In one piece–”The Coming Revolution in Public Education”–John Tierney sees current incidents of resistance to current showpieces of school reform from educators, parents, and legislators as a revolution in the making. The evidence he submits to readers comes from instances of teachers refusing to give tests, parents boycotting exams, prosecutors indicting administrators for cheating, and legislators reducing numbers of tests.

In the other piece, “Failing the Test,” David Kirp lists setbacks to current school reforms citing similar evidence that Tierney does but adds instances of districts (e.g., Montgomery County, Maryland, Aldine, Texas, Union City, New Jersey) where long-term efforts have produced solid gains in student achievement without resort to market-based reforms.

I know that evidence well that Tierney and Kirp provide;  I have tied together the same bits and pieces into a story of growing parent and educator resistance to the harmful effects of too much testing, too much standardization, too much concentration on schools helping the economy to grow. But do all of these efforts in stringing together these instances of grassroots rebellions constitute a political movement or that a revolution is around the corner? Or are these cascading events akin to seeing a false dawn, another example of wish trumping reality?

These cartoons, of course, don’t help me make up my mind on whether there is, indeed, finally, a gathering counter-movement to market-oriented school reforms that have settled into schools as the “new” normal over the past three decades.

Gauging whether discontented teachers refusal to give their students tests or scattered parent boycotts of tests and similar incidents constitute an emerging “revolution” in K-12 public schools is as dicey as basing a vacation on a weather forecast six months from today. So what kinds of evidence would I look for that would be closer to a 24-hour forecast?

1. Over a dozen states reject Common Core standards. Currently, five states, including Virginia and Texas, have refused to hop on the bandwagon. Republicans have come out against the Common Core recently because of the federal weight being put behind implementing the standards. Legislators in South Dakota have expressed deep reservations about the standards. Indiana has “paused” implementation of the Common Core.

2. At least ten states withdraw from adopting new national tests of Common Core standards slated for 2014-2015. Utah and Alabama have already dropped out of the consortia designing new tests. Indiana legislators halting implementation of the standards includes the possibility of the state withdrawing from the consortia charged to create a national test of the standards. Whether recent disruptions in online testing in four states will lead to dropouts is unknown but online delivery of tests has so far run into massive technical difficulties with the new tests less than two years away.

3. More state and local school boards officially reduce number and frequency of tests as Texas is about to do. The Texas Senate has passed a bill to reduce the number of existing end-of-year tests for getting a diploma from 15 to five. A similar bill in the Texas House of Representatives. This comes within a year of hundreds of Texas school boards passing resolutions condemning the amount and frequency of standardized tests. Florida, a stronghold of aggressive standardized testing and grading schools on their performance is having second thoughts. As is occurring in New York state.

4.  Student and parent boycotts  of standardized tests spread from suburbs to small towns and big cities across the U.S. Parent and student boycotts in taking state standardized tests have been scattered and sporadic (See here, here, and here). Thus far, these protests against tests have been isolated and uncoordinated. Should they coalesce, however, into regional and then a national movement that includes small towns, affluent suburbs, blue-collar suburbs, and big city minority parents and students, state and local officials would have to think again about the number of tests they administer, their frequency, and worth to the enterprise of teaching and learning in schools.

5. Business and civic leaders support publicly the reduction of standardized tests and penalties administered to failing schools. CEOs and mayors coming out against too many standardized tests or local chambers of commerce criticizing the harshness of accountability regulations have yet to occur. I have found no instances of such activities by business and civic leaders.

Were such evidence described above to materialize, I would then say that what appears as isolated instances of pushback against the dominant school reform model of the past three decades is much closer to a rebellion but not yet a revolution.

Because she is a divisive figure and damaged goods as an educator.  Both mean that her celebrity-hood as a school reformer–on the cover of Time magazine, chatting with Oprah and Jon–will give her visibility in 24/7 news cycle but not lead to any substantial elected or appointed political or educational office.

No President will appoint her Secretary of Education; no governor will appoint her state superintendent of education and no school board will appoint her as their school chief. She is a polarizing, radioactive figure who will set off Geiger counters and create instant political turmoil and  organizational instability–outcomes that may be good for media attention and garnering large speaker fees but disastrous for those responsible for making schools better and improving student performance.

In the absence of actual work with states, districts, schools, and classrooms, her reputation as a divisive figure forever trailed by a dark hovering cloud of cheating on test scores will tarnish  her efforts to have any direct impact on students,  pushing her  further and further down the food-chain of celebrity status.  She will slip into the land where once highly touted educational celebrities such as Joe Clark   (here also) and Chris Whittle  (here also) became answers to the game: Whatever happened to _______ ?

