“If You Feel Better, Press 1” A Miniature from Our Time

            So I’m in my home talking with my friend of many years, Ed Frankel, a seasoned writing teacher and a beautiful poet. I just read to him a few pages on how the harmful tendencies in education policy and reform (from the over-reliance on standardized testing to rule-focused and routinized training and evaluation of teachers) are legitimized and given a cutting-edge gloss by the technocratic spirit of our time—a spirit that has influenced so much of our lives, from health care to the pursuit of happiness. This is the kind of thing Ed and I talk about. Visit me and I’ll make you a cocktail and subject you to something I’m trying to think through.

            Ed’s got a quietly stern poker face. I’m seated; he’s leaning against my couch, silent. You don’t want silence from Ed. “But,” he finally says, “school’s been like that for a long time, hasn’t it? Like, maybe always? Rote learning? Tests? Formulaic lessons? Man, I was bored to death in school, and that was in the 1950’s,” he says flatly.

            Ed’s right, of course. There is no golden age of schooling. But there were times in our past when other ideas about education were in the air—other ways to think about it and define its purpose. “What I’m saying, Eddie, is that our rapture with high tech and ‘innovation’ and ‘disruption’ and quantifying everything provides a kind of caché for tired, one-dimensional ideas about how to measure and improve a deeply complex human endeavor like education.”

            Suddenly, my telephone rings, and Ed and I are jolted back onto terra firma, a good six feet apart. I get up from my chair and walk slowly to the phone.

 

Interlude: Why walk slowly…?

            The rest of this small story requires that I take you back a few days before I read those pages to Ed, which will also explain why he’s in my home.

            I had abdominal surgery on February 25, 2021 to correct a chronic problem that worsened during the last week of November 2020. This physical distraction, by the way, is my excuse for infrequent postings on this blog. (In comparison, Diane Ravitch had a knee replacement several years ago, and kept her blog going daily.) Ed came down from Northern California to shepherd me through the surgery and Netflix-infused recovery. Saint Eddie.

Close Interlude

 

            It’s a robo-call. From the hospital that discharged me two days earlier. A woman’s voice, youngish, upbeat, even sunny, begins by identifying the hospital and noting my recent stay and hoping I am doing well, because “We at ____ care.”

Then the voice says it has six questions for me:

If you feel better, press 1.

If not, press 2.

           

If you understand how to take your medications, press 1,

If you have questions, press 2.

You get the idea. Question #6 asks if you have any comments on the quality of your stay. Patient satisfaction. The call ends with “Have a nice day.”

Ed and I look at each other in disbelief. The call itself was laughable, though it hurts to laugh. But, as if on cue, we were served up with an example of the point I was trying to make with my friend: That we have gotten so used to substituting technological efficiency for real and messy human experience that a prerecorded call proclaiming care and checking on sick people’s well-being didn’t strike anyone at a prestigious health-care network as odd. Consider, too the number of people receiving this call who are much sicker, more distraught, and significantly less advantaged than I am.

I understand the context here. Hospital administrators are under immense strain: COVID, financial loss, understaffing, legal and political pressure, and more. This robo-call is an expedient and efficient way to single out recently discharged patients who might need help. I assume a medical professional of some type would make a follow-up call to those who press 2. If I were a hospital administrator in the middle of a long, packed day, I’d probably be all in with the plan.

But what I don’t want us to lose sight of is how commonplace this kind of human interaction is becoming—a representative slice of our time—and how accepting of it we have become. This digitizing of emotion. The automation of care. One parallel in education is the reduction of the rich human experience of learning and discovery to tests and benchmarks and rankings, to scripts and routines that yield an immensely consequential but largely procedural institutional rite of passage. The journey exhausts everyone involved, but it’s hard to get a clear fix on it until something pops us out of the everyday flow of events.

To learn something new, press 1…

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“A Nation at Risk” at 35

At the end of April, 2018, National Public Radio education reporter Anya Kamenetz did a story on the 35^th anniversary of the highly influential government report “A Nation at Risk.” Issued by the Department of Education under President Ronald Reagan, the report had a huge impact and shaped the language of education policy to this day. Here are some of the explosive sentences from the opening two paragraphs. You will recognize them, or you will have heard echoes of them:

Our Nation is at risk. Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world.

[T]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.

We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament.

