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An Interview with Harold 'Doc' Howe II: 'Stirring the Pot' By Mark F. Goldberg A former U.S. commissioner of education, vice president of the Ford Foundation, and senior lecturer at Harvard tells Mr. Goldberg about his current interests and concerns related to improving society in general and schooling in particular.

AT AGE 82, Harold "Doc" Howe II -- commissioner of education under Lyndon Johnson during the high point of school desegregation and later vice president of the Ford Foundation -- continues to promote excellence in education, to write for education journals, and to worry about the damaging influence of the standards and testing movement on the opportunities of America's underclass and minorities.

Howe was a child of some privilege. His father was an all-American quarterback at Yale who held religious and academic positions throughout his career. But young Harold also experienced many of the difficulties of American life as a result of family and historical circumstances. For 10 years during the Great Depression and into World War II, Howe's father was the president of Hampton Institute (today Hampton University), a black college in Virginia. Harold attended public school in Hampton for two years, which introduced him to "the South in its segregated condition and probably influenced things I did later in my life."

After a solid secondary education at the Taft School, undergraduate studies at Yale University, and a brief teaching career interrupted by the onset of war, Howe served in the navy from 1942 to 1945 as the captain of a minesweeper. Today, helicopters do naval minesweeping, but at that time the work on a minesweeper was "dull, dirty, and dangerous. Many of the things that had to be done were tough because the ships were frequently exposed to damage and people were being killed." By the end of the war, Howe had commanded missions in both the Atlantic and the Pacific, had experienced disasters at sea from explosions and hurricanes, and had learned some important lessons about leadership.

Howe's understanding of leadership came not by training but by "trial and error, particularly in some very dangerous and difficult assignments toward the end of the war." Howe learned that "leadership works best and your crew will perform better if everyone knows why they're being asked to do things and not when they're told, 'Just do it. Don't ask questions. I'm the boss.'" Howe is convinced to this day that, no matter whether you are sweeping mines or trying to improve schools, "success is best achieved through working closely with the crew or teachers -- and not by orders from above."

After he left the navy, Howe and his young wife Priscilla lived in New York while Howe got an M.A. in history from Columbia University. From 1947 to 1965, Howe held a number of jobs in both private and public educational institutions. At Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, "I learned how to teach, mostly from association with another teacher, Leonard James. He was a demanding person, but kids liked him. He taught me how to avoid telling things, but rather how to raise questions and get kids interested in figuring out what the answers might be." James also taught Howe to fashion test questions that "challenged students to interpret their studies with great subtlety."

By 1950, Howe had become the principal of the public combined junior/senior high school in Andover, and here, "I found my way into understanding the human relationships of a school. Instinctively, I followed what I had learned as a naval captain." With this approach, he was able to gain the support of the faculty and to help move the school forward.

In Cincinnati, as principal of Walnut Hills High School -- a special school much like Boston Latin School or Bronx High School of Science -- Howe entered the "wider world of education." He not only ran this school but also began to serve on national committees and to ally himself with education organizations. Advanced Placement (AP) was just coming into being, and Howe worked with people at the Educational Testing Service and the College Board, some of them Yale or Andover connections. "Many people were critical of AP at that time, particularly colleges. I helped the College Board sell the program around the country, and I got a sense of the relationships between the public schools and colleges and universities." Howe also met a lot of people with whom he would work later in his career.

The principalship at Newton High School in Massachusetts gave Doc Howe the opportunity to make structural changes in a school and to experience firsthand "the inventiveness that could be brought to the factory-system school." He found an impersonal 3,200-student school in which "average" students received limited attention. With much cooperation from the staff, the community, and the school board, Howe introduced the House Plan, a system in which several small "houses" are created within the larger school. With some Ford Foundation help, Howe helped the staff at Newton High to "develop a schedule where some classes were lectures, some seminars, and some tutorials." In his next position as superintendent of schools in Scarsdale, New York, Howe inherited an excellent system in which the job was largely to continue what was going on. Even there, he "managed to stir the pot by having Scarsdale kids come in contact with kids very different from themselves."

In 1964, Howe accepted a post as director of the Learning Institute of North Carolina. Gov. Terry Sanford, arguably the most progressive governor in the South at that time, chaired the Institute board and helped direct its mission, which embraced everything from the reform and renewal of North Carolina's schools, to research on what was and was not working, to determining how the schools could be made more equitable in light of the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. This job, more than any other, prepared Howe for his work in Washington. "I gathered a lot of experience dealing with Southerners, poor kids, politicians, the legislature, and people in the power system in North Carolina. I came to Washington with this background."

