John Merrow
Addicted to Reform

Will Brehm  1:51
John Merrow, welcome to FreshEd.

John Merrow  1:54
Thanks, Will. Great to be here.

Will Brehm  1:55
Your new book is called ‘Addicted To Reform’. How is the United States, or America, addicted to reform in education?

John Merrow  2:06
When I say reform, there’s been a school reform movement that probably began back in the 1980s with the publication of ‘A Nation At Risk’, warning that we were danger of drowning in a rising tide of mediocrity. And that prompted just waves after wave of reform. And what I learned in 41 years of reporting is that an awful lot of these attempts to change: a) they were successful, they changed what they were aimed at changing. But they were really targeting symptoms, not causes. And so we would have a reform and it would make us feel good because gee we said, “Well let’s bring technology into the schools.” And so let’s bring reading machines, teaching machines. They got them into the schools, therefore we call it success. But they weren’t used, so when you go back later and you say “Yes, they’re there” but they’re in a closet somewhere. So that was a reform and we got addicted to that high of saying, “Hey, we just made great change”, but in fact, we really didn’t change anything at all or didn’t change very much. And it’s easy to get addicted to feeling high.

Will Brehm  3:19
And who is addicted? Who are these people that are so addicted to reform that they just keep going for the next fad and call it a solution to the educational problems?

John Merrow  3:30
Well, in most cases, Will, they are well-meaning, hard-working, good people who want to make a difference. I don’t disparage the individuals who spend a lot of time trying to change schools. So they’re our neighbors; they could be you and me. The difficulty is really challenging the paradigm of school. Because if you accept the paradigm, if you accept the system we have now, which is the teachers are the workers, and the students are the product, then you say, “Well, let’s improve the teachers.” “Let’s raise their pay”.” Let’s raise the standards.” “Let’s watch them more closely.” And those are little reforms you can put into place and therefore you say, “Well, we made the system better.” If students are the product, let’s improve the product. Let’s get higher test scores. So we’ll push reform to get higher test scores. Or let’s make everybody take three years of math instead of two years of math. And you do that. The difficulty is, once you accept that model: teachers are workers, kids are product, then you start reforming that. But to my view, it’s like adding a couple more horses to the Pony Express. That’s not an efficient way to deliver the mail. So the argument of the book – and this is a longer answer to the question you asked – but the argument of the book on one level, it’s very simple: Educators need to look at each child the way a parent does. Right now, schools look at a kid and they look at Will Brehm and they say, “How smart is Will?” And they’ll test Will and they’ll put him somewhere. Instead, they need to look at him and say, “How is Will smart?” “How is he intelligent?” not “How intelligent is he?” Because once you ask that question differently, you say, “Gee, okay, he’s really interested in these things. So are Charlie and Juanita. Let’s have them working together. They’re all interested in aeronautics. Let’s build on that talent and interest.” And then we as the adults make sure that Will learns to read, to write, to work with numbers, to work with other people, to speak persuasively. All the things that we want. But you have to change the fundamental question. And until we change the fundamental question, we’ll keep on reforming, but we won’t really change anything.

Will Brehm  6:12
So why don’t you think the reforms have targeted that simple switch that you’re making in the question? It seems so straightforward and simple, but yet it hasn’t been a target of reform. We’re still asking, “How smart is Will?” or, “How smart is John?”

