EDUCATION

Progressive education demanded highly skilled, brilliant teachers, and it failed because such teachers could not be recruited, not without much higher pay inducements. People of that calibre will go into law or medicine or the sciences. Or take their chances in the corporate world of business and finance or the glamor professions. There wasn't one boy in any school I went to that ever wanted to be a teacher. We all wanted to be good providers, clever, successful, affluent, and live in graceful houses.

Until we can offer young people real financial success in schoolteaching, and that will never happen, the status quo will stay pretty much the same.

I hate to think I've hit on the heart of the matter and have no more to say, having written only about a fiftieth of a book, but that is that. All I need is a title, and three hundred pages of filler.

A MODEST PROPOSAL.

Schools should be able to draw young people away from the remunerative professions by offering them similar financial incentives. Simple as that solution appears, it is the solution. That's the business model. Entice a young upward mobile graduate away from the other more lucrative professions. Only one way to do that, with big money, and it has never been possible to do. Don't give teachers raises, hire teachers at very high pay. And that can't be done because it's unfair.

Most american schools are denied really gifted teachers because they don't have the funds needed to hire them away from law, medicine, business engineering and scieitific research. You get a lucky few very bright women with successfull husbands in the field, but that just isn't enough. in Indonesia, and singapore, phillipines, beginning teachers pay is equal to beginning doctors. Do you get it? Do I have to write a whole damned book. That is the simple truth, and covers the whole big picture, and shows us how we are mired into the status quo because of tenure. Don't give teachers raises, hire brilliant new teachers at very high pay. And that can't be done because it's unfair.

In lall my years in teaching, I never heard about greater planning time or smaller teaching loads. all the leaders could talk about was longer hours.


deflects money from the front lines of teaching and learning where it could be used to hire more highly trained teachers and provide them with greater planning time, smaller teaching loads, and more up-to-date materials.


highly trained is the wrong word, you want highly gifted teachers, who choosse teaching over law, engineering medicine or scientific research .and they make that choice not because they are saints who dont care about being rich, but because tghey can become as rich as a lawyer, doctor businessman engineer or scientist and be high school teachers.
as long as teachers are low paid, as has always been an american tradition, female teachers, itinerate teachers etc, so long as they are paid working class wages, you will not be able to draw on the kind of gifts required.


so no book needs to be written. the simple truth is sufficient. these writers take a long time to say very little. Don't give teachers raises, hire teachers at very high pay. that cant be done becausse its unfair. fair. that's why in george f. will's home, fair is a word that is off limits. He doesn't allow the word to be used.


John F Kennedy said it in a well publicized speech. life is unfair. Fairness is the poison that is ruining our schools. Fairness prohibits us from hiring fresh brilliant young teachers at equal levels of pay with medicine, law and the sciences, as they do in singapore, and many asian countries. Schools should be able to draw young people away from medlawsci careers by offering them real financial success. That's the business model. Entice a young upward mobile graduate away from medlawsci financial success? Only one way to do that, with big money, and it has never been possible to do.


At International High School in New York City, teenagers who are recent immigrants to the United States can be seen clustered around lab tables, talking and gesturing intently as they work out a physics problem. Two students who speak mostly Spanish are working through the implications of one of Newton's laws with one student who speaks mostly Polish and another who speaks mostly Chinese. The four students communicate successfully with one another using sketches, mathematical notations, role-playing, and phrases in English and their native languages. Their teacher, working in turn with each classroom group, stops by briefly to ask a few questions that evaluate the students' understanding and to graphically illustrate a point with which they have been struggling. He asks if they can connect a concept they studied yesterday with the problem they are working on now. Smiles of recognition crease one face after another as the students realize how the ideas come together. Amid muted cheers and back slapping they record their results. When the seventy minute period ends, the students are too engrossed in their work to leave until the teacher shoos them off to their next class.

What we have here are brilliant young teachers who were enticed away from their dreary highpaid future careers as dentists, lawyers and doctors or engineers working in cubicles. Unless they are earning about twice what normal teachers make, they will sooner or later, as the teach for america kids did, go back to the hard, highly paid professions. Passing the bar, finishing medical or dental school, or veteranian school, or engineering, that's much harder and no fun at all, but the reward is security and affluence. Try to agree with that even though it feels somehow unidealistic. Don't fall for this idealism crap. Young people want to be rich. and calling them yuppies won't discourage them from wanting to be clever, successful and live in graceful homes. It's a natural urge.

I'll stop repeating myself if I get the idea that anyone reading this is convinced by now. It's simple damn it. Entice the brightest and best teachers with real money. Not working class pay, the kind teachers have always been stuck with. And that means new hires making more money than old hires. Much more money. Two or three times as much money. A young gifted teacher needs $125,000 a year to start. Do that, implement that, and your schools will take off. When the seventy minute period ends, the students are too engrossed in their work to leave until the teacher shoos them off to their next class. Shoos them off to their next class? Is there a public school in America that doesn't see the joyous exit from the room when the bell rings??? A teacher so brilliant he has to shoo the students off to their next class? Anyone that compelling will become a lawyer etc, a doctor, a good provider.


At International High School in New York City, teenagers who are recent immigrants to the United States can be seen clustered around lab tables, talking and gesturing intently as they work out a physics problem. Two students who speak mostly Spanish are working through the implications of one of Newton's laws with one student who speaks mostly Polish and another who speaks mostly Chinese. The four students communicate successfully with one another using sketches, mathematical notations, role-playing, and phrases in English and their native languages.






