How much can schools improve the life prospects of children growing up in poor neighborhoods? This question has divided the education community since at least the 1960s, when a group of researchers led by James Coleman attempted to quantify the extent to which segregation hurt black children. Coleman concluded that differences in family background had a greater impact on student achievement than did differences in school quality.

Almost 40 years later, former New York Times education columnist Richard Rothstein revisited the question. In a series of lectures at Columbia University’s Teachers College that became the book Class and Schools (2004), Rothstein chronicled the ways in which out-of-school factors undermine low-income children. Poor kids arrive at school knowing fewer words; live in substandard (often lead-poisoned) housing; lack health care; spend afternoons, weekends, and summers in neighborhoods without decent parks or libraries; face discrimination in the workplace after they leave school; and so on. This part of Rothstein’s argument was not new to anyone familiar with the lives of poor children. But he made one additional claim that upset many educators. According to Rothstein, the challenges facing low-income students meant that they would always do worse, on average, than their higher-income peers.

I devoured Class and Schools when it came out; it seemed an urgent call for our nation to address out-of-school factors holding poor children back. Others saw (and see) Rothstein as defeatist, apologizing for school failure and telling inner-city teachers and kids that they will never beat the odds. The argument erupted again last year when two groups of education reformers set out what were widely seen as competing agendas. The Education Equality Project—led by New York City schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Washington, D.C. schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee, and minister-activist Al Sharpton—emphasized school accountability, tough standards, and changes in how teachers are hired, fired, and paid. The other group, formed by the Economic Policy Institute (Rothstein’s home), called for a “Broader, Bolder Approach,” insisting that schools alone cannot be expected to successfully educate poor students. Schools need help, they said, in the form of expanded health care, afterschool and summer programs, quality early childhood initiatives, and the like.

Although the rhetoric from the two camps does not always reflect it, the gap between them is narrowing. Two important new books on schools suggest it should narrow further still.

Canada describes Harlem Children’s Zone’s social programs as a ‘conveyor belt’ taking children from cradle to college.

Geoffrey Canada, the subject of Paul Tough’s Whatever It Takes (2008), has affinities with both camps, but his approach to the problem of urban poverty feels comprehensive in ways that would especially please Rothstein. Canada (with whom I serve on a nonprofit board) started out as director of the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families, which offered a range of programs to Harlem youth, including truancy prevention, afterschool tutoring and drop-in centers, and anti-violence initiatives. The programs helped, but after a few years Canada realized something was missing. He grew tired of saving a few kids in his afterschool program while the rest of the neighborhood remained poor and violent. Piecemeal was no longer going to work.

So in 1997 Canada started the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ), an extensive network of social programs that includes parenting classes, health clinics, and tutoring centers that serve children and families in a 97-square-block area of Harlem. Canada had read the same research that Rothstein had, and used the findings to create a plan of action. Do Harlem kids arrive at kindergarten with cognitive deficiencies? HCZ responds with Baby College, where parents learn to read to their children, take them to museums and libraries, and ask open-ended questions instead of issuing commands. Canada believed that he could raise poor children’s academic performance by providing their parents with the same child-rearing advice—about discipline, nutrition, and cognitive development—that is so readily available to middle-class parents.

Canada describes HCZ’s social programs as a “conveyor belt” taking children from cradle to college. The children of Baby College graduates would enroll in Harlem Gems, a prekindergarten program that emphasized language skills. When they were ready to start public school, they would find HCZ staff in the building, providing reading programs, computer labs, and other supplemental services. By partnering with existing schools, Canada hoped to ensure that the impact of his early interventions did not “fade out” over time.

To his dismay, however, school principals did not always welcome HCZ’s efforts. Moreover, Tough writes: “Even in the schools where the programs were running smoothly, they didn’t seem to be producing results: the neighborhood’s reading and math scores had barely budged.” So Canada decided to create a charter school of his own.

Tough’s book begins on the April night in 2004 when Canada held a lottery to admit students to his new Promise Academy. The primary grades were open to students who had benefited from HCZ’s early intervention programs. But in a decision that would prove fateful for his project, Canada also created a middle school that was open to all comers. Roughly a third of these students were soon found to have “serious learning issues.” And this 30-odd percent, Tough writes, generally shared two other characteristics: they had “disengaged parents” and they “made trouble in the classroom.” Members of Canada’s board took to calling these students “bad apples.” But Canada was unwilling to expel them. They reminded him of young men whose pictures he kept on one wall of his office—his first karate students when he had started working in Harlem in the 1980s:

They had come to him unstable and angry and eager to fight. He had taught them martial arts and mentored them through one crisis after another; he drove them in a rented van to tournaments all over the Northeast. He had lost some of them, to gun violence and prison and drugs, and those losses still haunted him. But twenty years later, most of them were now thriving—college graduates holding down decent jobs.

‘There are some kids up on that wall that there was no way they should have gotten through college,’ Canada said. ‘But you can get them through.’ He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the faces in the photos. ‘Now, if you’ve never done it yourself, then, absolutely, you can look at certain kids when they’re eleven and think, “This kid can’t make it.” You do think that—until you’ve actually taken some of those kids that everybody else has said can’t make it, and you help that kid make it. And once you’ve personally made it happen, you never lose that. You see that kid as a grownup, going on with his life, and you think, “How many kids like this one have we thrown away?”’

In addition, Canada wanted the younger children at Promise Academy to grow up in a place where older kids served as positive role models. Every eleven-year-old who “made it,” Canada believed, would help change the expectations and atmosphere of the neighborhood. This was his “contamination” theory—his vision of how to transform a community as well as individual lives.

Acting on this vision, Canada and his team tried everything they could think of to make the middle school work. They replaced struggling teachers and administrators, rode herd on faltering students, and adopted stricter discipline policies. They expelled a student with extreme behavior problems. They also surrounded the middle schoolers with the types of services—including medical care and counseling—that Rothstein’s book calls for. Still, while Canada could see improvement, the test scores did not reflect it initially—at least not for the oldest students.

Eventually, under tremendous pressure from his board (one of whom feared that another year of low scores would damage “the Harlem Children’s Zone brand”), Canada made a wrenching decision: he would not open a ninth grade as planned. The troubled eighth graders would graduate and be helped to find other schools, and Promise Academy would refocus its efforts on the younger kids, those whom Canada’s programs had had more time to shape.

A few months later, however, a final set of test scores for the eighth graders came in. They were stunning. Whereas less than 10 percent of the students had been on grade level in math when they arrived three years earlier, now 70 percent were. It turned out that even bad apples could achieve.

As impressive as the Knowledge Is Power Program school I visited seemed, it looked to be all-black…. It is a tragedy that we have taken integration off the table.

In what is otherwise a hopeful, inspiring book, the decision to give up on the eighth graders at Promise Academy is the one heartbreaking moment. But the episode contains an important lesson: Canada’s initial instincts were correct. The eleven-year-old who never got the benefits of Baby College or Harlem Gems still needs a school that is caring and rigorous, and can still draw significant benefit from it. And we have an obligation to provide such schools to children who did not make it onto the conveyor belt at the outset—even if the odds of their succeeding are longer.

My colleagues and I at the Maya Angelou Public Charter School in Washington, D.C.—an alternative school for students who have struggled academically and otherwise—have learned this from experience. When we see students who are years behind in school, who have dropped out or been locked up, we might be able to say that only a certain percentage will graduate from college. But a percentage does not show up at your doorstep; Denice, or Jason, or Ashanti does. And we can never tell in advance whether any particular kid will make it. Like Canada, we have been surprised too many times to make predictions. So until our society guarantees that no child misses the conveyor belt, there have to be places that offer young people a second chance.

• • •

During Promise Academy’s darkest days, Canada’s board kept pressing him to turn the school over to an outside group—the Knowledge is Power Program, or KIPP. Canada did not relish the prospect. According to Tough, Canada saw KIPP as operating a “dueling model.” KIPP, Canada thought, did not seek out the most troubled students. Moreover, its goal was to take those kids who could survive its strict program and lift them out of a troubled community, whereas Canada saw the school as part of the larger community and wanted to transform them both.

The KIPP schools are the favorites of what has been called the “no excuses” side of the school reform debate. These advocates dispute Rothstein’s claim that school reform depends on community revitalization. Stephen and Abigail Thernstrom, for instance, point to KIPP as proof that schools can enable children to overcome the disadvantages of growing up in a poor family or community. Recall that James Coleman and his team took schools as they were and found that their impact was limited relative to family background. Coleman never said that it was impossible to create a school—or a network of schools—so extraordinary that it could make poor children competitive with their more privileged counterparts.

Jay Mathews’s book about KIPP, Work Hard. Be Nice., is the story of extraordinary teachers creating extraordinary schools. As Teach for America recruits in Houston in 1992, Michael Feinberg and David Levin were dumb enough to think they knew it all, humble enough to quickly realize they were wrong, and lucky enough to have great mentors to show them how it was done. In his first year of teaching, Levin was lost, but across the hall was Harriett Ball, the building’s legend. Ball gave Levin and Feinberg much of what have become KIPP trademarks, including the songs, chants, and raps that fill the air, the frenetic pace that teachers maintain as they work the room, and the relentless approach to discipline that forces students to focus on the consequences of each action, no matter how small.

When we see a program flourishing, it is easy to assume that success was inevitable. But watching Feinberg and Levin build KIPP—which now runs 66 schools in 19 states and the District of Columbia—reminds us how hard, and unlikely, success can be. KIPP started as a tiny program within a single Houston school, and, in the early days, the founders often found themselves fighting obstructionist, closed-minded administrators (of course there were some dedicated and constructive administrators, too). Some of KIPP’s battles with the powers that be were silly: when Feinberg posted motivational signs outside his classroom, the principal objected because he had not gotten approval for the specific adhesive used. Others were serious: administrators instructed Levin to exempt certain low-performing students from the statewide assessment, fearing that the students would fail and drag down the school’s reputation. When Levin refused, he was fired, despite having previously been voted the school’s teacher of the year (and despite, as it turns out, having been right—the kids passed).

With administrators like these, it is no surprise that the original proposal to create a KIPP school-within-a-school was not well received. When Feinberg and Levin offered to recruit 45 students and work with them for longer hours (at no extra pay), the district balked because it could not decide whether this qualified as “curricular reform” or an “after-school program.” Finally, Feinberg and Levin turned to another of their mentors, Rafe Esquith, who advised them to be polite toward the bureaucrats. But what if they still refused, wondered Levin and Feinberg. “Work around them,” Esquith said. “Do it anyway.”

Levin and Feinberg took something else from Esquith: his work ethic. Esquith started thinking about his kids at 5 a.m. and did not stop until 11 p.m., and he was often with them on weekends and over the summer. This attitude is built into KIPP’s structure, which includes a longer school day (nine hours), a longer week (three hours every other Saturday morning), a longer year (a three-week summer school), and a great deal of homework (one to two hours a night). Kids are expected to call teachers if they need help with an assignment. KIPP schools are full of slogans, but they all revolve around Esquith’s core motto: “There are no shortcuts.”

Mathews’s enthusiastic account of KIPP schools contrasts sharply with the descriptions by KIPP critics. Skeptics have three concerns about how the schools operate. First, that in the effort to achieve high test scores, the schools sacrifice creative thinking in favor of a drill-and-kill approach. Second, that the structure is too rigid. Third (and related to the first two), that any program employing a distinctive approach for poor and minority children should be viewed with suspicion. According to Tough, this last concern was paramount to Geoffrey Canada. If the middle class is told that “children in Harlem need their own special category of educational practices, they will get the message that those Harlem kids are ’not like us.’”

In response, Mathews invites critics to spend time in a KIPP school. Persuaded, I chose unscientifically among KIPP’s three schools in Washington, D.C.

I originally wanted to see Saturday school because it fit my schedule best. Ms. Almagor, my teacher contact, told me her Saturday assignment was to go horseback riding with seven of her students. I liked this school already, and suspected that Rothstein would, too. Here was an activity that could bolster the students’ self-confidence and their awareness of the world beyond their neighborhoods: just the sort of activity that Rothstein says poor kids need and are routinely denied.

But I really wanted to see classes, so I turned up on a Thursday instead. The hallways were quiet—the loudest noise was from a teacher chastising students who were apparently not quiet enough. Students were in lines. And they were required to read, not talk, during breakfast. This level of structure does not fit my progressive sensibilities, but I tried to remain open-minded. Having attended some fairly chaotic urban schools, I understand the argument that a highly structured environment might be needed to make learning possible. As Mathews writes, the KIPP founders wanted to send a message:

School should be a place where students could feel safe from bullies and wise guys and acts of childish cruelty. . . . They strived to make KIPP an island of peace where children could speak their minds and tend to their business without having to defend themselves.

To somebody who got beat up almost every day in fifth grade, that sounds great.

But what happens inside the classroom? Mathews insists that KIPP’s critics are wrong to say that the schools emphasize rote learning rather than more intellectually challenging activities. In this regard, KIPP may have been ill-served by some of its supporters. So much of the media coverage about KIPP focuses on kids marching in lines or singing uplifting chants in unison. Such scenes play better on the evening news than a teacher-student writing conference, even if the latter matters more.

Based on my statistically insignificant sample of one school visit, Mathews is right. Ms. Almagor’s all-boys, seventh-grade English class was varied, fun, and sophisticated. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun was the text, and the class opened with a period of silent reading, followed by group discussion (enthusiastic hands, participation from every corner, with Ms. Almagor calling on the few students who did not volunteer). Next the students broke into pairs, first to read aloud and then to act out a scene in small groups. The class concluded with “college-style discussion,” in which the teacher sat back and the students formed a circle and ran their own seminar. Procedurally, students were learning how to take turns, to respond to each other’s arguments rather than go off on tangents, and to disagree respectfully. Substantively, they were learning how to make an argument based on specific textual references (“Well, I disagree, because on page 154 Walter says . . .”).

This was a place of seriousness, study, and self-expression. A class where boys read, and were proud of it.

Throughout my visit, I was deeply impressed by the culture inside the classroom. Before the lesson began, I was peppering Ms. Almagor with questions in the hallway, so we arrived about 30 seconds late. When we walked in, every student was neatly tucked into his desk, eyes on whatever book he had chosen for the silent reading period. I moved to the back of the room and began reading myself, and after about 5 minutes I heard Ms. Almagor say to the class: “I respect the decision that you made on your own, without my saying anything. But with this particular visitor, I don’t mind.” At which point students stretched out, put their feet on desks, lay down on the floor, or clambered onto bookshelves. Having found their preferred reading perches, they turned back to their books. Ms. Almagor later confirmed what I suspected—the kids read every day and normally sat wherever they liked. But they adjusted their behavior for outsiders, because some visitors do not understand that thirteen-year-old boys lying on the floor reading are in fact learning.

This was a place of seriousness, study, and self-expression. A class where boys read, and were proud of it. (My favorite poster: a student-designed placard reading, “There are other schools. But we work harder.”) But not just that: this was a class full of boys who understood that to thrive in the world where KIPP aims to send them, reading and writing well are just the start. Knowing how people read you is equally critical.

• • •

As impressive as the school seemed, I left with one nagging concern: the school looked to be all-black, and, as the D.C. Charter School Board Web site would confirm, overwhelmingly low-income. Of course, that is true of the rest of the public schools in the neighborhood, but those schools are not being portrayed as models of reform. It says something important that the schools offered up as our best hopes are so completely segregated. It says even more that neither Tough nor Mathews feels the need to address the question of segregation in their books.

It is a tragedy that we have taken integration off the table. Perhaps I believe this because my parents—one black, one white—met in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and saw themselves as part of a struggle for an integrated, beloved community. Perhaps it is because I am still moved by Thurgood Marshall’s argument that our nation will only learn to live together when our children learn together. Or maybe it is because of my lingering fear that if poor kids are isolated in schools of their own, they will inevitably end up being shortchanged by a society content with massive wealth inequality. If we make schools better and improve the lives of some kids (or, in Canada’s case, a whole neighborhood) but do nothing to disrupt segregation, are we simply making separate a little more equal?

Despite these misgivings, I think I know how Canada, Feinberg, and Levin would defend their choice. I know it because, when I saw the terrible schools for jailed kids in D.C., I felt an obligation to help create a better alternative, even though I knew that almost every child in the school would be African-American and that most would be poor. I recognized the urgency of offering those kids the support and resources that no other program was going to provide. But I do not want to live in a society that accepts this situation as inevitable. And I am confident that Canada, Feinberg, and Levin do not, either.

If it is possible to make a great school for kids who deserve at least that, surely that is a worthy undertaking. And by this important measure, KIPP looks pretty inspiring. KIPP schools have posted the largest and most sustained learning gains across a network of schools that I have seen. Students who have been in KIPP for three years have moved, on average, from the 34th to the 58th percentile in reading on a nationally normed test, and from the 44th to the 83rd percentile in math.

The data about student achievement at KIPP have long been contested. (Rothstein is one of the doubters.) Some critics have suggested that less able students are leaving KIPP and thereby inflating the gains reported for those who remain. Others ask whether it makes sense to rely on test scores as the sole measure of student progress. And, most important, some question whether the documented learning gains will prove durable and translate into improved life outcomes for graduates. Mathematica Policy Research is conducting a five-year longitudinal study comparing KIPP lottery winners with children who entered the lottery but were not selected for admission. No doubt the results of this study will figure heavily in Mathews’s next book—a detailed examination of KIPP’s remarkable growth.

Assuming that KIPP is as successful as we all hope it is, what lessons can we draw from its story? Rothstein might say that even if the KIPP model works, it is exceptional and cannot be replicated on a scale that would bring about a general improvement in the academic performance and life prospects of poor children.

