I’m not sure what was more disconcerting from the blogosphere last week: Deborah Meier’s comparison of KIPP schools’ “ideology” to that of Nazi Germany or Jay Mathews’ hesitation in suggesting that Washington, D.C., shouldn’t be a city of charter schools.
Meier writes:
What troubles me most about the KIPPs of the world are not issues of pedagogy or the public/private issue, but their "no excuses" ideology implemented by a code that rests on humiliating those less powerful than oneself and reinforcing a moral code that suggests that there's a one-to-one connection between being good and not getting caught. It tries to create certainties in a field where it does not belong.… As we once reminded colleagues, Nazi Germany had a successful school system—so what? I'd be fascinated to interview some KIPP graduates to learn how its work plays out in their lives.
Yikes. That’s quite a leap.
In his Washington Post column Mathews, who wrote a book about KIPP (Work Hard, Be Nice), was describing a new report that suggested that the D.C. public school system either close 38 struggling schools or send their students to charters. Mathews notes that charters are already so popular in the nation’s capital that 41 percent of the city’s students attend them with more on the way. He writes:
This charter fan doesn’t think that’s good. It is not clear that the best charters are capable of such rapid expansion. More important, moving kids from bad regular schools to charters in the way Gray’s Chicago-based consultant, IFF, recommends would accelerate the downward spiral of traditional public schools in the city.
What is wrong with this picture? Meier and Mathews aren’t arguing with each other—or even about the same thing. What links them is a scaling phobia. Meier sees too much of it; Mathews, not enough. Meier sees fascism in a popular model of schooling that seems to be doing a fairly good job educating its 32,000 kids—all of whom, as far as I know, attend voluntarily—and Mathews simply doubts that “the best charters are capable of such rapid expansion.”
Choice has a way of solving problems all by itself.
As I suggested in my Scaling up, part 1, essay, part of the problem here is in seeing charters as a pedagogy (or, in Meier’s view, ideology) rather than a market mechanism, one that is largely indifferent to pedagogy or ideology, and, for that matter, capacity. Choice has a way of solving those problems all by itself. The market, as Milton Friedman famously said, is not a cow to be milked. The idea is not to shoe-horn schooling into governance systems but for governments to get out of the way so good schooling can happen. As RiShawn Biddle says, “The very assumptions—including benefits of scale—at the heart of district bureaucracies hinder much-needed efforts to stem dropouts and help kids enjoy economically and socially prosperous futures.”
By coincidence, over the weekend I came across a dusty copy of a Fordham report from 1999 called “Better By Design.” Written by James Traub of the New York Times, the study profiles ten models of school reform—from Accelerated Schools to Core Knowledge and Success for All—and is still a good read. Traub even includes the Coalition of Essential Schools, founded by the respected educator Theodore Sizer and trumpeted by Deborah Meier, whose Central East school in East Harlem was a part of the Coalition. And Traub notes that “an effective model may bring out the best in all the constituents of a school, but it must succeed with the ordinary human material of administrators, teachers, and children.” The question seems to be, How do you scale up freedom?
I was struck by Traub’s introductory “truism,” that “it is a lot easier to make a good school than to make a good school system.” Or, “Such are the charms of the exemplary school that one can easily forget the difficulty of reproduction.”
In the context of preparing this essay, however, I wondered, why we should worry so about creating a good system. But as Traub suggests, “Something here must be generalizable and replicable; but what?”
We need less system, not more.
Might I suggest that it is hiding in plain sight. The success of so many different models of schooling over the last couple of decades—including the ones Traub wrote about in 1999—suggest that it is less pedagogy than governance methodology that is the key. And the what may just be government getting out of the way. We need less system, not more. The very notion of scaling up may be leading us in the wrong direction, as RiShawn Biddle suggests, because it only encourages the bureaucracy’s bad habits.
A new flower must “take root in the local soil,” wrote Traub about model school designs. Indeed, Jay Mathews is hesitant to throw over neighborhood schools. But he must be careful to check the soil before planting any seeds. We’ve got a lot of scrub and stone to remove before we start cultivating, much less planting.
