Left Back and Ordinary Resurrections

Dear Marjorie,

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Yes, Kozol is to be applauded for insisting that the very poor not be shifted onto an underclass educational track. What's more, like Ravitch, he sees that those who want to do the shifting are often "lifelong activists and intellectuals." He's also right that one of the worst disadvantages under which slum parents labor is lack of information. Most of the parents in Mott Haven simply don't know that their children can go elsewhere than wretched Morris High, an institution of 1,900 students from which only 65 emerge each year with diplomas.

But one trudges through dozens of pages of intellectual desert to reach such nuggets. The book is just inattentive, and nowhere more so than when it dwells on the children who are its supposed focus. They remain strangely static over three or four years that are roiling with change in most kids' lives. Elio's an endearing boy with a temper and a dad in jail; will he go bad? We can't say, because he's identical at the close of the book to what he was in the opening pages. "Pineapple" has an uncanny ability to boss adults when she's 8, and that's the trait through which Kozol caricatures her when she's 11. Either Kozol knows little of human nature or he's awfully narcissistic.

I'd guess narcissistic. A progressive group invites Kozol along on a rented bus that's taking these children out of their joyless slum for a day--the first trip ever for some of them. Where do they go? Coney Island? The Catskills? Of course not! Radicals would never sponsor something fun for poor kids. They take them instead to a Washington demonstration, to march around as props for protests against welfare cuts.

Then Kozol professes dismay that parents who raise money for their own children's schools "don't bring the same aggressive energy to bear in fighting for a higher spending level for all children in all neighborhoods." Talk about innocence!

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You present a sort of syllogism by which, since I believe in an academic curriculum, I must favor either national standards or federal control of education.

Hardly. Voluntary standards don't bother me much. Would that the Department of Education limited itself, as its predecessor organizations did, to "firmly asserting" what people should learn, on evolution or anything else. I would actually prefer 50 local arguments to one big national conversation, on laboratories-of-democracy grounds. But as long as national standards were voluntary, you'd have those arguments, anyway.

The degree of federal involvement in education (right down to wiring classrooms and adding 100,000 teachers) is already too high and comes with too many strings. Federal control of education would be a mistake, for two reasons.

First, the freedom of parents to control their children's education is a much more important issue than academic standards. Since you brought it up, I would absolutely apply this principle to "the more extreme versions of Afrocentric history." Afrocentrism is worse than creationism in that it's more tightly linked to the self-esteem movement, which has a long record of lowering standards until every kid can be patted on the back. I cannot think of a school district in the country that would benefit from it. But I don't know the kids in those districts as well as their parents do and wouldn't claim the right to choose for them even if I did.

Second, over the long haul, federal will mean less rigorous. Ravitch is revisiting a lot of themes introduced in Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1964). Hofstadter showed that, while progressivism (school as therapy or day care) and traditionalism (the academic curriculum) come in cycles, the former is more in the American grain. Right now, we're in a period where educators are defending "standards." But there will always be constituencies with a natural stake in educational mediocrity. Subpar teachers seek job security. Pork-barreling politicians construct facilities of dubious educational utility. Parents insist that any work their children can't get A's in is too hard. We'd be foolish to bet that the current enthusiasm for standards is permanent.

Ravitch shows that in times of bold, persistent (crackpot, hubristic) experimentation, certain school districts under local control have been saving remnants of a first-rate curriculum. They are always an affront to the experimenters--as Salt Lake City's were to Ellwood Cubberley's school survey movement in 1915, as Virginia's were to Alice Miel's revolutionaries at Columbia Teachers College in 1946. I have no expertise in today's voucher programs. But unionized teachers' ferocious, nationwide resistance to even the tiniest and most local of them does show an almost paranoid fear of pedagogical competition.

There seems to be an Iron Law of Educational Establishments: the crankier the idea, the more ruthless its implementation. At times when crankery rules--i.e., at least half the time--federal control would allow embarrassingly good public school systems to be wiped off the map.

Great talking to you once more, Marjorie.

Best,
Chris

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This week, our Book Clubbers discuss Diane Ravitch's Left Back and Jonathan Kozol's Ordinary Resurrections. Ravitch's book critiques a century's worth of school reforms, arguing that reform has dumbed schools down instead of strengthening them. Kozol's book is an extended look at one group of children in the South Bronx and their "little miracles of stubbornly persistent innocence." Click here to buy Ravitch's book, here to buy Kozol's, and here for an explanation of Slate's new and improved Book Club format. Click here to read this discussion from the beginning.

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