NPQ: Addressing State of Education

In France, young people riot about the poor quality of their education. In the United States, it would take cancellation of “The Simpsons” to get a rise out of most students.

Yet in France, 17 to 24% of the students who complete high school are prepared to do college work, while in the United States, the figure is a pathetic 5%. And that doesn’t include the 600,000 or more U.S. students who drop out each year.

The Fall issue of New Perspectives Quarterly is packed with those sorts of statistics. So its no wonder that the diverse cast of 17 commentators in this remarkable 58-page NPQ package have quite a cow about the sorry state of education in the United States.

The discussion gets rolling with a rhetorical kick in the pants from editor Nathan Gardels.

“Our urban public schools are not only being deserted by the dropouts of the underclass but the opt-outs of upper America and an anxious middle class,” he writes. “The schools are inappropriately burdened with parental responsibilities because both mom and dad are out working in the lower-wage economy. Teachers are thanklessly saddled with imparting disciplined habits and long-term perspective to kids whose chief aspiration is acquiring a pair of $100 Nikes like the kind Michael Jordan wears. Stymied by the stupor of the sitcom society and a student body versed in video, the pitiful state of American education is the mirror of our mediocrity.”

Reading the whole NPQ package is like attending a three-day education conference organized by an open-minded iconoclast.

In one article, Lauro Cavazos, the first Latino to serve as U.S. secretary of education, emphasizes increased parental involvement in all ethnic groups, but particularly among Latinos. In another, Shelby Steele, the bete noire of many liberal African Americans, argues that preferential admissions policies for blacks are cruel--as evidenced by a 72% college dropout rate. What the black community needs, Steele writes, is better parenting and a demand that the public school system improve.

And in a third article, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton describes his state’s Home Instruction Program for Pre-school Youngsters (HIPPY), in which paraprofessionals teach underprivileged parents to use special workbooks to instruct their preschool children.

With typical Golden State optimism, Bill Honig, California’s school czar, looks on the bright side, citing evidence that schools here have improved considerably in the last six years. Meanwhile, he laments, the overworked educators who are striving to make public schools better, expend needless energy fighting off an army of critics offering only bad alternatives.

Some national leaders, for example, are chipping away at public education with their “superficial ideas, such as public school choice, vouchers, merit schools and alternative certification”; left-leaning intellectuals are clamoring for an “ethnic curriculum” regardless of the cost to more basic learning, and yuppie consumer snobs shop for private schools rather than working to improve the public schools at hand.

This problem of middle-class flight from the public schools is one of the most engaging and emotional debates in an issue loaded with them. Pulitzer Prize-winning author J. Anthony Lukas acknowledges, for example, that much of the middle-class defection to the suburbs or private schools is fueled by racism. But he asks, “How does one disentangle the web of fears and judgments about the future of one’s children?”

Author Kevin Phillips, a former Nixon staffer, offers statistics to show that the middle class itself is quickly shrinking because of Reagan-era economics. And the numbers don’t even tell the whole story. As Barbara Ehrenreich says in another article, the middle class ideas of home ownership, college tuition, and annual family vacations, are often out of limits to some still labeled middle class: “If a family is making $20,000 a year, they are in the middle, numerically, but the numerical middle stopped corresponding to our cultural idea of what the middle class was.”

On the other hand, the alleged middle class’ inability to pay its kids way through college may not be a major bummer after all. Despite all the media hullabaloo about America’s inability to compete against the rest of the world, this country is producing a lot more jobs for hamburger flippers than nuclear physicists.

This emphasizes what emerges as the underlying theme of the issue: “The society we have constructed has given us the education we deserve.”

Still, Ehrenreich thinks, America’s haves must reinvest in public schools if those schools--and by some accounts, therefore, the nation--are to survive.

“When one looks at the awful state of New York City public schools, it is hard to believe that things wouldn’t change if the children of stock bankers and finance bankers were enrolled.”

The have nots, she and others believe, must somehow shake themselves free of the amusement stupor that has lulled them into complacency about education.

As Gardels writes in his introduction, “In today’s world, the last laugh will not go to the best entertained but to the best educated.”

In contrast to the NPQ kaleidoscopic approach, the November Atlantic Monthly cover story features a simple solution to America’s educational woes: Make the kids spend more time in school.

Readers who have encountered the perplexing array of perspectives in NPQ may find the Atlantic’s one-note approach refreshingly simplistic.

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