Many books have been published recently about the battleground of American school reform.  Here are reviews of three of them.

The Teacher Wars:  A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession 

by Dana Goldstein

Doubleday, 2014.

The most readable, accessible book of the three reviewed here is journalist Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars.  Many readers apparently already agree:  it’s the only book of the three—indeed, the only book on the history of education in a long time, to spend some time on the Best Seller lists. (Full disclosure:  a decade ago, the author took my course on the history of American school reform, and, certainly without needing to, she graciously mentions me in the acknowledgements.  I think she would have made the Best Seller list without me.)

Goldstein has a gift for telling tales of the struggle for teacher professionalization by focusing on significant participants in that effort, from Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher in antebellum America; to Charlotte Forten, an African-American educator inspired to improve the lot of freed slaves in the South after the Civil War; to Ella Flagg Young, the turn-of-the-century  Chicago school superintendent, and Margaret Haley, who led the teachers union there; to the inimitable, inevitable Al Shanker, most associated with the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict in the late 1960s and then with national leadership of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT); and down to the present.

It’s an ambitious project for less than 275 pages of text, but Goldstein brings it off.  Her book can serve as an engaging introduction to the history and issues involved in the history of the profession, while readers already familiar with that history will find that events and issues are brought into sharper focus by her succinct, well-written narrative and her ability to identify what has changed and what has stayed the same over time.

Mann and Beecher are used to set the stage in the first chapter, “’Missionary Teachers’:  The Common Schools Movement and the Feminization of American Teaching.”  Mann aimed to achieve real, if rudimentary, professionalization of the teaching corps by setting up “normal schools.”  Beecher believed that women’s special attributes, exercised mainly in the “separate sphere” of the home, were also particularly suited to the classroom.  The result: a feminized teaching corps that was expected to be motivated more by missionary zeal and selfless idealism than by the desire to make money made teaching a profession unlike any other.  And, Goldstein says, “in many ways we are still living with the teacher training system the common schools movement created.”

In telling the rest of the story, Goldstein takes time to note the periodic reinventions of the wheel that characterize education reform.  Teach for America, for instance, echoes not only the Teacher Corps of the 1960s, but also Beecher’s Board of National Popular Education.  The Gates Foundation’s educational interventions parallel those of the Ford Foundation in the 1960s, with just about as much success.  And she identifies the recurring “moral panics,” such as the one during the McCarthy era, that often demonize teachers for their supposed failures.  We are in another such period now—and have been since the 1983 “Nation at Risk Report.”  But the top-down push for accountability, over-reliance on high-stakes standardized tests, and the obsession with quantifying “value-added” metrics to evaluate teacher performance may have run their course, she thinks.  Let us hope she is right.

Goldstein quotes John Dewey: “Education is, and forever will be, in the hands of ordinary men and women.”  Her common sense recommendations call for supporting them in classrooms where standardized tests have a place but don’t dominate, where curriculum and pedagogy aren’t mandated but developed and applied in ways that respect and enhance teachers’ expertise.  Others have made a similar case—David Kirp does so in Improbable Scholars (2013), for instance.  Goldstein’s book is special because it keeps its balance even on the rockiest historical terrain, because its approach highlights how we have gotten to where we are today, and because of the exceptional clarity of that illumination.

From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse:  How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education 

by Jack Schneider  

Harvard Education Press, 2014.

Jack Schneider, assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross, is the author of Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America’s Public Schools (2012), a study of the 30 years of school reform since the “Nation at Risk” report.  His new book expands his chronological range and narrows his focus, as, building upon David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s classic Tinkering Toward Utopia (1995), he works to determine what makes some school reforms successful and others, not so much.  (Cuban, indeed, supplies the book’s foreword.)  It’s an interesting and provocative effort.

Schneider focuses on four reforms that made it:  Bloom’s Taxonomy (officially, “Taxonomy of Educational Objectives for the Cognitive Domain”) that includes the famous pyramid with “Knowledge” at its base and “Evaluation” at its peak; Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, which took off after Gardner’s Frames of Mind was published in 1983; the Project Method, initiated way back in 1918 in William Heard Kilpatrick’s article of the same name; and Direct Instruction, the decidedly unprogressive pedagogy that has found a niche in urban, elementary reading classes.  He attributes their success to their ability to meet four conditions:  first, “perceived significance,” which “send[s] a practitioner-friendly signal of its scholarly merits”; second, “philosophical compatibility,” which convinces teachers that the new idea will “jibe with closely held beliefs like the idea that teachers are professionals, or that all children can learn”; third, “occupational realism,” meaning that the research can be put quickly into use; and, finally, “transportability,” not merely “from research into practice, but also from teacher to teacher.”

