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The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

This was written by education historian Diane Ravitch on her Bridging Differences blog, which she co-authors with Deborah Meier on the Education Week website.

Ravitch and Meier exchange letters about what matters most in education. Ravitch, a research professor at New York University, is the author of the bestselling “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” an important critique of the flaws in the modern school reform movement.

Dear Deborah,

On the afternoon of Sept. 14, I attended a private screening of "Waiting for Superman," the film in which Michelle Rhee is portrayed as one of the true heroes of today’s school reform movement. That evening, Washington D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty — who appointed Rhee and gave her free rein over the city’s long-troubled public schools — lost his bid for re-election. The election was widely viewed as a referendum on Rhee, who attained a national reputation in her role as schools’ chancellor. Her allies considered her bold and combative; her opponents considered her divisive and mean-spirited. In the closing days of the Fenty campaign, she went to the districts where Fenty had his strongest support—the largely white districts in the city’s Northwest section—to rally voters.

When the results came in, Fenty was trounced in largely black districts. In Wards 7 and 8, his opponent, D.C. Council President Vincent Gray, won 82 percent of the vote. In Northwest Washington, where white voters predominate, Fenty won 76 percent of the vote. Fenty decisively lost the black vote and decisively won the white vote. D.C. public schools are about 5 percent white, so it is a reasonable supposition that the anti-Fenty vote was fueled to a large degree by parents of children in the public schools. Gray won handily, 53 percent to 46 percent.

Journalists attributed Fenty’s loss to the power of the teachers’ union, but such an explanation implies that black voters, even in the privacy of the voting booth, lack the capacity to make an informed choice. When the Tea Party wins a race, journalists don’t write about who controlled their vote, but about a voter revolt; they acknowledge that those who turned out to vote had made a conscious decision. Yet when black voters, by large margins, chose Gray over Fenty, journalists found it difficult to accept that the voters were acting on their own, not as puppets of the teachers’ union.

In the post-election analyses, the most common complaint about Fenty was that he was arrogant and out-of-touch with black voters. Rhee spoke about her failure to communicate, though it is hard to think of any figure in the world of American education who had as much media attention as she has had over the past three years. Certainly, she did not lack for opportunities to communicate. Her critics say that her fundamental flaw was arrogance and an indifference to the views of parents and teachers.

Rhee believed that mayoral control gave her the power to work her will and to ignore dissenters or brush them off as defenders of the status quo. Mayoral control bred arrogance and indifference to dialogue. She didn’t need to listen to anyone because she had the mayor’s unquestioning support. Mayoral control made democratic engagement with parents and teachers unnecessary. It became easy for her to disparage them and for the media to treat them as self-interested troublemakers.

Mayoral control of schools short-circuits democratic processes by concentrating all decision-making in the hands of one elected official, who need not consult with anyone else. If D.C. had had an independent school board, Rhee would have had to explain her ideas, defend them, and practice the democratic arts of persuasion, conciliation, and consensus-building.

We now have an "education reform" movement which believes that democracy is too slow and too often wrong, and their reforms are so important, so self-evident that they cannot be delayed by discussion and debate. So self-assured are the so-called reformers that they can’t be bothered to review the research and evidence on merit pay or evaluating teachers by test scores or the effects of high-stakes testing. If they can find one study or even a report by a friendly think tank, that’s evidence enough for them. Mayoral control gives them the mechanism they need to push ahead, without regard to other views or collateral damage.

The trouble with this anti-democratic approach to school reform is that it alienates the very people whose votes are needed by the mayor to continue what he started. Although one can find exceptions, it is usually the case that voters don’t like autocracy. They expect to be treated with respect, not condescension. They expect democratic institutions to operate with democratic processes. They expect their leaders to explain and discuss their decisions before they are final and to change course when they are wrong. The very behaviors that schools are supposed to teach—how to think, how to participate, how to reason with others, how to find common ground—are the same behaviors that we expect to encounter in public life.

In other contests, the pro-charter lobby took a beating in Democratic primaries in New York City. There, the pro-charter group Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) targeted three African-American state legislators for defeat because they questioned the expansion of charters in their communities.

DFER raised huge sums for the challengers (See "DFER Watch"). The highest-profile race was in Harlem, which has more charters than any other neighborhood in the city. Hedge-fund managers and other friends of DFER poured more than $100,000 into the campaign to defeat state Sen. Bill Perkins, who gained their enmity by seeking public audits of charters. The New York Times, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News ran numerous articles and editorials vilifying Perkins and endorsing his opponent, Basil Smikle. Smikle was supported by New York Gov. David Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

On Sept. 14, the three state senators opposed by DFER were re-elected by large margins. DFER’s main target, Perkins, collected 76 percent of the vote. The media referred to the re-election of these state senators as victories for the teachers’ union, denying the possibility that black voters exercise personal agency when they cast their ballots.

These electoral losses and the recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll suggest that the "reform" movement led by the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, DFER, hedge-fund managers, and the Obama administration lacks a base of popular support. But now begins the next phase of the movement, as its public relations campaign goes into high gear with the release this week of "Waiting for Superman."

