Trying

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet engage in a one-way conversation

The Maria Chronicles, #21

With class over, Maria fixes her gaze on Derek, waiting to get his attention amid the rustling of pages and the rude sound of sliding chairs and desks. But in this as in other ways, he's hard to reach, and he's almost out the door before their eyes meet.

"Derek, can I talk with you for a minute?"

He silently takes his hand off the door and walks back. Vanessa is lingering near Maria's desk. She looks at Derek and back at Maria, perhaps hoping Maria will dispatch Derek so that Vanessa will have Maria to herself. But when Maria asks, "What can I do for you, Vanessa?" it's clear that the teacher's intention is the other way around.

"I was hoping we could meet to go over the test," Vanessa says.

"Well, this isn't a good time," Maria answers. "How about tomorrow before school? I'll be up in my office."

"Great," says Vanessa, satisfied. "See you then."

Blech, Maria thinks as she turns back to Derek. Vanessa is a pain in the ass. But she'll be easy compared with Derek; Maria's been dreading this encounter but knows she has to do it. She pauses to take in his Metallica concert shirt, perplexed by these kids who buy shirts with bands who were on tour before they were even born. It seems so fake.

"Derek, I'm a little concerned about you."

He says nothing, inscrutable. Maria is actually kind of impressed: no move toward defensiveness, much less defiance. There's real discipline in his self-containment. But it worries her, too.

"You passed the exam, but barely. You rarely participate in class discussion. Your first essay was late, though I thought it was actually pretty good. Do you have a problem with the class that we can talk about?"

Derek lifts his eyebrows and moves his eyes, as if he's been asked a question he's been asked an impossible question. "No, not really."

"Not really?"

"I mean, no. The class is fine. I don't really have a problem with it."

"Well, actually, what I meant is that I think that you're kind of the problem. Not in the sense that I think you're disruptive or anything (though Maria does think his disengagement is at times so extravagant as to be distracting to other students), but rather that your performance has been marginal at best. I was hoping we might be able to talk about it before, or instead of, getting your parents involved."

Maria feared that this would be heard as a threat, even blackmail. But she's again surprised by the lack of reaction.

"Do you think I should call your folks?"

He shrugs. "Whatever. Do what you have to do. My dad isn't around, but you should catch my mom."

What does "isn't around" mean, she wonders. Maria is mad at herself. She should have asked around and tried to get more of Derek's backstory before this conversation. She meant to ask Jen Abruzzi for help, but didn't see her at lunch and decided she would go ahead and get this over with. Now she sees this situation will be going on for a while.

"Well, look, Derek, is there anything I can do to help improve your performance? Because I'll tell you that if your performance doesn't improve soon in one form or another you're going to end up in trouble. Do you understand what I'm telling you?" Maria is struggling to keep her irritation out of her voice.

Derek purses his lips and nods. He glances up at the clock. "I'm late for practice," he says.

"Oh really? What do you play?"

"Point guard. Tryouts are today."

Aren't tryouts different than practice? Maria wonders. But she's not going to press him on that ground. She's having enough trouble with him as it is.

"Well, all right then," she says. "You know where I stand. I'm here to help you, Derek. But you gotta meet me, if not halfway, then somewhere along the way. I see someone interesting when look at you. But the walls are a mile thick. I'll respect those barriers as long as you understand and are willing to accept the consequences, as you seem to be. But . . . well, I hope you won't blame me for trying."

That came out a little more plaintive than she intended. Maria is a little embarrassed.

But Derek, still expressionless, looks at her and nods. It's the most hopeful thing he's done.

"You can go." And with that, he does.

"Jesus," Maria says, turning around to save her notations on the Smart Board. People always talk about how big an impact teachers can have. But most of the time, it's the limits that define her reality. She turns off her computer, shuts out the lights, and heads outside, where the bright afternoon air has more bite than it did this morning. She sure wishes she had another layer.

Piazza Facebook

The social network as urban district

In the nine months since I first stumbled my way onto Facebook, I've come to believe -- "realize" is too strong a term to describe a perception that, given my general state of ignorance about social networking, I must regard as provisional -- that relatively few of the people I've friended are in fact regulars at the site. Upon getting new accounts, most of us plunge in with a combination of uncertainty and excitement, vaccuuming up contacts and poking around the various features. But once the novelty wears off, Facebook seems to fade into the background somewhat. People may visit when they get a Facebook message in their email account, but may otherwise never initiate contact that way or gaze at walls or profiles.

