Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

“If naivete is a danger, so is fatalism.”*

The history of school reform has been a back-and-forth journey between hyperactive innocence and passive resignation. I will explain this and give examples below but before I do that I want to ask one question and then state a fact.

Why has school reform occurred again and again? One would think that reformers who have defined the educational and social problems to be solved, planned solutions to those problems, and adopted remedies would have answered that question by saying: “Those previous reformers failed but we will succeed. After our reforms are adopted,” they might say, “we can walk away confident that the problems would disappear.”

Not so. Turns out that the social and educational problems reformers supposedly solved still persisted even after these well-intentioned problem-solvers exited. Lo and behold, then another generation of wannabe reformers would appear, do their thing, and then disappear (see here, here, and here).

The fact is that tax-supported public schools in the U.S. have experienced repeated “crises” since the late-19th century (see here, here, and here). Ardent reformers have attacked these “crises”with both gusto and money, again and again. But in the aftermath of these “crises,” disappointed and tired practitioners, parents, and researchers slunk away, resigned to failure in the wake of perverse mishaps they had not anticipated or just plain fatigue.

While the above quote says it all, some examples of naivete and fatalism will help.

Naivete:

1. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg gave the Newark (NJ) public schools a grant of $100 million. With an additional $100 million raised in private funds, reformers closed the city’s schools, created more charters, and vowed to improve abysmal student test scores in math and reading. Newark Mayor Cory Booker, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and others hailed the grants. However, much pushback from a subsequent mayor, community activists, and parents, largely ignored by the donors in giving the money to school officials, complicated the reforms (see here, here, and here). And the results, at best, have been mixed. At worst, many consultants reaped a bonanza in fees.

Chalkbeat journalist Matt Barnum concluded that the outcomes of the huge infusion of money in the Newark public schools was, well, blurry:

*The overall effect of the reforms on student learning was mixed.

*Students seemed to benefit from school closures.

* Charter schools continued to outperform the district, but have grown less effective.

*The results don’t show whether the reforms “worked” — because that’s a complicated question.

2. Technology will transform teaching and learning. The heady optimism of donors, Silicon Valley companies, and venture capitalists that teachers and students using devices and software will revolutionize teaching and learning have long been the hyperbole peddled by enthusiasts since the earliest computers entered schools in the1980s.

Even with accessibility to new technologies broadened to where 1:1 devices are available to students in most U.S. schools, they are partially used in lessons–save for those schools and businesses that offer online courses or have established cyber-schools.

Nonetheless, digital tools have been incorporated into most teachers’ repertoire of classroom activities during the school day. But have these devices transformed teaching? Hardly.

Consider classroom furniture. Sure, compared to the 1950s, classrooms no longer have bolted-down desks. Movable chairs and tables permit teachers to create circles of students for classroom discussions and small groups to work cooperatively on assignments. Moreover, whiteboards have replaced blackboards. And interactive “smart” boards have been installed in over 90 percent of U.S. classrooms..

But the usual format of a lesson: a beginning, middle, and end occurring within 50-minutes periods during the school day; dividing students into small groups, allowing for independent work, whole group discussions, etc. etc. etc.–all of these parts of lessons continue (see here, here, and here).

I find this story of small chunks of classroom change occurring over time historically accurate. It is, I believe, naive for school reformers to believe that major shifts in teacher and student practices can be achieved through state or district mandates, large infusions of dollars, or new technological devices.

Fatalism:

1. Nearly all school reforms fail. Wrong.

The age-graded school (e.g., K-5, K-8, 6-8, 9-12), a 19^th century innovation, has become an unquestioned mainstay of school organization in the 21^st century. Today, most taxpayers and voters have gone to kindergarten at age 5, studied Egyptian mummies in the 6^th grade, took algebra in the 8th or 9^th grade and then left 12^th grade with a diploma.

As an organization, the age-graded school sorts children and youth by their ages to school “grades”; it sends teachers into separate classrooms and prescribes a curriculum carved up into 36-week chunks for each grade. Teachers and students cover each chunk assuming that all children will move uniformly through the school year to be annually promoted.

If any school reform–in the sense of making fundamental changes in organization, curriculum, and instruction–can be considered a success it is the age-graded school. Consider longevity–the first age-graded structure of eight classrooms appeared in Quincy (MA) in the late 1840s. Or consider  effectiveness. The age-graded school has processed efficiently millions of students over the past century and a half, sorted out achievers from non-achievers, and now graduates nearly three-quarters of those entering high school Or adaptability. The age-graded school exists in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and North America covering rural, urban, and suburban districts. What other school reform has been this successful?

Or consider the kindergarten. An innovation initiated by late-19th century middle-class women in various cities who wanted young, poor urban children to get experiences that would help them and their immigrant families do better in life. Beginning in private schools, by the early 1900s, city school systems slowly incorporated these private kindergartens into public schools making them K-8 schools (see here and here). By the end of the 20th century, pre-kindergarten classes for three- and four-year olds had become part of many urban districts (see here).

2. Largely minority and poor urban schools fail again and again.   Not so. Instances of schools and districts enrolling poor children of color succeeding by the dominant metrics of the period (e.g., test scores, graduation rates, college admissions) have appeared since the late-1970s when the Effective Schools movement emerged. Such schools and districts are surely the exception but they do exist especially when superintendent, principal and teacher leadership at these sites remain stable over time. Examples of such schools and districts are:

*Harlem Children’s Zone

*Summit Charter Schools

*Prize winning urban districts

Keep in mind, however, that these districts and schools are not the rule. The dismal fact is that most schools and districts with predominately poor and minority children and youth are under-resourced, have inexperienced or beaten-down teaching staffs, and a record of entering and exiting principals and superintendents who cannot get a grip on the schools they lead. The record of continuing failure–using metrics of the day–tell the same story over and over again.

Reformers, then, have blended naivete and fatalism over generations, ignoring the past and seldom listening to those who work daily in classrooms. That ignorance and passive resignation has been dangerous for schools then as it is now.

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*Yascha Mounk, “Figures of Division,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2019, p. 33

In 2003, Microsoft Corporation went into a partnership with the Philadelphia public schools to build and staff a brand-new high school called “The School of the Future” (SotF) in the middle of a West Philadelphia low-income, African American neighborhood.

Microsoft would supply the technological expertise and the district would staff and operate the school. The mission: prepare youth to go to college and enter the high-tech information-saturated workplace prepared to get entry-level jobs and launch careers.

