Massachusetts News 
Paul Moreno 

Although many people believe they know exactly what Dr. John Silber thinks, his thoughts are always filtered by liberal reporters. It is rare for him to be able to speak directly to the citizens. 

Whether you agree with him or not, he will certainly make you think. 

Mass. News: Is public education finished in Massachusetts? 

Silber: No. I believe the ideal structure is a system of public education. The purpose of vouchers and the purpose of charter schools should be to create competition that will result in the improvement of the public schools.  

Vouchers could offer the opportunity of giving children the choice of attending private schools or parochial schools. That’s very unlikely in the state of Massachusetts, though not in other states, because of our constitutional prohibitions against the mixture of church and state. Those barriers are so high in Massachusetts that it will be difficult to work that out.  

The other difficulty with vouchers is that there are limited numbers of schools to which children can go. If they go to a private school--I mean a non-religious private school--or to a school in a different community, how are they going to get there? There’s no public busing that’s going to pick them up and take them there. So the children who will be beneficiaries of such a program are children whose parents are better off than the other parents. So it’s the most privileged children who are going to be further privileged by most voucher programs. That’s why I don’t see the voucher program as a success except as it creates competition. And to the extent that we can create competition, to put the standard public schools on notice that they have to improve or they’re going to be in jeopardy, that’s fine.  

Mass. News: Are teacher unions a problem? 

Silber: The charter schools have the opportunity to improve the system but the teachers union has succeeded in so hampering the charter schools that they don’t play on an even field. They don’t get a building. They do get freedom from the regulations of the teacher contract, and that is absolutely essential. But in our last attempt to increase the number of charter schools, the teachers union succeeded in persuading the legislature to come in with the so-called Horace Mann schools, which require charter schools to obtain the permission of local authorities, including the teachers union, to open. This denies the fundamental principle of the charter school.  

We need the English system where a regular public school can be taken over by a private board of parents and interested citizens and operated independently of a school committee. That alternative would not impose the cost of financing the school on the shoulders of those trying to sponsor a charter school. It would generally introduce a level playing field and you could very quickly see whether these schools could do a better job or not. There would be no basis for complaint in the public schools because the money that they would be losing control over would be balanced by the smaller number of students they would have to instruct.  

The teachers union President, Mr. Steve Gorrie, testified before the Board of Education that the charter schools posed a terrible burden on the public schools because they lose this income. Well there are two things wrong with his analysis. They don’t lose the income unless they’re losing the students. And the second thing is that under the law, which the Teachers union managed to influence, the school district that is losing students is compensated for their loss to a certain percentage. So the very feature of competition that was supposed to put fear and trembling into the standard public schools to improve their performance has been cut out of it by the success of the Teachers union in rigging the legislation.  

Mass. News: Are you saying that the unions have too much political power? 

Silber: They certainly do. One thing you can never do is you can never accuse the teachers union of being politically stupid. They are politically shrewd. They don’t come in and oppose getting rid of tenure. They come in and say, "Yes, let’s get rid of tenure." But then they see to it that the legislation includes so many obstacles to removing any incompetent teacher that it doesn’t matter whether you call it tenure or whether you call it a sinecure or whether you call it contracted services. Once you’ve contracted with a teacher, after three years, it’s hard as hell to get rid of one of them. And that’s the way that they work.  

There is a bill before the legislature now by Rep. Harold Lane (D-Holden), who is the chairman of the joint committee on education, which has some wonderful proposals. It bars the teachers union from bargaining about things such as determining the class schedule, determining the curriculum, and determining the hiring of teachers. It has another section which gives principals the authority to hire personnel whether they’re in the school system or not, so that they can hire the best faculty, and no one can be transferred into their school without their approval. But there are other sections which take it all away and which give a faculty senate authority to oppose any recommendation made by the principal or the superintendent. This guarantees the union control over all of management decisions. So what they take from the union on one hand, they more than give back to the union in another section  

And they will now get through legislation more than they have ever been able to win at the bargaining table although they have won many management rights at the bargaining table. And that’s the way it works. And the public is supposed to be so stupid that they can’t see through this flimflam. But it is a flimflam.  

Mass. News: Why do we need public schools? 

