” Zimmerman and Robertson approvingly cite the “stirring dissent” by Colorado judge Gregory Hobbs: “When we strip teachers of their professional judgment, we forfeit the educational vitality we prize. . . . When we quell controversy for the sake of congeniality, we deprive democracy of its mentors.”

The book’s historical survey has its arresting moments. I didn’t know that Horace Mann, as he worked to magnify the reach of public education, was intolerant of introducing controversial subjects in the classroom: “If the day ever arrives when the school room shall become a cauldron for the fermentation of all the hot and virulent opinions, in politics and religion, that now agitate our community, that day the fate of our glorious public school system will be sealed, and speedy ruin will overwhelm it.” We surely owe to such sentiments the often-tame quality of so many textbooks and curricula in the United States. But the history summary is too brief to be systematic: it may be important, for instance, that in a 1953 survey, Ohio teachers reported “teaching the controversies over the federal take-over of the Steel Mills, the Firing of General Douglas MacArthur, and the use of the Atomic Bomb,” but the reader cannot judge if this instruction was unusual, or geographically limited, or widespread across the nation. At best, this part of the book offers general support for the authors’ claim that “we simply do not trust our teachers to engage students on controversial issues in a knowledgeable and sensitive manner.”

The second part of the book attempts to define what that trust could mean if we took it more seriously. What constitutes a controversy worth teaching, and how should educators approach teaching it? Here, we find the book’s principal contribution: to argue for a distinction between topics on which strong disagreements divide the public but “expert” opinion is largely settled, and those on which both public and experts’ judgments diverge. Regarding the former kind of issue (evolution and global warming are offered as examples), the authors argue that teachers should not remain neutral but rather teach specific respect for expert judgments and general respect for the expert “epistemologies” that support those judgments:

When the controversy is one between experts and portions of the public, the teacher . . . has an obligation to let the students know the settled judgment of those qualified to investigate the issue.

In regard to topics where neither experts nor the public have reached consensus, the authors “agree that it is important for teachers to ‘teach the controversy’ rather than directing students toward a particular conclusion.” They go further, suggesting that “parents may legitimately ask that the schools represent their side of the issue.”

So for issues such as abortion, the assumption is that teachers would need to take on the role of neutral discussion facilitator. It is striking, however, that abortion is mentioned only twice in the whole book and is not the subject of direct discussion. The death penalty is referred to once, with no analysis. In short, the book is light on discussion of some of the most obviously controversial ethical issues of our time. Moreover, the authors punt even on issues they do address: on white privilege, we are told that the issue of whether “the concept of white privilege [should] be taught in schools . . . may itself be a maximally controversial question.” Note their use of the word “may” and the fact that the question is left unanswered. In general, if the issue is judged by teachers to be too “hot” in their particular communities, the authors conclude that “avoidance could be a reasonable strategy.”

The endless raising of unanswered questions, the vague explanations of what makes an issue “maximally controversial” (who exactly gets to decide how much intra-expert disagreement gives an issue that standing?), and the generally anodyne quality of many of the conclusions (“We acknowledge . . . that deciding how to classify a given issue can sometimes be difficult”) combine to leave the reader feeling undernourished by both the theoretical and the practical content that is served up.

There is a sense, however, of worrying about deck chairs on the Titanic. Recent measures of academic achievement in the United States suggest that the Enlightenment Project is in trouble: our high-school students’ performance is largely unchanged since the 1990s, and students in many other countries have leapfrogged over them. According to a 2013 analysis by Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg of Tufts University, teaching the controversies does indeed appear to increase students’ civic knowledge; perhaps such discussions allow teachers to raise the energy level in the classroom and thus better capture the attention of students. But ours is an age in which teachers are expected to teach critical thinking about nothing in particular. It is tough to “dare to know” when any canonical knowledge itself is disdained. Teaching the controversies may indeed be one important way in which to engage students with knowledge. Any contribution to that end is most welcome.

