Larry Cuban: Understanding the Stability of American Schools

(Disclosure: Larry Cuban is a friend, but my opinions on his value originated long before I met him.)

Over 20 years ago, Franklin Foer extolled conventional wisdom (CW) and its avatar,  David Gergen, arguing that Gergen’s relentlessly conventional wisdom was based on his deep expertise, which led him to unflashy but unerringly correct conclusions.

Until starting this piece I’d forgotten the author, the date, and the publication. My memory said the CW exemplar was David Broder, which made finding the article nearly impossible. 

What stayed with me was the plainly correct observation that flashy, controversial and ultimately flawed “takes” are given more public attention than accurate analyses yielding  prosaic outcomes reflecting the status quo.

Larry Cuban is a writer, historian, teacher, and educator who built a career pointing out that no Big Idea, whether it be driven by technology, “science”, money, standards, leadership, or organizational mandates, is likely to change the implacable stability of American education. And he gets it right. A lot.

Just as David Gergen has been banking on his “boring” takes for decades, Larry has been successful in education policy despite his avoidance of bold, controversial policies and predictions. Popular Stanford professor and co-author of a  famous text on education reform, he has made Rick Hess’s list of prominent edu-scholars every year since it came out in 2012.  

In ed school, we were assigned a chapter Larry wrote on problems versus dilemmas, a frequent topic on his long-running blog.  I initially dismissed his observations because I confused his insights with the teachers’ values. One wanted to support her students by advocating rent control but she might lose her job, for example. But we reread the piece after seven months of student teaching and I realized that the dichotomy was essential regardless of the examples. Today it’s hard to avoid the reality that most if not all education policy debates are dilemmas  wrongly pegged as  problems.* Accept this reality and it’s a short step to understanding that little will change.

Larry recently wrote a memoir, one I strongly recommend, although my  book reviews usually run to multi-part articles filled with examples and arguments on the author’s many misconceptions. (No David Gergen, I.) 

Larry structures his life story around America’s three eras of education reform, which correspond with his own education and career. His childhood took place in the fading days of the  Progressive Era, characterized by rapid secondary school expansion and increased focus on education administration and methods. His immigrant parents worked in New York City until they could buy n their own grocery store in Passaic, New Jersey, where Larry was born. Forced into bankruptcy by  anti-Semitic boycotts of all Jewish-owned stores, they relocated to Pittsburgh to be with family. An average student who preferred history and science, Larry’s memories of school are quite fuzzy, although he clearly recalls lessons of both traditional  and progressive approaches. More vivid memories involve sports and friends, a core group of whom he has stayed in touch with for seventy years.

The next section, my favorite, focuses on the Civil Rights era in education reform, from the late 50s to the early 70s. Larry majored in biology and history education. His first job was as a science teacher, but his strong desire to teach US history led to employment in a 99% “Negro” school in Cleveland, Ohio, a job that set the trajectory of his career. Lecturing to bored students five classes a day enervated and depressed him, so he started typing up primary sources of black history in an attempt to create classes more like his graduate seminars.  In a few years he became a notable teacher expert at engaging black students, qualifying for a year seminar in Yale. 

From there, Larry’s career becomes a roadmap of major 60s initiatives. He was invited to Washington, DC to head the Cardozo Project in Urban Teaching initiative, training returning Peace Corps volunteers to teach and build curriculum, originally a one-year project that his successful leadership converted into continued extensions. Ultimately the model was adopted first as DC’s Urban Teacher Corp and then as a model for the National Teacher Corps. He tried federal employment as a director of race and education at the Commission on Civil Rights, but he wasn’t a happy administrator. The horror of Martin Luther King’s assassination created racial tensions in the diverse office staff, so he left and enjoyed a few months of unemployment as a stay at home dad. He then went back to the DC district and worked in staff development until office politics drove him out. 

 Larry’s blazing early success in teaching drove his initial belief that curriculum and engagement could close the achievement gap and drive societal change. Witnessing the politics and obstruction of his ideas at the federal and state level changed his opinion: the  “best unit of reform” was a leadership position. But the ability to influence and reform as an administrator would require either  experience or more education.  Although Larry had kept teaching all through this period, covering one or two periods of history a day at a local school, he hadn’t stayed anywhere long enough to start an administrative career–and doing so would take a number of years. So off he went to Stanford to get a doctorate as a shorter path to a leadership position.  

The Civil Rights era of Larry’s career offers wonderful insights into teaching and education politics of an earlier era**. Larry’s brief recollections of ed school as well as his efforts to teach in a manner consistent with his training also sounds really familiar. I’m reminded again that many aspects of the education debate have a much longer timeline, one that most ed schol  critics ignore.

