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Others question teacher quality. As the profession has lost social prestige, it has attracted more recruits who are themselves only average students. Says James Koerner, author of The Miseducation of American Teachers: "Teachers are not trained as adequately as the public thinks they are." Typically, over half the courses an education student takes are in methodology and not m the subjects he will teach.
Add to the school's problems those of society: more broken homes, more two-income families with no one to mind the children and—not least—less reverence for the written word. Concern about poor writing has turned up even at the best U.S. private schools. Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass whose standard curriculum includes three years of a foreign language, math up to calculus and intensive writing was driven by what Headmaster Theodore Sizer describes as the "video generation" to introduce an English competence course five years ago. In it, students are drilled in basic sentence structure four hours a week.
Too often, says Harvard's Riesman, public schools cater to teen-agers desire "to be entertained." Consequently, homework and requirements have gone down, grades have gone up. Watered-down curriculums fail to challenge. "The only places in schools today where people are really encouraged to perform up to capacity are in sports and the band," says Riesman, adding that elitism is almost as dirty a word as sexism or racism " Back-to-basics proponents advocate tightening up the curriculum with more requirements and forcing all students to show minimal competency" in essential skills before graduating. So far, 26 states have passed laws requiring competency exams. Congress has also begun hearings on whether there should be a nationwide competency exam.
While many educators applaud the back-to-basics movement, at least as a demonstration of concern about the state of schools, some are worried that it may be pressed too far. They rightly fear that valuable electives, such as music and art, may be scrapped along with the easy courses. Says Harold Howe, vice president of education and research at the Ford Foundation: "The important issue is not innovation v. tradition, but whether we're asking kids to write and pushing them to develop."
Koerner argues that some nationally recognized test, like those used in Europe, might bring up standards. Yet, he adds, "because of the broadness of the political constituency, the exam will probably end up being so easy that it won't tell you much"—a criticism already leveled at the state competency tests. There is also the problem of how to avoid any cultural bias that might adversely affect minority students.
A more constructive approach, many educators feel, would be to concentrate on teacher training—deleting some of the methodology instruction in teachers' colleges and adding courses in the teacher's future subject. Says Howe: "Any school worth its salt also needs in-house retraining of teachers rather than sending them off to local teachers' colleges for a course and then raising their salaries."
Koerner would go one step further and abolish or reform the tenure system to allow schools to dismiss incompetent teachers and hire more