-
Troublemaker: A Personal History of
School Reform Since Sputnik by Chester
E. Finn, Jr. (Princeton University Press, - 2008). 364 pp.
M. D. AESCHLIMAN is Professor of Education at
Boston University, Adjunct Professor of English at
the University of Italian Switzerland, and author of
The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case
Against Scientism.
Chester Finn has written an absorbing
book of great importance about American
K-12 education over the last fifty years,
drawing on and depicting his lifetime commitments
and activities as one of our most
important educational policy specialists—in
national government, state government, the
university, the research institute, the advocacy
group, and the world of publications.
His autobiographical account should be put
on that small shelf of books indispensable for
specialists and citizens alike in their capacity
to inform, illuminate, and motivate: Charles
L. Glenn’s The Myth of the Common School
(1988), for the theory, history, trajectory, and
problems of the public school movement
over the last two centuries in France, Holland,
Germany, and the USA; E.D. Hirsch’s
The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have
Them (1996), for a profound analysis of the
terrible inadequacy and ineffectiveness of
American K-12 schooling, and a practical
program for its improvement that is now
being used in over 800 schools; and Diane
Ravitch’s Left Back: A Century of Failed School
Reforms (2000), a magisterial survey of American
K-12 educational policies since 1900
with a haunting and damning subtitle that was
changed for the paperback edition.
The U.S. Constitution created a decentralized
republican democracy in which the
rights of individual citizens and states were
safeguarded against national encroachment
and domination. Given the brutalities and
catastrophes of top-down, statist educational
policies since the French Revolution, this
arrangement, rooted in the Bill of Rights, has
served us well politically, restricting or preventing
large-scale statist indoctrination. But
since the victories of the educational
“Progressives” from the 1920s on—John
Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, and their
many contemporary successors in the teachers’
colleges and educational schools, which
consolidated and institutionalized those victories
in a worldview and matching educational
policies—American public education
has become increasingly ineffective in conveying
knowledge, skill, and even elementary
civic and ethical understanding. The
books by Glenn, Hirsch, and Ravitch provide
vital narrative and exposition as to why
this has taken place, and Hirsch’s 1996 book
and his subsequent The Knowledge Deficit
(2006) have also drawn attention to his “Core
Knowledge” curriculum, a movement of K-
8 curricular reform that shows strong promise
of doing something substantial to counteract
and ameliorate an otherwise deteriorating
situation characterized by an overwhelming
irony: vastly increased American educational
expenditures over the last half-century have
been accompanied by declines in educational
outcomes, giving us one of the weakest and
most unfair public education systems in the
developed world.
Chester Finn’s autobiographical account
of his involvement in alternately critiquing
and shaping American K-12 educational policy
since the 1960s is an ideal and detailed complement
to Glenn’s, Hirsch’s, and Ravitch’s
books, and in fact he has been steadily allied
with Ravitch for many years in a partnership
that has shed much light and done much
good.
Finn started out in the 1960s as an idealistic
liberal Democrat concerned particularly with
inner-city poverty. His first mentor, and
perhaps the most lasting influence on him,
was that maverick Democrat Daniel Patrick
Moynihan, on whose staff he served in the
Nixon Cabinet and also when Moynihan was
Democratic senator from New York. Finn’s
account of American political history as it
affected educational policy over the last halfcentury
is unusually revealing due to his roles
as a participant at high levels of policy-making.
In addition to serving on Moynihan’s
staffs, he was a chief associate of Secretary of
Education William Bennett in Washington
and of Tennessee governor (now senator)
Lamar Alexander in Nashville. A professor of
educational policy, a major figure in research
institutes and advocacy groups, he is also the
author of important books and an editor and
frequent writer for what are now two of the
nation’s most important magazines on educational
policy, Education Next (published quarterly
by Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the
Program on Educational Policy and Governance
(PEPG) at the Kennedy School of
Government at Harvard—not the Harvard
Graduate School of Education, a bastion of
Progressivism) and The Education Gadfly (published
weekly by the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute of Dayton, Ohio, and Washington,
DC).
Finn has informed, detailed, seasoned, and
reasoned opinions on the whole horizon of
K-12 educational issues, but his particular
interests are in parents’ rights to school choice,
the charter school movement, voucher programs,
and educational assessment and accountability.
His life work should be seen in
the light of two large, tragic contemporary
ironies. The increased educational expenditures
vs. diminished educational outcomes
anomaly referred to above is the first of these.
