When it comes to making exaggerated claims for what they've accomplished, educators are real pros. In most fields, people making a notable discovery are careful not to claim too much for it. Medical researchers who discover a new drug or procedure are scrupulous about specifying the percentage of people likely to find it effective, and even a success rate of 10 or 15 percent is considered an achievement.
Educating kids is more difficult than keeping them healthy, so it would be reasonable to expect success rates for new education programs or techniques to be more modest. Educators, however, seem to think that, unless they claim a 100 percent success rate, their discovery will not be taken seriously. So they don't say what medical researchers do--this works for some people under some circumstances, it may have these side effects, and we are continuing our research. Educators speak in terms of panaceas, magic bullets and miracles.
Seymour Fliegel, who worked for a number of years in East Harlem, New York City's District 4, is a good example of this tendency to overclaim. Fliegel was appointed by Anthony Alvarado, the district superintendent who actually originated the alternative schools program in District 4. Alvarado does not claim that choice and competition among public schools in District 4 created a miracle; Fliegel does. In fact, that is the name of the book Fliegel has written: Miracle in East Harlem: The Fight for Choice in Public Education (New York: Random House, 1993). Fliegel is especially fond of talking about Benjamin Franklin High School, which he says was the worst in the city. The school board shut it down in 1982, and it was reopened as the Manhattan Center for Science and Math, a public school of choice. According to Fliegel, a miracle happened. By 1986, there was a 96 percent graduation rate and 100 percent went on to college. That is an impressive achievement, but there is less to it than meets the eye.
The students in the old Benjamin Franklin were the ones no other high school in Upper Manhattan wanted. But when the school reopened as a school of choice, it did not have the same students. Kids who were interested in specializing in science and math submitted applications; they and their parents were interviewed; and the school was able to reject the kids it didn't think would make it. As Fliegel says, the school was aiming for youngsters in a certain category of achievement--not the ones who get into highly selective schools like Stuyvesant or Bronx Science but not the bottom of the barrel either.
Obviously student performance was much improved: Students graduated and got into college instead of dropping out in droves. But these kids were an entirely different group from the ones who had attended Benjamin Franklin.
Someone once asked former governor of Georgia Lester Maddox about improving the state's prison system. He replied that what the system needed was a better class of prisoner. That's the "miracle" Fliegel is really talking about. Choice enabled those running Manhattan Center to get a better class of student. In "What School Choice Really Means" (Atlantic Monthly, November 1992), David Kirp points out other things about the District 4 successes that Fliegel ignores. How much of the success that some schools enjoyed was due to the extraordinary amount of federal and other grant money they attracted? How much to the quality of leadership in some schools?
Kirp also looks at the downside of choice. Choice, he says, is not a panacea; it is not a way of making sure all students get an excellent education. There are some very good schools in East Harlem because students compete to get into them--and the schools choose the students they want to have. But the truth, Kirp says, is that this system of winners also has losers: "At the bottom of the heap are schools that virtually [no students] ... would choose. These get the hundreds of children who are left over after the more successful schools have made their picks."
There was no miracle at the Manhattan Center for Science and Math or any other school that Fliegel touts. When miracles happen, they happen incrementally, in places where people work constantly and over the long term to build on their advances and correct their mistakes. If you want to see a place where that's happening, it's District 2, where Anthony Alvarado is now superintendent.