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Citation: The Nation Feb 17 1997, v264, n6, p16(8)
Author: Kozol, Jonathan
Title: Saving public education: progressive educators explain
what it will take to get beyond the gimmicks.(Cover
Story) by Jonathan Kozol, Amy Stuart Wells, Lisa
D. Delpit, Mike Rose, Norm Fruchter, Herbert Kohl,
Deborah W. Meier and Randall Cole
------------------------------------------------------------------------
COPYRIGHT 1997 The Nation Company Inc.
President Clinton's inaugural address envisioned a "land of new promise" in
which the knowledge and power of the information age will be within reach ...
of every classroom." Clinton's proposals for getting there have featured
school uniforms and think lank cliches. We thought we'd help out by asking
several progressive educators to consider briefly what we could do if we
really wanted to improve our schools.
Their responses assess the currently fashionable solutions, examine the
cultural and ideological roots of our neglect of schools, especially city
schools, and propose a host of changes. Underlying them all is a respect for
children and a determination to elicit every young person's potential
They share another conviction as well: that no reform -- no national
standard, no charter school, no parent participation, no breakup of large
schools -- an ultimately succeed in a system in which some schools are short
on desks, classrooms, textbooks, qualified teachers and working plumbing,
while others boast a computer on every desk and a senior class trip to Cancun.
The fight for educational equity is being waged in legislatures and courts.
And equity itself is not enough: An urban school filled with new immigrants
requires more money than one in a wealthy suburb, not the same amount. Of all
the notions the right wing has sold Americans, the idea that money cannot
improve education may be the most dangerous.
Recycled slogans sometimes seem to be the curse of education policy
discussion in this nation, and there is no set of slogans more neurotically
reiterated these days than the need for goals and standards" and "criteria"
and measurements of outcome" in our public schools.
The ritualistic repetition of these phrases started under George Bush when
a list of manifestly insincere objectives was advanced and codified under the
pretentious banner of "America 2000." All children, we were told, would enter
school "ready to learn." All children would be given skills required for
participation in the workplace of the future," and all would graduate from
high school fully literate. Best of all, we were assured, these goals would be
attained not by such seemingly essential strategies as spending money to
deliver preschool education to poor children, lowering class size or
rebuilding the decrepit schools in which so many inner-city children are
concealed but solely by the cost-free exercise of raising expectations,"
holding children and their teachers "more accountable" and penalizing those
who measurably fail.
As the eighties ended with no evidence that goals like these were ever
going to be reached, there was a noticeable panic in some quarters; but
politicians and the pundits who advise them seem to grow addicted to their
lists and incantations. Instead of revising them in light of evident defeat,
they decorate their lists and add new promises, new "instruments of
measurement" and new demands. It is not surprising, therefore, that the White
House now has added several fashionable buzzwords from the world of cyberspace
to modernize the rhetoric of insincerity -- but once again, with not the
faintest whisper about equity
To speak of national standards and increasingly, of national exams but
never to dare speak of national equality is a transparent venture into
punitive hypocrisy. Thus, the children in poor rural schools in Mississippi
and Ohio will continue to get education funded at less than $4,000 yearly and
children in the South Bronx will get less than $7,000, while children in the
richest suburbs will continue to receive up to $18,000 yearly. But they'll all
be told they must be held to the same standards and they'll all be judged, of
course, by their performance on the same exams.
Slogans, standards and exams do not teach reading. Only well-paid and
proficient teachers do, and only if they work under conditions that do not
degrade their spirits and demean their students. Education Secretary Richard
Riley is a thoughtful and sophisticated man who understands this just as well
as any teacher in New York who has to struggle to get forty kids to pay
attention in a classroom that has only thirty books and thirty chairs, or any
teacher in Ohio working with her pupils in a basement corridor because the
district lacks the money to build schools. The President surely understands
this too. If political considerations silence him from saying what he knows,
they need not silence those of us who teach and work with children.
Money, as the rich and powerful repeatedly remind us, may not be "the only
way" to upgrade education, but it seems to be the way that they have chosen
for their own kids, and if it is good for them and for the daughter of the
President -- it is not clear why it is not of equal worth to children of poor
people. A useful strategy for activists, therefore, would be to take the
rhetoric of goals and standards at face value but to insist that it be wrapped
in the same package as the equity agenda. "If all our kids are to be judged by
equal standards," we might reasonably say, "then every one of them deserves an
equal opportunity to meet them. Anything less will merely add humiliation to
defeat and further stigmatize those who were cheated in the first place."
This argument, we may assume, will not be heard from anyone in Congress;
but at the state and local levels it could fuel the efforts of a growing
number of determined organizers who are now in court attempting to compel
their legislatures to rewrite the funding formulas that rig the game of
education almost everywhere in favor of the children of the orchestrating
class. That class will never willingly give up the power it possesses to
defend its children against honest competition from the children of the poor;
but a grass-roots struggle for equality in education finance has been
percolating now for several years, and advocates and lawyers may decide that
this is a good time to seize upon the rhetoric of standards to put teeth at
last into the fight for simple justice. As odious as it may seem to use the
language of our adversaries, it may be the best weapon we have.