John Merrow  6:32
Well, it’s a good question. There are a couple of reasons. One is, it’s an easy question to ask but it’s a hard change to make because it really turns everything upside down. The second sad truth is there are people who benefit from failure, who benefit from mediocrity. A quick example is remedial education in college. Millions of kids go off to college and they need remedial education. Well if you want to fix that, you have to go back to the source. Instead, what colleges do, they’ll set up Departments of Remedial Education. Now all those Departments of Remedial Education, those are salaries, those are people working. They’re all benefiting from the failure of school for the graduates to be completely competent. So changing it requires more than simply asking the right question. You have to understand that some people are going to get hurt. All these consultants who go around advising schools on how to raise their graduation rate, they’ll be out of jobs. But that’s actually a good example of a current reform that we are addicted to, which is raising the graduation rate. Arne Duncan, during the Obama administration, the Secretary of Education, made a big point, “Let’s raise the graduation rate.” Jeb Bush, when he was Governor of Florida: “Let’s raise the graduation rate.” Well, that’s a reform. So, you focus on raising the graduation rate. That means getting Will over the bar so he can graduate, getting John over the bar so he can graduate. Then that’s the metric by which your boss and you know they’re going to be judged. So, what happens? Well in some cases, well-meaning people said, “Gee, John needs some more help in algebra. Let’s give him the help.” We give him the help and he does better and he graduates. But in other cases, they said, “Well, let’s set up credit recovery.” And credit recovery is a computer-based program where you go in and sit in a classroom for a week, maybe a few hours a day, and get a semester’s worth of credit by answering some questions about algebra. So therefore, you graduate. There are other ways to raise the graduation rate. Let’s say I’m not doing very well and I’m on track not to graduate. So, the counselors say, “Hey John, you don’t have to drop out exactly. Why don’t you go get a GED?” And I’ll say, “Okay” and I’ll leave that school. Well that’s going to help the graduation rate either because I wouldn’t have graduated. Now, does the school then keep track to see if I actually went to a GED? Do they walk me over there? No, they just push me out the door and say, “Here’s the address.” We did some reporting on that back when Jeb Bush was governor of Florida – that’s a long time ago. And there were schools that were simply doing that. They were just pushing kids out the door. And since I had low test scores, that helped the schools’ test scores also. But I didn’t graduate, I just wasn’t on their records. There are other ways to raise the graduation called cheating. There are a number of cases where adults have simply changed grades, and therefore the kid graduates. So that’s a reform. And the graduation rate went up. In the ’70s, 70% got to 83%. But it’s a phony statistic, but it’s a quote “successful” reform. Makes everybody feel good.

Will Brehm  10:09
Is this why you call it “education as a sorting machine” in your book?

John Merrow  10:14
Well that’s what the system does. I mean, that’s really what it was set up to do. And I suppose it made sense on one level. If they’ll sort and they’ll say, “Oh, well, there are plenty of jobs”, but not everybody can be a white-collar manager, and we need some people who are actually going to go dig those ditches or whatever. You could sort kids and you could look at each kid and say, “How smart is he?” “How smart is she?” Well you could argue for a long time about the morality of doing that and certainly about the efficiency of it because as it turns out, the sorting wasn’t sorting based on how smart you were, it was based more likely on what color your skin was, how rich your parents were, and so on, what social class you were. But leaving aside that, we as a society, we simply cannot afford sorting anymore. I mean, there’s plenty of time for sorting. You could play the Kenny Rogers song: “You got to know when to sort them, know when to …” Their sorting occurs. When you try out for the soccer team, they’re sorting because you may not be good enough, or you may be great. So, you’re sorted. Certainly, there’s sorting later on. When you apply to colleges, they do some sorting. You apply for jobs, they’re sorting. But there’s no reason to sort kids in second grade, third grade, fourth grade. If you’re asking the question, “How is Will smart?” then that’s saying, “Well let’s approach the teaching of Will in this way, as opposed to that way.” But that’s not sorting you into Robinson, bluebirds or whatever. The larger point about sorting today is most of the people who run schools are Caucasian or white, the power structure. The public-school system in California is already majority minority. It’s majority minority in a lot of places. We as a country cannot afford not to educate all those children. We can’t say “Well those are other people’s children.” In quick anecdote, Will: back in February, I had a near death experience. I had a sepsis infection from a botched prostate biopsy and I went into septic shock. My blood pressure dropped to 69 over 34, which is when your organs start to fail. And my wife came into the hospital room, when they had all these people gathered around me, and she took a photo. And I remember when I came to, there were about 15 people working on me. Maybe five of them were white people. Two thirds were people of color – black, Hispanic, Asian. Those are other people’s children, but they’re the ones who were monitoring my IV drip. And the kids who are in school today are the kids who are going to be the mechanic on the jet plane that you’re getting on. They’re going to be monitoring your IV drip. They might be the gas maintenance guy who’s come to repair the gas main leak in your neighbor’s house. Don’t you want them to be competent? They may be working for the IRS looking at your tax returns, just tuning up your car. You want them to be capable citizens, if only in your own self-interest. To keep you alive. The idea that we can sort kids into so called winners and losers, and give some kids a better shot, that’s just fallacious. That’s actually suicidal in my view, and as I say, when I woke up, when I started to get better, and saw all these people working on me, because I think a lot about education, I started thinking, “Gee, we better make sure all these kids are educated. I want to stay alive.”