            The diction is urgent, even fevered. Our schools are mediocre and getting worse, and their sorry state is resulting in an erosion of our economic and technological preeminence. The opening sentences build momentum toward an existential threat, the equivalent of a military attack—brought on by ourselves, by our educational failures. It comes as no surprise that these passages were quoted and quoted again in countless political speeches, opinion pieces, and institutional position papers.

            Support for this catastrophic assessment comes a few pages later in the form of a list of thirteen “Indicators of the Risk.” These indicators included the numbers of college students or military personnel needing remedial instruction in mathematics or English, percentages of Americans who are functionally illiterate, and the like. Over half of the thirteen indicators concern declines in international or national standardized test scores, such as those for the SAT. The emphasis on decline is important here, for it supports a central claim of “A Nation at Risk” which is that we were once dominant but have lost our way. This notion of loss, of a fall from a golden age is a powerful trope in our nation’s social policy, beautifully articulated some time ago by David K. Cohen in the Harvard Educational Review.

            So there it is. 1983 and we are doomed if we don’t do something fast and decisively. Erosion. Decline. Loss of Power. Assault. An act of war—against ourselves. Interestingly, throughout the rest of the report, there is little of this apocalyptic language. While the authors continue to make some questionable claims and offer some debatable solutions, there are also calls to boost the teaching profession, to increase school funding, to promote “life-long learning,” and to assure “a solid high-school education” for all. But few people read the full report. What was picked up was the dire language of the opening and—this is hugely important—that language not only took on a life of its own, it also distorted the way many reform-minded folk implemented the recommendations of the report that had promise.

            From the beginning there was trenchant criticism of “A Nation at Risk,” analyzing the report’s hyperbolic language and gaps in the logic of its claims and, of key interest, the problems with the report’s evidence. One simple and obvious example: A decline in SAT test scores results from increasing numbers of people taking the test, people who, a generation earlier, would not have considered college. So, yes, the average score might dip a few points, but because a wider percentage of the population was aspiring toward higher education. (For an excellent early compilation of the criticism see the 1985 collection, The Great School Debate, edited by Beatrice and Ronald Gross.) It is noteworthy that there were several other government reports written after “A Nation at Risk” that offered a different assessment of American education, but they received much less attention and, in fact, one was initially suppressed. Maybe we weren’t teetering on the brink after all.

            OK back now to Anya Kamenetz’s story on the 35^th anniversary of “A Nation at Risk.” Either for this story or for an earlier project, Kamentz interviewed several of the authors of “A Nation at Risk” and found that they did not set out to conduct an objective investigation of the state of American education, but came to the task convinced that schools were in serious decline as global competition was heating up, and therefore their job was to sound the alarm and, as one author put it, get education “on the front page.” They succeeded, big time.

            Kamenetz quotes James Guthrie, a well-known educational researcher who more recently reanalyzed “A Nation at Risk” and concludes that the report’s authors “cooked the books,” presenting only data that supported their bleak vision of America’s schools. But Guthie adds that “seldom, maybe never, has a public report been so wrong and done so much good,” for the alarm bells focused the nation’s attention on education. Guthrie is alluding to the sad fact that it is very hard to get the attention of policy makers and the public—there are so many issues competing for airtime, and a host of factors, from bias to saturation, can keep a particular issue from registering. One tactic activists have is to frame their issue as a crisis—which is exactly what the authors of “A Nation at Risk” did. Educational researchers like David Berliner and Bruce Biddle have forcefully argued that the crisis was “manufactured,” but the authors of the report would argue in return—and James Guthrie agrees—that drastic measures were needed to put education on policy makers’ radar. Education analyst Marc Tucker picks up from Kamenetz’s NPR story to take issue with Guthrie’s end-justifies-the-means logic and to further argue that the reforms sparked by “A Nation at Risk” have had “a profoundly malign effect on American education,” not the positive effects Guthrie claims. (Tucker’s blog is behind a pay wall, but you can get a good summary of it in Diane Ravitch’s May 12, 2018 post.)

