Reform school confidential; what we can learn for three of America's boldest school reforms

Washington Monthly, Oct, 1992 by Katherine Boo

When A Nation at Risk toppled American educational complacency back in 1983, I was just out of high school, working as a typist for the federal government. Beside me was another just-graduated clerk named Peggy, who had gone to D.C.'s Coolidge High School. Peggy was pleasant and industrious, with a reverence for horror movies. Before long, I realized that she was also functionally illiterate. She had learned to type, slowly but cannily, by matching letters on the page to letters on the keyboard. When he needed to know what something actually said, she asked her coworkers to read for her.

One heard a lot of stories like Peggy's back then, as it began to dawn on America how broke the public education system was, especially in the cities and among the poor. There were illiterate honor students, kids who graduated after missing months of school, teachers who couldn't spell competence, let alone demonstrate it. Here in D.C., those stories begat blue-ribbon commissions, tens of millions of dollars in new funding, and perhaps as many new programs as there are schools--from Afrocentric education to early-learning centers to magnet schools. And with each came the expectation that there'd eventually be fewer Peggy stories to tell.

A few weeks back, weary of school officials' talk about how nicely reform efforts were progressing, I started wondering how those reforms had played out at Peggy's alma mater, Coolidge. In 1982, when she graduated, the school's average reading levels were more than two grade levels below the national norm--scores among the worst in a pretty sorry school system. Today, after all the reports and research, refinancing and retooling, Coolidge students' reading scores are exactly the same as they were. And those are the scores of the slim majority of kids who stayed in school--another statistic frozen in place.

Figures like these, I think, help explain why half of Americans now claim to support educational vouchers. It's not really a profound faith that this country's St. Anthonies and Oxford Preps will cure what ails education. The recent results of the Bush administration's own National Assessment of Educational Progress show that kids about to graduate from private school don't do any better than public school kids when you control for family background. Rather, the polls lay bare our lack of faith in the public schools' willingness and ability to transform--a faith strained to breaking by some of America's most celebrated and ambitious reform efforts.

Rochester, New York. Chelsea, Massachusetts. Chicago, Illinois.In those places in the mid-eighties, some of education's most committed reformers seized upon a few bold ideas, drummed up some cash, and embarked on a seeming revolution from within, generating hype and hope in the process. Rochester's goal was to beef up the quality and status of teachers. Chicago sought to give parents control over the way the schools were run. Chelsea focused on leveling the playing field for poor kids. Theirs are still the experiments educators point to when they ask for more time to fix the system. But today, each of them is foundering, leaving communities, students, even the leaders who propelled them disillusioned.

On one level, the stories of these efforts reinforce what many Americans apparently believe: We've tried public school reform. It didn't work. Let's ditch the whole idea. Yet before we start dismantling public education, perhaps we should check out why even these tremendous efforts have failed--explanations rooted, not in money or theory or intention, but in an educational establishment that has managed to thwart the most righteous of reforms.

The greenback attack

In the world according to liberals like Jonathan Kozol, the key to school reform is in the bank: money to hire good teachers, money for innovative programs, money for books, money to relieve students' socioeconomic disadvantages. But it was probably no accident that Kozol, when researching Savage Inequalities, didn't spend much time in Rochester. Five years ago, in a school district of 33,000 students--most of them poor and almost half from single-parent households--Rochester launched one of America's most expansive and expensive efforts to rebuild a system whose test scores and dropout rates consistently ranked it as one of the worst in New York State. Goaded by a "Call to Action" by the Rochester Urban League and funded by hundreds of millions of dollars from taxpayers and local corporations like Eastman-Kodak and Bausch and Lomb, chilly Rochester in 1987 became, as U.S. News put it, the hottest place on America's education map.

Rochester's throw-money-at-it approach was not without a guiding, and good, idea: freeing the hands of teachers to do what they're supposed to do--butt into the lives of kids and make them learn in whatever way works. What Chris Whittle, in his obsession with uniformity, fails to realize is that good schools leave room for passion, giving people freedom to experiment, adjust, and respond. But in the unreconstructed Rochester schools, as in most others, administrative dicta spewed forth on everything from what days to read Silas Marner to assignments on the weekly cafeteria detail. Correspondingly, teachers worked to the rule, got raises like clockwork, and earned the minimal respect they deserved. Students learned, if they were lucky.