High School Confidential
THE WORLD WE CREATED AT HAMILTON HIGH 1953-1987 by .Harvard University Press, $24.95.
THE BRAND OF conservatism that became politically dominant in this country when Ronald Reagan was elected President revolves around the idea that in the sixties liberals took over a perfectly good and happy America and, in the name of correcting a lot of trumped-up problems, nearly ruined everything. As a fable, sixties revisionism has a powerful appeal, but many of the specific examples given in support of it have to be taken on faith—for example, the idea that detente and insufficient defense spending made us an international weakling.
The story that Gerald Grant tells here, though, makes an almost perfect true-life case study of the destruction by liberals of the peaceable kingdom of the fifties. Following social-science etiquette, Grant—a professor of education and sociology at Syracuse University— calls the school that is his subject Hamilton High School, in Median, U.S.A., but it’s really Nottingham High, in Syracuse, New York. It opened in 1953 in a middle-class residential neighborhood, and its early years were ones of high achievement and social conformity. By the beginning of the seventies there were policemen in the hallways and pimps operating on the school grounds. The principal had a full-time bodyguard; his predecessor had had his skull fractured during a race riot in the cafeteria. School closings due to violence and threats of violence were a regular occurrence. Student test scores were dropping dramatically, and nearly three quarters of the corps of teachers had left the school over a five-year period.
These problems were directly attributable to liberal reforms—mainly desegregation, but also a series of changes designed to confer upon students the same legal rights that adults have. Schools, Grant says, have always been “the means of creating social change through improving the opportunities for the next generation rather than consummating radical reform in the present generation.”This view of schools as social meliorist institutions sounds gentle, but the result, for Hamilton and many other high schools, was utter chaos in the short run and a kind of fundamental loss of compass in the long. Public schools change, and turn over their populations, so quickly that they tend, as Grant points out, to have little sense of their own history. A detailed account of one school over a generation, like this one, is rare and, because it makes Hamilton’s change for the worse so plain, somewhat shocking.
In recounting a story that would have lent itself well to easy moral indignation, Grant is admirably restrained. He communicates a true commitment not only to the well-being of Hamilton High but also to the necessity of desegregation— there is not a hint of the feeling that if we would just return to the race relations of the fifties, everything would be all right. In fact, he is optimistic about race—almost jarringly so, given what one is used to reading on the subject these days. By the early eighties at Hamilton High, Grant flatly declares, “the racial hostilities between whites and blacks had dissolved.” The “class couple” in the 1982 yearbook was interracial. The SAT scores of blacks at Hamilton, which fell steadily during the first decade of desegregation, have been rising steadily since 1978. Black students who study no longer get called “whitey" by other blacks. (In general, after a period in the seventies during which courses like Parenting Today and Search for Self flourished, Hamilton has tightened up its academics.) Grant portrays the racial problems at Hamilton as having been a long, extreme, but discrete convulsion, not a permanent condition.
Still, Grant is profoundly dissatisfied with the state of Hamilton and, by extension, with the state of the American urban public high school. What bothers him the most is the school’s continuing inability to regain a “positive ethos.” Hamilton doesn’t conceive of itself as a community whose job is to impart values as well as skills and information. The students don’t go to assembly. Cheating is widespread. The school drug counselor claims to be unqualified to tell students what’s right and wrong. Teachers don’t even try to impose discipline, let alone teach students how to live. Hamilton is a bureaucratic, utilitarian institution—people get what they want out of it and move on. Grant longingly compares it with several private and parochial schools that have unabashedly made adolescent character formation a part of their charter.
The conservative preoccupation with moral authority as the key to a happy national life runs deep in Grant. In public schools, he says, authority has moved upstream over a generation, and so been fatally weakened. In the fifties teachers and principals ran schools through the exercise of traditional authority that inhered in their jobs. Then, in the name of achieving various national goals, authority was shifted to the superintendents’ offices and the Department of Health and Human Services, which exercise a rational form of authority that revolves around legalistic rules. The corridors of Hamilton High are practically crawling with professional therapists who aren’t employed by the principal and who see their role as protecting students from the faculty and administration. Students react to being corrected in class by threatening to sue their teachers. Everything done in schools as part of an effort to “impose a new moral order on the country,” Grant says, has had the effect of weakening the moral order in the schools themselves.
It’s a measure of Grant’s effectiveness that he makes even such troglodytic causes as school prayer, ending federal aid to education, and bringing back corporal punishment (all of which he mentions wistfully but doesn’t actually argue for) sound as if they should at least be allowed into the informed debate about education. Where he falls short is where almost every book about social problems, from How the Other Half Lives to Women Who Love Too Much, falls short: the analysis of what’s wrong is much more persuasive than the prescription for fixing it.
