Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

After many years teaching high school social studies and then university graduate students, I documented the history of teaching. In this research and writing, I have struggled with a dilemma peculiar to being a researcher/practitioner. I prize teaching and respect K-12 teachers for the daily work they do. I also prize the value of researchers describing and analyzing classroom lessons as objectively as they can and then making judgments about change and stability in teaching practices. Those values came in conflict, however, when I researched and wrote about teacher use of high-tech devices in lessons.

Over the years, I have interviewed many teachers across the country who have described their district leaders buying computers, deploying them in classrooms while providing professional development. These teachers have told me that using computers, Smart Boards, and other devices have altered their teaching significantly. They listed changes they have made such as Powerpoint presentations and students doing Internet searches in class. They told me about using email with students and parents. Teachers using Smart Boards said they can check immediately if students understand a math or science concept through their voting on the correct answer.

I then watched many of these teachers teach their lessons. Most teachers used devices that they described in their interviews. Yet I was puzzled by their claim that using these devices had substantially altered how they taught. Policymaker decisions to buy and deploy high-tech devices was supposed to shift dominant ways of traditional teaching to student-centered approaches. That is not what I encountered in classrooms.

I am not the first researcher to have met teachers who claimed substantial changes in their teaching in response to district or state policies. Consider David K. Cohen’s classic article: “A Revolution in One Classroom: The Case of Mrs. Oublier.”

In the mid-1980s, California policymakers adopted a new elementary math curriculum intended to have students acquire a deep understanding of math concepts rather than memorizing rules and seeking the “right” answer. The state provided staff development to help elementary teachers implement the new curriculum. Then, researchers started observing teachers using the new math curriculum.

One of these researchers, Michigan State University professor David K.Cohen, observed one third grade teacher Mrs. Oublier (a pseudonym) to see to what degree Mrs. O had embraced the innovative math teaching the state sought. Widely respected in her school as a first-rate math teacher, Mrs. O told the researcher that she had “revolutionized” her teaching. She was delighted with the new math text, used manipulatives to teach concepts, organized students desks into clusters of four and five, and had student participate in discussions. Yet Cohen saw her use paper straws, beans, and paper clips for traditional classroom tasks. She used small groups, not for students to collaborate in solving math problems, but to call on individuals to give answers to textbook questions. She used hand clapping and choral chants—as the textbook and others suggested—in traditional ways to get correct answers. To the researcher, she had grafted innovative practices onto her traditional ways of teaching math and, in doing so, had missed the heart and soul of state curriculum policies.

How can Mrs. O and teachers I have interviewed tell researchers that they had changed their teaching yet classroom observations of these very same teachers revealed familiar patterns of teaching? The answer depends on what each person means by “change” and who judges the size and direction of the change: the researcher or the teacher?

Change in classroom practices clearly meant one thing to teachers and another to researchers. Teachers had, indeed, made a cascade of incremental changes in their daily lessons. Researchers, however, keeping in mind what policymakers intended, looked for fundamental changes in teaching. In the case of Mrs. O—from memorizing rules and getting the correct answer to focusing on conceptually understanding math. Or in this case, getting teachers to shift from traditional to non-traditional instruction in seating arrangements, lesson activities, teacher-talk, use of projects, etc. Mrs. O saw substantial incremental “changes,” while the researcher saw little fundamental “change.”

Researchers, however, publish their studies in professional and mainstream media. Teachers like Mrs. O seldom tell their side of the story. Yet teachers’ perceptions of change have to be respected and voiced because they have indeed altered their practices incrementally and as most practitioners know (lawyers, doctors, accountants) that is no easy task. How, then, can a researcher honor teachers’ incremental changes while pointing out few shifts in fundamental patterns of teaching?

Whose judgment about change in classroom practice, then, matters most? Should researchers “consider changes in teachers’ work from the perspective of new policies….[or intentions of policymakers]? Or should they be considered from the teachers’ vantage point? “(p.312). I believe both the teacher’s and policymakers’ perspectives count when documenting what occurred in classroom lessons and reporting what has happened in lessons. It is not an either/or choice.

In the 1979 film “Being There,” Chance (Peter Sellers) goes from an illiterate, TV-watching, not-too-swift gardener for a wealthy Washington, D.C. family to the confidant of a dying financial titan Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) who is on a first name basis with the President of the United States (Jack Warden).

