BOOK

REVIEW

We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future, by Chester E. Finn, Jr. New York: The Free Press, 1991, 311 pp. $22.95 hardbound. Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of America's Teachers, by Rita

Kramer. New York: The Free Press, 1991, 222 pp. $22.95 hardbound.

Adam Scrupski These two books on education, published at the same time by the same press for the same price, complement each other. Chester Finn discusses everything but teacher education; Rita Kramer fills in the blank. I will therefore discuss Finn's book first, then Kramer's. Taking Charge Chester Finn, professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University, director of the Educational Excellence Network, and president of the Madison Center for Educational Affairs, has risen to prominence as a major critic of trends in American education. In dozens of articles and in the book he co-authored with Diane Ravitch, What Do Our Seventeen-Year-Olds Know? Finn has discussed a wide range of problems affecting schools at every level. Yet, We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future is his first attempt to address the reform of American public education as a whole. Thus it will command the wide attention it deserves. Because Finn served under William Bennett in the Department of Education during the Reagan presidency and enjoys a close association with Lamar Alexander, President Bush's secretary of education, many will read We Must Take Charge

as an expression of contemporary conservative thought on educational policy. Finn, however, justifiably asserts that in one sense his prescriptions for American education are anything but conservative, for rather than urging a consolidation of traditional practices, he proposes dramatic new directions in educational reform. And these prescriptions, I shall argue, owe as much to liberal as to conservative thought on education. In a version of the cultural lag argument employed for years by liberal reformers, Finn maintains that today's school is essentially a nineteenth-century institution. Originally designed to serve only part of the population, it is inadequate to the job it is now asked to perform. And whereas it was once complemented by such other agencies of education as church and family, with the decline of the latter, the school staggers under a larger share of educational burden. Contemporary "dislocations in families, churches, neighborhoods, work lives, personal mores, and leisure time pursuits" require schools to "enmesh" themselves with the lives of their students and their s t u d e n t s ' families. Thus, though Finn also calls for parents to take responsibility for their children's behavior and achievement, he primarily wants "to devise m e a n s o f b o o s t i n g [the school's] leverage and increasing the fraction of their lives that children spend u n d e r its influence." A m o n g o t h e r things, he proposes lengthening the school day and year. Finn offers ten precepts for improving public education. Essentially, he calls for national standards for intellectual attainment, a national core curriculum that will occupy about two-thirds of any school district's curricular space, management of individual schools by their teachers and administrators, parental choice of school, and a national testing system.

Book Review

This call for a national educational policy abandons the traditional structure o f local school control. T h e local school board, for Finn, only tends to preserve the power o f the educational establishment. Real local control, he argues, consists in giving decision-making authority to the professionals who serve in individual schools. This, he adds, must be accompanied by parental choice and a system o f testing that, by informing parents how well their children are learning, ensures accountability. Finn's argument, however, does not take into a c c o u n t the t e n d e n c y o f a school's teachers to form what Willard Waller, o u r most acute sociologist o f schools, called a "well-organized ruling class. "1 A few parents participating in a s c h o o l ' s g o v e r n i n g s t r u c t u r e are n o match for such an oligarchy; but a democratically elected school board, mandated to contend with the professionals, can be a m o r e powerful force. It may even, through the pressure it exerts on top administrators, be an effective agency o f the community. Ironically, Finn's emphasis o n central education control (through national testing and curriculum) and local c a d r e d o m i n a n c e c o u l d inhibit rather than foster p a r e n t empowerment. Finn settles for choice a m o n g public schools as better than no choice at all, yet he describes extending choice to private schools "a thinkable option" that should be a "fundamental operating assumption." Curiously, in his a r g u m e n t he makes little use o f the success o f Catholic schools in educating urban students (first revealed by James Coleman and recently confirmed by others). 2 While the success of athletic teams is m e a s u r e d and public, Finn points out that t o o f r e q u e n t l y a t e a c h e r ' s or a school's a c a d e m i c success is g a u g e d solely by scores on achievement tests n o r m e d for typical students. He main-