Won’t her advocacy organization StudentsFirst lobbying state legislators for more charters, vouchers, performance evaluations for teachers, and the end of seniority for rehiring laid-off teachers make a difference? I doubt it for the following reasons.

Compared with the efforts of the deep-pocketed Koch brothers in influencing state legislatures through the American Legislative Exchange Commission (ALEC), or the well-funded Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), Rhee’s organization is minor league in political acumen,  expertise, and experience in political advocacy. Nor does StudentsFirst have any bench strength; it is all Michelle.If  she leaves the organization out of fatigue or pique, no more StudentsFirst. Moreover, such political work to be effective is back-channel and under the media radar. Such work is not Michelle Rhee, considering her few years in Washington, D.C. and since.

But there is something that Rhee can do to reduce the radioactivity, remove suspicions about her motives, and regain a pinch of credibility that she carried as a school reformer when the mayor of Washington, D.C. appointed her in 2007.

That something is for her to return to the classroom and teach for three to five years. Teaching will redeem her soiled reputation as a fame-seeking missile interested only in snatching the headline, the interview, the donor’s dollar. She will regain her credibility as someone who cares about school reform by teaching and working to have her students do well in school and in life. She might even move on, were she so inclined, to take state and federal leadership posts.

Although I hope she will make such a counter-intuitive move, for I do admire her energy, intensity, and commitment to students, I doubt that will occur. Celebrity-hood, once tasted,  becomes addictive and, so often, spirals downward as the addict seeks the next moment-of-glory fix. With regret, I blow a kiss goodbye to Michelle Rhee even now as she rides the cresting wave of “America’s most famous school reformer.”

In the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ben Stein famously plays a high school teacher who drones on about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act while his students slump at their desks in a collective stupor. For many kids, that’s history: an endless catalog of disconnected dates and names, passed down like scripture from the state textbook, seldom questioned and quickly forgotten.

Now take a seat inside Will Colglazier’s classroom at Aragon High School in San Mateo. The student population here is fairly typical for the Bay Area: about 30 percent Latino, 30 percent Asian and 40 percent white. The subject matter is standard 11th grade stuff: What caused the Great American Dust Bowl?

Tapping on his laptop, Colglazier shows the class striking black-and-white images of the choking storms that consumed the Plains states in the 1930s. Then he does something unusual. Instead of following a lesson plan out of the textbook, he passes out copies of a 1935 letter, written by one Caroline Henderson to the then-U.S. secretary of agriculture, poignantly describing the plight of her neighbors in the Oklahoma panhandle. He follows that with another compelling document: a confidential high-level government report, addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, decrying the region’s misguided homesteading policies.

Colglazier clearly is a gifted and well-trained educator, a history/economics major and 2006 graduate of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. But what sets this class apart from Ferris Bueller’s is more than the man; it’s his method—an approach developed at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education that’s rapidly gaining adherents across the country. At a time when national student surveys show abysmal rates of proficiency in history, trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking…..

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress. Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?

Most history teachers do not teach like Will Colglazier or the cartoon figure teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Colglazier is an exception, albeit according to the journalist, one who joins many others in using  historical thinking to gain deep understanding of the past rather than a heritage approach, that is, using facts from the past to recreate a present that tells Americans who they are, who they were, and the nation they are part of.

As I and many others who have been in classrooms have pointed out, most history teachers tilt toward the heritage end of the spectrum of history teaching but many do incorporate historical approaches in their lessons (See here and here).

Why?

One answer looks at how external testing, state academic standards, federal accountability regulations, teacher certification, and the unofficial national curriculum of Advanced Placement influence what teachers present. These omnipresent structures in the policy terrain set the boundaries within which teachers teach. To answer the above question on why teachers tilt toward “traditional” teaching, then, I also want to identify other factors that often go unmentioned by those eager to improve the teaching of history in K-12 schools.

Consider that cultural beliefs about the function of public schools to socialize children and youth into the dominant civic and social values (e.g., honesty, respect for others’ values, cooperating) are anchored in age-graded school structures. They become a powerful organizational mechanism for carrying out societal expectations (i.e., kindergarten prepares children for the first grade, a high school diploma is essential to going to college or getting a decent job). Teachers operating separately in their classrooms move 25 to 30-plus students through a 700-page history text, and give frequent tests to see whether students have learned the required knowledge and skills.

