Reviews

REVIEWS

In Defense of Individual Rights - Capitalism Magazine
August 20, 2005

The War Against Excellence
Cheri Pierson Yecke

Reviewed by Jonathan Butcher
http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4372

In a survey of gifted students published in 1994, a sixth-grader from New York did not mince words when asked about “cooperative learning,” the educational fad that calls for students to work on assignments in groups.

“Since I always end up doing everything, even when I try to get other people to do things, it is sort of like working by myself,” she said. “Except my teacher yells at me for doing everything and not giving anyone else a chance, which I did give … It also takes longer because I have to wait for everyone to catch up to me.”

Her comments typify those of gifted students on the drudgery of “heterogeneous grouping” -- the practice of placing students of different ability levels together on projects so those who learn quickly can help pull up the others.

Heterogeneous grouping is a staple of cooperative learning -- one of the many educational fads that have seeped into middle-school education over the past 50 years. Cheri Pierson Yecke, former secretary of education in Virginia and commissioner of education in Minnesota, describes this movement to make all middle-school students equally mediocre in her book, “The War Against Excellence.” She decries the effort to “promote social egalitarianism by coercing students who are gifted/high ability to be like everybody else” as well as the way educators tend to use middle schools as laboratories in which to conduct their perverse social experiments.

Yecke provides a history of the reform movement that began in the 1950s and has produced a body of research supporting the ideas that a) middle-school students cannot learn challenging material and b) treating students differently based on skill level is harmful. She calls this effort, spearheaded since 1973 by the National Middle School Association, unethical.

“Public schools never were meant to be the vehicle for massive social experiments aimed at achieving the questionable utopian goals of an elite few,” she says.

She considers “heterogeneous grouping” merely the most destructive of these trends. Gifted students who understand the material don’t find themselves challenged, and students less far along take a back seat in the project to the more gifted, whom they figure can do the work quicker and more competently. This, of course, only widens the gap, academically and socially, between the top students and the rest. Other exercises, such as peer tutoring and cooperative learning, lead to similar results.

What’s worse, these “reforms” actually seem to arrest student achievement. The most-recent report on long-term reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress tests revealed that overall achievement among 9-year-olds has improved nine points since 1971. But middle-school students have improved just four points over that period, and high-school students haven’t improved at all.

Considering that barely a third of eighth graders can read at grade level, this “progress” simply cannot be enough to satisfy students, parents or educators. And, as Yecke points out in her perceptive final chapter, “Implications for the 21st Century,” it does not bode well for our future.

In the final chapter, Yecke argues that the movement’s core values are un-American: “American values such as rewarding individual effort, honoring individual achievement and promoting healthy competition have given way to a capricious smorgasbord of liberal ideas that undermine traditional values in many of our schools. Beliefs driving racial equity include the leveling of achievement and the desire for equality of outcomes. This is in stark contrast with the premises underlying our nation’s founding principles.”

The middle-school reform movement has sabotaged America's schools, and this intellectual genocide must be stopped. By attempting to make all students equal, middle-school progressives have given all students subject to their poisonous methods something in common -- none can achieve their potential.

Michigan Education Report
Spring 2005 Issue
April 11, 2005

Reviewed by Dr. George C. Leef
http://www.educationreport.org/pubs/mer/article.asp?ID=7041

A review of "The War Against Excellence," by Cheri Pierson Yecke; Preager (2003); 260 pages; $49.95.

In 1983, the U.S. Education Department’s National Commission on Excellence in Education published its watershed report, "A Nation at Risk." The report famously stated, "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

Since then, there has been a great deal of talk about improving the educational system. Some legislation has been passed purporting to raise standards.

But on the whole, it’s hard to perceive much improvement. In fact, if author Cheri Pierson Yecke is correct in "The War Against Excellence," things have gotten worse, particularly at the middle school level.

Yecke is a former U.S. Department of Education Commissioner for Minnesota. Her volume is the latest in a stream of books by a multitude of authors in recent years exposing unpleasant truths about government schools.

This stream is fighting a broader current. School districts and employee unions invest mightily in public relations to keep parents, taxpayers and politicians convinced that "public education" is doing wonderfully, but just needs more money. "The War Against Excellence" pulls back the curtain to reveal that over the last 20 years or so, middle schools — usually sixth grade to eighth grade — have been infested with an alarmingly anti-academic mindset.

