THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 15, 1995 TAG: 9501170468
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 117 lines
Myron Lieberman, who is known for his critique of the American public education system and for his support of radical school reform, has been a professor of education for more than 40 years. He is senior research scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.
During the 1960s Lieberman was an expert witness and consultant to the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in districts throughout the southeastern United States and New Jersey.
Recently, he spoke with staff writer Philip Walzer. These are excerpts.
Q. You wrote a book in 1993 titled ``Public Education: An Autopsy.'' Are public schools really that bad?
A. The argument over how bad they are . . . is essentially irrelevant. It's like an automobile. You might say the Model T was the finest automobile of its time, but if you could do a lot better, you'd do it. I don't try to get bogged down in how bad schools are. I think in some ways they're worse than people realize, but that's essentially a secondary issue.
Q. A lot of reforms have been circulating these days - charter schools, vouchers, privatization. Will any of them make a real difference?
A. To educational officials and politicians, the perception of reform is more important than the reality of it - because their election or their job depends on the perception, not on the reality. So we have a tremendous growth industry, aided and abetted by the media making a big thing out of every little cosmetic change.
When you talk about privatization, we could have private monopolies every bit as bad as public monopolies. Privatization, per se, is not a solution. The real problem, as I see it, is the absence of any competition.
Q. But won't some of these reforms, like vouchers and charter schools, encourage competition?
A. Not necessarily. You could have vouchers that are so limited in various ways that they don't lead to competition. (In Milwaukee's choice program), you have severe limits on how many kids are eligible and the schools can't be new schools. You have a whole bunch of restrictions on it that make it impossible as a test of a market system.
Q. What, then, is the answer?
A. The answer is that we have to have, as I proposed in the book, a three-sector industry, such as you have in the medical field, where you have government hospitals, nonprofit hospitals and for-profit hospitals. But a great deal of the progress comes out of the for-profit hospitals. And I believe the same thing would be applicable to education. We are missing the for-profit sector. That's where you get the investment and R & D, and that's where you get the dynamics of progress. You don't get it from nonprofit schools.
Q. Is there anything in existence you could point to as a model - any city, any district doing something like this?
A. I could show you plenty of models of what shouldn't be followed. For instance, in California, the law makes it virtually impossible for a school to contract off services. So even if a private-sector company could do more for less, by California law, it's prohibited from entering that market.
To give you another illustration: California also has a law that a certain proportion of school budgets go for salaries. A lot of people cheer that and say that's great, that means more of the budget will go to the classrooms. But if you wanted to get better service at a lower cost, if you were a company, you would try to reduce your labor costs and try to produce the same level of service. But there's no incentive to do that in California.
Q. You've written about teacher unions. Do you see them as a force for professionalism and excellence in education, an obstacle to reform or maybe a little bit of both?
A. They are the major obstacle to reform. The union operates by trying to achieve a monopoly over the market. You can see this in education - they don't want any privatization, they don't want vouchers. I don't say this pejoratively; that's how a union functions. If you could go to work in a unionized district for less than the negotiated wage rate, what good would the union be? You have to weaken the unions. There's no alternative to it.
Q. Do you see any politicians on the horizon who will take up the banner of education reform and really stick with it? President Clinton? Governor Allen?
A. On the Democratic side, forget it. The public-sector unions collectively are perhaps the single main constituency of the Democratic Party. Look, one out of every eight delegates to the Democratic convention that nominated Clinton was an NEA or AFT member. They were the largest interest group at the convention. You don't think he's going to do anything to jeopardize that, do you?
On the other hand, there is a lack of sophistication about what to do about it on the Republican side. There are some who have indicated that they will do something, but it's a little too early to say categorically that they will. Governor Whitman in New Jersey was going to be a big supporter of choice, but when push came to shove, she just collapsed completely.
Q. Public schools are sometimes criticized for creating some of the educational problems that trouble colleges. But you've said that colleges hold plenty of responsibility for the problems in public schools.
A. There is a tendency that if one level of the academic ladder relaxes standards, that reverberates down. You can get into college now with a high school diploma regardless of what you know. And we know you don't have to know anything to get a high school diploma.
Grade inflation got started in the colleges, especially during the '60s, when guys were trying to get a deferment so they didn't have to serve in the military. So the professors, who were sympathetic, began upping grades, and then the women claimed that was discrimination, so then they began upping them for everybody.
In one way after another, the impact of the colleges has been to lower the standards. Of course, to the professors, it's the other way around; they cry in their beer over what poor students they have, but they are the primary causal factor. ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
Color photo
CRITIC SPEAKS
What: ``Education: Policy and Precedent,'' part of President's
Lecture Series.
When: Thursday.
Where: Old Dominion University, Mills Godwin Building.
Time: 8 p.m..
Cost: Free, open to the public.
For more information: 683-3115.
KEYWORDS: INTERVIEW EDUCATION UNITED STATES by CNB