How I Became A Soldier in the Great American Education War

       The math wars, the reading wars, the testing wars, and all the other schoolyard fights reported in the news today are part of a much wider conflict that is occurring throughout the United States over the meaning of educational excellence and how to achieve world-class schools. Before explaining how I became a combatant in The Great American Education War, allow me to provide a bit of biographical background. I am 56 years old, an early baby boomer, not a late one, having been born on November 24, 1945, one month to the day after the founding of the United Nations that ushered in the post-World War II era. Most of my childhood was spent growing up in a modest area of Baltimore. My father was a pharmacist in those more innocent times when drug stores had soda fountains and the delivery vehicles were bicycles; I doubled as soda jerk and delivery boy. My mother was a schoolteacher, when those same innocent times provided few other career options for women.

       My parents sent me and my brother to the public schools. Both the elementary and junior high schools I attended took their name from nearby Pimlico Racetrack, which was only about fifteen minutes from my house if I walked with a fast gait. In contrast, Baltimore City College High School, my next stop, was located several miles across town. I relied on public transportation, which meant my spending an hour each way, as I had to transfer from one bus to another in making the daily trek between home and school. This "busing" was a fact of life for me and my friends. It was the price one had to pay for the quality of the education the high school had to offer. "City" was one of the best schools, public or private, in the entire metropolitan area. For those of us enrolled in the special college preparatory program, the venerable institution—it is the third oldest public high school in the country—rewarded our long commute with masterly teachers and cherished traditions but most of all with a dedication to academic excellence. I graduated in 1962 and went on to earn a bachelor's degree in political science from Loyola College of Baltimore in 1966 and a Ph.D. in political science from Syracuse University in 1972.

       Since 1972, I have been a professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, a state university with an enrollment of some 12,000 students, making it the third biggest institution of higher education in Missouri. Although the campus address is Natural Bridge Road and the school mascot is the Riverman, the place is several miles from the banks of the Mississippi River, with the only nearby body of water being the local duck pond called Bugg Lake (named for the first chancellor of the college). Owing to its origins as a campus designed to provide a college education for St. Louisans who could not afford to leave home, it is primarily a commuter university, with only a few dormitories and a relatively small percentage of residential students. The university has attracted its share of very bright students, especially after the creation of the Pierre Laclede Honors College in 1989, but the student body as a whole tends to be a working-class clientele consisting mostly of students who work many hours a week to pay their tuition (and hence are necessarily only part-time students), who are often the first in their family to attend college, and who not only come from St. Louis but are likely to remain in St. Louis after graduation.

       My professional life has primarily been spent teaching and writing about international relations, including authoring a textbook that has been used at places like Duke, Stanford, and the U.S. Naval Academy as well as community and state colleges. Among my writings is a book on the United Nations calling for improved global institution-building (not world government, but better mechanisms for cooperation among sovereign states). I was recognized in 1995, on the fiftieth anniversary of the UN, by the St. Louis chapter of the United Nations Association of America as one of fifty local "people who have devoted their lives personally and professionally to the values of peace and justice within their own communities and throughout the world." In the pages that follow, I will utter some "politically incorrect" statements, but I can hardly be accused by the PC watchdogs of being insensitive to diversity and not understanding multiculturalism.

       As suggested by my scholarly interest in the UN, I have spent much of my adult life as a liberal—participating in the civil rights movement and the anti-war protests of the sixties, delighting in the Republican downfall over Watergate in the seventies, speaking out against some of Ronald Reagan's Cold War policies in the eighties, and even privately wondering whether impeachment was the right punishment for Bill Clinton's sexual dalliances in the nineties. All the while, however, I sensed that as I was aging, I was becoming more and more alienated from the left. In the circles I travel in, such a confession can raise eyebrows if not hackles, given the overwhelming liberal bent of professors in academia. I have a good explanation for this personal metamorphosis. It is not that I have abandoned liberalism. Rather, liberalism has abandoned me. It is not uncommon to experience such a revelation; the "liberal disillusionment" of the 1920s experienced by John Dos Passos and others, as well as the "neoconservative" conversion of Norman Podhoretz and the New York School in the 1970s, come to mind.

       In my case, it was "progressive education," which is closely associated with modern liberalism, that provided the breaking point. Currently in control of the education establishment, progressives have long dreamed of classrooms where children work independently and cooperatively, relatively free of adult direction, grading, and other such "constraints." The more I have seen of progressive pedagogy at work, the more disenchanted I have become. The utter failure of our schools under progressive rule has provoked a backlash, as the public has called for increased standards and accountability. This in turn has produced a backlash against the backlash, mounted by educators on the defensive. If my eclectic ideological history as well as my lifelong commitment to teaching is not enough to convince the reader that I can offer a fair, informed analysis of the contemporary education scene and the war that is now raging, there is one other credential I can furnish—that of a battle-scarred parent.

