NEW FACULTY

Heinrich (Rick) Mintrop

Rick Mintrop wasn’t planning to move to the United States when he came from his native Germany to the Bay Area in 1981 to study English in a summer school program. “I hadn’t realized that higher education costs money here,” Mintrop recalled. “In Germany it’s free, and I arrived in San Francisco to enroll at USF with no funds. They wouldn’t admit me, so I ended up studying at an adult school in Oakland and liked it here. After six weeks, I wasn’t ready to leave. After two months, I still wasn’t ready. I just stayed.”

Mintrop went on to teach social studies at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in the largely African-American Bayview section of San Francisco, a huge change from the Berlin school where he’d been an instructor. “My partner was African American and I had a cultural interpreter in him,” Mintrop said. “We also had a session at school I called ‘Teach the Teach’ where the kids taught me to understand their dialect.”

In 1990 he entered graduate school in education at Stanford. “I knew nothing about graduate study in the U.S.,” said Mintrop. “In Europe, graduate school means reading interesting books and discussing them at night in cafes with other students while you slowly get drunk. In graduate school in the U.S., I really had to work as I never had before as a student.”

He also found a unique research opportunity. “The Berlin Wall had just come down and my advisor had a grant to study change in East German schools,” Mintrop said. “I went back to Germany to do research for my doctorate, testing out my hypothesis that the educational system would be conservative—it would react slowly to social change.”

Did his theory prove true?

“Only in some respects,” Mintrop remarked. “East Germany had untracked secondary schools . That changed overnight, and teachers adjusted quickly with almost no reflection on the process. The schools also quickly jettisoned the Marxist-Leninist dogma. Teachers who had been telling students that Bismarck was the founder of German imperialism one year were teaching that he was the founder of modern Germany the next year. But student-centered pedagogy was much harder to implement.”

Mintrop has gone on since his Ph.D. to teach classes on comparative education, school improvement, school accountability, and educational leadership at the University of Maryland and at UCLA. In Los Angeles he taught in the Principal Leadership Institute (PLI), a program parallel in many respects to Berkeley’s PLI, where Mintrop is now an associate professor.
His research on school change led to the publication in 2004 of his second book, Schools on Probation: How Accountability Works (and Doesn’t Work) from Teachers College Press. Jeannie Oakes has said of the book, “With a clear argument, solid empirical evidence, and compelling stories, Rick Mintrop reveals that the current accountability emperor has no clothes.”

Mintrop’s latest endeavors continue his interest in school reform. “I’m trying to set up ways of connecting assistance to low-performing schools through university and district partnerships with research and leadership programs that train leaders who are knowledgeable about how to turn low-performing schools around.”

Mintrop sees institutions such as Berkeley playing an important role in legitimizing the piece of school reform not measured by test-driven strategies such as No Child Left Behind and the California School Accountability System. “It’s crucial to create schools that maintain a focus on student engagement, cultural relevance, and democracy—schools that help to foster democratic citizenship while trying to make accountability a constructive endeavor,” he said. “To what degree can we, under current conditions, further those wider educational goals as well?”

return to BEL Spring 2005 contents

return to GSE publications