ConVal Regional High School, Peterborough, NH: 3/23 & 3/24, 2009

It was a trip I had made many times—hundreds on the school bus, hundreds more my senior year in my first car, a ‘93 Subaru station wagon. I made the trip several times again 4 years later when I substitute taught at my alma mater. Down and across the bridge I went, through my hometown of Antrim, past Bennington and Hancock, to ConVal High School.

Twenty miles from home to school is an unusually long trip, but ConVal (Contoocook Valley) is a regional high school serving nine small towns in southwest New Hampshire, so for students in outlying towns a hefty commute is the norm. With a thousand students, ConVal is a mid-sized, or Class I, public high school.

The building loomed large and sprawling in my high school memory but appears underwhelming to me now on a dreary Tuesday morning. Late winter is an ugly time in New Hampshire. The trees are bare and mounds of dirty snow mixed with sand and salt line the roadways and loom in the corners of parking lots. Frost heaves take their toll on your vehicle, and everything seems worn down by the cold. After visiting scores of teachers and principals at schools across the country, would I be disappointed by my own school? I didn’t want that. My high school experiences were both rewarding and trying, and I had great and lousy teachers, but overall I recall my time in high school with great fondness. The school served me well and I was proud of it because it was my school. I wanted my visit to reflect that.

In his introduction to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America Harvey Mansfield wrote: “It is not just a few great general needs that are universal to human beings; so too is willful pride.” Mansfield meant that people’s lives aren’t shaped simply by needs, over which they have no control, but by “certain distinct forms peculiar to a people of which they are proud.” It struck me that schools are among those distinct forms that evoke powerful feelings of pride. They give people a sense of belonging to place, and place is always particular. Tocqueville marveled at the “decentralizing passion” that Americans exhibited, characterized by the strong attachment they had to their states and regions.

Perhaps it is no more than nostalgia. Nothing more than the sentiment Daniel Webster expressed in his ringing defense of the independence of Dartmouth College in 1818: “It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it!” Indeed, many education reformers chide Americans for their stubborn attachment to their local public school. How can reformers change the status quo when the populace is looking through rose-colored glasses at the schools of their youth? If only everyone would stop clinging to schools as they are, thinking that’s how they’ve always been, so that real improvements can be made to America’s school system.

I suspect the average American doesn’t resist change to the structure of schooling out of nostalgia so much as out of a refusal to accept dictation from others beyond the local community. Whether it’s court-imposed change (see posts on busing in Boston here, and Raleigh, here) or “experts” berating school district inefficiencies, local residents respond, “No thank you. We’ll take care of ourselves.”

School districts may not be the most efficient way to administer public education, but they serve an important auxiliary function in addition to educating students. Mansfield again: “Tocqueville commends America’s numerous local governments and nongovernmental associations not for their efficiency or even their justice, but because they develop citizens’ attachment to political freedom.” Locally controlled and administered school districts squarely fit that description. They are among the “secondary powers” Tocqueville commends for filling the void between the individual and the state: they train citizens in the art and practice of being free.

My visit to ConVal proved to be surpassingly informative and enjoyable, due in large part to the trust and familiarity that began with Principal Sue Dell. Talking across a small table in her office, Dell told me the broad goal she works for is making sure all her students are engaged in learning. “There is a real belief that is being accepted more and more, that all children can learn,” she said. Everyone expects schooling to be tailored to the individual student, and “the days of planning a lesson for a whole classroom are quickly disappearing.” The push to raise all kids to the level of “proficiency,” required by NCLB, has changed the responsibility of schools and teachers.

From day-to-day Dell says she must jump from one task to the next. “You have to be sort of ADD to be a principal,” she laughs. “It’s a real people business,” that begins by greeting students in the morning as they enter school. She visits classrooms, handles teacher grievances, raises private money for lights for the football field, and holds weekly meetings with the district superintendent. Dell emphasized the importance of building and maintaining relationships based on trust.

