The Vacuous Quality of the Public School Debate

By Raymond Franklin

Education is under siege. Public schools are being abandoned in inner cities and even in older suburban areas. Many low income students seem to be passing through the school system without acquiring basic skills. Teachers claim that schools are overcrowded, lack equipment and supplies, and are physically deteriorating. The media report daily incidences of disorder and violence. Yet, state and city politicians only talk about cutbacks, getting more for less. There is much discussion about preparing students for the job market and the 21st century, although few have a clear picture of what either are likely to require. All segments of the educated public talk about the knowledge revolution and the importance of technical skills and brain power for future employment. At the same time, we daily hear news about the downsizing of smart, technically educated people with college degrees. In spite of the popular disillusionment with education in general, polls indicate that large numbers of parents are satisfied with their children's specific educational experience. No conclusions can be derived from these statements other than that contradictions abound.

This does not mean there is a lack of proposals to change the system. As noted by a San Francisco-based group representing Landmark Education Corporation, "one of the constants within education is that someone is always trying to change it.... [Yet the fate of most proposals fort educational innovations over the last three decades . . . have not endured" (Marzane, et al., 1995, 162). This has led to social fatigue with respect to efforts to change our educational system and is clearly manifested in the buck-passing ritual that takes place. College teachers fault the high schools; high school teachers fault the intermediate level schools; and the K-6 teachers blame family breakups, unemployment, parents who lack child-rearing abilities and do not read to their children at bedtime.

Given little consensus about the status of our schools, organizing the issues of the debate is a prerequisite to clarifying some basic questions: Education toward what ends? By what means? For whom? How do we separate the wheat from the chaff in the reform debate? In essence, what is to be done?

The Big Picture

There are three broad historical sketches employed in the discussion of our school system. One suggests that up to the 1960s, it has been relatively successful. Simply stated: in some past unspecified "golden age," troublemakers and students who failed to work were thrown out of the schools, properly punished inside the schools, or subjected to parental discipline. Unfortunately, according to this view, these qualities in our system were eventually destroyed by progressives and liberals. This began gradually in the 1920s with John Dewey, and culminated rapidly in the 1960s with the sexual revolution, Civil Rights revolution, and the anti-Vietnam War movement. The outcomes were the spread of permissiveness, disorder, relativism, and a decline in the standards that we allegedly once possessed (Bloom, 1988).

Another and more reasonable reflection of the historical record, articulated most recently by Diane Ravitch and Joseph Viteritti, argues that our school system in the past was a success because it had limited goals-namely helping huge numbers of immigrants to learn how to read, write, and become American citizens. Parents of such immigrants were, for the most part, out of the picture since they understood little English (Ravitch and Viteritti, 1996).

The peak of this successful period came when reformers a century ago

This success story ignores the black and rural populations who were bypassed by the educational system. It fails also to note that at the turn of the century only 10% of the student population were enrolled in high school and that large numbers left school after the eighth grade to work as laborers. Yet, Ravitch and Viteritti's historical reflections have merit. In discussing the present, they go on to say that success is never forever. What worked in one era under certain circumstances began to fail as conditions changed. Bureaucracy became overgrown, embedded in regulatory rules. It became inefficient, inhumane, and increasingly distant from the people who were supposed to be served by the system. In the course of time, the demands on the schools changed but the bureaucratic structures-government, school administrators, and unions-ossified. The factory model ceased to be appropriate. Now we need a system that incorporates

The hope that a new arrangement will ultimately emerge stems from the great variety of experiments being conducted in local areas in the form of chartered schools. The faith is that ultimately the present chaos will become order; that is, the failed experiments will fall by the wayside and the successful ones will blossom and become models for the whole nation (Ravitch and Viteritti, 5).

The third broad historical approach is that our present system has not failed. Given its goals and scale, its failure has been over-emphasized. Its failure is being talked about by those with a hidden agenda aimed at destroying the public school system. Even though this hidden agenda is led more by conservative ideologies than by liberal ones, liberals partake in the failure argument.

