Morning at a West Coast high school. The first-period bell rings, barely audible above the classroom din. "O.K., everybody, settle down," says the soft-spoken teacher of the course called Modern Problems. Her two dozen students, grouped around seven tables, pay scant attention. She switches on a video machine by her desk; a neatly categorized outline flashes on the board.
Have you already copied this down?" she asks, point ing to the topic headings. A few heads bob yes, several more shake no; the rest of the stu dents merely carry on with their private conversations. The subject of the day is not terrorism, energy or Watergate. Aptly enough, the topic is "The Problems of American Education."
What the teacher might have taught her class, had they been willing to listen, is that American education in the '70s is in deep trouble. And almost by definition, any problem with public education is a big one. No where are the difficulties more acute than in the 25,300 public high schools, junior and senior, in the U.S., which enroll 19 million stu dents and carry a million teachers on their payrolls. To maintain the U.S.'s vast public education establishment, from elementary schools to colleges, taxpayers will spend $144 billion this year — a 152% increase over the past decade. Those billions add up to more than the country spends for national defense.
But never have more Americans worried about whether they are getting their mon ey's worth from the institutions that were once the symbol of the nation's dedication to democracy.
Although confidence in the schools is hard to measure, a majority of Americans seem convinced that the quality of public education is on the decline.
Former Labor Secretary Willard Wirtz, head of a panel of experts that has spent two years studying the problem, concluded this fall that U.S. education has been "off stride for ten years." Reflecting the general concern, Jimmy Carter during his campaign called for creation of a separate, Cabinetlevel Department of Education to help remedy the situation; one of his aides S declares, "We're going to get that started." But whatever Washington does, issues of public education are largely a matter of state and local responsibility.
Of all the areas of concern about U.S. education, only one is showing some improvement. The dropout, who was a great worry in the alienated, rebellious 1960s, is no longer so common. The percentage of high school students who quit before g graduation has fallen to about 25%, down from the dropout rates of 1960 (31%) and 1950 (37%). At the same time, about 45% of those who do graduate now go on to college, up from 33% in 1960—though that is probably less a measure of scholastic excellence than a reflection of the increase in available places in two-and four-year colleges, and the greater competition for jobs at all levels. Everywhere else, the health of U.S. education in the mid-1970s—particularly that of the high schools—is in deepening trouble:
Declining performance. After more than a decade of vaunted "innovations" — free-form "open classroom" programs, flexible mod ular scheduling, enough electronic gadgetry to make some schoolrooms look like Mis sion