CHAPTER ONE

The Right to Learn
A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work
By LINDA DARLING-HAMMOND
Jossey-Bass Publishers

Read the Review

The Right to Learn

Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental.... The freedom to learn... has been bought by bitter sacrifice. And whatever we may think of the curtailment of other civil rights, we should fight to the last ditch to keep open the right to learn, the right to have examined in our schools not only what we believe, but what we do not believe; not only what our leaders say, but what the leaders of other groups and nations, and the leaders of other centuries have said. We must insist upon this to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be.

--W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Freedom to Learn"
([1949] 1970b, pp. 230-231)

Many books have been written in recent years about what is wrong with America's schools and how they might be fixed. This rush of concern from educators, policymakers, businesspeople, and others is in many respects well founded. As the United States moves from a simpler society dominated by a manufacturing economy to a much more complex world based largely on information technologies and knowledge work, its schools are undergoing a once-in-a-century transformation. Never before has the success, perhaps even the survival, of nations and people been so tightly tied to their ability to learn. Consequently, our future depends now, as never before on our ability to teach.

Although the right to learn is more important than ever before in our history, schools that educate all of their students to high levels of intellectual, practical, and social competence continue to be, in every sense of the word, exceptional. Although many such schools have been invented throughout this nation's history, they have lived at the edge of the system, never becoming sufficiently widespread for most young people to have access to them. Over the last decade reformers have created and redesigned thousands of schools that are now educating rich and poor, black, brown, and white students alike to levels of success traditionally thought impossible to achieve. Yet these schools, too, remain at the margins, rarely embraced or supported by the systems in which they struggle to exist and generally unexamined for what they can teach the education enterprise. This book asks how we can reinvent the system of U.S. public education so that it ensures a right to learn for all of its students, who will enter a world in which a failure to learn is fast becoming an insurmountable defeat.

THE RIGHT TO LEARN IN ACTION

At International High School in New York City, teenagers who are recent immigrants to the United States can be seen clustered around lab tables, talking and gesturing intently as they work out a physics problem. Two students who speak mostly Spanish are working through the implications of one of Newton's laws with one student who speaks mostly Polish and another who speaks mostly Chinese. The four students communicate successfully with one another using sketches, mathematical notations, role-playing, and phrases in English and their native languages. Their teacher, working in turn with each classroom group, stops by briefly to ask a few questions that evaluate the students' understanding and to graphically illustrate a point with which they have been struggling. He asks if they can connect a concept they studied yesterday with the problem they are working on now. Smiles of recognition crease one face after another as the students realize how the ideas come together. Amid muted cheers and back slapping they record their results. When the seventy minute period ends, the students are too engrossed in their work to leave until the teacher shoos them off to their next class.

International High School was launched by a group of teachers determined to reverse their students' failures. In a traditional New York City high school most of these students would drop out before 12th grade, but for ten years International has graduated virtually all its students, enabling them to pass both the New York State competency tests and a set of much more rigorous performance assessments developed within the school, and sending more than 90 percent to college. Equally important, students leave this school with a clear sense of themselves and their talents, an ability to frame and solve problems, and a capacity to work well with a wide range of other people (Darling-Hammond, Ancess, & Falk, 1995). The teachers believe, and research supports their view, that International High School's success is a function of its small size, the knowledge and commitments of its teachers, and the freedom it experiences as an alternative school. Alternative status allows faculty to structure teaching and schooling practices that are much more productive than those possible under state and city mandates.

Although the 450 students from more than fifty countries who attend International arrive speaking little or no English, they are immediately immersed in challenging content through an activity-based curriculum that allows them to practice English as they also learn to examine ideas through social sciences and literature, think mathematically and scientifically, and test their views against reason, evidence, and alternative perspectives. Most of their work is conducted in groups and facilitated by teachers who coach them toward proficient performances. Teachers also work in teams, sharing curriculum ideas and teaching strategies with one another and reviewing one another's practices. Teachers have developed structures that allow them to focus on student success and that give them continual opportunities to get better at what they do. Here is more of the picture.

In another International classroom pairs of students are reading each other's autobiographies and asking questions to guide revisions. Before they are done they will have revised their writing several times to refine their ideas and clarity of expression. A student from Ghana asks one from Puerto Rico if she can explain more about the culture of San Juan in her autobiography. As these two converse they are learning about other societies, expanding their view of the world, building a new relationship, and developing their ability to communicate. The obvious seriousness with which they undertake this exchange is coupled with the enjoyment of sharing ideas with a friend. The classroom hums with the sound of purposeful learning that is, in Paulo Freire's words, both rigorous and joyous (Freire, 1970).

A DIFFERENT STORY: DOING SCHOOL

Only a few miles away from International, students in a mathematics classroom in a traditional suburban high school of more than 2,500 are shoehorned into desks still riveted to the floor in rows as they were when the building was constructed many decades ago. Their teacher stands with her back to them, scrawling the steps for solving a quadratic equation on the blackboard. She calls over her shoulder, "Just write this down. You need to memorize it by Monday." Most students write obediently; a few are whispering to one another; one is sleeping unnoticed. As the teacher recites one of the procedures used in the solution, a young man raises his hand halfway and asks, "Why do you do that? Standing more than ten feet away with her back turned, the teacher does not hear him. She continues writing, calling out as she goes which terms are to be squared, summed, or subtracted, "teaching" without regard to learning. The young man cups his forehead in his hands and puts his pencil down, defeated by the unrequited effort. Most of the others keep copying, willing to accept the fact that they are not supposed to understand. This mathematics class is one of the academic courses serving a relatively small number of students, mostly white and Asian, in the second highest of the school's six tracks.