In late 1965, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Howe as U.S. commissioner of education. At that time the Office of Education was part of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW). John Gardner, an old friend from Scarsdale, headed HEW. "The biggest issue in my three years as U.S. commissioner was the whole national furor about school desegregation." Of course, there were other problems and responsibilities in the Office of Education, ranging from establishing a good relationship between the federal government, the states, and the schools to enlarging the department by hiring competent people to help translate the new education laws enacted by the Congress into local action in the schools. Howe also strongly supported the Children's Television Workshop, a private, nonprofit agency in need of federal funds. But desegregation was the elephant in the room almost all the time during Howe's first two years in office and a fair amount of the time in his third year.

The issue was fairly simple, but the solutions were political dynamite, especially in the South. "The 1964 Civil Rights Act said nobody gets federal money for a discriminatory activity, and the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act said to 15,000 school districts in the United States that we have a lot of money to give you. Here I was blocking the money until a district stopped discriminating. In much of the South, the schools were still formally segregated. I had to set up rules and regulations for getting the schools desegregated -- something no one knew how to do." This was very serious and highly charged business. When Richard Nixon spoke in the South in the fall of 1968 in his bid for the Presidency, the opening line of most speeches was a promise to fire Harold Howe. There was more than one congressional resolution calling for Howe's resignation on the ground that he was moving far too fast. Some people even suggested that Howe was a Communist.

All the elements of Howe's career came together to support him. He was by this time a trustee at Yale, Vassar, and the College Board. Doc Howe had made a lot of resourceful friends over the years who were in a position to help him. For instance, Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame, arranged an honorary degree for Howe. It was hard to argue that Howe was evil or anti-American when a front-page story in the Washington Post stated that one of the nation's great universities had just honored him as a man of unquestioned dignity and patriotism. "I never made use of my connections in any direct way, but they were there, they gave me credibility, and they helped."

Howe and his Office of Education staff drew up the "guidelines" that were required for school desegregation. The courts and the justice department reviewed everything he did, but in the end it was his department that was charged with "getting the schools desegregated in order to receive federal money." Howe would promulgate the rules, and the elected representatives and governors from the southern states would "yell and contact the President." Many of these people had great political influence, easy access to the President, and sometimes were even close personal friends of Lyndon Johnson. "I had numerous conversations with President Johnson and members of his staff, particularly Joseph Califano, about this. Of course, there were also people from the Justice Department present." The Supreme Court had stated in the 1954 Brown decision that segregated schools should be desegregated with "all deliberate speed," a phrase that everyone had strong feelings about but that no one could properly define. "A war of words and political squabbles resulted."

Lyndon Johnson was in a very difficult position. Someone like Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia would put pressure on the President. Johnson would phone Howe and tell him to go talk to Russell, to explain the rules to him, and to help him understand what needed to be done under the new law. The President consistently supported Howe, although in the beginning it was "reluctant support. In the end Johnson supported the new law and required his southern friends to go along or to lose the federal funds. This was very tough for Johnson, and I admired what he did. He became a genuine enthusiast about poor people and black people."

Howe left Washington at the end of 1968, spent two years in India as a program officer for the Ford Foundation, and then began an 11-year career in 1971 as the Ford Foundation's vice president for education and public policy. He quickly realized that he had to focus on a very few significant issues if he was going to have any real impact on educational and social concerns. Two issues had special appeal for Howe: the education of minority students and the status of women in American society.

With some difficulty, Howe was able to convince the Ford trustees and Ford president McGeorge Bundy to spend $100 million over several years to improve education in black colleges and to support black and Hispanic doctoral students. Half of the money was spent on faculty development at black colleges, and the other half was devoted to locating and supporting promising black and Hispanic graduate students. The black college development program had modest success, but "the program to support minority doctoral candidates was extremely successful. We almost doubled the number of minority doctoral students at high-powered universities."

The women's issue was dealt with creatively and effectively. Ford's trustees agreed that they had neglected women and set up a committee chaired by Howe to study solutions. Instead of setting aside a modest sum of money for women's projects, the committee recommended that women's concerns be included in every grant Ford made. "Every division in the Ford Foundation was told that, whatever you do, the interests of women are involved, and you must include women's concerns in your grant as well as raise questions related to women." This decision had real teeth. If an organization applied for a grant, it was asked if it had women on the board. If the answer was no, "they didn't get the money." Groups applying to Ford soon learned that including women's concerns and placing women in positions of real authority was a sine qua non for success at the foundation.

