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Deborah Wadsworth in her Commentary in Ed Week speaks of three “challenges” facing public education.

First there is the challenge that arises from increased competition from abroad, and the risk that we face of falling behind countries like China and India, which are racing forward in the global competition for high-tech and creative industry.

Then there is the challenge represented by the high drop out rates for Latinos and African Americans, at both high school and college levels. For this situation seriously undermines our ideal of equal educational opportunity for all. The challenge is to restore that ideal, and so far we’ve made little or no progress.

Finally, the standards movement has arrived, but is not yet on firm footing. The challenge is to make sure that it stays here, that we not let up and return to an earlier period when there were no standards.

In regard to the first challenge there is nothing we can do. In math and science the world is going to catch us, just as recently developed basketball players in countries such as Greece and Argentina have caught up with, and lately even outplayed the best from our National Basketball Association. Already in the toughest school mathematics competition of them all, the Math Olympiad, our stars are equaled, if not surpassed, by the stars from other countries, from little Romania to big China. It seems that talent and ability are well shared throughout the world. The battle ground of the future will not be in the schools, but in the work place. Probably the very best that we can do to remain competitive is to further strengthen our working environments where the best and the brightest from our own schools and from elsewhere, will want even more than at present to settle down and become entrepreneurs and thereby create new businesses that bring new jobs and new wealth to the country. And if we lose the battle it won’t be because of what is happening in the schools. It will be when our most talented and knowledgeable young people go elsewhere for better conditions in which to live and to work.

The high dropout rates in our inner city public schools have not responded to our efforts to lower them. It really seems to me that school, and particularly high school, as currently configured, was not meant for everyone, and that the large numbers of minority and immigrant children who are dropping out of school are telling us this. And we’re not hearing it. Instead we’re getting behind one academic support program after another, thinking that this will be sufficient to get these wayward youngsters back on track. School for these kids, at least until they drop out, usually means preparing, or being prepared for, a math or English language test which they know they will probably fail. Perhaps dropping out is in the circumstances the very best thing they can do. The real challenge is to reconfigure our schools to fit the lives, interests, and talents of all students.

I actually believe that we must have standards. I think most people do. If we didn’t have them for so long it was not because we didn’t believe in them. Rather it was because we were trying to do too much, and there was no way that any set of standards could take into account all that was being done in the classes.
The essential schools movement recognized this, and tried to go much more in depth, and cover much less ground. But they also made the mistake of treating everyone the same. Kids are different, and they get more different from one another every day of their lives. By the time they’re in high school, when there is a particular skill to be learned, such as writing an essay, solving a math problem, or becoming a better reader of history and literature, there are very few who can be in the same room and profit from their time there with others. All of these things are most productively done on one’s own, if of course a tutor or other help is readily available when needed. Furthermore only when they have done a lot of work on their own will the times when they are together with their classmates be interesting and productive.
This aspect of how we learn has also been recognized, in this case by those who would make individual study plans for each student. These people were on the right track, but they never figured out how to get kids working on their own without constant supervision, and hence the classroom.
What does all this mean in regard to standards? That the problem of standards will be solved when we solve the problem of motivating kids to learn, when we get them interested. For then they themselves will want to know that they are making progress, will want to judge their effort by some objective measure of what they have learned, or what skill they have acquired. Standards otherwise are one more failed school reform imposed from the outside on our schools and students.

This is just the first in a series of articles on the so-called "education crisis" in our country. Are our public schools in crisis? Those who continue to follow the lead of A Nation at Risk, the prominent 1983 report on the condition of American education by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, continue to say that there is a crisis, that we’re not keeping up with other nations. Those who reject the validity of the report, following the lead of David Berliner, Gerald Bracey et al. say that the crisis is a manufactured one, created by those who would undermine and eventually replace our system of locally controlled public schools by a system of school choice and private control.

What do you think? I think that in regard to the condition of our public schools it’s all in the eyes of the beholder. Public education can be just about whatever you want it to be. It simply depends on where you’re coming from. Do you hold a conservative, libertarian, liberal, socialist or one of many other viewpoints? What is the nature of your own schooling, public or private? What has been your educational experience, perhaps as a volunteer in an impoverished inner city school, perhaps as a Mom in a middle or upper class suburbs? Then what’s important to you? What do you watch on television? How much time do you watch television? How do you live? All of this and more will shape your own opinions in regard to the condition of our public schools. Furthermore, even as we talk the schools are not standing still, allowing us to see them whole. They are changing and evolving even as we look at them. They, like everything alive, are moving targets.

There are those who would simplify all of this. Richard Gibboney, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, for example, has this to say:

"It makes no sense to talk of schools being better [or not in crisis] when they [the schools] scorn the two things that really matter: the cultivation of intelligence and the cultivation of the democratic spirit." [Nor, I would add, would it make any sense to talk of them as being worse or in crisis.]

Are there just two things
that really matter? If that were so why then we might concentrate on
those two things to the detriment of everything else and make some real
progress. We could really get behind the SATs and all the other
standardized tests (as many,in fact, are now doing). But there’s the
rub. Who wouldn’t say that there are a number of other things that
matter just as much? Music and art. Sports. Public speaking. Theater,
et al. Not to even mention the virtues that which schools used to be
mostly about. What should the schools be most about? We can no more
answer that question than we can answer the related question, what is
the nature of man?

