Chronicle of Higher Education
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Creating a Third Culture
By Robert A. Weisbuch
"Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." That summarizes higher education's attitude toward the development of teaching in the public schools over the last half of the 20th century.
Most of academe's work on the topic of teacher training has been done at the branches of state universities that needed to make a buck and create a niche. It certainly didn't get done much, or well, at the prestigious universities -- their notion of aiding K-12 education has usually been through policy and research, not by providing your kid with a great kindergarten teacher. Teacher training happened even less at private liberal-arts institutions like Drew University, where I am in my third year as president.
That not-so-benign neglect controlled my own attitudes, too. I became a college professor, in part, because it was so decidedly not like being a K-12 teacher. It was the difference between social enhancement and status poverty, between attracting dates and repelling them, between Socrates and Wally Peepers.
I carried that noblesse oblige with me to the University of Michigan, where I was on the faculty for a quarter century. When a bright student in English told me that he, or more usually she, was planning to teach 10th grade as a career, I felt deep disappointment; if she said fourth grade, that implied the need for a psychiatric evaluation.
After I left Ann Arbor to lead the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, public education sneaked up on me. Whatever my prejudices, I had a new responsibility to comprehend the entire educational landscape; and what I could not help but see, even with my blinders in place, was that the schools had become a huge national issue.
Somehow we had scapegoated the schools, loaded onto them the responsibility of curing every social inequity and of educating a whole new population of Americans, for many of whom English was not a first language. We expected the schools to achieve all of that while granting them a dime where a dollar would have been insufficient. We had come to distrust, and even despise, schoolteachers and to blame our groaning public-education system for every failure that belonged more justly at the doorstep of government and home.
Slowly, slowly, my leaf turned. By the end of eight years of increasing involvement in school-university partnerships at the foundation, the same kids I had disparaged for their K-12 career plans had become my heroes. But to be real, my own heart was still drawn to academe. I left the foundation when it became clear that, if it was to continue its tradition of meeting national needs, it required a leader who had far more K-12 moxie. I had come to believe that the only salvation for our system lay in creating a third culture that could end the apartheid between higher and public education.
Last month at Drew, we announced a new master's program in teaching that is intended to model what a deep liberal-arts emphasis might mean for a future schoolteacher. Meanwhile, Arthur Levine, my successor at Woodrow Wilson, announced a Rhodes-style fellowship program to encourage superb students to become lifelong teachers in the public schools.
Those twin events made me think about teaching on either side of the gorge that separates academe from public education -- the greatest gap between schools and universities, according to Michael Timpane and Lori White, authors of Higher Education and School Reform, of any nation in the world. And that made me think that Drew and Woodrow Wilson and all the other bridgers had better take some deep breaths and prepare for a very dangerous project, yet one on which nothing less than the entire educational ecology of the United States depends.
There was a time in the establishment of the American university when the dividing line between schools and colleges was hazy. The two systems now house vastly different cultures based on dissimilar economies and pressures. Several years ago at a Woodrow Wilson conference in Berkeley on creating school-university partnerships, one high-school teacher cried out, "You college faculty from Cambridge and Michigan simply made your decision weeks ago and here you are. Until yesterday, I was arguing with my principal in Oakland about whether I could leave school an hour early to get here on time."
More pervasively, teachers in the schools, enlisted time and again into partnerships with the colleges, have seen those alliances undercut suddenly when a superintendent or a department head departs. That song by The Who, "Won't Get Fooled Again," is the anthem of such once-idealistic teachers.
And on the college side, faculty members whose own children attend public schools and who often are among the most vocal in complaining about their academic quality, nonetheless ask what is in it for them, professionally, to create such collaborations.
If we are going to ford the gap and not fall in, we must first describe conditions in those two vastly different nations.
On the schools side, we are approaching a probable end to the latest huge, and hugely reductive, experiment with American K-12 education, the No Child/No Bad Idea Left Behind Act, passed by the Gradgrinds of both major political parties and hilariously underfinanced by the Bush administration. Yet it is merely the latest (in fact refreshingly conservative and occasionally rigorous) fad that passes for an idea in the K-12 sector. Search through the progressive school-reform literature and there is even less mention of the academic disciplines than in the No Child Left Behind materials, which at least acknowledges their existence if only to transform them into whipping posts.
