U.S. Education Doesn’t Make the Grade

Back in 1983, the landmark study, “A Nation at Risk,” found that “The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.”

Has the situation changed since then?

Millions of parents sending their kids off to school this week know the answer: “Yeah, it’s become worse.” The Sept. 10 Newsweek reports, for instance, that test scores are down nationwide again this year. But then, Newsweek’s experts ask, what do you expect of kids who are stupefied by TV and video games then forced to read lousy textbooks and study boring curricula?

Any parent or teacher knows that the problem goes much deeper than that, though. The Sept./Oct. Utne Reader pulls together a collection of articles and essays addressing the problems of public education today and suggesting an intriguing array of potential cures.

Educational reform organizations, for instance, suggest such radical measures as deregulating the teaching profession so that electricians and medical doctors and anyone else with knowledge to impart can step into classrooms and teach.

“Training in pedagogy should not be a requirement for someone to be associated with young people,” one reformer writes. Another expert would open the classroom to “co-teachers”--why, for instance, shouldn’t the town’s Civil War buff share his knowledge with a group of fourth-graders?

One of the most intriguing reforms suggested is to simply let kids tutor each other more often and in more situations, beginning in kindergarten. “Under this system,” one expert explains, “the tutor is the one who benefits most from the tutoring. The tutors get a great deal of benefit from preparing the material, playing the tutor role, and feeling good about themselves.”

Whatever changes are made, someone will have to push for them. But who? In an Utne piece excerpted from the Washington Monthly, Joseph Nocera argues persuasively that urban public schools have declined because the middle class, mainly the white middle class, have abandoned them.

For instance, how many middle class Southern California parents, Angelenos in particular, feel strongly about improving public education but “aren’t willing” in Nocera’s words, “to sacrifice their children on the altar of their social principles?”

Nocera believes that there is hope that the parents left behind will change schools: “It would take only a few eloquent black voices to turn the state of the schools into the moral cause it ought to be,” he writes. Meanwhile, Nocera himself pulled his kids out of urban schools, and feels like “a co-conspirator in the one great crime of my class.” Mere guilt isn’t gonna solve much, though. In another essay, John Gatto, a New York City Teacher of the Year, says what millions of parents and teachers and probably students too feel: “We need a ferocious national debate that doesn’t quit, day after day, year after year, the kind of continuous emphasis that journalism finds boring. We need to scream and argue about this school thing until it is fixed or broken beyond repair . . . .”

REQUIRED READING

Readers get ready: A mo’ better Spin magazine hits the stands next month.

Director Spike Lee says he was only “vaguely familiar” with the rock ‘n’ roll magazine when editor and publisher Bob Guccione Jr., called him and asked him to be “guest editor” for a month. But Lee took him up on it, and the October issue is all his.

How’d he do? Ask him.

“As I look at the lineup, not only is it the blackest issue (which wasn’t very hard to do) but, I might add, it may be one of their best,” the filmmaker says in his editor’s remarks.

His brief tenure introduced the magazine “to a wealth of African-American talent: writers, journalists, artists, and photographers,” Lee writes in his editor’s remarks. That’s true, although he would have introduced even more new talent if he hadn’t put himself on the cover, included a profile of his sister, allowed many of the features to brim over with references to his own films, and conducted the two lead interviews himself.

Lee’s Q&A; with the Rev. Al Sharpton begs for a more skilled and skeptical interviewer. But that same naive and impassioned style makes Lee’s interview of Eddie Murphy a quirky and refreshing joy to read.

For a long time, Lee and Murphy have seemed to represent opposite poles of the new black Hollywood: Murphy the commercial compromiser, Lee the righteous (and self-righteous) crusader. This interview does little to change those images. But as the two alleged enemies do their verbal dance, sometimes sparring, sometimes playing off each other’s clear admiration for the other, struggling throughout with the question of just how bonded they should be by their race, both reveal deeper and deeper layers of character beneath the skin.

“I have a very strong black consciousness but I am about gradual change and dialogue that is much more civil,” Murphy says. Yet what he most admires is that Lee remains politically outspoken in spite of the frightening history of outspoken black leaders in this country.

Lee seems most impressed that Nelson Mandela thanked Murphy for the laughs he’d given the African nationalist leader while he’d been imprisoned.

At their worst, both weasel out of responsibility for their mistakes and shortcomings by blaming racism. (It was even some unnamed “they” that kept the two from getting together before now: “How come we never just talked to each other?” Lee asks. “What they like to do is to separate,” Murphy says.)

But Murphy is much more willing to admit his own fallibility. After Lee steamrollers him with vague notions about how earthshaking a cinematic collaboration between the two of them would be, Murphy raises the possibility that they’d make a stinker.

At their best, though, the two are clearly trying to do the right thing in fighting racism and injustice and in assuming a disproportionate share of responsibility--as black men and as media heroes--for young blacks in America.

As promised, the rest of Lee’s Spin package is sufficiently black it makes you realize just how white the media is--and how impoverished it is for that homogeneity.