Which is not to say that Facebook necessarily becomes a kind of personal fad, like a video game or a new pop album you play obsessively for a while and then forget about. It remains an invaluable tool, especially as a kind of interactive phone book whereby you can contact someone even if you don't remember an email address, or seek information on a new or prospective acquaintance. Its utility is likely to be a source of durability long after it has lost its novelty.

I sometimes sense aversion, even distate, surrounding heavy Facebook use. For the lurker, it can be a huge time-waster. For those inclined to post, it can be all too apparent evidence of self-promotion, if not clinical narcissism. I've been on both the giving and receiving end of a comment like "You've been quite active on Facebook lately!" and it's not hard to discern passive aggression mingling in there with any overt admiration or approval.

My motives in getting a Facebook account were largely utilitarian: I did so simultaneously with launching this blog, and used Facebook as a marketing tool for the blog (it remains an important component of my modest audience). Still, I was as enchanted by it as many of those who joined without such motives, and, I'm somewhat surprised to say, have become only more in the time since. Lately, in the odd moment when I go just for the hell of it, I do so with a recurrent visual motif in my head: the piazza San Marco in Venice.

What's odd about this is that I'm sorry to say that I've never been to Italy, much less Venice. So there's double sentimentalizing going on, both of the Facebook I know and the famed public square I don't. But I somehow imagine, as I scroll down my wall, that I occupy a small window looking out on that public square. Each post, with its little picture of friend or acquaintance -- or, let's be frank, virtual stranger -- is like a person wandering across my purview at the time I happen to be there, or someone sitting at her own window across the square. Given the traffic that passes through on any given day, and the fact that I'm only at my window a fraction of the time, I miss most of what happens. I have about 500 friends, and at busy times of the day any post that goes up will pass from the top to bottom of my screen in a few hours (if that). Thus it is that time is becomes a kind of space; the range of my vision, depending on the light of day, can be anywhere from three to ten hours wide. Whatever the width or length, there's always someone going by, a sight to see.

And, occasionally, something to hear. Among the traffic I witness, there will be an occasional voice that hails me across the square, or that I will call out. Our communication will be public, a wave of approval that all can see, or a comment of greeting or praise that many will witness (or, perhaps comment upon as well). Occasionally, I will receive communication through the back door, as it were, mail that arrives outside the view of the square but which bears an inseparable relationship to it.

I'm not sure how far I should extend this metaphor; I could speak, for example, of the businesses that peddle their wares (I certainly put mine on display), or the authorities that administer or police the square (we all worry about their trusworthiness even as we benefit from them). If there's any larger point here, it's about the way cutting edge technology tends to be enlisted in the service of traditional longings and imagined pasts, in this case an urban village in which everybody knows your name.

Cheers.

Calculations

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet grade an exam (and herself)

The Maria Chronicles, #20

Denise: 77%
Olivia: 72%
Mia: 81%
Wilhelmina: 94%
Derek: 64%
Vanessa: 80%
Ali: 69%

Shit, Maria thinks to herself as she flips through the set of just-graded exams. I've got a problem on my hands.

Or, more accurately, a set of problems. The first is that some of these kids are surprisingly mediocre at absorbing the factual material she'd like them to master. This is not exactly a news flash when it comes to someone like Derek. It's more unexpected in the case of Olivia. She's been a bit of a cipher in class, but has struck Maria as someone who's largely on the ball. That may not be the case after all.

Then there's someone like Vanessa, which points toward problem #2. Eighty percent is not a terrible score, but she knows Vanessa well enough to think that she'll be upset when she gets the exam back. "I am so ready for this test," she told Maria this morning as Maria gave her a copy of the exam. Apparently not, Vanessa. Presumably there are other Vanessas in the class as well. This is likely to lead to disputatious discussions as well as silent resentment. Keenly aware of her probationary status in the eyes of the student body as New Teacher, Maria would just as soon not antagonize multiple students at this point. Not that she should be letting that bother her.

