What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the
community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools
is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.
-- John Dewey, School and Society
Mike McClaren, a superintendent in Oklahoma, was
attracted to the idea of a "performance-based" curriculum: he believed in
specifying his schools' learning outcomes in advance and shifting the
emphasis from memorization to problem solving. This made sense to Mike
King, principal of a nationally recognized middle school in McClaren's
district, who wanted his teachers to have more autonomy and his students
to have more opportunity to learn from one another. Neither man was
pushing for anything too radical; they just thought educators should be a
little less concerned with deciding which students were better than others
and a little more committed to helping all of them succeed.
As it turned out, both men felt obliged to find new
jobs as a result of this agenda, with McClaren jumping before he was
pushed. Key people in the community were unhappy, and three newly elected
board members made sure that the changes -- and the people responsible for
them -- didn't last. Predictably, the most vocal opponents were affiliated
with the Christian Coalition and other ultraconservative groups. But here
is the interesting part: even in small-town Oklahoma, the usual suspects
on the Right could not have done it on their own. Their allies, who by all
accounts gave them the margin of victory they needed to roll back reform
efforts, were individuals who were not particularly conservative or
religious. King describes them as "your upper-class, high-achieving
parents who feel that education is competitive, that there shouldn't be
anyone else in the same class as my child, and we shouldn't spend a whole
lot of time with the have-nots."1
McClaren, who looks back on what happened from his new
post several states away, says he made "two fatal assumptions" when he
started: "I thought if it was good for kids, everyone would embrace it,
and I thought all adults wanted all kids to be successful. That's not
true. The people who receive status from their kids' performing well in
school didn't like that other kids' performance might be raised to the
level of their own kids'."
It is common knowledge that the Christian Right has
opposed all manner of progressive reforms. They may act stealthily to get
themselves installed on school boards, and they may read from identical
scripts in auditoriums across America about how outcome-based education
and whole language will destroy our way of life. But they are ultimately
identifiable, and, once their core beliefs are exposed and their claims
refuted, their impact (at least in many places) can be limited. Far less
attention has been paid to the damage done by people whose positions on
other social issues are more varied and more mainstream -- specifically,
the affluent parents of successful students, those whose political power
is substantial to begin with and whose agenda was summarized by another
educator in that same Oklahoma town: "They are not concerned that all
children learn; they are concerned that their children learn."
There is no national organization called Rich Parents
Against School Reform, in part because there doesn't have to be. But with
unaffiliated individuals working on different issues in different parts of
the country, the pattern is generally missed and the story is rarely told.
Take a step back, however, and you begin to grasp the import of what is
happening from Amherst, Massachusetts, where highly educated white parents
have fought to preserve a tracking system that keeps virtually every child
of color out of advanced classes, to Palo Alto, California, where a
similarly elite constituency demands a return to a "skill and drill" math
curriculum and fiercely opposes the more conceptual learning outlined in
the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standards; from an
affluent suburb of Buffalo, where parents of honors students quashed an
attempt to replace letter grades with standards-based progress reports, to
San Diego, where a program to provide underachieving students with support
that will help them succeed in higher-level courses has run "head on into
vigorous opposition from some of the community's more outspoken,
influential members -- the predominantly white, middle-class parents of
high-achieving students."2
Jeannie Oakes, author of Keeping Track, calls
them "Volvo vigilantes," but that isn't quite accurate -- first, because
they work within, and skillfully use, the law; and second, because many of
them drive Jeeps. They may be pro-choice and avid recyclers, with nothing
good to say about the likes of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh; yet on
educational issues they are, perhaps unwittingly, making common cause
with, and furthering the agenda of, the Far Right.
The controversies in which these parents involve
themselves fall into three clusters, the first of which concerns the
type of instruction that is offered. Here we find a tension
between, on the one hand, traditional methods and practices, geared toward
a classroom that is construed as a collection of discrete individuals,
each of whom is supposed to absorb a body of knowledge and basic skills,
and, on the other hand, an approach distinguished by active discovery and
problem solving by a community of learners.
Second, there is the question of placement, or
which students get what. This category includes debates over such issues
as tracking, ability grouping, gifted-and-talented programs, and honors
courses -- as distinguished from efforts to create more heterogeneous and
inclusive classrooms.
Finally, there are the practices that take place after
(but undeniably affect) the instruction, in which the emphasis is on
selecting and sorting students so only a few are recognized:
awards, letter grades, weighted grades (which give an additional advantage
to those in the selective courses), honor rolls, and class rank -- as
opposed to the absence of these practices and, sometimes, the presence of
an assessment system geared more to enhancing learning than to
distinguishing one student from another. It is the difference between a
bumper sticker that says, "My Child Is an Honor Student at . . ." (with
the understood postscript: "And Yours Isn't") and one that says, "Every
Child Is an Honored Student at . . . ."3
All affluent parents, of course, do not necessarily
line up on the same side of every dispute. With respect to the type of
instruction, anecdotal reports suggest that highly educated, middle-class
parents sometimes support -- or even demand -- an emphasis on higher-order
thinking, a literature-based approach to teaching reading, and the use of
cooperative learning -- at least within homogeneous groups. (After all, as
Syracuse University's Mara Sapon-Shevin observes wryly, some parents
figure, "My kid will have to learn to negotiate with the other Fortune 500
companies.") But just because most parents who support these innovations
are middle-class doesn't mean that most middle-class parents support these
innovations -- just as the fact that a disproportionate number of truly
progressive schools are private doesn't mean that a disproportionate
number of private schools are progressive. The parents who prefer
worksheets and lectures can use their clout to reverse or forestall a move
to more learner-centered classrooms. Moreover, a tolerance for whole
language or cooperative learning often does not extend to the newer
approaches to teaching math, as reformers in Palo Alto and other
California communities are discovering.4
By the same token, resistance to the elimination of
letter grades and awards assemblies is not confined to those who live in
large houses. Parents in some working-class neighborhoods have been
particularly outraged by these proposals, banding together under such
names as PURGE: Parents United to Restore Graded Evaluations.5
Still, the experience of some educators matches that of Bob Gallagher, a
staff development coordinator in the Buffalo area, who reports that the
"parents of kids who were struggling" were pleased by a shift to rubrics
and narrative assessments, while the parents of honors students
"absolutely went crazy" at the prospect of losing traditional letter
grades. Perhaps the reaction can more accurately be predicted by the
status of the student than by the income level of the parent -- although
the significant correlation between these two is itself cause for concern.
