Tinkering Toward Utopia: a Century of Public School Reform / David Tyack and Larry Cuban

Tinkering toward Utopia This book has been awarded Harvard University Press's annual prize for an outstanding publication about education and society, established in 1995 by the Virginia and Warren Stone Fund. Tinkering toward Utopia A Century 0/ Public School Re/orm David Tyack & Larry Cuban Harvard University Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Copyright © 1995 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Ninth printing, 2003 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Vata Tyack, David B. Tinkering toward utopia: a century of public school reform / David Tyack and Larry Cuban. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-674-89282-8 (cloth) ISBN 0-674-89283-6 (pbk.) 1. Educational change-United States-History-19th century. 2. Educational change-United States-History-2Oth century. 3. Education-Social aspects-United States. 4. Education and state-United States. 5. Politics and education-United States. I. Cuban, Larry. II. Title. LA216.T92 1995 371'.01'097309-dc20 94-47545 To Our Students Past, Present, and Future Contents Prologue: Learning from the Past 1 1 Progress or Regress? 12 2 Policy Cycles and Institutional Trends 40 3 How Schools Change Reforms 60 4 Why the Grammar of Schooling Persists 85 5 Reinventing Schooling 110 Epilogue: Looking toward the Future 134 Notes 145 Acknowledgments 177 Index 179 Prologue Learning from the Past We call this book Tinkering toward Utopia to highlight the tension between Americans' intense faith in education-almost a secular relig ion-and the gradualness of changes in educational practices. For over a century citizens have sought to perfect the future by debating how to improve the young through education. Actual reforms in schools have rarely matched such aspirations, however. The words "utopia" and "tink ering" each have positive and negative connotations. Utopian thinking can be dismissed as pie-in-the-sky or valued as visionary; tinkering can be condemned as mere incrementalism or praised as a commonsense remedy for everyday problems. Both positive and negative examples of tinkering and utopian thinking abound in the record of educational reform. At the heart of that history lies the complex interplay between the purposes and processes of institutional change. l Reforming the public schools has long been a favorite way of improv ing not just education but society. In the 1840s Horace Mann took his audience to the edge of the precipice to see the social hell that lay before them if they did not achieve salvation through the common school. In 1983 a presidential commission produced another fire-and-brimstone sermon about education, A Nation at Risk, though its definition of damnation (economic decline) differed from Mann's (moral dissolution). For over a century and a half, Americans have translated their cultural anxieties and hopes into dramatic demands for educational reform.2 Utopian thinking about education has been a tapestry woven of many strands. One was political. The new nation declared on its national seal the aim of becoming "The New Order of the Ages." From the Revolution Prologue onward, educational theorists have self-consciously used schooling to construct the citizens of that new order. A Protestant-republican ideology of making the United States literally God's country inspired the promot ers of the public school movement of the nineteenth century.3 The political theorist Hannah Arendt argued that in the United States education has played a "different and, politically, incomparably more important role" than elsewhere, in large part because of "the role that continuous immigration plays in the country's political consciousness and frame of mind." Educational leaders have tried to transform immigrant newcomers and other "outsiders" into individuals who matched their idealized image of what an "American" should be, an effort succinctly portrayed in the accompanying cartoon, first published in Judge on April 20,1901. But the newcomers and "outsiders," of course, were not simply wax figures on which dominant groups impressed their values. Many groups have contested with one another to define and create model citizens through schooling, and this political debate has shaped the course of public education.4 Millennial thinking about schooling has also been a favored solution to social and economic problems. In the early twentieth century, educa tional elites saw themselves as expert social engineers who could perfect the nation by consciously directing the evolution of society. When Lyn don B. Johnson sought to build the "Great Society" and declared war on poverty in the 1960s, he asserted that "the answer to all our national problems comes down to a single word: education."5 Americans have thought it easier to instruct the young than to coerce the adult. Debates over how to create perfect citizens through schooling long antedated Miss Manners's Guide to Raising Perfect Children. In theory, if the child was properly educated, the