Today’s dominant educational legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), requires outcomes–but it does not require opportunities or other “inputs.” Presumably, policymakers were skeptical about the quality of mandated opportunities, even if there were adequate funding. If, for instance, the federal government told schools that they must provide science classes, or after-school activities, or service-learning opportunities, some schools would offer very ineffective, hollow versions of these programs. Would they be considered in compliance with the law even if their outcomes were poor? Instead, Congress said that schools must achieve specific outcomes–mainly, reading, math, and science scores–but they could choose their own methods. (This is a simplification, but close enough for argument’s sake.)

The focus on outcomes instead of opportunities bothers me for several reasons, although I understand and do not dismiss the reasons behind it.

First, NCLB–unavoidably–selects a small list of outcomes: all ones that can readily be measured in high-stakes exams. Those of us who also care about civic knowledge and habits, artistic development, foreign languages, and moral learning are faced with a dilemma. Either we demand tests in our favored areas (some of which aren’t very testable), or we try to smuggle our subjects into schools without testing them. The latter course is difficult when schools are struggling to get their kids through the required exams.

Second, a focus on outcomes encourages us to think of children and teenagers as people who are prone to fail. We work hard to identify those most “at risk” and to intervene so that they avoid clear marks of failure (mainly, bad test scores). As a result, we may set our sights too low, forgetting that flourishing people need more than adequate test scores. As Karen Pittman says, “Adolescents who are merely problem-free are not fully prepared for their future.” Worse, we may overlook young people’s potential. They are capable of serving others, creating works of art, and organizing constructive activities. Treating them as bundles of problems instead of assets can help to drive them out of school, or so I strongly suspect. This is an argument for guaranteeing every American child opportunities for positive development.

Third, not everything we do in school should be measured by its effects on individual students. Whatever skills schools may provide, they are also places where we spend some 18,000 hours of our lives. Some activities during those hours ought to be instrinsically satisfying or else meaningful because they benefit other people (or nature), not because they enhance students’ individual skills.

A school is a community, and communities ought to have news sources, discussions of their own issues and problems, and opportunities to serve. Thus I would support student newspapers and other media; students’ discussions of local issues; and service programs even if they had no demonstrable impact on students’ skills or knowledge.

These activities should be done well. There is a big difference between a fine scholastic newspaper and a poor one. But the difference is not measured by the impact on kids’ reading scores. It has to do with the seriousness, breadth, and fairness of the coverage and the impact on students’ knowledge of their own community. Likewise, the quality of service projects has much to do with whether the service actually addresses problems, quite apart from whether the participants gain skills and knowledge.

The other side of the argument is that some of our children cannot read or understand basic math. They are at great risk of failure in life. They will be unable to participate as citizens or create works of art if they are poor and sick and prone to arrest–all of which are consequences of illiteracy. Our urgent priority must be to identify them, help them, and punish those adults who “leave them behind.”

Well, maybe. But that strategy is no use if kids hate school and drop out, or if kids pass our reading exams but cannot use written texts for practical purposes, or if kids make it through school but don’t know what to do with their lives.

(O?Hare Airport, Chicago) I just attended a very stimulating large conference on ?values and evidence in educational reform,? organized by Crooked Timber?s Harry Brighouse and the Spencer Foundation. There were panels on standards and testing; charters and vouchers; and small schools–major controversies in educational policy today. The panels combined statements by passionate advocates of each reform; careful and dispassionate reviews of the empirical literature; and philosophical analysis of the underlying moral issues.

I?d like to summarize the most challenging of the presentations, but I?m not sure whether the ground rules permit such publicity. So instead I?ll offer a thought about ?choice? in education. Given the prominence of vouchers in the public debate (although not in our actual school systems), people tend to equate ?choice? with parents? options about where to send their kids, using public money. But there are other critical choices that people can be allowed to make; any given policy will combine several of these in varying degrees:

Parents? choices about where to try to enroll their kids

Kids? choices about where they want to enroll and whether to attend school at all

Kids? choices about which particular classes and other activities to participate in

Schools? choices about which kids to admit (or actively recruit)

Teachers? and coaches? choices about which of their students to involve in various classes and activities

Teachers? choices about where to work

Schools? or school systems? choices about whom to hire as teachers and administrators

Schools? choices about what to teach and how to teach it

Adult citizens? choices about how to assist or influence all kids? education

I doubt there?s a single ideal recipe, but I am at least somewhat enthusiastic about giving families choices among schools and giving adults choices about what and how to teach. (There is, however, a profound question about whether adolescents or their parents should choose schools, under various circumstances.) I don?t much like allowing public schools to choose their students, because then they can take the easy road to success: selecting and admitting those who are easiest to teach. Allowing teachers to choose where to work clearly worsens inequality–many of the best qualified instructors place themselves in easier school buildings and systems. However, simply denying choice to teachers is impossible: they can always quit altogether.

We already have an educational system characterized by choice and constraints. The question is not whether to increase or reduce choice, but who should be allowed to choose what and when. The considerations mentioned above are just the beginning of that discussion.