Moreover, age-graded secondary schools have history teachers teaching five classes a day (with at least one planning or “free” period and lunch) usually involving up to three different preparations (e.g., world history, U.S. history, and economics) with a student load of anywhere between 125 to 165 a day. The sheer whirl of traversing these classes between 7:45 AM-3 PM is exhausting for 22-year-olds. Imagine what it is like for 62- year-olds. When grading homework, reading essays, and checking quizzes are factored into the workload of most history teachers—don’t forget most teachers see individual students before school, during planning periods and lunch, and then after school–the daily decisions and fast pace of the day, much less the unpredictable emotional ups-and-downs that accompany working with teenagers, exhilarate and exhaust teachers. These social beliefs and school structures added to the public expectation that every student passes a test to graduate and then goes to college merge to create intense workplace conditions that influence how teachers teach.

Yet history teachers are hardly passive agents that societal expectations and school structures pour into a mold. Teachers bring their life experiences, formal and informal knowledge, and personal beliefs about children, learning, and serving the community that also influence what and how they teach history. And this is where blends of heritage and historical thinking pedagogy enter the picture.

Both constrained and autonomous, teachers accommodate to external demands and organizational structures while carving out a niche for themselves in which they can make independent decisions about how they organize their classrooms, group students, and teach.  Most history teachers end up picking and choosing different practices to put a tattoo on their teaching yet fall somewhere in the middle part of a continuum of teaching practices.

While most teachers use a version of the heritage approach, a small minority like Will Colglazier work within the constraints of the age-graded school and make other teaching choices based on their beliefs about learning, children, and knowledge of history.

Consider New York teacher Linda Strait (a pseudonym). A researcher who observed her teach a hybrid of both traditions of teaching. She teaches U.S. history through lectures, guides discussions, and controls what content is taught and how.

Yet in her Civil Rights unit, she offered a series of lessons beginning with a videotape “The Shadow of Hate” after which students divided into small groups to discuss and list their reactions on wall charts; an ungraded quiz on a reading Strait had assigned; a roundtable discussion of four questions she posed to the class; a two-day simulation of a local skating rink that refused to admit minorities with the teacher role-playing the owner and students making pitches to her to keep or drop the policy. Then two days of reviewing notes, writing in-class practice essays for the 11^th grade Regents tests that would draw from the Civil Rights unit.

Strait tells the researcher, “I try to throw in as many activities and projects, but I still feel that I am too heavily the center of it.” She has invented a hybrid of the two teaching traditions out of the choices she made within the constraints of state and school district policies, the structures of the age-graded high schools, her knowledge of the subject, personal experiences, and beliefs about how her students learn U.S. history (pp. 16-28).

Will Colglazier is part of a minority of teachers using historical thinking pedagogy. Most teachers of history blend both pieces of it and the heritage approach; they hug the middle.

The kids, cute as buttons, answer that faster is better than slower and, of course, more is better than less. If you have not seen the ads, see here and here. They highlight AT&T’s  speed and services in a humorous way.

And the ads have been hits, according to market researchers. Ad agency BBDO released the series–called “It’s Not Complicated”–last November and they have soared in ratings as measured by how many times tweets mentioned the ads.

I have watched these ads many times and I finally put my finger on what bothered me about them. What got to me was not that the values of speed and quantity were being reinforced with kids–hey, the first-graders’ responses are cute and you gotta smile when you see a gap-toothed little kid jump up and down in excitement. What bothered me was the degree to which the pervasiveness of beliefs in technology and its generous fruits are held in America and is now peddled to all of us explicitly without a blink or doubt… by first graders.

Not only in “Silicon Valley” (CA),  Austin (TX), Seattle (WA), Boston (MA), and New York (NY) where high-tech businesses and culture flourish but also in small towns, leafy suburbs, and along Main Streets elsewhere are these strong beliefs in the power and glory of technology prized. What are some of these social beliefs?

*New technologies can not only solve global warming, cancer, and low reading scores but also entertain us daily and make life at home easy.

*New technologies spur change, altering old and familiar ways of doing things. Thus, change means improvement. Improvement leads to  progress and progress  is good.

*Fast is better than slow.

*More is better than less.

None of these beliefs and the values they mirror, of course, is new. They were in the DNA of  colonists in Pre-Revolutionary America, mid-19th century pioneers,  homesteaders and entrepreneurs, early 20th-century captains of industry, and greenhorn immigrants disembarking at Ellis Island. Relishing the use of new technologies from the plow to the mechanized reaper, from canals to railroads, from the stethoscope to the X-ray, from the classroom blackboard to the iPad–Americans have seen these inventions as unvarnished progress in solving vexing problems. It was America on the move, creator of the new and destroyer of the old.

