Education = Expectations
Children are likely to live up to what you believe of them.
LADY BIRD JOHNSON
I have never met a stupid child, though I’ve met plenty of children whom adults insist on calling “stupid” when the children don’t perform in a way that conforms to adult expectations.
I remember a six-year-old girl I tutored in reading at an elementary school in Little Rock. I’ll call her Mary. She lived in a tiny house with six siblings, her parents, and an assortment of other relatives, who came and went unpredictably. There was so much commotion in the evenings that she was rarely able to sleep for longer than a few hours, and she always looked tired. She seemed uncomfortable talking, but she didn’t want to read, either. Sometimes her eyelids would droop and she would lay her head on the desk.
One day, desperate for a way to hold her attention, I asked Mary if she liked to draw. Her brown eyes lit up and she nodded eagerly. Her colored-pencil drawings of people and animals were technically advanced and rich in detail. Awkward as she was with words, Mary communicated vividly through her art. Her pictures of a small house crowded with many people and lacking space for her to draw or to play provided us with a way to begin talking about her life. When I complimented her on them, though, she repeated what other adults must have said to her: The drawings were just silly “baby” stuff and not very good.
When her teacher observed what we were doing, she cautioned me that my purpose was to help Mary learn to read, not to play. I suggested that encouraging Mary to express herself in her drawings and then helping her to write stories about what they conveyed could lead her to reading. But the teacher could only see that Mary and I had failed at our assigned task, which was to read stories in the class workbooks.
Mary was obviously intelligent, but her intelligence was expressed in the pictures she drew and not by trying to read from a printed page. Yet her artistic interest and talent were not being praised at home or in school. It wasn’t surprising that she often seemed withdrawn or unhappy. How could she not notice that her talents were ignored, even penalized? It does not take long for children like Mary, whose intelligence is expressed in a way that is not customarily recognized or appreciated, to lose a sense of how valuable their particular gifts are, and, along with it, their confidence and sense of self.
When this happens, teachers, parents, and other adults often write them off as “slow” or “unmotivated” and come to expect less of them in the way of academic performance. Tragically, the children are thus deprived of the opportunity to master the basic skills they will need to realize their particular gifts. This is a loss not only to them but to the entire village, which could benefit from all our talents.
In his 1983 book, Frames of Mind, Howard Gardner outlined the theories about multiple intelligence that he had formulated while working with gifted children and children who had suffered brain damage. He discovered that the loss of certain mental capacities, such as language ability, was accompanied by an enhancement of others, such as visual or musical abilities. These findings prompted Gardner to explore how parts of the brain seem to promote different abilities. He uncovered what he describes as the capacity people have to express themselves through various forms of intelligence.
Even within the same family, it’s easy to see that different children are good at different things. From very early on, some seem to be drawn to words and learning from books, although the abstract, logical reasoning mathematics requires may come less easily to them. Other children excel at math, because their minds travel most easily in the worlds of numbers and symbols, but they may have difficulty expressing themselves in words.
Verbal and mathematical abilities stand children in good stead in most classrooms. Other kinds of intelligence may go unrecognized. Children who think in visual images may not thrive when limited to words and symbols. An early knack for music, like my husband’s, might be ignored if it is not accompanied by more conventional skills. So might the strong intuitive skills that allow people to read the moods and temperament of others. We have all known children who seemed to think with their bodies—who can rapidly learn a new sport, for example—and yet seem restless and uncomfortable when they are forced to sit still at a desk. The brilliant choreographer Martha Graham once said, “If I could say it, I wouldn’t have to dance it.” Yet rather than celebrate our children’s multiple forms of intelligence, too often we elevate one form over another or caricature kids accordingly, labeling them “jocks” or “nerds.”
Howard Gardner’s list of intelligences takes into account verbal, mathematical, visual, physical, and musical intelligences as well as psychological skills like the ability to understand and interact well with others. These forms of intelligence are not mutually exclusive. Every one of us has all of them to some degree. Their particular constellation may determine not only what we are good at but how we learn—if we are given the encouragement and opportunity to develop them.
