The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  By putting its emphasis on the importance of a coherent curriculum, A Nation at Risk was a precursor to the standards movement. It recognized that what students learn is of great importance in education and cannot be left to chance. When the standards movement collapsed as a result of the debacle of the national history standards, the reform movement launched by ANAR was left without a strategy. To fill the lack, along came the test-based accountability movement, embodied by the No Child Left Behind law.

  So, the great hijacking occurred in the mid-1990s when the standards movement fell apart. The passage of No Child Left Behind made testing and accountability our national education strategy. The controversies over national standards showed that a national consensus would be difficult to achieve and might set off a political brawl. State education departments are averse to controversy. Most states settled for “standards” that were bland and soporific to avoid battles over what students should learn. Education reformers in the states and in the federal government endorsed tests of basic skills as the only possible common ground in education. The goal of testing was higher scores, without regard to whether students acquired any knowledge of history, science, literature, geography, the arts, and other subjects that were not important for accountability purposes.

  Whereas A Nation at Risk encouraged demands for voluntary national standards, No Child Left Behind sidestepped the need for any standards. In spirit and in specifics, they are not closely related. ANAR called for sensible, mainstream reforms to renew and repair our school system. The reforms it recommended were appropriate to the nature of schools: strengthening the curriculum for all students; setting clear and reasonable high school graduation requirements that demonstrate students’ readiness for postsecondary education or the modern workplace; establishing clear and appropriate college entrance requirements; improving the quality of textbooks and tests; expecting students to spend more time on schoolwork; establishing higher requirements for new recruits into the teaching profession; and increasing teacher compensation.

  These recommendations were sound in 1983. They are sound today.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Transformation of District 2

  IN THE HALF-DOZEN YEARS after the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, almost every state established a task force, study group, or commission to discuss school reform. When President George H. W. Bush took office in January 1989, he convened a national summit of governors to agree on a course of action. The participants set specific goals for the year 2000, which included a pledge that “all children in America will start school ready to learn”; American students would be first in the world in math and science; at least 90 percent of students would graduate from high school; all children would master “challenging subject matter”; all adults would be literate and prepared to compete in the global economy; and every school would be free of drugs, alcohol, and violence. Worthy goals all, but none was attained by the year 2000.

  In retrospect, it seems curious that elected officials would set such ambitious targets for achieving ends over which they had so little control and for which the solutions were neither obvious nor at hand. Perhaps the leaders were mimicking corporate America, where it is customary to set numerical targets for sales, profits, and other easily quantifiable outcomes. Or perhaps they just underestimated the difficulty of attaining their admirable goals.

  Still, the dire warnings about mediocre academic performance continued to grab headlines, and something had to be done. The George H. W. Bush administration urged the public to support the national goals and promoted voluntary national academic standards. The Clinton administration came to office committed to national standards and tests. But enthusiasm for national standards waned in the wake of the noisy controversy over the history standards. In 1997, President Clinton proposed voluntary national testing. However, Republicans took control of Congress in the November 1994 elections and refused to authorize it, and national standards and tests were a dead issue.

  For a time in the 1990s, the most promising idea for school improvement was “systemic school reform.”1 Leading scholars said student performance would improve only when all the parts of the education system were working in tandem to support higher student achievement. That meant that public officials and educators should establish a curriculum, set standards for proficiency in those subjects, base tests on the curriculum, expect teachers to teach it, choose matching textbooks, and realign the entire education system around the curricular goals. The scholars recognized that school reform begins with determining what children should know and be able to do (the curriculum) and then proceeds to adjust other parts of the education system to support the goals of learning. This approach makes sense; it is what top-performing nations do.2

  Some states made a stab at systemic reform, but it was difficult to realign so many moving parts, especially when the results seemed remote to school officials who wanted them now, not years from now. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to systemic reform was that it required numerous stakeholders—textbook publishers, test publishers, schools of education, and so on—to change, which turned out to be an insurmountable political obstacle. Few states or districts had anything resembling a curriculum or syllabus—that is, a coherent, clear description of what students were expected to learn in each subject in each grade. The curriculum was supposed to be the linchpin of systemic reform, the starting point for instruction, teacher education, assessment, and professional development. Absent a curriculum, systemic reform and alignment made no sense.

  So the search went on for the idea, the program, the innovation that would lift achievement, not just one student at a time, nor even one school at a time, but in an entire district, particularly one with many poor and low-performing students. The challenge, which no school district had mastered, was “scaling up” isolated success to include almost all students.

