Max and Gertrud Bondy

[Radical educational reform and experimentation has a mixed history in this country, especially at the liberal end of the spectrum. John Dewey (1859-1952), the American philosopher and psychologist, has arguably had the most influence on progressive theories of teaching and scholastic organization in the United States. His ideas, however, if carried too far or applied injudiciously, can descend into Auntie Mame travesties of self-indulgence or formlessness. As sociologist, poet, writer, and public intellectual Paul Goodman (1911-72) writes: “On the whole, the history of progressive education has not been a cheerful one. Its ideas and methods have been stolen and bastardized precisely to strengthen the dominant system of society rather than to change it.” A few attempts at a new paradigm for educating young people have appeared on the scene from time to time, though most didn’t last very long despite impressive successes in the fields of teaching and learning (usually for reasons more connected to administrative or financial problems, or both). Goodman and, especially, Dewey both were often associated with these schools, one of which, the New School for Social Research in New York City, founded in 1919 (and renamed the New School University in 1997 and then simply the New School in 2005), is still operating successfully. Its more radical cousin, Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, lasted only 24 years, from 1933 to 1957. Black Mountain was virtually an open educational system where the faculty and students worked in partnership more like masters and apprentices and the teachers were not only educators but often prominent practitioners in their fields, especially in the arts and letters. Black Mountain became a center for arts training during its short existence, but the near absence of an administration, which the founders saw as an impediment to learning and open inquiry, eventually led the school to descend, as historian, essayist, and playwright Martin Duberman described in his study of the experiment, into “little more than a group of squabbling prima donnas.”

[Strangely, though, another, very similar experiment unfolded in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts, directed in this instance at teenagers. The Windsor Mountain School also lasted only a short time, from 1939 to 1975, but it followed many of the same practices as Black Mountain (from which, perhaps not coincidentally, some of the faculty came), with, perhaps, a little more structure and formality—though not much. The founders of the unusual prep school were Max and Gertrud Bondy, World War II refugees from Germany by way of Switzerland, who’d developed their philosophy of education beginning in 1919 in Europe as a response to the growing authoritarianism they saw developing in German society following World War I. I learned of the Bondys and their school when I began doing research into the life and career of Leonardo Shapiro, the innovative stage director I knew in the 1980s and ’90s and about whom I’ve written many times now on ROT. Independent of Leo’s connection to the Bondys and the influence he felt Windsor Mountain, from which he’d graduated in 1963, had had on him, the story of Max and Gertrud Bondy is fascinating and worthy of note. I hope ROT readers will agree. ~Rick]

When Max Bondy (1892-1951), a former art historian, returned to Hamburg in November 1918 after service as an artillery officer with the German Reichsheer in World War I, he saw that his countrymen had become accustomed to cruel behavior toward one another and, especially, to prisoners of war. He decided that this situation had arisen because, as children, the Germans hadn’t been taught “decency and love” but “only to obey.” Bondy saw the German public schools of the day as focusing almost exclusively on obedience and stern discipline. Germany had raised a generation of bullies, cruel to anyone weaker than they. The only way to change this, Bondy decided, was to change the way children were educated. Before the war, Bondy had observed that the young men at universities habitually tormented their younger schoolmates and that their social organizations promoted drinking and found great honor in dueling and bearing scars. Parents treated their sons with extreme strictness but didn’t teach them respect for others. Bondy organized a club in which the aggressive impulses of the members were spent in debating, animated discussion, sports, and mountain climbing. In fact, mountain climbing, an activity which required skill, courage, and daring, but which pitted the men not against one another but against the mountain, served as a metaphor for the kind of non-competitive pursuit the Bondys encouraged.

In 1923, Max Bondy and his Prague-born bride, the former Gertrud Wiener (1889-1977), one of the first female physicians in Germany whom Max had married while she was still in medical school, founded a school, initially in Gandersheim, Lower Saxony, and then in 1929 in Marienau, south of Hamburg, as an alternative to the public schools. Their goal, pursuant to a dream Max Bondy had formed with friends who hadn’t survived the war, was to educate a new kind of German, with a “sense of responsibility, self-respect and the desire to be a new person.” Schule Marienau became one of the first in Germany to establish a student government as the Bondys endeavored to develop an atmosphere of mutual trust and reliance instead of discipline and punishment. “We wanted the students to feel that they could be leaders and be responsible for themselves,” Gertrud Bondy said, “building up a life in the school.” Self-government for the Bondys wasn’t merely meant as a way to inculcate democracy; more importantly for their epistemology, it was intended to direct the students’ energies to productive and beneficial activities. “We have often seen that the most aggressive young person has become the most energetic leader of the group,” explained Max Bondy.

Small at the start, Schule Marienau was organized into groups with each group functioning as a community, the members of which did everything together, for and with one another. Each group of eight to ten students had a teacher as an adviser and an elected student as a peer leader. If two groups developed a dispute, they’d stage mock combat “in the spirit of sportsmanship,” fighting for treehouses which they’d built. Whereas traditional German boarding schools had strict discipline similar to U.S. military schools, reinforcing the sense that there was an authority over the students, Schule Marienau wanted the adolescents to feel they could become leaders and, as Max Bondy phrased it, “self-sufficient people who will take their responsible place in future life.”

In 1931, on the cusp of the National Socialist’s take-over of the German government, Max Bondy said: “We see the standard of the German youth continually declining. His way of thinking gets more and more dependent. One rarely meets a critical, well-educated individual anymore.” Independent thinking and judgment, the Bondys believed, can defeat the mob mentality of suppressive authority, but it should also benefit society by leading its members towards the common good. The educational reformers saw teaching cooperation as “the real antithesis” to Social Darwinism: instead of the notion that “the basis of education is competition,” schools should promote the maxim, “The group that is best able to cooperate and live together has the best right and chance for survival.” A student who didn’t learn the basic lessons of the Bondys’ new community quickly either changed under their guidance or was dismissed from the school.

(I haven’t been able to confirm this, but it sounds as if one of the Bondys' inspirations was Prince Pyotr Alekseyevich Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat who grew disillusioned with life at the imperial court. Kropotkin, 1842-1921, author of Mutual Aid, insisted that cooperation and mutual assistance are the standard in both nature and human society, attacking Social Darwinists for their view that the world is essentially competitive. Windsor Mountain alumnus Leonardo Shapiro cited Kropotkin as a personal inspiration and I believe that he learned of the Russian anarchist’s philosophy and possibly read Mutual Aid while he was at the school. I don’t know whether the book would have been assigned reading or if precocious students like Shapiro were just encouraged to read such challenging fare. In any case, Kropotkin’s philosophy dovetails with the Bondys’ pedagogical principles.)

When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, the public schools soon began teaching ideas that contradicted what the Bondys believed. The reformers “saw at once that the drive to hurt, both physically and mentally, to indulge people in the wildest cruelty and meanness, all those ‘uneducated’ drives, revealed themselves in the majority of German adults.” Teachers in the state schools, the Bondys believed, ignored the truths established by modern psychology indicating that these kinds of impulses were part of the human constitution—Hitler, explained Max Bondy, hadn’t created these drives—and can’t be eliminated—but they can be “educated.” “Too late for the world it was discovered that . . . if they are not educated,” insisted the Bondys, “they will break through in some way that may damage the world terribly.” Perhaps most significantly to their agenda, the Bondys concluded, “It was not the neurotic or psychopathic; it was the average German whose drives were uneducated.” Max Bondy pointed out that “Hitlerism, Chauvinism, anti-Semitism, freshman hazing, groping, etc., apply to normal average people and not to sick people.”

They saw the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws which discriminated against all kinds of minorities, particularly Jews, and “sanctioned the open display of sadistic drives.” (The Bondys were Jewish by heritage, though they had been baptized as Lutherans in 1924.) The establishment of the concentration camps and the horrors that took place there following on the seizures of the possessions and murders with impunity of members of the outcast groups were anathema to the Bondys and their followers. The Marienau students were shocked at what they saw happening around them and the Bondys saw more clearly the need for education. A few years earlier, Max Bondy noted: “We are observing with fear the decline of the thinking and acting of the majority of the German students into the thinking and acting of mobs. The present public school system seems to be unable to counteract the mob spirit efficiently.” In 1936, Gertrud Bondy, who’d also studied psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud in Vienna, took as many students as wanted to go and moved them to Gland, Switzerland, on the northwestern shore of Lake Geneva. (Coincidentally, Gland, 17 miles north of Geneva, is only about 11 miles from the town where I went to school one year myself more than 25 years later.) Max stayed in Germany under the impression that the Nazi philosophy couldn’t sustain itself. When he realized he was wrong, he joined his wife in Switzerland in 1937 and they built a new school founded on their old principles.

In 1939, the Bondys emigrated to Windsor, Vermont, and established the Windsor Mountain School based on these same principles the following year. After moving briefly to Manchester, Vermont, the school settled in its final location in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1943. Upon Max Bondy’s death in 1951, Heinz Bondy (b. 1924) assumed the headmastership of the school, which closed in 1975. (Heinz Bondy’s older sister, Annemarie Roeper, b. 1918, married a man who’d been a student at her parents’ school and came to the U.S. with her husband in advance of the Bondys. The Roepers moved to Detroit where they founded a school dedicated to the education of gifted students. The Roeper School is still operating.) Shapiro described Heinz Bondy as “the voice of leadership, of experience and doubt—tempered idealism.” (Gertrud Bondy, then already over 70, was “the soul of the school.”)