            I agree with Tucker and the other critics of “A Nation at Risk” and the policies it spawned. But isn’t it also true that there are big problems with American education. It is terribly unjust that so many poor children, children of color, and immigrant children receive a sub-par education. It is a serious personal liability for an adult to not be able to read and write beyond a rudimentary level, and if tens of millions of us have a good deal of trouble reading and writing, that has significant civic and economic ramifications. These and other problems with education in the United States should cause outrage and lead to action. But one hard lesson learned from “A Nation at Risk” is that the way problems are represented has major consequences. This issue of language and representation sometimes gets lost in debates about the benefits or harm resulting from specific education reforms, but I think it is centrally important. It was one of the concerns that drove Possible Lives, published twelve years downstream from “A Nation at Risk”:

Our national discussion about public schools is despairing and dismissive, and it is shutting down our civic imagination... We hear—daily, it seems—that our students don’t measure up, either to their predecessors in the United States or to their peers in other countries, and that, as a result, our position in the global economy is in danger. We are told, by politicians, by pundits, that our cultural values, indeed our very way of life is threatened…

We seem beguiled by a rhetoric of decline, this ready store of commonplaces about how awful our schools have become. “America’s schools are the least successful in the Western world,” declare the authors of a book on the global economy. “Face it, the public schools have failed,” a bureau chief for a national news magazine tells me, offhandedly. “The kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District are garbage,” a talk-radio host exclaims.

There are many dangers in the use of such language. It blinds us to the complex lives lived out in the classroom. It pre-empts careful analysis of one of the nation’s most significant democratic projects. And it engenders a mood of cynicism and retrenchment, preparing the public mind for extreme responses: increased layers of testing and control, denial of new resources—even the assertion that money doesn’t affect a school’s performance—and the curative effects of free market forces via vouchers and privatization. What has been seen historically as a grand republican venture is beginning to be characterized as a failed social experiment, noble in intention but moribund now, perhaps headed toward extinction. So, increasing numbers of people who can afford to don’t even consider public schools as an option for their children, and increasingly we speak, all of us, about the schools as being in decline. This is what is happening to our public discussion of education, to our collective vision of the schools…

If we try to organize schools and create curriculum based on an assumption of failure and decay, then we make school life a punitive experience. If we think about education largely in relation to economic competitiveness, then we lose sight of the fact that school has to be about more than economy. If we determine success primarily in terms of test scores, then we ignore the social, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of teaching and learning—and, as well, we’ll miss those considerable intellectual achievements which aren’t easily quantifiable. If we judge one school according to the success of another, we could well diminish the particular ways the first school serves its community. In fact, a despairing vision will keep us from fully understanding the tragedies in our schools, will reduce their complexity, their human intricacy. We will miss the courage that sometimes accompanies failure, the new directions that can emerge from burn-out, the desire that pulses in even the most depressed schools and communities.

            One of the big challenges we have in front of us is how to maintain momentum in addressing the inequities in our education system but to do so in a way that is analytically and linguistically precise. How can we, to the best of our ability, keep focus on the vulnerable and underserved and do so with a mix of urgency and accuracy. A legacy of “A Nation at Risk” is a way of seeing that obscures the careful vision we need when working to improve our schools.

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Possible Lives at 20

Here is an essay I wrote reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America.  It appeared in Valerie Strauss’s Washington Post column “The Answer Sheet” on August 8, 2015 [see it here].  As Ms. Strauss put it in her introduction to the essay, we don’t find much of this kind of understanding of school as part of community, a sense of place, in current education policy and reform.

***

            More than anything, it was the nihilistic policy and media language about schooling that got me on the road in the early 1990^s to document good public school classrooms, and from those classrooms to draw a more comprehensive language—a richer set of stories—about public education in our country.  In the back of my mind was William Least Heat-Moon’s wonderful book Blue Highways, a chronicle of his travels across the back roads of the country, which were printed in blue on old highway maps.  Heat-Moon set out to discover America and, in a way, himself.  My goal was different, but, I would later realize, not unrelated: I wanted to get us to think about schools and school reform in a different way.

            This fall marks the 20^th anniversary of the book that resulted from my journey—Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America—and that fact got me to look through some of the notebooks I kept during my travels.  About mid-way through the writing of the book, the opportunity came up to drive with a friend across the U.S., and I saw the trip as a chance to view the country I had been seeing in segments in one long arc.

            I’ve pulled two scenes from the cross-country notebook: one from Tucumcari, New Mexico, the other from Rochester, New York.  In addition to the teachers and students who form the core of Possible Lives, I met countless people in restaurants, markets, small shops—and just on the street as I was finding my way around.  They were open to a stranger, and added to the richness of the journey.  I learned so much from these conversations: about local history, about changes in the economy, about regional speech and folkways, about the hopes and grievances attached to school, and about the place of school in memory.

