One-on-One
name: John Merrow, Ed.D.’73
where he grew up: On a farm in Noroton, Conn. (now part of Darien)
where he lives now: Palo Alto, Calif., and New York City (and in lots of not-five-star hotels and motels)
what he does: Founder, president, executive director, and host of Learning Matters, which produces The Merrow Report, a series of documentaries for PBS, NPR, and Frontline. (He’s also a NewsHour special correspondent.)
how to find him: Go to www.pbs.org/newshour/indepth_coverage/education/no_child. There you can watch all three segments on NCLB, listen to podcasts, and learn more about buying the DVD (as Merrow says, a steal at $8.95). You can also link to Learning Matters latest adventure — streaming the series on YouTube.
Why did you recently produce a three-part series on No Child Left Behind (NCLB)? We’ve done
more than a dozen previous pieces about aspects of the law. This time we decided to ask three questions that we didn’t see anyone else asking.What are the loopholes? What happens when a
school hits bottom five years in a row and is forced to restructure? And what is the law’s impact
on our nation’s best teachers?
Any surprises from the series? I was surprised by the depth of vehemence among teachers and delighted by their eloquence.
Any disappointments? The nearly total hostility of the education establishment in San Diego to two bad schools trying to go charter. It became clear that money and power trumped any concern about learning opportunities for those kids.
The series originally aired on TV, but viewers can now watch it online and listen to podcasts. Have these new technologies made it easier to tell your story? Increasingly so. We may also start a blog that will allow and invite viewers to get involved. This could be particularly relevant as we begin chronicling the adventures of two school leaders in serials on the NewsHour: Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Paul Vallas in the New Orleans Recovery School District.
What kind of feedback have you had from teachers since the series aired? Very, very positive.
Any less than positive? The hostile responses have some largely from college education types and from administrators who felt that our piece about loopholes talked down to them. They wrote to say, in effect, “We know, we know.” I find that fascinating. We also upset individuals with strong political views on both the left and the right. I had to smile when one viewer accused us of letting Karl Rove write our scripts and another viewer told us to watch our backs because Karl Rove and his thugs would be gunning for us. They saw the same report!
In doing this series, the one new thing about education that you learned was … I really did not grasp the extent of the loopholes and the lengths states go in order to avoid being labeled. My longtime colleague, John Tulenko, did superb research into this. He deserves the credit, not me.
If you were in charge, the one thing about NCLB you’d change is ... I believe we owe a debt to this law because it seems to have awakened many thoughtful people to the foolishness of letting the federal government run public education. I suspect that the long-term impact of NCLB will be the development of common standards and common tests, done by states working together. In that sense, President Bush is a lot like King George III. You may recall that the fractious colonies finally united against a common foe, George III, who was preoccupied with a foreign war. Our George (George II) and his education policies are a “common foe” for many in education policy at the state level who are united to develop common tests and common standards. And George II also has his own foreign war, unfortunately.
You were a teacher. Would you have stayed in the profession under NCLB? I cannot imagine teaching under NCLB, which seems to me to be fundamentally hostile to the profession. But NCLB is an extension of trends that began much earlier, a philosophy that would like schooling and curriculum to be “teacher-proof.”
About the Article
A version of this article originally appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of Ed., the magazine of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
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