Designed to Fail - Education in America: Part Four

part one   part two   part three    part five

Social Reproduction.

"The basic reproductionist argument was that schools were not exceptional institutions promoting equality of opportunity; instead they reinforced the inequalities of social structure and cultural order found in a given country. How they were understood to do so depended on the theoretical perspective of analysts, the sites they prioritized for study, and a varying emphasis on top-down structural determination versus bottom-up agency by individuals or small groups. Early research on educational reproduction provided structuralist accounts, identifying systematic features of language, culture, and political economy, which were reflected in the conduct and organization of classrooms and curricula and assigned a causal role in perpetuating linguistic, cultural, and economic inequalities (Bernstein 1975, Bourdieu and Passeron 1977, Bowles and Gintis 1976)."

"Although the reproductive thesis is simple to state in academic terms, it has been and continues to be quite unpalatable to many of those who work in schools or educational systems more generally (Rothstein 2004). This is probably because it presents a direct challenge to meritocratic assumptions and seems to dash egalitarian aspirations. Early arguments and analyses of reproduction were also of their era, the 1960s and early 1970s, when economic and social stability seemed more secure than it has in recent decades. They were also formulated with a structuralist intellectual confidence that has not survived the intervening decades of reflexive, postmodern uncertainty (Bauman 1997). By the early 1990s, there was a turning away from arguments about social reproduction and education, whether focused on economic, cultural, or linguistic dimensions. This is puzzling in some respects because the problem of inequality remains a central feature of the contemporary world, within nations and on a global scale (Henwood 2003; Stiglitz 2002), and the centrality of straightforward economic factors in school performance appears little changed over more than 40 years (Coleman 1966, U.S. Dep. Educ. 2001)." - James Collins, Social Reproduction in Classrooms and Schools (2009)

"This is probably because it presents a direct challenge to meritocratic assumptions and seems to dash egalitarian aspirations." Indeed. Social Reproduction is not commonly discussed in American education, and the socially reproductive systemic designs of Henry Barnard and Ellwood Cubberley are not discussed - even by the type of elite educational leadership which resides at Stanford University, perhaps because it is(a) so uncomfortable, (b) so challenging to American Civil Religion, and (c) because it makes education seem, in deep ways, hopeless.

But how do we solve the persistent problems if we refuse to engage the basic issues?

Say what I will about Diane Ravitch, and say it I have (welcoming her to the fight, but still very bitter over the damage she and her collaborators wrought in the 1980s and 1990s), but when she tweeted on Sunday night, "Focus on teacher evaluation is red herring spurred by Billionaire Boys Club & Duncan to avoid social, econ[omic] issues," she was absolutely right.

In fact, today's "educational reformers" will discuss absolutely everything except the system of American education and its social reproductivity. They will argue for and against teacher training (teachers are not well-trained enough, six weeks of Teach for America training is plenty), for and against increased teacher pay (it is essential, teachers are paid too much), for and against privatization (we must use the business model, federal involvement in education is required), but they will not touch the essential unfairness of American society or its economic system.

America had better things to do with its lower class children than to educate them.
Child coal mine workers, 1900

And so both Ellwood Cubberley and Social Reproduction have vanished from the conversation, and even those who should really know better, like to trumpet the memory of Woodrow Wilson - a clueless racist whose international naiveté led directly to World War II - and the "progress" of his age. It is, of course, the progress of the Wilsonian age, the conceits of White American superiority and our belief in measuring the world against that, which still bedevils us almost a century later.

It is important to recall that the system designed was never intended to educate all equally, and the structure developed was designed to ensure that.

The Eton lads get their education,
so do the kids at Sidwell Friends

When Wilson said, "We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks," we know which groups were automatically consigned to the latter class - African-Americans, Catholics, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and anyone who would today be considered "disabled."

In fact, the system was designed to fail most, dumping three-quarters of students before they ever reached high school. The Prussian System of age-based grades replaced the individually structured, multi-age, peer tutored one-room schoolhouse model because it would give students the means to defeat students who might learn at a different rate. The accompanying industrialized model of mass education was created to consign non-compliant students to the lowest paying jobs in society. The results were clear. On the verge of American entry in World War II only 25% of Americans had completed high school, and less than 5% had completed college. It would only be after the liberalization of education and the integration of the 1960s that high school graduation rates would cross the 50% mark. Students, then as now, fell behind when measured against the "ideal" standards of "age-based" learning, and, unable to catch up in the graded, age-segregated system, dropped out as soon as that was possible or legal.