According to the author, five beliefs that progressive education theorists embrace have infiltrated the middle schools. Yecke does not say that these views are confined to middle school, only that the problem seems worst there. The five views can be stated briefly:

Belief in the overriding value of students achieving equal educational outcomes.
Belief in questioning the value of individualism.
Belief in the supremacy of the group over the individual.
Belief that advanced students have a duty to help others at the expense of their own needs.
Belief that competition is negative and must be eliminated.

University of Florida Professor Paul George, one of the educational "progressives" whom Yecke quotes, opines that middle schools should become "the focus of societal experimentation, the vehicle for movement toward increasing justice and equality in the society as a whole." "Schools," he writes, "are not about taking each child as far as he or she can go. They’re about redistributing the wealth of the future."

The United States has always had plenty of educational theorists eager to use government schools as experimental laboratories for their own notions about the reformation of society, but the current crop seems to have been particularly effective in getting their ideas implemented.

Yecke discusses several distressing manifestations of those beliefs. One is the attack on ability grouping. Schools have customarily followed the practice of putting brighter students in accelerated classes, so they can proceed at a faster pace; sometimes, too, schools have grouped slower students together, so they can receive special attention.

To egalitarian theorists, ability grouping is a practice that is both educationally bad and morally wrong. Yecke quotes education activist Elizabeth Cohen on the supposed need to redesign education along egalitarian lines:

What is at stake here is the attempt to undo the effects of inequality in society at large as it affects the day-to-day life of the classroom. Social scientists have documented the ways in which classrooms tend to reproduce the inequalities of the larger society. Undoing these effects is an ambitious undertaking. Nonetheless, the application of sociological theory and research to the problem of increasing equity in [the] heterogeneous classroom leaves room for hope that these goals are within our reach.

From that statement, it is evident that the educational reformers who want to remake our schools as a prelude to remaking society would rather that the brightest children be held back from their natural learning pace in school so that there will be less inequality among adults in the future. If gifted kids can be slowed down, the thinking goes, they wouldn’t be so successful later in life, thus taking a big step toward so-called "social justice."

That this leveling down would make everyone poorer in the long run by retarding those who have the most ability seems not to bother the activists.

The abolition of ability grouping has met with strong resistance from parents of gifted children, who resent having their kids held back just to satisfy the egalitarian impulses of education theorists. Yecke quotes one parent, who says, "The problem with this forced redistribution of intellect is that it limits my son’s educational opportunity and intellectual growth. Advocates of collaborative learning argue that it’s more important to encourage socially desirable aspirations than to develop individual students’ knowledge base and intellectual skills. I disagree." Unfortunately, the complaints of such parents are usually met with indifference by school officials.

Another manifestation of the egalitarian impulse is the move toward "cooperative learning." That’s another of those warm and fuzzy notions that hides an unpleasant concept, namely that students should work and be graded in groups, rather than individually. Again, this is supposedly necessary to correct an underlying social injustice.

The obvious problem with cooperative learning is that the smarter or more diligent students do most of the work, but must share the credit. To the theorists, this approach to education performs the vital task of informing the bright kids that they have to "share" their talents, and of discouraging them from using their ability to their own benefit.

A particularly disquieting aspect of cooperative learning is that it not only groups students together, but demands that the more gifted students instruct the slower ones. Under the concept of "peer tutoring," students who have already mastered new material are expected to help teach students who have not. This peer tutoring supposedly compels gifted students to develop a sense of responsibility to their classmates. If there are not any instructional tasks the gifted students can do, they can be required to help the teacher with other tasks.

Yecke writes, "(S)tudents who have completed their work can tutor others or perform clerical duties — but they cannot be allowed to work to the extent of their abilities and get ahead of the class." When parents of gifted students complain that school time is largely wasted for their kids, and that "cooperative learning" is holding them back, the educational theorists tend to reply that the research does not show that any educational harm is done to bright kids by holding them back so they can learn responsibility.

The author finds this "research" to be very feeble and reports that some of the activists privately acknowledge that their program does hinder the progress of bright students, but they regard it as a price worth paying in order to achieve their goals of "social equity."

The author is rightly concerned about the spread of the egalitarian vision of school, observing that it has been absorbed into the curriculum of many college education programs. Teachers in training often hear from their professors that these ideas are widely accepted and that they should aspire to become "change agents" within their schools.

