Progress?

The Troubled Crusade: American Education 1945-1980.
by Diane Ravitch.
Basic Books. 384 pp. $19.95.

The ferment over education reform of the 1960’s and the emergence of neo-Marxism in the universities have, over the past decade or so, inspired a spate of revisionist histories of American educational institutions and policies. Against this tide, Diane Ravitch has stood almost alone as a voice of reason and moderation. One has looked forward, then, with some eagerness to The Troubled Crusade, her new history of American education in the postwar period. But although it has many virtues, this is a disappointing book.

Mrs. Ravitch begins with an examination of the battle over federal aid to education in the late 1940’s. She skillfully recounts how that effort, led by conservative Senator Robert Taft, foundered on the shoals of race, religion, and federal control of the schools. She devotes particular attention to the acrimonious battles between Cardinal Spellman of New York and Eleanor Roosevelt over government aid to Catholic schools. Her discussion of the many areas of vehement disagreement between Catholics and liberals in the immediate postwar period offers a useful historical perspective that reminds us how subdued such tensions have become today. Indeed, in the light of those early battles, it is striking that the current debate over tuition-tax credits has been free of denominational animosities. In this sense the nation has traveled some distance toward tolerance, justifying, in one area at least, the tone of optimism pervading this book.

Mrs. Ravitch is even more attentive to the distance we have traveled with regard to federal intrusion into the schools. Her final chapter ably depicts the “iron triangle” of interest groups, executive-agency bureaucrats, and congressional staffers who have found, at least up until recently, common cause in providing more and more federal funds, and federal guidelines, to local education officials. Especially interesting is her treatment of the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act, in which Congress went one step further and mandated detailed individualized education plans for handicapped children while supplying only a fraction of the funds necessary to meet the costs involved.

In covering the ground between the early battles over federal aid and the state of affairs symbolized by today’s “iron triangle,” Mrs. Ravitch misses few points of interest. She takes note of the way educational interest groups grabbed on to the issue of national security as a rationale for the post-Sputnik National Defense Education Act and for federal funding of the National Science Foundation’s innovative curricula. She manages to squeeze in chapters on the arteriosclerosis and eventual death of the Progressive Education Association, and on the loyalty-oath controversies of the early 1950’s. She competently appraises the campus rebellions that began with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. And in her chapter on the alternative-education and free-school movements of the 1960’s, she offers a sober historical perspective on those reformers who, in their eagerness to denounce the purportedly unprecedented failure of American schools to serve minority children, overlooked the fact that encounters between the schools and earlier generations of immigrants had hardly been smooth or felicitous.

As Mrs. Ravitch makes clear, the real impetus behind the growing federal role in educaton was the dilemma of race which the nation began to confront in the 1950’s and which ultimately led to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. She provides a dispassionate account of the legal developments leading up to the Brown case, and shows how the seeds of confusion and dissension over the difference between desegregation and integration lay dormant in that momentous 1954 decision. Mrs. Ravitch then traces the perverse development of judicial opinion as educational institutions were directed to shift from color-blind policies, as prescribed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, to color-conscious policies. Here as elsewhere in the book she effectively illuminates misconceptions about ethnic and group relations that have influenced our educational policies.

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Mrs. Ravitch’s effort to comprehend all these disparate aspects of postwar American education in a general history is most welcome, and in many respects successful. For despite the vast changes that have occurred in the schools over the past thirty-five years, this recent history has yet to receive much scholarly attention. Still, Mrs. Ravitch does not do as much with her subject as one would have hoped.

One problem is that despite, or perhaps because of, the very comprehensiveness of her effort, Mrs. Ravitch offers no clear idea or point of view to tie her history together. She does show at very great length that the federal role has grown enormously, and with it federal control of the schools. She does demonstrate that large-scale reforms have been less successful than more modest ones. And she does show conclusively how affirmative-action policies have led to quotas and reverse discrimination. But these are truths on their way to becoming truisms, and their treatment here is not enough to sustain this book.

A second and more serious problem is that in her evident concern to write a scrupulously “balanced” and “judicious” narrative (both words appear in the glowing jacket endorsements), Mrs. Ravitch has not avoided the opposite pitfall, a tendency to shy away from the implications of her own evidence and the logic of her own argument.