The second irony is one that also haunts the
work of Glenn and Hirsch: the great victory
of 1960s civil rights legislation in destroying
de jure segregation in the public schools has
not been followed, as was expected, by a
diminution in de facto racial segregation and
by an overall improvement in American educational
outcomes. In fact, our urban schools
are more segregated than ever, with “the
exodus of many white families for private and
suburban alternatives. Today,” Finn continues,
“Boston’s public school enrollment is
86% minority, compared with 35%” in 1974,
and it “is less than half its 1970 size.” In
addition, the collapse of the Black family
since the 1960s—which Moynihan predicted
forty years ago—has intensified the misery
and vulnerability of our poorest fellow-citizens,
increasingly including whites as well
(European countries are experiencing the
same breakdowns, with illegitimacy rates
among British whites particularly worrying).
Yet as Paul T. Hill of the University of
Washington has said, commenting on Finn’s
book,
these developments are the “product
not of impersonal forces but of people with
ideas and motivations.” Finn describes and
discusses these people, ideas, and motivations
in illuminating narrative detail, starting with
the post-World War II “Progressive” institutional
consolidation of Dewey’s and
Kilpatrick’s ideas and practices and their lonely
and isolated critics in the 1950s, Robert
Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Smith, Arthur
Bestor, and the Catholic-school sector. He
shares E.D. Hirsch’s pessimism about dislodging
this establishment in the educational
schools and teachers’colleges and the larger of
the two teachers’ unions, the National Educational
Association (NEA), but has high
praise for the late Albert Shanker’s leadership
of the smaller one, the American Federation
of Teachers (AFT).
Like Charles Glenn and John E. Coons,
Finn argues that in a republican democracy
with tax-supported public schools at which
children’s attendance is mandatory and enforced
by law, the rights of parents to choose
and help shape their children’s educational
opportunities and formation must be respected.
As Coons has memorably put it, “the
right to form families and to determine the
scope of their children’s practical liberty is for
most men and women the primary occasion
for choice and responsibility. One does not
have to be rich or well-placed to experience
the family. The opportunity over a span of
fifteen to twenty years to attempt the transmission
of one’s deepest values to a beloved
child provides a unique arena for the creative
impulse. Here is the communication of ideas
in its most elemental mode. Parental expression,
for all its invisibility to the media, is an
activity with profound First Amendment
implications.” Wealthy parents express this
choice by moving to well-off communities
with schools they like or by placing their
children in private or parochial schools. Increasing
numbers of people school their chil
dren at home. But poor working parents, and
even most middle-income parents, have no
such choices and are coerced by a system for
which adjectives such as “free” and “public”
and “adequate” have become increasingly
equivocal.
Like Charles Glenn, Finn lauds the fundamental
precedent set by the U.S. Supreme
Court with Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925),
which unanimously overturned an Oregon
law that attempted to close all private schools,
with Catholic schools the main target of this
nativist, majoritarian measure. The decision is
all the more noble in light of the authoritarian,
statist policies then so glamorously institutionalized
in republican France, fascist Italy, and
communist Russia (for the last of which John
Dewey expressed great sympathy in the late
1920s). “The fundamental theory of liberty
upon which all governments in this Union
repose,” Justice McReynolds wrote for a unanimous
Court, “excludes any general power of
the State to standardize its children by forcing
them to accept instruction from public teachers
only. The child is not the mere creature of
the State.”
The primary practical methods by which
Finn sees an opportunity to safeguard and
renew parents’ right to school choice and to
increase student morale and academic effectiveness
include charter schools (purposely
distinctive and autonomous public schools
free from some union regulations) and vouchers,
especially for students trapped in chronically
under-performing, incompetent, or dangerous
schools. Though not a Catholic, Finn
follows the Catholic Moynihan in emphasizing
the desirability of giving vouchers that
can be used in parochial and private as well as
in alternative public schools. The voucher
programs for poor and poorly served citizens
in Milwaukee and Cleveland, most of whom
choose Catholic or other Christian schools
for their children, have been ruled constitutional,
with the Cleveland program impor
tantly confirmed as constitutional in the Supreme
Court’s 2002 Zelman v. Simmons Harris
decision. Finn argues that “the most enduring
value conflict in American K-12 education is
between partisans of the public school system
and advocates of pluralism, competition, and
choice.”
