The Deep Secrets of Good Schools
By Karl Zinsmeister

Americans tell pollsters that improving schools is just about their highest public priority today. Yet there is no consensus on the best way to do this. People are profoundly uncertain of how to judge the scads of faddish educational reforms now in circulation. One of the most constructive things that can be done to improve education, therefore, is simply to observe successful schools in practice. What exactly does each offer to students? Why do they work while others fail?

For more than a year now, we’ve been doing just this sort of observation for you. Our investigators have visited schools from California to Connecticut, and Michigan to Mississippi. In the pages that follow, you’ll find 14 intriguing profiles of schools that truly teach. Collectively, they can tell us a lot about what poor-to-middling schools (and there are far more of these in our land than you may realize) ought to be doing that they aren’t.

The schools you’re about to tour vary enormously—they include public, private, charter, and for-profit schools, a Catholic school and a Jewish school, a military academy, rural boarding schools, big-city schools, schools that are mostly black, others that are mostly white, elementary schools and high schools. We emphatically did not seek institutions that turn out all Harvard students. The nation doesn’t want many more Harvard graduates; the nation wants a mix of perspectives, skills, and training. Our profiles are of schools that produce disciplined, striving, competent graduates ready to contribute to America in one of the thousands of ways our country needs help—whether through academic pursuits, commercial creativity, diligent military service, or just plain good character and decent citizenship.

We picked schools that do a lot with what they are handed at the start. Obviously a school packed with doctors’ kids will produce high SAT scores. Big deal. What we looked for were institutions that make strong forward progress given the human potential they begin with—advancing children as far as possible from where they entered in intellect and character.

As much as they differ, it’s extremely interesting how many common traits are shared by the successful schools we profile. A remarkably similar basic formula applies in almost all of these places:  high demands on students, strict discipline, a strong and unapologetic moral component, including a respect for religion, an emphasis on teaching intellectual basics, a preference for time-tested books and curricula, clear standards of dress, grooming, and comportment, and an insistence on politeness, respect, and courtesy.

And one other thing:  most of these schools are comparatively “hard.” They push kids, and demand effort. That alone distinguishes them from many other U.S. schools. In an article in The Executive Educator, an Israeli mother named Judith Koren who relocated her two children to one of the best public schools in Westchester County, New York, laments that “at the start of the U.S. school year, my son’s sixth-grade class was getting about an hour of homework a day. But after three months, a group of parents complained to the school that their children were overworked…. The teachers cut back on assignments.” She concludes that “no one expects very much of American kids,” and warns this is why U.S. students often test lower than foreign counterparts. Arriving from Israel, Koren reports, “my sixth-grader was a full year ahead of his classmates in mathematics, and my third-grader—who could barely read English on arrival—tested only six months below the class average.”

So what secret formulas, potent technologies, and rich financing methods do overseas teachers rely on? How do they make learning so much fun for their students? The answer is, they don’t. The secret ingredient in most successful education is cost free. It is exceedingly low-tech. And it has little to do with fun in the simplest sense. That ingredient is brow sweat.

Koren describes how two British women she knows became effective essayists and speakers. “Each week, they’d had homework exercises like this:  While preserving every essential point, reduce a 100-word essay to 50 words, then to 20, then to 10. Reduce 500 words to 50, 1,000 words to 100. Week after week, year after year. A grind? Sure it’s a grind. Who said literacy is easy? It takes practice. Few kids want to put in that amount of work. The schools have to demand it.” (By the way, anyone trained in this method should contact me immediately—I have a job waiting.)

Though they hardly ever act forcefully on their knowledge, most Americans now understand that their local schools are not demanding enough of their pupils. A national survey funded by the Fordham, Gund, MacArthur, and Olin Foundations just released this fall found that only 9 percent of parents say teachers are putting too much academic pressure on their child. Only 10 percent say their child is getting too much homework. Just 11 percent say their child’s school does too much testing.

Queried whether they would support a requirement at their child’s school of summer classes for students who can’t meet uniform standards, 81 percent of all parents answer yes. More than two-thirds say they would favor harder standards even if their own child were sent to summer school or even held back a grade.

Beneath the big commonalities of high standards and mind-stretching demands, however, the best schools vary widely in classroom practices and educational techniques—as you’ll see when you read through our mosaic of profiles. This is to be expected in an undertaking so deeply personal as education.

I learned a lesson in this regard during my early years as a father. One humbling aspect of raising children for me was discovering how much youngsters can differ, even within the same family, and how strong each child’s internal predispositions tend to be. Rearing children is not like kayaking, where you point the boat precisely where you want to go; it’s more like sailing—you take the prevailing force as a given and simply try to redirect it. If you’re good, and lucky, you’ll zig-zag your way to about where you’d like to be. But be prepared to roll with the seas.

Every child has peculiar capabilities and needs, and an innate direction of his or her own. Effective schooling, like effective parenting, must begin by acknowledging this reality. Some children are delicate and in need of extra sensitive treatment; others will be ruined without a whip hand. Some students thrive on independent coursework, others desperately need structured days and inspired guidance. Some children are bursting with quirky gifts, others have a fire for competition burning within their breasts, yet others will achieve precisely as much, or as little, as is demanded of them. Some youngsters go through several of these phases at different points in their lives.

Schools must take the differing natures of children into account. To a considerable degree, this is a sorting exercise. There are, to put it simply, certain children who should never darken the door of a military academy, yet others who will blossom only in one. When it comes to writing, memorizing, learning languages, pursuing science, absorbing music, obtaining religious training, exploring athletics, there is not strictly one answer to educational excellence. Rather there are multiple answers for children of different ages, origins, and temperaments. To reach his maximum potential, the fatherless inner-city boy will sometimes require a different regimen from the rural girl, or the offspring of dual-career suburbanites. (Of course Horace Mann, the father of American public schooling, thought just the opposite—insisting there was one “scientific” method by which all children should be educated.)

Education is a humane undertaking—a people business—and as with other people businesses I suggest what we really need if we’re going to succeed is a bloom of competing options. They all need to be serious, demanding, and clear-eyed. And they must share certain universals of truth, common language, joint history, and tradition. But these fundamentals may be pursued through a variety of methods and mechanisms.

It may seem paradoxical to argue that all successful schools share certain basic assumptions while at the same time saying there is no single right way to educate. But after you’ve read our 14 profiles I think you’ll concur. The Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem and the Benjamin Franklin Charter Schools in Arizona could hardly be more different culturally, yet they are educational blood brothers.

Because we need wide choices to suit differing circumstances, we ought to be encouraging competition among schooling alternatives. We should require every school to disclose its results, then let parents and children select the best match for their situation—without pointlessly eliminating alternatives like private or religious schools. As even arch-liberal Brent Staples wrote recently, “the argument that millions of children must have their lives snuffed out by failing schools and incompetent teachers just to keep impregnable the wall between church and state has worn thin in millions of homes, including my own.”

The great—and tragic—irony is that while education is one of life’s undertakings least suited to one-size-fits-all production, America’s current system of publicly financed schools is one of the most uniform and monopolized portions of our society. Compare the way we school to the way we provide doctoring, or housing, or even college education.

Our liberal elites love to criticize cookie-cutter shopping malls, standardized highways, and assembly-line hamburger chains. Yet they haven’t a word to speak against the automaton blunderings of public education monopolies. For a glimpse of how rich and multi-faceted childhood education could be in a freer world of de-monopolized education, please wander through the classroom doors we open for you starting on page 18.