Supplementary Materials

Education Sector Author Talk, September 20, 2007

Rick Kahlenberg has written a masterful biography of Al Shanker—deeply researched, thoughtful, eloquent—and crystal clear without in any way oversimplifying the complex period that Al and the rest of us have lived through. After reading Rick's book, I understand better many aspects of the things that I've witnessed in education reform.

For me it's an inspiring book. The central figure was so courageous and smart. As I was reading, I was reliving my feelings of awe at Al's bravery, and his ability to combine moral strength with intellectual insight and political shrewdness. This book's publication renews our deep sorrow that Al died prematurely. Nobody can replace him.

Al's intellectual insight came partly from his inborn intellectual gifts, but also from his training in philosophy. He was a voracious reader. He was especially interested in ideas that connected abstract thought with concrete action, as I found the first time I met Al in the flesh—at an AFT QuEST conference where he had invited me to speak. At dinner afterwards we got to the topic of Alfred Korzybski. (If you have never heard of him, don't worry. Al speculated that he and I were the only people in the school world who knew about Alfred Korzybski. We were of the same era and had both done undergraduate and graduate work in philosophy. He was even a member of the society that Korzybski founded, and he later sent me one of their mailings.) Years later, after he died, I was looking at some of the books in his personal library, now housed at AFT headquarters, and I took out his edition of the works of Bernard Bosanquet, another obscure philosopher that we had both been interested in. It was well underlined and filled with marginal comments.

I have always been enormously grateful for that side of Al—for his training as an intellectual. It enhanced his ability to analyze an argument, to judge its validity, and to follow its implications to their practical conclusion. Al and I agreed that this intellectual habit was behind his early advocacy of my arguments about the need for a specific core curriculum. He instantly grasped that this was not just a technical argument for higher achievement, but also one for social justice, and national cohesion and solidarity. He was as disappointed as I was that the so-called standards movement did not really produce anything like a specific core curriculum.

I like Rick Kahlenberg's title, Tough Liberal. It's exactly right. William James once drew a contrast between tough-minded and tender-minded people. Tender-minded liberals are fond of pious slogans while tough liberals are pragmatists who are indifferent to slogans, and insist on getting the job done for the sake of social justice and the good of the community as a whole, no matter what bad names one might be called in doing so.

I was transfixed by Rick's account of Al's battles against soft-lived, tender-minded liberals who inhabited safe posts in philanthropy and education. I was reminded of Irving Howe's remark about the academic left: "they don't want to take over the government; they just want to take over the English Department." The world of philanthropy and the academy, especially the ed-school professoriate, is filled with tender-minded liberals. In the security of tenure, education professors may sound like flaming revolutionaries, but rarely do they do anything concrete beyond offering slogans about subverting the power structure. Their main venture into the specifics of curriculum is to assign in their own courses the wonderland works of Donald Macedo and Paulo Freire, while perpetuating Teachers-College slogans of the 1920s that a pre-set curriculum is really a conservative plot to sustain the power structure.

Al was uniquely able to lead the tough-minded left against the mind-befogging slogans of the tender-minded left. With great acumen Rick Kahlenberg's book describes Al's battle against limousine liberalism, its fuzziness, its self-righteous posturing, its condescending embrace of identity politics, its haughty superiority to middle-American values of solidarity and social assimilation. Over the past eight decades, through well-honed education slogans, tender-minded leftism has been able to persuade the Democratic Party that all right-thinking Democrats should repudiate a set curriculum in the schools. They have been able to imply that anyone who advocates a set curriculum must be a Republican. Al was uniquely situated to rebut such nonsense, which he saw through with laser clarity. He was sometimes called a "conservative" along with a lot of other names, but I don't remember anyone calling him a Republican.

All this makes Rick's book hugely timely. Everybody talks about making education a nonpartisan issue, just as everybody talks about the weather, without doing anything about it. But in the education scene today it's not just a matter of getting centrist Democrats together with centrist Republicans to defeat the extremists in both parties. That's always a good idea. But first and foremost it's a matter of the Democratic Party getting more resistant to pious slogans in education, and more cognizant of what, practically speaking, the real educational issues are. Is Americanization an aim of schooling? If you want to narrow the achievement gap and the vocabulary gap in races and classes what do you really need to do? This was the sort of practical issue Al was especially good at articulating. I hope Rick's book will be a catalyst for more Democrats advocating effective ideas in education no matter how they conflict with tender-minded slogans.

That's not to say that Democrats have a monopoly on tender-mindedness in education. The tender-minded Republican belief that free-market arrangements will providentially improve schools is structurally indistinguishable from the tender-minded Democratic belief that nurturing the individual child's interests and culture will providentially improve schools. Both leave school improvement to some quasi-divine power inherent in some larger theoretical structure—the workings of the market, or the child's natural development. The desired outcome will be accomplished by the genius of market competition or by the interests of the child—without our having to figure out just what to teach year by year. Both progressive Democrats and free-market Republicans substitute a quasi-religious faith for detailed analysis and tough choices. Both parties are equally tender-minded and equally ineffectual. One of the most poignant moments in Rick's book was his observation that after all the sloganeers on both sides had gotten their way, no arrangement had fixed the schools in Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

Al continues to be greatly missed and greatly needed. The moral I take from Rick's fine book is that both parties need to overcome tender-mindedness in education—their faith in some providential invisible hand, and recognize that only tough-minded, slogan-resistant pragmatism can get the job done. So many thanks, Rick, for doing such a splendid job, and for re-vitalizing the essential debate between tender-minded slogans and tough pragmatism. That seems to me THE educational issue of our day.