David Whitman writes about the coverage of his new book, Sweating the Small Stuff.
On Monday, August 18, Jay Mathews of the Washington Post wrote a complimentary column about my new book, Sweating the Small Stuff, which recounts the tale of six inner-city secondary schools that have succeeded in closing the achievement gap. When a first-rate reporter like Mathews calls your book "splendid," "lively," "readable," and drops a few other bouquets suitable for framing and book jacket blurbs, it may seem churlish to quibble with his column. But his opposition to my subtitle--Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism--and more generally to my use of the term "paternalistic" to describe these gap-closing schools has since triggered a groupthink blogfest decrying my use of the "P-word."
Unlike Mathews and columnist George Will, nearly all of the armchair commentariat criticizing the paternalism label has yet to actually read Sweating the Small Stuff, though they have read Mathews' column and a Fordham Institute press release on the book. Several bloggers, including Joanne Jacobs and Robert Pondiscio at the Core Knowledge Blog, are keeping an open mind about the utility of the paternalism label. But without having read the book, a number of bloggers have already roundly misconstrued the origins and meaning of the term, the "new paternalism." This mini-brouhaha in the edusphere threatens to overshadow the newsworthy record of these inner-city schools--diverting attention from the important implications that these break-the-mold schools bear for the future of inner-city education.
To cite but the most recent examples, in Eduwonk, guest blogger Richard Whitmire of USA Today joined Mathews in proposing a second re-naming contest to identify a better moniker than "paternalistic" for the schools featured in Sweating the Small Stuff (the American Indian Public Charter School in Oakland, Amistad Academy in New Haven, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago, KIPP Academy in the Bronx, the SEED School in Washington, D.C., and University Park Campus School in Worcester, Mass.) "To say the schools are highly structured is an understatement," Whitmire conceded. Nonetheless, to say the schools were super-highly structured, or what one might call paternalistic, was a bridge too far. Whitmire himself prefers to call these schools the "Elites"--though he acknowledges that his label for these maverick inner-city schools might be a tad off, conjuring up a "country club where they make you wear ties and jackets to Sunday dinners in August."
Whitney Tilson didn't like the P-word either and asserted that "what the schools are doing is instilling not only knowledge, but the absolutely critical soft skills that are necessary to succeed in life, such as ???kindness, decency, integrity, and hard work'"-all skills, Tilson implies, that a paternalistic school cannot impart. In Flypaper, commenting at the prodding of the Fordham Institute, Michael Goldstein, the founder of the celebrated MATCH Charter School in Boston, also criticized the paternalism label, suggesting that a paternalistic school was one that imposed values in opposition to those of students' parents.
So how in the world did I dream up the provocative sobriquet "the new paternalism" to describe these schools? I didn't. The "new paternalism," as I detail in a 33-page chapter, is a movement that social scientists have been writing about for more than a decade. In fact, in 1997, the Brookings Institution-no bastion of reactionary thought-published a 350-page volume entitled The New Paternalism in which various luminaries explored the reach of the new paternalism in welfare offices, prisons, schools, and other areas of public policy.
Unlike the paternalism of a century ago, the new paternalism was benevolent rather than malevolent. As Lawrence Mead, the editor of the Brookings volume, pointed out, new paternalist programs still utilized a strict supervisory approach to reducing poverty but they supplemented this careful monitoring of clients with assistance to help make clients self-sufficient. The old paternalism required welfare recipients to work off their checks and live in poorhouses; the new paternalism provided "help and hassle" to able-bodied clients instead. Those on welfare still had to demonstrate to their caseworkers that they were looking for work and willing to take jobs under the threat of losing their benefits. But caseworkers meanwhile would help them find and secure work.
To be sure, the new paternalism was still controversial because it contained an element of moral arrogance, an assertion of superior competence. Individual A, in his official duties, was interfering with individual B to promote B's own good-though left to his devices, B might choose another course of action. Yet as Mead pointed out, new paternalist programs only worked because they typically enforced values that "clients already believe." Rare is the parent who thinks it is a good idea for their child to be disruptive or do poorly in school. Instead, the presumption of the new paternalism, as I spelled out, was that low-income families often "lack the family and community support, cultural capital, and personal follow-through to live according to the middle-class values that they, too, espouse."
It is difficult to read Mead's description of the new paternalism without having these schools jump off the page at you. All six of the schools I visited ceaselessly monitor student behavior, penalizing bad behavior and rewarding and recognizing academic achievement and good character. The schools, moreover, are not just strict, academically demanding institutions-they are highly-prescriptive schools that are determined to mold student character to instill self-discipline, perseverance, respect for elders, politeness, thrift, and other virtues that will serve students well later in life.