Over the years at Ford, Howe was able to play an important role in a public policy committee that steered some money to deserving proposals that came in from the outside. Howe and others had noticed that each year several very good unsolicited requests went unfunded. The new policy was "resented by some of the staff members," who preferred to fund ideas they generated, but the overall result was that many small, quite worthwhile grants were made to education and other public organizations that would not have been made without this new policy and committee. Howe also backed the foundation's substantial efforts to improve the fairness of school funding, particularly in areas serving poor families. Such accomplishments as these made the years at Ford among the most fulfilling in Doc Howe's long career. The time at the Ford Foundation had almost none of the terrible tensions Howe experienced in Washington. "I just had a grand time at Ford. I loved it."

From 1982 to 1994, Howe served as a senior lecturer in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. During those years and now in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he lives with his wife, Doc Howe has continued to express his strong feelings about such topics as poverty, social equity, testing, and teacher training. Poverty is one issue that Howe feels is not understood well by people in this country. "The old-fashioned view of poverty is that you're poor because you are lazy or stupid or alcoholic. It's your fault. The more modern view is that most of poverty is the result of factors outside of your control, and society has an obligation to deal with that situation." An obvious example is that a child born into extreme poverty is "simply stuck with it, willy-nilly, no fault of the child's."

Poverty, of course, limits what young people learn. Middle-class and upper-middle-class youngsters go to libraries and museums, travel to distant places, and generally absorb the attitude that they can and should learn and be successful. In addition, they go to schools that are reasonably well funded and staffed by good teachers who want to be in them. "Poor kids often get lousy schooling in school, and their 'schooling' outside of school is also poor, so they really do not have a fair opportunity. There is no level playing field, as the saying goes." Howe's statement and beliefs are informed by considerable background. From 1984 to 1988, he spent substantial time studying the lives of poor children, first as co-chair (with Marian Wright Edelman) of a commission appointed by the National Coalition of Advocates for Children and later as chair of a commission funded by the William T. Grant Foundation. The first commission issued a publication in 1985 titled Barriers to Excellence: Our Children at Risk. The second commission, one of whose members was Hillary Rodham Clinton, then an attorney and the wife of the governor of Arkansas, issued a 1988 publication titled The Forgotten Half.

Doc Howe is convinced that most school reform efforts aimed at children in poverty are far too narrow and that much more money and effort should be directed toward providing poor children with the opportunities both outside of and inside school that they do not get today. "Poor parents need to be educated and helped, so they can do what middle-class parents do; poor children need more contact with committed adults who like them and whom they like; poor communities need to be provided with whatever it takes to educate their children in school and outside of school." Long ago, the evidence was in that success in school correlates very highly with family income, education, and social class. Poor children must be provided with at least some of the advantages that flow to middle-class children from these factors.

The current movement for standards and testing is much on Howe's mind. He knows that standardized tests gauge a very narrow band of learning, that they often do not cover the materials and information most commonly taught because those questions do not help to discriminate among test-takers, and that their accuracy is frequently called into question. Even if the standards were important and the tests highly accurate, Howe would still consider them destructive. "You test kids who have poor lives and inadequate schooling, flunk them, and say they didn't meet the standards. You must first improve their lives and schooling and then give the test." Howe is also convinced that standards and tests force teachers to spend a great deal of time teaching students how to take tests and getting them prepared for the very narrow information on the tests. "That reinforces the old factory-model school and defeats many new and valuable ideas in education because there is little time to implement them."

Teacher training is another serious interest of Doc Howe's. First, he makes the point that excellent, experienced teachers "need to control the teacher preparation programs in this country." Otherwise, the programs often veer too far from the reality of the schools. Second, Howe is convinced that we need to follow the medical model for the teacher internship. The internship should be a full year, very hard and demanding, but well supervised. "Teachers currently go through a very slim, inadequate student teaching experience, perhaps doing some observing or some practice teaching under light supervision. What's needed is a serious internship year with payment for people who do the supervision and payment to the intern, perhaps two-thirds of the starting teacher salary. It's expensive, but it would make all the difference in the world."

Harold Howe II has been active in education for more than 50 years and shows no sign of slowing his interest or his pace. A tall, slim man, he has the same craggy good looks and tousled hair he had years ago. He walks with the slightest stoop, but with the grace and definition of the former athlete who pursued ice hockey, mountain climbing, and other vigorous sports. He continues to publish everywhere, from Education Week to the letters sections of the New York Times and the Kappan; to read education journals and newsletters; to stay in touch with old friends, former students, and educators; and to care deeply about children, their schooling, and their nonschool lives. When he pauses for a moment and says thoughtfully, "I think the economic division in society is rapidly becoming the most divisive force of all," it is clear that this deeply generous and caring man is not flagging in his resolve to do what he can to be part of the national conversation about improving society in general and schooling in particular.

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