Can Public Schools Keep Up With Skill Requirements?
Last month, an educational journal published its annual poll of attitudes about public schools. It is a poll every candidate should read. Education, it seems, is one of those subjects where people worry more about the general issue than their own situation. Ask people about public schools, and they say schools are in terrible trouble; ask about their own child’s school, and they glow.
As it has for 11 years, the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll asked public-school parents to assign a letter grade to their oldest child’s school. This year, 26% of parents gave “A” or “B” to “U.S. public schools”--but 66% gave their child’s school a grade of “A” or “B,” a level of satisfaction unchanged from a decade ago. When questioned in detail, more than two-thirds gave an “A” or “B” to the curriculum in their child’s school.
The result is a paradox. Candidates for the presidency, for the Senate, for the local water district all insist that U.S. schools need a major overhaul. They propose school choice, statewide academic standards, bigger budgets, student uniforms, even more charter schools. But none of these remedies can work without parental demand for stronger student skills.
And last month’s poll suggests that demand isn’t there. What is going on?
To resolve the paradox, begin with the way parents evaluate their children’s education. Ideally, a parent wants answers to two questions:
* What is my child learning relative to other children? The answer comes from report cards and standardized tests.
* Is my child learning the skills needed to get good jobs in today’s economy?
For most parents, the latter question is the stumbling block. The question is hard to articulate because what we call the “schools problem” has more to do with changes in the economy than with changes in schools. The nation’s schools didn’t collapse in the 1980s: If we measure schools by standardized achievement-test scores, they are doing a little better now than 15 years ago. The schools problem exists because skill requirements in the economy have escalated so much faster than schools have improved.
We can see the economy’s rising skill requirements in the average incomes of 30-year-old men whose education stopped with a high-school diploma: $28,000 in 1979 (in today’s dollars) compared with about $21,000 today. College graduates with the weakest skills aren’t doing much better. These income numbers are a strong signal that the candidates are right--schools need to upgrade what they teach. But, for most parents, the signal arrives only after the student has graduated high school--after their child has lost contact with teachers and parents have lost interest in the school.
Candidates who are serious about education must begin by educating parents about what is at stake. A good first step is to ask parents to consider the recent graduates of their own child’s school--say, the class of 1994. If a parent’s child is now in elementary school, are its 1994 graduates taking algebra in middle school? Or do they cluster in remedial courses? If the child is in middle school, how many in its class of 1994 went on to good high schools and advanced-placement courses? If the child is in high school, how many recent graduates went to college? How many now work at decent wages? How many are idle--not in school, but not working because no one will hire them?
Most parents and many schools don’t have this information. Collecting it will require a school’s parents, teachers and administrators to work the telephones together. But once collected, the information previews the future of today’s students--a preview many parents may find unsettling. When enough parents in a school decide they want a different future for their children, then and only then, can they begin a serious discussion about making schools better.