Talking with Teachers

Dell arranged for me to meet several ConVal teachers who agreed that the school was changing its ways. The expectation was that all kids would do well and almost all should go to college. This often starts with the parents, some of whom push for scaled grades so that their kids’ scores look better for college admission, veteran math teacher Kathy Hamon told me. Of course, “not all kids have a reason to go.” That less than 60 percent of incoming college freshman nationwide graduate after six years, said English teacher Tim Clark, is perhaps a sign that we are pushing too many kids toward higher education.

Social studies teacher Nancy Gagnon said education is subject to fads, and she gets frustrated when schools are forced to jump “from bandwagon to bandwagon.” However, she doesn’t fault those pushing new initiatives to make things better: “It’s generated out of the feeling, ‘We have to do a better job’. There is no best way to teach kids.” Still, she believes silver bullet reforms take up teachers’ time and inevitably fail. Gagnon says there just isn’t enough time to do all she’d like for her kids.

On the level of school structure, Gagnon had doubts about teacher tenure. You need to be a good teacher no matter how long you’ve been teaching, she said. “Teaching is a very easy job to do badly, and very difficult to do well,” but measuring and rewarding teachers for performance is no easier, she said. While open to the idea of merit pay, Gagnon wondered how it would work in practice. One thing she supports is more observation and evaluation of teachers: “I’ve been observed once in 11 years.” More evaluation would provide an incentive to “ramp things up” in the classroom.

“When I think about how education has changed,” journalist turned English teacher Tim Clark began, “I think more about how society has changed.” Clark is a middle-aged man with short-cropped grey hair whose clear manner of speech is the result of a career working with words. His observations were about society in general, but are anchored by his experiences at ConVal and in southwest New Hampshire.

Society has gotten “cruder,” Clark continued, and it’s something that has affected kids as much as adults. In school, crudeness translates into a lack of respect. The issue of respect came up frequently during my conversations with Clark, Sue Dell and other teachers. Teachers used to expect and receive a certain level of respect from almost all students just for being adults and teachers. “Those days are long gone.” Now teachers tend to say they must earn students’ respect, and they need to show students an equal measure of respect. They say the hierarchical relationship between teacher and student has been replaced by an egalitarian one.

Math teacher Kathy Hamon attributed the increased disrespect to broken homes, a decline in church attendance and other cultural slides that remove structure and guidance from kids’ lives. Clark added that the recent economic downturn hasn’t helped. When parents are unemployed all sorts of bad things trickle into schools. But Clark was clear not to paint an overly rosy picture of the “good old days.” Adolescent psychology says kids need to rebel, and when Clark gets into arguments with bad-mouthing kids he says he has to remember, “It’s not about me.” Often it’s about problems kids have at home, he said.

Are poor grades caused by low income? Gagnon thinks some kids have the attitude, “Who cares where Zimbabwe is, I didn’t have breakfast.” Twenty years ago, she said, teachers knew more about their students’ family problems. “Maybe we knew too much,” Gagnon shrugged, “but now we know too little. “You can’t educate the kids without knowing the whole person.”

Hamon told me her struggles with disrespectful students occur more frequently in classes for low-performing students. That reminds me of something Clark told me: The distribution of students by academic achievement is changing. He called it the “U-Curve,” the opposite of a bell curve distribution where most students are in the mid-range of academic achievement. Clark say says he sees lots of As and Bs, and lots of Ds and Fs, but “the C’s have gone away.” Clark thinks this reflects the larger society, which is losing its middle ground. The A and B students come from intact families where there are books in the home and high expectations. That’s not the case for D and F students.

Despite these concerns, Clark said he’s “one of the few who think[s] public education is pretty good.” Kids are still growing up, having families, finding jobs and paying taxes. He cited research showing that Americans give their local schools a decent mark while remaining concerned about education overall. About 40% give their local public school a grade of A or B (and 35% award a C). Only 20% award an A or B to American education in general.

