The Classroom Crucible: What Really Works, What Doesn't, and Why

National Review, June 10, 1991 by Geoffrey Morris

THE dismal performance of America's schools has been charted so often and so thoroughly that Shut Up and Let the Lady Teach, the sad story of a year in a Brooklyn school, leaves one depressed but not at all shocked.

By her own account, a bright and energetic Emily Sachar entered Walt Whitman Intermediate School hopeful and well prepared, but inevitably her enthusiasm collided with bureaucratic nonsense and appalling administrative and educational ineptitude.

Halls were defaced by graffiti, floors strewn with litter. Desks were in short supply, and often lacked legs and tops. Class schedules were ill conceived, necessary school supplies non-existent. Even if there weren't teachers who told students that "preferred" is spelled "perferred," or who showed up for class, coffee in hand, 15 minutes late (CPT-colored people's time-according to some black faculty), the situation would still have been hopeless. Learning hardly ever occurs at Walt Whitman.

On commencement day, Mrs. Sachar observed the banter and clamor of her students, admired the splendor of caps and gowns, but felt no sense of pride, for too many of the pupils moving on to high school could not read, write, or do simple mathematics. Months before, in discussing with Mrs. Sachar whether or not to pass a student whose test-score average was around forty, an assistant principal remarked: "It's up to you, but maybe you should pass him to encourage him." At Walt Whitman, illusory self-esteem was more important than lasting knowledge.

According to Mrs. Sachar, some of Walt Whitman's black teachers were held to a different standard-because they were hired by reason of color, not competence; because they owed their jobs to black political patronage. When one union official was questioned about Principal Claude Winfield's favoritism toward black teachers, he answered, "Favoritism is how you run a school."

Winfield could serve as a role model for incompetent administrators. The day before classes began, he "wore a red-and-white gingham shirt with an open collar, his crocheted cap, dark sunglasses, blue pants, white Reeboks, and a red sweater with two white stripes across the breast." "I dress this way so the parents don't think I'm the principal," he explains. The camouflage works-no one ever mistakes Mr. Winfield for a principal.

To solve the ills of Walt Whitmans everywhere, there is, of course, no shortage of experts offering this or that innovation. Most involve changes in administrative policy. In The Classroom Crucible: What Really Works, What Doesn't and Why, Edward Pauly calls most of these policy recommendations what they are: nonsense.

Many experts blame policy failures on poor execution in the classroom by teachers and pupils, but after poring over studies by James S. Coleman, the Rand Corporation, and others, Mr. Pauly maintains that innovation has mostly hampered rather than promoted educational success, since most bureaucratic policies fail to translate into practical classroom behavior. He concludes that each school-by selecting teachers particularly competent to handle specific groups of students, and by employing simple, coherent curricula and sound disciplinary policies-can create for itself a proper classroom harmony. And such micromanagement as is appropriate should come from parents, teachers, and non-winfieldian principals.

Mr. Pauly has discovered through exhaustive research what others have been saying for years: elaborate programs dictated from afar fail-or else are simply ignored, as is the case in our most effective schools.

One of the most consistently wise-and (somewhat lonely) writers on this topic has been Jacques Barzun. Contrast Mrs. Sachar's Principal Winfield with what Professor Barzun, in one of his essays collected in Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning, describes as the exemplary principal. Commenting on a nationwide study of inner-city schools whose students performed considerably better than others with similarly "disadvantaged" student bodies, Professor Barzun concludes that each successful school's principal "had a clear idea of what he wanted to achieve ... chose and supervised his teachers, helped and encouraged them to follow his lead. They came to believe that reading, writing, and counting can be taught. With everybody taking it for granted that learning is what is supposed to go on in school, the pupils came to believe it too."

Principals such as Winfield must be dismissed and replaced by ones such as Barzun's exemplar or New Jersey's Joe Clark-principals who will run their schools with both the authority necessary to control behavior and the concern required to inculcate a love of learning.

On the subject of vouchers, of which Mr. Pauly is a somewhat skeptical advocate, Professor Barzun answers: Choice "will be another Grand Abstraction masquerading as a competent judgment," another impediment to success. He imagines schools judged by gossip, newsletters, and abstract scores" which, he argues, may put a school in high esteem this year and out of fashion the next.