In 2006, this shining new eco-sensitive, high-tech school, adjacent to a large park and the city’s zoo,  costing $62 million, opened for 750 students. Students were chosen by lottery. The founders and district leaders were committed to educating students–called “learners”–to use software-stuffed laptops through a Microsoft developed portal rather than traditional printed textbooks. A shining new media center, science labs galore, and especially equipped classrooms supported interdisciplinary projects and team-driven projects driven by students’ interests. The facility sparkled. As did the hopes and dreams of the teachers, “learners”, and parents.

In 2012, School of the Future graduated its first class of 117 seniors–three years after it opened and every single one was admitted to college. But it was a rocky ride for these largely poor and African American graduates and subsequent classes.

Principal turnover, unstable district funding–the state had taken over the Philadelphia schools–mediocre academic achievement, and technological glitches, that is, devices became obsolete within a few years–made the initial years most difficult in reaching the goals so admirably laid out in the prospectus for the school.

In 2026, School of the Future remains in operation but even with its surfeit of technology devices and software, it resembles traditional high schools across Philadelphia in its goals, policies, and practices (see here, here, and here).

As Richard Sherin, SotF’s founding principal or “Chief Learner, said while leading the school:

At one point this school functioned very much through technology….Where our innovation is now is to get back to the fundamentals of what an educational academic program is supposed to be like, and how you get technology to mirror or augment that.

Part of those “fundamentals” is having a regular school day of seven 56-minute periods like most high schools with an 11-minute hiatus for what used to be called “home room.” Textbooks have returned as have using paper and pencil for classroom assignments.

While project-based learning occurs in different academic subjects, state standards, yearly testing, and accountability have pressed both administration and faculty to focus on getting better-than-average test scores and graduating most of their students–SotF still exceeds other district high schools in the percentage they graduate.

This slippage from grand opening of a futuristic school to one resembling a traditional high school is common in public schooling as it is in other institutions.

Why is there regress from a school built for the future to the traditional model of schooling as seen in New York’s Downtown School (Part 1) and here in Philadelphia’s School of the Future?

I have an answer but surely not the only one. Designers of future schools and innovations overestimate the potency of their vision and product and underestimate the power of the age-graded school’s structure and culture (fully supported by societal beliefs) that sustain traditional models of schooling. That see-saw of underestimation vs. overestimation neatly summarizes the frequent cycles of designers’ exhilaration with a reform slowly curdling into disappointment as years pass.

The overestimation of a design to alter the familiar traditional school has occurred time and again when reformers with full wallets, seeing how out of touch educators were as changes in society accelerated, created new schools chock-a-block across the country in the 1960s such as “free schools” and non-graded schools  (see here and here).

Within a decade, founders of these schools of the future had departed, either  burned out or because they had ignored politically powerful constituencies of parents and teachers who were uninvolved from the start. These well-intentioned reformers also ignored how the familiar structures and culture of the age-graded school have been thoroughly accepted by most parents and teachers as “real schools.”

Designers of reform seldom think about the stability of the institution that they want to transform. They seldom think about the strong social beliefs of taxpayers, voters, teachers, and parents who have sat in age-graded schools and who sustain the “grammar of schooling” generation after generation.

From daily schedules of 50-minute periods to the fact that teachers ask questions far more than students during lessons to the use of textbooks, homework, and frequent tests–these stable features of the “grammar of schooling” or what Seymour Sarason in The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change (1971), has called the “regularities” of schooling–persist decade after decade. While reformers often exaggerate reform outcomes they champion, they neglect just as often the powerful influence of organizational structures and school cultures.

And do not forget that some designers give up. They realize that their grand visions cannot be accommodated by public schools quickly so they create schools of the future in private venues such as “micro-schools” or  the Khan Lab School and the like.

The notion of mindful incremental change over a lengthy period of time in the direction of gradually building a “school of the future” is anathema to fired-up, amply funded designers and billionaires who want their visions enacted in one fell swoop. Inevitably, then, disappointment ensues when futuristic schools slip back into routines that those designers and philanthropists initially scorned.

Thus, regression to the mean smells like failure to these reformers who underestimated the power of the “grammar of schooling.”

Historians have a unfortunate reputation for being wet blankets. Reformers propose a new idea or a program aimed at transforming what children or youth do in schools and some historian will say: “Hey, that ain’t new. It was tried in the 1890s and lasted less than a decade.”

The historian is nearly always accurate in the facts that similar or even identical innovations did occur before but those very same historians too often forget to add that the contexts then are not the same contexts now. Times change. Teaching machines in the 1950s, for example, are surely similar to widespread “personalized learning” in the present decade in seeking individualized learning but the 1950s and 2020s in the U.S. were politically, economically, technologically, and socially very different.

Historians, then, can see the similarities in innovations but must note the differences in how the innovation began and played out over time in two different contexts. In doing so, such historians can inform current school reformers on the policy strengths, defects, and outcomes–both anticipated and unanticipated–in previous efforts suggesting where there are potholes and bends in the road that have to be noted and avoided by contemporary policymakers. While there are no “lessons” or an easy “usable past” that historians can tell policymakers, historians can point out similarities and differences that can help decision-makers, practitioners, and parents in current policy debates and actions.

There is also another reason for historians to draw upon the past to inform decision-makers about consequential policies; those innovators who come up with an idea and put it into practice already have a view of the past and they act on it. They already have views and identities shaped by history. Those views and “facts” may be uniformed, naked of accurate information of what happened in earlier years but it is, nonetheless, a view of the past that entrepreneurs and policymakers–who are eager to create schools that will best prepare the young for an uncertain future–hold.

Essayist and novelist James Baldwin said it all in 1965.

History, as nearly no one seems to know, is not merely something to be read.  And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past.  On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.  It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.

Historian of education David Tyack put it crisply: Policymakers do not have a choice about whether to use history. They do it willy-nilly. The question is: How accurate is their historical map?

And the historical maps used by techno-utopians inspired to transform traditional schooling into futuristic venues–“learning spaces”–that better prepare students for an information-saturated world where yesterday’s careers are obsolete and today’s jobs disappear each year bear little resemblance to what happened before.  These techno-utopians believe that, while the task will be difficult and complicated, they can succeed where previous efforts failed because, well, they are smarter, know exactly what to do and how to do it, have more technological tools, and wallets filled with cash. In short, they are arrogant–they know better than those who do the work daily in schools and ignorant of past similar efforts where just as smart, well-intentioned reformers put into practice innovations a generation ago.

