Like you, I imagine some elite boarding school out there where they teach Virgil and the Greek philosophers and maybe even Latin. Having said that, I’ve got to believe it’s pretty darned rare. Maybe there are more perennialist schools in the UK, but not so many in the US.

I went to a progressive private school. I laughed when I read in one of our Electronic Reserve Readings that “Edward L. Thorndike won and John Dewey lost” (Labaree, 2005, pages 279-280). This was certainly true in my school. There were progressivist quotes all over the place but, in the end, it was certainly essentialist in its focus on ‘core’ subjects, grades, testing and results. In reality, my school was a college prep school with enough art, music, PE and cooperative learning to make all the political constituencies feel good about their ‘progressive’ school.

That was a very long time ago and I wonder if it has gotten closer to its roots in the intervening 30 years, but I doubt it. As a rule, our society is very essentialist and the school’s constituency is urban yuppie, which is to say ‘success’ focused. I don’t recall seeing any mention of this in our various readings but I wonder if the modern heirs of Dewey are the alternatives schools like Waldorf and Montessori? It seems that this may not be the conventional view but I see many similarities. I look forward to learning more about these kinds of schools as this program unfolds.

Of all the various groups involved in curriculum design, teachers seem to be the least involved and least powerful. While there is a certain wonderful, twisted post-modern logic to that, by any other measure it seems sad and ironic. There is a discussion early in our textbook as to whether teachers are technicians or professionals. While I certainly agree that teachers should be treated and viewed as professionals, their lack of involvement in curriculum design gives question as to their actual status. Particularly in an essentialist, NCLB world, it would seem that their role is increasingly narrow and pre-defined. Thanks goodness that relative autonomy still exists when the classroom door is closed or all the joy would have been sucked from the job, at least for me.
 
It is easy to imagine a world where teachers set the curriculum and teachers teach. A good comparison would be the military, especially the USMC. There, every marine is first and foremost a rifleman (rifleperson?). The people who design the warfighting philosophy are marines in doctrine roles who might well be marines leading troops in combat a year later (see General David Petraeus, not a marine but a writer of doctrine and a warfighter). The ‘administrators’ are field grade and flag rank marines who’ve come through the ranks, holding fighting jobs along the way. To be sure, the government sets the objectives, but the professional soldiers create the doctrine, training and execution. There is no ‘administrator’ class or ‘doctrine writer’ class separate from those who do the fighting. While there are flaws in that model as well, it does illustrate a very different path that education might have taken in the US.

I particularly like the way you portray progressivist emphasis on helping the children gain the skills they need and assume that that will also satisfy the essentialist need to do well on the test. That is my bias too, to teach my students how to learn and how to reason while teaching core material. Apparently, like you, I am pulled by both camps. I feel that the core subjects are essential to success in life. At the same time, it’s far from clear to me that teaching narrowly to a test cements that core knowledge meaningfully.

However, as I consider these two philosophies, it occurs to me that some test results in some populations are so spectacularly poor that these differences of philosophy become largely irrelevant. In LA Unified School District, the percentage of elementary students scoring proficient or advanced on the CST (i.e. with ‘acceptable’ scores) falls generally between 30%-60%, depending on ELA or Math, grade and year of test) (California Department of Education, 2010). In most cases, over 50% of the students failed to meet ‘proficient’ or better.  This is not in any way to belittle the importance of educational philosophy, both personal and system-wide. But it is a reminder of the breathtaking failure of some parts of the system in ways that seem to demand addressing at a more existential level as well. 

I am confused about behavior and consequences in school. Last year, the teacher used a colored card system where reaching red meant a trip to the principal’s office. After a while the principal told the teacher to stop sending him kids, similarly to your situation. This year, the kids are a bit older and the teacher uses a mostly positive system of discipline. Incidents are less. And this is a good lesson to me to learn to navigate ‘bad behavior’ and find a way to make it ‘good’. However my core instinct is to have a big metaphorical stick to create an environment where staying in between the lines is understood to be prudent. Perhaps this is the subject for a different course, but since it’s come up, I’m curious what recourse teachers really have. Throwing things at teachers seems like an unacceptable transgression and should require immediate and dire consequences. If a trip to the principal’s office is off the table, what is there? Likewise, I gather in many environments, a suspension is not such a bad penalty. The harder core kids would probably prefer that to school anyway. I just don’t know how I would establish an environment of discipline in that environment. The only tool I’d have would be love of learning or committment to the rewards of the education (reading, writing, HS diploma, etc). If that’s not of interest to the hard cases and if there’s no major negative incentive, what’s left?

It’s tricky for me. As it stands, public school systems seem to be a hybrid. Each district has some autonomy. The states get their nose in the districts’ affairs and finances, dictating much of what the districts do (or can do). And the Feds ‘big-foot’ everybody w/ regulations and financial incentives. It seems quite the mess to me. 

My instinct is that the system would be better if it went to either extreme.

If the Feds ran national public schools there would be clear national standards. There would be (potentially) tremendous sources of funds, not limited by a state’s need to balance the budget. There would be the full weight of the nation on this essential function. On the other hand, the federal government just seems to destroy anything it gets its hands on.  With centralized control, there’s be no public alternative or alternative model in the event the feds went astray. Like all things federal, done well it could be amazing. Done poorly, it’d be an unending nightmare.

I have it in my head that the original vision for schools was local; that each town or locality would fund and run their own school system, limited only by a few federal mandates on what must or must not be done. This of course creates the possibility or some pretty screwed up school systems, but also many more wonderful ones. From what I’ve seen the parents are quite involved in their children’s schools. The problem comes when there’s no real recourse for those parents. I see that even here. We are a smaller part of a two town school district and the benefits of a bigger system do not outweigh the costs, though not by enough to drive the town to separate. As a general rule, families could choose their schools by moving and schools would thus compete and to some extent be made better by that competition. Where it may break down is w/ low SES situations. The traditional view would have it that locational mobility is far more limited in these situations and thus low SES school systems would lack the resources to be effective. Possibly that is not true and possibly Title I funds would be applied more effectively in a system more narrowly responsive to the parents.

I think having the states be the dominant force in education is just bad. I’d like to see a world where schools are run and funded locally (w/ federal money to top off low SES districts). But that is a big bet on freedom of choice and in any event is highly unlikely to ever happen. Where we seem to be headed is ever growing federal intrusion into schooling. Unfortunately, it is being done is perhaps the least efficient way. Perhaps the solution is to embrace the inevitable and nationalize schooling. It’s pretty clear to me the current system, in CA anyway, is in need of a reboot.

It is fascinating to me that the impulse to more and more rigidly focus on a single, narrow vein of knowledge has such enormous traction. As you say, it doesn’t seem that NCLB is particularly helping testing outcomes. I believe I read that less art, music and PE hurt rather than help outcomes in ‘core’ subjects. And, again iirc, studies shown no or inverse correlations between amount of homework and results. On a different front, the money spent in schools is famously uncorrelated to outcomes. Yet we as a society continue to follow the strategy: ‘push on the string’ expecting different results.

Separately, after reading Chapter 4 of our text, I can’t help thinking that teachers are standing beneath an enormous social avalanche. It would seem the learning issues caused by the factors at work in low SES in our society are far beyond the capability of the educational system to ameliorate.

It makes one wonder when folks will stand up and yell “Stop!” but that doesn’t seem to be happening…