The Inspector General
(See Cover)If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . it expects what never was and never will be.
--Thomas Jefferson
Autumn after autumn, the dream has persisted, in alleys and wood lots, mansions and tenements: every American could rise by education. Ben Franklin nourished it with self-improvement primers. Jefferson gave it philosophical reasons. An unlettered people scrambled for skill and knowledge. "Your government will never be able to restrain a distressed and discontented majority,'' warned Britain's Lord Macaulay. "This opinion," retorted President-to-be James Garfield. "leaves out the great counterbalancing force of universal education/' The focus of a European town remained the cathedral; the focus of an American town became the high school. By the 20th century, quipped Britain's Historian Denis Brogan. U.S. public education was a "formally unestablished national church.''
Virtuoso Instrument. By any description it could boast of remarkable achievements. It homogenized waves of immigrants, inculcated morality without religious affiliation and boosted brainpower across the nation. From an eighth-grade education in 1940, the median schooling of adult Americans has risen to 10.8 years (and will be 12.2 by 1965). Against 95,000 graduates in 1900, U.S. high schools this year produced 1,500,000, and half of them are going to college. And out of public schools in every corner of the land have marched armies of the nation's future leaders.
The size of the enterprise is staggering. From less than 16 million in 1900, enrollment has jumped to 36 million. From less than $215 million in 1900, the annual cost has soared to $14.4 billion (about 3% of the Gross National Product). Of all U.S. families, 40% have one or more children in public school.*Of all living Americans, one out of five is a public-school student.
How can anything so vast be excellent? It has no leader, no philosopher, no hand on the tiller. Public education is a headless wonder. The problem: to give its body--the citizens--faith and direction. Few men have tried with calmer good sense to work to this end than James Bryant Conant, 66, volunteer Inspector General of U.S. public schools.
Splendid & Shameful. The outstanding feature of James Conant's long (1933-53) reign as president of Harvard was his interest in education--notably public schools. Among besieged educators, he was well known (and trusted) long before he became U.S. High Commissioner and Ambassador to West Germany (1953-57). Among plain citizens he has won towering respect since The American High School Today (McGraw-Hill; $1) was published early this year. This fall Conant embarks on a second study: the junior high school. Nobody has already done more to convince Americans that high schools can improve--"with no radical change.''
No change? As the huge enterprise cranks up this week, it splutters far and wide. Despite ceaseless new construction, the nation's unremitting birth rate leaves the schools short of 195,000 teachers and 140,000 classrooms. Another 1,300,000 bright-eyed youngsters invaded the schools last year, and this new school year of 1959-60 begins with 1,843,000 more children than the schools have room for. One-third of the schools are potential firetraps ; some are still using gaslight; nearly 75% of the high schools are too small to pay for anything resembling a nuclear-age curriculum. And though wise men urge the country to spend at least twice as much money for education, the U.S. maintains an "educational deficit" estimated at anything from $6.8 billion to $9 billion yearly.
If money is a nightmare, even more vexing is the oddly uneven quality of public education. Compared to Europe's state-run systems, U.S. schools seem an anarchist's brainchild. With their genius for decentralization, the Constitution's writers left education in the laps of the states, which handed it over to local communities. Today nearly all responsibility is vested in 198,108 members of 49,477 school boards. The schools they command reflect vastly different standards. The . teachers they hire receive grossly varying salaries. The results range from splendid to shameful.
Some studies show that public schoolers outdo private-school graduates in top colleges. But only a fraction of public schools turn out students of such high caliber. Some of the brightest graduates (nearly half the top 30%, or 200,000 yearly) do not go to college at all. Too many bright students do not even finish high school. And despite compulsory education, millions of Americans never glance at a book from year to year (only 25% say they do). Some 8,500,000 can barely read.
Revolution. Criticizing the schools is no new habit. Ever since it took root in the mid-1800, the "common school" has been under whiplash criticism. When educators urged a broader curriculum than "the Bible and figgers," opponents cried that "every county in the state will need an insane hospital." When education began to reach sizable proportions in the 1880s. alarmists predicted the downfall of parental authority by "a crime-and-pauper-breeding system." In just one of his dozens of leaflets, Maryland's polemical Pamphleteer Francis B. Livesey blamed public schools for "the Negro problem, the servant problem, the labor problem, the tramp problem, the unemployment problem, the divorce problem, the eyesight problem, the juvenile problem, the bribery problem and the pure-food problem."
