If Michael Winerip is to be taken at his word, then his latest New York Times piece, published Sunday, is meant merely to make the reader ask?himself?whether the fact that?lots of?so-called ?education reformers? spent their formative years in private schools is at all relevant to judgement of?their adult perspectives. In other words, are the public-school remedies proffered by private-school graduates inherently tainted owing to their remove, during their teenage years, from public-school education? The reporter doesn't put it exactly like that, though, instead wondering evenhanded-seeming-ly if ?a private school background gives them [?reformers?] a much-needed distance and fresh perspective to better critique and remake traditional public schools?? Or, might it simply ?make them distrust public schools?or even worse?poison their perception of them? Or does it make any difference??
Unanswerable questions, maybe. But it seems logical to believe that one needs not attend a public school to fairly offer suggestions for mending the worst among them (incidentally, such suggestions might be made to a number of private schools, too). After all, we do not think it odd that most of those working to aid the poor (social workers, community organizers, whatever) were never themselves poor. And no one seriously asks what percentage of top officials at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grew up in the projects, nor whether those who wish to improve the nation's prison conditions?ever did time at Sing Sing. Public education, with its chip-on-shoulder workforce, its us-versus-them, union-versus-?reformer? ethos, is one of the few?fields in which this sort of biographical information is considered germane. That Winerip could write such a piece and that the Times's editors would print it is less a comment on them, I think, than on education policy's debilitating, annoying obsession with petty identity politics. (There is always this, too, of course: anyone who is shocked and troubled to learn that private-school graduates hold numerous peak positions in the ?education reform? world is probably also shocked and troubled that so many American presidents emerge from the Ivy League. To such a person one would like to say, ?Sorry that reality is bothersome for you, but privileged children often become successful, powerful adults. That simply won't change.?)
So, then, to answer Winerip's perhaps-rhetorical question, no?it makes no difference where adults attended high school. And yet . . . there is and always will be something inappropriate-seeming about the ?reform-minded? politician, pundit, think-tank wonk who opines from on high and never deigns to mix at ground-level with the local public schools; whose last sustained interaction with a public-school classroom was perhaps years ago, perhaps never; who devotes hours to crafting eloquent legislation, op-eds, research reports but has not in the last decade devoted five minutes to crafting a relationship with a student who attends D.C. Public Schools; whose mind brims with ideas and information but whose knowledge of what a public-school school day is really like is woefully impoverished. And all this applies to the teachers' union bigwigs, too, probably more so. As has been frequently pointed out in a different context: it doesn't matter what school you attended but what you do after you leave it.
UPDATE: With all due respect to my Flypaper colleagues (see below)?and the Quick and the Ed blog (see here), I cannot detect the utility of these sort of "where did you prep?" exercises. They remind one vaguely of the?affluent kid, charged by his peers?with being?rich and elitist, who jumps too eagerly?to proclaim his love for Tupac and remind his accusers that, mere months ago, his bike was stolen from his very own backyard, so his neighborhood is actually, you know, kind of rough. More to the point, the surveys and declarations of public-school education merely provide Winerip's article a poignancy not?essential to?it, and they further?harden education policy's identity-politics cement. Who cares what your skin color is? Who cares where you went to high school,?what your daddy did for a living, where you lived and what you ate and how you take your coffee??Actions and?ideas?are what?is supposed to count here.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow