No Size Fits All: A New Program of Choice for American Public Schools without Vouchers

By Richard Striner and L. Michelle Johnson

“No Size Fits All” is a book that will break the public policy deadlock over federal education standards in the United States. American debates about education policy are focused at the moment on two big policy disputes.

The first big dispute concerns the Common Core testing standards, which force American students into a dreary routine that makes millions of children hate school for no good reason. The second big dispute concerns the proposal of Education Secretary Betsy De Vos to siphon federal public school funding into “vouchers” that parents could use to send their children to private schools. Critics complain that this proposal is inherently a threat to the hard-won right to a tuition-free public education at the elementary and secondary levels.

The politics of federal education policy has devolved into an all-or-nothing fight between defenders of a status quo that its critics condemn as oppressive and proponents of a school choice reform that its critics condemn as subversive. “No Size Fits All” interrupts this all-or-nothing argument with a humane and sensible alternative––one that could lay the groundwork for broad new consensus on federal education policy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jan 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785272349

Richard Striner

Richard Striner is a writer, scholar, teacher, and civic activist. He served as a professor of history for thirty years at Washington College. The author of over a dozen books, Striner is also the author of numerous magazine and journal articles as well as public affair commentaries and op-eds. Striner has served as Senior Writer for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial Commission and as a consultant to the World War II Memorial Committee of the American Battle Monuments Commission. His most recent book is Summoned to Glory: The Audacious Life of Abraham Lincoln. Previous presidential books include Woodrow Wilson and World War I: A Burden Too Great to Bear, Lincoln and Race, Lincoln’s Way: How Six Great Presidents Created American Power, and Father Abraham: Lincoln’s Relentless Struggle to End Slavery. Striner has contributed to the online New York Times “Disunion” series on the Civil War and has written two cover stories for the American Scholar magazine.

Book preview

NO SIZE FITS ALL

NO SIZE FITS ALL

A NEW PROGRAM OF CHOICE FOR AMERICAN PUBLIC SCHOOLS WITHOUT VOUCHERS

RICHARD STRINER AND L. MICHELLE JOHNSON

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK

or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Richard Striner and L. Michelle Johnson 2020

The authors assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955027

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-232-5 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-232-2 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

We dedicate this book to our children.

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter 1 A Battle of Principles

Chapter 2 The Genesis and Implementation of Common Core

Chapter 3 The Modern Legacy of Progressive Education

Chapter 4 Case Study: The Baltimore Montessori Public Charter School

Chapter 5 National Advocacy

Chapter 6 So Many Different Kinds of Public Schools

Chapter 7 Betsy DeVos and the Wrong Kind of School Choice

Chapter 8 The Best Kind of School Choice

Epilogue

Notes

Index

PREFACE

We are hardly alone among the vast numbers of educators, students, parents, and citizens who are fed up with the regimented system that dominates so many of our public schools. And we are hardly alone among the people in the United States who have tried to do something about it.

This book is one among many in recent years to critique the philosophy—though to call it a philosophy is to give it an undeserved compliment—that forces so many American students into a lock-step educational routine. And this book is merely one among many that critiques the Common Core standards.

But in several ways this book is different. First, it places the current educational situation in a long-term historical perspective. Second, it contrasts the regimented approach with case studies of successful public schools that exemplify alternative methods of the sort that were pioneered decades ago in Montessori, Waldorf, Sudbury, and other so-called progressive schools. The fact that the alternative schools that we examine are all within public school systems should be noted. Too often people seem to presume that a Montessori school, for instance, is by nature a private school. That is not the case at all. In the course of this book we will present some case studies of alternative schools whose achievements could be replicated in any part of the United States.

Third, and finally, this book is different because it concludes with a definite legislative proposal: a proposal for reform through which Congress would require all public school systems that receive federal funding to create and make available an ample number of alternative-method schools—schools that will be open to all students and parents who prefer them. This reform would naturally require a reasonable amount of time to be phased in. But the requirement would be nonnegotiable: no more federal funding for local school systems unless each school district that receives such funds gives parents and students a choice of the schools they want. And no waiting lists for admission to the schools will be permitted. They will be open to all.

It’s time for the people of this free country to demand the kind of public schools they would want if they were given the choice, the kind of schools that enable their children to play to their strengths, to use their God-given talents in ways that lead not only to professional success but also, and of equal or greater philosophical importance, to the pursuit of happiness that was so justly proclaimed to be a right when the United States was born.

CHAPTER 1

A BATTLE OF PRINCIPLES

Educational policy has been a subject of passionate dispute for centuries. In the past two centuries, advocates such as Maria Montessori have recommended more flexible approaches tailored to the different needs—and the different aptitudes and preferences—of different students. Such progressive educators strove through a number of different methods to help their students grow up to be independent thinkers who could communicate effectively and solve problems.

In opposition to such individualized and student-centered education, a broad array of advocates have insisted that students should master a common set of skills, meet a common set of requirements, take a common set of courses that will dominate the curriculum, and go about their work in the classroom in exactly the same ways.