Mathews contends, however, that by demonstrating that disadvantaged kids can achieve at high levels, KIPP removes a critical obstacle to reform. “Many people in the United States,” he writes,

believe that low-income children can no more be expected to do well in school than ballerinas can be counted on to excel in football. . . . These assumptions explain in part why public schools in impoverished neighborhoods rarely provide the skilled teachers, extra learning time, and encouragement given to children in the wealthiest suburbs.

I would like to believe, with Mathews, that if you show that something works, people will support it. But do we really need more proof that poor children can succeed in school? Consider early childhood education. As Tough points out, we have decades of data about the benefits of high-quality programs for poor children. Yet we still do not provide enough spaces for all of the kids who need them.

Moreover, notice how much weight the words “in part” carry for Mathews when he writes, “these assumptions explain in part” why children in poor schools are shortchanged. What about power, race, class, stigma, and a desire to maintain positions of relative privilege? Surely they at least merit discussion as we speculate about why the poor get less. My list of alternative hypotheses could go on, and would not be limited to explanations that comfort liberals. Consider that a charter school network like KIPP can operate in 19 states only because charter school advocates overcame the opposition of liberal critics and teachers unions.

There are over 19 million low-income students in this country. That is the problem we have to solve.

Mathews also praises KIPP for proving that success can be scaled. After all, the KIPP network has grown from one school to 66—with plans to grow to aboout 100 by 2011—while getting better. That is a testament to what talented people can do, and is rightly celebrated. But we should be careful not to conflate the question of how KIPP will replicate its model with the very different question of what it will take to achieve KIPP-like success for all (or most) low-income students.

If KIPP expands as planned, it will serve 24,000 students in 2011. There are over 19 million low-income students in this country. That is the problem we have to solve. (Just to be clear, this is not KIPP’s problem—it is our problem.) What would it take to get KIPP-like quality for millions of children?

For too long, I am afraid, the answer has been to trumpet the success of a spectacular school or teacher and shout, “No More Excuses,” or “It’s Being Done.” But that alone will not work. Those responsible for consistently underperforming schools do not know how to get better. It is not as if teachers in bad schools have great lesson plans and are hiding them. People working in persistently underperforming schools have become demoralized to an extent that outsiders touting “best practices” fail to understand. Until we get smarter about how to help them improve through well-designed mentoring and professional development programs, little will change.

Even worse, the hard truth is that many mediocre teachers and administrators do not have the capacity to improve to anywhere near the standard required to achieve KIPP-like results. As much as it thrills us to read about extraordinary people succeeding with poor children, I want to see how ordinary people can do the same. Until then, we should hesitate before assuming that successful models will change the field.

If anybody doubts this, please consider two assignments. First, read Charles Payne’s So Much Reform, So Little Change. As Payne reminds us, there have always been some excellent schools. Before KIPP, there was Harlem’s Central Park East, which flourished under Deborah Meier’s leadership in the 1980s and 1990s. For many years, Central Park East was the icon of “what works” in inner-city education, and Meier’s account of the school in The Power of Their Ideas remains one of the wisest books ever written about teaching. But Central Park East did not revolutionize education, because efforts to transplant what worked there into schools with different cultures and less-skilled educators often failed.

Second, visit the human resources department at KIPP. There you will see an organization singularly dedicated to recruiting the best talent. KIPP knows that nothing is more important than the quality of the teacher in the classroom. So KIPP invests heavily in this area, and its brand, resources, and strong school leaders allow it to succeed. To say that KIPP gets a disproportionate share of the best young teachers is a compliment; it hardly diminishes KIPP’s success. But it does raise important questions about how we are to achieve KIPP-like success without a massive human capital improvement.

Perhaps the most important lesson we can take from HCZ and KIPP is this: the best programs are always innovating, refining, challenging themselves to do better by the students they serve. And for just this reason, the most successful reformers do not fit into neat ideological categories. Canada started out running social programs, but when he peeked inside Harlem classrooms, he quickly realized he could never transform the neighborhood without fixing the schools. Feinberg and Levin, by contrast, set about to change how a single classroom operated, but they learned that in order to succeed, they had to redefine the boundaries of what we call school. Today in Houston, KIPP is running programs for three-year-olds. In several cities, it now provides afterschool and summer school programs, individual tutoring, social workers for kids in distress, and, at some campuses, classes for parents. It is also actively involved in community partnerships that address families’ medical and other needs.

In response to the ongoing “fix communities” versus “fix schools” debate, those doing the work in the trenches increasingly are settling on a single answer: do both. As Ms. Almagor wrote me after my visit to her classroom:

In the long run, providing the dental care and (Lord knows) the family and parenting support is way more scalable and less leap-of-faith than the yes-we-can, sheer no-excuses, stubbornness-will-accomplish-the-impossible solution. Even our kids who are doing well are struggling against such preposterously unfair burdens. If we can make the job less impossible, we should.

She has it exactly right. She is willing to make the leap of faith; she does it every day that she walks into her classroom. But this is only part of the fix. The larger question remains: how can we justify making her work so hard, or the odds for her kids so long?

What we most need now—and President Obama’s recent education speech suggests he understands this—is for policy advocates to adopt some of the pragmatism that Canada, Levin, and Feinberg have shown on the ground. On the one hand, this means recognizing that poor kids will not routinely succeed until we build all the pieces—from cradle to college, in school and out—that Canada began with and that KIPP is adopting. It also means, as KIPP’s founders saw from the beginning and as Canada came to learn, that the conveyor belt does not work unless we acknowledge the failings of schools as they are, and transform them into places where excellent teaching and high expectations are the norm.

by Ken Blackwell,
OP-ED: Washington Times, 2/20/2009

One of the most contentious social and political debates of our time pits the opposing goals of equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome.

Some would claim the point was settled before the Founding of the American republic in that the Declaration of Independence recognized as an unalienable right the “pursuit” of happiness rather than happiness itself. Others argue that various social and political disadvantages through history create the need for more balanced outcomes as recompense for past wrongs.

This discussion is no more heated than in the world of education. The question of opportunity versus outcome is vexing and whether the discussion revolves around K-12 education or higher education, opportunity and outcome continually collide.

We increasingly see this conflict played out in the way colleges and universities decide whom to admit and the unfortunate trend is that too many schools are redefining merit as it has traditionally been recognized.

The main engine behind this effort to change the nature of academic merit is a group called Fair Test, a Boston-based organization that characterizes itself as working to “end the misuses and flaws of standardized testing.”

The reality, however, is far different. The efforts and track record of this organization demonstrate that simply administering a standardized test constitutes a misuse, while the primary flaw of such tests is that they exist at all.

Standardized tests have been accused of potential bias since the 1970s when activists insisted that an Scholastic Aptitude Test question involving the word “regatta” was biased against women, minorities and anyone else who hadn’t sported a silk ascot at the yacht club. In fact, the SAT and the ACT, another widely used college admissions test, have long since addressed legitimate claims of bias in testing. Both are scrupulously developed, reviewed and updated by dedicated educators to ensure they reflect a student’s academic merit. They also are administered in a consistent manner, which is more than you can say about a lot of things in life. Anyone who must adhere to a set of standards in any endeavor knows they sometimes seem arbitrary. But arbitrary as college admission standards may be, they are nothing compared to the tyrannical anarchy of ill-defined or holistic admissions, which Fair Test promotes.

Human nature demands that we be given a target something for which we can strive. This is why humanity sets and seeks specific goals. But the holistic college admissions structure promoted by Fair Test and others destroys empirical standards and leaves such decisions to the whims of shifting admissions policies and those who formulate them. It’s reminiscent of the uncertain standards I sometimes faced as a young black man coming of age in the post-segregation world of Cincinnati.

And who is formulating such policies? It varies from institution to institution but a look at the funding of Fair Test is troubling. Writer and college educator Mary Grabar revealed in her recent article http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=43412 that Fair Test is funded by men like liberal billionaire George Soros and the Woods Fund, who counts among its board members Bill Ayers, the former domestic terrorist who admitted complicity in a series of bombings from New York to Washington, D.C. during the 1970s.

All this, of course, would be forgivable if the goal was sincere, however misguided. But it’s largely an extension of an education strategy that has been in place for nearly a half-century. In the 1960s, liberals began a concerted effort to seize control of higher-education, via dominating professorships and tenure. It worked. Now, the social engineers aren’t content with dominating the faculty rooms they want to control who gets admitted to colleges and universities.

Ideology aside, the efforts of Fair Test and others who want to eliminate standardized testing stand to put all of American higher education at risk. Jonathan Epstein, a senior researcher with the private sector educational consultancy Maguire Associates, notes that colleges with test optional admission policies could disorient students and their families in terms of determining which college to attend. The result, says Epstein, is that “a disoriented customer market is not in the best interests of any institution or higher education in general.”

Standards of academic excellence are critical to the future of students and our economy. If we forsake such standards based on the ill-conceived ideology of Fair Test and like-minded individuals, we risk not only our children’s future but that of our nation.

Ken Blackwell is a senior fellow at the Family Research Council and American Civil Rights Union. He is a former Ohio secretary of state.

Response:

My wife was one of those who many years ago scored poorly on the various “tests” that were administered in the public schools she attended. In her case, most likely because of the fact that she was a reservation-born First American whose first two languages were a Native language and Spanish. When she first entered a non-reservation school at the age of 13 her English was considerably less than polished and she was frequently the butt of insensitively cruel jokes because of her ethnicity, her language problems and the fact that her wardrobe consisted of one old skirt and a pair of jeans. With the exception of the sciences and math, she struggled in school and was advised not to apply for college. HS was not a happy time in her life.

]]> http://toomanyintheclassroom.org/2009/02/22/equal-opportunities-not-outcomes/feed/ 0 PBW http://toomanyintheclassroom.org/2008/12/28/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-flow/ http://toomanyintheclassroom.org/2008/12/28/mihaly-csikszentmihalyi-flow/#comments Sun, 28 Dec 2008 13:48:51 +0000 Philip Waring http://writersoneducation.wordpress.com/?p=352 ]]> Nathan Bupp,
Free Inquiry, Vol 26, no. 6
Humanism and the Science of Happiness

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi garnered wide attention with his bestselling 1990 book, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, in which he argued that the most rewarding happiness lies in the skillful performance of meaningful work that fully occupies one’s attention. He has emerged as one of the leading figures in the growing positive-psychology movement. Free Inquiry’s Associate Editor Nathan Bupp questioned Csikszentmihalyi about positive psychology and his own insights.

Free Inquiry: In your opinion, what are some of the most valuable insights to emerge out of the “science-of-happiness” field?

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Personally, I have been most impressed by the effects of the “gratitude intervention” that Martin Seligman has devised, which apparently has a lasting effect in raising people’s happiness. Basically, volunteers are assigned randomly to various “interventions,” and their happiness is assessed before and after. This method is almost identical to the double-blind, random-assignment experiments used by pharmaceutical companies to assess whether a new drug is effective. In the gratitude intervention, people are asked to think about a person who was kind or helpful to them but has never been thanked for it. Then the volunteer is supposed to write a one-page letter of thanks, make an appointment with the target person, and read the letter in his or her presence. The volunteers who are randomly assigned to do this task show significant increases in happiness half a year after completing it. Other interventions based on positive psychology experiments also show impressive results, but this appears to be the most effective.

FI: How can we educate our emotions? What is your view on “emotional intelligence?” Is it a valuable construct?
Csikszentmihalyi: I am not sure that educating the emotions alone should be a main goal. From Castiglione’s courtier to Dale Carnegie, there have been many good prescriptions for how to achieve emotional education, but it seems to me one needs to ask a more fundamental question: how do we develop character?
FI: Can there be a genuine science of happiness that is entirely distinct from pharmaceutical intervention?

Csikszentmihalyi: I certainly hope so. Drugs can do neat things, but I doubt any state of consciousness worthy of the label “happiness” can be induced by them-except in temporary bursts that do not have long-lasting effects. Think Soma or opium. Drugs can modify behavior and get us to strive for goals, but they cannot indicate what behaviors and goals are more likely to lead to happiness. Whether the nonpharmaceutical study of behaviors and goals that may lead to happiness will ever become a science is, of course, still uncertain, but it’s worth pursuing, isn’t it?

FI: What-and who-were some of the philosophical precursors to your concept of “flow?”
Csikszentmihalyi: I was influenced by some graduate courses on Husserl and Heidegger that made me take seriously the phenomenological approach, which I have tried to make more systematic in my own research. Also, Abraham Maslow’s concept of “peak experience” was influential, and it resonated with my experience in playing chess and in rock climbing. After I started writing about flow, I came across a huge amount of material from Hindu and Chinese sources that indicated that similar ideas have a long history in other cultures as well.

FI: In your book, The Evolving Self, you talk about the need to see through the “Veils of Maya,” those mental blinders that the self, culture, and our genes impose on us. Secular humanists have talked a lot about the need for the cultivation of critical thinking in the public at large. Is there an inherent need in humans to harbor a certain amount of “positive illusions?” What does the science of happiness have to say about this?
Csikszentmihalyi: Yes, the importance of “positive illusions” as an anchor for morale has been recognized for a long time, by observers ranging from Karl Marx to Vilfredo Pareto to Sigmund Freud. Of course, what is real and what is illusory is not always clear. Current research shows that people who take a positive view of things (and thus might be seen to suffer from illusions) have a better chance of changing their external circumstances, which is to say, their reality.

FI: Are the conclusions flowing from the “science-of-happiness” research humanistic?
Csikszentmihalyi: I do think so. I know that some colleagues who identify themselves as “humanistic psychologists” would say no, as an understandable reaction to the reductionistic, simple-minded application of the scientific method to psychology, especially by workers in the generation from 1950 to 1980. But in my opinion, banning science from human affairs is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

FI: What role or roles can classical conceptions of the good life-such as those of Epicurus, Aristotle, and Spinoza-play in a modern, scientifically advanced world?
Csikszentmihalyi: I am firmly on the side of science, but not to the extent of assuming that because we live in a modern (or postmodern) world we are actually in every respect wiser, or even more thoughtful, than people who lived a few millennia ago. I assume that when we can’t learn anything new from Aristotle et al., we will stop reading them. At this point, that does not seem likely.

FI: Has science killed the “soul”-metaphorically speaking?
Csikszentmihalyi: Many people who speak of the “soul” do so in a somewhat narcissistic, romantic way-they mean by it something unique to them, mysterious, perhaps God-given. I like to think of it as something we create by investing our psychic energy in goals that benefit entities outside ourselves. The Romans’ term for this was magnanimus, the root of our magnanimous, from the Latin magna (great) and anima (soul); the Hindus strung the same concepts together in their title mahatma, which is given to people like Gandhi. In this sense, science is not inherently inimical to the soul-on the contrary.

FI: In a naturalistic world-devoid of religion-can a creative blend of the humanities and the sciences lead to an ultimately more fulfilling and absorbing life?
Csikszentmihalyi: It had better be possible, or things will not go too well for our species. Such a “blend” will require enormous creativity-but I do think that, as time goes on, its inevitability will become increasingly obvious.

FI: We have often heard about philosophical wisdom. Can there be a genuine science of wisdom, a scientific wisdom?
Csikszentmihalyi: German psychologist Paul Baltes and the American psychologist Robert Sternberg have started systematic studies of happiness-the approach is still in its infancy, but again, I’d say it’s worth pursuing.

FI: Americans seem to be caught up in a primarily materialistic conception of happiness-the “hedonic treadmill,” as it is sometimes called. Is this written in our genes?
Csikszentmihalyi: I think there is a strong genetic component in this need for possessions. After all, our ancestors living in conditions of scarcity must have been selected for the ability to secure material resources-tools, food, domestic animals, and the like. It’s hard to escape from the results of hundreds of generations of natural selection. The question is whether now that we are becoming aware of the fact that we are the main selective force on the planet, will we be able to apply brakes to this greed for ever more stuff?

FI: Is the situation similar in Europe?
Csikszentmihalyi: I think Europe has been to some extent sobered up by how close the West came to annihilation during World War II, and so there is some hope for a new global contract to emerge from there. But of course, greed has been at home in Europe for a long time-just as it has been in China and everywhere else.

FI: In The Evolving Self, you say early on that “at this point in history it should be possible for an individual to build a self that is a conscious, personal creation-not just an outcome of biological drives.” What tools do we have at our disposal to help make this so?
Csikszentmihalyi: We have more freedom, more free time, more knowledge, and fewer cultural pressures than at virtually any other time in the past-at least we have the potential for these. While most of these precious resources are ignored or being wasted, the potential for taking control of one’s consciousness seems much greater than it has ever been. Perhaps we need a real scare to make us take our task seriously-global warming? Avian flu? George W. Bush?

FI: Is frustration and a vague sense of discontent the price we pay for being human? In other words, are humans victims of their own biological design?
Csikszentmihalyi: I do think that the price we pay for our large brain, which frees us from being completely programmed by genetic instructions, is that, too often, we act in ways that have not passed the muster of natural selection. Instead of adding value to our lives, these acts can detract from it. Of course, the independence of our brains from past instructions has a potentially enormous upside too-the freedom to create completely new ways of being. A dangerous tool, this big brain, but it can be lots of fun.

FI: You have said that you “have a na•ve trust in the universe–that at some level it all makes sense, and we can get glimpses of that sense if we try.” Can you explain further?
Csikszentmihalyi: Well, I suppose it’s a variation on Pascal’s wager-the idea that since we don’t know whether there is some meaning in existence or not, we are better off believing in it than not believing. After all, realizing that, despite its size, my brain allows me only a pitifully minuscule glimpse of reality makes me humble about what I don’t know. Perhaps there is a rhyme to the music of the spheres after all. And sometimes, one definitely gets that impression-perhaps only a small intimation, but enough to keep hope alive.