Will Brehm  14:31
So how do America or Americans overcome these racial and social class sorting that takes place in education given the way that American education is funded based on property taxes, which we know is deeply racially segregated?

John Merrow  14:52
That’s a great question. The book has 12 steps. So, we don’t have enough time to talk about the 12. But you have to ask that question about each kid, “How is she intelligent?” You have to recognize that it’s in your self-interest, ours as a society, to make sure that all kids get a decent education. You probably have to spend money differently. You don’t necessarily have to spend more money, but you do have to spend money differently. I would say you have to raise teachers’ salaries going in, and then change the pension thing so that the funding doesn’t become … Right now, it’s negative. You have low starting salary if you work for a long time. Start with a higher salary. Attract people. But then you have to make it more difficult to become a teacher; you have to raise the entry level. But then you can’t just do that, you also have to make it easier to be a teacher. You know, when I was a kid – and I’m now 76 – my parents trusted teachers. The society trusted teachers. We have gone from trust flipping all the way over to the other side to verify. And Ronald Reagan said about the Soviet Union, “Trust, but verify”. That’s the approach we need with teachers. We need to trust that these are people, men and women, women and men who want to do the right thing. And you have to put in ways to keep track of how things are going. You have to connect with kids. You cannot think of a kid as a product. In the schools that I’m writing about – and they exist – I said earlier, in the model we have now teachers are workers and kids are the product. If you ask the different question, then suddenly, the kid becomes the worker and knowledge is the product. Teachers are management. We found out what Will is interested in. We found out what John is interested in. So, we’re going to make sure John and Will are doing work in things that they’re interested in, and we’re going to look at the work they do; that’s the product. We also have to make sure kids work together. Because that’s what you do when you’re a grownup – you cooperate. Everywhere else working together is called “cooperation”. In school, it’s called “cheating”. That makes no sense. All the things that kids enjoy most involve cooperation, whether it’s an athletic team or the school paper or being in a drama or music, those are cooperative activities and that’s what brings a lot of kids to school. Let me give you one quick example of that. And a simple example that doesn’t involve a lot of money. It involves the paradigm shift. The quality of the air matters, right? So, you’re in Tokyo, I’m in Massachusetts. Let’s say every third-grade class had an air quality monitor which cost maybe 40 bucks. And three times a day – beginning of the day, middle of the day, toward the end of the day – the kids take their air quality monitor outside, take a reading and they come back in and they can plot the readings they’ve had. But they also put that data up online with third graders all over Massachusetts, let’s say. And they can see different readings in Roxbury, near Boston, versus Worcester versus the mountains in the western corner of the state. They by Skype – we’re on Skype right now – by Skype, they bring in Dr. Smith and Dr. Jones, and they asked her, him to explain. They want to find out. There’s some anomalies. “Why is the air so different here versus there?” And they start learning what’s going on. “What causes these differences?” They start writing letters. They have to learn how to write a letter. They ask politicians to come in, and then they have to speak to those politicians. Now by the however long they do this, they know more about the air quality than their parents do, probably than the town officials. What have they done? They have created knowledge. They have worked. They’ve been workers. The teacher is the management, foreman, whatever, the supervisor. It’s still teaching, obviously, because they can’t just sit down and scribble a letter. How do you write a business letter? Well that’s a good thing to know. Those air quality readings involve numbers. Let’s make some graphs. Let’s make some charts. So that we can make a presentation. Let’s make a presentation. Let’s go to the hospital, the nursing home, and let’s talk to older folks and ask them what they remember and then tell them what we know about the air. So, this is how you do it. You break down those barriers. If you have all the third graders in Massachusetts connected to each other, it’s going to be more difficult for them to have the prejudices that their parents do. Because they’re connecting on an intellectual level. I was in a high school a few years back, Will, in New Haven; I’d been asked to come up there to the Yale School of Music. So, we went to the high school, and the local high school did not have enough kids to form an orchestra. So, they got on Skype with a big screen and they connected to a high school in Rhode Island which also did not have enough kids, and they practiced together. They rehearsed together. And during the downtime, they started talking to each other. Well, the kids in one of the schools was predominantly Italian American. The other had a lot of black and white kids. And they normally would not have been talking to each other. Italian American and maybe just black kids, but the point is they didn’t know each other, but on Skype they began to connect. And they weren’t connecting on some drag racing or whatever. They were connecting a level of music; they were talking about music. Well again, that makes it harder to inherit the prejudices that you get at the dinner table in your own house. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. We are what we repeatedly do. So, if we want kids to be able to read well, they should read. If we want them to speak articulately and work with other people, then they have to practice speaking; they have to work with other people. So, what happens with this addiction to reform is that we adopt this reform which is superficial – higher test scores. We want higher test scores. We’re going to fire teachers unless the kids have higher test scores. Well that reform makes you feel good because you get the test scores up, but it in fact is very, very damaging. Because once you can reduce a kid to a number, you’re no longer asking, “How is Will smart?”, you’re saying, “How smart is Will?”, and if his test scores aren’t good enough, we’ll figure out a way to make them look good. We’ll cheat. And there’s been lots of cheating, again because we are addicted to these superficial reforms. And that’s why I wrote the book.