Silber: If you’re going to hold together American society and not extend the notion of pluralism to the point where we have lost our national identity, there has to be something that unifies the children of the United States into a group with a common culture. That common culture is going to have to be found in a coherent curriculum so that the graduates have read certain documents, such as the critical documents of American history and American politics. They’re going to have to know mathematics, and they’re going to have to know some science, and they’re certainly going to have to have a command of the English language if they want to participate successfully in the life of the United States. It’s difficult to participate in the political life of the United States through translation. You’ve got to be able to know what’s being said. There would not have been any point in Lincoln and Douglas having their debates if they were not speaking to an audience through newspapers and an audience sitting on the ground listening to them who could speak English. To participate in the political life of the nation requires the national language.  

We have to preserve the system of public education. I think that’s very important and I support charter schools and particularly the English system of charter schools--the "general maintained" schools--because they preserve essentially public schools. Now the "general maintained" school movement in England took off just like a skyrocket. Within a very few years they had three thousand "general maintained" schools. And the reaction by the local education authority was so profound that drastic reform was introduced in the standard public schools but it introduced a radical reform in the state schools so that the demand for "general maintained" schools dried up. The same thing I believe would happen with our charter schools. If the charter schools reached the point that they were taking 10% of the students, and the money that they took from the regular public school program was not compensated for by money from the legislature. Local school committees would have to wake up and regain their management rights, and they would have the cooperation of the teachers union. Because the unions would see that if they didn’t cooperate they would end up with a state system of charter schools not bound by teacher union contracts. 

Mass. News: Is our legislature effective? 

Silber: I don’t see any chance of getting that kind of legislation through a legislature that is largely controlled by the teachers union. The teachers union provides a valuable service to any budding politician. Any kid out of law school who can’t find a job in a law firm that will pay him handsomely can go to a minor law firm with the realization that he will bring visibility to the law firm by his presence in the legislature. And so he can pick up a higher salary in the legislature than he could ever hope to earn as a lawyer fresh out of law school. That gives him a retainer and it also gives him the opportunity to practice law on the side which makes it a much more valuable position than he would otherwise have available.  

What we’ve seen is a transformation in the quality of the legislature in Massachusetts. It used to be if you go back about 20 to 50 years, it was a group of small businessmen, engineers, doctors, very few people who had been teachers and some lawyers. Now it’s virtually all lawyers or teachers or former teachers, but it is also is a very young and a very inexperienced group of people. Not people who had to learn their living on their own and have had all the chastening that goes through the tremble factor associated with earning your own way in life or in business. So it’s a very different group. 

It makes it very difficult to have influence over them because they were elected very largely by the support of the teachers union. The teachers union has a group of teachers who are not working during the primary season in Massachusetts. So they’re out there holding up signs. They’re out there addressing envelopes, stuffing envelopes, and providing all the kinds of services that other politicians, other candidates would have to hire. And they get on the telephone and set up a network and they help get out the vote. They do all kinds of things that are valuable. So a budding politician can sell his soul to the teachers union and he's home free. He’s got an advantage over any incumbent that decides to run on an independent ticket.  

The remarkable thing about Cellucci is that he opposed them. He did not oppose the teachers union but they opposed him. Both teacher unions endorsed Harshbarger and did everything in their power to defeat Cellucci and he won anyway. Which shows that you can defy the Teachers union and win but you’ve got to be a pretty strong candidate and a pretty determined candidate to do so. There’s got to be some way of breaking the stranglehold of the Teachers union on the state legislature if meaningful education reform is going to pass. We’ve got to be able to convince these legislators that they can go to the Teachers union and say: In the long run, the legislative reforms we have passed help the Teachers union because you are discrediting yourself in the public mind by your protection of incompetence.  

Mass. News: Was the test for teachers fair? 

