What’s the Matter with American Education … Really?

A Faculty Forum talk by Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, November 15, 2007

As you know, the title of my talk is “What’s the Matter with American Education…Really?”  That’s actually the title of a book I am just beginning to write.  And I thought I would talk a little about what, at this early point, I think this book will be about.

But before I do that, I want to answer the two questions I have been asked most persistently, if ever so politely, since I arrived at Simon’s Rock:  first, who are you?  and  second, why are you here?  In connection with the second question, I also want to say a few words about the new center – the Bard Center on Education and Democracy – that I am organizing – and with which I hope to get your advice and help. 

As some of you know, I graduated from Concord Academy during Elizabeth Blodgett Hall’s last year there as Head of School.  Like many of my classmates, I was deeply influenced by Mrs. Hall and, in fact, came here to see her a number of times, most importantly, during my sophomore year at Smith College.  At the time, I was thinking about dropping out of college.  Mrs. Hall wisely convinced me not to drop out, practically pointing out that it would be easier to stay in college and finish than to return later on.   I was very grateful to her for seeing things straighter than I was seeing them at that moment, when the appeal of wandering through Europe as a starving, would-be artist seemed supreme.  So, I sent her ten dollars to help her start what was to become Simon’s Rock.  I am, therefore, Simon’s Rock’s very first donor.

Thanks to Mrs. Hall I stayed at Smith College and graduated and then moved back to New York City, where I became a high school teacher and got a master’s degree in social studies at Teachers College (TC).  Subsequently, after our now 35- year-old son was born, I went back to Columbia, this time in history, to get a Ph.D. and I stayed very happily at Columbia, at both TC and in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences History Department, until 1994, when I left for NYU.  In 2000, while still on the faculty at NYU, I became president of the Spencer Foundation in Chicago, which gave away about $30 million a year to support education research all around the world.  From there, I went to Harvard, initially to be the Charles Warren Professor of the History of American Education and the dean of the Graduate School of Education.  After stepping down as dean, I taught undergraduates in the FAS History Department -- and now I am here and very pleased about what I am finding at “the Rock.”   

That’s the bare outline of my c.v., but, of course, it really does not tell you who I am.  I therefore thought I would describe myself in three quite different ways, which may help explain why I am here and what I am doing. 

First, I am a historian, but I study education.  I have always held joint appointments in history departments and in schools of education.  I see history as a method for understanding education – what it is, has been, and can be; how it operates as a social and psychological process; and why it matters.  I have always been fascinated by history and majored in history at Smith College.  But since graduating from Smith, I have also been deeply committed to education because, in a very real sense, education represents my politics.  When I graduated from Smith, having had an interesting time writing an honors thesis, I was torn between getting a Ph.D. in history and becoming a teacher.  At Smith, I had become involved in the civil rights movement and I decided to be a teacher and to go to TC because I wanted to teach in Harlem.  As things turned out, I did not teach in Harlem, but rather on the Lower East Side, near where BHSEC is today.  But I believed then, and continue to believe all these years later, that helping kids learn to read, write, and think is very importantly working for civil rights.

As a historian who studies education, I have learned quite a lot about schools and schooling, although my own writing has not been centrally concerned with schools and schooling.  My dissertation, which became my first book, examined the lives of five NYC women who were important social reformers, in order to figure out how they were educated by family, friends, work, political activities, and, more incidentally, schools.  My next two books were histories of the Carnegie philanthropies, first, the Carnegie Foundations for the Advancement of Teaching, and then the larger Carnegie Corporation of New York.  Both organizations have played very important roles in shaping the schools and colleges – and equally important in terms of education, the museums and public television – we have today.  They helped establish the College Board, TIAA-CREF, and Sesame Street, among many other things.  My most recent book, An Elusive Science:  The Troubling History of Education Research, dealt with the development of education as a field of professional study.  I have written quite a lot about education policy, especially during the five years I was editor of the Teachers College Record.  But I have been less interested in the history of education traditionally defined than in education as a process and a part of all of our lives and how that has been shaped by “the politics of knowledge,” which was the title of one of my books. 