Yecke is not optimistic about a quick reversal back to school cultures that emphasize academic achievement; the egalitarian mindset is too widespread. Fortunately, parents who can see that their children are being used as the guinea pigs in a sociological experiment have alternatives. Yecke cites the example of Maryland’s Howard County, where the school administration chose to ignore parental protests against grouping students of unequal abilities together. As a result, the number of parents choosing either private schools or home-schooling in Howard County has risen by 50 percent during the last decade.

"The War Against Excellence" will startle readers who are unaware just how explicitly many middle schools set out to homogenize children and use the classroom to remedy society’s imagined ills. Revealing to parents the often-unreported activities and theories practiced in their children’s schools is worth the price of the book.

George C. Leef is executive director of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, N.C.

March 2005

The War Against Excellence
by Cheri Pierson Yecke, PhD
(Praeger, 2003)

Reviewed by James Fenwick, PhD

One does not have to agree with Yecke's major premises and conclusions in order to admire her extensive effort to convince the reader that the middle school movement has led to a rising tide of mediocrity in the education of the nation's young adolescents. However, while reading Yecke's work this reviewer experienced a troubling feeling best characterized by the old aphorism, "If one has only a hammer in hand everything looks like a nail." The author rightly targets the need for more attention to gifted and talented students in middle schools nationwide. This conviction lies at the heart of her book which appears to have been triggered by a thinly veiled disenchantment with the experiences of her own gifted children whose allegedly compromised intellectual lives as young adolescents are cited several times.

Yecke has embarked on a cause célebre in attacking contemporary middle schools and little if anything arising from this movement escapes her hammer. Her bibliographical references are extensive and impressive but unfortunately selective and biased. One might easily infer that this book is a modification of her doctoral dissertation. If true there is nothing wrong with this but what is wrong is the use of selective data while omitting other significant references. Facing rather than ignoring counter arguments would have given much greater credibility to her work. Two of the most glaring omissions are the failure to cite Taking Center Stage, A Commitment to Standards-Based Education for California's Middle Grades Students published in 2001 by the California Department of Education and the exhaustive work of Hayes Mizell of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation whose sane, penetrating work on middle grades education during the past twenty years has influenced and challenged thousands of teachers, administrators, and school board members nationwide to strive for academic excellence.

The failure to make even a single reference to Taking Center Stage by Yecke is most remarkable since it serves as the primary professional reference for thousands of middle school teachers and administrators in the nation's most populous state with a million or more middle grades students enrolled in its schools at any given point in time--not to mention the book's extensive use in other states. This omission, which one must assume to have been deliberate, is especially egregious since one of the most basic emphases in Taking Center Stage is academic excellence and the educational conditions which contribute to the realization of this goal in middle schools.

Yecke speaks of assumptions by some of her sources that young adolescents are incapable of demanding cognitive tasks because of so-called brain periodization. Taking Center Stage trashes this notion by holding that ". . . A new, demanding learning environment was crucial for [middle school] students to achieve at their highest potential. Gone was the assumption that young adolescents were unprepared to engage in more complex thinking skills needed in problem solving, investigating, experimenting and creating. . . .Young adolescents would be given assignments calling for rigorous intellectual pursuits." (pp 101-102) Yecke makes no mention of this countervailing position by the nation's largest state department of education.

Yecke states that ". . . Social aims makes it appear doubtful whether the contemporary middle school movement and the standards movement can successfully co-exist." (p 224) Yet once again she completely ignores the deliberate efforts to address this critical task by the most populous state. Taking Center Stage advances the proposition that standards-based education recognizes that students learn in many different ways and at different rates of speed and thus promotes flexibility in adapting to those expectations. Strategies include effective, purposeful differentiated instruction and fluid grouping of special needs students at both extremes of the learning continuum (e.g., GATE [Gifted and Talented Education] students and students needing remediation). p 118. It is not by accident that the current fiscal year budget for California's GATE students is $46,536,000--not enough by this reviewer's standards but nevertheless representative of a significant commitment.

Yecke's failure to include any references to Taking Center Stage and the work of Hayes Mizell places her otherwise commendable scholarship in question. It is true that she cites a broad cross-section of educators [in her words, "radical activists"] including Oakes, George, Slavin, Cohen, Jackson, Noddings, Lounsberry, Lipsitz, and others. But for the reader who is familiar with these sources and the remarkable insights they have contributed to the education of America's children over the past several decades, one is left with a cruel caricature of their work. Any author can suffer from selective quotations from their works that belie their fundamental beliefs about education and society. Cohn and Noddings are based at Stanford--one of the nation's more conservative institutions of higher education. Jackson's work was completed while associated with the Carnegie Corporation which is certainly not known as a radical institution, at least by most accounts!