Today the charge is academic "softness." James Conant does not agree--or quite disagree. Some critics, he thinks, miss their target as badly as Pamphleteer Livesey. What everybody ought to know more about, he suggests in a forthcoming book; The Child, the Parent and the State (Harvard University; $3.50), is the history of a highly significant development --the transformation of the U.S. high school from 1905 to 1930. Those who thunder that Cicero molded young minds at the turn of the century are right. But Cicero's assassin was not John Dewey alone. It was a combination of child-labor laws, compulsory school attendance, the growing need for vocational training, and the Depression, which sent jobless teenagers scurrying to school for shelter. In 1910 thousands of 15-year-olds had full-time jobs; in 1930 about 90% were in school. Result: an entirely different breed of students, with widely varying abilities. No educational system in history has ever been presented with a broader job--or opportunity.
Noah's Ark. To criticize the schools in good sense, says Conant, the first rule is to grasp their astonishing diversity: "You can find almost any animal in the system. It's like Noah's ark." The pervasive U.S. cathedral is the "comprehensive" high school, which sends some of its students to college and gives the rest marketable skills. But hundreds of schools are "special." New York City has outright detention camps for delinquents--and it also has the exquisitely superior Bronx High School of Science (TIME, May 5, 1958). Some urban schools teach 90% of their students to be auto mechanics and beauticians. Some suburban schools send 90% of their students to top colleges.
Each has different problems. The mainly vocational school has to teach skills applicable to the local job market. The suburban school has to deal with many a boy not blessed with talents to match his parents' ambitions. Nobody can judge a school's performance without analyzing how well it serves the specific needs of its students.
Summertime. The first critic to stop being constructive after 1905 was a longtime guardian angel--the college professor who once took a proprietary interest in high school standards. When professors took a good look at the proletarianized high school, they left it to what they considered a lowbrow technician--the education professor. And to figure out how to run the schools, the "educationists" seized upon Philosopher Dewey's innocent theory that children learn best by being interested instead of disciplined. It fitted the educationists problems, muses Conant, "as a key fits a lock ... If
John Dewey hadn't existed, he would have had to be invented."
"Education is life," Dewey once ruminated vaguely. "Education is life," parroted the educationists, and turned the thought into revelation. So began the grand detour of progressive education. In 1938 the powerful Education Policies Commission placed "recreation" on a par with "the inquiring mind." In some schools, flycasting crowded out French (no trick after 22 states in the World War I era passed laws discouraging "foreign"-language study. Dewey himself was shocked at the excesses. The college professors scowled--silently. By World War II, many a school was running along happily as a substitute for summertime down on the farm. A good many parents were delighted.
Ventilation. The great awakening began when new postwar suburbanites put their children in public schools. Often they were bright young graduates of private schools, and they found plenty to complain about: lower standards, overcrowding, the teacher shortage. No help was the nation's sudden flood of babies: 40 million in the last decade (the total U.S. population in 1870). Up went the cost per pupil, from $197.65 in 1949 to $340 this year. Up went parental blood pressure. And out of their shells popped the college professors.
When the academics began to cry out, it was not so much to denounce public schools as to defend their presumed purpose. They spoke as scholars concerned that a know-nothing smog had smothered the schools; they indicted the educationists' "copper-riveted" union shop. They attacked the quality of teacher training, the tedious "methods" courses required by educationist-inspired certification laws. For the first time in a generation, men of learning paid grave attention to the content of public education.
Some of the charges were wild--but the ventilation was immensely productive. Last year West Virginia began certifying on the basis of exams instead of courses; 33 other states now are revamping their laws; all are asking liberal arts advice. And the professors have made a discovery: only 24% of elementary and 17% of high school teachers come from the despised (and fast vanishing) teachers colleges. The rest come from the professors' own liberal arts colleges.
Today, after years of pooh-poohing public school teachers, professors are trying to recruit them. The need is so great that one-third to one-half the next decade's college graduates should theoretically become school teachers. M.I.T.'s Physical Science Study Committee is revolutionizing high school physics. This summer, top university scientists taught 17,000 high school science and math teachers at 350 National Science Foundation institutes. All over the country, professors are beginning to drop in on the schools--following the pattern set by James Conant.
Always a Formula. When Bryant, as his family called him, was growing up in Dorchester, on the southern edge of Boston, his hobby was chemically analyzing his mother's laundry soap. The stench forced his photoengraver father to build him a lean-to lab outside the house. But the boy chemist's talents got him into famed Roxbury Latin School (he was the most precocious science student in 20 years) and through Harvard in three years. He married the daughter of Harvard's top chemist; in 1931 Professor Conant himself took over the department. "Bryant," said his mother once, "always had a formula for everything."
