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. 

People who are hungry for a little good news about what U.S. schools and students are achieving -- and that's most of us -- should take a look at The Concord Review. The Review publishes history essays written by pre-college students from all over the English-speaking world, but most are from the U.S. and fully half are by students attending public schools.

It's hard to redesign an airplane while you're flying it -- and almost impossible if you're trying to dodge anti-aircraft missiles at the same time. But that's what we're expecting teachers and other school people to do right now: reform their schools while they tough it out through threatened and actual layoffs and budget cuts. 

All across the country, people are interested in what's happening in the New York City schools. One question they often ask is, "How's Joe Fernandez doing?"

Last week, Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos showed off the 1990 wall chart, the latest in the Education Department's yearly compilation of facts and figures about how our schools are doing. The signs Secretary Cavazos pointed to looked bad.

Wealthy school districts have always found it easier to raise money than poor ones. The result has been some shocking differences between have and have-not districts. In Kentucky, for example, per-pupil spending in 1988-89 ranged from as much as $4000 to as little as $2000. Is this kind of inequality constitutional? Last year, the Kentucky Supreme Court decided it wasn't. But the court did not stop at asking for a revision of these funding formulas -- it called for a new education system.

Why is reading an enormous pleasure for some children and a misery for others? The readers devour practically anything they can get their hands on. The others stumble through a page or so and often have a hard time remembering a single thing they've read. Technically speaking, the second group may be literate, but the painful decoding of words that passes for reading won't be much of a help on the job or in their private lives.

Many of us have felt a great lifting of spirit over the last year as we've watched freedom breaking out and expanding in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern Europe. And we've assumed that democratic societies with democratic laws and institutions would inevitably follow. But that's not necessarily how things work.

A couple of stories about education reform in Czechoslovakia and France recently appeared on the Overseas page of the Times Educational Supplement (London) on March 2, 1990, together with a story from the U.S. The editors probably weren't trying to make any particular point, but the three stories, interesting in themselves, are even more interesting when you look at them together.

Along with all the other problems our schools are suffering from these days, we have a serious
problem with attendance.

A new, national study of what students don't know always spawns a new bunch of newspaper and magazines commentaries (often including my own) on why our kids are so ignorant and how we should reform our schools to take care of this. 

Does this country have more will than wallet? That's what President Bush told us in his inaugural address last year, and his policies have been consistent with that assertion. But Herbert Stein, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Presidents Nixon and Ford, doesn't agree.