adult would need no reform. But if adults did prove wayward-ending up in traffic court, for example-taking a course might set things straight. In 1990, when state legislators in California faced charges of corruption, they passed a law requiring all lobbyists to enroll in a class on ethics.6 Repeatedly, Americans have followed a common pattern in devising educational prescriptions for specific social or economic ills. Once they had discovered a problem, they labeled it and taught a course on the subject: alcohol or drug instruction to fight addictions; sex education to combat syphilis or AIDS; home economics to lower the divorce rate; driver education to eliminate carnage on the highway; and vocational training or courses in computer literacy to keep the United States eco nomically competitive.7 2 Learning from the Past [To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.] THE AMERICAN POLICY Bringing the truant boy to the little Red, White and Blue Schoolhouse. Faith in the power of education has had both positive and negative consequences. It has helped to persuade citizens to create the most comprehensive system of public schooling in the world. Americans have used discourse about education to articulate and instill a sense of the common good. But overpromising has often led to disillusionment and to blaming the schools for not solving problems beyond their reach. More important, the utopian tradition of social reform through schooling has often diverted attention from more costly, politically controversial, and difficult societal reforms. It's easier to provide vocational education 3 Prologue than to remedy inequities in employment and gross disparities in wealth and income. When we speak of educational reforms, we mean planned efforts to change schools in order to correct perceived social and educational problems. Sometimes broad social crises triggered school reforms, and sometimes reforms were internal improvements initiated by profession als. Diagnoses of problems and proposed solutions changed over time. But whatever the reform, it usually entailed a long and complex set of steps: discovering problems, devising remedies, adopting new policies, and bringing about institutional change.8 Americans celebrate innovation. In education this penchant for the new has produced, time and again, criticism that educators are moss backs who resist change. In his studies of educational reforms, Paul Mort concluded that about half a century elapsed between the introduction of a new practice and its widespread implementation; he called the latecom ers "laggards."9 While some lament that educational reform is an institutional Bermuda Triangle into which intrepid change agents sail, never to appear again, others argue that public education is too trendy, that entirely too many foolish notions circulate through the system at high velocity. Are schools too resistant to change or too faddish? Viewed over the course of history, they may seem to be both. Educators have often paid lip service to demands for reform to signify their alertness to the public will. But their symbolic responses often protected school people from basic challenges to their core practices. lO In the last generation reforms have come thick and fast, as educators can testify. Since the value of change is in the eye of the beholder, one set of innovators may seek to undo the results of previous reforms. At one time reformers thought that the graded school-which groups chil dren by age and proficiency-greatly enhanced educational efficiency; later critics sought to create ungraded schools as a way to break the lockstep of fixed grades. Curriculum designers succeeded in substituting easy texts for classic works in English classes for "slow learners," only to find the new curriculum condemned as the educational equivalent of junk food. l1 Focusing only on change runs the danger of ignoring continuity in the basic practices of schools. The film Hope and Glory, about London during the Blitz in World War II, vividly portrays the persistence of familiar routines under the most trying conditions. Crowded in a bomb 4 Learning from the Past shelter during an air raid, schoolchildren sit in rows under the stern eye of their instructor as they recite their multiplication tables through their gas masks. We want to probe the meaning of continuity in schooling as well as to understand change. Change, we believe, is not synonymous with pro gress. Sometimes preserving good practices in the face of challenges is a major achievement, and sometimes teachers have been wise to resist reforms that violated their professional judgment. Although policy talk about reform has had a utopian ring, actual reforms have typically been gradual and incremental-tinkering with the system. It may be fashionable to decry such change as piecemeal and inadequate, but over long periods of time such revisions of practice, adapted to local contexts, can substantially improve schools. Rather than seeing the hybridizing of reform ideas as a fault, we suggest it can be a virtue.

Load more