Among the fundamentals of their philosophy was the establishment of a “friendly school”—a description Max Bondy preferred over “progressive school,” which he felt sanctioned the indulgence of a student’s “individual leanings” without considering others’ needs and rights—which fosters an atmosphere of trust among the students and between the students and the adults. This friendliness, the Bondys argue, isn’t mere “practical politeness to keep outside friction to a minimum.” Max Bondy explained:

If the aggressions of a young person express themselves in a wrong way, it is because he feels constantly attacked and his attacks in turn are his self-defense. If this is so, we have to create a community life in which his fears and anxieties are not confirmed by reality. Therefore we try to create an atmosphere which is more friendly than usual in the ordinary life period. We explain to our colleagues why they must really listen when a child talks to them, not only that they must show patience but that they must honestly take the child seriously.

The Bondys’ goal was the development of “mutual recognition, respect, and, if possible, friendship” among everyone in the group and beyond it. They also advocated the “education of the emotions,” a psychologically-based form of instruction aimed at redirecting the aggressiveness that they believed was innate and ineradicable in humans but could be put into constructive efforts. Max Bondy conceded that the existing schools did well enough with the “education for knowledge,” though some could criticize the material taught, he acknowledged. They also succeeded in the “education of behavior,” what we’d call socialization and good citizenship; and there was sufficient “training for acceptance of outside control, punctuality, and tidiness.” (Max Bondy made these claims in Europe in the 1930s; I wonder if he’d still make them today in this country, given the problems identified with the consequences of our public education.) But the Bondys found that “most educators have not even devoted time to a discussion of methods” for training the emotions, which he termed “the main task of education.” “That is a deeper reason for the idea of our self-government,” explained Max Bondy. Having concluded that the German people’s aggressiveness under the Nazis was in part the consequence of the lack of any emotional training, leaving them unable to resist the pull of authoritarianism, the Bondys insisted, “We want to give the young people the possibilities for working out their aggressions in a positive way.”

The “anti” feelings the Bondys saw exercised around them, the prejudices, bigotry, and hatreds of one group for another, they contended were not the result of improper understanding or an intellectual failing of some kind, but the lack of emotional training that impelled the haters and bigots to direct their own fears and anxieties into aggressiveness and violence. The domestic counterparts of this aggression included the tyranny of a parent over the family or the rejection of a child or spouse. The educators also recognized it in less-destructive behavior such as rudeness, hurting others clandestinely, and engaging in gossip and slander. As Max Bondy asserted:

We do not need to believe fatalistically and pessimistically in the hopelessness of human nature when we see these drives which are destructive and a handicap to happiness and joy. We know today that all these drives of hatred and aggression can be tamed through our knowledge of modern psychology. Psychological insight gives a new opportunity for the betterment of education.

The Bondys believed that all children face “disappointments, lack of security, lack of guidance” which “make a child feel lonely, weak, and lost.” As a consequence, the children develop “anxiety, insecurity, and inferiority feelings” which put them “on the defensive,” generating “feelings of hatred and jealousy” so that they act out aggressively by breaking things or hurting animals and other people. As we grow up, most of us learn to suppress the destructive behavior, but the impulse is still there in our psychology, hidden behind the veneer of politeness and socialization.

The friendly atmosphere established at Schule Marienau and later at Windsor Mountain was the key to the emotional training that would assuage those fears and obviate the impulse to violence. What Max Bondy called “the main idea of our school” was to generate an atmosphere where people don’t feel isolated, where they don’t need to defend themselves because no one’s attacking them. If you don’t feel afraid, the reformers believed, you don’t lash out. This is what Max Bondy called the “atmosphere of general friendliness,” the environment that makes “‘laws’ and ‘limitations’ bearable and livable,” referring to the rules the community sets, first, “to transform the child into a well-adjusted social being, and secondly, to enable him to get as much as possible out of life.” The students are also shown that those who are older or stronger, including the teachers and other adults, don’t get more rights or privileges than anyone else; bullying the younger or weaker gains nothing. Even though it seems that this setting doesn’t exist outside of the schools’ campuses or that “hard reality forces feelings of distrust and anxiety,” the Bondys insisted that the practice was still both valid and effective. Max Bondy did grant that the emotional education he advocated was easier to accomplish in small groups like boarding schools of limited size, where an adolescent can get a complete view of the entire community, than in a family, where the family dynamics make it difficult, or large schools, where a less-personal atmosphere exists and the potential for loneliness is greater. He also emphasized that the national, ethnic, and religious mix of the school community like Windsor Mountain was an important element in the emotional training. The reformers asserted that, though it can take years, they had proved in practice that young people will gradually feel less hostile and insecure as they find that others, including adults and even strangers, listen to them and take them seriously.

The education offered at the Bondys’ schools, as well as other forms of instruction, was accomplished as much outside as inside the classroom, in conversations with the adults which were often initiated by everyday events. The idea that adults listen to the children and pay attention to their questions and concerns, whether in class, in formal conferences or meetings, or in casual conversations on the school grounds, was part of the way the friendly campus enables the emotional training. The teachers and other staff of the schools had to learn to listen carefully because the students’ real concern might be disguised as an innocent and even frivolous question or passing remark. Furthermore, the adults were admonished sometimes to come at an issue obliquely, by “philosophizing” with the student or offering academic help and easing into the more fundamental matter. (We can see here the influence of Gertrud Bondy, who we should remember was a trained psychoanalyst.) Teaching at Windsor Mountain (and, I would surmise, at Schule Marienau as well) wasn’t easy, as the faculty had to expose themselves freely to the students’ scrutiny and demonstrate clearly that they aren’t hypocrites who use the students for their own ego-enhancement. The student units were also meant to offer support and attention to anyone feeling adrift. And although students who engaged in selfish or aggressive behavior were left to suffer the unpleasant consequences of their actions, punishment, which the Bondys believed led to resentment and anger, was rare. The important aspect of the mutual respect and friendliness was that the adolescents weren’t left alone with their problems but were allowed to speak their minds and voice their concerns in an environment where they’d get sympathy and understanding. This, the Bondys affirmed, was how confidence was built and, therefore, a sense of personal security fostered.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t incidents of bad conduct at the Bondy schools. There were occasional occurrences of everything from laziness and gossiping all the way up to making hostile ethnic or racial remarks about another member of the community. In addition to dealing with the immediate transgression itself, as well as its consequences, the schools turned these incidents into “teachable moments,” as we call them today. “We do this by encouraging lively discussions,” explained Gertrud Bondy, “giving people the opportunity of letting out their aggressions in words, proving their points and understanding the opposite opinions. This is a much more positive life.”

The Bondys continued their emphasis on student government as a way to teach the students leadership responsibilities and their encouragement of independent thinking and individuality in service to the larger community. Members of the unit were assigned responsibilities to increase their interest in the welfare of the entire group. In response, of course, the older students and the group leaders approached the younger and newer members with the friendliness fostered by the schools’ philosophy. The Bondys recognized two kinds of ambition: one, the drive for renown and power; the other, the desire to do the right thing. It was this second kind of ambition that the Bondys intended to instill in their students. Students who weren’t leaders were expected to try to become what they wanted to be. Being a leader in the Bondys’ epistemology meant seeing that life was enjoyable and satisfying for everyone in the community. Being disruptive or selfish was clearly not the way to accomplish that. If students were interested in becoming part of the student government, they would have to work to develop the leadership qualities that would take them to that goal.

The Bondys established an atmosphere in Lenox where adolescents were encouraged to “find their own voice” and engage in “radical political thought” as well as “self-motivated artistic endeavors.” The Windsor Mountain School, in the words of former student Steven Court, specialized in educating “kids who were the black sheeps of their family” in an environment free of rules and administrative repression. (Court, whom I interviewed in 1997 by phone in Iowa City where he was a grad student at the University of Iowa, was a student at Windsor Mountain from 1970-73.) An earlier alumnus, Jeffrey Horowitz (class of ‘64), founder of New York’s Theater for a New Audience, observed that the student body included “a number” of “misfits” and that the school encouraged and supported them. The freedoms—intellectual, social, political, sexual—offered by Windsor Mountain School all had profound repercussions on its students in their adult years.

Max and Gertrud Bondy saw “formal” education, by which they meant conventional schooling, as a way to teach people “to present only a smooth uniform exterior” while suppressing their individuality and independence of mind. “We consider [the formal school’s] method of education ‘non-educating’ or ‘mis-educating,’” declared Max Bondy. “The formal school only knows a uniform education, it does not recognize the importance of individual education.” With a student body of about 250 and a student-to-faculty ratio of seven to one, Windsor Mountain nurtured a “friendly atmosphere” that fostered mutual trust and respect in which student-teacher relationships were “close and informal.” One senior student, extolling the faculty members’ interests in non-academic pursuits like motorcycles and photography, acknowledged, “I relate to teachers like friends and equals, not like teachers.” As Paul Goodman called for in The Community of Scholars, Windsor Mountain strove to prepare its students for life beyond the campus without smothering their “creative impulse and attitude for change” by encouraging independent thinking and individual creativity in service to the community. Their educational philosophy, as we’ve heard, stressed individuality and independent thinking, but they were not unbridled libertarians. Uncircumscribed freedom is merely selfishness, they taught, but independence in service to the community is leadership.

One of the principal goals of education, the Bondys affirmed, is to make the student a member of society. “He cannot live as a hermit, and he will not wish to live [as] a hermit if he is not a psychopath,” said Max Bondy. “Through small but necessary restrictions he will learn to curb his own impulses and desires.” The Bondy schools’ aim wasn’t to create conformists, but to make everyone feel they are part of a group. While their students were expected to question authority and “test whatever is offered to them,” each was expected to bring his skills and talents to the service of the community, “to sublimate his ego to the superego represented by the group.” The Bondys not only taught their students to question whatever dicta are handed down to them, but emphasized that, even as adolescents, they are responsible for themselves and that others did not have power over them. “Wake up,” Gertrud Bondy admonished her students, “—not only to criticize but to criticize constructively, and to put your good ideas across to people.” Those with superior educations mustn’t remove themselves from society but participate in it, the Bondys taught. Max Bondy told a reunion of Marienau alumni:It would indeed be bad if the former members of our school community would live in seclusion, despise the way of life of the “others” and only look forward to the time when they can again be together for some days . . . among like-minded people.

