Educating the Secretary
Education Secretary William J. Bennett is a fast talker on a slow learning curve. He has yet to figure out that insulting the nation’s teachers just as they return to another demanding year in the classroom is the hard way to achieve reforms in education. Bad teachers are part of the problem, as Bennett said in a speech this week. But good teachers are part of the solution, and lumping them together in his lecture will not move any of them closer to higher academic achievement.
But one part of his speech that was on the mark was a challenge to nine presidential candidates to discuss education in depth when they meet tonight in Chapel Hill, N.C.
The candidates, like the schools, face serious questions about the pace and direction of education reform. The reform movement has achieved its first goal--persuading Americans that schools need better teachers, teachers need higher pay and students need higher standards. Some politicians still have not gotten the message that the public wants to keep those reforms going, but that may come in time.
Next comes the bigger management question: What is still missing? It is more a matter of money than Bennett would have people believe, but it is more than money. It does mean weeding out in-different teachers. It also means rewarding outstanding principals, and making students care about school so that they resist economic or social pressures to drop out. It requires developing better textbooks, incorporating blacks, Latinos and Asians as well as whites of European background into history books and the roles of women as well as men into the core of study. It means ensuring that students sense the sweep and importance of history and the lyricism of literature.
We hope that the candidates accept the challenge tonight and actually spell out how they would help schools meet their own challenges. We will be watching for glimpses of recognition of the need for a President to set goals for states and local communities, which is where the real thrust for education reform must begin because that is where the responsibility rests.
What people not only want to hear but need to hear is how well the candidates have digested the flood of reports on school reform and how they can translate public interest in reform into better schools for the nation’s sons and daughters.
The candidate, or candidates, who can capture the imagination of the American public and enlist and unify educators and their communities in the cause of knowledge will perform a vital service. Any who stand out on education issues may well also move ahead of the pack for the nomination.
The operative word is unify --not divide or divert , at which Bennett is so adept. Parents who want their children to have a better life than they have, business people who cry out for creative and literate staffs, a nation that needs ever better informed citizens to help avert foreign- and domestic-policy blunders won’t fall for Bennett’s glib line. But they just might follow the candidate who outlines a sound education program--not over a cliff, but into the White House.
