What is the real story of America’s schools?
The stories people choose to tell about education ultimately determine the “facts” they want to communicate to others. And how people frame an issue (their story) determines what facts they can accept—to get people to accept new facts, we have to get them to see a new frame, or story, (and not vice versa).
Marc Tucker, the president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, took a shot at making that point in a recent blog at Education Week, pointing out that as much as we like the notion that education is teaching young people facts, “stories trump facts every time.”
Tucker’s own story is that he is “a creature of the radical middle,” and can offer a position that is ultimately the most reasonable. He does this by positing a couple of extreme stories.
Tucker shares two oft-told tales about education to frame his own story. There’s the “Story of the Evil Teachers Who Run Schools as a Money-Making Scam,” on one hand, in which public education has been taken over by the teachers unions who run the whole business as a sort of sinecure. From the other extreme we get “Story of the Struggling Schools Trying To Overcome the Ravages of Poverty and the Mistreatment of Teachers” in which teachers struggle against socio-economic forces they are powerless to control. He then offers a position in the “middle,” a most reasonable sounding alternative.
But there are two problems with the Story of the Sensible Middle. First is that the middle is not always very sensible. There’s no sensible middle between those who believe the earth is a globe and those who believe it’s flat. We should not be looking for a sensible middle between, say, thinking that detaining and torturing children is bad, and thinking that detaining and torturing some children is okay. Second is that the middle we’re presented with often isn’t the middle at all.
The Story of the Broken Schools continues to be one of the most powerful stories in education. In this story (famously released in book form in 1983 as A Nation at Risk), our public schools used to be wonderful, but now pose a clear and present danger to our entire way of life. This story of educational failure has been pushed so effectively that most folks, even in light of evidence that their own schools are pretty okay, still believe that everyone else’s school is the pits.
This story is in many ways the prequel to all the other education stories we’ve been hearing, each one promoted by a particular group.
In The Story of the Magical Free Market, we learn that the broken schools are just waiting to be revived by competition. In The Story of Run a School Like a Business, we learn that schools would be better if they were run more on a corporate model. These stories are favored by folks who see education as a missed entrepreneurial opportunity, a $600 billion dollar piggy bank waiting to be tapped.
And in a story that features Marc Tucker as a main character, we get The Story of How Top-Down Federal Control Would Let Us Design a Cradle-to-Career Pipeline. The subtitle is How Schools Can Provide Business and Government With a More Useful Array of Meat Widgets. For Tucker, our economic problems and the hollowing out of our middle class are all the result of broken schools and not, for example, broken economic policies. If we could just design a more through and exacting school system, we could prepare students for as useful place in society (and tell them what that space is going to be).
Tucker’s a major character in The Story of How We Must Be More Like All These Other Countries That Get High Test Scores Because Reasons! And lots of folks are reading The Story of How These Big Standardized Tests Give Us Reliable and Valid Data About Schools, Teachers, Students and Even The Entire System. That last story is total science fiction.
There’s a vast library of stories about public education, but all of the widely shared ones trace their heritage back to the Story of the Broken Schools.
There’s a vast library of stories about public education, but all of the widely shared ones trace their heritage back to the Story of the Broken Schools. Their wide range covers what amounts to a long-running conversation about what radical surgery the patient should be subjected to. As a result, The Story of How Public Education Is a Strong System That Deserves Support now qualifies as a wild and crazy tale.
Tucker proposes the sensible middle not just as his position, but as a way to solve the education debates. Bring everyone together at a table. Get them to sacrifice in order to gain. Negotiate, compromise, and discover together a middle path, a third way. Tucker doesn’t just want to claim that he occupies the sensible middle-—he wants everyone to come live with him there. But that creates the same old problem.
Your grandmother is suffering from a persistent cough. Two doctors say, “Amputate her legs.” Two other doctors say, “Amputate her arms.” Just one doctor says, “She’s basically healthy. This is just a cold. Give her plenty of fluids, stop feeding her Twinkies, and let her rest.” Where is the sensible middle?
Tucker’s sensible middle is fundamentally the same as all education reform middles—something radical must be done to fix public education. That’s not the middle of the education debate, but so many strong voices have adopted some version of that story that it can seem middlish (insert discussion of Overton window here).
Tucker is correct that stories, not facts, move the audience, but a story’s weight should come from facts, not from repetition and volume. It should rest on details that actually are truthful and not just ones that feel truthy. Rather than claiming that his approach is in the sensible middle, Tucker would do better to show us why it’s the most accurate story in the education debate library.