The Death and Life of the Great American School System

by Diane Ravitch

  The teachers and principals said they had not objected to Balanced Literacy or to the intensive professional development. San Diego had been a “whole-language” district before the Blueprint, so this approach was not unfamiliar to them. Yet they uniformly were bitter about the high-handed way in which the reforms were imposed on them. Teachers, especially veterans, spoke about being harassed. They complained about mandates and directives that narrowed what they were permitted to teach. The Bersin era, several said, was a “reign of terror.” Those who didn’t go along were bullied. Teachers were punished by grade switching: A first-grade teacher might be reassigned on short notice to teach sixth grade, while a sixth-grade teacher would be reassigned to teach kindergarten or first grade. Principals spoke in hushed voices about the abrupt public removal in June 1999 of the fifteen administrators. The theory behind these tactics, several said, was “culture shock,” keeping everyone on edge, afraid, insecure.

  One principal who was promoted to the central office by Bersin spoke with regret about the district’s 90 percent turnover in principals. When the fifteen administrators were fired, he said, it sent a message: “Comply or be destroyed.” The influx of large numbers of new principals brought new problems. They had no “deep reservoir of experience” and felt “intense pressure to push change,” so they “bludgeoned people” when they walked through classrooms, thinking that by taking harsh actions, they could forcibly change people’s beliefs. “People complied because of fear,” he said. “All up and down the system, there was fear.” The introduction of five hours daily of literacy and math in high school, he said, was a disaster. “That meant eliminating all electives, other courses. The kids hated it.”

  This administrator was blunt about his time as a principal under the Blueprint. Putting coaches in every school, he said, was “a great idea, badly implemented.” The coaches sowed animosity, especially among experienced teachers. The coaches made teachers feel less competent, not respected. Teachers saw them as policemen and did not trust them. They came into classrooms to inspect the “word walls,” the “leveled libraries,” and the mandatory student-made posters, all elements of Balanced Literacy. The general sense among teachers was that the coaches were there to catch teachers making mistakes and to report them, not to help them.

  He described the reforms as a regime of thought control. “We learned to walk the tightrope regarding teacher talk.” He and his teachers learned to say over and over: “I am a reflective practitioner, I am a reflective practitioner.” He said, “Survival became paramount. Everyone was afraid of speaking out. We were muzzled.” He survived, he said, because his teachers united to protect him, and he protected them.

  A principal who was promoted during the Blueprint era complained about the “minute-to-minute schedule. If kids are reading something they really enjoy, it is hard to stop and move on to the next assignment. But we were closely monitored and had no choice.” Another who was hired during the Blueprint days said, “It was great pedagogy, but they got the people stuff all wrong. Their sense of urgency sometimes spilled over and provoked a sense of anxiety [in teachers], then hostility.” She said, “They came to ‘kick ass.’ They never listened. It was bad the way they got rid of principals, the way it was done. It undermined trust.” She added that people in the schools generated an active rumor mill about what was allowed and what was prohibited, some of which was untrue.

  A retired principal wistfully described the elementary school she had founded. It was an English-Spanish dual-language school with a newspaper, a bank, a currency, and a court, mostly run by the children. When the new era began, all these innovative programs had to go, because the school had to concentrate only on literacy and math. The instructional leader assigned to her school came from New York City. “She made me feel incompetent,” she said. “She saw nothing good. The hardest part was to go back to the teachers and cushion the news. Everyone was demoralized.” She said, “If you gave her any information, it was bad, she wrote you up for an infraction. Or if you asked a question, it was bad. She was always demanding that I write up the teachers: ‘Document them, fire them!’” When the principal retired, the entire staff left the school. Her dream died.

  A National Board-certified teacher who was a former Teacher of the Year for the district spoke contemptuously of the regimented language, the scripted talk, such as “I am a reflective practitioner.” Teachers were not allowed to question the leadership’s strategy. “We bonded, we spoke in code words. They spied on us, videotaped our staff development meetings, with the camera pointed at the audience, not the presenters. Sometimes we agreed that no one would talk. We would sit quietly, in a form of passive noncompliance. It was a totalitarian atmosphere. We were subversive. We knew what they wanted to hear. We would be punished if we didn’t parrot the words they wanted to hear,” she said.

  A high school teacher spoke with derision about the three-hour block of time for “genre studies.” Everyone knew the classes were for “dummies,” he said, and the kids felt stigmatized. He spoke of the introduction of a physics course in ninth grade (“ActivePhysics”), based on comic books. It was dumbed-down physics and was eventually dropped. Then there was “Algebra Exploration,” which was “fuzzy math for kids who failed algebra.” He said that the system turned principals into “Stepford wives,” doing the bidding of the central office.

