Patton, Sarah, and Mondale, Sarah, (Producers). (2001). School: The Story of American Public Education Reviewed by Sherman Dorn, University of South Florida

Patton, Sarah, and Mondale, Sarah, (Producers). 2001. School: The Story of American Public Education. Chevy Chase, MD: Stone Lantern Films, Inc. Four one-hour episodes:   "The Common School (1770 - 1890)"   "As American As Public School (1900 - 1950)"   "Equality (1950 - 1980)"   "The Bottom Line (1980 - the present)" $539     ISBN 0-7365-3571-3 Reviewed by Sherman Dorn University of South Florida September 19, 2001 School is an inconsistent documentary of the history of American public education. Using "a democratic experiment" as the theme running through the four episodes, producers Sarah Patton and Sarah Mondale fashion a standard liberal story of the rise and reform of public schooling. In some individual segments, they succeed in retelling important vignettes. Other segments are disappointing in either their sketchy, fragmented nature or in their restating misleading myths about the history of education. A wise teacher would be very cautious in using this documentary in class. While useful in spots, School is not as careful with either interpretation or detail as better history documentaries. School's four episodes cover disparate topics in the history of education. The first episode focuses on Horace Mann's role in the common-school reform movement, the Catholic-Protestant school debates in New York City in 1840, school desegregation efforts in Boston in the 1840s, and the feminization of teaching. The second episode concentrates on the use of schools to Americanize immigrants, the developing role of IQ tests, and the low expectations many schools and educators had of immigrant and minority children in the early twentieth century. The third episode includes primarily efforts to desegregate schools by race, eliminate gender discrimination, and the fight in one Texas town over whether the curriculum would include and celebrate the heritage of its majority Mexican-American students. The fourth episode discusses the A Nation at Risk report, public-school choice in New York City, the Milwaukee vouchers program, and the management of a Baltimore school by Education Alternatives, Inc. There are many topics covered too briefly for my taste (such as the education of Native Americans, the exclusion of children with disabilities from schools, and the history of school bureaucratization), but I recognize that no documentary can be truly comprehensive. The main assumption throughout the documentary is that public education has both reflected and advanced American democracy, in all its glory and flaws. Our inequities, it suggests, have been awful, but we've come a long way towards equality. Primary series consultant David Tyack, an historian of education at Stanford University, says as much at the end of the third episode: "We have had many debates about affirmative action, desegregation, feminism, special needs children... We sometimes forget where we were in 1954. I see a net gain for our society" (available online at http://www.pbs.org/kcet/publicschool/pdf/quotes.pdf). The conservatives interviewed for the fourth episode are used primarily to illustrate that the last 20 years have seen a challenge to the political legitimacy of public schools, and the producers counterpose the standard liberal answer in their splicing interviews that defend the schools: public schools are still the best democratic tool we have. The most satisfying segments focus on specific incidents: Catholic Bishop John Hughes' fight against the New York Public School Society, the controversy over segregated schools in nineteenth-century Boston (featuring Charles Sumner), Julian Nava's high school education in 1940s Los Angeles (he was later an activist member of the school board in Los Angeles and ambassador to Mexico), Dorothy Raffel's battle to play interscholastic basketball in the 1970s, and the efforts by Chicano activists in Crystal City, Texas, to control a school system where Mexican-Americans were in the majority and to recraft a curriculum that entirely ignored Mexican-Americans. Here, Patton and Mondale employ the best tools of the documentary producer: immediacy and high stakes for the individuals portrayed. Here, too, the vignettes will either surprise the viewer unaware of the historical literature or illustrate the larger story in that episode. That the best segments focus on conflicts is both a reflection of the medium (where conflict makes for good television) and also a problem for the larger theme of the documentary. The benefits of schooling for democracy are described rarely (and nowhere in an effective manner). Other segments of School are adequate as history, if not particularly strong. The segment on desegregation and Brown v. Board of Education included interviews of Linda Brown, the name plaintiff in the case, and others from Topeka, Kansas. Unfortunately, School implies that the effort to desegregate the schools arose from nowhere in 1950, ignoring the earlier victories the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund had won. The documentary suggests (erroneously) that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was crucial in breaking up Southern segregation in the late 1960s, was a central part of