What Americans Want from Public Schools

AMERICANS CONTINUE TO FOLLOW the advice of Benjamin Franklin in making “the proper education of youth” the most important American social policy. Public education uses more resources and involves more people than any other government program for social welfare. It is the main activity of local governments and the largest single expenditure of almost all state governments. Education is the American answer to the European welfare state, to massive waves of immigration, and to demands for the abolition of subordination based on race, class, or gender. Although public schools in the United States are expected to accomplish a lot for their students, underlying all of these tasks is the goal of creating the conditions needed for people to believe in and pursue the ideology of the American dream. Our understanding of the American dream is the common one, described by President Clinton this way: “The American dream that we were all raised on is a simple but powerful one—if you work hard and play by the rules you should be given a chance to go as far as your God-given ability will take you.” The dream is the unwritten promise that all residents of the United States have a reasonable chance to achieve success through their own efforts, talents, and hard work. Success is most often defined in material terms, but everyone gets to decide what it is for himself or herself. The first man to walk across Antarctica talks about this idea in the same way as people who make their first million: “The only limit to achievement,” he said, “is the limit you place on your own dreams. Let your vision be guided by hope, your path be adventurous, and the power of your thoughts be directed toward the betterment of tomorrow.” The American dream is a brilliant ideological invention, although, as we shall see, in practice it leaves much to be desired. Its power depends partly on the way it balances individual and collective responsibilities. The role of the government is to make the pursuit of success possible for everyone. This implies strict and complete nondiscrimination, universal education to provide the means for pursuing success, and protection for virtually all views of success, regardless of how many people endorse them.

Public Schools in the New America

THE LANDSCAPE OF PUBLIC SCHOOLING in the United States has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, in part because of substantial movement toward the collective goals of education. Schools are more racially integrated than before Brown v. Board of Education; desegregation continues to contribute to the growth of the black middle class. Levels of school funding are higher than a generation ago, and in many states funding is more equitable across districts. Children with severe disabilities spend more of their days in the mainstream; children with subtle learning problems are increasingly identified and helped; parents have the legal right either to challenge the separation of children with disabilities or to demand special services for them. Most English language learners get at least some help in making the transition to English-speaking classes. Dropout rates have declined for whites and for blacks (although not for Hispanics). NAEP scores are higher in many subjects in most grades, with the greatest gains being made by black students. Most states have adopted standards and are developing curricula and professional development programs to bring those standards into the classroom; some states have shown demonstrable improvement in student learning as a consequence. Schools are increasingly sensitive to students from varied religious and ethnic backgrounds, and curricula are more multicultural. Ability grouping is more flexible than it used to be, more students have access to Advanced Placement classes, more take a reasonably demanding curricula, and more attend college. Through it all, despite concerns and disagreements, Americans have sustained their commitment to public schooling. While conflicts over education policy remain serious and policy irrationality persists, policy and practice have changed in ways that bring the ideology of the American dream closer to reality. These developments took place mostly in a context of economic stability (or even great prosperity) that made it relatively easy to dedicate more resources to public education. Broader political, social, and demographic developments, beginning with civil rights protests, also strongly affected them. Yet schools would not have moved toward greater quality, equality, and inclusiveness unless enough Americans believed deeply in the American dream and expected public education to foster the institutions and practices needed both to promote the pursuit of individual dreams and to keep democracy vital.

School Reform

AMERICANSGIVE A GRADE OF “B PLUS” to the schools attended by their own children, a “B minus” to the public schools in their community, and a “C” to the public schools nationally. Incumbent politicians extol the impact of the educational reforms they have sponsored while insurgents point to the problems that remain. Some analysts call for an “autopsy” on public education, others insist that such rhetoric represents a “manufactured crisis” comprised of “myths [and] fraud.” The American public education system is not in crisis. Some public schools are impressive and many are doing a good job, although most are not as good as they should be. In a few places, chiefly in poor urban districts (and in some poor rural districts as well), schools are failing miserably; they provide the evidence for people who see a crisis. Once again the most serious problems result from inequality. In part because of home and community influences, poor children often come to school less ready to learn than others, and they face more obstacles to educational success as they grow up. Parents and communities can and must contribute to alleviating this problem, just as social policies such as full employment, universal health insurance, and family allowances could help. As we have seen, however, it is the schools to which we have given the central responsibility to make the American dream work, to provide the structure and tools that all children need to pursue their dreams and maintain democracy. America has chosen to invest in schools rather than these other social policies to try to equalize opportunity; if our nation allows public education to fail the children who most need its help, then the dream is merely a sham. We cannot simultaneously substitute schools for other policies to alleviate poverty and permit schools to shirk the tasks needed to do the job. School reform can help poor children, and others, improve their performance. The movement for high standards has created a mechanism that can help all students to learn more. Preschool, summer school, and small classes can help them.