If the position of a certain group of parents is not
always clear-cut with respect to teaching and assessing, the battle lines
are sharply drawn when it comes to placement and allocation issues, and
the "gifted parents," as some observers like to call them, know what they
want and how to get it. Sometimes their success is a function of being
able to choose not only classes but schools -- specifically, selective
independent schools or well-funded public schools in affluent suburbs.
American education is so segregated and stratified today that the elite
mingle mostly with one another. Annette Lareau of Temple University wanted
to study a school in Philadelphia whose student population cut across
lines of race and class; she was unable to find a single example. "Who are
the middle-class parents arguing against?" she asks. "I think that's why
you don't see more of these conflicts. Poor kids are generally not in the
same schools."
Pitched battles are more common in integrated schools,
but even here they happen rarely because, in large measure, the affluent
white parents have already won. The plum classes and programs for their
children already exist, as do the letter grades and awards to distinguish
them from those other children. The system serves these parents well, and
their influence is such -- or the fear that they will yank their children
out is sufficient -- that few superintendents (and even fewer school
boards) dare to rock this boat on which first-class cabins are so clearly
delineated from steerage. The reformers eventually get tired -- or
fired.
As Amy Stuart Wells of UCLA sees it, even many liberal
white parents may say, in effect, "We like the fact that our kids are in
desegregated schools, but the fact that the white kids are in the top
classes and the black kids are in the bottom is someone else's problem."
Last fall, U.S. News & World Report published an article
documenting how many "schools that appear integrated from the outside are
highly segregated within. . . . Honors classes are dominated by whites,
regular classes by blacks."6 In response, a liberal New
Republic columnist readily agreed that the honors program in his own
daughter's school in Montgomery County, Maryland, amounted to "a school
within a school" for the white and Asian students -- and then announced
that if this program were eliminated, he would pull his daughter out of
that school "in a nanosecond."
What is interesting about this exchange is that the
U.S. News reporter had pretty much taken for granted the existence
of tracking and seemed concerned only about the racial make-up of each
track: the possibility of heterogeneous classrooms was not even raised
until the very end of the article, and then it was immediately dismissed.
Yet the liberal columnist served notice in a national magazine that any
attempt to create a fairer system would be an invitation to white flight,
something in which he would unapologetically participate. Most affluent
parents send this message more quietly and locally, of course, but it
reverberates through the offices of administrators and effectively
discourages meaningful change.
Or consider two essays published independently in
1996. The first, in the American Educational Research Journal,
describes a series of interviews with "educated, middle-class mothers,
perceived by others as well as themselves as liberals who believe in
integrated and inclusive education." In the course of conversation, these
women pronounced themselves committed to equity and tolerance but then
proceeded (under questioning) to become far more passionate in dismissing
these very ideals when it came to the advantages they thought their own
children should receive. The self-described liberals tended to "support
segregated and stratified school structures that mainly benefit students
of the middle class," the researchers discovered.8
The second article, published in the Harvard
Educational Review, contains a very serious charge leveled by Wells
and her colleague Irene Serna: tracking, advanced placement (AP) courses,
and gifted programs do not provide differential instruction for legitimate
pedagogical reasons -- or allow for a system based on merit -- so much as
they represent a naked grab for artificially scarce benefits by those who
have the power to get them.9
Think scientifically for a moment about how this
disturbing hypothesis might be tested. If it were accurate, the
beneficiaries of these educational advantages would "be more concerned
about the labels placed on their children than about what actually goes on
in the classroom."10 And indeed, there is reason to think that
this is frequently true. To begin with, AP classes at the high school
level are usually difficult but often poorly taught, with an emphasis on
short-term memorization of facts presented in lectures and textbooks -- in
effect, one long test-prep session. Yet many parents seem to care a lot
more about who is in these classes (namely, their own children and a few
others who look like them) than about how they are taught.
Granted, it is hard to deny the superiority of the
instruction in gifted-and-talented programs and some other honors or
high-track classes, what with hands-on learning, student-designed
projects, computers, field trips, and other enrichments. But research
generally shows that it is precisely those enrichments that produce better
results rather than the fact that they are accorded only to a select few.
What happens in those classes is more decisive than the fact that they are
homogeneous.11 So if parents of those students were concerned
about the quality of learning, they would have no reason to object to
extending those benefits to everyone.
