The Educational Experiment We Really Need?
Two recent op ed pieces, the one by Sara Mosle in Slate Magazine, The Educational Experiment We Really Need, and the other by Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times, Education’s Ground Zero might profitably have been placed side-by-side in the same publication.
Why? Well Mosle makes this judgment of KIPP or the Knowledge Is Power Program, (an educational experiment, by the way, that she greatly admires):
“Until KIPP tries to succeed within an entire, single community, it is, for all its remarkable rise and deserved praise, just another model program that has yet to prove it can succeed with all—or even most—disadvantaged children.”
And Kristof, while speaking about Michelle Rhee, the young, 39 years old, superintendent (the sixth in the past ten years) of the Washington DC public schools, has this to say:
“[Rhee's] aim is for Washington to become, in just six years, one of the best-performing urban school districts in the country, while drastically reducing the black-white achievement gap. ‘A byproduct of that,’ she added, ‘will be that we will take away from all the other school districts and schools across the country the excuse that because the kids are poor, minority, whatever it might be, that they can’t achieve at the same high levels.’”
In other words Rhee’s reforms, targeting as they do the entire Washington DC school district, could be just that “educational experiment we really need,” and that, according to Mosle, so far we haven’t had. And in that sense the two pieces could profitably have been placed side by side.
We would like to believe this to be so, that we need the reform movement, or educational experiment she describes. And we would certainly like Rhee’s reform efforts to bear fruit.
However, the fact is that we don’t need still another reform movement of the kind that Sara Mosle is suggesting. Whole system reform movements ought to be things of the past. And furthermore we don’t expect Michelle Rhee to be successful with hers. I know I don’t.
The obstacles in the way of Rhee’s reforms are just too great, the greatest of them being the teachers who rarely if ever go along with the reformers, and then there are the parents who probably don’t understand the reforms, let alone have the strength, knowledge and talent to support them.
And then there is this thought. The educational experiment we really need, to use Sara Mosle’s words, has in fact been with us from the very beginning, from that moment when we decided that everyone should be “educated,” the disadvantaged no less than the advantaged.
This educational experiment is the history of this nation’s public schools and the experiment is still going on, and has been since the time of Horace Mann’s “common school” more than 150 years ago.
And so far this experiment has failed. We are still not succeeding in educating all of our children, and especially the poor and disadvantaged among them. Endless reform efforts, going back to the mid 19th century, have never accomplished what they intended.
Why? Because the needs of the children, and probably even more so of the disadvantaged among them, have always been many, and no one, single effort, not even KIPP, and even less a system wide reform effort such as Michelle Rhee’s, could ever succeed with all the children.
KIPP may have sensed this from the beginning, that the whole nine yards of urban education was just too much to take on, and as a result chose to break pieces off from the system, to open a few schools (66 academies at present, in 19 states, or about 3 schools a state) in many different communities, and thereby, perhaps, were they successful.
No, we don’t need just one experiment. There can be no grand plan for educating everyone. We need rather to break up the largest school systems into many smaller parts. Where we have been and are successful that is what we have already been doing. Magnet schools, charter schools, independent schools, and many others, are all examples of our doing quite well by our children and their needs. These schools don’t need our reform efforts.
Rhee will succeed only if she breaks up the system, only if her reforms are multiple and many, reflecting the multiple and different needs of the children, for even when the children are all poor their educational needs are no less dissimilar for that. I don’t know if she understands this.
Nicholas Kristof doesn’t understand. When he talks about education he sees only one outcome. “Unless we succeed,” he says, “in that effort to get more students through high school and into college, no bank bailout or stimulus package will be enough to preserve America’s global leadership in the long run.”
If getting more students through high school and into college, if filling the ranks of America’s global leadership teams, if this sort of outcome was the overriding goal of our public schools, especially the inner city schools, as in Washington DC, failure for most of the children would go on being the inevitable result.