Will Brehm  22:56
A little secret: I was absolutely terrible at tests when I was growing up.

John Merrow  23:01
Well, and you see, with the sorting machine, the sorting machine says, “All we want to know is how does Will do on tests?” then you’re going to be sorted over here. I was really good at tests, but I wasn’t a worker. But I got sorted and I got very, very lucky. I remember I had a classmate who worked his tail off. A really nice guy. Determined, pleasant person to be around, curious, but he froze on tests. He was infinitely better as a student, better prepared, better material to contribute to a college. But he didn’t get into any of the colleges that he hoped to get into just because he didn’t do well on the test. Huge mistake and life altering for him. And we can’t afford to do that.

Will Brehm  23:57
This paradigm shift – it seems like in your career, you’ve traveled all over America, even some countries outside of America and looked at schools, like the actual schools. How teaching was done. So, it seems like – but maybe I’m incorrect – have you witnessed some examples of successful paradigm shifts actually taking place inside some schools?

John Merrow  24:27
Sure. We have about 100,000 schools in this country. There are a couple of hundred that are run by teachers, and the tendency there is for the teachers to try to look at things differently. There are classrooms, there are thousands of individual teachers who in their very bones, they look at each kid and say, “How can I reach this kid? What does this kid care about?” Which is like saying, “How is Will smart?” The system is full of well-meaning women and men who would like to operate that way. Unfortunately, they’re in a system. But to do it, they basically have to be subversive; they have to work around. They have to do things they’re not allowed to do, and then apologize later because if they ask permission, they’ll say, “No”. And I think what happens is a lot of those people are driven out of the system because they can’t do what they know is right to do. The world is full of former teachers. If you go into any gathering and say, “How many of you used to teach?” an awful lot of hands will go up. And if you get to know those people, you’ll find they really wanted to do the right thing but were driven away. And I have three children, three grown children. One was a wonderful teacher and I tell the story in the book – I think it’s in the book – about how she was teaching. She’s trilingual and she was hired to teach Italian in Spanish Harlem because they wanted the kids to learn a second language. And the kids didn’t speak Spanish, they spoke a kind of Spanglish. She’s fluent Italian so she said your eighth graders, “Okay, let’s learn Italian. If you learn this much Italian, we’ll go out for pizza. But if you learn this much, we’ll go to a real Italian restaurant with cloth napkins in small groups and we’ll order in Italian.” Well, these kids mostly had never really traveled much outside of a small radius and they were going gangbusters, and she actually panicked, because suddenly how was she going to pay for this these dinners? And we did a fundraiser and she had plenty of money but then three weeks before the state tests, the principal came in and said, “Okay Miss Merrow, that’s enough Italian”, or a month before said “I want you to drill the kids in math.” “But sir, I’m not a math teacher”. “Do what I say.” “Sir.” “It doesn’t matter.” So, she did what she was told. She drilled the kids in math. It did not work. Now in New York City, those tests are given about a month before the end of school. The kids got the message: Italian didn’t matter. Only the test mattered. So, the day after the test ended, somewhere between about 60% of her kids simply stopped coming to school. Because they understood. They were test scores, that’s all they were. She left teaching and she was a wonderful teacher. She was focused, determined, she called parents, spoke to them in Spanish about their kids. She reached out to the parents to say something nice about the kid, “Carlos really was participating.” I don’t know where she learned this, but somehow, she intuited that it that it’s better to have that first contact be positive. Later on, if I have to call and say, “Carlos is causing trouble”, but if she makes the contact right away, the first one’s a positive. She was a terrific teacher. The system said “Hey, your kids are test scores. Get their test scores up.” She said, “I don’t need this.” And the world is full of former teachers who’ve been driven out of a system which just says, “How smart are you?” and sorts.

