AHLSTROM: Chicago-style ‘reform’?

OPINION:

COMMENTARY:

In selecting the CEO of Chicago’s schools, Arne Duncan, as his new secretary of education, President-elect Barack Obama has made a shrewd political pick. Mr. Duncan supports both merit pay for competent administrators and teachers and elaborate programs to retrain and retain low performing faculty and staff. He favors reauthorization of No Child Left Behind, but with significant changes.

By passing over both proven reform candidates like Jonathan Schnur, co-founder of New Leaders for New Schools, and established guardians of the ancient regime, like Stanford University’s Linda Darling-Hammond, the president-elect has found a way to navigate the education wars - pleasing the teachers’ unions and appeasing those who want real change.

Mr. Duncan is both smart and decent. In Chicago, he has demonstrated a singular ability to master the bureaucracy and work the middle while finding time to play enough pick-up basketball to ensure that he will now have the ear of his new boss.

Does Mr. Duncan’s appointment represent “change we can believe in”? Not if his record in Chicago is any indicator. During his seven year tenure as Mayor Richard Daley’s teacher-in-chief, Mr. Duncan’s efforts brought no statistically significant improvement in aggregate student performance. In fact, under his stewardship the extraordinary gaps between Chicago’s educational “haves” and its educational “have-nots” continued to grow.

Schools are all about the transmission of ideas from one generation to the next. Failed ideas mean failed schools. Given the current and constant preoccupation of America’s public school bureaucracy with social engineering, school structure and pedagogical novelty, it is safe to say that even if our public schools are reformed, the education students receive in them will not be improved. The tragedy of America’s public schools is not how they teach our kids, but what they teach them.

Mr. Obama will be our tenth consecutive “Education President.” Yet in the half-century since John F. Kennedy called for “the maximum development of every young American’s capacity,” our schools have failed two generations of America’s youth. In the quarter century since President Reagan’s blue-ribbon education report called us “A Nation at Risk,” per pupil spending tripled while performance declined.

Today, the fashionable phrase is “education for the 21st century.” Essentially, it is a call for more math and science and a greater emphasis on “skills” - specifically the ability to think creatively and to evaluate and analyze information. On careful review, these recommendations appear to be just the latest way of rebranding the retreat from humane arts and letters.

If the development of a student’s capacity to reason well and “problem solve” should be the focus of a 21st century education, Secretary-designate Duncan should encourage school districts from Montauk to Malibu to provide sequential coursework in formal logic and rhetoric - staples in a classical regime. The teaching of those disciplines remains the best known pedagogical device for the development of high-level skills.

While no one argues with the need for interdisciplinary studies or applied math and science, what is missing in all of this is an adequate appreciation for the singular place of classics and humanities. Strong offerings in S.T.E.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) without well conceived programs of liberal learning will unleash upon the world a lethal legion of graduates who are technological geniuses and moral midgets. And given the wholesale proliferation of technologies, scientific brilliance and literary despair is a toxic brew.

Anand Mahindra, chairman and managing director of Mahindra - one of India’s great industrial combinations - made this point recently at a symposium at Harvard Business School. He argued that America’s significant scientific edge is a thing of the past, noting that India already has several schools of technology as good as any in the United States. He is right. The world is flat! That horse is out of the barn.

Mr. Mahindra - a great admirer of the United States - went on to point out that what made America great was not its technological edge but its historic attention to “the liberal arts.” It is, he insisted, “America’s vision of humanity” that made us a beacon for the rest of the world.

Is Mr. Duncan going to reintroduce classics and great books to America’s impoverished classrooms? Are his schools going to steep our students in that liberal learning that once provided what Robert Frost called “a momentary stay against confusion”? If not, there will be no meaningful reform.

Over the past few months much of the hard-earned wealth of millions of Americans has evaporated - not because the moguls on Wall Street and the fixers on K Street did not know their math and science. Our country has been brought to the brink by a generation schooled on technology and unlettered in the poetry of time. Our troubled schools are but a symptom - albeit a tragic one - of a national culture that has become commercialized and politicized into a trivial cult of getting and spending.

The president-elect has made the right choice on education - and it was not the choice of Mr. Duncan. Along with Michelle Obama, he determined that neither Malia nor Sasha will ever see the inside of a public school. They will both attend a private school rooted in deep religious traditions and fortified with strong programs in classics and liberal arts. If only every American was free to make that same choice.

T. Robinson Ahlstrom is the chairman and CEO of the Fund for Classical Education.