Where We Stand

Fifty years ago, in the decade before the Supreme Court heard Brown vs. Board of Education, the American Federation of Teachers was a small union of about 50,000 members. Like other unions, it organized people where they were employed, and since schools were segregated, a number of AFT locals were, too, especially in the South. After World War II, AFT stopped accepting segregated locals into the union. Nevertheless, in cities like New Orleans and Atlanta, we had a large number of members in separate black and white locals.

Writing laws is not an exact science. No matter how carefully crafted a piece of legislation is, it can have design flaws -- gray areas or big loopholes -- which lead to disputes, court cases and, often, decisions that obscure or pervert its intent. This is what's happened to the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). IDEA defines services for disabled children, a group whose educational needs used to be largely ignored, but there have been serious problems with a number of its important provisions. IDEA will be up for reauthorization soon, and Congress needs to fill in some blanks and rewrite some language in the law.

Since Chancellor Ramon Cortines began running the New York City school system less than a year ago, he has demonstrated a real concern with raising academic standards and improving the quality of education in the city's schools. This week, he unveiled his latest initiative, which would tighten graduation requirements by increasing the number of mathematics and science courses from 2 to 3 units. More important, it would require that kids who are entering freshmen in 1994 take and pass academic courses in math and science in order to graduate.

We say, in this country, that we are all in favor of tough education standards, but are we really serious? Not if the recent challenge of the Ohio high school exit exams by the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) is any indication.

When President Clinton signed Goals 2000: Educate America Act into law earlier this month, not many people noticed. Americans were understandably preoccupied with events in Bosnia, and the press was busy getting maximum mileage out of Whitewater. That's too bad because this is the most significant piece of education legislation we've ever had.

Education Alternatives, Inc. (EAI), the private, for-profit outfit that has been managing some schools in Baltimore, is going around the country looking for new business. It's making the same promises in Hartford, New Haven and Hawaii that impressed the folks in Baltimore two years ago. Of course, it's too early to tell whether EAI will succeed in turning around the Baltimore schools it manages, but what about a tentative grade on what the company has accomplished so far? EAI talks a very good game. Do the facts support their claims?

In Lenin's Tomb, David Remnick describes how, as the power of the Communist regime waned, people hurried to uncover the truth about events they believed had been misrepresented by the government or suppressed altogether (New York: Random House, 1993). As a result, the real stories about the previous 40 years came to light -- the names and numbers of people murdered in Stalin's purges, the economic and human costs of collectivization and industrialization, the casualties of Chernobyl. ... Citizens were finally able to see the shape of their nation's history.

The other day, when Goals 2000 passed in the Congress, a CNN
reporter commented that she didn't know what good goals and standards would do because not all kids had the same wherewithal to achieve them.

My recent columns on inclusion, in which I urged a moratorium on the rush to place all children with disabilities in regular classrooms, drew a flood of letters. As you might expect, the letters ranged all over the map, from applauding my stand to accusing me of being "malicious," "immoral," and worse.

The biggest terror for many little children is getting lost. They'll go somewhere with their mother or father and when they look around mom or dad will be gone. In the classic happy ending, the parent appears and hugs the child, and they go home together. But for many of the kids in our society who are lost because they are not getting the support they need from adults, there won't be any happy ending.

For many years, when I talked to principals and superintendents in large urban school districts where youngsters were not doing very well, I'd hear the same thing. They'd tell me they had a new plan or policy or initiative that was making a tremendous difference. You couldn't see any difference in the test scores, they'd say, but that was not the whole story. If I would only go into the schools, I'd see kids smiling, and I'd feel the warmth in the classrooms. That would tell me a whole lot more than test scores.

The latest hot idea in school reform is management by private, for-profit companies, and the leader in the field is Education Alternatives, Inc. (EAI). EAI, which has been managing nine schools in Baltimore, is apparently the top contender for a contract in Michigan. The company has an attractive come-on. It claims that, by combining business know-how and educational expertise, it can save failing schools and make money. And it will achieve these results using the per-pupil allowance the district already spends. This sounds like a terrific deal, but if the superintendents in Baltimore and Michigan-- and the other people who are currently talking up EAI-- knew their history a little better, they might hesitate.

I confess. A few years ago, I seriously thought of supporting a constitutional amendment to balance the nation's budget. It's true I had written in the past about the problems that such an amendment could create. But I thought that sometimes, in the lives of individuals and countries, you have to take an action that has serious drawbacks because the alternatives are worse. For instance, nobody likes the idea of imposing a curfew, but when a community is facing an unusual amount of violence and crime, most people will go along with one.

A basic premise of many school reformers is that central authority is inherently bad because it stands in the way of innovation and change. So the first step toward improving schools, they say, must be to loosen the control of school boards, superintendents and central bureaucracies-- or remove it altogether-- and hand power over to people at the school level.

For years, the books assigned in junior high and high school literature classes were pretty standard. Most kids read A Tale of Two Cities and Macbeth and maybe, as a bow to American content, The House of Seven Gables. And few asked how these books got their status as "classics" or why they kept it. All that has changed. The literature curriculum is currently undergoing some serious scrutiny-- and that's a good thing. Kids should read more books of quality that are also representative of our history and our multi-ethnic society and culture. But what do we mean by "representative"? If we are dropping Silas Marner, how do we decide what takes its place?

The movement in American education that is taking hold the fastest and is likely to have the profoundest-- and most destructive-- effect is not what you might think. It's the rush towards full inclusion of disabled children in regular classrooms.

It seems we have a new standard for judging the success of a school. We no longer ask, "How much has student achievement improved?" We ask, "Is everybody happy?"

While Americans talk about improving education, establishing national goals and standards, professionalizing teaching and empowering individual schools to be creative, something is happening that will wipe out the benefits of all these changes. That is the move toward requiring that students with extreme emotional/behavioral problems be educated in regular classrooms. 

Do we really want schools to be free from violence, disorder and disruption? We say we do, but recent events in Cincinnati show that there are some prices we are not willing to pay.

Americans are worried about violent crime, more so than about any
other problem. And of course they are worried about how to solve it. The Clinton administration has set up a task force to find solutions. This is a welcome move. Schools, too, need help in coping with the eruption of violence that threatens to turn them from safe havens into extensions of the street. But schools are also part of the solution to ending the violence afflicting our entire society.