Temptations to bash the teachers unions are, confessedly,
immense. And omnipresent—those scenes, for instance, last winter
at the Wisconsin statehouse, aswarm then with obnoxious public
employee union members, teachers included, behaving as though the
public had elected them, and not Governor Scott Walker, to sort out
the state’s economic tribulations.
Steven Brill’s new book,
Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools
(Simon & Schuster) bombards the teacher unions with scorn and
statistics. Conversely, it celebrates the efforts of school
reformers such as Wendy Kopp of Teach for America. It’s being
widely reviewed and cited, not least on account of Brill’s
prominence as the founder of Court TV (now truTV).
The book is certainly welcome, even if all it achieves is
diversion of the unions from their favorite tasks—collecting dues
and protecting the jobs of inferior teachers. “Truly effective
teaching,” zealous and inspirational, Brill argues, is the
desideratum for which we should strive. Such teaching can “overcome
student indifference, parental disengagement and poverty.” Which,
in at least a limited sense, must surely be the case. The
assertion, all the same, rubs the wrong way against assertions
that, it strikes me, we might want to check out with the attention
normally reserved for headline topics like charter schools and
crusading superintendents.
Brill puts the bad-schools monkey on the unions’ back. Is that
its only natural habitat? Consider an essay in the New York
Times of last September 4. The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet
Philip Schultz recounts his battle with dyslexia. He remembers how
the dyslexic child he was found himself seated with two others like
him at a separate table in the classroom, away from the normal
kids. He couldn’t tie his shoes or tell time. “I not only couldn’t
read but often couldn’t hear or understand what was being said to
me.…My situation then seemed hopeless.”
So he got from there to here…how, precisely? “My mother read the
one thing I would listen to—Blackhawk comics—over and over again,
hoping against hope that by some leap of faith or chance I would
start to identify letters and then begin to arrange them into words
and sentences, and begin the intuitive, often magical, process of
turning written language into spoken language.
“One night, lying in bed as she read to me, I realized that if I
was ever going to learn to read I would have to teach myself.” And
so he willed himself into “being” an invented character who could
both read and write. “Starting that night, I’d lie in bed silently
imitating the words my mother read, imagining the taste, heft and
ring of each sound as if it were coming out of my mouth.…And
suddenly I was reading.”
The effects of families on learning and motivation are profound.
What we may no longer grasp is that those efforts are pivotal. I
offer a thesis: the United States can have the greatest schools in
the history of humanity—provided it supports the cultural
conditions for such schools. Those conditions, I posit, include
families reflexively committed to the educational enterprise,
unwilling to turn away from it for frothier considerations. Such a
thesis is less reckless than it possibly sounds. It is grounded in
experience (that “better guide than reason,” John Dickinson called
it). We have walked this ground before. We know its contours.
A good school is a school whose pupils have parents who care
about their children’s schooling—and demonstrate that care in ways
direct and indirect. By policing homework. By carrying on
intelligent conversation. By inspecting report cards. By following
in the footsteps of Philip Schultz’s mother, with A. A. Milne in
hand, or just Blackhawk comics: reading, reading, reading. By…well,
you know what I’m talking about, through that experience of which I
spoke, or possibly just through intuition. The so-called royal road
to learning leads, one might say, through the family kitchen.
There is a chirpy 1950s feel to this exhortation: Oh, David, oh,
Ricky, Dad’s home, shall we gather around the table for some good
old Πr2? Let us step apart from the pitying stereotype.
The '50s were the high tide of middle-classness in America. Social
and economic success engendered the desire for more of the same.
Ambition and self-respect, not to mention hard work, were OK. In
fact, they were good. The middle class was a demanding class. It
insisted on standards of a certain sort: not the highest in
history, perhaps, but higher than anything seen around this place
since then.
The social revolution that began in the early 1960s—instituted,
ironically, by the children of the middle classes—changed the
culture of the public schools. The old stodginess (as some saw it)
was out; mere vitality, or just occasional curiosity, was in. The
culture of the revolution was egalitarian: A’s for everyone, no
D’s, no F’s, for sure. It was as though a whole society, marching
with some order and exertion toward a distant goal, stopped
suddenly, unbuckled its belt, sat down for a rest, sporadically
fell back into line, walked a few paces, more raggedly than before,
then sat down again. In due course, rather than conning Worsdworth,
students were agitating for the right to protest war and racism.
The Age of Relaxation commenced. We live in it yet.
THE OLD MIDDLE-CLASS ideals aren’t gone. In middle- and
upper-middle-class communities, parents who don’t volunteer at the
elementary school, or supervise homework, or (preferably) both, are
rare birds. Their children’s public schools thrive, as do the
private schools—Christian ones, particularly—that have sprung up
to intensify the educational experience for families with the
wherewithal. Notice additionally the steadily growing number of
middle-class families that teach their children at home. I used to
shake my head at such people. How was this thing going to be made
to work? Well, it does work, so far as I can judge. The parents who
undertake the vast and all-absorbing task of homeschooling are in
earnest. They want the same things little Ricky and little David’s
parents wanted for their kids in days of yore. They may indeed want
those things more intently. Charter schools, at the public level,
respond to and serve the same instincts: that my child
(never mind my address, my job, my race or color) should receive
the same strict, generous care the children of more affluent
parents receive.
We get back to want. In order to get, you first (as a general
rule) have to want. What any culture wants—truly, deeply wants—it
gets eventually. The educational standards and outcomes we used to
have, we somehow don’t want anymore—possibly even feel guilty
about expecting. Our failure to get the good things we kind of, but
insufficiently, want, we blame on someone else. The teacher unions,
yes! The government, for not paying the teachers enough in the
first place!
What might we do, culturally speaking, to get good schools
again? Many may not agree with my own prescription, but I’d begin
as a nation and a society, using law, example, and precept to
rebuild the marriage culture, wherein most people not so long ago
married and stayed that way, “for better, for worse; for richer,
for poorer.” Such a creed has to be preached without intermission,
in churches, in schools, in the media, not least in the
entertainment industry, where these days it draws the most
derision.
The schools of the '50s, and earlier, were far from perfect. At
least they reflected a general social commitment to work and
achievement, a commitment fostered by families as essential to
their own well-being and to the long-term good of society. Can we
go home again? Maybe so, maybe not—but one shudders to think of
the alternatives.
