Where We Stand

When the members of Congress met last week in a tremendous debate about authorizing war against Iraq, their arguments and counter arguments were full of references to history. Members talked about Socrates and Abraham Lincoln; the Mexican-American War and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century B.C.E. 

Once upon a time, people talked about student achievement in terms of the kids' responsibility for what they leaned. Nowadays, we've discarded these crude yardsticks because we understand that many things can influence a child's success in school. But we've substituted something just as crude. I mean the notion of accountability that makes schools totally responsible for student learning.

It's easy to be in favor of multicultural and global education, in principle. The trouble comes when you try to say exactly what you mean by the term so you can put it into action. 

With the coming of the new year, we're going to have a new U.S. secretary of education. We hope we'll also have a new chance to move ahead on the commitment that President Bush and the governors made at the Education Summit last year. But there are some troubling signs that we may be in for a regression to the bad, old days of Ronald Reagan, William Bennett and private school choice.

On many polls that ask students what class they find most boring, history is often the choice. But when you look at the general run of history textbooks, this reaction is not too hard to understand. History is a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. And U.S. history is a story that helps us see where our country has been and where we should be heading

There are some terrific school restructuring efforts going on across the country, but whenever you find radical change, you're likely to find someone trying to sabotage it. This is only natural because many people hate change and will do almost anything to avoid it.

Discussions of school restructuring often come down to rearranging some familiar elements: Let's add these programs and get rid of those; reallocate these funds or those resources. They ignore just how radical changes will have to be if we are to make school work for the many youngsters that have given up on it. It will take visionary thinking that is firmly rooted in the realities of the problem -- like Tam Dalyells's proposal for ship schools.

Political scientists John Chubb and Terry Moe, the authors of Politics, Markets and America's Schools (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1990) think that they know how to fix public education. They say there are two ways to organize schools: democratic control, which is how public schools are now run, and market control, which is the way private schools operate. Chubb and Moe call their school plan "public school choice"; it is actually privatization at public expense.

Why do we have to settle for such a lousy system of childcare? Working parents who agonize over finding decent and affordable childcare often have to settle on something that may not be decent. Some countries no wealthier than we are have excellent child-care systems that are even publicly financed. How do they do it?

We all know that reforming our schools is going to be a difficult and complicated job. But Barbara Lerner believes that there are some simple and effective steps we can take to raise student achievement. She gives us this piece of promising news in a paper called "Rethinking Education's Cinderella Reform."

Why don't more good people go into teaching -- and why do so many good teachers leave? You've heard some of the answers to these questions: low pay, lousy working conditions, lack of community respect. But a reason you rarely hear is the shabby way school districts often treat even their best teachers. Far from being rewarded for their achievements, teachers who do anything out of the ordinary are likely to pay for it.

Many people think that good teaching is like pornography -- you know it when you see it. But is that true?

There's a good deal of debate about how successful this country has been over the last decade. But there's one thing no one disputes -- the gap between the rich and poor has widened tremendously in the past ten years.

At what has been billed the biggest-ever world summit, 70 or 80 world leaders have come to New York City this weekend, and put aside discussions of budgets, armaments and wars. Instead they're talking about the condition of the world's children and discussing the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which has been hammered out by the United Nations and is awaiting ratification by member nations. They're also debating a set of goals for improving the conditions of children in the 1990s.

Progress doesn't always follow a straight line. Take the case of religion and public schools. When I was young, public education still reflected this country's largely Christian and Protestant origins. Most kids, no matter what their faith -- or lack of it -- started the day listening to a passage from the King James Bible and saying the Lord's Prayer. And this was hard for many of us.

Reams of material have been written about the push in this country to reform our schools and make ourselves economically competitive -- and I've been a big contributor to this paper mountain. But one of the most perceptive comments on this effort that I know is the joke about the three friends -- an American, a Frenchman, and a Japanese -- who are captured by some natives while they are hunting in the South Seas.

What's one of the first things a company trying to improve its productivity does? It takes a close look at what management theorist call its "human resource investment," and it makes sure employees have the best tools available to do their jobs and the training to use the tools. It seems odd, then, that as we agonize over improving productivity in our schools, we ignore the primitive level of technology in most classrooms.

Not too long ago, people saw history mainly in terms of kings, warriors and battles. Of course, that's no surprise. History is the story we tell ourselves about our past, and when you tell a story, you can't include everything. You have to choose what to put in and what to omit, and you base your choice on a certain attitude towards life or a certain point of view. So when people believed that only the doings of their rulers mattered, history was told from the rulers' point of view.

Supporters of parental choice of schools claim that this reform will improve education, but critics charge that the evidence for this claim is thin and anecdotal. Not so, say James E. McClure and T. Norman Van Cott, economics professors from Ball State University. According to the Wall Street Journal (June 25, 1990), Professors McClure and Van Cott argue that there's plenty of evidence that
choice leads to excellence, and it comes from the U.S. system of higher education.

Today's guest column is by Anthony L. Suchman, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry, University of Rochester, and Director of the General Medicine Unit at Highland Hospital, Rochester, New York. A longer version originally appeared in Medical Encounter, vol. 7, no. I, Spring 1990.