ALL THE ACTORS in the story of Hamilton High exercise some emotional claim on Grant, but his heart belongs to the teachers. Again and again he shows them being made the fall guys for social problems they didn’t create: it’s teachers who have to be the foot soldiers (almost literally—teaching has become more physically hazardous than military service) in the war against racism, teachers who are assigned the task of “mainstreaming” the handicapped, teachers who lose dignity and status when students are given new rights. They have seen their pay and prestige decline steeply, relative to those of other fields, during just the period when the world has dumped so many of its troubles on their shoulders. The success of feminism has effectively drawn off the steady supply of bright women that teaching used to have. As I read along in The World We Created, I began underlining some of the words Grant uses to describe the treatment of teachers: “libel,” “condescension,” “persecution,” “infantilized.”
Grant’s way to fix the schools is to give all power to the teachers. The superintendents should give control of schools back to the principals — and each school’s teachers should essentially be allowed to pick their own principal. Also, teachers should be paid much more (“a top range of remuneration comparable to that of other professionals”), should have their performance reviewed only by other teachers, should not be subjected to competency testing except when they enter the field, should not have merit pay, and should continue to be protected from dismissal. At this late date in the history of our faith in professions Grant is able to call in stentorian, doubt-free tones for “fundamental reforms that could establish the basis of a true profession” in teaching.
A few years ago Ann Grimes and Laura Washington, of the Chicago Reporter, did a first-rate series on South Shore High School, in Chicago, another urban public school that deteriorated badly in the sixties and seventies and that, unlike Hamilton, shows few signs of improvement today. Their work showed a terrifying level of teacher incompetence— for instance, an English teacher who misspelled the words vocabulary and tragedies. Most public-school teachers today come out of teacher’s colleges, which are notoriously inferior stepchildren of the higher-education system, with low overall standards and an absurd emphasis on instructional techniques at the expense of the subjects that their students will soon be teaching. In very little time teachers’-college students become tenured teachers, totally protected from consequences if they prove to be no good at their work. It isn’t just students who have benefited from the profusion of due-process rights since the fifties; bad teachers are major beneficiaries too.
Grant mentions the teachers’-college problem briefly, but nowhere in his impassioned final chapters is there any hint of anxiety that putting teachers completely in charge of schools might protect bad teachers as well as empower good ones. Also, it isn’t clear to me how the kind of authority for which Grant yearns can flow from a group, rather than an individual. The schools he admires usually have the kind of benevolent-dictator head who will be familiar to readers of affectionate novels about prep schools or newspaper stories about inner-city schools that work. But when the impressively dedicated Grant, who spent years on this book—including one as a teacher at Hamilton High—assembles a group of Hamilton High teachers to begin the work of transforming the school, months appear to pass in meetings to discuss gauzy matters like the necessity of “space for a genuine dialogue.” Surely the schools of the fifties didn’t have that lazy, summer’s-day feeling that any institution run by a committee has.
Because Grant knows what he’s talking about so thoroughly, he scatters throughout The World We Created small insights about what makes modern-day urban schools work. For example, integration is now a success at Hamilton because today’s students have been in integrated schools since kindergarten, and because the city of Median has an allchoice school system that lets parents and students pick their school (within the bounds of racial quotas), which forestalls any bitter feelings of coercion. Grant paints integration as a difficult but noble cause; however, the studentrights movement, in his account, has done virtually no good and a lot of harm, by ensnaring school life in legalism and depriving kids of the discipline they need. Judging from Grant’s evidence, it should be junked. Paying “master teachers” significantly more—nearby Rochester now has a pay scale that goes up to $70,000 a year—clearly has an impact on the morale of all teachers. (Grant would give these high salaries on the basis of longevity, not performance.)
The richness of Grant’s superb research means that he had the material to produce a nuanced, complicated remedy to schools’ problems. Right now the country seems to want, almost desperately, to fix public education, so a truly convincing solution from Grant would have had a lot of influence. It’s too bad that he chose instead simply to make an emotional plea in behalf of teachers. As Grant points out, it has become a modern American tradition for us to impose on schools sweeping reforms that sound wonderful but don’t work. It’s hard to believe that handing education over to the teachers as a kind of reparation for their suffering over the past twenty years wouldn’t be just another one of these fixes that do more for the national conscience than for the schools. □