The Education Gadfly Weekly

Frederick M. Hess
Common Core
February 2008

A conversation that Susan Jacoby (see above) overheard at a bar on September 11, 2001, spurred her to write The Age of American Unreason: "‘This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said. The other asked, ‘What is Pearl Harbor?' ‘That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,' the first man replied." Still at Risk, the maiden publication from Common Core (the executive director of which, Lynne Munson, recently spoke with Jacoby on NPR), seeks to shock and awe us with similar tales of Americans' ignorance of their own history and culture. CC tested 1,200 seventeen-year-olds' knowledge of such crucial topics as the Civil War, the Bill of Rights, Hitler and World War II, the Bible, and Orwell's 1984. Here's what it found: 43 percent knew the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900; 67 percent knew the Bill of Rights guaranteed the freedoms of speech and religion; 77 percent knew Hitler was Chancellor of Germany during World War II; 50 percent knew that Job is best known for his patience and suffering; and 52 percent knew the central plot of Orwell's famous dystopian novel. That's a sampling of the most egregious examples, but there are plenty more. Of course, these kinds of surveys have sprung up before, so it's worth asking here why we care about the findings. Jacoby uses data of this sort to fuel an overwrought campaign against Americans who don't wear the membership badge of the intellectual clique on their sleeves. CC takes a more nuanced view, highlighting the contribution that a broad, liberal education makes not just to American democracy, but also to people's enjoyment of their lives as individuals. Look for more valuable contributions from this young organization in the future. And read Still at Risk here.

We stand corrected. Last week, Gadfly posited that perhaps Barack Obama has an open mind when it comes to school choice. After all, he did tell the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about that city's voucher program, "If there was any argument for vouchers, it was ‘Alright, let's see if this experiment works' and if it does, then whatever my preconceptions, my attitude is you do what works for the kids." That sentence seems to suggest--actually, it seems to state unequivocally--that if vouchers are shown to help learning, the senator from Illinois would support them. Wrong. His campaign, undoubtedly ruffled that they may lose favor with a certain as-yet-uncommitted-to-any-presidential-candidate teachers' union, sent Education Week a clarifying statement. Obama's words were apparently taken "out of context"; the senator has always opposed vouchers and still does, his campaign says. Words taken out of context? Baloney. One of two things is going on here: Either Obama, in his bid to win Wisconsin, decided to lie to the Journal Sentinel and pretend to support proven-effective voucher programs, or he is actually open-minded but being censored by his campaign. Either way, it's a giant disappointment.

"Obama and Vouchers," New York Sun, February 27, 2008

Broad Acres and Adelphi elementary schools are neighbors serving an impoverished corner of the Washington, D.C. suburbs that is home to thousands of recent immigrants. But because the first school sits within the affluent and well-regarded Montgomery County district, and the second resides in Prince George's County, an urbanized district with the typical challenges that label implies, their realities and resources couldn't be more different. Montgomery County has lavished all sorts of love on Broad Acres--a longer school year, smaller class sizes, full-day kindergarten, an army of ESOL experts, and more. It helps that the school receives $1,750 in federal Title I funds for every student; Adelphi gets only one-third as much. Moreover, Prince George's principals are tied down by one of the most restrictive teacher contracts in the country, while Montgomery boasts one of the better collective bargaining agreements. School-by-school reform efforts are great, but what's the takeaway from this story? It's the system, stupid. It's time we tackled antiquated funding systems, outmoded collective bargaining agreements, and all other manner of red tape that impede schools from success.

"Nearby Schools, Worlds Apart," by Daniel de Vise, Washington Post, February 26, 2008

"Some Teachers' Contracts Bind Reforms, Study Says," by Nelson Hernandez, Washington Post, February 25, 2008

Common Core, an organization devoted to bringing content-rich instruction to U.S. classrooms, was born this week. Susan Jacoby's new book, The Age of American Unreason, was born two weeks earlier. It seemed fitting to welcome the former by reading and reviewing the latter.

The Age of American Unreason shares much with Common Core, notably the belief that all students should receive a variegated education that exposes them not only to science and math but also to music, literature, history and the arts. This is, however, but one of Jacoby's arguments; the others are multiple and diffuse. She begins her first chapter, for example, by bemoaning the "plague" of the word "folks."