Gagnon worries that school is the only place to meet people of different backgrounds and experiences. “You don’t have the bank anymore, the church, or the town meeting.” Perhaps ConVal serves that purpose, but my visits to public schools across America tell me the romantic notion of public schools as “common schools” is largely mythical, or at least historical. Taken collectively public schools may reflect society overall, but looked at individually our schools reflect only their own neighborhoods, which means they reflect our society’s social divisions by wealth and by race. Why this is so is subject to great debate. Charles Murray at the American Enterprise Institute contends that residential and school patterns reflect a form of social sorting by intellectual ability. Harvard sociologist Robert Putnam argues that self-segregation is a defense mechanism to protect “social capital,” the common knowledge that builds trust and reduces conflict in communities.

These considerations aside, the most important thing to keep in mind is that these are children, not adults. “Many adults in the community,” Clark said, “lose sight of the fact that most of what we know as adults, we didn’t learn in high school.” He notes that when ConVal asked parents what their children should learn in high school the result was a great list of things, that, cumulatively, add up to wisdom. But you don’t learn that in high school. You learn it in life.

Montgomery County, Maryland: 5/13/09

Since 1973 it has been federal law that every child with disabilities is entitled to a "free appropriate public education." That includes instruction in a regular classroom, with additional services, or instruction in a separate classroom. These two strategies are called “inclusion” and “pull-out.” Educators debate the merits of both approaches (see my visit to Idaho), but it strikes me as one of those pedagogical debates where both sides have merit. I don’t know in which direction we have veered too far. In Montgomery County, Maryland I visited “Ms. Jones,” a teacher who works with special needs kids at a local public elementary school.* In Montgomery County, Jones told me, the policy is inclusion, and perhaps too much so.

One of the reasons Jones supports more pull-out is that she knows the challenge of trying to teach kids with a wide range of abilities from the same lesson plan in the same classroom. I sat in on Jones’ 2^nd grade reading lesson where she explained the difference between frogs and toads. Jones said one of the hardest things is teaching classes where one kid can hardly do any independent work, another kid picks up on the lesson in two minutes, and for a third it takes two days. Jones enjoys working one-on-one or with small groups of students. One student she works with is Sarah, a third grade girl who reads at the kindergarten level and has trouble focusing her attention for even short periods of time. Sarah is a special education student who receives extra help from Jones at the back of a regular classroom. I worked with Jones on Sarah’s spelling lesson. Even in this plush suburb of the nation’s capital not all kids are learning at the same pace. Jones has learned she can only plan a loose lesson plan, because she will probably have to adapt it.

What if the parents of a student with disabilities think their son’s needs aren’t being met by his school’s program? Often times the student is entitled to attend a private school and the public school district must reimburse parents for tuition costs. That has led to lawsuits: the Washington Post reports that District of Columbia schools allocated $7.5 million of this year's $783 million budget for prospective legal costs. After the 9^th circuit court of appeals ruled that an Oregon school district must pay for the private schooling of a special needs child, the school district appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to rule on the case Forest Grove School District v. T.A.** At issue is whether students with disabilities must first apply to attend a public school before they are reimbursed for private school costs.

Parents question why they must waste time and effort applying to a public school that they know cannot meet their child’s needs in order to receive a voucher that will pay for the specialized education a private school can offer. Nancy Reder, deputy executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Special Education, an organization that filed a brief in Forest Grove, disagrees. Preemptive vouchers would "open the door for parents to completely bypass the public school system and go directly to private school, and then ask for reimbursement,” she says.

Montgomery County is one of the country’s wealthiest areas and has comprehensive special education programs. Even still, county taxpayers paid private school tuition for 614 special-ed students. The Washington Post reports that tuition costs “have risen from $21 million in fiscal 2000 to a projected $39 million in fiscal 2010.” That’s less than some neighboring districts. “Prince George's County schools, with fewer services, this year spent $56 million on 1,168 students. And the District, with a historically troubled special-education department, has 2,300 students receiving private care at a cost of $141 million.” The students are usually adolescent males who need more adult supervision.

