Further Reflections on “Why Go to School?”

Several friends of mine who have been reading the blog commented on how comprehensive and thoughtful readers’ posts have been. It’s true. So, then, imagine a conversation about education on a broader level – regional, national – a conversation that takes its time, that involves a range of topics, that collectively gets us to think about the many purposes school can and should have in a complex society like ours.

Consider the topics raised by those who have posted comments in the last ten days.

For Karin, School is a place to form relationships and connect with others in ways that lead to a public self, “how to connect as a citizen.”

Kerri, Mira, and others also mention relationships – these with teachers who mattered in a deeply personal way: “the human face of the educational experience” and being with adults who “see the best” in young people.

For Patty, school provided a place to belong (a miniature society, perhaps?), a sense of being in something “bigger than myself.” And for one anonymous writer, school provided “escape from the reality of my life” – a point I can understand.

For Bronwyn, once it kicked in, education provided “an invitation for me to see my life and its meaning, and the lives of others and their meanings.”

For Meño “we go to encounter and deal with things/people/ideas that we would not, in the course of our humdrum everyday lives, normally or naturally encounter.”

Christopher cites intellectual engagement and pleasure, and celebrates the environment of exploration, of searching that school can provide – and this business of seeking, exploring is mentioned in other posts as well.

As do others, Rachel mentions making connections with teachers, but also discusses the joy of making connections across domains of knowledge, seeing the interrelatedness of things. And through the extracurriculum – in her case, musical theater – school become a site of creativity.

Josh values the potential for self awareness and the sharpened ability make informed decisions.

Artineh also values critical thinking and intellectual engagement, but underscores the way her education provided the prospect of economic self-sufficiency. This drive for economic stability was tied to gender inequality, financial hardship, and immigration, thus bringing to the fore in our discussion (as Meño and the anonymous writer also did) the issue of inequality.

People posed these goals of schooling in rich accounts of their own education, and teaching, and parenting. The accounts have the heft and texture of life to them: yearning, rebellion, joy, comfort, the spark of intellect, the shaping of identity. There is so little of any of this in our talk about school, so little heart and soul, but, as well, so little of the cognitive tug of intellectual engagement.

There is, of course, another dimension to our discussion, mentioned by some of those who posted comments – most recently by K-8 – and that is the fact that school often doesn’t serve young people well.

In Possible Lives, I write that a comprehensive assessment of public education (and private education, for that matter), needs to contain both criticism and images of goodness, of possibility. Otherwise judgment can devolve into dismissiveness and despair or into blithe optimism blind to incompetence and inequality. We need a vision that simultaneously sees both harsh reality and potential.

So let us return to the compelling list generated by the readers – relationship, intellectual engagement, self-reliance, encountering the new, etc. – and ask what it is about formal schooling in the U.S., public or private, that impedes these goals. Some things come quickly to mind: the way schools are structured, school politics, race and class bias, economic inequality.

Let’s think about this question. And let’s push on it. Take the issue of school structure, for example. Fine things happen in traditionally organized classrooms, and awful things in non-traditional ones. What is it exactly about school structure, or bias, or education politics, or whatever that disrupts the kinds of goals readers have listed?

I’ll get the ball rolling by suggesting that one of the awful things about race, class, or gender bias is that it usually brings with it assumptions about limited intellectual ability. Another point: A barrier to more and better interpersonal connection between teachers and students – along, of course, with work load – are professional and subject matter traditions that don’t emphasize the deep connection between cognition and human relation. I know in my case the relationship I developed with my senior high school English teacher was fundamental to my emerging interest in literature and writing. It was a kind of connection that, for me anyway, was rare in my high school.

Please feel free to post your thoughts (from your personal experience as well as from your observations as citizen, parent, or teacher) about the things that limit the realization of the kinds of goals listed above.

This rich blend of the possible and the constraints on the possible would be at the center of a reinvigorated discussion of the purpose of schooling.

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Several recent contributors to this blog have fine blogs of their own, and I want to recommend them here: Deborah Meier (with Diane Ravitch) “Bridging Differences” (http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences), Karin Chenoweth (http://www.britannica.com/blogs/author/kchenoweth), and Mike Klonksy (http://360.yahoo.com/michaelklonsky). If I’ve missed anyone, let me know.

Why Go to School?

I want to continue and broaden the discussion of what school is for. We have been focusing on public education, but let’s open the lens and ask the basic question: Why do we educate – through public or private institutions? Why do we yearly go through the hugely expensive and culturally monumental ritual of sending young people to school?

This is the question we need to "address on a national scale because, as many of us have been saying, for close to thirty years our national discourse about schooling has been so narrow. Teachers and parents younger than thirty or thirty-five have heard little else, at least at the level of public policy.

This week I suggest we try to answer the question about why we educate by going to our own experience of schooling.

