Prolonging the Endless Debate

Thirteen years after the nation found itself at risk, civilized discourse on public education's performance remains a distant dream. It proved easier to engineer a Bosnian settlement than it has been for America's educators and their critics to fashion even a wobbly consensus on how our schools are doing and what to do about those that fall short.

Brand names and loyalties count for little in the endless debate. In a once-unthinkable role reversal, political and social conservatives are today's bomb-throwing reformers, while advocates of sensible change are dismissed as stand-pat mossbacks or, even worse, as contrarians.

What should be a collective endeavor--fixing poorly performing schools and fine-tuning the rest-- finds the nominal participants generating wildly conflicting data and ridiculing rather than respecting the other side's interpretations. Typical of the tenor of this curious debate is Chester E. Finn Jr.'s putdown of David Berliner's and Bruce Biddle's masterful The Manufactured Crisis as "a reprehensible tome ... (not) worth your money or the demise of a single tree." So much for civility.

Even in our wonder world of communications miracles, enlightened dialogue is not possible if the parties inhabit different planets. Central to the belief code of public education's defenders, as of most Americans, is an unspoken but powerful conviction that government has an obligation to secure the rights of individuals and to help the needy. But this widely accepted canon is at sharp odds with the message of the self-appointed revolutionaries, who have little use for social safety nets and seem to view civic responsibility as a relic of misguided idealism.

Their reasoning keeps shifting. In the early 1980s we were supposedly losing the economic war with Japan and Europe, and it was clearly the fault of the public schools. But when, as Stanford Professor Larry Cuban has reminded us, the U.S. economy's indicators moved into high gear, no one thought to credit public education for a key role in the turnaround. Now, in the face of persuasive evidence that our schools are doing their job as well as can be expected in an unstable culture, the new reformers want to scrap the whole enterprise in favor of a hodgepodge of private school choice, for-profit McSchools, contracting out, and other gimmicks leading to their real goal: privatizing the nation's schools.

Sadly, the mass media haven't outdone themselves in setting the record straight. Controversy and disaster, not dull recitals of educational statistics or feel-good vignettes from the schools, are what sell newspapers and attract TV and radio audiences. And today's school-trashers--such as downtown Washington figures as Finn, William Bennett, Jeanne Allen, Denis Doyle, and Diane Ravitch--are masters of the pungent sound bite and the tightly composed op-ed essay. They are formidable, well-connected, and often convincing adversaries, capable of spinning almost any story on educational issues into a nasty assault on the public schools.

The research findings of the contrarians--presented succinctly in the May issue of The School Administrator--constitute an impressive aggregation of data that state and local school leaders ought to be promoting to help enlist backing for realistic school improvement. It has been heartening to note their occasional emergence on op-ed pages and in talk shows.

But for all of their manifold virtues and straight thinking, the contrarians are still professors, think-tankers, and independent scholars. What is sorely needed, right now, is for school people--superintendents, board members, community leaders, parents, principals, and teachers--to enter the public arena and help them carry the day. School people possess a priceless advantage over everyone else in the endless debate: they are in the trenches and know what life there is like.

George Kaplan, an education policy analyst in Bethesda, Md., is the author of images of Education: The Mass Media's Version of America's Schools.

COPYRIGHT 1996 American Association of School Administrators
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