The present system, argues educational researcher Richard Rothstein, is working and doing its job. The failure of the public school system is a myth. Drawing on extensive data, Mr. Rothstein seeks to demonstrate that all detailed national studies suggest that:

• school administration costs consume only a small portion of the total school budget;
• public schools now produce most of the academic skills currently demanded by employers; education funding has doubled since 1965;
• dropout rates have decreased;
• test scores are higher, especially among minority groups;
• school choice is a misguided direction and will worsen schools and increase race and class segregation. (Rothstein, 1993, 21)

Rothstein concludes that

This direction, of course, takes us into fundamental changes of labor market institutions; and calling for more federal spending in an age when big government has allegedly come to an end. Before addressing this important issue, we want to move from the large school picture to the micro view.

The Small Picture

There is a monotonous recurrence of complaints about what goes on in schools and in classrooms. Some look at the fifteen years following World War II (late 40s and 50s) as the "golden age" that was rapidly terminated with the cultural shift in the 1960s. What pundits were actually saying about the 1950s was different than our retrospective reconstruction of the past. For example, Benjamin Fine, education editor of the New York Times, writing in 1947, concluded that the quality of our country's schools was declining rapidly. The low teacher salaries, the low status of the teaching profession, the insufficient number of schools, the overcrowding of the classrooms and the deterioration of the buildings were some of the problems regularly noted (Fine, 1947).

Ten years later, 1957 (the year that the former USSR launched Sputnik), it was said that we failed to do justice for our best and brightest in the schools. The scapegoat was educational theories and practices that were seen as holding children back. Much of this was laid on the schools of education that trained teachers. In addition, a spate of books was published about why Johnny could not read, write, or do arithmetic. Finally, as might be expected, children who did not learn easily were assumed to have biologically determined IQ deficiencies.

Most of these children "happened" to be African Americans. The best we can do for such students is to track "them" into vocational courses (Adler, 1957).

While the current period is saturated with a mixed bag of complaints not unlike those of the past, they have become far more racialized in terms of suburban and inner city schools. The former are white and good; the latter are bad and black; the former are affluent and the latter are poor. Children graduating from suburban schools are on their way to college, and those coming from inner city schools are on their way to unemployment lines, crime, and eventual incarceration. This is a grim picture, and one that spells despair. The situation is ripe for reformers, and reformers we have.

The Business of Reform

The nature and quantity of advocated "reforms" have changed. With the devolution of the federal government and the privatization of everything, education is transformed into an ordinary commodity-bought, sold, and discarded in accordance with whimsical consumer tastes. Competition and choice are the big gun words. "Lure of the Education Market Remains Strong for Business" reads a lead headline in the New York Times. The article reported that the National School Boards Association "found that more than 60 percent of school boards were considering or had considered hiring a private company to run a district or part of one." But as one plows through this article and many others that involve how business executives can contribute to public education, one finds little discussion of the education process, learning concepts, or the purposes of education m a democratic society. There are references to private and charter schools that will teach public schools something "about management and innovation. . . [and] a free market in education" (Applebome, 1996,15).

Even when the elite segments of the business community speak out, like those organized by The Conference Board, a private research company aimed at improving business enterprise and enhancing the contribution of business to society, you get empty rhetoric that calls for "collaboration among business managers, educators, parents, and a variety of other key stakeholders as equals in a long-term process of change, relationship building, and goal setting and achievement" (Waddock, 1994, 8). This is a model that sees schools as corporations with responsibilities to consumers, government, stockholders, and its workers. They all presumably have a stake in the functioning and survival of the corporation, meaning sustaining corporate profits. The stakeholders of school programs formed in this model aim to produce students who can fit comfortably into the corporate world's work force. Education is transformed into an instrument of economic imperatives.

In reality, "partnerships," "critical thinking," and "standards"-the three favorite words used ad nauseam-are just magic mantras without serious substance or strategies to achieve explicit goals. Partnership is an administrative substitute for the injection of new energy and life that can only come from the staff within schools themselves. Raising standards by arbitrarily making tests more difficult is a substitute for real improvement in the quality of teaching, books, and materials needed by students. Critical thinking, abstractly stated as a goal in most teaching models, is something that emerges slowly from the whole learning experience. It cannot be manufactured through a cookbook recipe.

Education is not and cannot be thought about as an enterprise that seeks to maximize profits and minimize expense, that seeks some kind of value added in relation to each input-one favorite way that some economists articulate the way school reform should proceed.