David Steiner is professor and executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

Charter Schools at the Crossroads: Predicaments, Paradoxes, Possibilities
by Chester E. Finn Jr., Bruno V. Manno, and Brandon L. Wright
Harvard Education Press, 2016,
$62; 270 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

Here is a very useful, synoptic guide to the American charter-school sector upon its 25th anniversary. Charter Schools at the Crossroads begins with the first charter-school law (Minnesota, 1991) and chronicles the sector’s growth to today’s 6,800 schools serving 3 million students, or 6 percent of the K–12 public-school enrollment. The text is replete with interesting facts, such as the number of rural charters in the nation (785), the percentage of charter schools that belong to national networks (40 percent), and a comparison of annual teacher turnover (18.4 percent in charters, 15.7 percent in district schools).

Those who have encountered the delightfully acerbic animadversions of which Finn is a master will be disappointed. This is not the voice that once opined that teachers can be “ignorance factories…. Why not get rid of the people who aren’t getting the job done?” Now president emeritus of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Finn has co-written the book with Bruno V. Manno, senior advisor to the Walton Family Foundation and emeritus trustee of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, and Brandon Wright, who serves as the editorial director at the Fordham Institute. All of these authors and organizations can plainly be counted in the pro-charter camp, yet the book takes a balanced approach and a judicious tone throughout.

The authors provide a mostly even-handed summary of the research that evaluates and compares charter-school performance to that of other public schools. They explain that the challenges for researchers are that the school effect must be disaggregated from family background, and that their methods must account for “selection bias”—the likelihood that children whose parents choose a charter school are already different from those whose parents do not. Few researchers would quibble with their methodological preference: “When it comes to pupil achievement, assessment of gains over time (panel studies), rather than absolute levels at a specific point in time, is superior.” Their summary of the sector’s academic outcomes, which draws heavily on a series of studies by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University, is likewise relatively uncontroversial: there is a positive achievement effect for poor, nonwhite, urban students, but suburban and rural charters come up short, as do online charters, about which the authors duly report negative findings. All fair as far as it goes, although readers who want to dig into the controversies around selection bias, methodological research issues, or a final reckoning of impact will be disappointed. The critical literature from Bruce Baker of Rutgers University, the thinking from Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute on what those “extra days” of learning do or don’t mean in terms of movement from one percentile of performance ranking to another—these and other such debates are simply passed over.

Is it possible for an empirically oriented book, presumably designed for students of the contemporary education scene, to be too careful? Fifteen years ago, having judiciously reviewed the record and the criticisms of charter schools (Charter Schools in Action: Renewing Public Education), Finn and Manno were willing to render a judgment, arguing then that “schooling based on choice, autonomy, and accountability can undergird a new model of public education.” In their current book, we are assured that the charter-school model “is here to stay,” but that “we cannot claim today that the word charter is any more determinative than district when it comes to analyzing or explaining school performance.”

A few pages later, we are told that the charter sector “has advanced public education as a whole.” Well, how exactly? And to what degree? The problem is that often the forest gets lost because the leaves aren’t counted: the authors describe a CREDO report’s conclusions on the cumulative advantage of urban charter schools for poor African American students but give the reader no sense of how trustworthy they deem the report to be nor how significant the purported charter-school impact is—compared, for example, to results of any other major school-reform strategy.

The authors delineate many concerns about the charter sector. In a section titled “Who Watches the Watchers?” they point out that in some states, authorizers operate virtually unchecked, with dire consequences for students, and that the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools approves the quality controls of only two states (Hawaii and Louisiana) and the District of Columbia. In Minnesota, it took the legislature 18 years after passage of the state’s charter law to counteract sloppy authorizing by placing more power in the hands of the state education agency.

On a related issue: education reformers often decry the obstructionist power of vested interests, especially those of teachers unions. Finn and his colleagues, however, note that charters themselves are not impervious to financial and political corruption: “Low-performing schools also crave students, resources, and legitimacy…. Firms that earn their living by operating or selling services to schools naturally want to sustain their revenues. So do authorizers that derive their income via a formula keyed to student enrollments.” A section on Ohio charter politics makes such claims explicit, naming names of individuals and operators who held up charter-law reform in that state for a decade through massive campaign contributions and behind-the-scenes glad-handing. Neither are the authors sanguine about for-profit operators, noting
that, “Something is plainly awry when schools or their service providers enrich their owners while producing shoddy pupil outcomes.”

The authors also worry that the sector has not sufficiently diversified. Philanthropists have become so enthralled with urban “no excuses” models that “we must also ask whether philanthropy’s role in shaping this sector … has excessively narrowed its scope and constrained its possibilities.” Alternative models and missions remain unfunded.

