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The conversation around public education and education reform has, for the past few decades, been rather hollery. A new book, A Search for Common Ground: Conversations About the Toughest Questions in K-12 Education, attempts to address the same old issues in a less strident and yell-filled manner, presenting instead a thoughtful conversation between Rick Hess and Pedro Noguera, who represents two sides of the many-sided ongoing debate.
Conversations of this sort have been attempted before. Years ago, education scholar Jack Schneider attempted a written dialogue with reform darling Michelle Rhee, without much effect. Years before that, a series of conversations between Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier were part of Ravitch’s transformation from a supporter of ed reform into one of its staunchest critics. The “conversation” label has been used for other endeavors as well; the Education Post website launched as a “new conversation,” but was bankrolled by wealthy ed reform supporters to serve as a sort of campaign-style war to boost the ed reform message.
So education “conversations” have a checkered history. This book reminds us why they are worth the attempt.
Hess and Noguera are a good pair to make this attempt. Both are firmly associated with their “side” in the ed policy debates, but both have shown at times a willingness to break with their camp’s orthodoxy. And they are, as they remind us a few hundred times in the course of the work, friends.
The conversation takes the form of exchanged emails (though those emails are clearly composed in the knowledge that a larger audience will be viewing the result). The pair takes a stab at back-and-forthing most of the hot-button topics of education policy—choice, testing, privatization, philanthropy, equity, and teacher pay, plus a final chapter looking at the pandemic.
To be clear, absolutely nothing is settled in this book. The same points of difference that have marked these topics for years remain, and if you are someone who has followed and/or participated in these debates, you are unlikely to find much here that you have not heard before—from either side. Nor is this book about settling any of these debates.
Instead, Hess and Noguera probe and search for areas where they agree. While many such debates are marked by an attempt to drill down and dominate an opponent on the places where they are “most wrong,” this conversation does the opposite. You can watch as, at several points, they abandon a line of discussion (school vouchers, philanthropy) as being unbridgeable and instead veer toward the areas in which they come closest to each other.
It’s a different sort of discussion. Advocates from both sides may find the book frustrating (”Why aren’t you calling him out on how wrong he is!”), and, as I suggested above, veterans of the education debates may not find much new here.
But for those who are not steeped in education policy lore, the book is an excellent guide to the various sides of these questions, with a focus on what does and does not separate the two sides. For policymakers, there are hints here about where some progress could be made. And the book has value as a model of how conversations can develop when you stop assuming that your opponents are either evil or stupid or both, a helpful model in this country even beyond the bounds of education policy debates.