All of this occurred to me as I finished reading Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism an ethnography about a New York City public middle school that opened in 2009. Amply funded by exceedingly idealistic and optimistic technology entrepreneurs, students would create gaming software, work on high-tech projects in teams, and learn in spaces similar to start-up companies. This would be a school where coding and digital media production practices across the curriculum became routine, where pedagogy was redesigned to be game-like, and where the school would “cultivate student agency, creativity [and] improvisational problem-solving capacities” (p.98). In short, a media technology, student-centered school of the future.

Christo Sims who was there as a researcher when the public school opened with a sixth grade class spent three years at Downtown School–a pseudonym–and described the thinking that produced the school, its policies, and practices.

Things, however, didn’t work out the way the designers intended.

Consider how school-made rules for controlling student movement and reducing noise appeared. Sims asks reader to consider how school leaders and teachers broke down classroom lessons into step-by-step procedures and set activities. Sims notes that in some classrooms rows of desks facing the front of the room replaced tables and chairs arranged in circles with students facing one another. He documents that as lessons ended, teachers organized students into “quiet, forward-facing, single-file lines before they left the classroom” and then “teachers  marched students down the hallway to their next class” (p.97). Furthermore, teachers and students became time-minded, both having a sharp awareness of completing an activity in a given amount of time. Thus, according to Sims, a student-centered ideal school turned into one eerily similar to a traditional school.

One part of the school year did come close to the aspirations of the school designers. Called “Level Up,” a week-long period, three times a year, when the school completely altered their daily schedules, classroom lessons, and interactions. School leaders issued periodic challenges for teams of students to work on. For the first “Level Up”week, leaders challenged students to build a Rube Goldberg machine out of common materials (popsicle sticks, paper clips, rubber bands, plastic bags, etc.) that parents and teachers had provided. Another week-long session had students writing and producing short plays based on fairy tales that they had “remixed” from music, videos, photos, and art.

These interludes during the school year were moments when the school designers’ rhetoric of student agency, participation, and involvement matched what occurred in the school. Students chose which kind of machine or “remixed” fairy tale to create, worked on it together and turned in a product that they exhibited to the rest of the school. But these interludes were three weeks out of a 36-week school year.

After close observation and participation in the school for three years, Sims concludes that: “While the reformers championed student agency and creativity, students had very little say about what they could do, and most of what they were supposed to do was quite similar to the very schooling practices that reformers criticized and aimed to replace” (p.94).

I do not know whether the Downtown School is open in 2026.* What I do know is that the historical paradox of creating schools for the future that end up resembling present-day schools continues. A well-funded redesigned school where well-intentioned, optimistic reformers reject the traditional model of teaching and learning only to slide inexorably into the kind of schooling similar to what they found lacking is not rare but common in the history of public schooling.

Smart, well-funded idealists thought (and continue to think) that creating a brand-new school with a novel curriculum and state-of-the-art technologies would be free and clear of traditional space, schedule, parents’ social beliefs about what a “real” school is, and the inherent asymetrical power relationships between teachers and students that have marked tax-supported public schools for at least two centuries. The Downtown School that Christo Sims describes may well be an instance of “regression to the mean,” a statistical phrase all too common in the performance of organizations and individuals over time. That slow movement to the middle of a continuum is what Part 2 explores.

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* “Downtown School” is a fictitious name that Sims gave to the New York City school he observed.

Every job has its share of surprises. A key piece of equipment breaks down. A traffic accident forces a change in delivery routes. A client calls to say you’ve won the contract–but they need the order filled three months earlier than planned. No matter where you work, you need to be able to improvise to meet your objectives, or at least cut your losses.

“The Presidency was no different,” former tenant in the White House, Barack Obama said in describing his job.

He describes his Party’s fight for the Affordable Care Act in 2009-2010 in his first term. Improvising political decisions with both Democrats and Republicans while juggling scores of other issues that beset any President capture what he and his partners had to do repeatedly. Obama knew well those compromises, dotted with sudden and unexpected twists and turns, had to be dealt with. Improvisation was the order of the day when it came to health care.

Re-read the epigraph. It also applies perfectly to teachers teaching and their unplanned decision-making when trying to meet their lesson objectives.

Non-teachers would be amazed at the many decisions secondary school teachers make during their five 50-minute daily lessons or elementary school teachers during their five-hour school day. Also non-teachers would marvel at the frequency of on-the-fly, unplanned decisions during each lesson as well as the seemingly effortless segues teachers make from one task to another. Decisions tumble out one after another while questioning students, starting and stopping activities, and minding the behavior of individual students as if teachers had eyes in the back of their heads.

I know of no MRI tests examining brain activity that neuroscientists have used on teachers while they make classroom decisions. Nonetheless, the number and frequency of decisions teachers do make during a lesson have been examined sporadically (mostly in the 1970s and 1980s) through simulations and video analyses of actual lessons but seldom since then (Readers who know of recent studies, please let me know).

In distinguishing between planning lessons and actual classroom teaching–what academics call “interactive” teaching– researchers found that teacher-driven routines governed the total number and frequency of decisions. However, these routines for managing groups of 25-35 while teaching content and skills—taking attendance, going over homework, doing seat-work, asking questions–were unpredictably interrupted by unexpected events (e.g., unruly students, PA announcements, student questions, equipment breakdowns). Thus, spontaneous, unplanned decisions had to be made. Both expected and unexpected events during lessons increased the volume of teacher decisions.

*Researchers Richard Shavelson and Hilda Borko summarized studies that reported .7 decisions per minute during interactive teaching.

*Researcher Philip Jackson (p. 149) said that elementary teachers have 200 to 300 exchanges with students every hour (between 1200-1500 a day), most of which are unplanned and unpredictable calling for teacher decisions, if not judgments.

In short, teaching because it is a “opportunistic,”that is, neither teacher nor students can say with confidence what exactly will happen next. Such situations require “spontaneity and immediacy” (Jackson, p. 166, 152).

Effective teachers, then, have to improvise. They must decide on the spot in dealing with both the routine and unexpected. Such unexpected, ad-lib decision-making is a large chunk of what is called the art of teaching.

While Barack Obama doesn’t mention teachers in the above epigraph, the ex-President easily could have.

When asked how I got interested in the uses of technological devices in classrooms, I answer that I was the target for a quarter-century of high-tech innovations and classroom reforms when I taught high school history and served as a district administrator in different urban school systems.