the debate over the bill (something interviewee Gary Orfield debunked in 1969). The producers largely skim over the political and bureaucratic resistance to desegregation in the 1950s and 1960s and the violent response in the North, such as in Boston. Hampton's (1987, 1990) Eyes on the Prize series covers both of these topics better than Patton and Mondale do. The last episode is similarly satisfying in some ways and yet obviously incomplete. On the one hand, Patton and Mondale contrast the jeremiad of A Nation at Risk with evidence of relative stability in achievement and Larry Cuban's comment that schools have always been the scapegoat for national troubles. On the other hand, there is no reference to the earlier criticism of the Life-Adjustment Movement (which the producers describe in another episode) on grounds similar to A Nation at Risk. The series describes in reasonable detail the public-choice experiment in Spanish Harlem, the voucher experiment in Milwaukee, and Baltimore's contracting out the management of one school to Educational Alternatives, Inc.—but while School explains why Baltimore ended EAI's management (little evidence of better student achievement), it fails to discuss the controversy over vouchers and school achievement. The description of the Core Knowledge curriculum and Central Park East Secondary School's portfolio system is entirely uncritical, and some factual errors (such as the claim that Central Park East Secondary School is a middle school, or that Core Knowledge does not vary across the sites) should make the viewer wary about the accuracy of some other matters in this hour that covers primarily contemporary affairs. Some choices by the documentarians are just puzzling. Why focus on Western schools when discussing the feminization of teachers? The turnover of teaching from a male to a largely female profession was not a regional phenomenon. Moreover, the selection here missed an important point Strober and Tyack (1980) made about the connection between bureaucratization and feminization: school systems in settled, urban areas had more incentives to hire women as teachers than did rural schools. In general, the producers largely ignore bureaucratization and centralization, except for one slow pan of an organizational chart spliced into a montage of early 20th-century film footage and sound. Thus, the criticisms of schools in the last hour, which could have built on a story that emphasized bureaucratization, appear to come out of the blue. For a series whose consultant was David Tyack (one of the primary historians of school bureaucracy), that deemphasis is surprising. Unfortunately, the weakest segment is early in the first episode. The discussion of the common-school reform movement is questionable both as history and as documentary method. First, the story told—that common-school reformers in essence created a public school system for a new, democratic nation—is both monolithic and a half century out of date, more in line with Cubberley (1919) and Curti (1935) than recent historiography or even the first general critics of this view (Bailyn, 1960; Cremin, 1965). This celebratory view of Mann uses colonial education primarily as a foil for common-school reformers. Bailyn's precís of the older view of colonial education could work as well forSchool as for Cubberley: [The colonial era's] pedagogical institutions were so few and so evidently pitiful, so bound down by religion and other antiquated concerns, that it was hard to know what to say about them except that they demonstrated by comparison the extent of subsequent progress. (p. 12) Bailyn was describing this view in order to criticize it, and historians have been in the process of debating and revising the history of early nineteenth-century education for over 40 years. Even moderate and conservative historians would find the script's implication there was no widespread schooling before Horace Mann disconcerting. Kaestle (1973) showed that the systematization of schooling in New York City did not appreciably increase attendance. Public schools were not filling a void, as the segment implies. In higher education, for example, academies had the upper hand early in the 19th century, as high schools were often unpopular (Reese, 1995). Moreover, the segment focuses on Mann's first school report, thereby ignoring his more important ideas, including arguments about the economy, class conflict, and how Massachusetts schools should be more like Prussian ones. Common-school reformers deserve credit for a number of things, and one can fairly conclude that they changed the meaning of "public" in the phrase "public school" (e.g., Katz, 1987), but the segment in the documentary is embarrassing for its oversimplifications, omissions, and misleading statements. So, too, that segment includes two odd mistakes in documentary production. First, as Richards (2001) noted, the producers chose eight photographs of children (which would have been rather rare before 1850) to illustrate the narrative on the common-school movement. (From the clothing, Richards and I both suspect the photographs were from several decades later.) Second, the background for the discussion of district (or village) and dame schools includes voices of children reading texts in chorus. As the script explains minutes later, one