FI: Philosophers have often drawn distinctions between a life of contemplation and the life of action. From the standpoint of the science of happiness, can one be seen to be more fulfilling than the other, or is it the better part of wisdom to attempt to forge a synthesis of both?
Csikszentmihalyi: I was very impressed by Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition and her analysis of the vita contemplativa versus the vita activa-so much so that I can say nothing on the topic that is original. In my work, I have suggested that the best solution is a synthesis-but saying that is the easy way out, isn’t it?

2. Thirty years of analyzing responses from thousands of people have led research psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi to the theory of “flow” – a state of consciousness in which concentration on activity is so intense that complete absorption is achieved.

In the following interview with FI Editor Timothy J. Madigan, he talks about his studies of people who have found happiness in everyday experiences and the guidelines he has formulated to help others do the same.

Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “Chick-sent-me-high-ee ” – a Hungarian name that means “of St. Michael of Csik,” a Transylvanian province) has written or coauthored many books on finding meaning in daily existence, including Beyond Boredom and Anxiety, The Evolving Self, Creativity, and the seminal Flow: The Psychology of Everyday Experience (1991) and Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (1997). He is Professor of Education and Psychology at the University of Chicago and a member of the National Academy of Education and the National Academy of Leisure Sciences.
FREE INQUIRY: Could you define what you mean by “flow”?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: I became interested in this over 30 years ago when I was doing a study of creativity by observing artists at work. I was very impressed at how they could get lost in what they were doing without concern for anything else except the activity. I tried to find out, first of all, why artists’ work was so rewarding. Then I became interested in corresponding experiences in other activities. And so I started looking at people who seem to be doing things for the sheer sake of the experience. They were rock climbers, dancers, chess players, musicians, etc. All of them used, more or less, the same words to describe how it felt to perform their activity that was so satisfying.
That became the theory of flow. It essentially says that people who seem to feel most positive about their lives possess a set of common characteristics, such as knowing clearly what they have to do, getting feedback on what they are doing, and being able to match their abilities with the opportunities for action so that skills and challenges are in balance. When those characteristics are present, people begin to concentrate very highly. As a result they forget the problems of everyday life, and they seem to step into a kind of alternative reality. That consolidation of characteristics is what I call the “flow experience.”
FI: What connection do you see between flow and happiness? Are they one and the same, or is there a difference?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: What people ordinarily call happiness is very similar to flow. But the interesting thing is that when people are in these flow conditions they are not necessarily happy because their attention is too taken up by what has to be done. They cannot reflect on how they feel. It’s really after the experience, in looking back, that they say that it was the happiest moment of their lives. If you are climbing a rock or composing or playing a musical piece you cannot think if you are happy, you are just so involved in what you are doing that to be happy would be a distraction that would make you fail at what you’re doing.
FI: So it’s focusing on the moment?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: Definitely. When you reconstruct that experience in memory you attribute happiness to it, which is I think how people actually operate.
FI: How do you study flow scientifically?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: Initially, I was simply using interviews. Then we developed questionnaires. The system that we are using now relies on a much more sophisticated methodology where we ask people to carry for a week a booklet and a watch that is programmed to go off every two hours, between 7 and 11 at night usually. When the watch starts beeping you take out the booklet and write down what you’re doing. Over time we found this to be a very reliable and valid snapshot of the quality of a person’s life at that moment. And when you aggregate these over a week’s period you get a fairly accurate snapshot of a person’s life as a whole.
FI: Have you also done cross-cultural studies of flow?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: We have obtained data from colleagues who have been working in different cultures. One of the surprises is how similarly people in Japan or India or Korea describe their optimal experiences.
FI: It is encouraging that people of different traditions can nonetheless express this attitude in their own terms. It reminded me very much of Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: I was vaguely aware that there may be a connection, but I didn’t really think about it or follow it up until afterwards. I think the neat thing is that somehow every generation or two you have to rediscover what people knew in the past or restate it in some new way that is more consonant with a new general understanding. The substance may be very similar; it’s just the way you express it. The structural framework changes.
FI: What you’ve added is the scientific data. If Aristotle had had computers who knows what he might have done.
What connection do you see between flow and organized religion?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: It’s kind of a love-hate relationship in some ways, because I think that religions have preserved some of the important understandings about what life has to be like to make sense. On the other hand, they have then put that understanding into a rigid framework that often militates against being able to live that way. I am concerned when religious people are convinced they possess the ultimate truth. Religions represent great steps forward in getting a sense of what the universe may be like and what our place in it is. But it is only a step. We have to honor what religion has accomplished but I think we need to take further steps because that’s certainly not the end point.
FI: You point out that there are two extremes that could lead to a loss of flow. One occurs when you join an organization such as a fundamentalist religion or a mass movement of some sort that really is not concerned with the individual. On the other hand there is the extreme of complete individuality and solitude. You point out that there is actually a disintegration of self when that occurs. Do you see the flow notion working best in institutions that still allow for individual growth and exploration?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: Definitely. The social context has to exist. You can have flow while reading in solitude or doing something else alone, but essentially, in the long run, there has to be a context in which you can confirm your existence, together with others. One of the challenges we have is to discover new forms of sociability that will allow that, because it is kind of scary, when you look not only in the United States but even more in some of the other advanced countries like Scandinavia, how fragmented people are getting, how many people live alone and have really no connection with anyone.
FI: I see a great deal of relevance to this for the humanist movement. On the one hand most people, myself included, who become humanists tend to have broken away from some religious tradition, usually because they found that there was no room for growth or that their questions were not being taken seriously. On the other hand, as you point out in Flow, for people in your studies who live by themselves and do not attend church, Sunday mornings are the lowest part of the week.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: What all of the studies slowly revealed was that it’s really quite difficult for individuals to be able to keep their minds in any sort of orderly state unless they have a goal they’re pursuing and that they know how to reach, or that they have other human beings around them with whom they interact. Or they have some artifact like a book or a computer they can work on. But that’s really a subset of having a goal. If you don’t feel that you have a goal and you don’t have anyone to relate to, then typically people’s minds begin either to turn to the negative problems that everybody has that are upsetting or they begin to lose control over the flow of thought and it becomes chaotic. We are generally unable to control the stream of consciousness. A Chinese curse says, may all your goals be fulfilled. It is a very good insight because I think that, if you don’t have a goal to organize your attention, then randomness starts to prevail unless one has self-discipline. Some people have discipline. They can meditate, they can do something in their head like adding up numbers, writing poetry, or playing with ideas, but that’s rare. Most people really require an external structure to keep their minds ship-shape.
FI: I like your comment that, while that it’s true that swamies can be in a state of flow, so can plumbers.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: I really do think so. We have so many examples of people in what seems to be boring or repetitive jobs who really enjoy them.
FI: In that regard, flow is not an elitist concept. You don’t have to join some esoteric religion or movement in order to learn how to achieve it.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: That’s exactly right. Last winter, Good Morning America wanted to do an episode on flow, so the producer asked me to put her in touch with some of the great flow people that I know. I said no. I thought they should find them themselves. She asked how to go about it. I said, go out in the street and start talking to people, and I guarantee that in two hours you’ll have some really interesting examples.
The show turned out to be great. One guest had been slicing salmon in a delicatessen for the past 20 years. He talked about his job like a poet. He talked about how each fish was different and how he got a feeling for its anatomy by working on a marble cutting slab.
Another was a pediatrician who loved to see children every day. There was a woman who enjoyed doing laundry. She serviced a family of eight people, and she just loved to fold the laundry, smell it, and touch it.
FI: Can you give our readers a few tips on how they may try to find flow in their own lives?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: I have two suggestions. One would be to think back on all the things that you wanted to do when you were 10 or 15 or 17 but that you put aside and forgot about. Create time for them now. Cut out all the stuff that you don’t really need to do, that is neither absolutely necessary nor enjoyable.
The other suggestion would be to keep track of what you’re doing for a week or so, almost like doing your own experience sampling method. Instead of using watches and beepers, just keep track in a diary of what you really enjoy doing and what you wished you were doing. After a week or two begin to review what you’ve written. See how you could inject a little bit more of what you would really like to do. Then observe how you feel when you do these things, and, if they really work, do more of them until you feel comfortable.
By being reflective and in touch with your feelings you can begin to choose more wisely what the quality of your life should be.
FI: At the end of Flow you describe how you sometimes teach classes for tired businessmen who feel burned out. You discuss Dante with them. What can they learn from Dante?
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: Dante is probably the first person, at least in the West, who described what we now call a mid-life crisis. The first verses of The Divine Comedy are on being in the middle of his life and having lost his way in a dark forest. He reviews the internal dangers of that forest – lust and greed for money and power. These have always seduced people into thinking that they have to do things that they don’t really like to and that are not really good for them or for anybody else in the long run. Of course, there is the need for sex. We have been selected to want to procreate soon and quickly. But what’s the meaning of this program when you live two to three times longer than our early ancestors and each individual’s having offspring is no longer a necessity for the race? The same is true of greed. If you are in a subsistence existence you want to get as many calories and as much of scarce resources as possible. But after awhile, that activity again, becomes self-defeating.
So in many ways those three beasts that Dante confronted in the dark forest are really the beasts that we all carry inside ourselves. They had a very good reason for being there at one point and they’re still somewhat useful. But we can’t let them dictate where we are going and what we are doing. That is something that executives could relate to, because many of them have been working very hard towards goals that in mid-life don’t seem as important or as meaningful.
FI: You also mention that, although Dante is considered almost the epitome of orthodox Catholic thinking, he actually was quite unorthodox and had a very eclectic approach. Like you’re doing now, he was making connections. He drew connections with the pagan world of Virgil, and the Islamic as well as the Christian world.
CSIKSZENTMIHALYI: It’s so important to realize that we all have parts of the puzzle and no one has the solution. We have to put these pieces together, whether they come from China or Syria or India or whatever. Ninety-nine percent of the pieces are not even on the table yet, you know. They will be coming next generation or the generation after that. You have to stay humble, but you have to be optimistic.

For more than 70 years, a controlling insight in my educational philosophy has been the recognition that no one has ever been — no one can ever be — educated in school or college.

That would be the case if our schools and colleges were at their very best, which they certainly are not, and even if the students were among the best and the brightest as well as conscientious in the application of their powers.

The reason is simply that youth itself — immaturity — is an insuperable obstacle to becoming educated. Schooling is for the young. Education comes later, usually much later. The very best thing for our schools to do is to prepare the young for continued learning by giving them the skills of learning and the love of it. Our schools and colleges are not doing that now, but that is what they should be doing.

To speak of an educated young person, rich in understanding of basic ideas and issues, is as much a contradiction in terms as to speak of a round square. The young can be prepared for education in the years to come, but only mature men and women can become educated, beginning the process in their 40′s and 50′s and reaching some modicum of genuine insight, sound judgment and practical wisdom after the age 60.

This is what no high school or college graduate knows or can understand. As a matter of fact, most of their teachers do not seem to know it. In their obsession with covering ground and in the way in which they test or examine their students, they certainly do not act as if they understood that they were only preparing their students for education in later life rather than trying to complete it within the precincts of their institutions.

There is, of course, some truth in the ancient insight that awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom. But, remember, it is just the beginning. From there on one has to do something about it.

And to do it intelligently one must know something of its causes and cures–why adults need education and what, if anything, they can do about it. When young adults realize how little they learned in school, they usually assume there was something wrong with the school they attended or with the way they spent their time there. But the fact is that the best possible graduate of the best possible school needs to continue learning every bit as much as the worst.

How should they go about doing this? In a recent book, I tried to answer the question, “How should persons proceed who wish to conduct for themselves the continuation of learning after all schooling has been finished?” The brief and simple answer is: Read and discuss.

Never just read, for reading without discussion with others who have read the same book is not nearly as profitable. And as reading without discussion can fail to yield the full measure of understanding that should be sought, so discussion without the substance that good and great books afford is likely to degenerate into little more than an exchange of opinions or personal prejudices.

Those who take this prescription seriously would, of course, be better off if their schooling had given them the intellectual discipline and skill they need to carry it out, and if it had also introduced them to the world of learning with some appreciation of its basic ideas and issues. But even the individual who is fortunate to leave school or college with a mind so disciplined, and with an abiding love of learning, would still have a long road to travel before he or she became an educated person.

If our schools and colleges were doing their part and adults were doing theirs, all would be well. However, our schools and colleges are not doing their part because they are trying to do everything else. And adults are not doing their part because most are under the illusion that they had completed their education when they finished their schooling.

Only the person who realizes that mature life is the time to get the education that no young person can ever acquire is at last on the high road to learning. The road is steep and rocky, but it is the high road, open to anyone who has the skill in learning and the ultimate goal of all learning in view–understanding the nature of things and man’s place in the total scheme.

An educated person is one who through the travail of his own life has assimilated the ideas that make him representative of his culture, that make him a bearer of its traditions and enable him to contribute to its improvement.

1.  An elite that is already smart; It needs to be wise

America is run by an elite. That’s not a controversial statement. Every complex society is run by an elite, in the sense that a tiny fraction of the population has a decisive effect on the economy and culture.

Consider the American economy, and the role that is played by the heads of the hundred largest corporations, hundred largest financial institutions, and the hundred largest hedge and venture capital funds. Combine their influence with that of the hundred most powerful economic policy-makers in the executive branch and the hundred most powerful politicians in the House and Senate. It amounts to just 500 people, but think of the collective effect they have on how much your groceries cost and whether you can find a job.

Consider the culture, and the comparably small numbers that apply to people who shape our constitutional jurisprudence, report the news, and create the nation’s films, television shows, music, and books. Even in the age of the Internet, a few thousand people have vastly bigger megaphones – and raw power-than everyone else.

Membership in the elite has no hard boundary. The CEO of the 101st largest corporation is also obviously part of the elite, and so is the CEO of the 1000th largest, albeit with declining influence. Using a broad definition, the elite includes the nation’s notably successful in all the professions-professors who publish influentially in their fields, for example, or trial lawyers who take the big cases and set legal precedents. It includes the people who shape the life of a community-who run local businesses, banks, television stations, newspapers, schools, and churches. In the aggregate, this broad elite also has a massive effect on the nation’s economy and culture.

Add them all up, and America’s elite comprises more than a million adults. But it is still an elite – a small fraction of our 300 million people. The good news is that America has gone further than any other country in opening admission to the elite to talented people whatever their origins. But that does not change the reality that a small proportion of the American population has a huge effect on our future.

What these people have in common is that, with the exception of the occasional empty-headed heir, they are almost always pretty smart. They don’t have to be geniuses but, just as an offensive tackle in the NFL has to weigh 300 pounds to have much chance to make the team, you have to have intellectual ability in the top ten percent to have much of a chance to be notably successful in the elite occupations.

The top ten percent is not a hard-and-fast requirement (just as there are still a few 290-pound offensive tackles), but it is a good ballpark figure for the intellectual ability needed to stand out in the jobs held by the people who run the country. It has to be true for jobs that require advanced professional degrees, because the academic filter requires intellectual ability that high. But scholarly investigations have found that extremely large proportions of people who are notably successful in the rest of the elite occupations I listed have intellectual ability in the top ten percent. For convenience, I will refer to the top ten percent as “gifted” – the right word, since no one earns high intellectual ability. It is a gift.

To anticipate the standard criticisms: Being gifted does not mean you are part of the elite. The great majority of the gifted are not. Nor is intellectual ability the decisive factor in success – other qualities are more important than intellectual ability once you’re smart enough, just as other qualities are more important than poundage to offensive tackles who weigh enough.

My point is this: Almost all of the eighteen-year-olds who will become the elite of the future are heading off to college this month. We need to think systematically about how college should educate this group that will produce the people who will run the country in the future-think about it not for their sakes, but for ours.

The defect with their current college education is not that they don’t get enough years of education. More than ninety percent of the gifted go to college. About eighty percent of them get a BA. Of those, about half continue in some form of postgraduate education. If the measure is raw amount of education as measured by years in school, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children.

If the measure is the quality of their professional training, the nation is also doing fine. America’s professional and graduate schools are the best in the world at turning out physicians who know their medicine, lawyers who know their law, and engineers who know their engineering.

The problem with the education of the gifted involves not the amount of education nor their professional training, but their training as citizens. Those among the gifted who go on to become members of the elite make decisions that affect the lives of the rest of us. We need to structure their college education so that they have the best possible chance to become not just knowledgeable, but wise.

The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education that hardly any college requires any more: A classic, rigorous, liberal education. In the next two days, I will take up two of its aspects: rigor in thinking about virtue and the good, and rigor in understanding one’s own limits.

2.  Virtue? The Good?;  What Are They?

The topic yesterday was the elite that runs the country, drawn overwhelmingly from among the top 10 percent in intellectual ability, dubbed “the gifted.” Today’s topic is their education in virtue and the Good.

As someone who has spent a fair amount of time on campuses over the past 20 years, I am happy to report that today’s gifted students are, for the most part, nice. They are not racist, sexist or homophobic. They want to be generous to those who are less fortunate. They say please and thank you.

But being nice is not being good. Living a nice life is not living a good life. One of the special tasks in the education of the gifted is to steep them in the study of what good means – good as it applies to virtue, and the good as a way of thinking about how to live a human life.