Down the hallway a remedial English class, composed largely of African American and Latino students and other recent immigrants, is working its way through a lesson on prepositional phrases. The teacher reads aloud from the text and pauses to ask whether anyone can identify the phrase he has read as an adjective or adverb phrase. Those students whose heads are not on their desks look back at him blankly. One girl asks why they should know this, and the teacher replies that it will be on a test. Another young woman raises her hand to answer. The teacher looks at a seating chart to identify the student's name; she is one of more than 140 he sees every day. When she answers incorrectly, the teacher grimaces, states the correct answer, and instructs the students to complete the questions at the end of the chapter. He retreats to his own desk, unsure of how to make the material meaningful and defeated by the only substantive exchange of the hour.

JOINING THE ISSUE

This real tale of two schools is a common one in U.S. education today. Although the right to learn is prominent in the rhetoric of schooling, teaching in many schools is managed by procedures that hold little chance of producing satisfying learning. It is rare to encounter the kind of democratic education seen at International High School--education that teaches young people to think well and independently, to use what they learn to produce high-quality work, to take initiative, and to work effectively together.

These abilities are central to the changing demands of society and to the goals of current school reforms. Since the release of A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education, 1983), hundreds of commission reports have been issued and thousands of pieces of legislation have been passed to try to redesign schools so they can prepare a more diverse group of future citizens to learn at much higher levels, cope with complexity, use new technologies, and work cooperatively to frame and solve problems. In just over a decade we have experienced a "first wave" of reforms that sought to raise achievement though course and testing mandates, a "second wave" that argued for improvements in teaching and teacher education (Holmes Group, 1986; Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, 1986; National Governors' Association, 1986), and a "third wave" that is focused on defining more challenging standards for learning while restructuring schools so that they can produce dramatically better outcomes (Smith & O'Day, 1990; Sizer, 1992; Schlechty, 1990).

Increasingly, the redesign task is defined as one of transforming the education system rather than merely getting schools to do better what they have always done. If the challenge of the twentieth century was creating a system of schools that could provide minimal education and basic socialization for masses of previously uneducated citizens, the challenge of the twenty-first century is creating schools that ensure--for all students in all communities--a genuine right to learn. Meeting this new challenge is not an incremental undertaking. It requires a fundamentally different enterprise.

Building a system of schools that can educate people for contemporary society requires two things U.S. schools have never before been called upon to do:

To teach for understanding. That is to teach all students, not just a few, to understand ideas deeply and perform proficiently

To teach for diversity. That is, to teach in ways that help different kinds of learners find productive paths to knowledge as they also learn to live constructively together.

I suggest that this task will require a new paradigm for education policy--one that shifts policymakers' efforts from designing controls to developing capacity among schools and teachers to be responsible for student learning and to be responsive to student and community needs and concerns. This means (1) redesigning schools so they focus on learning, foster strong relationships, and support in-depth intellectual work; (2) creating a profession of teaching to ensure all teachers have the knowledge and commitments they need to teach diverse learners well; and (3) funding schools equitably so that they invest in the front lines of teaching and learning rather than in the side offices of system bureaucracies.

The rekindled vision of democratic education that motivates many current reforms is powerful--yet also profoundly problematic. A candid assessment of long-standing barriers and a commitment to fundamental reform will be necessary if we are to build the kinds of education needed to support a twenty-first-century democracy in a multicultural technological world.

In the first part of this book (Chapters One through Three) I describe the genesis of our current system of education and the obstacles we face. The remainder of this chapter reveals how barriers to democratic education were established and why they remain solidly planted in so many schools. Chapter Two shows how the U.S. education system evolved its deeply ingrained bureaucracy and why that bureaucracy has failed to produce the schools we need. Chapter Three treats the central issue of teaching and learning in classrooms, describing what we now know about the realities of teaching diverse learners and examining how specific policies help or hinder student learning.

In Part Two (Chapters Four through Six) I describe how restructured schools have produced new approaches to education and extraordinary results for students. Chapter Four presents specific examples of schools that work, identifying nine features these schools have in common and how each feature could be supported by education policy. Chapter Five looks at how successful schools are structured for success and suggests how their strategies can be adapted in other schools. In Chapter Six, I show how staff and other resources can be allocated to better support teaching and learning, examining practices in some other countries as well as in restructured schools here that contain some object lessons for us.

In Part Three (Chapters Seven through Nine) I describe the policy changes needed to develop a system of democratic education able to support successful schools in all communities. Chapter Seven discusses how standards can be developed and used to support students while avoiding bureaucratic pitfalls. In this chapter, I explain why top-down curriculum reform strategies have never worked and what would be needed to create the conditions for powerful teaching and learning in all schools. Chapter Eight shows how greatly access to knowledge varies within and across schools and discusses how we can begin to ensure that all children have a genuine opportunity to learn. Finally, Chapter Nine describes how we can change teacher preparation and teaching conditions in order to build a profession of teaching that can enact a broader, more inclusive vision of education opportunity.

BARRIERS TO DEMOCRATIC EDUCATION

Providing most Americans with an empowering and equitable education has always been a struggle, and it remains one today. Relatively few schools offer all their students a rich, active curriculum that teaches for understanding. Even fewer manage to educate a diverse set of students for constructive social interaction and shared decision making. From the time many Southern states made it a crime to teach an enslaved person to read and Northern states opted to establish differently funded schools for the rich and the poor, through decades of separate and unequal schooling that continue to the present, the right to learn in ways that develop both competence and community has been a myth rather than a reality for many Americans.