This is not to say that Mrs. Ravitch maintains a totally neutral stance toward the events she recounts. She is, as I have noted, highly critical of racial quotas. She is also disparaging of bilingual education. In her chapter on “The New Politics of Education,” she describes how a transitional program intended to aid non-English-speaking students has been transformed into a mandatory program meant to reinforce minority cultures. Summing up her findings on this and other such developments, she observes:

The lesson of the federal categorical programs . . . , federal directives, and court orders, it appeared, was that each interest group had to look out for itself, to get as much federal protection and as many public dollars as possible, regardless of the effect on the institution. Lost in the new order of things was any conception of the common interest, the idea that made common schooling possible. Outside intervention assumed that local officials were not to be trusted to do the right thing, and distrust was a corrosive sentiment, especially in an institution where parents entrust their children to the care of strangers.

Yet having forcefully and eloquently brought her readers to this point, Mrs. Ravitch manages to lose track of it within four short pages, ending the chapter with these words:

By 1980, regardless of who was elected President, there was no turning back to the days when local school boards were near-autonomous and when higher education was as remote from the government as were churches. The changed situation was a new fact of life, like the discovery of nuclear energy. . . . Much had been gained because of the active dedication of the federal government and the courts to the rights of all children. To the extent that the pursuit of good ends jeopardized equally valuable ends, like academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and diversity; to the extent that government programs gave new responsibilities to academic institutions while depriving them of the authority needed to carry out those responsibilities, there remained a compelling agenda for future educational reformers.

Here “balance” verges on becoming a balancing act. Having incisively portrayed the way in which interest groups gain access to the federal treasury and federal power so as to impose their regulations on local authorities, Mrs. Ravitch next counsels resignation toward such activities as toward acts of God. Having unmasked much educational reform as the sum of the efforts of self-interested actors, she invokes a vision of future educational reformers moved by some transcendent idea of the common good. Yet she offers no evidence that the “corrosive distrust” of local educators spawned by the new politics of education is about to change. Indeed, she makes it abundantly evident that the forces she has identified are firmly entrenched in our legal and political institutions.

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What then is the basis of Mrs. Ravitch’s optimism? Largely, one feels, the remarkable educational progress made by black Americans in the postwar period. Among other indicators, Mrs. Ravitch notes that in 1960 about 40 percent of black youngsters graduated from high school, compared with about 67 percent of whites; in 1980, 70 percent of blacks graduated, compared with 82 percent of whites. At the very beginning of the book, Mrs. Ravitch cites the 1945 congressional testimony of Mrs. Florence Christmas, the teacher-principal of an all-black school with 190 students and 3 teachers in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. In an epilogue Mrs. Ravitch returns to Hazlehurst to report on education there today. Mrs. Christmas’s school no longer exists. It has been replaced by a new and larger school with better facilities and better-paid teachers.

But serious problems persist in Hazlehurst. Some high-school graduates are barely literate. School facilities are falling into disrepair. Classroom discipline is lax. Above all, whites have abandoned the public schools and set up their own academy. Still, Mrs. Ravitch sees in Hazlehurst grounds for hope, not despair. Once again, her historical perspective stands her in good stead. She takes particular satisfaction in the work of Rowan Torrey, Mrs. Christmas’s nephew and a recent graduate of all-white Millsaps College in Jackson, who has returned to Hazlehurst and begun to push for better schools. Reflecting on the developments in this small Southern community, she declares:

In the crusade against ignorance, there have been no easy victories, but no lasting defeats. Those who have labored on behalf of American education have seen so many barriers scaled, so much hatred dispelled, so many possibilities remaining to provide the basis for future reconciliations.

With this, Mrs. Ravitch sweeps aside the bulk of her own argument against racial quotas and reverse discrimination. Certainly in the field of education, where busing has become a symbol of the sort of misguided policy which engenders more racial rancor than it cures, it is difficult to find “the basis for future reconciliation” that she somehow manages to discern. Indeed, what her comprehensive and scrupulously fair narrative makes obvious is the painful irony that while old race barriers may have been toppled, new ones have arisen in their place. Regrettably, this is one of many ironies which Diane Ravitch exposes but fails fully to confront.

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