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Most often the headlines and the horror stories come out of big-city ghetto schools, where the problems —racial, financial, educational—are the worst. The problems are real enough, but in many ways they are so special as to be part of the larger society's difficulties in improving the lot of America's underclass, rather than crises of education.
More alarming is the fact that nine out of ten high school students attend small-city and rural institutions or quiet suburban schools, and that these schools, once the very symbols of the best the U.S. could do for its children, are also suffering from a profound malaise. For the 55% or so of American teen-agers who do not go on to college, high school is the apex of their formal educational career; they will prosper or join the ranks of the unemployed largely on the basis of what the schools teach them.
For a look at what has gone wrong inside both school and classroom, TIME correspondents visited three U.S. high schools that are not afflict ed with the intractable problems of core city schools. One is in Medford, Mass., a Boston suburb. One is a small-town school in Coos Bay, Ore. One is a middle-size school in Iowa City, Iowa. All are fairly representative of that historic backbone of America's public education system, the public high school. A tale of three cities:
Medford High: Strife in the Suburbs
The facilities at Medford High, located on a hill next to a woodland preserve, are superb. Eight interconnected stone and brick buildings in one giant comprehensive and vocational school, with a gym just short of a football field in size and the second largest indoor swimming pool in the state. The much esteemed math and science departments—which offer such courses as computer programming, calculus and earth science—have at their command a computer with eleven keyboards The facilities for vocational education, which train 471 of Medford's 3,548 students, include a fully equipped school of cosmetology When Medford High opened seven years ago, after an older facility burned, it cost more than $16 million—the most money the town had ever spent on anything. Medford's 60,300 residents, many of them blue-collar families of Italian and Irish descent, did not mind.
The city still has what one teacher describes, in a reference to traditional ethnic regard for education as the door to upward mobility, as "enough of a foreign element to insist on good education." The school on the hill is the pride of the community.
But that pride is not shared by all the students. Vandalism is a problem; a favorite prank is to smash the school's two-story glass windows, which cost $700 each. Last year's damage bill came to almost $30,000 —close to what the school spent on textbooks. The great majority of students could not care less about their school. "The school spirit of