My Enlistment in the Cause

       What perhaps most equips me to comment on the state of precollegiate education, aside from my vantage point as a college professor who annually sees the finished, or not-so-finished, products that are being produced in our schools, is my experiences as a father of two children who recently completed their education. I do not claim to speak for all parents. I can only tell my own story, but there is reason to believe that it is not unique to me. It is a parent's perspective as much as anything else that informs this book.

       Certainly, my earliest interest in K-12 educational issues stemmed from my participant observation of what was happening in my kids' elementary school and middle school in the 1980s. I was living then in University City, an established St. Louis suburb that was founded in 1906 by one Edward G. Lewis, a quixotic sort who envisioned creating nothing less than the intellectual capital of the earth. He proceeded to build a number of imposing structures designed to reflect the varied architectures of the world, including a recreation of an Egyptian temple and an ornate, octagonal tower in the Second Renaissance Revival style that became city hall, whose claim to fame until recently was that it had the largest rooftop searchlight on the planet, supposedly having been procured from the Czar of Russia. Lewis' dreams were dashed when he ran out of money, but not before he had laid out a street grid in which most of the avenues were named after colleges and universities. My wife Ruth and I lived with our two children on Vassar, and the neighborhood elementary school was named Delmar-Harvard, since it was situated at the intersection of Harvard Avenue and Delmar Boulevard. The home of Washington University, the municipality was a magnet for academics attracted to the charm of the stately older homes and the bohemian flavor of "the Loop," the downtown row of shops, bars, and eateries. We had bought the house on Vassar from a UM-St. Louis colleague of mine, who had taken a job at the University of Oregon.

       U. City at one time had the reputation of being the best school district in the entire state of Missouri. Although long committed to diversity, it had been in actuality a mainly white municipality, with an especially heavy Jewish presence, over many decades. Like so many older suburbs, it started experiencing demographic shifts in housing patterns during the 1960s, which produced greater racial integration of the public schools followed by white flight on the part of many parents concerned about the future of the district. Rightly or wrongly, there was the usual concern whether kids coming from poor households lacking in intellectual sophistication would lower the quality of education. By the time we moved to U. City, black enrollments had already overtaken white enrollments in the district, and the district was in decline at least in terms of the perception of outsiders. Nevertheless, we arrived with the typical idealism and cosmopolitanism that academic families are known for, and that U. City was known for.

       These qualities were to be increasingly tested over time, as the enrollment of African-American students was to climb within just a few years to over 85 percent of the district-wide total in a community which remained residentially 50 percent white, yet was not only abandoning the public schools for private schools in droves but was also becoming geographically divided between the predominantly black half living north of Delmar and the predominantly white half living south of Delmar. We lived just north of Delmar, in one of the few truly integrated parts of the city. The St. Louis metropolitan area has always had a strong private school, including parochial school, tradition—it has the highest percentage of school-age children enrolled in private institutions of any major metro area in the country—but U. Citians, with their liberal, egalitarian personae, were assumed to be above educational privatization. Judging from the rapid abandonment by whites, as well as middle-class blacks, of the U. City public schools, liberalism in U. City went only so far, as parents were unwilling to make their children martyrs to the cause.

       Ruth and I gave the U. City public schools our best shot. We became active in the PTO and worked hard with other parents to improve the entire school community. We remained in the system for several years, long after many of our friends had left. By the late 1980s, our older son, Stephen, had made it through Delmar-Harvard Elementary School and was in the seventh grade at Brittany Woods Middle School, while our younger son, Sean, was in the third grade at Delmar-Harvard. On the whole, they had received a very fine education along the way, with many superb teachers who were throwbacks to the days when U. City was known for academic excellence. They, in fact, were performing well in their classes and on standardized tests. I started noticing, however, that, as time went on, the newsletters sent home by the school principals and the curriculum statements endorsed by the school board contained fewer and fewer references to words such as "rigor," "homework," "standards," "merit," and "discipline" and more and more references to "equity," "diversity," "self-esteem," "inclusion," "multiculturalism" and all the other buzzwords that are now recited with rote monotony by K-12 educators. At first, these buzzwords sounded innocent enough. After all, who could possibly be against "equity" and "diversity"? However, I gradually began to realize that these words represented a sea change in K-12 thinking that was moving the U. City schools away from a commitment to academic excellence toward a commitment to academic mediocrity.

