SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B7
sion of “troubled youth” that Montessori
railed against at the dawn of the 20th century
in Italy persists well into the 21st century in
America. One 2020 report found that Ameri-
can public school students lost more than 11
million days of instruction to out-of-school
suspension in 2015-16, with Black and Latino
students disproportionately affected. And ev-
ery year, more than 100,000 students are
expelled — often to boot-camp-style schools
that serve more as holding pens than educa-
tional institutions.
We may not wholesale exclude or incarcer-
ate our least-privileged children, as they did
more than a century ago in Italy — but at times
we come close to it. We need a Montessori
revolution in this country, but one focused
broadly on reviving and extending the princi-
ples of inclusion, access and respect for all
children’s bodies and minds that defined Mon-
tessori’s early work.
“The Child Is the Teacher” is the first
biography of Montessori written by a “non-fol-
lower” with no connection to the movement or
its founder, according to De Stefano. “I am not
an expert in pedagogy and I leave to others the
task of explaining Maria Montessori’s thought
in all its complexity,” she writes. Her aspira-
tion, she says, is solely to tell “the story of a
life.”
And an interesting life it is. In short, vi-
gnette-style chapters De Stefano documents
Montessori’s unusual and groundbreaking ca-
reer path from one of the first female physi-
cians in Italy to a feminist leader active in
pushing for women’s suffrage to a professor ofthere are five times as many private Montes-
sori schools in the United States as public
ones.
“The Child Is the Teacher” repeatedly
evokes this tension between “Montessorism”
as something of a social justice movement,
aimed at empowering society’s most neglected
through education, and as an educational
strategy deployed largely to benefit society’s
most privileged.
It is that social justice element of Montes-
sorism that Americans need to embrace now,
as we emerge from a pandemic that has
widened gaps in educational opportunity and
outcomes, and contributed to the disappear-
ance of thousands of disproportionately low-
income students from classrooms.
In many American communities, low-in-
come children have the least access to pro-
grams that prioritize freedom, creativity and
critical thought. One recent large-scale study
of a public prekindergarten program for low-
income children in Tennessee, for instance,
found that years later graduates of the pro-
gram performed worse in school than stu-
dents who did not attend the program. One of
the researchers blamed in part the authoritar-
ian, drill-focused approach to pre-K (a star-
tlingly different approach than most middle-
and upper-income families seek out). “Teach-
ers talk a lot, but they seldom listen to chil-
dren,” the researcher told NPR. “Children are
not learning internal control. And if anything,
they’re learning sort of an almost allergic
reaction to... external control.”
Meanwhile, the government-backed exclu-while doing little to alter the Fed’s extremely
easy interest rate policies, even as the recovery
picked up pace and it became increasingly
clear that inflation was not just a transitory
phenomenon in certain markets. This re-
sponse may have contributed to the speed of
the U.S. recovery (although I doubt it added
very much), but it also helped stoke inflation,
which has aggravated Americans and eroded
their purchasing power. Rising inflation also
makes it more difficult for the Fed to respond
to unexpected economic perils such as an
increase in commodity prices in the wake of
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Timiraos provides little insight into what
was going on inside the Fed and the minds of
its leaders as they sought to deal with inflation
in 2021 — what was presented first as transito-
ry in the summer and then as a serious concern
by the end of the year. Perhaps his sources were
less eager to talk about the latter issues than
their initial successes. As a result, the pages
about the current battle against inflation read
like a rough draft of a history that is still being
written. Powell’s legacy and the credibility of
the Fed will be influenced by how this story
turns out. For answers, we may have to wait for
Timiraos to write a sequel.grams to buy securities in markets that sup-
port specific loans, like credit cards, auto and
student loans.
All of this was done faster and larger than in
2008 and extended into new areas. For in-
stance, unlike Bernanke, the Fed in 2020
bought corporate bonds, including junk
bonds, as well as municipal securities and a
range of other credit instruments. In many
cases, just the promise to act if needed was
enough to persuade the private sector to con-
tinue lending at reasonable rates, greatly re-
ducing the resources the Fed had to expend.
A lot of prominent economists criticized
these steps, worrying that they would take the
Fed into new political territory that would
undermine its independence. In fact, the oppo-
site happened. The Fed enhanced its prestige
and bolstered its independence by ensuring
that credit continued to flow and markets
continued to function. In contrast to the hos-
tile response to much of what the Fed did in the
2008 financial crisis, Rep. Patrick McHenry
(N.C.), the top Republican on the House Finan-
cial Services Committee, which oversees the
Fed, praised Powell’s work: “A-plus for 2020.
On a 1-to-10 scale? It was an 11.”
