Straight Talk About American Education/Compelling Belief: The Culture of American Schooling

...Somehow poetry became part of the whole, dreadful process...

...Furthermore, Black implies, we do not serve the long-term interests of private schooling itself if we wink at educational malpractice, encourage schools that cater to bizarre tastes, and invite allegations of fraud and chicanery...

...Mortimer Adler et...

...But Black is an old-fashioned liberal who believes that education cannot be left entirely to the marketplace, and that school administrators cannot be wholly trusted in matters of quality control...

...To be sure, the elementary/secondary school establishment remains largely oblivious of—or defensive about—the palpable shortcomings of our public schools, and we have a long way to go before the pronouncements of the National Education Association and its ilk come to echo the everyday observations of parents and employers, if indeed they ever do...

...have done, making equal claims for both...

...But Black comes down squarely on the side of reasonable standard-setting and oversight by government, preferably at the state level, in such matters as school certification, teacher competency, and student achievement...

...So far, so good...

...But Hamilton's book is a refutation of the supposed link between neurosis and creativity...

...David S. Seeley, Education Through Partnership (American Enterprise Institute, 1981...

...and they have, over the years, found it relatively easy to function within a public-policy framework of limited oversight and (even more limited) aid...

...The governmental foot thus creeps back through the schoolhouse door, to be followed by a whole leg as Arons urges redistribution of economic resources to enable low-income families to realize their educational dreams...

...Education is gradually moving into the center of the political arena...

...But trouble lurks just ahead...

...they are particularly numerous in New York...

...It is a world of plain speaking and common sense, largely devoid of education jargon, interest-group politics, and funny ideas...

...Robert Benjamin, Making Schools Work (Continuum, 1981...

...It is a world that knows the difference between non-discrimination and quotas...

...Though he does not insist that "public" schools be scrapped, he would have private schooling of every sort be free from nearly all government regulation and financed in such a way as to be accessible to poor and rich alike...

...But where some would simply attach a safety valve that would ease these pressures by allowing the dissident to escape from the strictures of state-dominated schooling, Arons's libertarian inclinations lead him to construe education itself as fundamentally a private act, an extension of the family, a responsibility of the parent, and to suggest that a vibrant, free, and diverse society must make it possible for all to raise their children as they think best...

...Rather, they are taking their signals from impatient constituents, from direct observation, from common sense, and from the solid writings of responsible critics, some of which are even beginning to be issued by major commercial publishers—a welcome signal, perhaps, that solidity may now be marketable.* Two such volumes are the latest works of Theodore Black and Stephen Arons, which have somewhat more in common than appearances would suggest...

...That this will be true of schooling, too, is already evident from the enormous brouhaha surrounding the terms on which private schools share in a public "benefit" so routine and innocuous that many do not even call it "aid," namely tax deductions for their donors and exemption from taxation on their own revenues...

...Samuel L. Blumenfeld, Is Public Education Necessary...

...Robert B. Everhard, editor, The Public School Monopoly (Pacific Institute for Public Policy Research, 1982...

...That prizes educational quality and has scant patience with the excesses wrought in the name of equity...

...Black agrees that the future well-being of the Republic depends in part on acceptance of the principle of educational choice...

...Compelling Belief is in fact a compelling book of heresy...

...Deploying an inventive and rather generous construction of the First Amendment that owes much to Alexander Meiklejohn and a bit to Justice Douglas, Arons boldly asserts that "the present political and financial structure of American schooling is unconstitutional...

...If further proof were needed, it was supplied in rich and varied detail during the Senate Finance Committee's "mark up" last autumn of the tuition tax-credit bill that President Reagan proposed, when a very modest level of aid to the parents of private-school students was weighted down with many of the same restrictions, regulations, and prohibitions that already burden the public schools...

...That is why a number of mainstream private-school groups, such as the National Association of Independent Schools, are having second thoughts about tuition tax-credits, and why many fundamentalist educators have already decided they would rather be free than prosperous...

...Rather, it demands greater tolerance for diversity within the educational system, even at the price of some messiness...

...It is, in short, an educational world that would instantly strike the vast majority of parents and students—and, I judge, the majority of teachers, though not their national spokesmen—as sane, reasonable, and appealing...