I then say that I have been trained as an historian and studied many reform efforts to improve schooling over the past century in U.S. classrooms, schools, and districts. I examined how teachers have taught since the 1890s. I investigated policymakers’ constant changes in curriculum since the 1880s. I analyzed the origins of the age-graded school and the spread of this innovation through the 19^th century. And I parsed the utopian dreams of reformers who believed that new machine technologies (e.g., film, radio, instructional television, desktop computer) would alter how teachers teach and students learn. I then end my answer by pointing out that these electronic devices are in the DNA of all innovations aimed at altering how teachers teach and how students learn.

What surprises me is that these questioners had not viewed high-tech devices as having either a history in schools or as blood relations to constant efforts to improve schools. Instead, they saw (and see) innovative high-tech devices as singular, even exceptional, ways of transforming teaching and learning completely divorced from previous efforts at improving classroom practice through curricular reforms in math, social studies, science, and other subjects or instructional reforms such as project-based learning, team teaching and Direct Instruction.

And that is a huge conceptual error. Why? Because, school and classroom reforms including technological ones, are part of the same genetic code–they are kissing cousins, so to speak.

Teachers using iCell App, Khan Academy videos, Google Classroom, Kahoot, and other software programs are implementing curricular reforms and trying to shape instruction. Technological innovations, then, are blood cousins to curricular and instructional reforms. Consequently, to stretch the metaphor, they share similar genes.

For example, all reforms come bathed in rhetoric. Take the “21^st Century Skills” effort, organized by the Partnership for 21^st Century Skills (P21), a reform coalition whose members include Verizon, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Dell. Their mission is to prepare the current generation of children and youth to compete in a globalized economy. Their words, like the rhetoric of so many other reformers—past and present—portray a economic, social, and political crisis for U.S. competition in world markets unless today’s youth leave school fully equipped with the skills of creating, innovating, collaborating, and critically thinking. And don’t forget: a repertoire of technological skills. The rhetoric must not only create a sense of crisis, it must portray existing institutions as woefully deficient. Read the stuff.

If patterns emerge from analyzing reform rhetoric over time so can patterns be observed in the journey of a policy from its rhetoric to becoming formally adopted and then appear as an actual program in schools and classrooms. Designing the policy and program means frequent revisions as they go through the political vetting process to get funded. Think of federal laws such as No Child Left Behind and Every Student Succeeds Act and a spanking-new whole language software program for district schools.

Ditto for finding patterns in the degree to which those adopted policies get implemented and changed as the design wends its way into schools and eventually classrooms (e.g., e.g., Success for All, Maine’s 1:1 laptop initiative, ClassDojo)

If reform rhetoric, policy adoption, and putting innovations into classroom practice can be examined for regularities so can the criteria used to assess the reform (e.g., test scores, satisfaction of teachers and students with innovation, rates of graduation, etc.). Once assessed, determining whether or not the reform should be sustained across the entire district is a judgment call that authorities make on the basis of political, ideological, and evidentiary grounds.

In viewing technological innovations as a sub-set of curricular and instructional reforms, teachers, principals, and parents can identify patterns, determine consequences for the adoption of the innovation, track the journey as it goes from policy to classroom practice, and expect certain outcomes while being open to unanticipated outcomes as well.

Too many policymakers, practitioners, and parents see technological innovations as unique initiatives unrelated to historic patterns in school reforms. They err.

My experiences as a practitioner and historian have taught me to see technological devices as being blood relations, even kissing cousins, in the history of school reform in the U.S..

On the one hand, some neuroscientists and journalists have argued that unrestrained access to information and communication through social media have rewired the brain. The brain is flexible and can alter itself in response to the environment by creating new neural pathways that ancestors lacked. So multi-tasking has become the norm and, with social media, they argue, we are more productive and connected to people as never before.

Yet on the other hand, there are those neuroscientists who concur that while the brain is plastic, it has hardly been rewired. Instead, complete access to information and people–such as friends, like-minded enthusiasts, and strangers–unleashes brain chemicals that give us pleasure. Or as one psychologist put it:

What the Internet does is stimulate our reward systems over and over with tiny bursts of information (tweets, status updates, e-mails) that … can be delivered in more varied and less predictable sequences. These are experiences our brains did not evolve to prefer, but [they are] like drugs of abuse….

To these researchers and journalists, the Internet and social media are addictive.

So these  competing views emerge from current brain research. Most studies producing these results, however, come from experiments on selected humans and animals. They are hardly definitive. They offer parents and educators little firm knowledge about the impact on children and youth from watching multiple screens hours on end, day-after-day.

And nothing is mentioned about the issue that both neuroscientists and philosophers persistently stumble over. Is the brain the same as the mind? Is consciousness–our sense of self–the product of neural impulses or is it a combination of memories, perceptions, and beliefs apart from brain activity picked up in MRIs? On one side are those who equate the brain with the mind (David Dennett) and on the other side are those who call such equivalency, “neurotrash.”

Yet even with the unknowns about the brain, its plasticity, and the mind, we know much less about what effects the Internet has upon young children, youth, and adults. One writer even asked: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Nonetheless, many school reformers have embraced brain research with nary a look backward.

Consider those reformers including technology enthusiasts who hate current school structures with such as passion that they call for bricks-and-mortar schools to go the way of gas-lit street lights and be replaced by online instruction or other forms of schooling that embrace high-tech fully. Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor, to cite one example, makes such a case.

[T]he roots of our twenty-first-century educational philosophy go back to the machine age and its model of linear, specialized, assembly-line efficiency, everyone on the same page, everyone striving for the same answer to a question that both offers uniformity and suffers from it. If the multiple-choice test is the Model T of knowledge assessment, we need to ask: What is the purpose of a Model T in an Internet age?

Others call for blended learning, a combination of face-to-face (F2F in the lingo) and online lessons.

There’s this myth in the brick and mortar schools that somehow the onset of online K-12 learning will be the death of face-to-face … interaction. However this isn’t so — or at least in the interest of the future of rigor in education, it shouldn’t be. In fact, without a heaping dose of F2F time plus real-time communication, online learning would become a desolate road for the educational system to travel.

The fact is that there is a purpose in protecting a level of F2F and real-time interaction even in an online program…. The power is in a Blended Learning equation:

Face-to-Face + Synchronous Conversations + Asynchronous Interactions = Strong Online Learning Environment

Then there are those who embrace brain research with lusty (but uncritical) abandon.