But the political skills and instinct to go big
and go fast — which created an almost unquali-
fied success in staving off a financial crisis in
2020 — may have led the Fed to go astray in its
macroeconomic response in 2021. Powell
cheer-led an oversize fiscal response last yearThe narrative takes off when it gets into a
detailed, day-by-day account of the pandemic
response, highlighted by tables showing the
daily totals of covid-19 deaths and the fluctua-
tions of the Dow Jones industrial average,
among other data.
The book makes clear how much of a collec-
tive process this dizzying month of policymak-
ing was. Timiraos portrays not just top leaders
of the Fed such as Powell, Vice Chair Richard
Clarida, New York Federal Reserve President
John Williams and Fed Governor Lael Brain-
ard, but also an assortment of key staffers like
Daleep Singh, whose international contacts
give him advanced warning of the pandemic;
Lorie Logan, who oversaw the Fed’s operations
with financial markets; and Andreas Lehnert,
whose penchant for reading books about dis-
asters served him well in avoiding one in this
case — to name just a few of the dozens who
addressed the crisis and play a role in the book.
The key to their success was not that they got
everything right the first time but that they
kept going at the problems over and over
again, tackling issues in market after market
that underpinned realms such as business
lending, state borrowing and international
transactions with promises of forceful action.
The team relied in part on Ben Bernanke’s
playbook from the 2008 crisis, which called for
purchasing Treasury and mortgage bonds to
lower an array of interest rates. At the same
time, the playbook promoted setting up pro-Book World
TRILLION DOLLAR
TRIAGE
How Jay Powell and
the Fed Battled a
President and a
Pandemic — and
Prevented Economic
Disaster
By Nick Timiraos
Little, Brown.
342 pp. $30THE CHILD IS
THE TEACHER
A Life of Maria
Montessori
By Cristina De Stefano
Translated by Gregory
Conti
Other Press.
348 pp. $28.99U.
S. and international stock markets
plunged in February 2020 amid un-
certainty about a coronavirus out-
break in China and other parts of the world. By
early March, the Dow Jones industrial average
was rapidly tumbling toward a bear market,
even though only a few covid-related deaths
had been confirmed in the United States.
Shortly afterward, the most safe and liquid
financial market in the world — the U.S.
Treasury market — started to seize up. It
seemed like the United States was facing pres-
sures possibly as severe as the 1918 flu pandem-
ic and the 2008 financial crisis all at once.
Politicization and public pushback marred
the public health response, tragically resulting
in a death toll that exceeds that of the pandem-
ic a century ago. The financial system, howev-
er, survived, and the Dow average and the S&P
500 closed 2020 at record highs. Saving the
financial system kept credit flowing to busi-
nesses, enabling them to avoid layoffs and even
hire new workers. Both Main Street and Wall
Street were the beneficiaries. We have the
Federal Reserve largely to thank for these early
successes under the leadership of Chair Jay
Powell, who seemed made for the moment.
Nick Timiraos wrote the first draft of this
remarkable history as the chief economics
correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and
now has followed up with “Trillion Dollar
Triage: How Jay Powell and the Fed Battled a
President and a Pandemic — and Prevented
Economic Disaster.”
The book’s strength lies in its detailed origi-
nal reporting and the fast-paced narrative of
the harrowing month that the Fed spent nearly
unilaterally preventing a financial catastrophe
as the coronavirus was taking off in 2020.
Embedded in the tale is a careful accounting of
the economic and financial implications of the
Fed’s actions. Timiraos takes the story into
2021 and the fallout from the Fed’s subsequent
decisions that contributed to the highest infla-
tion in four decades. The author conducted
more than 100 interviews. (I spoke with Ti-
miraos, who sought my perspective as an
economist who had helped craft President
Barack Obama’s response to the 2008 eco-
nomic crisis and my view of one congressional
meeting where I delivered remarks.)
“Trillion Dollar Triage” begins with a short
history of the Federal Reserve, from its incep-
tion through the inauguration of Donald
Trump. While little of this history is new, it lays
out important context for steps the Fed took to
maintain its crucial independence. We also are
introduced to the historical role models whom
Powell would try to emulate and other leaders
whose example he sought to avoid.
Timiraos recounts President Trump’s nomi-
nation of Powell to chair the Federal Reserve,
Trump’s increasingly unhinged attacks on the
Fed and Powell’s deft handling of them. We see
how the Fed chair used the president’s criti-
cisms to garner widespread support on Capitol
Hill. I was sitting 20 feet from Powell at the
Fed’s Jackson Hole conference in 2019 when
Trump tweeted, “Who is our bigger enemy, Jay
Powell or Chairman Xi?” Timiraos provides
nothing new on this incident, but it was still
shocking to live through it again in his account.Inside the Fed’s frantic e≠orts to save the economy from the pandemic
ECONOMY REVIEW BY JASON FURMANJABIN BOTSFORD/THE WASHINGTON POSTPresident Donald
Trump walks with
Jerome Powell after
Trump announced
Powell as his
nominee for
Federal Reserve
chair at the White
House on Nov. 2,
20 17. Trump would
eventually criticize
Powell publicly over
policy
disagreements.anthropology at the University of Rome.