No, you . . . must integrate into the community of the nation. You must not show yourselves to be better than the others, only better educated.

An example of putting this belief into practice could be seen in a tradition common in the ‘60s at Windsor Mountain, according to Jeff Horowitz. The school had little endowment but strove to maintain a scholarship program for deserving students, including many from Africa. Scholarship funds were raised by students who voluntarily worked in the Lenox community by performing services like painting residents’ houses. Besides benefitting the future scholarship students and Windsor Mountain, this practice was also an example of the Bondys' oft-stated precept that helping the community in which you live is a “positive action.”

(Once again I find myself wondering about Windsor Mountain reading assignments. I know that Leo Shapiro was introduced to the German novelist Hermann Hesse, 1877-1962, while he was a student there, and one of the books Shapiro later cited as an inspiration was Magister Ludi—also known as The Glass Bead Game—in which Hesse holds that humanity’s truest calling is the commitment to others rather than cloistered, solipsistic contemplation. I can’t help but see the parallels between the 1943 novel, the author’s last, and one of the Bondys' firmest tenets. Could it have been a book much read on the campuses of Schule Marienau and Windsor Mountain because of the stark similarities between the two philosophies? Could that be why Shapiro felt strongly enough about the book to talk to me about it specifically?)

The textbooks used at Windsor Mountain were conventional, but college-level. Students as young as 13 or 14 (Windsor Mountain started with seventh grade), however, were already reading authors like Goethe, Proust, Dostoyevsky, Nikos Kazantzakis, William Faulkner, Kenneth Fearing, William Golding—authors and works I didn’t read until college (if then)—and Sartre’s Nausea, Hesse’s Siddhartha and Journey to the East, and René Daumal’s Mount Analogue were the elective choices of some. The school’s theater program staged European drama like Max Frisch’s Biedermann and the Firebugs, Maeterlinck’s Pélléas and Mélisande, Giraudoux’s The Enchanted, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata, and Yeats’s Purgatory; and many of the Windsor Mountain students “seemed already to be professional artists” in poetry, painting, and theater. (Camp Windsor, a theater camp conducted on the campus, offered continued immersion in the arts during the summer.) Alumnus Shapiro, already a theater enthusiast and occasional visitor to Greenwich Village as a high-schooler, characterized the young artists as Village denizens, only younger.

Windsor Mountain, while offering traditional college-preparatory academics, took a liberal approach to regulating its students’ lives. Heinz Bondy, the headmaster, insisted that the “purpose of a school is not to run smoothly,” but to keep changing and adjusting to find answers. There was no dress code, no rules for leaving campus, no censorship of student publications. Students and faculty alike were subject to the same standards of conduct and there were no restrictions on political activity. The students themselves could suggest courses for the curriculum on the theory that adolescents were responsible, intelligent individuals capable of making reasonable choices about their lives. Teachers there were free to “experiment, improvise, and develop their own styles” and “teach pretty much what they want in any way they wish without interference from the administration.” The faculty even included several professional artists-in-residence, a rarity even now for secondary schools. Like a Black Mountain College for teenagers, the goal of the Windsor Mountain School, which didn’t demand its graduates go on to higher education as long as they pursued goals that made them happy, was to create a community that blurred the boundaries between students and adults and between classroom and life. Two late alumni invoked the name of a famous British experimental school, Summerhill, whose founder declared he’d rather the school “produced a happy street cleaner than a neurotic scholar," as a kind of paradigm. Windsor Mountain shared this philosophy: Horowitz put it this way: “If you were a happy secretary, that was just fine” and Court stated the school philosophy as: “Live what you’re for, stop fighting what you’re against.”

Windsor Mountain was one of the few private prep schools where the student government had more than an advisory function. The student court had sole authority over suspensions and expulsions and the student council made all the non-academic rules. In the 1969, for instance, the student council voted to allow students to visit the dorms of the opposite gender during the day and early evening. In addition to the sciences, arts, and literature, students in Lenox were also taught about political dissent, Horowitz asserted. Among his schoolmates at Windsor Mountain were several whose parents had suffered the effects of the probes by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), losing jobs and seeing their lives destroyed. The HUAC legacy was a topic of conversation on the campus which, Horowitz attested, “had a strong socialist element.” Far from suppressing social engagement or political activity by its students, Windsor Mountain encouraged it and students were free to participate in political activity if they wished. In the 1960s, the school hosted concerts by such counterculture icons as Pete Seeger, whose daughter Tinya was a student at Windsor Mountain, and Joan Baez. Other prominent parents who sent their children to Windsor Mountain, which was coeducational and had a religiously and racially integrated student body and faculty before the civil rights activism of the ‘60s, included singer Harry Belafonte, jazz musicians Thelonious Monk and Randy Weston, singer-actor Judy Garland, actor Henry Fonda, and civil rights lawyer Clifford Durr and his wife, activist Virginia Foster Durr.

It can’t be denied that, described this way—and much of what I presented here is either directly from the Bondys’ speeches or closely paraphrased from them—the Bondy philosophy sounds more than a little socialistic, utopian, and flower-childlike. If Schule Marienau (which still operates in Dahlem, Lower Saxony) and later Windsor Mountain didn’t slip into Auntie Mame caricature, there’s something of Peter Pan’s “Think lovely thoughts” floating around the Bondy epistemology. Still, there’s also a lot of truth embedded in it: prejudice is, indeed, often based on fear—though ignorance isn’t absent as Max Bondy seemed to believe. And while it might be possible to create a truly friendly atmosphere in a small community such as a boarding school of fewer than 300 students with a low student-faculty ratio, in the larger, more open society at large, or even just a medium-sized public school, the kind of control and intellectual discipline necessary to maintain one would be impossible to attain. Finally, the notion of teaching a young adult “to sublimate his ego to the superego represented by the group” would fly in the face of the ingrained American ideal of “rugged individualism” that has permeated our culture since long before there was the concept of the “Me Generation.” I don’t know how the European schools actually worked, but by the time the reformers got to Lenox, they seem to have succumbed to some practicality. I’m afraid the closest we’re likely to come to the Bondy ideal is the way John Lennon saw it: “Imagine.”

[Many of the facts and quotations from the Bondys in this article are drawn from various speeches of the Bondys published on a website that’s no longer on line (and which I corrected here for obvious spelling or typing mistakes). (The site was maintained by a descendent of Max Bondy’s brother and contained other material, such as genealogical information.) Some of the speeches, translated into English, may have been taken from a German-language book, Max Bondy: Reden an jungen Deutsche (1926-1947) [Speeches to young Germans] (Marienau, Ger.: Schülern der Schule Marienau, 1998), published by the school originally founded by the Bondys. The principal sources, however, were speeches entitled “Philosophy of the School” and “The Objectives of the School and Their Origins.” The first was delivered by Max Bondy clearly at Windsor Mountain (although I can’t tell which campus) and the second by Gertrud, obviously after her husband’s death.]

Teachers & Reform (Addendum)

The movement to reform school systems, now coupled with the drive to bust unions, especially of public employees, in some states, has brought a return of “blame the teacher.” The focus has mostly been on seniority, especially when it comes to laying off teachers as budgets are slashed across the board in both cities and states around the country. According to the existing laws and policies of many states and school systems, if layoffs become necessary, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg insists they are in New York City, the most recently hired teachers will be the first to be let go regardless of their accomplishments and evaluations on the job or their potential as teachers for the future. Bloomberg and his education commissioner, among others, are promoting a change in the law, known as “Last In, First Out,” or LIFO, to allow school boards to choose the teachers to be laid off based on merit rather than seniority.

First off, let’s get away from one topic that’s part of this debate right now: whether state budget cuts inevitably mean teacher layoffs as well. Bloomberg insists the state shortfall requires him to cut the city budget, including the education department, and that that necessitates laying off teachers. Governor Andrew Cuomo suggests that such cuts aren’t necessary, despite his proposed state drawdown and some opponents to the mayor’s budgetary choices also assert that firing teachers isn’t needed, either. (Cuomo’s proposed cuts in administrative expenditures such as bureaucracy, office overhead, and consultants.) To be perfectly honest, I have no idea what the truth is here. I’m far too ignorant about financial matters and the economy to see one way or the other. Furthermore, it’s irrelevant to the issue I want to get into here: whether it’s fairer and better for the schools and students to make decisions about reductions in force based on seniority or merit, irrespective of whether the current situation requires a RIF or not. Whenever the time comes, now or in the future, that teachers have to be fired to meet budgetary demands, that question remains. Additionally, while this discussion is going on in the press and on the airwaves, some activists and spokespeople have taken to maligning the teachers again as a way to weaken the position of the teachers’ unions, which Chris Christie, the new governor of New Jersey, has dubbed “political thugs” in a televised interview. “The teachers union is an institution built to protect the interests of itself,” but not the schoolchildren, stated Tony Bennett, Indiana state Superintendent of Public Instruction. In both Wisconsin and Indiana, Governors Scott Walker and Mitch Daniels have impelled legislatures to pass bills stripping public employees, including teachers, of their collective bargaining rights, a move opposed by Americans across the country by nearly two to one; other states are contemplating similar laws. (You have to wonder, by the way, why all the governors trying to hogtie these unions are Republicans while the unions almost invariably support Democratic candidates.) In February 2010, school officials in Central Falls, Rhode Island, announced plans to fire all the unionized teachers at the high school. The tumult was settled, but politicians around the country cheered the move and morale fell, with 20% of the faculty leaving and daily absenteeism among the rest increasing dramatically. As I said in “Teaching & Reform” (ROT, 29 July 2010), I find these tactics reprehensible.

