A Lonely Crusade for Classroom Standards

...Schooling should match students' aspirations...

...The first two categories are self-explanatory...

...Kozol, in his book, urges an escalation from the liberals' favorite arsenal—a federal appropriation of about $10 billion a year for the next decade...

...Within three months of the report of the National Commission, Time proclaimed in a cover story that the "crisis" in education was all but over...

...The important question, as Ravitch puts it, is, "What's going on here...

...Rather than acknowledge any link between this problem and the "reforms" he urged a decade ago, Kozol puts the blame on too little use of the open classroom, not too much...

...This is a critical time for educational reform, and for that reason there is one aspect in which this book disappoints...

...Ever the cautious historian, Ravitch refrains from making this case explicity, though she should have...

...In only one of these essays does Ravitch do any first-hand reporting (a lively profile of New York City's "best" high school...

...And isn't it better that students stay in school rather than drop out in response to repressive and demanding requirements...

...That might be excusable, though still somewhat parochial, if high school graduates at least could speak and write fluently in their native English...

...Some have gone so far as to suggest that this decline signaled progress, with more and more students aspiring to college education...

...These horror stories should be familiar by now...

...In the humanities, Ravitch notes, the serious study of history has all but disappeared, even in some of the best high schools...

...Ravitch deserves the attention, and our public schools deserve it even more...

...But such skills are also following a downward spiral...

...Meanwhile the proportion of students in the academic track dropped considerably, to only 34 percent...

...The college-bound students in the former tend to take courses such as calculus, chemistry, and advanced placement English...

...But this is not the same conspiracy described by radical historians of the 1960s, who asserted that traditional formal schooling was a ploy by the Establishment to stifle creativity and turn children into obedient cogs for the capitalist machine...

...For example, educators like to point to declining dropout rates, strongly hinting that stiffer standards will reverse this happy trend...

...The students who have suffered a relative loss are the great mass of students in the middle: predominantly white, of moderate intelligence and motivation, and overwhelmingly middle class...

...Ravitch cites one major state university where half of the freshmen were enrolled in such courses...

...In New York City, a teacher can be licensed to teach "social studies" without having taken a single history course in college...

...A good portion of them will go from high school to a community college or public university...

...Long before the National Commission on Excellence in Education warned of a rising tide of mediocrity, Ravitch had lambasted self-styled school reformers (most of them political liberals) for debasing academic standards in the name of "educational relevance...

...Students should not be forced to take dry, academic courses for which they probably will have no use in the real world, the argument goes...

...These essays instead resemble classical sculpture: precise, well crafted, but cool to the touch...

...Less than 15 percent of all high school students study a foreign language, and only 6 percent do so for more than two years...

...Reflections on the Educational Crises of Our Times...

...The Schools We Deserve...

...What do their high school and college diplomas really represent...

...The remaining essays seem to have been written from the relative calm of Ravitch's office at Columbia University...

...Although critics such as Ravitch have begun to correct these skewed perceptions, many liberal reformers remain unrepentant...

...On the national level, public debate on education seems moribund...

...On a standard Bell distribution curve, they're the large bulge with the B and C averages...

...To read Ravitch's collected essays* is to take a rather harrowing tour of the numerous intellectual cul-de-sacs and dangerous back alleys that public educators have frequented for much of the last two decades...

...A 1980 report by the National Science Foundation warned of a "current trend toward virtual scientific and technological illiteracy:' Little wonder, as 35 states require only one year of mathematics and science—and little wonder that the U.S...

...At a time when unalloyed support for school busing was the litmus test for one's enlightenment on racial issues, Ravitch pointed out the not-so-subtle racism inherent in the assumption that white students could learn just fine on their own but black students couldn't...

...Basic Books, $19.95...

...Their implicit messages are clear: most students can't "take" a rigorous curriculum...

...According to the National Commission on Excellence in Education, "Twenty-five percent of the credits earned by general-track high school students were in physical and health education, work experience outside the school, remedial English and mathematics, and personal service and development courses such as training for adulthood and marriage...

...But the dropout rate has remained "virtually unchanged" since the mid-1960s, Ravitch points out...

...Such a book would also generate a great deal more excitement than this collection...

...Between 1964 and 1979, Ravitch notes, the proportion of students enrolled in general education more than tripled, from 12 to 40 percent...

...Jonathan Kozol, for example, author of Death at an Early Age, excoriated rigid hierarchical schools and urged that students be given responsibility for their own learning...