Conant was nearing a Nobel Prize for his research on chlorophyll. He never got it. In 1933 Harvard plucked him out of the lab and elected him president (at 40) to succeed aging Abbott Lawrence Lowell (Cambridge was full of old professors, and its reputation had sagged). By World War II, Conant had hired so many outstanding new professors and administrators that he was able to spend up to 75% of his time away from Harvard, organizing atomic scientists for the supersecret Manhattan Project.
All through those years, Conant grew more interested in public schools. In the penny-pinching 19305, he saved Harvard's ailing Graduate School of Education (now one of the best) from extinction. In 1936 he ordered a new Harvard degree: Master of Arts in Teaching, uniting education courses with liberal arts. In 1949 he suggested launching the National Citizens Commission for the Public Schools (now the National Citizens Council for Better Schools) to throw intelligent criticism instead of brickbats at the schools. When it began, only 17 citizens groups existed in the country. Today's roster: 18,000 local groups in 49 states and the District of Columbia.
All the Gifted. What first fascinated Conant about the public school was its Jeffersonian character--the mixing of children from all social levels. At casteconscious Harvard, President Conant's great theme was the American tradition of respecting any man good at his trade. "Each honest calling, each walk of life,'' he said in a baccalaureate sermon, "has its own elite, its own aristocracy based on excellence of performance . . . There will always be the false snobbery which tries to place one vocation above another. You will become a member of the aristocracy in the American sense only if your accomplishments and integrity earn this appellation."
By this reasoning, all men working at full throttle are "gifted." In a status-conscious nation, the idea is sometimes hard to get across. Conant's transmitter: the "comprehensive" high school, a social melting pot throwing rich and poor, dull and bright together. In ideal form, thinks Conant, it should give every kind of student as good an education as he might get in a school designed just for him.
Amid the nation's scramble for brainpower, some men believe in imposing a uniformly "tough" curriculum on all students. Vice Admiral Hyman G. Rickover wants to set up European-style schools limited to the brightest scholars. To Conant, both ideas are anathema on realistic as well as philosophical grounds. A single standard would breed frustration, delinquency and lower standards. The elite school implies splitting up universal education on the European pattern.
European academic education is very good, very tough--and very limited. Only 20% of European youths are chosen for pre-university schools (most go to work at 14), while 89.2% of American 14-to 17-year-olds are in school. And to import European education would mean changing child labor laws and compulsory attendance (despite union opposition), persuading over 1,000 independent liberal arts colleges (unknown in Europe) to close in favor of graduate universities, abolishing local school boards and setting up federal control. In sum: impossible.
In fact, the elite system is not entirely satisfactory to Europeans. Britain and France already are broadening their education toward the U.S. pattern. A modern industrial nation needs more than a few brains; it has to uplift talent at every level. It cannot afford technological un-employables--spiritually, politically or economically.
No Loafing. Is quality in quantity possible under the U.S. system? To practical-minded James Conant, the question is whether a high school can 1) give all students a citizen-worthy general education,
2) give the majority marketable skills,
3) give the "academically talented" (the top 15-20%) work to challenge them. "If the answer were clearly in the negative," he says, "then a radical change in the structure of American public secondary education would be in order."
One change is in order. A basic Conant premise: high schools with graduating classes of less than 100 cannot function properly. They cannot afford qualified teachers tor advanced physics, math, foreign languages. One-third of all high school students attend such small schools --17,000 of the total 21,000 U.S. high schools. If the total were cut to about 12,600 schools, reckons Conant, all would be big enough to hire good teachers.
In 1957 Conant was not sure whether a high school of any size could do the job. On a $350,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, he set out to find the "best" comprehensive high schools in the country. His divining rod was a list of stiff standards, assembled after long brooding ("My dogmatism. You don't have to take it"), and his own disarming manner. "This is James Conant," he introduced himself to principals. "I don't know if you've heard of me. I used to work at Harvard."
Conant felt that every student should spend half the regular English course learning to write; he should turn out at least one theme a week. All should have at least one year of science, math, American history. And to keep the school cohesive yet challenging, all should be "grouped" according to ability--subject by subject, not by divisive IQ "tracks." One exception: all should take a course together in U.S. problems. For the job-bound as well as the college-bound, elective courses should include everything from plumbing to twelfth-grade physics.
