About Why School? by Mike Rose

Rose, Mike. Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us. New York: New Press, 2009.

Mike Rose wrote Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievement of America’s Underprepared about his own schooling which I consider the most useful description of life for a working class student ever written. Some of his own experiences show up in this book too—his need for remedial math help when he took grad school statistics, for instance. But most of this book relies on anecdotes about his students to illustrate his faith—and his disappointment—in American schools.

Why School? incorporates various articles that Rose has written over the years as a professor in the Graduate School of Education at UCLA. There is much criticism here, but there is also much hope.  I noticed right away that, for each new topic, Rose begins with positive aspects. No Child Left Behind, for instance, shines a light on the performance of poor children and children of color who have been underserved or even ignored in past educational efforts. However, the “accountability mechanism” (45) of the law disregards what we know about students and testing. In another chapter he applauds the instinct of business people to try to “improve American education and create opportunity for young people” (53) while decrying their dismissal of teacher competence and “elevation of systems thinking.”

Rose draws on other research he’s done to explain the extraordinary skills and knowledge required for various blue-collar jobs such as hairdressing and waiting tables. He does this to illustrate that we underestimate what students will need in the working world if they don’t go to college. He also touches on a characteristic of these jobs that I consider even more important: “reductive and limited ways of thinking about intelligence” (83) leads to a management style that restricts workers’ freedom and possibilities of growth.  He cites a study by Glynda Hull of assemblers of circuit boards. Although the management insisted their workers needed literacy skills, they assigned only basic literacy tasks such as reading labels. So the workers had no reason to learn or use more advanced skills. I couldn’t help but relate this story to the way teachers’ professional competence is so often doubted by policy makers.

Another section I found interesting was about standards, the current term for behavioral objectives. “Standards that are applied fairly facilitate learning and show students that their teachers believe in their ability to meet academic expectations” (102). Standards for student performance must be explained to the student and consistent across levels, Rose claims.  In developing them, we need to think about “the broader questions of the purpose of teaching a particular subject” (108) and the histories of the students in the class.  Often, however, standards are rigidly set and rigidly enforced. Rose quotes John Dewey: “’the teacher should be occupied not with subject matter in itself but in its interaction with the pupils’ present needs and capabilities’” (114).

Rose obviously values teachers and teaching in this book, but I wished for more support for the role of teachers in an age of accountability. Although their resources may have dwindled and their creativity may be limited, teachers are still the front line, the people with the most influence on each child’s experience in school. The last chapters of Why School? raise the level of hope in the book. Rose explains how the language of criticism of public schools—such as the editor who wrote “We all agree that American public schools are a joke”—shuts down any attempt at improvement. Rose has written extensively about successful schools, students, and teachers across the country, particularly in Possible Lives: The Promise of Public Education in America. He claims we need to examine and celebrate what is working  more than we focus on deficiencies and failures.

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