Other authors referenced by Yecke also have substantial professional credentials. This reviewer recognizes the validity of extensive citations from primary sources in defense of the author's convictions, as Yecke has done. Yet scholarly integrity requires that citations from these primary sources be balanced when fairness demands a more thorough look at the broad themes of their writing. George, Oakes, Lipsitz and others are prime examples. Once again, how much more powerful Yecke's legitimate concerns would be had she given a more balanced treatment to her analysis rather than to engage only in a systematic diatribe. Yecke is out to prove her points and professional niceties are not part of her agenda, or so it would seem. Interestingly, she makes references to the Hegelian dialectic and the Kantian categorical imperative in developing the logic for her case. As an aside, one wonders why it is necessary to take the reader down these arcane roads.

This reviewer agrees with many of Yecke's implicit and explicit concerns about the misuse of certain instructional practices. However, rather than to condemn these practices in a wholesale fashion one might wish for a more careful assessment of them. After all, any tool in the wrong hands--whatever the profession or craft can wreak havoc. The War Against Excellence makes it clear that the author has no use for classroom practices that emphasize cooperation and collaboration in the learning process. She is right in asserting that cooperative learning can be little more than an exercise in which only a few (the gifted) do all the work for others if instruction is not properly managed. But this conclusion fails to recognize that at its best cooperative learning results in a rich exchange of ideas and information among students that can lead to deep learning--a synergistic effect that extends far beyond the capacity of students to experience individually when working in splendid isolation. Yecke fails to note this powerful alternate side of cooperative learning as an ideal for which many of the most able teachers continuously strive.

Peer tutoring and heterogeneous grouping--as well as cooperative learning--are special targets for Yecke's hammer. For this reviewer there is a profoundly troubling failure on her part to recognize how the real world spins in its orbit. American society is complex with enormous human diversity. Schools represent one of the primary resources in the development of our ability to live and learn together and to cooperate in achieving shared goals. While basically supporting the use of peer tutoring, heterogeneous grouping, and cooperative learning in its more academically rigorous form, this reviewer wishes to avoid the trap of assuming that all learning should take place in cooperative groups or that students of like talents and interests should be consistently deprived of each others intellectual company, or that more able students give themselves up as peer tutors to the exclusion of their own personal academic development. But Yecke's wholesale criticism of these and related practices, selective arguments, and failure to confront opposing scholarly convictions that might weaken her position in response to what she repeatedly characterizes as "radical activists" have a collective tendency to sour those who might otherwise more closely identify with many of her points. The word "radical" or "radical activist" is used so frequently in Yecke's work that by the end these terms are essentially meaningless as descriptors.

Yecke should be given the benefit of the doubt in terms of her sincerity but one must remember the old axiom, that it is possible to be sincere yet sincerely wrong. To all readers I would say study Yecke's treatise as a serious and scholarly work but allow yourself the freedom to disagree with her or to question her premises and conclusions--to sort the wheat from the chaff. For every negative argument and condemnation she makes about contemporary middle school practices there are equally serious and scholarly counter arguments that in this reviewer's opinion carry more weight than Yecke has managed to accumulate by her nevertheless impressive scholarship.

Minneapolis Star Tribune published an abridged version of this review.
March 24, 2004

The War Against Excellence
Cheri Pierson Yecke, Praeger Publishers

Review by Jeremiah Reedy
Professor of Classics
Macalester College
St. Paul, MN 55105
reedy@macalester.edu

Yecke’s Book Sheds Light

When Achilles went off to the Trojan War, his father told him, “Try always to do your best.” This bit of advice, which has been called the “first commandment” of the “heroic ideal,” reflects its origin on the battlefield where those who were not best ended up enslaved or dead. Such an ethic can be found in many cultures, but in Greece, as Bowra pointed out, it outlived the heroic age and was sublimated, becoming in the Golden Age the “pursuit of excellence” in every realm. It thus played an important role in the achievements of the Greeks in art and architecture, in tragedy and comedy, in philosophy and science, and in poetry, mathematics, literature and history. Later the Stoic philosophers made virtue (moral excellence) the highest good. As the classical tradition and the Judeo-Christian tradition merged to form the Western worldview, the emphasis on always doing one’s best was strengthened by admonitions from the Bible, such as the sayings of Jesus, ”Be ye therefore perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” and ”To whom much has been given, much will be expected.” Thus the pursuit of excellence became an integral part of the Western tradition, contributing much to its unique vitality.

