Prepared by Charlotte Astor
America's economic, national and international security demand quality education. The size and diversity of the country's educational system, however, make the effort toward world-class education for all a continually challenging and often controversial endeavor. What follows is a sampling of recent commentary from a variety of sources.
Also, I don't think we can discount the diversity factor we have in this country. We're a nation of many cultures and creeds and influences, and what seems important among one group or location may not be a priority elsewhere. In countries such as Japan, where there is little diversity in the culture, it is easier to motivate students toward common goals. (Excerpted from "Raising the Standards," The American Legion Magazine, April 1997, p. 60.)
The biggest threat to the American educational system may come not from within our schools but from the depth of our divisions over what exactly they should accomplish and how best to get them to accomplish it. And our divisions will not be healed as long as we ignore the history of the accomplishments that have already been made. We should begin improving our schools by appreciating how well they have, in most places and at most times, done so far.... [U]ntil after World War II, it was assumed that no more than 20 percent of American youth could handle a college curriculum at all; now 62 percent of all high school graduates enroll in college the following fall. (Excerpted from "What Happened to America's Public Schools?," American Heritage, November 1997, p. 52.)
Mixed reports don't make for good headlines, and qualified good news undermines the sense of crisis essential both to liberal demands for more money and to conservative arguments that only vouchers and other radical solutions will do. High school completion rates -- now roughly 90 percent -- and college graduation rates are the highest in history. One in four adult Americans has at least a bachelor's degree -- the highest percentage in the world (and the percentage keeps getting higher). A larger percentage of 22-year-olds receive degrees in math, science, or engineering in the United States than in any of the nation's major economic competitors....Because of reforms instituted in the 1980s, more American high school students than ever before are taking four years of English and at least three years of math and science....A growing number of people, in the name of world-class standards, would abandon, through vouchers, privatization and other means, the idea of the common school altogether. Before we do that, we'd better be sure that things are really as bad as we assume. The dumbest thing we could do is scrap what we're doing right. (Excerpted from "The Near-Myth of Our Failing Schools," The Atlantic Monthly, October 1997, p. 72.)
The privilege for parents to choose their child's education is probably an inevitability in the not-too-distant future....Certainly, schools supported by vouchers or charter schools provide opportunities to explore alternative arrangements, which are sorely needed on the education landscape. The idea of choice also provides options beyond selecting the school, and they compel me to wonder where the choosing stops.
...[I]f I can choose the school, I should be able to choose the curriculum the school offers....If parents can choose the school, can they choose the teachers with whom their children will study? And if they find that they don't like one or two teachers, can they choose different ones in October?...[I]f choice is our future, then what is it that makes our nation or any state in the Union a commonwealth? What will bind us together other than the pursuit of choice?...What happens when individual, ideological pursuit is the game, and our children are the pieces we move about?...
Choice will only create a new set of problems to solve in a new arena, and it too will be as tyrannical as the current monopoly on compulsory education without choice, just in different ways. (Excerpted from The Washington Post, Nov. 17, 1997, p. A23.)
If, as Americans, we are now part of an international economy...and if that international economy values most of all the literate, self-driven worker who, seated at a computer console of some kind, continuously monitors the work processes in which he or she takes part...then the schooling that encourages participation and initiative rather than rote learning is also the schooling that helps each of us and all of us to survive economically.... (Excerpted from an address to The Secretary's Open Forum of the U.S. Department of State, Nov. 3, 1997. )
What makes a good school? There are no stock answers, like wardrobe or testing or size. But there are some universal truths. A good school is a community of parents, teachers and students. A good school, like a good class, is run by someone with vision, passion and compassion. A good school has teachers who still enjoy the challenge, no matter what their age or experience. A good school prepares its students not just for [standardized aptitude tests] but also for the world out there. (Excerpted from "How to Teach Our Children Well," Time, Oct. 27, 1997, p. 64.)
New technologies could take over many of the instructional duties that now define professors' jobs, according to faculty members who are peering into the future. Some of them are alarmed by what they see, while others are encouraged.
Among the latter are faculty members -- joined by some administrators -- who expect that teaching will become more efficient, and that students will benefit, as parts of the professor's job are taken over by multimedia software, recorded lectures and other high-tech tools. Professors could end up having more time to do the things they do best, these people suggest.
Others -- even some faculty members who use technology in their classrooms already -- worry that professors will be left on the sidelines. Publishing companies and brand-name universities, they fear, could team up with a handful of well-known scholars to market lectures, and even entire courses on CD-ROMs and World-Wide Web sites. The quality of education, these critics say, could erode...."Doing away with human contact would be disastrous," says Mary Burgan, general secretary of the American Association of University Professors. She says she's afraid administrators see technology as "a cheap, quick fix" for complex problems in higher education. (Excerpted from The Chronicle of Higher Education Web site, http://chronicle.com/colloquy/97/unbundle/background.htm.)
The [Inter]Net is both helping and changing the home-schooling movement in America. [Editor's note: Home schooling is the educational alternative in which parents/guardians assume the primary responsibility for the education of their children. Recent figures show that between 750,000 and 1 million school-age children are being educated at home.] Because it makes educational resources more easily available, the Net dramatically increases the access to information for students learning at home. But because it makes community-building easy, the Net is helping to foster communities of home-schooling families that could go a long way toward building a consensus among this very disparate group on curriculums and teaching techniques.
In short, these communities are building alternative school systems and facing and solving the problems of community schooling not from a government mandate, top down, but from the ground up....
Whether or not home schooling is a good idea remains a topic of intense political and social dispute. Is it better for students to be taught in a socially uncontrolled environment according to a government-mandated curriculum? Or is it better for students to be educated at home or in small communities of like-minded, nonprofessional educators? (Excerpted from "Internet is Nurturing Home Schooling," The New York Times on the Web: Cyber Times, Sept. 5, 1997, http://nytimes.com can be reached via electronic mail at: [email protected])
Vouchers raise enormous constitutional questions about the potential violation of our traditional separation of church and state. They reduce rather than enhance accountability since unlike public schools, private institutions are free to pick students and expel them at will, are subject to only minimal public scrutiny and have no obligation to pluralism, financial diversity, democratic control or even standard academic standards....
[T]here are good public schools all over the country in middle- and high-income neighborhoods. A voucher-driven federal raid on scarce school funds would be a terrible thing. Meanwhile, inadequate public schools would be further weakened as the best students escaped to private entities and left only the poorest, most troubled students behind. (Excerpted from "The Wrong Choice About Schools," The Orlando Sentinel, Aug. 25, 1997, p. A-11.)
Of the 52 million schoolchildren in America, fewer than 8 million attend private or parochial schools. Of those, fewer than 20,000 are using vouchers to help cover their tuition. And only two cities, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Cleveland, Ohio, use tax dollars to supply the vouchers. ...
Supporters [of vouchers] ask why the poor should not have the same chance at private schools as the better-off. Though it's too soon to tell whether most voucher-supported students perform better academically in a private school, no one needs a study to show that most private schools are safer and more orderly. For inner-city parents, vouchers can represent salvation from a system in perpetual disrepair, even if they offer just a fraction of poor children a way into the lifeboat of private schooling. (Excerpted from "They'll Vouch for That," Time, Oct. 27, 1997, p. 73.)
U.S. Society &
Values
U.S.I.A. Electronic Journal, Vol. 2, No. 4, December
1997