FEN: As an educator, what do you make of the presidential campaign so far?

TS: The focus heavily emphasizes early childhood and the early elementary grades. However, there's very little talk about the age group in which I have a particular interest, which is adolescents.

FEN: Why do you think that is?

TS: I think the problems facing adolescents are so politically dicey that the candidates stay away from them. Adolescents are both overgrown children and young adults. People who feel that adolescents are still children argue that we need to tell them what to do more, push them harder, test them until they beg for mercy. It's easy to say that we have to raise the bar, but it's much harder to ask, "What are we going to do -- practically -- to get the attention of these increasingly autonomous young adults?" No one wants to talk about that.

FEN: Have you heard any themes in the campaign that you don't like?

TS: The only thing that grates on me is the self-righteous talk about "getting tough." Everyone has to out-tough everyone else -- standards, discipline, and all that talk.

FEN: It's especially interesting when the "tough talk" comes from candidates who have little first-hand experience with public schools. Gore attended St. Albans, Bush went to Phillips Academy....

TS: It's always interesting to watch where wealthy political leaders send their kids. It would be an interesting exercise to take all the big-shot businessmen and governors that were at the Education Summit and find out where their kids go to school.

I was headmaster of an elite private school for nine years, and I observed close-hand how intensely caring rich folks are about their kids -- how much they respect the individuality of their kids, and how much they want them to be principled, self-starting young people. That's a long way from a standardized curriculum and paper and pencil tests.

It's not that the political leaders are attacking the issues that I'm talking about -- it's that they aren't tackling them at all. It's the silence that's troubling.

FEN: What silences do you mean?

TS: A serious discussion of the purposes of public education, which addresses the need for our young citizens to use their own minds. Democracy depends on people who think for themselves in a responsible and principled way. This doesn't fall nicely into a multiple-choice test and it doesn't fit with a conception of education as a kind of gasoline pump where you stick the nozzle in the kids' ear and you pour stuff in. That metaphor still dominates the way that political leaders express education.

FEN: The candidates -- Gore and Bradley in particular -- have proposals that would encourage more people to go into the teaching profession (forgiving student loans, for example). Would such programs help increase the ranks of high-quality teachers?

TS: I think those proposals are missing the point. In raw numbers, the U.S. produces more certified teachers than it hires every year. The real problem is that up to half of those beginning teachers are out of the system inside of five years.

FEN: Why is the turnover so high?

TS: There are two very clear answers to that. One is that teaching is not competitive financially. This can be solved. The harder one is that the conditions of work are not conducive to serious teaching. Let's say that you're an English teacher in your first year of teaching. You may have to get to know about 220 kids your first year. If you want the kids to write well, you're going to have to read each paper and comment on it. If you spend just 10 minutes per week outside of class grading the papers, you've added 20 hours to the workweek. The arithmetic says it all -- you can't do the job well. So, many people with pride in their work leave! You don't hear the candidates talking about that.

FEN: That's interesting because -- while the candidates have detailed proposals about how they're going to tackle the "teacher crisis" -- the "turnover" issue hasn't been addressed. Why not?

TS: My experience is that these people aren't stupid. They just realize that acknowledging the reality would be so politically painful that it's wiser to be quiet. That's what's troubling to me, the gutless quality of some of the discussion's about education.

FEN: What can you say to a parent who cares about education but feels disconnected from politics?

TS: I would suggest that every parent, grandparent, or concerned citizen should take the time to shadow a child through middle- or high-school for a day or two. When you do everything that a kid does in a typical, well-intentioned high school, you end up radicalized. You realize that the very way that we operate schools militates against the good intentions of both the teachers and the kids. You can't teach 150 kids well at once; you can't learn well in 47-minute snippets; you don't learn well when the curriculum is so sweeping that you don't have time to really understand anything. A world history course covering Cleopatra to Clinton -- it's bizarre! What we need are concerned citizens who are informed about what good people are doing in a system that is no longer defendable.

Interview by Michael Smith