Whatever the range of intelligences includes, it is increasingly clear that standard IQ tests capture only a fraction of it. The tests were originally designed to measure only the aptitudes that fall within Gardner’s first two types of intelligence, verbal and mathematical. Yet much classroom work engages only that part of a child’s potential. Schools often categorize children’s intelligence according to their performance on IQ and other narrowly conceived tests and adjust their encouragement and expectations accordingly. Even “slow” children are quick to catch on to the categories schools have put them into, and learn a simple equation: If adults don’t think I can achieve, I can’t and I won’t.
The philosopher Nelson Goodman suggests that we would do well to learn to ask how rather than whether someone is smart. That question would shift the emphasis to helping individuals realize their potential, rather than whether they have potential in the first place. The main point I want to make here is that virtually all children can learn and develop more than their parents, teachers, or the rest of the village often believe. This has great implications for how we approach our children’s educations.
One of the striking differences international studies have repeatedly turned up between American parents and students and their counterparts in other countries, particularly in Asia, is the greater weight our culture currently gives to innate ability, as opposed to effort, in academic success. I don’t know all the reasons for this preoccupation, which seems to be linked to an obsession with IQ tests and other means of labeling people, but some possible explanations are not particularly flattering to us.
Believing in innate ability is a handy excuse for us. Too tired to read to a child or enforce rules on TV-watching or phone use? Too preoccupied to seek out extra help for a child who needs more practice with math or a foreign language? Why bother, if none of that really makes much of a difference anyway? More concerned with how a daughter looks than whether she’s reading at grade level? More interested in a son’s jump shot than in how he conjugates verbs? If that’s what gets our attention, you can bet it’s what kids will think is important too. But how can we parents see the connection between effort and appearance, or between effort and athletic prowess, but not between effort and academic success?
The bell curve lets the rest of us off the hook too. What’s the sense of reforming schools, especially if it costs any money? What is the point of figuring out how to tailor teaching to the unique ways children learn? Why puzzle over what they should learn, and why bother to articulate it to them? Cream will rise to the top no matter what we do, so let nature take its course and forget about nurture.
If we are permitted to write off whole groups of kids because of their racial or ethnic or economic backgrounds, then the occasional academic shooting star will be seen as a fluke. And when whole groups of kids succeed despite the odds, like the poor Hispanic high school students Jaime Escalante coached to succeed on the Advanced Placement calculus examination, their success can be ascribed to a unique brand of charismatic teaching and motivation that can’t be replicated anywhere else.
I began to work on behalf of education reform in Arkansas in 1983, when my husband asked me to chair a committee that would make recommendations for improving Arkansas’s education system. That was also the year that “A Nation at Risk,” the landmark report about our schools, was issued. I couldn’t begin to describe in a single chapter all the effort since then that has gone into promoting preschool and kindergarten programs, raising academic standards, establishing accountability, professionalizing teaching conditions, improving vocational and technical education, and many other changes. But after a dozen years of involvement in education reform, I’m convinced that the biggest obstacles many students face in learning are the low expectations we have of them and their schools.
I’ve mentioned the impact President Eisenhower’s post-Sputnik call for higher math and science performance had on my generation. Performance standards were upgraded; new classroom equipment was purchased. Our parents and teachers demanded more from us. Nearly forty years later, though, education is more important to success in the global village than ever. Now we have no clear and immediate enemy to frighten us into improving education for our own children; we have to do it for ourselves. But the starting point is the same: High expectations begin at home.
MY PARENTS made learning part of our daily activities, from storytelling and reading aloud to discussing current events at the dinner table to calculating earned run averages for Little League pitchers. They taught me and my brothers in all sorts of informal ways before we started school, and they continued teaching us in partnership with our teachers at school.
When I was in fourth grade, I was having trouble with arithmetic. My father said he would help me if I got up as early as he did each morning. The house was cold, because the furnace was turned off when we went to bed. I would sit shivering at the kitchen table as the house slowly warmed up and my father drilled me on multiplication tables and long division.
Some parents do not easily assume the role of teacher. They may lack the confidence, be unwilling to devote the time, or simply not know, for example, that reading aloud to babies and toddlers is the single most important activity we can do with children to ensure that they will read well in school. But the village has found ways to help parents start teaching children when it counts most, in the preschool years.
