An Unfinished Journey: Education & the American Dream

By Jeanne Allen

Inspired by love of country, her Italian heritage, and this nation’s ongoing quest to raise its children to aspire and achieve their greatest dreams, Jeanne Allen wrote An Unfinished Journey, which uniquely challenges us to think big about the education of our youth.

The author—a well-known pioneer and veteran of education policy, politics, and culture—provides a compendium of powerful yet brief essays that will have parents, policy makers, and the general public both laughing and crying at the way the nation’s education institutions have developed or mishandled all that it takes to help children achieve their greatest potential. From musings on Columbus Day to how kids behave in school and from the role of parents to politicians, this book is a uniquely informative and instructive firsthand account of the people, policies, and players that have shaped American education and why it matters. Combining a fascinating personal story with political acumen from more than thirty years in the arena, Allen paves the road to finishing the journey to the American dream.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jan 23, 2020
• ISBN: 9781796076073

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Copyright © 2020 by Jeanne Allen.

Library of Congress Control Number:    2019920189

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-7960-7609-7

                            Softcover                          978-1-7960-7608-0

                             eBook                              978-1-7960-7607-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 01/23/2020

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CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

PART I PARENTS

My Turn: Are Parents Sheepish, Apathetic Or Just Plain Out-Of-The-Loop?

It Could Have Been My Boy

Parents vs. the Blob

What Every Parent Needs to Know about Their Schools

Why Mommy and Daddy Can’t Read—Public Education’s Crisis and the Stockholm Syndrome

PART II STUDENTS AND THEIR SCHOOLS

As US Teachers Ramp Up Pressure, Face Reality: L.A. Strike Was about Control, Not Students

Understanding School Choice through the Eyes of Our Children

Seeing Red: Doing a Tremendous Disservice to the Students We Coddle

Why We Need the Student Success Act

Back-to-School Lessons from a College-Bound Kid

Whose Attention Deficit?

A Senior’s Brave New World

Massachusetts’s Students Are at Grave Risk. Here’s How to Protect Them

Race Is a Red Herring in the Battle for Better Schools

It’s Time to Rethink School Spending

Educational Opportunity Comes to Puerto Rico

PART III THE BLOB

Making Math Fuzzy

Nevada School Choice: Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion

The High Court Takes on Teacher Freedom

Fixing Schools Means Overcoming the Education Establishment

How Teachers’ Unions Became the Paper Tigers of Education Reform

An Abbreviated Story of Labor: What Once Was but Is No More

Pennsylvania Makes It Too Hard to Start Charter Schools

Fightin’ Words: Why Secretary Paige, and the Nation, Deserves Better

To Russia (or Chicago) with Love?

The Education Establishment Channels Nero as Rome Burns

PART IV POLITICS

Charter Schools and Sausage

Who Can Wait?

Those Concerned about Race and Equality Should Champion Charters

You Haven’t Heard of This Word. But It’s Strangling Charter Schools in America

Charter School Holy Wars

House Republicans Paid the Price for Their Inaction on Education

The Disarray Perception: On the Charter School World’s Leadership

What Is Education Reform? Theory, Practice, and Models of Success

The Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher: It’s Time to Let Education Innovation and Opportunity Thrive

What’s a School Choice Warrior to Do during This Political Campaign?

PART V CHARACTERS

The John Walton Effect: The Key to Seizing the Education Reform Offensive—Again

Backpack Full of Hypocrisy

Randi Weingarten’s Racial Demagoguery

What’s in a Word? Reckoning with Charters and Oprah

A Nobel Winner by All Accounts: Remembering Milton Friedman

A Diamond, Rough around the Edges

Tribute

Part VI Culture

Why I Proudly Celebrate Columbus Day

Joy to the World or Bah Humbug!—You Make the Choice

Epilogue

PREFACE

M any of the themes here—college entrance, college debt, charter schools, the crazy opposition to them on the part of interest groups who protect the status quo, and so forth—are still challenging parents, policy makers, and the general public.

As I look at my personal and professional experiences in the larger education sphere from the earliest years of my career to the present, it is uncanny—no, unfortunate and even irresponsible—that what occurred a generation ago is still very much in play. We are a nation that prides itself on independence and entrepreneurial endeavors. We believe that we can do anything. But somehow improving the delivery of and access to education and skills needed to work is still not a national priority enough to truly change what we do so that it actually works. This is a national travesty.

