November 2009: Interview with Mike Rose

IDEA director John Rogers interviews Mike Rose, Professor of Social Research Methodology in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, about Rose’s new book, Why School: Reclaiming Education for All of Us.

JR:  Mike, your new book is called, Why School:  Reclaiming Education for All of Us. The book asks Americans to reflect on the purposes of public education. Why did you write this book now? What is it about our present moment that calls for a rethinking of public education?

MR: For at least 20 years the only justification we hear for schooling from policy makers is an economic one – we have to prepare students for the new economy, build "21st century skills”, prepare individuals for the workforce.  I come from a working class family – and education made possible the life I have now. I’m absolutely not against preparing students for an economically viable life.  I don’t have a beef with a vocational, job-oriented purpose as one of the reasons we send kids to school, but that has crowded everything else out.

Historically, we validated education in the United States with a much broader range of reasons. Preparing future citizens and developing moral and ethical sensibilities was part of educational discourse through the 19th and early 20th century.  And parents typically want a number of things from the schools: they do want their kids to move up the economic ladder, get a job. But they also want them to be with other kids, think with other children, find things that interest them, learn how to learn, develop into good people. So we have a wide range of expectations of school, but these days we only hear the mantra of preparation for the 21st century economy.

JR:  Why is that a problem? 

MR:  The justification we hear for schooling shapes what gets taught, how we educate, and what it means to be educated. It has implications for the way we define ourselves as a nation. 

Related to the narrowing of our educational purposes is the hyper reliance on a particular kind of test-based accountability as the engine of school reform in our time. Again, it’s an issue of proportion. I see nothing wrong with having some kind of standardized measure as part of the way we judge how effective our schools are, or the need to set benchmarks for what we want kids to know. But it’s become a runaway train, what William James called a “tyrannical machine.” It overloads the way we think about school reform and measuring achievement.  It defines teaching and learning. These two large and overlapping trends—the economic rationale and high-stakes testing—are why I thought now would be a good time for a book like Why School.

JR:  I’m struck by the fact that the increased emphasis on the economic purposes of schooling, at the expense of all other purposes, has occurred over the last three decades. During this same period, we have seen a dramatic growth in economic inequality. Is there a relationship between the two? 

MR:  I don’t know if there is a direct relation between the growing gap between the haves and have nots and the emphasis on earning and money – but they are all part of the same world we live in.  David Cohen and Barbara Neufield wrote that “schools are a great theater in which we play out the conflicts of the culture.” We have felt more economically threatened as a nation during this period.  The spread of globalization and other forces have destabilized the economic preeminence that the United States had coming out of World War II through the 50s, 60s, and 70s.  We turn to the schools to answer this problem of a loss of economic preeminence.  It seems like schools are the place we turn to address what we do not address through public policy, or our meager welfare state, or other types of government intervention.  We continue to look to the schools to address growing inequality, to make up for the failures of our economic and social policies, to, for example, educate members of the working class so they can earn more money and make up for the income gap.

JR: You write: “I’m especially interested in what opportunity feels like.  Discussions of opportunity are often abstract—as in ideological debate—or conducted at a broad structural level—as in policy deliberation. But what is the experience of opportunity?" How do young people experience opportunity?

MR: This has a personal resonance for me.  In my own education, I experienced a dawning intangible sense that my life could be different through school, classes, working hard with books.

Recently, I was in this wonderful wood construction class, with lots of high-tech electrical tools. I remember talking with this young man. As he talked about woodworking, he looked around the room, swept his hand all around these sophisticated tools and he said how he was looking forward to learning how to use them.  That describes one sense of opportunity – there is more out there in front of me to learn, to do. In learning how to use them, I will get better at something that matters to me and that affects who I am as a person. The sweep of his hand across that wall of the workshop, to me represents this powerful sense that I will get better at something that matters to me and it’s not a pipe dream, it’s real. 

Another immediate and concrete way that I think people experience opportunity is when they are standing in an institutional or occupational space where they didn’t expect to end up, just sensing a future extending out in front of them.  I see this when I talk to young people in their first year in college who come from humble origins and had a hard time getting to this place. They often say,  “I really can’t believe I’m here – Oh my gosh, this is real.” It is both an emotion and something more cognitive, having to do with the plans one can now make for one’s life. It definitely has an effect on the way one sees oneself and what one might be able to do, what becomes possible. 

I think that sometimes when we talk about opportunity it can become an abstraction or it becomes something we try to talk about in terms of statistics or gaps.  And while that way of conceptualizing of opportunity has powerful analytic capability, I don’t think we should forget that there are strong feelings that attend the sense or feeling of opportunity.  And those feelings can be hugely motivating.

JR:  In the book you describe the rigor of your high school English teacher: “Though I won’t claim that everyone in Mr. McFarland’s class experienced it as I did, most of us knew that guy was working like hell to do right by us.”  My guess is that many parents and community members have stories of their own Mr. McFarland. Yet, these same people may not always feel like the public school system—as a system—is working like hell to do right by them.  Does this reflect a lack of hard work or a failure to communicate? Or something else entirely? 

MR: In Possible Lives I call for readers to acknowledge what is good in the schools—those teachers and leaders who make education happen, those places that do right by kids. I simultaneously recognize that there are some teachers and some leaders, some schools that don’t do a good job at all. Both perceptions are correct, but as a culture, we have trouble holding contradictory perceptions in our minds at the same time. I think that wreaks havoc in reform policy. Thus policy often promulgates “magic bullet” solutions to complex problems.

