America has always had a love-hate relationship with community values.  We have always exhibited a tension between American individualism and the more cooperative side of our culture.  At the same time, our pragmatism has often trumped both.  When faced with a problem, such as improving our schools, Americans frequently find a way to readjust our definitions of ourselves and to work out solutions. It is time to do so again, and re-embrace community values.

For the last generation, market-driven school “reform” has made great political mileage by stressing individualism and competition. It is time for the pendulum to swing back to a more balanced, neighborly approach. The question is how to redirect school improvement towards values that are more consistent with public schooling.

Even so, it was with some trepidation that I read Closing the Opportunity Gap, edited by Prudence Carter and Kevin Welner.  Before opening their collection of essays by some of our greatest education scholars, I knew it would force me to deal with some issues that I would prefer to ignore; I just did not know which of my beliefs I would have to rethink.

Gloria Ladson-Billings’ “Lack of Achievement or Loss of Opportunity?” was the first chapter that forced me to confront a reality that – for political reasons – I would like to duck.  “Although many people bemoan the loss of civility in public discourse and national debate,” Ladson-Billings writes, “the real problem is that our discussions about morality remain centered on the individual.”

During the last generation or two, America has focused on personal responsibility regarding health care, welfare, and education, and we have neglected our social obligations. It is tough enough confronting corporate school “reform,” however, without grappling with the idea that the accountability hawks have been so formidable as political opponents because they have been riding the waves of larger social and political forces. 

The contemporary school “reform” movement has exemplified the Lee Atwater/Dick Morris/ Karl Rove politics of destruction.  They took the proven tactics of demonizing “welfare queens” and others who supposedly failed to show enough individual responsibility and used them to scapegoat teachers for failing to embody the heroic , “No Excuses!” mindset that would allow each educator to singlehandedly overcome the legacies of poverty in each classroom.

The test-driven “reformers’” dirty politics is just a symptom of the problem. The politics of personal destruction has worked because it has distracted Americans from the truth that we have been afraid to face – that we owe a collective “education debt.” To close the achievement gap, we must do something more difficult than shifting the subject away from the blame game.  I tend to recoil when someone like Ladson-Billings explicitly articulates the hard truth we must face. She is correct, however, and we must persuade our individualistic nation to accept our common “moral debt,” as the root cause for failing schools.

Similarly, it is easy to see why the data-driven school of “reform” has won so many political victories during the last generation. As Janelle Scott and Amy Stuart Wells explain, it has been a time of market-driven policies and increased segregation in all public arenas. Despite the evidence to the contrary, market-driven, competition-driven education policies make intuitive sense to persons struggling in our increasingly stratified economy.  In our corporate world of winners and losers, it is no surprise that “educational entrepreneurs are targeting market niches in a manner that may maximize their short-term success and their bottom line.”  That corporate “reform” strategy, predictably, encourages charter schools to enroll fewer students who would make it more difficult to produce the metrics they seek. Their shortcuts have thus made segregation even worse.

I did not want to read the words that I feared would come next. Sure enough, Scott and Wells correctly explain that we must counter the short-sighted quest for easier gains by individual educational winners by articulating the ideals of “common” public schools. (Of course, I embrace Scott’s and Wells’ values.  I’m just leery into stepping into the “reformers’” trap and sounding like we are pointy-headed liberals.)

On the other hand, Scott and Wells remind us that America had success from the 1960s to the 1980s in moving toward a more inclusive model of schooling.  During that time, state-sanctioned segregation was dismantled and students with disabilities gained the right to be served in public schools.  And, those policies improved student outcomes. They thus recommend three strategies that may have been imperfect, but that have worked. 

Although magnet schools “have fallen prey to standardized measures of school quality,” and have been undercut by the U.S. Supreme Court, we must remember that “early magnet schools provided a relatively uncontroversial – and peaceful – means of integrating schools.” The Court also undermined the momentum of interdistrict school desegregation plans and socio-economic integration, but both remain as promising alternatives.

Gary Orfield’s chapter, “Housing Segregation Produces Unequal Schools” offers a simpler type of solution that I was seeking – a policy approach which goes along with our dominant social and economic trends and which does not require us to swim upstream against today’s individualism.  We need to take advantage of gentrification.  We can take a page from the “small schools” movement and make personalized schools that are attractive to affluent newcomers to the city. Parents in gentrifying areas can be persuaded that diverse schools are not a zero-sum game. We can strategically design schools that offer the same nurturing culture to poor children of color that “boutique” schools provide to the affluent.

I must admit that I did not want to deal Orfield’s other statement that, “Magnet schools, charter schools, and all other publicly funded schools of choice should be required to have the basic civil rights requirements of diversity goals and recruitment strategies, free transportation, no admissions tests, lotteries when schools are oversubscribed, and service to English language learners and special education students.“  Like most educators, I have had my fill of top down mandates.  I don’t want to counter the superficially attractive tactic of school choice with regulations that recall the liberalism of the past.

But, Orfield, like Scott and Wells, are right and my fears are wrong.

Linda Darling-Hammond tackles the third issue that I would prefer to dance around.  Money matters. She reminds us that there is no free way of paying off our “education debt.”  Darling-Hammond recounts evidence ranging from Ronald Ferguson’s research in Texas to successes in Massachusetts and New Jersey that show the benefits of tough-minded investments in education.  

As we head into a new era of austerity, I do not know which is more daunting – the idea that we have to admit that closing the achievement gap will cost money or the need to head back up a road where some regulatory rules must be followed. Challenging our fellow citizens to put the common good above the pursuit of the most pleasurable market niche is frightening enough. But, insisting that we must pay our moral debt is doubly frightening.

I read Closing the Opportunity Gap the day after the Supreme Court overruled the Voting Rights Act. And, then, the Court overruled the Defense of Marriage Act. So, again, I have mixed feelings about our prospects.

In my heart, I know these great scholars are right.  In my brain, I know they are right. I can’t deny that I wish that Prudence Carter and Kevin Welner had given us a quicker and easier game plan – like the corporate “reform” model that goes with the flow of the individualism of recent years.  In community there is strength, however.  Our democracy has had tougher roads to hoe. So, let’s face up to the need to close the Opportunity Gap.