But object they do. Wells and Oakes have been studying
the experience of 10 schools across the country that are trying to ease
away from tracking. Many of these schools have taken the advice of Anne
Wheelock, who urged educators to help parents of top-tracked students
understand that "inclusive schooling offers all students the type of
education usually reserved for gifted and talented students."12
The detracking in these 10 schools was carefully planned to bring other
students up to a high level, but not to take anything away from the
privileged children. Yet the reaction from the parents of the latter
students has been powerfully negative -- often fatal for the reform
efforts. These parents have pressured educators "to maintain separate and
unequal classes for their children, . . . [demanding] to know what their
children will 'get' that other student will not have access to.
"13
This is essentially what happened in San Diego, where
an attempt to give a leg up to lower-tracked students was, as Elizabeth
Cohen of Stanford University puts it, "the kind of project that you'd
think wouldn't bother upper-status parents at all. Wrong! They said, 'What
are you going to do special for my kid?'" This posture, she adds, goes
beyond a simple and commendable desire to do everything possible for one's
own children. "When parents tell me they're terribly anxious about their
kids getting ahead, I'm sympathetic. Everyone wants the best for their
kids. But when it extends to sabotaging programs that are designed to help
people, I have to draw the line."
Notice what is going on here. It isn't just that these
parents are ignoring everyone else's children, focusing their
efforts solely on giving their own children the most desirable education.
Rather, they are in effect sacrificing other children to their own.
It's not about success but victory, not about responding to a competitive
environment but creating one. As Harvey Daniels of National Louis
University sees it, "The psychology of those parents is that it's not
enough for their kids to win: others must lose -- and they must lose
conspicuously."
This explains much of the frustration experienced by
educators who insist that narratives or portfolios are far more
informative about students' learning than letter grades are, or who cite
evidence to show that focusing students' attention on getting A's tends to
reduce their interest in the learning itself.14 These arguments
will only persuade someone who is looking for more information about his
or her child's improvement or someone who is concerned about sustaining
the child's interest. If, however, the point is not for assessment to be
authentic but for it to serve as a sorting device, to show not how well
the student is doing but how much better he or she is doing than others,
then A's will always be necessary -- and it will always be necessary for
some people's children not to get them. It will be necessary not only to
rate children but to rank them, to give out not only report cards but
trophies and plaques and certificates and membership in elite societies,
all of which are made artificially scarce.
This agenda is arguably anti-child, but should that
surprise us? We live in a culture that is remarkably unfriendly toward
children in general; a "good" child is one who doesn't cause us any
trouble. Even when politicians and businesspeople demand "world-class"
schools, they usually mean those that produce high test scores, and their
reasons evidently don't have much to do with meeting the children's own
needs. As for material possessions, it is true that
some parents -- those
who have enough income -- spend lavishly on their children, generating the
notion that we are a child-centered society. But public spending for
children is often meager and always surrounded by contention, and it
embodies the peculiar conception that children are not valuable as persons
in their own right but only for the adults they will grow up to be. . . .
The saccharine myth [that] . . . children are [America's] most precious
natural resources has in practice been falsified by our hostility to other
people's children and our unwillingness to support them.15
The problem does not rest solely with our attitude
toward children, however, but also with our attenuated sense of community.
Our culture is distinguished by an ethic of individualism as well as a
tendency to collapse all human interaction and most matters of public
policy into economic laws. Vouchers and school choice plans effectively
say to parents, "Never mind about what's best for kids; just shop for the
school that's best for your kids." It's not a community; it's a
market -- so why would we expect things to be any different inside the
school? How much commitment to inclusive education can we expect in an
exclusive society? Sadly, when parents (and, shamefully, some educators)
go to great lengths to erect walls between the "gifted" and the ordinary,
another generation is raised without a commitment to the values of
community, and the vicious circle closes in.16
Beyond attitudes toward children and community, there
is the question of how we view education itself. In a new book titled
How to Succeed in School Without Really Learning, David Labaree of
Michigan State University argues that schooling these days is not seen as
a way to create democratic citizens or even capable workers, but serves
more as a credentialing mechanism. "The purpose of education from this
angle is not what it can do for democracy or the economy but what it can
do for me," and this shift turns our school systems into "a vast public
subsidy for private ambition." One implication of such a transformation is
that education becomes "an arena for zero-sum competition filled with
self-interested actors seeking opportunities for gaining educational
distinctions at the expense of each other" -- precisely what we've seen
affluent parents doing so relentlessly and so well.
Labaree incisively demonstrates another implication of
viewing education this way, which is that the quality of learning itself
is likely to decline. "We have credentialism to thank for the aversion to
learning that, to a great extent, lies at the heart of our educational
system," he observes. While the pages of journals like this one are
brimming with suggestions for how to make schools more effective, the
impact of these ideas is perforce limited if making schools more effective
is really beside the point for most Americans. The point is not to get an
education but to get ahead -- and therefore, from the student/consumer's
point of view, "to gain the highest grade with the minimum amount of
learning." In fact, efforts to help all students succeed, or to place more
emphasis on teaching and less on sorting, would be not merely irrelevant
but utterly contrary to the individualistic, competitive credentialing
model of school -- and so such efforts would be bitterly contested by
those with the best chances of getting the shiniest credentials.
It is elite parents [who] see the most to gain from
the special distinctions offered by a stratified educational system, and
they are therefore the ones who play the game of academic one-upmanship
most aggressively. . . . They vigorously resist when educators (pursuing a
more egalitarian vision) propose to eliminate some form of within-school
distinction or another -- by promoting multiability reading groups, for
example, ending curriculum tracking, or dropping a program for the
gifted.17
No wonder a somewhat disillusioned Anne Wheelock now
muses that "all the research in the world" about the positive effects of
detracking or abolishing letter grades "doesn't persuade these folks." No
wonder such parents are more likely to ask, "How is my child doing
compared to everyone else?" than to inquire about how effectively that
child is learning. To paraphrase a popular song, What's learning got to do
with it?