Will Brehm  28:47
A lot of what you’re saying reminds me of a book from the 1970s by Ivan Illich called Deschooling America. Do you think you’re calling for a new deschooling movement to emerge in America?

John Merrow  29:01
I remember the book and there’s some seminal books for me. Jonathan Kozol’s Death at An Early Age, Paolo Freire’s books about liberation. But no, I’m not calling for deschooling. Basically, there have been three fundamental reasons for school. Certainly, when I was a kid, you had to go to school because that’s where they kept all the knowledge. It was there in the textbook service or in the teacher’s head. That’s no longer true. Now kids swim in a 24/7 sea of information. Not knowledge – information. You went to school for socialization. That’s where the Jewish kid got to know the Catholic kids and so on. The girl got to know the boy; the white kid got to know the black kid. Socialization, there’s an app for that. There are 100 apps for socialization now, and kids use them. They connect. The problem is, of course, they don’t know when they connect with this person via some app and that person says he’s 13 years old. Well, he might be a former Congressman hoping to do sexting. We’ve had plenty of cases of that. Then the third reason for school, back then and still today, was a place for kids to be while their parents were working. And we still need the third reason. Most parents are working. But the first two conditions have changed. The knowledge, it’s information. So, you need school, but you need a different kind of school. School has to equip kids to question that flood of information. All this stuff on the internet, how do we know whether it’s true or not? How do we ask critical questions about stuff that’s being thrown at us as if it’s true? Socialization. Technology. You cannot ban technology. Instead what you have to do is use technology in positive knowledge building ways. I mentioned the air quality monitor and using the internet to connect kids. That’s using technology to create knowledge. What a lot of adults do, Will, is they say, “Oh these kids are digital natives. I’m just a tourist. They know everything.” Well, politely, that’s just BS. Yes, kids are digital natives, but they are not digital citizens. That’s not a given that they’ll be digital citizens. And so, it’s the job of adults to equip them with the tools of citizenship to understand. And if you don’t help kids use technology positively, many of them will use it negatively. The old thing was “idle hands do the devil’s work”. Not anymore. Now it’s idle thumbs on that smartphone use doing that. And I write about this in the book, about embracing technology carefully because there are too many cases of kids who’ve been harassed on these anonymous apps and have killed themselves, just being goaded into it. So, the kids will be using this stuff. They need to be using it positively – using it to create knowledge, using it to connect. Another quick example, a little more expensive tool is a water quality monitor. The State of Texas has something like 4000 miles of fast running water. And suppose students could go – now I’m not talking about the Rio Grande, which is sluggish – but suppose high school kids would go to the river and test the quality of that water. And they could count the detritus and so on, so forth. You know, get the pH, acidity and so on. And then they start sharing that data with every other 10th grade science class in Texas, start looking for anomalies and differences, bringing in people via Skype to explain how this stuff works, writing letters. That’s going to keep them busy. They’ll feel really good; they’re learning stuff. But they also aren’t going to have the time to go on and harass some poor, weak kid, make fun of some little fat kid or whatever. So yes, we need school. We’re not deschooling, but we need radically different approach to schooling which begins with that simple question, “How is Will smart?”

Will Brehm  33:49
So, you’ve interviewed pretty much every single recent Education Secretary in America. What piece of advice would you give to the new Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos?

