Prof. em. historische pedagogiek Larry Cuban: Success, Failure, and “Mediocrity” in U.S. Schools (Part 1)

Samenvatting: vurige pleidooien en mislukkingen van progressieve’ (radicale) hervormers de voorbije 150 jaar volgens een vast patroon.

*Toen er een generatie progressieve hervormers verdween , stond er weer een andere op. Het hervormingspatroon werd telkens opnieuw herhaald

* In elke generatie manifesteerden politieke & andere elites zich vooreerst als onheilsprofeten die de zgn. ellende van het vigerende onderwijssysteem overbeklemtoonden en de scholen/leerkrachten veroordeelden voor de lage kwaliteit. De scholen/leerkrachten hadden gefaald. Ze leverden leerlingen af die volgens hen die niet in staat zijn om in de bestaande politieke, economische en sociale wereld hun intrede te doen.

* Deze vurige schoolhervormers manifesteerden zich vervolgens als de verlossers uit de ellende: hun voorstellen voor nieuwe bestuursvormen, curricula, organisatorische en pedagogische hervormingen ... zouden van de falende scholen, succesvolle scholen maken.

*De vurige hervormers onderschatten hierbij ook de complexiteit & bestendigheid van scholen als instellingen
en de middelen die nodig zouden zijn om de door hen voorgestelde hervormingen door te voeren

* Uiteindelijk, na verloop van tijd, toen de hervormers vaststelden dat de scholen niet voldeden aan hun hoge verwachtingen, verlieten ze teleurgesteld het schip. Teleurgesteld en tegelijk vol afkeer, toegevend dat de scholen niet veel beter waren dan toen ze aan de hervormingen begonnen waren.

* Hun hervormingen waren mislukt, en de progessievelingen pakten dan uit met allerhande verontschuldigingen (uitvluchten) voor het falen. Het falen was te wijten aan de nukkige leerkrachten die niet wilden veranderen, de zwakke bestuurders, de verstokte bureaucratie, de vijandige ouders ...

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For the past month or so I have been wrestling with questions that have bugged me for a long time.
I have learned over the years that school reform have life cycles that follow a singular pattern. Join me in a fast-forward trip through school reform in the U.S.

Late-19th century Progressives, for example,
saw overcrowded classrooms, unqualified teachers, immigrants speaking dozens of languages and unfamiliar with being American, rote recitation, massive inefficiencies in administering schools, and students wholly unprepared for an industrial workplace. Schools were failing to educate children and youth. It was a crisis that had to be ended. New curricula, medical and social services, different forms of instruction, innovative school organization and democratic governance became the established ideology for “good” public schools between the 1890s and 1940s.

After World War II, a rising movement of anti-communism rejected Progressivism in schools and spurred by the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union sought to inject academic steel into a Swiss cheese curriculum to produce more engineers, mathematicians and scientists. Again what constituted a “good” school shifted.

By the mid-1960s, the Civil Rights movement spilled over both segregated and desegregated schools altering again Americans’ sense of what a “good” school is.

And in subsequent decades, economic fears of Japanese and German exports out-performing U.S. cars, electronics, and other products led to business and civic leaders looking to schools to bolster an inefficient and sagging economy. A Nation at Risk (1983) coalesced those fears into a war plan to revive the economy through making schools stronger academically and turning out graduates who could enter the workplace prepared with requisite knowledge and skills. Again, the definition of a “good” school shifted. The U.S. continues to this day to be in the thrall of this education-cum-economy ideology.

In this hop-skip-and-jump through the history of U.S. school reform a pattern emerged.
First, policy elites in each generation, exaggerating existing conditions, condemned schools for their low quality. Schools had failed. They graduated students unfit to enter the existing political, economic, and social world. Then these ardent school reformers proposed governance, curricular, organizational, and instructional reforms that would turn failing schools into successful ones often underestimating the complexity of schools as institutions and the resources needed to make the proposed changes actually alter how schools operated and teachers taught. Finally, after time had passed, as schools didn’t conform to the expectations of these fervent reformers, they walked away in disappointment and disgust saying that the schools were not much better than when they had started. Their reforms had foundered. They blamed, among others, resistant teachers, unthinking administrators, a clogged bureaucracy, and hostile parents.

As one generation of reformers passed through, another arose and the pattern reasserted itself anew. Historians and social scientists have documented these cycles of reform over the past 150 years (see here, here, here, and here).

The chronic defeat of major school reforms authored by Progressives, Civil Rights leaders, CEOs and U.S. Presidents to achieve their lofty goals of fundamentally altering the system of schooling over the past century to school the “whole child,” raise all students to high proficiency levels in reading and math, and “personalize learning” reflects the often-used language within schooling of “success” and “failure.”