This turnabout occurs after Chance’s wealthy employer dies and lawyers for the heirs kick out Chance from the only home he has known without a penny. Well tailored–he took the custom-tailored suits of his employer–courteous and with a certain presence, Chance is completely unaware of life. As Louise, the Black maid for the millionaire said about Chance, “you’re always going to be a little boy.”

Chance wanders into downtown D.C. where the chauffered Cadillac of Eve Rand (Shirley MacLaine), the wife of the financial titan, accidentally knocks Chance down. To make amends for the accident, Eve Rand brings him home to see Ben’s personal doctor. In the back seat of the limousine, when asked his name he says: “Chance the gardener.” Eve hears  “Chauncey Gardiner.”

Introduced to Ben Rand, the two men hit it off with Chauncey often repeating the last line that Ben had just said. When the President comes to see Rand, his primary financial backer, he meets Chauncey. After the President’s asks Ben’s advice on an economic speech he plans to give to  prominent CEOs, he turns to Chauncey and asks what he thinks. Chauncey doesn’t have a clue about what the President is talking about but responds with a metaphor about planting in the Spring, harvesting in the Fall, and letting fields lie fallow in the Winter. The next day, the President uses the metaphor with the CEOs and mentions Chauncey Gardiner. In hours, Chauncey appears on national TV and again talks in metaphors of flowers and seasons which listeners hear as pearls of wisdom. He becomes a star among the political and corporate elite. At the end of the film, the pallbearers of Ben Rand’s coffin–all industrial and financial leaders–are talking about running Chauncey for President.

I offer this extended summary of the film because it illustrates the frequent errors all of us make daily of projecting onto individuals brilliance and wisdom on the basis of a few cues while ignoring the situation or context in which people operate. Social scientists call this the error of attribution.

One example in education would be attributing gains in academic achievement to school officials buying laptops and tablets for teachers and students. Consider Union City, New Jersey a place where student use of computers had presumably led to substantial gains in test scores.

What is often overlooked, however, is that Union City had launched system-wide reforms in curriculum, teaching, and accountability 3-5 years before schools were wired, computers bought, and technical support provided. Yet gains in academic achievement were attributed to teachers adopting computers, not the structural and curricular changes introduced years earlier (see here).

Another example of the attribution error is the off-and-on bashing of “bad” teachers as the source of poor schooling in the U.S. (see here, here and here). Mary Kennedy points out the error that critics make in confusing teaching with teacher quality.

We label teachers as caring, efficient, engaging, or boring, as if the events we see in classrooms sprang entirely from personal qualities that teachers bring with them when they enter the room…. [A]s our attention has recently turned to questions about teaching quality, we have started to examine the personal characteristics of our teachers–their credentials, licensure, test scores, skills, and personal values–and have overlooked aspects of their work that are outside their control, such as resources, planning time, and … school infrastructure that might influence the quality of teaching practice.

Very smart people today attribute teachers’ classroom performance and school success to their personal qualities–think Teach for America, teacher-as-hero films, and judging teacher performance using student test scores—and overlook or ignore the situation in which they labor.The daily work load, workplace conditions, unceasing bureaucratic demands, schools segregated by class and race, the use of fear and sanctions to spur improvement–none of these, they imply, have much bearing on student learning.

In “Being There,” very smart people attributed to Chauncey Gardiner personal qualities of good breeding–those splendidly tailored suits–and substance as a thinker who speaks in sage metaphors. Rather than considering the situation in which Chauncey was really Chance the gardener, an employee who could neither read nor write, and learned everything he knew from watching TV. Billionaires and the President attributed wisdom to Chauncey.

“Being There” is a film where attribution error has few consequences. In attributing sole power to personal traits of teachers or to suggest that new classroom technologies “personalize” learning, ignores all-important school structures and community contexts. Such policy mistakes made again and again in school reform decisions misdiagnose what the problems are and what needs to be done.
 

“First graders in a Tokyo public elementary school are presented with a challenge for the final semester: to form an orchestra and perform “Ode to Joy” at a school ceremony. The film examines the Japanese educational system’s tenuous balance between self-sacrifice and personal growth as it teaches the next generation to become part of society.” The documentary can be seen here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/18/opinion/japan-education-childhood.html (click on arrow when article appears).**

“What makes Japanese people Japanese? For me, the key lies in what we are taught during our elementary school years.