...They should be given freedom of choice in shaping their curricula...

...blacks can't learn without a sufficient number of whites beside them in the classroom...

...By turning out millions of high school graduates incapable of even reading Marx, much less being moved to class warfare by his words, the nation's public schools help ensure that the sons and daughters of the powerful and well-to-do have that much less competition...

...As Ravitch points out, the public's attention span for school reform historically has been short...

...Not surprisingly, high school educators have vigorously defended this proliferation of the "generally educated...

...Yet this perspective suggests no small irony, given that Kozol's latest book, Illiterate America, estimates that one-third of the nation's adults are illiterate or nearly so...

...Ravitch has little patience with such educational relativism, under which a course in "mass media" has the same credit value as a far more rigorous one in English grammar...

...What kind of courses are students in the general track taking...

...Remedial writing courses have become one of the biggest growth industries in higher education...

...As the courts increasingly relied on sociological studies to determine the "optimal" mix for student learning, Ravitch also lampooned the absurdity of this approach—illustrated, for example, by the ruling of federal Judge Arthur Garrity of Boston that any school that departed more than 10 percent from the city-wide black-white pupil ratio of 61-to-32 percent was legally "segregated ." Ravitch also drew the scorn of the Hispanic community by describing bilingual education for what it too often has been in practice: an attempt by special-interest groups to enlist the courts and the federal government on behalf of a specific pedagogical method that does little for students' real educational needs but a great deal for the careers of bureaucrats and Spanish-speaking teachers...

...Phillip Keisling is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...students' egos are so fragile that it is better to "socially promote" them to the next grade even if they haven't mastered their material...

...most will wind up in respectable jobs as nurses, computer operators, sales clerks, teachers...

...They urged a few more bombs...

...But the profile of SAT-takers has remained virtually unchanged since 1970, Ravitch notes, and scores have actually fallen faster since that date...

...This is like putting people on a diet of 1,800 calories a day without caring whether they are consuming junk food or nutritious food," she notes caustically...

...It is neither a particularly new nor an original argument...

...Missing is any sense of immediacy, of Ravitch roaming the hallways and talking to the teachers, administrators, and students who actually inhabit the schools about which she writes...

...Kozol recently blasted the "back to basics" movement—with which Ravitch has been identified—as "an unsubtle euphemism for a retrogression into basic privileged reward for [the] few and basic heartlessness toward those who are denied the means of access...

...General education," certainly the most ambiguous of the three tracks, is where most of the action's been in our public schools lately...

...Should Ravitch ever decide to augment her impressive research and analytical skills by venturing out to test her theories against reality, the result could be a book as important to understanding where public education has gone astray as Robert Cards The Power Brokers was for understanding urban planning...

...In this respect, he is reminscent of the die-hard conservatives who still insist that we could have won the Vietnam war if only we hadn't lost our nerve...

...Ravitch comes well armed with statistics to refute the fundamental arguments for general education...

...seems to be losing so much ground to foreign competitors in fields such as applied engineering...

...Most disturbing, Ravitch's research reveals the nation's public schools as part of a subtle, yet invidious class conspiracy...

...One very important answer is something known as "general education ." Most public high schools now "track" their students, steering them into one of three programs: academic, vocational, or general education...

...Rather, the conspiracy involves not oppressive, autocratic schools but horrendously bad schools...

...It is noteworthy," she adds, "that the dropout rate continued to fall during the post-Sputnik years when rigor and requirements were in fashion" As for falling SAT scores, many educators claim that their steady slide from 1964 to 1983 could be explained by an increasing number of poor and minority students who took the test...

...Those in the latter spend most of their time in pursuits such as woodshop, accounting, or on-the-job training...

...On the state level, where a flurry of recent reform brought merit pay, career ladders, and teacher testing, the momentum may soon subside as powerful interest groups such as the teachers' unions continue to mobilize (see article on page 24...

...Yet how "educated" are these citizens...

...Ravitch succeeds in revealing the patronizing nature of liberal prescriptions such as general education and busing...

...Meanwhile, those who have urged high standards-and high expectations—for students, regardless of social class, have often been dismissed as pitiless reactionaries...

...Yet as turn-of-the-century Progressives herded the children of immigrants into vocational education, arguing that this was "better" for them than a standard academic program, contemporary liberals have generally succeeded in portraying themselves as sympathetic and enlightened...

...While it is true that bad schools do the most damage to poor and minority students in the inner cities, it's also true that those students have never received an adequate education...