SCHOOLS NEEDN'T BE PRIVATE TO SUCCEED LIKE THOSE DO
By Don Erler
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 12, 1999

        With area schools back in session, our thoughts return to the best ways to educate our youngsters.

        Let's begin with good news about public instruction in some of our suburban districts. Grapevine-Colleyville, Birdville, Carroll, Keller (except for two grades) and H-E-B reported that at least 90 percent of third- through eighth-graders passed both reading and math sections of 1999's TAAS tests. In most cases, the scores were improved from 1998.

        The bad news, says Bruno Manno, a senior education fellow at the Annie E. Casey Foundation and former U.S. assistant secretary of education, is that the average math scores for American black and Hispanic public-school 12th-graders are about the same as for white and Asian eighth-graders.

        In contrast, Catholic schools do a superior job of instructing inner-city and minority children. As Manno points out, 76 percent of Catholic school students, vs. 45 percent of those in public schools, take college preparatory courses; the dropout rate is more than five times lower for Catholic school students; and 27 percent of urban minority Catholic high school graduates earn college degrees, compared to 11 percent of their public school counterparts.

        Most public educrats remind me of the self-serving fellow who complained to his psychiatrist that his brother believed himself to be a chicken. The doctor suggested that he set his brother straight, to which he responded, "Sorry, doc, I need the eggs. " These professional pedagogues argue that whatever their faults, public schools are needed to promote a common civic bond among America's diverse populations.

        However, as University of North Carolina sociologists Christian Smith and David Sikkink wrote in the April issue of First Things, the data clearly reveal that American families whose children attend public schools are not as rooted in the broad civic culture as are families involved in Catholic, other Christian, nonreligious private and home schooling.

        These "are consistently more involved in all of the civic activities examined than are families with children in public schools," with home schoolers being the most active in civic life.

        So am I advocating the dissolution of public schooling? Of course not. But I am suggesting that public schools that act like private ones are more likely to succeed.

        Two contemporary examples point in a hopeful direction. Mayor Richard Daley, authorized by the Illinois Legislature to take control of Chicago's failed public school system, has instituted a number of sensible reforms that are starting to bear fruit: union teacher contracts that require accountability; mandatory homework; elimination of social promotion; longer school days; stricter discipline; uniforms in 80 percent of elementary schools.

        Similarly, according to renowned education reformer Chester Finn Jr., some 50 education leaders, defying the dogma of their union, have issued a manifesto calling on states to open teaching to well-educated individuals who do not wish to suffer through the academic indignity of state-mandated degrees from misnamed colleges of education.

        Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge has tried to remove teaching from control by the educrats' monopoly, only to be confronted in court by the Pennsylvania branch of the National Education Association and the state association of teacher colleges. They crave their eggs.

        It should be self-evident that teachers should be steeped in academic subjects, the mathematically adept teaching math, historians teaching history, linguists teaching language. But consider the letter by Tom Montgomery recently published here.

        Montgomery wrote that he visited "a number" of his daughter's Burleson High School teachers, many of whom admitted "that they would probably have a difficult time passing the TAAS test. "

        We need teachers and students who are mutually evaluated against standards of excellence. In short, we need public schools that look private.

CER Home Page The Education Forum Education Reform E-Mail CER CER Publications