What’s new is that these beliefs have been converted into facts and made explicit; they are so commonplace as to appear in ads where six year-old foils shout them out.

So what?

No rant against technology here. After all, I have a full array of devices in hand and at home to use for work, play, and managing my life. What bothers me is that the taken-for-granted  acceptance of these beliefs now made explicit has silenced serious examination of their flip side, the negatives of these entrenched views.

Where, for example, can issues of how new information technologies erase boundaries between work and home, where you are on call 24/7, be examined?  Where can issues be discussed of new communication technologies not leading to more democracy but being used by dictatorships (e.g., Syria, North Korea, China) to stay in power  or how new technologies worsen existing problems (e.g., fracking for oil, loss of privacy)?

In the home already saturated with labor-saving and entertainment devices? Hardly. Few families can examine openly beliefs they cherish.

Perhaps in the old media of newspapers, television, and books where such opportunities do exist but, unfortunately, they are largely ghettoized into newspaper op-eds, Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) programs, and seldom read academic studies.

Sure, there have been some academics and public intellectuals from Langdon Winner to Neil Postman to Evgeny Morozov who have pointed out the political and social downside to a technology-rich culture viewed as crucial to economic growth and solving age-old problems. Moreover, a few social scientists have compiled experimental evidence on multi-tasking, distractions, and the perils of doing things speedily. And some philosophers have laid to rest the deeply embedded notion of inevitable progress as a positive good. A nano-fraction of the public read these studies.

Where, then, can the pluses and minuses of technological innovations  be examined? Perhaps you have already guessed where I am going for an answer. Public schools.

There are some schools and teachers who within the disciplines of science, math, history, English get students to think critically about past and present issues including analysis of media ads, technological innovations, and the beliefs students hold about these issues. Not many, however.

Most public schools are enmeshed in a standards, testing, and accountability regime aimed at sending everyone to college. Critical thinking, media literacy, and analyzing the pros and cons of technological innovations are seldom in evidence in most school settings, given the past three decades of making schools an arm of the economy.

I do wonder about those six year-olds who made those ads for BBDO and what they learned while the camera was on. What if their teachers asked them whether faster was better than slow in doing a school project or helping a friend or eating dinner with a parent? I do wonder.

Since 2000, hospital bills have increased at an annual average rate of 10 percent.  Surveys show most Americans think that health care costs seriously threaten the economy.  Issues of access and quality complicate the picture.  Health care is gobbling up 20 percent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Meanwhile, funding cutbacks are distressing K-12 schools.  More than half the states are spending less per student this year compared to last.  As thousands of teachers are laid off, school boards and superintendents are reverting to bare-bones core academic programs and nervously depleting fund balances..

Schools and hospitals have many similarities.  These include for profit and nonprofit types, boards of directors and CEO’s, differentiated patient or pupil treatments, stringent confidentiality of records, specialized and licensed staff, extensive professional development, substantial physical plants and technology, and diverse business functions.  Schools and hospitals are communities as well as bureaucracies.

Hospitals depend on individual plans for each patient.  They keep detailed records regarding what intervention has been tried, which ones have succeeded or failed and for what length of time.  They must measure change carefully because lives depend on it.. At least for nondisabled children, Schools are less conscientious about individual plans for children .

Schools should take the cue from hospitals and strive toward complete, flexible individual plans for all students.  Thereby, interventions can be applied consistently and for the right length of time.  Special education has helped schools build bridges between themselves and the medical world.  Like medical professionals, school staffs have adopted the use of Response to Intervention (RTI).  Teachers vary the time, frequency and duration of an intervention to meet individual needs, assess and compare data regarding its effects, and then if necessary utilize an alternative intervention. RTI gets at problems before the child fails dismally and has to be remediated.   Educators should expand and refine this model, along with other medical inspirations like brain-based learning, doing group rounds, action research, scientifically valid practices (a federal Race To The Top program priority), referrals and preventive counseling.

Teachers hope to be publicly respected like doctors.   This will not happen unless school boards empower teachers to exercise more discretion to generate students’ individual plans.  Joint accountability for results would be a must, but teachers and children would benefit from more responsive and tailored support.

 Teachers and doctors alike are grappling with an explosion of internet-based information and new technology.  Educators are encouraged to coach or guide students to self-directed learning, while doctors and other medical staff are exploring telemedicine to facilitate prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and rehabilitation in home settings.  The key is to use technology more creatively, not as a convenient substitute for the status quo.

