Remembering Two Historians: David Tyack and Michael Katz

            If we’ve ever needed clarity of thought, and a respect for knowledge, and an ethical commitment to understanding history and its consequences—if we’ve ever needed these virtues, we need them now. Two historians of education whose work embodies intellectual rigor and moral sensibility died before the 2016 presidential election, David Tyack in October, 2016 and Michael Katz several years earlier in August, 2014. David would be appalled at the nomination of Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education, and Michael, who wrote brilliantly on urban history and on poverty as well as on education, would have observed with horror the prospect of rolling back protections for the vulnerable to pre-FDR levels. And both would have much to say about a looming Second Gilded Age. As we prepare for the next few years, it could help us to keep these historians’ books close at hand.

            In my blog of August 25, 2014, I posted a eulogy for Michael Katz as well as an earlier commentary I wrote when he updated his fine book, The Undeserving Poor. You can access that post here http://mikerosebooks.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-tribute-to-historian-michael-b-katz.html, and I also quote some of it now to give you a feel for what makes The Undeserving Poor so terribly fitting for our time:

The Undeserving Poor [I wrote] is not so much a history of poverty in the United States as a history of ideas about poverty, and the ideas are complex and, for the most part, troubling. I began to understand how it is that poor people are so often categorized and characterized in such one-dimensional and insidious ways: as shirkers, or passive, or morally defective, or stupid—as people responsible for their poverty because of some damning personal or cultural quality. I also began to understand the reasons behind various interventions aimed at poverty—or refusals to intervene. I had never read a book quite like this, one that demonstrated just how much the ideas and language in the air matter in the construction of public policy.

            I read the first edition of The Undeserving Poor in the early 1990s and wrote Michael Katz a long fan letter that sparked a lasting friendship. My introduction to David Tyack began in an even more personal way.

           

            Though my first year of college was pretty bumpy, I eventually found my way with the help of some exceptional teachers, and was fortunate to be in the running for a fellowship awarded by a national foundation. The process involved an interview, which was scheduled in a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, several bus transfers from my home. I was green as chlorophyll, and this world of high-powered academics and high-stakes interviews in hotels I had never seen from the inside was new territory for me. To make matters worse, the buses were running late, so I showed up at my interviewer’s door in a sweat and nervous. Thank God the interviewer was David Tyack, then a young professor from Reed College. I didn’t know anything about him, let alone about Reed College, but the guy couldn’t have been nicer. He put me at ease immediately, and we talked for over an hour. (Anybody reading this who knew David wouldn’t be at all surprised.) Years later when I was trying to educate myself about the history of American education, I kept running across this David Tyack fellow. The little educational history I had read up to that point was mostly in textbooks, and, to be honest, was dry and antiseptic. Tyack’s rendering was vivid, human, full of memorable characters and events, richly interpreted.  I wrote David Tyack a letter reintroducing myself and the result was another long-lasting friendship.

            David wrote or co-authored so many fine articles and books, it’s hard to know where to begin. I’ll limit myself to four: The One Best System: A History of Urban Education; Managers of Virtue: Public School Leadership in America, 1820-1980 and Learning Together: A History of Coeducation in American Public Schools (these last two are co-authored with the political scientist Elisabeth Hansot, David’s wife); and, with Larry Cuban, Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform. David took on big topics and always looked at the societal and systems level of things in his analysis of schooling—though his analysis is also laden with specific detail, with classroom scenes, with quotations from administrators and teachers and parents, and with snapshots of communities. A reader comes to understand both the particulars of time and place and the many forces that influence those particulars. One of the many things I appreciate about David’s work is his refusal to simplify. You come away from his books with a rich and complex understanding of schooling. He avoids simplification in the lessons we can take from history, though he very much wants us to benefit from what history can teach us. “The way we understand [the] past,” he writes in the Prologue to The One Best System, “profoundly shapes how we make choices today.” He also deeply believed in the civic purpose of the public school, its central place in a democracy. Yet, and here’s the nuance again, he was clear-eyed as well about the ways our schools have historically contributed to inequality.

