Where We Stand

Right now, members of the Bush administration are stumping the country saying that the best way for us to meet the national education goals is to use public funds to send kids to private schools. They argue that private schools take students just like the ones in public schools and do a much better job with them. But as I said last week, the results of the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math exams tell a different story.

Tell a story once or twice and people might be skeptical about it. Tell in 10 or 20 or 100 times, and most people will accept it as truth. For years, we've heard that Catholic and other private schools do a far better job of educating their students than public schools.

When President Bush first talked about his education plan this spring, I had some questions and reservations, but there also seemed to be good reason for optimism. But was I in for a big disappointment when the president presented his legislative package to the Congress!

Last week, Chris Whittle surprised people by announcing a new, educational venture: a national chain of private, for-profit schools. Whittle has already aroused plenty of controversy with Channel One, which offers television sets and satellite dishes to schools in return for a guarantee that their students will watch a daily, 12-minute program, with 2 minutes of commercials. 

Right now, there is lots of talk and argument about reforming our schools. How can we do it? What should a new classroom or school or school system look like? But everybody agrees on one point -- no changes will work unless we have discipline in our schools.

People passing by an inner-city school may think it's filled with young people who can't or won't learn, but if they go inside they'll find two groups of kids.

Does the U.S. spend more on education than other industrialized countries? That's what a couple of presidents and secretaries of education have gone around the country telling us. The trouble is, this picture of America as the educational big spender is a myth. 

School Administrators often complain that they could do a better job of running their schools -- and making them work for students -- if they didn't have to deal with the constant meddling of school boards in day-to-day operations. School boards defend themselves by saying that they are responding to constituents, which is what they are elected to do. 

I was at the White House on Thursday when President Bush announced his new education initiative. This initiative marked a turning point in American education: Never before has a president of the United States said that the federal government has a major, ongoing responsibility for improving the quality of elementary and secondary education.

Right now, thousands of school districts are cutting their programs, and they're laying off teachers and paraprofessionals by the tens of thousands. This reflects the economic disruption throughout the country.

Americans place a high value on fairness. We want to make sure that people who are competing in any area have what we call a "level playing field," so no one has an unfair advantage over anyone else.  Education is one of them and labor-management relations is another. That's why the pending legislation that would make it illegal for employers to hire permanent replacements for striking workers is so important.

Over the past 20 years, minorities have made substantial progress in raising their test scores in reading and mathematics and their Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. Nevertheless, there is still a big gap between their achievement and that of white students-and a feeling of great frustration. 

We frequently hear comparisons between our education system and the systems of other industrialized countries, along with suggestions that we do things the way they do. But these countries don't have our history of slavery or our sense of responsibility for righting past inequities, so decisions and policies that are straightforward for them can be much more complicated for us.

Last week, the heads of five large U.S. corporations appeared before the House of Representatives' Budget Committee. They were making a case for the full funding of WIC, a federal supplemental food and nutrition program for pregnant women and children under the age of five. 

Today's guest column is by Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, US. Department of Defense. It first appeared in The American School Board Journal, February, 1991.

If anyone had talked about a common curriculum for US schools a few years ago, people would have said he was crazy. Now, we have begun to understand the price we pay for our fragmented curriculum. We've also begun to find ways of building a common curriculum in a typically American way -- through voluntary effort rather than government intervention.

People often see history as a set of immutable facts and events that took place in the past. But it's really a story we tell ourselves about these facts and events, and we rewrite the story as we get new insights and develop new understanding of the past. But as long as history focused mainly on the deeds of rulers, it did not tell the story of contributions made by people who never sat in the White House or led an army.

Choice is currently being talked up as the solution for all our educational problems. But anyone applauding the $200 million for choice in the President's new budget -- or getting ready to jump on the choice bandwagon -- should look at the analysis of choice offered by Edward Wynne, a conservative writing in a conservative magazine. Wynne says, in effect, "We've been there before and it didn't work" and he tells us why.

What's the most important thing young children learn when they begin school? According to Schooling: The Developing Child by Sylvia Farnham-Diggory, it's to forget-forget about the personal learning programs they developed as they figured out how to walk, talk and understand their world-and assume the role of pupil in the school bureaucracy.

Remember the skills gap? The good news is that employers are no longer complaining because they can't find enough skilled workers. But that's also the bad news. Workers' skills have not improved; instead, jobs are being dumbed down.