America, in the century after 1840, as Wilson, Cubberley, Adams, and Barnard all said, needed little in the way of 'distributed leadership' and - from the top - wanted less. Unschooled tinkerers (Edison, Ford) were one thing, but an educated population - as Germany and France were proving - and land-grant education in the US was suggesting - seemed to create socialists, and union leaders, and potentially an angrier agricultural class which might overturn the system. [1]

So that imported Prussian System, with its age-based steps and grade-level standards, was introduced as a filtering system.  As Jefferson had noted at the start of the 19th Century, the separation by ages would find the gems and give the rest, "an education proportional to the condition and the pursuits of his life," which, in the Social Darwinism of Wilson and Cubberley's time, meant the capabilities to be a miner, a millworker, a railroad construction crew member, a shipyard worker. Get to eighth grade (or not) and you went to one of those laboring jobs. Get through high school and you could work on Main Street. That five percent who went to college - they would lead.

Setting the standards for those age-based grades, then as now, was critical to maintaining the nation's class structure.

The standards? It is difficult to imagine how, if the age-based standards are accurate measures of anything, the majority of children could be "below grade level." Since all of our achievement levels, from the IQ test through every large assessment, is based in an "age-based norm" - shouldn't that "norm" at least be the median?

67% of Fourth Graders are at or below "proficient" for reading. How is "proficient" defined for this age?

Yes, it is "a median," but not "the median." The age-based standards are developed based on upper-middle-class white children living in suburbs or expensive urban neighborhoods and functioning "normally" - that is, without "disability," without language issues, without safety issues, without poverty issues, without family stress, etc. The class Wilson and Cubberley were willing to educate in the days of the Great War, are still the socio-economic class we create schools for.

And this is exactly what the powerful get out of an education system designed to fail: They get (a) to control the measuring devices and design them for themselves, and they get to (b) reduce economic competition.

By establishing "measuring sticks" which declare their own superiority, the wealthy and powerful - the Ivy Leaguersof America - get to win before the race they so enjoy is run. And by winning, they get to preserve the fruits of victory for themselves and their offspring - the best schools, the Ivy League educations [2], the top-paying jobs in the economy, and the agenda-setting jobs in government.

[Considering top university admissions, "the odds of getting into the pool of credible candidates for admission to a selective college or university are six times higher for a child from a high-income family than for a child from a poor family; they are more than seven times higher for a child from a college-educated family than they are for a child who would be a first-generation college- goer," While at Ivy League and 'Ivy equivalent" institutions, "Low-income students constituted about 11 percent of those admitted to the nineteen institutions that were studied; first-time college goers made up 6 percent. Students who fit both categories made up just 3 percent of enrollment at these schools, even though such students represent roughly 19 percent of the U.S. college-age population."]

In simple terms, the system works remarkably well for those who currently have wealth and power. When people decry the educational system in the United States they are really not discussing Scarsdale, New York or Greenwich, Connecticut or Sidwell Friends in Washington or Evanston, Illinois or Santa Barbara, California or St. Ann's in Brooklyn. All of these schools do fine, public or private, unionized or not, longer or shorter school days/years, and no matter the teacher pay structure.

The schools which are struggling - and educators, from William Alcott then to Deven Black, Alice Mercer, Dan McGuire, Dave Britten now, know this - are struggling because of a lack of resources, and/or having differing resources - in the students' homes, in the community, and in the school itself. The students "in trouble" rarely enter with fewer skills, they enter with different skills, built to function in a different environment.

Here is the "colonial" issue: The English child raised on the estate in Essex, with parents speaking "The Queen's English," begins that "race to the top" half-way there. This child knows the language, the rules of rugby, the proper way to drink tea. The child growing up in Derry or Bombay, Lagos or Port Elizabeth, comes with differing language, differing sport, differing eating habits. If school is about that British language, those British customs, and those British manners, the children from "the colonies" begin way behind. Unless that kid from Essex falls asleep under a tree, as in The Tortoise and the Hare, and has no one to wake him up, it is simply inconceivable that the colonial kids will ever catch up.The best they can hope for, if they run all their lives, is to be second-class Brits.

Michelle Rhee laughs about
taping kids' mouths shut, and her audience
laughs with her.

