Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for November 8, 2005 BOOK REVIEWS

They agree public schools need help - in different ways

Reviewed by Dale Mezzacappa

Crash Course
Imagining a Better Future for Public Education
By Chris Whittle
Riverhead. 269 pp. $24.95

The Shame of the Nation
The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America
By Jonathan Kozol
Crown. 404 pp. $25

Jonathan Kozol and Chris Whittle would both be surprised to see their names in the same sentence.

Kozol, social critic, teacher, and National Book Award winner, is like an Old Testament prophet. In The Shame of the Nation, a sequel of sorts to 1991's Savage Inequalities, Kozol declares that America treats poor black and Hispanic students as second-class citizens when it comes to education, increasingly isolating them in schools that are denied the kinds of resources available to better-off white students in the suburbs.

Whittle, founder and president of Edison Schools Inc., the nation's largest for-profit school manager, is an entrepreneur and uber-salesman. In Crash Course, he lays out his conviction that the only things standing in the way of a radical transformation of American education - including its failure to adequately educate most of its poor black and Hispanic students - are capitalist ingenuity, more willingness to think outside the box, and some reordering of federal research money.

Kozol and Whittle agree on one thing: that the system is failing the children, not the other way around. For Kozol, though, the failure is moral and unconscionable; for Whittle, it is a technical problem, a lack of imagination and forward-thinking.

In fact, it is both.

Using data gathered from Gary Orfield of the Harvard Civil Rights Project, Kozol says that since he wrote Savage Inequalities, segregation in U.S. schools has gotten worse, reversing a period of court-ordered integration that had shown some promising results. Today, nearly three-fourths of black and Hispanic students attend schools that are predominantly nonwhite, and one-quarter attend what he and Orfield term "apartheid" schools - in which virtually all the students are nonwhite.

For Whittle, this same set of circumstances is a business opportunity. Whittle makes a pretty good case that 20th-century schools - which in many ways are really 19th-century schools - won't cut it in the 21st century, especially not for the poorest children. He says the teaching profession must be transformed, with those willing to be held to performance standards paid up to $140,000, and principals, $200,000. He says that students should take more responsibility for their own learning, arguing that, with the right arrangement, fewer teachers would be needed. Sitting 20 or 30 children in one classroom with one adult isn't the only way - probably not even the best way - to prepare students in this day and age. He says students should also be given responsibility for running the school: doing tech support, and monitoring, or even tutoring, younger children.

The education intelligentsia has ridiculed many of these ideas, and while Whittle argues for their practicality, his own experience with Edison indicates that such radical transformation is not likely. Pennsylvania is a good place to look for evidence of this. Under Gov. Tom Ridge, who wrote the preface to Whittle's book, the state government promoted charter schools and private management. At one point, Ridge's education secretary wanted to hire Edison to run Philadelphia's system and manage 45 of its schools in an arrangement free of union constraints and bureaucratic limitations.

Ultimately, Edison wound up with 20 schools, no contract to run the system, and a "thin management" deal that gave the company little leeway to impose its most radical redesign. (A recent study by Rand Corp. of Edison's model concluded that, unless Edison could impose its entire model, its schools did not do better than comparable schools.)

There is not a lot in Crash Course about the Philadelphia experience. Whittle briefly acknowledges that the machinations in Philadelphia nearly bankrupted him and sank the company as Wall Street reacted, after all the hype, to the smaller-than-expected contract. But he then pronounces the "multiple provider" model spawned here - several private companies managing schools and with their progress compared to each other and the district - to be the "future" of education reform.

And there is not a word about Edison's experience in Chester-Upland, where it did wind up managing most of the schools, but left four years later with huge financial losses and barely any educational progress.

One also need look no further than Pennsylvania for the deepening divide that Kozol describes: urban black districts (such as Chester-Upland) surrounded by largely white ones that spend twice as much per student; closer-in suburbs whose tax bases and per-pupil spending stagnate or decline when more blacks move in; a widening circle of white flight in search of "better" schools - not to mention an almost aggressive unwillingness on the part of the legislature or the courts to deal with the issue.

In fact, the current legislative leadership doesn't recognize spending inequity as a problem and has repeatedly rejected the notion that more money for poor districts will help their students. As Edison's experience has shown, getting the private sector to solve the problem while ignoring the underlying injustices just doesn't work.

Both Kozol and Whittle call for more federal involvement in a solution. Whittle wants the federal government to invest far more in research and development of new school models. Kozol endorses a constitutional amendment proposed by U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D., Ill.) of Chicago that would guarantee an education "of equal high quality" to all children. He also speaks well of legislation offered by U.S. Rep. Chaka Fattah (D., Phila.) in which the federal government would hold states and school districts accountable not only for higher student test scores, but for providing sufficient resources to help them meet that goal. Neither, unfortunately, is very practical.

Ultimately, Kozol says, there needs to be a national change of heart, a political mobilization. Maybe we need to recognize the moral failure before we can unleash the will and the ideas to correct it.