The question at issue in Forest Grove applies to non special-ed kids too. If a neighborhood public school “fails” them, should they be able to attend a different school? That’s the logic behind the public school transfer polices the No Child Left Behind law prompted states to adopt (see my visit to Dallas, TX). But it’s also the logic behind publicly-funded vouchers. As I’ve seen on this trip, there are understandable reasons why voters veto comprehensive state-wide voucher plans. (See post on the defeat of the Utah voucher initiative.) But parents of special needs students are already reimbursed for the cost of their child’s private school tuition. Is forcing them to enroll their child in a public school in order to qualify for reimbursement really necessary?

*The school I visited in Montgomery County requested to remain anonymous

**Update: The Supreme Court ruled in the Forest Grove case on 6/23/09. In a 6-3 decision (Stevens with Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsberg, Breyer and Alito—Souter with Scalia and Thomas) the court ruled that parents may be reimbursed even though their kids haven’t received services in public school.

The majority concluded that since Congress requires public schools to provide a “free adequate public education,” “Congress could not have intended to require parents to either accept an inadequate public-school education pending adjudication of their claim or bear the cost of a private education if the court ultimately determined that the private placement was proper under the Act.”

The dissent argued that the law clearly required parents to try public schools first. “When a mother tells a boy that he may go out and play after his homework is done,” writes Souter, “he knows what she means.” Likewise, “So does anyone who reads the authorization of a reimbursement order in the case of ‘a child with a disability, who previously received special education and related services under the authority of a public agency.’ If the mother did not mean that the homework had to be done, why did she mention it at all, and if Congress did not mean to restrict reimbursement authority by reference to previous receipt of services, why did it even raise the subject?” Citing the expensive nature of special education, the dissent determined that it makes “good sense to require parents to try to devise a satisfactory alternative within the public schools, by taking part in the collaborative process of developing an IEP that is the ‘modus operandi’ of the IDEA.”

Albert Einstein Academy, Wilmington, DE: 5/5/09

The Albert Einstein Academy (AEA) is a K-6 Jewish day school in the leafy suburbs of Wilmington, Delaware. Although it’s a small school with only 48 students, it is located on 30 acres, and shares an indoor and outdoor pool, sports fields and tennis courts with the Jewish community center next door. As a community school, it is open to Jewish families of all denominations, from Orthodox to liberal. Founded in 1970, it is part of a growing Jewish day school movement: enrollment has nearly tripled across the country over the last three decades, up to 200,000 students.

At the school entryway is a poster of a grinning Albert Einstein, with the school’s Mitzvah (“good deed”) message below. Each year the theme changes, and this year it’s “go green.” Community service and leadership are important school values, school director Michal Cherrin told me, as is a strong performing arts focus, which aims to get kids up on stage to overcome their shyness. As future leaders, AEA students are urged to serve their communities to help “repair the world.”

Cherrin and admissions director Debbie Nachlis sat down with me to explain what it meant to be a Jewish day school. First, there is the curriculum. “The Jewish Studies curriculum involves intensive exposure to Jewish culture, customs, ceremonies, history, and Bible.” Students are taught Hebrew and study the Torah and Rabbinic texts, as well as participate in daily prayer. Cherrin said that rituals are important, and Kabbalat Shabbat is held every Friday. School food is kosher and Jewish holidays are celebrated.

Judaism also shapes the relationship between school and home. Since the Jewish religion is based in the home, Cherrin continued, school can be understood as an extension of homeschooling. AEA requires that parents give at least 25 hours of service to the school. Nachlis observed that what students learn at school can also make its way back home. Many largely secular parents find themselves learning Jewish rituals and practices from their own children. The school asks that parents not host birthday parties on Saturdays, which would encourage students to skip the Sabbath.

In concert with the program of Judaic studies, AEA promotes knowledge of American citizenship and multi-cultural education to develop the child’s ethics and values. It coordinated some of its activities with a nearby Catholic school this year, and will work with a Montessori school next year.