Children as young as 6 are given the responsibility to clean their own classrooms and serve one another lunch. Schools are structured like mini societies, where everyone has a role and is expected to contribute to the community. There’s a strong focus on nonacademic education intended to teach teamwork, work ethic and a sense of accomplishment.

Growing up in Japan as the child of a Japanese mother and a British father, I struggled with my identity. It was only years later when I was living abroad that I came to appreciate the values and work ethic instilled in me by my elementary school education; they are so normalized in Japan that their worth is underappreciated. These traits also contribute to why Japanese society works the way it does: Our trains run on time because we are taught to prioritize harmony and consideration for others; on the other hand, we live under a collective pressure to conform and not bring shame upon our community.

In the short documentary, “Instruments of a Beating Heart,” filmed in 2022, first graders at a Tokyo public school are presented with a challenge for their final semester: to form an orchestra and perform at a school ceremony. As the children are taught to “make your hearts as one” and rigorously rehearse, we see both the pressures and the wonders of being held responsible to a group. The character-building traditions in Japanese education are experienced through Ayame, who, in the face of newfound challenges, learns to be resilient. I believe the experience of overcoming obstacles, as Ayame does, is crucial to education. But where should the balance lie between discipline and freedom?

What is happening in our schools will shape what our future society will look like. While the Japanese system has its strengths and weaknesses, I hope this film provides the opportunity for other societies around the world to hold a mirror to their educational systems and to reflect on how they want to raise the next generation.”

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*”Ema RYAN YAMAZAKI was born in Osaka to a British father and a Japanese mother in 1989. After graduating from New York University, she worked as an assistant for documentary filmmaker Sam POLLARD and began her career as a film editor. Her directorial debut was the feature-length documentary MONKEY BUSINESS: THE ADVENTURES OF CURIOUS GEORGE’S CREATORS (2017), which won the audience award at the Nantucket Film Festival. Her subsequent documentaries KOSHIEN: JAPAN’S FIELD OF DREAMS (2019 / NC ’21) and THE MAKING OF A JAPANESE (2023 / NC ’24) were screened at international film festivals.”

**An American teacher describes her year-long experience of teaching in a Japanese elementary school. See: https://larrycuban.wordpress.com/2022/06/04/japanese-classrooms-from-chaos-to-complete-control-mary-devries/

Corporate leaders want high school graduates who can size up situations fast, think on their feet, and solve problems. Parents and voters want the next generation to think clearly as they enter a world that won’t stand still. Consensus does exist over the importance of students graduating with flexible, sharp minds but confusion exists over how to best get schools to produce such graduates.

Since the 1980s, states have developed English, math, science, and social studies curricula to include thinking skills. Teachers have received special training in helping students to reason. Results so far have been meager. How come?

The answer is that these curricular reforms are little better than washing and waxing an old, dented jalopy because these reforms aimed at increasing student reasoning powers fail to alter the school’s fundamental structures or permeate classroom lessons. Why is that?

According to psychologists, reasoning is an untidy mental and emotional process that requires time for an active interplay between teachers and students, time for both to mull over inconsistencies, and a classroom climate that encourages problem-solving without fear of teachers or peers making cutting remarks. Reasoning also requires teachers who stir students to ask questions and allow mistakes to be aired without recrimination. In high school subjects, then, the necessary conditions for thinking to occur are sufficient time and a classroom atmosphere where both teachers and students are free to display thinking and not get punished (or laughed at) for mistakes.

Do high school structures provide enough time and support for frequent and open use of reasoning skills? Hardly. Take, for example, the 4 Ts: Time, Teacher Load, Textbooks, and Tests.

* Time. Teaching 20-30 students for 50 minute lesson at least five times a day leaves little time for considering ideas or problems when teachers are expected to cover textbook chapters and curriculum standards. Individual attention to students’ comments evaporates. The average teacher waits a few seconds for a student to answer a question.
* Teacher load. Most high school teachers face five classes daily totaling 130 to 150 students. They may teach two or even three different subjects (e.g., Algebra 1, geometry, remedial math).
* Textbooks. Textbooks are primary sources of classroom information. Texts get thicker, not thinner each year. Text-driven homework and text-based quizzes determine what is to be remembered, not what ideas can be analyzed.
* Tests. True-false questions flourish in teacher-made tests while multiple-choice ones populate standardized tests. Both require a correct answer. Occasionally, English and social studies teachers create essay tests where students write a page or longer to answer a question.

