Citizen or Consumer?
            

            Dear Peggy,

            You, of course, get right to the heart of the matter: A good teacher never
follows a method to the letter. And if you're the parent of a child who's lucky
enough to have a good teacher, you rarely find yourself worrying about whether
the method being employed is traditional or progressive, whether there's enough
breadth or enough depth. What's more, neither do your fellow parents--even if
their kids are not at all the kinds of students yours are: Good teachers seem
to manage to find ways to fit the needs of many different sorts of students in
the same class. It's during the lousy years with weak teachers that we parents
suddenly find ourselves being led from our particular complaints to ask bigger
questions about the whole approach of a school, and being tempted to think in
unduly polarized terms--as if there was some clear-cut choice between
constructivist and more teacher-directed learning.

            I suppose an important question to ask, which is not at all the focus of
Bennett's book but should presumably be part of the debate about curricular
reform, is what sort of guidance proves most helpful to teachers and most
conducive to attracting good ones to the profession. Do you, for example, think
the Core lesson plans could be useful background material for a teacher who
felt free to take half a year or more to do her own version of what Hirsch
allotted, say, 13 days to cover? I couldn't tell from my quick peek what the
quality of the bibliographies was. We all hear constantly that strong
principals play a large part in creating strong schools, but I was struck that
Bennett had very little to say about them and their role--except as the last
resort for disgruntled parents. What do the best of them do to help set a
school's academic direction? This book has notably little to say about what
sort of changes could help most to raise the quality of teachers and
principals, which they evidently consider to be pretty low.

            But if anything is to be accomplished, it's clear they think school choice
is the way. Bennett, et al., are in favor of a voucher plan that would allow
parents to choose among not just public schools, but private and parochial and
charter schools as well. In fact, the program of constant oversight and
pressure this book advocates almost doesn't make sense, or is merely a recipe
for frustration, if there isn't school choice: "Start hunting for a different
school," they urge parents whose complaints haven't born fruit. But what do you
do if you can't afford, or get your kid into, a private school and don't want
him to attend parochial school? If you don't have at least some public-school
alternatives to consider, you stew. It does seem somewhat surprising, though,
to hear these authors defend their voucher plan on the grounds that it fosters
"pluralism in schooling," after pushing a shared curriculum as hard as they
do.

            I haven't thought as much as I should have about school choice, but the
parents I know who have been able to pick from a variety of public schools have
been glad of it--and have stuck with the public-school system when they
otherwise would have left. As a spur to improvements in the system, given the
slow pace of top-down efforts at reform, it seems worth trying out in different
ways, but it shouldn't be considered a cure-all, especially for the worst-off
schools. Nor, as James Traub pointed out in the New York Times Magazine
last weekend, are schools themselves a cure-all for poverty. But if the result
of school choice is to isolate failing schools even further than they already
are from pressures that might lead to improving them, it would be a failure for
reform.

            This book has the unintended effect of exposing the unappealing side of the
school-choice crusade: The ideal parent of these pages does not remind me much
of an upstanding, civic-minded citizen--the kind of patriot Bennett presumably
admires. Instead, the micromanaging mother and father conjured up here resemble
demanding consumers, obsessed with promoting their child's future and convinced
that school and teacher should revolve around their needs and demands. What
kind of respect for our common culture is that? For old-fashioned
honor-thy-father-and-teacher-and-country types, the authors convey a
surprisingly ruthless '90s get-ahead attitude. Do you agree? The message to
parents makes me more tired than I already am of marketplace values. Along with
that moral compass Bennett has urged, it seems we better whip out our Palm
Pilots, and fast: "You must be the chief coach, trainer, coordinator, and role
model."

            This has been fun, and you've made me think that what I'd really like to
have on my shelf--and read--is the teacher's guide for parents.

            Ann