In Arkansas, I introduced a program that had been developed in Israel. Called HIPPY—the Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters—it works like this: A staff member recruited from the community comes into the home once a week and role-plays with the parent (usually the mother), demonstrating for her how she can work with her child to stimulate cognitive development. Along with special activity packets, the program employs common household objects to illustrate concepts. For example, a spoon and a fork might be used to demonstrate differences in shape or sharpness, or the volume control on the TV might be turned up and down to teach the concepts of loud and soft. The material in the activity packets, designed for parents who may not read well themselves, is outlined in straightforward fifteen-minute daily lesson plans arranged in a developmental sequence. The usual starting age is four, and most children participate for two years. Some programs add a third year, so children can begin the program at the age of three.
When we brought HIPPY into rural areas and housing projects in Arkansas, a number of educators and others did not believe that parents who had not finished high school were up to the task of teaching their children. Many of the parents doubted their own abilities. One mother whose home I visited told me she had always known she was supposed to put food on the table and a roof over her children’s heads, but no one had ever told her before that she was supposed to be her son’s first teacher.
Not only did the program help kids get jump-started in the right direction; it also gave the parents a boost in self-confidence. Many of them became interested in learning for themselves as well as for their children, going back to school to get a high school equivalency degree or even starting college. This is a particularly important development, because researchers cite a mother’s level of education as one of the key factors in determining whether her children do well in school. It stands to reason that when a mother furthers her own learning, she becomes more engaged in her child’s.
There are similar—and similarly successful—efforts going on elsewhere, such as the Parents as Teachers (PAT) program started in Missouri, which also uses home visits to coach parents on preparing children for school.
The importance of early learning is also one of the driving ideas behind Head Start, the thirty-year-old federally funded preschool education program that has consistently helped to prepare disadvantaged children for school. But Head Start doesn’t reach children until they are four, when we now know from research that many of them are already behind their peers. So when Congress reauthorized Head Start in 1994, at the President’s recommendation it established Early Head Start to target low-income families with infants and toddlers.
So far, however, Head Start reaches only about 750,000 of the estimated two million children who need it, and Early Head Start is just getting under way. Despite the proven success of investments like Head Start, it and many other preventive programs are caught in the battle over federal budget priorities. Our nation can afford to invest in early childhood education and balance the budget. There are few more important investments at the federal, state, or local level than programs focused on helping parents to develop the confidence and skills to teach young children.
We work at home to prepare children for learning, in anticipation that much will be demanded of them when they reach school. Too often, however, expectations are undermined by a piecemeal approach to educational change. Nearly every problem in education, including the plague of low expectations, has been tackled successfully somewhere. Leading education reformers like James Comer, Theodore Sizer, Ernest L. Boyer, and Deborah Meier have diagnosed our ills, prescribed strategies for recovery, and put them to work. They usually boil down to a few crucial ingredients: clear expectations that all children can and should learn; manageable school and class size; an orderly classroom environment; the close personal involvement of at least one teacher with each child; a commitment to tailoring instruction to how different children learn; active parental participation. Reciting this wish list is easy. Figuring out how to put it into practice in the face of bureaucratic opposition, parental qualms, some teacher resistance, and the host of other obstacles reform faces is another story.
I once spoke to a group of school superintendents about model programs that had been effective in transforming poorly performing students into motivated achievers. I asked if anyone in my audience had visited any of the programs I mentioned. A long silence fell over the room. Finally, one superintendent confessed that he couldn’t see himself explaining to his school board that a nearby school was solving a problem that had stumped him. There wasn’t anything new in education anyway, he added, so he couldn’t see the sense in getting worked up about some “experiments.”
That superintendent would doubtless brush off as “experimental” Reading Recovery, a program started in New Zealand, which is considered among the most literate countries in the world. Reading Recovery has demonstrated consistent success in getting nearly nine out of ten first graders who read poorly to grade level in a few months. In 1984, a group of educators at Ohio State University’s College of Education launched a Reading Recovery pilot in selected Columbus, Ohio, public schools. The program was astonishingly successful, and gradually it won widespread support. Reading Recovery teachers are now being trained in school districts in forty-seven states. Yet many schools continue to pursue remedial reading methods that are not nearly as effective. Why?
The first problem is money, especially in urban school districts, which generally have less money to begin with and more students in need of help. Even though children move through the Reading Recovery program quickly and, after leaving it, usually do not need additional help, saving money in the long term, a front-end investment is needed to train teachers in the strategies that make the program a success: one-on-one tutoring, with an emphasis on phonics and language skills. The failure to make a sufficient initial investment creates a self-fulfilling prophecy: When large numbers of first graders still can’t read at the end of the year, the program will be judged a failure.