I will assert, however, that reductions in school budgets aren’t necessarily best addressed by firing teachers on any basis. (Poor-mouthing has long been a good excuse to divide voters and disenfranchise some “undesirable” portion of an electorate.) In fact, we can’t fix our schools, whether for financial reasons or pedagogical failings, by getting rid of classroom teachers. Whenever someone complains about the problems and failures in public education, the first reaction is to blame the teachers. Never mind that schools are notoriously unevenly financed so that schools with problems get fewer resources. Never mind that reversing undeserved tax cuts for corporations and millionaires could restore school funds without burdening budgets. Never mind that social problems in the community like drugs, gangs, or poverty have a greater effect on learning than any teacher does. Never mind that studies show that classroom teaching is responsible for only 20% of a child’s education—that evenings, weekends, and vacations account for nearly as much of the experience. Never mind that school administrations, from the state departments of education to local school boards to principals and administrators in the school buildings are more responsible for what goes on inside a school than the hamstrung faculties. Never mind any of that—if there’s something wrong, it’s the teachers who get the blame first, and the solution is always to fire teachers and take away the few hard-won rights they’ve obtained over the years. Now, as we see in states across the country, the teachers’ meager salaries and benefits are the being spotlighted as the cause of the budgetary shortfalls. The teachers’ contracts aren’t the reason for the budget crunch in the first place (that was Wall Street enabled by oblivious regulators), and firing a bunch of them won’t fix the problem much in the second. In the third place, the teachers who are left, with larger classes and reduced classroom resources—not to mention fewer extracurricular and enhancement programs—are demoralized and marginalized even more.

On the surface, basing the decision to fire or retain teachers based on effectiveness seems like a no-brainer, especially in light of what I wrote back in “Teaching & Reform.” I said then that I was in favor of anything that benefited the students and that merit pay and other inducements to recruit and keep good teachers was sensible in spite of any opposition from teachers’ unions, who back the status quo. I still support any change that works for school kids, no matter on what side of the political spectrum it falls, but there are implications to the seniority-vs.-merit debate that may not be apparent at first look and which muddy the waters considerably. The major question is whether jettisoning the seniority rules applies only to layoffs or whether it will affect other aspects of the system as well.

If we want to make the schools better and keep good, dedicated teachers, then I think pay and layoff decisions have to be based on the effectiveness of the teachers under consideration. Based solely on who’s been around longest, these actions discourage good teachers and encourage the tactic of hanging on without sticking your neck out, keeping your profile low, and not making any waves—or worse, sucking up to the administration. Seniority provides a certain job security, which is good, but it doesn’t promote innovation or originality. Good teachers don’t come into the system and others don’t stay. Seniority may disadvantage new teachers, but how many college grads are likely to sign up for a job that they know going in will be short-lived because they will soon be considered old-timers and subject to dismissal in favor the novices coming up behind them? This doesn’t mean that longevity and loyalty shouldn’t be rewarded, either. Clearly, a teacher who’s been on a faculty a long time is a valuable asset, both for the school and the newer teachers; the students, too, benefit from the continuity and the experience the longer-serving teachers bring to the classroom. In any given school, the administration tends to be more footloose, moving from school to school or even district to district, while faculties remain in place longer, providing a stability that would be lost if senior teachers were regularly dismissed. Schools with the lowest teacher turnover are usually the most successful.

Though there are certainly exceptions, for the most part, teachers who’ve been on the job for 10, 15, 20, or more years must have something on the ball; they get evaluated yearly at least, after all. Neither age nor long service means that a teacher is not good or should be put out on an ice floe. When I was studying Russian 40 years ago, our best teacher was an older woman who’d been a Russian teacher in the Soviet Army: she was the most knowledgeable about how to teach language, the most engaged and responsive, and the most interested of our whole cadre of instructors. (She was also the sweetest person: she took her whole section, of which I was a member at the time, to the student kitchen on the day designated for our class picnic and taught us to make real Russian borscht—not the red Polish beet soup most Americans know—which we then relished along with the rest of our class that afternoon. Now, that was a learning experience!) We can’t afford to lose the experienced teachers any more than we can afford not to get the new, enthusiastic ones.

But what if the loss of seniority protection bears on other aspects of the system? Tenure, for instance, is a subject that’s been argued in this general debate, too. It’s often unpopular among the public (though I believe that’s based more on the way its portrayed in adversaries’ public statements than it is on the actuality). Opponents to tenure, whereby teachers reach a stage where they can no longer be fired arbitrarily and have considerable freedom in their classrooms, assert that it’s a process that protects mediocre and ineffectual teachers who long ago became little more than placeholders. Governor Christie, who’s also told teachers they are greedy, has bluntly declared, for instance, that tenure protects incompetent teachers and Governor Walker’s bills (which still face legal challenges) would deny teachers tenure protection. The unions, such opponents say, protect instructors who are past their prime and should be replaced by younger teachers. Defenders of tenure point out that it protects teachers who’ve earned some autonomy from being dismissed or reassigned capriciously by principals and superintendents with political, social, or personal agendas. Before teachers won the right to unionize and bargain collectively for the conditions of their employment, that’s exactly what happened. And since even without seniority as a criterion, longer-serving teachers earn higher salaries than newly hired ones, firing older teachers and replacing them with new hires cuts costs—as workers in many other fields have seen in recent years. (It also cuts down on pension obligations since the longer teachers serve, the more they’re vested in the pension plans. Reduce the length of service before retirement and you reduce the pension the state owes the retiree.) Furthermore, tenure is awarded, not automatic; there’s an evaluation process before a teacher is granted tenure, no matter how long he or she’s served.

A friend of mine who’s a retired professor from a nearby community college and was very active in her faculty union—she even served as a union officer—got quite heated when discussing the trend toward reducing the influence of seniority and other union protections in teacher employment. Though my friend’s experience wasn’t in secondary or primary school, many of the issues are the same, especially the matter of tenure. Without the protection of tenure, she warned, schools will begin paring away at the independence of the teachers in the classroom and administrations with agendas will be able to insert their programs into the schools’ curricula—and no one will have the authority to fight them. Without the power of union contracts, collective action, and due process protection, administrations can fire teachers they don’t like or who won’t toe their lines, leaving schools with homogeneous faculties who all think alike and follow the same program without variation or dissent. (This is, in fact, what it was like before teachers were free to unionize.) There would be no interplay of varied ideas or open discussion of differences. A school whose faculty is entirely young, unprotected, and inexperienced is much easier to control and bend to the will of a designing principal or superintendent. My friend was very exercised over the trend she sees and the potential consequences if the union-busters prevail.

Now, I confess, I find my friend’s alarm a little hyperbolic, but I can still see her point, especially when it comes to the matter of seniority-based tenure. As readers of ROT should know by now, the freedom of expression, whether in a classroom, a theater, or an art gallery, is almost sacrosanct to me. I was once asked to leave a school because, the director told me, I asked too many questions. I didn’t take enough on faith, he said. Really? A school’s for asking questions. There’s no such thing as asking too many questions in a school. (In my own defense, first, you should know that this wasn’t a secondary school, either, and I was just a few years shy of 30. Second, I didn’t ask all my questions—which I don’t think were excessive in any case—in class; I took them to the instructor afterwards and asked to meet with him.) A circumstance in which questioning a teacher, a principal, or an administrator is discouraged, whether the questions come from a student, a parent, or another teacher, is anathema to me. It leads to an atmosphere not of education, but of indoctrination. Tenure, along with other protections, is designed to promote and safeguard the free exchange of ideas in the classroom; there are also precautions available to prevent abuse and assure decorum, especially in elementary, middle, and high school classrooms where the students are still children. The wholesale removal of the shield against orthodoxy and enforced conformity is a practice common to authoritarian states not, presumably, to a democracy.

Seniority, for all its faults, is at least an objective criterion. It’s easy to tell who’s served longer than whom, even if the system counts years of other government service, either in other jurisdiction’s schools or even in the military. Anyone can add up the numbers and compare the totals, and there’s little debate about the results. But who makes the evaluations for merit as a deciding factor in dismissals (or pay, which runs into the same question)? On what are the evaluations based? Test scores are an inadequate means of assessing a teacher’s work in a classroom, though they’ve been used frequently despite evidence that they are inaccurate, imperfect, and often biased. (Not all subjects are tested, and reliance on tests as a standard also inevitably leads to teaching to the test.) So, individual evaluations, then. Whose opinions count more in the final selections—the principal, the superintendent, a board of some kind? Do peer evaluations play a part? Student appraisals? No matter which of these or other judgments are used, they are all imprecise and subjective, and liable to all kinds of influences that may not be relevant to teaching ability or classroom skill. No school district has come up with an equitable set of assessment standards. This is one of the chief fears of unions who foresee their members being judged on the basis of whims and nonce criteria—or, perhaps worse, someone’s political or social beliefs. New York City’s current procedure puts most of the responsibility on principals to identify ineffective teachers, but there are reports of school principals who themselves have bad records for management and yet have been left in place for years, long enough to be making decisions on teachers’ careers. At the same time, the merit evaluation formula devised for New York State schools is so complex as to be incomprehensible and has often contradicted the personal appraisals of a teacher’s colleagues, supervisors, students, and former students. Seniority and tenure protect good teachers from maltreatment at the hands of a principal or a school board for reasons having nothing to do with their classroom effectiveness.

It also matters where the evaluators work. If they’re from the same schools as the teachers being judged, they get greater access and they know the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the different schools, but private feelings can get into the mix if the evaluators know the subjects of their assessments too well. If the evaluators are from the board level, they’ll be more objective and clinical, but they’re remote from the teachers’ daily work and won’t have full-time contact with the subjects. Which is better, fairer? You could devise an evaluation system that includes some of both kinds of evaluators, but it would probably be cumbersome and complex. What’s the answer? If you’re going to judge teacher proficiency as the basis for layoffs and pay raises, someone’ll have to come up with a solution.

