It Takes a Village (26 page)

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.”

 

U
LTIMATELY, 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.

 

I
N
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.

 

S
OME 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.

 

O
UR 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.