A real education reformer.

Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform Since Sputnik by Chester E. Finn, Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2008). 364 pp.

Chester Finn has written an absorbing book of great importance about American K-12 education over the last fifty years, drawing on and depicting his lifetime commitments and activities as one of our most important educational policy specialists--in national government, state government, the university, the research institute, the advocacy group, and the world of publications. His autobiographical account should be put on that small shelf of books indispensable for specialists and citizens alike in their capacity to inform, illuminate, and motivate: Charles L. Glenn's The Myth of the Common School (1988), for the theory, history, trajectory, and problems of the public school movement over the last two centuries in France, Holland, Germany, and the USA; E. D. Hirsch's The Schools We Need and Why We Don't Have Them (1996), for a profound analysis of the terrible inadequacy and ineffectiveness of American K-12 schooling, and a practical program for its improvement that is now being used in over 800 schools; and Diane Ravitch's Left Back; A Century of Failed School Reforms (2000), a magisterial survey of American K-12 educational policies since 1900 with a haunting and damning subtitle that was changed for the paperback edition.

The U.S. Constitution created a decentralized republican democracy in which the rights of individual citizens and states were safeguarded against national encroachment and domination. Given the brutalities and catastrophes of top-down, statist educational policies since the French Revolution, this arrangement, rooted in the Bill of Rights, has served us well politically, restricting or preventing large-scale statist indoctrination. But since the victories of the educational "Progressives" from the 1920s on--John Dewey, William Heard Kilpatrick, and their many contemporary successors in the teachers' colleges and educational schools, which consolidated and institutionalized those victories in a worldview and matching educational policies--American public education has become increasingly ineffective in conveying knowledge, skill, and even elementary civic and ethical understanding. The books by Glenn, Hirsch, and Ravitch provide vital narrative and exposition as to why this has taken place, and Hirsch's 1996 book and his subsequent The Knowledge Deficit (2006) have also drawn attention to his "Core Knowledge" curriculum, a movement of K-8 curricular reform that shows strong promise of doing something substantial to counteract and ameliorate an otherwise deteriorating situation characterized by an overwhelming irony: vastly increased American educational expenditures over the last half-century have been accompanied by declines in educational outcomes, giving us one of the weakest and most unfair public education systems in the developed world.

Chester Finn's autobiographical account of his involvement in alternately critiquing and shaping American K-12 educational policy since the 1960s is an ideal and detailed complement to Glenn's, Hirsch's, and Ravitch's books, and in fact he has been steadily allied with Ravitch for many years in a partnership that has shed much light and done much good.

Finn started out in the 1960s as an idealistic liberal Democrat concerned particularly with inner-city poverty. His first mentor, and perhaps the most lasting influence on him, was that maverick Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, on whose staff he served in the Nixon Cabinet and also when Moynihan was Democratic senator from New York. Finn's account of American political history as it affected educational policy over the last half-century is unusually revealing due to his roles as a participant at high levels of policy-making. In addition to serving on Moynihan's staffs, he was a chief associate of Secretary of Education William Bennett in Washington and of Tennessee governor (now senator) Lamar Alexander in Nashville. A professor of educational policy, a major figure in research institutes and advocacy groups, he is also the author of important books and an editor and frequent writer for what are now two of the nation's most important magazines on educational policy, Education Next (published quarterly by Stanford's Hoover Institution and the Program on Educational Policy and Governance (PEPG) at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard--not the Harvard Graduate School of Education, a bastion of Progressivism) and The Ethical ion Gadfly (published weekly by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute of Dayton, Ohio, and Washington, DC).

