[I am reposting since I just discovered that I put the wrong link in the original post. Sorry, Susan!]

Susan Ochshorn of ECE PolicyWorks and a new member of the board of the Network for Public educatio, writes here about two polar opposites: Deborah Meier and Eva Moskowitz.

Ochshorn compares the biographies, the lives, and the education philosophy of these two people.

She begins with Meier, an advovate, like Ochshorn, for children’s right to play:

“More than two decades ago, Deborah Meier warned that the idea of democracy was in peril. “Is it ever otherwise?” she asked in the preface to The Power of Their Ideas, her elegantly argued manifesto for public education. A self-described preacher on its behalf, she has spent half a century nurturing “everyone’s inalienable capacity to be an inventor, dreamer, and theorist—to count in the larger scheme of things.”

“I met Meier in the mid-aughts, when I joined a grassroots campaign she spearheaded in New York City to restore creative play and hands-on learning to preschools and kindergartens. This éminence grise of progressive early childhood education and the small-schools movement (for which she received a MacArthur fellowship in 1987) had begun her career as a kindergarten teacher at the Shoesmith School in Kenwood, a diverse neighborhood wedged between the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park and an impoverished black community.”

When she turns to Moskowitz, she sees a power-hungry woman who uses children for her own purposes.

“The Education of Eva Moskowitz” is a torturous read. After 359 pages of copious detail, an internal structure that defies chronology, zig-zagging across Moskowitz’s life, the evisceration of journalists, politicians and “union flacks,” as she refers to people and organizations fighting for social justice, and anyone else who has crossed her, my mind was numb. Not to mention her hubris, greed, narcissism, humorlessness and lack of self-awareness…

“His hypocrisy would have been comical if the fates of real children weren’t at stake,” Moskowitz writes of Mayor Bill de Blasio, her adversary in building an empire. Ah, yes, the children. “While it can be frustrating to teach them because they don’t know how to behave,” Moskowitz writes in a chapter called “Weevils” (an infestation she attributes to snacks from the Department of Education), “the upside is that they are virtually a blank slate…. if you take advantage of that fact to teach them to become good learners, that investment will pay dividends for years to come.”

“Apparently, Moskowitz isn’t aware that the tabula rasa theory of the English empiricist John Locke has been discredited by decades of neurological and developmental science. As Berkeley psychologist Alison Gopnik writes in The Philosophical Baby, “Their minds seem drastically limited; they know so much less than we do. And yet long before they can read and write, they have extraordinary powers of imagination and creativity, and long before they go to school, they have remarkable learning abilities.”

“Moskowitz and other charter network operators such as KIPP’s David Levin have cast their “No Excuses” schools in the mold of Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner, whose radical behaviorism ignores internal processes—thoughts, feelings, and neurophysiological processes—emphasizing the relationship between observable stimuli and responses. Through a process called operant conditioning, behavior is modified by positive and negative reinforcement. (See Pavlov and his dogs.)

“With harsh discipline, and incentives offered for good behavior and high scores on practice tests, Moskowitz remains convinced she can close the achievement gap between her students, the vast majority of whom are black or Latino living in poverty, and their more affluent, white peers. Her methods are abusive. Students’ every movement is monitored. Daydreaming is prohibited. Children are shamed, their lackluster performances on weekly spelling and math quizzes posted in a red zone on charts in the hallway.”

As we view these two, we see a struggle for the heart and soul of American education, or for the hearts and souls of our children. Big money is betting on Moskowitz. She is the darling of Wall Street, DFER, and other corporate titans. The survival of our democracy and humane ideals is riding on Meier’s vision.