Worldly lessons

In The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way, journalist Amanda Ripley offers a message of hope rooted in experience

The following review has been posted on the Books page at the History News Network

History is not destiny: this is the message of journalist Amanda Ripley in her foray into secondary education. We all know that the United States has been struggling comparatively in international rankings of academic performance as measured by standardized tests -- and has been for some time. Most of us are also aware that the reigning educational superpowers are Finland and South Korea. We tend to assume the reasons for a nation's place in the academic world are relatively static: material prosperity, cultural values, ethnic homogeneity (or lack thereof). But, Ripley argues, global performance has in fact been quite fluid. South Korea and Finland were educational backwaters until relatively recently -- as was Poland until even more recently. But, showing more confidence in the efficacy of government than Americans have been able to do, each of these nations has taken proactive steps that have made a difference (even as other nations, among them Italy and Norway, have slipped, for some of the same reasons the U.S. has lagged).

Ripley rests her case on two foundations. The first is empirical: her standard of measurement is the Program for International Assessment Exam (PISA), a standardized test developed at the turn of this century by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, an NGO based in Paris. Though PISA is subject to the same skepticism and limits of many standardized tests, it is more analytical and real-world based than most, particularly those administered in the United States. But the bulk of Ripley's analysis is anecdotal: she follows three American students as they journey to rural Finland, urban South Korea, and western Poland, contextualizing accounts of their experiences with thick descriptions of the political, social, and cultural milieu in each.

As one might expect, the portraits that emerge from each of these places is starkly different. South Korean students are subject to a brutal academic grind in which most of their learning takes place under the auspices of private tutors who drill their charges late into the evening. (The government actually launches police raids to enforce a recently implemented curfew on study.) Polish students learn amid the shadows of the Nazi and Soviet past, which linger in ugly buildings and material deprivation. Finnish students, by contrast, learn under much sunnier conditions -- but that's a decidedly metaphorical statement (the American student there, who hails from Oklahoma, struggles with depression, some of which stems from the cold, dark climate). Residents of these countries find things to complain about -- perhaps a source of solace for anxious Americans -- but all have seen demonstrable success in their striving, not simply in the realm of test scores, but also in their economic fortunes.

Most important for Ripley is that for all their differences, these countries are alike in one important particular: "everyone -- kids, parents, and teachers -- [sees] getting an education as a serious quest, more important than sports or self-esteem." (Ripley's "The Case Against High School Sports" is the cover story in the current issue of the Atlantic.) American education reformers, she says, think they can improve education by improving teacher quality. But they get the equation wrong: rather than help teachers get better, they should focus on getting better teachers in the first place, and the way to do that is to make teaching a prestigious profession in which only the most qualified candidates may get in the classroom. She illustrates the point that it's all too easy to become a teacher in the United States with a story of a man who wants to become a football coach and so trains to become a math teacher. And she devotes a chapter to a Korean tutor who earns $4 million annually -- enough to beguile a college student out of a career in investment banking.

Along the way, Ripley challenges a series of conventional wisdoms. Yes, money matters, but students from rich countries often do poorly, and while those from poor countries often do well. (Poland has about the same child poverty rate as the United States.) Yes, parental involvement counts, but only the right kind -- the evidence suggests that boosterism and brownie-baking actually hurts student performance, while reading to your children is a telling indicator of future success. Yes, children need encouragement and support -- roughly half of Finnish children receive some form of special education at some point in their careers -- but lowering expectations and tracking students does more harm than good. Yes, racial and ethnic diversity is a complication, but Finnish immigrants do at least as well as natives do. (This point is among the least convincing, given the relatively small proportion of Finnish immigrants, and the growing anxiety among natives about schooling their children with them.)

This is a fast, provocative read. And the book's message is optimistic -- really: we can improve. And yet as the government shutdown of 2013 makes clear, American society is suffering from a paralysis of will in the ability of the government to take decisive action in the realm of social welfare. Maybe there will come a day when the work of reform will begin again. If and when it does, Ripley's work may point the way toward progress.

Proposal

In which we see Ms. Bradstreet entertain company -- and an offer

The Maria Chronicles, #47

"Here we go," Jack Casey says, placing a tray with two cups of tea and a pair of scones on the wicker table on Maria's third-floor porch. It's an unaccountably warm day, and they've decided to sit outside. The buds on the trees are barely visible, and so there's still a view of the Hudson from Maria's apartment. This setup has the added advantage of having them sit side by side, rather than face each other. Maria moves her crutches to make it easier for Jack to sit down.

