Excellence for All: How a New Breed of Reformers Is Transforming America's Public Schools

1. The Right Time: 1980-2010

11 1 thE right tiME 1980–2010 By the time of Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the idea of excellence for all had been firmly established as the highest aim in American education reform. Equally well accepted was the notion that by taking an entrepreneurial approach to the nation’s education problem, reformers could identify “what works” and replicate successful school models on a large scale. The result, its supporters argued, would be a nationwide network of urban academies, providing for low-income and minority students the kind of schools previously reserved for more privileged populations. Like an invasive species with no natural enemies, the excellence for all movement became the dominant vision in American school reform efforts in the early twenty-first century. It so captured the imaginations of ambitious school leaders, politicians, and philanthropists that it swiftly became a widely accepted bipartisan rallying cry at the local, state, and national levels. But far from being a nonnative transplant to the American educational ecosystem, the excellence for all movement is a homegrown product—the unique result of particular historical circumstances. In that sense, the story of the excellence for all era is also a story of evolution in the world of education reform. Excellence for all as a reform credo was not hatched into the world fully formed. Rather, it developed in response to unique environmental challenges, organically transforming and adapting in order to win constituencies, expand in appeal, and grow in influence. The education policy-making context of the twentieth century was fraught with tensions—between social efficiency and social justice, between pursuit of access and advantage, and between government and markets—and the aim of excellence for all unified a fractured landscape by offering something for everyone. In so doing, it won the day, if perhaps only politically. 12 ExcEllEncE for All StrUgglES oVEr thE SchoolS Americans have long fought over the aims of schooling, variously expecting schools to maintain order, foster social mobility, strengthen the state, advance meritocracy, reinforce privilege, and promote equality. But while at the dawn of the twentieth century policy elites in the world of education reform tended to share similar concerns, that would begin to change over time.1 Leaders representing a broader range of backgrounds and ideologies , and working in rapidly changing domestic and international contexts, would introduce new concerns and emphasize different aims in education policy making. And while some of these varied purposes would be compatible , they would hardly be mutually inclusive, eventually threatening to permanently balkanize American school reform. Whatever policy-making divides might later emerge, early twentiethcentury school reformers were in relative agreement about the means and ends of school reform. Driven by social efficiency concerns like social utility and administrative efficiency, they supported efforts that they believed would produce stability both in and out of the schools. Hoping to address the era’s major concerns, they sought to create policies that would Americanize the immigrant, for instance, or modernize rural areas. And, in a period still characterized by local control and radical geographical differentiation in terms of educational standards and resources, they strove to consolidate one-room schoolhouses, to create teacher credentialing requirements , and to reduce the number of students repeating grade levels in public schools.2 Perhaps most emblematically, school reformers of the early twentieth century sought to make the schools more “socially useful” by creating alternatives to the academic curriculum for non-college-bound students.3 Unlike future reformers who would define equity differently, these “administrative progressives,” as historian David Tyack has called them, sought to serve each student according to his or her perceived needs.4 As Boston’s superintendent noted in 1908, the schools had previously offered “equal opportunity for all to receive one kind of education.” But times had changed, and high schools were finding themselves serving an increasingly wide cross section of the American population. The remedy for such “democratization” of the schools, this superintendent proposed, was simple: provide the opportunity for students to receive an “education as will fit them equally well for their particular life work.”5 The college-preparatory curriculum, such leaders argued , was simply impractical, particularly in light of the rapid expansion thE right tiME 13 of high school enrollment, and failed to educate most students for their likelier destination after high school—the workforce. Exemplary among these early twentieth-century sorting efforts was the crafting of the Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education...