The Essence of Education Reform

-- By JessicaRogers - 26 Feb 2013

Education Reform as a Major Legal Issue

There has probably been no social policy issue that has gotten more attention over the last decade than education reform.

Really? What evidence supports this unlikely generalization?

The debate has taken on many forms, and, I have come to appreciate, involves many legal policy issues as well. The debate has most recently been framed with such catch phrases as “No Child Left Behind” in the Bush administration, and “Race to the Top” in the Obama administration. There has been an enormous amount of focus on the role of the federal versus state versus local government, putting to the test the issue of where the responsibility for education reform most lies in our federal system.

Why even adopt the word "reform"? The debate, if any, has largely been about whether to blame teachers unions for the consequences of poverty. That, in the wealthiest nation on earth, a fifth of the children grow up in poverty, don't do well at learning, and have few chances of advancement in life, is the fact. The so-called "debate about education reform" is a ritual for ignoring the fact.

Issues from federal regulation and standards that schools need to meet in order to qualify for enhanced federal funding, all the way to the New York City Mayor taking control of the school system away from an independent Board of Education have marked some of the many legal/governmental controversies over the last decade.

But these are all mere epiphenomena. How to educate the children of the poor is no more a mystery than how to educate the children of the rich. No one thinks we need an urgent social effort, or a great deal of legal machinery, to fix Harvard, or the Scarsdale and Chappaqua public schools. Not because of higher "per pupil expenditure" within the bureaucracies of the schooling system, but because the children being educated aren't poor, hopeless and afraid. "School reform" is a way of changing the subject from the consequences of radical inequality. No nation with an aristocratic social system has ever instituted universal public education. When the US was a democracy, it created such a system of social self-development, and it became the beacon of the world. The US is now an aristocracy, and it is dismantling its obsolete systems of social mobility. "Education reform" is what we euphemistically call one of the aspects of that process.

Yet test scores of American students continue to deteriorate relative to scores of other nations, and the success of charter schools created to compete with neighboring public schools is still an open question.

Bushwah. On both sides. Aggregate national test scores are a useless way of evaluating social commitments to learning. Comparing Finland or South Korea to the United States misses all relevant points entirely. So does asking whether schools that choose their students can attain better "results" than schools that must educate every child who lives in their bailiwick. These are mere distractions, yelling matches designed to be noisy, fueled by "research" designed to subsidize the "researcher." If we were once again a democracy, educating everyone who is here to attain any role in life to which she aspires, we would neither be concerned about our relative standing in the world's scorecard, nor interested in privatizing the jailing of the poor.

The Law Student's Education Reform

On August 15, 2012, myself and 360 fellow first year students arrived at Columbia Law School to begin our legal education at what is considered one of the great law schools of the world. As we began our Legal Methods class training, we were pressed to analyze the essence of our federal system in terms of the relationship between federal law, state law, the respective court systems, and court review of the regulatory apparatus that have been created under each. In my mind, I began to relate all of this back to the various jurisdictional conflicts over who is really going to drive an improved educational system in this country.

You would not write "On August 15, 2012, myself arrived at Columbia." In English, nouns do not inflect, but pronouns do. In any language, mistaking cases is the most fundamental form of grammatical error, so readers or listeners cannot avoid an unconscious negative judgment about the person who makes it. Therefore, you must not make errors like this in your writing. From this moment, you and I and 360 other people will so resolve. Right?

Then something else dawned on me. I was in the process of my own personal "education reform" and it occurred to me that the macro policy education reform goals were totally missing the beat. My new fellow students and I all really struggled with being exposed to a new way of thinking—a highly analytical reasoning process that involved honing in on the key facts of a case, the standards under which those facts were to be assessed, and the distinctions between various cases as the facts and law evolved or changed. Here we all were, after 17 years of education under our belts, the last four years of which involved training at the best undergraduate programs in the country, and we were all struggling to grasp an analytical reasoning process that was entirely new to us.

In other words, you were learning.

The Uniqueness of the Law Student's Education Reform

That's when it occurred to me, how did we all get through so much school, so much liberal arts education, so much reading and writing, and here we were for the first time truly being exposed to the exercise of getting to the essence of what really matters, analytically reasoning our way through it, and articulating a point of view based on it? Why were we all struggling so much through this process, as opposed to this being the type of educational training we have had all along? It dawned on me even further, isn't there some seriously wrong with our educational system that it would take getting to law school, which only a fraction of one percent of all students of any given year are privileged enough to get to, for our minds to be exposed to this kind of training?

Maybe. But maybe you were imposed upon, and that wasn't really what was happening in "Legal Methods." As I have explained already, that so-called "learning to think like a lawyer" is actually a process of "learning to talk like a lawyer." To be sure, the process also calls upon some other cognitive skills, which you may or may not have acquired previously in the course of your education. Among these, the winnowing of large, documented bodies of information for relevance to an interpretive narrative, for example. That may not have been part of a particular student's education, but if the student were educated as an historian, it would be familiar. Political science students will have met all the tedious formal reasoning before, and have learned to manipulate it in the usual unimaginative bullshit ways. Students in rhetorical disciplines, including literary studies and drama, will grasp the performative aspects of the law school classroom naturally, and perhaps even understand, unhelped, the relevant aspects of the law itself.

