Unacknowledged Parents

Unacknowledged Parents Before there were charter schools, there were country day schools. What lessons do day schools hold for this new experiment in school choice? A reading of the educational press on the school choice movement in America would lead one to believe that charter schools (like the open classroom schools in the 1970s) sprang fully formed from the pipe dreams of policy wonks. But to take a liberty with Mae West, parthenogenesis had nothin’ to do with it. Charter schools are the offspring of the country day school, sired by the voucher movement. These unacknowledged origins are worth thinking about because they bring into focus many of the practices charter schools must be willing to draw upon if they are to become an important alternative to conventional public schools. Reform has been the normal state of educational politics in an evangelical nation, but educational reform in the nation most devoted to the rhetoric and uses of the free market has been oddly hermetic: sealed against the traditions of the free market. What has made choice suddenly palatable to a citizenry long committed to “the one best system” of public education? Challenges to the prevailing system have come from both theory and practice. John Chubb and Terry Moe altered the terms of the debate with the 1990 publication of Politics, Markets and America’s Schools. Give schools greater autonomy, give parents greater choice, and let loose the forces of the marketplace—only in that way, they argued, can school reform succeed. Meanwhile, inner-city Catholic schools were putting to shame the dismal public schools just down the block or around the corner. In Great Britain, the Thatcher government had introduced in 1988 “opting out schools,” freed from the control of the local education authority, like the American charter schools that followed a few years later. And other initiatives, such as the small school movement and the Coalition of Essential Schools, have also helped to enlarge the range of possibilities. At the same time, the balkanization of the public school curriculum was undercutting the civic argument for the common school. The comprehensive high school at the center of its consolidated district (which after World War Two had put out of business small private academies and public high schools) was under increasing pressures to address health, social, and vocational matters not previously thought to be the business of academic institutions. The rise of special education, alongside vocational education and homogeneous grouping schemes, further undercut the common curriculum. And the gradual abandonment of a curriculum designed to produce patriotic citizens with a common attachment to the nation’s history and traditions—and even a common national pronunciation of English (see, for example, Warriner’s grammar book which formed the backbone of public high school English classes for thirty years)— invited new ways of thinking about what our schools should be and how we should make citizens. In 1967, when I first began reading about school choice, it was an idea for economists. The massive investment in the “Common School” as the designated instrument of the American melting pot made school choice not so much heretical as unthinkable. In 2004, a true choice plan, as simple, American, market-driven and direct as the G.I. Bill, has become merely political heresy. The journals are willing to talk about it, and school choice enjoys a support no one was predicting in 1967, or even twenty years later. The first American charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992. Now there are about 2,700 charter schools in 36 states. (The country day school in which I work competes for students with four charter schools.) The historical question is: why the sea change? Anxiety about school is a creature of the middle classes. Schools are the sorting and gate-keeping institutions—people who want to become middle class or remain so go to school. Although we often speak of colleges as “first” or “second” tier schools, it would be more direct to classify them as “upper middle class” or “middle class.” The working poor look to unions, patronage jobs, small businesses and trades, and also to community (lower middle class) colleges. The rich have always treated schools as a kind of club membership and relied more on tutors and connections for the academic trappings of class membership, for which the middle classes struggle in schools. The middle classes drive school reform, in short, because for them it is a high-stakes game. The New Country Day School Movement is also a creature of the suburban middle classes. Like charter schools, it is a movement driven from the bottom up. What exactly are country day schools and in what sense are they a “movement”? First the social joke: country day schools are never in the country. They are in the suburbs where the middle classes have moved. (In some cases, the day school’s appearance in what was nostalgically thought of as a rural area is the first sign that the houses are about to be assigned numbers by the authorities.) They are day schools because their clients, the middle class professionals and wannabe professionals (now overwhelmingly double-income families), have not attended boarding schools, nor do they seek one for their children. These parents were raised at home, and not by servants. They attended public schools. They are deeply suspicious of the elite trappings of the older private schools, at least at the elementary and secondary levels. (Their egalitarianism gets confused when it comes to the colleges, in part because it was never a national mission for our colleges to be a common ritual of American citizenship.) Estimates vary, but in the two decades between 1968 and 1988 about a thousand country day schools sprang up in America’s expanding suburbs, a tangible sign of the growing dissatisfaction of the middle classes with their increasingly burdened public schools. They opened in the shells of the old academies put out of business by the large, comprehensive high schools. They opened in church basements. They opened in empty stores; they opened in many of the same kinds of places that the charter schools which came after them occupied. They were opened by teachers from the public system and by anxious and idealistic parents, and they were supported by volunteerism and low tuitions. Like any undercapitalized venture managed by inexperienced entrepreneurs, these schools often failed—the average lifespan was three to five years. Some estimates hold that for every five country day schools that opened in this time period, only one survived beyond the first six years. The endowments and large gifts and bequests so common to the older private schools, and the tax levies, bond issues, foundation grants, and federal subsidies usual in the public sector, were not part of the early histories of the country day schools. What is significant about the New Country Day School Movement is that it was not driven by the old private elites or by the experts in the federal and state departments of education, or by their allies in the teacher’s unions and in the university schools of education. It sprang from the middle classes. Again, with the single exception of the school choice movement, no other “reform” of the past five decades has been a bottom-up movement, persevering in spite of powerful entrenched opposition from every