A warning: as technology redefines relationships, shoddy education or physical damage can occur as individuals self-diagnose or take intellectual shortcuts over the Internet.  Technology must reinforce rather than substitute for licensed professional expertise, solid thinking and good judgment.

 The intersection of medicine and education could be called health.  Public schools struggle to combine core academic subjects with learning about mental, emotional and physical health.  By the same token, hospitals and doctors are challenged to reach out to their surrounding communities in ways that could definitely strengthen health services

By promoting healthy communities, schools and hospitals could better serve the public at lower cost.

For many years I have served on the board of a nonprofit network called the Healthy Community Alliance (HCA) in rural western New York.  Largely state grant-funded with six full-time employees, the network  provides or coordinates programs that address chronic disease awareness and prevention, youth mental health, parent education and management including physical activity and nutrition.

The Alliance takes advantage of emerging health and lifestyle priorities for both young and older populations.  It maintains an impressive list of partnerships and affiliations, but relationships with both hospitals and school districts are hampered by apathy or uneasiness because silo thinking lingers.  School and hospital executives should prioritize alliances with regional health networks to close community service gaps more efficiently and cost effectively.

Funding is a minefield for both schools and hospitals.  However, public schools operate in a comparatively controlled fiscal environment.  Elected school boards, annual public budget or tax rate referenda, property tax caps, and mandated reporting requirements keep schools more accountable to their constituencies than most hospitals are accountable to theirs.

Hospital charges depend on a confusing combination of costs derived from different sources.  Hospitals do not publicize standardized fees for specific services.  Usually patients are not in any position to make informed choices.

In a recent Time Magazine special report, Stephen Brill urges significantly lowering the eligibility age for Medicare to 40 so that insurance limits can be extended on certain expensive tests, drugs, and services. Medicare controls costs by reimbursement based on certain standards for treatment.  The standards are published, specific, measurable, and reasonably scientific.  Connecting performance standards to cost reimbursements seems to hold promise not just for medicine, but as well for schools where politics often override educational performance. Medicare may have big flaws, but it also saves big money.   

Everyone wants measurable results to assure performance quality and bang for the buck.  School and hospital leaders should make time to discuss their commonalities.  By climbing out of their boxes, these two institutions could reconnect cost with quality and multiply productivity.

  References

Anderson, G. (Johns Hopkins University) as cited in Babcock, C.R. (2013, March 12). Americans without insurance face escalating hospital bills. The Buffalo News. Buffalo, New York.

Brill, S. (2013, March 6). Bitter Pill: How outrageous pricing and egregious profits are destroying our health care. Time Magazine.

CBS News/New York Times. (2009, June 20). The Debate Over Health Care. National Poll Conducted by CBS News/New York Times.

Healthy Community Alliance, Inc. (2012).  Community Value Report. Gowanda, New York: Author.

Mellard, D.F., and Johnson, E. (2008). RTI: A Practitioner’s Guide to Implementing Response to Intervention. Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Oliff, P., Mai, C, and Leachman, M. (2012, September 4). New School Year Brings More Cuts in State Funding For Schools.  Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Washington, D.C.

Richardson, W. (2013, March). Students First, Not Stuff. Educational Leadership, 7 (6), 10-14.

USDOE. (2012). The Condition of Education. Washington, D.C.: Author.

Public and private insurers pay doctors not only for visits to offices, clinics, and hospitals but also for the diagnostic tests they order such as blood work, sonograms, X-rays, scans, and the treatments they deem best in light of an emerging diagnosis. They also prescribe medications and screen healthy patients for possible diseases including more tests since this system of payments–called fee-for-service–encourage such practices. Fee-for-service payments from private and public insurers depend upon counting patient visits, diagnostic tests, and treatments.

Surveys of physicians, in part, support this view of doctors ordering additional tests beyond what may be necessary for the patient. Consider “aggressive care.” In a recent survey of primary care physicians, 28 percent said they ordered more tests or referred patients to specialists—their operational definition of “aggressive care.”  When asked why, physicians responded that they feared malpractice litigation, had to meet clinical performance measures set by insurers, and had insufficient time with patients. Recently a group of nine medical groups of specialists laid out recommendations that would reduce diagnostic tests (e.g., imaging tests for many cases of lower back pain).