Students’ digitally conditioned brains are 21st century brains, and teachers must encourage these brains to operate fully in our classrooms…. If we can help students balance the gifts technology brings with these human gifts, they will have everything they need.

So where are we? In an earlier post I quoted  cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham, a frequent blogger. He once offered three bullet-point facts for those educators caught up in brain-based research*:

#The brain is always changing

#The connection between the brain and behavior is not obvious.

#Deriving useful information for teachers from neuroscience is slow, painstaking work.

Willingham ended his post by asking a key question:

“How can you tell the difference between bonafide research and schlock? That’s an ongoing problem and for the moment, the best advice may be that suggested by David Daniel, a researcher at James Madison University: ‘If you see the words ‘brain-based,’ run.’ “

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*The link to the Washington Post op-ed no longer works; the article has been deleted. I apologize to readers for not being able to supply link. However, Willingham has an article where he cites the myths about connections between neuroscience and schooling (see here).

Why is it that now with a bustling, productive economy, falling inflation, and relatively low levels of unemployment, American public schools seldom receive credit for the state of the economy? In light of scathing past criticism of poorly performing public schools undermining economic growth (see here), the question sounds foolish. It isn’t foolish if you consider the Great School Scam of the 1980’s.

In past decades, U.S. Presidents, corporate leaders, and critics blasted public schools for a globally less competitive economy, sinking productivity, and jobs lost to other nations. The United States, as one highly popular report, “A Nation at Risk,” put it in 1983, that the U.S. had educationally disarmed itself in a hostile economic war. “If only to keep and improve on the slim competitive edge we still retain in world markets,” the report said, “we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system.”

And in that decade and since, school reforms poured over the country. States legislated higher graduation requirements, a longer school year, new curricula, and more tests for students. Since the 1990s, more students take academic subjects. Scores on tests of basic skills are higher now than in previous decades (except for the immediate post-pandemic years). More students go to college than ever before.

That is why I ask: Since America competes well with Japan, Germany, and China in labor productivity, economic growth, and share of world merchandising exports, why haven’t public schools received the educational equivalent of the Oscars?

Not even a cheaply framed certificate of merit, however, is in the offing for public schools. For the myth of better schools as the engine for a leaner, stronger economy was a scam from the very beginning. Even though few reputable economists ever equated declining test scores with declining global competitiveness–critics of public schools did throughout the 1970s and 1980s.

Even though most corporate leaders knew that falling productivity was connected to shifting technologies, restructured industries, and poor managerial judgments–they joined business round tables to lobby for school reforms. Of course, Presidents George Bush, the Elder, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush knew that stimulating economic growth depended far more on fiscal and monetary policies than turning around low-performing schools–nonetheless, they pressed for national goals and standards.

The bumper sticker was: Better schools, a Better Economy! Thus the lack of praise for the performance of public schools as the economy has brightened particularly since the recession of 2008 exposes the lame political logic peddled by many national school reformers.

When business leaders and national public officials blamed schools for an unhealthy economy, they avoided harsher public judgments about inept governmental and corporate policies and helplessness in the face of intransigent economic cycles. The political appeal of cunningly simplistic solutions for intractable problems is not, of course, confined to public schools. Past popular frenzy for three-strikes-you’re-out legislation to rid streets of dangerous criminals, for example, or anti-crime bills that funded more prisons are instances of public officials desperately seeking policies that masquerade as action but have little promise of eliminating the problems that initially triggered the bleak search for solutions. Gulling the public with ersatz solutions remains politically attractive.

What makes the educational swindle tricky to uncover is that no conspirators hatched the fraud. No covey of grifters dreamed up the scam over a few beers. Business leaders, national and state policymakers, and practitioners saw the obvious political appeal of harnessing schools to building a stronger economy and believed in their heart-of-hearts that such concerted efforts to improve schools would indeed improve the economy. The media amplified the delusion. What occurred was a widespread, self-inflicted, but politically useful deception anchored in deep confusion over the many purposes public schools serve in a democracy.

For almost two centuries the public has wanted its schools to do many things. Schools have been expected to take safe care of children while they are in school six or more hours a day. Schools have been expected to bend children’s minds toward the values that each community prizes and away from harmful behaviors like drug abuse, careless sexual activity, and other destructive acts that adults have trouble controlling. Schools have been expected to create communities of children where learning and decency are valued. Furthermore, schools have been expected to create literate citizens who can make wise public judgments, contribute to their communities, and become useful workers and entrepreneurs in the economy. Note, then, that among the many purposes schools are expected to achieve, one is clearly economic. The scam begins here with a sleight of hand regarding these purposes.

No one seriously expects 13,000 school districts in the U.S to set fiscal and monetary policy for the nation’s economy. No one seriously expects schools to generate millions of high-wage jobs. No one honestly wants schools to make pricing or factory-relocation decisions. What most Americans expect of their schools is to equip students adequately for future entry into the workplace.

For there is a clear connection between schooling and the economic benefits accruing to individual students when they complete high school and enter college. Few doubt the compelling statistics that the more formal schooling an individual completes, the higher their lifetime earnings. High school dropouts, on average, earn less than high school graduates, who, in turn, earn less than those who complete college. While such figures vary by gender, class, and race the link between years of schooling and income has remained strong. Confusing the individual benefits of schooling with the alleged collective benefits that schools confer upon the larger economy is the shell game that has been played out over recent decades.

This lack of praise for the work done by schools after decades of energetic school reform reveals so clearly the skillfully concocted deception about the causal connection between better schools and a healthier economy. The scam may be politically appealing but, undebated or ignored, it remains a swindle that can, if left unattended, undermine public confidence in schools.

A number of years ago, I was a member of a panel held at Mission High School in San Francisco. Software developers and designers of ed-tech products attended this panel discussion. The moderator asked each of us to state in 8 minutes “what hard lessons have you learned about education that you’d like to share with the ed-tech design community?”

My fellow panelists were two math teachers–one from Mission High School and the other a former teacher at Oakland High School, three product designers (one for the Chan/Zuckerberg Initiative, another for Desmos, and the lead designer for Khan Academy) who had been working in the ed-tech industry for years. In attendance were nearly 60 young (in their 20s and 30s) product designers, teachers, and ed-tech advocates .

Elizabeth Lin, then a designer for Khan Academy, had organized and moderated the panel. She began with a Kahoot quiz on Pokemon and Harry Potter. For the record, I knew none of the answers. I had never played Pokemon or, as of that date, had cracked a Harry Potter book. 

