A couple of stories about education reform in Czechoslovakia and France recently appeared on the Overseas page of the Times Educational Supplement (London) on March 2, 1990, together with a story from the U.S. The editors probably weren't trying to make any particular point, but the three stories, interesting in themselves, are even more interesting when you look at them together.
The report from Prague presented Czechoslovakia's revolution from the perspective of the schools. And it's just what you might imagine. Everything is changing -- curriculum, school governance, even school holidays. Czech students are hurrying to drop their Russian language courses. And they're rejoicing in the disappearance of "official civics textbooks that laid down the line six periods a week, term by term."
For teachers and school officials, the process is more complicated. When students abandon Russian in favor of other foreign languages, who will teach these languages? How will schools replace the textbooks that suddenly became obsolete last November? How will teachers, who have had to get used to toeing the communist line, be retained? How will the schools be governed? (Following the revolution, most school held elections for their principals and assistant principals -- and got rid of many of the former office holders. But it's not clear that this system will continue.)
Some of the issues facing the Czech school system are familiar to people who want to reform U.S. schools -- the TES article even talks about demands for local autonomy that sound like the calls for school-based management in some U.S. district. But of course the Czechs have an impetus for change that we lack. They have seen their education system debased and their children taught lies in the place of history and civics and literature. As one teacher put it, "Education was always the issue people were most angry about. No one liked their children learning un-truths." And now they have an opportunity to make their schools a central institution in a free society. Though the methods and the means may not be clear, the direction is.
The story from France deals with a more familiar problem -- and maybe a more difficult one. I mean the obstacles that traditions and institutions -- in this case the church -- can put in the path of reform.
The French Ministry of Education has found that many students entering high school are unable to do high-school level reading. So they are embarking on a reform of elementary school education. And reformers are not just thinking of adding or subtracting a few programs. The idea, according to the TES writer, is to reorient elementary education so the system is adapted to the child instead of assuming that the child will adapt to the system.
One of the changes reformers are considering is a new school week. French children still have Wednesdays off and go to school on Saturday mornings. Since students have a lot of homework and are under considerable pressure, reformers would like to change the school week to give children a free weekend. But the plan is meeting with some important opposition from Catholic bishops. The problem is that French law guarantees a half day a week for religious instruction, and this has traditionally taken place during the free Wednesdays. If the free day is moved to Saturday and catechism has to compete with parents' weekend plans -- well, the potential conflicts are obvious, even if the eventual outcome is not.
Thanks to the separation of church and state guaranteed us by our Constitution, school reforms in the U.S. are not likely to be compromised by the demands of religious institutions. But the story is broader than that and illustrates what all school reformers know: Any time a proposed reform comes into conflict with an important institution or a longstanding tradition, the reform might have to be scrapped no matter how much it has to recommend it. And any comprehensive reform effort is likely to face a series of such conflicts.
The story from America? Well, it's a tale of how things are sometimes better than they seem. A group of undercover police officers who passed for high school juniors attended five of New York City's toughest high schools for seven months. Their assignment: to check out the levels of violence and drug use in these schools. To everybody's surprise, the cops reported tight security and little violence or evidence of gang activity or drug use during school hours. Good news? Well, yes and no.
Many New Yorkers will be relieved to hear, as Board of Education Chairman Robert Wagner says, that their schools are not the black-board jungles they had assumed. And of course the schools feel vindicated. But not everybody is pleased. The police investigations, TES reveals, have drawn sharp criticism from the New York Civil Liberties Union, which denounces their "gross insensitivity and serious disregard for fundamental privacy, fairness and intellectual freedom within the schools."
As the TES writer observes, "Perhaps there is no such thing as good news."