Who Cares About Noriega--Our Enemy Is Within

Do any of you really care whether Manuel Antonio Noriega stays or goes as ruler of Panama? Of course, we are all well-coached by the culture of concern to say that we care about Panama, or NATO, the deficit, the START treaty and other thudding abstractions that get denominated as “issues” in American political discourse. But down deep, I suspect, most of us don’t give hoot about Noriega.

For weeks the networks and the newspapers have tried to make us care by lavishing attention on this dubious dictator. He has even been the subject of those certifiers of seriousness in our media culture, “Nightline” and the Sunday TV talk shows.

Into the bargain, he has been injected into the presidential campaign, with George Bush using “the Noriega issue” to distance himself from Ronald Reagan, and with Michael Dukakis trying to make political hay out of the Administration’s haplessness in handling the general.

While we have all been anesthetized by this absorbing froth, a crisis that threatens our tenuous claim to civilization has worsened. I refer to what is happening to the children of the poor in our urban school systems.

“Nobody in his right mind would send kids to public schools”; so says Edward Burke, a Chicago alderman quoted by the Chicago Tribune in an extraordinary series it has just completed about that city’s schools, which have been called “the worst in America” by the U.S. Department of Education. The statistics cited in the series--the 50% dropout rate, low test scores, high incidence of violence in the classroom--are too familiar to feed indignation. But the details are in a class of the horrific all by themselves.

There is the dedicated teacher who lends a book to a bookless pupil--whose family uses its pages as toilet tissue. There is the incompetent teacher, all 22 of whose 4th-graders must go to summer school or be kept back, who says that her “career goal” is to retire at full pension.” There is the little boy who just hasn’t been himself since his older brother was murdered. There is the “reading coordinator,” the daughter of a local pol, who spends her days administrating, coordinating, supervising and otherwise avoiding all contact with students who need help with reading. There is the American flag left on a school flagpole on Friday night, only to be found lying in a torn heap on the muddy ground on Saturday morning. There is the school superintendent who says, “The learner must learn for herself of himself”--in other words, don’t blame me for the social and moral disaster I preside over.

This is the reality of public education in urban America, 1988; a chart comparing the Chicago schools to those in Los Angeles, New York, Miami and Houston leaves little doubt on that score.

So here we have a clear and present danger to the country, one that we taxpayers will be paying for in the coin of crime and welfare and sundry other social ills for decades. But of the presidential candidates, only Jesse Jackson, who calls for giving education the kind of budgetary weight and bully-pulpit prominence hitherto reserved for “defense,” is taking it seriously. Yet nothing that Noriega can do to us (and only one thing that the Soviets can do to us) can possibly harm this country as much as the mutilation of the American dream that takes place every day in the public schools of America’s great cities.