Tuition is $12,000 a year, but half of the kids receive some sort of financial aid. And recently the Kohelet Foundation gave the school a large grant to help knock down tuition costs. With many families measuring the costs and benefits of private school in face of the current economic downturn, the grant couldn’t have come at a better time. I asked if AEA supported education vouchers to make school more affordable. Nachlis responded that vouchers are a mixed bag. “Clearly they would help our school,” she said, but she worried that vouchers would detract from a strong public education system.

Even though vouchers are simply another way of publicly funding education, the objection that vouchers will “weaken” public schools is common. What many critics are really concerned about, I think, is that vouchers will weaken the idyllic “common school” notion of public education: a school designed to serve children of all social classes, ethnicities, religions and abilities. As I’ve discovered on my trip, the tendency of people to congregate with others who are similar has rendered the idea of “common” public schools largely fictitious, or at least historical.

Of course, some taxpayers may object to supporting schools with which they do not agree. Though public schools already offer many choices, vouchers will give parents even more choices of schools and school communities that reflect their values and fit their child’s needs. Consider Cherrin’s choice of the “go green” theme for AEA’s school year. In an interview earlier this year with Delaware Online, Cherrin explained, “I just think the whole idea of global warming is very serious. And if you start educating the kids at an early age, that’s when they’ll find the passion for saving the planet and ecology. It becomes part of their being, instead of having to be told what to do.”

By comparison, the general public has reached little agreement, beyond the 3 Rs, about what should be taught in our schools. As a result, public schools need to be all things to all people, an inch deep and a mile wild. But AEA has values that it seeks to instill in its students, whether they are derived from Jewish history and religion or from concern for the earth. It invites parents who share these values to send their kids to AEA.

St. Louis and Kansas City, MO, 4/13/09

Missouri v. Jenkins is perhaps the largest and most costly judicial experiments in the history of education. Between 1985 and 2003 a Missouri district court mandated that the Kansas City Metropolitan School District (KCMSD) spend over $2 billion more on its schools in order to achieve racial integration. As an alternative to forced busing, the court ordered that the money be spent to build magnet schools, boost teacher pay and revamp the city’s educational offerings. The plan failed.

The case began in 1977 when the KCMSD filed a suit against the state of Missouri and the suburban districts surrounding Kansas City alleging that they “had caused and perpetuated a system of racial segregation in the schools of the Kansas City metropolitan area.” The KCMSD proposed a plan for metropolitan-wide busing (see my visit to Raleigh, NC). However, the plan proved unsatisfactory after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that city school districts could not conscript children from the suburbs into a forced busing program. “In Milliken I [a 1977 Supreme Court decision regarding Detroit’s desegregation plan],” writes Joshua Dunn in Complex Justice, his book about the Kansas City case, “the Court ruled that interdistrict remedies were unconstitutional if there had only been an intradistrict violation.” Public opinion was also against busing; a 1977 Kansas City Times poll found 75% of residents opposed, including 87% of whites and 61% of blacks. The District Court cleared suburban school districts of any wrongdoing, but realigned the KCMSD alongside the state as a defendant, and held the defendants liable of operating a segregated school system within the city. The court classified present and future Kansas City students as the plaintiff.

The district court decided to comply with the Supreme Court ruling by requiring that Kansas City schools become magnet schools. They were considered more attractive to all students in the metropolitan area. Every high school and middle school and half of all the city’s elementary schools became magnet schools, i.e., a school with a special focus that accepts students from anywhere in the city or suburbs. Magnet schools, writes Dunn, were “supposed to draw in white suburban children into the KCMSD and improve the academic performance of black children.” The new schools were often housed in extravagant buildings with exotic features like gigantic swimming pools and planetariums. One school even hired a Russian Olympic fencing coach to teach highschoolers the art of sword fighting.