Let’s look at New York City’s situation as an example. Clearly, the final cuts would be decided by the schools chancellor, the head of the city’s Department of Education. But in New York City, the chancellor is a political appointee of the mayor and as such is beholden to him for his job. We can’t know what influence the mayor and his political agenda will have on the decisions to let teachers go; even if Mayor Bloomberg is an honest broker and stays out of the process, the next mayor and chancellor may have a different relationship. (Rudolph Giuliani, Bloomberg’s predecessor, had also tried—but failed—to gain the mayoral control of the school system Bloomberg has. Giuliani was a man who tried to get the Brooklyn Museum of Art evicted from its city-owned building because he didn’t like the art on exhibit. He also fired a successful police commissioner because he acted too independently for the mayor’s taste. What kind of school manager do you suppose Mayor Giuliani’d have made?) On what is current Chancellor Dennis Walcott, formerly the Deputy Mayor for Education and Community Development and president of New York City’s school board, going to base his determinations? The last chancellor, Cathleen Black, was a publishing executive, not an educator—she had a lot of difficulty getting approved for the job because she had no background in education either as a teacher or an administrator. Black resigned on 7 April after only three months on the job after Mayor Bloomberg—also a businessman, as most readers will surely know by now—had urged her to step down. Both Black and Walcott were the mayor’s hand-picked choices to run the city’s schools, as was Joel Klein, Black’s long-serving predecessor who was also selected from the ranks of business executives. What does that suggest about independence of action and thought?

(Black’s experience when Bloomberg named her his nominee for the post is a demonstration that demonization and negative characterization can be a tactic on both sides of this issue. Unions declared her incompetent and unqualified for the job as soon as her name was floated and unions and other activists lobbied bitterly to deny her the waiver needed for the appointment. As it turned out, unfortunately, Black was temperamentally ill-suited for the chancellorship, but she was never given a chance to demonstrate that before she was torn apart in the press simply for having been Bloomberg’s choice. She wasn’t a product of the system—and was therefore unbeholden to the people who run it—and that’s all her opponents cared about, as far as I could tell. Joel Klein, considered an effective reformer and manager, had had no more educational experience than Black had had. Klein, the first chancellor of the New York City education department under mayoral control, served for an unprecedented 8½ years.)

There’s also the problem, one of perception both in the education bureaucracy and among the general public, that somehow old equals bad and new or young equals good. Putting this proposition down in writing makes it clear how patently wrong the attitude is, but it’s operating in the debate, especially in the political and advertising dispute that went on over the airwaves and in the press. In addition, even if practicable evaluation standards could be devised, new, younger teachers would be subject to misjudgment as well. No teacher is born good, much less great. (The Gates Foundation has been subsidizing studies, the $45 million Measures of Effective Teaching project, to see if they can determine what makes a good or great teacher and if it’s something that can be taught. But that research has only just concluded.) It takes time and experience, guidance and mentoring (from more experienced teachers), and if a new teacher is evaluated in her first or even second year in a classroom, she might very well look like a hopeless case rather than one who needs a bit of seasoning and direction (and perhaps plain old confidence) before she blossoms into a very good teacher. I can attest from experience that there are many aspects of teaching that you can only learn from experience and I often relied on my veteran colleagues to help me through a sticky situation, from a lesson plan that wasn’t working to a tough disciplinary situation that I’d never have known how to handle on my own. The students would surely suffer if all their teachers were busy discovering fire for the first time. An experienced teacher can obviously also be caught in this bind: even a good teacher can get stale or fall into a rut and then seem to an evaluator as ineffective. But to someone who knows him, he just may need a sabbatical or a refresher course to rehabilitate the skill that had made him a good teacher—but dismissal removes his abilities from the classroom and the schoolhouse permanently. Where’s the long-term benefit in that?

The seniority-merit debate is complex in other ways, too. According to polls, the public, including parents of schoolchildren, overwhelmingly backs decisions based on effectiveness and wants to see an end to LIFO. The unions, as we’ve seen, supports seniority—but union members don’t: by large margins, they prefer to see reductions in force determined by merit, not seniority. (Voters also have said they want to see teacher pay determined in the basis of classroom performance rather than longevity, too.) But, like the way tenure has lost support, I feel that the popularity of performance as the sole criterion for RIFs is evidence not of its effectiveness but of the tenor of the public pronouncements by its supporters. (It doesn’t help that, although Mayor Bloomberg’s popularity has been diminished since his election to a third term, the regard for his main adversary on this issue, the United Federation of Teachers, has dropped precipitously as well.) I believe the almost knee-jerk support for using effectiveness as a standard and entirely rejecting seniority comes in large part from the way teachers, especially experienced, long-serving ones, are depicted in ads and speeches. At present, the debate is over budget cuts and the potential dismissal of teachers as a cost-saving move, but overall, the portrayal of teachers as the root cause of all the problems in our education system has been part of the discussions of school reform, the power and influence of teachers’ unions, and the rights of public workers to form unions and bargain collectively. Aside from the fact that this tactic doesn’t solve anything and dispirits good teachers and motivates them to leave the system, it’s monstrously unfair. First, teachers aren’t the sole influences on a student’s ability to learn. There are equally powerful forces at home and in the community; the teacher and the school only have the most salient impact. Second, the effectiveness of any given school depends more on the administration of the local and state school boards and the school itself than on any individual teacher, who often has to make the best of whatever atmosphere and conditions the school has provided. Teachers are the least in control of their own occupation, largely dominated by women not incidentally, of any similar professional in society: doctors, lawyers, accountants (who are all still mostly men) all have more to say about how they do their work and how they relate to their clients than teachers. Not only do they have school boards and departments of education looking over their shoulders and dictating their curricula and teaching methods, but they have politicians, activists, and interest groups, most of whom have no educational experience whatsoever.

This practice of using non-educators to oversee school systems is really part of the phenomenon in this country where voters see experience and qualifications as marks of elitism and arrogance. The U.S. has always had a streak of anti-intellectualism running through its society and politicians and activists with an agenda have often made use of it to divide people by portraying those with expertise and knowledge as out of touch with the mainstream, the Joe Six-Packs and Soccer Moms who are presented as the heart of the Real America. The idea spread abroad is that anyone can teach: it takes no skills, experience, or training. Early last March, Mayor Bloomberg himself proclaimed, “The length of time that you have worked is irrelevant to whether or not you can do what our children need.” (Ironically, during his campaign for a third term, Bloomberg made the reverse argument to justify his bid to be reelected a second time despite a term-limits law he had swept aside for his benefit. Disconnect, anyone?) As long as this situation prevails, our schools will continue to deteriorate and become training grounds for low- and unskilled workers rather than routes to greater achievement and accomplishment. Demean the teacher and the ones who suffer are the children. When they are old enough to run things, what will become of our society then? We see already a concentration of wealth and power in a ever-smaller segment of the population; debasing public education by continuously cutting funds, programs, and committed teachers will assure that this trend continues and becomes irreversible. Good public schools with good teachers has always been the principal process that has made the United States a nation of upwardly-mobile strivers and achievers no matter what part of society the student started from.

Teachers aren’t on the job to aggrandize themselves. The pay is pitiful and the social standing is closer to that of a manual laborer than of the highly educated professional a teacher is. The very fact that teachers take on the responsibility they do and return to work every day, every year shows the level of commitment they have to the task—a calling, really. To portray them as lazy, shiftless, selfish, overpaid, coddled, underworked, ineffective, and reactionary clock-punchers is simply untrue. It’s worse for the older teachers, who are further maligned for their long service and years of experience doing the most important job our society offers: teaching our children. The notion abroad in this country that the lack of experience is an asset (or, conversely, that previous service is a shortcoming)—it’s the basis for a lot of the political campaigns in recent elections—has little validity in reality, and it has even less in a classroom. Both sides of the merit-vs.-seniority argument are demagoguing, and they’re doing on the backs of the teachers (and, in the case of supporters of teacher effectiveness as a criterion, the teachers’ unions) not because it’s logical or reasonable, but because it inflames the public. Demonization is a wedge tactic: it polarizes the public so that we have to go to one extreme or the other. No one can stake out a position in the center (just as in national politics) because if you support even an iota of the other side of the argument, you will be subsumed in the demonization yourself. If you see benefit and value in both merit-based standards and seniority, then you’re dismissed and vilified by both sides.

Well, vilify away. Now, I’m no education expert, so I don’t know how to implement any of this, and I have no clout with the parties, so I can’t even imagine enough agreement among them to accomplish a compromise. The strong rhetoric that prevails, especially among the anti-union activists, generates nothing but tensions and makes teachers suspicious and resistant to compromise. My solution, however, includes elements of both seniority and performance evaluation. We cannot dismiss the value of a teacher’s years of experience or professional training, accumulated over a whole career. I don’t know how you’d measure that on a scale of standard criteria, so it would have to be calculated in some form similar to the way it is now—total up the years on the job and add in a supplement for additional degrees beyond a bachelors and professional courses taken outside of work. (I also think that some additional consideration should be taken for non-classroom experience a teacher has accumulated such as chaperoning school trips abroad or to distant cities; conducting after-school workshops or activities related, even tangentially, to the teacher’s field; organizing events that enhance the students’ appreciation, understanding, or knowledge of the arts, politics, civics, sports, the economy, and so on; teaching non-credit classes in subjects not offered in the curriculum. You can’t measure these contributions, but they pay off so much.)

