Where We Stand

President Bush didn't have much luck selling the Japanese on the idea that American cars are just as good as theirs. Now, he's back trying to sell the American public on an equally dubious proposition -- that spending public money on private schools is the way to fix public education.

How can we increase U.S. productivity so we'll continue to be competitive in the world economy? This question has everybody worried. 

When I was growing up, the Triangle Shirt Waist fire was still vivid in people's memories. I often heard my mother, a garment worker and an ardent trade unionist, talk about how 150 workers, most of them young women, were killed in that fire.  That fire was 80 years ago, and most people thought nothing like it could ever happen again. But we were wrong -- as we found out with the Imperial Food Products fire in Hamlet, N.C.

Old ways of doing things are hard to change. This is true even when they don't make much sense -- or maybe especially when they don't make sense. That certainly explains why, though most people are talking about professionalizing teaching, many supervisors still want to treat teachers like bad kids or day laborers who need to be kept in line.

Most people know that some of our schools are poorly equipped and housed in run-down buildings, but few even imagine the conditions Jonathan Kozol describes in Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (New York: Crown, 1991).

Today is the 20th anniversary of this column; it first appeared on December 13, 1970. People have often asked me how the column came to be. Here's the story.

We measure a country's success not only by the average national income but also by how many people are living in poverty. Why not apply the same criteria to education? 

We've had a blizzard of articles recently comparing Catholic and public schools. Stories in Forbes magazine, the New York Times and Readers Digest -- to name only three of them -- assure us that Catholic schools do a much better job of educating students than public schools. These articles are not scientific. 

The 1991 George Orwell Doublespeak Award should go to President George Bush and Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander. Both of them know that millions of Americans are strongly opposed to using tax dollars to pay for private and parochial school tuition. 

How well are our students doing? People often answer this by saying that 50 percent go on to college -- which is more than in any other country. But numbers don't tell us whether the kids really know anything or whether they are going to college in order to get their high school ( or junior high school) education. They don't address the question of standards.

While people in Washington, D.C., are talking about improving the education system and meeting national goals by the year 2000, people in many of our local schools are wondering how they're going to make it through the year.

We're in the midst of an important change in our school curriculum. By including the contributions of many different groups that have not previously been recognized, we're trying to make a multicultural curriculum that accurately reflects our society.

Is the performance of American students as bad as most people believe it is? According to Gerald W. Bracey ("Why Can't They Be Like We Were?", Phi Delta Kappan, Oct. 1991), the "evidence overwhelmingly shows that American schools have never achieved more than they currently achieve. And some indicators show them performing better than ever." 

We are in the midst of a revolution in the teaching of American history. Most people would agree it's long overdue. In the past, our history has been taught as a drama in which white men had all the good roles. 

As I go around the country talking to business groups and legislative leaders, I find increasing recognition that big cities are going to have to attract the best teachers possible in order to survive. If city kids, victimized by poverty and its resulting social ills, don't make it in the public schools, urban America is finished.

One of the national education goals adopted last year by President Bush and the governors is that U.S. students will be "first in the world in math and science" by the year 2000. Now the latest math test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are in. 

Many people assume that private schools get much better results with their students than public schools, and it stands to reason that they would. So it's shocking to look at the results of the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exam and find that, when private school students graduate from high school, they do almost as poorly as kids graduating from public schools.

America 2000, President Bush's program for revitalizing our education system asks many of the right questions, and that's important. But will the strategies that are being proposed do the job?

Many people who support education vouchers, which would allow public dollars to follow students to private schools, do so out of the best of motives. They believe that competition with private schools would encourage excellence in the public schools. 

For the past couple of weeks, I've presented evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exams and else where indicating that private schools do not outperform public schools. When all is said and done, the NAEP exams tell us, kids who are about to graduate from private school are achieving at about the same low level as public school kids.