But while the authors do not hold back on critiquing the charter sector, they turn surprisingly coy in examining where it might be headed. They identify but do not weigh in on important battles within the sector, such as special education quotas, disciplinary practices, and backfilling (the practice of admitting new students when spaces open up throughout the school year). On the latter, for example, they note disagreement between Paul Hill and Robin Lake, colleagues within the Center on Reinventing Public Education, but they demur on taking a side themselves, declaring, “From where we sit, they both make compelling arguments.” As for debates about discipline, the authors ask, “How to strike a legally defensible, morally acceptable, fiscally manageable, and educationally sound balance between the rights or interests of one child and those of many others who attend that school? … Such questions have no easy answers.” But the reader is left wishing they had posited a few.

Given its evenhanded approach, Charter Schools at the Crossroads constitutes a perfect anchor text for a full overview of this major sector of American schooling. At the same time, those seeking new material with which to critique or celebrate this most important education-reform approach will have to look elsewhere.

David Steiner is professor and executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City Classroom
by Ed Boland
Grand Central Publishing, 2016, $26; 256 pages.

The Secret Lives of Teachers
by Anonymous
University of Chicago Press, 2015, $25; 272 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

In these new books, two authors reflect on their experiences as teachers in New York State. One is Ed Boland, a career changer from the world of nonprofits. Boland takes his social conscience and his teacher-training courses at a New York City education school and plunges into the world of a city public school. The other, who remains “Anonymous,” reflects on many years of teaching social studies in an elite private school in upstate New York. The reviewer approaches the task in a Platonic mode: Are there universals underlying the job of teaching that transcend school contexts? Is there an essential core to teaching children that remains timeless?

The title of Boland’s The Battle for Room 314 says it all: the author experienced his classroom as if it were a war zone. The heavy fog of despair never lifts: successes are ephemeral, well-intentioned efforts splinter on the rocks of urban reality, and failure is both personal (for the teacher) and systemic (for the students, their school, and their world). Unsurprisingly, the school portrayed in the book was placed on the list of the weakest 5 percent of the state’s public schools. Only 2 of the 32 teachers who began the academic year with the author stayed beyond three years. At least a portion of the graduating class—comprising half of the students who started their senior year—were onstage only because their teachers bent the rules governing graduation standards.

What’s most disappointing about this book is that, for all its honesty and moments of humor, realism, and despair, it isn’t especially insightful. Lacking either pedagogic perception or original social commentary, it ends with a predictable laundry list of suggested education reforms: more funding, more research, better teacher training, more innovation. In the end, the book is a dreary diary penned by a poorly prepared, rather tortured teacher, who largely fails at his craft in a mindlessly mismanaged school.

Yes, there are episodes so ghastly that the reader’s voyeuristic instincts are temporarily engaged. The author’s failures in his classroom are at times memorable, and we are torn between empathy and regret that he lacks more-effective strategies. The portraits of wasted student talent poignantly speak for themselves. And there is blame enough to go around, from the failure of the school’s administration and that of Boland’s teacher preparation (less than an hour on classroom management), to the surrounding socioeconomic reality of which the classroom is a tragic microcosm.

Of course, those who make a genuine effort to teach in such difficult circumstances deserve our respect, and the reader will start this book rightly sympathetic to the “best intentions” of the author. First-year teachers in New York City public schools often experience genuine hell, even as they give their all, as Boland apparently did. But then we read: “The cops don’t care. The union doesn’t care. The rich neighbors don’t care. The parents don’t care,” followed by the observation that “I began to loathe my students.” What does one make of a story that portrays a teacher swearing at his students and ends with bathetic phrases of lukewarm self-congratulation (“Any role I played in a young person’s life … is a worthy one”)? Well, not much.

***

Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer’s instructions on the art and science of hermeneutics—essentially, how to read with respect for the text before you—call on us to take stock of our prejudices and then bracket them if we hope to learn something when we read. I confess that I approached The Secret Lives of Teachers with plenty of prejudice, partly because of the jacket blurb’s promise that “scandalous” revelations awaited (they did not), and partly because of the apparent subject matter (a teacher in an elite private school tells all). Was I really going to have to review an exposé of how the sons and daughters of privilege play their way through a coddled adolescence marked by illicit drugs, erotic fumblings, and petty cruelties? In fact, although there is an episode involving pot brownies, the temperature stays tepid: the pace of the storytelling is leisurely, and neither the dramas nor (with one exception) the language would bring a blush to Jane Austen’s cheek.