Concerns about career advancement sometimes work against innovative programs, too. The success of a program like Reading Recovery may not be enough to outweigh the preconceptions of teachers and administrators who have long affiliated themselves with other approaches or are intent on preserving their budgets, staff, and political clout.
Such misplaced adult priorities divert our efforts and energies from where they are most productively spent—on paying attention to how children learn and doing our best to personalize the learning process so that each of them can meet high standards.
It is precisely this concern that motivated social psychologist Jeff Howard to create the Efficacy Institute in Lexington, Massachusetts. The Institute has trained twenty thousand teachers in school districts throughout this country to rethink their assumptions about children’s intelligence. In Tacoma, Washington, where two thirds of the teachers in the district have gone through Efficacy training during the past three years, results of this new approach are already visible. On standardized tests, the scores of fourth and eighth graders rose significantly in just two years. Part of the reason for this increase in achievement is that teachers go back into the classroom and share their new knowledge about learning with the students, explaining to them how important it is for them to work hard so they can “get smart.” Students absorb the message that smart is not something you simply are, but something you can become.
Another innovator who has pioneered a more effective approach to learning is Bob Moses, who is revered for his efforts to mobilize black voters in the South during the civil rights movement. Thirty years later, he has brought the same passionate commitment to a different kind of work.
Helping his own daughter to struggle with her algebra homework in the early 1980s, Moses, who had been a teacher before he became a civil rights leader, began volunteering at her school, trying to get students to be comfortable with numbers and more engaged in the process of problem solving. He knew that without strong math skills poor children would be at a disadvantage in the highly competitive world of higher learning. His determination gave birth to the Algebra Project, which addressed the crisis in math education among minority students through a middle school curriculum that was designed to bridge the conceptual gap between arithmetic and algebra.
Moses developed a five-step model that mimicked the natural learning process he had observed in children and brought abstract concepts down to earth. When working with students in Boston, for example, he treated a route on the subway as a number line, assigning negative and positive values to various stops. After the kids rode the subway, they returned to the classroom to test out their concepts. In the early 1990s, Moses returned to Mississippi, this time to crusade for the right to learn algebra, early and effectively.
Moses’s method of teaching students mathematical concepts through real-life examples seems as if it should be an obvious one. But in many classrooms, teachers still treat the subject in purely abstract terms, assuming that some students are “naturally” able to grasp the concepts, while others—girls and minority students, for example—cannot. The methods Moses pioneered demonstrate that most students can grapple with advanced math. They have been so successful that programs like the Algebra Project are being instituted in schools around the country.
Such programs are particularly important because studies show that the strongest single indicator of whether students will go on to college is whether they have taken both algebra and geometry. Armed with this knowledge, the College Board’s Equity 2000 Project is working to ensure that students receive at least two years of college preparatory mathematics before graduating from high school. So far, the program has been adopted in six urban areas around the country. Preliminary results show a rise in teachers’ expectations for students’ performance and a dramatic increase in student enrollment in algebra, with only a small increase in course failure rates.
Forward-thinking teachers and school administrators across the country are creating a whole range of alternatives to cookie-cutter teaching and evaluation methods, such as the use of student portfolios and exhibitions in addition to conventional exams to assess students’ progress. Such educators also put a premium on getting parents involved in kids’ learning.
Schools are frightening places for many parents. When Bill and I went to our first parent-teacher conference when Chelsea was in kindergarten, we were apprehensive. For the first time, another adult was going to pass judgment on our child, and our many years of schooling did nothing to ease the anxiety.
If a child’s parents have not finished school or were poor students themselves, they may be even less at ease in a school setting. Many parents stay away except when a child gets into trouble. Knowing how important parental involvement is to their success, however, more schools are making efforts to involve parents actively as their partners in educating children.
Dr. James Comer, a child psychiatrist at the Yale Child Study Center, created the School Development Program as a means of reducing barriers between home and school. More than six hundred schools in twenty-one states have adopted Comer’s approach, which teaches parents how to help their children learn, encourages parents to help plan academic programs, and brings parents, teachers, and other school staff together in relaxed settings.
