The inequity and ineffectiveness of American K–12 public education are widely deplored, both at home and abroad, and have become appropriate objects of public scrutiny, concern, and legislation at both the state and national levels in the past twenty-five years. A field that for a century has been overwhelmingly dominated by a mind-set and thought-world deriving mainly from the work of John Dewey, calling itself “Progressive” (an incalculable rhetorical advantage) and disastrously prone to endless neophilia or “policy churn” (Frederick M. Hess), has also seen the emergence, especially in the past quarter century, of outstandingly judicious scholars, policy-makers, and reformers such as Diane Ravitch, E. D. Hirsch Jr., Chester Finn, John Silber, Charles L. Glenn, Eric Hanushek, and Jeanne Chall. These new reformers themselves draw on earlier figures of distinction, often lonely dissenters from “Progressive” orthodoxy, such as William C. Bagley, Isaac Kandel, Arthur Bestor, and James Coleman. Particularly isolated voices in this debate were conservatives or libertarians, such as Russell Kirk and Milton Friedman.

A few, mainly private, institutions and journals have been making great contributions to the newly vital discussion of the ends and means of primary and secondary education. Among the institutions are the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (of Dayton and Washington, D.C.), the Core Knowledge Foundation (Virginia), the Pioneer Institute (Boston), the Manhattan Institute (New York), and the Hoover Institution (Stanford). Among the journals are the Fordham Institute’s Educational Gadfly, the Core Knowledge newsletter, Common Knowledge, and the quarterly Education Next, published by the Hoover Institution in collaboration with the Fordham Institute and the Program on Educational Policy and Governance (PEPG) at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard (not the Harvard Graduate School of Education).

In the wake of the important, ominous 1983 U.S. government report on American K–12 education, A Nation at Risk, these figures, institutions, and journals have managed to reach a critical mass of citizens, thinkers, legislators, and policy-makers, helping stimulate interventions and policy initiatives at the local, state, and national levels. Today, concepts and strategies such as accountability, achievement gaps, state standards, curriculum frameworks, charter schools, vouchers, and school choice have provided a largely new mapping of the educational terrain that has thrown on the defensive the older though still-dominant “Progressive” tradition, with its strongholds in the larger teachers’ union (the NEA) and the schools of education and teachers colleges. Important leadership has been provided by prominent political and educational figures such as Senator (and former governor) Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the late union leader Albert Shanker, former Boston University president John Silber, and a succession of thoughtful education secretaries under Presidents Reagan, the two Bushes, Clinton, and now Obama—not to speak of grassroots voucher and choice activists, largely African Americans, in cities such as Milwaukee and Cleveland.

The narrow but important U.S. Supreme Court decision Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (2002), the Cleveland voucher case, upheld the possibility of expanded voucher programs for the nation’s poorest-performing school districts and confirmed the importance of the earlier, continuing, impressive voucher program in Milwaukee. Whatever the faults of the Bush-initiated but bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act of 2002, it shined a valuable national spotlight on the real dynamics and problems of our K–12 public education system and provided serious incentives for diagnostic testing, accountability, and preventive or remedial programs at the state level, such as the effective Reading First initiative, which was ultimately and sadly killed by the current Congress.

The problems and defects of American schooling most clearly afflict the lives of the poor, immigrants (especially non-English-speaking children), African Americans, and urban students generally. This point is made and remade in a very large literature, including the poignant recent contrast of the disastrous Syracuse, New York schools with the much-improved schools of Raleigh, North Carolina in Gerald Grant’s Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh (Harvard, 2009). But despite the terrible achievement and competence gap between poor and middle-class schools—often a clear racial gap as well—the actual performance of students even in most of our prosperous, usually suburban schools should be a source of great concern. Comparative studies of American student performance such as the international PISA and TIMSS scores reveal very low American competency levels that are simply inconsistent with intelligent citizenship, occupational self-sufficiency, and international competitiveness.

These facts have been documented most persuasively in a series of books by the distinguished literary theorist and educational thinker E. D. Hirsch Jr., of the University of Virginia. Already thirty years ago one of the world’s leading theorists of language and literary interpretation, Hirsch turned his attention in the late 1970s to the problems of K–12 public education, being largely animated by profound disappointment at the failure of the legal destruction of de jure racial segregation to improve the educational performances of the nation’s poorest and least fortunate students, many of them African Americans.