Teaching the appreciation of Beethoven's 9th Symphony by reducing the presentation to ten minutes with five instruments may be profitable, but it does not lead to an understanding of music. The business community is incapable of thinking through the tasks that are required to build an educational system capable of fulfilling the multidimensional needs in a democratic society. Contrary to much business rhetoric and what many educators believe, business people's habits of mind and planning periods are simply too shortsighted and limited for tasks related to educational reform. People interested in overhauling our public education in order to meet the onrush of the 21st century must work at keeping business and schooling separate. This is not knee-jerk anti-business sentiment. People like Lester Thurow, former dean of MIT's business school, has expressed such sentiments in far harsher terms: "Put bluntly, private capitalistic time horizons are simply too short to accommodate the time constants of education... Human capital cannot be owned. Capitalists don't invest in things they cannot own" (Thurow, 1996). To emphasize: our citadels of learning should educate; businesses should train. Both will reap benefits by this division of labor, since educators are inadequate trainers and business persons have few incentives to educate.

Perhaps we can recast the limits of the reform talk in somewhat different terms before we affirm our own direction. We have fifty states and hundreds of cities and districts that come in all sizes and demographic mixes. Schools in these zones also vary by income and the amount of funds available per pupil. The story of funding differences among inner city schools, white ethnic working class neighborhoods, and suburban schools has been told many times. Despite the overall differences between areas, some "good" functioning schools can be found in all parts of our metropolitan areas. These "good" schools may all be different, guided by different philosophies, but they seem to work because they have a coherent purpose, small classes, a dedicated faculty, and clear expectations from everyone involved. They often, it should be further noted, screen or limit their entering students.

When the whole experimental story is added up, it embraces a very small portion of the student population. It does not constitute a substitute for a public policy, public investment, and an active public debate about educational ideas.

Because the large majority of public schools throughout the country have not been affected by the "alternative" school syndrome, a sentiment has grown that the public school system has completely failed. And if it has not completely failed, it needs to do much better. As a result, a general consensus has developed that the public school system must be overhauled from bottom up and top down. Overhauling institutions as complex as our school system involves overcoming barriers that are sustained by vested interests such as unions, bureaucratic privileges, demagogic politicians, district and local school boards, superintendents, the way teachers are trained and their ingrained teaching modes and, it must be added, the biases and prejudices of parents who are often much too parochial in their attitudes about what constitutes the purposes of education.

The magnitude of the barriers has induced many to give up trying to reform the school system from within. There is a social conspiracy at work aimed at undermining the public school system through exit. The exit principle, employed to justify decreases in educational spending, is derived from economics (Hirschman, 1970). If you do not like one store, buy at another. The first store will be forced to shape up or go under. Extended to social organizations, if you don't like your family, your neighborhood, city, state, exit from them. As applied to schools, the argument is that people need options to leave and to create alternatives between schools. Choice and competition, funded through vouchers, we are told, will exert pressure on the inert public school system and thereby make it come alive. If it does not come alive, it deserves to die. The faith behind this reasoning is that it will eliminate only the public schoolyard weeds without damaging much else.

In our view, this path spells the death of public education, the continued abandonment of low income, inner city minorities, and the creation of Burger-King school systems throughout the nation with an intellectual diet as healthy as that produced in fast food factories.

The Hard, Long Road to Real Reform

Producing and disseminating knowledge, more than most activities, is a collective process. This has become more so than in the past. The direct experience that is handed down from parents to children when farmers and craft workers dominated the scene is of little value in an age where information, symbolic interaction, knowledge, and brain power are the main ingredients. Throughout the 19th century and the early part of the 20th, literacy was not even a prerequisite for most jobs. Learning, in contrast, now takes place in a social context in which individuals need to be nurtured a long time before they are ready to use their accumulated knowledge to understand the world as adults. This preparation period takes place in schools and involves formal procedures that increasingly must be sustained over an individual's lifetime. This long run social horizon comes in conflict with the short run, immediate gratification impulses of a diverse, democratic, and market driven society like our own. Needed are guardians of the idea of public education, public investment in its human and physical infrastructure, and a strong commitment among educators, teachers, and those immediately responsible for governing schools to lean against the temptations of the media, commercialism, anti-intellectual mass tastes, and quick fixes. Restoring the public commitment cannot be achieved by only criticizing the enemies of public schools. In the course of saying no to vouchers, privatization, and other kinds of gimmicks aimed at destroying our public school system, we must identify what we wish to build in a way that integrates images of what wewant from our society, philosophy of education, pedagogy, and educational goals. We must also convince the public that they will get something from the larger public investments in this domain. This is a tall order and requires a serious national debate among those deeply concerned about reconstructing the public edifices of learning. Our endeavor here is to make a few suggestions. No doubt, they will sound utopian to some. No apology is needed for this, since there is little evidence that hard-nosed realists have answers.