John Merrow  34:03
I don’t believe she would listen. I interviewed every Secretary of Education up to my retirement. John King, whom I knew, and I talked to, I never officially interviewed him because he was not Secretary when I left. But I have to say, I don’t think Secretary DeVos is a listener. I think she is convinced that she knows the right way, which I find scary: people who are absolutely convinced. I’d love to interview her and get her to explain what she thinks the purpose of school is. I argue in the book that in this, we’re so polarized. We’re deeply polarized in education, and just every other aspect. But we might be able to agree that the purpose of school is to help grow adults. Three important words. As a way of having a conversation. If you say “help”, well that means it’s a cooperative process. Schools aren’t the educators, parents are educators. So, schools have to understand, educators have to understand, that they’re helping parents. “Grow” the verb, that’s a process. Growing is a process. And so that means you cannot just take a test and say, “Okay, we know everything we need to know about Will”, because it’s a growth process. You understand that you don’t take a snapshot and declare victory and go home. The purpose of tests is to figure out how kids are doing. We use tests in this country to figure out how teachers are doing, and to punish teachers. I don’t think there’s any other country in the world that does that. And then the third word, you said, help grow adults. That’s where the conversation starts. If school’s purpose is to help grow adults, what do we mean by an “adult”? What do we want our young people to grow up to be able to do? Well, it seems to me, you want them to be productive citizens. You want them to vote. You want them to hold a job and get to work on time. You want them to be good neighbors. You want them to be able to monitor your IV drip in the hospital or fix a gas main leak. So, if you say those things, say, “Okay, well how do you get to be there?” Again, to go back to Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do.” So therefore, we need to have kids in school repeatedly doing the things that they’re going to be doing as adults and practicing democracy, if you will. I mean, democracy is not some automatic form of government. It requires work. It requires practice. But school is an undemocratic institution. We let these kids out. I argue in the book that Donald Trump is President of the United States in part because of this sorting machine of public education which has sorted people into winners and losers. It sorts an awful lot of people into this category of you’re not a winner (I don’t want to call it loser). What Hillary Clinton called the deplorables. A lot of people went to school and were never made to feel very good about themselves. They were numbers; they got to get through. What they enjoyed was being on the team, being in the play, being in some extracurricular activity. But they got through. And they did not emerge from school prepared to argue back and forth, to examine information and say, “That’s true and that’s not.” or “I want to know more about this.” And they’re not uneducated – which is what Trump said, “I love the undereducated” – they’re miseducated. In ‘A Nation at Risk’ in 1983, it said if a foreign country did what we’re doing to ourselves, we would call it an act of war. Well, I think those chickens came home to roost in the last election. All those people were miseducated, and it’s much easier to fall for demagoguery, your line of “let’s just make America great again,” and not examine that sort of stuff if you have been treated as an object all through school. Hillary, on the other hand, was sorted into a winner category. And it’s easy if you’re a winner category to not have much empathy for the people who weren’t in your group. She may have cost herself the election when she talked about a bucket of deplorables, but that may have been where she really is coming from, because she was sorted into the winner pile. And do you have empathy for the people who weren’t winners? Well, maybe not. So, if we’re going to continue – and we can survive four years of Donald Trump, or maybe less, or maybe more – but we can’t elect a succession of people like that or our democracy is toast. We need to educate all our children by asking that fundamental question, “How is she intelligent?” and creating systems which build on the strengths that every kid has, and create a system which allows wonderful women and men who we’re teaching to do that – to reach out to touch each kid, and to connect with each kid to have them work together. I do try to lay it out in the book that we will not survive if we continue on that path that we’re on right now. And so, you asked me your initial question about Betsy DeVos. I’d love to have a conversation with her. I don’t think her mind is going to be changed. I think the solution is going to be at the state level and in large school district level where they say, “We’re not going to do these things. We are not going to just treat kids as numbers.” And there are some examples, and I provide them in the book, where you can say, “Okay, we can do these things.”

Will Brehm  40:38
Well, John Merrow, thank you so much for joining FreshEd. It really was a pleasure to talk.

John Merrow  40:43
Will, thank you very much. This was a real pleasure. I love talking about education and I’m excited about my new book. I hope it’ll reach some people and at least get a good conversation going.

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