Huron High School and Pioneer High School are not only among the state’s best, but among the nation’s best. Yet one reads continuously of calls for “reform” in America’s public education system. Can those calls properly be construed as extending even to Huron and Pioneer?
These two schools produce not only a large number of individual high achievers (students with stellar ACT, SAT, AP, PSAT, PLAN, and other standardized scores), but also significant average scores: as was recently demonstrated, the average scores among the lowest thirty percent of students in these schools is above the statewide average score for all students.
The word ‘reform,’ meanwhile, as it applies to American public schooling, has become as common as blades of grass on a golf course.
For all of this century (so far), and for most of the last, the phrase “call for reform,” applying to public education, is an automatic reflex for both politicians and journalists. This language is used as a reaction to perceived flaws in the system, real or imagined.
Correspondingly, reform efforts and initiatives have multiplied, some of them with sincerely good intentions, none with lasting results.
How can the word ‘none’ be used so confidently here? Because “lasting” does not describe any aspect of our public school system. The chant of “reform” ensures that as soon as any attempted reform is implemented, it becomes part of the status quo and a target of the very demand for reform which gave birth to it.
It’s the French Revolution of education, where the revolutionaries, who finally wrest power from the monarchs, are instantly seen as the new monarchs against whom the rebellion must fight.
In a K-12 educational system, any hypothesis would reasonably require, at a minimum, thirteen years of implementation before one might even attempt any preliminary evaluation of it. Yet most reforms have only a year or two before they are jettisoned in favor of the next reform.
Further confusion is created by the fact that the discussions of educational reform are conducted on a national level, which to some extent by its very nature cannot account for the wide variation among local schools. According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are approximately 37,100 high schools in the United States.
Consider the diversity among the nation’s approximately 14,000,000 high school students: the variables include religion, size of community, ethnic heritages, native languages, attitude of parents toward education, income levels, etc.
Any single nationwide reform movement is bound to be inappropriate for some set of schools somewhere, and the number in that set is likely to be quite large. This thought nudges us toward the consideration of local control.
Until the creation of the Department of Education in 1980, schools were largely the jurisdiction of cities, counties, and states. Certainly, the federal government was increasingly encroaching on local control even prior to that year.
Education is currently the object in a three-way tug of war between cities, states, and the federal government. The chances of all three agreeing on a policy, or having a consistent view on school matters, are small.
States are often threatened with a loss of federal funding if they don’t comply with some Department of Education policy; yet the federal government still imposes unfunded mandates on local schools, despite a 1995 congressional effort to eliminate this practice.
There are reasons to suppose that a significant reduction in the federal government’s role in education, and a corresponding shift to local decision-making, would benefit students. The reader may catalogue such reasons.
A different question, however, is this: whether reducing federal intervention in education would be good for Huron High School, Pioneer High School, and AAPS students in general. Because Huron and Pioneer are statistical outliers, what’s good for education in general might not be good for them.
Whence this perpetual tumult of “calls for reform”? Many problems confronting our schools can be traced, directly or indirectly, back to John Dewey. He was a professor at the University of Michigan from 1884 to 1894, and died in 1952.
Dewey either reconceptualized schools so that they had little to do with education, or he reconceptualized ‘education’ so fundamentally that the word obtained a very different definition. Mortimer Smith writes:
Much of modern educational thought has its roots in the past, in the reformers Rousseau, Froebel, and Pestalozzi; but I think it would be generally agreed that the philosophical godfather of the movement is John Dewey. Traditionally, philosophers are scholarly, bookish individuals who are happy to idle in quiet backwaters, avoiding the mainstream of the life about them, content in the hope that whatever small contribution they may
make to the total of the world's thought will make itself apparent to future students examining a past age; but a happy exception to this tradition is Professor Dewey, whose long life may rightfully be called a useful one,
and whose thought has had the most direct and potent sort of influence on the society in which he has lived, and in the one field of educational theory has been the dominant influence in America during the past fifty years.
Whether we say that schools no longer have much to do with education, or we say that the education which schools offer has been redefined in such a way that it has little to do with all prior education, Dewey influence has much to do with this transformation.
It is now de rigueur to scoff at the notion of curriculum as a body of knowledge, or to dismiss the idea that text is a centerpiece, if not the centerpiece, of education.
Instead, “life skills” and “hygiene” replace text, and “self expression” replace “self discipline.”
There is nothing new about this: Dewey’s effect on American education is almost a century old. The quote from Mortimer Smith, above, is from 1949. The malaise is long upon us. In that same year, Bernard Iddings Bell wrote:
American education is so defective in theory and practice as seriously to threaten the long continuance of the way of life to further which this nation was founded. We have become, largely because of what schooling has done to us, a people incompetent to function as free men, which is something else again than flattered and manipulated robots. What is the use of abundance if we are trained to use it with the intelligence of children who never grow up? Quite a few observers of the American scene have lately been speaking their minds concerning this. Even I have said my two-pennies' worth about it. We fault-finders vary in the way we put things but we agree in being mighty dissatisfied, alarmed.
To return to our local situation, we ask whether, or in which ways, Huron High School and Pioneer High School can be improved.
Those who toil daily in the classroom might address this question: a Math teacher points out that work habits and study skills empower students to succeed; those who have the self-discipline to attend to daily homework master concepts and score better.
A Spanish teacher notes the intellectual fragmentation caused by the constant use of handheld electronic devices. While they can be, at times, useful in the learning process, they cultivate a habit of allowing one’s mind to dart about, rather than work on a topic reflectively.
A History teacher wrestles with curricula which have been rewritten repeatedly, and in which History as a body of knowledge is unrecognizable. The skills (“know how”) have been retained and expanded at the expense of mastery (“know that”).
A German teacher works belatedly to instill rigor and abstraction as skills used in thinking about language, because they have been purged from the curricula of the primary years.
These examples show that there are points of contact between Ann Arbor’s statistical outliers and the other high schools in America. These examples are by no means exclusive to the Ann Arbor Public Schools, but rather typical of the nation.
There is a paradox lurking in this situation: on the one hand, Huron and Pioneer are producing excellent, world-class students, who achieve at stratospheric levels. The preparation these schools offer is amazingly good, as their graduates discover during their freshman year at whichever college or university they attend. On the other hand, despite these superlative academic offerings, there are also areas for growth.
This rambling bit of prose is intended primarily to stimulate the reader’s thinking about these topics. Sadly, it cannot offer definite solutions or proposals. The reader is encouraged to do so.
[Andrew Smith is a German teacher both Huron High School and Pioneer High School. Although the topics here discussed can be controversial, there is intention neither to irritate nor to advocate, but rather merely to think. Andrew Smith reserves to the right to change his mind about any or all of what is here written.]