***

            It is mid-August, 1993, and I’m in the El Toro Restaurant in Tucumcari, New Mexico talking with a local woman named Edda, whose parents homesteaded just outside the current border of the city.  She is with her daughter, the “baby of the family”, who will soon be going off to college in Texas, a hedge against the uncertain future in her hometown.  Tucumcari borders Texas in east-central New Mexico, and has a population of about five thousand people.  Its economy, Edda explains, is built on cotton and feed and livestock.  Tucumcari’s once vital downtown, Edda continues, suffered as corporate retailers moved into larger neighboring cities, and the recession of the early 1990’s dealt a final blow.  “There were nice shops here,” she says.  “Used to be you could buy beautiful dresses right here.”  The city is tearing down two historical buildings.

            Edda directs me to an old building that houses the Tucumcari museum.  It is not far away.

            The main floor is crammed with artifacts of Tucumcari’s livestock industry—over one-hundred varieties of barbed wire—and with stone tools, pottery, and arrowheads from local Native American tribes.  In the basement, the curators recreated a general store: A Victrola, lamp shades, hardware, dry goods, and all kinds of remedies: Chill Tonic, Hart’s Compound, and a laxative called Satanic, the devil’s arms opened wide across the label.

            By the staircase, a sign: We do not discuss politics, religion, or the Civil War.

            Up the stairs, then, to the second floor to find that about half of the space has been fashioned into an early Twentieth Century classroom.  Rows of small desks with ink wells.  A mannequin dressed as a teacher—long, green flowered dress, hair pulled back in a bun.  The alphabet.  Pictures of the presidents.  A bookshelf with old books stacked sideways: science, geography, the Spell-to-Write Spelling Book, a Universal Composition Book.  There is a globe, lunch pails, and an eighth-grade diploma: “Admission to High School.”  It turns out that this building was Tucumcari’s old schoolhouse.

***

            “Crazy Ronny” stands in front of a massive heap of metal, jagged sheets of aluminum, severed steel beams, copper coil, burnt vats and tanks.  Ronny supervises this recycling operation in the defunct train yard in Rochester, New York, and he is electric with pride and get-go.  The recycling plant has been running for two years, so Ronny has been with it as it’s grown.  “We’re taking it in,” he says grinning, “faster than we can get it out.”

            The railroad’s old roundhouse still stands—well, part of it…sections are sheered off to accommodate the lot’s machinery and the movement of scrap.  The pits where mechanics stood to service the undercarriages of railroad cars are filled in, and the turning track in the middle of the yard is gone, though the brick lining remains.

            Ronny is not a big man, but is wiry and powerful, with forearms that you get only from years of turning a wrench or winch.  He is handsome in a rough-hewn way, and his face is bright with confidence.  He is quick and generous with praise for his crew.  He describes the difficult task of stripping the 4” glass lining out of chemical processing vats and says he doesn’t know how his guy does it so well.  He praises his welders, their skill, their tenacity.  My guess, though, is that he’s had tough times—in school, perhaps, maybe with the law.  His tee-shirt announces Crazy Ronny, and he’s right at home in this metallic wasteland and up to the task of taming it.

            During the time of my visit in 1993, Rochester had suffered the fate of so many Eastern industrial cities: economic restructuring, empty factories, jobs lost.  Recycling plants exist in good economic cycles and bad, but I couldn’t help but see this one as both outcome and symbol of hard times.

            The remnants of closed shops are gathered together here, processed and crushed into usable material for new industries, or old ones surviving in other forms or locations.  Creative destruction in a pretty literal sense, but only a few jobs are being created out of tons of thousands lost.

            But in the midst of this post-industrial churn, Ronny found meaningful work.  In the 1990^s there were some government programs being floated to retrain former industrial workers for (much lower paying) service jobs.  I couldn’t imagine a guy like Ronny sitting at a desk all day or helping people process a claim or find a better appliance.

            This job mattered to Ronny.  He supervised it and watched it grow.  He knew what he was doing, had command of untold tons of twisted steel and iron, understood the flow of work, what his crew could do, appreciated their know-how—the skills involved in removing a four-inch layer of glass lining from a vat way taller than a man.  My Uncle Joe Meraglio once said that the shop floor of General Motors was his schoolhouse.  Ronny would understand exactly what he meant.

***

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