In Camden, New Jersey, the idea of “family schools” emerged in the early 1990s. As in other communities where family stability is threatened by drugs, violence, and abuse, school must be a safe haven for the family as a whole if children are to prosper. As Annie Rubin, principal of Coopers Poynt, one of Camden’s family schools, says, “For every child at risk, there’s also a family at risk.”
At Coopers Poynt, parents and guardians find an array of social services. Nurses provide prenatal screening and conduct classes in parenting and child development. The presence of a full-day parents’ center encourages parents to volunteer as classroom aides. Coopers Poynt opens its doors early each morning—before classes begin but not before many students’ parents start their workday—and doesn’t shut them until late afternoon. “We don’t have any magic formula,” Rubin says. “We just care. I just feel that if [families] are touched by us, they’re all going to do a little better.”
A number of independent programs exist to strengthen parents’ involvement in their children’s schooling. The Family Math program, based in Berkeley, California, was developed to give parents the confidence and skills to help their children learn math. Parents and children come together for weekly classes, held in four- to eight-week cycles at schools, community centers, and libraries. Teachers and parents who have been trained as Family Math instructors demonstrate math activities that parents and children can do together at home, none of which require more than pencil and paper and ordinary household items like beans, buttons, and toothpicks. The program has been so successful that it has been replicated in a number of communities around the country. As with HIPPY, it has inspired some parents to return to their own education.
Kent Salveson, an Orange County–based developer in Southern California, has offered an innovative example of how businesses can help to promote an entire community’s involvement. In conjunction with the University of Southern California, he created a low-income housing project called EEXCEL Apartments. (EEXCEL stands for Educational Excellence for Children with Environmental Limitations.) Salveson’s idea was to strengthen the ties between home and school, and to make education, child and health care, and family counseling more accessible to the poor. Explaining the thinking behind his brainchild, Salveson said, “If we want to change a neighborhood, a community, our country, we have to change the home. I don’t care if it’s in Beverly Hills or in South-Central. Children are being neglected. A nation is the sum of all its homes.”
The original forty-six-unit complex has spawned other EEXCEL buildings in California, and more are in the works in several other states. All of them are in low-income areas that don’t generally have access to the family support services they need. Each has space set aside for classrooms, which are equipped with computers, books, and school supplies. In exchange for course credit, local university students are available four hours a day, four days a week, to provide one-on-one tutoring to children who live in the complex. At the end of each semester, EEXCEL holds a banquet for the parents, children, and tutors to celebrate the children’s school achievements and awards gift certificates from local bookstores to children who get good grades. The complexes also sponsor other activities and services designed to bring neighbors together—résumé and job training programs, Campfire Girls and Boys, bookmobile visits, a food share program, literacy and art classes, and community holiday parties. Salveson says that one of his goals is to “break down the massiveness of the city to a smaller community of people who live in the building.”
NOWHERE IS the partnership of parents and the rest of the village more crucial to the schools than in the expectation that discipline and order are necessary for learning to happen. One spring morning, my brother Tony came downstairs for breakfast and found my father in his customary place at the kitchen table, reading the sports page. Instead of talking sports, though, as they usually did, my father began to quiz Tony about what he had done in school the day before. Tony answered with vague descriptions of a day like any other at his junior high. Only then did my father show him the photo in the sports section. Prominently featured in the bleachers were my brother and several friends who had skipped school to join the crowd celebrating the Chicago Cubs’ opening game at Wrigley Field. That day, the boys got in trouble both at home and at school.
Skipping school is one thing. Today drugs and violence lead the list of offenses foremost on parents’ and teachers’ minds. How do we reassert adult authority?
First, we parents have to back up school authority and quit making excuses for our kids when they misbehave. Does that mean teachers and principals are always right? Of course not, but they deserve to be given back the presumption that they are.
Schools have to do their part by stating the rules clearly and punishing violators. Habitually disruptive students should be removed from regular classes until they are able to attend without interfering with other students. Standards of conduct should be explained and enforced, and parents should say “Hallelujah” instead of “I’ll sue!”
Schools could take a big step toward improving discipline by sending kids the clear message that school is their work and they are expected to behave and dress accordingly. I agree with those who advocate dress codes and even uniforms in some school districts because they appear to diminish the frictions caused by brand-name consumerism and gang identification. I’d much rather have students worrying about their homework for the next day than whether they have the right clothes to wear or who might attack them if they wear the wrong color sneakers.