Actually, Maria is not especially concerned about a set of scores that average in the mid-seventies (which, strictly speaking is where the average should be: 75% is a C). In any case, she'd rather be perceived as a hard-ass than a pushover, especially at this point. Grade inflation being what it is, she's almost required to cede ground over the course of the year, if for no other reason than to foster a sense of psychic confidence that at least some of these kids are actually going to need by way of creating self-fulfilling academic prophecies. Realistically speaking, there are two tiers of grades that can end up on a report card that don't result in unpleasant consequences for student and/or teacher (usually in the form of parental protest): some form of A and some form of B. Maria usually has to go lower on that in a few cases a semester, but avoids it when she can. On assessments like exams and essays, however, she's generally comfortable handing out Cs and Ds, especially in the case of papers that she allows students to re-write.

But then there's problem #3, her biggest source of discomfort. And that is a feeling that it's Maria who really performed poorly here. Question #19, for example, asks students about the antifederalists, and Maria now sees that there may have been some ambiguity about whether the term referred to people who opposed the Constitution in the 1780s, as opposed to those who opposed the Federalist party in the 1790s. Sixteen of her twenty students got that one wrong. Seventeen students didn't know the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which Maria is sure she mentioned in class. Maybe that was the problem: she mentioned it in class. Sure, it was in the textbook. But as far as these kids are concerned, if it wasn't discussed in class, it didn't happen, and Maria has given them little reason to think otherwise.

Maria decides to void those two questions, which means she'll give three points apiece to all those kids who got it wrong, and three points to any who got either or both right. This will bring the average score up to somewhere around 80%, -- a B- in Maria's book -- and drag Derek over the line from an F to a D. Vanessa won't be thrilled, but hopefully less querelous; Olivia will remain mired in mediocrity. Ditto for Ali. Maria will have to keep a closer eye on those two, part of which will involve watching to see how proactive they are in grappling with this outcome.

Maria begins entering the scores in her gradebook in pencil, knowing that errors and challenges will inevitably lead to adjustments. She thinks of an old saying to the effect that it's best not to look too closely into the making of sausages and wars. Grading, she muses grimly, should be added to that list.

Reception

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet study outside her field

The Maria Chronicles, # 19

Maria was reluctant when her department chair/emergent friend Jen Abruzzi called her up on Saturday morning, announcing she was coming by in two hours to take Maria to the football team's home game. "I've got too much work to do," she protested.

"Now, now, Maria, all work and no play makes Jill a dull girl. I think you'll enjoy it."

"I don't know anything about football!"

"You think I do?" Maria knows Jen does, but decides not to argue.

"C'mon," Jen continues. "It'll be fun. Lots of familiar faces. And I'll take you out for a hot toddy afterward."

Maria wasn't sure she was up for lots of familiar faces, but less sure she wanted to spend the day alone. So it was that she put on jeans, a long sleeve t-shirt, and a wool sweater. She also found an old scarf in the school colors that she wrapped around her neck. Almost like a real fan.

They didn't actually arrive until the game was apparently well underway -- the scoreboard clock said 6:31, whatever that meant -- and Maria found herself in the grip of diametrically opposed emotions. She felt an incipient dread over seeing anyone she knew, and yet was impressed, even awed, by the spectacle: the packed bleachers, a concession stand, cheerleaders, and the absolutely enormous players in their shoulder pads and helmets. Maria followed Jen as she skirted up the sidelines. If this was a pool, Maria would be wanting to dip her foot in gingerly. But Jen isn't giving her that option.

"Hi Ms. Bradstreet!" Maria doesn't recognize the face. "Hi," she says noncommittally.

A man she definitely does not know tips his school cap. "Ms. Bradstreet," he says evenly.

"Hello," she replies.

Jen, who's in front of her, turns around. "Hey Ed," she says. "This is Maria. I believe you two recently resolved a problem with our mutual friend Janey Wilcox."

Ugh, Maria thinks. That's a dispute over releasing a student for a soccer game that Maria would rather forget, since it required her to eat crow by e-mail. But Ed extends his hand. "Nice to finally meet you in person, Maria," he says, offering his hand. "And good of you to show up today in support of our boys." He's choosing to interpret my presence here as an act of good sportsmanship, Maria thinks to herself.