The struggle was articulated in the great debates between W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington about whether black children must be trained as laborers or might be educated to think for a living (Du Bois, [1930] 1970a). It appeared in the ideological battles that shaped urban schools for the children of immigrants at the turn of the century (Tyack, 1974). Large impersonal factory-model schools with rigid tracking systems were created to teach rudimentary skills and unwavering compliance to the children of the poor. The more affluent and advantaged were taught in small elite private and public schools or carefully insulated special tracks within comprehensive schools, where they were offered a stimulating curriculum, personalized attention, high-quality teaching, and a wealth of intellectual resources.

At the same time, some genuinely democratic schools were built from the work of reformers like John Dewey, Ella Flagg Young, and Lucy Sprague Mitchell at the turn of the century, in the 1930s, and in the 1960s. In these eras, many individuals worked to create an "equity pedagogy" (Banks, 1993) that challenged diverse groups of students to think independently; to create, invent, and understand academic subjects through research, writing, and inquiry; to experience ideas firsthand; and to make decisions democratically. Efforts to create what John Dewey called a "new education" featured reforms that reappeared in each of these eras and again recently: interdisciplinary curricula aimed at making connections among ideas; disciplinary learning conducted through student experiences; research studies and other projects emphasizing the use of knowledge and the development of higher-order thinking skills; cooperative learning; shared decision making among teachers, students, and parents; and detracking that makes a challenging curriculum available to more students.

These features of progressive education are sometimes posed as antithetical to the acquisition of rigorous and disciplined understanding in subject matter areas. They are decidedly not, but the source of these claims is instructive. For example, progressive education has been recently caricatured by E. D. Hirsch in The Schools We Need (1996). Hirsch rightfully rejects false dichotomies between the building of shared knowledge and attention to children's interests and between clear purposeful instruction and engaging and effective learning. In his claims that progressive education has undermined U.S. schools, however, he is wrong about three things: the goals of progressive practice, the nature of prevailing practice in U.S. schools, and the body of research evidence about effective teaching and learning. He also misunderstands why less effective teaching practices--whether labeled progressive or traditional--are so difficult to change and what is needed to help all students acquire the disciplined understanding of subject matter and the ability to apply that understanding that both he and I, and many others, agree they need.

In this and later chapters I present extensive evidence on these questions. The following summary introduces the central points. First, what Hirsch calls the "anti-subject matter principles of progressivism" (p. 49) do not exist. On the contrary, major thinkers and practitioners of education who might be called progressive--John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Jerome Bruner, Howard Gardner, Theodore Sizer, Deborah Meier, and many more--have sought deeper and more disciplined understanding of academic subjects and have developed curricula and assessment strategies for securing it. Teachers College at Columbia University--the institution that Hirsch fingers as the purveyor of fuzzy-headed anti-subject matter thinking--has in fact long maintained a most traditional form of subject matter-based organization in its teacher education programs, arguing in the face of various attempts at reorganization that the disciplines are a central foundation of knowledge for teaching. However, enacting schooling that attends both to student needs and subject matter demands is extremely difficult, and Hirsch is right when he perceives that many teacher preparation institutions and many schools are confused about how to do both well.

Second, Hirsch contends that the problem with U.S. schools, and the reason they perform more poorly than schools in other countries, is that they have widely adopted such progressive practices as research projects and discovery methods and have abandoned good old-fashioned rote learning and memorization. This claim is far from true. In fact, both national and international studies consistently show that the large majority of U.S. schools emphasize rote learning with heavy doses of lecture, drill-and-practice, memorization, and multiple-choice and short-answer testing. The exceptions are found in more affluent communities and higher tracks. Schools in European countries require more extensive projects and rarely use multiple-choice testing, favoring oral and essay examinations instead. In addition, schools abroad are much more likely than U.S. schools to engage students in research and writing, experimentation, and extended discussion of problems and ideas.

Finally, Hirsch selectively cites "mainstream research," most of it from the 1970s, to argue that direct whole-group instruction emphasizing drill-and-practice is the path to developing disciplined understanding and that progressive education as he has characterized it has failed. He ignores research before, during, and after that time that documents the success of "progressive" methods at engendering higher-order thinking skills and that illustrates repeatedly the failure of his favored prescriptions for enabling students to remember ideas, apply them in new contexts, or perform well on tests of complex skills (for reviews see Good & Brophy, 1986; Resnick, 1987a; Gardner, 1991). He also fails to note that many of the researchers he cites have published other studies reporting that the kinds of teaching found useful for engendering recall and recognition of facts on multiple-choice tests are decidedly different from the teaching that develops student success on tasks that require deep understanding and highly developed performance skills (for a review see Darling-Hammond, Wise, & Pease, 1983). And in a stunning display of ignorance, he alleges that "the research literature offers not one example of successful implementation of progressivist methods in a carefully controlled longitudinal study" (p. 216).

Although Hirsch is wrong about this, he is right that progressive reforms have often failed to take hold at the system level even when they have succeeded at improving student achievement in the classrooms where they have been applied. The reasons for this are important to understand. The following sections of this chapter explain why ineffective teaching practices are so difficult to change and how strategies that help all students learn both subject matter and thinking skills can be undertaken on a wide scale.

