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An Interview with Harold Hodgkinson: By Mark F. Goldberg Data really can clarify issues and help to predict the future, as evidenced by Mr. Hodgkinson's long and successful career. |
HAROLD Hodgkinson, since 1987 the director of the Center for Demographic Policy at the Institute for Educational Leadership in Washington, D.C., is the nation's leading educational demographer. Over the past 20 years, Hodgkinson has done 35 state demographic profiles on subjects ranging from special education to diversity, from Asian immigrants to Hispanics and secondary school principals. He has worked on assignments for 600 colleges and universities and dozens of public and private schools and school systems, in addition to federal agencies and such commercial organizations as Bank of America, IBM, the Association of American Publishers, and Hallmark.
The work that Hodgkinson does is scientific, statistical, and far more certain than subjective surveys, to be sure. However, it does not end with the numbers, tables, graphs, maps, and flow charts. "Basically, I present not just numbers, but what those numbers mean. That's been pretty successful. People actually change what they do based on what I've presented to them. I really live for that."
Harold Hodgkinson's predictions about the future, based on careful research, reveal some fascinating facts and trends. We have probably all read, for example, that early in the 21st century at least half of the public school students in the United States will be nonwhite. "But in Maine, that figure will be 9% and in California it will be 68%," Hodgkinson says.
With reasonable certainty, Hodgkinson can look 10 or 15 years out and say which students in which communities will do poorly on the new standardized tests. While some communities in California will struggle with youngsters who are just learning English and come from as many as a dozen foreign language backgrounds, in North Dakota the problem will hardly exist. Should states like Maine and North Dakota, then, pay little attention to the national trend toward growing diversity? "Their students are going to live in other places and must learn about diversity. North Dakota, for instance, has the highest percentage of youngsters graduating from high school and going on to college. They're not all going to live in North Dakota. Every year 43,000,000 Americans move, and a strong trend is to move out of the Northeast and the Midwest. North Dakotans will often move to areas where people have more skills than they do in how to live with people from different backgrounds."
From his early childhood in a small town outside of Minneapolis during the Depression, Hodgkinson was attracted to the idea of certainty. Young Harold's father was a physics teacher in a private school and often talked to him about the principles and facts that guided his field. As Hodgkinson grew through adolescence and young manhood, he was powerfully attracted to symmetry and relationships and data with predictive value. He loved the regularity of Mozart's music, heard frequently in his home on records and during rehearsals of his father's string quartet. He saw that "economists could not predict the next day's Dow Jones average, but demographers could predict 15 years out with great accuracy." Even in high school, his papers were about "showing that the ankle bone connected to the foot bone," analogous to the very sophisticated work he would do many years later showing the interrelationships among education, health care, housing, and transportation.
After completing his education at the University of Minnesota (B.A.), Wesleyan University (M.A.T.), and Harvard (Ph.D. in education and sociology), Hodgkinson accepted the challenge in 1958 to create the first School of Education at Simmons College. After four years as the dean, he left Simmons with "a thriving School of Education" to become dean of Bard College, at the time one of the most progressive colleges in the country. During his six years at Bard, Hodgkinson helped create a governance council of students, faculty, and administrators before such structures became a national trend in the very late Sixties. He left Bard in 1968 for the University of California at Berkeley to become the project director for the Center for Research and Development in Higher Education. In 1974 President Ford appointed Hodgkinson as the second director of the fledgling National Institute of Education (NIE).
The first director of the NIE, Tom Glennon -- "an able man and a wonderful person" -- had considerable conflict with Congress, and Hodgkinson's mandate was to place the agency on a solid budget footing so that its 450 employees could do their job of coordinating all federal research in education. With strong support from Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.), "I spent my first year cultivating the people in Congress who had the strongest negative feelings, particularly Sen. Warren Magnuson (D-Wash.), whom I got to know reasonably well and could work with." The budget was passed, and the agency continued its work.
After leaving the federal job in 1977 and working first independently and then as director of the American Management Association and president of the National Training Laboratories, Hodgkinson began his full-time work as a freelance demographer, always with some affiliation with a nonprofit institution to administer his grants. Much of his previous work involved demographic research, curriculum, and budget -- all areas that contributed to his understanding of educational issues and the limits of change based on anecdotal evidence. Hodgkinson understood how critical it was to know, with considerable precision, the ages of people in a state or an organization, how income was distributed, the absentee rates of a school, and numerous other features of a complex system that could reveal what was going on, what could be predicted, and what actions would likely ameliorate problems.