To my knowledge no one has doubted the propriety of pursuing excellence; after all who would want to recommend mediocrity? No one, that is, until quite recently. Welcome to the bizarre world of the middle school as revealed to us by Cheri Pierson Yecke in The War Against Excellence, the subtitle of which is The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America’s Middle Schools. It’s the world of “brain periodization,” “brain-based curricula,” “identity development,” “detracking,” “untracking,” and “transescents.” It’s a world where “progressive” educators know better than parents what’s best for their children (Parents aren’t up to date on the latest findings in Ed. Psych.) and high ability students are urged to “succumb to peer pressure and strive not to achieve, or they will risk making their classmates look bad---and their actions might even go so far as to force the non-motivated students to work harder!”

Dr. Yecke’s book, the fruit of seven years of research and writing, is not only a work of impeccable scholarship, it is an expose, guaranteed to make the blood boil of everyone who is interested in genuine education and the future of our country. It is carefully organized, well written, and exceedingly well researched and documented. (One chapter of 32 pages has 137 end notes; another of 22 pages has 130, and there are ten appendices.) As Dr. Yecke says, it is a story that had to be told, and a story the basically tells itself through quotations from books, articles and papers delivered at conferences.

The saga begins as Yecke, the mother of two academically talented daughters and a middle school teacher herself, became disillusioned (to engage in understatement) with “self-proclaimed experts” and their “pseudo-wisdom” who turned the middle school into an “activist movement designed to force radical social changes, regardless of the values or desires of parents, students, or members of the community at large.” Yecke returned to graduate school, and earned her doctorate so she could deal with the “so-called experts” as an equal. And that is what she does in this tough, hard-hitting, and much needed book.

The middle school made its debut in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. The National Middle School Association (NMSA) was founded in 1973. To most citizens the appearance of middle schools meant simply a new way of organizing the classes: 1-5, 6-8, 9-12 instead of the traditional 1-6, 7-8 and 9-12. But for the champions of middle schools it was much more---it was a movement. They saw, rightly of course, that a new structure is easier to change than an existing one. Hence they planned to use, and have been using, the middle school as a “testing ground” to change, first the whole educational system, and then society itself. As one prominent activist, Paul George, put it, the middle school has become “the focus of societal experimentation, the vehicle for movement towards increased justice and equality in the society as a whole.” This involved de-emphasizing academic achievement and focusing on alleged personal and social needs of students. As two “authorities” (Johnson and Markle) argue, “By systematically applying attitude change techniques, the chances of developing desirable attitudes among middle school students can be improved.” Professor George’s goals are even clearer: schools “are not about taking each child as far as he or she can go. They’re about redistributing the wealth of the future.”

In an attempt to justify the dumbing-down of the currriculum, the social engineers, starting in 1978, made use of a loony, mad scientist theory called “brain periodization.” This first cousin of phrenology claims that “brain growth reaches a plateau around the ages of 12-14 at which time ‘the brain virtually ceases to grow.’” Hence during this “learning plateau period” it was considered dangerous to introduce “new and challenging material” which could result in “negative neural networks to dissipate the energy of the [challenging] inputs.” The NMSA “formally endorsed” this theory in 1981, and the theory reigned supreme for ten years. Even after it was admitted in 1993 that “there is no supporting evidence” for it, its influence lingered on and lingers on even today, sustained by ideology but not by science. Parents who complain of lack of rigor, low expectations, and student boredom are considered “difficult,” and papers are delivered at conferences advising teachers how to deal with them.

Meanwhile, the most able students, left high and dry and bored by the abolition of “ethically unacceptable” gifted and talented programs are kept busy with “cooperative learning” and peer tutoring. The utopians did away with spelling bees and honor rolls (and in England musical chairs) hoping to breed “competition out of the next generation.”