1. In the pursuit of greater social and economic equity, we must move away from the over emphasis on equal opportunity to have unequal results. The simple reason is that de facto unequal outcomes produce an unequal distribution of opportunities in the next generation of competition between individuals and groups. A more ideologically palatable direction, in my view, would focus on initial conditions in the early stages of life. There is strong evidence that the educational gap between low income minority children and mainstream whites can be permanently eliminated if their K-6 educational experience is effective. By reducing class size to a maximum of 15 and keeping it at that level from K-6, minority children will overcome all skill deficits (Mosteller, 1995). Accomplishing this in the early years of schooling would alter the entire intermediate and high school experience of minority children. Equalizing performance, along with breaking down discriminatory barriers, will go a long way to achieve a more egalitarian society.

The larger principle here relates to the allocation of limited resources. A strong case can be made that the quality of school life from K-12 for everyone, even the top third of the student body, would benefit by focusing our primary efforts for a sustained period of time on uplifting of the bottom third of our student population.

2. While we agree with the general movement toward self-managed schools, this cannot be viewed as an automatic panacea. Other questions that need addressing include self-management for what and for whom? What kind of educational philosophy guides self management? This takes us to our next consideration.

3. Schools need to be conceived as "islands of freedom" to think, criticize, analyze, and explore in ways that may not conform to the immediate values of the surrounding community. As we are finding out, community-based schools, as in the case of self-managed ones, are no automatic solution to what ails education. This does not mean that principals and teachers do not include parents in school affairs. The struggle here is that any specific community and the public at large need to understand that schools as a sphere of activity in a free society have their own rules of the game and must in fact have rules different than those that operate in the workplace and business or the home or in public spaces that define community life. Parents, for example, are and should be completely free to instruct their children outside school discourse about creationism and any other "ism" that is not life threatening, but they should not be free to prevent high school students from mastering the theory of evolution in a biotechnical and genetic engineering age. To prevent this is to undermine student chances of understanding and participating effectively in the modern world. It is to turn students away from modern science and prevent them from acquiring informed judgments about many medical-ethical decisions that are likely to accrue in the future. The same logic, of course, must apply to views and to school constituencies that are liberal or radical.

4. The classroom is the place where pedagogy enters the scene. This relates to both what and how students learn. A good teaching direction always begins with understanding students' backgrounds, interests, experiences, and stages in life. But, it must be emphasized, the recognition and use of individual cultural histories is not the same as yielding to them. Learning does not necessarily involve conforming to existing felt needs and the limited boundaries of direct experiences. What must be grasped is that students who do not understand the complexities of the environment that bombard them daily cannot be empowered. They quickly become alienated from learning and the good feeling that is derived from discovering new things that transcend local knowledge. Mastering material unrelated to the personal requires motivation. And motivation-if it does not already exist- requires a whole range of pedagogic strategies such as group projects, hands-on activities, systematic study, drill following comprehension, sequentially organized curricula as students mature, and intense involvement in a few basic areas to overcome fragmentation in the acquisition of knowledge. This latter need, of course, becomes more important for high school students who require some degree of closure as they move on to the next stage in their life.

5. Our student population is marked by great diversity. This provides two opportunities that are important to the education process: a) learning to respect the "foreign" other who has a very different mind set; and b) comparing and contrasting differences. These processes are not only important for cognitive development at all levels, but they also undermine ethnocentric arrogance. Preventing diversity from leading to balkanization cannot be guaranteed by ignoring it and/or overriding it with a strong dose of education for citizenship and Americanization. We do not try to eliminate different musical sounds in an orchestra. We try to produce musical meaning from the differences.

