Millenarian malarkey? Perhaps. But credit is due: Alexander’s Education Department is an oasis in the boundless desert of anesthetized mediocrity that is the Bush administration. “We are on a crusade,” says Diane Ravitch, the distinguished education historian who is an assistant secretary. The crusade is a conundrum: how to create a school system that has hi standards but isn’t standardized. This may, in fact, be the defining conundrum of governance in the next decade. “Government is the last institution in society to enter the information age,” Lawton Chiles said when he was elected governor of Florida. The signal apparatus of the information age is the computer network: flexible, fast, decentralized, customized. The industrial-age analog was the assembly line: centralized, standardized, inflexible. The challenge is to make schools (and other bureaucracies) less like assembly lines and more like computer networks.
Much of the debate over education this year has settled into a simplistic tug of war between public and private school choice-mostly because the president’s men have determined that there are Catholic and fundamentalist votes to be had by promising federal funding for religious as well as public schools. Choice is crucial. Sclerotic public-school monopolies need to be pried open; competition is the best way to do it. But choice devolves into gimmickry without standards-one can imagine the AI Sharpton Institute of public Rhetoric, the Shirley MacLaine High School of Cosmology and Cosmetology-and Ravitch is working on the first set of curriculum standards in the nation’s history, plus a voluntary system of assessment (in English: testing) to see the goals are being met. “There have to be measurements. There have to be consequences,” says Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers. “Consequences produce all sorts of pressures on teachers and principals to behave differently… If there can be great benefits-higher salaries –or great punishments, like getting fired or closed down if the school isn’t doing well, you’re going to see results.”
Which should be a strong argument in favor of giving parents the widest possible choice of where to send their kids, but Shanker, whose position on these issues is close to Bill Clinton’s, is vehemently opposed to all but one version of private-school choice: “It would involve private schools taking any kid the public schools choose to send them,” he laughs. Indeed, he’s only lukewarm on public-school choice: “It’s a good way to get parents off your back if they don’t like your dress code or math standards-send ’em down the street.” But Shankerwhose vision and flexibility tend to evaporate when the jobs of his union’s members are at stake-is light years ahead of the leadership at the other big teachers’ union, the National Education Association, which opposes anything that smacks of accountability and has lobbied not only against choice but also against standards and testing (on the paternalistic grounds that the results skew against minority students).
The NEA blocked every one of Alexander’s initiatives in Congress this year. There are those who say he didn’t put up much of a fight–certainly, he didn’t get much support from the Education President-and Alexander, a mild-mannered fellow, is belatedly sounding more militant. But he’s also finding ways to get around Congress-using a monthly satellite town meeting (more than 2,500 communities participated last week) to spread the insurrection against business as usual; using a private corporation to fund “break the mold” school experiments when Congress refused. Alexander now spends most days on the road, publicizing schools-public and private-that are trying new things. In North Carolina, he visited one system, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, that seemed to be trying everything under the sun, from emphasizing a classical core curriculum in some schools to experimenting with “kinetic” learning for antsy kids in others. In a small ceremony congratulating these efforts, Alexander said he took his purpose from the writer Alex Haley, “Find the good and praise it.” Fair enough: it’s heartening to see a good man doing well.