       When I say sea change, I am referring to the fact that, following the Soviet Union's success at placing Sputnik in outer space orbit in 1957, there was a growing recognition that America's schools needed to be upgraded, particularly through offering more "accelerated," special college prep classes in junior high and high schools for high-achieving students (especially in math and science) if we were to catch up with and surpass the Russians. The K-12 establishment took the advice of the 1959 Conant Report, produced by a committee chaired by the former president of Harvard University, which advocated the practice of grouping students by ability in specific subjects. Although one might rightly question whether these "tracking" policies were excessively exclusive and failed to address the needs of the majority of children who were placed in lower tracks, they produced a level of rigor that was almost unprecedented in U.S. education, even for traditionally strong institutions such as Baltimore City College High and U. City High. I was fortunate to be placed in one of these accelerated programs and to be exposed to a curriculum that was incredibly demanding for a fifteen-year-old high schooler. As just one example, in my senior English course I wrote an eighty-page paper containing over one hundred footnotes on the subject of the sixteenth-century philosopher Erasmus and secular humanism, gleaned from pouring over stacks of books and taking prolific notes in the Baltimore Public Library on weekends. I could not help but laugh when my son's principal tried to convince me that the new direction the district was going in would provide a "richer," "more challenging" curriculum compared with the past. I was to learn that what was meant by this was, among other things, stream-of-consciousness "journal writing" where the student is expected to make a daily entry in a diary based not on reading but "reflections," free of worry about the use of standard English conventions or any of the other strictures associated with good writing.

       When I became involved in University City schools as a parent, I found that they were moving 180 degrees from the thinking that prevailed back then the post-Sputnik era. My suspicions that something was amiss were heightened in 1987, when under a new principal at Delmar-Harvard-a high-minded young man with a freshly minted master's degree in education-there were pressures to do away with ability-based reading groups in favor of "whole-language" instruction whereby all students in a given classroom were to be assigned the same reading and taught with the same exact lesson plan no matter their level of competence. Although grades K-5 had never been tracked like 6-12, it had commonly been understood that within any elementary classroom the teacher had to differentiate instruction to some extent by ability level, especially in heterogeneous classes containing students with wide-ranging competencies. In language arts as well as in math and other areas, the rumor at Delmar—Harvard was that all children were to be put through the curriculum in lock-step fashion at the same pace. No more "bluebird" and "redbird" ability groups—all birds were to be of the same feather. The suspicions and rumors were confirmed when at a PTO meeting later that year the principal stated that the top 20 percent in the past had benefited at the expense of the other 80 percent and that this no longer would be permissible. There was absolutely no evidence that the educational leaps made by high-achievers had been made on the backs of lower-achievers, yet he in effect was saying that, in order to raise the floor, we had to lower the ceiling. In what was to become a commonly repeated rationalization for eliminating ability-grouping, Ruth and I were told by the principal that "research shows that heterogeneous grouping does not hurt bright kids." Does not hurt? For me, this was an epiphany—apparently the mission of the public schools was no longer stretching kids' minds; instead they now aimed at damage control. As long as one's child was not harmed by whatever new philosophy the schools had embraced, parents should be content!

       This was my first encounter with the social-engineering tendencies of the progressive project and the leveling it sought to foster. It was not the last time I would hear invocations of the "latest research" to justify all manner of experimentation. Shortly thereafter, I learned that Sean, my third-grader, had been accepted into the selective Gifted and Talented Education (GATE) program at Delmar-Harvard. But some other very good students had been excluded, and some students with inferior grades included. It was obvious that, in his rush to fairness, the principal had substituted racial quotas and other counting-by-the-numbers for merit. When Sean's best friend moved out of the neighborhood, because his parents chose to leave the school system rather than stay and fight, it was an especially tough blow, although we could hardly blame them for pulling out. Transferring to another U. City elementary school was not an alternative, since all the schools seemed to be mirroring Delmar-Harvard's changes. I began writing memos to the school board and attending board meetings, questioning the trends but getting little satisfaction.

       Meanwhile, our seventh-grader in 1987 was having a decent year at Brittany Woods Middle School. Stephen had just been chosen for the all-county band as a saxophonist and was very much looking forward to the day when he would be able to play in the renowned U. City High Jazz Band. The band always had attracted the best musical talent (both white and black) in the district based on auditions, had gone on concert tours to Europe and other overseas locales, and had produced numerous accomplished musicians (e.g., two horn players who went on to become the chief accompanists to Wynton Marsalis and Harry Connick, Jr.). Then we learned during the year that the powers-that-be in U. City had decided that the jazz band had become too "elitist" and that, in an effort to create a more egalitarian music program, it was being phased out and folded into the high school marching band. The jazz band director chafed at the new plans, resigned in protest, and ended up taking over the band at John Burroughs School, a private school generally regarded as the best school in the St. Louis area.