These 4 Ts flow directly from traditional school structures. Generations of students, teachers, and parents know well the American high school. They have sat in classrooms where rows of students face the teacher’s desk; listened to teachers covering subject matter while students take notes, and answer questions about what is in the textbook. These structures and classroom practices, however, run contrary to cultivating student questions, independent thought, or taking intellectual risks. As most high school classrooms are currently organized, they hinder thinking, frustrating both teachers and students no end.

Of course, there are classrooms where teachers overcome such hostile conditions, prodding students to think long after they leave school. In the thousands of classrooms I have visited over the last forty years, I watched many teachers and students explore ideas, question one another, reject glib answers, and engage in the hard work of reasoning. When such teaching occurs, it does so in spite of the stubborn structures that high schools place in the path of these gifted teachers. They are, however, the exception.

In most classrooms, time is short, content needs to be covered and discipline has to be maintained. What counts is the correct answer on the test. Can schools change these structures? It is very hard but a few have.

Across the country, there are high schools in New York City and San Diego, to name only a few—that have gotten rid of 50-minute periods, bell schedules, and textbook-driven teaching. Teachers work together in teams teaching 90-minute periods. Further, these schools rely less on paper-and-pencil tests to determine how well their students have learned and far more on students displaying and explaining what they have achieved in their classes. In short, opportunities to think are not left to certain lessons once a week but woven into the daily fabric of these schools.

But it is heavy lifting for school boards, parents, and administrators to dump high school structures that inhibit reasoning and sustain those changes over time particularly when school boards annually threaten or actually cut school budgets. There is even less political will to challenge these taken-for-granted organizational routines. Yet the lessons of earlier reforms are clear: trying to get students to think without altering basic high school structures, will be no more than washing and waxing a jalopy. It may look good for a few days but it is still a jalopy.*

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For those readers, who are unfamiliar with the word “jalopy,” here are some photos:

In Part 1, I described a visit to a Southern California high school’s four social studies classes where students displayed values of doing the least amount of work to pass these academic courses. For most of these students, classroom habits revealed far more tedium than enthusiasm for, or even interest in, learning. Most of the disengaged students treated the classes like buzzing mosquitoes that had to be endured for 43 minutes before freedom came when bells rang ending the period.

After the class observations, I walked down the hallway and watched an assembly of a few hundred juniors and seniors sitting quietly and respectfully honoring three school athletes who, through hard work, self-discipline, and display of skills had become national all-stars. They also had football scholarships to universities. These players were on a team that had consistently beaten rivals and was on the cusp of becoming state champions.

The disconnect between what values and habits I saw in these classrooms and the values and habits displayed by members of the football team who practiced daily, played in interscholastic competition, and had to pass academic classes got me thinking about whether a school’s athletic achievements and the spirit that flows from such hard work and grit spilled over to the rest of the school influencing how non-athletes behaved in classrooms and achieved academically.

Of course, I only saw these four social studies classes. How many of those 9th and 10th graders were on athletic teams, I do not know. Nor did I visit honor or Advancement Placement classes in chemistry and calculus.

Keep in mind, however, the high school’s high dropout rate–less than 60 percent of students entering ninth grade, graduated high school. Also persistent low performance on annual state tests. My hunch is that while such classes and academically engaged students were present, in the face of such statistics, these classes hardly put a dent in the overall school culture pervading most classrooms. So I return to this disconnect, this apparent contradiction, between a school’s success in sports yet a high dropout rate and low scores on state tests. So I asked:

What does the research say about the connection between academic achievement and participation in high school sports?

No surprise here: The findings are mixed. One study of Ohio high schools concluded “that high schools that devote more energy to sports also produce higher test scores and higher graduation rates.” One writer summed up research on links between student athletes and academic achievement;

“One 2010 study by Betsey Stevenson, then at the University of Pennsylvania, found that, in a given state, increases in the number of girls playing high-school sports have historically generated higher college-attendance and employment rates among women. Another study, conducted by Columbia’s Margo Gardner, found that teenagers who participated in extracurriculars had higher college-graduation and voting rates, even after controlling for ethnicity, parental education, and other factors.”