  One urban district was said to have solved the puzzle of raising achievement across the board with a diverse enrollment, including a substantial number of poor students. That district—Community School District 2 in New York City—became a national symbol of success in the late 1990s.

  District 2 was one of New York City’s thirty-two community school districts.3 It stretched from the southern tip of Manhattan to the midsection of the island, including the affluent Upper East Side. Although the district contained public housing projects and pockets of poverty, especially in parts of Chinatown on the Lower East Side, it also encompassed some of the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods. In some neighborhoods, the public schools were so desirable that families moved to their zone, and real estate advertisements used them as lures for tenants and buyers.

  District 2 was only a small part of the much larger school district of New York City, but it included nearly fifty schools and about 20,000 students. In the late 1990s, the district’s remarkable achievements were documented by a consortium of prominent scholars, who told the story of District 2’s success at national conferences, in major education journals, and ultimately on national television. The centerpiece of the District 2 strategy was a reading program called Balanced Literacy, which was copied by other cities and had a major influence on textbook publishers.

  District 2 is important because it caught the attention of the corporate reformers who came to prominence at the turn of the twenty-first century. They became convinced that District 2 was the model for success in an urban district, that Balanced Literacy was the key to District 2’s success, and that other districts would experience similar improvement if every teacher were compelled to adopt District 2’s methods unquestioningly. They believed that District 2 had closed the achievement gaps among different groups of students. To business-minded reformers, District 2 provided a template that could be standardized and imposed by tough managers to achieve fast results, meaning higher test scores.

  The story of District 2 began in 1987, when Anthony Alvarado was appointed as its district superintendent. Tony Alvarado was well known in the New York City
school system as a dynamic, articulate, and charismatic leader. He had previously served for ten years as superintendent of District 4 in Harlem, where he had introduced small schools and a choice program, both of which attracted middle-class students from private schools and from other districts. Test scores rose during his tenure in this impoverished district, lifting it from last in the city to near the middle of the pack. In 1983, the New York City Board of Education named Alvarado chancellor for the entire public school system. However, the following year he resigned when it was revealed that he had borrowed large sums of money from subordinates.4

  The charming, irrepressible Alvarado reemerged in 1987 as superintendent of District 2. There he embarked on a reform program even more ambitious than the one he had led in District 4. Determined to turn the district into an exemplar of school reform, he opened small schools and choice programs to draw in middle-class students. He engaged literacy consultants from Australia and New Zealand to lead intensive district-wide professional development in Balanced Literacy, which soon became the district’s lingua franca.

  The debut of Balanced Literacy in District 2 followed a decade of sniping between partisans of phonics and what was known as “whole language.” During the late 1970s and the 1980s, whole language emerged as a popular national movement among many teachers, reading supervisors, and teacher educators. It emphasized student-centered activities, figuring out words in context, and reading experiences; it opposed explicit instruction in phonics, spelling, grammar, punctuation, or any other sort of linguistic analysis. Whole-language advocates caricatured critics as elitists and racists for their insistence on “arbitrary, ‘proper’ language.”5

  Critics of whole language were appalled by its methods, especially its disregard for teaching phonics and the conventions of standard English. In 1967, Harvard scholar Jeanne S. Chall supposedly had settled the ceaseless argument about teaching children to read. In her comprehensive study, Learning to Read: The Great Debate, she concluded that beginning readers needed to learn how to decode the symbols and sounds of language.6 In 1985, the National Academy of Education, which included the nation’s leading scholars, stated that “on the average, children who are taught phonics get off to a better start in learning to read than children who are not taught phonics,” but the polemical battle between the factions went on unabated.7 Not until the late 1990s, with the publication of reports from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was there an apparent consensus that beginning readers should learn the sounds and symbols of language.8

  Balanced Literacy was supposed to bridge the differences between the warring camps, but it is a hybrid that differs from both its predecessors. While Balanced Literacy may integrate elements of phonics and whole language, it focuses mainly on reading strategies and teaching children to identify and practice them. It places a premium on children’s mastery of certain prescribed techniques (e.g., predicting what they will read, visualizing what they will read, inferring the meaning of what they have read, reading alone, reading in a group, etc.).

  Large blocks of time are set aside each day for literacy instruction, in which children engage in structured activities such as shared reading, guided reading, independent reading, word study, writing, and reading aloud. During this time, the teacher functions as a facilitator, moving from group to group and conferring with students. Direct whole-class instruction is generally limited to a mini-lesson at the start of the literacy block. Each classroom has its own library, with books for different reading levels, and students choose the books they want to read or are assigned books to read in small groups. Children participate in cooperative learning activities in classrooms decorated with student work. Each classroom typically has a rug, where the children sit together, interacting with each other and with the teacher.

