Where We Stand

People who advocate vouchers seldom try to deal with the tough questions. 

A couple of years ago when I was in Aspen, Colorado, debating Jack Kemp about education issues, he asked for the floor just as he was about to leave and threw this one at me: How can President Clinton justify putting his own daughter in an expensive private school when he denies that privilege to other students? Isn't it hypocritical for him to send Chelsea to Sidwell Friends School and then not support vouchers so other kids can have the same opportunity? 

In securing Juan C.'s rights, the judges disregarded a much larger issue.

Just last week, a 16-year-old student in a Georgia school shot and killed a teacher who was standing at the door of his classroom. According to one newspaper account, the teacher was hit when the student drew his gun after being accidentally jostled by another student. Officials caught the kid and sent the other students home, and the next day they brought in grief counselors. Terrible though it is, the shooting of students or teachers in school is now such a common occurrence that there is a routine for attempting to deal with it. Not that any amount of counseling will bring the teacher back to life or make these students and teachers feel safe again. They now know, beyond any doubt, that they could be killed tomorrow or next week by a student who sneaked a gun into school. 

Most states believe that school reform must begin with higher academic standards. 

Anyone who tuned in to the Republican convention heard Bob Dole (and others) say that teacher unions are the big obstacle to improving the public schools. No one talked about the need for higher academic standards, a stronger curriculum, better textbooks -- or about getting students to work harder. Just get rid of the unions and the education problem will be solved. A few days before Bob Dole's acceptance speech, the American Federation of Teachers released a report that gives a much more useful picture of what's wrong with the schools and what can be done to improve them. Making Standards Matter 1996 is the second annual AFT review of academic standards in the 50 states. What did we find? The overwhelming majority of states believe that school reform must begin with higher academic standards. However, many of the standards that states have proposed are not clear and specific enough; and, for the most part, there are no consequences for failing to meet the standards. 

Two years ago, the seventh-grade students at Broad Meadows Middle School in Quincy, Mass., met a famous person who changed their lives. The celebrity was Iqbal Masih, the 12-year-old Pakistani children's rights activist and former bonded laborer. 

Administrators gave 98 percent of the teachers they evaluated a perfect score. 

Many people believe that getting tenure guarantees a teacher a lifetime job, even if the teacher's subsequent performance is lousy. So they listen sympathetically to calls for abolishing tenure. But tenure does nothing of the sort. It simply guarantees that there will be some form of due process before a teacher can be dismissed. The real problem lies in the evaluation process that leads to tenure and monitors the performance of tenured teachers. 

Teacher unions are an easy target for political rhetoric. 

Robert Dole did not reveal his vision for education in his acceptance speech at the Republican Convention, but he did find time to lash out at teacher unions and blame them for the failure of American education: "If education were a war, you [the teacher unions] would be losing it. If it were a business, you would be driving it into bankruptcy. If it were a patient, it would be dying." Unions were right up there, in Dole's speech, with notorious public enemies like Saddam Hussein, "Libyan terrorists," "voracious criminals," and the U.S.' s old adversary, the Soviet Union. 

How can we tell whether a researcher has reached sound conclusions? 

We're in the midst of a national debate about school vouchers. Voucher supporters argue that all students, and particularly poor, minority students in inner-city schools, should be given a chance to go to private schools at public expense. Permitting students to do this, voucher supporters say, will greatly improve their academic performance. 

For Mark, inclusion in a big-city high school would be an exercise in terror. 

Advocates of full inclusion have a simple answer to the complicated problem of educating children with disabilities. They believe that all of these children should be put into regular classrooms, regardless of the nature and severity of their disability. And they dismiss people who disagree with them as enemies of children with disabilities. 

The author of this week's guest column is Gary Conklin, who teaches US. history and economics at Louisville, Kentucky. "Talking to a Teacher" first appeared in the (Louisville) Courier-Journal, August 18, 1996.

Today's guest columnist is actor/activist Richard Dreyfuss, whose most recent film is Mr. Holland's Opus. The column is condensed from a speech Mr. Dreyfuss delivered to the AFT national convention of August 4, 1996.

If you took the "20/20" presentation of tenure seriously, you'd conclude that tenure is an insult to common sense.

