FIVE CRISES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION

...Christopher Jencks has written that "there are compelling moral and social reasons . . . for spending more money on schools...

...One fundamental fact overrides all others: The public schools exist for those who attend them and pay for them...

...Whether justified or not, whether desired or not, busing seems well on the way toward being foreclosed as an option available to the schools...

...In New York State, where the average expenditure per pupil was $1,245 per pupil in the 1969-70 school year, individual districts ranged from a low of $669 to a high of $1,889...

...For the nation as a whole, the suburban property growth in recent years has been more than two and one-half times that of the central cities...

...The white parent who fears that his child may be transported to a "black" school has reason to be concerned, for he realizes that the ghetto school is probably inferior to the one that serves his neighborhood...

...James Herndon believes that "the public school is the closest thing we have in America to a national established church," and ought to be disestablished just as the church has been...

...These changes have left the poor, under-educated, aged, and non-white in the central cities and have taken heavy manufacturing, many retail establishments, and other kinds of business activity to the suburbs along with middle and upper income families...

...His criticism is not overdrawn...

...Public elementary and secondary education is a large and expensive enterprise...

...Ivan Ulich advocates outright "de-schooling...

...He puts it this way: "The evidence we have reviewed suggests that equalizing opportunity will not do very much to equalize results, and hence that it will not do much to reduce poverty...

...The question troubled Thomas Jefferson, and has been troubling Americans ever since...

...Jencks recognizes that he is attacking cherished assumptions that have been part of the American myth for almost 200 years...

...We were concerned with the process of mixing bodies," she says, "and we assumed that the problems would take care of themselves...

...Commissioner of Education Sidney P. Marland, Jr...

...supervisors, principals, and teachers in the middle, and students at the base...

...It is a cliche to speak of the crisis in public education (and it was a cliche when I began writing about the schools almost twenty years ago...

...Professor Gross wonders, "How did people learn to read before the educators made such a big megillah out of teaching reading...

...The President's pledge, delivered in his State of the Union message last January, to submit a "revolutionary" program of school tax reform remains unredeemed...

...Our objective, instead, should be to deliver to those who succeed us systems of public education in a healthy state of flux—systems in which the balances have begun to swing toward the owners and consumers of public education...

...The greatest uproar, however, came from liberals, in education and outside it, who expressed alarm that Inequality would be used to buttress arguments against desegregation, against equalization of school finances, even against financial support of the public schools...

...Its members tend to be patricians— people of substance and property and good intentions, who "set policy" and leave it to the administrators to work out the details...

...John Holt defines school as "a place where children learn to be stupid...

...These are the rights of owners and consumers, and for too long they have not been recognized...

...But averages are averages...

...Those who work in them are public employes—they serve the public...

...Still, community insurrections in New York and a score of other cities indicate that the schools may be losing this last constituency...

...Robert B. Binswanger, who heads the Office of Education's Experimental Schools Program, comments: "Since World War II we've spent a great deal of time tinkering with the substance of the schools...

...If parents or students want to take buses to schools in other neighborhoods, school boards ought to provide the buses, expand the relevant schools, and ensure that the students are welcome in the schools they want to attend...

...We have determined," the court declared, "that this funding scheme invidiously discriminates against the poor because it makes the quality of a child's education a function of the wealth of his parents and neighbors...

...Teachers do indeed have rights...

...The late Paul Goodman said he "would not give a penny to the present administrators and would largely dismantle the present school machinery...

...Stated in simple (and inevitably oversimplified) terms, Jencks's central thesis is that when it comes to promoting social and economic mobility—and eventual equality—in America, schools and schooling simply don't matter very much...

...Some forty-six million students are enrolled in the schools, and per-pupil expenditure, now nearing an average of $1,000 a year, has more than doubled in the past decade...

...After a decade and a half of highly publicized "innovations"—of new curricula and new technology and new teaching techniques—it is depressing to find that even members in good standing of the educational establishment cannot come up with cheery success stories...

