"No other people," wrote Henry Steele Commager, themost widely read American historian of the generation following World War II,"ever demanded so much of schools and of education as have the American. Noneother was ever so well served by its schools and its educators." A lot of us,bombarded by the educational controversies and the ongoing schools-are-failingrhetoric of the past two decades, may now find Commager's words a littlequaint--even preposterous--either because he was writing about some long-gonegolden age or because he got carried away by his own celebratory fervor.
The four-part PBS documentary School: The Story ofAmerican Public Education, which will air September 3 and 4, is an ambitious attempt to show Americans how accurate Commager's assessment was and still is. No institution--certainly no cultural institution--is more pervasive, more deeply embedded in the history and hopes of our democracy, or more central to our debates about that democracy than public education. For all its shortcomings, to paraphrase Commager, none other has delivered so much. School has been America's great secular religion.
Produced by Sarah Patton and Sarah Mondale and written by Sheila CurranBernard, School breaks no new historical ground; too often it presumes that its viewers are only dimly aware of the complex and rich history of American education. Nonetheless, the program offers an important overview, plus a superb collection of archival photos and film clips that lend it a rare depth and human dimension.
Each of School's four segments covers one historical period, beginning with Horace Mann's crusade in the 1840s to establish free common schools for all children, continuing through the great era of urban growth and immigration, and ending with our latter-day debates about standards, testing, privatization, and vouchers. Here we see the nineteenth-century struggles, particularly by Catholics, to obtain secular instruction free of a "nonsectarian" (read Protestant) slant, and the fights, beginning in Boston in the mid-1800s, for racial integration and equal treatment in public schools not only for African Americans but for Latinos, American Indians, and, eventually, women. Many of these stories--for example, the successful battle by Mexican-American students and their parents in the late 1960s to end the blatant racism in the schools of Crystal City, Texas, and get something approaching respect--go far beyond educational issues: They're landmarks of American democracy.
The series devotes considerable attention to the controversies, particularlyin the first half of the twentieth century, over child-centered andactivity-focused progressive education--the first great model was in Gary,Indiana, in 1906--and to the checkered career of intelligence testing and theracial assumptions of those who pioneered it. It reminds us of the class-basedtracking of the elite into college-prep programs and others, mostly minoritiesand the poor, into dead-end courses, thus revealing the dubious pedigree of mostaptitude testing. It also spends a lot of time covering the push for higherstandards and accountability that's marked much of the past two decades.
But perhaps the most telling element of the story--often neglected or evendisparaged in this era of multiculturalism--is the part on the acculturation ofthe children of immigrants. School, says the literary critic Alfred Kazin in awonderful interview conducted not long before his death, was supposed to "get usout of the barbarism of our immigrant background.... School made you love thelanguage." And throughout there are those wonderful photos: kids caning chairs atJohn Dewey's lab school in Chicago (1900), students serving tea in a homemakingclass (1923), a "toothbrush drill" in a New York City school (1920), thestill-too-familiar clips of haters outside southern schoolhouse doors as thefirst integrated black students are escorted through the mob.
All the bases are covered, either by the narration read by the actress MerylStreep and the accompanying photos, clips, letters, and recollections (thesedays, it seems that Ken Burns is everywhere) or by the half-dozen talking heads,most of them historians and critics of education, who appear on camera and havecontributed useful supplementary essays to the series' accompanying book (alsotitled School).
Yet something is missing. the program ties each of its fourchronological eras to a theme. The section on 1950-1980, for instance, is aboutintegration and equal access. The part covering the past two decades focuses onthe testing-and-accountability movement, which the documentary not quiteaccurately says began with A Nation at Risk, the 1983 report of PresidentReagan's National Commission on Excellence in Education. In American education,there are few entirely new issues: There is a circularity about our schooldebates--something that the program's structure tends to conceal.
