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Tough Love at the Hyde Schools a heavy hand in the leadership of Hyde.
S hortly after his initial visit, I asked
James Traub whether he planned
to evaluate Hyde according to how effec-
However, Mr. Traub fails to mention
that three of Hyde’s four schools are
led by individuals with no familial ties
tively we honor our mission or on the to the Gaulds. There are no family
basis of how closely we embody his per- members on Hyde’s board of governors,
ception of the good school. Reflecting the authority to which all four of those
the latter, Traub’s “The Moral Impera- teams report.
tive”(Features,Winter 2005) is a thought- Pointing to our 100 percent college
ful piece on a complex subject. I write to acceptance rate at Hyde-DC (all four
fill in a few gaps. schools combined annually attain 98
His education worldview focused percent), Traub seems begrudging when
tightly through the window of the class- he offers that we “must be doing some-
room, Traub naturally begins with a thing right.” We offer him a standing
classroom drama.Although his depiction invitation to take a hard look at our
of the scene might be familiar to Hyde toward broad-brush characterizations. “engine room” should he want to dis-
students and faculty, the accompanying His depiction of the members of the cover the nature of that something.
illustration is so incongruous to their Hyde community as “wounded souls”
experience that they have uniformly is both inaccurate and unfair. Charac- MALCOLM GAULD
wondered if the drawing was intended ter development is good for both President, Hyde Schools
to apply to another article in the maga- wounded souls and confident ones.
zine. (For one thing, any Hyde student Both can be found at Hyde. He also Chicago’s Proven Results
would tell the kid in the front,“No hats
in the building!”)
In examining the Hyde“ship,” Traub’s
goes way over the line in claiming that
R egarding your two stories about
Chicago’s ending of social pro-
motion (“Retaining Retention” and
bias (that is, school = classroom) pre- Hyde’s 40-year trial- “Teachers and Students Speak,” Fea-
vented him from setting foot into its tures, Winter 2005), it should be noted
powerful engine room: the Hyde Family and-error quest to that one of the most important policy
Education Program. Hyde’s 40-year trial- decisions that Chicago mayor Richard
and-error quest to discover the best way discover the best way M. Daley made when he took control
to develop character has led us to our of the public schools in 1995 was to end
most significant discovery: good teaching to develop character social promotions.
will invariably lose out to poor parenting. Before then, the high school dropout
The dynamics within our families can has led us to our most rate was almost 16 percent; the per-
either catapult us to personal greatness centage of our elementary students
or chain us to desperate dysfunction. significant discovery: meeting national norms on the Iowa
Traub’s decision to disregard Hyde’s fam- Test of Basic Skills in reading was less
ily education program prevented him good teaching will than 37; the percentage of our students
from seeing what makes the place tick. testing in the bottom quarter was about
While Hyde’s holistic balance of aca- invariably lose out to 32. But things have changed. By 2003
demics, character, and family is undoubt- the dropout rate had fallen to 13 per-
edly at odds with Mr. Traub’s prefer- poor parenting. cent, the percentage of students meet-
ences, Traub misleads the reader when ing national norms was up to 41, and the
he suggests that Hyde has abandoned the “Hyde content” has been drained percentage of students testing in the
academic requirements for graduation. out of Hyde-New Haven. Suffice it to bottom quartile was down to about
Our enterprising culture did indeed lead say that Mr. Traub neither visited the 24—better than the nation as a whole.
us to a brief flirtation with this notion school nor spoke with anyone who This is all to say that we see retention
in our earliest days. However, stringent works there. as a tool to help students get the help
traditional requirements have been in The mathematician would catego- they need. And it works.