When my turn came to speak, I looked around the room and saw immediately that I was the oldest person in the room. Here is what I said.

Many designers and school reformers believe that in old age, pessimism and cynicism go together. Not true.

As someone who has taught high school history for many years, led a school district, and researched the history of school reform including the use of new technologies in classrooms over the past half-century, I am an oldster. But I am neither a pessimist, nay-sayer, or cynic about improving public schools and teachers making changes to help students learn. I am a tempered idealist who is cautiously optimistic about what U.S. public schools have done and still can do for children, the community, and the nation. Both my tempered idealism and cautious optimism have a lot to do with what I have learned over the decades about school reform especially when it comes to technology. So here I offer a few lessons drawn from nearly a half-century of experiences in public schools.

LESSON 1: Teachers are central to all classroom learning

I have learned that no piece of software, portfolio of apps, or learning management system can replace teachers simply because teaching is a helping profession like medicine and psychotherapy. Helping professions are completely dependent upon interactions with patients, clients, and students for success. No improvement in physical or mental health or learning can occur without the active participation of the patient and client—and of course, the student.

Now, all of these helping professions have had new technologies applied to them. But if you believe, as I do, that teaching is anchored in a relationship between an adult and a student then relationships cannot be replaced by even the most well designed software, efficient device, or virtual reality. There is something else that software designers often ignore or forget. That is that teachers make policy every time they enter their classroom and teach.

Once she closes her classroom door, the teacher decides what the lesson is going to be, what parts of top-down policies she will put into practice in the next hour, and which parts of a new software program she will use, if at all.

Designers are supposed to have empathy for users, that is, understand emotionally what it is like to teach a crowd of students five or more hours a day and know that teacher decisions determine what content and skills enter the classroom that day. Astute ed-tech designers understand that, for learning to occur, teachers must gain student trust and respect. Thus, teachers are not technicians who mechanically follow software directions. Teaching and learning occur because of the teacher’s expertise, smart use of high-tech tools, and the creation of a classroom culture for learning that students come to trust, respect and admire.

Of course, there are a lot of things about teaching that can be automated. Administrative stuff—like attendance and grade books—can be replaced with apps. Reading and math skills and subject area content can be learned online but thinking, problem solving, and decision-making where it involves other people, collaboration, and interactions with teachers, software programs cannot replace teachers. That’s a rosy scenario that borders on fantasy.

LESSON 2: Access to digital tools is not the same as what happens in daily classroom activities.

In 1984, there were 125 students for each computer; now the ratio is 1:1. Because access to new technologies has spread across the nation’s school districts, too many pundits and promoters leap to the conclusion that all teachers integrate these digital tools into daily practice similarly and seamlessly. While surely the use of devices and software has gained entry into classrooms, anyone who regularly visits classrooms much variation among teachers using digital technologies.

Yes, most teachers have incorporated digital tools into daily practice but even those who have thoroughly integrated new technologies into their lessons reveal both change and stability in their teaching.

In 2016, I visited 41 elementary and secondary teachers in Silicon Valley who had a reputation for integrating technology into their daily lessons.

They were hard working, sharp teachers who used digital tools as easily as paper and pencil. Devices and software were in the background, not foreground. The lessons they taught were expertly arranged with a variety of student activities. These teachers had, indeed, made changes in creating playlists for students, pursuing problem-based units, and organizing the administrative tasks of teaching.

But I saw no fundamental or startling changes in the usual flow of a lesson. Teachers set lesson goals, designed varied activities, elicited student participation, varied their grouping of students, and assessed student understanding. None of that differed from earlier generations of experienced teachers. The many lessons I observed were teacher-directed and revealed continuity in how teachers have taught for decades. Again, both stability and change marked teaching with digital tools.

LESSON 3: Designers and entrepreneurs often overestimate their product’s power to make change and just as often underestimate the power of organizations to keep things as they are.

Consider the age-graded school. The age-graded school (e.g., K-5, K-8, 6-8, 9-12) solved the 20^th century problem of how to provide an efficient schooling to move

masses of children through public schools.  Today, it is the dominant form of school organization.

Most Americans have gone to kindergarten at age 5, studied Egyptian mummies in the 6^th grade, took algebra in the 8th or 9^th grade and then left 12^th grade with a diploma around age 18.

The age-graded school was an organizational innovation designed to replace the one-room schoolhouse in the mid-19^th century—yes, I said 19^th century or almost 200 years ago. That design shaped (and continues to shape) how teachers teach and students learn.

As an organization, the age-graded school distributes children and youth by age to school “grades. It sends teachers into separate classrooms and prescribes a curriculum carved up into 36-week chunks for each grade. Teachers and students cover each chunk assuming that all children will move uniformly through the 36-weeks, and, after passing tests would be promoted to the next grade.

Now, the age-graded school dominates how public (and private) schools are organized. Even charter schools unbeholden to district rules for how to organize a school, have teachers teach, and students learn are age-graded as is the brand new public high school on the Oracle campus called Design Tech High School.

LESSON 4: Ed Tech designers are trapped in a trilemma of their own making.

Three highly prized values clash. One is the desire for profit—building a product that schools buy and use. Another is to help teachers, students, and schools become more efficient and effective. And the third value is the strong belief that technology can solve educational problems.

Many venture capitalists, founders of start-ups, and designers of products–call them cheerleaders for high tech innovations– cherish these conflicting values.

I’m not critical of these values. But when it comes to schools, product designers with these values in their search for profit and improvement under-estimate both the complexity of daily teaching and the influence of age-graded schools on teaching and learning. Those who see devices and software transforming today’s classrooms more often than not over-estimate the power of their product while ignoring the influence of school structures’s influence upon what occurs between teachers and students.

I don’t believe that there are technical solutions to teaching, to running a school, or governing a district. Education is far too complex.

These are a few of the “hard” lessons that I have learned.

Recently, I attended a celebration of a friend’s book being published. Both my friend and his wife are former students–I see them every few months.When together we catch up with one another’s families and what each of us has been doing since we last met.

At the gathering in their home I saw people I hadn’t seen in many years. Food and drink were plentiful on the patio but I grew tired of standing with my cane and went into their living room and sat. Toddlers, teenagers, and adults flowed easily between rooms and the outside patio. Someone I didn’t know sat down next to me and we engaged in a conversation that brought to mind many prior discussions I have had with fellow teachers, university colleagues, and graduate students as well as policymakers, parents, and researchers over the years. Here is my memory of that conversation.

