Schools Are for Learning, Not Social Labs--Gardner

In an address that updated his landmark “A Nation at Risk” report of 1983, University of California President David P. Gardner told a convention of school principals Monday in Anaheim that schools must be places of education and not laboratories for solving broad societal problems.

”. . . Our schools exist primarily to foster intellectual competence and informed citizenship in our free society,” Gardner told about 1,800 high school and elementary principals attending the California Principals Conference. “They do not exist to respond to every social, political or individual demand made of them by the plethora of single-issue interests that abound in this country.”

As examples of broad social problems, Gardner mentioned teen-age pregnancies, single-parent households and latchkey children (those unattended after school). He said that while all of these are urgent social problems to be solved, schools alone cannot do the job.

”. . . We cannot, as we have too often in the past, simply push . . . social problems onto the schools as if they were somehow magically equipped to deal with them or had the resources to help. . . .”

Gardner went on to identify four other “unfinished items of business on the agenda of (national) school reform:”

- A need to strengthen the teaching profession, in part by raising salaries.

- A requirement “to inject more rigor into the high school curriculum, to raise our expectations of students, and to improve student performance.”

- A need “to develop ways to monitor and evaluate what has been accomplished (in school reform) so we can build on what has worked and winnow out what has not.”

- A necessity for “federal initiatives” in national education, including aid to gifted students and state-by-state federal analyses of how educational reform is progressing.

In 1983, Gardner chaired the National Commission on Educational Excellence. In its report, “A Nation at Risk,” the commission said that it had found little excellence remaining in American education. Instead, said the report, education was being overtaken by “a rising tide of mediocrity.”

That report generated intense national debate and is generally credited with triggering widespread reform movements in all the states, including California. The omnibus California education reform measure, Senate Bill 813, was passed shortly after the Gardner report was issued.

Gardner recalled that report in his speech to the opening luncheon of the two-day state principals’ conference at the Anaheim Hilton and Towers.

He said the “Nation at Risk” report came at a time when the United States was ready to be awakened to the deteriorating educational situation. He said the nation was still reeling from “the worst recession since the Great Depression” and also was seeing the erosion of the country’s “once unassailable position in the international marketplace.”

Americans were ready to listen, Gardner said, “and listen they did. The past three years have seen an unprecedented wave of educational reform sweep across the nation.”

Nonetheless, Gardner said, the five “unfinished items” of school reform still must be addressed.

Most important, said Gardner, is the need to maintain schools as places to teach “intellectual skills” rather than to be social problem-solvers. A parallel need, he said, is to guard against letting non-intellectual subjects crowd out basic courses in the high schools.

He said the national commission found that too many high schools had allowed academic “appetizers and desserts” to “be mistaken for the main courses.” Gardner added: “Courses in consumer education, driver education, sex education, family education, safety education and bachelor living, for example, had been crowding out the more essential subjects such as English, mathematics, science, social studies, government, foreign languages and the arts.”

Gardner did not specify any group or organization when he castigated “single-issue interests” that he said are trying to influence education. But he said the central need is to keep schools focused on “what they are uniquely able to do--fostering the skills of citizenship and developing intellectual skills. . . .”

On the subject of teacher salaries, Gardner said: “When one considers teachers’ salaries as a percentage of each state’s total personal income, California ties with Florida for offering the lowest pay in the nation.”

Gardner indicated that he was pleased that the latest California Assessment Program test scores are showing improvements. He also praised the returned emphasis in most California high schools to teaching science, math and foreign languages.

The principals conference is being co-sponsored by the University of California and the Orange County Department of Education. The concluding events today include a luncheon speech by Assemblywoman Teresa Hughes (D-Los Angeles), the chairwoman of the Assembly Education Committee.