place for more than 30 years. rize as “necessary but not sufficient” his Your articles note many of these
I must strenuously object to at least reference to Hyde as a family “caste.”To facts, but it must be pointed out that the
two examples of the writer’s tendency be sure, the Gauld family has long had key to making retention effective is to
4 E D U C AT I O N N E X T / S P R I N G 2 0 0 5 www.educationnext.org
correspondence
recognize it as a warning sign and fix the space”for teacher education in the college function of American schools in the
problem. This year, we have refined our curriculum, including five-year and fifth- 20th century. Following the credo of
policy to require that a personalized year teacher education programs. Con- social efficiency rather than inquiry
learning plan be designed for each stu- fined to the undergraduate curriculum, learning, they created the modern edu-
dent retained, so that the principal, teacher education has surrendered cation bureaucracy and a radically dif-
teacher, and parents can all monitor the space—once occupied by foundational ferentiated curriculum, complete with
child’s progress. studies—to courses in the technical vocational rationale, dumbed-down
These students also work with spe- aspects of teaching and learning and to courses, and a focus on life adjustment
cially trained teachers. And previously more clinical practice. more than academic learning.
retained 4th and 7th graders now have Steiner faults courses in teacher edu- Research from inside and outside
access to extra learning opportunities cation for what he perceives as ideo- the ed school consistently shows that
after school and during the summer to logical bias—specifically, for their con- teacher education is an extraordinarily
make sure they stay on track. temporary and Western orientation. weak intervention in the process of
We also are working to prevent reten- Given the minimalist curriculum socializing teachers, whose main influ-
tions before they even occur, by target- assigned by the state, however, the won- ences are a long apprenticeship of
ing high-retention schools and imple- der is that the syllabi have as much as observation as K–12 students before
menting an intensive literacy program in they do. Faculty members do have entering teacher education and the
the early grades. We already have more choices to make, but the conversations powerful culture of the school in which
than 30,000 preschool slots systemwide at the AACTE are about “dispositional they begin to teach.
and have expanded this program into knowledge” and how to engage prospec- As for education professors, our
full-day kindergarten in targeted schools. tive teachers in the debates about lib- primary accomplishment as acolytes of
We look forward to a day when no eralism and education. pedagogical progressivism has been to
children are retained, not because they Steiner insists that he wants teachers change the rhetoric of educators, who
are simply passed along without scrutiny, who are liberally educated, but his rush have all come to talk like construc-
but because they have mastered the skills to judgment may produce the opposite tivists. But beyond this talk—and a
and concepts needed for their grade level. effect: the state’s imposing an even more few formalistic changes, like placing
On that day, we will know that we truly prescribed curriculum. Steiner is playing desks in clusters instead of rows—
have served every child in every school. to the“new right monopoly”in education there is little sign that the traditional
and setting the conditions that could teacher-centered mode of instruction
ARNE DUNCAN lead to mandates for a sterile, neutral, and has changed significantly in the past
Chief Executive Officer value-free preparation of teachers. Noth- one hundred years.
Chicago Public Schools ing could be more damaging to the (clas- Yes, education schools are ideologi-
sical) liberalism that Steiner and AACTE cally convergent in ways that are intel-
Teaching Teachers are seeking. lectually unhealthy. But instead of beat-
H owever flawed David Steiner’s
study of the syllabi and texts used
in three clusters of teacher education
DAVID IMIG
President and CEO
ing the dead horse of education school
ideology, researchers might better spend
their time trying to figure out which
courses (foundational studies, reading, AACTE forms of teacher preparation best
and methods of teaching), we agree enhance student learning.
