‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air’
In Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” those flowers are a metaphor for talents and gifts. I have always loved both the poem and those lines, but I wonder whether they accurately describe what is more likely to happen to talented youth today? What happens to talent that is not nurtured?
I remember the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan—the gifted son of hardscrabble Irish immigrants–telling me that ‘cream rises to the top,’ which was his own experience. My experience as a teacher in a federal penitentiary suggests otherwise. More importantly, so does hard data from solid research.
Let’s put one important fact on the table to start: Talent is randomly distributed. It is not a function of social class, race, income or even education. For more information on this, look at “The Achievement Trap” (PDF), a report by the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. It notes that when they enter elementary school, high-achieving, lower-income students mirror America both demographically and geographically. They exist proportionately to the overall first grade population among males and females and within urban, suburban, and rural communities and are similar to the first grade population in terms of race and ethnicity (African-American, Hispanic, white, and Asian).
Deborah Meier is the founder of the modern small schools movement. After teaching kindergarten in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York, Meier founded Central Park East elementary school in 1974. This alternative but still public school embraced progressive ideals in the tradition of John Dewey in an effort to provide better education for inner-city children in East Harlem, within the New York City public school system.
Checker Finn has been a player in American public education for a long time. To many liberals, he’s been a burr under the saddle–or worse–but no one can deny that he’s thoughtful, articulate, productive and tireless. Checker, the president of the Fordham Institute, has written a zillion articles and books, most recently the aptly-titled “Troublemaker: A Personal History of School Reform” and another mentioned below.
How would one go about measuring caring? I’m a big fan of trying to compare effort, not just amounts, so here’s what I came with. I decided to compare the percent of revenue that a leading pet company spends testing its goldfish food, puppy toys and flea drops to the percentage of our education spending that we devote to testing and measuring our children’s performance in school.
The Merrow Report 