Silber: Probably the most important achievement that we made under my leadership in the Board of Education was implementing a law passed in 1985 and reiterated in 1993 requiring that certification as a teacher depended upon the successful passage of a qualifying examination. Within 10 months of my becoming chairman and the new board coming in, we voted unanimously to require by January 1, 1998 that all prospective teachers must in order to be certified pass a test of competence in the English language including reading and writing and grammar and syntax. And also a test in the subject matter that they would be teaching. And you know the results of those--they’re dismal. First time around, about 60% failed. Last time around, about 40% failed. And we have colleges in which no more than zero passed. We have certain colleges in Massachusetts, schools of education that have not seemed able to bring in a single candidate who could pass that test. Those places should be shut down immediately. We have others in which 17 to 30% can pass. And they should be shut down or radically reformed and the reformation ought to take place within one or two years or shut them down. Because they are a travesty, they are a fraud being perpetrated on the people of Massachusetts.  

Our teacher test not only demonstrated that a significant percentage of graduates of four-year colleges could not comprehend the English language at a level appropriate to a high school senior, but that many of them were deficient in their subject matter areas--mathematics, science, history, foreign languages and so forth. Now the more important thing this demonstrated was the lack of high standards in schools of education. It has been known for a long time how weak schools of education are. They are deficient in their standards of admission, they’re deficient in the laxity of the curriculum they offer. Not only its mindlessness but how easy it is to get a good grade. That is a safe generalization. There are perhaps three or four exceptions to this rule among schools of education in Massachusetts. All but maybe a half dozen are seriously deficient and they are one of the serious obstacles to educational reform.  

There will be a tremendous lobby in the legislature by the deans and by the faculty of these schools saying: "Don’t allow the Department of Education to set high standards that could jeopardize our position. We’ve got to be protected." And they will have a very good hearing from the legislature and it will take a good hard fight to gain the support of the legislature for that sort of reform. At Boston University, just to put the record straight, 1238 was our combined SAT score for students admitted as freshmen to our School of education. That’s about 300 points above the average for schools of education in Massachusetts, which had an average score that is below the national average for high school seniors. So they are typically recruiting students who are below average in ability. If half of them are below average in ability, many in that lower half are far below the average in ability.  

Mass. News: It seems there are three parts of the problem: Universities and colleges, the schools of education, and then the K through 12 system. There has been a lot of discussion of which way the transition goes and which has to be reformed first. 

Silber: I think you ought to reform all of them at the same time. I think that we ought to insist that colleges and universities that want to maintain their position stop giving college credit to any student who can’t pass a rigorous examination in the English language and a reasonable examination in mathematics. If they can’t come in and take a college course in mathematics and a college course in English and do well in it, they shouldn’t be receiving any college credit. The colleges should simply set high standards for admission which is what we do at Boston University. It’s what Harvard does. It’s what Williams does and Amherst, Smith, Wellesley, they have high standards of admission. But you have lots of other colleges--Mt. Ida for example. If you can breathe you can get into Mt. Ida, I promise you. And you can always get out of Mt. Ida. You can get your degree. But you may never be able to pass the teachers exam. You can get your certification no matter how meaningless it is. There are several other colleges in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts whose standards are not much higher than those. And there are also schools in the state college system and the community college system whose standards are low. But the community colleges have a very different role. The community colleges should be remedial in part. Not remedial in whole but it’s perfectly reasonable since high school graduates don’t reach a reasonable standard of achievement. It is perfectly appropriate to have a post-secondary system that will try to bring these kids up to a reasonable standard and that’s part of the function of a community college. So they should have different standards from state colleges and the state university. But there is no excuse for the degraded standards of U-Mass Boston, not excuse for that at all. Or U-Mass Dartmouth. These are universities – divisions of the University of Massachusetts and they should have high standards. The same should be true of all the divisions of the University of Massachusetts. They don’t have any excuse for low standards of admission. If a student doesn’t meet their standards of admission, there are plenty of other colleges in Massachusetts, state colleges in Massachusetts to which they can go at a subsidized tuition.  

Mass. News: You’ve talked here a little bit about making up for some of the deficiencies of the K through 12 system by extending high school or community colleges, but you’ve also recommended abolishing some of the senior years of high school to increase the focus on early childhood education.  

Silber: No. That’s partly right and partly wrong. I’ve said if the legislature wants to come up with a claim that there is not money enough to support early childhood education for children aged 3 to 5, then they should chop off the last couple of years of high school because we would get more out of it.  