Even if the school has only one or two "highly gifted" students (the top 3% nationally), they should have college work under the Advanced Placement Program to enter college ahead of the game, and there take tougher courses. And the "academically talented" should never get a chance to loaf. As college material, they should take a minimum 18 courses with homework (at least 15 hours weekly), including four years of English, four years of math, three years of science, four years of one foreign language (for "mastery") --plus required courses.
In a year of inspecting 55 top schools in 18 states, Conant found only eight came close to being exactly "right" (all have improved since). Most common deficiency: only two years of foreign language study (partly because few colleges require more). Other flaws: able girls shunned math and science; able boys concentrated on them, skipping foreign languages and neglecting English. All down the line, observed Conant. "the academically talented student is not being sufficiently challenged."
Yet Conant was highly encouraged: "All of the schools could have been made as good as the best or even better. I am more and more convinced that it would be much more difficult to make a radical change in our schools than to improve those we now have."
Green Light. One of Conant's most potent prescriptions was the "academic inventory." a yearly comparison between bright students' capacities and the elective courses they actually choose. Like a stockholder's report, it sums up a school's income and outgo. And it goes straight to the heart of the matter: guidance.
The tool is yearly testing (aptitude v. achievement), an art that has come far since the old one-shot IQ score. The tests cannot measure inherent ability (testers used to think they could). They do determine "developed ability," a blend of innate talents and outer influences, which can be changed by home and school. With his wiggly blocks and foolish questions. the guidance man strikes some parents as a dangerous bore: George will go to Harvard no matter his score. Let George do it--if he can. Guidance counselors are after bigger game: the brainy boy from a culture-poor family who always thought he was "dumb," the bright laggard who needs to be prodded. To Conant. guidance is "the keystone of the arch of public education."
Conant is something of a guidance man himself. Things have happened in U.S. public schools since his calm, compact "first report to interested citizens" began to circulate. With 224,824 copies in print. his book is the first education bestseller since the vastly more excited Why Johnny Can't Read (1955). "With the mantle of Dr. Conant around me," as one principal puts it, many a working schoolman has finally got the school board's green light for scores of reforms and experiments that promise to make the new year one of the richest in history. Items: CJ In Philadelphia, high schools will give superior seniors five major subjects instead of four. In Richmond, high schools will begin a five-year program of 23 courses. In the Peekskill (N.Y.) High School, a Conant-inspired inventory should become the best persuader yet for top students not trying for college (36% of the brightest girls. 28% of the boys). Pasadena, Calif, has started summer schools for students who wish to accelerate (a Conant recommendation), expanded guidance from one counselor per 500 students to one per 300. added an optional seventh period to the high school day. In
Rhode Island, a statewide self-criticism meeting yielded money from the legislature for special programs: calculus in Cumberland High School, Russian in Cranston High School, the M.I.T. physics course in East Providence High School. P: English composition, a top Conant priority, is getting overdue attention. Main problem: the teacher shortage. To produce one student theme a week. Conant suggested that no English teacher should handle more than 100 students. But correcting 100 themes at ten minutes each takes 17 hours of work--2 1/2 hours seven nights a week. Chicago would need 330 more teachers, adding $2,300.000 to the budget. Solution: hiring part-time "lay readers." college-trained housewives who can take over the chore at 25-c- a theme. The idea is being used in 16 cities. P: Across the country, arithmetic is being switched from rote learning and the "social utility" approach, which make the subject either inscrutable or silly. The new idea is to fascinate children with mathematical concepts and analysis so they can reason as scientists do. San Diego tried it last year, got ,000 children of all mental levels to advance twice as fast. This year a revolutionary new textbook embodying the technique will spread throughout the U.S. Everywhere brighter children are reaching algebra much earlier, sometimes by the sixth grade. P: Foreign language study is soaring, especially in elementary schools. Last year the U.S. Office of Education urged all schools to begin ten years of language in the third grade, the most sound-sensing age level (all Russian children begin in the fifth grade). This year Washington, D.C. is starting third-grade French and Spanish. Hawaii's elementary schools will teach Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Tagalog. More than 400 U.S. high schools will teach Russian; New York City and its suburbs alone has more high school Russian courses than the entire nation had two years ago. All San Francisco high schools are switching language study from the formal grammar approach to the U.S. Army's faster speak-and-understand system. More and more schools have "language laboratories." electronic playback units that let students compare their pronunciation with native voices. Next step: conducting science, history or English literature classes in a foreign language. P: Elementary schools are changing radically from the "egg crate" method of locking all students by age in one grade under a pass-fail system. The new method: the "ungraded school," which usually means eliminating grades one, two and three (as in Marblehead, Mass.) and using ability grouping by subject. In Torranee, Calif., fourth, fifth and sixth graders are being lumped together in a "multigrade" school so that children of different ages can stimulate each other. In East Alton, III., small groups of six to ten move at their own pace; children who reach seventh grade ahead of time take "enrichment" courses.P:The junior high school, a stepchild institution, will get a year-long survey by Conant. His goal: strengthening the link between fermenting elementary schools and high schools. Junior high schools began originally as a euphemistic device for those who did not want to go to high school but needed a touch of it. From 2,653 1946 they have multiplied to 4,200. One reason: some communities build them instead of high schools because they cost less (no labs or shops needed). The teachers are paid less; the schools are not always citadels of learning. And the problems of combustible half adolescents in the seventh and eighth grades are one of the key blind spots in education.