It is through this lens that we might regard the
demand in some affluent communities for a transmission-based, "bunch
o'facts" curriculum. Why, asks James Beane, an expert on the subject,
would there be opposition to the contextual learning and cooperative
inquiry entailed by a reform such as curriculum integration, which "seems
to offer greater access to knowledge for more young people . . . [and]
encourages multiple routes to knowledge and multiple ways of demonstrating
it"? The question contains its own answer: if "young people who have
traditionally monopolized 'success' in the classroom are likely to find
themselves joined in success by more of their peers," this can be
"profoundly upsetting to some of their parents whose ambitions for their
children include being at the top of the class in school and getting into
elite colleges." What's more, vocal concern about the effects of
innovative teaching on standardized test scores may reflect "not a concern
about their own children's continued success but about the possibility
that their monopoly on success will be
threatened."18
So, too, for the organized, sometimes virulent,
opposition to the NCTM math standards among highly educated parents. In
Stanford University's backyard, a group calling itself HOLD (Honest Open
Logical Debate) has lobbied since late 1994 for a continuation of (or
return to) the kind of mathematics that stresses direct instruction,
standard textbooks, and drills to teach basic computational skills. The
highly educated and mostly well-to-do members of this group have used the
Internet as well as their political connections and media savvy to
persuade California officials to retreat from the state's new math
standards, which had emphasized conceptual understanding, open-ended
problems, and student communication about mathematical principles. Indeed,
HOLD has gotten some of its members appointed to statewide commissions,
and the implications are enormous for the adoption of curriculum materials
in California and beyond.19
Of course, reasonable people can disagree about the
best way to teach math and other subjects, but more than one observer of
the "math wars" has wondered whether we are witnessing a debate over
pedagogy or about something else entirely. Are parents really trying to
deny that encouraging students to figure out together what lies behind an
algebraic formula is more valuable than getting them to memorize
algorithms or slog through endless problem sets? Do they seriously doubt
that such an approach is better preparation for higher math in college? Or
does parental opposition really just reflect the fear that more
sophisticated math instruction might be less useful for boosting SAT
scores and therefore for getting students into the most elite colleges?
Math reformers who counterpose merely doing arithmetic with really
understanding (and being able to apply) mathematical principles may be
missing the more pertinent contrast, which is between doing what is best
for learning and doing what is best for getting my child into the Ivy
League.
This trade-off raises the intriguing possibility that
the exertions of the moms and dads of top students may exact a price not
only from other children but also from their own. Consider those parents
who essentially mortgage their children's present to the future,
sacrificing what might bring meaning or enjoyment -- or even produce
higher-quality learning -- in a ceaseless effort to prepare the children
for Harvard (a process I have come to call "Preparation H"). This bottom
line is never far from the minds of such parents, who weigh every decision
about what their children do in school, or even after school, against the
yardstick of what it might contribute to future success. They are not
raising a child so much as living résumé. As repellent as we might find
the corporate groups and politicians who regard education -- and even
children themselves -- as little more than an "investment," these parents
are doing the dirty work implied by this reductive world view, and they
are doing it to their own children.
Before long, the children internalize this quest and
come to see their childhood as one long period of getting ready: they sign
up for activities that might impress an admissions committee, ignoring
(perhaps eventually losing sight of) what they personally find interesting
in the here and now. They ask teachers, "Do we need to know this?" and
grimly try to squeeze out another few points to bolster their grade-point
averages (GPAs) or SAT scores. What they don't know, for their parents
surely will not tell them, is that this straining toward the future, this
poisonous assumption that the value of everything is solely a function of
its contribution to something that might come later, will continue right
through college, right through professional school, right through the
early stages of a career, until at last they wake up in a tastefully
appointed bedroom to discover that their lives are mostly gone.
And those are just the successful students.
These parents, then, could be described as having
sacrificed other children to their own, and also their own children's
present to the imagined future. But there is a third sacrifice, too, and,
like the second, it does their own children no favor: moral, social,
artistic, emotional, and other forms of development are often jettisoned
in favor of a narrow academic agenda. (Academics, of course, may simply be
a stand-in for the ultimate goal of material success.) By ruling out a
heterogeneous classroom on the grounds that it might slow down their
precocious child's race to acquire more advanced math or reading skills,
they ignore what he or she loses in other respects. By insisting that
students be graded and then ranked against one another -- or forced to
compete for various awards -- they deprive their children of the richer
rewards to be gained from attending a school that feels like a caring
community.
What Garrison Keillor said about school choice
proposals could easily be applied to ability grouping and gifted programs:
they seem to make sense "until you stop and think about the old idea of
the public school, a place where you went to find out who inhabits this
society other than people like you."20 The experiences of
students who have to struggle for what they have, who take so much less
for granted, are not just valid but valuable for their privileged peers to
hear. The latter get less than a full education, arguably become less than
fully human, when they are segregated for the purposes of purely academic
acceleration.21
Here, then, we have parents evincing what Nel Noddings
calls a "mean-spirited attitude that they want their kids to have the
best, and the heck with the other kids" -- and, in the process, actually
doing a disservice to their own children. How can we make sense of this?
The reasons are multiple, some simple and some complex, some based on
judgments most of us would regard as reasonable and some simply abhorrent.
The balance is different from one parent to the next and from one issue to
the next, but clearly there are several identifiable factors at
work.