To see how fee-for-service infiltrates daily clinical practice, do the following thought experiment. Suppose you want to build a house for your family. You will need experts, expensive equipment, and materials and have to coordinate all of these. Instead of hiring a general contractor to oversee brick masons, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, and other specialists, you paid electricians for every outlet they recommended, carpenters for cabinets they thought you needed, plumbers for faucets they wanted to install, and brick masons for sidewalks they thought you should have. As an owner of the house, you would have hundreds of outlets, scores of cabinets and faucets and sidewalk after sidewalk winding around your house. The expense would be astronomical and the house would be in dire trouble a few years later.

Physicians, researchers, and policymakers say that lack of coordination and mindfulness in building such a house is what has occurred with fee-for-service dominating private and public payments to most physicians. One doctor pointed out that in the analogy the “general contractor” is what primary care physicians do in coordinating health care for patients. But family medicine and primary care practitioners are shrinking in numbers. Economic incentives through fee-for-service, however, nudge specialists to order diagnostic tests and prescribe treatments using the latest technologies.[ii]

When specialists form groups or hospitals invest in the latest equipment (e.g., imaging machines) and procedures (e.g., arterial stents), incentives to use both often multiply. For cardiologists inserting stents (cost: $30-50 thousand per procedure) to keep arteries open is a huge money-maker. As one medical researcher said: “In many hospitals, the cardiac service line [stent] generates 40 percent of the total hospital revenue, so there’s incredible pressure to do more procedures.”

Financial incentives do reshape clinical practice especially when the federal government puts its fiscal muscle behind certain medical technologies. For example, in the 1960s, a machine was invented to cleanse blood of impurities because of kidney failure. This invention saved lives but was so expensive that only the wealthy could afford it. In 1973, The U.S. Congress amended Medicare to cover full costs for dialysis of patients who would otherwise die.

Uses of technological tests for diagnosis and treatment in medical practice is, in part, a function of financial incentives–the market at work–put in place by private and public systems of funding. Whether it makes a difference in caring for patients–either in healing or extending lives–remains unclear.

Now, switch from doctors using new technologies to diagnose and treat patients to teachers and principals working in classrooms and schools. Think about school reformers who press administrators and teachers to use online instruction, blended learning, iPads, etc., etc., etc. What, if anything, can be learned from the impact of fee-for-service funding spurring greater use of high-tech tests in medical practice and how market incentives can be applied to schools and classrooms?

For some, history lessons are ambiguous.

For some, history lessons are depressing.

These cartoons capture differences among historians and teachers over whether or not there are lessons for decision-makers seeking solutions to pressing problems.

No clear lessons, however, can be drawn from the past because then and now are different in significant ways. Take the second cartoon where the man in the center assumes that the other two are agreeing with him when they have completely opposite analogies in mind. The notion of obvious lessons derived from the past assumes that, for example, France and Britain caving into Hitler’s demands over Czechoslovakia in the 1938 Munich Pact was similar to the U.S. government sending troops to Vietnam to prevent Southeast Asian nations falling like dominoes to communism and, again, similar to President George W. Bush and Congress authorizing the invasion of Iraq in 2003 to strip weapons of mass destruction from a tyrannical Saddam Hussein.

But, of course, the national contexts of the late- 1930s, the early 1960s and a decade ago were neither identical nor even closely similar. Britain and France in the 1930s, suffering the effects of a lost generation of its youth in World War I, were very different nations than the U.S. at that time. And in the U.S., since the late-1930s, momentous shifts in the U.S. government, economy, society, politics, and culture occurred to make involvement in Vietnam and the run-up to toppling Saddam Hussein very different from these easy-to-use historical analogies. That assumption about situations four and seven decades apart being the same drives the idea that history can teach lessons.

Historical analogies, of course, are common. Historians use them to shed light on current situations and can be helpful as long as the different contexts for the unfolding of events are made clear.  Even Richard Neustadt and Ernest May, two scholars who dredged up past instances in Thinking in Time (1986) that could help top policymakers make better domestic and foreign policy decisions, stressed the importance of knowing the differences between then and now.

Those who fail to point out contextual differences or the weaknesses of particular analogies, in the scathing words of Gordon Wood become “unhistorical historians ransack[ing] the past for examples….” They are presentists who, in creating a “usable past” advocate certain policies because they believe their analogies, their examples fit the current situation. They are mistaken and misuse the past (see previous post). Which brings me to contemporary school reformers.