This is his first visit since Maria fell down a flight of stairs at school a month earlier. Jack was actually on the scene minutes after it happened, and has been a unseen powerful presence during her recuperation -- following her to the hospital, getting her car home, having food and flowers delivered. Maria has to admit it's been a shrewd approach, never asking what he can do, or giving her a chance to refuse. Well, maybe it's more accurate to say that Maria has declined to refuse. Her daughter Felicia thanked him on her behalf at the hospital, when she gave him the car keys. But Maria waited until yesterday to thank him by phone, which she realized she simply had to do. She also only thought it fair to invite him over as part of that expression of gratitude. He came bearing boxes of tea and scones that he picked up at the Tom's Bakery, around the corner.

It's turned out to be a pleasant visit. Jack has been alternately tactful, teasing, and curious. Maria realizes that in her desire to assert her independence, she's been so guarded with her children, as well as her best friend Janice, that she's been unable to unburden herself with a source of pain much greater than her ankle: the prospect of losing her job. Though she didn't intend to, she found herself explaining the situation to Jack. Maria recounted the visit of her department chair, Jen Abruzzi, five days earlier, and described the confluence of a teacher returning from leave, declining enrollments, and budget cuts that have imperiled Maria's future. Jack listened intently, nodding throughout. When she was done, he said, "I want to process this for a minute. Can I make us some tea?" And so he did, and so he's back.

"Well, Maria," he now says as he reaches for his mug, "you can't make them keep you. But you could certainly sue the school for a pretty penny."

"Sue them? Over what?"

"Your fall, of course. That's one dangerous staircase, even without that errant potato chip bag you slipped on."

"Jack! I would never!"

"Well, don't be so sure. For one thing, it's not entirely under your control. I can assure you that your health insurance company will be going after the school and that the school has a policy for just this kind of contingency. But you may also be able to net something for yourself. Do you have an attorney?"

"No I do not. And I won't be needing one, either."

"Can you really afford not to, Maria? Especially given this job situation?"

This is where Maria would like to say, "Fuck you, Jack." Instead she says, "I don't think I want to continue this line of discussion." She picks up her own tea, which allows her to cover her mouth.

Jack puts his own mug down and gets up, suddenly restless. He takes a few steps toward the balcony and turns around to face her.

"That's fair enough. I won't press that point. But I do have a proposal for you, Maria."

Oh no, Maria thinks.

"No, not that kind of proposal," he says, laughing as he reads her face. "Really, Maria. Give me a little credit here. No, what I'm talking about is strictly professional. You remember what I was telling you awhile back about my work with some folks down in the mayor's office?"

Maria nods. Jack is apparently deeply involved in the charter schools movement, trying to launch progressive schools using a Ted Sizer approach to challenge the Knowledge-Is-Power model.

"Well, after a couple years of planning, it looks like we're going to get our first charter going this fall. It'll be downtown. We're just getting going on the recruiting end, and I think you'd be a perfect addition. I'm thinking department chair."

"So you're working for the city after all?"

"No, no. Not for pay, anyway. But this is my life now. I've got some connections and the wherewithal to start things, and while I have no official paid role, I do think it's fair to say that I'm a part of this undertaking."

"Which is to say you're helping to underwrite it."

"Well, yes."

"That's great, Jack. But I don't think it would be right for me." Maria put her hand on her knees and looks down. This whole conversation is leaving a bad taste in her mouth.

"Look, Maria. I've long since figured out that you know my story -- the rough outlines of it anyway -- and I know you don't approve of it. That's fine. I'm not going to try to talk you out of your disapproval. But that's not because I feel I can't, but because I don't think there's anything I have to apologize for. Not to you, anyway."

Maria looks up. "Jack, I don't want --"

He holds his hand up to stop her. "Listen to me for a second. I'm not going to tell you that I'm proud of what I did in my years on Wall Street. I'm not. But I didn't do anything illegal, either, regardless of what you may have heard or read. My life since I left, my life since my wife died, has been about the degree to which you can really start over, to what degree you can put your past -- the part you don't like, anyway -- behind you. It's been a fascinating, ongoing experiment. And I'll be honest: I've regarded you as part of that experiment. Not in a clinical way, though it's required some discipline on my part. More as a process of discovery. About myself no less than you."

Maria is looking down again, not sure what to say, or how she feels.

"Anyway, the job is really something you should think about, because you wouldn't be working for me. I'd help you get it, of course, but that's it. I know it isn't ideal, and I wouldn't be bringing it up except for the fact that you're suddenly in this difficult situation with your current job. I wouldn't expect you to say yes right away, or at all. But don't say no now. Think about it and see how things play out at school. You're going back next week?"

"Yes. I probably could have gone back last week, but I wasn't ready to be limping around on crutches and living with the day-to-day ambiguity."

"I don't blame you." Jack looks at his watch. "Well, look, I better get going. Thanks for having me, Maria. I know this hasn't been easy for you. And I know I haven't been easy for you. Weirdly enough, that's kinda why I've kept at it."

"Well you've played your cards pretty well," she says, smiling.

"I am a pretty good card player," he says, picking up the tray and leaving her behind. "The real trick is what you do with your winnings. That's a game I'm still trying to figure out."

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.