Virtue by what definition? It sounds like a daunting question. It is not. The great ethical and religious systems of the world are in such remarkable agreement on the core issues that, practically speaking, any of them will do. Take the world’s two most influential secular ethical systems, Aristotelian and Confucian, as examples. If your children grow up to be courageous, temperate, able to think clearly about the consequences of their actions, to be concerned with the welfare of others, with a sense of obligation to set a good example for others in their own behavior and to accord to others their rightful due – all of which are central tenets of both ethical systems – do you really care whether they were raised to be good Aristotelians or good Confucians?

The problem is when they are raised in no tradition at all, and instead imbibe the reigning ethical doctrine of contemporary academia, nonjudgmentalism. If they were taught merely to be tolerant, fine. But nonjudgmentalism goes much further, proclaiming that it is a sin to make judgments about the relative merit of different ways of living. Nonjudgmentalism is the inverse of rigor in thinking about virtue – a task that, above all else, requires the formation of considered judgments.

For thinking about the Good and its intimately related question “What does it mean to live a good human life?” virtue is not enough. It is also necessary to think about what is the excellence peculiar to human beings that we should strive to realize, and what is the nature of human happiness.

Here, the great traditions diverge, and I am a multiculturalist. Each of the great traditions has identified truths about the human condition that the other traditions have not understood as deeply. Again, the problem arises when education teaches none of these understandings of the Good. Ask today’s college students – or college graduates from the last several decades – their understanding of the Good, and you may get an answer from some of the religiously committed students. From most, you will get a blank stare.

The void in teaching about virtue and the Good extends throughout the curriculum from secular kindergartens through secular colleges, and it affects children at all levels of academic ability, not just the gifted. That void should be filled throughout the educational system. I am nonetheless discussing the problem in terms of its effects on the gifted because of the elite’s special influence on the cultural milieu.

What we see on television and in films, hear in our music, read in our newspapers and books, is all produced by members of the elite. The depressing reality is that hardly any of the people who have such enormous influence on our culture have ever been in a school that made sure they thought hard about these issues. By “thinking hard” I don’t mean a one-semester course in philosophy, but a rigorous core curriculum that demands familiarity in depth with the greatest writings – philosophical, literary, and historical – bearing on issues of virtue and the Good.

Only a handful of colleges impose such a curriculum. In the colleges that don’t, only a fraction of gifted students voluntarily select more than a few of the courses included in that curriculum. Many select none. The result is that most of the graduates of today’s colleges are ethically illiterate. They don’t even realize that there is anything to learn.

Since we are starting from scratch, our ambitions should be modest. It would constitute a major step forward if the typical gifted student emerged from college with a reasoned appreciation of just two things: First, being virtuous is hard. It is not enough to behave pleasantly toward others. Behaving in ways that conduce to the good ends you seek takes measured thoughtfulness. When the decisions that members of the elite make affect large numbers of people, they must draw upon principles of right behavior and principles of human flourishing. It is folly to try to derive those principles without having drawn upon the wisest who have come before us.

Second, seeking the Good for oneself is both important and feasible. A difference exists between trying to do good for others and seeking the Good for oneself. The gifted should leave college aware that seeking the Good is something that can be addressed in secular as well as religious terms, that thinking about it is crucial to their future happiness – and that people even smarter than they are have written helpfully about it in the past.

There are no canned ways to teach wisdom. Colleges can only encourage it. But they can do that much, and they have abdicated that function for decades. The result is moral vapidity that suffuses the culture. The philosophy of “do your own thing” bequeathed to subsequent generations by the Baby Boomers is Exhibit #1. We cannot afford to let the next generation of the elite subsist on such meager nourishment.

3.  Taking the gifted down

College is usually pretty easy for the gifted who go into the humanities or social sciences. Those who major in mathematics, engineering and the hard sciences have to pass a tough curriculum, but all the other gifted can readily find undemanding courses in today’s colleges that allow them to get a degree without approaching their intellectual limits.

This wouldn’t be so awful except that many of these same students arrive at college having been told all their lives that they are absolutely wonderful human beings – and so very, very smart – and they leave college without having any reason to doubt it.

It is a product of the age of self-esteem. Since the self-esteem movement began in the late 1960s, it has become an article of faith among great swathes of American parents and K-12 schools that children are supposed to be praised, because praise fosters high self-esteem. Criticism is destructive, because criticism produces low self-esteem. Classroom competitions should be avoided, because they damage the self-esteem of the losers.

The encouragement of high self-esteem independently of real reason for that esteem became an all-purpose solution to the problems of children. Psychological health, high educational performance, earnings as an adult – whatever the desired outcome, higher self-esteem would help produce it.

Over the last several years, the self-esteem movement has been debunked in the technical literature. The landmark change in scholarly opinion occurred in 2003, when a review of the 15,000 studies that had been written on the relationship of self-esteem to the development of children concluded that improving self-esteem does not raise grades, career achievement, or have any other positive effect.

Worse, scholars are finding that praise that is not linked to performance backfires. For example, contemporary parents commonly tell their children that they are smart, in contrast to an earlier era, when parents were worried about giving their children big heads. But according to a recent meta-analysis of 150 praise studies, praising children for being smart tends to produce children who choose the easier alternative when given a task, who are risk-averse, and who have a diminished sense of autonomy. Researchers are discovering that the more children are praised for being smart, the more important it becomes for them to maintain their image. Their goal becomes to protect themselves, not to outshine others through superior achievement.

It should go without saying that this upbringing does not fit all gifted children. But it corresponds with the milieu in which many gifted children grow up, with the observed behavior of many gifted children, and with the current state of knowledge about the effects of praise.

There is a healthier alternative – healthier for gifted children and for the society that some of them will run as adults. Since they are in fact academically gifted, it is fine to tell them that. Trying to hide their academic ability from them would be futile anyway. But they must also be told explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift that they have done nothing to deserve. They are not superior human beings, but very, very lucky ones. They should feel humbled by their good luck.

At that point, praising them for actual accomplishment is appropriate. But even then, lavish praise is not what students need. Think back on your own college days. The praise you cherish is more likely to be the words of the exacting professor who, when you had done the very best you possibly could, said “Not bad.” That’s what today’s gifted students will cherish if we give them teachers who demand their best.

This healthier alternative also means making sure that at some point every gifted student fails in some academic task. There is no sadism in this, but an urgent need for our luckiest children to gain perspective on themselves and on their fellows. As matters stand, many among the gifted who manage to avoid serious science and math never take a course from kindergarten through graduate school so tough that they have to say to themselves, “I can’t do this.” Lacking that experience, too many gifted graduates are not conscious of their own limits. They don’t know, as an established fact, that there are some things they just aren’t smart enough to figure out.

Everybody else knows that for a fact. Making sure that all gifted students hit their own personal walls is crucial for developing their empathy with the rest of the world. When they see others struggle with intellectual tasks, they need to be able to say “I know how it feels” – and be telling the truth.

But empathy is not the chief reason that gifted students need to hit the wall. It is even more important that they achieve humility. A wonderful maxim is attributed to George Christian, one of Lyndon Johnson’s press secretaries: “No one should be allowed to work in the West Wing of the White House who has not suffered a major disappointment in life.” The same principle applies to those who will become members of America’s elite. No one among the gifted should be allowed to rise to a position of influence without knowing what it feels like to fail. The experience of internalized humiliation is a prerequisite for humility.

There is much more to be said about college and the gifted, but my theme should be obvious by now. The gifted disproportionately come from homes in which they already have everything going for them, and I have no interest in providing them with still more perks. But the nation has an interest in their education. Since they include the people who will end up running the country, it is time for colleges to start holding their feet to the fire.

Charles Murray is the author of “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality.”

ORANGE PARK, Fla. — David Campbell switched on the overhead projector and wrote “Evolution” in the rectangle of light on the screen.

He scanned the faces of the sophomores in his Biology I class. Many of them, he knew from years of teaching high school in this Jacksonville suburb, had been raised to take the biblical creation story as fact. His gaze rested for a moment on Bryce Haas, a football player who attended the 6 a.m. prayer meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes in the school gymnasium.

“If I do this wrong,” Mr. Campbell remembers thinking on that humid spring morning, “I’ll lose him.”

In February, the Florida Department of Education modified its standards to explicitly require, for the first time, the state’s public schools to teach evolution, calling it “the organizing principle of life science.” Spurred in part by legal rulings against school districts seeking to favor religious versions of natural history, over a dozen other states have also given more emphasis in recent years to what has long been the scientific consensus: that all of the diverse life forms on Earth descended from a common ancestor, through a process of mutation and natural selection, over billions of years.

But in a nation where evangelical Protestantism and other religious traditions stress a literal reading of the biblical description of God’s individually creating each species, students often arrive at school fearing that evolution, and perhaps science itself, is hostile to their faith.

Some come armed with “Ten questions to ask your biology teacher about evolution,” a document circulated on the Internet that highlights supposed weaknesses in evolutionary theory. Others scrawl their opposition on homework assignments. Many just tune out.

With a mandate to teach evolution but little guidance as to how, science teachers are contriving their own ways to turn a culture war into a lesson plan. How they fare may bear on whether a new generation of Americans embraces scientific evidence alongside religious belief.

“If you see something you don’t understand, you have to ask ‘why?’ or ‘how?’ ” Mr. Campbell often admonished his students at Ridgeview High School.

Yet their abiding mistrust in evolution, he feared, jeopardized their belief in the basic power of science to explain the natural world — and their ability to make sense of it themselves.

Passionate on the subject, Mr. Campbell had helped to devise the state’s new evolution standards, which will be phased in starting this fall. A former Navy flight instructor not used to pulling his punches, he fought hard for their passage. But with his students this spring, he found himself treading carefully, as he tried to bridge an ideological divide that stretches well beyond his classroom.

A Cartoon and a Challenge

He started with Mickey Mouse.

On the projector, Mr. Campbell placed slides of the cartoon icon: one at his skinny genesis in 1928; one from his 1940 turn as the impish Sorcerer’s Apprentice; and another of the rounded, ingratiating charmer of Mouse Club fame.

“How,” he asked his students, “has Mickey changed?”

Natives of Disney World’s home state, they waved their hands and called out answers.

“His tail gets shorter,” Bryce volunteered.

“Bigger eyes!” someone else shouted.

“He looks happier,” one girl observed. “And cuter.”

Mr. Campbell smiled. “Mickey evolved,” he said. “And Mickey gets cuter because Walt Disney makes more money that way. That is ‘selection.’ ”

Later, he would get to the touchier part, about how the minute changes in organisms that drive biological change arise spontaneously, without direction. And how a struggle for existence among naturally varying individuals has helped to generate every species, living and extinct, on the planet.

For now, it was enough that they were listening.

He strode back to the projector, past his menagerie of snakes and baby turtles, and pointed to the word he had written in the beginning of class.

“Evolution has been the focus of a lot of debate in our state this year,” he said. “If you read the newspapers, everyone is arguing, ‘is it a theory, is it not a theory?’ The answer is, we can observe it. We can see it happen, just like you can see it in Mickey.”

Some students were nodding. As the bell rang, Mr. Campbell stood by the door, satisfied. But Bryce, heavyset with blond curls, left with a stage whisper as he slung his knapsack over his shoulder.

“I can see something else, too,” he said. “I can see that there’s no way I came from an ape.”

Fighting for a Mandate

As recently as three years ago, the guidelines that govern science education in more than a third of American public schools gave exceedingly short shrift to evolution, according to reviews by education experts. Some still do, science advocates contend. Just this summer, religious advocates lobbied successfully for a Louisiana law that protects the right of local schools to teach alternative theories for the origin of species, even though there are none that scientists recognize as valid. The Florida Legislature is expected to reopen debate on a similar bill this fall.

Even states that require teachers to cover the basics of evolution, like natural selection, rarely ask them to explain in any detail how humans, in particular, evolved from earlier life forms. That subject can be especially fraught for young people taught to believe that the basis for moral conduct lies in God’s having created man uniquely in his own image.

The poor treatment of evolution in some state education standards may reflect the public’s widely held creationist beliefs. In Gallup polls over the last 25 years, nearly half of American adults have consistently said they believe God created all living things in their present form, sometime in the last 10,000 years. But a 2005 defeat in federal court for a school board in Dover, Pa., that sought to cast doubt on evolution gave legal ammunition to evolution proponents on school boards and in statehouses across the country.

In its wake, Ohio removed a requirement that biology classes include “critical analysis” of evolution. Efforts to pass bills that implicitly condone the teaching of religious theories for life’s origins have failed in at least five states. And as science standards come up for regular review, other states have added material on evolution to student achievement tests, and required teachers to spend more time covering it.

When Florida’s last set of science standards came out in 1996, soon after Mr. Campbell took the teaching job at Ridgeview, he studied them in disbelief. Though they included the concept that biological “changes over time” occur, the word evolution was not mentioned.

He called his district science supervisor. “Is this really what they want us to teach for the next 10 years?” he demanded.

In 2000, when the independent Thomas B. Fordham Foundation evaluated the evolution education standards of all 50 states, Florida was among 12 to receive a grade of F. (Kansas, which drew international attention in 1999 for deleting all mention of evolution and later embracing supernatural theories, received an F-minus.)

Mr. Campbell, 52, who majored in biology while putting himself through Cornell University on a Reserve Officers Training Corps scholarship, taught evolution anyway. But like nearly a third of biology teachers across the country, and more in his politically conservative district, he regularly heard from parents voicing complaints.

With no school policy to back him up, he spent less time on the subject than he would have liked. And he bit back his irritation at Teresa Yancey, a biology teacher down the hall who taught a unit she called “Evolution or NOT.”

Animals do adapt to their environments, Ms. Yancey tells her students, but evolution
alone can hardly account for the appearance of wholly different life forms. She leaves it up to them to draw their own conclusions. But when pressed, she tells them, “I think God did it.”

Mr. Campbell was well aware of her opinion. “I don’t think we have this great massive change over time where we go from fish to amphibians, from monkeys to man,” she once told him. “We see lizards with different-shaped tails, we don’t see blizzards — the lizard bird.”

With some approximation of courtesy, Mr. Campbell reminded her that only a tiny fraction of organisms that ever lived had been preserved in fossils. Even so, he informed his own students, scientists have discovered thousands of fossils that provide evidence of one species transitioning into another — including feathered dinosaurs.

But at the inaugural meeting of the Florida Citizens for Science, which he co-founded in 2005, he vented his frustration. “The kids are getting hurt,” Mr. Campbell told teachers and parents. “We need to do something.”

The Dover decision in December of that year dealt a blow to “intelligent design,” which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone, and has been widely promoted by religious advocates since the Supreme Court’s 1987 ban on creationism in public schools. The federal judge in the case called the doctrine “creationism re-labeled,” and found the Dover school board had violated the constitutional separation of church and state by requiring teachers to mention it. The school district paid $1 million in legal costs.

Inspired, the Florida citizens group soon contacted similar groups in other states advocating better teaching of evolution. And in June 2007, when his supervisor invited Mr. Campbell to help draft Florida’s new standards, he quickly accepted.

During the next six months, he made the drive to three-day meetings in Orlando and Tallahassee six times. By January 2008 the Board of Education budget had run out. But the 30 teachers on the standards committee paid for their own gasoline to attend their last meeting.

Mr. Campbell quietly rejoiced in their final draft. Under the proposed new standards, high school students could be tested on how fossils and DNA provide evidence for evolution. Florida students would even be expected to learn how their own species fits into the tree of life.

Whether the state’s board of education would adopt them, however, was unclear. There were heated objections from some religious organizations and local school boards. In a stormy public comment session, Mr. Campbell defended his fellow writers against complaints that they had not included alternative explanations for life’s diversity, like intelligent design.

His attempt at humor came with an edge:

“We also failed to include astrology, alchemy and the concept of the moon being made of green cheese,” he said. “Because those aren’t science, either.”

The evening of the vote, Mr. Campbell learned by e-mail message from an education official that the words “scientific theory of” had been inserted in front of “evolution” to appease opponents on the board. Even so, the standards passed by only a 4-to-3 vote.

Mr. Campbell cringed at the wording, which seemed to suggest evolution was a kind of hunch instead of the only accepted scientific explanation for the great variety of life on Earth. But he turned off his computer without scrolling through all of the frustrated replies from other writers. The standards, he thought, were finally in place.

Now he just had to teach.

The Limits of Science

The morning after his Mickey Mouse gambit, he bounced a pink rubber Spalding ball on the classroom’s hard linoleum floor.

“Gravity,” he said. “I can do this until the end of the semester, and I can only assume that it will work the same way each time.”

He looked around the room. “Bryce, what is it called when natural laws are suspended — what do you call it when water changes into wine?”

“Miracle?” Bryce supplied.

Mr. Campbell nodded. The ball hit the floor again.

“Science explores nature by testing and gathering data,” he said. “It can’t tell you what’s right and wrong. It doesn’t address ethics. But it is not anti-religion. Science and religion just ask different questions.”

He grabbed the ball and held it still.

“Can anybody think of a question science can’t answer?”

“Is there a God?” shot back a boy near the window.

“Good,” said Mr. Campbell, an Anglican who attends church most Sundays. “Can’t test it. Can’t prove it, can’t disprove it. It’s not a question for science.”

Bryce raised his hand.

“But there is scientific proof that there is a God,” he said. “Over in Turkey there’s a piece of wood from Noah’s ark that came out of a glacier.”

Mr. Campbell chose his words carefully.

“If I could prove, tomorrow, that that chunk of wood is not from the ark, is not even 500 years old and not even from the right kind of tree — would that damage your religious faith at all?”

Bryce thought for a moment.

“No,” he said.

The room was unusually quiet.

“Faith is not based on science,” Mr. Campbell said. “And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.”

“But I do,” he added, “expect you to understand it.”

