Conclusion

How Well Have American Educational Institutions fulfilled their shifting assignments: assimilation, adjustment, access, achievement, and accountability? On the whole schools and colleges have delivered what Americans wanted but never as promptly or as completely as they wished. Impatience is a national trait, one to which policy people are particularly prone. Typically educational practice changes slowly, finally achieving the new objective after it is decades old. Furthermore, the reforms are usually only a partial implementation of the new idea, which often changes substantially the value of the innovation. Such sluggishness, while annoying to the reformers who want immediate results for their new idea, nonetheless insulates us from the dramatic swings of enthusiasm, such as education for cognition only or for self-esteem only, both necessary and thus both to be sought, but in a balance. Schools and colleges today principally justify their existence by how well they are preparing their students to participate in the economy. Most of the evidence they are inclined to present (or to hide) is based on indicators of student academic learning, an important, though inevitably partial, influence on one’s capacity to be productive in the economy. Two important elements are missing here. The first is whether participation in the economy is a sufficient justification for tax-supported education in a democracy. The second is whether measures of academic learning, most commonly tests, are broad enough indicators of what students have gained from their schooling. Traditionally the goals of education and the more specific task of schooling have been much broader than preparing workers for employment. Both in the United States and elsewhere, education has been seen as the means by which the older generation prepares the younger one to assume responsibilities of adulthood, a much wider role than simple employment. Public schools, especially in a democracy such as ours, have the primary institutional obligation to provide children with the academic skills—particularly literacy, numeracy, and an acquaintance with other disciplines, such as history, science, and the arts—to learn about the world in which they live. In addition, schools typically have had an important role in shaping youngsters’ traits and attitudes, such as their ingenuity, integrity, and capacity for hard work both individually and collectively.