On April 26, 1983, President Reagan laid eyes on a report that blasted the quality of American pre-collegiate education and called for major reforms in our education system.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the now-famous "A Nation at Risk" report, most observers have come to agree that American pre-collegiate public education is inadequate. Over the intervening years, three remedies have been proposed, each associated with a different point on the political spectrum. Each has merit, but all bypass the only solution likely to work in the long run - a genuine professionalization of our pre-collegiate teachers.
Conservatives say that American public schools have had no competition for more than a century and, hence, no incentive to improve. Charter schools and vouchers, they argue, would spur competition in the system for the first time, and public schools would be stimulated to improve their performances or else close down.
Even if this argument were correct, it would be difficult to carry out. Charter schools are expensive to start and sustain, and the quality is difficult to maintain once the charismatic founders depart from the scene. Vouchers will not nearly pay for admission to the most desirable schools.
Liberals retort that our schools are not that bad. They serve more children better now than ever before. If we want to improve schools, liberals say, three steps are necessary. First, as a society, we need to spend more money on education. Second, we need to improve the living conditions of families and communities so that they can focus on education rather than on survival. Finally, we need to ensure diversity in the classroom because segregation hurts youngsters.
While few would dismiss these arguments out of hand, they are even less viable in these days of overstretched budgets. The call for integration has muted, and it is unconvincing to make improvement of an institution contingent on alterations throughout the broader society.
A third view that has received much attention by policy-makers in the Bush administration can be called the Olympian view. It states that education can be improved if scientific methods are applied. Using medicine as a model, officials are calling for decisions about curriculum and pedagogy to be made on the basis of randomized trials and other scientific-medical procedures. The implication is that if we choose the right methods, we can minimize the potentially destructive roles of teachers and engineer the desired results.
Without doubt, some questions about education can be legitimately subjected to scientific study and perhaps even randomized trials. Yet, the belief that our problems with teaching reading or calculus can be solved by finding the right method is naive. Teachers and students cannot be treated simply as experimental variables, the way that agricultural seeds or different drugs can be. All sorts of manipulations that might be scientifically desirable are simply impractical or illegitimate.
More fundamentally, education is primarily a realm of value judgments. What we teach and how we teach reflects our notions of the kinds of persons we want our children to become and the kinds of minds that we want them to have - for example, do we want to ask them questions or tell them the answers? These decisions can be informed but never totally answered by science.
There is a much more sensible approach to improving education; in fact, I believe it is the only approach likely to be effective in the long run. That is to produce a cohort of teachers who believe they are professionals, who act like professionals and who are treated as professionals.
Though it is not pleasant to say it, many people consider pre-collegiate educators as part of our unskilled labor force. In many respects that is correct - these workers have neither mastered the skills and knowledge needed to make consequential decisions in complex cases, nor are current trends likely to give them this competence. Indeed, the infantilization of teaching is likely to persuade talented would-be educators to pursue another career.
There is nothing magical about the notion of a cohort of professional pre-collegiate educators. Teachers in many East Asian and European countries conform to my notion of a profession; so do most teachers at the college level and many teachers at leading independent schools.
My studies of teachers in East Asia and Europe reveal a number of signs of a professional group.
First, during their own training, teachers have extensive experiences working with skilled teachers in congenial environments. Second, after becoming classroom teachers, they continue to learn from master teachers and have their own teaching critiqued by these masters - no shutting of the classroom door. Third, teachers put their heads together to help one another solve problems - curricular as well as disciplinary - that arise in the school. Fourth, and most important, teachers concur on what they will and will not do as professionals, and when they are asked to do something that violates their professional ethos (for example, give a test that they feel is intellectually illegitimate), they will - as a group - refuse to carry out this directive.
If you substitute the medical or legal professions in this example, you can see how what would be unusual for most American pre-collegiate teachers is routine in a recognized profession.
What has distinguished our country is our failure to recognize that a professionalized cohort is the key to long-term improvement of American education - instead, we prefer to follow the misguided right, left and Olympian "fixes."
Winston Churchill once said, "The American people always do the right thing, after they have considered every other alternative."
Just this once, can't we prove him wrong?
Howard Gardner teaches cognitive development at the
Harvard University Graduate School of Education. This article first appeared in
Newsday.