...Norman Drachler, who served for five turbulent years as Superintendent of Schools in Detroit and now heads the Institute for Educational Leadership at George Washington University, notes that "our public is no longer the placid immigrant group that came to America sixty or seventy years ago and carried on a love affair with the public schools, grateful for the opportunities and never challenging what the schools were doing...

...It is possible, if not likely, that if the total resources now available to the public schools were equitably allocated and rationally spent, they would prove more than adequate to meet the needs of all the schools...

...Ironically, the schools retain their strongest constituency among those who have been dealt with most shabbily by the American system of education...

...If we want a society in which people are free to segregate themselves, then we should apply that principle to our schools...

...Such bizarre disparities are inherent in the traditional and irrational American system of school finance...

...I felt, after an absence of seven years, that I hadn't missed a thing, that I had never been away—except that the problems seem to have intensified, and the solutions seem more remote...

...Its "huge goal" is "to eliminate illiteracy by the 1980s so that ninety-nine per cent of those under sixteen will have the skills to read to the full limits of their desires, and ninety per cent of those over sixteen will have the reading skills necessary to decide their own vocational and social destinies...

...The tensions are not complementary...

...FIVE CRISES IN PUBLIC EDUCATION ERWIN KNOLL The perennial controversy over public education in the United States has entered a new and important phase with the publication of Inequality—A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America (Basic Books...

...The National Education Association will be lobbying next year for a five-year commitment of $72 billion in new Federal school funds...

...The poor district," the court said, "cannot freely choose to tax itself into an excellence which its tax rolls cannot provide...

...Even if we are interested solely in equalizing opportunities for economic success, making schools more equal will not help very much...

...Chancellor Harvey Scribner of the New York City public school system has pointed out that "the schools—despite their flaws—are still generally viewed by the poor of this country as an institution of hope and social salvation...

...for the allocation of these funds among the school districts of the state, and for the evaluation of the effective use of these funds...

...Norman Karsh, who served as executive director of the President's Commission on School Finance, puts it this way: "There's nobody in the system you can point to and say, 'Change it!' Everybody has an out...

...It encompassed riots and reforms and the national educational hysteria engendered by the first Soviet sputnik...

...While teachers may find it relatively easy to bargain at the state and perhaps even the Federal levels—there are predictions of a national teachers' strike within the next decade —consolidation of school systems and placing authority at a higher level will leave the clients and taxpayers with even less access to the decision makers than they now have...

...The Crisis of Equality...

...In the wake of Serrano, litigation attacking the property tax system of school finance is pending in at least thirty-five states...

...Property owners in Beverly Hills paid a school tax of $2.38 per $100 of assessed valuation, while those in Baldwin Park paid $5.48, but Beverly Hills was able to spend $1,231 per pupil and Baldwin Park only $577...

...One provision of the bill was," he wrote, "that the expenses of these schools should be borne by the inhabitants of the county, every one in proportion to his general tax rate...

...Commission on Civil Rights and for two years as civil rights director in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, says with resignation: "This society is likely to remain segregated, so far as schools are concerned, into the indefinite future...

...Because they serve increasingly as mere custodial institutions for inmates assumed to be inherently unruly...

...We should not be satisfied with bequeathing to our successors school systems with essentially the same political balances that we inherited...

...It is a modest enough goal, but it is difficult to find anyone who believes it will be met...

...More important, they deserve to be involved in decision-making that affects their lives and destinies...

...The schools have failed, for example, at the basic task of teaching children how to read...

...Because they are monopolies with a captive clientele that is not free to take its business elsewhere...

...The Crisis of Confidence...

...He said: "Parents and students do not necessarily possess greater wisdom than school professionals...

...Martin does not believe that even nationwide implementation of the Serrano decision will have a significant impact on segregation in the schools, and suspects, in fact, that any reallocation of school resources at this point in time may result in greater discrimination...

...The period spanned the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling and the Federal school aid measures of the Great Society...

...If one believes in democracy—and most of us claim that we do—one must assume that people can make institutions work for them, that they can make schools produce education, and perhaps even promote equality...

...The President's Commission on School Finance proposed, in its final report last spring, that "each state assume responsibility for determining and raising on a statewide basis, the amount of funds required for education...