Around 1985, Eccles and Barber asked 10th graders in Michigan to identify themselves with one of the characters in the recent Hollywood movie, The Breakfast Club. All but five percent readily placed themselves in precisely one of the following categories: “jock,” “princess,” “brain,” “criminal,” or “basket case.” Each type of student spent most of his or her time with others of the same self-ascribed category. Students’ identities at 10th grade were strongly predictive of outcomes a decade later. The princesses attended college but drank. The criminals did drugs and dropped out. The brains were sober and successful in college. Those who participated in the performing arts did well in school but had higher rates of alcohol abuse and suicide attempts.

If we allow students to self-associate, given the norm in a modern American high school, they are likely to segregate into groups that reinforce social stratification. Students have too much choice about peer networks, but not enough obligation or opportunity to work with others unlike themselves. In various qualititative studies, including my own last year, students complain about being in a “bubble” (their word), isolated from other types of people.

If we try to build democratic communities in schools, through such concrete means as student governments, public performances, websites, or scholastic newspapers, these products will be produced by particular peer groups for their own friends. They will not benefit the student body as a whole.

This study is an argument for more radical school restructuring.

Sources: Jacquelynne S. Eccles and Bonnie L. Barber, “Student Council, Volunteering, Basketball, or Marching Band: What Kind of Extracurricular Involvement Matters,” Journal of Adolescent Research, vol. 14, no. 1 (January 1999), p. 31; Bonnie L. Barber, Jacquelynne S. Eccles, and Margaret R. Stone, “Whatever Happened to the Jock, the Brain, and the Princess? Young Adult Pathways Linked to Adolescent Activity Involvement and Social Identity,” Journal of Adolescent Research, vol. 16, no 5 (September 2001), pp. 429-455.

We saw a student production of Godspell last weekend in my little daughter’s Washington, DC public school. In a different DC public school years ago, I attended a PTA fundraiser that was pervasively religious, all of its rhetoric drawn explicitly from the evangelical Black church. I’ve argued here that it should be constitutional to teach intelligent design (even though it’s bad science and worse theology). In these three cases–and others like them–I’m not zealous to keep religion out of public schools.

I’m not saying that authority figures in state schools like the ones we have today should make sectarian, religious pronouncements while they perform their official duties. To mention an easy case, the principal of a neighborhood public school should not get on the P.A. system and tell all the kids that they must embrace Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But in closer cases, I’m inclined to tolerate religion in public schools, for these reasons:

First, the purpose of public schooling is to reproduce and enhance a culture (not simply to produce economic “returns” for graduates). Because cultural reproduction is a common good, we need to subsidize it with public funds: otherwise, many people will leave the expense to others. Of course, “culture” is heterogeneous and controversial. That is why citizens need to participate in shaping their schools. The debate about what values we should teach is not a cost, but an opportunity to create our common future. By the way, there must be some local control over education, because a national debate about culture will produce the lowest common denominator.

Education should not be conceived as value-neutral, because that is impossible, and the effort to strip it of overt values has negative consequences–such as those that I mentioned yesterday in reference to civics textbooks. I am not terribly offended if some of the values taught in public schools are religious, in part because I think almost all modern norms have religious roots.

As Eugene Volokh’s recent post and the replies indicate, the founders of the United States favored public schooling largely in order to inculcate values. I would reject their assumption that religion was a necessary foundation of public morality. (The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 said: “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”) But I would endorse the premise of the Northwest Ordinance that certain virtues are important for good government and public happiness, and that public schooling should promote those virtues. If my fellow citizens see religion as part of morality, so be it.

Second, I would rather have the freedom to participate in a robust debate about the content of our children’s education than to see courts dictate a position, even if I agree with it. For instance, when a judge rules that the teaching of intelligent design is unconstitutional, we cannot seriously discuss the issue. Likewise, if a court were to rule that public schools may not produce Godspell, we would have less scope to debate that play.

Third, Harry Brighouse argues in On Education that there are some perverse, unintended consequences from the American policy of barring religion from all state-funded education. A substantial group of parents is uncomfortable with secular public schools, because those institutions are materialistic, highly individualistic and competitive, and tolerant of premature sexuality. Brighouse (pp. 87-88) describes the typical high school:

It is a 2000-plus student institution, in which no individual knows every other individual; in which many children never have any teacher for more than one year of instruction; in which the prevailing values include pep rallies for sports and a slavishly conformist loyalty to school and neighbourhood. These schools maintain a deafening silence about spiritual or anti-materialist values, take sides in the Cola wars, and accept as a given the prevalence of brand names and teen-marketing. Religious parents often, with justification, believe that their own beliefs are at best ignored, at worst actively worked against by the schools. …

I suspect that in the US many parents are drawn to private religious schools not by any interest in having their chidren indoctrinated, but by their horror at the experience of the shopping-mall high school, and, in fact, an unarticulated sense that the values of the peer group, tolerated by the school, threaten, rather than serve, their children’s prospective autonomy. Religious parents fear that schools that do not incorporate strong moral values, and which treat spirituality as just another lifestyle option … endanger their and other children’s prospects for a balanced and satisfying life.