  Two kindergarten teachers described the reading test—Developmental Reading Assessment—as “the monster to which we fed our kids.” One asked, “Why would we have a three-hour literacy block for kindergarten children when they don’t know how to hold a book? Why teach reading to a four-year-old?” They complained about the inconsistency of the professional development, which often seemed to be devoted to “the latest rage, the idea of the moment.” One consultant said, “Move the desks to the corner and they will learn to read.” Another said, “If you use purple paper, they will learn to read.” Even the children were supposed to master the pedagogical jargon. The consultants wanted children to say things like, “I can make a text-to-text connection! I can make a text-to-self connection!”

  From the moment Bersin was hired, he and the SDEA were at loggerheads. The union accused him of harassing teachers, and he accused them of blocking reform. They were both right. In June 2001, the union surveyed its members about the reforms; most responded. When asked “Do you believe the Blueprint and other reform efforts instituted by Superintendent Bersin will improve the overall quality of education in San Diego?” 78 percent said “no.” When asked to describe teacher morale, 0.3 percent answered “excellent”; 6 percent said “good”; 29 percent said “only fair”; and 63 percent said “poor.” When asked “Do you have confidence in the current Superintendent and his administration?” 93 percent said “no.” When asked to offer one word that best described “the Superintendent and his administration’s attitude toward teachers and parents in this district,” the most frequently cited words were “dictator,” “arrogant,” “disrespectful,” “dictatorial,” “dictatorship,” “condescending,” and so on.33

  When I visited the district’s headquarters, I met with Bersin’s replacement, Carl Cohn, and top members of the central administration, most of whom had been appointed by Bersin and Alvarado. My conversation with Cohn was informal and candid. The staff members enthused about the historic successes of the Blueprint. When I met with the former director of curriculum and instruction, she wanted me to know how valuable she found Balanced Literacy. She said, “You won’t believe this, but we had fourth graders who didn’t know the difference between point of view and perspective. So we had to stop and teach it to them.” I wrote that down and said nothing. I did not want to admit that I didn’t know the difference between point of view and perspective either. I began to understand what the teachers had been telling me about the district’s demand that everyone mouth the same jargon.

  As I interviewed San Diego educators, I heard recurrent rumors about stress-related illnesses among teachers, whi
ch they called “Bersinitis.” Seeking evidence, I called the San Diego office of Kaiser Permanente, the major health-care organization in California, and spoke to a psychiatric social worker. She told me that from 1999 to 2005, San Diego teachers came to the clinic “in droves” with “work-related depression and anxiety due to a hostile work environment.” She said they were “under pressure by their principals to raise scores.” She said the phenomenon ended when Cohn took over. From 2005 to 2007 (when I spoke to her), not a single teacher appeared with a similar problem.34

  Alan Bersin told me over dinner in San Diego that there was no responsible alternative to swift, top-down reform and that the Blueprint had become deeply institutionalized in the San Diego schools. Brilliant, charming, and self-assured, Bersin said that school-based decision making is a terrible idea, and that elected school boards are obstacles to reform. He explained that reform could happen in public schools only by pushing hard, without waiting for consensus. If you wait for consensus, he said, reform won’t happen.

  But is this a replicable strategy? How many districts are likely to turn complete control over to a leader who is prepared to forge ahead without gaining the support of the teachers who must implement the program? How many districts are likely to disregard the views of teachers, parents, and others who might disagree with the leadership’s ideas about “reform”?

  The political genius of the San Diego approach was what I call a left-right strategy. Bersin’s instructional reforms employed and empowered the pedagogical left; he directed millions of dollars in professional development contracts to those who were deeply versed in Balanced Literacy and constructivist math. At the same time, Bersin’s accountability reforms and organizational policies—firing principals, demanding higher test scores, fighting the teachers’ union, attacking the bureaucracy, and opening charter schools—delighted the business community and those on the right who believe that public agencies, especially schools, are overflowing with waste, inefficiency, and incompetence and are greatly in need of accountability, competition, and choice.

  In the end, were the gains in the elementary years worth the rancor created by Bersin’s “take no prisoners” style? Surely I would have found enthusiastic supporters of the Blueprint if I had interviewed more teachers and principals. But I also have no doubt that the bitterness I encountered was genuine; whether it represented 70 percent of the staff, 60 percent, or only 50 percent was immaterial. Almost every study—including the AIR studies—documented that a majority of teachers were angry and disaffected. You can’t lead your troops if your troops do not trust you.

  Carl Cohn published an essay just three months after we met in San Diego, echoing what he told me in our informal conversation. Ostensibly criticizing the No Child Left Behind legislation, Cohn could not resist comparing the federal law to the Blueprint: “I inherited a district in which the driving philosophy over the previous six years had, similarly, been to attack the credibility of any educator who spoke out against a top-down education reform model. These attacks allowed those in charge to portray themselves as the defenders of children, to justify any means to promote their model of improving student achievement, and to view their critics through the same apocalyptic lens of good and evil that has characterized many of our national debates.” Such an approach, he cautioned, was counterproductive. “In San Diego, it produced a climate of conflict that is only now beginning to improve.” Any genuine school reform, he argued, “is dependent upon empowering those at the bottom, not punishing them from the top.”35

  School reform will continue to fail, Cohn warned, until we recognize that “there are no quick fixes or perfect educational theories. School reform is a slow, steady labor-intensive process” that depends on “harnessing the talent of individuals instead of punishing them for noncompliance with bureaucratic mandates and destroying their initiative.” He predicted that “ground-level solutions, such as high-quality leadership, staff collaboration, committed teachers, and clean and safe environments, have the best chance of success. These solutions are not easily quantified. They cannot be experimented on by researchers or mandated by the federal government.”