           

            Reading David Tyack and Michael Katz provides models for interpreting complicated, even baffling, phenomena, models as to how to systematically sort through a flurry of information, how to shape a careful argument, how to weigh and honor evidence that contradicts that argument, and, finally, how to do all this in the service of telling a story about the world we live or have lived in, a story that is as intellectually and morally legitimate as we can make it.

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A Tribute to Historian Michael B. Katz

            My friend Michael Katz died this weekend. Michael wrote brilliantly about the history of cities, of poverty, and of education. His books are meticulously researched and argued; they sharpen, and often change, the way you think. Among my favorites are: The Irony of Early School Reform, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, The Undeserving Poor, The Price of Citizenship, One Nation Divisible (with Mark Stern), and there are others, all wonderful.

            He helped me immeasurably over the last twenty years with my work. Immeasurably. And a few years back, we got to collaborate, editing a series of essays on school reform. As I’m sure his many students would verify, Michael’s feedback was something. He was tough-minded and didn’t hold back, though he provided the hard news in a way that made your writing better. And when you got praise—and he was generous with praise—well, you could take it to the bank, for Michael was not a bullshitter. I will always remember and celebrate his intellectual integrity. I am going to miss him very much.

            I reprint below a post I wrote in October, 2013 when a revised edition of The Undeserving Poor came out. It’s a phenomenal book, and it couldn’t be more timely.

***

            Sometime in the early 1990s, I found historian Michael B. Katz’s book The Undeserving Poor, which had been published a few years before. I still remember sitting in my small back bedroom—a makeshift study—scribbling notes all over the pages of the book as Katz described and analyzed the ways Americans have defined and discussed poverty. He had me hooked from the first sentence: “The vocabulary of poverty impoverishes political imagination.”

            The Undeserving Poor was not so much a history of poverty in the United States as a history of ideas about poverty, and the ideas were complex and, for the most part, troubling. I began to understand how it is that poor people are so often categorized and characterized in such one-dimensional and insidious ways: as shirkers, or passive, or morally defective, or stupid—as people responsible for their poverty because of some damning personal or cultural quality. I also began to understand the reasons behind various interventions aimed at poverty—or refusals to intervene. I had never read a book quite like this, one that demonstrated just how much the ideas and language in the air matter in the construction of public policy. As someone who had a background in literature and in psychology, I certainly was trained to appreciate the power of language, but Katz helped me see the intimate connection between words (and the ideas driving those words) and specific social attitudes, political positions, and legislative initiatives. The book was eye-opening, and it would have a profound effect on my own way of understanding social issues and writing about them.

            The Undeserving Poor has just been reissued by Oxford University Press, and Katz has used the occasion to revise the book in major ways, not only updating it but adding a good deal of new material to it. Let me admit that Michael Katz is a friend, and we have recently written together, but my initial impression of The Undeserving Poor was formed years before I met him. I thought it was a hugely important book when I first read it, and I think this new edition is hugely important as well. Especially now. We as a nation pretty much ignore poverty as a public policy issue. The ideas in the air regarding poverty in the U.S. are, to use Katz’s 1989 phrase, “impoverished.” The solutions that have political sway are either market-based (during the last election some conservatives were suggesting that the poor needed to start their own businesses) or involve educational or social-psychological interventions, such as helping the poor develop mental toughness or “grit.” There is no serious talk about jobs programs or housing or expanded social services or restoring the safety net. Within such comprehensive policies, educational and market-based interventions would make more sense and have a chance of succeeding.

            More than any book I know, The Undeserving Poor helps us understand why Americans talk about poverty the way we do and why our public policy—sometimes noble, sometimes mean-spirited—takes the shape it does. It is one of the important social science books of our time.

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Important New Book: Comprehensive Revision of The Undeserving Poor

            Sometime in the early 1990s, I found historian Michael B. Katz’s book The Undeserving Poor, which had been published a few years before. I still remember sitting in my small back bedroom—a makeshift study—scribbling notes all over the pages of the book as Katz described and analyzed the ways Americans have defined and discussed poverty. He had me hooked from the first sentence: “The vocabulary of poverty impoverishes political imagination.”