All of us certainly have bad memories from school. And those of us who educate can add to the list horror stories of bad teaching, bad curriculum, bad policy. From these negative examples, we can generate counter-examples of how schools can be and why we send children to them.

But let’s also consider the positive things we have received from our educations. And let’s use these examples as well to create a richer list of what schools are for. This tactic can provide us with another way – a concrete and personal way – to start a conversation from the ground up.

What follows is taken from an opinion piece I wrote for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last fall. See if it sparks your own memories about your education and/or your beliefs about the purpose of schooling. Please feel free to post your thoughts.

During most of my time in school, my father was seriously ill and my mother worked two shifts to keep us afloat. I was a disconnected and dreamy child, vaguely fearful of our circumstances, full of longing but without much direction. There's a lot of kids out there like me. And they need all that school can provide.

We should talk more about school as a place where young people form connections beyond the family with adults who can guide and mentor them. This was hugely important for me. These relationships often develop around a shared interest, around biology or mechanics, basketball or theater, thus putting a human face on knowledge and discipline.

We need to talk about school not only as a place where young people acquire knowledge, but where they learn how to use it, how to make an argument employing historical events, how to think with numbers. We need to talk about self-reflection, becoming systematic and methodical, examining one's own work. And we need to talk about motives and the consequences of choosing one path over another -- whether in a science experiment or in the schoolyard.

School is a place where young people learn how to think with each other, how to jointly puzzle over a problem, how to make sense of discordant views, how to arrive at consensus. School is a place where the world can open up -- mine certainly did -- through learning history, geography, and literature, but also through the people you meet and a growing sense of where you fit in the scheme of things.

All of the above help young people develop a sense of themselves as knowledgeable and capable of acting in and on the world. This, finally, was what education gave me, a pathway from hazy disaffection to competence, to a dawning awareness that I could figure things out and do something with what I learned. This was the best training I could have gotten for a vocation and citizenship."

Education, the Media, and the Public Sphere

I am so pleased to see the posts on this issue of the purpose of schooling. I’m continuing to think and write about the issue myself, and I hope this blog becomes a place for lots of people to exchange ideas about the reasons we educate in a democracy. Let me also invite readers who teach in postsecondary settings, job training programs, adult literacy centers, etc. to join in. The discussion of the goals of education has become narrow in those settings as well.

I think there is a two-fold task before us.

The first part, as everyone has been saying, is to offer a richer, fuller list of reasons as to why we educate in a democracy. I think we already have a long list of good reasons, and many of them have been posted by the readers of this blog alone. True, much public discussion and deliberation would be needed to refine them and achieve consensus, but we’re not operating in a conceptual vacuum.

The big challenge right now as I see it is to get this discussion more fully into the policy arena and public sphere. That is the second part of the task that faces us, and I think it is formidable. Let me tell you a brief story.

I originally submitted the essay on NCLB that I referred to in my 3/19/08 post to one of the on-line politics and culture magazines, a place where I had published before. You can read excerpts on the 3/19/08 post or retrieve the whole articles from the “news” section of my web site, but, in a nutshell, I tried to give NCLB its due while explaining its limitations and unintended consequences. So, for example, I explained in non-technical language why a standardized test score is an inadequate measure of learning. This is the kind of thing, I figured, it would be good for the general public to consider.

The editor responded that the piece was too “wonky” and “cautious”. Could I send something that is “faster” and gets to “what works and what should be changed?” I understand the editor’s desire for writing that has some snap to it, but I was also struck by the characterization of the writing as “wonky”, which, to my mind, means overly laden with details that only a policy buff would appreciate. How did we get to the place, I wondered, where analysis equals tedious attention to detail, where reflection becomes “caution”, or, the subtext, boring?

As we continue to try to change the public conversation about education, we need to consider, as well, the limits of the mechanisms of public discourse. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and will have more to say in future posts. But I’m curious about your thoughts and experiences. How do we get more deliberative discussion about the purpose of schooling out into the public sphere?

Democratic Education, the Election, and No Child Left Behind

I am taken by Deb’s post about influencing the political discourse in this terribly important election year. Her call resonates with other recent posts (for example, Jessica’s). There are people in education who have been talking to key political players–often concerning NCLB–but many more of us need to e-mail our politicians, write letters to the editor, write first-person opinion pieces for our local newspapers, and so on.

As I wrote in my previous two posts, a huge problem that faces us is that the national conversation about education has become so narrow–and has been that way for so long–that it’s hard to find the space to talk about issues other than test scores and economic competitiveness. NCLB, for example, is not only the 800-pound beast in the classroom, but in the media as well. I think of something a seasoned education reporter told me: he could not recall another topic in all his experience that so dominated news about schools.