The Lure of T. Rex

Over the next weeks, Mr. Campbell regaled his students with the array of evidence on which evolutionary theory is based. To see how diverse species are related, they studied the embryos of chickens and fish, and the anatomy of horses, cats, seals and bats.

To simulate natural selection, they pretended to be birds picking light-colored moths off tree bark newly darkened by soot.

But the dearth of questions made him uneasy.

“I still don’t have a good feeling on how well any of them are internalizing any of this,” he worried aloud.

When he was 5, Mr. Campbell’s aunt took him on a trip from his home in Connecticut to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. At the end of the day, she had to pry him away from the Tyrannosaurus rex.

If this didn’t hook them, he thought one Wednesday morning, admiring the cast of a T. rex brain case he set on one of the classroom’s long, black laboratory tables, nothing would. Carefully, he distributed several other fossils, including two he had collected himself.

He placed particular hope in the jaw of a 34-million-year-old horse ancestor. Through chance, selection and extinction, he had told his class, today’s powerfully muscled, shoulder-high horses had evolved from squat dog-sized creatures.

The diminutive jaw, from an early horse that stood about two feet tall, offered proof of how the species had changed over time. And maybe, if they accepted the evolution of Equus caballus, they could begin to contemplate the origin of Homo sapiens.

Mr. Campbell instructed the students to spend three minutes at each station. He watched Bryce and his partner, Allie Farris, look at the illustration of a modern horse jaw he had posted next to the fossil of its Mesohippus ancestor. Hovering, he kicked himself for not acquiring a real one to make the comparison more tangible. But they lingered, well past their time limit. Bryce pointed to the jaw in the picture and held the fossil up to his own mouth.

“It’s maybe the size of a dog’s jaw or a cat’s,” he said, measuring.

He looked at Allie. “That’s pretty cool, don’t you think?”

After class, Mr. Campbell fed the turtles. It was time for a test, he thought.

‘I Don’t Believe in This’

Bryce came to Ridgeview as a freshman from a Christian private school where he attended junior high.

At 16, Bryce, whose parents had made sure he read the Bible for an hour each Sunday as a child, no longer
went to church. But he did make it to the predawn meetings of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, a national Christian sports organization whose mission statement defines the Bible as the “authoritative Word of God.” Life had been dark after his father died a year ago, he told the group, but things had been going better recently, and he attributed that to God’s help.

When the subject of evolution came up at a recent fellowship meeting, several of the students rolled their eyes.

“I think a big reason evolutionists believe what they believe is they don’t want to have to be ruled by God,” said Josh Rou, 17.

“Evolution is telling you that you’re like an animal,” Bryce agreed. “That’s why people stand strong with Christianity, because it teaches people to lead a good life and not do wrong.”

Doug Daugherty, 17, allowed that he liked science.

“I’ll watch the Discovery Channel and say ‘Ooh, that’s interesting,’ ” he said. “But there’s a difference between thinking something is interesting and believing it.”

The last question on the test Mr. Campbell passed out a week later asked students to explain two forms of evidence supporting evolutionary change and natural selection.

“I refuse to answer,” Bryce wrote. “I don’t believe in this.”

Losing Heart

Mr. Campbell looked at the calendar. Perhaps this semester, he thought, he would skip over the touchy subject of human origins. The new standards, after all, had not gone into effect. “Maybe I’ll just give them the fetal pig dissection,” he said with a sigh.

It wasn’t just Bryce. Many of the students, Mr. Campbell sensed, were not grasping the basic principles of biological evolution. If he forced them to look at themselves in the evolutionary mirror, he risked alienating them entirely.

The discovery that a copy of “Evolution Exposed,” published by the creationist organization Answers in Genesis, was circulating among the class did not raise his flagging spirits. The book lists each reference to evolution in the biology textbook Mr. Campbell uses and offers an explanation for why it is wrong.

Where the textbook states, for example, that “Homo sapiens appeared in Africa 200,000 years ago based on fossil and DNA evidence,” “Exposed” counters that “The fossil evidence of hominids (alleged human ancestors) is extremely limited.” A pastor at a local church, Mr. Campbell learned, had given a copy of “Exposed” to every graduating senior the previous year.

But the next week, at a meeting in Tallahassee where he sorted the new science standards into course descriptions for other teachers, the words he had helped write reverberated in his head.

“Evolution,” the standards said, “is the fundamental concept underlying all biology.”

When he got home, he dug out his slide illustrating the nearly exact match between human and chimpanzee chromosomes, and prepared for a contentious class.

Facing the Challenge

“True or false?” he barked the following week, wearing a tie emblazoned with the DNA double helix. “Humans evolved from chimpanzees.”

The students stared at him, unsure. “True,” some called out.

“False,” he said, correcting a common misconception. “But we do share a common ancestor.”

More gently now, he started into the story of how, five or six million years ago, a group of primates in Africa split. Some stayed in the forest and evolved into chimps; others — our ancestors — migrated to the grasslands.

On the projector, he placed a picture of the hand of a gibbon, another human cousin. “There’s the opposable thumb,” he said, wiggling his own. “But theirs is a longer hand because they live in trees, and their arms are very long.”

Mr. Campbell bent over, walking on the outer part of his foot. He had intended to mimic how arms became shorter and legs became longer. He planned to tell the class how our upright gait, built on a body plan inherited from tree-dwelling primates, made us prone to lower back pain. And how, over the last two million years, our jaws have grown shorter, which is why wisdom teeth so often need to be removed.

But too many hands had gone up.

He answered as fast as he could, his pulse quickening as it had rarely done since his days on his high school debate team.

“If that really happened,” Allie wanted to know, “wouldn’t you still see things evolving?”

“We do,” he said. “But this is happening over millions of years. With humans, if I’m lucky I might see four generations in my lifetime.”

Caitlin Johnson, 15, was next.

“If we had to have evolved from something,” she wanted to know, “then whatever we evolved from, where did IT evolve from?”

“It came from earlier primates,” Mr. Campbell replied.

“And where did those come from?”

“You can trace mammals back 250 million years,” he said. The first ones, he reminded them, were small, mouselike creatures that lived in the shadow of dinosaurs.

Other students were jumping in.

“Even if we did split off from chimps,” someone asked, “how come they stayed the same but we changed?”

“They didn’t stay the same,” Mr. Campbell answered. “They were smaller, more slender — they’ve changed a lot.”

Bryce had been listening, studying the hand of the monkey on the screen .

“How does our hand go from being that long to just a smaller hand?” he said. “I don’t see how that happens.”

“If a smaller hand is beneficial,” Mr. Campbell said, “individuals with small hands will have more children, while those with bigger hands will disappear.”

“But if we came from them, why are they still around?”

“Just because a new population evolves doesn’t mean the old one dies out,” Mr. Campbell said.

Bryce spoke again. This time it wasn’t a question.

“So it just doesn’t stop,” he said.

“No,” said Mr. Campbell. “If the environment is suitable, a species can go on for a long time.”

“What about us,” Bryce pursued. “Are we going to evolve?”

Mr. Campbell stopped, and took a breath.

“Yes,” he said. “Unless we go extinct.”

When the bell rang, he knew that he had not convinced Bryce, and perhaps many of the others. But that week, he gave the students an opportunity to answer the questions they had missed on the last test. Grading Bryce’s paper later in the quiet of his empty classroom, he saw that this time, the question that asked for evidence of evolutionary change had been answered.

When Tony Petite enrolled in elementary school in Denver in the fall of 2005, he quickly discovered that he was the only kid in fourth grade who didn’t know how to write in cursive. In the four years he spent in the New Orleans public school system, no one ever taught him how. “In my third-grade school,” he told me recently, “they just sit you in the class, and they just tell you to do this, and tell you to do that. In Denver, they help you, and they show you how to do your work.”

Tony arrived in Denver along with his parents and younger brother, Troy, as part of the epic exodus of hundreds of thousands of people, including tens of thousands of public-school students, driven from their homes in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina and scattered to every corner of the country. At first, Tony felt out of place — he and Troy were among the only black students in the school — and academically, he started off well behind most of his classmates. But he got a lot of special attention from his teacher, and when he and his family returned to New Orleans a year later and he started fifth grade in Jefferson Parish, just west of the city, he was an above-average student.

Over the next two years, though, things slipped. His grades fell from A’s and B’s to C’s, D’s and F’s, and last semester, he was suspended five times, mostly for fighting. When the school year ended, Tony had failed sixth grade, and his mother, Trineil Petite, went looking for a different option.

I met Tony and his mother last month, when I arrived on the doorstep of their home in Gentilly with Tiffany Hardrick and Keith Sanders, the principals of a brand-new boys-only New Orleans charter school called Miller-McCoy Academy for Mathematics and Business. Gentilly, a quiet neighborhood of mostly single-story homes, was badly flooded after Katrina. The Petites’ current home, which belongs to Trineil’s 83-year-old grandmother, had been filled with about five feet of water; the front of the house is still marked with a blue X and a zero, spray-painted by a rescue crew in September 2005 to show that the house had been searched and that no dead bodies had been found. (These grim reminders of the flood remain on homes all over New Orleans; down the street, a house still bore the words “DEAD DOG IN HOUSE,” in six-inch-high black letters, with a giant arrow pointing to the front door.)

Petite had been searching for a school for Tony all summer, and a week earlier she heard about Miller-McCoy from the principal of a nearby charter school whose admission rolls were already full. Meanwhile, Hardrick and Sanders had been searching for Tony, or at least for boys like him; they had been in New Orleans recruiting students for almost a year at that point, running radio ads, knocking on doors, posting signs on the grassy strips that run down the middle of the city’s boulevards. Miller-McCoy would be a combination middle and high school, and Hardrick and Sanders needed 108 sixth-grade students and 108 ninth-grade students, all willing to take a chance on a school with no track record. When Petite called, they had almost reached their goal; Tony got one of the last spots in sixth grade.

Before they moved last year to New Orleans, Hardrick, who is 32, and Sanders, who is 36, were public-school principals in Memphis, graduates of a prestigious program run by New Leaders for New Schools, a nonprofit that trains aspiring principals to work in urban school districts with low test scores and high concentrations of poor and minority students. It was hard to leave Memphis, they told me — their schools were thriving, and test scores were rising — but they couldn’t resist the pull of New Orleans.

It was partly a desire to help right what they felt was a great wrong, a sense almost of moral obligation. After Katrina hit, Sanders told me, he spent the week glued to his television, watching one horrifying image after another. “I remember sitting in my living room and just crying, just really feeling for the people who were involved,” he said. “Now we’ve been given the opportunity to be a part of the rebirth of New Orleans. How often do you get a chance to contribute to something like this?”

But it wasn’t only sympathy for the survivors of Katrina that drew them to New Orleans. The city’s disastrously low-performing school system was almost entirely washed away in the flood — many of the buildings were destroyed, the school board was taken over and all the teachers were fired. What is being built in its place is an educational landscape unlike any other, a radical experiment in reform. More than half of the city’s public-school students are now being educated in charter schools, publicly financed but privately run, and most of the rest are enrolled in schools run by an unusually decentralized and rapidly changing school district. From across the country, and in increasing numbers, hundreds of ambitious, idealistic young educators like Hardrick and Sanders have descended on New Orleans, determined to take advantage of the opportunity not just to innovate and reinvent but also to prove to the rest of the country that an entire city of children in the demographic generally considered the hardest to educate — poor African-American kids — can achieve high levels of academic success.

Katrina struck at a critical moment in the evolution of the contemporary education-reform movement. President Bush’s education initiative, No Child Left Behind, had shined a light on the underperformance of poor minority students across the country by requiring, for the first time, that a school successfully educate not just its best students but its poor and minority students too in order to be counted as successful. Scattered across the country were a growing number of schools, often intensive charter schools, that seemed to be succeeding with disadvantaged students in a consistent and measurable way. But these schools were isolated examples. No one had figured out how to “scale up” those successes to transform an entire urban school district. There were ambitious new superintendents in Philadelphia, New York City, Denver and Chicago, all determined to reform their school systems to better serve poor children, but even those who seemed to be succeeding were doing so in incremental ways, lifting the percentage of students passing statewide or citywide tests to, say, 40 from 30 or to 50 from 40.

In New Orleans, before the storm, the schools weren’t succeeding even in an incremental way. In 2005, Louisiana’s public schools ranked anywhere from 43rd to 46th in the federal government’s various state-by-state rankings of student achievement, and the schools in Orleans Parish, which encompasses the city of New Orleans, ranked 67th out of the 68 parishes in the state. The school system was monochromatically black — white students made up just 3 percent of the public-school population, most of them attending one of a handful of selective-enrollment magnet schools — and overwhelmingly poor as well; more than 75 percent of students had family incomes low enough to make them eligible for a subsidized lunch from the federal government. The dysfunction in the city’s school system extended well beyond the classroom: a revolving door for superintendents, whose average tenure lasted no more than a year; school officials indicted for bribery and theft; unexplained budget deficits; decaying buildings; almost three-quarters of the city’s schools slapped with an “academically unacceptable” rating from the state.

Tony’s mother, Trineil, who is 31, was a product of that system. Before the storm blew her family to Denver, she had never been outside of Louisiana, even for a day, and everyone she knew had been educated in New Orleans public schools. She was familiar with schools that didn’t work and educators who didn’t seem to care much. So it felt more than a little strange to her to be standing in her home with Hardrick and Sanders, two highly educated, impeccably dressed black professionals, listening to them describe what Miller-McCoy had to offer her son.

“Ultimately, it’s my responsibility to make sure that you get to college,” Hardrick said to Tony. “You’re a sixth grader, and I’m standing in your living room telling Mom that if she will allow you to stick with me until 12th grade, you will be accepted to a four-year university.”

School wouldn’t be easy, she told him. He’d have to arrive each morning at 7:30 a.m., he’d have to wear a blazer and a necktie every day, he’d have to do his homework every night or stay until 6 p.m. the next afternoon to complete it. Hardrick handed Tony a copy of the Miller-McCoy Family and School Covenant, which she wanted him and his mother to sign, along with his homeroom teacher and Hardrick herself. All four people, she explained, had to make a commitment to get Tony to college.

“If you work hard and I work hard, we’ll get you there,” she said. “Is that fair? Are you ready to sign and shake and be officially welcomed to Miller-McCoy?”

Tony looked a little nervous, especially about the 7:30 part, but he nodded his head and said yes. Hardrick handed Tony a pen, and while he signed his name, she asked his mother if she had any questions.

“I’m excited,” Petite said. “This is different. Y’all are taking time with these kids.”

What first sold her on Miller-McCoy, she said, was when the woman who answered the phone at the school told her that the boys would wear matching blazers with the school crest. “I said, ‘Blazers?’ I’ve never seen any kids running around in blazers except at St. Augustine” — a nearby Catholic high school — “and that’s where you pay to go to school. This is a public school, and they wear blazers and ties? I want that for my son. I do. I really want it for him. I know he can do it.”

When we left, the sun was going down. It was sweltering, like every midsummer day in New Orleans, the kind of day when the only thing you want to do is sit next to an air-conditioner and drink iced tea. But all around the city, things were buzzing. Six other charter-school leaders were preparing to open their doors for the first time, training staff and arranging bus schedules. In an office park down by the Mississippi River, another crop of future principals were meeting to begin planning their own new schools, which they hoped to open in the fall of 2009. Two hundred and fifty Teach for America teachers, nearly all recent college graduates, had just arrived to complete preparations for their new positions in schools in the region. And in a converted office building across town, next to a highway interchange, 80 returning principals and other school administrators were spending the week being trained in new techniques of “instructional coaching” and behavioral interventions.

For many years now, the central debate in American education has been over just how much schools can do to improve the low rate of achievement among poor children. While it is true that for decades the children of New Orleans toiled in a substandard school system, they have also continually faced countless other obstacles to success — inadequate health care, poorly educated parents, exposure to high rates of violent crime and a popular culture that often denigrates mainstream achievement. And though the hurricane washed away the school system, it didn’t wash away their other problems. In fact, for most children it compounded them with a whole new set of troubles: wrecked homes, frequent relocations, divided families, post-traumatic stress. Were public schools really the right vehicle to attack all of those problems? Were a blazer and a necktie and a lot of hard work enough to get Tony Petite to college?

For Hardrick and Sanders and the dozens of other education reformers I spoke to in New Orleans since my first trip there in March, the answer was a firm yes. They didn’t deny the daunting spectrum of problems facing the children they were trying to educate. But they said they believed they could overcome them in the classroom — and that the new educational terrain in New Orleans had significantly increased their chances of success.

Before Hardrick and Sanders got in their car to drive off down the potholed streets of Gentilly, I asked Hardrick what had motivated her to abandon a successful school and a comfortable life in Memphis to come to New Orleans and start all over from scratch. She thought for a moment before answering. “I think that when we get it right, we will transform education for the nation, for urban schools everywhere,” she said. “We have an opportunity here to create a model that works, so we can say to other schools, other districts and other cities and states: This is what we should be doing. This is how we give all students a quality education.”

Of course, there’s also the possibility that the model they are building won’t work — and it is that thought that keeps Hardrick and many of the other new arrivals up at night. What if they don’t achieve the level of success they are hoping for? What kind of lessons will people draw from the city’s grand educational experiment then?

For the first couple of years after the storm, the schools of New Orleans, like most things in the city, were a mess. Students returned to the city more quickly than state officials expected (in some cases, parents living in Houston or Baton Rouge sent their children back alone, to stay with relatives or simply to fend for themselves), and by September 2006, there were about 22,000 public-school students in New Orleans, one-third of the pre-Katrina population. Though it was more than a year after the storm, the school system wasn’t ready for them: there were not enough buses, not enough textbooks; no hot lunches, no doors on the bathroom stalls. There also weren’t enough teachers — 106 positions were still unfilled on the first day of classes; at some schools, there were as many private security guards, often young and poorly trained, as there were teachers.

