Letters to the Editor of School Choices

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Home

Overview

List of Letters to the Editor, by Subject

A Reader's Critique (Part 3)
With a Response from the Author

Andrew,

Thanks for your interesting comments. I'll try to be brief.

First let me admit my error Re: the district consolidation data. You were correct. The data to which I was referring (and recalled in error) had to do with consolidation of actual schools, not districts. The data that I have reviewed re actual school size fit the time period which I identified, after the launch of Sputnik and Conant's crusade for larger high schools. As far as the effect on human beings, I believe this movement to have been far more significant than the district consolidation.

Beyond this there is so much in your note that is ideologically driven and inaccurate that I don't have the interest to respond to it all. Just two points and then I'll retire from this dialogue.

1. You say that "most public school teachers have progressive pedagogical views." This is ridiculous and could only come from an understanding forged by scholarship without experiential confirmation. Go to your local public high school, spend a few days observing the teachers' activities, and tell me how many of them have progressive pedagogical views. BTW this is the same delusion that Hirsch conjures.

Did you attend public schools yourself? If so were most of your teachers "progessive"?

2. Your comments re reading instruction in California continue to show how you don't understand the complexity of real life in schools. You say, "Are you trying to tell me that teachers taught whole language . . . used some other methodology entirely?" Yes, a great many did and do. Most teachers are not ideological, most teachers are not progressive in the way that you use the term, most teachers are pragmatic and synthetic in their methods, and most teachers ignore much or most of what they were taught in their teacher education programs as well as what governors and state boards of education tell them. Once again your conclusions seem to flow from a body of research that ignores the complex phenomenology of what really goes on in schools.

What's biased about your book is that it is evident that your ideology preceded your data. If you truly had an open mind, you would report at least some of the accomplishments of American public schools. But you don't seem to believe that there are any accomplishments. As you wrote to me previously, you believe that if we had had a market system in schools throughout this century, then we would have all of our accomplishments as a culture and much more. This is ideology, not history. What history shows is an enormously flawed system of schooling that also has had a good number of significant accomplishments. What is simplistic about your book is that you don't present a complex, nuanced story. Your argument and conclusions would carry much more weight with me, for example, if I could see that you understood the accomplishments as well as the flaws of our public schools.

Best wishes,

David

--David Marshak

The Author's Reply

Greetings David,

I appreciate your very thoughtful follow-up. Your most interesting point, to me, was that you don't feel I've given the public schools credit for their accomplishments. I'll get to that in a moment, but first wanted to address your other points.

You disagree with my characterization of most public school teachers as progressive. I suspect that we are using slightly different definitions of the term, because I am basing my conclusion on very reliable nationally representative survey data.

The heart of my definition of the term progressive is that progressively-minded teachers see themselves primarily as facilitators in children's self-directed learning rather than as active instructors who convey facts and ideas to students in a structured fashion. A subsidiary characteristic of progressively-minded teachers is that they tend to place less emphasis on building specific academic skills and more on an imprecisely defined holistic, interpersonal, affective sort of development.

As I wrote on pages 140 and 142, there is broad-based statistical evidence that most teachers hold these progressive views. These are not "ridiculous" sources, and they are emphatically empirical.

You wrote,

> Your comments re reading instruction in California continue
> to show how you don't understand the complexity of real life
> in schools. You say, "Are you trying to tell me that teachers
> taught to use whole language ... used some other methodology
> entirely?" Yes, a great many did and do.

I don't recall coming across any evidence of widespread, grass-roots teacher opposition to the move toward of pure whole-language in California in 1987, or widespread rejection of the purely whole-language textbooks and curriculum for the early elementary grades, or widespread resort to non-progressive, structured lessons of the form I refer to above.

There were pockets of resistance, but I did look at a lot of different sources on this and I would be surprised if they all managed to overlook the kind of groundswell of non-progressivism you believe to have existed. This transition was very heavily covered in newspapers from all over the state and in national publications as well. Do you have any kind of broad-based empirical evidence to support your view?

You also wrote,

> most teachers are not progressive in the way that you use
> the term,

As I've already explained, I have reliable and representative evidence to show that they are. You haven't shown me anything similarly representative to contradict my conclusion.

You also said that most teachers are not ideological purists. I agree, but that is not the same as saying that they are unaffected in their views by the progressive pedagogical training they received in colleges of education.

Now, regarding your main point: You think I haven't acknowledged the things public schools have done well, and you believe this is because of bias. In making this criticism, I don't think you are taking into account the criteria on which my overwhelmingly negative coverage is based. "Market Education" is concerned with how well various school systems work compared to one another. Compared to free markets there is almost nothing that public schools have done well. I say almost because, in the case of providing education to low-income families, it's very difficult to say which system is better. Public schools clearly provide much more funding for the education of low-income families, but they are also able to spend $84,000 on 12 years of public schooling and graduate functional illiterates, so the quality of that very expensive education can be extremely poor, and that quality tends to be worst in public schools serving the poor.

Rather than singing the praises of public schooling for providing more funding for mediocre and often poor schooling, I fault free markets for not providing enough funding to low-income families. I consider this fair. Most of the final chapter is dedicated to finding ways to provide low-income families with the funding they need to participate fully in the educational marketplace.

If you can point to some achievement of public schooling that is not historically inferior to the achievements of comparable free educational markets, I would be interested to hear of it.

What you seem to be saying is that public school systems have achieved many things that would not have been achieved if we did not have schools. That is true, but I am not interested in that alternative. I am not proposing that we do away with education. I am interested in how well public schools have done historically compared to free educational markets, and they have consistently done poorly whenever comparisons have been possible. Though no direct comparison has been possible during the last century in the United States, because we have lacked a free and competitive educational market during that time, I have documented in "Market Education" how the historical failings of public schooling have continued to this day in mismanagement, decreasing efficiency and decreasing performance (over the past thirty years), as well as continuing conflict over the curriculum.

So, once again, what are some of the things public schools have historically done better than free markets?

You have to keep in mind that even if I were biased, I'm certainly not dumb. I would love to be able to point to some relative public school successes because these would make my position more palatable to people such as yourself--just as you said. If I could honestly sugar coat my jagged little pill of a conclusion, I would do so. I haven't done so because I simply haven't found the sort of positive accomplishments which you claim exist.

--Best,
Andrew

Buy Xenical Buy Xanax Buy Phentermine mp3 players Buy Phentermine mp3 player Buy Cheap Phentermine Penis Enlargement Cialis Buy Cialis