It’s clear that NCLB is going to continue to hit tough political waters, and in a recent article in The American Prospect, Richard Rothstein predicts its demise. My guess is that NCLB will be maintained in some revised form, but even if it isn’t, the emphasis on high-stakes accountability mechanisms will continue to dominate political discourse on education, along with talk of economic competitiveness. Our challenge in this election year is to insist on holding schools accountable and to affirm the goal of preparing young people to make their way economically, but to do this in a way that opens up the discussion of what schooling is for in a democracy.

If readers are interested, I wrote a short essay on NCLB for Education Week (11/7/07) that is pertinent to this discussion. There is a link to it under the “News” section of my web page.

I excerpt a few paragraphs below:

A score on a standardized test seems like a straightforward indicator of achievement. The score goes up, goes down, or remains the same. But there are, in fact, a host of procedural and technical problems in developing, administering, scoring, and interpreting such tests. (And there are also concerns about how schools and districts can manipulate them.) “In most cases,” writes measurement specialist Robert Linn, “the instruments and technology have not been up to the demands placed on them by high-stakes accountability.” No wonder, then, that there is a robust debate among testing experts about what, finally, can be deduced from the scores about a student’s or a schools’ achievement?...

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A teacher I know tells this story. In response to the NCLB mandate to focus on all children, this teacher’s district has issued a page-long checklist on each student to be used in each class the student takes. Every teacher is to mark every time he or she assists a child, asks if the child understands, notes a behavior problem, and so on. This requirement applies to all students, every class–though principals, in an attempt to keep instruction from collapsing under the regulation, tell teachers to pay special attention to their students who are most at-risk. The intention here is a good one, but the means by which it is accomplished is so formulaic and cumbersome that it devastates teaching. Care becomes codified, legalistic, lost in reductive compliance. This kind of thing is not unusual today. It can be ridiculed as a thoughtless local response to good legislation, but the pressure to comply is great and when there are no funds available to mount professional development or changes in the size and organization of schools, or other means to foster attentive and cognitively rich instruction, then districts–in the context of a high-stakes, under-resourced environment–will resort to all sorts of draconian and, ultimately, counterproductive solutions....

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I think that one indication of the value of a piece of social policy is the public conversations it sparks, the issues it gets us to ponder. Civil Rights legislation, for example, gave rise to a moral debate in the nation, a self-examination of our history and first principles. NCLB does raise important questions about equity and expectation. But unless the testing program is part of a larger effort that includes other student compensatory and professional development efforts and social programs aimed at vulnerable populations, we get, instead, a focus on scores, rankings, and an elaborate technology of calibration and compliance. More sustained consideration of equality of opportunity, of the meaning of public schooling, of the nature of learning in a democracy–this all gets lost in the machinery of testing....

Further Thoughts on the Purpose of Public Schools

I want to offer a response to the comments as of 3/5/08. I’m struck by their thoughtfulness and passion, and I’m grateful for them. I hope the future of this blog lives up to them.

Some of the comments express a tension familiar to many of us concerned about education: a desire to defend schools and teachers, yet anger over how awful some teaching and schools can be. One post even raises the legitimate question: with such a history of not doing right by so many kids, why defend public schools at all?

I’ll be discussing the importance of public education in a democracy – and the very notion of “the public” – in future blogs, but here let me say quickly that, as flawed as it has been and is, public education has also produced remarkable results, not infrequently at the hands of teachers and administrators who are committed to their students, who make schools decent places, who, through their wisdom and labor, daily invent and reinvent public education. I suppose I hold onto the belief, the hope in the idea of public education, in a public commitment to an educated citizenry. And I think that commitment is all the more necessary in our time when there is such a strong and successful push on the part of the political right to discredit anything public and to substitute private, market-driven solutions to everything from education to emergency services.

My intention in “The Purpose of Public Schools is Lost in a Language of Failure and Money” was to counter the dominate national vocabulary we’ve heard for the last twenty years or so. For many younger people, it’s hard to imagine another language. The language of failure and money has been the educational policy soundtrack of their lives. And, unfortunately, they’re not hearing much different from the presidential candidates – when they talk about education, which is infrequent.

Let me close with a passage from the introduction to Possible Lives that is pertinent to the discussion we’re having:

I am not trying to ignore the obvious misery in our schools nor the limitations of too many of those who teach in and manage them. Nor have I disregarded the complaints of those whose schools are failing them; they have a strong voice in this book. This is not a call to abandon the critical perspective a citizenry should have when it surveys its institutions. What I am suggesting is that we lack a public critical language adequate to the task. We need a different kind of critique, one that does not minimize the inadequacies of curriculum and instruction, the rigidity of school structure, or the “savage inequalities” of funding, but that simultaneously opens discursive space for inspired teaching, for courage, for achievement against odds, for successful struggle, for the insight and connection that occur continually in public school classrooms around the country. Without a multiplicity of such moments, criticism becomes one-dimensional, misses too much, is harsh, brittle, the humanity drained from it.