Things began to change that spring. In February, Cecil Picard, the state education superintendent, died after a long battle with A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig’s disease, and Gov. Kathleen Blanco offered his job to Paul Pastorek, a former president of the state school board who had been running an educational advisory committee since the storm. Although Pastorek was not an educator, he was well acquainted with many of the leading figures in the education-reform world, and before he accepted Blanco’s offer, he spent a few days calling around the country, rounding up support, asking one person after another the same question: If I take the job, will you come help?

One call was to Paul Vallas, the head of the Philadelphia school system, who was locked in an increasingly bitter feud with the city’s school reform commission over a $73 million deficit in the budget that appeared unexpectedly the previous October. After six years running the Chicago schools and five years doing the same in Philadelphia, Vallas was known nationally as a reformer. Pastorek asked Vallas if he’d be interested in leaving Philadelphia and running the Recovery School District, the state-mandated entity that controlled many of the public schools in New Orleans.

Ever since, Pastorek and Vallas have been the odd couple at the top of the New Orleans school system. Pastorek, compact and neatly dressed, speaks softly and slowly, carefully weighing his words. Vallas, tall and rangy, is a manic talker; sentences take off in one direction and then veer wildly toward another. Pastorek sits still, his hands folded in front of him. Vallas is a compulsive fidgeter, sometimes hoisting his entire body up onto his office chair so that he is perched on the seat in a full crouch.

Vallas is the detail man; Pastorek is the deep thinker. Since taking the job, Pastorek has immersed himself in theories of education, consulting with scholars from Seattle to Toronto to London. His conclusion, more than a year into his work, is that fixing a public-school system is not at its root a question of curriculum or personnel or even money. It is a question of governance. It is simply impossible, Pastorek has come to believe, for a traditional school system, run from the top down by a central administrator, to educate large numbers of poor children to high levels of achievement. “The command-and-control structure can produce marginal improvements,” he told me when we met last month at a coffeehouse on Magazine Street. “But what’s clear to me is that it can only get you so far. If you create a system where initiative and creativity is valued and rewarded, then you’ll get change from the bottom up. If you create a system where people are told what to do and how to do it, then you will get change from the top down. We’ve been doing top-down for many years in Louisiana. And all we have is islands of excellence amidst a sea of mediocrity and failure.”

The theorist who has had the most influence over Pastorek is Paul T. Hill, who runs a research group at the University of Washington called the Center on Reinventing Public Education. In September 2005, while much of New Orleans was still submerged, Hill published an article in Education Week that urged state and federal officials and philanthropic foundations to resist the temptation simply to send emergency aid to whatever programs seemed most in need. “The circumstances call for a coherent strategy, not just a round of do-gooding,” he wrote. “Don’t spend money rebuilding the old district structure.”

In 2000, in a book titled “It Takes a City,” Hill and two other researchers laid out a new architecture for urban school reform that they called the Diverse Providers Strategy. Under this model, local school boards wouldn’t run a school system hierarchically, the way they usually did; instead, they would oversee a “portfolio” of schools, some run directly by the board and many run on contract by nonprofits, universities or private companies. Schools would receive money on a per-student basis, and principals could then use that money to staff their schools as they liked and pay for whatever instructional methods they chose. Each school would negotiate salaries and work rules directly with its teachers. The system’s small central office would be responsible only for oversight, though it would have considerable power to hold principals accountable: schools that didn’t produce results would be closed, and successful schools would be imitated and replicated.

It is this model that Pastorek and Vallas have adapted for New Orleans. Pastorek says that he wants the state’s role to be that of a “harvester of high-quality schools” in the city — nurturing promising ones and weeding out failing ones. “If schools run into trouble, you support them,” Pastorek said. “But if they’re still failing after you support them, then you pull the plug and bring in a new provider or an experienced provider. Over a period of 5 or 6 years, 10 at the most, we’ll have nothing but high-quality operators in our city.”

For now, though, the system on the ground in New Orleans is a bewildering tangle of interlocking organizational structures administering 86 public schools, only a minority of them directly controlled by Vallas. The law that expanded the Recovery School District, or R.S.D., allowed it to take over any “failing” school in the city, which meant virtually every school in the city except for the selective-admission magnets. Those magnets stayed as part of the rump version of the Orleans Parish School Board, an elected group that before the flood controlled the whole system and now controls just five schools and oversees 12 independently run charters. Two charter schools that existed before Katrina are overseen by the state school board. There are 33 charters under the supervision of the Recovery School District. And finally there are the 34 schools run directly by the R.S.D.

Looked at one way, this jumble is a classic let-a-hundred-flowers-bloom portfolio system. But in practice, the system is inherently unequal, with each network administered by different rules. Most of the Orleans Parish schools and charters admit students on the basis of test scores and writing samples with, in some cases, preference given to residents of the well-off neighborhood surrounding the school. As a result, they include the only public schools in the city with any significant population of middle-class white students. (Those are also the best-performing schools, by a considerable margin.) Recovery School District charters are “open enrollment,” meaning they are required to accept students from anywhere in the city, regardless of academic performance. But the charters can apply some degree of selectivity too, by making the kind of demands that Miller-McCoy’s principals plan to make on Tony Petite; weaker students and students with less academically focused parents sometimes can’t stand the pressure and drop out. The schools run directly by the Recovery district, as a result, are the schools of last resort, the schools required to admit every student: the kids who can’t get into selective schools, the ones who get kicked out of charter schools, the ones who arrive in New Orleans in the middle of the school year, the ones whose parents couldn’t get it together to find them anything better.

Many parents and other observers have charged that the city’s current structure has recreated and, in fact, codified the unfairness of the prestorm system, which was generally perceived to operate on two separate tiers of achievement and opportunity. According to a 2007 report commissioned by a coalition of civic groups, “Community members believe that in the current system, a select group of students has the opportunity to attend high-quality public schools, while the vast majority of students — for the most part poor and minority students — are stuck in low-performing schools in which they have little opportunity for growth and development.” In the Orleans Parish charters, 19 percent of students are deemed “talented and gifted,” compared with 1 percent of students in Recovery School District-run schools and charters.

It is one of the oddities of the organizational structure that governs public-school education in New Orleans today that Pastorek and Vallas, the high-paid hotshots at the top, are responsible for the schools with the biggest problems and the worst test scores, while the schools that are doing best are the ones furthest from their control, the ones they can claim the least credit for. What the two men will tell you, though, is that this is exactly the way things should be. Under a portfolio model, successful schools can be left alone to do their own thing, while failing schools are subject to increasingly active levels of, first, support and then control.

Pastorek and Vallas are employing two parallel strategies for the Recovery School District. First, they’re instituting a series of ambitious reforms in the district-run schools. They have expanded the school day by an hour and a half and are trying to extend the school year from 173 days to 193 days. This year teachers (who are working without a collective bargaining agreement) were each given a $3,000 raise. And in every school, principals and teachers are being trained in the “best practices” of the country’s leading charter schools. One of Vallas’s first acts as superintendent was to offer a prominent position to Gary Robichaux, a Louisiana native who, two weeks before Katrina, opened the first charter in New Orleans associated with the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools, the best-known and arguably the most successful network of charter schools in the country.

Last summer, Vallas persuaded Robichaux to leave his new KIPP school in the French Quarter to oversee the Recovery School District’s elementary and middle schools, and Robichaux is frank now about his intentions for his new job: he wants to apply as much of the KIPP model to the Recovery schools as he can. He has brought dozens of principals to visit the school he used to run, to observe the KIPP model up close, and this summer he conducted mandatory leadership training for the top administrators in each school.

Although Vallas is a believer, in theory, in decentralization, he and Robichaux are providing a great deal of centralized support for the schools in the Recovery School District. They have created a “managed curriculum” for every school in the district to follow: detailed binders that each teacher can consult to see which skills and what knowledge they should be imparting each week and month in order to keep up with the state’s standards. The R.S.D. requires its schools to administer regular “benchmarking” assessments to each child in the district in each core subject, to monitor how much is being learned — and taught — in each classroom.

But at the same time that Pastorek and Vallas and Robichaux are trying to improve the R.S.D.’s direct-run schools, they are also helping to create a competitive framework citywide that will most likely drive many of those schools out of existence. Part of the competition comes from a new voucher program, pushed through by Gov. Bobby Jindal, that will pay for nearly 900 New Orleans elementary-school students to attend private and parochial schools this year. But the more significant lever of change is charters — schools that get public money and are overseen by a government entity but are managed by an independent board. Pastorek, Vallas and Robichaux all say they expect charters to expand their presence in the district, to a point where 75 percent or even 90 percent of the city’s schools are charters.

Their evolving plan would involve both the highest- and the lowest-performing schools in the Recovery School District becoming charters, though in different ways. Principals at high-performing Recovery district schools will be encouraged to apply for a charter that would let them run their schools independently — essentially, to “graduate” out of the control of the district. On the other end of the performance scale, schools that consistently fall short of state standards, even after all of the training and support that Vallas can muster, will be seized by the R.S.D., which will either hand the school over to a new or existing charter-school provider or shut it down and replace it with a new charter school. Failing charter schools will also be taken over or closed down, by having their charters revoked or transferred to another charter provider.

“Over the long haul,” Pastorek explained, “the R.S.D. becomes an instrument that evaluates existing schools, supports existing schools, recommends the closure of schools and recommends the best operator to come in and take over, or the best operator to come in in place of that school. We put people in business, and we take people out of business.”

One obvious potential problem with this vision of an almost entirely charterized district is that charter schools are not magic; on average, nationwide, charters don’t do significantly better than traditional public schools. In New Orleans, however, there are some sound practical reasons for Pastorek and his team to feel confident about the prospects of a large-scale chartering program. A powerful alliance of nonprofits has emerged in the city, supported by money from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and other philanthropies, to recruit and train new charter operators and to help provide them the support and the personnel they need to set up and run consistently high-quality charter schools.

At the center of this alliance is a well-financed organization called New Schools for New Orleans, run by a former KIPP executive and a former Teach for America administrator. This is the group that “incubated” Miller-McCoy Academy for a year, recruiting Hardrick and Sanders from Memphis and providing them with office space, money and expertise during their year of preparation, as well as continuing support as the academy grows. This month, five schools incubated at New Schools for New Orleans will open their doors, including Miller-McCoy; next year there will most likely be four more. The New Orleans office of New Leaders for New Schools, meanwhile, will be training a new group of principals each year; five of the six members of this year’s “class” are going into positions leading charters. Teach for America’s regional operation in Greater New Orleans is growing quickly; its incoming class is the second-largest one in the country after New York City’s. Each year, the group plans to send 50 or more teachers into charters in the Recovery district, where they will serve as a well-educated and highly motivated, if inexperienced, labor force for the start-ups. (At the same time, Teach for America is sending 75 teachers this year into direct-run Recovery schools, where it perceives a greater need.) Finally, a group called teachNOLA recruited about 100 new teachers this year, mostly career-changing professionals, and three-quarters of them will work in charters.

Pastorek acknowledges that for superintendents across the country, shutting down failing schools has proved to be an exceptionally difficult undertaking. Aside from politically damaging visuals — it’s never good to have adorable children marching on your office, carrying signs saying, “Please Save Our School” — it’s hard to shut down even the worst school if you don’t have something effective to replace it with. But Pastorek says he is determined not to flinch when it comes time to “take people out of business.” And the combined force of those four nonprofit human-capital pipelines will make it much easier, in coming years, for him to pull the trigger. Each year, he’ll have a handful of new schools ready to open, each one led by a Gates-financed, fully incubated, KIPP-marinated principal like Sanders or Hardrick — the kind of academic superheroes who before the storm just didn’t come to work in New Orleans in big numbers. Inevitably, he’ll make space for them. And before long, that annual handful will add up. In a city like New York, with its 1,400 public schools, new-school innovations can seem like pebbles tossed into the ocean. But in a city with fewer than 100 schools, 5 or 6 new schools a year will have a big impact. Right now there are probably 100 great charter schools scattered across the country; in a few years, Pastorek and his allies are asking, why can’t there be 100 great charter schools in New Orleans?

Pastorek’s optimism and determination can be inspiring, but he admits that for now, at least, there’s no proof that a portfolio model will do a significantly better job educating poor children than a command-and-control model. When I spoke last month to Diane Ravitch, a historian of education who has spent decades studying and writing about the often dispiriting process of school reform, she said that she was skeptical that a change in the governance model would solve the problems plaguing New Orleans’s schools. “The fundamental issue in American education — I say this after 40 years of having read and studied and written about the problems — is one that is demographic,” she told me. Poor children, Ravitch said, simply face too many problems outside the classroom. “If you don’t buttress whatever happens in school with social and economic changes that give kids a better chance in life and put their families on a more stable footing, then schools alone are not going to solve the problems of poor student performance. There has to be a range of social and economic strategies to support and enhance whatever happens in school.”

Last spring, I paid several visits to a ninth-grade English class on the second floor of Rabouin High, a Recovery School District-run school in downtown New Orleans, just a few blocks from the Superdome. The class was taught by Chelsea Schmitz, a 23-year-old Teach for America corps member who was in her first year as a teacher. Demographically, Schmitz was quite a bit different than her students — white, blond and Midwestern — but she seemed to have built a rapport with them, in part by encouraging them to write about their lives. The students all arrived in her classroom performing well below the mean; at the beginning of the school year, Schmitz gave her ninth-grade students a set of reading-comprehension tests, and only one was able to read above a sixth-grade level, with many scoring significantly below that. But their autobiographical poems were eloquent and powerful.

What was most striking to me, though, reading the poems and listening to the students read them aloud, was the depth of the social dysfunction they described. I expected grisly stories about Katrina and its aftermath, but most of the students wrote about the problems that existed in New Orleans both before and after the storm: friends killed, cousins shot dead, cocaine deals, abusive mothers, fathers in prison. I was impressed with Schmitz’s ability to connect with and motivate her students, some of whom were only a few years younger than she was. But the task in front of her, to turn around the lives of these wounded and poorly educated adolescents, seemed daunting — to me, if not to her.

The long-running national debate over the potential impact of a teacher like Schmitz on the lives of children like the ones she faced at Rabouin resurfaced in June, when on consecutive days, two new advocacy organizations announced their formation, each calling for a very different solution to the problem of underachievement in school by poor minorities. One group called itself the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education; Ravitch was a signatory to that one, and the group’s declaration echoed her belief that schools alone were no match for the problems of inner-city youth. The second group, led by Joel I. Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, and the Rev. Al Sharpton, was called the Education Equality Project; its declaration blamed not social woes but a broken education system for the failure of so many of the nation’s schoolchildren. In the weeks after the announcements, Pastorek and Vallas both added their names to that declaration, and when I met with Pastorek, I asked him about it. What about the other group’s argument? Was it really possible to solve the problems of New Orleans’s children in the classroom without involving other social services and supports?

“It would be convenient to say that it’s a whole lot of other people who need to be part of the equation,” he replied. “But we have the job. And we have to do something.” Pastorek said he didn’t want to fall back on the excuse that he had heard from many other school officials, in Louisiana and elsewhere — that it was impossible to fix their schools until other social problems had first been corrected.

But then he switched direction somewhat. In many ways, he said, he was sympathetic to the Ravitch position. “If we want to really get kids to the level that we want to get them,” he said, “and we want to do it in a more efficient and effective way, then we would be well served if we took care of those kinds of problems — if we provided more resources to kids from conception to early childhood, if we took care of mental-health issues and physical ailments and teeth and eye examinations. Including, you know, where these kids go home to sleep at night. I’ve lived in this community a long time, and I can’t imagine how I could ever feel comfortable in neighborhoods that these kids live in at night. And yet they do, and we still expect them to do well.”

Pastorek paused for a moment. “So, now, can I solve all those problems tomorrow afternoon? Can I even get the attention of the people who have control over those things? Right now, in New Orleans, after Katrina, the answer is no, I can’t. But I can’t take the position that I can’t succeed unless I have those things. I have to take the position that we’re going to do it in spite of that. Now, will it be hard? Will I be less successful? Probably yes. But I have to take that approach, because I don’t have really any other cards to play.”

Ideally, Pastorek told me, he would like to go back to the governor and the Legislature and ask for financing for a more comprehensive approach to the needs of his schoolchildren, but first, he needs to deliver some results with the money he has. “If you want to get these schools from awful to good, you don’t really need to put out much money,” he said. “But if you want to get them from good to great, you have to start spending some money. And that’s where I think we are in the Recovery School District. We’ve got to get our schools from awful to good, and we’ve got to get there on the money that we’ve got, knowing damn good and well that it ain’t enough. But if I can get them from awful to good, then I can command more money so I can get them from good to great. And I can command other resources and other partnerships with these other people who need to be at the table.”

For now, it falls to teachers like Schmitz to do what they can with what they have. At Rabouin, there were metal detectors at the front door and frequent fights in the hallways. The high-tech whiteboard projector, which Vallas had installed in every Recovery district middle- and high-school classroom, was out of order in Schmitz’s room when I visited, and its wires hung down from the ceiling. But Schmitz had set high goals for her classes — she wanted each of her students to move up at least two grade levels in reading scores during the school year — and she worked hard to figure out how to make those goals a reality. She started a 7:30 a.m. “breakfast club” for the students who had shown the most improvement in their schoolwork or their attitude. She invented a reward system in which she handed out raffle tickets, known as Schmitz stubs, for a variety of positive behaviors, from answering a question correctly to helping another student; each Friday, she raffled off prizes like gift certificates to Subway or McDonald’s. At the end of the poetry unit, she took her students out to the Sound Café, a coffeehouse in the Bywater District, where they listened to slam poets and performed their own poems for an audience. She wasn’t able to hold on to all of her students; some moved away from New Orleans, some dropped out. But some flourished.