"Just trying to continue my education, Ed," Maria says. He smiles, perhaps knowing better than to say anything Maria would be quick to find patronizing.

Thankfully, Jen is pulling on Maria's sleeve, which allows her to wave goodbye in haste without making further eye contact. "Over there," Jen says, pointing to an open section at far corner the top row of the bleachers.

"Hi Ms. Bradstreet!" Maria sees her students Mia, Maggie and Tess, faces painted, arms folded to retain heat, greeting her in unison at the foot of the bleachers. She's glad to see them. "Hello girls," she says warmly. "How are we doing!"

"We're cold!" Maggie says."C'mon, she says to her pals. Let's get some hot chocolate."

Maria murmurs greetings to various people as she and Jen climb the steps. Jen, for her part, is making her way like a small-town mayor, waving and smiling her way to their seats. Maria sees English teacher Carl Kurtz, motioning them over and sliding down to make room for them. Is this why Jen targeted this location? Maria isn't sure how she feels about Carl, who she is now forced to sit beside as Jen makes her way to the other side of him.

Maria decides to avoid conversation by feigning interest in the game. In fact, she's fascinated by the spectacle: the sweep of colored uniforms on the field; the sweep of autumn leaves in against the gun-metal sky; the smell of of the grills on the ground wafting up the stands. (She realizes she's hungry.) She hopes it doesn't rain, as she has no umbrella or even a hat.

She's snapped out of her reverie by a huge roar from the crowd. She can't resist: "What just happened?"

"Complete pass," Carl answers, eyes still fixed on the field. "Not something you see very often in high school football," he continues, the wry expression on his face suggesting that it should be otherwise. "Not that it's done us much good. It's still third and seven."

Maria has no idea what Carl is talking about, though she likes the gentle tone of irony, even as she's struck by the lack of irony in his use of the collective pronoun. "Are you much of a football fan, Carl?"

"Well," he says, "I guess you could say so," glancing briefly at her and smiling. Two sets of players run on the field, and two more run off. "Not that I can claim to be any kind of expert. But I did play in college."

"Really?" Where did you play?"

"At Penn State," Jen answers for him. "Carl was a linebacker who played for Joe Paterno, one of the legends of the game."

"I was a second stringer," Carl says, embarrassed by Jen's boosterism.

"That's not what I heard," Jen responds. "Tom" -- Jen is referring to a colleague in the math department -- "told me you were a starter in your senior year. And that you had conversations with the Green Bay Packers organization."

Carl, suddenly riveted by the action on the field, perhaps coveniently ignores this remark. "Go go! go! go! go!"

The rest of the crowd has also erupted with excitement, as Maria sees a player run down the field with the ball, the rest of the players in tow. "Did you see that catch?" she hears as she watches players with the other uniforms in hot pursuit. (She had not.) "Go Tyler Go!" she hears. "Tyyyylerrrr!"

By this point, Tyler has reached the end of the field and the opposing players are suspending their pursuit. Happy teammates swarm around him. "That's our boy," Carl says. "Only a sophomore, but already a seasoned veteran."

The player is now making his way off the field, to ongoing slaps and evident, if unheard, words of praise. When he takes off his helmet, Maria feels a sense of shock: This is her Tyler, from her history survey class. She should have made the connection -- Tyler is not all that common a name -- but it just never occurred to her to think it. Not much of a student, truth be told. Not exactly a bad student; he does his work without incident or complaint. But his prose is flat and unimaginative. But here, he's a star. He's beaming now, and his smile is just wonderfully winning. This kid has a whole life she knows nothing about. Maria sees he's now standing next to the also unhelmeted Ali, who's also in her class. She never thought of them as particularly friendly, and, truth be told, she wouldn't think a kind with a name like Ali would be playing a game like football. But she imagines that as a teammate the two share some kind of bond.

Maria is still digesting all of this when she looks down at the ground level of the bleachers and sees him, the figure she has mentally referred to "cuff man," because every times she sees this person at school, which is not all that often, he has his dress shirt open at the collar and his sleeves rolled halfway up. Today he's wearing a brown suede bomber jacket and black jeans, talking amiably with what Maria would guess is a coach wearing a team cap and carrying a clipboard. Maria feels a surprising pit in her stomach. She's tempted to ask Carl or Jen what the man's name is, and what he does at the school, but thinks better of it. They would be too curious about her curiousity. Besides, this is enough excitement for one day. She doesn't want her world to get too big too fast.