In an early study done for Clark Kerr at Berkeley in 1968-69, titled "Institutions in Transition," Hodgkinson was able "to document the changes that came about as a result of the student protest movement." Most Americans thought that the student movement was extremely active at a small number of universities that got considerable television time. In fact, Hodgkinson was able to show that higher education was in ferment virtually everywhere. "The state that had the highest percentage of campuses on which there were student protests was Iowa -- but Iowa rarely made the national news." When he studied the characteristics of the protesters, it became clear that this was a very eastern phenomenon. "You could almost pick the streets in New York where the protesters came from."
In a 1989 study called "The Same Client," Hodgkinson pointed out the relatedness of problems in health care, housing, transportation, and education. He demonstrated that these services "all related to the same people but typically were not coordinated." He was able to make recommendations for integration, particularly "in cities where this is most feasible," although many governors now ask agency heads to come together to share information and discuss coordination statewide.
In a study completed in 2000, titled "Secondary Schools in the New Millennium," Hodgkinson discovered that many of the casual predictions about the increase in students over the next decade were not accurate. The nation will not be awash in new students, and the distribution of new students will be extremely uneven. Only five states will "experience a 25% increase in students in the next decade, and nine states will have a decline." He also determined that none of the modest national increase will be distributed evenly in terms of "age or family wealth or race or anything else." There are 3,068 counties in the United States, for instance, but only 200 counties will handle virtually all the increase in diversity. Sixty percent of the increase will be Hispanic and Asian, and 43% of the Asians are currently in three cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York.
Obviously, it is of great help to have this sort of information when you plan anything -- from budget to curriculum to staffing. Hodgkinson finds that many places ask him to repeat his study "after about 10 years" to see if there are new trends developing. Sometimes very crucial but subtle issues emerge that a demographer can illuminate. An example is the persistent confusion of race and class, revealed across several studies over the years. "If you know household income and the education level of the parents in America, you can predict about 45% of the variation on the national assessment scores without knowing anything about race." On, say, eighth-grade math scores, "social class is twice as predictive of variation as race is." Twenty-five percent of black households have an income higher than the national white average. There are places all over America in which black and Asian and white people live in great harmony, "but there are virtually no places where rich and poor people live together on the same street. Much of what we think of as poor race relations really stems from the fact that many blacks have been poor for so long. When blacks become educated, they get on the same escalator as everybody else."
For more than 40 years, Hodgkinson has confronted problems of education in public and private settings from preschool to graduate school, puzzling out the roles of everything from ethnic diversity and patterns of absenteeism to budget, health, and housing. When asked to speak about what should be on the national education agenda, he comes up with four large concerns: shifting views on standards and assessment; the home backgrounds of young people in light of demographic changes in the past three decades; curriculum, particularly as it relates to being a citizen in a diverse country and world; and leadership, especially the misleading notion of monolithic leadership.
The standards movement, given its initial impetus in A Nation at Risk in 1983, may not be the best solution for this time. Because of the enormous variation in school readiness, particularly among younger students, "this is the worst time to have a homogenized system. We have more diversity in the country now by race, ethnicity, income, parents' education, and other factors than we've had for many years." Teachers deal with many transient students as well as students from diverse backgrounds, and they need ways to tailor work to student needs rather than to expect everyone to know or do the same things.
Ironically, A Nation at Risk expressed admiration for the Japanese system, which favors curriculum uniformity and standardized testing. Now that the Japanese economy has been suffering for over a decade, on a recent trip to Japan Hodgkinson heard such remarks as "It's the schools that are responsible. We have to offer more alternatives and teach our youngsters to get along with other people." Just as Japan is trying to be more like the United States, we're trying to imitate Japan.
One can't help but notice that, in the most elite and successful private and public schools in America, "instruction and assessment are the same process -- it's seamlessly built into the seminar system" -- and there are very few standardized tests. Not every school can afford small classes, but this is a system worth imitating as much as possible. Theodore Sizer, a founder of the Coalition of Essential Schools, favors having "students doing a variety of high-level rigorous things," and that doesn't go well with standardized tests. More and more people are beginning to worry about the standards movement, and Hodgkinson has felt in the last year that "there's a whole lot of push-back developing against national assessment as well as questions about whether any state is doing assessment well."
