Here's the Deal, Mr. Unz

A number of readers and contributors responded to our request for replies to Ron K. Unz’s May 3 editorial, “Voucher Veto.” Following is one from Deborah Meier; others will appear next week on the letters page.

The Editors


One of the wonderful tricks of the right is pretending to offer a compromise when it’s complete surrender they’re after. That’s how we lost welfare, and it’s how we might soon lose Social Security and Medicare. So let’s look more carefully at the trade conservative Republican Ron Unz is offering.

We should welcome his insights on why the private marketplace is not a good model for schooling and hope that he goes on the campaign trail to promote his viewpoint on vouchers. It’s interesting, however, that Unz’s “gravest” concern is that vouchers might engender schools that teach Islamic or ethnic-nationalist beliefs; far more likely are schools that teach Christianity, white supremacy or use the schoolhouse to sell Pepsi-Cola.

Choice, he assures us, is only a ploy. What the right objects to, he says, is that too many public schools are practicing lefty “fads.” If only “the left will agree to scour the public schools clean” of the practices he deplores and do things his way, the right might not, after all, need choice. In Unz’s home state, for example, bilingual education, along with a bunch of other practices Unz thinks are nonsense, has been outlawed, and consultants to schools have to sign an oath promising not even to mention the fads on his list, let alone support them. In other words, if we all just promise to promote the curriculum and pedagogy favored by the right-as they’ve done in California-Unz thinks the right might be persuaded to abandon its effort to dismantle public education.

What separates Unz from those he describes as the “educational elites” are not mere passing fancies but disputes that have been going on for centuries. Indeed, cognitive research over the past fifty years has, if anything, yielded a consensus against his prescriptions, which largely rest upon a picture of the brain as an empty vessel that needs to be filled up with information and works best under stress.

But in truth, this won’t be settled by science or research. In medicine, what seemed indisputable in my childhood now seems like nonsense-so too with some of the pedagogical ideas of the right. But then some of our ideas might turn out to be nonsense as well. What won’t work is trying to stamp them out by law.

The right has its school agenda, and so does the left. Every family, I hope, has one too. It would be a mistake for the so-called mainstream educational and academic elites to mandate from on high exactly what schools should teach and how. What we’re debating are not merely means (pedagogical fads) but ends (what they’re for). The decision-makers should be those closest to the kids-parents, teachers and school boards-people who don’t see kids merely as instruments toward other ends.

Why have we abandoned this common-sense solution? Because Unz’s argument also rests upon a big, bald lie, a lie told so often that it’s become a truism: that the schools of the good old USA are bad and getting worse. The fact is, kids today know more, not less, than they used to-when most of them didn’t manage even to get to high school, much less graduate and go on to college. They work harder, spend many more hours in school and perform not much differently on standardized tests than their international competitors. Schools are only “deteriorating” (Unz’s word) in a physical sense-literally falling apart in our inner cities.

In literacy, which is at the heart of being educated, American kids rank near the top on all international comparisons. In my home state of Massachusetts we’ve been told by the scaremongers that 80 percent of our fourth graders are not proficient readers. Yet Massachusetts ranks fourth in the United States on eighth-grade reading tests, and the United States ranks second in the world on fourth-grade tests. (Only Finland beat us.)

Maybe this big lie has been allowed to go unchallenged by the media elite-who worry me more than the “educational elite”-because it seemed essential if the American people were to be persuaded to give up the one historic agenda upon which the whole nation used to agree: local control of public education. Since the late fifties public education has been bashed by left and right. Our “failing” schools were most devastatingly targeted by a bipartisan phalanx of bigwigs in the eighties as the cause of all our economic woes (but not, somehow, congratulated for today’s acknowledged economic success). Forty years of attack have left a mark. We need, first of all, a cease-fire.

What both right and left then need to agree to do is leave as many important decisions as possible to the people who actually know and cherish the kids-their parents, teachers and communities; they need to agree to enough choice so that most families feel that their children are in places they can trust and that they have access to reliable forms of accountability; and not least we need to agree to distribute resources in ways that allow poor communities to do for their kids something close to what rich communities do for theirs-like provide experienced teachers, good after-school programs and more.

Contrary to the radical idea put forth by both Unz and many on the left, I believe that the strength of our nation lies in not striving for one nationally “unified” educational system. We’ve survived our heterogeneity by allowing communities to have considerable power over the schools their children attend. More than a century ago we had more bilingual schools per capita than we have today, because many immigrant communities wanted it that way. Even in the apparently exceptional case of racial desegregation, we agreed to mandate busing from on high to create a nonracist community, not as a means of destroying community. Most schools in America have remained remarkably conservative in their practices, resisting school reforms pressed on them by various experts, because that’s what most Americans wanted. Am I for changing that? Yes. But this should happen through persuasion. School by school, community by community.

Am I for using the weight and prestige of the experts in the field of teaching and learning to achieve this? Yes. But not their power to mandate. So even if the evidence suggests that Unz’s nostrums are nonsense, I’m not for outlawing them. Kids learn best in schools their families trust, and they learn much more easily when the relationships between school and family are strong.

That’s the “compromise” that I’d like to offer Unz and his friends, as well as many on the more progressive side who also have a tendency to impose a one-size- fits-all agenda (called “standards”) on others. Our schools will be better places when they aren’t being monitored by thought police looking at whether schools are teaching the politically correct curriculum in the politically correct way; when professionals are expected to explain and support their viewpoints publicly and forthrightly; when second opinions from outsiders are welcome (even required); and when school people and their constituents are part of a common face-to-face conversation, and all citizens are expected to think aloud about both the means and ends of education.

Deborah Meier

Deborah Meier, the principal of the Mission Hill School, a new public pilot school in Boston, founded the Central Park East schools in East Harlem and is author of The Power of Their Ideas (Beacon).



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