Jay Greene Needs a Hobby

Jay’s got one of those names that pop up as regular as the sun shines when you read as much education material as I do. Perhaps best known for his 2005 book Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About Our Schools and Why it Isn't So, Greene's a naysayer, but a well-spoken one.

Last week Greene released his latest report through the Center for Civic Innovation and the Manhattan Institute. It’s not good. I don’t mean not good in the, “We’re out of beer? That’s not good!” sense, either. I mean it’s really...not....good. He takes a trend and tries to make it mean something, but it’s wasted effort that I think will be forgotten before July gets finished.

The gist is that Greene and a pair of graduate assistants studied the trends in naming schools in seven states over the past century, and there’s a lot less naming the school after a historical figure and a lot more naming the school after geography and cuddly animals. This is bad because,

“This shift from naming schools after people worthy of emulation to naming schools after hills, trees, or animals raises questions about the civic mission of public education and the role that school names may play in that mission.”

Wow. Greene’s argument is that by moving away from naming schools after great Americans we’re undermining the entire “civic mission” of schooling. He should get together with David Gelernter; they’d be BFFs.

He does have some fun stats, including:

• In Florida, there are 5 schools that honor George Washington and 11 named after Manatees.
  
• In the last 20 years a new school in Arizona is 50 times more likely to be named after a mesa or a cactus than a president.
  
• A majority of public school districts nationwide do not have a school named after a president.

Ponder that last bullet point for a moment, because that’s a classic example of how some of these think-tank guys overreach to try and prove their point. It sounds like it’s something, but consider—there’s thousands of school districts in the country that are composed of just a few schools. Here in Washington State the vast majority of districts are composed of 6 school buildings or less; is it really that surprising, then, that none of the buildings are named after a president? In the smaller towns the schools are typically named after the town; would it make sense for Asotin, for example, to be the home of Nixon Elementary, Van Beuren Middle, and Clinton High Schools?

This is one of those products that's mildly interesting and tangentially related to education. Meaningful, though? Meh.