America is not the same country it was just a few decades ago, and "we've neglected taking a serious look at the kinds of homes and backgrounds children come from today." Many youngsters are raised in single-parent families, and many of those families are poor. Only one household in four even has a child in a public school, which may account, in part, for the lack of support for those schools. When you take a careful look at life outside the school, you discover some things that are disquieting but that can be addressed without great cost. "Homework is one good example. The poverty rates are as high in the rural areas as they are in the cities, and many disadvantaged youngsters in both areas have no quiet place to study or to spread out books or paper." The school could help students understand the value of homework as well as provide a place for them that is quiet and suitable -- "a library, a local club, or even empty rooms in the school after classes are over."
Hodgkinson and many other demographers and researchers are aware of the value of the preschool years for children of poverty. President Clinton's early years in Hope, Arkansas, were spent in a very modest home with a widowed, albeit attentive and ambitious, mother. "My guess is that Clinton, although poor, probably had a pretty good first five years." However, many poor children do not get the background at home that they need in order to be ready for school. The nation's governors are developing increasing interest in preschool programs for children in need, making it possible for them to "come to school knowing numbers and letters and how to deal with other people nonviolently." Hodgkinson believes that this form of early intervention "has more potential than anything else in education."
When Harold Hodgkinson talks about curriculum, he is more interested in extremely important goals and real learning than in an unvarying set of facts or materials to master. "We teach European history too much by dates, battles, and capital cities," he says. "What students need to do is learn just who lives in France and what the issues are in France. Perhaps using interactive computer programs to take kids on a tour of France would be more valuable than memorizing a lot of facts about France." The English curriculum is another good candidate for reform. There is room for a few common goals, such as "learning the language, learning how to spell words, learning what a noun is, and so forth." However, in a diverse democracy, while the skills of reading can be standard, the content should be highly diverse. "You need to know how to read and how to interpret what you read, but the core curriculum should be genre, not particular works. If you are teaching poetry, different students can read different poems."
The issues of diversity and living in a shrinking world come up again and again when Hodgkinson discusses curriculum. Hodgkinson's work as a demographer has illustrated to him how important it will be for today's youngsters to see themselves as world citizens. "We need to create some new basic skills in our schools. Interpersonal skills are going to be more important as we have contact with people of different backgrounds. We need to learn how to deal with people whose beliefs vary from ours -- who don't believe in the future as much as we do or who feel that the extended family is more important than the nuclear family." Recent work has convinced Hodgkinson that 21st-century citizens will regularly have contact with people of many different ethnicities and beliefs -- even that many Americans will live in other countries for a year or two.
Basically, Hodgkinson is convinced that "leadership is unpredictable. Nobody predicted that Winston Churchill would be a leader. He found himself in a situation where he had to perform in an extraordinary way, and he found that he had the capacity to do it in that particular situation." In education, we have many examples in which a superintendent is very successful in one district but fails in another. When Hodgkinson was in Berkeley more than 30 years ago, the schools were in a bad way. What was needed was a leader "who could come in, clean up the place, but not destroy the organization -- and that was Neal Sullivan, who did it very well." Sullivan was great at seeing the problems and acting on them, but his talent was not for preserving continuity and managing a stable system. The next superintendent, also quite good, had to soothe the staff, maintain the system, and keep everyone working hard.
Hodgkinson calls this "situational leadership" and believes that we need to "train people in what gifts they have for particular settings." When he was a dean, he was very successful with curriculum, but much less successful in dealing with students' personal problems. It's the fit between the personal talents and proclivities of a leader and the peculiar circumstances of an organization or a situation that determines success. In his work, Hodgkinson has learned that "every big city has a political fingerprint. We know that many things that work in Kansas City just won't work in St. Louis," and it takes the right leader to discern what will and will not work in a particular situation. Leaders generally have a sustaining interest in some issue or cause and find the right fit for their talents, "but leadership is something you ascribe to people after they've done it."
Numbers are nondebatable by nature, although how they are used and just what they mean are debatable issues. Hodgkinson knows several things about the data he accumulates.
First, if the information is presented properly, people will sit up and listen. Hodgkinson uses graphs, flow charts, maps, and humor to help audiences understand what he is presenting. Of course, there are certain statements that will make an audience pay attention. "Americans are 5% of the world's population and 21% of the world's prisoners."
Second, data have their limitations. "Most audiences today are 80% baby boomers. The average baby boomer has a one-in-four chance of living past 85. I don't know which audience members will make it -- and that's the limit of numbers."
Third, data really can clarify issues and help to predict the future, as evidenced by Hodgkinson's long and successful career. With total conviction, Hodgkinson declares, "I believe that the implications of demographics for education are enormous. You ignore this field at your peril."
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