How would those changes help to retain the wonderful young teachers you write about?
First of all, it would immediately relieve that sense that there's always a sword above their heads, and that sword is empirically measurable testing. It would relieve the sense that every minute of the day has to be allocated to a predesignated skill. It would free them from the absurdity of posting numbers and the language of standards on their blackboards, which are of absolutely no benefit to a child. As Francesca once pointed out to me, no child's going to come back 10 years later and say, "I'm so grateful to you for teaching me proficiency 56b."
It would free the teachers from all of that, and it would allow these young teachers, most of whom have majored in liberal arts, and who love literature and poetry, to flood the classroom with all those treasures that they themselves enjoyed when they were children, most of them in very good suburban school districts.
You use a lot of military language like "combat," "assaults" and "capitulation" and return again and again to the idea that the administrative brass doesn't know what the grunts are living through. Are our schools really war zones?
Yes, they are. You rightly called teachers "grunts," in that they are the ones who are doing the actual work. In the inner-city schools these classrooms are not simply the front lines of education: They're the front lines of democracy. No matter what happens in a child's home, no matter what other social and economic factors may impede a child, there's no question in my mind that a first-rate school can transform almost everything. So long as the teacher is energized and highly skilled and her personal sense of exhilaration in the company of children is not decapitated by a Dickensian agenda.
I've received at least 30,000 letters, calls and e-mails or written notes handed to me from young teachers in the past two years alone: These teachers by and large are very well-educated and they are highly idealistic. And they know something that the testing and standards experts don't seem to know: namely, that the main reason for learning to read is for the pleasure it brings us, not for the utilitarian payoff of being able to read your orders.
So you take issue with the argument that children need to be prepared for the realities of the marketplace. But isn't that what they will face?
Yes, children do have to be prepared for the economic world -- but the invasion of the public schools by mercantile values has deeply demoralized teachers. I've been in classrooms where the teacher has to write a so-called mission statement that says, "The mission of this school is to sharpen the competitive edge of America in the global marketplace."
Francesca once said to me, "I'm damned if I'm going to" -- I don't think she said "damned," because she's too polite; maybe "darned" -- "treat these little babies as commodities or products. Why should they care about global markets? They care about bellybuttons, and wobbly teeth, and beautiful books about caterpillars." I think we have to protect those qualities.
Most of the teachers we're trying so hard to recruit into these schools, then driving out, tend to be the children of the 1960s generation, and they are steeped in civil rights values, and those who have gone to good colleges and universities come into these schools with what I would call almost a preferential option for minority children of the poor. But no matter what they've read beforehand, they're generally stunned at the profound class and racial segregation they encounter. It's not as if they didn't know that this was the case, but when they're suddenly in a class, as Francesca was, with not a single white child and only three white kids in the entire building, it hits them hard.
Is that how Francesca experienced it?
Francesca and I once had a long talk. I tend to say that we've basically ripped apart the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, but it was she who first pointed out to me that we haven't even lived up to the mandate of Plessy v. Ferguson, because our schools are obviously separate but they're certainly not equal.
Now, especially with the recent Supreme Court decision [on segregation], there's a sense of profound anger among these teachers. A sense that everything they grew up to believe is good and right is being discarded by our society. They also note that despite all the fatuous claims from the secretary of education, the achievement gap between the races has not closed. And even worse, the cultural gap has actually widened because of the narrowing of the curriculum in these schools.
Francesca, despite the fact that she refused to teach to the test, managed to be very effective in teaching skills, and her children did well. Apparently you don't need to hire Princeton Review to come into your school and use scarce education funds to pay them to create artificial test-score gains.
You're an advocate now. Have you ever considered going back to the classroom yourself?
All the time. When I was visiting Francesca's class, I was jealous of her. When I give lectures what usually happens is some teacher or principal in the audience will grab me at the end and say, "Do you have four hours tomorrow morning before you leave? Would you visit my school?" and I always try to do it. And then I don't want to leave because it really brings my spirits back. I love the unpredictable. I love the whimsical in children. I love it when a child asks me what you might think is a funny question, like, "Do you feel sad because you're old?" Or, "Is it lonesome to write?" It's a wonderful question, don't you think?
I'm still very healthy and I sometimes think I would love to go back and teach first grade or second grade. First grade, under the best conditions, is what I call the miracle year, because that's the year when -- if you're in a reasonably good situation, and if your children have a little pre-K, and if they've had a good kindergarten year -- it's in first grade that you see the children go from knowing letters only as images, the shapes of the letters, to suddenly writing and reading. Writing real sentences and reading real books. That's a miracle to me. To me that's more dramatic than anything that happened to me at my four years at Harvard.
This book revisits some of the topics -- like dealing with unsupportive administrators -- from your 1981 book, "On Being a Teacher." Why did you feel the need to return to those subjects?
Well, I've spent more time with other teachers since then and spent so much time in classrooms that -- I can't quite explain why. I know this book has a political cutting edge and it's going to make me a lot of enemies in Washington from the right-wing think-tank types. I'm sure they won't be sending me any bouquets from the Heritage Foundation, or the Manhattan Institute. But it's the first book I've ever written where I actually enjoyed it every day, and it's because there's enough in it, and because I think of it sort of as an invitation to the dance. I think the book, in a strange way, is kind of a cheerful book. Wouldn't you say so?
Somewhere between naive romance and sophisticated idealism.
I hope it's not naive. It's not a theoretical book, like, wouldn't this be wonderful? or something. It's based on being there. Francesca's kids did well. At the same time, she did not stick to the standards. I don't think there's anything in No Child Left Behind about reading the sonnets of Rilke to first graders.
About the writer
Matthew Fishbane is an editorial fellow at Salon.
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