In person and writing, Larry is calm and laid back, making it easy to miss the ambition drove many of his career decisions (although his deep love for wife and daughters as well as his long-running friendships come through).  His decision to pursue a doctorate for professional advancement led to his superintendency at Arlington Schools superintendent, which begins the book’s third section on the Standards Based Reform Movement, from the 70s until today. He was hired by a politically liberal school board (including Ann Broder, David’s wife–how plate o’ shrimp it would have been had Broder been the CW maven!). The internet still yields a  number of stories that support Larry’s recollections, including an epic revenge reversal that’s hard not to enjoy as sheer story-telling despite the outcome, which ultimately led to his ouster when a more conservative electorate flipped the school board.  

Larry’s account details the national shift from focusing solely on black  achievement to managing the needs and challenges of an economically, racially, and academically diverse student body. While he never neglected the practical aspects of superintendency–keeping the lights on, parental communication, board relationships, learning and test scores–both his memoir and contemporaneous reporting reveal his emphasis on instruction and instructors.  He visited classrooms weekly for all seven years of his superintendency and had a standing offer to join teachers for lunch and discussion. He offered workshops on observations and  inquiry-based questioning skills. He’d sub from time to time. 

Biiennial surveys during his seven year reign showed increasing parental satisfaction. Test scores in elementary school improved, while secondary school scores stagnated. (Twas ever thus.) Significantly, Larry’s successor lasted only one term and was fired when the school board flipped back to the left. By then, Larry had returned to Stanford where he’s been ever since, publishing over 20 books since retiring in 2001.

Larry’s memoir does much to explain his scholarly focus and philosophy. His sketchy memories of his own school experiences renewed his perspective on the relative importance of education: Or, as he says in the memoir, “Life educates.”

His success in improving engagement led to his conviction that meaningful curriculum and trained teachers would lead the way to greater learning. When he found constraints, he sought to broaden that “best unit of reform” –first trying policy, then in district management. Ultimately, Larry realized that his initial belief that “better schools could make a better society” had the “causal direction wrong: societal changes alter schools far more than schools remake society”.

His scholarship continually reflects this theme. Larry’s seminal work Tinkering Towards Utopia, written with his friend and colleague David Tyack, informed and warned passionate choice and accountability advocates about the cycles of earlier reform eras.  In 1995, the modern education reform movement was gathering steam, the federal government was enabling charters to “compete” with public schools so they could “end the achievement gap”. National curriculum reform was being attempted in every academic subject. Triumphalism was the tone of the day. Meanwhile Cuban and Tyack were pointing out how often this had been tried–and failed–before. ESA and voucher advocates would be wise to take note.

In As Good As It Gets, he explored a decade of Austin’s school reform under the same superintendent.  Larry observes that relatively little changed in the classroom and to the extent it did no link to management policy implementation could be ascertained. The title is double edged, praise with a shrug: hey, you want reform? This is about as good as it gets. 

As reform movements sought to use technology as the new tool to transform the classroom,  Larry reported the actual impact. Oversold and Underused, captures his thesis: computers in the classroom haven’t changed much about instruction or curriculum.

Larry’s books continually remind us of the strength of the conventional education models: for all we argue, nothing in education changes much. He views American schools’ implacable resistance to change with cheerful equanimity.  It is what it is, something to be accepted and even cherished, despite the inequities. I suspect Larry wouldn’t object much to Arnold Kling’s Null Hypothesis of Education Intervention. 

Although Larry supports charter schools, his message often runs contrary to reform rhetoric. Once he participated as a panelist in a 2015 AEI round table on classroom changes wrought by “billionaire philanthropy” for education reform. His presentation included this deeply Cubanesque slide predicting that most reforms will disappear, and the ones that don’t will actually strengthen the conventional form of public education. 

Howard Fuller, up next, responded with doleful humor: “It’s always difficult to read Larry’s stuff because then you want to go back in your house. It’s like ‘why did I leave my house today?’ you know, given how little leaving my house means to anybody…but after having fought through that, I decided to get on the plane anyway.” 

Acceptance doesn’t mean indifference. As I first observed over a decade ago,  Larry is one of just two well-known education policy experts who has significant experience as a teacher, a job he dearly loved and that clearly influences his research and findings. Above all, he seeks to inform his readers on the act of teaching and its disconnection from the far more visible policy debates. He loves to visit working classrooms. His books carry multiple, careful and detailed lesson observations, either those he witnesses himself or those he culled from archives and news reports. Anyone who simply wants to know what happens when teachers shut the doors in  America’s classrooms would be well-advised to read his work.

In years, decades, and even centuries to come, when historians are snorfling loudly at publishers who promoted nonsense like Richard Reeves’  treatise arguing we should keep boys back a year, they will still be reading Larry’s books for insight into America’s teaching force throughout history.

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*Examples in my own work: Algebra 2, the Gateway Course, The Day Of Three Miracles, The Push for Black Teachers, Minneapolis Style. Another ed school author who made much more sense on the second reread was Grant Wiggins. 

**Teaching History Then and Now has more such stories for those interested.