School Desegregation

RACIAL DOMINATION WAS, FROM THE OUTSET, the most glaring flaw in the ideology of the American dream. It began when the dream began, with Captain John Smith’s move to the “New World” in 1607. In his comments are all the elements of the American dream: equal opportunity for all, a chance of success for each, control over our nation’s political and economic future, and virtue, since America was “as God made it when hee created the world.” But enslaved Africans, who arrived in Virginia soon after Smith did, were not “borne to a new life”—or at least not one that allowed participation in the American dream. They were brought into, not out of, “every extremity.” And that terrible irony, the simultaneous invention of American slavery and American freedom, has shaped American society ever since. It has shaped its public schools as well. Desegregation has been our nation’s most direct effort since Reconstruction to come to grips with the evils of racial domination in public schooling. Beginning in the mid-1960s, it was the first as well as one of the largest postwar efforts to make America’s schooling practices fit its ideals. Many of the issues that we discuss in later chapters, such as funding equalization, school reform, the separation of children, and distinctive group treatment, are in part extensions of the successes of school desegregation or reactions to its perceived failures. Controversy over desegregation showed the difficulty in trying to satisfy both the individual and collective goals of the American dream; the experience demonstrated both the power of the ideology and the intractability of its internal conflicts. It continues to reverberate throughout American schooling and society. School desegregation was, on balance, an educational success. Its accomplishments were smaller than its advocates promised and less than they hoped for, but except when done irresponsibly or very unwisely, it improved the chances for black children to attain their dreams and did not diminish the chances for white children. Members of both races usually gained socially from the interaction. If it were politically feasible, a continued effort along these lines would be educationally beneficial. Ending legal segregation in schools and other public facilities, fostering real, not just legal, desegregation, did more to move the American dream from ideology to practice than has any other public policy or private effort.

Introduction

THE AMERICAN DREAM IS A POWERFUL CONCEPT. It encourages each person who lives in the United States to pursue success, and it creates the framework within which everyone can do it. It holds each person responsible for achieving his or her own dreams, while generating shared values and behaviors needed to persuade Americans that they have a real chance to achieve them. It holds out a vision of both individual success and the collective good of all. From the perspective of the individual, the ideology is as compelling as it is simple. “I am an American, so I have the freedom and opportunity to make whatever I want of my life. I can succeed by working hard and using my talents; if I fail, it will be my own fault. Success is honorable, and failure is not. In order to make sure that my children and grandchildren have the same freedom and opportunities that I do, I have a responsibility to be a good citizen— to respect those whose vision of success is different from my own, to help make sure that everyone has an equal chance to succeed, to participate in the democratic process, and to teach my children to be proud of this country.” Not all residents of the United States believe all of those things, of course, and some believe none of them. Nevertheless, this American dream is surprisingly close to what most Americans have believed through most of recent American history. Public schools are where it is all supposed to start—they are the central institutions for bringing both parts of the dream into practice. Americans expect schools not only to help students reach their potential as individuals but also to make them good citizens who will maintain the nation’s values and institutions, help them flourish, and pass them on to the next generation. The American public widely endorses both of these broad goals, values public education, and supports it with an extraordinary level of resources. Despite this consensus Americans disagree intensely about the education policies that will best help us achieve this dual goal. In recent years disputes over educational issues have involved all the branches and levels of government and have affected millions of students. The controversies—over matters like school funding, vouchers, bilingual education, high-stakes testing, desegregation, and creationism—seem, at first glance, to be separate problems.

Challenging the American Dream

MULTICULTURAL EDUCATION, whether as a curricular reform or as a general goal for education, swept the nation’s schools during the 1990s. As generally understood and practiced, it does not challenge the American dream; it is a central way of teaching respect for difference and part of the continuing process of redefining the common American culture. Similarly, bilingual education is usually intended to help students pursue success within the mainstream, not to remain outside it. But some Americans go beyond claims for respect and incorporation. They seek to use multicultural or bilingual education to enable members of their group to attain distinctive treatment within public schools, or they promote changes in school curricula or methods of teaching that reflect their racial identity or religious beliefs in ways that challenge the American dream. They promote “allegiance to groups,” in Albert Shanker’s terms, or they insist on the value of difference. Some of these advocates do not believe that fostering individual success should be a central value of public schooling, or they reject the usual formulation of democratic citizenship, or they believe that the whole ideology of the American dream is an exercise in power thinly disguised as a formula for fair treatment. When they couch alternatives in the language of discrimination or make proposals in the context of school failure, their impact can be politically volatile. These issues of religion and culture show the acute difficulty of balancing the claims of one, some, and all in American public schooling, as well as the virtues and defects of using the American dream as the framework for that balancing act. To the degree that proponents—of multicultural education, cultural maintenance, African-centered pedagogy, or religious values—appeal to fairness, challenge discrimination, or demand respect for diverse viewpoints, they can and should gain broad support. But when advocates of particular groups seek to use public schools to help them maintain their separate identity, try to separate themselves within schools, or propose to have an entirely separate education within the public school system, support appropriately drops. If they try to transform all the schools in accordance with their particular cultural views or religious beliefs in rejection of the American dream, support in the wider community melts away, as it should.