...School funds have been, are being, and will be squandered for purposes that have nothing to do with excellence and little with education...

...In his Autobiography, Jefferson recalled (and regretted) that the Virginia statute creating a system of public schools had left it to the county judges to implement the legislation...

...The U.S...

...Similarly, a significant number of black parents are expressing reservations about busing, for they fear that their children will be even more neglected, even more victimized, in a predominantly white school than in the segregated school they now attend...

...The Crisis of Control...

...Because they tend to be operated by fossilized bureaucracies that have forgotten that schooling has something to do with education...

...Personally, we believe in both open housing and open schools...

...Control of the public schools has been vested since Jefferson's time in those who are "generally of the more wealthy class...

...If we want economic equality in our society, we will have to get it by changing our economic institutions, not by changing the schools...

...Educators assume that this trend reflects a revolt against high taxes, but to some extent it surely also signifies a revolt against the schools...

...We who are charged with leadership responsibilities in public education should not serve merely as buffers between an angry public often justifiably dissatisfied with schools that educate some of the young but not all...

...I talked to some students, parents, and teachers, and dipped into the new literature...

...Commissioner Marland is disturbed by a "malaise" in public attitudes toward the schools—a feeling that they are "not responsive to people's needs and concerns...

...The problem with property tax revenues is that they are scarcest where school needs are greatest and where the competition for the local tax dollar is most acute— in decaying central cities and in pockets of rural blight...

...He acknowledges that Inequality is "certain to be misinterpreted" and "taken out of context and used to support all kinds of political causes I regard as detestable...

...Some seven million pupils are reading two years or more behind their grade level, and many fall further behind the longer they remain in school...

...So do principals and school administrators, and even superintendents...

...Martin, who served for five years as a staff attorney with the U.S...

...To ask us to give this up when we're just beginning to achieve it is asking too much...

...The obvious solution (as the President's Commission noted) is a "supplementary" infusion of Federal funds —up to the point of providing a quarter or a third (rather than the present nine per cent) of all school revenues...

...This is the least we can do to offset the effects of residential segregation...

...Office of Education's "Right to Read" program, announced with much fanfare early in the Nixon Administration, has "needs assessments," "strategies," and "demonstration sites...

...While the evidence is clear that the schools have made a long habit of failing large proportions of the poor while serving the vast majority of the relatively well-off, there is no discounting the fact that the schools did indeed serve some of the poor...

...Very little ever does...

...A seminar sponsored by the Washington Journalism Center provided me with an opportunity to hear and question twenty-one educators, educational bureaucrats, educational lobbyists, and radical as well as conservative critics of the schools...

...New patterns of school finance emerging from the Serrano case may result in shifting much school authority to the state and Federal levels...

...In most communities, a bond issue provides the only opportunity for a vote of confidence (or no-confidence) in the school system...

...Almost twenty-five million American adults are functionally illiterate—unable to read a newspaper or fill out a driver's license application—and most of them are young people who have fairly recently left school...

...The reason was that assessed property valuation per child amounted to $50,885 in Beverly Hills, but only $3,706 in Baldwin Park...

...If we go on tinkering for twenty more years, I don't think they're going to change...

...It isn't likely to happen...

...a district in Colorado spent $2,801...

...If we want an integrated society," says the Jencks report, "we ought to have integrated schools, which make people feel they have a stake in the well-being of other races...

...The assumption that money buys educational "excellence" is, of course, debatable, and will become more so with the Jencks report...

...Few of us are qualified—and I certainly am not— to evaluate the voluminous research data on which Jencks and his colleagues base their findings...

...the reality is that segregation will continue to be imposed, in most school systems, on those who want it and on those who don't...

...Chancellor Scribner of New York recognized this reality in a remarkable speech he delivered recently to his colleagues...

...We are all benumbed by crises foreign and domestic—crises of war and peace, crises in housing, in medical care, in the economy, crime crises, drug crises, ecology crises, But I am persuaded that at least five aspects of our educational system will need to be changed swiftly and drastically if we are to avoid painful and possibly catastrophic consequences for many of our people, and for our society as a whole...