The Successes and Failures of Progressive Reforms

In each reform era of the past century, many of the schools launched by progressive educators were extraordinarily successful. In the 1930s, the famous Eight-Year Study, led by Ralph Tyler, painstakingly documented how students from experimental progressive schools were ultimately more academically successful, practically resourceful, and socially responsible than matched samples of 1,475 peers from traditional schools (Aiken, 1942; Smith & Tyler, 1942; Chamberlin, Chamberlin, Drought, & Scott, 1942). Like the highly successful schools of today's reform initiatives, these school communities were small and organized around internally developed common goals. They sought to build a core curriculum linked to community concerns as well as to students' interests and developmental needs. The schools that showed the most extraordinary successes were those that differed most from mainstream practice: their teaching was the most experiential and inquiry oriented and their governance systems the most democratic.

Although the case for this approach to education was carefully proved, progressive education virtually disappeared during the war years. By 1950, even the schools that had been studied and found successful had mostly reverted to "fundamentals" (Redefer, 1950, p. 35). Communities skeptical about reform ideas were never persuaded that the changes were important enough to merit their spread. School-level reformers rarely engaged the political system in considering the implications of their work for policies ranging from course requirements, facilities standards, and Carnegie Units to teacher certification and accreditation rules. Journalists focused only on test scores, not on the changes in school practices that were creating such productive and competent students. Thus policymakers never understood the systemic changes needed to support and maintain the reforms the successful schools had produced, and parents and teachers in other communities never fully understood what the successful schools had done (Kahne, 1994).

A text-based, transmission-oriented curriculum focused on superficial coverage and rote learning returned in force in U.S. schools during the 1940s and 1950s. It was not until Sputnik persuaded politicians that the United States needed to become competitive with the Soviets that a press for more intellectually challenging education was revived. Curriculum reforms launched by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Education during the 1960s aimed to prepare students to think critically and independently as well as to understand ideas well enough to apply them to novel situations. Reforms like "discovery learning," "open education," "team teaching," "differentiated staffing," and "democratic decision making" also began to proliferate once again.

A substantial body of research developed during these years showed that intellectually challenging curricula and inquiry-oriented teaching produced noticeable learning gains for students, especially in terms of their abilities to think critically and solve problems, their abilities to express themselves orally and in writing, their creativity, and their self-sufficiency as learners (for reviews see Dunkin & Biddle, 1974; Glass et al., 1977; Good & Brophy, 1986; Horwitz, 1979; Peterson, 1979).

However, these 1960s reforms also failed to overcome the weight of traditional practice and were overrun by the back-to-basics movement of the 1970s and 1980s. Despite extensive dissemination efforts, neither coercion nor persuasion could get teachers to implement the new curricula faithfully (Huberman & Miles, 1986; Gallagher, 1967). Especially where professional development was absent (which was most places), teachers' practice remained substantially the same: textbooks, lecture-recitation methods, and an emphasis on rote learning predominated (Shaver, Davis, & Helburn, 1979). Although there were some successful adaptations (Berman & McLaughlin, 1978), almost none of the progressive curricula developed in these projects are still in evidence in schools.

Despite their successes in the places where they were well understood and implemented, the reforms of previous eras were unsuccessful when they left the high-intensity hotbeds where they were spawned. Many practitioners urged to implement these ideas were unable to do so effectively. Often the ideas were poorly understood, the practices were complex and took time to develop, and they typically required changes throughout the entire school environment, not just behind classroom doors. Even in schools where the reforms had succeeded, they gradually disappeared as individual superintendents, principals, and teachers who had been involved in the changes left and were replaced by traditionally trained (or untrained) practitioners.

THE DEMANDS OF PROGRESSIVE TEACHING

Perhaps the single biggest obstacle to maintaining progressive reforms is the extensive skill needed to teach both subjects and students well. In all the previous reform eras practitioners asked to implement reforms like "open education" or "the project method" knew they were supposed to make learning relevant and attend to student needs. However, they often did not know how to fashion work that was rigorous as well as relevant, how to employ variable student-based strategies and also teach for high levels of disciplined understanding in content areas. And schools were often unable to support the new pedagogies with new forms of organization, governance, and professional development. Many teachers lost track of either their students or the curriculum goals as they broke with their previous routines, trying to become more child centered by letting go of subject matter standards or more subject centered by ignoring students while the curriculum marched on ahead. In the 1960s, many educators' inability to manage both sets of goals led to the perception that schools had lost academic rigor in their eagerness to be relevant.

Teaching practice that succeeds in developing deep understanding of challenging content for a wide range of learners is highly complex: it maintains a dialectic between students and subjects, allowing neither to overwhelm the other. Such teaching presses for mastery of content in ways that enable students to apply their learning and connect it to other knowledge as they develop proficient performances in the field of study. Because students will necessarily come to any learning experience with different learning strategies and prior experiences--and thus with different starting points for the material to be learned--successful teachers must know how to create experiences that let students access ideas in a variety of ways yet always press for deeper and more disciplined understanding.

This kind of teaching is purposeful and may be highly structured, but it is also inevitably improvisational. Because real understanding is always hard-won and human beings bring different mixes of abilities and insights to the task, there is no prepackaged set of steps or lessons that will secure understanding for every learner in the same way. Teachers have to bring a great deal of knowledge and analytic ability to the task of developing understanding with their students.