            The Undeserving Poor was not so much a history of poverty in the United States as a history of ideas about poverty, and the ideas were complex and, for the most part, troubling. I began to understand how it is that poor people are so often categorized and characterized in such one-dimensional and insidious ways: as shirkers, or passive, or morally defective, or stupid—as people responsible for their poverty because of some damning personal or cultural quality. I also began to understand the reasons behind various interventions aimed at poverty—or refusals to intervene. I had never read a book quite like this, one that demonstrated just how much the ideas and language in the air matter in the construction of public policy. As someone who had a background in literature and in psychology, I certainly was trained to appreciate the power of language, but Katz helped me see the intimate connection between words (and the ideas driving those words) and specific social attitudes, political positions, and legislative initiatives. The book was eye-opening, and it would have a profound effect on my own way of understanding social issues and writing about them.

            The Undeserving Poor has just been reissued by Oxford University Press, and Katz has used the occasion to revise the book in major ways, not only updating it but adding a good deal of new material to it. Let me admit that Michael Katz is a friend, and we have recently written together, but my initial impression of The Undeserving Poor was formed years before I met him. I thought it was a hugely important book when I first read it, and I think this new edition is hugely important as well. Especially now. We as a nation pretty much ignore poverty as a public policy issue. The ideas in the air regarding poverty in the U.S. are, to use Katz’s 1989 phrase, “impoverished.” The solutions that have political sway are either market-based (during the last election some conservatives were suggesting that the poor needed to start their own businesses) or involve educational or social-psychological interventions, such as helping the poor develop mental toughness or “grit.” There is no serious talk about jobs programs or housing or expanded social services or restoring the safety net. Within such comprehensive policies, educational and market-based interventions would make more sense and have a chance of succeeding.

            More than any book I know, The Undeserving Poor helps us understand why Americans talk about poverty the way we do and why our public policy—sometimes noble, sometimes mean-spirited—takes the shape it does. It is one of the important social science books of our time.

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Q&A with Valerie Strauss on Public Education Under Siege

This is an interview Michael Katz and I did via email with Valerie Strauss, an education reporter for the Washington Post.  It appeared in her "Answer Sheet" column on August 28, 2013. [link]

* * *

Valerie Strauss: Tell us why you wrote Public Education Under Siege.

Michael Katz and Mike Rose: Well, maybe the best way to answer that question is with an example from the news.  At the end of July, the Walton Family Foundation (the philanthropist arm of Walmart) donated $20 million to Teach for America to recruit and train close to 4000 teachers to work in underresourced schools across the country.  The largest percentage of these recruits will be coming to Los Angeles, where one of us lives.  If the past is prologue, most of the new TFA crew will work in L.A. charter schools.  There’s a lot about this story that is good news, right?  The Walton Foundation is spending its fortune and shining its considerable spotlight on education, and Los Angeles will get at least 500 sharp, idealistic young people in its schools.  This scenario fits well in the current mainstream school reform agenda.

But the story also raises for us a host of questions about contemporary reform, and we produced Public Education Under Siege as a kind of sourcebook to use in exploring those questions.

VS: So, what are those questions?

MK and MR: One set of questions has to do with teaching itself: What does it involve?  What does it take to nurture it and do it—and how can we determine when it is done well?  A related set of questions has to do with understanding and sensibility about race and class, for many young teachers—like those TFA recruits—will be working in communities quite unfamiliar to them.  Race, class, and the economic and social history of schools matter.  The TFA story raises yet another question for us: What do underresourced schools in low-income communities need?  They certainly need teachers and principals who can commit to them, come to know them well and stay with them, for turnover and instability plague them.  Because so many of their students carry big burdens, these schools also need multiple integrated services: health care, legal aid, social work, and so on.  Finally, we believe in the old journalist’s dictum: follow the money.  Private philanthropies are more deeply involved in public education than ever before—and that could be a blessing, especially in these budget cutting times—but are there agendas behind the money?  The Walton Foundation has a record of support for charter schools and school vouchers, and the corporation financing the foundation is strongly anti-union.  If the influx of TFA recruits enter charter schools, that de facto further strengthens charters and, as well, directly or indirectly displaces local teachers, some of whom are highly qualified—exactly the teachers school reformers desire.  So a private foundation is directly influencing public education policy and practice.