Yecke reveals many more things that are being done by middle school educators (and one could add “progressive” educators in general) that are profoundly disturbing. Let me list a few: Their attempt to achieve social justice by “making everyone equal” (this means equal outcomes, not just equality of opportunity). Their blanket condemnation of competition without distinguishing its different forms, some of which have great social and personal value. Their disparagement of academic achievement. Their use of cooperative learning to promote group identity at the expense of individual identity. Their romantic notions of human nature and their naïve utopianism. And finally, their use of our children to advance their revolutionary social agenda. It is sad to learn that the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundations have played a major role in all of this nonsense.

I conclude with a comment on a word and two observations. There is in Latin an “inceptive verb suffix” which forms verbs that mean roughly “becoming.” From the present participles of these verbs we derive adjectives such as luminescent, phosphorescent, obsolescent and recrudescent. Middle school educators added this suffix to the preposition/prefix trans- giving us a truly hideous neologism, “transescent,” a pre-adolescent. (Every movement must have its jargon.) After being given their own name, middle schools students were seen by at least one educator as a minority group, “neglected, stereotyped and at times exploited” and in need of empowerment. Coining a words such as transescent is easy---a four-year-old could be called a studescent, a high school senior, a graduescent and a fifty-four-year old person a senescent, but we don’t need these words any more than we needed “transescent.”

To be as fair as possible, it should be emphasized that Yecke’s book is a critique of what the educational theorists and activists, mostly professors of education, are proposing, rather than a report on what is actually going on in middle school classrooms across the country. Fortunately, many (one hopes most) teachers, relying on common sense, intuition, and experience, know enough to ignore the theories they were required to study while earning their certification. As E.D. Hirsch has said (and I’m sure Dr. Yecke would agree), it is ideas that are the enemy, not people. It is the half-baked theories of professors under pressure to publish that must be exposed, discredited, and rejected.

Finally, I am only sorry that Chapter 9 on “Ethical Considerations” is so short (eight pages long including notes). Nevertheless the right issues are raised, e.g. “Does anyone have the right to use the public schools as laboratories for social experimentation?” Federal regulations require “voluntary informed consent” from human subjects before experimentation can begin, and parental permission must be given before children can be used as guinea pigs. “A massive social experiment” has been going on, and rank amateurs have been tinkering with the psyches of our children. Especially hard hitting is the section on “Radical Advocacy Research,” in which researchers use subjects to advance their own revolutionary goals. There are also serious “breach of trust” issues, but the ethics of all this calls for book length treatment.

Finally, I’m sorry that the exorbitant price of this book ($50.00) will prevent many from reading it. It is a book everyone should read.

Richmond Times-Dispatch
Sunday, April 4, 2004

Review by Robert Holland
Senior Fellow, the Lexington Institute

THE WAR AGAINST EXCELLENCE: The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America's Middle Schools, by Cheri Pierson Yecke; Praeger Publishers, $49.95.

What parent hasn't wondered what strange force takes possession of their children when they leave the happy days of elementary school and enter the three-year abyss known as middle school?

Suddenly the child who has seemed so eager to learn turns sullen, even rebellious. Grades plummet.

The bright promise a child had exhibited in elementary school fades, to be replaced by a parent's desperation just to see this kid through to becoming, somehow, a high school freshman.

Many have ascribed the intellectual slump to raging hormones. To be sure, these are the awkward years more than the wonder years.

But now critics are beginning to ask whether the middle schools are helping or hurting adolescents as they pass through this grade 6-8 Bermuda Triangle that was supposed to smooth troubled waters.

THE LOFTY RAND Corporation even issued a recent study calling into question the wisdom of stand-alone middle schools. "It turns out the onset of puberty is really a bad reason to move kids to another structure and to another school altogether," said one of the authors. Baltimore and a few other urban school systems have begun returning to traditional K-8 schools.

Cheri Yecke goes more directly than establishment critics dare to what she considers the heart of the middle-school malaise.

In this meticulously researched book, the Minnesota education commissioner (and former Virginia education reformer) assails a radical middle-school movement that, over the past three decades, has deliberately targeted for extinction individualism and the concept of gifted education. The movement's gurus have sought to eliminate all forms of ability-grouping while wholeheartedly embracing so-called cooperative education and peer tutoring.

Translated from educationese, peer tutoring means kids teach kids.

More specifically, gifted children are called on to exercise a presumed moral responsibility to help slower students catch up to where the whole class is supposed to be. Instead of going as far and as swiftly as their potential will carry them, gifted students are enlisted to be junior teachers. Ms. Yecke identifies this as education's Robin Hood syndrome.