quarter of the educational establishment. The independence of the Country Day School Movement allowed it to model ideas and values that fall outside the conventional enthusiasms of the educational establishment—an establishment chiefly occupied with technical or programmatic reforms, such as open classrooms, assessment techniques and certification protocols, calendar reforms, scheduling expertise, curriculum interventions, film strips, laptops, more tests, therapeutic programs, etc. What are some of these ideas and values? Scale Because these schools, like most charter schools and quite unlike the consolidated high schools, started and remained small, the survivors learned how to make their scale work for them. They learned the virtues of focus. They learned how to provide services, delivered in larger schools through bureaucratic interventions (think about the P.A. system as a symbol for this), in the context of authentic, ethical, and vibrant communities. The charter schools may find models in the management of school culture that are unavailable in any other sector of American education except the old elite private schools (where educators in public schools, with some reason, have been reluctant to look). Direct Accountability While the conventional voices of education reform argue for increased accountability by bureaucratic means—teacher certification, codified curriculum, lists of standards and objectives, testing, and calendar reform—the day school, driven entirely by tuition and accountable directly to the parents, must pursue market-driven models of management and accountability. And the model that is forced on it is an extreme one. Try to imagine another arena of competition in which the vendor is charging a high price for a service offered elsewhere for free, and what is worse, a service which has traditionally been free as air, and to which the customer has come to feel entitled. Or imagine yourself as a customer in late Rome, off to the bakery to get your free distribution of bread. There, next to the imposing public bakery, you see a smaller bakery selling bread for six dollars a loaf. This smaller bakery doesn’t even offer much variety. You have to feel sorry for this optimistic entrepreneur. He might just as well try to open a country day school. The country day school must be directly accountable to the customer every day. The unhappy customer does not complain to distant authorities. He simply leaves with his child in one hand and his tuition in the other. Then he badmouths the school to his neighbors, who are, after all, the school’s only customer base. I’ve met some amusing consultants in my time, but none as funny as the fellow who was trying to sell country day schools on the virtues of T.Q.M. (Total Quality Management). Successful day schools understand T.Q.M. from the inside and by instinct. Unprotected from dissatisfied students or parents by endowments or tax dollars, they sink or swim on quality control and responsiveness to the customer (and are there any customers out there needier and more nervous than young parents?). Market-Driven Values Schools that have survived in free-market competition have learned the virtues of the entrepreneur. They have learned how to focus on core values. They have learned how to run lean. They have learned how to keep close to the customer. They have learned about marketing. They have learned about quality control. And because they are not able to issue stock or sock away windfall profits, they must run lean every year. There is no room for failed experiments. It is learn on the job and get it right the first time. Such organizations have a lot to teach many for-profit businesses about efficiency in operations, as Peter Drucker has acknowledged. Pedagogy In the day school model, the teacher is certified by the head of school—the head is responsible for hiring, evaluating, and training teachers. Beyond that, the head’s job is to manage and market the culture of the school. The curriculum is typically driven by the teachers working independently of textbooks or state or federal guidelines. The course offerings are limited. The classes are discussion-based and small. The teachers are senators in their school; the conditions of their employment are unmediated by distant bureaucrats or unions. The teachers are also coaches and advisors. Interestingly, this model of pedagogy is directly inspired by the old private school traditions previously enjoyed by the wealthy. The country day schools belong to the same professional associations as the older and wealthier boarding and urban day schools. They are the poor cousins of such schools, but they recruit teachers and school leaders from them. They have learned the best lessons such schools have to offer and have modified them for a less elite setting. To find pedagogical practices that enjoy a long history of success and are relatively undistorted by intellectual fads or politics, charter schools may wish to look at successful country day schools. Indeed, where else can they look? Governance Incompetent governance has already become a legend in the world of charter schools. But models of effective governance in schools have been around a long time, although neglected by the education professionals until Chubb and Moe. These models come from the most successful of the older private schools and have been well imitated by the successful country day schools. These models, in which the governors are conservators rather than activists, are available to the new charter schools, should they only choose to look. And conversely, every one of the country day schools that failed over the past two decades, I would argue, failed not because of incompetent teachers or principals but because of incompetent governance. Public Accountability Models for useful school accreditation have been developed by the market-driven independent schools and used in New England for over thirty years. Perhaps the most effective and time-tested model is offered by the Commission on Independent Schools of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC). Last year, at an international conference on charter schools at Oxford University, the founding head of a British charter school described what for him was an ideal method of school evaluation. Instead of a bureaucratic rating system of ticking off boxes on a punch list, he wanted a knowledgeable outsider to come into his school as a “critical friend.” That wished-for format already exists in the model developed for the accreditation of independent schools. The Invitation For too long, thinking about schools in America has been crippled by a reluctance to look at models that fall outside the norms of the public school establishment. The new country day schools, however, opened the suburban middle classes to the notion that small, independent schools, without the resources and connections of old money, could succeed. And what makes the enthusiasts for charter schools believe that they can make their new kind of school work? Well, among other things, one of their neighbor’s children attended a similar school and was thriving there. It was new and small, and it didn’t offer many programs. It didn’t even have a gym. And none of its teachers were certified (although four of them held Ph.D.s in academic subjects). The teachers knew all the children and the children knew all the teachers. It was something that called itself a country day school.