One Sunday afternoon in May, one of Schmitz’s students, Ronnie Stewart, took me out to see the ruins of the B. W. Cooper public-housing complex, known more commonly as the Calliope projects, where he grew up. He and his family spent seven days trapped in their third-floor apartment by the flood that followed Katrina, until finally they were rescued by a Coast Guard boat. At one point, Stewart told me, when it looked as if help would never come, he and a couple of his cousins had to swim through the oily water that covered Martin Luther King Boulevard to get food and water and diapers for their family from a flooded convenience store. Now the projects are abandoned, surrounded by a tall barbed-wire fence and marked for demolition.

Stewart, who is 18, was a senior; he was taking Schmitz’s class because he never passed ninth-grade English. Before Katrina, he told me, his teachers never pushed him very hard. “They always showed us the easy way to get through something,” he said. “How to get around it. That’s why I think so many people are struggling now, schoolwise. Before the storm, we mostly had teachers just really trying to keep us in high school. No teacher was talking to us about college. But now they are. They’re mostly trying to get us out of high school and into college now.”

Stewart and his classmates gave Schmitz a hard time when she first arrived. “We tried to get over on her, but she always cracked down,” he said. “She was always there for us, always telling me: ‘Ronnie, do your work; Ronnie, what college are you going to? Ronnie, did you call the university?’ I was like, I finally got a teacher that really cares about me.”

The poetry unit had a big impact on Stewart. He wrote a poem called “The Life of a Kid in New Orleans,” describing the violence he had seen growing up: “For me just stepping outside the door of my house means/I am taking the risk of seeing death.” He memorized it and recited it, first for his classmates, then for a group of Schmitz’s fellow Teach for America teachers and finally at the Sound Café.

At Schmitz’s urging, Stewart applied to Southern University at New Orleans; beginning later this month, he plans to study criminal justice, a telling choice for a young man with two close friends in jail, one for rape and the other for murder. “Miss Schmitz showed me that there’s a lot more to the world than this,” he said, gesturing at the crumbling concrete hulks behind him. “If it wasn’t for Miss Schmitz, I wouldn’t be going to college now.”

Earlier this month, the state released test results for every public school in New Orleans. There were signs of improvement: 43 percent of fourth-grade students in Recovery School District charters and district-run schools scored at or above grade level on the state English test, compared with 34 percent in the previous year. But the numbers revealed the great distance New Orleans still has to go; in the percentage of students scoring at or above grade level in 8th-grade math, 12th-grade math and 12th-grade English, not a single R.S.D. charter or district-run school beat the average for Louisiana as a whole — and Louisiana is still among the lowest-performing states in the country. The gap between the system’s different structures remained, too; 89 percent of the Orleans Parish schools matched or surpassed the state average in fourth-grade English, while just 13 percent of Recovery schools did the same.

New Orleans’s newly arrived reformers have set their sights high. New Leaders for New Schools says it hopes that in five years, half of the public schools in the city will be led by principals trained in their system, and they want their principals to attain 90 percent proficiency rates and 90 percent graduation rates within five years of taking the job. Given that proficiency rates in most schools in the Recovery district are currently below 40 percent, those results would represent an educational earthquake. Pastorek’s goals are similarly ambitious; he sees a day in the not-too-distant future when the city’s white children will return to integrate the public-school system, along with the children of the black middle class, all drawn by safer and higher-achieving schools and the introduction of programs like specialized academies and the International Baccalaureate program.

When I spoke to Frederick Hess, an education-policy analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, he cautioned against putting too much emphasis on a complete transformation of the city’s school system. In the early 1990s, Hess worked as a teacher in Baton Rouge, and even then, he said, New Orleans was notorious for running an “abysmal” school district. “So if we’re now in a position where 20 or 40 or 50 percent of kids in New Orleans are attending good or even competent schools,” he said, “that to my mind is a significant win.

“Of course, the folks down there are the last people to plant their flag on improving things for 30 percent of the kids,” he went on. “They’re all world-changers. They’re all straight from the Great Society. That’s great, and I’m glad they’ve got huge ambitions, but the problem is that if they fall somewhat short of their goals, it will be very easy for critics of charter schooling or critics of Vallas or critics of New Leaders for New Schools or Teach for America to seize on the fact that we haven’t seen 100 percent of students served in the way we’d like and to then try to impugn the entire set of reforms.”

To Pastorek, the greater risk is the opposite problem — that people in Louisiana will be comfortable with the modest successes that he expects over the next couple of years. “Right now, a lot of people believe that you just can’t succeed with some kids,” he said. He told me about a recent conversation with a “senior-ranking” state senator who served on the Legislature’s education committee. “He had this idea in mind where we have to have a dual-track system, a track for the kids who are going to make it, and a track for the kids who aren’t going to make it,” he said. “There’s an assumption that there is a group of kids who won’t make it.” A big part of Pastorek’s job, as he sees it, is to convince Louisianans that that isn’t true.

Kira Orange Jones is one of Hess’s world-changers. Born in Co-op City in the Bronx, she joined Teach for America after college and was sent to Baton Rouge, where she spent the next two years teaching fourth grade. She earned a master’s in education from Harvard, and then in 2006 she returned to New York and started work as the head of new-site development for Teach for America. In the spring of 2007, when she was 27, she flew to New Orleans for a two-day conference, and by the end of the second day, she had made the decision to pack up her apartment and move down to run Teach for America’s operation in Greater New Orleans.

When I spoke to Orange Jones last spring, I asked her if she agreed with Hess that there was a danger in setting high expectations for what she and others might achieve in New Orleans. “Yes, there’s a risk,” she said, nodding. “But there’s no real alternative. The reality is that we have a window of opportunity to innovate and to take risks that other places in the country don’t have. But if within a matter of years we aren’t able to produce the results, that window will close. So we need to maximize this moment to do the work that should have been done a long time ago.”

When I asked Paul Vallas what made New Orleans such a promising place for educational reform, he told me that it was because he had no “institutional obstacles” — no school board, no collective bargaining agreement, a teachers’ union with very little power. “No one tells me how long my school day should be or my school year should be,” he said. “Nobody tells me who to hire or who not to hire. I can hire the most talented people. I can promote people based on merit and based on performance. I can dismiss people if they’re chronically nonattending or if they’re simply not performing.”

To Orange Jones, though, questions about the shape of the city’s education bureaucracy — charter versus noncharter, union versus nonunion, centralized or decentralized — were all somewhat beside the point. What really mattered, she said, was the work that was going on in individual classrooms, between teachers and the students who needed their help.

In a few weeks, 250 new college graduates would arrive to begin their assignments teaching in and around New Orleans, and it was Orange Jones’s job to make sure they had everything they needed to connect with their students. During the selection process, she said, she interviewed dozens of them, and those conversations made her feel optimistic. “When I hear the stories of why they’re joining us in New Orleans, it is really powerful,” she said. “They just deeply believe that what we’re taking on in the education realm is feasible.”

Of course, Orange Jones added, that didn’t mean that the job ahead of them would be easy. “The test scores in New Orleans may have been higher this year than they have been in 10 years,” she said. “But the reality is that they’re not nearly as high as they need to be.”

We were sitting in Orange Jones’s office on the sixth floor of K&B Plaza, which looks out on the hotels and office buildings of downtown New Orleans. The rapidly expanding Teach for America staff had moved in just a few days earlier, after outgrowing their previous space, and many of the offices and cubicles were still stacked with boxes. It had been almost exactly a year since Orange Jones arrived in New Orleans, and when she looked around her, all she could see was everything that still had to be done.

“We have a long way to go, frankly,” she said. “I mean, that sort of goes without saying. But we have to start somewhere.”

Paul Tough is an editor at the magazine and the author of “Whatever It Takes: Geoffrey Canada’s Quest to Change Harlem and America,” to be published next month.

April 7th, 2008

In 1983, A Nation at Risk misidentified what is wrong with our public schools and consequently set the nation on a school reform crusade that has done more harm than good.

The diagnosis of the National Commission on Excellence in Education was flawed in three respects: First, it wrongly concluded that student achievement was declining. Second, it placed the blame on schools for national economic problems over which schools have relatively little influence. Third, it ignored the responsibility of the nation’s other social and economic institutions for learning.

As to student achievement: A Nation at Risk based its analysis of declining student achievement entirely on average SAT scores which had dropped by about half a standard deviation from 1963 to 1980. But much of the decline had been due to the changing composition of SAT test takers — in the early 1960s, the preponderance of SAT test takers were high school students planning to apply to the most selective colleges. By 1983, the demographic composition of SAT test takers had mostly stabilized, and average SAT scores were again rising, not declining.[1]

Trend scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) also show a more complex picture than Risk described. In elementary and middle school math, average scores rose for both black and white students, starting in the late 1970s. This trend might not yet have been fully understood by Risk commission members — they might have concluded that the upturn then barely detectable would be short-lived. But the rise has certainly continued subsequent to 1983. Indeed as the figure below shows, for black students, the improvement has been so dramatic that black fourth grade math scores today are now higher than white fourth grade scores in 1978. In other words, if white math achievement had been stagnant, the black-white achievement gap would have been entirely closed. The continued gap is due to substantial improvement in white scores as well.

Eighth grade math scores have also increased since 1978, although not by as much; for twelfth graders, white scores have been stagnant, while black scores had a big increase from 1982 to 1990, and have been stagnant since.

Reading scores are less positive. For whites, reading performance is not substantially better now than in 1978, at the fourth, eighth, or twelfth grade levels. But it is not worse either. For blacks, reading performance is better, but not nearly as much better as in math.

None of this, however, supports the decline thesis of A Nation at Risk.

Because of the report’s doomsday aura, policymakers have mostly failed since 1983 to investigate the causes of these improvements — the obvious, unasked, question is, what were we doing right from 1978 to 1990 (and since), so we can do more of it?

A belief in decline has led to irresponsibility in school reform. Policymakers who believed they could do no harm because American schools were already in a state of collapse have imposed radical reforms without careful consideration of possible unintended adverse consequences. Not thinking that President Reagan’s rule (”if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”) applied to what conservatives and liberals alike assumed was an already broken school system, this irresponsibility reached its zenith in the bipartisan No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law of 2002.

I do not suggest that American schools are adequate, that American students’ level of achievement in math and reading is where it should be, that American schools have been improving as rapidly as they should, or that the achievement gap is narrowing to the extent needed to give us any satisfaction. I only suggest that we should approach fixing a system differently if we believe its outcomes are slowly improving than if we believe it is collapsing. And we owe the latter, flawed assumption, to A Nation at Risk.

Perhaps the greatest damage has been done by narrowing the curriculum in an effort to boost math and reading test scores. The trend is most notable since the enactment of NCLB, as schools have diminished attention to history, civics, the sciences, art, music, physical education, character development, and social skills, to make more instructional time available for test preparation in math and reading. This distortion of the historical breadth of American public school goals has been most pronounced for minority and other disadvantaged children. These are the children who most need a broad curriculum, as well as further gains in math and reading.[2]

Risk, to its credit, worried that “schools may emphasize such rudiments as reading and computation at the expense of other essential skills such as comprehension, analysis, solving problems, and drawing conclusions,” and it asserted, “Our concern, however, goes well beyond matters such as industry and commerce. It also includes the intellectual, moral, and spiritual strengths of our people. . . .”[3] But these caveats were buried beneath the report’s urgent calls to improve the reading and (especially) math skills that purportedly determined the nation’s economic health, and to increase the standardized testing that would spur such improvement.

From an irrational faith in the ability of standardized tests to inspire greater learning, and from an unwillingness to finance more expensive tests that would sample critical thinking as well as basic skills, we’ve again narrowed the curriculum to “minimum competency,” precisely the 1970s standard that A Nation at Risk denounced. From a belief that an alleged decline in student achievement must be attributable to a decline in teacher quality, at best, or to malfeasance (”low expectations”) of teachers, at worst, many districts have attempted to overcome this teacher incompetence by implementing scripted, or nearly so, curricula. We’ve attempted to focus teachers’ attention by a testing regime so rigid that it threatens to destroy teachers’ intrinsic motivation and their ability to address the full range of student difficulties that can only be diagnosed by creative teachers, student-by-student.

Again, this does not suggest that teachers are as well-trained as they should be, as well-motivated as we would like them to be, or as student-oriented as they must be. But it is hard to defend the proposition that teachers, especially those of minority and disadvantaged children, have been sitting around making excuses for poor performance when these children have gained a full standard deviation in test score improvement in a single generation.

As to schools’ responsibility for economic ills:[4] A Nation at Risk claimed that increased market shares for Japanese automobiles, German machine tools, and Korean steel reflected the superior education of those nations’ workers:

Our once unchallenged preeminence in commerce, industry, science, and technological innovation is being overtaken by competitors throughout the world. . . . [T]he educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation. . . .[5]

The report claimed that a “long-term decline in educational achievement” was somehow connected to “a steady 15-year decline in industrial productivity, as one great American industry after another falls to world competition.”[6]

Risk then stimulated a spate of similar reports through the late 1980s and early 1990s, all making similar claims that import penetration could be blamed on poor American education.

For example, in 1990, a group of prominent Democrats and Republicans calling themselves the National Center on Education and the Economy followed with another report, America’s Choice: High Skills or Low Wages. It saw skills development as virtually the only policy lever for shaping the economy. It charged that inadequate skills attained at flawed schools had caused industrial productivity to “slow to a crawl” and would, without radical school reform, lead to permanently low wages for the bottom 70 percent of all Americans.

Leading public intellectuals such as Robert Reich focused attention on human capital solutions in a laissez-faire global system. His book The Work of Nations argued that international competition would be won by nations with the most (and best) “symbolic analysts,” not “routine” workers. Lester Thurow’s Head to Head forecast that Western Europe would come to dominate the United States and Japan economically because European schools were superior. Mainstream economists, both liberal and conservative, agreed that rising wage and income inequality were caused by an acceleration of “skill-biased technological change,” meaning that computerization and other advanced technologies were bidding up the relative value of education, leaving the less-skilled worse off.

Yet the response of American manufacturers to this allegedly education-driven import competition was curious. Automakers moved plants to Mexico, where worker education levels are considerably lower than those in the American Midwest. Meanwhile, Japanese manufacturers pressed their advantage by setting up non-union plants in places like Kentucky and Alabama, states not known for having the best-educated workers. High school graduates in those locations apparently had no difficulty working in teams and adapting to Japanese just-in-time manufacturing methods.

The ink was barely dry on the America’s Choice report when Americans’ ability to master technological change generated an extraordinary decade-long acceleration of productivity, beginning in the mid-1990s and exceeding that of other advanced countries. The productivity leap was accomplished by the very same workforce that the experts claimed imperiled our future. No presidential commissions announced that American schools must be superior to those of Western Europe and Japan, as evidenced by our more rapid productivity growth.

Again, the authors of A Nation at Risk cannot entirely be faulted for assuming that poor education had caused a productivity collapse. The big upturn in productivity growth began after Risk was issued. But it did begin, and productivity advances created new wealth with the potential to support a steady increase in the standards of living of all Americans.

And for a brief period, standards of living did indeed increase, because the fruits of productivity growth were broadly shared. As the chart shows, the late 1990s saw increasing wages for both high school and college graduates.[7]

Even wages of high school dropouts climbed. But no presidential commissions praised American schools for producing widely shared prosperity.

The collapse of the stock bubble in 2000, the recession of the early 2000s, and the intensification of policies hostile to labor brought wage growth to a halt. Living standards again began to decline and inequality zoomed — at the same time that workforce productivity continued to climb. White-collar offshoring to India, China, and other low-wage countries signaled that globalization was now taking its toll on computer programmers and other symbolic analysts of the information age.

Today, however, a new cast of doomsayers has resuscitated an old storyline, picking up where A Nation at Risk left off. Forgetting how wrong such analyses were in the 1980s and ‘90s, the contemporary cliché is that however good schools may once have been, the 21st century makes them obsolete. Global competition requires all students to graduate from high school prepared either for academic college or for technical training requiring equivalent cognitive ability. We can only beat the Asians by being smarter and more creative than they are.

The argument got a boost from New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book, The World is Flat, and has been repeated by the same National Center on Education and the Economy in Tough Choices, a sequel to its 1990 report. The argument has also garnered support from influential foundations such as the Gates Foundation, and its chairman, Bill Gates, and from education advocacy groups such as the American College Testing Program.

The Tough Choices report bemoans the fact that “Indian engineers make $7,500 a year against $45,000 for an American engineer with the same qualifications” and concludes from this that we can compete with the Indian economy only if our engineers are smarter than theirs. This is silly: No matter how good our schools, American engineers won’t be six times as smart as those in the rest of the world. Nonetheless, Marc Tucker, author of Tough Choices (and president of the group that produced the 1990 report as well), asserts, “The fact is that education holds the key to personal and national economic well-being, more now than at any time in our history.”

Administration officials blame workers’ education for middle-class income stagnation. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson contends that “market forces work to provide the greatest rewards to those with the needed skills in the growth areas. This means that those workers with less education and fewer skills will realize fewer rewards and have fewer opportunities to advance.” Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan frequently blamed schools for inequality: “We have not been able to keep up the average skill level in our workforce to match the required increases of increasing technology. . . .”

