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The attention surrounding Clark has pushed a long-simmering academic debate $ about urban education into prime time, where it rightly belongs. Two decades of wrenching societal changes in family structure, in drug and alcohol use among teens, in the level of violence in inner cities, plus widespread parental indifference have undermined urban schools. "We have allowed the school situation to disintegrate to the extent that it calls for drastic measures, and therefore, Joe Clark," says Los Angeles Principal George McKenna, who, like Clark, has been singled out for praise by Secretary Bennett. "The ultimate challenge will be whether schools whose students face these pathologies can in fact become more stable and academically successful," says Ernest Boyer, former U.S. Commissioner of Education and President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
The dire condition of the nation's urban school systems is by now a familiar story, but some hard facts and illuminating incidents bear telling :
-- In Detroit, high school dropout rates are 41%, with 80% in the worst inner- city districts.
-- In St. Louis, 1 of 4 girls in public schools becomes pregnant before reaching her senior year.
-- In Boston schools last year, 55 students were expelled for carrying guns and 2,500 must report to police probation officers for past offences.
-- In Chicago, an open house for the parents of 1,000 pupils at Sherman School drew five mothers and fathers.
-- In Texas, the 100 top-ranked school districts spend an average of $5,500 a year per child, while the bottom 100 spend only $1,800. The results are evident in San Antonio's Edgewood district, one of the state's poorest, where 50% of students fall below the national norms in reading and writing.
-- In Philadelphia, an administrator describes conditions at an inner-city school: "People coming to class high, not just pupils but teachers as well; filthy bathrooms; gang intimidation; nowhere to hang coats without them being stolen."
-- In New York two weeks ago, Principal Edward Morris asked for a transfer from Park West High, where he had clearly lost control of violence-prone students, and where students in the cafeteria stomped a girl so brutally they broke her ribs.
In many schools these realities blend into a panoply of horrors for teachers and administrators. Odette Dunn Harris, principal of William Penn High School in Philadelphia, talks of confiscating crack bags from student pushers in a neighborhood torn by gang wars and racial strife. When she first arrived at the school, "they had riots in the lunchroom. The fire gong used to go off every five minutes, and that was the cue for the kids to break out." Some youngsters still carry knives and guns as casually as pocket combs. One parent assaulted her, and she notes, "I've had kids say to me, 'I'm going to punch you,' or they call me 'that bald-headed bitch' because of my short hair."
At Principal McKenna's Washington Preparatory High in Los Angeles just two weeks ago, three female students, about to cross the street to enter the schoolyard, were wounded in the sudden cross fire of a gang ambush. Says McKenna: "I personally buried six young men last year who had gone to this school, and I do the same thing year after year."