Letters to the Editor of School Choices

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A Reader's Critique (Part 5)
With a Response from the Author

Andrew,

Despite all of the complexities of your comments and all of your definitional hairsplitting about what you think "progressive" is or is not (which I continue to find ironic given your apparent lack of any experiential basis for your many judgments and discriminations) I still don't think you get it.

We have never had "child centered" or "progressive" education as a norm in American public schools. You can point to all the attitudinal data you want, but the structural and cultural norms have been relentlessly traditional. As I said before, Dewey lost the culture war. So did Kozol and Kohl et al.

Where we have had long-standing "child centered" or "progressive" education over generations has been in expensive private schools such as the Dalton School in New York or the Bush School in Seattle or many others like them. Why is it, do you think, that so many members of privileged classes have chosen "progressive education" for their own children while advocating traditional schooling for the chidlren of the working and middle classes?

I agree with much of your critique of public schools, particularly in relation to the poor and children of color. And I also believe that we would be much better served if parents could choose from a variety of different kinds of public schools, schools which offered genuine choice based on ideological/pedagogical/curricular diversity. Let parents who want DISTAR have DISTAR, let parents who want project-based learning have it, and so on.

I think the comparison between public schools and private schools in our society is much more complex and inconsistent than your argument allows. Here's one example, since you asked for specifics. Once the Ivy League schools and Stanford opened their doors equally to students from public and private schools in the early 1960s, the percentage of students who entered those universities from public schools jumped dramatically from a minority to a significant majority, which has continued to this day. Yale, for example, was about 65% prep school men in 1955. By 1975 it was about 70% public school men and women.

BTW the "decreasing performance (of students) over the past thirty years" is another piece of propaganda, at least, if you use SAT scores or NAEP scores. This was described in the Sandia Lab study in 1991 and many other sources.

The bottom line difference between us, though, is that you believe in the efficacy of markets by themselves and I don't. I believe that markets absolutely need to be countervailed by government or some other force; otherwise what markets produce is what we are seeing in the United States today: enormous concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of the relatively few while the income and wealth of the vast majority in the society decline gradually but seemingly inexorably. Markets alone gave us Dickensian England or Gilded Era America. If we had the kind of markets in schooling that you seek, we would probably end up with even greater disparities in the quality of schooling than we have today. I'd bet $100 on that.

Best wishes,
David

The Author's Reply

Dear David,

First, a correction. I am not completely lacking personal experience in and of schools, educators, and parents. I have interviewed and/or corresponded with literally hundreds of teachers and parents over the years, and I have spent time in schools in both Canada and the United States (though not in quite as many as peripatetic education writers like Jonathan Kozol). In fact, the early drafts of several of the chapters in Market Education had more first-person references to my observations and conversations with teachers and parents. I eliminated most of those during rewrites because I found them spurious--for epistemological reasons.

I never cease to be amazed at how educators and education writers are moved by anecdotes. Coming from a background in mathematics and computer science, I see anecdotes as fluff that serves, at best, to entertain the reader amidst the presentation of meaningful and representative evidence. When people cobble together a series of anecdotes and then fancifully draw sweeping conclusions from them as if they had real epistemological merit I am flabbergasted. I'm even more flabbergasted when--as is often the case--their arguments are swallowed whole.

I'm surprised that you seem to be making this same case--that, because I use representative evidence whenever possible instead of personal stories, my conclusions are less valid. Given your obvious concern for a sound epistemology I just don't understand this.

I am trying to get at the common principles of school governance by studying representative modern and historical data. I am not interested in studying just one or a few teachers and schools in a single kind of school system. That has been done many times before and to little avail. I am interested in the differential effects of various school governance structures on teachers in general, across time and across cultures. The kind of evidence I've chosen to answer those questions is the most appropriate and relevant evidence available. I have talked with teachers and visited schools to try to help me understand the patterns that emerge from representative studies, but I would not try to base such broad conclusions on the few observations that I could make personally even in an entire lifetime. Moreover, I couldn't interview Isocrates or Horace Mann if I wanted to.

So we do seem to have a grave epistemological difference on the value of personal anecdotes.

......

> We have never had "child centered" or "progressive"
> education as a norm in American public schools. You can point
> to all the attitudinal data you want, but the structural and cultural
> norms have been relentlessly traditional. As I said before,
> Dewey lost the culture war. So did Kozol and Kohl et al.

