Helping the Troubled Schools

Too many of the nation’s urban schools are still failing in their mission. Dropout rates remain high, the morale of teachers and students is low and school buildings are bleak and battered. It’s time for commitment from local, state and federal officials to spend more money, more time and more imagination on improving the schools.

There are signposts of failure in cities across the country, according to a depressing but realistic look at urban schools conducted recently by the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. They reported that in Cleveland recently only one public high-school student was a National Merit Scholarship semi-finalist out of 15,000 nationwide. That in one Houston elementary school half the students had to repeat a grade because they hadn’t learned enough to pass. That at one Los Angeles high school only about 12% of the students could read at the level at which they should.

Don’t just give up in the face of all these problems, the trustees said. Schools must expect the best from the students, not the worst. Principals and teachers should be given more authority to plan their own best answers to the problems that they see in their schools--with the caveat that these local schools must then demonstrate that their programs work. If they can’t prove that, then state and local officials should have the power to intervene.

Urban schools often can’t perform as well as they should because they don’t have as much money as suburban schools do. In the 1970s it looked as if such differences might be reduced. But today where a child lives often still determines the quality of his or her education. To combat this inequity, the trustees recommended a 5% increase each year in federal aid to schools having large numbers of poor children until all those youngsters are served. Currently only 40% of those eligible are covered. The trustees also recommended broadening the coverage of the highly valued Head Start program and spending more money to ensure that more children receive proper nutrition.

The trustees’ report comes at the very time Congress is debating its major education bill of the year, so it’s hardly an abstract issue. A House-Senate conference committee has just finished working on improving federally financed education programs for poor children. Money was not the big issue in the committee’s work, but rather how best to intervene to help the schools that are failing.

As the Carnegie trustees said, “When schools fail, swift changes must be made.” Otherwise students pass from grade to grade without learning much, school buildings aren’t being maintained and nobody seems to care. “No other crisis--a flood, a health epidemic, a garbage strike or even snow removal--would be as calmly accepted without full-scale emergency intervention.”

Recognizing this problem, Congress is for the first time spelling out the need for schools to show concrete improvement. If they don’t show progress in whatever tests that the states already use, the legislation would require that local district administrators help the schools draw up a plan to improve. If that didn’t work, state school officials would be required to join local districts to help out. By reaching this agreement, the conferees avoided a fight over who should be in charge in any intervention. There’s more than enough work for everyone.

Congress should move quickly on this critical measure after the spring recess. It’s an important step toward shoring up urban schools. Without commitment from all quarters to work in a major way in troubled city schools, the current wave of reform will wash over those schools, leaving them virtually unchanged.