But these 21st-century claims are as misguided as those of the last century. Of course, we should work to improve schools for the middle class. And we have an urgent need to help more students from disadvantaged families graduate from good high schools. If those students do so, our society can become more meritocratic, with children from low-income and minority families better able to compete for good jobs with children from more privileged homes. But the biggest threats to the next generation’s success come from social and economic policy failures, not schools. And enhancing opportunity requires much more than school improvement.

If A Nation at Risk commissioners could not have known that explosive economic growth was just around the corner, today’s education scolds have no such excuse. Workforce skills continue to generate rising productivity. In the last five years, wages of both high school- and college-educated workers have been stagnant, while productivity grew by a quite healthy 10.4 percent.

Rising workforce skills can indeed make American firms more competitive. But better skills, while essential, are not the only source of productivity growth. The honesty of our capital markets, the accountability of our corporations, our fiscal policy and currency management, our national investment in R&D and infrastructure, and the fair-play of the trading system (or its absence), also influence whether the U.S. economy reaps the gains of Americans’ diligence and ingenuity. The singular obsession with schools deflects political attention from policy failures in those other realms.

But while adequate skills are an essential component of productivity growth, workforce skills cannot determine how the wealth created by national productivity is distributed. That decision is made by policies over which schools have no influence — tax, regulatory, trade, monetary, technology, and labor market policies that modify the market forces affecting how much workers will be paid. Continually upgrading skills and education is essential for sustaining growth as well as for closing historic race and ethnic gaps. It does not, however, guarantee economic success without policies that also reconnect pay with productivity growth.

American middle-class living standards are threatened, not because workers lack competitive skills but because the richest among us have seized the fruits of productivity growth, denying what were historically considered fair shares to the working- and middle-class Americans, educated in American schools, who have created this new national wealth. Over the last few decades, wages of college graduates overall have increased, but some college graduates — managers, executives, white-collar sales workers — have commandeered disproportionate shares, with little left over for scientists, engineers, teachers, computer programmers, and others with high levels of skill. No amount of school reform can undo policies that redirect wealth generated by skilled workers to profits and executive bonuses.

A Nation at Risk gave renewed currency to the claim, now conventional, that the changing nature of work would require radical changes in education:

Computers and computer-controlled equipment are penetrating every aspect of our lives – homes, factories, and offices. . . . [B]y the turn of the century, millions of jobs will involve laser technology and robotics. Technology is rapidly transforming a host of other occupations. They include health care, medical science, energy production, food processing, construction, and the building, repair and maintenance of sophisticated scientific, educational, military, and industrial equipment.[8]

This description is literally true; indeed, it explains much of the dramatic rise in productivity we’ve experienced. But the conclusion that these changes would require radical changes in education was flawed. It ignored the obvious reality that technology de-skills many jobs. Retail clerks now routinely use laser technology to scan bar codes; these clerks no longer need basic arithmetic skills.

College graduates are, in fact, not in short supply. Indeed, some college graduates are now forced to take jobs requiring only high-school educations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that, for the next decade, only 22 percent of job vacancies will require a college degree or more. Forty percent will require only one month or less of on-the-job training, and could be filled by high school graduates or, in many cases, by dropouts — retail salespersons and waiters and waitresses, for example.[9]

In many high-school hallways nowadays, you can find a chart displaying the growing “returns to education” — the ratio of college to high-school graduates’ wages.[10]

The idea is to impress on youths the urgency of going to college and the calamity that will befall those who don’t. The data are real — college graduates do earn more than high-school graduates, and the gap is substantially greater than it was a few decades ago.

But it is too facile to conclude that this ratio proves a shortage of college graduates.

The denominator — the falling real wages of high-school graduates — has played a bigger part in boosting the college-to-high-school wage ratio than has the numerator — an unmet demand for college graduates. Important causes of this decline of high school graduates’ wages have been the weakening of labor market institutions, such as the minimum wage and unions, which once boosted the pay of high school-educated workers.

For the first time in a decade, the minimum wage was recently increased. The curious result will be a statistical decline in “returns to education.” But we should not conclude from a minimum-wage increase that we need fewer college graduates, any more than we should have concluded from falling wages for high-school graduates that college graduates are scarce and schools are failing.

Another too glib canard is that our education system used to be acceptable because students could graduate from high school (or even drop out) and still support families with good manufacturing jobs. Today, those jobs are vanishing, and with them the chance of middle-class incomes for those without good educations.

It’s true that many manufacturing jobs have disappeared. Replacements have mostly been equally unskilled or semiskilled jobs in service and retail sectors. There was never anything more inherently valuable about working in a factory assembly line than about changing bed linens in a hotel. What once made semiskilled manufacturing jobs desirable was that many (though not most) were protected by unions, provided pensions and health insurance, and compensated with decent wages. That today’s working class doesn’t get similar protections has nothing to do with the adequacy of its education, but everything to do with policy decisions stemming from the value we place on equality. Hotel jobs that pay $20 an hour, with health and pension benefits (rather than $10 an hour without benefits) typically do so because of union organization, not because maids earned bachelor’s degrees.

It is cynical to tell millions of Americans who work (and who will continue to be needed to work) in low-level administrative jobs and in janitorial, food-service, hospitality, transportation, and retail industries that their wages have stagnated because their educations are inadequate for international competition. The quality of our civic, cultural, community, and family lives demands school improvement, but barriers to unionization are a more important cause of low wages than the quality of workers’ education.

Fortunately, the elite consensus on education as a cure-all seems now to be collapsing. Offshoring of high-tech jobs has deeply undercut the Clinton-era metaphor of an education-fueled transition to the information age, since it is all too apparent that college educations and computer skills do not insulate Americans from globalization’s downsides. Former Clinton economic advisor (and Federal Reserve vice chairman) Alan Blinder has emerged as an establishment voice calling attention to the potentially large-scale impact of continued offshoring. Blinder stresses that the distinction between American jobs likely to be destroyed by international competition and those likely to survive, is not one of workers’ skills or education. “It is unlikely that the services of either taxi drivers or airline pilots will ever be delivered electronically over long distances. . . . Janitors and crane operators are probably immune to foreign competition; accountants and computer programmers are not.”[11]

These are not problems that can be solved by vouchers, charter schools, teacher accountability, or any other school intervention. A balanced human capital policy would involve schools, but would require tax, regulatory, and labor market reforms as well.

As to the relative responsibility of schools: A Nation at Risk was issued in 1983, a decade after the nation’s postwar narrowing of social and economic inequality had ended. By the time of the report, income was becoming less evenly distributed. The real value of the minimum wage was falling and the share of the workforce with union protection was declining. Progress towards integration had halted and, as William Julius Wilson noted in The Truly Disadvantaged, published only half a dozen years later, the poorest black children were becoming isolated in dysfunctional inner-city communities to an extent not previously seen in American social history.

Social and economic disadvantage contributes in important ways to poor student achievement. Children in poor health attend quality schools less regularly. Those with inadequate housing change schools frequently, disrupting not only their own educations but those of their classmates. Children whose parents are less literate and whose homes have less rich intellectual environments enter school already so far behind that they rarely can catch up. Parents under severe economic stress cannot provide the support children need to excel. And, as Wilson described, children in neighborhoods without academically successful role models are less likely to develop academic ambitions themselves.[12]

These nonschool influences on academic achievement were known to the commissioners who authored A Nation at Risk. The Coleman Report of 1966, still a major document of recent research history, had concluded that family background factors were more important influences on student achievement variation than school quality.[13] In 1972 and 1979, Christopher Jencks and his colleagues had published two widely noticed reassessments of Coleman, Inequality and Who Gets Ahead?, both of which confirmed the Coleman Report’s central finding. Yet the National Commission on Excellence in Education, in preparation for its Nation at Risk report, commissioned 40 research studies from the leading academic researchers in the nation, and not one of these was primarily devoted to the social and economic factors that affect learning.

Most remarkably, A Nation at Risk concluded with a brief “Word to Parents and Students,” acknowledging that schools alone could not reverse the alleged decline in academic performance. It urged parents to be a “living example of what you expect your children to honor and emulate… You should encourage more diligent study and discourage satisfaction with mediocrity. . . .”[14] This was the report’s only reference to nonschool factors that influence learning.

A Nation at Risk therefore changed the national conversation about education from the Coleman-Jencks focus on social and economic influences to an assumption that schools alone could raise and equalize student achievement. The distorted focus culminated in the No Child Left Behind legislation of 2002, demanding that school accountability alone for raising test scores should raise achievement to never-before-attained levels, and equalize outcomes by race and social class as well.

A Nation at Risk was well-intentioned, but based on flawed analyses, at least some of which should have been known to the commission that authored it. The report burned into Americans’ consciousness a conviction that, evidence notwithstanding, our schools are failures, and warped our view of the relationship between schools and economic well-being. It distracted education policymakers from insisting that our political, economic, and social institutions also have a responsibility to prepare children to be ready to learn when they attend school.

There are many reasons to improve American schools, but declining achievement and international competition are not good arguments for doing so. Asking schools to improve dramatically without support from other social and economic institutions is bound to fail, as a quarter century of experience since A Nation at Risk has demonstrated.

Notes

[1] Willard Wirtz, et. al. 1977. On Further Examination: Report of the Advisory Panel on the Scholastic Aptitude Test Score Decline. Princeton, N.J.: College Board Publications; Albert E. Beaton, Albert E., Thomas L. Hilton, and William B. Shrader, 1977. Changes in the Verbal Abilities of High School Seniors, College Entrants, and SAT Candidates Between 1960 and 1972. See my more extensive discussion in Richard Rothstein. 1998. The Way We Were? The Myths and Realities of America’s Student Achievement. New York: The Century Foundation.

[2] For further discussion of goal distortion in American education, see Richard Rothstein and Rebecca Jacobsen. 2006. “The Goals of Education.” Phi Delta Kappan 88 (4), December.

[3] National Commission on Excellence in Education. 1983. A Nation at Risk. The Imperative for Education Reform. U.S. Government Printing Office (http://www.ed.gov/pubs/NatAtRisk/risk.html). (hereinafter, “Risk”) p. 10, p. 7.

[4] This section was co-authored by Lawrence Mishel, and adapted in part from “Schools as Scapegoats” by Lawrence Mishel and Richard Rothstein in The American Prospect, October 2007.

[5] Risk, p. 5.

[6] Risk, p. 17-18.

[7] “The Productivity-Pay Gap” calculated and illustrated by Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute.[8] Risk, p. 10.

[9] Arlene Dohm and Lynn Schniper, 2007. “Occupational Employment Projections to 2016,” Monthly Labor Review, November.

[10] “Returns to Education” from Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Sylvia Allegretto, 2007. The State of Working America 2006/2007. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

[11] Alan S.Blinder. 2006. “Offshoring: The Next Industrial Revolution?” Foreign Affairs 85 (2): March/April

[12] I have discussed these issues in Class and Schools (Teachers College Press, 2004).

[13] Coleman, James S., and Ernest Q. Campbell, Carol J. Hobson, James McPartland, Alexander M. Mood, Frederic D. Weinfeld and Rober L. York, 1966. Equality of Educational Opportunity. Washington,D.C.: U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, Government Printing Office

[14] Risk, p. 35.

Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute.

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“The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself.” Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today’s very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble — in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

This is the last subject that any candidate would dare raise on the long and winding road to the White House. It is almost impossible to talk about the manner in which public ignorance contributes to grave national problems without being labeled an “elitist,” one of the most powerful pejoratives that can be applied to anyone aspiring to high office. Instead, our politicians repeatedly assure Americans that they are just “folks,” a patronizing term that you will search for in vain in important presidential speeches before 1980. (Just imagine: “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain . . . and that government of the folks, by the folks, for the folks, shall not perish from the earth.”) Such exaltations of ordinariness are among the distinguishing traits of anti-intellectualism in any era.

The classic work on this subject by Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” was published in early 1963, between the anti-communist crusades of the McCarthy era and the social convulsions of the late 1960s. Hofstadter saw American anti-intellectualism as a basically cyclical phenomenon that often manifested itself as the dark side of the country’s democratic impulses in religion and education. But today’s brand of anti-intellectualism is less a cycle than a flood. If Hofstadter (who died of leukemia in 1970 at age 54) had lived long enough to write a modern-day sequel, he would have found that our era of 24/7 infotainment has outstripped his most apocalyptic predictions about the future of American culture.

Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture (and by video, I mean every form of digital media, as well as older electronic ones); a disjunction between Americans’ rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism.

First and foremost among the vectors of the new anti-intellectualism is video. The decline of book, newspaper and magazine reading is by now an old story. The drop-off is most pronounced among the young, but it continues to accelerate and afflict Americans of all ages and education levels.

Reading has declined not only among the poorly educated, according to a report last year by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1982, 82 percent of college graduates read novels or poems for pleasure; two decades later, only 67 percent did. And more than 40 percent of Americans under 44 did not read a single book — fiction or nonfiction — over the course of a year. The proportion of 17-year-olds who read nothing (unless required to do so for school) more than doubled between 1984 and 2004. This time period, of course, encompasses the rise of personal computers, Web surfing and video games.

Does all this matter? Technophiles pooh-pooh jeremiads about the end of print culture as the navel-gazing of (what else?) elitists. In his book “Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter,” the science writer Steven Johnson assures us that we have nothing to worry about. Sure, parents may see their “vibrant and active children gazing silently, mouths agape, at the screen.” But these zombie-like characteristics “are not signs of mental atrophy. They’re signs of focus.” Balderdash. The real question is what toddlers are screening out, not what they are focusing on, while they sit mesmerized by videos they have seen dozens of times.

Despite an aggressive marketing campaign aimed at encouraging babies as young as 6 months to watch videos, there is no evidence that focusing on a screen is anything but bad for infants and toddlers. In a study released last August, University of Washington researchers found that babies between 8 and 16 months recognized an average of six to eight fewer words for every hour spent watching videos.

I cannot prove that reading for hours in a treehouse (which is what I was doing when I was 13) creates more informed citizens than hammering away at a Microsoft Xbox or obsessing about Facebook profiles. But the inability to concentrate for long periods of time — as distinct from brief reading hits for information on the Web — seems to me intimately related to the inability of the public to remember even recent news events. It is not surprising, for example, that less has been heard from the presidential candidates about the Iraq war in the later stages of the primary campaign than in the earlier ones, simply because there have been fewer video reports of violence in Iraq. Candidates, like voters, emphasize the latest news, not necessarily the most important news.

No wonder negative political ads work. “With text, it is even easy to keep track of differing levels of authority behind different pieces of information,” the cultural critic Caleb Crain noted recently in the New Yorker. “A comparison of two video reports, on the other hand, is cumbersome. Forced to choose between conflicting stories on television, the viewer falls back on hunches, or on what he believed before he started watching.”

As video consumers become progressively more impatient with the process of acquiring information through written language, all politicians find themselves under great pressure to deliver their messages as quickly as possible — and quickness today is much quicker than it used to be. Harvard University’s Kiku Adatto found that between 1968 and 1988, the average sound bite on the news for a presidential candidate — featuring the candidate’s own voice — dropped from 42.3 seconds to 9.8 seconds. By 2000, according to another Harvard study, the daily candidate bite was down to just 7.8 seconds.

The shrinking public attention span fostered by video is closely tied to the second important anti-intellectual force in American culture: the erosion of general knowledge.

People accustomed to hearing their president explain complicated policy choices by snapping “I’m the decider” may find it almost impossible to imagine the pains that Franklin D. Roosevelt took, in the grim months after Pearl Harbor, to explain why U.S. armed forces were suffering one defeat after another in the Pacific. In February 1942, Roosevelt urged Americans to spread out a map during his radio “fireside chat” so that they might better understand the geography of battle. In stores throughout the country, maps sold out; about 80 percent of American adults tuned in to hear the president. FDR had told his speechwriters that he was certain that if Americans understood the immensity of the distances over which supplies had to travel to the armed forces, “they can take any kind of bad news right on the chin.”

This is a portrait not only of a different presidency and president but also of a different country and citizenry, one that lacked access to satellite-enhanced Google maps but was far more receptive to learning and complexity than today’s public. According to a 2006 survey by National Geographic-Roper, nearly half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 do not think it necessary to know the location of other countries in which important news is being made. More than a third consider it “not at all important” to know a foreign language, and only 14 percent consider it “very important.”

That leads us to the third and final factor behind the new American dumbness: not lack of knowledge per se but arrogance about that lack of knowledge. The problem is not just the things we do not know (consider the one in five American adults who, according to the National Science Foundation, thinks the sun revolves around the Earth); it’s the alarming number of Americans who have smugly concluded that they do not need to know such things in the first place. Call this anti-rationalism — a syndrome that is particularly dangerous to our public institutions and discourse. Not knowing a foreign language or the location of an important country is a manifestation of ignorance; denying that such knowledge matters is pure anti-rationalism. The toxic brew of anti-rationalism and ignorance hurts discussions of U.S. public policy on topics from health care to taxation.

There is no quick cure for this epidemic of arrogant anti-rationalism and anti-intellectualism; rote efforts to raise standardized test scores by stuffing students with specific answers to specific questions on specific tests will not do the job. Moreover, the people who exemplify the problem are usually oblivious to it. (“Hardly anyone believes himself to be against thought and culture,” Hofstadter noted.) It is past time for a serious national discussion about whether, as a nation, we truly value intellect and rationality. If this indeed turns out to be a “change election,” the low level of discourse in a country with a mind taught to aim at low objects ought to be the first item on the change agenda.

info@susanjacoby.com

Susan Jacoby’s latest book is “The Age of American Unreason.”