So, here again, we have a teacher describing his year of work. This time, however, we trade inner-city New York for upstate pastures. Think Mr. Chips teaching in the Hudson Valley. Our narrator, “Anonymous,” is a high-school social studies teacher, and his musings meander from classroom to common room to field trip, returning to the school to celebrate (in a rare moment of sentimentality) the hope that is ever reborn at graduation: “I pause to savor the cadence.”

Anonymous’s temperament and tastes are well-suited to his chosen pedagogical world (a rare trip to a New York City charter school evokes fear and alienation—he describes the intersection at 2nd Avenue and 125th Street as “wide and empty”). His teaching style is traditional, but he listens to and learns from his students. These capacities, combined with a quick mind and a willingness to constantly hone his craft, suggest a strong teacher: Anonymous tosses a planned lesson on Huck Finn when the students press into uncharted interpretive territory. Deftly guiding the discussion, he opens the way for some deep thinking. Through a series of vignettes, we are entertained by throw-away remarks that run the gamut from the drearily familiar (“The academic dimension of schooling is really a relatively small part of a student’s life”) to something that Scott Fitzgerald might have written: “Rich people can afford to be nice. That’s why it’s always a little surprising when they unreservedly are.”

One pulls for the author: perhaps amid the punctilious style, the understatement, the two-dimensional portraits of students and colleagues, a deeper wisdom will emerge?

Certainly, there are moments that offer the opportunity for wisdom. A student makes a remark that inadvertently causes pain to a wheelchair-bound peer; another student is stunned to learn that a teacher believes she is “phoning it in”; a colleague is fired on dubious grounds. Each instance tests the author’s teaching and intellectual skills, but such moments come and go without deeper observation or analysis.

Here is Anonymous summing up his life’s calling, surely a moment for original insight:

My goal is to give them [my students] a sense of contingency: to show them one can have very different assumptions from the ones that govern their own lives; that those assumptions result in reasoning that leads in alternative directions; and that those directions lead to very different outcomes.

It is a worthy assertion, but hardly an arresting one. Anonymous respects his craft, and his hopes as a teacher are reasonable and responsible. But modesty and good common sense do not add up to a compelling book: once revealed, Anonymous’s secrets are too comfortable. Reading should not be akin to slipping on a well-worn tweed jacket. We should rather return Anonymous to the students who are lucky to be in his classroom.

There are, unfortunately, no fundamentally provoking truths to be mined from these two works. The takeaways are modest, though not unimportant: Both books remind us that school teachers are human, fallible, and far from Hollywood’s “teacher as hero” caricatures. The world of difference that characterizes the two New York schools is in itself powerful testimony to the inequities that continue to bedevil our education system. Let us not forget, either, that even among America’s more-privileged students, the majority are performing below their international peers. The subject matters of these books require far more urgent, sharp, and probing attention than they here receive.

David Steiner is professor and executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

The Prize: Who’s in Charge of America’s Schools?
by Dale Russakoff
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015, $27; 256 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

Some district schools [in Newark] have improved on state tests in grades three to eight, but the district’s overall passing rates remained roughly flat over the five years ending in spring 2014, and even dipped in some grades. In fifth grade, for example, state data showed only 29% of children were proficient in language arts. The district touts other gains, however, such as more children attending public preschool and graduating.

—“Newark’s $100 Million Education Debate,” Wall Street Journal, September 8, 2015

Few Education Next readers will arrive innocently at this review: the coverage of Dale Russakoff’s wonderfully written The Prize, an account of recent education policy in Newark, has been extensive. The combination of an extraordinary (and perhaps extraordinarily naive) 2010 donation of $100 million from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, the high-octane political antics of Mayor Cory Booker, and the very dedicated but consultant-reliant and at times tone-deaf district leadership of Cami Anderson converge to create an education drama of the first order. The meme picked up in many reviews is clear: writing in the New York Times, Alex Kotlowitz argues that the book “serves as a kind of corrective to the dominant narrative of school reformers across the country.” The suggestion is that “school reformers,” understood as those committed to teacher accountability and merit pay, principal autonomy, and the extensive use of data analysis to support school-level change, should eat a good portion of humble pie. Larger-than-life figures who claimed to have all the answers emerged with egg on their faces. Their efforts to reform education “from the top down” are revealed as an embarrassing fiasco.

