Optimism, Decentralization and Virtual Learning
Paul E. Peterson– Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government, Harvard University Director, Program on Education Policy and Governance and Editor-in-Chief of Education Next–has a new book out: Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning. (Which I haven’t read yet.)
Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, writes at City Journal:
Across the political spectrum, the need to reform American public education is no longer in dispute. Even teachers’ unions at least pay lip service to change, and debates about education policy now focus on where we should go from here. To answer that question, though, we must first understand where we started going wrong in the first place.
In Saving Schools, Harvard’s Paul Peterson tells us that America’s road to public-school ruin was, naturally, paved with good intentions. Peterson chronicles the history of America’s public schools through the lives of the six titans of education policy—Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King, Jr., Albert Shanker, William Bennett, and James Coleman. Each found that his noble efforts to save public schooling produced, at best, disappointing results and a legacy of government control that has done more harm than good.
Previous reform efforts have all been plagued by their tendency to consolidate power and decision-making. Mann designed his common schools as secular institutions run by a government monopoly. Dewey’s progressive vision of the professional teacher led to the dominance of education colleges and today’s useless certifications. King’s civil rights leadership gained legal access to all public schools for minority students, but a system that enrolls kids based on their address has tended to reinforce segregation. Shanker’s push to place power in the hands of classroom teachers eventually led to today’s onerous work rules and restrictions negotiated through collective-bargaining agreements. Bennett’s push for standards and test-based accountability tended to concentrate power with bureaucratic goal-setters.
Centralization is a problem, Winters continues:
Policies that consolidate power in few hands, Peterson believes, are bound to fail. Shifting school financing and decision-making from local school boards to state governments has cut ties between communities and schools. The result is ever more inefficient and unresponsive education policy, or what Peterson describes as “The Iron Law of Ever-Increasing Centralization—and Cost.” The two education reforms with the best chance of reversing the consolidation trend, he believes, are virtual education and school choice.
Michael F. Shaughnessy at Education News asked Peterson about the Iron Law:
What is The Iron Law of Ever-Increasing Centralization and Cost and why is it important?
Reformers want to do well by as many young people as possible, and to accomplish that goal, they want to capture as much power as they can. Inevitably, they try to control the centers of political power–states and, today, the federal government. It is all done with the best of intentions, but the result has been a system that is over-bureaucratized and dysfunctional.
Peterson explains why he wrote the book:
I felt that we need a succinct, readable history of the American school that explained why schools look the way they do today.
And why he included the people that he did:
Horace Mann and John Dewey were obvious, because they were the two key figures who shaped our schools in the 19th and early 20th Century.
Martin Luther King could not be ignored even though he was not an educator per se, because he not only led the drive toward desegregation in the late fifties and early sixties, but this efforts launched multiple rights movements that were in some ways more important for changing the school than the demand for equal rights for African Americans itself.
Nothing is more important for the 21st Century school than the success Albert Shanker had in winning for teachers the right to bargain collectively with local school districts.
William Bennett was the national spokesman for the excellence movement begun in the early 80s, and James Coleman, the least well known of all these figures, laid the intellectual groundwork for a future transformation of the American educational system.
Winters notes:
Peterson’s lion of school choice is sociologist James Coleman, whose reports in the 1970s and early 1980s showed that students benefited from a private-school education. Coleman’s work justified economist Milton Friedman’s argument that the government should focus on funding education, not providing it directly. While Coleman’s work was certainly groundbreaking, the reader is left wondering why Peterson didn’t make more of Friedman’s contributions. Friedman not only first popularized the idea of vouchers, but he then devoted his philanthropic foundation and many of his later years to encouraging states to adopt school-choice programs.
Martin Morse Wooster, author and education book reviewer at The Washington Times, is also a fan of the Coleman chapter of Peterson’s book:
Mr. Peterson’s best chapter concerns sociologist Coleman, who wrote four reports that shed a great deal of light on the problems of our schools. Coleman’s first book, “The Adolescent Society” (1961), created the style of book that describes a year in the life of a high school. This book, in Mr. Peterson’s view, “remains Coleman’s masterpiece.”
In 1966, Coleman led a massive research effort that showed that the best way to gauge whether a student will succeed in school is to determine a parent’s education and the number of books in the home. Spending money on fancy facilities and high-tech equipment, Coleman found, had little to do with student achievement. In 1975, Mr. Coleman discovered that white families were leaving inner-city schools for the suburbs, a phenomenon known as “white flight.” And in 1980, a third major Coleman study showed that Catholic schools did a better job educating children than did comparable public schools.
Wooster focuses on the centralization issue:
One of the continuing problems with our public schools is that they remain top-down, command-and-control bureaucracies strongly resistant to change. It has been nearly a century since school superintendents adopted the system of strong central offices that ineptly micromanage schools. Nearly every critic of the schools knows that this management system needs to be changed, but little or nothing is done. Why?
Along these lines, when Shaughnessy asked Peterson about the impact of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), he replied:
NCLB has been a mixed blessing. It has clarified for parents and citizens the need for school improvement, but it threatens to tighten the threads of the strait jacket in which schools find themselves.
Laura Impellizzeri at Huffington Post looks at the teacher-student relationship angle:
Education reformers have left the essential teacher-pupil relationship untouched for more than a century, fighting instead for changes outside the classroom: desegregation, teacher pay hikes, funding equality, increased testing, vouchers and changes in curriculum.
Harvard University government professor Paul Peterson argues that although many of those efforts have been well-intentioned, even noble, American schools haven’t kept pace with changes in society. And they’re just not very good.
Peterson says the barrier obstructing today’s education reform efforts is so obvious, it’s usually overlooked: Educating children costs a lot because it’s labor-intensive. Sure, American education spending has risen from 1 percent of GDP in 1902 to 2 percent in 1950, 4.5 percent in 1975 and 10 percent in 2006, he says, citing Census figures. And it’s climbing again with economic stimulus funding….Peterson’s solution is to make education capital-intensive, rather than labor-intensive, and to seek more volunteers and more student effort.
Impellizzeri isn’t as optimistic about virtual learning as Peterson is:
His survey of 150 years of education theory and practice brings Peterson to the conclusion that the best hope rests in virtual learning. And the promise is clear: More students can learn from a single teacher online, class discussions can work better than in traditional settings, it’s easier to submit and check work, transportation and real estate costs are much lower, and it’s cheaper to offer a full array of classes.
Except there are no real-life examples of online schools saving money. Not even Peterson’s paragon of online learning – the Florida Virtual School, a secondary school run by Julie Young, costs appreciably less per pupil than a traditional public school.
Most important, as Peterson acknowledges, the key age-old education stumbling blocks of quality and accountability remain. How do we ensure quality when teachers and students may never meet, let alone be observed by an expert? How do we maintain accountability when easily fudged test scores and graduation rates are the only gauges we have?
More on Saving Schools here.