Despite the exaggerated measures, “Student achievement fell and the percentage of minority students increased.” What went wrong? According to Dunn, parents thought the magnet program was too complex and many “suspected that all these special programs might actually get in the way of their children’s education.” For one thing, the programs were counterproductive. They didn’t help educationally disadvantaged students because they were designed for kids from educationally advantaged backgrounds—although many of those students didn’t attend the schools. Another problem, says Dunn, was that magnet schools “often created a two-tiered school district with academically gifted white and black students attending a few magnet schools while the majority of students remained in racially isolated and poorly performing traditional schools.” (Charter schools critics have similar fears; see my visit to this charter school in the Mississippi Delta.)

The judge in the case, Arthur Benson, later said, “We believed that if you put together a science school you will attract kids and their parents who are truly interested in science and are turned on and enthusiastic about science and you will attract teachers over time.” To his surprise, that didn’t occur. Students “selected schools on the basis of where their friends were going to school” and “teachers didn’t want change.” However, the “underlying problem,” writes Dunn, was a misreading of what school characteristics are important to parents: “Most suburban parents who were supposed to be enticed to send their children to KCMSD schools were more than satisfied with their children’s current schools.” The parents preferred their neighborhood schools apparently because it gave them proxy control over their child’s classmates. (I’ve discussed this issue in the context of parents who oppose vouchers: See here and here).

The failure of judicial intervention and the magnet program led the U.S. Supreme Court to release KCMSD from court oversight in 2003. The district returned to a policy of neighborhood schools, although the experiment left a legacy of under-enrolled magnet schools and unwanted programs across the city. Many schools were forced to close.

The situation in Missouri’s other large city, St. Louis, was similar to that in Kansas City. I visited Baden Elementary on my way through St. Louis. It is an old brick building showing signs of neglect in a poor section of the city. St. Louis also had a large, expensive, court-ordered desegregation program, which included magnet schools but also busing. In St. Louis enrollment plummeted too, from over 100,000 in 1970 to 30,000 for 2007-08. “Concurrently,” according to the district’s 2007 improvement plan, “poverty has risen among the families who send their children to public schools. Today, more than 85% of the District’s students receive free or reduced lunch and over 7,000 or 20% are defined by the state as homeless.” In 2009 the St. Louis school board voted to close 17 of its 85 school buildings. Baden Elementary was one of them.

The return of neighborhood schools is an ironic coming-home for desegregation policy. In the original desegregation case, Brown v. Board, Linda Brown, the plaintiff after whom the case is named, was fighting for the right to attend her neighborhood school. But as it turned out, neighborhood schools didn’t mean integrated schools. “Cities’ prior resistance, combined with residential segregation,” writes Dunn, “made neighborhood schools look like yet another attempt to elude desegregation.” Now, after decades of heavy-handed but ineffective judicially mandated alternatives to neighborhood schools, they’re back.

Desegregation policy and Missouri v. Jenkins decision illustrate what is perhaps the central conflict in education: the conflict between competing impulses toward centralization and local control. Dunn: “The KCMSD and Arthur Benson turned to the national government through the courts to remedy Kansas City’s education problems, but at the same time this prompted a backlash and calls for local control from the very group the courts were supposed to be helping. The case provides a powerful—and perhaps culminating—example of the judicialization of politics and administration in the second half of the twentieth century.” Intervention from on high only strengthened local desire for control and responsibility.

Wichita, Kansas: 4/10/09

Shortly after being named New York’s Teacher of the Year in 1991, John Taylor Gatto made the shocking announcement that he was retiring from teaching. Gatto explained that he would no longer “hurt kids to make a living.” In a statement he described the defects of the education system in which he felt complicit: “Government schooling is the most radical adventure in history. It kills the family by monopolizing the best times of childhood and by teaching disrespect for home and parents.”

Gatto fleshed out his objections in a book, Dumbing Us Down. In school, “I teach disconnections,” he writes, and that makes it difficult for students to engage with or find meaning in the material they are learning. But at stake is a larger issue: the institution of school creates a disconnected society. The old and the young are separated from one another, and the result is the breakdown of families and communities. “School is a major actor in this tragedy.” Compulsory and bureaucratic schooling has led to the “lessening of individual, family, and community importance.”