There is currently a big attack on teacher tenure -- particularly in the media. Look, for example, at the "20/20" segment that aired in February. If you took its presentation of tenure seriously, you'd conclude that tenure is an insult to common sense and its principal effect is to protect incompetent teachers by giving them lifetime jobs from which it is almost impossible to remove them. I'll take up this gross distortion in a moment. First, though, "20/20" did not even get the facts right.

What makes some kids who face enormous problems fail and a few, like Camara Barrett, succeed?

Camara Barrett sounds like a classic high-achiever. Valedictorian and fist in his class when he graduated from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brooklyn this spring, he was also class president, editor of the school paper, a peer tutor, and an award-winning public speaker. And he worked 15 hours a week at a Brooklyn medical center, getting experience in one of the fields he is interested in pursuing. So it's no surprise that he got admitted to eight universities and is going to Cornell with a scholarship from the university and another from the United Federation of Teachers. The surprise is that he achieved all this while living in a homeless shelter.

By any reasonable standard, our students are performing poorly.

What if the problem with student achievement that we spend so much time talking and worrying about were simply a myth? And what if this myth had been concocted and was being spread by conservatives who want to destroy public education? These are claims put forward by David Berliner and Bruce Biddle in The Manufactured Crisis, (Addison-Wesley, 1995). Combining good news with a conspiracy theory makes for compelling reading, but the authors are able to sustain their thesis only by ignoring or distorting evidence that doesn't fit. Lawrence Stedman, a researcher and teacher at the State University of New York-Binghamton, demonstrates this in a couple of careful discussions that appear in Educational Policy Analysis Archives, a scholarly electronic journal.

If kids aren't educated in school, they'll be educated on the streets.

Should the children of illegal immigrants be turned away from public schools? Unless a controversial amendment to the new federal immigration bill is stripped out before the bill becomes law, that is exactly what states will be permitted to do.

"A typical classroom gets an average of five new students a year."

Student mobility - kids moving in and out of a school - is something teachers think about a lot, especially those who teach in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, where it can be a big problem. Undoubtedly the chief sufferers' are the youngsters who suddenly find themselves in a strange class where they have no idea what's going on. But getting a new student or two in the middle of the year is also hard on the other kids in the class and on the teachers. Until recently, however, there has been little information on the extent of the problem and few real efforts to solve it.

The school board in Clark County, Nevada, has decided that its students deserve a new grading system. Now there will be no more hurt feelings--or damaged self-esteem--because somebody got a D or an F and no more swelled heads because of a straight-A report card.

Asian-American students tend to have a realistic idea of what leads to academic success.

Last week, I wrote about one of the important education books of the decade, Beyond the Classroom (Simon and Schuster, 1996), which provides a fresh perspective on the issue of poor student achievement. The authors, Professors Laurence Steinberg, B. Bradford Brown, and Sanford Dornbusch, say that looking at student achievement in terms of what the schools do is not enough. Unless we also consider the part that student attitudes and values play, we will never understand the problem, let alone solve it. And they offer some fascinating analyses of teenage culture and its effect on student achievement -- both in general and by ethnic group.

Many students say they go to school to hang out with their friends.

Most people agree that the school reform movement has not succeeded in finding the answer to poor student achievement. An new book, Beyond the Classroom, contends that it never will if we insist on looking only at what schools do -- or don't do -- and ignore the part that students and their attitudes and values play in the equation.

For all our talk about family values, we have yet to adopt policies that are supportive of children.

Marches and rallies are nothing unusual in Washington, D.C., but next Saturday, June 1, there will be a gathering the likes of which the city has never seen. Children of all colors and from every ethnic and socio-economic group and every part of the U.S. will gather on the Mall with their mothers and fathers, grandparents, guardians, aunts and uncles -- and teachers. The atmosphere will probably be more like a gigantic fair or church picnic than the usual Washington rally. The occasion is Stand for Children Day, sponsored by the Children's Defense Fund (CDF). AFT will be there, along with representatives from more than 3,000 other sponsoring organizations that cut across the political spectrum.

Every state ought to follow South Carolina's lead in making AP courses more widely available.

A few years ago, when I first started writing about the importance of common educational standards, most Americans considered national or state standards to be out of the question. Now, we have broad agreement in the U.S. that standards are essential. Indeed, most of the 50 states are already on the way to developing them.