In the twentieth century, the balance of power between these approaches veered back and forth in cultural and ideological cycles. In the past generation, the advocates of standardization have been able to force their methods on millions of students, teachers, school administrators, and parents in the United States. This process was supported by direct government mandates such as the No Child Left Behind law. The indirect pressure of the new Common Core standards has been added. And an ever-growing chorus of protest has been heard in response.

Discontent with standardization in public education is an old story. For example, many students down the years have complained about being dragged through required courses in fields for which they had no aptitude—courses that did not in any way relate to their career aspirations. Recently a literary editor named Philip Terzian recalled how his years in secondary school were rendered oppressive by courses in mathematics, courses he was forced to take against his wishes. He writes that of all the math he was forced to study, only simple arithmetic has been useful to him. He proclaims that his entire tenure as a student and undergraduate—all 16 years—was thoroughly, and sometimes catastrophically, spoiled by the pedagogical infatuation with math.

The problem, he theorizes, all boils down to the kind of mental patterns we possess. For whatever reason, he muses, and I suspect the explanation is neurological, mathematics is an unfathomable mystery to me. Its abstractions make no sense, its leaps of logic and deduction are inscrutable; its higher terminology might as well be Sanskrit […] In a just world, of course, this mental aberration would be purely incidental; but we live in an unjust world.

And so year after year he was subjected to courses that it made no sense for him to take. In many of these courses, he continues, the theoretical premise […] was not to arrive at an answer but to demonstrate that the answer had been reached by an approved method. Well, I am a self-taught draughtsman, and much prefer to play the piano by ear. This was exactly the opposite of the way my mind works, and induced in my teachers not pity or even amusement but bewilderment, impatience, sometimes rage. Surely the low point of my middle-school incarceration was when I was summoned to stand facing the class while my teacher read aloud the unconventional means by which I had solved an equation—at the end of which he hurled an epithet in my direction, balled up the paper, and threw it in the wastebasket.¹

All of Terzian’s recollections pertain to experiences from the 1960s. But there are millions of students right now who are being subjected to comparable treatment. They are forced to take a prescribed battery of courses that are said to make them all career and college ready.

The people who have foisted such regimentation upon us are self-righteous. They have their own reasons for doing what they do, and it has to be admitted that some of these reasons possess at least a grain of merit. They argue that national standards of attainment are necessary if college admissions officers and hiring directors are to know exactly what the credentials of applicants really amount to. They argue that America is falling behind in workforce skills and that mastery of a common core of knowledge will help Americans both individually and collectively to hold their own in a competitive world. And they argue in effect that there is only one way to educate students who will be able to think critically, communicate with clarity, and solve problems.

It is obviously a good idea to keep track of America’s workforce skills as they apply to the needs of business and government. It is also important to assess such skills as they apply to our national security. But it makes no sense to force every student in our public schools to do the same things, take the same courses, and pass the same tests, as if they all possessed identical aptitudes. If your kid wants to be a musician, for example, does his or her score on some standardized tests in math or science have anything to do with America’s competitiveness in the global economy or our readiness in national security?

Or course not. There is no connection whatsoever.

The only test results that matter for assessing our national readiness are test scores of students whose aptitudes will lead them into fields that are germane to our national readiness. Any educator who tries to argue otherwise is demonstrably simple-minded—or disingenuous. The same principle holds true for kids with an aptitude in science and technology, kids, for instance, who would like to have jobs coding productivity software. Is it fair—in the case of such technologically oriented students—that their scores on standardized tests that require them to compare and contrast the techniques of authors in two different works of literature might cause them to be labeled as not career or college ready? What sense does that make?

Some of our kids will be doctors and lawyers and engineers, but others will be actors, artists, models, and hairdressers. Why should such students be force-fed the very same program as math wizards? If assessments of educational outcomes were soundly conceived, they would test different students in varying ways instead of blurring all test results into a single and undifferentiated mass of flawed data. Flawed—because it is based upon the wrong presupposition that one size really fits all.

We should obviously make every effort to ensure that our children are literate. At the elementary school level, they should be given a structured path as they acquire literacy skills and number sense. They should be able to take risks and ask questions as they are exposed to a wide variety of fields. As they enter middle school, we should continue to expose them in preliminary ways to a wide variety of subjects. But once their aptitudes are clear, our schools should help them to develop their God-given talents, finding paths in life that will suit them.

Such a goal is incompatible with a regime that is driven toward some high-stakes tests that are based upon uniform requirements. Instead, the goal should be to get our students ready for a life in which they will think critically, communicate effectively, and solve problems within their chosen fields and in ways that are best aligned with their preferences and strengths.

It is undeniable that certain sequences of courses are necessary at the collegiate level (and perhaps as early as high school) to prepare certain students whose career paths are leading to specialized fields: students in college who are bound for law school need a pre-law curriculum and students bound for medical school must be prepared at the collegiate level. They must take a required set of courses. But when it comes to students in the arts and humanities, career-building will probably constitute a trial-and-error experience in which a good fit between the person and the organization that hires him or her will depend as much upon the personalities and activities in question as it does on a set of cookie-cutter credentials and standardized proficiencies. Why should students be labeled not career and college ready based upon some single measure?

Many of us who come from a liberal arts background can attest to the experimental nature of our initiation into the world of full-time