The multifaceted crisis of America's public schools On Free to Choose, his popular public television series, Economist
Milton Friedman stands before Boston's Hyde Park High School as
uniformed guards search entering students for weapons. In a voice-over
Friedman says: “Parents know their kids are getting a bad education but
. . . many of them can see no alternative.” Speaking of educational reform, Richard H. Hersh, associate dean for
teacher education at the University of Oregon, tells a meeting: “We've
been rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.” Says Professor J. Myron Atkin, dean of Stanford University's School of
Education: “For the first time, it is conceivable to envision the
dismantling of universal, public, compulsory education as it has been
pioneered in America.” Like some vast jury gradually and reluctantly arriving at a verdict,
politicians, educators and especially millions of parents have come to
believe that the U.S. public schools are in parlous trouble. Violence
keeps making headlines. Test scores keep dropping. Debate rages over
whether or not one-fifth or more adult Americans are functionally
illiterate. High school graduates go so far as to sue their school
systems because they got respectable grades and a diploma but cannot
fill in job application forms correctly. Experts confirm that students
today get at least 25% more As and Bs than they did 15 years ago, but
know less. A Government-funded nationwide survey group, the National
Assessment of Educational Progress, reports that in science, writing,
social studies and mathematics the achievement of U.S. 17-year-olds has
dropped regularly over the past decade. Rounding up the usual suspects in the learning crisis is easy enough.
The decline of the family that once instilled respect for authority and
learning. The influence of television on student attention span. The
disruption of schools created by busing, and the national policy of
keeping more students in school longer, regardless of attitude or
aptitude. The conflicting demands upon the public school system, which
is now expected not only to teach but to make up for past and present
racial and economic injustice. But increasingly too, parents have begun to blame the shortcomings of
the schools on the lone and very visible figure at the front of the
classroom. Teachers for decades have been admired for selfless
devotion. More recently, as things went wrong, they were pitied as
overworked martyrs to an overburdened school system. Now bewildered and
beleaguered, teachers are being blamed—rightly or wrongly—for much
of the trouble in the classroom. One reason is simply that it is easier for society to find someone to
blame than to hold up a mirror and see that U.S. culture itself is
largely responsible. But the new complaints about teachering also arise
from a dismaying discovery: quite a few teachers simply have not mastered the basic skills in reading, writing and
arithmetic that they are supposed to teach.
