Often, when I get into discussions about how well our kids are doing in relation to students in other countries, the poor achievement of our youngsters on international exams comes up. People have a number of ways of explaining this, but the diversity of our society is a frequent excuse. We can't expect to compete, these people say, because societies in our competitor nations are homogeneous and ours is diverse. This is dead wrong on a number of counts.

With the exception of Japan, our important competitor nations are no longer homogeneous. The great postwar migrations have changed the societies of countries like France and Germany so they too have become ethnically diverse. In Germany, there are guest workers from Turkey, Italy, Greece and what used to be Yugoslavia, and in France there are immigrants from North African counties, Portugal and Italy.

Yet, despite the problems of integrating substantial numbers of new immigrants into these societies, German and French schools continue to educate their students to a much higher level then our schools do. They produce young people who will be able to make more valuable contributions to their societies as workers and as citizens.

It is true that these other countries are not as diverse as the U.S., but the argument about our diversity ignores the extent to which diverse people tend to have more in common as they live and work and go to school together. That, after all, is the underlying importance of the common school and the purpose of public education in our country.

Our society has been made up of many different groups from the very beginning. Yet, with the exception of African-Americans, who were largely excluded, our schools did such a good job of educating new Americans that we have seen diversity as a strength, not a handicap. A majority of the readers of this column had ancestors -- and some had parents or grandparents -- who landed at Ellis Island or some other port of entry for immigrants. Most didn't know a lot of math and many could not even read English.

Other nations have perceived our diversity as something unique and to be envied. At the end of the I9th century, when our country started pulling ahead of England in productivity and wealth, one popular explanation was our diversity and our universal system of education.

So what do the people who blame our problems on diversity mean? Are they saying that because we are a country made up of different nationalities, races and religions, our children cannot learn to speak and read and write English? Do they mean our kids can't learn math and science and history the way kids in other countries do? Why should this be true now when it has not been try in the past?

Maybe "diversity" is a new racial epithet designed to suggest that some people are inferior to others. But, with the tragic exception of African-Americans, who have faced massive and longstanding prejudice, diversity has not meant that some groups achieved in school but others didn't. Being of a different race or national origin has not prevented new Americans from learning what they needed to know.

And if diversity is the problem, why is it that middle class and upper class children - the ones whose families have been in this country so long that they have nearly lost a sense of their immigrant origins -- achieve less well than similar groups in other countries?

We can't explain the failure of our students by pointing to diversity. John Jacob, president and CEO of the Urban League, made this point powerfully in a speech before the recent Urban League convention which I also has the honor to address. Diversity -- and eve adversity -- Jacob said, need not stand in the way of achievement. Jacob was talking about African-American children, but what he said goes for all our youngsters:

If America could take immigrant peasants from the backwaters of Europe and mold them into a people that led the world .. .if Japan, Korea and Taiwan could take people racked by poverty and devastated by war and mold them into a global economic powerhouse in one generation -- then a committed, dedicated African-American community can help its children develop into the most intelligent and skilled people on the face of the earth.

We can't accept the proposition that diversity is crippling us. The children who come to America from a hundred different countries are not dumber than the youngsters growing up in France or Germany or Japan and they are not dumber than their predecessors who landed here 50 or 100 or 150 years ago. But we need a vision of where we want to go.

John Jacob's goals for African-American children set standards we should aspire to for all our kids:

  • Every African-American child should graduate from high school with the ability to do calculus.
  • Every African-American child should be fluent in a foreign language.
  • Every African-American child should be able to research, organize and write a 25-page essay on a challenging topic.
  • Every African-American child should live by strict, high ethical standards.

As Jacob says, meeting these goals is "what it will take to make it in the twenty-first century. Not just for African-Americans but for all of America's people." He's right, and we must mobilize to achieve them.