LET'S GUARANTEE THE KEY INGREDIENTS

By NICHOLAS LEMANN

The U.S. has probably the most decentralized system of public education in the advanced world. Some countries, like France, have an education ministry that is officially in charge of every neighborhood elementary school. Some, like Japan, have a centrally dictated curriculum. Some, like England, have national tests, administered by the government, that every student must pass in order to move on to the next level of the system. Only here is education substantially in the hands of almost 15,000 local school boards.

We've all been raised on inspiring stories of educational localism--of parents and teachers in modest, out-of-the-way places who somehow, through spirit and hard work, maintain schools whose graduates can perform in a world economy. These stories are true, but they mislead somewhat: American education is not quite so decentralized as it looks.

For one thing, ours continues to be overwhelmingly a system run by governments--mostly local governments, but governments nonetheless. In elementary and secondary education, 89% of American students go to public schools, 9.5% to low-tuition private schools (mostly Catholic) and only 1.5% to private schools with tuition of more than $5,000 a year. The higher-education population is about four-fifths public and one-fifth private. All public school students have their education financed through the tax system, and all of them are subject to at least some central rules (like a ban on enforced racial segregation) that are imposed as a condition of the government funding.

Also, over the past half-century, we have had to develop a national marketplace in personnel, and this has required the development of uniform educational standards. Everything from the peer-review system in science to the SATs and ACTs is part of an effort to find ways of comparing students and schools from all over the country. That most of these efforts aren't explicitly run by the federal Department of Education should not obscure their nationalizing effect. Few high schools would dare proclaim that they weren't going to prepare their students for the SATs. But American education is still quite local in one crucial way: individual schools have the freedom to be bad. There is no reliable way today to ensure that every American public school student is getting a decent education, and, indeed, many are not getting one. This is a big problem--the worst problem in what is on the whole a good and generous education system. It cannot be solved solely through the kind of community effort that we've been trained, misleadingly, to think of as the only thing that can make an American school work.

There was a time when liberals, at least, believed that the way to fix bad local schools, especially in poor areas with low tax bases, was to give them federal money. In 1965 Congress passed, in a spirit of great hope, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which for the first time created a federal program (now known as Title I) to fund local schools. The program is still going, but the overall cause lost a lot of momentum when a big government study came out in 1966 contending that student achievement is not very closely related to school spending levels. Ever since then, the idea that you can't fix substandard local schools by throwing money at them has held sway.

Bad schools themselves, while certainly not resistant to hav-ing money thrown at them, tend to cling tenaciously to the principle of local control. In a poor neighborhood the public school system is often the biggest employer. Teachers, administrators and school-board members desperately want to keep their positions, even if they aren't doing a good job, and quite often there is very little pressure on them to do better.

It's wonderful when bad schools can be fixed just through parent and community involvement. When those things aren't present--and they aren't always--the bad schools still need to be fixed, because otherwise the students who go to them won't learn and will be doomed to lives of poverty. Two things are required, both of which Americans are heavily invested in believing we don't need in education: government money and external government control.

Although it's true that the gross correlation between spending and performance in schools is not high, over the years researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence showing that money does in fact help a lot if it is spent on the right things, like small reading classes. Taking local control away from nonperforming schools also seems to work. The heads of the school systems in New York City and Chicago have both done this recently, with good results. The only way to make sure no American child gets a substandard education is to guarantee, nationally, that every child gets a good one.