       The demise of the jazz band was the last straw for Ruth and me. I finally telephoned my neighbor, who served on the U. City school board, and asked the following question: "Has U. City abandoned excellence?" I will never forget his answer—a curt "yes." This was a white board member who had been accused of being a racist despite the fact that he and his wife had created a multiracial family which included their own two children and two adopted black children. I, too, would often be accused of racism when I raised concerns about academic excellence at school board meetings. I could live with the race-baiting that unfortunately was becoming an ever more prevalent part of life in U. City, even if it was becoming emotionally draining. What I could not live with was the confession by a school board member whose honesty and integrity I greatly respected telling me that U. City had abandoned academic excellence.

       Our choice was either to remain in U. City and switch to private school or to move to another part of St. Louis where the public schools were still strong. There was enough liberalism left in us that we opted for the public schools. Within a week of the phone call, we put our house up for sale; within two months, in March of 1988, we moved to Clayton, a neighboring suburb whose public schools had long since taken over the mantle of excellence that U. City had given up. Clayton was a relatively liberal community since many of its inhabitants, like us, had emigrated there from University City. It was considerably wealthier than U. City and most St. Louis suburbs, so its liberalism was decidedly of the limousine variety. Clayton was the kind of place that, shortly after we arrived, started organizing an annual art fair which drew exhibitors from around the country and where fairgoers could buy anything ranging from full life-size wax figures costing $40,000 apiece that rivaled Madame Tussaud's museum specimens to jewelry only slightly less pricey than the Hope diamond. Ruth and I had become house-poor to purchase the home in Clayton, but we figured nothing was more important than our children's education. Clayton was ranked third nationally in a survey by a noted business magazine that evaluated the quality of 1,000 public school systems around the country. So we were confident we had made the right decision and had nothing to worry about in terms of education.

       Although the City of Clayton was different demographically from U. City, being 90 percent white, the Clayton school district served many African-American children from St. Louis City, who were bused in under a court-mandated "voluntary" city-county desegregation plan. Clayton and other county districts did not participate in this program purely out of humanitarian motives; aside from judicial pressure, there was the incentive of state tax monies that followed each child to their new school. "Deseg" kids constituted approximately 20 percent of the Clayton school district's student body. Although it added valuable diversity to the Clayton school population, the deseg plan also injected an element of racial politics into educational issues, more subtle and not as volatile as in U. City but nonetheless there beneath the surface. More importantly, there was the element of pack pedagogy, as the same buzzwords I had heard in U. City were quickly making their way across the border into Clayton. Much to my chagrin, I found myself faced with many of the same battles I thought I had left behind.

       This was especially so after a new assistant superintendent for curriculum arrived on the Clayton scene in 1990—younger than the Delmar-Harvard principal, armed with a doctorate in education (not just a master's degree), and a woman. I never questioned her brilliant intellect or her good intentions, only her judgment about the definition and determinants of academic excellence. Although she brought some innovative energy to the curriculum development process, she seemed up in the clouds at times. A colleague of hers told me "she thought she was still at the University of Iowa [where she did her doctoral studies]." A new board in the mid-1990s hired a new Clayton superintendent to bring her down to earth, but she remained in a progressive utopia. I would do battle with her and others over the next decade and beyond, even after my children graduated from Clayton High School in 1993 and 1997.

       Despite these battles—and maybe because of them—I would have to say that, in retrospect and in fairness, my sons for the most part received a great education in Clayton. Clayton can rightly claim to be called a "world-class school district," if for no other reason than it enjoys state-of-the-art facilities and well over $10,000 per pupil expenditures. It is hard to mess up the education of children under such conditions unless the school district is truly incompetent. Nonetheless, the fact that my kids ended up receiving a great education was due not only to the many competent staff but also to me and other parents maintaining our vigilance and keeping the pressure on against the trendy changes in pedagogy that some of the curriculum gurus were forever contemplating. I found myself getting increasingly involved in K-12 issues, attending virtually every Clayton school board meeting, immersing myself in the education literature, writing op-ed articles for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, giving talks around town to various parent groups, and even testifying before the state legislature. By the time I testified before the Missouri Senate in 1996, I had come to realize fully just how all-pervasive the malaise of K-12 education was. It was not just a U. City problem or a Clayton problem or a Missouri problem but a national problem.

       The awful state of urban schools is well-known, that of schools outside the central city less so. If you look beneath the surface, if you get beyond the relative quality of the paint job on the schoolhouse door, you will find that the problem of American education is one that at its core differs surprisingly little from one community to the next, whether it is my own upper-middle-class suburban locale or an inner city locale with a large poor and homeless population. Let me try to give a sense of this problem as I discovered it over the years.