  Cohn observed that the leaders of the Blueprint forged ahead without listening to the very people whose cooperation was necessary for ultimate success. They ignored the fundamental importance of trust among those who make schooling effective: students, teachers, principals, and administrators. In my conversation with him, Cohn cited the work of sociologists Anthony Bryk and Barbara Schneider, who maintain in their study Trust in Schools that successful school reform depends on an atmosphere of trust. Trust “foments a moral imperative to take on the hard work of school improvement.” Trust, not coercion, is a necessary precondition for school reform.36

  Did the get-tough policy produce results? Did it lead to higher student test scores? These may not be the right questions. It makes more sense to ask whether a policy of coercion can create good schools. Can teachers successfully educate children to think for themselves if teachers are not treated as professionals who think for themselves? Can principals be inspiring leaders if they must follow orders about the most minute details of daily life in classrooms? If a get-tough policy saps educators of their initiative, their craft, and their enthusiasm, then it is hard to believe that the results are worth having.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Business Model in New York City

  IN THE FIRST DECADE of the new century, New York City became the national testing ground for market-based reforms. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his chancellor, Joel Klein, applied business principles to overhaul the nation’s largest school system, which enrolled 1.1 million children. Their reforms won national and even international acclaim. They reorganized the management of the schools, battled the teachers’ union, granted large pay increases to teachers and principals, pressed for merit pay, opened scores of charter schools, broke up large high schools into small ones, emphasized frequent practice for state tests, gave every school a letter grade, closed dozens of low-performing schools, and institutionalized the ideas of choice and competition (albeit without vouchers). In 2007, only five years after mayoral control of the schools was authorized by the state legislature, New York City won the Broad Prize as the most improved urban school district in the nation.

  IN THE FALL OF 2001, media mogul Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor of New York City. One of the wealthiest men in the world, Bloomberg had achieved renown as a businessman and philanthropist. As a candidate, he vowed to gain control of the public schools and to make them successful. His campaign literature maintained that the system was “in a state of emergency” and noted, “remarkably, $12 billion—30% of our city’s total expenditures, a sum greater than the school spending in Chicago and Los Angeles combined—is not enough to teach 1.1 million public school students or to provide safe, clean and appropriately equipped school facilities.” He vowed to remake the system with management reforms, incentives, merit pay, testing, and accountability.1

  When Bloomberg ran for mayor, the schools were overseen by a seven-member Board of Education, which was appointed by six different elected officials. Each of the city’s five borough presidents (from Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island) selected one member of the central board. The remaining two members of the board were appointed by the mayor. Since this arrangement became law in 1969, every mayor had sought to regain the power to select the Board of Education. For nearly a century prior to 1969, the city’s mayors had appointed every single member of the Board of Education; usually the members of the board were distinguished citizens and community leaders.2 Once appointed, however, the board was an independent agency, and its members had fixed terms and the power to hire the school superintendent and oversee his policies and budget.

  Mayor Bloomberg did not want an independent board. He wanted full, direct control of the schools, with no meddlesome board to second-guess him.

  In June 2002, the state legislature turned control of the public
school system over to Bloomberg, who promptly established the New York City Department of Education (DOE) to manage the schools. The legislation continued a central board of education, while giving the mayor a majority of appointees, who would serve at his pleasure; Bloomberg renamed it the Panel for Educational Policy and made clear that he considered it of no importance. When he introduced the members at a press conference, he said, “They don’t have to speak, and they don’t have to serve. That’s what ‘serving at the pleasure’ means.”3 He sold the Board of Education’s headquarters in Brooklyn to a real estate developer and moved the new department’s headquarters to the Tweed Courthouse, adjacent to his offices at City Hall. Henceforth, the shorthand term for the New York City Department of Education was simply “Tweed.”

  Thus, the DOE was housed in a magnificent building that symbolized the infamous Tweed Ring. Moreover, there was this irony: William Marcy Tweed, aka the boss of Tammany Hall, had led the effort to abolish the New York Board of Education in 1871 and turn the school system into a municipal department, making it easier to control and to loot. Boss Tweed’s Department of Public Instruction banned the purchase of books from the Harper Brothers publishing company as punishment for Thomas Nast’s cartoons lampooning the Tweed Ring in Harper’s Weekly. In 1873, after the Tweed Ring was exposed, the state legislature reestablished an independent Board of Education, appointed by the mayor. And from 1873 until 1969, the mayor appointed every member of the central board.4