COOPERATIVE learning entails children working in groups. Gung-ho advocates see this as necessary to the construction of a just social order with equal outcomes for all, and group rights exalted over the individual.

In practice, working in groups usually means the smart kids do most of the work and others share the credit. That's more Robin Hood, or "coercive egalitarianism" in the author's phrase.

As an outraged parent and an award-winning teacher, Cheri Yecke was one of the most effective citizen-activists in Virginia a decade ago when the education establishment was pushing a leveling scheme called Outcome-Based Education.

Now - after earning her education doctorate, serving as Deputy Secretary of Education in the Gilmore administration, shaping public-school choice and teacher-quality policies in the U.S. Department of Education, and returning to her native Minnesota to lead the state's effort to inject academic rigor into its education standards - she is herself an insider. But as this book shows, she continues to be a courageous and well-informed critic of the government system's failings.

Her many Virginia fans will love this book. Many education insiders will hate it. But it's hard to see how they can quibble with the depth of her research, even if they object to her conclusions.

Amazon.com
January 2004
Review by Henry T. Edmondson III, Ph.D.

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Professor, Department of Government
Director, European Government and Culture Study Abroad
Georgia College & State University
Augusta, Georgia

Cheri Yecke's explanation of the rise of mediocrity in American education is intelligent, informed, and important. The mess of American education is a kind of Gorgian knot; even well-meaning reformers often don't know where to concentrate their efforts. Yecke's explanation of the philosophical weakness of middle school identifies one of the most important strands in that intimidating knot. She will undoubtedly be criticized for her efforts: the resistance to meaningful school reform is seldom fought over "what's best for the kids"--it is most frequently a fierce battle to preserve power, turf and careers. She has made a strategic and courageous foray into occupied land on behalf of the captives: our students.

Townhall.com Book Club
January 2004

The War Against Excellence
Cheri Pierson Yecke, Praeger Publishers, 2003

Review by Jonathan Butcher
http://www.townhall.com/bookclub/yecke.html

Some stories are born in an author's imagination, nurtured by creativity, and told after a spark of inspiration. Some stories are a matter of tradition, and their legend grows with each retelling--thereby preserving a culture. And some stories are based on fact, but embellished in their composition in order to exaggerate a condition, something contemporary man calls "news."

Cheri Pierson Yecke's The War Against Excellence is none of these. The War Against Excellence is so meticulously researched and well-documented, so thoroughly explained and rich with supporting evidence that it could only have come from witnessing a set of events over and over again until an appalling scene became etched in the author's mind. The circumstances were so bleak, the opposition so entrenched in falsehood that the argument described in this book must have gnawed at the writer until nothing else could be accomplished--almost all other concerns became peripheral--until it was put to paper. In her introduction, Yecke says, "To put it simply, this is a story that has to be told."

In this book, Yecke, Minnesota's Commissioner of Education, comprehensively relates the history of American middle schools, focusing on a reform movement dedicated to egalitarianism that took shape in the middle of the 20th century. As part of this movement, a body of research and literature grew around the ideas that 1) middle school students cannot learn challenging material, 2) treating students differently based on skill level is harmful, and 3) middle schools should be used to conduct social experiments. The National Middle School Association, founded in 1973, embraced these ideas and led a movement to make all students equal through the suppression of excellent students.

This, says Yecke, is unethical. "Public schools were never meant to be the vehicle for massive social experiments aimed at achieving the questionable utopian goals of an elite few," she says.

Clearly the most destructive and widely-practiced method to accomplish these ends is what Yecke calls "heterogeneous grouping." Here students within classes are broken into groups and given assignments. The groups intermingle talented students with students who, though capable, either do not apply themselves to the same degree or do not grasp concepts as quickly. The result is that gifted students who already understand the material are not challenged by the content, thereby preventing their advancement and attenuating their ability to perform. The students who do not grasp the material do not participate as much in the project at hand, convinced that the talented students can do the work quicker and more completely; these non-participants, who are in need of the practice, then fall further behind their peers. Yecke explains how this process also takes place through peer tutoring and cooperative learning (similar to heterogeneous grouping).

Thus, in an attempt to treat all students equally, proponents of egalitarianism and "heterogeneous grouping" successfully restrain talented students, preventing their success, and completely alienate the perfectly capable students who simply take longer to grasp the same concepts.

