Where We Stand

Today's guest column is by Diane Ravitch, professor of history and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., historian and professor of humanities at the Graduate School of the City of New York. It originally appeared in Newsday on June 29, 1990, and is reprinted by permission of the authors.

He says he wants to be education president and that education is at the top of his agenda, but George Bush is proposing to take away the largest single contribution the federal government makes to education: allowing taxpayers to deduct the taxes they pay to city, state and school districts from their federal income tax.

One of the things that has influenced me most strongly to call for radical school reform has been the results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) examinations. These exams have been testing the achievement of our 9, 13 and 17-year-olds in a number of basic areas over the past 20 years, and the results have been almost uniformly dismal.

With communism crumbling in Eastern Europe and nations rushing to adopt a market economy, it seems that more people than ever before believe a competitive market system is the only one that will work. John Chubb and Terry Moe think the market system will also work to revive America's faltering schools. In Politics, Markets and America's Schools (Washington, D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 1990), they suggest a voucher system that would give students publicly funded "scholarships" to attend any school of their choice -- public or private. 

Lots of elementary school children are lost from the first day of school. They file into a strange classroom with a bunch of strange kids. At the head of the class is an adult they may never have seen before and certainly never spoken to -- the teacher. Kids who are good at playing the school game get used to this routine. Kids who are not are likely to be frightened and intimidated -- a good number of them will tune out the first day or the first week. And the teacher can lose the chance to reach them before even learning their names.

Over the years, we've heard a good deal of criticism about the way teachers are trained in this country -- and often it's been richly deserved. Critics have generally split into two camps. One has maintained that the only thing necessary to be a good teacher is to know your subject matter. The other side has tended to de-emphasize subject matter and has talked instead about the importance of pedagogy and personal qualities, like loving children.

Over the past seven years, we've seen many reports assessing the state of public education.  America's Choice: High Skills or Low Wages!, an excellent, new report from the National Center on Education and the Economy, is the first to deal with the big picture: the interrelationship between the state of the economy and what goes on in America's schools.

Whenever I'm in a discussion about the problems with our education system and how to fix them, I can be sure someone's going to bring up the decay of the family. "How can we expect kids to learn," this person will ask, "when we have all these broken homes? Even in two-parent families, things aren't the way they used to be."

John Chubb and Terry Moe think they know what's wrong with America's public school system, and why. In their new book Politics, Markets and America's Schools, they offer a compelling diagnosis -- and a new pitch for an old "panacea" that would leave us in worse shape than the disease. 

All across the country we're busy trying to improve American education. How? By applying the techniques commonly used by American business management --frequent evaluations to find out who is doing a poor job, career ladders and merit pay to reward the productive worker and easier dismissal for the weak and incompetent. But will it work? 

School violence may not be the most appropriate holiday season topic, but it is hardly avoidable. While parents, teachers and pupils enjoy their winter vacation, Frances Glick, the teacher-victim of an assault at George Washington High School Annex, remains in the hospital. At last report, her head injuries we so severe that she could not recognize her father five days after the assault occurred.

The U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity has been pressing for the adoption of a voucher plan. While there are many versions of the voucher plan, the basic idea is to give the children (or their parents) the money which the public schools now spend on their education and permit them to spend that money for education in public, private or parochial schools.