6. Accurate and purposeful testing, not the legislation of standards that cannot be enforced and often involve hidden agendas, should be our concern. Testing should never be used to designate a student's intelligence or mental capacity. Tests are a means of learning how individuals are performing at the moment of the testing procedure. The purpose is to help them move beyond their present performance. The mind is not like a bucket with a limited capacity to hold so much water and no more. Insofar as metaphors are necessary in this domain, I would argue that the mind is much more like a muscle that becomes agile with exercise.

7. Learning is inherently a social and cooperative process. Unlike competitive games that only allow for one winner and many losers, learning at its best is shared and permits everyone to win. My mastery of Italian or geometry does not inhibit anyone else from achieving similar mastery. Therefore, maximum learning occurs in a cooperative atmosphere in which teachers see themselves as learning from each other and from students, as well as from knowledgeable others outside the school system. A cooperative spirit also would involve opportunities for older students to assist younger ones, a process in which everyone would benefit. Such an atmosphere avoids demeaning individuals who are inadequate to the tasks at the moment. There are ways of helping students feel good about what they do know without disgracing them for what they do not know.

The defensive character and reactions that currently define exchanges within schools and between them and other institutions undermine in-house development and growth. The current preoccupation with merit raises for individual teachers, for example, is destructive of precisely the kind of cooperation that enhances the learning environment. Teachers and students need to avoid defensive reactions in the course of being corrected and learning to improve skills. Codes of respect and tolerance in schools with both diverse teaching staffs and student bodies need to be embedded in the everyday relations of school life. This is more critical than having special courses on morality and values.

Conclusion

We are living in a society experiencing a wave of change that may be close to that of the industrial revolution. Few can be certain about where they will be living and what they will be doing ten years following graduation from high school or college. Trite as it is to repeat, we are living in a global village bombarded by bits and pieces of information that cannot be understood from experience, that cannot be grasped without possessing a variety of conceptual frameworks. We are being shaken by disruptive economic, demographic, and technological forces that are not well understood. We are also experiencing shifts in the distribution of political power. The full consequences of these various kinds of transformative changes are imperceptible. Schools at all levels need to nurture a cosmopolitan perspective and raise the average level of conceptual thinking. Community control, the buzz word in some circles, is perhaps important in order to stabilize interpersonal contacts and solve strictly local problems, but it has not worked well in nurturing more intelligent teachers capable of understanding a national or world society. Community controllers think too parochially and often shift problems to someone else's backyard that has no protective fences.

A genuine politics of reform in a post industrial society-one where human capital, symbols, and instantaneous communication are an integral part of everyday life-must be aimed at helping people see life beyond their immediate appetites and limited experiences. Education is the modern temple in which to accomplish this task. The need here is to develop an educational system and concept of learning that stretches over the individual's whole life span. The notion of periodic sabbaticals-rather than layoffs, unemployment, and underemployment-should be extended from tenured members of university faculties to the whole labor force. This involves changing the role and meaning of education. Credentialism has reached its useful limits; it becomes void of substance for larger and larger numbers of students who acquire degrees or diplomas or certificates without much learning taking place because of the inadequacy of our learning institutions and because actual job routines usually do not require the skills suggested by the credentials acquired. With so many degrees out there, postsecondary credentials are no more useful than a high school degree a few decades earlier. Society has employed excessive resources to train people for jobs that did not require training. For this and other reasons, education as an instrument to upward mobility must be radically reconsidered.

Learning must be more about the art of living rather than making a living. Keeping up with the world should increasingly mean training or retraining to adapt to a changing workplace, not only to achieving a higher-paying job. This suggests a break in the current trend of bringing business ideology and interests into educational establishments. As we have argued, the role of business is not education. A lifelong continuing educational system geared to all ages and aimed at achieving an enlightened participation in society, rather than acquiring a certificate for employment and job upgrading, especially as we go into job sharing and less work, may induce a more creative and less commercial involvement in sport, science and technology, and cultural events (traditional, classical, and popular). People need loyalty and causes. Lifelong learning may facilitate more humane ones, and, at the same time, reduce the hate of "foreigners" in our midst and imperial fundamentalist exhortations. Conceiving educational institutions as a place for continual renewal requires a long-run horizon that only guardians of public education working through the federal government can undertake. This is one among many reasons why the devolution of the federal government's investment in public education is against our national well-being.

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