"Amazingly, their message is that high ability students should succumb to peer pressure and strive not to achieve, or they will risk making their classmates look bad--and their actions might even go so far as to force these non-motivated students to work harder!" Yecke says.

In her final chapter, "Implications for the 21st Century," a perceptive analysis of the implications of the middle school movement, Yecke argues that the movement's core values are un-American. "American values such as rewarding individual effort, honoring individual achievement, and promoting healthy competition have given way to a capricious smorgasbord of liberal ideas that undermine...traditional values in many of our schools." She goes on to say, "Beliefs driving radical equity include the leveling of achievement and the desire for equality of outcomes. This is in stark contrast with the premise underlying our nation's founding principles."

The middle school reform movement has sabotaged America's schools, and this intellectual genocide needs to be stopped. In one sense, while middle school reformers have not made all students equal, they have given all students subject to their poisonous methods something in common: none can achieve their full potential.

Jonathan Butcher is a Research Assistant in Domestic Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

The Education Gadfly
January 15, 2004

The War Against Excellence
Cheri Pierson Yecke, Praeger Publishers, 2003
Review by Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Cheri Pierson Yecke, Minnesota's gutsy and embattled education commissioner, authored this superb new book, which expertly fingers-and analyzes and explains-two major perpetrators of the theft of excellence from American K-12 education over the past several decades: the "middle school movement" as it has evolved, and the education system's inattention-morphing-into-hostility toward the distinctive needs of gifted/talented youngsters, PARTICULARLY in the middle schools.

As is normally the case, both problems began as well-meaning impulses. The middle school was an effort to do right by early-adolescent youngsters by placing them in educational environments that would be sensitive to their developmental and social needs and (in contrast to traditional junior high-schools) would focus on "teaching the child, not the subject." Neglect of giftedness arose from our obsession with equality, a concern that special treatment of uncommonly able kids is elitist, and the view that resources should be concentrated on youngsters who need to catch up rather than those who are already doing okay in school.

As with so many good intentions, however, these went badly awry and turned into a profound anti-intellectualism that is undoubtedly a major cause both of the well-known fall-off in U.S. pupil achievement after fourth grade and of our spotty record in nurturing tomorrow's leaders, particularly those from less-than-privileged circumstances. (The well-to-do's capacity to purchase better schooling for their children includes myriad opportunities to hone and enrich the minds of uncommonly bright youngsters living in their homes.)

You should definitely read this book, which can be termed a bargain (despite its hard-back price tag) because it tackles TWO big education problems while clearly showing the links between them. The ISBN is 0275981169.

Education Week - State Journal
Troubling Trends
December 3, 2003

Mediocrity rules the classrooms of U.S. middle schools. Academic competition is discouraged. The curriculum is watered down, and academic expectations are low.

Those are the troubling trends in middle school education described in no- punches-pulled fashion by Minnesota's education chief, Cheri Pierson Yecke, in her new book, The War Against Excellence: The Rising Tide of Mediocrity in America's Middle Schools.

Drawing on her experience as an award-winning middle and high school teacher, a state education official, and a director of teacher quality and public school choice for the U.S. Department of Education, Ms. Yecke contends that the move away from excellence in most middle school classrooms began in the 1980s. That was when, she writes, that grouping of children by ability began to be discouraged and was replaced with "'cooperative learning,' where a few students do all the work and everyone shared the grade."

Today's nationwide movement for standards and accountability offers hope for reversing the problems plaguing middle schools, she argues.

The book is published in hardcover by Praeger Publishers.

Though its bound to make waves in the education world, Ms. Yecke argues that the problems the book details are not new.

Respected scholars began documenting the move away from excellence in middle schools by the early 1990s, she said, but their warnings were largely ignored until American middle school students performed poorly on an international achievement test in 1995 and again in 1999.

The Third International Mathematics and Science Study, showed American students were holding their own against students from 41 countries in 4th grade in science and math performance, but lagging seriously by the time they reached 8th and 9th grade.

Ms. Yecke said she spent seven years researching and writing the book, mainly in an effort to understand how to better meet the needs of academically gifted middle school students.

"As a mother and a middle school teacher," Ms. Yecke says in a statement, "I had experienced firsthand the frustrations of trying to meet the intellectual needs of all children, especially those of high ability with strong motivation at the middle school level."
-Darcia Harris Bowman