When I went to school it was unusual for a child to graduate from high school at more than 17 years of age. And 16 years of age was a very frequent age of departure. This was certainly true at the turn of the century. It really wasn’t until after the war that we started encouraging the extension of adolescence and dumbing down the curriculum of the high school, so that kids could spend 18 years in school, graduating from high school either at 18 or at 19, and some graduating from high school at 20. This is crazy. We could more than meet the present standards of our high schools by the end of the 10^th grade. And the legislature doesn’t want us to be testing anybody on a test that’s more demanding than the 10^th grade test. So why not reach those objectives in the 10^th grade and get them out of there? 

Mass. News: Is the discouraging process you’ve described--where everybody goes to high school now, the graduation has been pushed back, the curriculum has been diluted--an inevitable consequence of the democratization of education? 

Silber: Those such as Horace Mann, and before him Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in Massachusetts, who supported public education--universal public education--were concerned with excellence. They did not believe in an aristocratic elite, an elite based on wealth, but they certainly thought there was a need for elitism in the area of learning.  

One of the most important things that I tried to contribute as chairman of the Board of Education was to expose the fraudulence of some of the pronouncements made by the Department of Education, like the one that all children can learn at high levels. All children cannot learn at high levels. The obligation of the schools is not to teach all children to learn at high levels but to help each child learn at the highest level of which each child is capable. That we can do. Some children are brighter than others. That is a fact. If somebody doesn’t like that, take it up with God but don’t tell me that I am bashing children or trying to undermine their self-esteem.  

It would be a wonderful thing if all children were equally bright, but they’re not. They’re not equally talented to play basketball. Nobody would give me a second thought if I were to sue the NBA on the grounds that they didn’t hire me as a basketball player. And I say here I am with one arm and I’m only five feet eight inches tall, you have no right, I’m an American with a disability therefore you’ve got to hire me to play basketball? Why? I mean this is an elite sport. This is a sport for persons who are superior athletes and they’re superior in only one area. That doesn’t mean they could be good baseball players, doesn’t mean that they can be good football players, doesn’t mean that they could be good in soccer but they’re very good in basketball.  

Now having said that, I believe that schools certainly have a function of trying to redeem the commonplace, they have an obligation to do everything they can for children, no matter how handicapped, or no matter how deficient in talent a child may be. Every child is important but children who are slow and children who have learning disabilities are not one bit more special or more important than children of talent. All of them have an equal claim on our attention. But what we should be able to do is to address their needs in different ways.  

The children who are gifted and the brightest should be able to graduate from high school with a certificate of mastery or with a Board of Education diploma in addition to the high school diploma. Those who don’t meet those high standards should graduate from high school with a different sort of certification which indicates that there are certain things they can do, but certain things they should not be expected to be able to do.  

Mass. News: How are the vocational schools? 

Silber: In my experience have been among the finest schools I have visited in Massachusetts. I think on average, the vocational schools are better than the other public schools. I think they do their very best to meet the needs of the children who go there. And many of them have extremely high standards. But they’re not conventional standards. I visited one school where there was a young cabinet-maker. To say that he is a carpenter is not enough. He can be a carpenter all right but he can also be a cabinet-maker and do the most refined, careful, painstakingly precise work you can imagine. This kid can’t handle mathematics. I don’t know why he can’t handle mathematics but he’s a like a weaver bird. If you gave a weaver bird a test in mathematics, the weaver bird would fail but that little bird can get out there and do the most magical construction jobs, build a hanging nest of extraordinary engineering sophistication. And he doesn’t have a blueprint; it’s all in his head. That’s the way that young man was. Well he’s got to be certified for what he can do, not excoriated for what he cannot do. And our educational system has to account for all of these variables.  

Human beings are enormously variable. And every single one of them is precious but one thing we have to get rid of is that cliché that you don’t deal honestly with children and you don’t assess their abilities and their deficiencies objectively and honestly because that might undermine their self-esteem. You build the self-esteem of children by enabling them to do things so that they can take pride in their accomplishments and you can’t do it in any other way.  

Mass. News: Are we being honest with children? 