Similarly, the child raised in Scarsdale or Greenwich or Santa Barbara, or at Sidwell or St. Ann's, begins the race more than half-way there. They know the language, the rules of classroom play (including how to bully), the proper way for a parent's note to excuse them from work or school itself. And if they mess up, they have the resources to escape any trouble. The child attending school with Deven or Alice, Dan or Dave, knows how to navigate city streets, often how to function on a highly adult level, often how to be their own caregivers, how to communicate in a wide range of circumstances. But they do not know what that first group of kids knows, and if they get into trouble they are on their own, and if they are abused, people will joke about it. So unless the kids in Scarsdale or Greenwich or Santa Barbara, or at Sidwell or St. Ann's die, the best these colonial kids can be, if they run all their lives, is second-class Americans.

The problem is, if these "colonial" schools leveraged these differing entry abilities, and supported differing learning paths with equitable resources, then the path to homogeneity, to the "one America" - behaving consistently no matter what race or ethnicity or national origin, would not come into existence. Remember Francis Adams? "The school has more to do than to educate the children: it is the mill, so to speak, into which go children of English, Scotch, Irish, German, Russian, Italian, and Scandinavian parents, and come out Americans. Africa contributes its negroes, and now Asia is sending its Chinese. All must learn English, and the result will soon be that the population of the United States will be the most homogeneous of nations." And this was echoed Monday morning by NBC's David Gregory and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie: "@GovChristie: RT @davidgregory: Education reform is a new form of patriotism; it's not just about our kids but our country." About our country, yes, but not about learning or our children, rather, it is about U.S. worker consistency and national "competitiveness." The perspective comes from the U.S. Secretary of Education, who opened the "Education Nation" conversation by saying, "What the president fundamentally gets is we have to educate our way to a better economy."

And yes, if the colonial children could leverage what they bring to school, if they might find their own path to success rather than stumbling along in another's wake, well they might not just compete, they might come out on top (see Irish Literature within the English language for proof of this).

So that path is blocked. While "white" kids get creativity and stories in their early grades, teaching them about the world and giving them dreams, "poor" kids get KIPP and scripted instruction, chants and memorizations. If they ever get past that, they find themselves so far behind their "white" peers that continuing the race seems genuinely hopeless.

Next: What we know and why the U.S. isn't doing it...

- Ira Socol

[1] The one place in 19th Century America where the need for 'distributed leadership' was seen as essential, the U.S. Army and U.S. Navy, ran their own institutions of higher education.

[2] I'm not much of a Gladwell fan - doubting his typical statistical analyses, but this is an interesting meta-analysis of Ivy League admissions - and consequences. You might also want to read Atkinson and Pelfrey on the question of Ivy League admissions, also Caroline Hodges Persell and Peter W. Cookson, Jr. "Chartering and Bartering: Elite Education and Social Reproduction" - Social Problems Vol. 33, No. 2 (Dec., 1985), pp. 114-129, and Paul William Kingston and John C. Smart. "The Economic Pay-Off of Prestigious Colleges."

Designed to Fail - Education in America: Part Two

part one     part three    part four    part five

How did the United States go from this:

"One error still prevails to a ruinous extent, namely: the neglect of cultivating and developing the powers of the mind, while every thing is attempted to be done by taxing memory with the weight of names and abstractions, allowing no play for thought, and exciting no interest whatever in the child's mind. It seems as if many of our teachers and book makers, from the highest to the lowest depart, ments, forget that children have minds, and suppose that the only powers they will ever possess, are to be imparted by teachers, whereas the teacher ought to know that he cannot impart a single iota of power. The most he can do, is, to develop powers already in existence, and because the attempt has been made rather to create than to cultivate, the mind of man has, in many cases, been actually cramped and weakened rather than strengthened at school." - Report of Mr. Lewis, Superintendent of Common Schools of Ohio (1839)

to this: 

"Schools should be factories in which raw products, children, are to be shaped and formed into finished products. . . manufactured like nails, and the specifications for manufacturing will come from government and industry." - Ellwood Cubberley's dissertation 1905, Teachers College, Columbia University 

and this: 

"People say, 'Well, you know, test scores don't take into account creativity and the love of learning. [pause] I'm like, 'You know what? I don't give a crap.' Don't get me wrong. Creativity is good and whatever. But if the children don't know how to read, I don't care how creative you are. You're not doing your job." - Michelle Rhee Time Magazine

In large part, they made this transition through this:

"From the point of view of American educational history the most important developments in connection with the Reformation were those arising from Calvinism. While the Calvinistic faith was rather grim and forbidding, viewed from the modern standpoint, the Calvinists everywhere had a program for political, economic, and social progress which has left a deep impress on the history of mankind. This program demanded the education of all, and in the countries where Calvinism became dominant the leaders included general education in their scheme of religious, political, and social reform...In his plan for the schools of Geneva, published in 1538, he outlined a system of elementary education in the vernacular for all. which involved instruction in reading, writing, arithmetic, religion, careful grammatical drill, and training for civil as well as for ecclesiastical leadership." - Ellwood Cubberley

and this:

Miss Columbia's School (1894 cartoon based on 1869 book)

"One of the most remarkable features of the American free school is its almost infinite power of assimilation, and this is one of the greatest works which the school does. It draws children from all nations together, and marks them with the impress of nationality. Mr. Pawson says: " The school has more to do than to educate the children: it is the mill, so to speak, into which go children of English, Scotch, Irish, German, Russian, Italian, and Scandinavian parents, and come out Americans. Africa contributes its negroes, and now Asia is sending its Chinese. All must learn English, and the result will soon be that the population of the United States will be the most homogeneous of nations." - Francis Adams.

The Horatio Alger Myth was a vital part of
the conversion of capitalist purpose to
Christian National Belief

It was one thing for Henry Barnard to design an education system which would divide American  children up in the most effective way for capitalist industrialism. It was one thing to import a system from authoritarian Prussia designed to foster compliant nationalism and train imperial soldiers [1]. But we would not be living with that system today if not for a system of religious and national mythology embracing that system and making it seem the inevitable result of a progressive, God-inspired nation.

Politics can shift, and does, but the essential myths which define a nation create institutions which endure. And this is a vital concept for the United States which has the second oldest extant government system on the planet (after the Most Serene Republic of San Marino).

The United States, lacking a defining specific religion or a native identity, has seen a civil religion created and embraced. It is not the typical founding of a nation through "Romantic Nationalism," because in the case of the U.S. the nation came first (more traditional Romantic Nationalism is represented by the Irish liberation movement with its literature (see Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland), sport, and re-embrace of Gaeilge, or the Zionist movement with the Maccabiah myths and re-establishment of the ancient Hebrew language). Not typical, but very powerful.

The power of this civil religion is that, in education as in economics, it converts arguments for change from political disagreement into heresy.

On part one of this series Lisa Parisi commented, "Seems like we teachers have two choices....work within the system to help students succeed or fight the system and lose our jobs. Not a good choice, either way. And having our government choose people to revamp the system and not choose any educators, is a clear message that the goal is to maintain the system, not help the children." And Lisa sums up the predicament the system creates for teachers. It also answers William Chamberlain's question from the same post, "Do you think when teachers are confronted with the reason school is the way it is they will accept it or rebel? Do we simply need to educate teachers about why they teach how they teach?" They may rebel, but the odds against that rebellion winning are long. In the past 300 years only the French Revolution permanently altered a nation's relationship to its religion.

The "American Civil Religion" did not arise with the Revolutionary generation, it began to be developed when the nascent second industrial revolution joined the uniquely American "Second Great Awakening." And this, historically, coincided with the the "invention" of the U.S. public education system, with schools becoming the missions of the new theology.

Throughout the 19th Century, as Henry Barnard's system was being "authored," the religion grew alongside it. America was "the last great hope of earth," as Lincoln said, with a divine mission. America was "a light unto the world,"and the furthest advance of western civilization. And this religion had specific components which were embedded both in the educational system and in the public's attitude toward that system:

First, the religion required a uniformity of belief and worship - as most Protestantism sects do. This required the "melting pot" concept of American immigration, in which those seeking to join the society would be converted into "Americans."

"The fusing process goes on as in a blast-furnace; one generation, a single year even-- transforms the English, the German, the Irish emigrant into an American. Uniform institutions, ideas, language, the influence of the majority, bring us soon to a similar complexion; the individuality of the immigrant, almost even his traits of race and religion, fuse down in the democratic alembic like chips of brass thrown into the melting pot." - Titus Munson Coan (1875)

Schools, of course, would lead this charge, they would be the smelter, replacing the disappearing frontier which Turner had called "the crucible." "The population of New York City is by no means homogenous," New York Governor - and Lincoln Secretary of State - William Seward said in 1842, "on the contrary, it is the object of education to make it so."

Second, the religion required a moral code which would support the nation's economic system. In this literature played a vital part, and the literature was transmitted through reading instruction in the schoolhouse, exactly as the Christian Bible was transmitted through the catechisms of the Protestant churches.

The McGuffey Readers, the Horatio Alger stories, the frontier tales of Daniel Boone et al, formed the mythic American individual, so different from the communitarian Catholicism and Socialism of late 19th Century continental Europe. In this "America" any joining together of any non-wealthy subgroup was discouraged (whether labor unions or The Grange) because "real Americans" worked their way up through individual hard work and moral rightness. This required education to be a competitive environment, where the old peer teaching of the one room schoolhouse vanished.