"Only a few decades ago," Jacoby writes, "Americans were addressed as people or, in the more distant past, ladies and gentlemen." But now, she tells us, "folks" predominates--an indication of just how debased American speech has become. From "folks" (which reinforces anti-intellectualism, says she) Jacoby moves on to "troops" (which reinforces the public's thinking about war casualties in "a more abstract way") and ends up with Don Imus's infamous remarks about the Rutgers female basketball team.

Jacoby then lists several different slurs and writes, "The awful reality is that all of these epithets, often accompanied by the F-word, are the common currency of public and private speech in today's America." They are? Where's the evidence? The claim doesn't ring true among people I know.

This is the problem with The Age of American Unreason. It is polluted with factually dubious statements that seem odd, out of place, and arrived at by means that stretch logic. These baseless soliloquies permeate the text.

Which is not to say that some of Jacoby's salvos aren't smart. She convincingly describes, for instance, how the recent fusion of anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism (i.e., that opinions [ironically, including her own] are more valid than evidence and facts) has undermined the quest for knowledge. Americans today may be content to know fewer facts about science, history, geography, etc. because they believe such knowledge is largely unimportant and doesn't convey to its possessors any tangible advantages.

Jacoby also notes rightly that policymakers have embraced a similar quid pro quo approach to schooling; they want to see the palpable benefits--more engineers!--of their educational investments. This is the challenge that confronts Common Core: to convince Americans that the "frills" of the curriculum (history, the arts, languages, etc.) are just as necessary as math and science.

But readers of The Age of American Unreason will need to ferret out its good parts among much of less worth. Jacoby's writing is strained by trying somehow to reconcile her support of a more rigid, facts-based education system with her dislike (contempt may be a tad too strong) of the conservatives who share her views.

Thus, readers must wade through, for example, a description of the 1960s that quirkily jockeys between condemning the decade's excesses and condemning the right-wing intellectuals who also condemn its excesses. Jacoby manages this badly.

She also misses many opportunities to attack ideas and not people, which is unfortunate and weakens her book. Jacoby might have presented an informed chapter about the rise of conservative intellectuals; instead, she chooses to be snarky. William Kristol "apparently imbibed contempt for liberalism with his mother's milk and father's spleen." Elliot Abrams is "one of those undead intellectual bureaucrats who seem impervious to every effort to drive stakes through their hearts." Such barbs could have been penned by Don Imus.

This is but one reason why, in an odd twist, The Age of American Unreason cannot itself be considered an "intellectual" book. Jacoby's rather dismissive treatment of faith and the faithful is another. (She attempts to present herself as respectful of religion but doesn't quite pull it off.) The writing is hampered by prejudices, which too often replace detailed, logical analysis.

Rick Hess, who authored Common Core's inaugural report Still At Risk (reviewed below), told USA Today, "There is this kind of Aren't We Stupid? industry." Jacoby's book, alas, is part of it. Unlike Common Core's data-based analysis--which fastens upon pushing schools to teach more content-rich material--The Age of American Unreason is a long, meandering complaint that offers no real solutions.

Potential readers should skip it, and perhaps imbibe some Dostoyevsky instead. Jacoby might not disagree with that prescription.

Everybody knows Detroit has a dropout problem. But no one, it seems, can say exactly how bad it is. According to a new study by the Education Policy Center at Michigan State University, just 31.9 percent of Detroit students graduate in four years. MSU researchers arrived at this figure using the so-called "cohort method," mandated by No Child Left Behind, which compares the number of high-school freshmen in a given year to the number of seniors four years later. This approach has its shortcomings; while it discounts the number of students who moved to charter schools or other districts, it does not track those who transferred to private schools or left Michigan altogether (this in a city that has lost about 4 percent of its population since 2000). Still, one suspects that the MSU researchers are nearer to the truth than the state, which guesstimates that 66.8 percent of Detroit youngsters finish all four years of high school. That's a whopping 35 percentage points higher than MSU's figure. Didn't Michigan sign on to the National Governors Association's "Graduation Compact" to improve and standardize graduation data? Whatever happened to that, anyway?