So, a first way I would describe myself is as a historian who studies education; and a second is as a scholar, who has also often been an administrator and sometimes even an entrepreneur.  During the summer before my senior year at Smith, I was an intern at Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire. I was also asked to help run the summer school, rather than just being a history intern teaching classes. Since then, I have usually worn two hats at once.  At Columbia, I became a tenured faculty member, but I was also director of a research institute and editor of a journal.  At New York University, I was a faculty member and a center director, and founded a new department in the School of Education. 

At the Spencer Foundation and Harvard, I was also able to intermingle my scholarly interests and my formal administrative responsibilities.  At Spencer, my colleagues and I redefined the focus of the Foundation, moving it from simply supporting excellent research about education, to supporting what we called “usable knowledge” – that is, research that can be translated into the tools teachers and policymakers need and can actually use.  Having written a book called The Politics of Knowledge, I had become aware that foundations like Spencer do not simply make grants.  They play a powerful architectural role in defining knowledge and how it is used and I thought it was important for Spencer to support the kind of knowledge that might actually make a difference in improving education, which I do not believe most formal research can do directly.

At Harvard, I was able again to infuse my administrative work with my scholarly interests.  I did that by raising millions of dollars to create a “Usable Knowledge” portal on the web and by convincing the faculty of the Ed School to develop a core curriculum built around the case method.  When I became dean, I had just finished writing An Elusive Science:  The Troubling History of Education Research, which, among other things, tried to understand why education has always been such a weak, low-status field of scholarship.  That book left me convinced that educators would not gain real standing in the formulation of education policy – standing at least equivalent to that of businessmen and politicians – until education became what I called a strong profession.  For that to happen, I thought (and still think) there had to be a body of knowledge and skill that all educators uniquely hold in common.  Such a body of knowledge and skill does not now exist and needs to be developed.  It therefore seemed logical to me to try to do that at Harvard.  We had wide-ranging talent in the faculty and, earlier, Harvard had played a critical role in standardizing the curricula for professional education in law, medicine, and business.  Whether Harvard will eventually succeed in defining a core of professional knowledge for education, which is likely to take decades, remains to be seen, but my colleagues at the Ed School continue to work at the task.

I said that a second way to describe who I am is to say that I am scholar who has also been an administrator and, on occasion, an entrepreneur.  I had never thought I was an entrepreneur until I went to Harvard, where one of our donors told me that was, in fact, what I am because I like to start things.  Whether or not he was right, over the years, I have helped start a school, which still thrives in Newark, New Jersey; and I have also founded a research center and a university department and refocused a number of institutions.  I like doing that.  Just as I find it fascinating to piece historical evidence together, so, too, do I find it challenging to match institutional purposes, people, and resources. 

The third and final way I would describe myself in answer to the question, who are you, is that I am a feminist.  My doctoral dissertation, which became my first book, was entitled A Generation of Women.  As I have mentioned, it was a study of five women reformers and how they became able to do what they did.  Having grown up at a time and in a family where it was assumed that marriage and children would be the primary and probably the sole focus of my life, writing that book helped me come to terms with the fact that work was also important to me.  It was also the first book in women’s history published by the Harvard University Press, something of which I remain very proud.

Since that book was published in 1979, I’ve been happily deviant in comparison to lots of traditional expectations.  I’ve been the only woman in many, too many, meetings and on too many boards.  I was the third woman since 1636 to be a dean at Harvard, a true but preposterous fact!  I also left my husband and son on the East Coast one year to be a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.  Doing that really gave my rather traditional mother palpitations – but we all survived – and being a grandmother is now one of the most important things in my life.

Since I began teaching graduate students in 1978, I’ve also had lots of female doctoral students and have greatly enjoyed helping them struggle through the difficult juggling acts of enjoying being female, while also feeling entitled to behave, when one chooses, in androgynous ways.  And that, to me, is what being a feminist is all about: believing that one’s sex and the relative traditional power of the two sexes is not and need not be determinative of one’s behavior.

So that is who I am.  Let me move on to why I am here.

Harvard University is a wonderful place, rich in endowment, talent, libraries, and much more.  Would you believe that last year I had $2,500 just to feed the 60 students in my fall class pizza?  Or that I had my very own bibliographer in Weidner Library to help me find material I wanted and to digitize the syllabi for my classes, including my Freshman Seminar, which, in true Harvard fashion was a history of – guess what? – Harvard University.