The current crop of school reformers have a full agenda of Common Core standards, test-driven accountability, expanding parental choice through charters and vouchers, spreading virtual teaching and learning, and ridding classrooms of ineffective teachers based upon students’ test scores. These reformers have their eyes fixed on the future not the horrid present  where schools, in their charitable view, are dinosaurs. These reformers are allergic to the history of school reform; they are ahistorical activists that carry the whiff of arrogance associated with the uninformed.

*They do not want to know what happened in schools when political coalitions between the 1890s-1940s  believed that there was a mismatch between student skills and industrial needs.  Vocationally-driven schools cranked out graduates who could enter skilled and semi-skilled industrial and white-collar jobs (See Benavot voc ed and Kanter voc ed). That was then. The current vocational drive to get all students into college and equip them with technological skills that no employer could turn away might give reformers pause in learning from the earlier generation of reformers’ impact on schooling.

*They do not want to know what happened in past efforts in various cities throughout mid-to-late 19th century schools in introducing widespread testing, evaluation of teachers based on those scores, and accountability. See here and Testing in 20th century.

*They do not want to know what happened when previous efforts to introduce innovative technologies into schools stumbled, got adapted in ways unforeseen by reformers, and even disappeared. See history of technology and here.

Were these starry-eyed reformers to pause and find out more about previous widespread efforts to transform schools along the lines they pursue, chances are they would find that that historical studies instil skepticism and, in Gordon Wood’s words, question “people’s ability to manipulate and control purposefully their own destinies.”  Moreover, historical knowledge takes people off a roller-coaster of illusions and disillusions. “  So often reforms go  awry and lead to untoward consequences, usually perverse ones, that reformers had not anticipated. History calls for humility among reformers, unfortunately, a trait in low supply among the current crop of amply-funded reformers.

These are the lessons that history teach school reformers.

*Progressive school reformers praise the 19th century one-room school for multi-age grouping, students helping one another learn their lessons, and close connections between school and community; conservative school reformers see the same one-room school house as a place where order and discipline ruled the day and students learned basic skills.

*Technology-driven reformers describe 21st century U.S. public schools as products of a late-19th century industrial age when schools became assembly-line factories and continue to this day to turn out graduates unequipped to enter a post-industrial, knowledge-based economy where jobs require collaboration, problem-solving skills, and creativity.

Both statements about the past are myths. Both derive from reformers-turned-historians with selective memories who seek to advance their current agendas. They create a usable past. And in doing so, they tip-toe around truth.

Professional historians wince when fellow historians and policy elites dip into the past and recover evidence that is useful in pushing particular reform-driven policies. Called “presentism “ among professional historians, it is an epithet that wounds academic reputations. Not among reformers cherry-picking facts from the past, however.

Why are the above statements myths? Other historians delving into primary sources  determined the accuracy of such statements labeling them as nostalgic renderings from imperfect memories. Jonathan Zimmerman looked carefully at the rural one-room school.

In Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory, Zimmerman points out how educational progressives and conservatives in the 1960s both pointed to the “little red schoolhouse”–which Zimmerman notes was seldom red since paint cost too much in most rural districts–as evidence for their current passions. Progressives committed to “open classrooms” in those decades saw through rose-colored glasses teachers and multi-aged students in the one-room school working together to learn; conservatives, deeply concerned about drugs and crime in most suburban and urban schools sprinkled pixie dust over the one-room school and saw the Three Rs, discipline, corporal punishment, and dunce caps as practices that needed to be resurrected (see YouTube of author discussing book).

Zimmerman’s careful sifting and analyzing of sources shows how the icon of the one-room school clearly had the features that both progressives and conservative attributed to the one-room school but fell far short of being an accurate portrait of all that occurred in such schools. He toppled the myth by offering a well-rounded portrait showing how memory and history are entwined in photos, documents, and recollections of teachers and students about their experiences in one-room schoolhouses.

In turning to the myth of current schools as factories producing graduates unfit for working in an information-driven economy, one need only turn to a few examples since such rhetoric is so pervasive in the past few years (see here, here, here, and here).

Many historians and other academics argue that it is a myth that U.S. schools are failing (and have failed) propagated by reformers who selectively use evidence to push their favorite reform. These scholarly challenges, however, have yet to gain much traction among the larger public in the super-heated global climate of reform talk coming from policy elites and street-level activists (See here, here, here, and alan krueger). What these scholars and journalists point out is that U.S. public schools compared to its own history of two centuries and compared internationally now are a mixed picture of successes and failures–not a black-white photo but one in rich colors.

Yet the myth of U.S. schools as failures persists in policy talk and action because such rhetoric and policies fit the ambitious agenda of technology-driven reformers eager and willing to transform failing U.S. schools into high-tech successful ones. See here, here, and here.

