Why it seems like only yesterday. . . . Oops, sorry, this is not to be a sappy reminiscence by an aging fogey. (Well, aging, maybe.) But in greeting 2005, I want to explain some momentous changes these past four decades, for American education and for me.
Yes, two milestones were passed in 1965. Lyndon Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ancestor of NCLB) - and I applied to the Harvard MAT program. A senior in college, I was swept up in volunteer social service programs of every sort, roused by the era's angry books about poverty and bad urban schools (Harrington's The Other America, Schrag's Village School Downtown, even Kozol's Death at an Early Age), stimulated by a guest lecture that Pat Moynihan gave in Ed Banfield's course on urban problems, and inspired by LBJ's insistence that the path out of poverty led through education and the suggestion that well-intended government programs such as Title I, Headstart, Upward Bound, Job Corps, Teacher Corps and Community Action were sure ways to place millions of needy families upon that path.
So to the distress of my parents I eschewed the family career - a fine Ohio law firm founded by my grandfather - and presented myself to Dean Ted Sizer and the other denizens of Appian Way as a candidate to become a bona fide educator.
I was, of course, a card-carrying, line-toeing, mid-'60s liberal. After all, I lived in Cambridge, Mass. We had scarcely dried our tears from Kennedy's assassination and the alternative to LBJ was Goldwater! Who could think that I and others like me, marching in synch with a beneficent federal government, would not clobber ignorance, end poverty, and turn America's inner cities into functioning, empowered, responsible communities?
Fast-forward forty years. The country changed. Education changed. The "problem definition" changed. The labels changed. And I changed.
What happened? I'll suggest ten partial explanations.
- Those ambitious programs turned out not to work very well and the problems they were combating proved tougher than we thought. The Head Start gains didn't last. Only a few Upward Bounders made it through college. Title I didn't cause schools to perform better. Some well-meaning policies even made things worse. (This was also true of a host of "social engineering" efforts. Remember compulsory busing?) More than a few other Johnson liberals were, in Irving Kristol's famous phrase, "mugged by reality" and began to second-guess their assumptions about the easy efficacy of public policy.
- Within education, the '60s "equality" goals were gradually displaced by a different but equally urgent problem: quality. We woke up one day to learn that SAT scores had plummeted. Employers grumped. International comparisons showed the U.S. in a bad way. The "Excellence Commission" warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity." (My earliest contribution to this awakening was a 1981 Life magazine article titled "A Call for Quality Education.")
- James Coleman's powerful insight gained traction, as more people recognized that the antidote to low achievement wasn't necessarily more spending - at least that there's no sure connection between what goes into a school as resources and what comes out as learning. (I first encountered this paradigm-shifting discovery as a grad student - by then in a doctoral program - when mentor Moynihan joined with Frederick Mosteller to conduct a celebrated Harvard "faculty seminar" devoted to a reanalysis of the Coleman data.)
- The better I got to know Washington, the more clearly I saw that Uncle Sam is a clumsy, imprecise fellow. At the Education Department, where I worked for several fascinating years in the mid-eighties, it proved hard enough to get checks delivered on time to the correct addresses. How could such an agency transform the practices of thousands of schools and millions of educators? Even the policies of fifty states?
- The state/local agencies that we trusted to do right by kids revealed themselves as part of the problem. School systems and state education departments were glad to take federal dollars but deeply averse to altering their own behaviors and routines, even when it became obvious that these fostered mediocrity, inequality, and inefficiency.
- The ever-balder self-absorption and power-greed of education's so-called stakeholders meant the producers were better served than the consumers. The teacher unions (whose role and clout ballooned during this period) were the worst offenders, but far from the only ones. "Education establishment" became a term of opprobrium, a source of trouble.
- The public school monopoly similarly revealed itself to be a wellspring of dysfunction. Its fierce opposition to initiatives like tuition tax credits (on which I worked alongside Senator Moynihan in the late 1970's) unmasked its determination to preserve control at all costs. Never mind that Catholic schools (the main focus of the Packwood-Moynihan bill) did a better job at a lower cost; never mind that many kids wanting to attend them could not afford to without financial help. Never mind that government routinely assisted students enrolled in Notre Dame and Fordham and St. Mary's. "Those kids belong to us" was the monopoly's message, "and so do all the education dollars."
- Even as Moynihan's ideas rubbed off on me, his party forsook me, moving leftward on myriad issues, foreign and domestic, and handcuffing itself to the unions. Meanwhile, the GOP shared my diagnosis of the problem and some of my ideas about solutions.
- The education profession forsook me, too, stubbornly pursuing ideas, strategies, and beliefs that simply didn't work. By 1981, Diane Ravitch and I founded the Educational Excellence Network. While many members were Democrats, all were discomfited by the regnant "progressivism" of the ed school thoughtworld (which I came to know up-close while on the Vanderbilt faculty).
- I got more experience with government and politics - and fell in with the likes of Lamar Alexander and Bill Bennett. This exposed me to the power of the bully pulpit to alter ideas and the value (and scarcity) of astute, idea-driven reformers in high places. It also buttressed my sense of the establishment's hostility to reform and the system's inertia. People started to call me a "conservative," but I saw myself (and still do) as a radical, seeking big changes on behalf of the poor and the powerless - and one day I realized that folks called "liberals" were more interested in maintaining the power structure and pleasing the stakeholders than in meeting the needs of children and boosting the performance of schools.
It's been quite a ride - and I see no signs that it's going to get smoother. So put on your seat belts. And Happy New Year.