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tains that schools should be held publicly accountable for their students' inteUectual achievement, with rewards or penalties assessed a c c o r d i n g l y . T o b l a m e schools' failure on such external factors as the breakdown o f the family is, to Finn, a form o f illegitimate buck-passing, a reflection o f o u r "no-fault" culture. Like liberal reformers, he demands that schools assume responsibility for their pupils' success or failure; but unlike these reformers, he considers testing a catalyst for improved pupil performance. Finn says that schools should administer tests that c o m p a r e student performance, not just at the school and state level, but also nationally and internationally. H e also p r o p o s e s a testing p r o g r a m students must pass to be p r o m o t e d or graduated and a system for sanctioning teachers whose pupils fail. Thus, Finn rejects that favorite o f mainstream educational a c a d e m i c i a n s the theory o f intrinsic motivation. H e states flatly that "external consequences are the main d e t e r m i n a n t o f how hard most o f us work and how much we accomplish." Finn does not believe that high school mathematics or English assignments, however constructed, can ever be m o r e appealing to teenagers than rock music or "mall-hanging." H e also notes the inanity o f the view that self-esteem is a significant factor influencing educational performance. Finn presents his precepts as a "new constitution for American education," but he suggests that such a revolution is just too big a j o b for government. Ordinary people armed with "reliable information and clear alternatives" must institute reform. Finn is impressed with such achievements o f "ordinary people" as their having stopped smoking, lowered their cholesterol levels, and recycled newspapers and cans. But are these the accomplishments o f ordinary people? Or

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are they the work of the "new class"-the academicians, bureaucrats, and journalists who have taken on society's reform and the purification of our lives as their special burden? Finn, alas, never says how ordinary people can revolutionize education. However, Finn does attend somewhat to an idea that suggests a less revolutionary, more conservative alternative. That is James Coleman's concept of "social capital." Coleman conceives of social capital as the social relations, essentially in the family, that constitute a kind of informal pedagogy, making available to later generations the experience and knowledge of earlier ones. s Social capital seems related to what Lionel Trilling called the "pedagogic mode," which "consists i n . . . the formation of one person's character by another, the acceptance of another's guidance in one's own growth. "4 This method of transferring knowledge is conservative in the genuine, "small platoon" sense of the word. And Finn appears to approve of it. For he says that "we should be devising means to generate and accumulate more social capital...trying to built it up within the family and between parent and child." Yet his emphasis on national school reform and the further institutionalization of the child (a longer school day and year) seems to ignore the significance of local sources of extraschool social capital. It is possible that genuine parental choice might be an engine of social capital regeneration, empowering parents to contend with the overinstitutionalization of their children and to reassume protective and tutorial responsibilities towards them. However, to conceive of choice merely as a market-like mechanism, wherein schools are selected by parents on the basis of their test scores, seems to leave the educational function exclusively to schools.

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None of this denies the importance and value of Finn's positive proposals. As James Coleman noted twenty-five years ago, there is already very little local variation in what schools teach. A national curriculum, therefore, would not impose a new uniformity but could effect a general elevation o f standards. And a national testing program, if its results are carefully analyzed, could be a useful tool. Yet Finn's argument is insufficient in the short shrift he gives parental choice and its implications for generating social capital. Parental choice, especially as ext e n d e d to private schools, is surely needed to empower parents. But it must be supplemented by other means of strengthening families. It is time, as Allan Bloom has suggested, to curtail the family's major competing socialization agent--the hedonistic and violent youth culture, with its generational solidarity and its antifamilial and antipedagogical biases.

E d School Follies Given the breadth of his criticism of American education, it is surprising that Finn has little to say about schools of education. However, this omission has been remedied by Rita Kramer in Ed School Follies: The Miseducation of Amerlca's Teathers. Kramer visited classes and interviewed deans, professors, a n d s t u d e n t s at schools and departments of teacher education in fourteen American colleges and universities. This is a relatively small sample of the hundreds of such institutions, and Kramer's findings must be called impressionistic; yet her sensible outlook and acute perceptiveness enable her to identify conspicuous failings that teacher education's most ardent defenders will be hard pressed to deny.