What we did in Public Education Under Siege was enlist people who have thought long and hard about issues like these and had them write short, accessible articles that lay out the fuller policy deliberations we should be having, deliberations that include the nature of teaching and learning; race, class, and inequality; the goals of education in a democracy; teachers unions, school governance, and parent involvement; school finance; education and the criminal justice system; and the role of private philanthropy in public education. 

VS: Why aren’t these issues part of the school reform discussion?

MK and MR: Well, there’s political reasons, certainly.  There is such reluctance to bring up issues of race or class, for example.  You’re accused of playing the race card or of engaging in class warfare—and the discussion stalls there.

Also, there are a lot of people and moving parts in contemporary school reform, and some of the conservative players have agendas, like vouchers and privatization, that can benefit from narrowly defining public school accountability.

But we also think that the core ideas driving mainstream reform—a faith in market-based solutions, a belief in technical fixes, like high stakes testing, a down-playing, even disregard, for teacher education and experience—put powerful blinders on reformers, many of whom are well intentioned and do care abut the awful education received by poor kids.  The market-technocratic orientation can make it hard to appreciate, let alone understand, history, culture, and social context as well as the intricacies of teaching and classroom life.

VS: How did this set of beliefs take hold, even among some liberals who previously had recognized that the public education system should be run as a civic institution rather than a business?

MK and MR: Multiple reasons, really.  In general, in American politics there’s been a shift toward the Right going on since the Reagan presidency.  And even before that, there’s been a growing attraction toward market-based solutions to public policy problems.  This embrace of market models, and along with it a technological orientation to social issues, has become increasingly bi-partisan.  It’s the new wisdom.

Partly, this move toward market solutions has been guided by a long-term and, frankly, masterful effort by conservatives, libertarians, and free-marketers to craft arguments, taking points, narratives, and policy briefs in support of this market orientation.  And schools have been in their sights for a long time.

And partly, there’s legitimate frustration that we all share with the poor education a lot of kids receive, typically the most vulnerable children in our society.  Mainstream reformers are looking for new solutions, and the kinds of market-oriented, technocratic solutions we’ve been discussing have the appeal of the new and the spirit of the times behind them.  We get their frustration, but think that some of their solutions create more problems than they solve.

VS: Speaking of solutions, do any of the writers in the book have any ideas about what needs to be done instead?

MK and MR: Yes, absolutely.  Different writers have different goals, and we think all are important.

In same instances, they want to demonstrate through data, classroom illustrations, or historical and social analysis why a particular aspect of reform is wrong-headed or could have bad unintended consequences.  For example, the problems with over-reliance on standardized test scores as a measure of student achievement, or the limitations of “Value Added” methods of assessing teacher effectiveness, or the way “choice” can contribute to resegregation.

In other cases, the writers argue that mainstream reformers don’t go far enough in implementing the goals they espouse.  Reformers want to reduce the achievement gap, for example, but downplay the role of poverty in academic achievement, thereby limiting the kinds of interventions they create.  Or reformers embrace a civil rights rhetoric but don’t honor the call of the Civil Rights Movement for economic justice as well as educational access and equity.

And in yet other cases, the writers want to shine a light on issues that are rarely if ever discussed in mainstream school reform, such as the role the increased criminalizing of students has on achievement, or the negative effect our lack of informed national language policy has on English Language Learners.

A number of the writers present alternative solutions to the problems that plague our schools and, more generally, offer alternative visions of reform.  There are discussions of a fuller set of goals for education in a democracy—the civic, social, intellectual, and moral, as well as economic, human capital goal that dominates current educational policy.  And we get to see classrooms in which this fuller purpose plays out.  We get to see examples, both in a regular public school and a charter school, of leadership that resists the test-driven pressures of the time and creates rich learning environments for poor kids.  Several writers offer a different vision of teacher development and assessment, ones closer to the actual work that teachers do.  And several writers offer different models of teacher unionization.  There are also discussions—based on community work in New York and Los Angeles—of organizing parents, assisting them in gaining a voice in their schools.  And there is an argument for raising again the truly big issue blocking educational equality: school finance reform.

