Mitt Romney Is No Horace Mann

During last night's debate, Mitt Romney took credit for the excellent performance of the Massachusetts public schools while he was governor. He said: 

We added more school choice. My legislature tried to say no more charter schools. I vetoed that, we overturned that. With school choice, testing our kids, giving our best teachers opportunities for advancement, these kinds of principles drove our schools to be pretty successful. As a matter of fact, there are four measures on which the federal government looks at schools state by state, and my state's number one of all 50 states in all four of those measures, fourth-and-eighth-graders in English and math.

But because Massachusetts public schools have been viewed as a model for the nation since the middle of the ninteenth century, when they became the pioneering common school system in the country, the person who really deserves the credit is Horace Mann. In 1837, Mann was named secretary of the Massachusetts board of education—the first such official in the country—and the nation's leading advocate for the idea of the "common school."

His six main principles were: (1) the public should no longer remain ignorant; (2) that such education should be paid for, controlled, and sustained by an interested public; (3) that this education will be best provided in schools that embrace children from a variety of backgrounds; (4) that this education must be non-sectarian; (5) that this education must be taught by the spirit, methods, and discipline of a free society; and (6) that education should be provided by well-trained, professional teachers. Mann worked for more and better equipped school houses, longer school years, higher pay for teachers, and a wider curriculum.

Throughout the 175 years since, Massachusetts has consistently played a leadership role in American public education, leading the way in such reforms as enhancing access to disabled and special needs children, establishing sports programs for girls, and equalizing school funding for low-income districts. Since the federal government began publishing state results on National Assessment of Education Progress tests, well before Romney became governor in 2003, Massachusetts has always scored at the top of the rankings for students of all races. 

Although the general educational policies Romney endorsed last night are fairly unobjectionable as he described them, the real explanation for the state's long-standing leadership derives from the principles that Mann set forth long ago. Many of those principles, it is worth noting, have been under attack from the conservative movement for decades and directly conflict with the home schooling movement that people like Rick Santorum embrace. But the best strategy toward enabling all of the states to do as well as Massachusetts—which would rank third globally if it were a country—is to pursue the original ideas that Mann advanced and which turned out to be so effective as carried out by those who followed him.

 

 

Comments

[Mike Pearlstein]

Greg,

The arguments in the Bell Curve have not been debunked. As Steven Pinker wrote in the New York Times article "My Genome, My Self" Jan 2009:

"To study something scientifically, you first have to measure it, and psychologists have developed tests for many mental traits. And contrary to popular opinion, the tests work pretty well: they give a similar measurement of a person every time they are administered, and they statistically predict life outcomes like school and job performance, psychiatric diagnoses and marital stability."

In other words, the exact claims of Murray and Herrnstein. And do groups differ on average? Yes, that is in fact not controversial. (see Philip L Roth’s 2001 meta analysis in Personal Psychology, Volume 54, Issue 2, pages 297–330, June 2001).

The hard question is what causes these differences. When privately polled in the 1980′s relatively few academics seemed to think these were purely environmental, compared to those who thought they are due to both environmental and genetic variation (see Snyderman Rothman survey).

Also, see Robert Weinberg's biology lecture at MIT. You can find this on Professor Steve Hsu's website under "forbidden thoughts".