Schrag Weighs In

In the latest issue of Harpers', Education Sector non-resident senior fellow Peter Schrag takes a shot at the Big Education Question of the Day: how much can we expect from the public schools?

The article$ is titled "Schoolhouse Crock: Fifty years of blaming America's education system for our stupidity," which (A) reminds me of why I let my Harper's subscription lapse a few years back: everything has become focused on appeals to cheap liberal cynicism; and (B) isn't really fair to the article itself, which a lot more measured than the title suggests.

That said, I think the piece falls short. This is familiar ground by now--Paul Tough tackled essentially the same question in the Times last year. All the requisite names and events are mentioned: Schrag walks the reader through the Sputnik-A Nation At Risk-NCLB three-step as well as can be expected (I will personally mail a check for $20 to the first person who manages to publish a version of this article in a reputable outlet without using the phrase "rising tide of mediocrity"), and the standard actors are quoted--Finn, Ravitch, Bracey, etc.

The real challenge isn't presenting this material but making sense of it--what can we expect from the public schools? And given that, what should we do? While Schrag does a good job laying out the competing arguments, he never really adjudicates them or ties them toghether into a coherent whole. The result is something like what one could call the "empirical agenda" of the Harper's set on education, i.e. what you get if you try to put their most commonly-voiced criticisms and positions together into a logical sequence. It goes something like this:

1) The public schools are doing a pretty good job; many critiques are over-blown.

But

2) They need a lot more money.

But

3) We can't expect they can do much better than they're doing now (which, to be clear, is pretty good), and so we shouldn't subject them to accountability regimes like NCLB.

This is neither logically coherent nor particularly compelling, which is why the left has been marginalized in a lot of contemporary education debates and decisions.

To be clear, Schrag's article is not this simplistic, containing the requisite caveats about the funding and the potential of good teachers in good public schools to help students learn. But that's the argument lying beneath it all, one ultimately based on the inefficacy of education. It's not a crock to believe that schools matter greatly or that they can be much better than they are.