The young man was in his 40s (yeah, to me being a 40-something is young) and an administrator in a medium-sized California district. I had known him when he was an undergraduate student and his family as well—years ago his mother was a student in one of my classes when she. was working on her doctorate. So the conversation flowed easily about his family, friendship with my former students, and work. When it came to his job as an administrator our conversation turned to the title of this post.

He told me about the persistent conflict he has faced in working as a teacher, principal, and now a district administrator about changing the school system. As I recall, he asked for my opinion on the question that has nagged at him for the past few years: why work within a broken public school system and make small changes that help the traditional system work a tad better for teachers and students when what is really needed are fundamental or giant steps that get rid of the existing system and create a far better, more equitable one?

This is a question that I have wrestled with my entire career that I eventually answered for myself by choosing to work within public schools. Now here was this sincere, thoughtful young man asking the same question that had bedeviled me for decades.

I answered him in a fashion familiar to me because I had worked out its logic over decades. Since it was a back-and-forth conversation the points I raised in my answer were more circular and less linear than I present here:

Here is what I said:

First, 90 percent of all children and youth attend public schools. If you want to influence the young, you work within the system.

Second, few, if any, public institutions serving the young, old, the ill, or victims of crime have tossed their existing systems and installed a fundamentally new one save for instances of political revolution such as had occurred in America, France, Russia, French, and China in earlier centuries. What has occurred most often in these public institutions has been incremental, not fundamental change.*

Third, each of the above public institutions that have significantly improved over time in reaching their stated goals have made incremental changes in reducing the gap in achievement between minorities and whites while increasing fairness than had existed before.  Taking small steps in building stairs that reach desired goals took many years, political savvy, thought-out strategies, and patience on the part of school boards and superintendents. Far from perfect today, such districts as Long Beach (CA) under Carl Cohen (1992-2002) and Christopher Steinhauser (2002-2020) who have led their district continuously for a quarter-century; Boston (MA) public schools under Tom Payzant (1995-2006) also stands out as an exemplar of incrementalism geared to achieving goals.

Fourth, too many superintendents, principals, and teachers who ardently seek fundamental changes within a short time frame in their districts, schools, and classrooms often exit within a few years. Reformers’ disappointment over making the changes they promoted add to the din reinforcing the stereotype of the intractability of public schools.

When we heard clinking glasses,from the newly published author and host of the party, our conversation ended

Had I more time with the young administrator, I would have added the ultimate point that each educator has the deeply personal task of eventually deciding what he or she has to do when it comes to altering public schools..

As I see it, the basic question facing each educator is : Do I work inside schools with like-minded colleagues seeking incremental changes toward worthwhile goals while making the commitment of spending time in schools and districts or, do I work outside schools mobilizing political groups to make changes such as gaining paid family leave, expanding unemployment insurance, increasing health benefits, locating less expensive housing, and unionizing workers. Then there is the choice of running for political office or aiding officials who seek changes in national economic, political, social, and cultural structures that frame the democratic, market-driven society in which we live?

For tax-supported public schools mirror the larger society and that society has historically strong beliefs, assumptions, and structures that shape what occurs in public institutions such as schools. While changes do occur in schools and districts, they will be mostly incremental but significant if harnessed in a concerted way to achieve particular goals. For reformers, then, there is, indeed, a choice.

As a reformer, I had made my decision decades ago to taking small steps toward incremental reform within public schools. Now at this party, my young friend was wrestling with a similar decision now.

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*The district administrator knew well what I meant in distinguishing incremental from fundamental changes. For those readers who do not. Here are the differences.

Incremental changes aim to end the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of existing structures and cultures of schooling including classroom teaching in small steps. By structures, I mean district goals, funding, and the age-graded school that are (and have been) basic building blocks of the system of tax-supported schooling in the U.S. By cultures, I mean the norms, expectations, and beliefs in the classroom, school, and district that color daily activities.

Promoters of incremental change view the basic structures and cultures of schooling as largely sound but in need of improvements. There are inefficient and ineffective practices that undermine the productivity and fairness of the system. The old car, to use a familiar metaphor, is sputtering and rusting but solid. It needs a paint job, tires, brakes, a new battery, and a tune-up—incremental changes. Once improved, the system will work as intended.

Examples of incremental changes in schools would include adding new courses to high school curriculum; introducing new tests; adopting pay-for-performance for teachers and principals; decreasing class size from 30 to 25; Each of these changes, of course, seeks increased efficiency and effectiveness of the system.

In the classroom, incremental changes would include the teacher introducing a new unit in her math course that she had never taught before. Perhaps a teacher who designs a behavioral modification plan with rewards and penalties for good and bad classroom behavior. Or a teacher who decides to use the mobile cart with 30 laptops for one of her classes.

The idea behind fundamental change is that the basic school structures and cultures are flawed at their core and need a complete overhaul or replacement–giant steps, not small ones. Or to switch metaphors, that old car is a jalopy far beyond repair. We need to get a new car or consider other forms of transportation.

If new courses, more staff, extended day and school year, and higher salaries for teachers are examples of incremental changes in the structures and cultures of schooling, then broadening the school’s social role in the early 20th century to intervene in the lives of children and their families by offering school-based social and medical services and for advocates of public schooling to see the institution as an agent of social reform in the larger society (e.g., ending alcohol and drug abuse, abolishing racial segregation, creating better people). Advocates of charter schools want more independence from district curriculum and policies. They want more parental choice and competition with regular schools by altering the fundamental structure of funding. Other reformers wish to replace the age-graded school with ungraded schools that eliminate promotion and retention, the sliced-up curriculum, and self-contained classrooms. Again, designs for fundamental changes are proposed giant steps to solve deep-seated problems or intractable dilemmas.

Applied to the classroom, advocates of fundamental change would transform the teacher’s role from transmitter of information to one who guides students to their own decisions, who helps children find meaning in their experiences, and urges them to learn from one another. These reformers seek to upend traditional teaching where the teacher talks, students mostly listen, use a textbook for the main source of knowledge, and pass tests that determine how much has been remembered. They want classrooms where teachers organize activities that help students learn from subject matter, one another, and the community. Assessment is less taking multiple-choice tests and more working on real world tasks. Such changes would mean substantial alterations in the ways that teachers think about content, pedagogy, and learning.

Awhile ago, a colleague asked me to write about my career as a practitioner/scholar over the past half-century. I accepted. Part of the request was to include what I have written about policy and its implementation as a historian of education that contributed to both research and classroom practice.