Finn has informed, detailed, seasoned, and reasoned opinions on the whole horizon of K-12 educational issues, but his particular interests are in parents' rights to school choice, the charter school movement, voucher programs, and educational assessment and accountability. His life work should be seen in the light of two large, tragic contemporary ironies. The increased educational expenditures vs. diminished educational outcomes anomaly referred to above is the first of these. The second irony is one that also haunts the work of Glenn and Hirsch: the great victory of 1960s civil rights legislation in destroying de jure segregation in the public schools has not been followed, as was expected, by a diminution in de facto racial segregation and by an overall improvement in American educational outcomes. In fact, our urban schools are more segregated than ever, with "the exodus of many white families for private and suburban alternatives. Today," Finn continues, "Boston's public school enrollment is 86% minority, compared with 35%" in 1974, and it "is less than half its 1970 size." In addition, the collapse of the Black family since the 1960s--which Moymhan predicted forty years ago--has intensified the misery and vulnerability of our poorest fellow-citizens, increasingly including whites as well (European countries are experiencing the same breakdowns, with illegitimacy rates among British whites particularly worrying).

Yet as Paul T. Hill of the University of Washington has said, commenting on Finn's book, these developments are the "product not of impersonal forces but of people with ideas and motivations." Finn describes and discusses these people, ideas, and motivations in illuminating narrative detail, starting with the post-World War II "Progressive" institutional consolidation of Dewey's and Kilpatrick's ideas and practices and their lonely and isolated critics in the 1950s, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Smith, Arthur Bestor, and the Catholic-school sector. He shares E.D. Hirsch's pessimism about dislodging this establishment in the educational schools and teachers'colleges and the larger of the two teachers' unions, the National Educational Association (NEA), but has high praise for the late Albert Shanker's leadership of the smaller one, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).

Like Charles Glenn and John E. Coons, Finn argues that in a republican democracy with tax-supported public schools at which children's attendance is mandatory and enforced by law, the rights of parents to choose and help shape their children's educational opportunities and formation must be respected. As Coons has memorably put it, "the right to form families and to determine the scope of their children's practical liberty is for most men and women the primary occasion for choice and responsibility. One does not have to be rich or well-placed to experience the family. The opportunity over a span of fifteen to twenty years to attempt the transmission of one's deepest values to a beloved child provides a unique arena for the creative impulse. Here is the communication of ideas in its most elemental mode. Parental expression, for all its invisibility to the media, is an activity with profound First Amendment implications." Wealthy parents express this choice by moving to well-off communities with schools they like or by placing their children in private or parochial schools. Increasing numbers of people school their children at home. But poor working parents, and even most middle-income parents, have no such choices and are coerced by a system for which adjectives such as "free" and "public'' and "adequate" have become increasingly equivocal.

Like Charles Glenn, Finn lauds the fundamental precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court with Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which unanimously overturned an Oregon law that attempted to close all private schools, with Catholic schools the main target of this nativist, majoritarian measure. The decision is all the more noble in light of the authoritarian, statist policies then so glamorously institutionalized in republican France, fascist Italy, and communist Russia (for the last of which John Dewey expressed great sympathy in the late 1920s). "The fundamental theory of liberty upon which all governments in this Union repose," Justice McReynolds wrote for a unanimous Court, "excludes any general power of the State to standardize its children by forcing them to accept instruction from public teachers only. The child is not the mere creature of the State."

The primary practical methods by which Finn sees an opportunity to safeguard and renew parents' right to school choice and to increase student morale and academic effectiveness include charter schools (purposely distinctive and autonomous public schools free from some union regulations) and vouchers, especially for students trapped in chronically under-performing, incompetent, or dangerous schools. Though not a Catholic, Finn follows the Catholic Moynihan in emphasizing the desirability of giving vouchers that can be used in parochial and private as well as in alternative public schools. The voucher programs for poor and poorly served citizens in Milwaukee and Cleveland, most of whom choose Catholic or other Christian schools for their children, have been ruled constitutional, with the Cleveland program importantly confirmed as constitutional in the Supreme Court's 2002 Zclman v. Simmons Harris decision. Finn argues that "the most enduring value conflict in American K-12 education is between partisans of the public school system and advocates of pluralism, competition, and choice."