Throughout most of this work, Montessori
maintained an interest in children’s welfare.
The author strongly implies that some of
Montessori’s initial interest in children
stemmed from a prolonged estrangement
from her young son: Conceived out of wedlock,
the child was raised primarily at boarding
schools, in keeping with convention for upper-
middle-class families of the time. At age 15, he
reunited with his mother, at which point the
Montessori movement was already spreading
rapidly. Mother and son remained close-knit
partners in spreading the movement for the
rest of her life.
Montessori was heavily influenced by the
work of Édouard Séguin, a French physician
who in the mid-19th century started what was
probably Europe’s first special-education
class. Working exclusively with students with
intellectual disabilities from a Paris asylum,
Séguin developed all of their senses by having
them work with a range of items, such as
feathers, seashells, peas, flour and bearing
balls. Montessori absorbed Séguin’s hands-on,
immersive approach — and his emphasis on
children historically excluded from tradition-
al schools.
De Stefano doesn’t portray a saint who is
consistently and exclusively devoted to serv-
ing the underserved. Particularly as her move-
ment grew, Montessori became prickly and
controlling, concerned about money, expan-
sion and a rigid adherence to her beliefs. In
1919, a German socialist follower opened a
Montessori program with the explicit goal of
using it as “an instrument of liberation for the
children of the proletariat.” Montessori initial-
ly refused to sign the diplomas, concerned that
too many of the children became atheists. And
for years, she collaborated with the fascist
Italian leader Benito Mussolini, using his
powerful endorsement to reignite and expand
Montessori schools in her home country.
(Their relationship fell apart as he became
more belligerent, a breach that forced her to
flee Italy before World War II; by the mid-
1930s, Mussolini and Germany’s Adolf Hitler
had closed all Montessori programs in their
countries.)
Yet to her death, Montessori never aban-
doned her faith in the idea that all children,
rich and poor, should be more valued, support-
ed and empowered. And whether we embrace
her educational methods or not, in that sense
we should all be more Montessorian.M
aria Montessori, the visionary behind
the popular child-directed approach
to education, focused her early efforts
on groups that had long been excluded from
Italy’s schools: children from impoverished
backgrounds, kids with disabilities, those with
mental illnesses. At the first school Montessori
led, she worked with neglected young resi-
dents of one of Rome’s poorest, most “disrepu-
table” neighborhoods, San Lorenzo — “a sort
of no-man’s-land where the police are reluc-
tant to set foot,” writes Cristina De Stefano in
“The Child Is the Teacher: A Life of Maria
Montessori,” a new biography of the famed
educator. “The children of San Lorenzo, above
all, elicit her compassion,” De Stefano tells us;
they were “barefoot, defenseless, victims of all
kinds of abuse.”
It was at this school, the Children’s House,
which opened in 1907 for children ages 2 to 6,
that Montessori began to crystallize her ap-
proach, which emphasizes child-led explora-
tion, manipulation of physical objects and
steady teacher observation. She insisted from
the start that “the children have to have total
freedom of movement. They must be allowed,
if they want, to lie on the floor or sit under the
table.”
It was a radical pedagogy at the time — no
less so because of its application to some of
Italy’s most disenfranchised children. One of
Montessori’s first essays on education docu-
mented the unnecessary treatment of Italian
students expelled from school. “The article is
an act of accusal against the government,
which thinks it can resolve the problem of
troubled youth by hiding it from view,” De
Stefano writes.
Yet as the Montessori approach quickly
spread, it morphed in some parts of the world
into something very different: an educational
fad for the upper class. In 1911, De Stefano
reports, the first American Montessori school
opened in a suburb of New York. It was private,
was funded by a wealthy bank president and
served exclusively students whose families
were part of Manhattan’s financial elite. In
more recent decades, dozens of public — and
free — Montessori programs have opened
across the country, often as part of explicit
efforts to desegregate schools. Yet it remains
an exclusive option in many communities;The unconventional life
and radical vision
of Maria Montessori
BIOGRAPHY REVIEW BY SARAH CARRREMO NASSI/ASSOCIATED PRESSItalian educator
Maria Montessori
in Rome in 1951.
Her philosophy of
child-directed
learning was geared
toward
underprivileged
students, but today
it is often
associated with
upper-class schools.Sarah Carr i s an O’Brien fellow in public service
journalism at Marquette University covering
educational inequality. She is also the author of
“Hope Against Hope: Three Schools, One City, and
the Struggle to Educate America’s Children.”Jason Furman is the Aetna professor of the
practice of economic policy at Harvard University.
He served as chairman of the Council of Economic
Advisers from 2013 to 2017.