with his basic argument that future In “Skewed Perspective,” David Steiner
teachers need more exposure to the makes a valid claim about the ideology DAVID F. L ABAREE
three millennia of writings about of American education schools, but he Professor, School of Education
schooling and education (“Skewed Per- misreads its significance. Stanford University
spective: What We Know about Teacher As the syllabi for teacher education
Preparation at Elite Education Schools,” courses suggest, there is indeed an ideo- David Steiner replies:
Features, Winter 2005). logical consensus around pedagogical Regarding David Imig: The point of my
Unfortunately, given the current real- progressivism in education schools, but research was not that foundations
ities of mandated courses and prescribed it has had little serious impact on teach- courses are missing, but that their con-
curricula,this is impossible to achieve.For ing and learning in American schools. tent is generally shallow and ideologically
more than 30 years the American Asso- It was that other branch of education slanted. Teacher preparation programs
ciation of Colleges for Teacher Education progressivism, the administrative pro- unquestionably face time pressure, but
(AACTE) has pleaded for more “life gressives, who shaped the form and Imig makes the unwarranted inference
www.educationnext.org S P R I N G 2 0 0 5 / E D U C AT I O N N E X T 5
correspondence
Apparently, when Jaime Escalante
moved to Sacramento, the local media
were anxious to find out how good
this famous teacher was. They found
a 9th-grade student who said he was a
lousy teacher.
Fascinated, they asked her why. She
said she had had a problem with her
algebra and went to Mr. Escalante for
help. He kept her after school for several
days and also on Saturday.
The media asked her what happened.
“Well,” she said,“I finally got it, but
he didn’t teach me anything. All he did
was make me work!”
WILL FITZHUGH
that more course work would produce the aims, methods, and content of edu- Founder
better-balanced reading lists. This con- cation. Moreover, if teacher prepara- The Concord Review
tradicts common sense: surely, to do tion is to remain in business in the hope
more of what is being done poorly is not that it becomes consequential, then it What’s a Teacher Worth?
a winning proposition. The case for
devoting more time to teacher prepa-
ration can only be made if we are ready
surely matters that this preparation
ceases to be ideologically biased. I n “The Uniform Salary Schedule”
(Forum, Winter 2005), Brad Jupp
cites Public Agenda research and iden-
to correct the deficiencies in teacher Reading, Writing, and Willpower tifies us as a“pro-teacher group.”While
preparation that my study reveals. As for
Imig’s opening rhetorical gesture, my
research analyzes 165 syllabi—45 in
I liked Diane Ravitch’s review of Paul
Zoch’s Doomed to Fail (Winter 2005),
which I also read with great interest.
I believe most of us at Public Agenda
admire teachers, Public Agenda is a
nonpartisan, nonadvocacy research
foundations—from a representative The myopia that overlooks student organization, and we don’t endorse a
sample of elite schools. Imig does not effort is, in my view, the biggest flaw in particular strategy for any group.
claim, or even suggest, that a larger sam- our current approach to education Mr. Jupp cites Public Agenda’s
ple would bring different results. Rather, reform. Teachers, and teachers of teach- report on American public school
in his eagerness to belittle my findings, ers, tend to focus on what teachers do, teachers, our 2004 study “Stand by
he shows a defensiveness that raises not on what students do. Me: What Teachers Really Think
concerns about the capacity of teacher about Unions, Merit Pay, and Other
education to reform itself. The myopia that Professional Matters.” In this study
Professor Labaree doesn’t dispute we found fairly broad support among
my methodology or my findings, but overlooks student teachers for some forms of differential
questions their significance on the pay—just not the form that ties pay
grounds that teacher preparation is effort is, in my view, directly to student test scores. But the
inconsequential. This would seem to research also suggests, at least among
argue for abandoning teacher prepara- the biggest flaw in teachers nationally, that differential
tion; yet Labaree calls for further pay is just not an especially strong
research, implying that if we knew how our current approach motivator or a top priority for most
to prepare teachers, then teacher prepa- teachers. Beyond that, our surveys of
ration would have an impact. However, to education reform. superintendents and principals have
in claiming that meaningful prepara- shown strong support for reform of
tion is yet to be found, he not only side- both salary and tenure.
steps my argument that teachers should This reminds me of a story I heard
be taught to think through intellectual Al Shanker [longtime president of the RUTH A. WOODEN
and moral issues related to pedagogy, American Federation of Teachers] tell a President
but also a long history of reflection on couple of times: Public Agenda
6 E D U C AT I O N N E X T / S P R I N G 2 0 0 5 www.educationnext.org
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