Franklin, Barry M. (Ed.) When Children Don't Learn: Student Failure and the Culture of Teaching. Reviewed by Ronald E. Butchart

Franklin, Barry M. (Ed.) When Children Don't Learn: Student Failure and the Culture of Teaching. New York and London: Teachers College Press, 1998. Pp. 184 $21.95 (Paper)       ISBN 0-8077-3718-6 $47.00 (Cloth)       ISBN 0-8077-3719-4 Reviewed by Ronald E. Butchart University of Washington, Tacoma March 3, 1999         Barry M. Franklin has been a persistent, effective gadfly, untiringly insisting that historians and others in the social foundations of education pay attention to education's most marginalized groups, especially students with mental and other handicaps. His publications and conference papers shed significant historical light into dark, unpleasant corners of the schoolhouse. He is not so much a revisionist as a pioneer, for, too often, there is no historical literature to revise, only blank pages to begin to fill.         In When Children Don't Learn, Franklin and his co-authors maintain an interest in special education students, but urge a broader focus. They analyze school failure, no matter the source of failure, enquiring specifically into the effects of school failure on the culture of teaching. They draw broadly from the social foundations disciplines and methodologies, including history, philosophy, political science, ethnography, and policy analysis. These writers suggest that school failure is not a natural or inevitable condition, but a socially constructed condition, one with serious implications for learners and for teachers. Their task is entrusted to only eight relatively brief chapters. Six of those chapters are research-based; a seventh is autobiographical; the last consists of "musings" on the problem of failure.         There is much to commend this project. Despite decades of research on classrooms, learning, teaching, and assessment, and despite loud clamourings for improved performance, accountability, and rigor—all of which presuppose their opposite, the failure of teaching and learning—remarkably little attention has been paid to failure as such or, particularly, to "the intersection of childhood academic failure and teachers' work lives," the "terrain that constitutes the subject of this volume" (p. 2). Any effort to problematize the taken-for-grantedness of school failure, to place failure in a larger context, and to explore failure's relationship to the culture of teaching, deserves a careful hearing.         Regrettably, this volume falls short of achieving its goals. While some of its essays are valuable in their own right, their cumulative impact is negligible. Perhaps the largest problem is that neither the volume as a whole, nor any of the essays individually, adequately deliver the promised insights into the culture of teaching as mediated by student failure. We gain tantalizing but unrealized hints about the language of "failurism" as employed by teachers; we get tentative glimpses into the efforts of a handful of isolated teachers to accommodate diverse learners; we learn salutary lessons from the mouths of students about teaching and teachers that produce failure; we appreciate again the theater of the absurd staged daily by institutions whose public mission may be learning, but whose bureaucratic imperative is chaos management. Yet the culture of contemporary teaching, as process, identity, and ways of living and working, appears here only incidentally. The volume scrupulously avoids enquiry into the degree to which student failure is in fact inextricably linked to many teachers' self-identity, though Richard Altenbaugh's important ethnographic study stands as an indictment of that aspect of the culture of teaching. Some teachers make their appearance here, but a culture of teaching does not.         The culture of teaching is inevitably conditioned by the institution that houses the formal learning process. The modern school is built upon the assumption of measurable, socially significant, inevitable differences. It predicates much of its daily activity on notions of "average" performance, with the necessary corollary of above and below average performance, the latter of which is defined, willy-nilly, as "failure." The modern institution of school speaks the language of developmental differences, yet insists upon age-grading, with the inevitable result of "failure" for many. The school cannot be separated from the idea of failure; it creates the conditions for failure. The culture of teaching, despite the wonderful exceptions that are celebrated here and elsewhere in the literature, is shot through with unquestioned expectations of the failure of some to validate the success of others. Yet this volume is silent regarding the institution itself, its inevitable production of failure, or the ways it conditions the culture of teaching.         More disappointing, given the clear progressive sentiments of most of the authors, the volume fails to analyze the social or political utility of failure, seemingly a necessary analysis if we are to fully comprehend the struggle to reduce the likelihood of being a failure, with all the devastating consequences of that label. Nor, remarkably, is there much effort here to explore the relationship between school failure, ethnicity, and social class. Race and class are mentioned, certainly, and even figure prominently in Eleanor Blair Hilty's and Susan R. Merrifield's essays, yet the uninitiated are left largely on their own to make sense of the relationship.         Finally, thin research erodes our confidence in the volume's effort. Some essays appear to be tentative explorations, early reports on potentially fruitful avenues of research, though they are not so labeled. Such forms of scholarship have their value, yet they carry virtually no weight in a volume aimed at staking larger claims. Overall, narrow case studies and ethnographies involving tiny samples tell us little beyond their idiosyncratic specificities; they are incapable of shedding light on cultures and processes, the burden or "terrain" of this volume. Were these authors attempting to provide examples for others to emulate, sample size would not matter. But this volume claims much more than that. It seeks to problematize "the ways academic failure structures and constructs the work of teaching" generally (p. 4). It thus engages a form of argument requiring generalizability. Clearly, there is no magic number of interviews or subjects beyond which researchers can feel satisfied with having captured a culture or a process or having established a prima facie case, but even the most sympathetic will find some of the research reported here extraordinarily thin, particularly when only six of the chapters are research-based.         While When Children Don't Learn fails (if I may use the term) to deliver the promised freight, some of its individual essays will be of interest to scholars interested in at-risk youth, drop-outs, or the problem of failure and school reform. Brian DeLany provides a particularly lucid study of systemic micro-politics in relationship to student failure. The essays by Richard Altenbaugh, summarizing extensive interviews with one hundred high school leavers, and by Susan J. Peters, Alan Klein, and Catherine Shadwick, reporting on a three-year classroom-based dialogue with forty special education students, begin to develop the breadth and "thickness" of data, and contours of context, that a study of failure requires; both at least hint at questions regarding the culture of teaching. Importantly, the research in those chapters has been reported elsewhere. Susan R. Merrifield's autobiographical reflections on her university teaching is highly readable and troubling, pointing indirectly at the knotty problem of culture and school-defined failure. Henry M. Levin's post-script, "Some Musings on What Can Be Done," provides the most incisive structural critique in the volume, but by this point in the collection, it almost does not matter—the project collapsed many pages earlier.         More's the pity, too. Franklin has once again identified a lacuna and has begun to define it. We can hope that he will return to the problem in future work, carrying us further into the wilderness than this vehicle was able to go. About the reviewer Ronald E. Butchart University of Washington, Tacoma         Ronald E. Butchart is the co-editor with Barbara McEwan of Classroom discipline in American schools: Problems and possibilities for democratic education (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1998).