Transmission teaching is much simpler. Teachers can "get through" texts and workbooks. Classroom routines are straightforward; controls are easier to enforce. There is a sense of certainty and accomplishment when a lecture has been given, a list of facts covered, or a chapter finished, even if the result is little learning for students. When a teacher has transmitted information, it is easy to say "I taught that"--even when students have not learned it. Active learning situations infuse more uncertainty into the teaching process. When a student is building her own understanding through a research project, for example, the teacher needs to construct a careful scaffolding to guide the learning process and have well-designed strategies for eliciting the student's thinking in order to assess what is being learned. Many teachers' preparation has not taught them how to create situations in which learners can have real breakthroughs in understanding or how to evaluate learning and adapt their teaching. Thus they teach as they remember being taught, creating a flow of lessons and activities aimed at fairly superficial coverage that moves along comfortably oblivious to student learning.

Efforts to develop thoughtful democratic classrooms have repeatedly been killed by underinvestments in teacher knowledge and school capacity. Lawrence Cremin (1965) argued that "progressive education ... demanded infinitely skilled teachers, and it failed because such teachers could not be recruited in sufficient numbers" (p. 56). In each era of change, progressive reforms gave way to standardizing influences: in the efficiency movement of the 1920s, the teacher-proof curriculum reforms of the 1950s, and the back-to-the-basics movement of the 1970s and 1980s. A backlash is forming against current reforms as well. The reasons for these reactions are always the same: when educators denied access to appropriate preparation and training prove unable to manage complex forms of teaching, policymakers typically revert to simplistic prescriptions for practice, even though these prescriptions cannot achieve the goals they seek. The failure of reforms today would be an even greater problem than in times past because the demands for higher levels of performance from a much greater number of citizens are acute, and the failure of society to meet these demands holds much greater social dangers.

EXPECTATIONS, FEARS, AND THE STATUS QUO

Providing a thinking education for all students is a difficult matter, not only because it requires sophisticated teaching but also because it is, from many perspectives, a subversive activity. Even if all educators were prepared to teach all students to think and perform at high levels, there would still be people who find the rearing of a group of independent-minded young people threatening to the rules that govern social life, and others who fear upsetting the social order from which they benefit. Conservative groups that have sought to defeat reforms in many states have sometimes argued that teaching students such skills as critical thinking might undermine parental authority. And when a Connecticut commission issued its call for school reform in 1995, there was a strong backlash among affluent towns against the notion that "all children can learn" and should be taught for high levels of performance. If that were to happen, many advantaged parents reasoned, "slow" children might be mixed up in the same classrooms as "bright" ones, leading to unhappy consequences: either the slow children might retard those on a fast track, or equally problematic, they might achieve well enough to compete for the slots in selective colleges that lead to top-tier jobs traditionally reserved for the advantaged.

Though these parents held understandable concerns about the potential classroom effects of a less-than-careful approach to detracking, their concerns about preserving selective access to the benefits of good education cut to the heart of schooling's purposes and the changing conditions of society. Democratic rhetoric and the presumptions of meritocracy have long rested on the fiction that all people have access to good education. Practically if not idealistically, poor education for many students was not a social problem when plenty of low-skilled jobs offering good wages were to be had. It is a problem today when most jobs demand much greater competence. Yet middle-class fears of growing competition for high-paying knowledge work jobs trigger a crabs-in-a-barrel syndrome: communities and households clamber to stay on top of a precarious heap rather than make an effort to raise the caliber of education for all. This is not always the result of mean-spiritedness. It is simply easier to try to hang on to what one thinks one has than it is to imagine improving the outcomes of an operation as big, cumbersome, unwieldy, and poorly understood as the U.S. public education system.

For all these reasons, true democratic education is both rare and unequally distributed. Although progressive influences have softened the edges of schooling during periodic eras of reform, they have made little dent in most students' experiences. Recent critiques by scholars and students are remarkably alike. They describe a system that seeks to manage schooling simply and efficiently by setting up impersonal relationships, superficial curricula, and routinized teaching. Together, these practices overwhelm the best intentions of all concerned (Boyer, 1983; Goodlad, 1984; Sizer, 1984). Structural problems of school size, bureaucratization, and fragmentation exacerbate the problems of uninspiring pedagogy. A dropout from a well-regarded New York City comprehensive high school explains how:

At one time school was important to me. I liked getting good grades and making my parents proud of me. [But in high school] I never felt part of the school. It didn't make a difference if I was there or not. Teachers were unwilling to be flexible in their teaching and to allow students to deviate from set ways of doing things. The teachers just threw me aside, probably because I was Spanish. The school had too many dumb rules that weren't realistic. I felt like I was being ignored, like I wasn't important [Carrajat, 1995].

Another dropout from the same school offered the kind of analysis an organizational theorist might make:

I had passing grades when I decided to drop out, but nobody tried to stop me. Nobody cared.... None of the counselors paid any attention to me. The individual classes were too big for students to learn. Students should have longer exposure to individual teachers. If students could have the same subject teachers throughout their high school careers, this would allow teachers to get to know them better.... No high school should have more than four hundred students max, and they should be all on one floor. Who needs seven floors in a school? [Carrajat, 1995].

A California high school student put it more succinctly: "this place hurts my spirit" (Poplin & Weeres, 1992, p. 11). His view was echoed by an administrator in the same school, who voiced the poignant dilemma of caring educators trying to make a dysfunctional organization work for children, "Yes, my spirit is hurt, too, when I have to do things I don't believe in" (Poplin & Weeres, p. 23). Poplin and Weeres's study of California schools found that "teachers perceive themselves to be very caring people who went into teaching to give something to youth. [They] struggled to articulate how their attention had been focused away from students. Teachers felt they were pressured to cover the curriculum, meet bureaucratic demands and asked to do too many activities unrelated to the students in their classrooms. Teachers and others felt the size of their classes and numbers of students they saw each day, particularly in middle and high schools, made it difficult to care" (pp. 21-22).