But in addition to parental choice, Finn insists on both the indispensability, and the difficulty, of establishing real academic accountability, discerned and guided by solid statistics about student competencies and the effectiveness of schools and encouraged by state and federal carrots and sticks. His discussion of standards and accountability from the publication of the sobering report A Nation at Risk under Reagan (1983) onward is detailed and illuminating, rightly focusing on the fine state-level initiatives of Republican and Democratic governors, but particularly of Lamar Alexander, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush as governors. His discussion of "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) is judicious, rightly crediting George W. Bush's bipartisan initiative and seeing it as growing out of previous efforts at the state level and his own father's Charlottesville education summit in 1989. However, unsympathetic Democrats now control the U.S. Congress, and the National Education Association is a large factor in their coalition and in their presidential election campaign. In addition, de-cen-trahzation provisions in the original NCLB legislation have come back to haunt its proponents: voluntary state standards and tests as guidelines by which to evaluate yearly progress in individual districts and schools, and by which to award or deny federal money, vary widely and have been unscrupulously played and tainted by state bureaucrats and district administrators eager to escape exposure and sanctions but eager to acquire federal financial benefits.

An alliance of extremes has probably doomed the NCLB legislation, corrupting and betraying its hopes. Liberal Democrats and their supporters in the NEA and the teachers' colleges hate external accountability and state-government (or even indirect national) dictation of their curriculum and academic standards, which are more specific, content-based, and common-sensical than they like. Conservative Republicans dislike the federal role in education generally, resent Bush's educational expenditures, and are pained when the mandatory National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests show that even students who are getting good grades in many schools in their districts actually know very little, as discerned by national and international comparisons and as compared to American students forty, fifty, and seventy-five years ago.

Grade inflation and "social promotion"--"the soft bigotry of low expectations"--have become endemic in our schools, with a low egalitarianism of outcome gradually establishing itself at the expense of the noble idea of equality of opportunity for access to an aggregated public good: decently organized, competent schooling. The National Center for Educational Statistics, Finn notes, "reported that twelfth graders' reading performance in 2005 was worse than in 1992--and flat since 2002." As for disparities between ethnic and racial groups, Sam Dillon of the New York Times wrote in 2006 that "the test-score gaps are so large that, on average, African-American and Hispanic students in high school can read and do arithmetic at only the average level of whites in junior high school." The recent Democratic congressional attack on the successful "Reading First" literacy initiative within NCLB succeeded in drastically cutting this effective feature of the educational act.

One of the most dismal but revealing features of Finn's book is his documentation of the trendy "Progressive" neophilia that has increasingly dominated our teachers' colleges and schools of education since the 1920s. "Progressivism" won the day at Columbia Teachers' College by the 1920s, drowning out and marginalizing judicious moderates such as William C. Bagley and Isaac Kandel, while more recently both relativizing "values clarification" education (Lawrence Kohlberg) and the seductive, flattering theory of "multiple intelligences" (Howard Gardner) have come to us courtesy of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In the university at large, left-Nietzschean, postmodern skepticism about reason and virtue is an ideal stimulant to increasing vice, foolishness, cynicism, and irrationality. (A prominent ed school professor in the Midwest has deplored the distinguished literary theorist, literary historian, and educational reformer E.D. Hirsch's "privileging" of the denotative dimension of language itself as authoritarian!) Former Boston University President John Silber's commitment two decades ago of Boston University to run the poor, dysfunctional schools of the nearby, bankrupt, immigrant entry-point city of Chelsea, Massachusetts, has been a noble, sustained initiative that no other teachers' college or school of education (or university) has chosen to imitate and for which his (private) university has gotten little credit, even in its local newspaper, the Boston Globe.

Though some progress has been made under President Bush's NCLB at the elementary level, the bipartisan consensus that created it is gone, and the future ofK-12 educational reform probably lies again with the states and with courageous, grass-roots initiatives such as Hirsch's Core Knowledge curriculum.

For a republic traditionally aspiring to personal liberty and equality of access to public goods worth having--ofwhich decent schooling at public expense is among the most important--Chester Finn's book is an indispensable guide and an inspiring portrait of what individuals and groups with common sense, civic commitment, and perseverance can accomplish in realizing the battered but noble promise of modem education--butalso a sobering picture of what they are up against.

M. D. AESCHLIMAN is Professor of Education at Boston University, Adjunct Professor of English at the University of Italian Switzerland, and author of The Restitution of Man: C.S. Lewis and the Case Against Scientism.