I also think there’s been a whole lot of people who have been very successful promulgating the point of view that public education is a disaster. Some conservative groups or free marketeers that want privatization have been quite effective in painting in the public mind that image that public schools are a failure. An article in the conservative Weekly Standard a few years ago began by saying, “Let’s face it, we all know public schools are a joke.” Where do you go from that? It doesn’t even leave you with a problem to solve. That’s the kind of statement that repeated enough, has contributed to the public impression that schools stink. This view is reinforced by the predominance of a particular kind of high stakes testing as the gold standard. Testing numbers are simple and concrete so media can grab on to them – no analysis needed. A buddy of mine, a veteran educational journalist, says these reports about high- stakes testing crowd everything else out of the news.

JR:  Is there a language, another way of talking about what schools do—beyond the narrow focus on test scores—that allows us as a public, to recognize the faults of our schools, but also at the same time allows us to celebrate and encourage the good things that are occurring?

MR: I feel a little hopeless, given the predominance of test scores, given the language of economic competitiveness.  It is hard to create a richer, more nuanced, more expansive vocabulary of what schools are for. But, we need to keep trying to get other ways of thinking and talking about schools out there.

We need to get better at talking about the richer, fuller experiences that schools present. We should evaluate schools, not just on standardized test scores, but according to the kind of world they create for students, including the skills they are learning, how they use knowledge, how they learn how to learn, how they address social and intellectual problems that don’t have any easy answer. We could get a sense of the kind of future they imagine for themselves. I guarantee you these are the criteria wealthy parents use when evaluating their schools.  So, we already have the basis for this much richer discourse, not in the broad public but in wealthy enclaves. However, it doesn’t seem to make it in the public record and it doesn’t become part of the conversation, even though wealthy parents are having these conversations among themselves about what schools ought to be for. But if we had this richer sense of schools, you could see a potential for a powerful advocacy as well as a powerful critique.

JR: When arguments are made that educational reform must address economic conditions outside of school, some people counter that appeals to a “broader and bolder agenda” represent a turning away from the hard work of school change, or, worse still, excuses for poor performance.  What do you see as the relationship between reclaiming our schools and changing economic circumstances?

MR:  This is a troubling binary, a false dichotomy that we’ve gotten ourselves into – it drives me crazy. I totally buy the “No Excuses” thing.  But how can people think that “no excuses” removes the necessity for looking at the economic inequality that surrounds the school. That is befuddling to me.

I met a young teacher from Calexico who said something like “sure there are lots of problems, but they can’t keep me from teaching.” She absolutely does the best for her students. Many other people in poor schools, poor neighborhoods are doing the same. But she also acknowledged the plight of some of her students and the effect poverty had on their life in school.

I have never heard really good educators making excuses. But good educators are terribly angry about the conditions in which some of their students live and realize those conditions affect student achievement. Achievement can fall apart in a heartbeat. The kid’s mother loses her job, or the father gets sick, or someone in the family ends up in jail. People don’t understand how easily destabilized achievement can be.

We have to do our best to create the richest kind of educational environment we can and at the same time realize that there is so much going on in poor neighborhoods that works against achievement, and it goes all the way from practical matters like a lack of eye glasses to the kind of broader more destabilizing family problems created by the loss of employment. Anyone who denies the devastating power of all of that to effect academic achievement has just never lived in poverty. 

JR: At the beginning of this school year, a great deal of media attention was directed to President Obama’s speech to school children.  Some critics of the speech worried that the president would impose his values on unwilling students. Defenders of the president noted that his message focused narrowly on motivating students to stay in school. Lost in this sound and fury was an opportunity to talk about what values public schools should promote and how they can do this.  What do you see as the role of public schools in developing values? 

MR: There are some really thoughtful and decent things we can say about values, but the moment you bring them into the current public sphere, you get a firestorm. Given the current cultural dynamic, considering, for example, right-wing radio, I wonder if these conversations are possible. As you know, values are an integral part of any human activity, especially schooling. 

Let me draw from my book, The Mind at Work. From watching young people working in various mechanical or construction trades, I saw values emerge from the work itself. The students had a desire to make something aesthetically pleasing, or to fix something to make it work right. Seeing something is damaged or broken and realizing it needs to be fixed. That involves values – they emerge out of learning.  Values are emerging all the time from the work students are doing. Any kind of academic work, any kind of intellectual work will bring with it an ethical or values dimension.  An ethic of practice emerges as part of learning to do that practice, whether its playing an instrument, a sport, learning wood working, reading literature --- all of these things, the whole world of values is part and parcel to it.

JR:  It seems like the power you captured in the book arose as young people were learning to do things that mattered to them and for which there was an audience.

MR: You are really getting at what matters. Somehow by participating in this little community of practice, the students are brought into a long tradition of craftwork and it touches them and speaks to them and they appropriate its values. When we think about values, we think about ideologically loaded hot button political values.  But in fact there are all kinds of values emerging every day in all kinds of educational settings – it would be nice to be able to acknowledge that – and see that as part of what it means to becomes educated. And this relates to our earlier topic of opportunity. If society doesn’t create opportunities for students to read literature, or learn in carpentry, or do science under supervision of more senior and skilled people, then these values don’t emerge in a natural way.