November 7, 1997
I haven't been amidst this much energy since the last time I was in a K-12 classroom. Maybe there's a connection.
Amy invited me here today to say a few words about school reform and the Coalition. So here they are:
DEMOCRATIC
TERRIFIC
COURAGEOUS
LOVING
BOLD
MEANINGFUL
DEMANDING
IMPERATIVE
But she didn't tell me I had absolutely to stop after saying those few words. So I thought of a few more, and I was helped in framing them by some curious items from medical reports that my chief source of humor, my brother, e-mailed to me the other day. These items illustrate a few things, not least the importance of education, and especially, of not dozing off while learning grammar and syntax. First, just to give you the flavor of these items, here is a sampling:
-Patient has chest pains if she lies on her left side for more than a year.
-He slipped on ice and apparently his legs went in different directions in December.
-Discharge status: Alive but without permission.
In this list, I saw an item that could have been written by one of the harsher critics of the public schools:
-Patient is alert but unresponsive.
Then there was another, clearly appealling to those who, while pessimistic about the potential for improvement, think that the public schools are tough enough to endure no matter what:
-The patient refused an autopsy.
But the one that encapsulates my chief worries about school reform was this one:
-The patient left the hospital feeling much better except for her original complaints.
Fortunately for us all, there is the Coalition of Essential Schools, . . one of the truly effective forces at work to assure that progress will be genuine and sustainable.
When the Hewlett Foundation made its recent grant to the Coalition, it did so with this rationaleã and I'm going to read a few sentences of what the Hewlett Board got as background:
One of the most bedeviling problems of school reform is making things happen on a meaningful scale. The history and politics of public education make top-down solutions infeasible. Neither is it possible systematically to gather momentum across a broad front from sovereign school districts. The most promising strategies, therefore, are those that connect schools through ideas and practices in a movement stimulated by shared objectives but animated by local initiative. CES exemplifies this approach. As realistic as it is ambitious about improving schools, CES offers a tested strategy in a long-term plan designed to maintain its forceful place in school reform.
You need to remember that the Hewlett Foundation made this grant EVEN AFTER THE COALITION HAD, IN A DARING DAYLIGHT ROBBERY, STOLEN AMY GERSTEIN FROM HER LEADERSHIP POSITION IN THE BAY AREA SCHOOL REFORM COLLABORATIVE. I want you to take it as great praise for the Coalition that such a grant could be made despite the deep despair and, more to the point, the sputtering fury and scorching bitterness we felt at losing Amy.
Actually, that's a bit of an exageration. The real truth is that we loved her and love her still and we miss her. But if anyone but us is going to get her, we're glad it's the Coalition.
Let me end with a couple of more general thoughts about what is at stake in this serious business we are all in:
Someone once wrote an aerodynamic analysis of the bumblebee, concluding that, given its clumsy, awkward structure, it could not possibly fly. A similar analysis might produce a comparable conclusion about the viability of universal free public education. But however unsuited the bee's makeup seems to be to its ambition, that bee makes possible pollination, and thus flowers and fruit, beauty and food. Its adaptation to a key role in nature makes it critical. Likewise, the role of schools and teachers is no less demanding, no less adaptive, no less critical.
Teaching all the nation's children to be capable, caring, and effective as
individuals, workers, and citizens is not work for the fainthearted. It would
be grand if it were easier. And a nation that makes that demanding job even more
difficult imperils its future to a degree hard even to imagine. We can, however,
use the current school reform energy, intelligence, and focus to both honor and
strengthen teachers, the systems that train them, and the classrooms where they
are laying major sections of the foundation for what our children and our nation
will become.
That is the frame within which many of us in the foundation world see the work
of the Coalition.
You are committed to public education and to both the granduer of the concept and the intimacy of the scale of teaching and learning. We admire your work, we appreciate deeply those of you who are doing it, and we we do indeed think that nothing less than our collective future as a free and open society depends upon it.