Historians of U.S. schooling, however, have investigated different features of public schools and described how the structures, norms. and culture of age-graded schools invested with powerful social expectations from parents and taxpayers have maintained a stability, a “dynamic conservatism,” in daily school operations that permits some innovations, including new technologies, to be adopted, others adapted and even others shunted aside. David Labaree, Nancy Cohen, Jon Zimmerman, William Reese, and other historians offer portraits of different aspects of schooling that give pause and invite skepticism of  what past and contemporary reformers promised and how the best of reformers’ intentions have gone awry time and again.

These historians do not seek a usable past; they shine a light on earlier eras that reveal ideas and actions taken in the context of earlier decades. They do not pick and choose which facts best illuminate present reform agendas. Such historical detective work questions contemporary reform-driven actions and urges mindfulness, even humility, among those who construct a usable past to justify policies that, more often than not, produce unintended consequences.

In the seminar’s syllabus, I explain why I put “good” in quote marks.

“Good,” I tell my students, is obviously not a technical term but a common one that is in daily use by educators, researchers, policymakers, parents, and taxpayers. A “good” school  also can be described as “great,” “excellent,” “productive,” “first-rate,” “effective,” or other similar terms. For the past quarter-century the dominant view of a “good” or “great” school has been one where students do well on state tests and send increasing numbers of their graduates to college. That view, while pervasive, is contested by other definitions of “goodness” represented in different designs for “good” schools (e.g., KIPP schools,  New Trier high school in Winnetka (Illinois), and the Open Classroom School  in Salt Lake City (Utah).

The second reason I offer for putting the word in quote marks is to make clear that it is a value judgment based upon individual and group conceptions of “goodness” in schools (e.g., federal and state definitions anchored in values of what makes a “good” school such as  Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP).  Conceptions of “good” whether it be a “good life” or a “good friend” are loaded with values. So, too, is what we believe should the purposes of tax-supported schooling in a democracy, what knowledge and skills should be learned, how learning and teaching should occur, and what should constitute success.

To make this point, in their first assignment I ask them to write an op-ed piece describing their version of a “good” school for a general audience. Their op-eds traverse a range of schools they call “good.”

After analyzing their op-eds in the seminar, I then offer students a wide variety of school models that designers, participants, and experts judge to be “good.” They are: Core Knowledge, School Development Project or Comer schools, Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology, KIPP schools, Rocketship Schools, and Child Development Project schools.

Then in one session summarizing these “good” schools, I  ask them to figure out why they are considered “good”–their purposes, strategies to achieve those purposes, measures of success, and responses from students, teachers, and parents. Then, I ask the students to judge which ones they consider “good.”

Most often, students judge each of the model schools they have read about and we have discussed in great detail, “good.” Afterwards, I ask them to write down answers to two additional questions that cause much consternation among them. The questions are: Would you teach at the school you have said was “good?” Would you send your children to the school you have judged “good?”

During the lesson, I tally all of their responses publicly to the above questions on whether the school is “good,” would they work at the school they designate as “good,” and, finally, would they send their children to that “good” school. Conflicts within individual students and across the class become evident.  Again and again, students see that while nearly all  of them designated, for example, KIPP or Rocketship as “good” schools, most of them would neither work nor send their children there. Most students wanted to work at  Comer and Child Development Schools. Most wanted to send their children to Core Knowledge and Child Development Schools.

The data from their choices revealed much individual and group nail-biting: the school is “good” but many would not choose to work at the school or send their children there. Often, discussions erupted at obvious inconsistencies expressed by students. The group slowly came to realize that while a school may be considered “good” by designers, participants, and experts, that does not mean that an individual teacher or parent would choose to work at that “good” school or  send their children there. Not only is the concept of a “good” school value-driven, they discovered, but many versions of  “good” schools exist and there is no one “good” school for all or even most children and youth. Period. End of lesson.

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*For earlier monthly posts featuring cartoons, see: “Digital Kids in School,” “Testing,” “Blaming Is So American,”  “Accountability in Action,” “Charter Schools,” and “Age-graded Schools,” Students and Teachers, Parent-Teacher Conferences, Digital Teachers, Addiction to Electronic Devices,  Testing, Testing, and Testing, Business and Schools, Common Core Standards, Problems and Dilemmas, Digital Natives (2),  Online Courses,  , Students and Teachers Again, “Doctors and Teachers,” and Parent/teacher conferences.