That Eighties Show

Two new books on the Reagan era suggest a lively range of opinion

The following omnibus review was published this week on the History New's Network's books page.

Twenty years after he left office, five years after his death, and a year after what is widely regarded as a watershed election that rejected some of it core tenets, the life and times of Ronald Reagan are poised on the cusp of a transition from memory to history. As with Andrew Jackson, with whom he had much in common, one can speak of an "Age of Reagan" that extended beyond his presidency. As with Jackson too, much perception of Reagan among intellectual elites was strongly negative when in power. Both were viewed as willful, but unintelligent, executives who delegated political operations to fierce partisans. Those partisans in turn reputedly manufactured a faux populism embraced by a gullible public even as they set the nation on a potentially ruinous course.

But for Reagan, like Jackson, a revisionist school has emerged. Two new books illustrate the ongoing range of opinion about Reagan -- and the new consensus, recently articulated by journalist Richard Reeves (Ronald Reagan: The Triumph of Imagination, 2005) and Princeton professor Sean Wilentz (The Age of Reagan, 2008) that this was a man to be reckoned with as a statesman and policy maker no less than in the realm of masterful communication.

In a sense, Gil Troy, who writes regularly for the History News Network, seems ill-suited to write a book with the title "The Reagan Revolution." Troy has carved out a space for himself as a latter-day Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. in books like Leading from the Center: Why Moderates Make the Best Presidents. And in fact, the argument of his new book belies its title: according to Troy, there was no Reagan revolution. This is not to say Reagan was an inconsequential president: Troy portrays him as a man who changed the nation's political climate even if he never changed its topography. And one can elaborate on this sentence with a half-dozen like it: Reagan cut taxes, though he never quite managed to rein in spending. He was perceived as hostile to Civil Rights, even as he maintained affirmative action and the nation underwent a demographic transformation. He rattled a saber with the Soviets yet ushered in a post-Cold War world. And so on.

Troy's mastery of his material and ability to condense it elegantly reflect both deep immersion in his subject and an ability to see forest through trees. But its underlying logic engenders a little restlessness. Reagan succeeded because he was at heart a centrist. As Troy makes clear in Leading from the Center, so was FDR. And Abraham Lincoln. And George Washington. One begins to suspect that for Troy, a successful, non-moderate Reagan would be a contradiction in terms. Yet he was more of an ideologue than any of these leaders. (One again thinks of Andrew Jackson and suspects Troy would tame him as well.)

The Reagan Revolution is a new entry in Oxford University Press's marvelous "Very Short Introduction" series, now over 200 (pocket-sized) volumes strong. Like other books in the series, it does not try to provide an unbroken narrative line. Instead, Troy segments its 130 pages into eight chapters, each of which are titled with questions -- "Was Reagan a Dummy?"; "Did the Democrats Fiddle as the Reaganauts conquered Washington?"; "Did the Reagan Revolution Succeed or Fail?" -- and sequenced into an overlapping, but loosely chronological, discussion. This intelligent strategy makes the book very useful for the casual reader as well as highly flexible for classroom use. It's hard to imagine another book serving such a function any better than this.

As it happens, Gil Troy, who teaches at McGill University, is also the editor, along with Vincent J. Cannato of UMass Boston, of Living in the Eighties, an anthology in another Oxford University Press series, "Viewpoints on American Culture." As one might expect, this is a collection notable for the quality of its scholarship and sturdiness of its prose. But the hallmark of the anthology, perhaps not surprisingly, is balance, not only in terms of opinion, but also generations and even professions. On the Right, former Attorney General Edwin Meese makes a cogent brief for Reagan's presidency as an almost unalloyed triumph, while Peter Schweizer of the Hoover Institution decisively credits Reagan for ending the Cold War. On the Left, heavyweight historians Sara Evans and Bruce Shulman decry the evisceration of feminism and the decline of public space respectively.