There is some truth to this reading. But stubborn facts, duly recorded in this compellingly readable book, complicate this conclusion out of all recognition.

First, the story’s heroes—public school teachers who kept their heads down and did wonderful work in their classroom—don’t quite behave as we might expect from those critical of the reformers’ agenda. Rather, such teachers

took it upon themselves to glean many lessons from the city’s best charter schools, and found charter school leaders eager to help. They organized themselves as a nonprofit agency through which they raised private money to purchase the rigorous, early literacy program, developed at the University of Chicago for kindergarten through third grade, that was used in the two leading charter networks—the TEAM schools of the national KIPP organization and North Star Academy, a subsidiary of Uncommon Schools.

Ras Baraka, now mayor of Newark but at the time a school principal and leader of the opposition to the new strategies, was an unusual kind of opponent to the reform movement:

In his first two years as principal, Central had such abysmal scores on the state proficiency exam given annually to juniors that it was in danger of being closed under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Baraka mounted an aggressive turnaround strategy, using some of the instructional techniques pioneered by the reform movement. He said he was particularly influenced by a superintendent in a high-poverty district in Colorado who was trained by philanthropist Eli Broad’s leadership academy—an arm of the “conspiracy” Baraka the politician inveighed against…. In addition to English and math, the test-prep classes at Central High included a heavy dose of motivation. Teachers told students over and over: You can pass this test. You must pass it—for yourself, your school, your community. Baraka scheduled a school-wide pep rally on the day before testing.

In short, arguing that the book damns the education reformers’ agenda is to misread it.

On other matters, the book presents a still stronger endorsement of reform. It hammers home the positive attributes of charter schools in Newark and the recalcitrance of the traditional school district. Stanford University researchers completed a review of New Jersey charter schools in 2012 (the CREDO report), finding that compared to their peers in traditional public schools, “charter students in Newark gain an additional seven and a half months in reading and nine months in math” per year of schooling. One can only conclude that the growth of the charter sector represented a major advance for the students lucky enough to win lottery-generated spaces in those schools. On the other side of the ledger, the book strongly supports the argument that the very structure of the traditional public-school district in Newark drained funds and support from the frontline of the classroom.

In the end, one of the most cherished elements on the reform agenda never got off the ground, namely, the right of school principals to override the job protection of long-serving teachers. The single greatest expenditure from the almost $200 million that was raised for Newark’s school system went to a new teachers’ contract. The new superintendent, Cami Anderson, “estimated the total cost of the labor agreements at $100 million.” Despite the money, New Jersey state law assured the protection of veteran teachers irrespective of their effectiveness in the classroom. While the Newark charter schools were recruiting from all over the country, the Newark school district “had to choose mostly from Newark’s existing supply, since leftover teachers in the excess pool already were bursting the budget.”

The Prize gives us three very important warnings: First, education reform can be undermined by failing to engage seriously with the community in question. There was, as Russakoff demonstrates, a fundamental reluctance to engage with the parents of Newark in any serious or sustained way. Second, state and local circumstances must be very carefully considered in advance of introducing changes. Blithe assertions that state law around collective bargaining would be done away with remained just that— assertions. Finally, just as absolute power can corrupt absolutely, so the lure of vast funds, and the pressure to show quick and major results, can produce very damaging behavior. Page after page evidences massive grandstanding (in part to secure the necessary matching funds to lock down the Zuckerburg millions), and a constant overselling of progress made.

But one should be careful in drawing broader conclusions about education reform from The Prize. On the one hand, there can be no conclusion that the “education reformers” have a monopoly on ideas that work to improve education for students. Not all urban public-school districts are as broken or inflexible as Newark was both before and during the interventions described. A typically thought-provoking and painful passage from Russakoff illustrates the perspective of a Newark public-school parent:

[Selta] Carter viewed dysfunction as a given in the Newark schools, and she spent her social capital shielding her daughter from it. The same was true for most of the two dozen other parents at the meeting. Among hundreds of Thirteenth Avenue School parents, they were the small core investing time and energy in classrooms. When they had concerns, administrators tended to listen. This was their definition of school choice: the ability to maneuver a child out of the path of inevitable disaster.

