Advocate of humanistic education dies at 78

Published 5:00 am Monday, September 19, 2011

Vito Perrone Sr., a leading advocate for humanistic, regimentation-free public education and a mentor to several generations of liberal reformers who fought the tide of standardized testing, died Aug. 24 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 78.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Sean.

Among progressive reformers, Perrone’s commitment to flexible teaching methods and his opposition to standardized tests made him the conscience of the profession in the modern era, when financially stressed schools nationwide embraced standardized tests as a way to improve academic performance and streamline the teaching process.

In Perrone’s view, which he disseminated for 40 years as a professor of education, first at the University of North Dakota and later at Harvard, the excessive use of such tests warped the education process, inhibited children’s natural interest in learning, caused teachers stress and prevented them from carrying out their real jobs: instilling in children a love of learning and teaching them the principles of citizenship in a democracy.

Though that view has been out of fashion in the mainstream of public education since the 1980s, Perrone’s persuasiveness attracted a stream of followers and helped give rise to a loose network of public alternative schools in New York, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia.

“Vito rallied the wing of the reform movement that was largely underrepresented in the ‘reform’ debate that you hear about today,” said Jay Featherstone, emeritus professor of education at Michigan State University. “But he kept the progressive vision alive. And he turned a generation of teachers into activists.”

Disciples

Among those who considered Perrone an inspiration was Jonathan Kozol, the educator and writer whose 1967 book, “Death at an Early Age,” ignited nationwide public outrage over classroom conditions in one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Another adherent was Deborah Meier, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner who founded the progressive East Park Secondary School in East Harlem and led the Mission Hill School in Boston.

In an interview Wednesday, Kozol said Perrone’s influence could be seen in the mounting opposition to the No Child Left Behind law, which has fueled widespread school standardization since it was signed by President George W. Bush in 2002.

“Deborah Meier and I heard it over and over again at the march on Washington last summer,” Kozol said, referring to the July “Save Our Schools” demonstration that drew about 5,000 teachers from around the country to demand increased financing for public schools and limits on standardized tests. “They were saying, ‘Where are the deans of education who will stand up for public education the way Vito Perrone did?’”

Perrone received national attention for a program he established at North Dakota to upgrade the education of the state’s primary and secondary school teachers, many of whom were graduates of two-year “normal schools” rather than four-year colleges. He invited the teachers to get their bachelor’s degrees at the university.

The success of the project, which brought North Dakota schools from near the bottom to near the top of national rankings, inspired Perrone to begin an even more ambitious project in 1972, the North Dakota Study Group on Evaluation.