The "quality" of our public education systems has been a recurring topic on
this list.
It is unfortunate that this issue has become so politicized that data is
seldom used to analyze the challenges we face nor to help us look at what
innovations are worht risking on.
For those interested in some good background data I would recommend "The
Manufactured Crisis" by D. Berliner. It presents some challenging
information concerning the actual performance of our public schools.
For example, the "employability" of the graduates of our schools would appear
to be as related to the nature of the changing American workplace as it is to
the competence of our schools. We now expect all children to graduate high
school when historically large portions an age cohort would drop out of high
school and enter the job market. This was not then seen as a system failure
or a personal embarassment. Today it certainly is on both accounts. And
this increased level of expectation has begun to move beyond HS to college
level training. As a real challenge to us: do we really expect that our
schools can prepare increased portions of any cohort to attain any level of
educational acheivement?
We lament that funding of our schools has grown without any improvement, and
in fact with a decline in effectiveness. Well performance measurements may
not be what they seem. Nor is the reality of funding. Much of the growth in
education spending has come from our decision that children with "special
needs" are entitled to educational supports. Support of traditional school
costs has in fact be stagnant.
What appears to be the key challenge is that educational performance appears
to be most clearly correlated with household income. Children in poor
families, as a group, do worse than those from families with greater income
levels. And, when this dimension is considered, our public schools do at
least as well as all of the other national systems we love to compare
ourselve to.
So the questions we face seem to me to be more related to difficult questions
about jobs our economies are able to produce, the level of training needed to
fill those jobs and the educational abilities of our population. The
challenge may very well have little to do with schools as examples of
"bloated government" or "bureacracy" and more to do with how we feel about
helping those who cannot help themselves.
Ms Pomo seemed to blame those who don't succeed for their own failure. The
question is whether it is really their fault at all; and if it is not, what
do we wish to do about it?
Martin Levine
martyML@aol.com
--Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>