For starters, it must be conceded that some parents
are genuinely worried about the extent to which their children are
learning, or would be learning, in a heterogeneous classroom. They are
afraid that the curriculum might be "dumbed down," resulting in boredom
and lack of appropriate challenge for their own children. In some places,
there is legitimate reason for concern, but as a rule too much attention
is paid to the difficulty level of what is being taught, the simplistic
assumption being that harder is better. To judge what goes on in a
classroom on the basis of how difficult the tasks are is rather like
judging an opera on the basis of how many notes it contains that are
challenging for the singers to hit.
The truth is that, if tests or homework assignments
consist of factual recall questions, it doesn't make all that much
difference whether there are 25 tough questions or 10 easy ones. A basal
does not become a more appropriate teaching tool just because it is
intended for a higher grade level. Boredom may reflect a problem with the
method of instruction (and the underlying theory of learning) rather than
with the speed or difficulty with which a lesson is taught. To insist on
homogeneity, then, would fail to address what is really wrong with many
classrooms, which is not that certain students can complete the worksheets
without breaking a sweat but that the teacher is relying on worksheets at
all.
The flip side of this is that heterogeneity may be
fairer but does not in itself constitute a prescription for effective
teaching. In fact, heterogeneity is hard to do well. But the parents of
high-scoring students ought to be providing support and respectful
pressure for educators to do it better, rather than simply opting out of
regular classrooms. "We remove the squeaky wheel, so we never repair the
car," remarks Mara Sapon-Shevin. "We need fundamental changes in how we
construct pedagogy and curriculum. If we continue to do segregation" --
including segregation of the so-called gifted and talented, whom she
prefers to designate as the rich and lucky -- "we'll never get
there."
Some parents are concerned less about the classroom
than about their children's future, and this, too, cannot be written off.
Yes, we live in a compulsively competitive culture; yes, the most
selective colleges by definition accept only a small proportion of those
who would like to attend; and yes, even the upper middle class has begun
to grow uneasy now that they, too, may be the victims of mass firings
(euphemistically called "downsizing"). "In a way you can't blame them,"
says Amy Stuart Wells of these parents. "It's a larger systemic issue in
how we define intelligence and merit, how we push competition for the few
spots at the top of the hierarchy."
And yet we find many people exaggerating the extent of
competition around them, reproducing and exacerbating it by what they do
to their children and their children's schools, overlooking the costs of
pushing youngsters to become winners, and becoming part of the "them" to
which other individuals will then point to justify their own unsavory
behavior. Harvey Daniels suggests that we take a closer look at the
explanations offered by people of privilege: "Do they really feel that
unless their kid accumulates a bevy of awards, he or she is going to
starve? Usually, these kids are going to be fine; they don't have anything
to worry about" -- except, perhaps, whether they attend a very elite
college or only a somewhat elite college. Decades ago, Bertrand Russell
pointed out that what is often meant by talk of "the struggle for life is
really the struggle for [competitive] success. What people fear when they
engage in the struggle is not that they" -- or their children -- "will
fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to
outshine their neighbors."22
Alongside concern for the success of one's children we
sometimes find a sticky attachment to the status quo. Larry Militello, a
principal in Williamsville, New York, put it succinctly: "Parents say,
'Look I live in this $600,000 house. I was successful with the system you
currently have. Why do we have to look at anything different?' " The twin
premises of this argument, of course, are equally ripe for challenge: that
the most important kind of success in life can be measured in terms of
real estate and that their own success occurred because of a system
that includes letter grades, separate tracks, memorizing the
multiplication table in third grade, and so on.
We find a different version of this same resistance
when parents assert that the old system is still working -- for
their children. Why would someone whose daughter is in the top 5% of her
class agree to stop ranking students? Here, says Deborah Meier, is the
dilemma faced by the Coalition for Essential Schools: the elite students
are getting a school-within-a-school with small classes and plenty of
attention, so "why should you be for change when your kids are benefiting
from exactly what we say is wrong with high schools?" More generally,
Glenn Kleiman, a senior scientist at the Education Development Center in
Newton, Massachusetts, reports that when educators from around the country
are gathered at a seminar, those from "suburban districts have the hardest
time making changes. They get the feedback that our kids are doing well;
they're getting into the best colleges. . . . It ain't broke; why change
it?"
The answer is that the system is quite clearly broken
for most students -- those who are not among the elect. And even with
respect to those at the top, one has only to look past the infatuation
with credentials to see the necessity for change: if students can read but
don't, if they fail to think deeply or to take satisfaction from playing
with ideas, if they are primarily concerned with what is going to be on
the test, then something is drastically wrong with the status quo.
