Recipe for an education best seller by Victor Sensenig

Best sellers about education, roughly defined as books that break onto the charts of such arbiters as Amazon and the New York Times, often share key ingredients. The most fundamental ingredient is the exploitation of the basic American assumption that all complex problems have simple solutions. The title is often the place to make this promise that a desirable capability can be acquired or complex educational problem can be addressed through the straightforward regimen offered in the book’s pages.

For example, according to Doug Lemov’s 2010 best seller Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques that Put Students on the Path to College, academic achievement can be raised through better teaching, and the book offers a taxonomy for becoming a better teacher by cultivating of series of classroom management techniques. Charles Murray liberally applies this ingredient in his 2008 book Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality. Presumably, one can sell even more books by both expanding the scope of the educational problem – in this case, the tragic alienation of America’s Schools and Reality – and making the solutions simpler and fewer. In Murray’s case, though, another strategy may be at work. His solutions are simplistic, such as limiting the number of people who go to college, but they are also engineered to provoke people rather than address real educational concerns.

The American appetite for simple solutions extends to parenting, and a spate of recent books are premised on the idea that American parents are doing it all wrong. Last year, Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother trumpeted “the Chinese way,” in which parents insist that an A is the only acceptable grade, children are drilled in math and piano for hours every day, and TV is verboten. This year, the French offer the best formula for producing a perfect child in Pamela Druckerman’s Bringing Up Bébé. Druckerman sees French parents as offering a more palatable alternative to American indulgence by, for example, not permitting all-day snacking or the interruption of adult conversation.

Chua is ruthless in her depiction of “loser” children and the “loser” parents who raise, or at least beget, them. While Druckerman’s tone is more measured, both books propose to fix a broken American institution by substituting a superior cultural model. But these books use another very potent technique. They are calculated to stir middle-class parental anxiety, inviting parents to wonder whether the under-achieving, ill-mannered American children who serve as the foils in these books possibly be their own. Simple fixes to the educational challenges of parenting and schooling become more attractive when the fear of failure is increased.

Peg Tyre’s recent book The Good School: How Smart Parents Get Their Kids the Education They Deserve effectively summarizes some important educational research in making the case for certain reforms, but it also makes use of the anxiety-inducing techniques of Chua and Druckerman, if much more subtly. Tyre describes her book as compiling the knowledge that parents need to be “winners” in a new free market landscape of education, where increasing choice has raised the stakes. Parents know that landing their children in the middle class isn’t guaranteed and that a hands-on approach to schooling is required. According to Tyre, this hands-on approach must begin with the preschool decision.

She starts the book by depicting a cultural scene that will be familiar to some of her readers, but completely alien to others. This is the world of preschool admissions consultants, charging up to $12,000, and exclusive, sought-after programs. In describing this world, Tyre acknowledges the “cartoonish” nature of preschool as a competitive sport. “Even well-grounded parents can get sucked into the madness that surrounds landing a spot in an affordable, high-quality preschool for their child” (p. 24), she writes.

But the book makes calculated use of this madness. Tyre goes on to argue that although there are excesses, these super-parents are on to something important, the fact that “preschools are not created equal” (p. 25). In fact, she says, the preschool decision has ramifications for the rest of your child’s life. The next few pages are all about how to be choosey, and Tyre gives tips on creating a good preschool “shortlist.” The rhetorical sleight of hand here is to depict irrational anxiety but then capitalize on the remaining traces of that anxiety. We get a good chuckle about the preschool rat race but remain uneasy. It’s hard for readers to forget the reminder that a lot people are working harder and doing better for their children, getting ahead in lines that some of us don’t even know exist. Ultimately, we are distracted from considering a more important question – how to ensure high quality early education for all.

This is not to argue that being a best seller makes a book suspect, but I think stoking anxiety and then providing simplistic solutions is suspect. I’m not convinced that reforms driven by anxiety can create more healthy and happy home and school environments for children.