Narratives of American Educational Systems: Part I

Like many of the things I try to post about, this post has gotten out of hand. It's now almost two months late so I'm posting the part that's been written in an effort to force myself to write the part that hasn't. More on that later . . .

According to the degrees I hold I'm an educational researcher. Hence, despite the fact that my work generally focuses less on educational policy and the activities of public and private institutions, and more on understanding learning and designing tools to facilitate it, I do actually have a pretty intense level of exposure to research and writing focused on the history, policies, and outcomes of educational systems, especially in America. Because I have this background, I need to come out of my digital media hidey hole for a moment here to share a few thoughts on education in America that I've been having in light of some recent noise on the internet and in the public sphere.

I know for a fact that this post is not going to have any impact on the debates that are raging across the pre-kindergarten through higher education landscape in this country. Heck, even if people came to this blog who were capable of impacting educational policies at district, state, or national levels I'm not offering solutions here. Rather, I'd like to talk about narratives. Specifically, I want to address the stories we tell ourselves and each other about education in America, and why those stories are poor representations of what has actually been happening to education in this country.

A major part of my impetus for writing this post involves an editorial Nicholas Lemann wrote in September in the New Yorker entitled Schoolwork. As I am doing in this post, Lemann focused on narratives of education in his editorial. He offered the seldom advanced claim that unlike the stories we usually tell about the American educational system, the entire enterprise has not actually been failing for the last 30 years. Instead Lemann offers the idea that there are some broken and dysfunctional elements in our nations school system, but that on the whole American schools have actually been remarkably successful by a number of different measurements if you look at the big picture.

On its face this is a pretty bold claim primarily because virtually everyone seems to disagree with it. Most parents, teachers, students, and policy makers are all more inclined to adopt the perspective that there's something fundamentally wrong with our schools, and more often than not they're happy to point fingers at each other in the process. In the case of teachers, parents and students, this is at least understandable. After all, people don't generally like taking the long view of a system which either they themselves or their children are enmeshed in. The immediate frustrations of everything that is wrong in their personal experiences tends to overshadow any kind of perspective that looks at how a system has grown and evolved over the course of more than 200 years.

Furthermore many students, teachers, and parents have a number of specific reasons for being frustrated with how schools are functioning for them in their own lives. Today's students face an accelerated curriculum and a much higher level of competition for seats in competitive post secondary institutions than prior generations had to contend with. On top of this, their high school diplomas alone are virtually meaningless for any context outside of higher education. In addition, there is of course  the rest of the learning in their lives, but I'll come back to that in the second part of this series.

Teachers are also contending with new circumstances that make their working environment more stressful. Teachers are far more regulated than they've ever been, and in many instances this means sacrificing some of their favorite lessons and classroom activities due to new constraints that force them into more scripted curricula. Additionally teachers now contend with the stress of being evaluated through the rather limited outcome of test scores, and in many instances these measurements are increasingly public. The incident of Rigoberto Ruelas serves as one example of how an evaluation driven narrative of education can cause extreme stress on an individual. For many teachers, the narrative of evaluation is a narrative of fear. We can add to this the tremendous turn over of young teachers in the system, many of whom leave after only a few years in the system.

Finally, parents as secondary stakeholders (it's their children's education, not theirs after all) live at the edges of a system which is increasingly stressed, and over which they can exert only indirect control. At the same time education has become increasingly political over the lifetimes of parents whose children are currently in the system. For better or worse, the public school classrooms of today are in many ways not like those they grew up with. In addition recent depictions of public education in efforts like Waiting for Superman have only further advanced a political narrative of education in America. Activist media in this vein has effectively supported the politicization of education on a larger social scale than at any prior point. In particular, middle class parents who had previously been the power players in local school politics have also been pushed towards a state of dissatisfaction with the system by embracing an evaluation driven narrative. Hence, despite the fact that studies have shown how parents tend to regard the schools they send their own children to as being good while they critique the American educational enterprise as a failure, we can start to see how like students and teachers, they too have powerful reasons to buy into narratives of failure.

I see the natural sources of pressure that students, teachers, and parents endure as strong reasons to accept narratives of failure when it comes to the story of public education in America. By this, I mean that given their circumstances, I believe it is currently extremely difficult for most students, parents, and educators to move beyond a reactive narrative of dissociation from school in their lives. When it comes to policy makers and pundits on the other hand, I believe that cleaving to the failure narrative is not only problematic, but ultimately damaging (details in Part II).

When I read Lemann's editorial, it immediately reminded me of claims advanced by both Irving Hamer and Rich Halverson while facillitating discussion about schools in courses I took from them at Teachers College and UW-Madison respectively. In each of their classes, professors Halverson and Hamer mobilized the idea of the American educational enterprise as a sort of amazing phenomenon, martialing records of the successes in American education, and bringing to their classes attention remarkable innovations that have taken place in this country over time. Of course, this challenges the personal experiences of many of the students in these courses and I was one of them. The cognitive dissonance that is created in considering the distance between the lived narrative of schools that educators have, and the historical narrative of the American educational enterprise is tremendous. With a good facilitator, it is enlightening. While I don't believe that the political narrative of education can afford to be quite as conceptually noisy as thoise sublime moments of learning, I do believe that the evidence of such extreme divergence in the records we have and the stories we tell should inform how policy makers and pundits think, talk, and work around education. Basically, this means we need to stop being afraid and learn how to actually understand the numbers.TBC