Classroom performance, too, must be counted, and greatly. I can’t conceive of a measuring system that works across the board, so one would have to be devised and tested, but it would have to appraise a teacher’s effectiveness in the class currently, but also consider where the teacher is likely to go in the years to come—as she or he gains experience and hones the appropriate skills. It must somehow also assess a teacher’s past contributions and how those can be continued and reinforced. The National Council of Teaching Quality has devised a system of determining a teacher’s position using a combination of measurements. Finally, any new process of hiring and firing teachers must make it easier to dismiss the small number of truly bad teachers that get into the system; the unions, for all the protections and support they offer teachers, must be more responsive when it comes to culling the inadequate and unsalvageable. Tenure should be highly valued, awarded only to the teachers who truly earn it, and should not become a shield for mediocrity or, worse, inappropriate behavior. Perhaps it should be revisited incrementally, say every five or seven years to be sure that a veteran teacher hasn’t settled into a comfortable rut.

In general, we have to stop relying on procedures and methods that have become sacred traditions, defended only because things have always been done that way. The world has changed since the ‘50s and ‘60s when most of those practices were initiated and we’ve learned more about schools, students, and teaching and learning than we used to know. Joel Klein was accounted a successful reformer, even before school reform became a politically popular idea, and he upended the procedures and practices long entrenched in the New York City school system, the largest and most complex in the nation. (Michelle Rhee, the former superintendent of the Washington, D.C., schools, was also a radical reformer and, despite her unpopularity with local teachers and their unions, she, too, made significant improvements in the success of the city’s educational system. Klein’s successors, both the short-term Cathie Black and her replacement Dennis Walcott, promised to continue Klein’s reforms in New York City.) One sweeping change Klein initiated was to turn virtually all the decisions about a school, from hiring and curriculum to spending and building use, over to the principal, as if, Klein put it, they were CEO’s of their own companies and rather than cogs in a bureaucracy. This gives principals unprecedented authority—making teacher contracts an even-more-significant protection—but Klein also established a principal-training academy to prepare his new administrators for the powerful mandate he handed them.

Despite the denigration of experts and scholars, we need to listen to what’s been discovered about pedagogy, intellectual development, teacher training, educational management, and even school funding and budgets and start making changes where necessary. Remember, the definition of insanity is continuing to take the same actions while expecting a different outcome. Things that aren’t working haven’t been working for years now. At the same time, we can’t implement reforms that are based on fads, wishful thinking, or popular notions that aren’t supported by research or empirical evidence. Let’s find new ways—there are people out there with ideas and experiences that work. And stop beating each other over the head with politics. We know that doesn’t accomplish anything.

In the end, though, what this society has to do is elevate the level of respect teachers get so that prospective good teachers don’t run away from the profession and good, experienced ones stay on and keep improving because they are appreciated in the classroom, the department of education, city hall and the statehouse, the home, the media, and the street. Politicians have long declared that they want to improve our schools (insisting that they “honor teaching”), but it’s hard to understand how denigrating teachers and restricting their rights does anything but make matters worse. We’ve been complaining for a very long time that U.S. schools are performing badly in comparison with several systems in the rest of the world, among them South Korea, Singapore, and Finland. Would it surprise anyone to learn that in those countries, and many others with better-performing schools, the teacher is a figure of respect and honor? (They are also paid better than they are here—often as much as first-year physicians or other highly-regarded professionals.) You think there might be a connection? Speak of a no-brainer.

[A contingent of National Board Certified teachers plans to march in Washington, D.C. and around the country to protest the attacks on teachers and teaching. The Save Our Schools March will take place in Washington on Saturday, 30 July 2011, starting at noon with a rally on the Ellipse (preceded by performances and other events). At 2:00 p.m., the demonstrators will march to the Department of Education where they will read a list of demands and issue a call to action. Following the demonstration at DoE, the marchers will return to the Ellipse for a closing ceremony. There will be parallel activities in cities around the country for participants who can’t travel to Washington; information will be available at twitter.com/#!/SOSMarch or www.causes.com/causes/556335-save-our-schools-march-and-national-call-to-action.]

Teachers & Reform

School reform has been a big topic for a long time but it’s heated up in recent months because of the Race to the Top, part of the economic stimulus package enacted by the Obama administration, and the changes in every state’s public education system that the program’s eligibility rules mandate. Known as R2T among other abbreviations, the $4.35 billion incentive program was announced in June 2009 and many states have already made sweeping changes in their education systems to accommodate the requirements of the program, a competition for millions in school subsidies. New York has been slow to respond, however, causing a loud debate among educators, legislators, union leaders, school officials, teachers, and public policy activists. Now, I’m no expert in education policy, but I’ve taught in private middle schools, public high schools, and both private and public colleges (where the products of secondary schools tend to end up), so I have some thoughts on this debate. I see myself as an informed but disinterested observer who, because I don’t really have a dog in the fight, can see the good and bad, the right and wrong on both sides of the argument.

A principal area of reform the administration demands is charter schools. President Obama is a big supporter of charters and states that limit the number of charter schools or put long delays in the approval process are required to loosen their restrictions if they want to compete for the federal funds. Another major condition of the package is increased use of student testing for teacher evaluation and promotion and the elimination of seniority as the basis for teacher assignments and retention if lay-offs become necessary. Tenure for teachers, under which they cannot be fired without extensive legal procedures, is also a provision states must abandon. All these prerequisites have met with opposition from teachers’ unions across the country, though the ferocity of the opposition varies from state to state. New York State, where the teachers’ unions are very strong and are important benefactors of the Democratic Party which controls the governorship, most significant state offices, and the contentious legislature, is one of the states that has resisted changes and may lose the opportunity to compete for the federal money.

Let me acknowledge right up front that I’m an advocate of public education; I’m also an advocate for teachers, though not necessarily for teachers’ unions. Mostly, however, I’m an advocate for students, schools, and education. I take a pretty pragmatic approach to educational programs: all ideologies and philosophies aside, whatever works in a school building and classroom gets my vote. Basically, if it’s good for the kids, I’m for it. If the old ways don’t work, change ‘em. If new ideas sound good but turn out not to be, drop ‘em and do something else. When bilingual education was first proposed, I was for it. It sounded like a good idea to let students learn history and math in their native languages while they learned English. But the kids never really learned English and there were several sets of classes and teachers in schools, so I no longer support the concept as it’s practiced. School kids aren’t guinea pigs: they aren’t there to experiment on, they’re there so we can teach them.

Schools always need money and in this time of devastating cut-backs, the appearance of bribery in R2T might be more real than imaginary. (One way to counter the attraction of R2T, opponents might note, would be to fund the schools enough that the allure of federal grants isn’t so enticing. Ironically, however, the forces who oppose reform efforts like R2T are usually also the reflexive proponents of “cuts”: cut taxes, cut property assessments, cut spending. Inevitably, those cuts come out of school budgets.) In order to qualify for the grants, states must make broad reforms in their educational policies that would ordinarily take years and copious debate to accomplish. While that process hasn’t always been productive, especially to the school kids, forcing the states to make precipitous changes might be disastrous; it’s certainly going to be contentious. New York teachers’ unions are already developing strategies, such as getting legislators to place “poison pill” clauses in the bills that essentially render some changes ineffectual, to halt the reforms the legislature is forcing on the schools. Other opponents of R2T are pointing to states’ rights as the rationale for challenging the new rules; it smacks to many conservative politicians and activists of the feds taking over the schools. (Several current conservative candidates for governorships and the U.S. Senate advocate abolishing the federal Department of Education.)

The issue—or, really, issues—of school reform are always hot-buttons. Advocacy groups are ever ready to chime in, whether or not they have the interests of students in mind. Many activists have political and ideological motives which have little or nothing to do with educational theory or pedagogical philosophy. Even organizations that you’d imagine have schools and students in the forefront of their concerns often don’t when you examine their motives. The teachers’ unions, for instance, are more focused on preserving teaching jobs, maintaining pay levels, and protecting members from disciplinary action than on teaching and learning. Others, such as politicians, line up against the unions more to score political points than to move the debate forward, trying to stand up to the unions to appeal to conservative voters and hand the Democrats, who benefit from a symbiotic relationship with teacher organizations, a defeat. Much of the rhetoric doesn’t elucidate the questions; it obfuscates and confuses them.

First, let me address charter schools. These are schools funded by the public system but which operate under their own rules in terms of curricula, hiring and firing, teacher accreditation, and most other aspects of school life. R2T mandates that many states entertain larger numbers of charter schools than their current laws permit. From the perspective that whatever benefits the kids gets my support, I can’t argue with attempts to establish schools that teach their students successfully where the existing schools have been failing (though there’s substantial evidence that charters aren’t inevitably better than ordinary public schools and are sometimes worse). A good school is a good school, and how it comes to be is irrelevant. But I do have problems with the concept of charter schools. For one, I see them in the same frame as school vouchers—they siphon funds from public schools and abandon them without attending to the problems or deficiencies that cause them to fail in the first place. Instead of fixing the existing schools, the charter and voucher systems skim off the best students, the committed ones, and take the money those students represent and shift them to another institution. Not only does that leave the old schools bereft of needed funds, resulting in even smaller budgets, but it turns them into warehouses for the students whose parents aren’t savvy or motivated enough to relocate their children. The consequences should be obvious: the public schools deteriorate even more because they’ve been further impoverished and because their best and most energized students have been removed. Instead of scuttling the public schools that way, the reformers should be pushing to fix them, finding out why they aren’t working right and improving the system. Generations of American leaders came out of our public schools. There’s no reason the concept of public education, which managed to acculturate generations of immigrant children from all over the world, should no longer work. It’s easier to open a new school than it is to fix an old one, but abandoning the public-school system isn’t the answer.

But I have other reservations concerning charter schools. The vouchers at least send the kids off to other established schools, private, parochial, or different public institutions that have ostensibly proved themselves to be good educators. The charters are new, with no track record for either their administrators or their faculty. Some of them are launched by sincere and dedicated people who just want a good place to teach their children. Many of the best private schools were started in just that way. But many are the projects of organizations or groups with agendas. Often those concepts are lofty—a school to inculcate the principles of leadership or success—but sometimes they are narrowly envisioned and the school is in danger of becoming not a place of education but of indoctrination. Since the schools operate outside the regulation of the public system, there’s no easy way to supervise them. Indeed, most charter schools, especially those that are started by organizations, resist control by the system they feel has neglected their children in the first place.