In terms of actually advancing the historiography of the Reagan era, the most important essays are a pair of pieces by Joseph Crespino and Kim Phillips-Fein, both of whom gave papers in a notably lively session at the Organization of American Historians Conference in Seattle earlier this year. In that session and these pieces, Crespino and Phillips-Fein and their generational cohort seek to move beyond the argument, crystallized most succinctly in Thomas and Mary Edsall's 1992 book Chain Reaction, that converging resentments of race, rights and taxes explain the success of the neoconservative movement. Crespino suggests the neocon synthesis in the South is much deeper and broader than such a formulation suggests; Phillips-Fein implicitly challenges Troy (who here zeroes in on Reagan's first hundred days to suggest they were the high-water mark of his "revolution") in emphasizing the scope and depth of Reagan's long-term success in shifting the nation's political discourse.

Perhaps the most satisfying pieces in the collection, however, are those that function as tightly focused case studies. Editor Cannato does a nice job in looking at New York mayoral politics and the ambiguous career of Ed Koch. Mark Brilliant of the University of California at Berkeley uses his own institution as a point of departure for tracing subtle shifts in the evolution of multiculturalism in academic life. Music executive and record producer Steve Greenberg's precise yet resonant analysis of racial -- and racist -- currents in the transition from the seventies to the eighties in popular music is rock criticism of the highest order. David Greenberg performs comparable service in tracing currents within liberalism in the eighties, as does Lauren Winner in her analysis of evangelical religion in the years between the Carter and Reagan administrations.

The field of what might be termed "Reagan Studies" is already well established, and there are no doubt graduate students across the country right now struggling to master a large and growing body of work. But these two works together comprise a remarkable sampler of a discourse in motion. It's morning in RR scholarship.

Theodore R. Sizer, 1932-2009

An appreciation of a New England education reformer in the context of American History

Ted Sizer, the internationally recognized education reformer who died last week at 77, was a great many things to a great many people in a career that spanned over half a century. Much has been said about him already (in places like the New York Times), with a good deal likely to come from a variety of perspectives. I myself happened to be Ted's son-in-law, and loved him for reasons that echo countless remarks that are currently pinging around the blogosphere. But I did think it might be helpful to those who knew him personally, and those who did not, to consider him from an angle that he himself considered a little unusual when I offered it to him a few years ago when I was engaged in some study of his life and work. Ted was a quintessentially American figure; it would not take long to make that point, in ways that ranged from his optimistic persona to his commitment to the democratic process. But I'd like to go a little further and suggest more specifically that he was, literally and figuratively, a child of New England.

Not that he was in any sense a provincial. Ted traveled the world to China, Australia, and South Africa and back in a restless spirit of inquiry. As a young man, he served in the U.S. armed services in Germany, and it was in training soldiers as an artillery officer that he first apprehended that giving people important responsibility was itself a valuable pedagogical tool. But the various homes he inhabited over the course of his life were centered in three states -- Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts -- and their imprint on him was as decisive as the impact he had in the other 47 and beyond.

New England, of course, is the cradle of American educational civilization. Early colonies such as Hartford and New Haven (which later merged, and between which he was born and buried, in the town of Bethany), mandated free public schools within a decade of their founding in the 1630s, as did Massachusetts. But the region was also the seedbed of private academies such as Phillips Academy Andover, founded in 1778, of which Ted would be headmaster two centuries later. For all their differences, these educational institutions were characterized by a powerful communitarian spirit in their mission, and an avowedly moral orientation that stressed the importance of independent-minded people who would also be civic-minded participants in public life -- a seeming contradiction that Ted finessed with notable grace in forging public-private partnerships at Harvard, Brown, and the Coalition of Essential Schools he founded in 1984. These characteristics remained discernible even in the nineteenth century, when strong-minded reformers like Horace Mann sought to adapt public schools to the needs of an emerging industrial capitalist order. Mann no less than Cotton Mather would have endorsed deceptively simple Coalition precepts such as "The school should focus on helping young people learn to use their minds well," or "The school's goals should apply to all students." (For more on these and other essential principles, see the CES website.)