Book Review

Kramer finds political correctness prospering in schools of education. As marginal, not quite academically respectable entities on university campuses, education schools tend to embrace ideological trends more dearly than do departments with more authentic academic credentials. Consequently, the more high-powered and prestigious the university, the more marginal and politically correct is its school of education. Krarner found political correctness in its purest form at Columbia University's Teachers College, which boasts a thriving peace education program as well as a popular philosopher of education who distributes Marxist literature and teaches that American society is based on exploitation, imperialism, and slavery. However, Kramer also cites examples of politically correct ideology at just about every institution she visited. Beyond mere ideology, Kramer found that many education professors are also social activists who believe that schools can effect societal reform. A dean at the University of Texas told Kramer, "You can't n o t use the schools as the agencies of social change." The schools Kramer surveyed also embrace any opportunity to support and supply institutionalized day care, sex education, and parental education-all of which are informed by the same social reformist impulse. Complementing both ideology and activism, Kramer found that schools of education promote a psychologically and socially therapeutic approach to teaching. Again, the strongest proponents of this approach are at the most prestigious schools. At Teachers College, professors speak of "feeling," "warmth," and "empathy." Elsewhere, the talk is of "multiple perspectives," "interactive decision making," and "creating a positive learning environment in order to foster personal development and social responsibility."

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Also frequently discussed are "community acts" and "cooperative learning." The latter consists of making pupil team members quickly informed "experts," who then teach one another. And always, there is talk of self-esteem. Kramer found pervasive the conviction that teachers are responsible for stimulating their students' interest in learning but that pupils bear no reciprocal obligation to make an effort. Thus, new teachers are told they must know as much as possible about a student's personal and cultural background to adapt their pedagogical approaches to his "style of learning." "Learning styles," usually unspecified and unexplicated, also seem to be an article of faith among teacher educators. Of course, they are related to teacher educators' wholesale acceptance of multiculturalism. At one California school a professor said of these different styles, "You can't say one is right and one is wrong; they're part of different cultures." The recently developed concept of "constrnctivism" or "social constructivism" is related to muldculturalism, as well as to a Rousseauian conception of youths' self-directed learning. Constructivism is increasingly popular in schools of education, but unfortunately is not discussed by Kramer. It challenges what teacher educators call the "direct instruction" approach to pedagogy. Constructivism claims that a student autonomously constructs meaning or "cognitive formations" for himself(or herself, teacher educators would be sure to say). To discover how this happens, psychologists and teacher educators are studying classroom and play-group speech. As opposed to Coleman's concept of social capital, construcdvism emphasizes intra- rather than intergenerational social experience. Kramer did find a version of constructivism in the "whole language" approach

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to teaching reading. This approach has conquered the entire field of reading instruction. Kramer aptly points out that this method may succeed with those students who can learn to read, write, and spell by doing what comes naturally in a language-rich context, but that the majority of students require a more concentrated, direct approach. (It has recently been reported that the Houston, Texas, school system has dropped the whole language approach to reading.) 5 Kramer is at her critical best observing teacher educators' attempts to recruit black teachers. Their recommendations range from the formation of future teachers clubs in junior high school (high school is too late) to Eastern Michigan University's plan to identify potential black teachers in high school, who are then introduced to teaching at nearby community colleges, transferred to fouryear campuses, and guided during student and contractual teaching by experienced mentors, who help with such tasks as taking attendance and grading. Kramer notes that these publicly-funded efforts cannot guarantee that their beneficiaries will enter teaching. She fails to mention that no evidence proves that minority teachers teach minority youth any better than nonminority teachers do. Indeed, the only evidence we have (from James Coleman's 1966 study Equality of Educational Opportunity) 6 suggests that the reverse is the case. Not all of Kramer's findings are negative. She is generally delighted with the quality of instruction given teachers of the handicapped. And she has good things to say about instruction in bilingual education. Kramer also writes approvingly of educators who include real knowledge and experience in pedagogical instruction. This takes two forms: wedding pedagogical technique to substantive knowledge of subject areas, and