My quarrel with concept-driven charter schools is twofold. First, I am uncomfortable with the desire to inculcate an ideology in the students. I don’t care what the belief is, I distrust any so-called school that bases its curriculum on a philosophical or political idea. (In the extreme, a madrasah is a school with a conceptual agenda. So are military academies, and I’m not thrilled with that program, either.) I wouldn’t even condone a school whose stated philosophy is to teach children to be patriotic Americans. Such an idea is too easily diverted to propaganda the way we’ve seen schools in totalitarian regimes become. When there’s little oversight of the curricula of charter schools, I have concerns.

My second reservation is related to my first: a charter school gets to teach what it wants with whatever teachers it sees fit, and we get to pay for it. Charter schools are essentially private academies subsidized by tax money. They’re supposed to get the same per-pupil funding that public schools get, and I assume that’s accurate, but the charters get to take my tax money and spend it pretty much however they like. (Plus, they have few of the mandated expenditures the public schools must sustain on that same appropriation.) Like the curriculum question, this raises the possibility of too much freedom with too little oversight. (I’m deliberately ignoring questions of the business management of such schools. I’m focusing on the pedagogical questions I have, but it should be noted that financial wastefulness and lack of proper accounting at charter schools are issues that have been raised by authorities and the press.)

This is not to say that boards of ed always run things excellently. (We recently saw proof of that in Texas.) They have good and bad aspects, of course, and the occasions when the school policy of some jurisdiction becomes a topic of news coverage or political controversy are rare when you consider how many school districts there are in this country; but it does happen. Even when the board’s actions don’t become political footballs, though, they can be inefficient, hidebound, bureaucratic, and just plain incompetent. They can also become hogtied by union rules and contractual obligations that militate against good education governance or stuck in a web of policies and practices that impedes progress and essential change. State and city bureaucracies can become obstructions to progress that benefits the students and it can take a sudden impact, like federal action or, in the worst cases, a court decree to make them get off the dime. In an ideal world, boards of ed would be staffed by educators, parents with kids in the system, and experienced administrators, not politicians, movement activists, or ideologues. In the real world, though most board members and department employees are committed to the management of a school system that works for all the children it teachers, you can get an unwieldy mix of backgrounds and motivations and the control can ebb and flow as voter sentiment shifts.

There are usually a couple of constants, though. At the top of the pyramid is always a chancellor, a superintendent, an ed commissioner, or someone in charge of administering the boards and the school system of the jurisdiction. The chancellor may or may not have a lot of autonomous authority. Often with the support of the mayor or governor, however, the chancellor can make substantial changes and reforms in the system, but the quality and efficacy of those reforms depend on who the mayor or governor and the chancellor or commissioner are. Currently, New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, and schools chancellor, Joel Klein, are both reform-minded. (Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty and Superintendent Michelle Rhee have also pushed through many reforms opposed by the unions and teachers.) At the federal level, President Obama and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, are both genuinely reform-oriented when it comes to education policy and, as Democrats, have no qualms about using government action to effect changes. (Unlike previous Democratic politicians, though, they, like several state governors, many of them also Democrats defying union objections, are ready to stand up to the teachers’ unions to enact changes.) But R2T does have an ominous dynamic: it looks like the feds’ using large (and perhaps irresistible) sums of money to bully legislatures to make changes the schools, teachers, unions, and even students may not want just so the states can get the cash.

Another significant element in the equation is the teachers’ unions. No matter how the rest of the system is administered, the unions have a say in the way the teachers and principals are treated because they are the negotiating authority for the teaching professionals. (I’m not sure how this process works in right-to-work states like Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas where union membership is not as strong as it is in states such as New York, California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. The national unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, still have a great deal of influence in teacher contracts across the country, but their direct influence varies.) The unions are also powerful political forces, especially among Democratic politicians and officeholders, because members are active in elections and the unions maintain lobbyists in Washington and many state capitals to put pressure on legislators and officials. This political sway can have either a beneficial or a deleterious effect on reform depending on how the unions view the changes. The unions, I think, do often stand in the way of change because their foremost focus, as I’ve said, is protecting jobs and contract provisions. The provisions of R2T, for instance, include several changes in the way teachers are hired, fired, and promoted as well as pay raises, tenure, and seniority. The unions, at least here in New York State, are resisting the changes and because of that relationship with Democratic lawmakers, the state legislature has had trouble passing the necessary reform bills that would make the state eligible for the competition.

Many reform activists see the unions as nests of self-interested bureaucrats who are only interested in protecting their positions and the contracts that keep them secure and cosseted and roadblocks to progress. To these reformers, the teachers are lazy and unmotivated, clinging to benefits they don’t deserve, preventing necessary changes to make the schools more effective. From this point of view, unions work to keep teachers who have proved to be poor educators (not to mention some who have behaved improperly). There’s some credibility in this perception. One of the reforms mandated by R2T is evaluating teachers based on student progress as measured on standardized tests and cull out teachers who don’t measure up. Unions have balked at this, as they have at using merit pay to attract and retain the best teachers. (Unions insist that pay, like lay-offs, be based on seniority.) While merit pay seems like an effective practice, I can see many problems with relying on test results as the determinate measure of teacher effectiveness without accompanying subjective evaluations such as classroom observation. First, many subjects, the arts prominently among them, and some aspects of all subjects aren’t easily measurable by testing. Second, progress isn’t all even or regular, and some significant advancements may seem small when converted to statistical test results. Third, a student’s achievement on a test is influenced by many factors other than the quality of teaching. Finally, putting so much reliance on test scores ultimately leads to classes being taught to take tests, as I saw in one of my 9th-grade English classes. (I shared this class with a test specialist, a post that wouldn’t even exist if test results weren’t so consequential.) The more that rides on test results, the more schools will teach to those tests because the emphasis will not be on learning but on passing the test.

(An emphasis on test scores can also pressure principals to take other, more nefarious actions. If they want to raise their schools’ scores, they get rid of the lowest-performing students, leaving the better student to take the tests and pull the average up in comparison with past results. This tactic, of course, simply queers the statistics while abandoning the students who most need the help. Classroom teachers have, unfortunately, been known to use a version of this same practice to improve the apparent performance of their classes.)

As for who’s to blame for the problems, my experience is that all the finger-pointers are wrong in substantial ways. The unions, engaging in obsolete protectionism harking back to before they were recognized in the 1950s and ‘60s when principals made teachers work long hours for low pay, are sometimes impediments to progress. For instance, denying principals the authority to hire and fire teachers on the basis of who’s doing the best work and forcing them to retain bad teachers over good ones because of tenure and seniority is plain counterproductive. Still, if it weren’t for the unions, which after all are labor organizations not pedagogical societies, and their sometimes adamant stands on issues such as working conditions, discrimination, hiring and firing, and pay, school boards and administrations would run rough-shod over teachers. Some school administrations still treat their faculties as adversaries rather than partners. Among all the professionals like doctors and lawyers, teachers have almost no say in the regulation and administration of their own field: the classroom teacher makes almost no decisions concerning school policy, the curriculum, the choice of textbooks, or the placement of students. (Of all the interests considered when the Obama administration devised R2T, teachers were among the few who were not consulted. This may be one reason that their unions resist the initiative.) Without unions, teachers, who occupy a low stratum of social esteem, would be unprotected entirely, subject to worse conditions than they now are. As cultural historian Jacques Barzun lamented, “Teaching is not a lost art, but the regard for it is a lost tradition.”

There’s no question that reform is needed, though. In so many districts, schools aren’t working. Students aren’t learning and teachers aren’t teaching. Certainly there are schools, even whole districts, that are doing good jobs, but especially in cities and many rural systems, children are reading below grade levels, unable to do basic computations, and not doing any written work at all. Other problems, like drugs and violence, the lack of discipline and respect, and the shortages of books and fundamental supplies, occur all across the country. Even without the current economic distress, schools are underfunded—especially considering the importance of the task they perform. (The rationale on which school funds are distributed has always seemed illogical to me. Schools that have the most—that is, rich districts—get the most; those that need the most are short-shrifted. That’s just backwards—unless, of course, you want to maintain the disparities among the economic classes.) It’s been fashionable, especially among politicians looking for issues, to blame the teachers. I think that’s not only wrong, but shortsighted.

One impediment to effective teaching, for example, is that whenever a social problem gains the attention of voters or civil authorities, someone sooner or later suggests putting another program into the schools. Drugs? Put an anti-drug program in the schools. Teen pregnancy? Put a sex-ed and a parenting program in the schools. Violence and guns? Anti-violence and -gun programs. Bullying? A conflict-resolution program. It doesn’t take much of this to steal hours from math, science, English, history, and languages. If the school uses the existing faculty to run those programs, it’s adding extra burdens to the teachers’ already-crowded schedules. If the school hires specialists, it’s stretching an already inadequate budget. Socializing that used to be learned in the home, the church, or the community is being shifted wholesale to the schools. Now, I know why these programs exist, and I’m not advocating going back to just the Three R’s. I think enhancements are valuable and even necessary, especially if we want to educate not only the average students but also the gifted ones who, we should hope, will be this country’s future leaders. But these programs aren’t enhancements. They’re usurpations taking up the slack for society, which then turns around and blames the schools and the teachers because they’re not teaching our kids. Talk about Catch-22!