Over and over again, research and casual observation reveal that in most bureaucratically organized schools, students feel alienated from teachers, who appear to have little time for students unless they are unusually "bright" or "problematic." Teachers feel at odds with administrators, who appear to have little time for them unless their concerns pertain to contractual matters, mandates, or paperwork. And everyone feels victimized by "the system," which demands attention to reports and procedures when teachers, students, and administrators would rather devote their time to each other and to learning.

HOW THE CURRENT SYSTEM FAILS TO EDUCATE FOR DEMOCRACY

Unfortunately, the bureaucratic school created at the turn of the twentieth century was not organized either for intellectual development or for individual responsiveness. As the United States moved from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy, efforts to create a system from thousands of haphazardly managed one-room schoolhouses adopted the then-popular factory-line technology for batch processing the huge numbers of students arriving en masse.

The Effects of the Factory Model Like manufacturing industries, schools were developed as specialized organizations run by carefully prescribed procedures engineered to yield standard products. Based on faith in rationalistic management, in the power of rules to direct human behavior, and in the ability of administrators to discover and implement common procedures to produce desired outcomes, twentieth-century education policy has assumed that continually improving the design specifications for schoolwork--required courses, textbooks, testing instruments, and management systems--will lead to student learning. Knowledgeable teachers were not part of the equation because the bureaucratic model assumed that important decisions would be made by others in the hierarchy and handed down in the form of rules and curriculum packages. Investments in teacher learning in this country are therefore small compared to those in other countries and in other professions.

Large age-graded departmentalized schools were designed for the efficient batch processing of masses of children in the new age of compulsory education and large-scale immigration. Their mission was not to educate all students well. A few students were selected and educated for thinking work, but most students-were trained in the basic workplace socialization they would need to conduct simple tasks neatly, punctually, and obediently. The rote learning that satisfied these early twentieth-century objectives still predominates in today's schools, reinforced by curriculum packages and texts, standardized tests that focus on low-cognitive-level skills, and continuing underinvestment in teacher knowledge.

The school structure created to implement this conception of teaching and learning is explicitly impersonal. Students move along a conveyer belt from one teacher to the next, grade to grade, and class period to class period to be stamped with lessons before they move on. They have little opportunity to become well known over a sustained period of time to any adults who can consider them as whole people or as developing intellects. Secondary school teachers may see 150 or more students a day, unable to come to know any individual student or family well. Between start-ups and wind-downs, elementary teachers have only about seven or eight good months with their students before they have to pass them off to another teacher who will start all over trying to get to know them. Teachers work in isolation from one another with little time to plan together or share their knowledge. Students, too, tend to work alone and passively, listening to lectures, memorizing facts and algorithms, and engaging in independent seatwork at their separate desks.

In urban areas, such factory-model schools are likely to be huge warehouses, housing 3,000 or more students in an organization focused more on the control of behavior than the development of community. With a locker as their only stable point of contact, a schedule that cycles them through seven to ten overloaded teachers, and a counselor struggling to serve the "personal" needs of several hundred students, teenagers struggling to find connections have little to connect to. Heavily stratified within and substantially dehumanized throughout, such schools are adversarial environments where "getting over" becomes important when "getting known" is impossible. Adults find their capacity to be accountable for students' learning constrained by factory-model structures that give staff little control over most of what happens to the students they see only briefly.

Even suburban schools, though often "nice," well-funded places, are typically not hotbeds of intellectual provocation. As Theodore Sizer (1984) noted after visiting dozens of such schools, "save in extracurricular or coaching situations, such as in athletics, drama or shop classes, there is little opportunity for sustained conversation between student and teacher. The mode is a one-sentence or two-sentence exchange.... Dialogue is strikingly absent, and as a result the opportunity of teachers to challenge students' ideas in a systematic and logical way is limited. Given the rushed, full quality of the school day, it can seldom happen. One must infer that careful probing of students' thinking is not a high priority" (p. 82).

Education Results at the End of the Line The result of this system is education that does not prepare students to understand and produce much thoughtful work. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (National Center for Education Statistics, 1994c), in 1992, for example:

* Only 43 percent of seventeen-year-old high school students could read and understand material such as that typically presented at the high school level, and only 7 percent could synthesize and learn from specialized reading materials.

* Fewer than half could evaluate the procedures or results of a scientific study, and just 10 percent could draw conclusions using detailed scientific knowledge.

* Just 36 percent could write well enough to communicate their ideas, and only 2 percent could write in an elaborated fashion.

* Only 7 percent could use basic algebra or solve math problems with more than one step.

These indicators show modest improvement over previous years (see, for example, Educational Testing Service, 1989a). However, few students have the skills needed to cope easily with the complexities of today's society. International comparisons of student performance in mathematics and science tell a similar story. U.S. students have tended to score at about the median of other countries at 5th grade, dip below the average by 8th grade, and rank below most other industrialized countries by 12th grade, especially on tasks requiring higher-order thinking and problem solving (McKnight et al., 1987; International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement, 1988). Even when the U.S. launched a separate international study to ensure the results were not biased against a U.S. view of curriculum, American thirteen- and seventeen-year-olds ranked near the bottom in both mathematics and science (Educational Testing Service, 1989b). The Third International Mathematics and Science Study, released in 1996, found U.S. eighth-graders ranking near the median of forty-one countries, below most European and Asian countries, and just above developing nations. The United States ranked a bit higher in science.