Hirsch has made a series of powerful, carefully documented arguments about the extraordinary ineffectuality of American K–12 education for all students, and he has become the chief figure in what may be called the neoconservative educational reform movement. Among Hirsch’s vitally important books are The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them (1996), The Knowledge Deficit (2007), and, most recently, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools (Yale, 2009). Hirsch has controversially argued, with strong statistical evidence, that between 1962 and 1979 there was a major decline in SAT verbal scores in the United States, and that this was an absolute numerical decline and not to be blamed on the inclusion of larger numbers of students from poor and poorly educated backgrounds in the SAT process. “The main historical pattern,” he has recently written, is that “Progressive [Deweyan] anti-academic ideas began to dominate teacher-training institutions in the 1930s. After 1945, as older teachers retired, and new, well-indoctrinated ones began teaching, these [‘Progressive’] ideas came to dominate in schools and schoolbooks. Those ideas are . . . scientifically incorrect [and] have been highly injurious to social justice and the common good” (letter to the New York Review of Books, February 11, 2010). This is a view that was argued from the 1930s on by a succession of thinkers who were increasingly marginalized by the growing “Progressive” establishment: William C. Bagley and Isaac Kandel (both of whom Hirsch has praised), President Robert M. Hutchins of the University of Chicago, Arthur Bestor, and Russell Kirk.

Not only has Hirsch persuasively critiqued our dominant, failed educational policies in detail, he also started a reform effort called the Core Knowledge curriculum, which is now in use in more than 750 American elementary schools, with growing proof of success, including important cases in the public-school system of New York City, where a heroic outer-borough superintendent, Dr. Kathleen Cashin, has apparently helped bring along New York City schools chief Joel Klein.

Briefly put, Hirsch’s chief target is the extremely content-light elementary school curricula, pioneered from the 1920s on by “Progressives” such as William Heard Kilpatrick, Dewey’s leading disciple at Teachers College, Columbia University, and reaching critical mass in the 1960s. The siren song of “educational skills” as separable from broad but very specific literacy content in the early curriculum has seduced generations of educationists, whereas what is needed is a very specific scope and sequence of texts in each elementary grade. The Core Knowledge curriculum now provides this. Like the most successful national educational systems in the rest of the world, the Core Knowledge curriculum is very prescriptive, indicating exactly what must be taught and achieved in each grade before a student moves to the next grade. This is, in fact, the only way in which to foster a real accumulation of educational knowledge and skill. Hirsch has also been a chief critic of the most recent educational fad, “21st-Century Skills,” which alleges that “higher-order” global competencies can be identified and taught in our K–12 schools. The growing success of Hirsch’s bottom-up, grassroots curriculum is a tribute not only to his insight and perseverance but also to the initiative, imagination, and courage of his many collaborators in the school districts that have adopted the Core Knowledge curriculum.

In The Schools We Need and Why We Don’t Have Them, Hirsch praised the prescience of Dewey’s Teachers College opponent William C. Bagley (1874–1946), whom Dewey and the “Progressives” attacked for being an “authoritarian.” One of Bagley’s most powerful insights was into the dynamics of transient students in American education and the lasting educational damage that such geographical mobility was doing to large numbers of poor children already in the 1920s. Without a fixed curriculum, transient students start over in each new school they enter, usually falling hopelessly behind and becoming not only ineffective in school but subsequently incompetent and embittered. Curricular weakness (a misleading emphasis on disembodied, decontextualized “skills” and a horror at requiring any memorization) and variability undermine the capacity of schools to convey to poor and mobile students the fundamental early deposit of literacy, numeracy, and common cultural knowledge that more stable, middle-class children get from their homes (if not much from our schools themselves).

The problem of “hypermobility” among students, particularly single-parent, poor, African American, and immigrant children, has proved the most intractable of the problems encountered over a twenty-year period by Boston University and local personnel who have been battling for school success in one of the most remarkable, noble commitments a private university has ever made to the welfare of our poorest fellow citizens, the Boston University/Chelsea partnership. Brainchild and long-term commitment of BU president John Silber, one of the most remarkable educational statesmen of our time, the partnership still represents a unique commitment of a major private university to operate the K–12 school system of a nearly moribund small city, the poorest in the state of Massachusetts at the time the arrangement began in 1989. Riddled with graffiti, stagnant economically, overwhelmed as an entry-level port for immigrants from all over the world, brutally divided and overshadowed by the darkening span of the Tobin Bridge into Boston, Chelsea in 1989 was a study in the pathology of American urban decline. But it had a cadre of concerned citizens who had heard of Silber’s repeatedly spurned offers to take over the problematic schools of larger Boston, just across the river.