One can easily imagine a research grid, with the four reforms on the X axis and the four conditions on the Y axis.  Schneider’s book successfully fills in all the boxes with prose that is clear, even pithy, albeit sometimes redundant.  He even appends a chapter on ideas that didn’t make it, including one researcher’s attempt to parallel Bloom with a handbook on the “affective domain” and Robert Sternberg’s “Triarchic” theory of intelligence.

Historians who like to emphasize “contingency” will find much to like here.  To succeed, to make it into schools and stay there, a reform needs to meet those four conditions, but Schneider also is quick to add that “there is an element of luck involved.”  Picking the right name matters.  Prestigious associations help:  Columbia Teachers College legitimizes all sorts of stuff, not just Kilpatrick’s “Project Method,” and Gardner certainly wasn’t hurt by being at Harvard and the recipient of a MacArthur “Genius Grant.”  And, as Tyack and Cuban noted almost 20 years ago, successful reforms are usually “add-ons.”  As Schneider says of Bloom’s Taxonomy, it had “something to offer a broad range of audiences…without provoking opposition.”

All true, and intriguing as far as it goes.  But, of course, the bigger question is not just how can a reform be successful, but how can we make sure that the useful, truly effective reforms succeed, and the dubious ones do not?  If longevity is a mark of success, then the Project Method, relentlessly promoted for decades by Columbia’s William Heard Kilpatrick, is successful.  But its meaning has been stretched so thin that it is applied nowadays to just about any activity that does not culminate with an in-class written test.  Howard Gardner, on the other hand, despite his best efforts, has been unable to prevent mangled, bastardized versions of his insights from crowding out the real thing (“multiple intelligences” is not just another term for “learning styles,” for instance).  Direct Instruction eventually found a niche in inner city schools despite flying in the face of most accepted definitions of teaching.  Founder Siegfried Engelmann said of his tightly scripted program, “We don’t give a damn about what the teacher thinks, what the teacher feels.”  And Schneider says that Bloom’s Taxonomy was “a shape-shifter…Whether or not [it] was right, it did offer a reasonable and uncontroversial way of explaining the world of learning.” 

One comes away from Schneider’s book with renewed appreciation for the idea that education research is indeed an “elusive science,” in Ellen Condliffe Lagemann’s phrase.  The goals of education, themselves elusive, are philosophical, not necessarily based on research at all.  The curriculum needed to reach those goals, and the pedagogy needed to implement the curriculum, are inevitably contested.  In such a world, as Schneider shows, contingency often matters more than the best laid plans of professors and others in the reforming band.  A sobering thought, but also an oddly reassuring one.

Fear and Learning in America:  Bad Data, Good Teachers, and the Attack on Public Education 

by John Kuhn  

Teacher’s College Press, 2014.

Starting with its title, with its echoes of “gonzo” journalist Hunter Thompson’s “fear and loathing” (in Las Vegas, on the Campaign Trail, etc.), John Kuhn’s Fear and Learning in America strikes a very different tone from the other books noted here.  Kuhn, a Texan who’s been a teacher (of Spanish), principal, and school superintendent, writes with energy, wit—and anger.  Lots of anger.  He’s angry with the continuing fallout from the “Nation at Risk” report of 1983 and with the top-down, test-driven, “accountability” regime that has been put into place since then, especially since the implementation of No Child Left Behind in 2002.  He’s angry because, so far as he is concerned, this regime makes things worse, instead of better, especially when it comes to dealing with educational inequality.

Kuhn admits that he is an “unlikely activist.”  But less than ten years ago this once-conservative Texan underwent a dramatic conversion experience (triggered partly by, of all things, an episode of ABC’s “20/20,” with John Stossel).    Even his book’s chapter titles express the energy and emotion of a convert’s indignation over the way things are now:  “Scaring America,” “Standardized Junk Science,” “The Educational Dark Ages I: Ignorance,” “The Educational Dark Ages II: Mendacity.”

His criticisms often hit the mark.  But his polemic is unlikely to convince anybody who’s not already convinced, although it may (at least briefly) fire up people who already agree with him on the issues.  Concerned about the growing role of private foundations in funding and influencing particular reforms?  Kuhn denounces the “swarm of well-meaning dabblers and malevolent vandals tearing away at the foundations of American public education in broad daylight.”  Dubious about whether holding teachers accountable will close the achievement gap?  Kuhn says that “sketchy metrics and magical education solutions like value-added measures of teacher effectiveness” are essentially smoke and mirrors, intended to distract attention from real issues of poverty and inequality.

Kuhn writes with such verve that even Diane Ravitch, the distinguished education historian who had a conversion experience of her own a few years back,  gets carried away and gushes in the Foreword that “John Kuhn’s book is packed with more wisdom than any 10 books that I have read about American education.”  Really, now. If you like his ideas, you’ll get a nice rush from his rhetoric.  If you don’t, you’ll never finish it.  And if you’re feeling perverse, you could send a gift copy to Bill Gates or Michelle Rhee.