Ted had the good fortune of coming of age as the American Century crested; a beneficiary of the G.I. Bill, he entered university life and became the youngest dean in the history of Harvard at age 31 as much because of the rapid expansion of postwar academia as for his evident talent and social skills. But he was at the helm of Phillips Andover during the rocky 1970s, and was keenly aware of the economic challenges facing public education in the face of receding collective commitment. Yet through it all his egalitarian ethos guided his work, whether in making the co-education a condition of his acceptance of the Andover post, creating a math and science program for underprivileged students while there, or in founding a charter public high school in central Massachusetts (and serving as co-principal with his wife, Nancy, in 1998-99 to plug a personnel hole).

Ted was sometimes characterized as a "progressive" educator, and the label makes sense -- to a point. Certainly, his vision was broadly consonant with Progressive-era pioneers like John Dewey, a clear and important influence on his work. And use of the word "progressive" to describe those like him skeptical of test-driven curricula and information delivery systems is also accurate, if a bit imprecise. But "progressive" is a word that can obscure at least as much as it reveals. Ted's progressivism owed a lot more to, say, Jane Addams than Theodore Roosevelt. It was the bottom-up progressivism of the urban reformer, not the top-down progressivism of the elitist technocrat. His emphasis on the local and the empowerment of the individual made him a compelling figure to President George H.W. Bush no less than President Bill Clinton, both of whom sought his counsel. He could talk -- and laugh -- with anyone, and his curiosity was inexhaustible.

I myself prefer to use a different term in thinking about Ted: pragmatist. The figure most prominent in this regard is yet another New Englander, William James. The Jamesian faith that truth is something that happens to an idea is evident in Ted's famous precept that "unanxious expectation" is the optimal stance in a teacher's relationship with a student, to cite one example. Calling him pragmatic might sound a bit odd to some, given the sense of boyish idealism that animated him to the end of his days. It may sound odd to others, given that much of the criticism of Ted's work centered on a belief that his ideas were impractical, particularly when attempting to leverage them with any sense of scale.

But Ted was never an ideologue, and remained relentlessly focused on what actually works -- and solutions that were the product of close empirical observation at thousands of schools. He was never opposed to standards per se, but he insisted that the standards for those standards be high, that those doing the evaluating did their homework no less than the students they were evaluating. The often unspoken appeal of standardized tests for those who champion them is often about the ease with which they can be administered rather than the value of what they measure. Authentic assessment is difficult: good work always is. As Ted and Nancy used to say of their charter school when they were principals, "If it were easy, it wouldn't be Parker."

Moreover, Ted understood as a matter of instinct and reflection that search for the truth is never simply a matter of gathering information, one reason he lamented the mindless quality of so much education research and the misplaced priorities of most Ed schools. That's why, when he tried to convey the reality of everyday life in the United States, he did so through a fictional character: Horace Smith, the beloved teacher (and later principal) of the archetypal Franklin High. Horace lives on in the pages of Ted's celebrated trilogy: Horace's Compromise (1984), Horace's School (1992) and Horace's Hope (1996). In capturing the granular details of the classroom, and the often painful dilemmas that prevent good people from doing their best work, Ted both comforted and inspired hundreds of thousands of students on the road to becoming teachers.

Part of what made books like these so vivid to generations of readers, and what made Ted himself so vivid to generations of colleagues and students, is that he was a remarkably sane person. His sunny disposition and eagerness to engage made him a joy to experience in almost any setting. He was a good man who lived a good life who had the good sense to savor simple gifts -- and share them, which he would do with sometimes breathtaking generosity. Ironically, this could be a sobering lesson for those of us who were less well-adjusted than he was. But, finally, a life-affirming one. Here, truly, was a great American: E unum, pluribus.

A struggle for power

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet parry a grade-grubbing parent

The Maria Chronicles, # 18

Maria is startled when the phone at her desk rings at 11:17 on a Tuesday morning, while she's reading her favorite blog on her laptop. She's almost forgotten she has a phone on her desk. And she's definitely forgotten to check her messages for days. Maria remembers a time when answering machines were a novel technology. Now they're fading fast. "Hello?" she asks tentatively.

"May I speak with Maria Bradstreet?" asks a female voice.

"Speaking."

"Ms. Bradstreet, this is the office of Doctor Ronald Chiklis, chief of endocrine surgery at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Please hold for Dr. Chiklis."