...For the first time, a small but increasingly influential group of critics is carrying its disenchantment with the schools to the point of calling for their abolition...

...It will be cited by those who have not read it, and invoked (in part) by those who find its conclusions (in part) untenable...

...The statewide average for Alabama was $463...

...This is the day of the consumer...

...By last year the percentage approved had fallen below forty-seven per cent...

...I was writing about the same problems and the same failures...

...Commissioner of Education's Ad Hoc Group on School Finance has noted: "Many of the roots of the crisis in financing large city educational programs may be found in the redistribution of population and various economic developments that have taken place during recent years...

...And she notes that the school drop-out rate is higher than ever among black high school students—particularly among those attending desegregated schools...

...This would throw on wealth the education of the poor...

...The signs are not hard to find...

...But they deserve to be heard...

...The diagram makes little provision for parents and citizens, who remain in the distance, wondering what is going on...

...In 1960, voters approved eighty-nine per cent of all school bond issues submitted to public referendum...

...He would not be concerned about busing his child to an expensive private school...

...Because they are often accountable to no one— least of all to their patrons—for their failures and mistakes...

...How soon it can be brought into existence may determine whether or not American education weathers its current crises...

...Some educators challenged the validity of the research on which Jencks based his findings...

...Well, they didn't...

...In California, with a statewide average of $753, the spread was from $569 to $2,414...

...Parents and students have rights of another sort—rights that derive from ownership of a public institution, and from individual opportunity in a society which places high value on education...

...It's the biggest cop-out in the country today...

...We must not give up on compensatory education in spite of its bleak record," says U.S...

...Visit almost any high school to verify the contempt which even the "brightest" and most "successful" students—especially the "brightest" and most "successful"—manifest toward the institutions in which they spend such a large portion of their lives...

...and the justices, being generally of the more wealthy class, were unwilling to incur that burden, and I believe it was not suffered to commence in a single county...

...Even before it reached the bookstores, Inequality was under attack from right and left...

...The U.S...

...If the great nationwide uproar over busing has any positive value, it lies in demonstrating how profoundly committed we remain, eighteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, to the practice of racial isolation in the schools, and to the discrimination that attends such isolation...

...Advocates of "free schools," "open schools," "schools without walls," are still talking about schools...

...It is not a matter of whether we "want" an integrated society or one in which people are free to segregate themselves...

...And when it ended, nothing much had changed...

...The public schools have failed dismally to crack even the tasks they have set themselves, let alone the important problems that really need attention," says Ronald Gross, a teacher, poet, and author of Radical School Reform...

...With that public, he observes, the schools were able to maintain "an alimony relationship—we wanted them to finance us but not live with us...

...The schools, for better or worse, are as immutable as any institution in America...

...The massive and complex study by Christopher Jencks and seven of his associates at Harvard University's Center for Educational Policy Research is not likely to become a popular best-seller, but its impact is certain to be profound...

...But the schools are owned by the people and exist to serve children and parents...

...It doesn't have much money...

...They result primarily from the schools' basic reliance on local property taxes, which still account for more than half of all public school revenues...

...The school board, whether appointed or elected, is America's last vestige of the "gentleman (or lady) in politics...

...The main policy implication of these findings is that although school reform is important for improving the lives of children, schools cannot contribute too significantly to adult equality...

...That time is past, or at least passing...

...Prompted in part by the publication of Inequality, I recently revisited education...

...The durability of racism in the schools is demonstrated most painfully by the growing number of blacks who once put their faith in integration, and who are now having second thoughts...

...It has been estimated, however, that state governments would have to increase their current expenditures by about a third simply to assume the burden now being borne by local school districts—and they would have to spend substantially more than that to provide a measure of equalization without undertaking the politically hopeless task of reducing the school budgets of affluent districts...

...We should not serve as administrators of static school systems...

...And union teachers in New York have demonstrated that community organizations cannot look to them as natural allies...