School Finance Reform

IN A WEALTHY NORTHEASTERN STATE, two schools are near each other geographically but far apart in every other way. The school in the city sits beside an abandoned lot in a community that has lost most of its industrial jobs. “The physical appearance of the school is bleak, depressing. The hall is dark and dingy. . . . The playground outside is all brown wood and it is completely surrounded by hard pavement.” The library has not been used for 13 years; even the faculty bathrooms have no toilet paper or soap. The gym leaks. There is one computer for every 35 students, and none of the classrooms is wired for the Internet. The principal has trouble attracting qualified teachers in many fields and has none trained in computer instruction; according to the scholar who looked at these schools, teachers mainly use the computers to keep the students busy playing games when they have completed their worksheets. In this school 98 percent of the students are non-Anglo, more than two-thirds are eligible for free or reduced-price school lunches, almost three in ten are in special education. The residents of the district have a per capita income of $17,000 a year. In the suburb nearby, the school is “housed in a modern building and surrounded by large, well-maintained athletic fields. [It] boasts such amenities as a spacious school library furnished with rows upon rows of book stacks, and a high-ceilinged auditorium with theater-style seating and a grand piano on stage. Not only does the school have computers in every classroom, it also has a fully equipped computer lab, staffed by an instructor.” There is one computer for every four students, all wired for Internet use. Teachers have aides as well as access to “resource teachers” who specialize in various academic fields, help with curricula, and give “guest lectures” in classrooms. Most students participate in the orchestra, chorus, or specialized bands (or perhaps all three). One fourth-grade teacher, a graduate of Vassar College, was chosen over more than 200 competitors for her job, and along with the others in the school is paid considerably more than the state average. In this school 95 percent of the students are Anglo, fewer than one percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, and only 5 percent are in special education. Residents of the district have a per capita income of $70,000.

Separation and Inclusion

IN LOS ANGELES HISPANIC PARENTS PICKET A SCHOOL, demanding that their children be taken out of bilingual education classes and put into regular, English-speaking classes; in Florida the state department of education officially chastises the schools in Orange County for not providing bilingual education classes. A mother hires attorneys and spends two years fighting to have her developmentally disabled teenage daughter placed in a full-time residential facility at public expense; another set of parents pays for neuropsychological testing for their five-year-old son with cerebral palsy so that they can do battle if the Wellesley, Massachusetts, school district tries to move him out of a regular kindergarten class. In Montclair, New Jersey, one parent opposes a plan to eliminate ability grouping in ninth-grade English because he “doesn’t want his daughter jeopardized by the possibility that the new plan isn’t going to work”; another supports the plan because “an end should be put to a [grouping] system that intentionally or unintentionally privileges a small minority and fails to do justice to the rest of the children.” It is extremely hard to figure out how best to educate children who are in some way distinctive in their physical, emotional, or academic capacity, or in their English language proficiency. These children may differ not only from the majority of students but also from those perceived to have the same characteristics. Their advocates sometimes disagree passionately about how the inclusion of students with distinctive characteristics affects their achievement and that of their peers. In addition, the placement of these students is often affected unfairly by the usual racial and class hierarchies. Everyone concurs that whether we help children with distinctive characteristics to achieve their dreams is an important test of our nation’s commitment to the American dream. But deep disagreements remain about how to do it. Most Americans believe, in principle, that interaction in the classroom and playground is the best way for children to learn to appreciate, or at least deal with, people different from themselves. Mixing in this way may even lead students to find new dreams, see new possibilities, invent new futures. This is the premise behind the view that the collective goals of education are best achieved when students are educated together regardless of variations in ethnicity or race, gender or religion, ability or disability, background or beliefs.

Choice

ALL OF THE REFORMS DISCUSSED SO FAR seek to promote the individual and collective goals of education by improving public schooling—making schools and classrooms more racially integrated, more equitably funded, more academically challenging, more focused on student learning. The most vehement critics of public education, however, look at the forty-year history of reform in this country and conclude that pursuit of the American dream through public schooling is bound to fail. They believe that the current system of public education exists for the adults who work in it and eats money, that the public has invested more than enough time and resources in trying to make the system work and should try another approach. In the words of a mother and choice advocate from New Hampshire, the public system is about “Power and money! The public school system is a powerful monopoly. The people running this monopoly fear change. They fear the resulting demise of their power.” To her mind, only by fighting this “chokehold” can we promote collective as well as individual goals of schooling: … If the school system doesn’t live up to our standards, we should have the right to “save” our children. . . . Any child not educated to be the best that he can be is heartbreaking to most parents. Any child not educated to be the best that he can be is of less value to the community he lives in. . . . This is where the concept of “school choice” becomes so important as a civil right…. Advocates of choice believe that public schooling cannot work and dooms poor children. “The combination of monopoly in the public sector, significant profitability for those who serve the monopoly and the unique ability for the wealthy to choose the best schools has translated into a nightmare of predictable results for ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” says Lisa Keegan, the former superintendent of public instruction in Arizona:… Public education in the United States should be that in which the money necessary for an education follows a child to the school his or her parent determines is best. . . . The nation cannot abide a system that is blatantly unfair in the access it provides its students to excellent education. This battle for the right of all children to access a quality education is the civil rights movement of our time, and it will succeed.