Pure progressivism has never been the norm in our public schools, true, but the impact of progressivism on the curriculum has been tremendous and there is simply no basis for denying that. I have a personal collection of reading textbooks / school literature anthologies published between 1836 and 199x and they alone are clear evidence of the effects of progressive ideas. Today, NO college-of-education textbook in widespread use either explains or advocates a systematic synthetic phonics curriculum for early reading instruction. That was not true one hundred years ago. Because of the influence of progressive educators, today's teachers are never even taught how to teach reading by a method more effective that the unstructured mishmash that is now widely practiced. There are many other examples of this phenomenon. Are you really denying all this?

By the way, I find our focus on progressivism a bit beside the point. I would be indifferent to being proven wrong about progressive methods tomorrow. I don't really care what methods are used so long as they work. My key conclusions have to do with what kinds of systems most reliably identify and disseminate effecitve methods.

I continue to dispute your views on the influence progressivism because I don't agree with them, but I consider school governance structures, not particular teaching methods, to be the key issue in improving education.

> Where we have had long-standing "child centered" or
> "progressive" education over generations has been in
> expensive private schools such as the Dalton School in New
> York or the Bush School in Seattle or many others like them.
> Why is it, do you think, that so many members of privileged
> classes have chosen "progressive education" for their own
> children while advocating traditional schooling for the chidlren of
> the working and middle classes?

It isn't "so many". If you investigate (see, for instance, the "Peterson's" guides to private schools) you will find that progressive private schools are in the minority. One of the leading series of books on teaching reading via synthetic phonics was produced by the Catholic Education Association. Most private schools flirted with progressivism for a shorter period of time and in less depth than most public schools.

In my view, the reason some of the most progressive schools have been non-government schools has to do with a combination of strong personalities and the free enterprise system. Dewey et al. were charismatic salespeople for their ideas, and it is easier for such people to implement their ideas faithfully in the private sector than in the public sector. In the absence of vigorous competition, that can be either good or bad for families.

> I agree with much of your critique of public schools, particularly in > relation to the poor and children of color. And I also believe that
> we would be much better served if parents could choose from a
> variety of different kinds of public schools, schools which offered
> genuine choice based on ideological/pedagogical/curricular
> diversity. Let parents who want DISTAR have DISTAR, let
> parents who want project-based learning have it, and so on.

I couldn't agree more.

> I think the comparison between public schools and private
> schools in our society is much more complex and inconsistent
> than your argument allows.

My assessment of public versus private schools in our society is complex. At the end of the chapter in which I point to the superiorities of existing private schools, I explain their dramatic failure to either innovate or to expand (in the case of popular schools). I haven't simply argued for sending all our kids to existing private schools, but rather for the recreation of a truly competitive educational marketplace coupled with scholarships and/or tax-credits for low-income families. The last chapter of the book, in which I discuss some implementation details, has been criticized for being too messy. It hasn't been criticized for being too simplistic (until now).

> Here's one example, since you asked for specifics. Once the Ivy
> League schools and Stanford opened their doors equally to
> students from public and private schools in the early 1960s, the
> percentage of students who entered those universities from
> public schools jumped dramatically from a minority to a
> significant majority, which has continued to this day. Yale, for
> example, was about 65% prep school men in 1955. By 1975 it
> was about 70% public school men and women.

I have a lot of trouble getting people to see that I make a clear distinction between the private schools we have today and a free and competitive educational marketplace. I try to do that in chapters 8 and 9 and also in the Conclusion chapter. And, as I just mentioned, I go to great lengths to point out the stagnation and unimpressive record of our private schools during the past hundred years. Not-for-profit status and lack of vigorous competition due to limited school density are some of the key causes of these deficiencies.

But, since you bring it up, in the example you gave, 30% of Yale students come from the private sector, which comprises only 10% of all students at the K-12 level. Even the students of our deficient existing private schools are still overrepresented by a factor of three to one. Furthermore, the change in enrollment at Yale and elsewhere is clearly due in large part to the dramatic growth in the number of college bound public school students as compared to the already high number of college-bound private school students during the period in question.

> BTW the "decreasing performance (of students) over the past
> thirty years" is another piece of propaganda, at least, if you use
> SAT scores or NAEP scores. This was described in the Sandia
> Lab study in 1991 and many other sources.