There are public school districts across the country that have engaged in innovative contracts between teachers and the central office, and there are multiple models of educational interventions, including at the curricular level, that show real promise and do not depend on wholesale structural reform.

At the same time, while Dale Russakoff is a superb narrator, she is not always a reliable guide to national education policy. Her brief treatment of the major reforms in New Orleans and Washington, D.C., is confusing, mixing data with generalizations that do not follow. The treatment of charter schools, most especially, moves uneasily from individual portraits of attentiveness and effective support for children to generalizations about the weakness of the sector. It should be said simply: to date, charter schools are the success story in Newark.

Thus the final work is left to the reader. For those who are committed to reforming public education from within and who are resistant to charter schools, vouchers, or tax credits, the challenge is to suggest a way forward when so much funding disappears into the central office, when funding itself is limited by our byzantine school-financing structures, and when it remains so difficult to replace weak teachers with stronger ones. For the reformers, the challenge is no less urgent: thanks to Zuckerberg, funds poured into the Newark charter schools. According to the CREDO report, they were already performing better than charters in other New Jersey cities. As has been the case in Boston, New York, and New Orleans, high-profile Newark charter schools became a magnet for talent. Can the model be sustained and nationalized without loss of quality?

David Steiner is professor and executive director of the Institute for Education Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

Lessons of Hope: How to Fix Our Schools
by Joel Klein
Harper, 2014, $27.99; 320 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

Joel Klein, former chancellor of the New York City school system, has written an important book about education. In an era where celebrities of all kinds use ghostwriters or are “assisted by X,” and where the focus is on puffery, whitewashing, sensationalism, or revisionist history, Klein’s voice is in every sentence of this book. His education policies are present on every page, and missteps are acknowledged: at one point Klein writes, “we had blown it”; at another, “we made a totally boneheaded move.” He doesn’t claim to have solved education problems for our time, and he doesn’t trumpet every policy success as his own. There are moments, to be sure, of self-congratulation, but they are held in check.

The book is all Klein—feisty, sharp, proud, irreverent, dedicated, and convinced. Praise is freely dispensed to team members; Michele Cahill, Jim Liebman, Eric Nadelstern, and Chris Cerf, among others, are warmly lauded. Cheap shots are avoided: Klein only names when he must, not when his animadversions are directed at passing episodes. And when he does criticize, Klein also reaches for compliments—teachers union boss Randi Weingarten may have been the bane of his professional life, and in Klein’s view she missed the chance to be truly revolutionary, but she is “whip smart” and avoided ad hominem attacks. A long antagonism with education historian Diane Ravitch (whose unremitting opposition to Klein clearly did him political damage) is described with an unusually detailed personal account that avoids sentimentalizing, yet hints at vulnerability.

Clearly, the book cannot be separated from the record it documents. That record consists of eight years of rising test scores (evidenced most reliably by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)), far higher graduation rates, strong performance from the new small high schools Klein created, and often-impressive results from the growing charter schools sector that he championed. After reading the critics and examining many more studies than Klein names (some inevitably negative), I believe there is simply no doubt that under Klein’s leadership, children attending public schools in New York City were, on average, being far better educated at the end of his eight years than they had been nine years before.

Because Klein’s educational record is strong, all those interested in narrowing the tragic education-performance gap between our well-off and our poor students should read this book. The major planks of Klein’s reforms are well known: breaking much of the old local district bureaucracy, empowering principals and creating a new principal training center, issuing report cards for schools, delivering autonomy and innovation zones for experimental schools, and keeping more of the city’s problematic teachers out of its schools. The story of how each reform was created, pushed, resisted, and to varying degrees implemented, however, is an object lesson in just how difficult it is to forge serious changes in our nation’s largest public-school district.

Outsiders will learn much from this book about teachers unions, tenure, politics, and the press. They will be able to judge the benefits that came from the support of a powerful mayor, a serious amount of extra funding (from the economic recovery after 9/11 and often from outside foundations), and from Klein’s own considerable willpower in overcoming the status quo. But readers will equally see the power of countervailing forces. For alongside the reforms he implemented, Klein provides a second list just as long of the reforms that just died: less binding teacher tenure, serious increases in teaching time, a streamlined disciplinary process for teachers, and a salary scale that would have allowed for substantial merit pay.