  Balanced Literacy has a well-defined structure and methodology. The teacher is not supposed to stand at the front of the classroom and instruct the entire class beyond the mini-lesson, nor is the teacher’s desk placed at the front of the classroom. Children are expected to teach one another. The hoped-for result is a joyful buzz as children engage in varied learning activities. Teachers are supposed to teach the prescribed strategies and procedures, and the students (alone or in groups) are expected to practice their reading strategies and refer to them by name. A student might say, for example, “I am visualizing,” “I am summarizing,” “I am making a text-to-self connection,” “I am making a prediction,” or “I am making an inference.” In theory, students who become conscious of reading strategies become better readers.9 In some districts, Balanced Literacy is implemented flexibly, with room for teacher discretion; in others, all elements are strictly prescribed and closely monitored by supervisors.10

  Such approaches had been criticized in the early days of Balanced Literacy. In 1987, educators P. David Pearson and Janice A. Dole warned, “We have to consider the possibility that all the attention we are asking students to pay to their use of skills and strategies and to their monitoring of these strategies may turn relatively simple and intuitively obvious tasks into introspective night-mares.” They suggested that “what really determines the ability to comprehend anything is how much one already knows about the topic under discussion in a text.”11 Knowing reading strategies is not enough; to comprehend what one reads, one must have background knowledge.

  Once District 2 officials adopted Balanced Literacy as the district’s pedagogy, the entire staff was required to learn a new vocabulary, new ways of teaching, and new ways of interacting with one another. Alvarado became an evangelist for the idea that the job of all teachers and principals, indeed all staff members, was to focus relentlessly on instruction, by which he meant faithfully implementing Balanced Literacy and, later, the district’s mandated mathematics program. Every principal was expected to be an instructional leader, not just the manager of the building. Professional development was not an isolated activity, but a daily routine in every school. Every month, principals attended a day-long conference on instructional improvement. Principals accompanied district officials on “walk-throughs,” visiting every classroom to ensure that teachers were using the district-approved methods and that the expected improvements were taking place.

  Alvarado made sure his principals and teachers were trained in Balanced Literacy and used only the new methods. Those who did not were quietly encouraged to transfer to other districts. Over the course of his eleven-year tenure in District 2, Alvarado replaced two-thirds of the district’s principals and about half the teacher workforce.12

  By the mid-1990s, the district rose from a middling performance to second place among the city’s thirty-two community school districts on state tests of reading and mathematics. This impressive growth got the attention of eminent researchers Lauren Resnick of the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh and Richard F. Elmore of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Resnick is a cognitive scientist with a deep interest in standards and assessments; Elmore, a scholar of organizational behavior. Resnick and Elmore are among the most respected scholars in education.

  Impressed by the district’s gains, Resnick and Elmore joined with Alvarado to document how the district became successful and why it ought to be considered a national model. In 1995, Resnick, Elmore, and Alvarado requested funding from the U.S. Department of Education for their unique venture, which they called a study of “High Performance Learning Communities.” They received a grant of $6,177,462 to document “The District 2 Story: A Human Resources Theory of School Improvement.”13

  Over the next few years, Resnick, Elmore, and their colleagues—a team that included five members of the District 2 staff, half a dozen researchers, and a large number of graduate students—turned out some two dozen research studies and reports, as well as conference papers and videos. Several of the studies were published in major education journals. The dramatic improvements in student achievement, they said, wer
e due to the district’s heavy investment in professional development and its determination to make every teacher and principal responsible for improving instruction.

  The district put most of its discretionary funding into teacher training and principal training, on which it spent between 3 percent and 12 percent of its budget, far more than any other district in the city and more than most districts in the nation.14 Alvarado made a conscious choice to invest in professional development rather than reduce class size. He even eliminated most classroom aides to free up additional funds for professional development.

  In 1987, when Alvarado took charge of the district, it had nearly 18,000 students, almost all in elementary and middle schools. (At that time, high schools were controlled by central headquarters, not by community school districts, but Alvarado received permission to open some small high schools in his district.) The student enrollment was 26 percent white, 15.4 percent African American, 24.5 percent Hispanic, and 34 percent Asian. English was a second language for about 20 percent of the students.15 About half the students came from families whose income was below the official poverty line. The district included a large number of middle-class students, even before Alvarado opened small alternative schools and programs for gifted students.