By Diane Ravitch
The president is not supposed to be the superintendent of schools, but he should have an understanding of what makes good schools good, why education reforms so seldom work, and what ideas permeate the education establishment.
The president will find an excellent summary of the last century of research between the covers of Jeanne S. Chall’s The Academic Achievement Challenge: What Really Works in the Classroom? (2000). He will also find that education has been plagued time and again by failed innovation. There is this romantic strain within education that looks for the easy way to learn, the fun way, the way that involves no effort. And it turns out that teaching and learning are not easy.
To successfully understand education debates, one has to understand alternate realities. To help him make the shift between the world most Americans live in and the one that surrounds federal education policies, I recommend he read Lewis Carroll’s Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. This would give him a wonderful perspective on many federal education programs.
For instance, a couple of years ago, writing about Head Start, I complained about the lack of evidence for its educational effectiveness. I later got a call inviting me to come to the Department of Health and Human Services and learn about the latest evaluations of Head Start. So I read the evaluations and met with the person in charge. The studies said that kids are happy, kids are getting medical care, kids are getting nutrition, and their parents are getting jobs. There was one study of what kids were learning that said they weren’t learning anything. They enter Head Start knowing zero letters and by the end of the year they learn one or two letters. The reason they don’t learn any letters is that no one is attempting to teach them any letters. I was absolutely enraged. The original purpose of the Head Start Program was to get kids a head start in education, so they might be able to catch up with middle class kids. Middle class kids are learning all their letters, at home and in real preschools.
If I were putting together the president’s bedside reading, I would have him read W.H. Auden’s Collected Poems (1991). It would tell the president a great deal about the concise use of language. It might even give him some wonderful allusions he could use in his speeches.
Diane Ravitch is a historian of education at New York University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Her latest book is Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reforms (Simon & Schuster).
By Nadine Strossen
The new president should read about civil liberties to renew his commitment to our nation’s founding ideals of “liberty and justice for all.” Eighteenth-century American reality was far from those ideals, and we still have not attained them.
Rights are especially embattled in the criminal justice system, thanks largely to the War on Drugs. The U.S. incarcerates and executes far more of its citizens than any other developed country. Our prisons are overcrowded with individuals who committed nonviolent, consensual drug offenses. Moreover, the record-breaking populations of our prisons and death rows are disproportionately members of racial minorities, reflecting pervasive discrimination. Too many politicians pander on these issues, afraid of being labeled “soft on crime.” We deserve a president who has both the information and the political courage to promote reform of our criminal justice and drug policies, finally repudiating the demagogic rhetoric that has driven these policies for decades.
In Race to Incarcerate(1999), Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, offers a devastating critique of our current crime policies and suggests constructive alternatives.
Standing up for constitutional rights is often politically unpopular, so John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage presents fitting role models for a president committed to protecting civil liberties. Published in 1956, Profiles is a classic work that merits regular re-reading. It celebrates a diverse range of past leaders who led their peers and the public by remaining true to their principles, not opinion polls.
Given the long tenure of Supreme Court justices, a president’s most lasting impact on our civil liberties is through his appointments to the Court. That subject is explored in Protect and Defend(2000), the latest novel by best-selling author Richard North Patterson. As he struggles to appoint a justice who honors even the most controversial constitutional rights, the book’s fictional president, Kerry Kilcannon, is a splendid exemplar for any actual head of state. (The ideologically diverse legal and political experts whom Patterson consulted while writing the book included our two most recent presidents.) This gripping novel thoughtfully examines the issues with which a principled president must grapple in honoring his oath to “protect and defend” our Constitution, including its promise “to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Nadine Strossen (nstrossen@aclu.org), a professor at the New York Law School, is president of the American Civil Liberties Union.
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