I enjoyed being dean of the Ed School at Harvard, but after three years I decided to step down.  I was the first dean appointed by Larry Summers, my appointment having just been announced when Larry had his famed blowup with Cornell West; and I was also the first of Larry’s deans to resign, a fact that was announced at just about the same time Larry made his infamous, ill-informed, and unfortunate remarks about women and science.  The timing of my decision to step down therefore occasioned a huge amount of publicity.  The streets around the Ed School were clogged with TV trucks for several days; New York Times and Boston Globe reporters followed me, whenever they could, and Crimson reporters staked out my office for months.  Even last year, a Boston Globe reporter followed me into the ladies room at a conference at Columbia, wanting to know if I would talk to her.

The media frenzy had nothing to do with me.  It had to with Larry Summers’s moment of notoriety and the media’s insatiable appetite for gossip.  It enraged reporters that while, of course, I could have given them lots of juicy tidbits, I refused to do so, insisting instead that I was resigning because after five years of heavy, very full-time administrative responsibility, I wanted more time to write.

When you have to deal with the press – and as a Harvard dean I was given media training during my first week in office – it is helpful if you tell the truth.  And I did tell the truth about my reasons for stepping down as dean.  After resigning, I was offered lots of interesting jobs, as a college president, provost of a large land-grant university, director of a research institute, and the like.  And I said no to all of them because, as I had told the press, I wanted and want time to write.

I had met Mary Marcy through Emily Fisher during Mary’s very first week at Simon’s Rock and admired what she was doing.  When the possibility arose that I might come here, I therefore leaped at the opportunity.  My husband and I have lived in Columbia County, New York, for about 16 years and love it there and I have been intrigued about Simon’s Rock since I gave it its first ten dollars more than 40 years ago.  In the process of exploring the possibility of coming here, Mary also suggested that I create a center of some kind.  Subsequently, as Mary and I sat in Leon Botstein’s kitchen, while he microwaved noodles for lunch, he suggested that we call the center the Bard Center for Education and Democracy.

I hope that explains why and how I got here and now let me turn to what I am doing. I am continuing some of the outside activities I was engaged in while at Harvard.  I am chairing two boards, one is the board of trustees of Concord Academy, and the other is the board of advisors of the District Management Council, a group of management consultant who work with school superintendents all across the country on problems of school management.  I am also cochair of the National Research Council’s Committee on Teacher Education, which has two million dollars from the U.S. Congress and another two million from private sources to generate a report on what we know in scientific ways about preparing teachers to teach math, science, and reading.  The report should finally be done in the spring of 2008.

More important, I am also beginning to organize a center, the Bard Center for Education and Democracy (BCED), which, as it is currently – and very tentatively – designed will do essentially two things:

First, it will serve as a venue for conversation about matters concerning education, democracy, and their relationship. Second, it will function as an umbrella for outreach activities here at Simon’s Rock and throughout the Bard system.

I should say a few words about each of these purposes.

What does it mean that BCED will be a venue for conversation?  And why is that needed?  By “conversation” I mean deliberate, systematic talk or exchange about important ideas, public problems, and open questions (I might note, parenthetically, that one of my first articles was entitled “Education as Exchange”).  I do NOT mean point-counterpoint contestation; and I do not mean aimless chat. Conversation is the mechanism by which different people come to know other people’s minds and meanings.  It is the most effective vehicle we have for identifying and reconciling different perspectives and priorities.  In my view, conversation is the sine qua non of democratic societies. 

Today, in the US, we have a plethora of think tanks, research centers, and advocacy groups, many devoted to education.  It did not make sense, therefore, to think of BCED as just another think tank or research center. 

Instead, we decided to focus on creating a venue for conversation and a center of outreach because there are questions essential to democratic education in the 21st century that need discussion, which are not currently being discussed well.  Central among these are three questions, in which I am particularly interested:

1. Why do we educate?  We say we want as many students as possible to go on to college.  But why is that important?  For economic reasons, of course.  But why else?  What is school for?  What is college for?  All of you, in this room, may know, but most people don’t.  They have not even asked the question.