But in addition to parental choice, Finn
insists on both the indispensability, and the
difficulty, of establishing real academic accountability,
discerned and guided by solid
statistics about student competencies and the
effectiveness of schools and encouraged by
state and federal carrots and sticks. His discussion
of standards and accountability from the
publication of the sobering report A Nation at
Risk under Reagan (1983) onward is detailed
and illuminating, rightly focusing on the fine
state-level initiatives of Republican and
Democratic governors, but particularly of
Lamar Alexander, Bill Clinton, and George
W. Bush as governors. His discussion of “No
Child Left Behind” (NCLB) is judicious,
rightly crediting George W. Bush’s bipartisan
initiative and seeing it as growing out of
previous efforts at the state level and his own
father’s Charlottesville education summit in
1989. However, unsympathetic Democrats
now control the U.S. Congress, and the
National Education Association is a large
factor in their coalition and in their presidential
election campaign. In addition, de-centralization
provisions in the original NCLB
legislation have come back to haunt its proponents:
voluntary state standards and tests as
guidelines by which to evaluate yearly progress
in individual districts and schools, and by
which to award or deny federal money, vary
widely and have been unscrupulously played
and tainted by state bureaucrats and district
administrators eager to escape exposure and
sanctions but eager to acquire federal financial
benefits.
An alliance of extremes has probably
doomed the NCLB legislation, corrupting
and betraying its hopes. Liberal Democrats
and their supporters in the NEA and the
teachers’ colleges hate external accountability
and state-government (or even indirect national)
dictation of their curriculum and academic
standards, which are more specific,
content-based, and common-sensical than
they like. Conservative Republicans dislike
the federal role in education generally, resent
Bush’s educational expenditures, and are
pained when the mandatory National Association
of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests
show that even students who are getting good
grades in many schools in their districts actually
know very little, as discerned by national
and international comparisons and as compared
to American students forty, fifty, and
seventy-five years ago.
Grade inflation and “social promotion”—
“the soft bigotry of low expectations”—have
become endemic in our schools, with a low
egalitarianism of outcome gradually establishing
itself at the expense of the noble idea
of equality of opportunity for access to an
aggregated public good: decently organized,
competent schooling. The National Center
for Educational Statistics, Finn notes, “reported
that twelfth graders’ reading performance
in 2005 was worse than in 1992—and
flat since 2002.” As for disparities between
ethnic and racial groups, Sam Dillon of the
New York Times wrote in 2006 that “the testscore
gaps are so large that, on average,
African-American and Hispanic students in
high school can read and do arithmetic at only
the average level of whites in junior high
school.” The recent Democratic congressional
attack on the successful “Reading First”
literacy initiative within NCLB succeeded in
drastically cutting this effective feature of the
educational act.
One of the most dismal but revealing
features of Finn’s book is his documentation
of the trendy “Progressive” neophilia that has
increasingly dominated our teachers’ colleges
and schools of education since the 1920s.
“Progressivism” won the day at Columbia
Teachers’ College by the 1920s, drowning
out and marginalizing judicious moderates
such as William C. Bagley and Isaac Kandel,
while more recently both relativizing “values
clarification” education (Lawrence Kohlberg)
and the seductive, flattering theory of “multiple
intelligences” (Howard Gardner) have
come to us courtesy of the Harvard Graduate
School of Education. In the university at
large, left-Nietzschean, postmodern skepticism
about reason and virtue is an ideal
stimulant to increasing vice, foolishness, cynicism,
and irrationality. (A prominent ed school
professor in the Midwest has deplored the
distinguished literary theorist, literary historian,
and educational reformer E.D. Hirsch’s
“privileging” of the denotative dimension of
language itself as authoritarian!) Former Boston
University President John Silber’s commitment
two decades ago of Boston University
to run the poor, dysfunctional schools of
the nearby, bankrupt, immigrant entry-point
city of Chelsea, Massachusetts, has been a
noble, sustained initiative that no other teachers’
college or school of education (or university)
has chosen to imitate and for which his
(private) university has gotten little credit,
even in its local newspaper, the Boston Globe.
Though some progress has been made
under President Bush’s NCLB at the elementary
level, the bipartisan consensus that created
it is gone, and the future of K-12 educational
reform probably lies again with the
states and with courageous, grass-roots initiatives
such as Hirsch’s Core Knowledge curriculum.
For a republic traditionally aspiring to personal
liberty and equality of access to public
goods worth having—of which decent schooling
at public expense is among the most
important—Chester Finn’s book is an indispensable
guide and an inspiring portrait of
what individuals and groups with common
sense, civic commitment, and perseverance
can accomplish in realizing the battered but
noble promise of modern education—but also
a sobering picture of what they are up against.
