ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, May 26, 1996 TAG: 9605240033
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
COLUMN: william raspberry
SOURCE: WILLIAM RASPBERRY
IT'S HARD to know whether David Mathews has come up with a penetrating insight or just another fetching truism.
There's no disputing the truth of what he says in his new booklet: The trouble with public schools lies more with the public than with the schools.
No, that's not true. There's lots of disputing that truth. Almost every critique of public education (and every proposal for improvement) disputes it, focusing on what the schools do, or fail to do. The schools are dreadful because teachers are ill-trained or afraid to exert discipline, or because the schools are cheerless, underfunded and unsafe.
Seldom does anyone say what Mathews, president of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, says with such conviction: The trouble with the public schools is that they no longer have a ``public'' that considers them their schools.
It's almost impossible not to nod in agreement as you thumb through ``Is There a Public for Public Schools?'' Of course the schools (at least in those places where everybody knows they are awful) have lost their public support - not just in money but in personal commitment. Of course public schools (especially in the cities) are becoming the educational counterparts of public hospitals: supported by taxpayers who will use them only as a last desperate resort. Of course educators find it hard to improve schools that have lost the support of the communities they serve.
Perhaps the clearest illustration of the loss of community commitment Mathews talks about is in the public schools of Washington, D.C. It has become routine (for blacks especially) to blame the problems of big-city public schools on white flight. It's not that black children need white classmates, we insist, but the abandonment by whites means the loss of public support - the loss of money - to do what needs to be done.
The problem, we frequently insist, is racism. And sure enough, in most of America, it is possible to point to poor-performing, mostly black schools surrounded by higher-performing, better-funded white ones. If only ``they'' hadn't left, with their money and their political clout, why inner city schools would be doing just fine.
But look at Washington. It's black people, not whites, who have the political clout here. The school board and the city council are black-dominated; virtually all the principalships and the overwhelming proportion of teachers are black. Blacks run things. And as for money, even during this city's time of fiscal trouble, the per pupil expenditures aren't that far off the average. (And no one I know would argue that a 50 percent increase in outlays would make an appreciable difference in academic outcomes.)
So what's wrong? Are black students (poor black students, at least) uneducable? Are black teachers such self-haters that they refuse to teach black children? Are the teachers poorly trained, or not smart enough in the first place? (Then why are so many of these students successful when they transfer to other jurisdictions, or to private schools?)
Mathews, President Ford's secretary of Health Education and Welfare and a former president of the University of Alabama, thinks that what is wrong is the disengagement between the schools and their ``public.''
In many cases, he says, ``there may be no public waiting to be engaged.''
The public he is talking about is more than a collection of people such as you might find in a shopping mall, more than members of the same audience, more even than people who live near one another. He has in mind people who have a particular sort of relationship: who are committed to common purposes, who know they need one another even when they might not particularly like one another.
``These relationships lead to a distinctive kind of action, to cooperative civic action that is complementary and mutually reinforcing.''
He's right - right as well when he says that ``fundamental change (in public education) has to start with the public and within the community. . . . It is unlikely that schools will change unless communities change, unless citizens increase their capacity to band together and act together.''
But is that an important insight, or merely the interposition of another, equally vexing question: How do you change - or build - community?
Washington Post Writers Group
LENGTH: Medium: 80 linesby CNB