Ignorance of those harms, obliviousness to the tradeoff between
credentials and learning, a simple lack of awareness about what (and who)
is being sacrificed when a school is rigidly tracked and how even the
winners ultimately lose as a result of competition23 -- these
are probably the most charitable explanations for why some people fight
reform. They just don't get it. But we cannot discount, at least in some
instances, the presence of more malign motives. One is racism (or its
twin, classism). This is no less a factor just because it is not splayed
out on the surface with ugly, disparaging epithets, as Wells and Oakes
explain:
Unlike the more blatantly racist parents of an earlier
generation, who resisted school desegregation policies because they did not
want their children in schools with 'colored' children, [today's]
influential parents are more subtle and savvy in their resistance to
detracking efforts that lead to desegregation within schools. They couch
their opposition to detracking mainly in terms of the low-track students'
"behavior" -- lack of motivation to learn, lack of commitment to school or
interest in higher education, tendency to act out, and so forth --
without making the connection between these behaviors and the low-track
students' 'penetration' of an unequal and hierarchical system in which
they are at the bottom.24
From personal experience, Hugh Mehan, a sociologist
who has worked in the schools of San Diego, can tell you what racism
sounds like in the Nineties: "Bringing those lower-achieving students into
the classroom is going to water down things for my children. They're not
going to be able to keep up, and the teachers are going to have to slow
things down." (Interestingly, a parent who dismisses the capabilities of
"those" students may persist in the belief that white, middle-class
children are smart -- and therefore deserving of special treatment -- even
when their record of school achievement is not especially
high.)25
Finally, our search for reasons must include simple
selfishness, which sometimes accounts for both the callous disregard for
other people's children and, in the final analysis, what many affluent
parents are doing to their own. Social psychologists call it BIRG: basking
in reflected glory. "We didn't realize they had so much emotionally
invested in the concept that they were the parents of the 'good'
students," recalls Bob Gallagher from Buffalo. "Not to have the bumper
sticker to put on their car was more important to some parents than the
learning that was going on in the classroom."
Daniels has seen this, too: "When you meet these
people for the first time, they manage to insert into the conversation in
the first two minutes the fact that their kid is in some kind of gifted
program. It's not about the kid -- it's about them, their egos, their
bragging rights." The child's needs and point of view often play little
role in decisions that are made by, as well as for, the parents. Indeed,
"some of these kids live in constant fear of letting their parents down,"
observes Lilian Katz, an authority on early childhood education -- and
that may continue well after the high school valedictory address has been
delivered.
A list of explanations for the actions of these
parents, then, would include a simple desire to do what is best for one's
children and a preoccupation with what is most flattering to oneself, as
well as anxiety about anything unfamiliar, prejudice about those children
who aren't like us, and simple lack of knowledge. It isn't clear which of
these is a deliberate rationale for fighting change, which is an
unconscious determinant, and which is simply a consequence of the others.
It's not even obvious whether the whole picture is getting brighter or
darker over time. Meier sees a disturbing trend: "Fifteen years ago people
who were for tracking were on the defensive. Now it's right out in the
open in the middle of the West side [of New York City]. There was a
certain noblesse oblige that these parents used to have. Now a
green light has been given to greed and self-centeredness."
Similarly discouraging is the fact that efforts to get
rid of letter grades have been going on for decades, with some of the most
eloquent articles and persuasive research reports on the subject having
been published more than half a century ago.26 Those districts
that have managed to replace letter and number ratings with narrative
assessments, portfolios, and the like may find, as one assessment
specialist in Kentucky describes it, that some parents "come to the
[parent/teacher] conferences and love everything they get. And then, at
the very end, they kind of lean over and whisper, 'But if you were
going to give a letter grade, what letter grade would you give my child?'
" Perhaps this is good news, though, she adds: "At least they whisper now!
. . . They are learning to do without grades, although they would still
like them. Maybe in a few years they won't even whisper; they just won't
ask."27
To get to that point -- and to a comparable point with
respect to other kinds of school reform -- will require educators to
understand the depth and strength of the resistance posed by affluent
parents of high-achieving students. And it will require some or all of the
following measures.
Appealing to fairness. We need to invite people
to live up to their own best ideals, to impress upon them the moral
implications of these policies, and to help them understand that it's not
just other children but the very prospects for a democratic society that
are at risk from tracking and other practices.28
Focusing on broad, long term goals for their
children. It's easy to get caught up with short-term issues such as
grades, or to collapse all long-term discussions into such questions as
college admission. But ask parents what they really want for their
children over time, how they'd like their youngsters to turn out, and it's
very rare, in my experience, to hear about Harvard or six-figure salaries.
As I often do when speaking to such groups, I asked the parents of
students at an elite independent school in Texas not long ago what their
long-term goals were for their children. Here is the list that resulted:
happy, balanced, independent, fulfilled, productive, self-reliant,
responsible, functioning, kind, thoughtful, loving, inquisitive, and
confident. A week later I asked the same question of another large
audience of parents, this time in an affluent Minneapolis suburb. The
answers were almost identical.
The reformer's job, then, is to help parents see that
favored educational practices -- from drill-and-skill teaching techniques
to letter grades to awards assemblies -- are actively impeding the
realization of the very goals that they themselves say they
want.29 A number of parents (and educators, for that matter)
may never have thought about the difference between seeing school as a
place for learning and seeing it as a place for accumulating credentials.
Provoking reflection about the ways these views pull in opposite
directions may help parents reevaluate their positions.
Distinguishing between legitimate and illegitimate
requests and then responding to the former. If parents want to make
sure their children are challenged and engaged by what they are learning,
it is natural for them to be leery of any reform that might jeopardize
that -- an entirely legitimate concern. But wanting to make sure that
only their children, or an arbitrarily limited group of similar
children, receive the best possible education is not legitimate and should
not be honored.
By the same token, if grades offer the only window
through which parents can get a sense of how their children are doing at
school, it is perfectly understandable that they would be nervous at the
prospect of eliminating these grades. The educator's job is to show how
various forms of authentic assessment can meet their legitimate need for
information even more effectively than letter grades can. (In fact, it is
hard to imagine something less informative about how well their
children are learning than "B.")
But I believe that "How much better is my child doing
than the other kids in class?" is not a legitimate question, and the
educator's job is to explain why this is so rather than creating a system
of ranking (or norm-referenced testing) designed to answer it, thereby
doing a real disservice to all children. An elementary school teacher near
Kansas City says she responds to this parental question by confiding, "You
know, your child is the best in the class!" Then, after a pause, she
muses, "Of course, this is the dumbest class I've ever had. . . ." Apart
from its wit, her answer nicely points up just how useless norm-referenced
evaluations really are.