I published an article several years ago in which I pointed to flagrant errors in the unpublished--but very widely circulated--drafts of the Sandia National Lab paper. Those drafts were, on the whole, very poorly researched and reasoned. Subsequent papers based on the draft Sandia Report, such as one by David Berliner, repeated the factually incorrect data. Here is an excerpt from my paper describing some of the errors.

To show that the average SAT score has been lowered solely by an increase in the number of non-White test- takers, it is necessary to demonstrate that the scores of Whites were constant or improving during the given period. Berliner's table does just that, revealing a gain in the mean SAT score of Whites from 930 in 1975 to 945 in 1990 [1]. These scores are not accurate. The mean White SAT score actually fell from 944 in 1975-76 to 930 in 1990-91 (U.S. Department of Education (1), 1993, p.126). None of the other SAT scores in Berliner's table are accurate either. His figure for the 1990 average score of Mexican- Americans is fully 26 points higher than the true value. It seems that he estimated his numbers from a graph in an unpublished report by Sandia National Laboratories, and it has been suggested that the graph was grossly inaccurate [2]. Whatever the cause of the error, the true data show a decline in the average White score, contradicting Berliner's [amd the SNL's] claim.

When the Sandia National Lab authors finally published the paper (I believe that was in 1993), it contained neither the incorrect data nor the fallacious and inflated claims of the drafts.

As for the evidence of decline in performance, based on the limited data sources you mention I can only assume that you haven't yet read chapter 6 of Market Education, in which I present a comprehensive look at the reliable representative evidence, including the NAEP. Though the NAEP is indeed the rosiest of the lot, even it only shows stagnation on the whole between its inception and the mid 1990s. Most other sources show significant declines in one or more subjects. I'm not aware of a more comprehensive treatment of the statistical evidence.

> The bottom line difference between us, though, is that you
> believe in the efficacy of markets by themselves and I don't.

I don't "believe" in anything. I am not a "believing" sort of person. My conclusions and my reasons for holding them are explained in my book. If someone presents representative evidence and/or valid arguments that contradict my conclusions, I'll change my conclusions (I've done it before--I was initially supportive of charter schools and state-funded vouchers, but now am highly skeptical of both).

> I believe that markets absolutely need to be countervailed by
> government or some other force;

I hold no strong opinions on such a broad topic. I would not dream of asserting the supremacy of markets in all areas of life. I know a little something about educational markets, more than most people at the moment, and that is what I have written about.

> otherwise what markets produce is what we are seeing in the
> United States today: enormous concentrations of wealth and
> power in the hands of the relatively few while the income and
> wealth of the vast majority in the society decline gradually but
> seemingly inexorably.

This is a myth. I investigated this verifiable (and indeed falsifiable) claim in the same article to which I referred above. Here is what I found:

Let us take as an example, therefore, the changes in American income distribution over time, adjusted for inflation. The period between 1929 and 1957 is perhaps the earliest for which reliable information is available. In 1929, 41.5 percent of households earned less that $2000 a year (incomes are given in 1950 dollars). In 1957, only 17.3 percent of households earned below that amount. While only 20.6 percent of households were earning more than $4000 in 1929, 54.6 percent were doing so by 1957 (U.S. Bureau of the Census (1), 1975, p. 300). These figures reflect a substantial real increase in earnings at both high and low income levels; much of the population that would have been considered poor joined the ranks of the middle class and the wealthy. Furthermore, this period was not exceptional. Similar gains were enjoyed between 1947 and 1970 (Ibid, p. 290), and they have continued, though far more modestly, from 1970 to the present (U.S. Bureau of the Census (2), 1993, p. 457).

Note that median incomes also quadrupled by the best estimates of economic historians in the first 80 years of our republic (the source for this is in Market Education).

> Markets alone gave us Dickensian England or Gilded Era
> America. If we had the kind of markets in schooling that you
> seek, we would probably end up with even greater disparities in
> the quality of schooling than we have today. I'd bet $100 on that.

Are you aware that the kind of market I recommend includes financial assistance for low income families and that where similar (though not identical) programs are already implemented on a small scale they are diminishing disparities in educational outcomes?

If you really would like to place a bet on this I'm not inherently opposed to the idea, but I wonder if we could agree on the criteria for establishing outcomes? We seem to have real differences in what we consider to be proof. Betting on the welfare of children is also a disturbing concept to me.

Best,
Andrew

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