What your observation actually establishes, ironically, is the total unimportance of the concept of "education reform." Let's take for granted, arguendo, as they say in law school, the question you pose: "Why wasn't I better prepared for the methodology of law school as taught in Legal Methods?" On the basis of this question, any jackass could create a "pre-law" curriculum, and could go into business as an "educational reformer" by proposing that you should have been subjected to it. But law school begins by teaching law talk, and there is no reason why you should have learned law talk before coming to law school. Law school is strengthened immeasurably by being, in the United States, a graduate discipline, which can draw upon the different forms of higher education already experienced by the students who use it to become lawyers. One of the few global advantages of American lawyers is that they can also possess expertise in other disciplines, from software engineering to economic modeling to advanced foreign or public policy studies. That constitutes their unique value as lawyers, because almost all the world's other lawyers have studied nothing but law since the age of 17, and are thus incapable of independent or creative thought in any of the other aspects of complex social activity.

In this way, the schlemiel whose narrow understanding made a "reformer" out of him achieves only disimprovement, owing to his inadequate grasp of the context: He couldn't see the forest for the trees, and he couldn't see the trees for the woodchips he made out of them.

The problem is that this fellow, with his narrow range of interests that he calls "reform," becomes the tool of the entrepreneur with the broader and perhaps more nefarious range of interests, to whom, as Stalin says, the reformer is a "useful idiot." The revolutionary and the despot—both of whom know that tears and parades run the world when force does not—are realists. They do not believe in pleasant bed-time stories about "rationality" and "reform." What can be done is what should be done, for them. Not more, as for the pragmatist, but not less either.

No matter what someone pursues after their formal education, what matters most is to be able to distinguish the relevant from the irrelevant, to analyze your way clearly through a problem, to present and articulate your thoughts, and to do so in a persuasive manner.

Another case mistake. Pronouns must agree in number. No matter what someone thinks about the rest of your writing, she will unconsciously judge you negatively here. Her brain automatically registers the arrival of the ungrammatical sentence someone else has uttered. She is unconsciously wired to acquire a bias against the reliability of the speaker of the sentence she has heard, no matter who said it. Right?

Yet, so much of the education reform debate is focused on test score competency, which rarely captures these ingredients of what are so central to being a well-rounded person with well articulated thoughts. Often, instead, the testing is about measuring skills that largely get at a teacher's ability to get a child to memorize and regurgitate information. Instead of this rote learning, test-score-focused, approach to stuffing in ones head mounds of irrelevant facts, we should be focusing on the key ingredients of a legal education becoming the foundation of all educational reform. If education had always been geared towards assimilation of relevant information, analyzing its meaning, and articulating our viewpoints, my classmates and I may not have been so initially confused by the notion of "material facts" and so terrified of the notion of a "cold call."

But it is not the purpose of all education in a democratic society to make you more successful in law school. Assuming, once again arguendo, that the methodology of law school if taught to you early would have come in handy for you now, it does not follow, as you suggest, that it would come in handy for orthopedic surgeons, plumbers, roofing contractors, sculptors or chamber music violinists in quite the same way. In fact, it doesn't even follow from experience. I have, in my not so limited life with law students, taught lots of people who were the children and spouses of lawyers. They had acquired a good deal of law talk and legal method, having been taught inefficiently but persistently over sustained periods. The advantage thus conveyed, however much it may be envied by beginning students (and I remember envying them myself), is—I assure you—negligible.

Maybe Law School Could Have Gone a Step Further

That is not to say that a legal education is beyond being critiqued and subject to thorough analysis itself.

It's kind of you to restrain your adulation. But the problem isn't the absence of analysis, Heaven knows, or even critique. We are at all times surfeited with both, as you might expect among people who are sort of lawyers. The problem is only that the revolution hasn't started. Yet.

Even in law school there is very little time spent challenging and analyzing the process you are going through, even though that very process is all about acquiring analytical reasoning skills.

This could be summarized more tightly as "absence of reflection."

Yet, if the mindset we are taught to acquire in law school had been an intricate part of our entire education, perhaps questions about whether law school really does everything it should to cause prospective lawyers to challenge their own training/profession/professors would not be something reserved for discussion in a single class my second semester of law school. Had it been a central theme of my 17 years of prior education, that kind of challenging of the status quo legal education might, instead, be found in the mainstream of the entire law school process. Legal education being subject by students to probing analytical assessment might well lead to greater self-awareness by lawyers and the profession.

This could be summarized as "learning occurs by experimentation and reflection on experience." This is also the essence of John Dewey's argument in Democracy and Education, which is for you, in this context, a revolutionary document. He having flung it off the roof onto the parade, you might want to pick it up off the sidewalk and read it, so that you can stop fretting about "education reform" and get down to the business of transforming society. Or at least the second draft.

Conclusion

Applying the essential ingredients of analytical reasoning, along with written and verbal advocacy, to how we approach education reform generally, would seem to be a path much more worthy than many failed paths taken to date.

This is not the way to write a conclusion. A conclusion should reaffirm, in resonant tones, the basic thesis presented by your essay, and offer the reader a stepping-stone to further thoughts of her own, taking the idea you have presented in other, different or larger directions.

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