would rarely have heard children in chorus in a one-room school whose students included 3-year-olds and 17-year-olds and with texts they happened to have at home. Such use of misleading "corroborative detail intended to give artistic verisimilitude," as Pooh-Bah said in The Mikado (Gilbert, 1885), especially the chorus of children's chanting, is a disservice to teachers who might have to spend more time correcting misunderstandings than students would spend in watching the segment. The statistics shown occasionally in graphic form are also problematic. On the one hand, they show the expansion of the public school system over the past 200 years and, in spots, key statistics about inequities. On the other hand, the casual use of rough guesses as "factoids" is troublesome. First, they are highly uncertain, something those who have worked on historical school statistics understand all too well. Second, many statistics from the decennial census refer to adult population experiences, not experiences of children at the time of that census. Thus, for example, there is a gap between the average educational attainment of all adults in 1970 and the average educational attainment of young adults who had just left school. The documentary does not provide the needed context for viewers to understand the statistics presented. What of the larger argument, that public schools have been a grand democratic experiment? There are plenty of works to support an interesting, provocative documentary with that theme (e.g., Carnoy & Levin, 1985; Gutmann, 1987; Katznelson & Weir, 1985; Labaree, 1988; Peterson, 1985; Reese, 1986; Spring, 1976; Tyack, 1974). It might focus on debates over the control of schools, the purpose of education, and specific institutions like academies and high schools, not to mention the role of schools in building up state and national governments. Instead, the unspoken and unquestioned message of School is that open and growing access to schools has, by itself, been a measure of democracy. Why so many saw education as a crucial right of citizenship in the U.S. (in contrast with many other countries) is an important question, and one that the documentary largely leaves untouched. Moreover, this documentary fails to provide evidence that schools have, in fact, supported a democratic polity. Have schools produced better voting, as Jefferson hoped would happen with an agrarian republic? My final impression is that the documentary both tried to carry a broad theme and also touch on every important subject for at least 30 seconds. As a result, School is too fragmentary to serve as a comprehensive history and too oversimplified to do its overarching theme sufficient justice. References Bailyn, B. (1960). Education in the forming of American society: Needs and opportunities for study. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Cremin, L. A. (1965). The wonderful world of Ellwood Patterson Cubberly: An essay on the historiography of American education.. New York: Teachers College. Cubberley, E. P. (1919). Public education in the United States. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co. Curti, M. (1935). The social ideas of American educators (rev. ed.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Gilbert, W. S. (1885). The Mikado, or the town of Titipu. Originally produced in the Savoy Theatre, London. Retrieved September 10, 2001, from the World Wide Web: http://math.boisestate.edu/gas/mikado/html/mikado.html Hampton, H. (1987). Fighting back (1957-1962). Episode 2 of Eyes on the prize: American's civil rights years 1954-1965. Boston, MA: Blackside, Inc. Hampton, H. (1990). The keys to the kingdom (1974-1980). Episode 7 of Eyes on the prize II: America at the racial crossroads, 1965-mid 1980s. Boston, MA: Blackside, Inc. Kaestle, C. F. (1973). The evolution of an urban school system: New York City, 1750-1850. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katz, M. B. (1987). Reconstructing American education. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Orfield, G. 1969. The reconstruction of southern education: The schools and the 1964 Civil Rights Act. New York: John Wiley & Sons. Reese, W. J. (1995). Origins of the American high school. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Richards, P. (2001, September 9). Reactions to PBS Documentary. H-Education e-mail list [online]. Available: http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~educ. Strober, M. H., & Tyack, D. (1980). Why do women teach and men manage? A report on research on schools. Signs, 5, 494-503. About the Reviewer Sherman Dorn is in the social foundations faculty at the University of South Florida. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania. He is on the editorial board of the Education Policy Analysis Archives and the Education Review, as well as the advisory board for the H-Education e-mail list. His research has included a history of dropping out and special education, and he is the author of Creating the Dropout: An Institutional and Social History of School Failure (1996) as well as of articles that have appeared in the History of Education Quarterly, Theory into Practice, Education Policy Analysis Archives, and the Journal of Special Education. His current research focuses on the modern history of special education in the urban South.