Who the hell is Ronald Chiklis? Maria wonders. And why is he calling me? Oh yes: Jake's dad. But why doesn't he just pick up the phone himself? Or, better yet, send an email?

A male voice comes on the phone. "Mrs. Bradstreet."

"Yes, I'm Ms. Bradstreet."

"Ron Chiklis here, Jacob's father. How are you."

Maria has decided on a minimalist approach: "Fine."

"You're new at the school, correct?"

"Correct." Asshole. Maria knows what he's doing.

"I'm calling regarding Jacob's recent essay on the American Revolution," he says after a pause.

Maria has absolutely no recollection of Jake's essay, which she graded over the weekend and returned yesterday. That in itself tells her something: it was neither memorably good nor memorably bad. But Dr. Chiklis seems to think Maria will know exactly what he's talking about. She begins clicking around on her computer to the folder where she stores student comments. For the time being, she buys time in a way that always seems stilted and yet always seems to work: by paraphrasing what's just been said. "You'd like to talk about Jake's essay."

"Right. You gave the essay a B. I must say that I read the essay myself and thought it was a good deal better than that."

Maria smiles and resists the urge to say, "Is that so?" She's now found the comments and scans them, remembering the essay. "Yes," she says. "I'm looking at my notes. I said that it was a decent essay, clear structure, strong evidence, but that the thesis could have used a little development."

"Right," Dr. Chiklis says. "Jake's thesis was that the American Revolution was a struggle for power."

"Yes."

"I actually thought that was a pretty good thesis. I'm a bit of an amateur historian myself. Are you familiar with the work of Theodore Draper, Mrs. Bradstreet? I believe his book was actually called A Struggle for Power."

Maria is a bit surprised that the good doctor is citing this magisterial study. "Yes, I am," she replies. "Been a while since I read it, though." Dammit, she scolds herself, don't be defensive!

"Yes, well, I read the book on a long flight to China for an international conference a few years ago. I thought was rather good. Not as good as Gordon Wood's book, that first one, published back in '69, when I was an undergraduate at Harvard. But very good. What I don't understand is how you could say that Jacob's essay was undeveloped, which I take to mean simplistic, when it's comparable to what Draper said in his book, which I regard as one of the best on the topic."

It's official: Maria's dander is up. Dad probably wrote the essay; if he didn't, he damn near shoved Jake into plagiarizing Draper. Maria's seen enough to see that he's a fairly passive kid, and here might be an explanation as to why. Probably the child of a second marriage. In any case, it's time to push back. "Yes, Draper's book is a major reinterpretation of the American Revolution," she begins. "But it's impossible to appreciate the force of his argument without putting it into historiographic context. Draper is actually responding to Wood. Wood is one of a number of historians who have emphasized the role of ideological forces in the coming of the Revolution; Draper's book is a self-conscious piece of revisionism borrowing from Marxist analysis that re-emphasizes materialist factors."

"Well that's all fine and good," Chiklis says. "But what does any of that have to do with Jacob? This is not graduate seminar, after all."

"No. It is not. And that's really my point. Jacob's thesis is superficially similar to Draper's, but lacks the rich sense of texture and historiography that makes his book the landmark you rightly view it to be. As matters currently stand, Jake saying that the American Revolution was a struggle for power is a little like saying that diabetes is a serious disease. Accurate enough, but not an especially insightful piece of analysis. That's why he got a B."

There's silence on the other end of the phone. Maria feels like she's landed an almost palpable punch.

"So what could he have done that would have been better?"

"Oh, any number of things," Maria replies. "His classmates made arguments like 'the American Revolution was inevitable,' or that it was the result of British ineptitude, or a blow for freedom, or whatever. Let me be clear: Jake's essay wasn't bad. It just could have been better. And it still can. I'd be happy to talk with him and give him a chance to revise it." (Him, she says silently. Not you.)

"Well, this is one of Jacob's problems. He's not proactive enough. That's why I'm calling. But I will encourage him to come talk to you."

"That would be fine." Him, not you.

"All right then," Chiklis concludes. "Thank you, Mrs. Bradstreet."

"You're welcome, Mr. Chiklis." Maria hangs up the phone. And sticks out her tongue.