2. Where and how does and can education occur?  Education takes places in schools and colleges, but also – and increasingly importantly – via the Internet, TV, radio, museums, and other so-called informal institutions of education.  If we are going to deliver the quantities and levels of education we need to deliver to an increasingly diverse population, we need to get rid of our school-centric views of education.

3. What is the role of education in current events?  In a democratic society, education should be our first response to challenges like the increasing fundamentalism around the world.  But I need not tell you that it is not our first response today to domestic and international challenges.  In part, that is because we think of education too narrowly, as preparation for adult roles, and not also a continuing aspect of understanding and learning how best to take action about public problems.

The Center will be a venue for conversation about education, democracy, and their relationship and it will do that by organizing a series of seminars, called “education and democracy seminars,” which will be linked to lectures, visitors, and publications, and most likely a book series with the Princeton University Press. 

Before I even thought of coming here, you all had, of course, already developed some very important outreach activities, to let the world know about some of the interesting educational practices going on here and at BHSEC.  The BCED should facilitate those activities and help develop more of them, here at Simon’s Rock and throughout the Bard system

It’s interesting to look across the variety of programs Bard has invented and now sponsors, and to think about how they fit with some of the educational questions I hope the Center can illuminate through conversation:  why we educate, where and how education occurs, and education’s role in responding to current events.  When one looks across the so-called “Bard system,” it becomes clear that Bard is not simply a college – it is really a liberal arts university – that encompasses liberal arts education in a variety of formats:  for traditional aged college students; for younger students; for prison inmates; and for low-income adults.  Bard’s excellence in the liberal arts and its commitment to deliver liberal arts education to different groups, in different ways, makes it a very unusual model among institutions of higher education and one that warrants more widespread dissemination.

Finally, in addition to trying to get this Center thought up and launched and the various other activities I mentioned, I am also working on two books.  I am thinking about, but not yet actually working on a history of higher education in the U.S. in the 20th century, that will explore the changes in and relationships among universities, think tanks, and philanthropic foundation.

I am also beginning a small book from which I took the title for this Forum, “What’s the Matter with Education . . . Really?”  This book will have three main chapters.  Chapter One, “Purposes,” will argue that our public discussions of education are impoverished by our disinclination to consider questions of purpose – or as I put it in talking about BCED, our failure to ask why do we educate.  In my view, this is tied to a general disdain for theory and for intellect and it is very unfortunate.  Our disinclination to talk about goals, objectives, and aims – other than those pertaining to the economy -- results in a situation where we have a cacophony of talk about education, but nothing resembling a real conversation that might build toward a consensus concerning what we want education to accomplish for this society at this moment in time.  There have been occasions in our history, however, when there have been lively public debates about educational purposes and we need to look back to those to recover possibilities to rekindle civically significant debate today. 

Chapter Two, “Schools,” will argue that, while the problems of most public schools are real and difficult and in need of attention, the biggest problems for this society stem from our over-reliance on schools.  I believe that we need to deliberately deploy a wider range and variety of institutions – the Internet, TV and radio, and museums, among others ­– if we are to have public education that is adequate to the times in which we live.  Chapter 2 will detail that belief.

The Third Chapter, “Universities,” will argue that universities need to renew the land-grant and progressive commitments to public service.  Universities need to shed some of their ivory tower isolation and take more responsibility not only for studying public problems, but also for improving public services, especially education, public health, and social welfare.  As part of that, they need to rethink the professional and disciplinary boundaries that carve real social problems into abstract and often meaningless pieces.  The book’s conclusion will try to explain how all this might be brought about.

I want to stop there, hoping I’ve demystified who I am, why I am here, and what I am doing; and hoping, too, that some of the links between what I am writing and thinking about in connection with establishing the BCED and in connection with my scholarly work are evident.  I have always believed that the best way to test the value of ideas is in practice.  Most important, though, I hope I have made it clear that I am eagerly inviting all of you, to the extent you want to or have time, to help think with me about the new Center, which should, in significant ways, reflect and advance work in which all of you have been involved for quite some time.