Where We Stand

Parents are used to hearing kids complain about having to take algebra. "It's really boring, and what good will it do me anyway?" they ask. Now the kids have an ally in Gerald Bracey, an education consultant, who thinks that forcing most kids to study algebra is a disagreeable waste of time.

It's a presidential election year again, so I'm sure to be asked over and over, "Mr. Shanker, how important do you think education issues will be in this year's election?" My usual answer has been, "I wish they would be, and they seem to be now. But as we get nearer to election day, the voters will narrow their thinking down to two issues: Who's going to do a better job with the economy, and who's tough enough to take on the next international bully who comes along?"

There was a lot of hoopla last week when the president of Yale University resigned and took a new job. This is not front page news in itself, but Benno Schmidt was leaving a prestigious job to become CEO of a national chain of private, for-profit schools being planned by entrepreneur Christopher Whittle. Whittle, best known for Channel One, which provides schools with television sets and satellite dishes in return for a guarantee that their students will watch a daily 12-minute news program with 2 minutes of commercials, says he aims to turn around American education with his Whittle schools.

The idea of a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget has been floating around Congress for a number of years, but it's never had the votes to get through. Now, all of a sudden, we hear that it's going to pass overwhelmingly in the House and the Senate. How come?

"Teachers' Leader Calls for a Return to Tradition." "Educator Urges Return ... to Basics." "Older Ways in Education." People who have seen these headlines describing a talk I recently gave have been asking me if -- after I0 years of thinking and working -- I've given up on school reform. Or have I finally decided that they had education figured out right in the good old days?

Like a lot of other Americans, I couldn't believe it when George Bush blamed the Los Angeles riots on the failed liberal social programs of the 1960s. Which of these programs does he hold responsible? 

Incentives in business are often held up as wonderful examples for schools and especially for the people who work in schools. Look, critics say, if principals and teachers were rewarded for excellent performance and penalized for poor performance - if they were given real incentives the way people in business are -- we'd have much better schools. One of the incentives that is most often proposed is merit pay because this kind of thing is said to work so well in the private sector.

Choice is a word with great resonance for Americans because we consider it basic to our definition of freedom. Being free means being able to choose what you believe, what job you want to do, where you want to live and work, what you buy, etc. It's no wonder that the idea of school choice has caught on with a lot of people.

We probably wouldn't welcome yet another book giving us the bad news that American students do not achieve as well as Asian students. But The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education (New York: Summit Books, 1992) by Harold W. Stevenson and James W. Stigler does far more than that: It challenges us to take a new look at some education practices that we have come to take for granted.

Anyone who believes in fairness must have been disgusted last week. That's when Caterpillar, Inc., the world's largest maker of construction machinery, told its 12,600 striking workers that, unless they cross their union picket lines, they will be permanently replaced. Caterpillar said it was necessary to do this in order to remain competitive in a world market, but that's garbage. 

This Tuesday, Democratic voters in New York can make or break Bill Clinton's candidacy. A win here lets him concentrate on building a coalition strong enough to topple President Bush. A loss lengthens the odds that Clinton -- or any Democrat -- will beat George Bush. Thus, more than one man's fate rests in our hands.

Nowadays, most people who talk about improving U.S. education are all for raising standards. But "standards" is just another buzz word if we don't agree on certain things: what children need to know, what we mean by satisfactory levels of achievement and how we'll know whether kids are attaining these levels.

When we talk about the poor performance of our students, there are always plenty of explanations. Public schools are rigid and bureaucratic; the curriculum is impoverished; students have no incentive to work hard; teachers have so many other responsibilities that they hardly have the time or energy to do their real job -- in other words, it's everybody's fault but the students'. People seldom talk about the attitudes and habits of mind kids bring to school. What responsibility do students -- and their parents -- have for school performance?

There are people who consider privatization -- getting private companies to take over providing public services -- to be a panacea. They look at the poor performance of our public schools, for example, and say that privatization would solve this problem. 

When people reach for quick and easy ways to fix what's wrong with our schools, they often talk about extending the school day and the school year so kids will learn more. They point to the superior performance of students in Japan, for example, where the school year is 12 weeks longer than ours, and where kids go to school for eight hours a day. How could being in school that much longer not make a big difference in learning?

There is general recognition that students in other industrialized countries achieve at a much higher level than American students. They do better on the international examinations that allow us to make comparisons, and their school-leaving exams are more demanding than any our students face. What are these countries doing that we aren't?

America's schools have always been subject to fads and crazes, and "multiculturalism" is the latest. Of course, America is a multicultural society, and we have been from the beginning. Our textbooks and curriculums now reflect this fact, and they should. But that's not what the new multiculturalism is about.

When a great disaster, like a hurricane or an earthquake, strikes people in our country, the president often declares a state of emergency. This mobilizes resources; it cuts through red tape; and it focuses attention on the people who are in danger so they get the help they need -- and get it right away. Last week, leaders of the AFT called on President Bush to declare a state of emergency for America's poor children and to devote some of the peace dividend to their pressing needs.

Usually, when we talk about changing the way people behave, we also talk about changing incentives. Most U.S. high school students have little incentive to work hard and get good grades, and some school districts have begun trying to change this by offering rewards and prizes for kids who improve their school performance.

The 20th century is an extraordinary study in contrasts. It has been one of the bloodies of centuries. At the same time, the growth of democracy has offered us a reason for tremendous optimism. And now, as the century draws to a close, a greater percentage of people is living in freedom than at any other time in history.