May I join with distinguished colleagues like Leon Botstein, president of Bard College, to propose an approach that is directly and unashamedly intellectual? We've tried everything else, so how about giving "thought" a shot?
This may sound far-fetched, but perhaps creating an educated society in a democracy requires engaging student interest. There is the inkling of a possibility that force-feeding children, in imitation of captive cattle, is less successful than setting out a delicious meal for them. And just for a hoot we might proceed on the assumption that human beings actually enjoy learning.
Step one is, to paraphrase Dick the Butcher in Henry VI, we kill all the state-based tests. Or at least demote them, and make testing a necessary afterthought rather than a substitute for thought. "You don't fatten a hog by weighing it," former presidential candidate John Edwards said, pungently if not elegantly.
To our legislators: You thought you could never give up smoking but you did. You can lose the test addiction, too. Take two pills of sense and a spoonful of dignity and the symptoms of a test-crazed era will be gone in the morning.
On this new morning, you will awake to a world where children of all ages get dazzled by the ongoing debates and discoveries of the academic disciplines. Can't happen? It's easy if you try. The late and superbly playful poet Kenneth Koch argued that children love poetry, that the babe bouncing on the parent's knee is a rhyme-and-rhythm fan from the start. An appreciation for poetry depends, he said, on unlearning whatever made it seem other than a natural pleasure, based on the pulsing of the blood. It's that way with all creative and analytic mental activity.
Yes, but, skeptical school veterans are quick to say, try that in a classroom riddled with children from the mean streets, where the very act of calling a class to order is a challenge. How hopelessly effete and elitist an intellectual approach becomes in such a setting.
No, how desperately required it is -- because nothing else stands a chance. It may mean digging down into the early years as in France, where humane learning begins in government-sponsored preschools; and it certainly will mean more money spent in the short term (and less in the long term, once the nation can reduce its expenditures on every negative aspect of human control borne of a failed education, such as remediation, welfare, and prisons).
That is not at all to gainsay the terrific social differences the schools must endure and are unreasonably expected to expunge. In fact, if you visit a school in an economically deprived neighborhood, it is not violence that you find in the building but a depressing boredom. Any street life, however self-destructive, seems superior in plain human interest.
We've tried military-style discipline, standards, and tests. We've tried vocational ed, a whole subject in itself that, as now constituted, deserves the scorn Diane Ravitch gives it as profoundly anti-democratic. We've tried using college admission as the carrot, so that our kids are always living the present only in terms of flattering the future rather than existing in the moment.
Might we instead begin with the assumption that curiosity is a native aspect of being human? Could we now give inspiration a try?
There's a lot of it out there. Every subject has inspired teachers with expert strategies and great results, working in schools that exist often in the most unpromising social circumstances. When we discuss standards and assessment, how about we begin with those efforts rather than with a bunch of abstractions?
And now to the universities: Carnegie Corporation's Teachers for a New Era effort requires faculty members in the liberal arts and in campus schools of education to make common cause. The Early College efforts of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at best, does require that third culture, in which universities actually co-lead schools with district officials.
If that third culture is to develop, college faculty members might stop coming on to their school counterparts like gods delivering grace to undeserving sinners. We need to acknowledge that a strong teacher in the schools knows a great deal more about pedagogy than we do. Even beyond the obvious fact that we share the same kids at different stages and the more emotionally compelling fact that professors have kids, too, it is well past time to shed our pretensions, share our status as intellectual leaders, and acknowledge both what school teachers bring to the party and the mutual benefit that accrues from a partnership between equals.
At Drew, with our new master's program beginning this summer and several school-university partnerships to follow, I hope we will not fall into the pretension of thinking we can teach the teachers how to teach. That is what we can learn from them. What we have to offer is the rich life of the disciplines, a life that should not be confined to academe but should emanate from it.