In 1994, the Long Beach School District in California became the first district in the nation to mandate uniforms for its elementary and middle school students. That year, school violence decreased to half the rates of the previous year. Other districts are taking note and beginning to follow suit.
Long Beach leaves the precise details of the uniform to each school’s principal so long as the elements fit the overall dress code. The school system has sought financial assistance to enable low-income families to purchase the uniforms, but a group of parents and students has filed suit anyway, claiming they cannot afford the costs and that the school district has not helped. Without going into the merits of the case, I find it hard to understand why energy is being spent litigating that could be used to raise money for uniforms or to tackle some other school problem. Other schools with voluntary uniform codes, like those in Fulton County, Georgia, have used school funds to subsidize uniform purchases and have started an exchange program for outgrown uniforms.
Robert E. Lee High School in Houston, Texas, provides a good example of the effect community-wide involvement can have on curbing violence in schools. Several years ago, the school set out to enlist the support of families and community members in dealing with a serious gang problem. The city of Houston initiated a school-day curfew, imposing a two-hundred-dollar fine on parents if their children were found on the street when they were supposed to be in school. At the same time, the high school implemented a “zero tolerance for gangs in the school” policy. Bilingual administrators combed the neighborhoods the school serves, speaking with families and “cutting contracts” with them to enlist their help in enforcing the policy. A core group of teachers, administrators, police officers, and school district security guards worked to identify gang members and to take steps to evict them from the school if they became violent. Since then, the climate in the school has changed dramatically, and students’ scores on state exams have steadily improved. An honors English class has been established for the first time. As the principal said, “We can now concentrate on our academic problems, not our sociological ones.”
ULTIMATELY, THOUGH, what schools need most from the village are high standards to live up to. Some people disagree, claiming that even voluntary standards interfere with local control, permitting outsiders to determine what children are taught. I have never accepted that argument, which confuses what standards are for: They establish what children should know, not how they are taught or measured. Algebra is algebra, from Little Rock to Atlanta, from Seattle, Washington, to Washington, D.C. And even before I started working on standards in Arkansas, I knew of many schools, particularly in poor areas, that needed help designing appropriate curricula.
Education is fundamental to our country’s future and to the future of our children, who will have to be prepared to compete in a national and global economy. High standards will help ensure that all of them—no matter where they live—will have access to quality education.
I think often of a young man I met at an annual reception for high school honors graduates and their parents that Bill and I started hosting at the governor’s mansion in 1979. He told me he had long dreamed of becoming a doctor. But when he went for an interview at the local college, he was told that, although he was his graduating class’s salutatorian, his school had not adequately prepared him for the rigors of a premed course of study. What he had been taught as “algebra” was arithmetic with a few x’s thrown in. He was advised to take a fifth year of high school somewhere with more challenging classes or go to college prepared to take remedial courses. What a rotten choice to be confronted with after he had kept his side of the bargain by studying and performing well!
When I worked on education reform in Arkansas, the proposals we made for a standardized curriculum and course content recommendations to accompany it encountered opposition from administrators who claimed in all sincerity that their students didn’t want or need higher standards. One superintendent told me that very few of “his kids” went to college, so he couldn’t see what difference it would make. Another superintendent ushered me into his office and pointed at a sign on his desk that said, “This too shall pass.” He told me that was what he thought of my husband’s efforts to reform education. Standing in front of the new gymnasium they had built, he and the school board solemnly assured me that they knew the kids in their district, and none of them were interested in taking foreign languages, art, or advanced sciences.
Thankfully, their attitude was not representative of the majority of citizens or legislators, and Arkansas passed a sweeping education reform in 1983 that has changed the expectations—and lives—of thousands of students. But all too often, in too many places, the concept of “local control” is still used to justify having low expectations of students, particularly poor ones, and to resist holding all students and schools accountable for their progress in meeting explicit goals.
IN 1989, President George Bush convened the nation’s governors in Williamsburg, Virginia, to kick off an effort to establish national goals for education, a movement that received support from all but one of the assembled governors and that quickly took on national momentum. My husband represented the Democratic governors at that gathering, only the third such working meeting in our nation’s history. As President, he and Secretary of Education Richard Riley, who had championed effective education reform as Governor of South Carolina, brought the goals-setting process to fruition in 1993 when they presented to Congress the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, which passed with strong bipartisan support and the backing of almost every major national parent, education, and business organization.
