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Educators observe that "professionals" have nosed parents out of the school system but believe parents should help set educational policy. Says Koerner: "A school-board member too is very often bamboozled by the alleged expertise of those who run the schools." Increasingly, parents are showing a healthy impatience with the professionals. Coos Bay Lumberworker Don Dean, who has a daughter at Marshfield High, complains that too many kids see school as a democratic institution. It's not. It s an institution of learning." School-tax rebellions attest to parental dissatisfaction. Other indicators are experiments in Illinois and California with performance "contracts" between schools and parents. Example: in Oakland, teachers and parents last month signed a contract in which the teachers agreed to assign homework and parents in turn promised to provide their children with a quiet corner for studying every night.
Signs of local insistence on excellence—or at least adequacy —in public education are encouraging, and a necessary correction to the excesses and the pandering of the past decade or two. One facet of the American experiment, of which education has long been a vital part, has been its capacity for correction and renewal. "The tendency of democracies is, in all things to mediocrity," James Fenimore Cooper once pessimistically observed. It is time for the schools to prove him wrong.