"Detroit schools grad rate: 32%" by Karen Bouffard, Detroit News, February 25, 2008

Yes, I've learned plenty in the 57 years since I entered 1st grade in Dayton, Ohio's Fairview Elementary School, and the four decades since I taught social studies at Newton High School in Massachusetts. Let me share a dozen of the most profound lessons.

1. Great, committed teacher/adviser/mentors, high standards, a focused curriculum, a culture of achievement, and plenty of hard work by students well aware that real consequences attach to their performance--what more does a successful school need? Yes, I'm talking about the Knowledge Is Power Program and Amistad, the Academy of the Pacific Rim and Stuyvesant, and others of today's super-schools. But I'm also talking about the Catholic schools of the 1960s and my own time at Phillips Exeter Academy, where by senior year I was awakening at 3 a.m. to study. It paid off, for me and lots of others. (I was able to skip my freshman year at Harvard.) But it was sink or swim--and those who treaded water were sometimes invited not to return for the next semester.
   
   
2. People are good at different things--and plenty of human traits matter besides academics. At the Colorado Outward Bound School in 1962, those who excelled had physical prowess, street (and mountain) smarts, stamina, and the ability to forge and lead a group. Integrity and impulse-control mattered, too, I deduced, when my tent-mate, a youthful auto thief sent to Outward Bound by a Denver judge, ate our four-day food ration on day one--and later broke into an abandoned miner's cabin to help himself through the wilderness "solo survival" while I plucked watercress from a spring and carefully husbanded my secret roll of Life Savers.
   
   
3. Even the biggest-name schools have kids "left behind," victimized by an inferior education. Newton High School, circa 1966, was celebrated for its Ivy League-bound graduates and Harvard education school affiliation, but it also had plenty of teenagers just putting in time for a diploma. For most of the 12th graders to whom I attempted to teach a no-curriculum course called Problems of American Democracy, I was the third consecutive intern in three years of high school social studies. They never had an experienced instructor. (They were also bigger and tougher than I was--at least the boys were.)
   
   
4. Teaching is truly hard, and being smart and well educated doesn't make one good at it. At Newton, between my own inexperience, discipline problems, an inattentive "mentor," and the absence of any expectations, syllabus, or external accountability for the "P.A.D." course for these "curriculum II" kids, I just plain wasn't very successful. I also came to realize that, if I were going to make a difference in American education, it wouldn't be at the retail level.
   
   
5. By the time kids with tough lives have been further scarred by bad schooling, traditional "intervention" programs aren't apt to yield lasting success for many. My disillusionment with Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society began in the mid-1960s, when the Harvard-based Upward Bound program that several of us graduate students talked the then-dean of education, Theodore R. Sizer, into applying for yielded a swell summer experience and a handful of continuing friendships, but failed to transform the life prospects of those disadvantaged teenagers. That's why I'm blown away by the successes--and unsurprised by the rarity--of some of today's amazing schools. Yet the best of these are starting younger (KIPP now has a preschool) and enveloping their kids close to 24/7 in--let's be honest--a different culture as well as strong academics. No wonder these are usually "schools of choice" that operate outside the norms of the regular system, often with considerable additional resources.
   
   
6. Persistence counts, even in the nation's capital. My longtime mentor Daniel Patrick Moynihan's steadfast, multidecade pursuit of causes that meant much to him--the renewal of Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue, for example, and reforming the welfare system--showed me that it's sometimes possible to get important things done. But what patience and stamina that requires! If I got hit by a truck tomorrow, I hope that somebody might recall my own efforts to revitalize the National Assessment of Educational Progress, including the launch of state-specific reporting and the "achievement levels" that still constitute the closest thing we have to national standards.
   
   
7. Character counts, too, along with leadership and courage. Watching Lamar Alexander's school reform struggles of the mid-1980s, when he was Tennessee's governor, I saw how indispensable a shrewd, courageous, goal-driven, and well-disciplined political leader is. Watching William J. Bennett in action as the U.S. secretary of education, I saw what a difference it makes to have clear ideas and forcefully articulate them. But how quickly one gets into hot water when those ideas push against the established wisdom. (How willing one is to resist the force of convention may be the ultimate gauge of character in public life.)
   
