The multifaceted crisis of America's public schools
On Free to Choose, his popular public television series, Economist Milton Friedman stands before Boston's Hyde Park High School as uniformed guards search entering students for weapons. In a voice-over Friedman says: "Parents know their kids are getting a bad education but . . . many of them can see no alternative."
Speaking of educational reform, Richard H. Hersh, associate dean for teacher education at the University of Oregon, tells a meeting: "We've been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic."
Says Professor J. Myron Atkin, dean of Stanford University's School of Education: "For the first time, it is conceivable to envision the dismantling of universal, public, compulsory education as it has been pioneered in America."
Like some vast jury gradually and reluctantly arriving at a verdict, politicians, educators and especially millions of parents have come to believe that the U.S. public schools are in parlous trouble. Violence keeps making headlines. Test scores keep dropping. Debate rages over whether or not one-fifth or more adult Americans are functionally illiterate. High school graduates go so far as to sue their school systems because they got respectable grades and a diploma but cannot fill in job application forms correctly. Experts confirm that students today get at least 25% more As and Bs than they did 15 years ago, but know less. A Government-funded nationwide survey group, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, reports that in science, writing, social studies and mathematics the achievement of U.S. 17-year-olds has dropped regularly over the past decade.
Rounding up the usual suspects in the learning crisis is easy enough. The decline of the family that once instilled respect for authority and learning. The influence of television on student attention span. The disruption of schools created by busing, and the national policy of keeping more students in school longer, regardless of attitude or aptitude. The conflicting demands upon the public school system, which is now expected not only to teach but to make up for past and present racial and economic injustice.
But increasingly too, parents have begun to blame the shortcomings of the schools on the lone and very visible figure at the front of the classroom. Teachers for decades have been admired for selfless devotion. More recently, as things went wrong, they were pitied as overworked martyrs to an overburdened school system. Now bewildered and beleaguered, teachers are being blamed—rightly or wrongly—for much of the trouble in the classroom.
One reason is simply that it is easier for society to find someone to blame than to hold up a mirror and see that U.S. culture itself is largely responsible. But the new complaints about teachering also arise from a dismaying discovery: quite a few teachers (estimates range up to 20%) simply have not mastered the basic skills in reading, writing and arithmetic that they are supposed to teach.