Many of my colleagues have written books—some dozens—documenting the history, policy, and practice across thousands of amazing ideas, institutions, and concepts. Some have wrung their hands over the difficulties and declines; others have paid tribute and homage to amazing success stories.

I wanted to write about what I saw firsthand, not just from research but also from experience at home and at work. Ironically, my personal life has always mapped almost precisely with what was happening in my professional life. So as I learned through my own education what was lacking, the country was reacting to data and documenting that on a national scale. As my own know-how was put to use in the service of my children’s schooling, the trends and experiences I had were played back to me almost daily in the dozens of phone calls I took from parents, lawmakers, and the media.

I wrote about these things for newspapers, magazines, journals, speeches, and in my own blog. So when I sat down to start writing about what the future of education might hold, I realized that because a great future relies on knowing history, I might try to look back at what had already happened to guide my writing.

And then with all the pieces I had done—hundreds of them, with over twenty-five or so years in front of me—I realized that things really haven’t changed all that much. Perhaps then revisiting them would be a way to help people most inclined to want to be great parents and citizens to be informed, to know more, and perhaps, just perhaps, to do something about it.

It was during a visit to the land of my ancestry that I was motivated to use history to carve some thoughts for the future. When archeologists dig through centuries of ground and begin to uncover ancient cities and ancient ways of life, they study what transpired not just for idle interest, though that happens. Rather, they do this so we can learn and know more about how history unfolds and what impact we can have on its course.

Even today, knowing what we know about the Greeks and Romans, how they lived, how they gave us our plumbing, eating, drinking, science, and art, we still study; and we still learn. That won’t ever stop.

Consider this a bit of an archeology of education. In the following pages, I share why I am motivated to not just share but to learn more about how we do what we do and why it is we often cannot move forward but why we must.

INTRODUCTION

Agitator for Choice Leaves Her Mark

W hen a reporter from the magazine Education Week put together a profile on my involvement in the movement to better America’s schools, a detractor observed, Nobody’s ever called her subtle. And that’s just fine. I’m full-blooded Italian—we don’t do subtle.

For decades, I’ve been in the mix—as a student, as a parent, as a reformer, and sure, as an agitator—in the matters that most affect America and its future: how we as a nation prepare our youngest citizens for their futures. Everything depends on this. The nation’s economy and workforce, its culture and stewardship of its past, even the functionality of its democracy—these are the greatest stakes imaginable. Accordingly, there isn’t time for delicacy.

Consider it a family commitment.

Over a century ago, my grandparents on my mother’s side left Ciminna, an ancient and tiny mountain town in the northwest corner of Sicily, for a better life in America.

The port of Palermo, in Sicily’s capital city, is fifty minutes by car on a good day. That was the path my grandfather took from the heart of Ciminna to the Mediterranean Sea in the late 1880s. He and his family had a far from luxurious journey. They rode down rough paths, which were roads in name only, toward the port of Palermo on the Mediterranean Sea on a cartful of kids and packages drawn by a horse in a journey that took at least six hours.

Once they reached the port, they were processed before sailing for fifteen hours to the Bay of Naples and then onto New York and Ellis Island. Waiting there, if they could seize it, was something available nowhere else in the world: membership to a wildly diverse population bound together by belief in liberty, self-reliance, a common love of country, a mutual understanding of its institutions and knowledge of its past, and a single national language as well.

And the place where all these things came together, not just for those newly arrived here but for all this nation’s citizens, where they were all taught, learned, and inculcated were America’s schools.

My father’s family would make a similar journey, for the same reasons, a few decades later from a remote village in Campania to New York where they, too, would settle and thrive.

My family obtained access to this dream; the institutions meant to enable them to do so made it possible. But for those arriving today or, more disturbingly, the next generation of descendants of those who arrived here in a previous century, the outcome is in some degree of doubt.

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My Dad’s Family Departs for America

Certainly, my family’s story is by no means singular. Millions of men and women migrated to America in search of a new life or to escape an old one. Many came before my grandfather, and many still arrive daily. They yearn to find the comfort or even prosperity that comes with employment in the world’s largest economy. They seek security in the world’s most tolerant and free society, and they hope that their children and their children’s children will find all these things, only in greater abundance.

But when confronted with the dreary fact that only a paltry 35 percent of American children are reading at their appropriate grade level, does anyone really still believe that our nation’s schools remain where the American dream begins? And if the answer is no, what then will hold this national experiment together?