Gatto’s ideas about schooling are radical, but it’s easy to see the truth they contain, at least for many homeschooling families around the country, including Becky and John Elder. The Elders, who live with horses, a goat, a garden and a sawmill several miles north of Wichita, made the decision to homeschool their five children. When I sat down with Becky on a clear Kansas spring day in April, she told me that Gatto’s message of fragmentation resonated with her. During the course of human history, she continued, children have been educated mostly in the home. The switch to what she termed the “industrial model” of education aimed to train kids to be dependable—and dependent—workers, but it separated them from family and community and from the diverse experiences necessary for a complete education. That’s why Elder chose homeschooling for her children.

While Elder felt learning at home was best for her family, she isn’t opposed to all models of schooling, and she recently started her own private school. Elder’s school doesn’t accept kids until 3^rd or 4^th grade (I forget which) because she doesn’t want to encroach on family life. Opposed to the fragmented curricular approach of most schools, she favors the classical model of education (see my post about classical education). Elder was fortunate to find an old factory building to house her school, which has been refurbished to include a basketball gym, library and classrooms. On “Work Wednesdays” every week students work at the sawmill or elsewhere in town. Some are helping to build a brick-making workshop on. “Our little school of 80 kids is holding corporatism at bay,” she laughs.

Tony and Celeste Woodlief lives down the road from the Elders, and they too homeschool their four sons. In an article Mr. Woodlief explains their decision: “Folks in our neck of the woods embrace the proper goal, which is not supporting public schools, but supporting public education — the education of the public, which is only ever you and me and our neighbors. The goal is educated children, after all, not allegiance to some institution or ideology.”

I sat down with the Woodliefs around their kitchen table; the kids were playing basketball outside with the neighbor’s kids. Celeste, who is Montessori trained and has taught in Detroit public schools, believes the Montessori approach (see my post Children Teach Themselves) has a lot to offer. It holds that children have an innate interest in learning, sparked by interactions with the environment and guided by adults. Contrary to some critics, that doesn’t mean Montessori ignores structure, rules and discipline. The foundation of good parenting and education, writes Woodlief, “is love, order, and relentless application of rules like: Eat all your vegetables, and Mind your manners, and Don’t push your brother’s head into the toilet.” Mr. Woodlief attributes much bad parenting and inept schooling to the mistaken idea that children are inherently angelic. “Rather than help our children develop internal constraints that channel their energy and passion into productive enterprises, we end up teaching them that limits and discipline are for chumps.”

I observed how Tony and Celeste managed their time and attention. While they were answering my questions, they were getting the kids dressed for church (“Are you sure you changed your underwear?”), and putting dinner on the table (“Don’t spill the soup on your nice shirt!”). Homeschooling takes a lot of work, and it’s not always fun. But for families like the Woodliefs and the Elders, they are proud to be responsible for their children’s education. It is rewarding because it is hard, and important. It is the stuff life is made of.

Charles Murray, whose past writings have made similar points about welfare policy, recently questioned the impact of government intervention on families and communities. He said government takes away “too much of the life from life.” Invited to deliver the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol lecture, Murray said:

The problem is this: Every time the government takes some of the trouble out of performing the functions of family, community, vocation, and faith, it also strips those institutions of some of their vitality--it drains some of the life from them. It's inevitable. Families are not vital because the day-to-day tasks of raising children and being a good spouse are so much fun, but because the family has responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the family does them. Communities are not vital because it's so much fun to respond to our neighbors' needs, but because the community has the responsibility for doing important things that won't get done unless the community does them. Once that imperative has been met--family and community really do have the action--then an elaborate web of social norms, expectations, rewards, and punishments evolves over time that supports families and communities in performing their functions. When the government says it will take some of the trouble out of doing the things that families and communities evolved to do, it inevitably takes some of the action away from families and communities, and the web frays, and eventually disintegrates.

“Seen in this light,” Murray writes, “the goal of social policy is to ensure that those institutions [family, community, faith, vocation] are robust and vital.” Ditto for education.