Offering information. Our job is not limited to
educating students; sometimes we are called upon to educate parents and
others in the community. Of course, we can also learn from them, and we
must be respectful of their concerns and beliefs; finding a balance here
is an art and sometimes an agony. But if we know from experience how
children of different backgrounds (including the child whose parents brag
that he was reading at age 4) thrive when they can learn from one another
in a cooperative classroom, if we have witnessed how children both
understand and enjoy math better when they are tackling real-life problems
than when they are staring at a ditto full of naked numbers, if we realize
why it makes sense for children to write even before they can spell, then
we need to share our experiences with parents.
Likewise, some parents will be relieved that
detracking doesn't mean "teaching to the middle" -- but they have to be
made aware of this. Parents deserve to know that plenty of elementary
schools give no letter or number grades at all without jeopardizing their
students' eventual high school performance or chances for college
admission. (Indeed, a few high schools, too, have done without grades --
and even more have abolished class ranks -- while continuing to place
their graduates in the most selective universities.30 For that
matter, some children gain admission to these universities without ever
having set foot in a school.)
In fact, rather than abandon reforms designed to make
school more equitable or learning more meaningful just because parents
express concern about the impact on their children's future, educators can
help these parents look more carefully at the chain of associations that
are usually taken for granted. College admissions officers are not
97-year-old fuddy-duddies peering over their spectacles in horror at an
unconventional application: they are more likely to be recent graduates
praying to be saved from another earnest 3.7 GPA, student council vice
president, flute-playing tennis star from the 'burbs. Apart from the
flexibility about grades, at least 280 four-year colleges are now making
the SAT and the ACT optional.31
Parents also might be invited to question the premise
that admission to a top-ranked college is necessary or sufficient for
success in life; people without the usual credentials (but possessed of
determination and genuine love for what they are doing) often flourish,
and people with superlative credentials may be summarily sacked.
Individuals representing each of these categories ought to be invited to
speak to students and parents -- possibly in place of the usual lectures
offering tips on how to polish a transcript. It might also be useful to
hear from well-to-do, educated parents who have had an experience that
changed their frame of reference: perhaps their children wound up in a
heterogeneous classroom, or in a nearby school that feels like a caring
community rather than a nonstop rat race, and they came to realize how
much better off their children were there. (The real epiphanies, according
to education consultant Willard Daggett, come to those parents who
discover that one of their children is disabled.)
Organizing the less-powerful parents. Rather
than directly oppose the parents who demand the preservation of programs
that benefit only their own children, Jeannie Oakes advises educators to
reach out to all the other parents, to "build community advocacy for an
equity agenda" so that school board members, administrators, and
politicians hear from everyone with an interest in the issue, instead of
just from the elite.
At the very least, people typically lacking in wealth,
self-confidence, or political savvy can be provided with the skills to be
more effective advocates for themselves and their children.32
Ultimately, though, we want not only to have more parents demanding that
their own children get more resources, but to build a constituency for a
fairer, more effective sort of schooling for all children.
Respecting a moral bottom line. Educators
should do all they can to bring parents aboard, to persuade and inform and
organize, but in the final analysis there are some principles that have to
be affirmed and some practices that cannot be tolerated. As one Maryland
educator put it, "We're not in the business of educating one group of
students. As professionals we're responsible for educating everyone, and
there are things that we must not do. That's a moral and professional
issue."33
NOTES
1. All unattributed quotations in this article are derived from personal communications.
2. Daniel Gursky, "On the Wrong Track," Teacher
Magazine, May 1990, p. 43. The program, Advancement Via Individual
Determination (AVID), continues to generate opposition from these quarters
to this day.
3. Something similar to the latter slogan is actually
used by the Friends School of Atlanta and other Friends schools around the
country, as well as by the Drew Model School in Arlington,
Virginia.
4. Joseph Kahne, assistant professor of educational
policy at the University of Illinois, Chicago, attributes this disparity
to several factors. First, there is a single right answer to most math
problems, and parents may fear that their children won't know it,
particularly when they sit down to take a standardized test. "They aren't
nervous about whole language because they know their kids will be reading;
their literacy skills aren't threatened." Moreover, these parents are
already familiar with reading for understanding; in their own lives, they
don't underline the topic sentence or circle the vowels. The more
sophisticated approaches to mathematics, by contrast, are utterly alien to
most adults, and few people will enthusiastically support -- or even
permit -- a move from something comfortably familiar to something they
don't really understand.
5. This particular group was formed in Silver Creek,
New York.
6. Julian E. Barnes, "Segregation, Now," U.S. News
& World Report, 22 September 1997, p. 24.
7. John B. Judis, "Honor Code," New Republic,
20 October 1997, pp. 4, 45.
8. See Ellen Brantlinger, Massoumeh Majd-Jabbari, and
Samuel L. Guskin, "Self-Interest and Liberal Educational Discourse: How
Ideology Works for Middle-Class Mothers," American Educational Research
Journal, vol. 33, 1996, pp. 571-97. The quotations appear on page
590.
9. See Amy Stuart Wells and Irene Serna, "The Politics
of Culture: Understanding Local Political Resistance to Detracking in
Racially Mixed Schools," Harvard Educational Review, vol. 66, 1996,
pp. 93-118.
