WASHINGTON, OCTOBER 8, 2009--At an AEI conference, New York University professor Jonathan Zimmerman discussed the legacy of the little red schoolhouse in contemporary debates in education, including the Department of Education's pending reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act, implementation of the "Race to the Top" stimulus funding, and creation of common standards. Zimmerman was joined by fellow education experts Carl Kaestle, Andrew Rotherham, and Ellen Condliffe Lagemann to discuss the implications of his new book, Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory (Yale University Press, 2009).

Moderated by AEI research fellow Andrew Kelly, the panel engaged in wide-ranging discussion of how the "little red schoolhouse" symbol influences current educational debates. Zimmerman explained that the one-room schoolhouse has been used historically as an icon for varied--and often conflicting--movements. In the early twentieth century, Progressives attacked the one-room schoolhouse as shabby in order to justify their proposals to build new, more cosmopolitan, consolidated schools; yet the Works Progress Administration later advertised Amish one-room schools as tourist destinations. The schoolhouse icon made appearances again during World War II, the Cold War, and during desegregation in the 1960s and 1970s as a shared symbol of American history. For the Left, it stood for progressive and child-centered approaches to education, while the Right saw the schoolhouse as a symbol of order, authority, and faith. Zimmerman concluded, "However much it distorts the past, the little red schoolhouse ideal reflects the best of American education. Anyone who wants to make it better will have to start from there."

Carl Kaestle, University Professor and Professor Emeritus of Education, History, and Public Policy at Brown University, noted that while liberals tended to latch on to specific aspects of the red schoolhouse, conservatives embraced the metaphor as a symbol for preserving schools as they were. Kaestle said, "What needs more discussion is the words surrounding these debates like bureaucracy, equality, standards, efficiency, and government. Like the metaphor of the schoolhouse, those terms can obfuscate as much as they illuminate."

Andrew Rotherham, cofounder and publisher of Education Sector, described many of the policy implications embedded in Zimmerman's book. He said that we need to acknowledge the "power of nostalgia in schooling and debates about schooling" and recognize that, as one of the last broad-based community institutions, "[o]ur schools are where we go to fight" about the values and debates of our time. Rotherham commented on how education reform requires hard choices but noted that our educational system seems, more so than other public entities, incapable of making those decisions.

Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Levy Institute Research Professor at Bard College as well as a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute, questioned the predominance of the schoolhouse ideal, asserting, "We have to break . . . the monopoly that schools and colleges hold on our educational imagination in order to rethink and reinvent how we deploy more and more varied resources for the purposes of public education." Lagemann suggested several possible ways to accomplish this task: allow schools to contract with other entities to teach subject matter that is not a core function of the schools, permit students to leave school and participate in apprentice programs while still being held accountable for minimum competency, and create educational bank accounts that students can use to pay for any kind of educational service they choose. Lagemann acknowledged the difficulty of such reform ideas but closed by saying, "We spend huge amounts of time worrying about school reform, how to make one kind of institution more effective, rather than thinking about more fundamental educational redesign."

Zimmerman noted that while he was in agreement with Lagemann that we should not equate education with schools, he believed that the purpose of education was a civic one and that the little red schoolhouse ideal will continue to play an important role in the collective American imagination.