Silber: I’ve seen so much damage done to children by telling them they’re good and then all of a sudden they find out they’re not, telling them they can do things and all of a sudden they can’t. Would you tell a child that that child can swim if a child can’t swim. So the child jumps off the deep end of the swimming pool and drowns? No. If a child can’t swim, you say you can’t swim. Now you get in that pool with that child and teach the child how to swim and then the child has the self-esteem it has earned after it has acquired this ability. There is a cliché that has been spawned by bogus theoreticians at schools of education that somehow we must not criticize children and we must not deal honestly with them because to do so would undermine their self-esteem. 

I visited a school out in the middle of Massachusetts where posted on the wall was the statement by a fourth grade student, probably 10 or 11 years old, "When ice cools down, molecules melt." This weird revisionist science is inexcusable at any age. If a child cannot comprehend molecular theory, he shouldn’t be introduced to molecular theory at that stage in the school’s curriculum. But if the child is properly taught and comes up with such a silly incorrect answer, that answer should never be posted on the bulletin board so that the child is honored for having come up with wrong answer. 

At the same school, on a different bulletin board, I read, "Hitler fought the war for Japan"--as if Japan needed any help. Hirohito and Hitler would have been amazed to read this statement. Why was this posted? If a student reads that, they get a wrong idea about history. In another class, an English teacher gave them the Gettysburg Address. The very fact that they were asked to read The Gettysburg Address is a sign of a sound element in the curriculum. Now she tells the students, "You paraphrase it. Suppose you were at Gettysburg and you had to make the address." It’s a wonderful assignment, but one student wrote, "Ladies" (and that’s spelled L-A-D-Y-’-S) "and gentlemen, we are assembled on a burial ground," (B-E-R-I-A-L) and it goes on with mistake after mistake in the English language in English grammar and spelling and there it is on the bulletin board. I bring the superintendent over and I show him these things. And I say, "What are these doing on the bulletin board when they’re mistaken?" "Of course they’re mistaken," he says. "This is what school is for. Children have to make mistakes." And I say, "Yes, I understand that but why were they posted before they were corrected? Or why were not any of the mistakes pointed out, red circles around each of the mistakes so that somebody would be alerted to the fact that these are deficient." His response was, "We don’t want to destroy the self-esteem of these children." And I said, "How would that destroy their self-esteem?" "Well you’re telling them that they’re no good." I said not at all. I said that before you post these things you should tell the student that he’s got a mistake here. If it’s on molecular theory, he should go back to your textbook and reread it and see what it says and see if he can’t answer this question again and get the answer correct.  

When it comes to the Gettysburg Address, there’s no problem with the content, it’s a problem with the English language, and you say to the student, "I have circled all the mistakes. I’ve circled mistakes in spelling. I’ve circled mistakes in grammar and syntax and construction. You go back and correct these because this is a nice essay and when you get it corrected, I want to post it so that everybody can see how well you’ve done." And you tell each one of those children, "When you get that answer right, I’m going to post your answer as an example of excellent work but I can’t do it until you’ve corrected it." I said, "How does that undermine the esteem of any one of those children?" It gives them the opportunity of earning esteem and that’s the only way you can honestly acquire esteem. Esteem is not something that can be given, it’s something that each child and each human being has to earn.  

Now when you have a superintendent of schools who has that deranged notion of educational theory, educational reform is not going to come out of his school. Not unless somebody can persuade him to change his mind. And he knows when I use this example whom I’m talking about--he couldn’t possibly be unaware of it. I also commented on how bad the students’ handwriting was. He said, "We don’t teach handwriting, I can’t write well either." Well my answer to that is you should not cosmologize your embarrassments. If you’re not good at handwriting, then get back to a Palmer class and learn how to write. Because a teacher ought to be able to write, and a teacher ought to set a standard of legibility in cursive writing for the students. The children aren’t writing cursive anymore, all they’re doing is printing badly And they print the capital letters are often just as small as the ordinary letters, and the ordinary letters are sometimes as large as the capital letters It’s pathetic and there is no excuse for it. We have to continually overcome the bad theories that have been propelled by schools of education, none worse than the whole language of method for teaching English which has set back literacy in the country and that’s the most important reform that’s yet to be made.  

In our next issue: Dr. Silber tells how we throw money away on school administration, why our country cannot survive with mediocre schools, and how we can teach character without mixing church and state. 
 

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