The truth is that there is now an enormous chasm between where this country once offered, even promised, the opportunity of a full life and where it now disappoints and undermines that very dream for millions.

Incredibly, in 2014, 76 percent of Americans admitted that they were not confident that their children would lead better lives in this country. Seventy-six percent! That’s not the spirit of ’76 that this country was founded on.

There are likely many reasons for this pessimism, such as political dysfunction, economic unease, and an erosion of trust in America’s institutions. With that last dynamic in mind, surely the fact that almost daily the news is full of stories of failing schools and lame excuses for why kids can’t read contributes to that distrust. All this while the federal government supplies some $70 billion to fuel education from Kindergarten to college. Add in the states, that number grows to some $350 billion. That’s more money than the Apollo program cost taxpayers.

* * *

Over a century after my grandfather left his part of the world to build a better life, I returned to Ciminna. In the years since my mother’s family left Sicily, little had changed in their hometown. Its population, still scattered among centuries-old buildings, hovers around four thousand. Visitors, as I found out firsthand, still take the steep ride up the Serre Mountains and around the twisting farmland to arrive in the town center where the tower bell still rings over the pink-stuccoed cathedral.

I listened to it echo across the piazza, just as my maternal grandparents did. The circumstances were, of course, different. They left there in search of a better life, and I returned the benefactor of their ambition, hard work and the American system that made it all possible.

As I walked through the streets of Ciminna, I elicited curiosity. The belle cittadine asked what I needed and what I was doing. Once I explained why I came—to look at the place where my maternal family began—they were not only excited but wowed that I came from America, that they went to America. It was as if time stood still and the country beyond the sea was still new, still a dream to awe and inspire. Come visit! I said to one young lady whose family carried the name of mine. No, I could never … came the reply, as if the dream and the promise were just too far out of reach.

As I took the winding ride over mountain roads back to my hotel in Palermo, something became as clear as the cyan water lapping against the beaches in that ancient city. My grandparents on both sides took this path and risked everything to come to America. This was not just a trip to an airport and a few hours’ journey with air-conditioning and all the comforts of home. No, even today, one hundred years later, the prospect of what our nation offers is beyond what most—not just here but in so many towns and cities in Italia and throughout the world—even envision for themselves or their children.

And while the promise that made their risk worth taking and that still draws millions to the same shores fades, we can’t even bring ourselves to make modest changes to save it. In fact, we take it all for granted. Day after day in gli Stati Uniti, people who are here and people who come now want better; they want more. Yet those whom we look to provide this and whom we vote for, engage, and petition most often ignore the cries for better. When it comes to education, it’s a textbook case in what my father used to say in Italian that God gives bread to people with no teeth! They have been given so much, yet they behave as if they cannot consume what they have, cannot appreciate the gifts.

How does this manifest itself? Activists and legislators clash regularly over a modest two-thousand-person program to give poor kids scholarships to attend private schools that affluent parents routinely send their kids to (and make no mistake, the legislators are in this group). We plead with governors to simply pay attention to the fact that most of their schools are failing; we work to get options in law and then have to redouble our efforts so teachers’ unions won’t strike them down.

All this while an alarming number of the advocates who profess to care about the right of every child to the quality education necessary to achieve the American dream have become fixated on their own success, not that of students. They fight to limit opportunities for more education, preferring instead to sanction the creation of only a fraction of the innovative new schools that are permitted under new laws (that people like me crusaded alongside desperate families to secure). Then they claim to know whether they work for all kids not by way of their parents’ assessments but by measure of artificial, distorted, and often flawed assessment data.

I am an optimist at heart, but the trends are not promising. That’s why I agitate and occasionally—okay, routinely—eschew subtlety. A large part of that effort has centered around communicating ideas, drawing attention to the good ideas and actors in the education ecosystem, and shining a bright light on the bad.

This started when I arrived on the campus of Dickinson College and realized how woefully unprepared I was for the challenge of higher education compared to my new classmates.

The principal of my hometown high school promptly received a letter containing my thoughts on the matter. I haven’t let up since.

On the occasion of the silver anniversary—in October 2018—of the Center for Education Reform, the organization I founded to improve the chances for every American child to do better in life than their parents and grandparents did, it felt appropriate to begin to gather up all the essays, articles, volleys, and exposés in one central location.

What follows is the distillation of a few decades in this particular arena. They’ve been gathered and put together