But most students do not participate in interscholastic sports–40 percent is cited as the national average but if one were to look closely at some low-income, largely minority schools participation in competitive sports would be no more than 20 percent. For the 60 to 80 percent who do not compete, there is no research that I can find that shows a spillover affect from high school sports to academic culture in classrooms.

What researchers and critics of high school sports programs have pointed out, however, is that so often academic programs are starved while dollars flow for hiring coaches (many of whom are not teachers), new locker rooms, and better turf for playing fields.  Some critics urge high schools to abandon interscholastic sports and spend more money on academics. See here and here.

But research findings are seldom invoked in providing resources for such value-laden policies as financing sports programs and cultivating academic success. Parents’ and educators’ strongly held beliefs often trump research time and again.

What  beliefs dominate current thinking about competitive athletics in high school?

For the urban high school I visited in Southern California and similar ones elsewhere in the country (e.g., Dallas’s Carter High School, Cleveland’s Glenville High School), many adults believe that competitive sports are pipelines to university scholarships and an education that leads directly to middle and upper-middle class status. They also believe that winning teams build pride-in-school and community, promoting a spirit of achievement that flows across the entire school. See here.

So I return to the contradiction that I noticed when visiting social studies classes and then watched a sports assembly. Does a school’s athletic  achievements spill over to the rest of the school influencing how non-student athletes behave in classrooms and achieve academically?

From only watching four social studies classes in this Southern California high school, I did not see it. But the sample of classes I observed is far too small and may be unrepresentative of the larger school.  From what I have heard from athletic boosters clubs at every school I have taught at or observed, I want to say “yes.” But when I turn to the research on high school sports and academics, one has to scratch to find such studies. So without seeing strong evidence of this linkage or studies that confirm such a connection, I can only say: I do not know.

One of my former colleagues in anthropology once told me that he gags every time he hears the word “culture.” Why? Because “culture,” he said, has come to mean everything under the sun and has thus become meaningless. With my colleague’s gagging in mind, I will try to be careful in using the c-word in this post.

So let’s imagine going into a high school.

What do you see? What do you hear the teachers and other staff members saying? What do the bulletin boards look like? How easy was it to enter the school? What are the children saying and doing? How noisy is it? Do you feel welcome or afraid? What is the general “feel” of the environment? All these questions and more pertain to the underlying stream of values and rituals that pervade schools. This underlying stream is the culture of that particular school.

The question I think about a lot is: Does a school culture influence strongly what values and rituals turn up in academic classrooms?  Can, for example, a school’s athletic success stir pride in students studying history to show up before the tardy bell rings? Sit down at their seat and start answering questions on the whiteboard? Can winning the state football championship spill over into math and science classrooms so that students become engaged in studying the content, work quietly with partners in doing an assigned problem, and turn in homework regularly?

I do not know the answers to these questions. I will explore them in this two-part post.

Let me sketch out an example I saw up close recently.

Before the Covid pandemic, I visited four social studies classes in a southern California urban high school that is largely minority and poor. With nearly a thousand students in 9th through 12th grades, the school, one of a half-dozen in the city, ranked the lowest of the city’s schools on annual state tests and graduated less than 60 percent of its students. Metal detectors and pat-downs by uniformed security personnel were daily rituals. Its football team had won state championships and provided an annual pipeline of scholarships for athletes to universities.

Since I saw only one teacher teaching classes in U.S. history and world geography, I will not generalize about classroom cultures elsewhere in the school.

While 20-plus students were enrolled in each of the four classes, only one had more than 20 students appear. In the other classes 10-15 students appeared. Most were in their seats at the tardy bell but late arrivals entered throughout the period. The 16-year veteran social studies teacher was prepared for each class, amiable with students, and firm in following school and classroom rules.

One of the four classes (the largest with 24 students but 30 were enrolled) was U.S. history but this day they were preparing for the state graduation test by going over items from a booklet prepared for this test. The teacher had an overhead projector with transparencies of test questions and topics from previous years. She marched through the items slowly by asking various students what the correct answers were and explaining why they were correct. Of the two dozen students about 8 were engaged with the lesson, the rest chatted until admonished by the teacher, applied cosmetics, had their heads down on the desks, or were engaged in other tasks. Late-comers gave slips to the teacher. The period lasted 43 minutes. The students packed up their belongings a few minutes before the bell rang.

The three ninth grade world geography classes I observed were studying 19th century European imperialism in Africa. The teacher had the state standard for the lesson and assignment listed on the chalkboard with three questions for students to answer as they filed into the class.

