Whither Public Education after NCLB?

Every morning we would hear the music as we passed the open doors. Usually jazz or something popular would be emanating from the bank of three rooms on the first floor. Students were practicing on their school supplied instruments. Sometimes they sounded polished; sometimes they would be working on a new piece. Whatever happened to be the style or genre of the day, it sounded good to a teacher on his way to work. Urban high school kids were practicing and engaged, busy at doing what they liked and what other people enjoyed.

I mention this personal memory because it might surprise some people. Here I was coming to work every day in a large comprehensive urban high school that faced all the problems so aggressively covered in commercial media outlets and so thoroughly embedded in the popular consciousness. Whatever the challenges, the fact is that I liked to walk in everyday and to pass the music rooms en route to the main office to sign in. Unfortunately, that pleasant experience was short-lived. The following year those same rooms were silent. Why?

The answer, I believe, points a direction for us as our country enters a new political era and, we hope, a new day for public education. Events unfolded basically as follows. We were told that our school enrollment would decline in the next academic year, not due to a shrinking student population but because Philadelphia high schools were being downsized across the board in an effort to make the high school experience less impersonal and to encourage adolescents to stay in school and to graduate. Few would disagree with this worthy goal. But what actually transpired as this scenario unfolded?

Our enrollment did in fact decline as the middle school a few blocks down the street added students and moved toward becoming its own high school. Meanwhile, the school district treated our enrollment decline in the traditional way. A decline in student numbers meant fewer teachers and fewer resources would be assigned to us. Decisions about where to cut were traditionally left to the administrator in charge at the school level. Our principal decided to cut, among other things, the instrumental music program. Then, since we no longer had such a program, the school district came and removed the instruments; they were needed elsewhere, of course. To summarize, over a period of a few months, our secondary school--which would still continue to serve over 1,000 young people – had lost its music program – staff, instruments, the works.

This episode, I believe, provides an example of the hazards of attempting education “reforms” (in this case, making high schools smaller) without, or as a substitute for, expanded funding and support (which would have been necessary to have a quality music program at each of the two schools mentioned here). This is likely to become a central issue in the debate as educators, parents and education activists wrestle with the effort to find the way forward in the “post NCLB” period. The failure of the federal government to support the “No Child Left Behind” legislation with resources or to listen to calls for changing it has caused such widespread resentment and dissatisfaction that we can expect a broad range of proposals for such change to surface in the near future.

Now is the ideal time for public education advocates – teachers and other school workers, parents, students and the community generally – to find common ground regarding what the basic needs of our students are and to step forward with as cogent, concise, and comprehensive a program as possible. Such a program might include:

1. drastically expanded federal support for public education, with special attention to the neediest schools and districts.
2. curricular standards that are rigorous in terms of content (for math and science, but not only math and science, social studies and the arts as well)
3. curricular standards that give attention to the diversity of people in our country and around the world (in history and social studies, but not only in those subjects) and to the contributions that they have made, as well as to the destructive effects of exclusion, bigotry and racism
4. programs that enable young people to attend schools with youth of varied and diverse backgrounds, races and cultures – in other words to experience the diversity of our country firsthand as they grow up.
5. Compensating education workers fairly to encourage young people to enter the field and to stay in it.

Such a program would appeal to a majority of Americans. That is, after all, who attends public school. Despite all the campaigns and attempts to influence and skew people’s attitudes about public education, the fact is that most people send their children to public schools and consider them a crucially important institution in our country.

That does not mean that winning support for such a program will be easy. Each one of the issues mentioned above has its own historical baggage which can make it potentially controversial. Consider point four above, for example. As benign as such a proposal might seem, the history of the US shows that integration is a goal that still eludes us and will be reached only with determined and courageous leadership. Its very elusiveness leads some otherwise outspoken and determined educators to downplay it and put it on the back burner, which is where it too often has been left. For instance, the new superintendent of Philadelphia’s public schools is an African American woman who participated in desegregating a suburban St. Louis high school as a teenager and who, by here own account, considers school integration a worthy goal. But a recent article quoted her as having come “full circle” on this issue. Of the persistent patterns of segregation in urban school districts she said, “I can’t change those things, so I stopped thinking about desegregation and integration.”

So our discussion will need to take into account both the urgent nature of the issue and the importance of being sensitive to a wide range of views and experiences. If we can go forward in that spirit of urgency and inclusion, we should be able to make the case for including a “New Deal” for public education as a central part of the new administration’s program.