Masters & Apprentices. Ahead lie major innovations, many of them seeded by the prodigious Ford Foundation. Already Ford and its Fund for the Advancement of Education have spent more than $10 million for some 50 educational TV projects. Most imposing: Washington County, Md., where 18,000 first-to twelfth-grade students in 49 schools get about 120 classroom lessons a week on a closed-circuit system. By all evidence, it improves the lessons. The best teachers can reach the most students, and given several days to rehearse, the best extend themselves.
To attack the teacher shortage, the Ford Foundation has spent another $15.6 million on two vibrant experiments: "Intern" college-student teachers and "teaching teams." By practicing in nearby schools, interns get enough credit to skip a tedious year of postgraduate study. And often they join teaching teams (being tried in Baltimore this year) that could solve a big problem: the discouraging salary ceiling that a teacher reaches after 15 years. Some teams have equally ranked specialists. Most have a "master" teacher who gives the main presentation, then turns over the class to several journeymen, apprentices and clerical aides. The master (salary: up to $15,000) is free for another class or study in his field. Result: a true hierarchy of ability, a chance for able teachers to get paid more.
Strong Medicine. Yet all the big innovations--images of the future--depend on local control and local money. Few states really control curriculums except New York, with its 175-year-old Board of Regents (patterned on French education). And few states provide enough money. All the states together carry 40% of the total U.S. school budget, compared to 57% by local governments.
Local governments are not so vexed this year about an old debate: federal aid for school construction. Eighty percent of school bonds requested this year were voted in, compared to 73% last year. But the quality of a school depends most upon the quality of its teachers, and such is the character even of devoted pedagogues that money attracts them. Last year the average classroom teacher's salary in Mississippi was $3,070; in only 13 states was it above $5,000. One out of every ten teachers quits yearly. There is no problem in wealthy Scarsdale, N.Y., which can spend $865 a year per student. But Georgia ($208) is another matter. And who will pay for a master teacher in Ekalaka, Mont. (pop. 904)?
What the National Education Association calls for is a "significant" inoculation of federal money. The Government is already spending $2 billion yearly on education. A full dose would be strong medicine. If the "educational deficit" is really $9 billion, it is equal to more than 10% of the entire federal budget. No Congress would dream of spending that amount without peering into curriculums, and the prospects are not cheery.
Preservation. For penny-pinching public schools, with all their endless money problems, the real villain is the creaky machinery of state and local taxes. The wastefully uneven assessment ratios of the antiquated property tax range from 6% of market value in South Carolina to 59% in Rhode Island. And if all states boosted their present taxes by 10%, they could collect $4 billion more a year. If all 17 states without an income or sales tax imposed them at the average rate in other states, they could raise $8 billion yearly. "There seems to be only one alternative," concluded the Rockefeller Report on Education, "a thorough, painful, politically courageous overhaul of state and local tax systems."
The nation's public schools are worth it. With work, quality in quantity is possible. Volunteer Inspector General Conant has proved it. The individual citizen cannot change tax laws or curriculums. His part is electing a wise school board and supporting it, respecting good teachers and paying them. For in this curiously American process--education for all the children of all the people--there lies the promise of what James Bryant Conant calls "a continuing insurance for the preservation of the vitality of a society of free men."
*Private and parochial school enrollment is climbing even faster: from 3,400,000 to 5,800,000 in the last decade.
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