Now, the public will be immersed in the "reform" narrative: Our public schools are rotten; low test scores are caused by bad teachers; high-stakes testing works; merit pay works; charters work; the unions that represent teachers are the main obstacle to "reform."

Diane

From the Bridging Differences Website...

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White Knights and False Villains in Education

By Deborah Meier on September 23, 2010

Dear Diane,

Forty-five-plus years ago, when I sent my children off to our local Chicago public school and started to substitute around Chicago's South Side schools (to earn a little money), I was amazed. The one feature that stood out was the disrespect shown toward teachers, and not surprisingly toward the children and their parents.

Like you, my interest in public education was in its capacity to nourish the health of a fuller democracy—to give all kids what I thought was being offered to the richest and most favored.

I even thought we had succeeded and that the only question was how to move from a few hundred examples to a few thousand. I never assumed our approach had to persuade everyone and welcomed other ways of answering the common question: What does a modern democracy require of all 18-year-olds to survive-plus? I assumed there was room for more than one answer.

At Central Park East, we had our movies—a few documentary films describing some of our examples—including Fred Wiseman's three-hour opus on Central Park East Secondary School and our own homemade film on "Graduation by Portfolio," and a small, award-winning film about a combined 2nd and 3rd grade classroom at CPE: "We Know Why We're Here." There was one little film about our violin program ("Small Wonders") that even attracted some interest in Hollywood. Other schools followed suit. (Urban Academy produced dozens.)

But they hardly compared with "Waiting for Superman"!

This is hardly surprising because, in fact, when Hollywood got hold of "Small Wonders," they turned it into something rather different: a story about bad teachers, bad unions, and heroic white saviors. They publicized it as the "true" history of the music program at Central Park East school in East Harlem. They even had shots of the exterior of the actual CPE and roughly followed the history of the violin teacher. Except ...

They made the school's longtime, full-time music teacher—a remarkable guy named Barry Solowey—into a lazy, incompetent teacher who depended on the union to keep his job while the hero—Roberta—was threatened by a citywide lay-off. Barry had served 250 kids a year for more than a decade; Roberta served 100 eager volunteers—in three CPE-like East Harlem Schools (about 30-40 in each) for three or four years (at that time). Barry saw every class weekly, produced an annual opera and a Broadway musical, and ran three choral groups,—who also sang in Carnegie Hall— and he taught recorder to every interested child. Both teachers did superb work. But imagine our shame when we saw what Hollywood had done to the character clearly meant to describe Barry and a school called Central Park East.

They needed a "knight on a white horse" to make the story a popular hit. "Music of the Heart" (with Meryl Streep) was merely following the long-before, laid-out script about public schools and teachers and the organizations they fight to create.

There's a long line of such films that highlight the lonely life of the great teacher. In fact, if they are indeed sometimes lonely, it's because they are breaking the rules—not those set by the unions, but by Management. Probably we need to make a list of all the rules that are imposed against teachers, not on their behalf by their unions. If it were otherwise, how come all the states (such as Texas) that don't allow unions even to have contracts follow so many of the same inane routines?

The same is true of many of the books, some of which become movies. Sometimes we have a strong black man, but usually it's a highly cultured but tough white person who refuses to lower his/her expectations and never gives an inch.

We're now entering the age when "tough love" is the plot when it comes to teachers and parents. Only it's they who we need to be tough on. It's all those smart young people who went into teaching in the late 1960s and '70s (some to avoid the draft) with their permissive spoiled-brat histories who become the villains of the new wave of school-based romances.

Neither tough-love imposed by elite Ivy League grads nor the generous-love imposed by elite draft-dodgers—forgive the unfair labels—will do. We need schools in which adults are treated like adults by those "above" them in the hierarchy—which has hardly ever been the condition of public schools, especially those serving poor communities. We need adults who demand ever more democracy in their schools, where adults join together to present their approach to being well-educated by modeling it in the presence of children. The school is where we can teach both children and adults the habits of mind on which democracy thrives. We need interesting and powerful adults who can help raise another generation—of interesting and powerful adults. We need adults who are treated with the kind of respect that suggests to the young that it's good to grow up and join adulthood. We need schools that treat the adults at home likewise—families that need to raise their children's aspirations even as their own have been crushed.

How those of us who have spent our lives fighting for such reforms have been cast as the "status quo" is remarkable. Those who preceded me and no longer are alive—the Lillian Webers and Ted Sizers—would be startled by the labels the new "reformers" have given them. I believe people can call themselves what they like. But I wish I had enough money and power to prevent them from successfully re-labeling others as lazy, self-interested, money-grubbing purveyors of low expectations.

It would be fun to re-read some of the old classics and watch some of those films before we allow even recent history to be rewritten and distorted to demonstrate that nobody ever had a good idea until "they" came along.

Yes, Diane, I suppose I'll have to go see the "Superman" film someday—as I finally did make myself see "Music of the Heart." But I also suggest folks watch a wonderful recent French movie on a similar subject, treated honestly: "The Class."