   
8. School choice without quality doesn't do enough. "Structural" reformers err when they disregard what happens inside classrooms. E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Diane Ravitch are right about that. Once upon a time, I expected the market to provide correctives for mediocre schools--or put them out of business. But I've learned from long immersion in the choice wars (starting at Moynihan's side on the Senate floor during the "Packwood-Moynihan tuition-tax-credit bill" debates of 1977, and continuing through today's charter school struggles) that many American parents are unfussy customers when it comes to academic performance. They care about a safe, nurturing environment and a caring teacher--and about convenience and sports and such. Those are significant considerations, yes, but not enough to boost achievement.
   
   
9. I also erred in thinking that competition per se would trigger great changes in traditional schools. Breaking up monopolistic systems and creating options for needy kids remains the right thing to do, but often the former monopoly, instead of truly competing, strives, via political means and dirty tricks, to quash the upstarts. (Spend a month with me in Ohio one day!) Political compromises also lead elected officials to enact Potemkin reforms--that's as true of standards-based as choice-style reforms--that amount to surface changes unaccompanied by the more wrenching shifts that are needed for those reforms to succeed.
   
   
10. Hard as it is to make government reforms succeed, private ventures also face trouble sustaining their edge and not slipping into wary, bureaucratized, status-quo-ism. I've been part of two ambitious innovations (Edison Schools and K12 Inc.) that show the private sector's power to devise first-rate education breakthroughs--but in time they, too, had to make painful compromises, driven both by the need to turn a profit and by the power of established interests to rein in and distort the best of entrepreneurial initiatives. All such efforts eventually collide with the reality that the "system" they yearn to reform is either their regulator or their customer (or their political opponent), and they must make their peace with it.
    
    
11. Don't read too much into test scores. They're OK at gauging the overall performance of populations and institutions (OK, that is, if the tests are well grounded in solid standards), but they're risky when it comes to judging individuals. Our daughter never tested well, but more than made up for it with pluck, hard work, and determination. For years, our son brought home impressive test scores yet managed to learn very little. Today, both kids are successful professionals, happily married, and deftly raising our two little granddaughters. But that's after many episodes (and some risky parent interventions) in which test scores concealed more than they showed.
    
    
12. Nothing in education reform is easy. Changing the ground rules doesn't necessarily make for better teaching and learning. As I've learned from being a charter school "sponsor" in Ohio, putting a "charter" sign over a schoolhouse door doesn't make it a good school. (Nor, for that matter, does the label "private.") At day's end, a great school is a great school (and, alas, a rare find) no matter what the label says. What changing the ground rules does is create new and perhaps more favorable opportunities for schools to succeed. It's no guarantee that they will.

This article originally appeared in the February 26th edition of Education Week. It is derived from Finn's new book, Troublemaker.

Frederick M. Hess
Common Core
February 2008

A conversation that Susan Jacoby (see above) overheard at a bar on September 11, 2001, spurred her to write The Age of American Unreason: "‘This is just like Pearl Harbor," one of the men said. The other asked, ‘What is Pearl Harbor?' ‘That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,' the first man replied." Still at Risk, the maiden publication from Common Core (the executive director of which, Lynne Munson, recently spoke with Jacoby on NPR), seeks to shock and awe us with similar tales of Americans' ignorance of their own history and culture. CC tested 1,200 seventeen-year-olds' knowledge of such crucial topics as the Civil War, the Bill of Rights, Hitler and World War II, the Bible, and Orwell's 1984. Here's what it found: 43 percent knew the Civil War took place between 1850 and 1900; 67 percent knew the Bill of Rights guaranteed the freedoms of speech and religion; 77 percent knew Hitler was Chancellor of Germany during World War II; 50 percent knew that Job is best known for his patience and suffering; and 52 percent knew the central plot of Orwell's famous dystopian novel. That's a sampling of the most egregious examples, but there are plenty more. Of course, these kinds of surveys have sprung up before, so it's worth asking here why we care about the findings. Jacoby uses data of this sort to fuel an overwrought campaign against Americans who don't wear the membership badge of the intellectual clique on their sleeves. CC takes a more nuanced view, highlighting the contribution that a broad, liberal education makes not just to American democracy, but also to people's enjoyment of their lives as individuals. Look for more valuable contributions from this young organization in the future. And read Still at Risk here.