The story of Boston’s own modern educational history has been recently told in Joseph M. Cronin’s Reforming Boston Schools, 1930–2006: Overcoming Corruption and Racial Segregation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Cronin—himself a former university president, commissioner of education in Massachusetts, and state superintendent of education in Illinois—details and gives enormous credit to Silber and Boston University for their unique commitment to the Boston public schools: “The university that stepped forward time and time again for Boston schools [for] thirty years was Boston University.” In addition to the generosity of none-too-rich Boston University to its hometown, however, the story of the university’s leadership in Chelsea has needed telling for a long time. Yet it has been a case study to which mainline “Progressives,” teachers’ unions, schools of education, education journals, and the major newspapers in the Boston area and throughout the country have not been eager to draw favorable attention.

A socially conservative Democrat and foreign-policy hawk of formidable intellectual, administrative, and polemical gifts, Silber was so distasteful to the Massachusetts liberal elites that they voted heavily against him in the 1990 Massachusetts gubernatorial election, giving the election to libertarian Republican William Weld, who proceeded to appoint Silber chairman of the Massachusetts State Board of Education, an appointment of great consequence and benefit for the Commonwealth which is well narrated by Cronin. The Boston University/Chelsea educational partnership has finally found an adequate account in a fine new book, Partnering for Progress: Boston University, the Chelsea Public Schools, and Urban Education Reform, edited by Cara Stillings Candal (Information Age Publishing, 2009), with contributions by several of the principal figures in the partnership, foreign scholars from Italy and the Netherlands attracted to it as a uniquely promising urban educational model, and Dr. Charles L. Glenn, one of the nation’s leading educational policy specialists and for twenty-one years (1970–91) the director of urban education and equity efforts for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The story of Boston University’s commitment and of the city of Chelsea’s vicissitudes (including bankruptcy and receivership by the state) contains a set of real (as opposed to ghostwritten) “profiles in courage” and illustrates many of the urban and demographic dynamics discussed in Grant’s book on Syracuse and Raleigh and in Cronin’s book on Boston. It is a story that deserves to be more widely known, for its challenges, its successes, and its failures. Perhaps the greatest of the challenges and partial failures concerns the fate of those highly transient or “hypermobile” students, students whose families move so frequently that they are hard to serve with any degree of adequacy in schools. As Deputy Superintendent of the Chelsea Public Schools Mary Bourque points out in her contribution to the volume, fewer than 16 percent of the graduates of Chelsea High School in the three years of 2005–7 had started there in kindergarten. This kind of profoundly demoralizing and destabilizing mobility is one of the greatest educational and social problems we confront as a nation, making particularly difficult the measurement of academic progress of stable cohorts of students across time. State standards containing specific curriculum frameworks that can mitigate curricular variability at least within a given state (e.g., the Regents in New York and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System or MCAS) are part of a solution.

As E. D. Hirsch has noted, William C. Bagley had observed and deplored such mobility as early as the 1930s, arguing for the need for some degree of curricular uniformity across district and state lines. But the content-light curricula that the “Progressives” have left us with have helped to “dumb down” several generations of American students. It is revealing that Chelsea’s greatest successes have been with early-childhood and elementary education, and that, as its current superintendent, Thomas Kingston, notes, a large part of this success is probably due to the adoption of Hirsch’s Core Knowledge elementary-school curriculum. Despite terrifying transiency and crippling linguistic, familial, housing, health, and economic disadvantages confronted by poor students and parents, the solid, measurable success of the Boston University/Chelsea partnership provides a model and a chapter in American urban history well worth study. As the liberal commentator and reporter Sam Allis of the Boston Globe reluctantly conceded in a February 2003 Globe essay on the partnership, “Whatever you think of Silber, he has been true to his word with Chelsea.” Of course, in some sense “it takes a village” to educate, but it also takes intelligent, courageous, committed individuals who are in it for the long haul.