There were 10-15 students in each of these classes. The teacher walked around the room making sure that cell phones were put away (a school-wide rule). She passed out  a worksheet drawn from the textbook chapter on imperialism. After 15 minutes, the teacher orally went over each question (she told them that for these questions they had copied down, the answers could be found on pp. 345-350 in the textbook and that they were going to be on Friday’s test).

Most of the students completed the worksheet and gave it to the teacher when the period ended. At least a third or more of the students in each class, however, chatted most of the time, slept, and did not complete the worksheet.

I do not know if these four classes were representative of classroom cultures in the rest of the school. Nothing much was expected of the students beyond textbook and worksheet answers. Most complied. Teachers worked hard at completing their lessons, collecting worksheets, and grading and returning them the next day. That was it.

From my perch in the back of the room in these four classes, I saw that students were largely disengaged from each lesson’s content. While school rules were enforced, the values, rituals, and habits favored the least amount of academic work possible. There were no disciplinary incidents that occurred in any of the four periods; teachers maintained orderly, safe classrooms.

At the end of the fourth period class, I walked down the hall and stopped in and watched a joyous assembly of 11th and 12th grade students honoring athletes who had been chosen as all-stars to play in a U.S. Army-sponsored  football game.

And here is where the contradictions I noted in the title of this post between school and classroom cultures occurred. I take it up in the next post.

The metaphor of the pendulum hides much more than it reveals.

Consider that a clock pendulum swing returns almost to the same spot it left. Although there is motion, there is little change. Continuity is the word that comes to mind in describing a clock pendulum. Yet the pendulum doesn’t return to the exact spot. Ditto for change in schools, that is continuity amid change.

Recall what occurred during the mid-1980s after the report, A Nation at Risk came out (1983) deploring the state of schooling in the U.S. State curriculum regulations and federal oversight of schools became front page news. Researchers who went into classrooms concluded that there were enduring practices that teachers used in organizing classes, maintaining order, asking questions, teaching basic skills, using texts, and testing students. Over many decades, even as new curricula and technologies (e.g., laptops, interactive whiteboards, smart phones) entered and exited classrooms these practices, with occasional alterations, persisted.

Researchers also documented that policymakers can legislate changes in teacher practices all they want but teachers, once they close their classroom door, will change only what they believe will benefit their students. In short, public officials–from the superintendent to the President of the United States–cannot mandate what matters in a classroom.

Yes, of course, some policies teachers will embrace willingly. For example, nearly all teachers endorse computers into classrooms in the 2020s but not a quarter-century ago. Yet policies that are suspect in teachers’ minds (e.g., performance evaluations and salaries based upon student test scores) or ones that are forced upon them without much regard for their opinions (e.g., new math and reading programs), have little staying power in classrooms. The trend, regardless of what particular fad policymakers talk about, is small alterations over time in stable teaching practices–that pendulum swing.

Does the pendulum metaphor for school reform apply today? Yes, in that boosters of charter schools, paying teachers on basis of student test scores, and using classroom chatbots, for example, claim that these reforms will influence how teachers teach and students learn. When state and local test scores drop (or go up) critics (and boosters) leap to the conclusion that charters or pay-4-performance plans caused those declines (or increases). Ignoring the stability in teaching practices over time or examining the test itself, class size, the impact of family background on academic performance, school reformers (both from the left and right) skip to the easy conclusion that the newest reform  caused the decline (or rise) since teachers adopted “new” practices.

So what? Suppose many school-watchers have inaccurately assumed that what public officials say is happening in schools is what teachers actually do in their classrooms. Suppose further that critics have also ignored the clear trend of stability in teaching practices. Such insights might deserve, at best, a yawn.  Of what importance is it, then, to the public to make these distinctions between hyped policy talk and enduring classroom practices?

First, differentiating between listening to the sizzle rather than tasting the steak is seldom applied to school reform. Policy talk, the sizzle, is important because, in a democracy, it registers what issues need to be addressed. But teaching practices, the taste of the steak, is what matters in the classroom. To improve teaching practices over time, we need to see what actually goes on in the classroom and pay less attention to pendulum-like swings in policy talk.