...Between ten and fifteen per cent of all pupils entering the fourth grade (and between thirty-five and fifty per cent in ghetto schools) cannot read at all...

...Why are the schools so indifferent to quality, so impervious to change...

...No such revolution is in sight, nor is it sought even by most of the radical school critics...

...But we do not believe that forced busing can be justified on the grounds of its long-term benefits to students...

...Who owns the schools...

...There is a broad consensus that a new method of paying for public schools must be found, but neither the courts nor state legislatures nor Congress nor the Nixon Administration have proposed a credible substitute...

...Still, it occurs to me that I may have indulged in journalistic hyperbole when I stated above that the Jencks report would have an "important" and "profound" effect on American education...

...The obvious result has been the inability of the tax base of the cities and income level of its residents to meet the high-cost educational and other needs of the population in the city...

...Differences between schools have very little effect on what happens to students after they graduate...

...Marcus Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies has described the model as a pyramid, with board and superintendent at the apex...

...That is hardly a radical manifesto, though it describes a public school system that does not yet exist— in New York City or anywhere else...

...Erwin Knoll is Washington Editor of The Progressive...

...In its landmark decision last year in the case of Serrano v. Priest, the California Supreme Court cited the impact of property taxes in two communities in the same county, Beverly Hills and Baldwin Park...

...Ruby Martin is one of them...

...Even the major new Federal aid programs enacted in the last decade have barely raised the Federal share of school funds to about nine per cent of all income...

...The model is beginning to come under heavy stress from several directions...

...Citing the evidence of widespread abuses under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (which was supposed to provide funds for schools serving the poor but has often been misapplied to schools serving the affluent), she asks: "If the same people are going to be making the same decisions, what difference will a redistribution of money make...

...A school district in Maine spent $229 per pupil...

...There is, however, no compelling reason to treat schools differently from other social arrangements, including neighborhoods...

...The Crisis of Quality...

...Their rights derive from the right to be employed with fairness, and to work in dignity...

...Conservatives were understandably upset by his contention that in order to attain substantial equality in America, "we must establish political control over the economic institutions that shape our society . . . what other countries call socialism...

...In discussions with black students attending newly desegregated schools, she has found a dismaying number who believe that Brown v. Board of Education was "part of the white conspiracy to put down blacks...

...In the Serrano case, the court held that the California system of school financing—the system that essentially prevails in all the states except Hawaii—"with its substantial dependence on local property taxes and resultant disparities in school revenue, violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment," as well as the state constitution...

...In Montgomery County, Maryland (whose residents have the highest per capita income in the United States), the high school Student Alliance told the Board of Education: "From what we know to be true as full-time students it is quite safe to say that the public schools have critically negative and absolutely destructive effects on human beings and their curiosity, natural desire to learn, confidence, individuality, creativity, freedom of thought, and self-respect...

...An officer of the American Federation of Teachers puts it this way: "Over the last ten years we've finally had some influence over the conditions in which we work...

...But no such redistribution is in sight, and in the meantime some minimal standards—in teachers' salaries, facilities, services, and supplies—must be met if education is to take place in the disadvantaged districts...

...School systems (like schools) are rigidly hierarchical...

...Students and parents, less organized and therefore less effective, are also voicing new demands...

...Christopher Jencks believes that "without schools few children would learn to read and virtually nobody learn algebra...

...For most of a decade, from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, I spent all of my working time reporting on education for newspapers and magazines...

...There are terrible inadequacies in the system, and I haven't seen them, get much better," says Don Davies, Deputy Commissioner for Development, adding: "We've gone through a time of great talk, some money, some interest—and very little substantial change...

...They lost the students long ago—if, indeed, they ever had them...

...But will Americans feel compelled...

...In ascending order of importance, more or less, they are: The Crisis of Finance...

...I remain quite frustrated and not too optimistic about the possibilities of reform...

...The issue "has reached an emotional point where busing can no longer serve as a viable tool to provide quality education," says Ruby G. Martin, an expert on school desegregation law...

...Teachers, effectively organized for the first time, are successfully asserting their demands for a voice in the full range of school decisions...