Current metrics suggest what a “contribution” may look like. There are, for example, Google scholar and Edu-Scholar rankings. Also Web of Science citations. All well and good but they don’t show influence or impact on what practitioners do in their classrooms or what researchers investigate and publish. Rankings and citations are, then, no more than fragile, even shaky, proxies of a “contribution.”

I thought about these metrics a lot and decided instead of measuring my influence on groups for whom I have written much and often, I would describe those works that gave me much satisfaction in writing. This is not false modesty. After all, what I think may be a contribution, others may yawn at its banality. What I think is a mundane article or a just-so book,  I will receive notes from readers about how powerful the study was in altering their thinking. To me, then, writing is a form of teaching: some lessons fly with my students and others flop.

So what follows is my self-assessment of those writings that gave me the most satisfaction and feeling of pride in doing something worthwhile.  Others would have to judge whether what I have written over the past half-century has contributed to what practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and the general public—audiences I have written for—know and do. In all instances, what I offer are publications that were prompted by puzzling questions that grew out of my teaching, administrative experience, and what I learned as a researcher. They have played a huge part in what I chose to research, write, and teach.

How Teachers Taught (1984, 1993)

This study of three different generations of reformers trying to alter the dominant way of classroom teaching (1900s, 1960s, and 1980s) was my first historical analysis of teaching. The question that prompted the study came out of my visits to Arlington (VA) public school classrooms over the seven years I served as superintendent in the 1970s and early 1980s. I kept seeing classroom lessons that reminded me of how I was taught in elementary and secondary schools in Pittsburgh (PA) in the 1940s. And how I taught in Cleveland (OH) in the 1950s. How could that be, I asked myself? That question led to a three-year grant to study how teachers taught between 1880-1990.

I used archives, photographs, and teacher accounts in varied districts to cover a century of policy efforts to shift teaching from teacher-centered to student-centered instruction. I documented the century-long growth of classroom hybrids of both kinds of classroom instruction. Few historians, sadly, have since pursued the question of how reform policies aimed at altering teachers’ classroom behavior actually get put into practice.

 The Managerial Imperative and the Practice of Leadership (1988)

Here again, a question that grew out of my being in classrooms as a teacher in Cleveland and Washington, D.C. and an administrator in the District of Columbia nudged me. What I saw and experienced in classrooms and administrative offices looked a great deal alike insofar as the core roles that both teachers and administrators had to perform. Was that accurate and if so, how did that come to be? So I investigated the history of teaching, principaling and superintending. I saw that three core roles dominated each position: instructional, managerial, and political. I compared and contrasted each with vivid examples and included chapters on my experiences as both a teacher and administrator.

Reform Again, Again, and Again (1990)

The article that appeared in Educational Researcher looked at various cycles of change that I had documented in How Teachers Taught and The Managerial Imperative. The central question that puzzled me was how come school reform in instruction, curriculum, governance and organization recurred time and again. I was now old enough and, most important, had experienced these reform cycles.

I presented a conceptual framework that explained the recurring reforms. My prior studies and direct school experiences gave me rich examples to illustrate the framework.

Tinkering toward Utopia (1995)

David Tyack and I collaborated in writing this volume. We drew heavily from the “History of School Reform” course we had been teaching to graduate students for nearly a decade and each of our prior studies . In only 142 pages (endnotes and bibliography excluded), we summed up our thinking about the rhetoric and actuality of school reform policies in curriculum, school organization, governance, and instruction over the past two centuries in the U.S.

Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom (2001)

In 1986, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology since 1920 was published. In that study, I looked at teacher access and use of film and radio in classrooms during the 1920s and 1930s, educational television in the 1950s and 1960s and the first generation of desktop computers in the early 1980s. The central question driving that study was: what did teachers do in their lessons when they had access to film, radio, television, and later computers?

The question derives from the larger interest I have had in school reform policies and the journey they take as they wend their way from state and local school boards into classroom practice. Like new curricula, governance changes, and shifts in how best to organize schools, grasping at new technologies that promise deep changes in how teachers teach is simply another instance of school reformers using policy mandates to alter classroom instruction. In short, adopting new technologies is simply another thread in the recurring pattern of school reformers seeking classroom changes during the 20^th and 21^st centuries.

Fifteen years after Teachers and Machines appeared, computers had become common in schools. So in Oversold and Underused: Computers in Classrooms, I asked: to what degree were teachers in Silicon Valley schools using computers in their classrooms, labs, and media centers for lessons they taught? Such questions about classroom use go beyond the rhetoric surrounding new devices and software. I wanted to see what actually occurred in classrooms when districts adopted policies pushing new technologies into pre-school, high school, and university classrooms.

Teaching History Then and Now (2016)

The question that prompted this study came out of writing for my blog since 2009 on how I taught history at Glenville High School in Cleveland (OH) and Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s and 1960s. I wondered how teachers in these high schools were teachning history a half-century later. Those personal questions led me to reconstructing my teaching from personal records and archives I found at each school. Then I went to those very same high schools in 2004-2005 to do observations and conducted interviews with teachers of who were then teaching.

Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice (2009-2026)

On this WordPress blog, I have published over 2000 posts about the history of school reform and teaching in the U.S. and around the world. Twice weekly, I write an 800-1000 word post about a question that I want to answer, an issue that intrigues me, or an event that I believe is important to educators and schooling.

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These publications have given me great satisfaction in writing for varied audiences. Converting questions and ideas into words on a screen or jottings on a piece of paper is what I have done since I published my first article in 1960 in the Negro History Bulletin. Have I written things that have never left my home and remain in closets and bottom drawers? You bet. But writing is a different way of teaching; it remains crucial to me and for as I long as I can write about the past as it influences the present, especially policies that aim at altering how teachers teach, I will do so..

Yet the act of writing remains mysterious to me. Why do the words sometimes flow easily and excite me in their capturing illusive ideas and rendering them in a graceful way and yet other times what I see on paper or on the screen are clunky sentences, if not clumsy wording? I do not know. Immersed in writing about policy and practice historically (as it has been for me in teaching in high school and graduate seminars), nonetheless, has given me soaring highs and much satisfaction.

While I may not understand the mystery of writing, I remain most grateful to Clio, the muse of historians, and the few thousand subscribers, especially the questions and comments I get from readers.

For that gratitude I have received and for the personal satisfaction I have gained from writing across these decades, I am one most fortunate writer and teacher. Thank you dear readers.