Second, because talk about school reform moves far more quickly than what happens in classrooms, it is proper to appreciate teachers for being slow in responding to calls for faddish shifts in practice. Now, that may sound un-American to savor the virtue of patience in considering an innovation but as new programs and proposals have spilled forth, it has become clear that they range from goofy to wise. Teacher deliberateness does both the public and students a favor by judging carefully the worth of any particular innovation.

Perhaps the pendulum is the wrong image to capture the differences between reform talk and what happens in classrooms. Perhaps the metaphor of a hurricane is better. The hurricane whips up twenty-foot high waves agitating the surface of the ocean yet fathoms below the surface fish and plant life go undisturbed by the uproar on the ocean’s surface. Whichever metaphor makes sense, no longer should we confuse what public officials say schools are doing with what happens in classrooms.

The 1989 film Lean on Me portrays Eastside High School principal Joe Clark in Paterson, New Jersey rescuing a school mired in violence and poor academic performance. In one dramatic scene with actor Morgan Freeman playing Clark, over two hundred troublemakers are on the auditorium stage. The rest of the Eastside student body sit in the auditorium watching Clark quiet everyone including those students standing behind him.

Facing the two-hundred mischief-makers milling around on stage, Clark points his finger at them and says: “You are expurgated! You are no longer welcome in this school.” The school security staff in blue blazers escort them out of the building doors.

Joe Clark’s kicking out troublesome students pleased movie crowds as it did the country when they learned about this baseball bat-toting principal. In real life, however, Joe Clark, with his bullhorn and bat, got in trouble with the school board over expelling the students but he did have his 15 minutes of fame even making the cover of Time magazine. *

Lean on Me lays out the fantasy Americans have about school principals. They want fearless school leaders but get managers with keys dangling from their belts. This expectation of Principal-as-Superman (or Wonder Woman) is fairly common but few principals are Clark Kents in mufti. Most principals want to be school leaders but cannot because they are caught in the middle between their district bosses wanting them to follow policy, parents wanting their requests fulfilled, teachers wanting to be left alone, and students wanting teachers who know what and how to teach.

Principals learn to navigate a middle ground between these stakeholders avoiding open conflicts by juggling competing expectations of these varied constituencies. The DNA of the job is managing, politicking, and taking few risks.

Ralph and Edna as Principals**

Take Ralph, a veteran administrator who presides over a suburban elementary school. He is a friendly, forty-ish fellow who is fond of playing the guitar for sing-alongs with kindergartners. He trusts his teachers to do the right thing so he seldom visits classrooms. Neither children nor teachers, however, give him headaches. Parents do.

As he sees it, parents press their children to achieve, achieve, and achieve. He sees that pressure in the third-grade girl bursting in tears at a “B” on a report card or the fifth-grade boy throwing a tantrum at being asked to re-do homework. Parents constantly ask him to assign their children to particular teachers whose students perform well on state tests. If Ralph hesitates in responding to their requests, they are on the phone to the superintendent asking why Ralph is always dragging his feet.

Yet Ralph also knows that these are the same parents who raised $30,000 for the school to meet teacher requests for 1:1 laptops and class trips to museums. Trapped by the conflicting expectations of teachers, parents, and his bosses, Ralph’s primary task is to keep parents satisfied, teachers buffered from parents, and children safe. He manages as best as he can but, nonetheless, he is caught in the middle.

A few principals, however, are like Edna who was appointed to a working-class Black and Latino middle school. A Ralph-like principal had been there ten years letting teachers do what they pleased even as the school’s academic performance plummeted. The superintendent told Edna to raise those test scores. She knew that her largely white staff needed prodding and support if they were ever to share her belief that all students can learn.

In the first year she observed classrooms constantly, determining which teachers would stay and which ones she could ease out. She made teachers responsible for what happened in hallways. She recruited parents and teachers to become part of a new school council to help her make school-wide decisions. She got students to volunteer to paint murals on hallway walls and pick up litter on school grounds.

Then she turned to academics. She asked each teacher for a plan to improve academic instruction in their academic subjects. The teacher plans were reviewed by parents, amended, and put into practice in year two. She scrounged funds to support teachers being paid for summer training.

Not until year four, was there a flutter in test scores. But what made the superintendent, parents, teachers, and students ardent supporters of Edna was that the school was becoming a community where children and adults had come together to work for the school rather than for only themselves.

In year five, the superintendent appointed Edna to be his assistant superintendent and assigned another Ralph to the school.