In most foreign countries, these parents would opt for state-funded religious schools. Some are not fundamentalists (or even necessarily believers), so they add diversity to religious schools by enrolling their own children. In most countries, state-funded denominational schools are regulated so that, for example, they must teach core democratic principles and tolerate non-believers.

In the United States, however, we have pervasively secular public schools that aim for value-neutrality (sometimes with bad consequences); and we have religious schools without any access to state money whose curricula are completely unregulated. The religious schools may draw religiously zealous parents who are hostile to the mainstream culture. When this happens, their students become a homogeneous group, deprived of diverse influences.

American Catholic schools, although not state-subsidized, give a taste of what would happen if public schools could introduce more religion–or if private religious schools could get state money. After Vatican II, Catholic educators chose not to proselytize, but instead to teach a set of values that are highly compatible with secular democracy. They also draw diverse student populations. They appear to do a better job of secular civic education than the public schools–on average. Thoughtful observers like Jim Youniss and David Campbell believe that modern Catholic education succeeds because it is grounded in strong moral commitments.

Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch have an article in Education Week entitled “Bridging Differences.” Meier is a hero for many progressive educators; her small schools in East Harlem are democratic communities that give significant voice to students and faculty in developing their own curricula. Ravitch, in addition to being an excellent historian of education, is a prominent proponent of a national core curriculum backed with exams.

The two distinguished women were supposed to debate No Child Left Behind, but instead they had a long and personal conversation that generated a tremendously insightful article, written in the first-person plural. Their human connection–their mutual sense of respect and trust–is tangible. They write movingly near the end of their article:

As the lunch ended, Diane said to Deborah, ‘I would be glad to see my grandchildren attend a school that you led.’ Our macro-level differences do not interfere with our mutual respect for each other’s work. That itself is something we hope our schools can help teach young people.

They disagree about much and candidly explore their disagreements, which mostly concern matters of educational policy, such as whether to use NAEP scores for assessment. Their agreements about the political situation are striking. Specifically:

1. They agree that all well-intentioned reform ideas become bastardized because of the way public institutions are run today. “As we talked, we found ourselves deeply frustrated, even angry, as we realized that the so-called reforms of the day are too often a perverse distortion–one might say an ‘evil twin’–of the different ideas that each of us has advocated.” Small schools (which Meier advocates) become places “to park some difficult dissidents to quiet them while other schools are brought into compliance.” Mandatory curricula (which Ravitch favors) are watered down and filled with foolish content.

2. They agree that part of the reason for bad governance is a lack of citizen-based, independent institutions in which matters of value can be debated and diverse people can find positive roles and build countervailing power:

Almost all the usual intervening mediators–parent organizations, unions, and local community organizations–have either been co-opted, purchased, or weakened, or find themselves under siege if they question the dominant model of corporate-style “reform.” All the city’s major universities, foundations, and business elites are joined together as cheerleaders, if not actual participants, offering no support or encouragement to watchdogs and dissidents. This allows these elites the opportunity to carry out their experiments on a grand, and they hope uninterrupted, “apolitical” scale, where everything can, at last, be aligned, in each and every school, from prekindergarten to grade 12, under the watchful eye of a single leader. If they can remain in power long enough, it is assumed (although what actually is assumed is not easy to find out) that they can create a new paradigm that no future change in leadership can undo.

I read “apolitical” to mean: driven by experts, free of overt debate about values, technical and difficult to grasp, conducted in private, and closed to citizens. Ravitch wants a national debate about what is essential to learn, culminating in the design of public standards. That’s a political process at a large scale (although she would leave lots of room for teachers to make other decisions). Meier wants a robust debate within each school about what is most important. That’s also politics, but at a decentralized level. Neither one wants consultants, pyschometricians, and managers hired from corporations to make critical decisions without public debate and involvement.

3. They emphasize the civic mission of schools, partly because they believe we need a robust civil society to prevent the poor governance that we observe in today’s large school systems. A precondition for civil society is democratic education:

During our animated conversation, we agreed that a central, abiding function of public education is to educate the citizens who will preserve the essential balances of power that democracy requires, as well as to support a sufficient level of social and economic equality, without which democracy cannot long be sustained. We agreed that the ends of education–its purposes, and the trade-offs that real life requires–must be openly debated and continuously re-examined. Young people need to see themselves as novice members of a serious, intellectually purposeful community. We think that it would be healthy if students listened to and participated in such discussions, and came to understand the purposes for their schooling beyond the need to acquire more certificates.

4. They share an ideal of the teacher as a professional. She should be trusted to make important judgments about values and techniques based on her experience and her relationships with her own students, while being held accountable. They see all major current educational reforms as hostile to such professionalism.

5. They believe that a respectful dialogue among people with divergent views is both possible (as they demonstrate in the article) and essential to progress on education.

By criticizing “apolitical” reform efforts and modeling a mutually respectful dialogue about values, Ravitch and Meier exemplify a form of politics that we desperately need.