School reformers and education traditionalists alike were taken aback last week when Pedro Noguera resigned from the board of the State University of New York outfit charged with authorizing charter schools. For traditionalists — who oppose the very existence of charters — Noguera’s departure (along with one of the underlying reasons — his opposition to the opening of one of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charter schools) pleases them greatly because the generally thoughtful education professor has been one of the few fellow-travelers willing to break ranks with them on the importance of school choice. They hated the fact that he was even working to support this aspect of school reform.
Yet as Steve Evangelista of the Harlem Link Charter School points out in this Voices of the Dropout Nation, education traditionalists should actually been happy that Noguera was helping to expand educational options for our poorest and minority students — and, in the process, forcing the much-needed rebuilding of American public education from its foundations.
So Dr. Pedro Noguera resigned from the SUNY board last week, apparently responding to negative feedback from anti-education reform forces for his role as head of the board’s Charter Schools Committee. When an outspoken and respected critic of the system takes a position of authority, the ground tends to shift.
Dr. Noguera’s view of charter schools and education reform has always been nuanced, and the charter community will feel his loss. It could herald an even more extreme narrowing of goals than the movement already has. And that’s exactly why these enemies of reform should be careful what they ask for. Supporting Dr. Noguera’s view of authorizing, even when he made decisions that didn’t sit well with charter school opponents, would keep an ally who knows how to toe the line in the authorizer’s chair. Now, we can expect the SUNY board to appoint someone less interested in the voices of those who say they are oppressed under the current wave of reform.
I have to admit I’m puzzled by those people. How could anyone work with at risk children in this system and think it’s just A-OK as it’s been? How could you not want serious shakeup?
Chancellor Walcott is experiencing the same dip in popularity as Dr. Noguera. The enemies of reform had a field day with Cathie Black, and loved to hate Joel Klein. But who is their model? Let’s go back a few chancellors and find the ideal chancellor for these critics. Harold Levy? Rudy Crew? They managed to stand by and manage the system, make some incremental changes that just didn’t stick.
Going further back, there were Ramon Cortines and Anthony Alvarado. These are earnest professional educators with good instructional ideas who found more staying power on the west coast. But Cortines could not get things done with the Giuliani administration and Alvarado made key mistakes that prevented him from furthering his agenda.
What I most fear is stagnation in the system–because the system is still so unresponsive to students’ real needs. I was up in the middle of the night reading an article by William J. Stern about Times Square in the 1980s for some reason a couple of weeks ago and I came across a broken-windows quote from Giuliani’s police chief, William Bratton. He said that the New York Police Department “didn’t want high performance; it wanted to stay out of trouble, to avoid corruption scandals and conflicts in the community.” For an officer in the pre-Giuliani era, career success in the NYPD bureaucracy only came by shunning, risk and avoiding failure. And in the process, as Bratton pointed out, no one in city government realized that “tolerating low-level crime created an environment that inevitably led to serious law-breaking.”
Bratton’s statement exactly described the state of the teaching force when I arrived as an educator in the 1990s: A tolerance of a system in which adults are served at the expense of children. What Joel Klein did, and bless her heart, what Cathie Black would have liked to have done; what Chancellor Walcott aims to do, and what Pedro Noguera has spent his professional life saying we all should do, is to break down this idea that the system needs to serve adults. The system exists for children. And when incentives have adults watching their backs and avoiding trouble instead of doing what’s best for kids, as it has since I started teaching, there’s a need for serious shakeup.
Enemies of reform, complain about people like Dr. Noguera at your own risk, because in urging him to abandon charters you just may get what you ask for.