The genius of Goals 2000 is that it marries the ideas of high standards for what children should learn, local control over how children learn, and accountability for whether children learn. The act reaffirms the traditional principle of local control of education, acknowledging that each community is the best judge of what will work in its schools. But it also recognizes, as I learned in Arkansas, that many parents and schools need guidance in setting goals that will prepare children for future challenges, as the Information Age changes the ways we live and work.
Under the legislation, states are expected to establish their own academic content standards and assessments of student performance. Goals 2000 gives schools help in determining where, amid the daily flurry of demands, they need to focus their attention and what skills students need to acquire. The National Assessment of Educational Progress, administered by the federal government, acts as a report card, a tool for charting the results of state and local reform efforts.
As soon as Goals 2000 passed, it was attacked by extremists, who stirred up anxious parents with visions of totalitarian control over their children’s minds and of “secular humanists” stealing their children’s souls. One teacher told me that a local church had protested when she moved the chairs in her classroom into a circle for discussion purposes, citing the insidious influence of Goals 2000 because “everyone knows that’s how witches’ covens meet.” The incident would be laughable except that her principal ordered her to put the chairs back in their neat rows.
What are these goals that promote such passionate reactions?
By the year 2000:
1. All children in America will start school ready to learn.
2. The high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.
3. All students will leave grades four, eight, and twelve having demonstrated competency in challenging subject matter, including English, mathematics, science, foreign languages, civics and government, economics, the arts, history, and geography; and every school in America will ensure that all students learn to use their minds well, so that they may be prepared for responsible citizenship, further learning, and productive employment in our nation’s modern economy.
4. United States students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement.
5. Every adult American will be literate and will possess the knowledge and skills necessary to compete in a global economy and exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.
6. Every school in the United States will be free of drugs, violence, and the unauthorized presence of firearms and alcohol and will offer a disciplined environment conducive to learning.
7. The nation’s teaching force will have access to programs for the continued improvement of their professional skills and the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills needed to instruct and prepare all American students for the next century.
8. Every school will promote partnerships that will increase parental involvement and participation in promoting the social, emotional, and academic growth of children.
These goals are hardly the stuff of revolution—and are not likely to be fully achieved easily, or by the year 2000. We cannot expect to reverse decades of declining standards in a few years. A recent report showed that the country has made progress in some areas, such as math and science achievement. There has been little or no progress in areas such as reading achievement. And there have been greater problems with respect to juvenile drug use, especially marijuana, and classroom disruption.
But the whole point of goals is to encourage a process in states, school districts, and individual schools that will set standards and offer real guidance as to what should be taught and how student performance should be measured so that progress toward the goals can be assessed. Why should we accept goals, standards, and performance measures in business or sports but not in our schools? Can you imagine a successful CEO telling stockholders that their company has nothing new to learn from anyone and that it can’t be expected to improve in any case, because, after all, look who its employees and customers are?
I was privileged to know the late Sam Walton, the legendary founder of Wal-Mart. He regularly visited Wal-Mart stores, literally dropping in unexpectedly in the small plane he piloted with his bird dogs in the back, landing in a nearby field if necessary. He would walk up and down the aisles, asking employees what they thought could be improved. Until he became too recognizable, he also walked the aisles of competitors’ stores, asking employees there the same questions. He was never too proud to take an idea from anywhere if he thought it would improve customer service and value.
Children and their parents are customers of public education, but they are rarely asked what could be improved. Teachers are the lifeblood of any school, but they too are often ignored or marginalized when decisions are made. All citizens have a direct stake in how well our schools perform. The process of setting—and meeting—goals is one way to make sure all stakeholders in public education are involved.
SOME CRITICS of public schools urge greater competition among schools and districts, as a way of returning control from bureaucrats and politicians to parents and teachers. I find their argument persuasive, and that’s why I strongly favor promoting choice among public schools, much as the President’s Charter Schools Initiative encourages. I also support letting public schools determine how they can best be managed, including allowing them to contract out services to private firms.