These studies have found that in contrast to teaching in many higher-scoring nations, U.S. teaching is dominated by textbooks, lectures, and teachers' chalkboard explanations followed by individual seatwork, with little cooperative work, project or laboratory work, or use of resources such as computers, calculators, or manipulatives. Researchers note that these "strategies geared to rote learning" reflect a view chat "learning for most students should be passive--teachers transmit knowledge to students who receive it and remember it mostly in the form in which it was transmitted.... In the light of this, it is hardly surprising that the achievement test items on which U.S. students most often showed relatively greater growth were those most suited to performance of rote procedures" (McKnight et al., 1987, p. 81).

In a wide-ranging review of assessment results, Stedman (1996) notes that in addition to these troubling results in mathematics and science, "history and civics classes are dominated by textbooks, tests, quizzes, and short-answer questions. It is unusual to find students working in groups or writing long papers. Writing instruction in the schools is also limited and is focused on mechanics. Only about a fourth of 8th graders report that their teachers spend more than an hour a week on writing.... What we're seeing is that, particularly at the high school level, students are often disengaged, teachers' work is often factory-like, and intellectual life is often poor."

The Neglect of Teaching The U.S. education system's failure to focus on teaching quality has taken a large toll. For most of this century, it was thought that learning could be improved by ever more precise specification of teaching procedures: a more tightly prescribed curriculum, more teacher-proof texts, more extensive testing, and more carefully constrained decision making. The problem with this approach is that although policies must be uniform, students are not standardized in the pace and manner in which they learn. The tendency to prescribe practices thought to be desirable on statistical grounds has deflected attention from what works with particular children, creating a "focus on service delivery rather than on successful learning ... [on] the provision of instruction rather than the effective educating of students" (Raywid, 1990, p. 162).

Furthermore, the assumption that rules for practice can be enforced through regulatory systems has created an elaborate bureaucracy to design and manage education prescriptions, a bureaucracy that is an expensive exercise in futility. The century-old U.S. decision to invest in large highly specialized school organizations that design and monitor teaching rather than in knowledgeable teachers who could make decisions themselves has led to a system that fails at the most critical tasks of teaching. Moreover, it drains resources out of classrooms to support functions peripheral to teaching.

In short, although the system we have inherited accomplished the goal of many decades ago--the creation of a structure for providing basic schooling on a mass basis--it is not organized to achieve more ambitious intellectual or social goals for learning. Furthermore, international assessments reveal that in the aggregate, not only do U.S. schools offer less thoughtful teaching and produce lower average achievement than schools in many other countries but they are also the most administratively top heavy and the most educationally unequal in the industrialized world in terms of spending, curriculum offerings, and teaching quality (McKnight et al., 1987; Educational Testing Service, 1989b; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995).

The idea of hiring low-paid teachers and micromanaging their work has proved to be a Faustian bargain that has created a continual shortage of highly competent individuals, particularly in fields like mathematics and science, and a large superstructure of supervisors, specialists, and other nonteaching staff to direct teaching and to deal with the learning problems created by the lack of investment in teacher knowledge (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996). By the early 1990s, U.S. school systems spent only 33 percent of their funds on teacher salaries and just over half (53 percent) on instruction (National Center for Education Statistics, 1995a, tables 72, 77, 161) and hired more administrative and nonteaching staff than any other industrialized country (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, 1995).

Many European and Asian countries have adopted a more professional model, in which teachers are extensively prepared, well-supported, and responsible for most school decisions. Because more teachers are hired, they have more time for planning and learning together. And because they have more sustained time with their students, they are more effective in teaching to high levels. Furthermore, most of these countries fund schools centrally and equally while the United States continues to spend more than ten times as much on the education of some of its children as it does on the education of others (Educational Testing Service, 1989a; 1991). U.S. communities have some of the best schools in the world, but they also have some of the worst.

For all these reasons, in the United States of America, children who are required by law to attend school are not guaranteed the right to a qualified teacher. More than 25 percent of those hired into teaching each year are not fully prepared and licensed for their jobs (National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, 1996), and these underprepared teachers are assigned primarily to schools and classrooms serving the most educationally vulnerable children (Darling-Hammond, 1988; 1992; Oakes, 1990). These teachers tend to be more autocratic in the ways they manage their classrooms, less skilled at managing complex forms of instruction, less capable of identifying children's learning styles and needs, and less likely to see it as their job to do so, blaming students when their teaching is not successful (Darling-Hammond, 1992). Then, because the competence of the teaching force is so uneven, more legions of supervisors and specialists are hired to develop systems to guide and inspect the work of teachers who are not trusted to make competent decisions. And so the cycle that favors bureaucracy over teaching repeats itself.

This allocation of resources might be justifiable if it produced student learning. Unfortunately it does not. The effort to regulate schools ever more aggressively merely deflects money from the front lines of teaching and learning where it could be used to hire more highly trained teachers and provide them with greater planning time, smaller teaching loads, and more up-to-date materials. The further we push the twentieth-century model of education management, the less well served many students will be. Those denied well-prepared teachers because the funds needed to hire them are absorbed elsewhere and those whose needs do not fit the mold on which prescriptions for practice are based will be "taught," but they will not learn.

(CHAPTER ONE CONTINUES....