By John Thompson

It was with trepidation that I approached A Path Appears, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. I would never try to match my narrow expertise in my field, inner city education, with Kristof’s and WuDunn’s comprehensive expertise on global problems. My students and I shared many wonderful classes where we read and discussed Kristof’s columns in the Sunday New York Times. But, Kristof, at least, had long supported test-driven reformers who are driving engaging instruction and the clash of ideas from many urban classrooms.

In his Op Ed pieces, Kristof seemed to trust “papers” issued by “astroturf” corporate reform think tanks. If he and many other journalists are so easily swayed by so-called “research” that doesn’t measure up to social science standards, does that say something about the field of education? Is our profession held in such low esteem that otherwise great journalists just skim abstracts of high-profile “studies?” Or, should we be more suspicious of those journalists’ evaluations of evidence within their expertise?

I am thrilled to say that A Path Appears measures up to the best foreign policy journalism and scholarship. Kristof and WuDunn are silent about the test-driven reforms that Kristof, at least, has supported. But, they not only do a great job in covering education issues overseas. They provide a solid appraisal of the path that American school reform should have taken.  Even better, their musings on philanthropies and international social problems provide wisdom to prompt discussions on scaling up school improvement efforts. (That is an equally ambitious topic that is best left for another post, but I will close with an quick observation on the issue.)

Accountability-driven school reform has failed dramatically in trying to use the stress of high-stakes testing and competition to overcome the stress produced by generational poverty and trauma. However, Kristof and WuDunn explain the research of Harvard’s Jack Shonkoff who documents the lasting effects of “the constant bath of cortisol in high-risk infancy.”  This “toxic” stress explains how poverty regenerates itself.  Shonkoff’s research argues for early interventions as a child’s brain is forming, as opposed to waiting until they fall behind in school and belatedly remediating those who struggle to concentrate or control their aggression in class.

Kristof and WuDunn then summarize the findings of Columbia University’s Irwin Redlener, and others, on how risk factors (such as deafness) can interact with insufficient language development related to poverty. The combination of these and other factors “inevitably” lead to “increased rates of learning challenges and school failure.”  Kristof and WuDunn then view learning challenges through the prism of “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. These ACEs increase absenteeism and failure in academic and workplace settings, as well as long-term health outcomes. One result of ACEs is that activity in the prefrontal cortex is decreased, undermining impulse control and the brain’s “executive functioning,” which controls “overall thinking and decision-making processes.

Turning to solutions, Kristof and WuDunn review the work of Johns Hopkins’ Mary Ainsworth on the long-term impact on maternal attachment. “Obviously,” they write, “we need to help high-risk parents,” so they can better “nurture their children with love and hugs.”

A Path Appears then synthesizes the findings of great research on successful programs ranging from David Olds’ Elmira initiative, with its Nurse-Family Partnership, or  nurse visitations to stressed-out, pregnant teens and the Carrera curriculum for health, sexuality, and other life skills. They explain the success of the Ford Foundation’s Citizen Schools (bringing a second shift of caring adults into schools,) the Youth Village (which coaches low-income parents in a way that resembles the Nurse-Family Partnership,) and mentorship efforts through Cure Violence that reduce violence in Chicago. They review classics such as the Perry Preschool initiative, Hart and Risley’s pioneering work on language acquisition, Walter Mischel’s, and James Heckman’s research, as well as new efforts like Angela Duckworth’s scholarship and Amy Klein’s campaign to improve school lunches.

I’ll admit, that I sometimes worried as Kristof and WuDunn introduced some chapters, such as when they recount a Teach for America teacher becoming an intern for the McKinsey Group – the consultants who pioneered the spinning of “research” outcomes in favor predetermined cheap and easy nostrums for American schools. In that case, however, Alejandro Gac-Artigas turned down the McKinsey prestige and led the Springboard Collaborative, to address summer learning loss.

Regarding lessons for scaling up social programs, A Path Appears gives no simple solutions. I will address one aspect of that issue, however. Kristof and WuDunn rightly note that earlier evaluations of philanthropic giving have often been “approximately as rigorous as those of grandparents evaluating their grandchildren.” They rightly praise efforts to use random studies and other data to objectively estimate the effectiveness of social programs. Moreover, they correctly note that innovative donors use advertising campaigns that put an individual’s face on the overwhelming nature of mass suffering.

I don’t want to always bring political issues back to school reform, but I can’t help it. A Path Appears does not answer, but it implicitly adds urgency to the question why American education reformers have been so allergic to addressing the research cited by Kristof and WuDunn. Surely researchers for the Gates Foundation seriously wrestle with the scholarship evaluating their overseas investments before they fully scale them up. Why do they refuse to acknowledge the huge body of social science that argues against their preferred education policies at home?

Were Kristof and WuDunn to survey all the footnotes on the education advocacy sites funded by Gates, I bet they would be shocked by the way that the foundation’s favored reformers ignore the research that A Path Appears describes. Having made a snap judgment that the programs reviewed by Kristof and WuDunn won’t work, and having pressured the federal government and states to enact their “teacher quality” hypotheses into law, they seem to be afraid to ask whether they headed the nation’s schools in the wrong direction before looking at the most important evidence.

I also wonder whether other philanthropies are connected to a pattern comparable to that of corporate school reform. The American Billionaires Boys Club “deputized” teachers as the agents responsible for overcoming the legacies of poverty. The Gates Foundation believed that the personalized approach of making teachers the drivers of transformative change would be viewed as a tribute to educators. And, it would have been if their simplistic game plan had had a chance of working.

So-called “teacher quality” policies failed. Educators fought back, and venture philanthropists responded by investing in a range of think tanks that issue report after report, claiming that teachers are the key to closing the achievement gap. Impatient and frustrated corporate reformers then argued that teachers’ due process rights undermine students’ performance, and used charts by economic theorists as props in a legal and political campaign against our rights.

Tragically, these astroturf organizations understand the power of personalizing issues. They have thus sought to “otherize” or demonize teachers and unions for opposing their quick fix. In doing so, they have spread the message that the types of programs endorsed by Kristof and WuDunn are mere “excuses” for teachers not doing their job.

I’m reluctant to end a review of such a great book on such a negative note. After all, there are thousands of ways up the mountaintop to hope and prosperity. I still would like an explanation why the Gates Foundation rashly chose a single school improvement path to scale up, and pressured systems to implement their agenda before it adequately studied the scientific evidence. Regardless, I hope philanthropists will learn that scorched earth politics against others who have dedicated their lives to fighting poverty, suffering, and ignorance is not one of those paths.

What do you think? Will edu-philanthropists listen to Kristof and WuDunn? Will the next era of school improvement respect the value of “love and hugs?”

Image by Henze, used with Creative Commons license.

John Thompson was an award winning historian, with a doctorate from Rutgers, and a legislative lobbyist when crack and gangs hit his neighborhood, and he became an inner city teacher. He blogs for This Week in Education, the Huffington Post and other sites. After 18 years in the classroom, he is writing his book, Getting Schooled: Battles Inside and Outside the Urban Classroom.