Classroom Drama

This recent AP story is typical of a problematic style of reporting when it comes to urban schools, their follies, and occasional triumphs.

In "100 percent of school's first class college-bound," the writer, Sharon Cohen, took the opportunity to flex her literary muscles, and in the process created a journalistic abomination. Instead of using the success of Chicago's Urban Prep charter school as a launch point for discussion of education reform and what lessons Urban Prep does and doesn't hold for that seemingly endless enterprise, she merely riffs on the personal-interest tales of three students.

This kind of criticism could be lofted at a lot of literary journalism, but in the case of education—particularly of poor black kids—it is especially troubling. That's because this type of story isn't merely cheap inspiration, but is actually counterproductive.

Writing about urban-education success stories too-often focuses on the characters of instructors and administrators—their rock-like stoicism or their dynamic personalities. Either they are effective disciplinarians who turn around the lives of wayward students, or visionaries who convince bored, behind-the-curve kids that learning is to their benefit. The classic of the genre is Deborah Meier's The Power of Their Ideas; Paul Tough's Whatever It Takes is a more recent example.

Celebrations of singular schools make good stories not because the schools provide useful lessons for reform, but precisely because they are unique—as in, not easily reproducible. They are products of circumstance and the labors of a few tenacious people.

But what the education system needs is ideas that can be implemented by mediocre educators—who make up the balance of the teaching corps—and policies that will attract better ones.

It also needs policies that make it possible for students to do better in the context of the public system that trains, and should train, most of them. That means a disavowal of destructive standardized-testing regimes and investment in quality teachers: teachers who are excited about their subjects and aren't just looking for an attractive reference for graduate school applications. Students shouldn't be filling in bubbles, but reading books. Teachers should be committed professionals. Policy could make this happen, but stories likes Cohen's suggest only that personal heroics can achieve these goals.

Her story, and many others, have also given up on a third important aim: integration, which is typically nowhere in sight. I can understand this impulse. Some education is better than none, and if integration has to be taken off the table in order to get students into the classroom, perhaps it's for the best.

At least, that's how the theory goes. But this is deeply flawed. Education is supposed to have social value. We invest in it publicly because it yields benefits for the whole polity. Among these benefits should be a less racist future, one in which trivial differences such as skin color are not vehicles for judging people. Students who learn in an integrated environment are more likely to become adults without prejudice.

The abandonment of integration goes hand in hand with the inordinate attention paid to personal-achievement narratives. In both cases, the wider social purpose of and investment in education are ignored. When we reject integration in favor of individual goals, we pass up a significant public good that education could foster, thereby making education seem less and less publicly valuable. Likewise, when we reject public policy in favor of individual efforts, we undercut the system's ability to improve as a whole, thereby further weakening the public-interest argument for education.

Do these currents reflect the American obsession with individualism? Maybe, but that obsession appears oversold, as any principled individualist could tell you. More likely the twin strands of personal achievement and integration-omission represent cognitive dissonance in the face of the realities of institutionalized poverty and racism. These tales of individual success tell us not to worry about inequality. In these stories, the United States works: everyone has the opportunity to thrive, look, here's the proof.

The result is further nourishment for the delusions that racism does not exist and that poverty is always a function of irresponsibility or laziness. And so race and class privilege are buttressed with the sentimentality that is the companion of contempt.