COMMENTARY: The continuing failure of the public schools

c. 1998 Religion News Service (Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.) UNDATED _ The purveyors of conventional wisdom have been rushing once again to rescue […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. Check out his home page at http://www.agreeley.com or contact him via e-mail at agreel(at)aol.com.)

UNDATED _ The purveyors of conventional wisdom have been rushing once again to rescue the public schools _ this time from the disgraceful performance of American high school seniors in international science and math tests.


There seems to be two general thrusts to the arguments as they show up in the op-ed pages of The New York Times, the place where conventional wisdom is made official.

The first is that the tests don’t matter because, despite the low math and science scores, the American economy is the strongest and most vigorous in the world.

Science and math have nothing to do with a healthy economy, the reasoning goes, so Americans shouldn’t worry about how badly their children perform on these subjects. Thus, the public schools are still doing a fine job with their pupils. The public schools, in other words, are responsible for the nation’s successful economy even if they fail to teach their students adequate math and science.

The strength of the public school ideology _ which is really a secular religion _ is so great that a Harvard professor can make the economy argument and expect to be taken seriously.

This logic could lead to the conclusion that the United States doesn’t need secondary schools at all; the economy will prosper no matter how innocent young Americans are of science or math. And, if they don’t need need to know science and math, they certainly don’t need history, literature or composition.

The second argument, which is quite different from the first, is that the nation should forget about everything else and concentrate on educating disadvantaged minorities. That’s where the problem of American education is concentrated.

It is certainly true the public schools don’t do much for children who labor under one kind of disadvantage or the other. However, even if through some miracle the public schools could bring minority scores up to those of more affluent whites, the scores would still be lower than those of other countries.


It is difficult to understand how a school system that is unable to teach adequate science and math and literacy to the children of the white middle class could possibly be able to teach the children of poor minorities. On the basis of their record, public educators have not the slightest idea how to teach the poor.

Ultimately these arguments don’t matter and they fail to persuade.

No matter how many international tests show the deficiencies of American public education, the public schools remain a lazy monopoly _ an educational Gulliver tied to the ground by over-paid, time-serving bureaucrats, and power-hungry teacher unions and, most importantly, parents who insist on good grades for poor work or even no work at all.

Moreover, the very legislators who demand competition in other areas of life denounce standardized national tests because they know the young people from their own districts could fare poorly in national competition.

Monopolistic power is bad for any human organization, be it a church, a computer maker, an airline, or an educational system. No one wants competition.

Everyone who has a monopoly struggles desperately to preserve it. Ask the IBM of 10 years ago about that _ or Microsoft today. Yet competition, in the long run, is healthy for a monopoly. Ask IBM today.

Some reform of the public schools is feasible. But there is an upper limit to how much success even the best reforms can have as long as the administrators and teachers in public schools enjoy their monopoly.


Only when control over education is taken away from professional educators and returned to the parents _ caring parents _ to whom it really belongs will American students begin to compete successfully with the rest of the world.

Freedom of choice for parents is the only way to break the public schools’ powerful monopoly.

DEA END GREELEY

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