c. 1997 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is an Episcopal priest in Winston-Salem, N.C., an author and former Wall Street Journal reporter. E-mail him at journey(at)interpath.com.)

UNDATED _ Now that schools are back in session, the numbers start appearing. SAT scores, racial balance, class size, volunteer hours _ we love to measure education, which, next to love, may be the most imprecise thing we do.

Three numbers have caught my attention: 890, 126 and 76.

The public school where my wife teaches English as a Second Language started the school year with 890 students _ in a facility designed for a maximum of 750. Kindergartners have flooded the school.

The school’s new ESL program began last year with 30 students and ended in June with more than 80. It started this year with 126 and probably will reach 150 by Christmas. The vast majority of these non-English-speakers are Hispanic, mainly from Mexico, here seeking jobs.

The main local trend has to do with race. Under court pressure two decades ago, Winston-Salem, N.C., undertook widespread busing in order to achieve a reasonable racial balance. But the public pendulum turned, a new school board was elected, and now the schools are being resegregated.

They call it restoring”neighborhood schools,”but that’s admin-speak for allowing white neighborhoods to have white schools. The school where my wife teaches is now 68 percent non-white overall and 76 percent non-white in the burgeoning kindergarten.

Meanwhile, public schools were still hiring teachers the week school opened. One ad showed eight openings in a highly regarded school system.

What do these numbers mean? Once again, public schools are a bellwether of who we are as a nation. The new baby boom, it seems, has reached school age. If we’re lucky, a new Elvis will appear and we can finally stop listening to”oldies”on the radio. Failing that, we can expect some cultural focus to shift toward young families. Some churches are already making that shift, to the dismay of older parishioners accustomed to centrality.

The shift toward young families, however, won’t be as total as the shift after World War II, because at least 25 percent of these boomlet babies are being born to unwed teenagers and won’t offer much commercial opportunity.

The current wave of Hispanic immigration is catching many by surprise. States like North Carolina are a long way from the Gulf of Mexico. We don’t know how to respond. Tension between blacks and Hispanics in our schools is high _ as are tensions between Mexicans and other Latinos.

A local bank added a Spanish-language option to its automatic teller machines. People talk about new Mexican restaurants. But beyond that, it’s simply perplexing _ and exciting to many of us _ to visit K-Mart and find half the customers speaking Spanish.

The racial imbalance is disturbing. A just society doesn’t segregate people. We tried it for decades, and it nearly tore our nation apart. It’s pathological to think we can resegregate schools and this time it will be a benign experience. It won’t be benign. Racial hostilities are already explosive. Non-white presence in higher education is dwindling. Income inequities are worsening. How can we think that this new racial imbalance will be anything other than destructive?

Teacher shortages reflect several realities: fear of physical abuse, overcrowded classrooms, an overly politicized environment, unrealistic expectations and lousy pay.

Are we surprised? Our collective treatment of children is outrageous. A just society cares for its children. Ours treats them as a market.

The pay says it all. We make aspiring lawyers jump through hoops so they can earn six-figure incomes preserving property, whereas a person caring for young children is paid minimum wage. The cartoonist who deploys cutting-edge technology to produce Saturday-morning violence earns far more than the highly trained schoolteacher whose charge is to transmit civilization from one generation to the next _ in a trailer.

The snapshot of ourselves that emerges from our schools isn’t a pretty one. While our children learn to stand in line, face daily violence, and take tests, we grown-ups are acting out a greedy streak that ought to embarrass us.

I think Nell Leslie, who taught me to love reading in fifth grade at School 70 in Indianapolis, would be shattered to see that the educational enterprise has been mired by a society that thinks it can commercialize its children and separate its races.

MJP END EHRICH