Critics, of course, will decry much of what Klein accomplished, as well as what he wanted to achieve but couldn’t. Some claim, for example, that students who remained in the bad high schools as they were being phased out, or who ended up in other similar schools, were left in the worst of all possible situations. Klein’s opponents also point to recent data on charter schools that show, as a whole, less than stellar results on Common Core–aligned English Language Arts assessments. Some argue that the NAEP results were overblown when compared with those of such cities as Washington, D.C., Boston, and (for all its other recorded problems) Atlanta.

There are strong responses available, especially to these last two potentially important critiques. The fact that Klein ignores them means that he has opted to some degree to preach to the choir. Yet a tough, accurate analysis of some of the pushback from critics would have given the book more weight. The relative paucity of data (and the absence of any footnotes to substantiating research) keeps the text moving quickly and will appeal to the impatient, but gives hostages to fortune.

The subtitle of Klein’s book (“How to Fix Our Schools”) raises the question of transfer. Judging how much of Klein’s work can be applied elsewhere depends on to what degree his work responded to a unique New York City context. Klein acknowledges that “NYC is not most cities.” Many of the reforms he championed, namely, more accountability, more focus on standards, and growth in charter schools, are already at various levels of implementation in states and districts across the country.

In fact, the key transfers may already have occurred. Klein points to a long list of those who once occupied senior positions on his team who went on to run school systems in other cities and states. Klein’s support pushed allies into key posts, and his persuasiveness brought hundreds of millions of dollars from philanthropy to support education reform, not only in New York City but also across the country. Without Klein’s record and influence, Democrats for Education Reform and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan would have been without their first serious standard-bearer.

In the end, the country still finds itself divided about education reform. There are those who are still deeply invested in the educational status quo. Since these powerfully entrenched interests wreck the lives of too many children, their political influence must be relentlessly confronted. Klein’s story reminds us, vividly, of just how terribly difficult it is to sustain this struggle. Somewhere in the midst of all this, there is a powerful, pragmatic way forward, and in a few places, Klein draws a breath and points to it: to balancing tougher entry into the teaching profession with a more professional experience once inside it; to content-rich curricula that are truly worth teaching; to technology in the service of new forms of learning; and to sophisticated partnerships between those in the schools and the families, community leaders, philanthropic institutions, administrators, and taxpayers beyond the school walls.

As an author, Klein might have given more space to thinking through paths not taken. As New York City schools chancellor, however, Klein was in the trenches, faced with a deeply broken system. He did not have the luxury of theorizing, of deep thinking about the Aristotelian telos of a public education, and he does not avail himself of that luxury in this book.

There remains, as Klein is the first to remind us, vast work still to be done on raising teacher effectiveness, on improving school leadership, and on removing the blight posed by our weakest schools. His book bears vital testimony to the deep divisions built into our public education system, and to just how tough it is to move that system even to the slightest degree. All debates registered, and inevitable missteps accounted for, we should be grateful that Klein put his shoulder to this ungrateful wheel, and as a result changed the life prospects for millions of young people.

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College and former New York State Commissioner of Education. 

Teachers Versus the Public: What Americans think about schools and how to fix them
by Paul E. Peterson, Michael Henderson, and Martin R. West
Brookings Institution Press, 2014, $28.00; 144 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

Most Americans possess only general, and not quite accurate, notions about their public schools. Moreover, the perceptions of the general public and the teaching profession often differ quite dramatically.

Paul Peterson (well known to readers of Education Next as its editor in chief), director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance and professor at Harvard University, and his fellow authors have published a short book that quantifies this reality. They find that Americans typically overestimate local school performance and underestimate costs and salaries. More than 80 percent of the public support annual student testing, three-quarters favor charter schools, two-thirds favor higher teacher pay, and half are in favor of means-tested vouchers. In contrast to the general public, teachers are less likely to support school choice, testing, and school accountability, and more likely to support higher teacher salaries and raising taxes to pay for them.

These findings are less than surprising, and some of them are familiar. It has long been known that Americans are locally generous to education performance, meaning that they inflate the academic performance of their own children and their own children’s schools. On the latter point, Gallup polling between 2007 and 2012 indicates that about 50 percent of respondents gave a grade of A or B to the schools in their community, while only 20 percent gave those grades to the nation’s schools as a whole. The Peterson results track the Gallup poll results quite closely, with 44 percent of the respondents giving their local schools one of the top two grades and 20 percent giving those grades nationally.

