A New Battle over School Reform

By Ezra Bowen

Few government documents have raised more hackles or lit more fires than the 1983 Department of Education report titled A Nation at Risk. The survey sounded an alarm over the "rising tide of mediocrity" sweeping American schools. It warned that had this mediocrity been imposed by a foreign power, "we might well have viewed it as an act of war." Overnight, the document became a spur for nationwide school reform.

Last week at the White House, on the fifth anniversary of A Nation at Risk, Secretary of Education William Bennett presented President Reagan with a sequel that is likely to be even more controversial. Titled American Education: Making It Work, the new report tries to assess what the reform movement has achieved during the past half decade. "There has been undeniable progress," proclaimed the Secretary. "Students have made modest gains." But, he concluded, "we are still at risk."

On the positive side, Bennett pointed to a small increase (16 points out of 1,600) in SAT scores, ending a long, downward slide; a jump from 76% to 86% in the percentage of high school seniors passing American history; and new or strengthened homework policies among at least one-fourth of all high schools. But the report's downbeat observations quickly overshadowed those cheering facts. Items:

-- "Good schools for disadvantaged and minority children are much too rare ((and)) the dropout rate among blacks and Hispanic youth in many of our inner cities is perilously high."

-- "Teachers and principals are too often hired and promoted in ways that make excellence a matter of chance, not design."

-- "Our schools still teach curricula of widely varying quality."

-- "Students know too little and their command of essential skills is too slight."

Bennett lashed out at those who he believes are to blame: the "educational establishment," and, particularly, teachers' unions. "You're standing in the doorways, you're blocking up the halls of education reform," he charged. Bennett assailed those who engage in what he calls "opposition by extortion, the false claim that to fix our schools will first require a fortune in new funding." Instead, Bennett somewhat vaguely recommends strengthening curriculums, rewarding good teachers and principals, and instituting "accountability" throughout the education system.

The new report has angered many educators, who resent Bennett's emphasis on the negative, his slighting of the achievements of the past five years, and his finger pointing. "Sarcastic, belittling, patronizing," declared John Brademas, president of New York University and formerly a leading education advocate in Congress. California Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig notes that the number of students scoring above 450 in math and 500 in verbal on SATs has jumped 18% since 1983. "If this was the steel industry and we had an 18% gain in productivity, it would make headlines," says Honig. The downbeat report, he adds, "misleads the public."

Yet even Bennett's critics agree that American schools need further improvement. The past five years has indeed brought about tighter graduation requirements and stricter teacher standards backed by better pay. But most of the progress has come in affluent areas, where students are best equipped to respond to increased demands. "The reform movement has been most successful with those students who need it the least," says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For inner-city students there has been little change. "Reforms were aimed at middle-class schools," notes Gary Orfield, an urban-education expert at the University of Chicago. "They didn't really address low-income schools."

Nowhere is this more evident than in Chicago. Despite what Superintendent of Schools Manford Byrd calls a "flurry of ((reform)) activity," studies show that the dropout rate remains 46% overall and 56% for minorities. Earlier this year, Bennett declared Chicago schools to be the nation's worst. Critics claim that the reforms have been little more than lip service from a bureaucracy with no intention of changing. Those innovations that have made it into the classroom may have done more harm than good. The back-to-basics emphasis, for instance, makes no sense in a system that has already cut courses in art, music and even physical education.

"You have to give kids something that inspires them," says Chicago Alderman Edwin Eisendrath, a former teacher. Imposing tighter standards without remedial help can backfire. Says Boyer: "It's like raising the hurdles and not giving students extra coaching when they were already tripping."

But extra help for students, particularly in crumbling urban schools, requires extra money. While most states have raised their education budgets since 1983, the Federal Government's contribution has been largely rhetoric. "I just wish that the policies of the President and Secretary matched . their verbal commitment," says Brademas. Bennett's talk of a conspiracy of "extortion," say his critics, closes the door to intelligent discussion of funding.

So far, most of the thrust for reform has come from Governors, legislators and businessmen concerned about a shrinking pool of qualified workers. "Reform has been a sort of top-down initiative," says John Moore, chairman of the department of education at Trinity University in San Antonio. "Teachers were never brought into it." As a result, while progress was made, many reforms were misguided. In Houston, for instance, state rules requiring failing students to be tutored foundered because of problems in scheduling the sessions and the fact that many students failed to show up.

More than that, in part because of Bennett's broadsides, teachers were considered the problem, which left them wary of the reformers. "The constant criticism is demoralizing," complains Albert Shanker, head of the American Federation of Teachers. "If the Secretary of Commerce disliked businessmen as much as Bennett dislikes teachers, the President would throw him out of the Cabinet."

Ultimately, most educators agree, if reform is to have any lasting success, it will have to turn away from such externally imposed regulations and encourage change from within. Principals and teachers, says P. Michael Timpane, president of Teachers College at Columbia University, "have got to be at the center of reform." Some localities have already realized this. In New Jersey, Commissioner of Education Saul Cooperman has sought to create teacher incentives, including bonuses for success in inner-city schools and grants for top teachers to spend in classrooms as they wish. Last fall Rochester teachers signed an innovative three-year contract granting greater classroom freedom and salaries that start at $29,000 and rise to $70,000 for stars. In return, the teachers agreed to be held accountable for student performance.

In beleaguered Chicago, plans are afoot for a number of similar reforms that would take power and funds away from the city's bloated administrative bureaucracy and place them in the hands of teachers, principals and local parents. One such plan, called CURE (Chicagoans United to Reform Education), comes from a grass-roots movement. "We will place authority and responsibility with the people who are closest to the children," explains Renee Montoya of Designs for Change, a child-advocacy group that is helping to lead the way. Efforts like these, says Boyer, constitute a "new agenda," a critical second wave that may succeed where the earlier, top-down reform movement failed. If so, perhaps at last the tidal wave of mediocrity will subside.

With reporting by Jerome Cramer/Washington and John E. Gallagher/New York