Gibboney goes on to  say: "I accept the Deweyan assumption that a healthy individual of ordinary intelligence can be an intellectual–someone who enjoys ideas, knows how to use information, participates in civic life. This means reading, conversing, considering issues. This is what intellectuals do, and it’s not really that difficult…. [But] how can schools be better than the society of which they’re a part? They can’t, and we keep forgetting that. Sometimes I think school reformers should be going after mass TV, urban sprawl, and the big money that buys elections.”

Here Gibboney seems to be saying that if you would reform the schools change what people watch on television. Change how they fund candidates for office. Change the world out there where they spend most of their time (We will see that David Berliner says something similar when he says if you would really improve the schools, improve first the imperfect world in which the kids are living.) Although difficult if not impossible to do, what Gibboney (and Berliner) says does makes sense.

Anyway, you get the idea. Crises in the schools? Probably, and probably as many crises as there are students and people who think about such things. In fact, how can we say anything at all about the effectiveness of our schools, that is, how can we determine that they are or are not in crisis, without knowing what they’re expected to do? We can’t.

Finally, don’t we usually use the word crisis in public education to refer to a situation when there’s not much learning going on?  Well compared to what one could be learning there is never much learning going on (think of someone actually learning the Spanish language and then what a student is actually doing in six years of highschool Spanish). So in this sense, how little one is ever doing of what one could be doing, the schools are always in crisis. Think about just one "crisis" that we’ve allowed to go on for my whole lifetime at least, a situation when most of our children do not learn to play a musical instrument while in school. Why might not this be even a greater crisis than the fact that so many 8th grade students in our inner cities will know little or no algebra when they enter high school….

Deborah Meier is a good person, a good teacher, and a good friend of mine (I hope she still is). She has had her own website for about one year now. Every month she posts a new lead article. This month that article is entitled “Protecting Public School.”

Deborah seems to belong to a large group of educators and many other interested parties in the country who are more or less convinced that the Right is out to destroy the public schools, and that vouchers, charters, and most of all, NCLB, are the main instruments for their doing so. Some are even convinced that there is a right wing conspiracy to this end. Others blame the libertarians who would make schooling a matter of private choice, not one of right and obligation. Still others blame the big corporations for working to have the schools serve not the larger public, but their own needs for skilled workers.

Deborah has a particular thing about the word, public. For her the word public seems to represent the best we can be (as opposed to private, the worst?) Now she feels that the word has been seriously damaged, terribly compromised, and needs our help to be restored to its proper place in our  democracy. Public, Deborah says, has come to mean bureaucratic and mediocre, and public institutions, most of all the schools, have become places for losers. Deborah is working hard, once again, to change this incorrect perception.

Then she turns her attention to our democracy, and what makes it so precious. This may be her favorite subject, and protectiing our democracy by what we do with our children in the public schools may be what has always most interested her. Most of those who would protect the public schools do this, very often by referring to their Koran or Bible, which is John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. Deborah says that “the genius of our democracy is in sustaining the tensions and balances between various sources of power—including the power of us ‘ordinary people.’” Well, that’s certainly what we would like our democracy to be. She’s right about that. And though she doesn’t say so it’s probably true that there are more and more American citizens with less and less power. (There are certainly more and more citizens, the country reaching the 300 million mark just last week. When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration there were some 2.5 million. When Horace Mann created the Common School there were nearly ten times that amount, but still little or nothing compared to now, about the population of Iraq today, or maybe not because I haven’t yet heard the latest body count from Baghdad.)

But Deborah clearly implies that one way to regain, or restore the proper power balance between groups of citizens, in particular between the powerful, the not so powerful, and the powerless, is through the system of public schools, these being ideally places where all three groups might interact with, treat with respect, and learn from one another, as opposed, say, to town/gown or public/private situations where the common and the elite rarely or never meet. So Deborah is all about protecting the public school, or at least her conception of the public school.

I would like to ask her if the public school that she would protect has in fact ever existed on a large scale? It certainly doesn’t now. I would ask her if what she would protect isn’t rather a kind of Golden Age, or perfect childhood, neither of which of course ever existed except as they took on a kind of reality for us as our memories of our past became more and more selective, as we distanced ourselves from the earlier times.

You know what I think? I don’t think that anyone is out to destroy the public schools. I don’t think that Ted Kennedy and George Bush had that in mind when they worked together to fashion the No Child Left Behind law. I think rather there are a large number of public schools, some in rural areas, but mostly in our large inner cities, where the children, mostly minority and immigrant, are not being well served. They are certainly not learning to become literate and responsible citizens, that which is rightly high on Deborah’s goals for our schools. Nor are they becoming well read and acquiring useful skills and knowledge. Most important, perhaps, another of Deborah’s and my cherished goals for a school, do we have any indication that the students in these inner-city schools are becoming self-learners.

I think that those who would reform our present system, and vouchers and charters and NCLB are such attempts, I think they meant to better a bad situation, not destroy a good one, and that they are most of all concerned about the numbers of kids who are not learning. Do you really think we would hear anything from the reformers, or about the conspiracy of the Right, if all our public schools were like those, say, in Scarsdale, Newton, and Lake Forest? But they’re not, and that’s the rub.