"The Horatio Alger myth conveys three basic messages: (1) each of us is judged solely on her or his own merits; (2) we each have a fair opportunity to develop those merits; and (3) ultimately, merit will out. Each of them is, to be charitable, problematic. The first message is a variant on the rugged individualism ethos . . . . In this form, it suggests that success in life has nothing to do with pedigree, race, class background, gender, national origin, sexual orientation—in short, with anything beyond our individual control. Those variables may exist, but they play no appreciable role in how our actions are appraised." - Harlon Dalton.

American schools thus "attempt" to treat all "equally" as opposed to "equitably." We pretend that all are born with the same opportunities, and that "effort" and "proper behavior" is what matters, what will determine success or failure. This is a vitally important educational effort designed to block the kind of revolutionary impulses the 19th Century power structure saw threatening the economic and social structure in Europe, where even a Kaiser like Wilhelm II ruled an essentially socialist nation.

And it is what leads us directly to KIPP Schools, and the basic idea that failure in America's economic system is an individual moral, and not a systemic, problem.

Which brings us, belatedly - I apologize (four part series? perhaps) - to Ellwood Cubberley and the permanence of our system. Cubberley, the Teachers College trained teacher educator, stood astride American education in the first half of the 20th Century like a colossus, from his chair at Stanford University.

It was Cubberley who wrote the civil religion narrative permanently into the American education system, through both his books, and his deep impact on teacher training. When the history of American education began to be re-investigated after the Second World War, Cubberley's influence was obvious, Teachers College professor Lawrence Cremin devoted an entire book to him (The Wonderful World of Ellwood Patterson Cubberley).

Yet, as we debate education today, Cubberley, despite the cafe named for him beneath the College of Education in Palo Alto, has disappeared - and with him our understanding of the "how" and "why" in our current arguments. Cubberley is only mentioned twice in Tyack and Cuban's Tinkering toward Utopia, though we may assume the authors lunch, at times, in the eponymous cafe. In Cuban's massive How Teachers Taught, Cubberley is similarly absent (four mentions in 293 pages).

In Richard Altenbaugh's The American People and Their Education, Cubberley is simply not mentioned at all.

And this is deeply problematic, for it is Cubberley's "victory" over Montessori and Dewey which permanized the system, which created the canonical text under which almost all of our school's operate. Gatto: "Immediate action was called for. Cubberley’s celebratory history doesn’t examine motives, but does uneasily record forceful steps taken just inside the new century to nip the career of intellectual schooling for the masses in the bud, replacing it with a different goal: the forging of "well-adjusted" citizens."

Gatto quoting Cubberley: "Since 1900, and due more to the activity of persons concerned with social legislation and those interested in improving the moral welfare of children than to educators themselves, there has been a general revision of the compulsory education laws of our States and the enactment of much new child-welfare...and anti-child-labor legislation....These laws have brought into the schools not only the truant and the incorrigible, who under former conditions either left early or were expelled, but also many children...who have no aptitude for book learning and many children of inferior mental qualities who do not profit by ordinary classroom procedures....Our schools have come to contain many children who...become a nuisance in the school and tend to demoralize school procedure."

"The school reorganized its teaching along lines dictated by the new psychology of instruction which had come to us from abroad.... Beginning about 1880 to 1885 our schools began to experience a new but steady change in purpose [though] it is only since about 1900 that any marked and rapid changes have set in."

What exactly did Ellwood Cubberley do? And why did he do it? That is...


Next: Cubberley, Permanence, Social Reproduction, and those left behind...

- Ira Socol

[1] Sheldon Richman. Separating School & State: How To Liberate American Families. "Gatto emphasizes how the Prussian model set the standard for educational systems right up to the present. "The whole system was built on the premise that isolation from first-hand information and fragmentation of the abstract information presented by teachers would result in obedient and subordinate graduates, properly respectful of arbitrary orders," he writes. He says the American educationists imported three major ideas from Prussia. The first was that the purpose of state schooling was not intellectual training but the conditioning of children "to obedience, subordination, and collective life." Thus, memorization outranked thinking. Second, whole ideas were broken into fragmented "subjects" and school days were divided into fixed periods "so that self-motivation to learn would be muted by ceaseless interruptions." Third, the state was posited as the true parent of children. All of this was done in the name of a scientific approach to education, although, Gatto says, "no body of theory exists to accurately define the way children learn, or what learning is of most worth."