Charter schools are public schools created and operated under a charter or contract. They may be organized by parents, teachers, or others from the community. The idea is that they should be freed from regulations that stifle effective innovation, so they can focus on meeting goals and getting results. By 1995, a total of nineteen states had enacted charter school laws, and about two hundred schools had been granted charters. The amount of autonomy and flexibility the schools have been granted varies from state to state. Some are authorized to operate independently from the outset, while others have to appeal to their local districts to waive individual rules.
The O’Farrell Community School is a charter school in San Diego, California. It has a racially diverse student body of fourteen hundred sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Students are clustered in “families,” with a head teacher who stays with them all three years. Cutting the red tape and regulations has freed teachers to work together. They have implemented a code of conduct known as “the O’Farrell way” (which includes community service as a graduation requirement), built course requirements around portfolios of students’ work, and arranged for a health and counseling center to help students with nonacademic problems.
The Improving America’s Schools Act, passed in October 1994 with the President’s strong support, provided federal funds for a wide range of grassroots reforms, including launching charter schools. In addition, some states are using Goals 2000 funds to support charter schools like O’Farrell. Federal encouragement and funding are necessary in many places to break through bureaucratic attitudes that block change and frustrate students and parents, driving some of them to leave the public schools.
OUR REFUSAL to recognize diverse forms of intelligence and to uphold standards for all are most unfair to the majority of students who do not go on to obtain a four-year college degree. One in seven students does not even get a high school diploma or obtain a GED by the age of twenty-five.
From 1986 to 1988, I participated in a study sponsored by the William T. Grant Foundation called Youth and America’s Future. The title of its report, “The Forgotten Half,” referred to “the young people who build our homes, drive our buses, repair our automobiles, fix our televisions, maintain and serve our offices, schools, and hospitals, and keep the production lines of our mills and factories moving. To a great extent, they determine how well the American family, economy, and democracy function. They are also the thousands of young men and women who aspire to work productively but never quite ‘make it’ to that kind of employment.”
Speaking plainly, we don’t do much for these young people, and the consequences—for them and for us all—are severe. The 1990 Census showed that young people without college degrees earn significantly less on average than those with degrees. Those who go out into the job market with a high school degree or less are at a much greater disadvantage than they were fifteen years ago. Even if they performed well in school, few employers will even ask to see their transcripts.
In 1994, the President, again with bipartisan support, signed the School-to-Work Opportunities Act, aimed at improving the odds for those forgotten kids. The legislation offers incentives for improving vocational education in high schools and community colleges, and it enables more states, cities, schools, and employers to set up apprenticeship programs that lead to good jobs.
The key to helping students at risk of dropping out to stay in school is to make learning relevant in their lives by linking their schooling with “real world” experience. The Oakland Health and Bioscience Academy in Oakland, California, is one example of how that can be done. With the help and support of an interested community, the academy prepares students for a wide range of health and bioscience careers. Academy teachers work closely with staff from local community colleges and area hospitals to design relevant curricula, and one community college is developing a program that will grant credit to students at the academy and other area schools for the anatomy and physiology courses they take. Formal clinical apprenticeships at area hospitals are also in the works.
School-to-work programs like this one are providing students who are often disregarded in traditional classrooms the chance to learn specific skills. They are also improving academic performance. A recent report noted that the Oakland Academy students scored significantly higher in reading, language, and math than other students from similar backgrounds. School-to-Work programs are a chance for the whole community to get involved in educating our youth, by opening up internship opportunities and workplace visits.
AS A NATION, we are at a crossroads in deciding not only what we expect from education, but what education can expect from us, individually and collectively. The degree of our commitment will determine whether we graduate to a new era of progress and prosperity or fail our children and ourselves. Like education itself, our decision involves something beyond pragmatism. It is also a test of our values.
Do we believe children can learn if they are taught in a way that takes account of their particular talents and holds them to high and clear expectations? Do we believe all children deserve an orderly learning environment? Are we willing to set national goals for educational performance and provide incentives for teachers, schools, and students to meet them? Are parents ready to become partners with schools again, for the benefit of their own—and other—children? And how about the other members of the village, those who are childless or whose children have passed school age? Are they—are all of us—ready to join this partnership?
If we can answer yes to questions like these, we can be successful in educating children to move confidently into the future, carrying the village with them. The root of the verb “to educate,” after all, means “to lead forth.”