From the April, 1998 Phi Delta Kappan
What the best and wisest parent wants for his own child, that must the
community want for all of its children. Any other ideal for our schools
is narrow and unlovely; acted upon, it destroys our democracy.
Mike McClaren, a superintendent in Oklahoma, was
attracted to the idea of a "performance-based" curriculum: he believed in
specifying his schools' learning outcomes in advance and shifting the
emphasis from memorization to problem solving. This made sense to Mike
King, principal of a nationally recognized middle school in McClaren's
district, who wanted his teachers to have more autonomy and his students
to have more opportunity to learn from one another. Neither man was
pushing for anything too radical; they just thought educators should be a
little less concerned with deciding which students were better than others
and a little more committed to helping all of them succeed.
As it turned out, both men felt obliged to find new
jobs as a result of this agenda, with McClaren jumping before he was
pushed. Key people in the community were unhappy, and three newly elected
board members made sure that the changes -- and the people responsible for
them -- didn't last. Predictably, the most vocal opponents were affiliated
with the Christian Coalition and other ultraconservative groups. But here
is the interesting part: even in small-town Oklahoma, the usual suspects
on the Right could not have done it on their own. Their allies, who by all
accounts gave them the margin of victory they needed to roll back reform
efforts, were individuals who were not particularly conservative or
religious. King describes them as "your upper-class, high-achieving
parents who feel that education is competitive, that there shouldn't be
anyone else in the same class as my child, and we shouldn't spend a whole
lot of time with the have-nots."[1]
McClaren, who looks back on what happened from his new
post several states away, says he made "two fatal assumptions" when he
started: "I thought if it was good for kids, everyone would embrace it,
and I thought all adults wanted all kids to be successful. That's not
true. The people who receive status from their kids' performing well in
school didn't like that other kids' performance might be raised to the
level of their own kids'."
It is common knowledge that the Christian Right has
opposed all manner of progressive reforms. They may act stealthily to get
themselves installed on school boards, and they may read from identical
scripts in auditoriums across America about how outcome-based education
and whole language will destroy our way of life. But they are ultimately
identifiable, and, once their core beliefs are exposed and their claims
refuted, their impact (at least in many places) can be limited. Far less
attention has been paid to the damage done by people whose positions on
other social issues are more varied and more mainstream -- specifically,
the affluent parents of successful students, those whose political power
is substantial to begin with and whose agenda was summarized by another
educator in that same Oklahoma town: "They are not concerned that all
children learn; they are concerned that their children learn."
There is no national organization called Rich Parents
Against School Reform, in part because there doesn't have to be. But with
unaffiliated individuals working on different issues in different parts of
the country, the pattern is generally missed and the story is rarely told.
Take a step back, however, and you begin to grasp the import of what is
happening from Amherst, Massachusetts, where highly educated white parents
have fought to preserve a tracking system that keeps virtually every child
of color out of advanced classes, to Palo Alto, California, where a
similarly elite constituency demands a return to a "skill and drill" math
curriculum and fiercely opposes the more conceptual learning outlined in
the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standards; from an
affluent suburb of Buffalo, where parents of honors students quashed an
attempt to replace letter grades with standards-based progress reports, to
San Diego, where a program to provide underachieving students with support
that will help them succeed in higher-level courses has run "head on into
vigorous opposition from some of the community's more outspoken,
influential members -- the predominantly white, middle-class parents of
high-achieving students."[2]
Jeannie Oakes, author of Keeping Track, calls
them "Volvo vigilantes," but that isn't quite accurate -- first, because
they work within, and skillfully use, the law; and second, because many of
them drive Jeeps. They may be pro-choice and avid recyclers, with nothing
good to say about the likes of Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh; yet on
educational issues they are, perhaps unwittingly, making common cause
with, and furthering the agenda of, the Far Right.
The controversies in which these parents involve
themselves fall into three clusters, the first of which concerns the
type of instruction that is offered. Here we find a tension
between, on the one hand, traditional methods and practices, geared toward
a classroom that is construed as a collection of discrete individuals,
each of whom is supposed to absorb a body of knowledge and basic skills,
and, on the other hand, an approach distinguished by active discovery and
problem solving by a community of learners.
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