...and the forthcoming works by Diane Ravitch (Basic Books) and Gilbert Sewall (Macmillan...

...dictu, a lengthening list of governors, legislators, mainline editorial writers, foundation executives, and even a few farsighted association chiefs is no longer drawing its counsel on education issues from the conventional folly of the sixties...

...He is much taken with the plight of educational dissidents: the parent who prefers to teach his child at home, the Protestant fundamentalist preacher-educator whose world is based on faith rather than science, the rural sectarians who choose to rear their youngsters in an atmosphere of piety, stern morality, and meticulous avoidance of worldly "progress" and technocracy...

...Michael E. Manley-Casimir, editor, Family Choice in Schooling (Lexington, 1982...

...Though too many American schools remain sorry excuses for educational institutions, the notion that something must be done about this is finally beginning to make its way into the political, cultural, and intellectual mainstream...

...Arons is a youngish attorney on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, where he writes pro-lifically about legal, educational, and constitutional issues...

...That understands why parents want their children to learn values in school, and which values they want them to learn...

...al., The Paideia Proposal (Macmillan, 1982...

...The problem here is that Arons is trying to harness both libertarian instincts and liberal impulses to the same policy cart...

...He would not give government an educational monopoly (though he is proud of having sent his own children to public schools) but suggests that one sure antidote to educational statism is public confidence that all schools, under whatever auspices, abide by generally accepted norms and expectations, at least in the core of their educational programs...

...In any event, that has been our experience in health, welfare, housing, higher education, and every other policy domain in which a benevolent society has attempted to improve the choices available to those without sufficient private resources...

...The remedy, Arons argues, is to effect a "separation of school and state" by ending the hegemony of government-related education and by substituting a system wherein the state is "neutral" as to what is taught and even-handed in apportioning the financial resources for such schooling...

...Arons explores the "suppression of intellectual freedom" that results from universal compulsory public schooling, chronicles the efforts by some parents (and a handful of educators) to break the mold, and sketches the Constitutional bases upon which he believes those efforts legitimately rest...

...That takes as given the necessity of testing youngsters in order to see what they have learned...

...He favors public aid to private education and would try tuition tax credits and vouchers (yes, both...

...And that concedes such sensitive matters as sex-education their rightful place in the schoolhouse, but insists that they be approached with delicacy and without compulsion...

...They were the ones who cleared a space for him where, in his lucid moments, he could create something that will live on beyond the legacy of his madness...

...For only if we devise arrangements that are tolerable to the responsible dissidents can we shift our focus from their specific grievances, which are important in principle but marginal in practice, to the schooling received by the great majority of American children, which is and will remain public, but which is not yet nearly as good as it needs to be...

...No longer are thoughtful criticisms confined to the seasonal reflections of reactionary columnists, the boozy lamentations of aging academic traditionalists, and the gatherings of such oppositional groups as the Council for Basic Education...

...private education—the very qualities that make it attractive to parents, and perhaps worthy of aid, in the first place...

...That appreciates the dependency-inducing and homogenizing effects of extensive federal intrusion into schooling...

...One need not be a Washington-weary cynic to predict that all the rest would be added in due course...

...In part because the freshening interest in education by governors and legislators and other elected laymen has not yet assumed gale force...

...Black is an educational layman, a business executive in late middle age, who has penned what amounts to an anthology of astute observations and sane insights garnered through long service as a member (and for five years "chancellor' ' or chairman) of the New York Board of Regents, the nation's oldest, most comprehensive, and most powerful state "board of education...

...The difficulty is that such aid, no matter how it may be supplied, will come under some kind of public control...

...Why, then, is it so different from the never-never-land found in most teachers' colleges, education journals, and the actual policies and practices of many school systems...

...He believes, with Arons, that the Supreme Court has egregiously distorted the First Amendment...

...As Hamilton's book repeatedly demonstrates, Lowell was fortunate in having people who stayed by him...

...This carries risks—some of them already manifest in the clumsy, even simplistic, efforts by a few states to improve teacher and student quality through mandate, fiat, and regulation—but it also has enormous potential for good...

...That does not mean strengthening the homogenizing, monopolizing, statist tendencies that both Arons and Black deplore...