10. Ibid., p. 103.
11. "When advantages to students in the high-ability
tracks do accrue" -- and even this result is not always found -- "they do
not seem to be primarily related to the fact that these tracks are
homogeneously grouped. For example, controlled studies of students taking
similar subjects in heterogeneous and homogeneous groups show that
high-ability students (like other students) rarely benefit from these
tracked settings." See Jeannie Oakes, "Tracking in Secondary Schools," in
Robert E. Slavin, ed., School and Classroom Organization
(Hillsdale, NJ.: Erlbaum, 1989). Slavin's own work, in addition to the
research Oakes goes on to cite, is pertinent here.
12. Anne Wheelock, "Winning Over Gifted Parents,"
School Administrator, April 1995, p. 17. See also Wheelock's
Crossing the Tracks: How "Untracking" Can Save America's Schools
(New York: New Press, 1992).
13. Amy Stuart Wells and Jeannie Oakes, "Potential
Pitfalls of Systemic Reform: Early Lessons from Research on Detracking,"
Sociology of Education, vol. 69, special issue, p. 138.
14. On the latter point, see Alfie Kohn, Punished
by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise, and
Other Bribes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993).
15 W. Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, Broken
Promises: How Americans Fail Their Children (New York: Basic, 1982),
pp. 56, 85. Kids These Days: What Americans Really Think About the Next
Generation, a report released by Public Agenda in June 1997, found "a
stunning level of antagonism not just toward teenagers but toward young
children as well," according to a news story in the New York Times,
26 June 1997, p. A-25.
16. See, for example, Mara Sapon-Shevin, Playing
Favorites: Gifted Education and the Disruption of Community (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1994).
17. See David F. Labaree, How to Succeed in School
Without Really Learning: The Credentials Race in American Education
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). The first chapter, which
contains the heart of the argument, was also published as "Public Goods,
Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals," American
Educational Research Journal, vol. 34, 1997, pp. 39-81. The quotations
used here are taken from pages 30, 32, 258, and 259 of the book and, in
one case, from Labaree's article "Are Students Consumers?; The Rise of
Public Education as a Private Good," Education Week, 17 September
1997, pp. 48, 38.
18. James A. Beane, Curriculum Integration:
Designing the Core of Democratic Education (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1997), p. 79.
19. See, for example, Allyn Jackson's two-part
article, "The Math Wars: California Battles It Out over Mathematics
Education," Notices of the AMS (American Mathematics Society),
June/July and August 1997.
20. Garrison Keillor, "The Future of Nostalgia,"
New York Times Magazine, 29 September 1996, p. 68.
21. Educational researchers, of course, tend to share
this bias, evaluating the effects of ability grouping, class size, and any
number of other variables mostly in terms of their impact on academic
achievement -- and, indeed, mostly in terms of their impact on
standardized test scores.
22. Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness
(New York: Horace Liveright, 1930), p. 45.
23. For more on the pervasive and inherent harms of
competition, see Alfie Kohn, No Contest: The Case Against
Competition, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Miffliin, 1992).
24. Wells and Oakes, pp. 138-39. Indeed, "advanced and
gifted programs began to appear and proliferate at the same time that the
schools in these districts were becoming more racially mixed," according
to Wells and Serna, p. 108.
25. See Brantlinger, Majd-Jabbari, and Guskin, p.
585.
26. "If I were asked to enumerate ten educational
stupidities, the giving of grades would head the list. . . 'But it's a
competitive world!' I am told again and again. Certainly it is, and a very
messy one I should say. Look around. And I should add, 'It was also once a
disease-ridden world and we are curing it.' . . . If I can't give a child
a better reason for studying than a grade on a report card, I ought to
lock my desk and go home and stay there." That was written by Dorothy De
Zouche in "The Wound Is Mortal: Marks, Honors, Unsound Activities,"
published in The Clearing House -- in February 1945. Plus ça
change, plus c'est la même merde.
27. The comments of Merry Denny are quoted in Joan
Gaustad, Assessment and Evaluation in the Multiage Classroom, a
special issue of the Oregon School Study Council Bulletin, vol. 39,
nos. 3 and 4, February 1996, p. 51.
28. See Joseph Kahne, "Democratic Communities, Equity,
and Excellence: A Deweyan Reframing of Educational Policy Analysis,"
Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol. 16, 1994, pp.
233-48. Nel Noddings points out one difficulty with an appeal to fairness:
many privileged parents insist that the present arrangement is
fair, arguing that "if other parents would work as hard as I do, then
their kids would do fine. They just have to pull up their socks and get
with it."
29. I suppose it is possible that some of these
parents are being dishonest, that they actually are less concerned about
their children's ethics and happiness than about their wealth. But it is
more respectful to take the parents at their word and more effective to
hold them to their own rhetoric.
30. For example, the Carolina Friends School in
Durham, N.C.; the Poughkeepsie Day School in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.; the
Waring School in Beverly, Mass.; Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, N.Y.; the School
Without Walls in Rochester, NY; and
the Metropolitan Learning Center in Portland, Ore., give no letter or
number grades at all.
31. See "ACT/SAT Optional Colleges List Soars to 280,"
FairTest Examiner, Summer 1997, p. 5. For a copy of the list, send
a self-addressed stamped envelope to FairTest, 342 Broadway, Cambridge, MA
02139, or download it from www.fairtest.org/optional.htm
32. The Right Question Project, for example, trains
facilitators to help parents ask four questions: What is my child learning?
What does my child need to learn? Is the teacher teaching what my child
needs to learn? If not, what can I do? For information, contact the
Project at 218 Holland St., Somerville, MA 02144.
33. Jake Burks, quoted in Wheelock, Crossing the
Tracks, p. 76.