To the Editor:

I would like to thank Diane Ravitch for her clear and sympathetic treatment of the school-debunking evidence I present in my book, The Great School Legend: A Revisionist Interpretation of American Public Education [Books in Review, October 1972], but I would also like to clarify certain points which I believe she has misinterpreted.

First, rather than ignoring what she calls the “disabling culture” of some immigrant groups, my point in the book is precisely that the schools actually reflected and reinforced propensities—enabling and disabling—determined elsewhere. School was a positive encounter for some groups and a negative one for others; and, as we are only recently discovering, for some parts of some supposedly successful groups, the experience was negative too.

Secondly, while I discuss the lack of positive school effect as measured by school pretensions about achievement and mobility, my position is different from the Coleman Report (and the new Christopher Jencks-Harvard University study of schools, for that matter) in that I see public education as a reflecting and reinforcing agent . . . actively “mirroring” (to use the word Mrs. Ravitch uses) society by translating existing social realities into the categories of performance by which the system legitimates its rewards and deprivations. I do not see schools as irrelevant or impotent at all. In this perspective, poor academic performance at such urban high schools as New York City’s Benjamin Franklin, for example, is as important a part of successful public-school functioning as is academic achievement at, let us say, the Bronx High School of Science. Charges of school failure, impotence, and/or irrelevance make sense only if one assumes—erroneously as I see it—the integrity of public-school rhetoric about mobility as a primary school goal.

Finally, my concluding remarks with respect to teachers doing things differently in schools: these remarks were intended as a highly personal reflection by one who, like so many other teachers, continues to teach in public education. Indeed, in that concluding chapter I tried to make clear my view of public-school subservience to the socioeconomic system. The feeling expressed in the last part of the concluding chapter, while it lacks the rigor I sought—not always successfully, unfortunately—in the body of the book, is a groping for hope, a personal statement about the way in which actual lives can never be so clear-cut as social analyses. Despite what I consider to be the negative historical momentum of public schooling, many people with a vision of a less exploitative version of society do work in schools—trying, at least, to rewrite the intra-institutional script rather than living by the existing one. . . .

I spoke of tension in the schools as a potential movement toward the creation of a “vehicle” for radical social change; not, by any means, the vehicle itself. I, like Mrs. Ravitch, deeply regret that I can offer no reliable school alternatives, no school successes in other nations, which have achieved a more democratic resolution of deep-rooted social inequities. Fortunately, however, the usefulness of serious criticism and the force of applied personal hope do not depend on being able to do so.

Colin Greer
New York City

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Diane Ravitch writes:

Colin Greer recapitulates his view that public schools have traditionally served the interest of the “haves” by preventing true social mobility. In his book, he made it clear that he holds the public schools primarily responsible for the fact that American society is not entirely egalitarian as well as for what he considers a misplaced faith in the forward social progress of America. The key phrase in his letter is that “poor academic performance at such urban high schools as New York City’s Benjamin Franklin, for example, is as important an aspect of successful public-school functioning as is academic achievement at, let us say, the Bronx High School of Science.” In Marxist fashion, Mr. Greer perceives the schools as a tool to maintain an unjust and relatively rigid class structure, by assisting the “haves” and suppressing the “have nots.”

Mr. Greer’s thesis rests on the assertion he makes in his book about the absence of social mobility. He can easily document that some children succeed and others fail; he can also document that in every generation school failure is concentrated among poor children (regardless of race or ethnicity). But he does not establish his contention that there exists in this country a “constancy of economic immobility.” In a recent issue of the Public Interest, Seymour Martin Lipset summarizes the latest data on social mobility and finds that American society is more socially mobile than in the past, and that there is about the same social mobility in various industrialized nations, with the United States having a “slightly higher rate.” Lipset also states that studies in the Soviet bloc, Western Europe, Israel, and the U.S. indicate that “increased educational resources and access to more and better schooling are not sufficient to make up for the cultural situation of the family and the norms and values the child receives.” Since, as Lipset demonstrates, even such relatively “classless” societies as Russia and Israel have similar problems in schooling their culturally diverse populations, Mr. Greer’s analysis is at best not proved.

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