Public education demands a capacious critique, one that encourages both dissent and invention, fury and hope. Public education is bountiful, crowded, messy, contradictory, exuberant, tragic, frustrating, and remarkable. We need an expanded vocabulary, adequate to both the daily joy and daily sorrow of our public schools. And we are in desperate need of rich, detailed images of possibility.

The Purpose of Public Schools Is Lost in a Language of Failure and Money

We can all agree," wrote a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard not long ago, "that American public schools are a joke." This way of thinking and talking about our public schools has been with us for some time: cynical and despairing. It was what led me, in the early and mid-1990s, on a cross-country journey to observe a wide variety of public schools that had been judged by their teachers, students, and parents to be good and decent places of learning.

I took side roads, stayed overnight with families, consulted local historical societies, and spent hundreds of hours in remarkable classrooms. The journey was both geographical—recording actual classrooms and communities across the United States—and philosophical, trying to gain a lived, felt sense of what public education means in a democracy. It was a powerful journey, and it seems that the same kind of reflective journey is more needed now than ever.

In the midst of the culture wars that swirl around schools; the fractious, intractable school politics; the conservative assault on public institutions; and the testing, testing, testing—in the midst of all this, it is easy to lose sight of the broader purpose and grand vision of the common public school.

Now, God knows, there is a lot wrong with our schools – from the tangles of school politics to the terrible things often assumed about the abilities of kids from poor communities. I don't dispute that, have taught in the middle of it, have tried to write about it. And I surely don't dispute the legitimate anger of people who have been betrayed by their schools. But the scope and sweep of the negative public talk is what concerns me, for it excludes the powerful, challenging work done in schools day by day across the country, and it limits profoundly the vocabulary and imagery available to us, constrains the way we frame problems, blinkers our imagination. This kind of talk fosters neither critique nor analysis but rather a grand dismissiveness. It plays into equally general and troubling – and equally unexamined – casual claims about the schools' responsibility for our economic woes and social problems. And this blend of crisis rhetoric and reductive models of causality yields equally one-dimensional proposals for single-shot magic bullets: Standards will save us, or charter schools, or computer technology, or the free market or, big-time in the last six years, broad-scale testing programs like No Child Left Behind.

And what will the magic bullets do? Reaffirm our economic preeminence and assure our children's competitiveness in the labor market.

The economic motive has always been a significant factor in the spread of mass education in the United States, and as someone from the working class who has achieved financial mobility from schooling, the importance of the link between education and economic well-being is not lost on me.

But this economic focus can restrict our vision of what school ought to be about: the full sweep of growth and development, for both individuals and for a democratic society. This narrowing of discourse, this pinching of what we talk about when we talk about school is evident in the public sphere, the national and regional discussions of education, its goals and purpose.

We need public talk that links education to a more decent, thoughtful, open society. Talk that raises in us as a people the appreciation for deliberation and reflection, or for taking intellectual risks and thinking widely — for the sheer power and pleasure of using our minds, alone or in concert with others. We need a discourse that inspires young people to think gracefully and moves young adults to become teachers and foster such development.

I'm not simply longing for rhetorical flourish here, although a little scholastic uplift would be a welcome thing. Public discourse, heard frequently enough and over time, affects the way we think, vote, and lead our lives. I worry that the dominant vocabulary about schooling limits our shared respect for the extraordinary nature of thinking and learning and lessens our sense of social obligation. So it becomes possible for us to affirm that the most meaningful evidence of learning is a score on a standardized test, or to reframe the public good in favor of fierce and unequal competition for a particular kind of academic honors. Education is reduced to a cognitive horse race.

When was the last time you heard extensive, deliberative public talk that places school failure in the context of joblessness, urban politics, a diminished tax base, unequal funding, race and class bias? Or heard a story of achievement that includes discussion of curiosity, reflectiveness, uncertainty, a willingness to take a chance? How about accounts of reform that present change as alternatively difficult, exhilarating, ambiguous, promising – and that find reform not in a device, technique, or structure but in the way we think about teaching and learning? And that point out how we need a language of schooling that, in addition to economics, offers a vocabulary of respect, decency, aesthetics, joy, courage, intellect, civility, heart and mind, skill and understanding? For that matter, think of how rarely we hear of a commitment to public education as the center of a free society. We need a richer public discussion than the one we have now.

An important project over the next few years – and though I focus on schools, this applies to a range of social issues – will be to craft a language that is critical without being reductive, that frames this critique in nuance and possibility, that honors the work that good teachers do daily and draws from it broader lessons about ability, learning, and opportunity, that scrutinizes public institutions while affirming them.