More Idle Thoughts on “the Schools”
Why do we go on comparing the achievement of our middle and high school students to those of other countries? I’m thinking, in particular of an article, “What Makes Finnish Kids so Smart,” from the WSJ of February, 2008, one that I happened to read for the first time today, in WSJ reprints I think, but no less relevant for us now than then. And I’m well aware of any number of quite similar articles from before that date and after.
Why do we continue to make these comparisons? They don’t make a lot of (common) sense. Of course I’m not the first one to say this. The late Gerald Bracey pointed this out over and over again throughout a lifetime of writing about the schools, usually defending the public schools from all takers.
Take the comparison often made of our kids to the Finnish kids, and then consider the size of the respective populations, and the heterogeneity, or lack thereof, of the respective student bodies, of the differences of class, race, and ethnic origin in particular. The population of Finland is five and one quarter million, putting it right between Minnesota and Colorado. In that regard a comparison to either one of these states, or any one of the many similar sized ones, might have made sense.
But, the Finnish student body is largely homogeneous, and there are very few in the schools whose first language is not Finnish. Not so, of course, in this land of immigrants. Even in relatively sheltered areas of the country such as Minnesota and Colorado, the class, racial, and ethnic differences among the students are probably huge in comparison with their counterparts in Finland.
This, the poor performance results when our country’s students are compared to those of other countries, is just one of these pieces of “evidence” that people cite to spotlight the “failure” of our public schools.
Diane Ravitch, in her new book, The Death and Life of the America School System, cites another piece, the failure of the school reforms to reform the schools. Even Paul Peterson, with more common sense than most when he writes about the schools, cites as evidence (and explanation) of failure, the absence, especially in our inner cities, of school choice.
But those who write about the schools, almost without exception, make the same mistake. The “schools,” that entity of which we have so much to say, doesn’t really exist. No more than does the American. For just as there are only individual Americans there are only individual schools, and rarely can one say the same thing about any two of them, about two Americans or two schools taken together.
Yet people go on talking about all the schools, saying the schools this or the schools that, and each speaker or writer gives a different meaning to “schools,” probably understanding it to mean, “the school that I attended,” and therefore know best.
Furthermore, we talk about our schools as we talk about our soccer and Davis Cup teams, as if they, the schools, could somehow, as those soccer and tennis teams in various tournaments and competitions, meaningfully compete with other schools on international playing fields. It can’t happen.
This situation, when schools mean different things to different people, explains why so many who write about the schools have totally different opinions of what is wrong and what needs to be done, and propose radically different changes or reforms, — small schools, large schools, Horace Mann schools, essential schools, charter and pilot schools, magnet schools, schools of choice and voucher schools… or simply defend the schools as they are.
The people who write have their own schools in mind when they write. And almost for any opinion or position one may have regarding the schools there are any number of schools out there that can be readily enlisted in support of that opinion or position. And that’s what happens.
So of course schools differ widely among themselves. I would take this even further and say that in some fundamentally important sense there ought to be as many schools out there as there are children of school age, because no two children, let alone 30 in the classroom, learn in the same way. Furthermore, how that single child, in any one school, learns will determine most of all what that school is, and is about. And if that single child doesn’t learn the school has failed. And if too many of them don’t learn that the school is a failure.
We don’t hear much about the schools where children are learning, the successful schools. There are many of these. These schools are the engines that power the country. Stuyvesant High School in New York City, is one example. And there are thousands of others.
It’s interesting that the writers, who have so much to say about “the schools,” and especially what’s wrong with the schools, don’t often write about Stuyvesant or Stuyvesant like schools. But these schools are no less a part of “the schools” than those in trouble and failing and of which we hear so much.