At times it feels like the current reform movement is a runaway train—a very well-fueled, fast-moving, powerful one.  But there are increasing counter-voices to it, from local anti-testing movements to broader national organizations.  We need to create a coherent, compelling alternative vision, a different story that includes both critique and exemplar.  We hope that the writers in this book collectively contribute to that story.

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An Interview on Public Education Under Siege

This interview follows up on my last blog post on Public Education Under Siege, edited by Michael B. Katz and me.  It was conducted by Joanie Harmon for Ampersand, the on-line magazine of the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies—though this version is slightly adbridged.

***

“We absolutely need to address the terrible quality of education that many poor and vulnerable populations of students receive. This has to be a national priority.  But to achieve any level of equality for these children, we need to understand the big picture of our schools, a picture that includes reformers’ concerns about assessment, teacher quality, and teacher education, as well as the many other social and economic factors that affect a child’s performance in school.”

Public Education Under Siege seeks to fill in the gaps in the mainstream view of school reform, among them, topics that are typically not addressed by government, philanthropies who invest in education, or even high-profile figures in the reform movement.  Thus the book includes historians, experts on learning, public policy scholars, teacher educators, and political economists and sociologists.

“So, for example, some of the [book’s] contributors focus on the significant inequality of funding for schools, the political and legal history of that funding inequality, and the way true school reform will be stymied until we can create new ways to frame this issue,” says Rose. “And some of the contributors focus on other kinds of inequality: on segregation, for example, and the many subtle and not-so-subtle ways that residential and educational segregation is maintained, with negative consequences for low-income children of color.”

“Yet another manifestation of inequality is found in the connection between race, social class, and the criminalization of children, for there are significant disparities in the punishment—and legal ramifications—meted out to kids in poorer verses wealthier schools. These and other manifestations of inequality aren’t part of our mainstream discussion of school reform, yet they have an effect on how kids do in school.”

 “A common retort from many reformers to criticism of their approach is that the critics are defenders of the status quo,” he states. “But, in fact, many of those who have concerns with mainstream reform raise legitimate concerns about the way the school curriculum has been narrowed: for example, social studies, the arts, and humanities trimmed back, the inadequacies of standardized tests to get at the full scope of learning, the functional, even punitive, nature of the education that results from such policies, and so on.  Our contributors bring a number of perspectives to the current reform scene, which, we think, broadens our understanding of the limits of current reform, and, more importantly, broadens our understanding of education.”

Rose notes that the focus on economic austerity and rising national debt has resulted in attempts by political conservatives to change the definition of education from a public to a private good, in light of the current cuts to social programs.

“The notion that schooling is something that benefits all is not as prominent as it has been at other times in our history,” Rose says.  “I think that certain business leaders, for example, are very much in support of education because they connect it to workforce development. Although, those same leaders are fighting higher taxes, minimum wage laws, and other initiatives that would affect the quality of education. Just think of what it would mean for primary grade achievement for all children to have adequate eye and hearing care.”

Rose says that while it may be impossible to depoliticize education, the argument made by liberal, centrist, and conservative economists alike for educating the nation’s youth – and future workforce – is watertight with benefits to all sectors of society.

Rose cites the example of California, a state whose economic straits were historically preceded by an exemplary vision to educate its citizens during the post-World War II era of economic growth. During that time, he says, California was highly ranked nationwide in per pupil spending, and a state master plan was put into place to ensure a quality education from kindergarten through college.

“Part of the rationale was an understanding of the public dimension of education,” Rose says. “A robust education system has private benefit for people, but it also has a significant public benefit, both social and economic.”

“Schools aren’t isolated institutions.  Mainstream reform tends to view schools narrowly, considering their immediate bureaucracies, the unions that some of their teachers belong to, and the schools of education that certify those teachers.  But the influences that affect schools go beyond unions and education schools. Schools exist in history, and a social and political context, and they’re powerfully affected by the economy in the communities that surround them.  If we don’t understand and respond to these multiple influences, then we won’t get far in improving the schools that are the focus of contemporary reform.”

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