The view of teachers as anything but dedicated professionals who deserve both respect and a measure of control over the way they perform their jobs is unjust. I know there are bad teachers (just as there are bad doctors, lawyers, and electricians), but I was never anything but impressed with the veterans I worked with; they developed syllabi that were both substantial and engaging, they found ways of making the material speak to their students, and they managed classes that were often too large or populated with underachievers and disrupters. New to the profession myself, I was in awe of how well they did what I was struggling to accomplish. And they did it with inadequate pay for long hours of preparation, marking papers, devising projects, meeting students and parents, supervising extra-curricular activities, and attending departmental meetings. The idea, as voiced by some myopic, self-proclaimed reformers, that a teacher’s life is defined by a seven-hour day, a five-day week, and a nine-month year is ludicrous. That anyone would do this job for the paycheck (not to mention the prestige) as if it were some kind of sinecure is an absurd notion. The teachers I knew were constantly worried about their finances (and this was before the current economic distress), their health coverage, and their job security—on top of their concerns for their students and their school. They were all seeking tutoring work and summer employment to pay expenses their teaching contracts didn’t cover. Vacations were additional work time for the teachers I knew, not rest or travel time. (Our community leaders, John F. Kennedy once observed, “see no harm in paying those to whom they entrust the minds of their children a smaller wage than is paid to those to whom they entrust the care of their plumbing.”) Yet they came back year after year—often using their own scarce funds to provide resources for their classrooms—to do what I think is the most important job in our society: teaching our kids. Characterizing teachers as lazy and uninterested is so far outside my experience as to be unrecognizable as reality.

As for the schooling of new teachers, on the other hand, I discovered that some didn’t know much about their own fields. Most (80%, according to the U.S. Department of Education) had backgrounds not in their subjects, but in education. In other words, they’d been trained how to teach, but not what to teach. Because I’d been hired as part of the Alternate Route Program, by which non-certified people with strong practical backgrounds (theater and writing, in my case) were hired to teach beside educationally trained teachers, I had to take teacher-training classes after school. Our instructors were from the education department of a New Jersey university, and I was disturbed that their focus was entirely on educational theories and pedagogy; very little time was devoted to how to teach our subjects—which, of course, were all different from one another’s. The new, young teachers coming into the system, as I saw it, were all being trained in education but not in educating. Furthermore, I had to take the National Teacher Exam, a test that evaluated my skills in the subjects I was supposed to teach. My principal subject was English and I hadn’t taken an English course since my sophomore year in college, more than 20 years earlier. (I wasn’t an English major.) I was surpised, therefore, when I scored in the 96th percentile. That means that all but 4% of the other prospective teachers did worse than I had. I should never have outscored all those other exam-takers, English and education majors fresh out of school. If they couldn't beat my score on a test for which I was only about half prepared, what did that say about their training? If these were the people being hired as teachers by our public schools, what did it say about the quality demanded of public-school faculty? I wondered what kind of teachers these young prospects would make. I found this outcome disturbing, if not outright frightening.

In the mid-1980s, just before I started at that New Jersey high school, there was a movement within the nation’s schools of education to revise their teacher-training programs. Unfortunately, the reform focused on theory and the social-scientific study of schools and education. Other ed schools got caught in a ’60s feed-back loop (the era when their faculties and administrations had been in college) and followed the paths of progressivism—an emphasis on individual instruction, informality in the classroom, and the use of group discussions and laboratories as instructional techniques—or constructivism, which argues that people generate knowledge and meaning from their experiences. The unglamorous subject of how to teach in a classroom went the way of teaching grammar in English and dates in history—it wasn’t hip. It’s these legacies with which we’re contending today. A recent survey showed that few ed-school teachers had ever set foot in a primary- or secondary-school classroom—yet they are supposed to be teaching teachers how to teach. (This brings to mind the old jibe: “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; and those who can’t teach, teach teachers.” I always hoped this was a gross exaggeration.) After such preparation, the novice teacher is thrust into a classroom alone (and, because of seniority, almost always into the most difficult classes in the school). New lawyers and doctors shadow more experienced practitioners for a period of apprenticeship; new teachers, armed with their certifications, are thrown in at the deep end to sink or swim on their own. (I once opined that when a teacher is in a sink-or-swim situation in a classroom, it’s the students who are likely to drown.) We’re in line for a more practically oriented direction for teacher training and, toward that end, the Obama education department has doubled its teacher-training budget for 2011. (One intriguing experiment in Boston, called the MATCH Teacher Residency; models its training regimen on medical school.) Happily, a movement is beginning in ed schools to study teachers and teacher training to find out what makes the effective teachers effective; the Gates Foundation, for instance, is spending $335 million to study successful teaching methods.

I’m sorry to say this, but parents, too, get in the way of good teaching. Parental involvement, a vital part of education, is generally construed to be in support of the teachers, not in conflict with them. Now, I know it’s their kids who’re being taught and parents are naturally concerned with who’s teaching their children and what’s going on in that building. But parents have tunnel vision: they’re interested first in the welfare of their child, not yours or anyone else’s. When it comes to school, they want what they think is right for their child and they don’t necessarily consider the effect on other students. I experienced this quite clearly when I was staging plays for a New York City middle school. There was a meeting with the parents whose children were interested in participating at the beginning of the semester in which the play was prepared. After I told them about the play, I explained the rehearsal process and schedule and how I intended to run the after-school sessions. Invariably several parents explained that their children had soccer practice, music lessons, French tutoring, and so on after school and would be available only two or three afternoons a week. But they wanted their kids to be part of the play anyway. When I described the way a cast works as an ensemble and that everyone’s participation and attendance was part of the lesson—that everyone comes together and cooperates in order to accomplish a common task—they didn’t understand: their children should be accommodated, regardless of the needs of the group. If I suggested the children might consider giving up some of their other activities for the period of rehearsal, the parents looked at me as if I were out of my mind. Not their kids; they should get everything they want when they want it! This is a natural impulse, of course, but when parents get to look over the teachers’ shoulders and make demands which the principal backs up, it begins to eat away not only at the teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom, but even their authority. Who’s in charge in the room? The teacher, the student, the parent, or the principal?

Teachers not only need to be in control in the classroom, they need to be seen to be in control. In early and middle adolescence, students learn because their teachers lead them. (‘Educate’ comes from the Latin root ducere, ‘to lead’ or ‘to draw,’ and the prefix ex-, ‘out.’) At that stage of intellectual development, children see the Right Answers as the possessions of the Authority (that is, the teacher in the classroom, the parent in the home, and so on) and they learn because the Authority wants them to. (In later adolescence, somewhere between the end of high school and the early college or work years, young people begin to lose this absolute dualism and recognize multiple truths, relativism, and the possibility that right answers, when they exist, may be possessed by many different people.) If the students see their teacher lose her or his authority (which is distinct from Authority) in the room, they lose respect for the teacher. This affects learning (not to mention discipline, a separate but allied issue). The result is that learning falters—and the teacher, often undeservedly I maintain, gets the blame.

Social programs displacing academics, intrusive parents, antagonistic principals, and hidebound boards aren’t the only problems with which schools and teachers are saddled. Oversight and paperwork are a fact of any public system, and schools should be accountable to the public. But oversight carried too far becomes not just burdensome but a job in itself. Even at the level at which I taught, the bottom of the ladder, the paperwork required by the state, district, and school ate into the time I needed to prepare for and do the job I thought I was there for: classroom teaching. (Never mind the extra-curricular activities like advising the drama club or directing the plays.) And it’s not just documentation. There are too many outsiders who have a say—or want to—in what happens in the schools. Interest groups (some with political agendas), activists (ditto), politicians, courts, unions all have their oars in the water, and they’re not all pulling in the same direction. Yes, I understand that in many instances, this interference is necessary and even beneficial—courts mandating desegregation, for instance—but the tangle of kibitzers with clout makes administering the school and teaching in the classroom a minefield. One reform, therefore, is to clean house in the school building. Let the teachers teach and the administrators administer, and let those with other ideas and interests find other places for them.

The comprehensive answer, of course, is that education policy and school reform shouldn’t be a matter of political agendas, interest-group activism, or even pedagogical theory but practicality and common sense. All the groups and individuals with a stake in education and schools need to stop acting as adversaries and start supporting one another in the name of benefiting the children. (Part of the difficulty, as usual in any complex debate, is that many of the stakeholders promote the notion that they have the sole solution to the problem: lowering class size will solve the problem; more money and resources will solve the problem; firing bad teachers and paying good ones more will solve the problem; testing will solve the problem. It’s the True Believer Syndrome.) It’s more than just getting many of them out of the schoolhouse, but getting them to see that they should be working in partnership. State legislatures shouldn’t be scrambling to make changes in schools policy just to get a federal handout but because the changes are necessary to make the schools work better for the students. Unions shouldn’t be opposing reforms because it endangers the jobs of bad teachers; they should be looking for ways to make it easy (but fair) to clear out the dead wood and make way for enthusiastic, motivated new teachers. School boards and superintendents shouldn’t be battling to place programs, textbooks, and courses into the schools because they fulfill private philosophical positions but because they make learning better for the children. Teachers don’t all oppose testing as a measure of student achievement and, thus, teacher effectiveness—as long as other, more subjective and individual kinds of evaluations are made as well. Teachers on the one hand and principals on the other have to stop eying each other like labor and management in an auto factory; a schoolhouse shouldn’t feel like a revival of Waiting for Lefty. Debate is fine; it’s productive and should be part of the policy-making process, but the acrimony and antagonism has to stop. When a decision’s made, the focus should be on implementation, not repeal and reversal. I don’t know what it takes to accomplish any of that, but I do know it has to happen, and the sooner the better. Right now, too many school systems of this country are like racing shells in which all the rowers are pulling in different directions, with varying force, and in conflicting rhythms. The coxswains are asleep at the tillers; no one’s beating the tempo or steering the boats. Right now, our shells are more likely to capsize than to cross the finish line. A crew doesn’t move downstream straight and true, much less win a race, unless everyone on board pulls together. Stroke, people, stroke!