So what’s the news in the research this book reports? Two findings are noteworthy. First, provided with more precise information about the performance of their schools and districts, Americans lower their ratings of local schools and express greater support for charter schools, parent trigger mechanisms, and vouchers (if extended to all children). These views are especially prevalent among Americans who live in low-performing school districts. Give them information about teacher salaries, and Americans become more skeptical about supporting increases in teacher pay.

The second set of findings regards differences between African American and white opinions. There is relative silence, unfortunately, on Hispanic views. The text notes, without any further analysis, that Hispanics rate their schools far more highly than do African Americans, but why? Focusing on African Americans, the authors report that they are (understandably) far more critical of their schools than the rest of the public, and far more supportive of what is repeatedly called “the reform agenda”: merit pay for teachers, charter schools, vouchers, and tax credits to fund private school scholarships. On all of these issues, the gap in opinion between African Americans and teachers is especially marked.

It seems clear that Peterson and his colleagues are not simply reporting these findings for their own sake; a political agenda gradually takes shape in these pages. First, they hint that disseminating real data about school performance and teacher salaries would lead to more rapid reform. (In this context, the authors hold out hope that assessment results based on Common Core standards will increase transparency of educational achievement across the country, a bet that looks less secure than it did a year ago.)

Second, Peterson and his coauthors see an opening in the split between African Americans and teachers unions. The authors note the wealth of teachers unions and the role that their dollars play in keeping the national civil-rights leadership in line with union priorities—against the wishes of most black citizens. But, they argue, African Americans’ growing awareness of the failings of public schools and their enthusiasm for alternatives are putting pressure on the status quo: “The alliance between teachers and minorities within the Democratic coalition can be held together as long as education problems are defined as the by-product of inadequate funding. While successful in the past, today that strategy is becoming problematic…”

The authors tiptoe in these intimations; they do not stride. There is nothing concrete on political strategies. Only occasionally does the tone change. Drawing on comparisons to the airline and communications industries, the authors in their closing pages advocate for “large-scale competition” in the education sector. Their argument: “If large-scale competition is introduced, the government will not need to persuade teachers to go along with reforms, as teachers will be struggling to keep their jobs if students move elsewhere.” But while the call for competition is clear, the strategies to encourage it are not laid out.

What to make of the book? One could certainly quibble with small points. For instance, the authors refer to “the reform” case as though it were monolithic and uncontested, and cite, for example, arguments that certified teachers are no more effective than uncertified, with no indication that this finding is disputed in the literature. Throughout, one might wish that the authors were less coy about the agenda they can see taking shape around their findings.

But for this reviewer, the deeper issue lies elsewhere: the authors’ narrow range of “reform” opportunities. When parents know their children are getting a disastrously poor education, it is unsurprising that they will support alternatives, especially if those alternatives have shown powerful results, as, say, is the case in some New York City charter schools. But there is a certain begging the question in the authors’ reserving of the term “reform” for only the set of policies endorsed by such bodies as Democrats for Education Reform, the U.S. Department of Education and sympathetic state school chiefs, and certain figures, such as Jeb Bush, in the Republican Party.

The survey and the book would have been more provocative had a much broader “reform” agenda been considered, one that proposes rethinking teacher preparation, reshaping the tax structure, or establishing a national curriculum, for instance. Other countries, such as Finland, closed their schools of education and moved them to the universities, requiring subject-matter degrees and raising the bar for entry substantially. Ontario, too, focused its efforts on strong teacher preparation. Alberta, Canada, overhauled its property-tax structure to distribute resources more equitably, and at the same time expanded funding for school choice (including home-school stipends). Still other countries, such as England, are moving toward content-rich curricula, since academic rigor is shown to diminish the achievement gap as few other interventions do. Peterson’s team did not explore any of these reform options.

The authors would naturally respond that such alternatives aren’t seriously on the radar screen. That, of course, is the point. The policymakers in Washington who define “reform” delimit the realm of imaginable alternatives. How would the general public in the United States respond if given an educated choice between the reform agendas in Ontario and Washington? That’s what we need to know.

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College.