Why are there more Ralphs and Ednas than Joe Clarks?

The answer is: A job that forces risk-averse principals to manage bosses, parents, teachers, and students creates Ralphs. Risk-seeking Ednas relish managing conflicts and escape the trap of being caught in the middle. But they get promoted to district offices.

And Joe Clark?

Well, they seldom retire from the principalship. Their behavior creates discord within the school, angering teachers, parents and students, eventually attracting the board of education’s attention. Then they depart.

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*Joe Clark served as Paterson’s superintendent from 1982-1989. He died in 2020. The obituary is here.

**Ralph and Edna vignettes are drawn from the principals with whom I have worked as a teacher in Cleveland (OH) and Washington, D.C. schools. Also, I drew from my experiences with nearly 50 principals I supervised when I served as Superintendent of the Arlington (VA) public schools.

Talk about Artificial Intelligence (AI) has surely mushroomed in the past two years since a small San Francisco company made ChatGPT available. Other chatbots (e.g., Alexa from Amazon; Gemini from Google, Siri from Apple) are now available. Moreover, a more measured response is slowly emerging about what chatbots can and cannot do.

Being able to laugh about the onslaught of chatbots and how teachers, students, and professionals have come to rely on them for writing first drafts and answering questions get at how each of us relates to inanimate but “smart” objects. These cartoons may get you to smile or even laugh while also raising fears. Whatever occurs, enjoy!

Recently, I was invited to be part of a five member panel at Google to discuss the impact that AI will have on teaching and learning in schools. My fellow panelists were drawn from the technology sector. As a historian of schooling and veteran high school teacher, I was expected to offer a brief perspective about previous technological innovations that had entered classrooms. Here is what I said to the 200 participants:

Over the past century, every technology introduced to improve teaching and learning has been hyped as “revolutionary” and ”transformational.”

Consider this list:

*Radios in classrooms

*16mm movies

*Overhead Projectors

*Instructional television

*video-casettes

*1:1 laptops

*Interactive Whiteboards

That inflated vocabulary of previous classroom technologies triggering sweeping changes in teaching and learning continues in 2024.

In speaking of AI recently, the Dean of the Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, said:

“[This Technology] is a game-changer for education – it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching.”

Yet there is little evidence that classroom use of these previous technologies forced classroom teachers to rethink, much less reshape, their instruction. Nor have I found convincing evidence that these technologies altered fundamentally how teachers teach, increased student engagement, or raised test scores.

So I have concluded that those pushing AI use in classrooms fail to understand the complexity of teaching.*

Why do I say that?

Promoters of AI have attended public and private schools for nearly two decades and sat at desks a few feet away from their teachers. Such familiarity encouraged AI advocates to think that they knew thoroughly what teaching was like and how it was done. That familiarity trapped promoters of AI into misunderstanding the sheer complexity of teaching especially the cordial relationships that teachers must build with their students.

Anyone who has taught at least three to five years appreciates the extensive knowledge, skills, and emotional connections needed to get kindergartners, fifth graders, or high school seniors to learn. By “emotional connections, ” I mean building relationships with individual students and a class are paramount in getting students to learn. Few boosters of AI, for example, seldom mention that a teacher-student relationship is unlike a student-machine connection.

Teaching, then, is not a mechanical act of connecting dots. Teaching is a complex act that requires knowledge of subject matter, managerial skills, and emotional labor. Often, it is improvisational. Most important, however, is that teaching requires gaining students’ trust. It is both an art and a science that takes years to master.

This brief history of hyped-up technological innovations previously adopted by public schools and the lack of causal links between these new technologies and altering how teachers teach or student learn may feel like I am raining on the parade of AI promoters. So be it.

While I believe AI will not force practitioners to rethink how they teach, nonetheless, as so many teachers have done in the past, they will adapt AI to fit the contours of their classrooms. And in doing so, AI may become just another item added to the list of previously hyped technological innovations that evoked initial gasps of delight and slowly became part of many teachers’ repertoires.

Or maybe AI in classrooms will become just a footnote in a future doctoral student’s dissertation. Too early to say.

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* Beyond understanding completely the complexity of teaching, perhaps those who create these tools are driven by the simple fact that the U.S. public schools market is large (i.e., nearly 50 million students and three million teachers) and lucrative. Further, schools are just as vulnerable to technological fads as are women’s fashions, deodorants, and automobile styling.