Like other new paternalistic institutions, these schools are fixated on curbing signs of disorder. They subscribe to James Q. Wilson's famous broken windows theory, i.e., the notion that urban schools are not undone so much by violence itself as by the perception of disorder, of the broken window left unfixed. At KIPP schools, students frequently are told to correct their SLANT-Sit Up, Listen, Ask and Answer Questions, Nod your head to show that you are listening, and Track the speaker. At Amistad Academy, teachers drill into students that they are supposed to "sweat the small stuff," down to tucking in their shirts and never rolling their eyes at a teacher. At Cristo Rey schools, students learn that they cannot go off to their one-day-a-week clerical jobs without learning to shake hands properly, answer a phone and take a message. Boys cannot report to their jobs with facial piercings, sunglasses, and corn rows. Girls' earrings may be no larger than a quarter--and only soft colors may be used for eye shadow. Wearing a watch is recommended. But the watches cannot have sports logos or cartoon figures on the timepiece.
As I make clear repeatedly in Sweating the Small Stuff, the new paternalistic institutions, for all their preemptive monitoring, are not like the paternalistic institutions of the past. They are not harsh or forbidding, nor are they glorified juvenile detention centers, Spartan wilderness schools, or teen boot camps. Teachers are both authoritative and caring figures-a school role that some might call "paternal," especially for students who are growing up without fathers at home. Teachers, male and female alike, are remarkably well-informed about the home lives and struggles of students. They laugh with students and gently tease them. Tellingly, many students describe their schools as a "second home." KIPP Academy in the Bronx even has two fulltime social workers on staff who meet with the most at-risk students on a daily basis and with all KIPP students regularly.
The new paternalist schools are also more palatable to liberals because they build up the "cultural capital" of low-income students by taking them to concerts, to Shakespearean plays, on trips to Washington, D.C., and to national parks. In some cases, the schools help students find white-collar internships, easing their way into the world of work. And the schools promote not only traditional virtues but social activism. SEED, for example, explicitly encourages community involvement in progressive causes, as do KIPP Academy, Cristo Rey, and the University Park Campus School.
The negative response to the paternalism label is thus not a backlash against the concept of the new paternalism as it is employed in the social sciences and practiced at these schools. Rather it is a too-swift reaction to the stereotypical associations of what it means to act paternalistically--which Jay Mathews describes as "the clumsy and often harmful doings of stiff-necked dads." Mathews goes so far as to assert that paternalism "carries one of the heaviest loads of negativity that I can imagine."
During my visits to these schools I never saw principals or teachers hesitate about asserting their authority and superior competence to shape student character. But I found a great deal of reluctance on the part of school founders, particularly those with liberal leanings, to publicly own up to the paternalistic regimen of their schools. They, too, could not get beyond the negative associations that "paternalism" conjured up. And if they privately acknowledged that their schools might practice a benevolent form of paternalism, they were adamant that the term could never be used or redefined in a positive light in a public forum. When it came to the use of the label "the new paternalism," political correctness and pejorative stereotypes would prevail.
It doesn't have to. But I think this discomfort with publicly owning the paternalistic elements of these schools is at the root of Jay Mathews' frustration, and the failure of other bloggers, to come up with a label during the last decade that they believe is more suitable for these schools. Mathews, who has been working on a book on KIPP schools for a number of years, confesses that he has never come up with a good name for these schools, though he reports that he has tried out ten different names (tough little schools; tough-love schools; teacher-driven schools; challenge schools; strong-principal schools; achievement-focus schools; high-performing high-poverty or HP squared schools; high-intensity schools; maternalistic schools; and the ungainly mouthful, PHILO schools, short for public high-impact low-income open-enrollment group.
These labels, like Richard Whitmire's "Elites" label, fail to stick for two reasons. First, the labels could describe hundreds of schools; second, they fail to acknowledge or capture the highly prescriptive, supervisory nature of these schools. I'll be curious to hear what Mathews' naming contest produces as its winner. But I am skeptical that his label of choice will acknowledge the relentless monitoring of behavior that characterizes these schools.
It may be that a subtle element of reverse sexism underlies the backlash against the "new paternalism" label. Mathews, for example, objects to calling these schools "paternalistic" but he thinks "maternalistic" would work better. Why would it be okay to calls these schools maternalistic but not paternalistic? Webster's defines paternalism simply as a principle or system of governing that echoes a father's relationship with his children. Yet Webster's makes no reference to paternalism echoing clumsy, harmful, and stiff-necked fathers. Could it be that the image of a school acting as a strong but loving father has threatening connotations, as if the idea of a benevolent paternalism was an oxymoron that cannot be taken seriously?
In the end, the students I interviewed didn't need their schools to help fill the role of a surrogate mother. After all, these adolescents already had mothers and grandmothers. What they lacked-- not just in their own homes but in their neighborhoods as well--was live-at-home fathers. This father-hunger was particularly acute among black male adolescents. The new paternalistic schools provide discipline and leadership in character development. They teach self-sufficiency and cultivate a sense of mastery among their students-all traits which might arguably be associated with firm but caring fathers.
It's time for the left and the education establishment to rethink its instinctual antipathy to the "P-word." If they fail to do so, the important lessons of these gap-closing schools could get lost for want of a politically acceptable nomenclature. ????????
--by David Whitman