...Black does not dwell overlong on the specialized anxieties of the true educational dissident...

...The private-school image that looms largest in his mind's eye is the long-established Catholic parochial system...

...Devin-Adair, 1981...

...In part because special pleading by interest groups within and around education—including a few of the less noble dissidents whose part Stephen Arons takes— have tended to focus our interests and energies on volatile marginal issues rather than on the core of the educational process...

...This arresting conclusion follows from his view that the Bill of Rights protects both the expression and the formation of belief and opinion, that schooling is the major influence—besides the family itself—on a child's beliefs, values, and opinions, and that government control of schooling therefore constrains intellectual freedom, political diversity, and individual dignity...

...It is a world in which public and private schools coexist, in which the societal interest in education is tamed but not broken by the familial interest, in which the state retains authority to require children to attend school (and the responsibility for providing the wherewithal of schooling) but exercises that authority with a light touch...

...Ted Black's educational world is an improved version of the one that most people inhabit...

...This is natural, for Catholic schools remain much the largest segment within private education...

...And in part because, until quite recently, one would not be likely to find NBC, Newsweek, or a major commercial publisher such as Harcourt Brace Jovanovich giving the time of day to "straight talk" about education...

...Lowell's life would appear to be about the consequences of suggestibility, especially the suggestibility born of psychiatry...

...Though he judges competition to be conducive to quality, '' If we are to enjoy educational pluralism, we must be assured of high quality in all of the educational systems which make up the pluralistic whole...

...In part, one must ruefully conclude, because sensible people do not rule many precincts of that land, and a number of those who started sensibly have been bullied, cajoled, and confused into silliness, excess, and extremism...

...But such straight talk is now slowly displacing the twisted discourse of recent-years...

...But, mirabile Chester E. Finn, Jr...

...one person's notion of what is flaky and unacceptable in the classroom may be another's pedagogical Nirvana...

...For the liberal in Arons cannot abide the possibility that society might tolerate schools that practice racial discrimination in any manifestation, a laudable instinct but one that leads him to urge public regulation of that aspect of schooling...

...Arons correctly observes that it is virtually impossible to accommodate their conceptions of schooling within a framework of majoritarian "public" education and state regulation, and that efforts to do so invite factional strife, endless litigation, and controversy over everything from the choice of books for the school library to the credentials of "qualified" teachers...

...Clearly the poetry had little to do with Lowell's countless breakdowns...

...And some might argue that the madness robbed the poetry of its early greatness...

...There is, of course, no easy solution...

...STRAIGHT TALK ABOUT AMERICAN EDUCATION Theodore M. Black/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$14.95 COMPELLING BELIEF: THE CULTURE OF AMERICAN SCHOOLING Stephen Arons/ McGraw-Hill/ $19.95 Chester E. Finn, Jr...

...He stops short of offering any particular scheme, but is clearly headed toward some sort of voucher system...

...If we permit children to receive their formal education in schools which, by default, we allow to be inferior and of poor quality, we do a disservice to the national interest as well as to the children themselves...

...Not at all coincidentally, they are also the sector of private education that most ardently seeks additional public aid, preferably through tuition tax credits, and that foresees little difficulty enduring whatever strings may be attached...

...Charlotte Lowell believed what she was told about her difficult son (whose difficulty was, of course, of her making), conveyed this to her child, and then the child lived up to her expectations...

...Ted Black's knowing pragmatism contrasts with Arons's libertarian-utopianism, though not in every particular...

...That means turning our gaze occasionally toward the lofty ideals set forth by Stephen Arons, but keeping our feet firmly on the road paved by Ted Black...

...Provided we can avoid politicizing the curriculum itself, which means resisting the vigorous efforts of the NEA and some of its allies to enshrine leftist ideology in the classroom, education can only benefit from increased exposure to the hard light of public scrutiny and political accountability...

...Other worthy new volumes include Gene I. Maeroff, Don't Blame the Kids: The Trouble with America's Public Schools (McGraw-Hill, 1982...

...That, too, is a decent impulse, one shared by many longtime advocates of public aid to private education...

...is Professor of Education and Public Policy at Van-derbilt University...

...The inexorable result would be the erosion of the distinctiveness and diversity of...