Neither the call for tougher standards--often issued incrisis terms--nor the claim that schools are failing the country because they aretoo academically flabby is anything new. In 1957, after the launching of Sputnik,schools were blamed for not producing the scientists and engineers the nationneeded. If the schools didn't shape up, the Russians would beat our brains out inthe Cold War. A few decades later, A Nation at Risk described our schools' alleged failures as unilateral economic disarmament; this time if they didn't shape up, the Germans and Japanese would beat our brains out. Now, critics of drill-and-kill instruction and high-stakes testing often echo progressive criticism of education that has reverberated for more than a century and that in some ways reflects a romantic sensibility about children that goes back at least to Rousseau.
Beneath all that is a fundamental American ambivalence: Should we pursuerigorous standards and unforgiving demands that kids and schools perform, or arewe committed to democratic inclusiveness and unlimited second chances? Thisquestion, too, gets lost in School. The talking heads--from Chester Finn, Jr.,and Diane Ravitch, thoughtful conservatives who served in the Reaganadministration, to writer and test critic Nicholas Lemann and Stanford Universityhistorian Larry Cuban, both of whom are on the moderate left--reflect some ofthat ambivalence, but somehow the interview excerpts that made it into theprogram soften their differences. There seems to be a conscious preference forsmooth narrative over philosophical conflict.
Except for racism and the shortage of resources, we don't hear much about theforces and attitudes that stand in the way of school-reform efforts: theteachers' unions that have resisted differential pay, the seniority rules thatmake it hard to assign experienced educators to underperforming schools, theknow-nothings who fight evolution and sex education and scour school librariesfor witches and signs of secular humanism, the local boosters who are notaltogether sure whether there's any need to make the high-school quarterback passalgebra before he can play on Friday night, and the long and honored history ofan anti-intellectualism that never really had much use for anything that soughtto reward academic distinction.
Speaking about the similarity of earlier business demands that schools producea trained workforce and recent efforts of business leaders to institutecorporate-model accountability standards in schools and to impose test-centeredinstruction, Cuban points to the recurrent themes in school reform. In hissupplementary essay, he raises a number of related questions: "Do schools gearedto preparing workers also build literate, active, and morally sensitive citizenswho carry out their civic duties? What happens when the economy hiccups,unemployment increases, and graduates have little money to secure highereducation or find a job matched to their skills? Will public schools, now an armof the economy, get blamed--as they have in the past--for creating the mismatch?"He concludes: "These basic questions, unasked by business-inspired reformcoalitions over the past century, go unanswered today."
As do many others. We are fighting over a lot of the same things ineducation--race, religion, testing, standards--that, in one way or another, we'vefought over almost since the beginning. But this point gets buried in a narrativesometimes afflicted with a passivity of tone that makes the progress of Americanpublic education sound like a seamless whole rather than the messy, uncertain,contentious thing it often is. Current debates about such issues as testing,curricula, and phonics in the teaching of reading should have been more sharplyanalyzed. Ravitch, our most articulate critic of progressivism, isn't reallyallowed to state her case in this series. It would have been nice if she had.
Yet School's documentation of the progress that has been made is powerful andmoving: its periodic recording, for example, of the growth in school enrollmentover time and the increase in the number of years the average student stays inschool, and the stories of how hard Americans fought to create the free commonschools and then to ensure their children's right to attend and to be respectedregardless of race, gender, or class. All of this underscores a strong faith,throughout much of our nation's history, in the centrality of the public school.In their implicit contention that the institution is too casually maligned bypoliticians and editorialists, Patton, Mondale, Bernard, and their colleagueshave succeeded admirably.
Although huge flaws and inequities remain in our educational system--in resources, in achievement, in opportunity--the common school remains thequintessential institution of our democracy. There is no real alternative. Aslate as 1950, the average child didn't go past ninth grade; fewer than 14 percentof blacks had a high-school diploma; kids in 17 southern states went tosegregated schools that were inherently unequal. A half-century later, we beginto take at least the first two years of college almost as a matter of right forall Americans.
Mann dreamed about "a free school system (that) knows no distinction." Hewrote: "Education, beyond all other devices of human origin, is a great equalizerof the conditions of men--the balance wheel of the social machinery." We aren'tthere yet, but School reminds us of how far we've come. Surely a littlecelebration is in order.