Academic Questions / Spring 1992

expanded classroom experiences for teacher candidates. Kramer finds the smaller, less prestigious teacher education institutions preferable to their larger, more prestigious counterparts. The former focus on the substantive and the concrete, indulging less in ideological and therapeutic approaches. Perhaps their origins in the old "normal school" traditions are guiding the smaller education schools aright. Kramer thinks that all the pedagogical instruction aspiring teachers need can be acquired in one summer, supplemented with classroom experience (Finn skips even the summer, settling just for practical experience). This is what has come to be called the "alternative certification" route, today most prominent in New Jersey. Kramer, however, laments the limited scholarly competence of the alternate routers she met. She suggests that secondary teachers need a vigorous education in their area of expertise. Had Kramer or Finn delved deeper into the data, they might have found that alternative certification is hardly a solution to our teacher education problem. For example, in the area of most dramatic shortage--mathematics--only 40 percent of alternate route mathematics teachers in New Jersey were mathematics majors, compared to 80 percent of traditional education program graduates; and alternate route mathematics teachers compared to college-trained teachers expressed less satisfaction with teaching, exhibited a higher attrition level, and received more unsatisfactory appraisals from supervisors. 7 Traditional college-based teacher education should not be so readily dismissed. Perhaps there is a virtue in seminary-like vocational preparation for those who would, like the clergy, minister to an unselected clientele. A period of what Robert Merton calls "anticipatory socializa-

Book Review

tion" may ensure the internalization o f the service motive in students who later, as teachers, must deal with the stresses and strains o f neglected o r over-indulged compulsory conscripts. My experience as a principal during the great period o f teacher hiring in the 1960s suggests that people thus trained approach teaching with a good deal m o r e seriousness and care than do those who take an alternate route. Incisive and valuable as Kramer's observations are, they do not bear the weight o f o n e o f her general conclusions, that, except for the media, "schools o f e d u c a t i o n are the greatest c o n t r i b u t o r to the ' d u m b i n g down' o f America." It is fair to charge that teachers g r a d u a t i n g f r o m d e p a r t m e n t s and schools o f e d u c a t i o n are insufficiently p r e p a r e d in subject matter. But, as Kram e r admits, this applies as well to college graduates in general. T h e solution is n o t to do away with p r o g r a m s o f teacher e d u c a t i o n but to r e f o r m them. Both K r a m e r and Finn a p p r o v e o f the H o l m e s G r o u p ' s call f o r f i v e - y e a r teacher e d u c a t i o n programs, offered in collaboration with arts and sciences faculty to e n s u r e intensive subject m a t t e r training. T h r o u g h such r e f o r m s , we might recall teacher e d u c a t i o n institutions to their traditional and successful ways.

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Notes 1. Willard Waller, The Sociology of Teaching (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1965), 9. 2. Seymour P. Lachman and Barry A. Kosmin, "Black Catholics Get Ahead," New York Times, 14 September 1991; Susan Chira, "Where Children Learn How to Learn: Inner-City Pupils in Catholic Schools," Nero York Times, 20 November 1991. 3. James S. Coleman and Thomas Hoffer, Public and Private High Schools: The Impact of Communities (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 222-25. 4. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (New York: H a r c o u r t Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 77. 5. Debra Viadero, "Opposed to Whole Language, Houston Schools Revert to Phonics," Education Week, 20 November 1991. 6. See James S. Coleman, "The Sidney Hook Memorial Award Address: On the Self-Suppression of Academic Freedom," Academic Questions 4 (Winter 1990-91): 18-19. 7. Gary Natriello and Karen Zumwalt, "Challenges to Alternative Contexts for Teacher Education," in The Context of Teaching, vol. 1 of 1991 Yearbook of the National Societyfor the Study of Education, ed. Ann Lieberman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).

Adam Scrupski is professor of education at Rutgers University, New Brunawick, NJ 08903.