Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 14, 1991 TAG: 9104140335
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SUSAN CHIRA THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Making America an educational as well as a military superpower will mean confronting several crises: the glaring failure of the worst students, the tolerance of mediocrity, and a national heritage of anti-intellectualism. It will mean combating poverty and shoring up disintegrating families. It will require grueling work from students and an end to parental apathy.
Last year, President Bush and the nation's governors prescribed a series of ambitious goals to be met by the year 2000. American students should catapult from last to first in math and science achievement. Every American adult should be skilled and literate. Children should arrive at school ready to learn, their potential unclouded by poor nutrition or inadequate prenatal care.
It proved much easier to enunciate the goals, however, than to figure out how to achieve them. Task forces of the governors and White House staff continue to labor over that problem, with no concrete recommendations in sight.
Bush's proposed 1992 federal budget offers modest increases in some areas, particularly the widely praised Head Start preschool programs, but no large influx of money. Some states and cities are trying radical ways to overhaul schools, but results are years away.
Now that the Persian Gulf War is over, Bush clearly hopes his education appointments will help counter complaints that he has no strong domestic policy.
Alexander pushed through educational reforms as Tennessee's governor and as president of the state's university system. David Kearns, who will be his deputy, used his platform as chairman of Xerox to call for efforts to improve American education.
But the breast-beating over the state of education has not inspired a public commitment to reform. Most Americans think it is someone else's problem.
Alexander cites polls showing 80 percent of parents give the nation's schools a C or below, but 72 percent grade their own child's school A or B. Many parents and children are satisfied with mediocre performance, beguiled by a creed that values feeling good about yourself over pushing yourself.
Smart children are often taunted as nerds, and smart black children told they are "acting white." Bart Simpson, that cocky underachiever, is a cult hero. A principal in rural Mississippi complains that high school football games land on the front page of the paper every week, while the town's first National Merit Scholarship finalist in 20 years merited only a back-page mention.
Signs are that students are getting the message. According to the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, American junior high school students spend an average of 3.2 hours a week on homework; their Japanese peers put in 16.2 hours.
About 1 percent of American 18-year-olds take advanced physics examinations, said John Bishop, an economist at Cornell University who studies education, compared with 11 percent of Japanese. Unsurprisingly, East Asian and Western European school children regularly trounce their American peers in international tests.
Of course, many Americans would be reluctant to draw lessons from systems that are unapologetically elitist and hierarchical. In many Asian and Western European countries, academic standards, curriculum and school management are national, not local, affairs.
Children must pass a succession of national tests to get into the few top schools that alone guarantee entry to the best jobs. Students know they usually have just one shot at success, and watch their opportunities narrow as test results place them either on an academic track or a vocational one.
As unfair as such a system might seem, there is no denying that it focuses attention. There are obvious rewards for academic achievement and penalties for failure. And, at least in Asia, society reveres rather than mocks educational excellence.
While most American educators stop short of recommending such draconian measures, they complain that students have no clear incentives from society at large, most colleges or most employers.
Examples of poorly educated entrepreneurs who struck it rich abound, showing students that the path to making money does not necessarily depend on education. No matter how lackluster their academic records, most students usually can get into some college.
In a survey of American employers, Bishop found that most never requested a job-seeker's high school transcript. "In Europe, a diploma establishes that someone is above a certain level," he said. "Here, it doesn't even provide an assurance of literacy."
As a result, many educators argue, most students see no point in pushing themselves.
"Kids in their own way are rational creatures, who go through an informal calculus of whether there is any real reward for studying hard, learning and doing well, or any tangible punishment or pain if they take easy courses and slide by and don't try very hard and don't do very well," said Chester Finn, a former assistant secretary of education. "So put yourself in the head of a 16-year-old deciding whether to go out and party or stay home and work on the history paper."
The demands of international competition, however, are bound to force higher standards, greater selectivity, and more clear-cut rewards for academic achievement.
Graduate programs in engineering, science and mathematics increasingly are dominated by foreign students, a trend the United States will have to reverse if it hopes to keep pace with Asian competitors. The need for more sophisticated knowledge applies both to scientific laboratories and the assembly line.
Take General Motors' new Saturn automobile plant in Tennessee, where Alexander is from.
"There, the headlight assembly team helps decide who new team members will be," he said. "They don't want any new team member who doesn't know math, reading skills, who doesn't understand spatial relationships, who doesn't have good team skills, because a team member without those skills can't make a defect-free headlight, and because if they can't do that people will buy Toyotas and they won't have jobs."
Stories like this provide ammunition for Finn and others who argue that the country needs the discipline of a national test for high school seniors, with the results available to colleges and employers.
"Americans don't know how they're doing," he said. "They get these misleading test results in which everyone scores above average. It's as if all the teachers went to smile school. There is nothing in these report cards calculated to alarm you about your child's performance."
Harold Stevenson, a University of Michigan psychology professor, found that Asian parents expected a higher level of achievement from their children than American parents did. While Asian parents believed that hard work bred academic success, American parents were more likely to cite inborn ability.
"We can't understand why Americans have such low standards for their children," Stevenson said. "Here you must feel good about yourself. But they ignore the fact that you can feel good about yourself by doing well."
Yet the prospect of national standards and tests - in effect, a move toward European and Asian practices - raises the question of what Americans should emulate about those societies and what they should shun. There are few more cherished national beliefs than that of America as a land of opportunity, where most people can make it, at most any time in their lives.
"The evidence is clear that a lot of talented people bloom late," said Theodore Sizer, a Brown University education professor who heads the Coalition of Essential Schools, a network of schools dedicated to improving themselves. "One of the great glories of the American system is how deliciously messy it is. All sorts of people can rise."
The question is not really whether standards should be higher - they will have to be - but how best to achieve them while honoring American traditions, if that is possible.
"Can we have it both ways - can we have tangible rewards for real performance, tangible unpleasantness for failure, and at the same time not shut off opportunities?" Finn asked. "I don't know. We've gone too far in the direction of saying there's never really a judgment that makes a difference. We're always happy to let you start again."
And while students in Europe and Asia have national curriculums, the extraordinary diversity of American society, and the demands of its competing ethnic groups, make any such agreement unlikely. One need only look at the fierce debate about multicultural education to know how difficult it would be to outline precisely what every American should know.
But a national test could enforce a de facto national curriculum. The prospect encourages those such as E.D. Hirsch Jr., author of "Cultural Literacy," who argue that educated Americans should be able to draw on a common vocabulary of ideas.
That notion alarms those such as Deborah Meier, who founded the widely acclaimed Central Park East elementary and secondary schools in East Harlem. Her schools teach children how to learn rather than prescribing a set curriculum. "I'm afraid a national exam would deaden things," she said.
While Alexander does not support a national curriculum, he said he believes national standards could be developed without imposing homogenization. Mathematics teachers, for example, recently agreed on an outline of principles students should master at different grades.
"The math profession has defined new world standards and is developing ways to measure progress toward those standards," Alexander said. "That still leaves Debbie Meier and her teachers free to invent hundreds of ways to help her children succeed by learning mathematics to that standard."
The dilemma is whether it is possible to balance egalitarianism with excellence, to have standards without standardization. In Japan, for example, teen suicides and the relentless pressure to succeed are well documented.
But a Confucian reverence for learning, strong family support and general economic prosperity help to ensure that even those students who fail to get into college know enough to become productive workers and educated citizens.
This kind of dedication may be the best lesson the United States can learn from its competitors.
by CNB