Jonathan Kozol's newest book, Amazing Grace, was recently released in
paperback by HarperCollins.
There is at least one domestic policy issue on which President Clinton has
remained consistent -- an issue he has used as a bridge, if you will, to his
second term: charter schools. Now passed in twenty-five states and the
District of Columbia, charter school laws allow groups of parents, educators,
community activists and entrepreneurs to start publicly funded schools free of
most state and local regulations. From Boston to San Diego, approximately 450
charter schools have begun operating since 1991.
Charter schools in themselves do not have a clear political agenda. With
diverse roots -- from the urban community activism of the sixties to the
conservative pro-market reform rhetoric of the eighties and nineties --
charter schools promise to be all things to all people by granting disparate
groups the power to create schools distinct from the traditional public
education system. As a result, a wide range of activists -- from born-again
Christians to civil lights leaders -- who are dissatisfied with public schools
have embraced the charter school concept. Policy-makers from both sides of the
political aisle have vaulted onto the charter school bandwagon, for very
different reasons.
Pro-voucher conservatives, for instance, see charter school legislation as
a way to shake up public education by forcing competition into a
monopolistic" and over-regulated system. They see charter schools as one step
down the road toward dismantling the public system and funding schools (public
or private) based on per-pupil calculations, or vouchers.
For progressives, charter school reform promises to empower poor
communities to wrestle control of their schools from the uncaring and
hegemonic state. Publicly funded Afro-centric and Chicano-centric charter
schools are the lefts answer to the myth that equal opportunity exists within
the current public system. Moderate Democrats like Clinton applaud charter
schools for providing divergent groups with autonomy while holding all schools
accountable to high academic standards.
Thus the definition of charter school reform -- what it stands for and its
implications for the future of public education -- will be contested in the
next few years. To the extent that Clinton wants to leave his imprint on this
popular reform, he needs to go beyond his call for 3,000 charter schools by
the year 2000. He also needs to help clarify the purpose and the promise of
these schools.
He could, for instance, argue that a certain percentage of the $51 million
in federal charter school grants to states must be earmarked specifically for
transportation costs for students from low-income communities who want to
cross school district lines and attend a charter school in a more affluent
area. If the President really believes the assertion in his inaugural speech
that "great rewards will come to those who can live together, learn together,
work together, forge new ties that bind together," why not target federal
funds specifically to charter schools that are racially and socioeconomically
diverse -- that help lessen the vast chasm between the ethnic groups and
social classes that our housing patterns reinforce? Including state-funded
urban-suburban transfer programs as a component of charter school reform would
help alleviate racial segregation while providing greater educational
opportunities. And targeting federal funds toward the lowest-income and most
disadvantaged communities would help realize the goal of community empowerment
through charter school reform.
Currently, the federal guidelines for state applications for charter school
grant money and the President himself have not addressed these critical
issues, allowing voices on the right to dominate the national policy debate.
Government has a role to play in standing up for our values and our interests
and giving Americans the power to make a difference in their lives, Clinton
tells us. He can demonstrate that by working to shape the charter school
reform movement to democratic ends.
Amy Stuart Wells, an associate professor at U.C.L.A.'s Graduate School of
Education and Information Studies, is author (with Robert L Crain) of Stepping
Over the Color Line (forthcoming from Yale).
On Dr. King's birthday, I watched, riveted, the PBS special on the civil
rights movement. The filmmakers accomplished an amazing feat: The
smooth-skinned, bright-eyed, idealistic faces of the young civil rights
workers, Bob Moses and Endesha Mae Holland among them, faded into the same
faces, forty years older -- lined, deeper-eyed, voices less strident but
somehow more intensely determined -- reminiscing about the past and talking
about the present. I was moved to tears by the commitment that these heroes
have kept alive so long, as well as by the powerful struggle that occurred
when I was too young to participate.
How strong these young people were, but how little the nation cared. Those
valiant boys and girls in Mississippi were humiliated, beaten, even killed.
The local "law" was the evil killing machine that tore their flesh and offered
their spirits to snarling dogs. The federal government said there was nothing
it could do. Before the media arrived citizens throughout the nation watched
Ed Sullivan and Leave It to Beaver in their suburbs, with little thought given
to those polite black children who were stirring up so much trouble.
Coming to terms with this sobering reality led the civil rights workers to
a unique strategy. They could be spared only if they brought young white
people into their struggle, young white people whose well -- heeled families
could call senators and judges -- and get their calls returned. Young white
people whom the nation watched and fretted over, ready to usher them into
their rightful futures as doctors, lawyers and nuclear scientists. The black
children were so despised, so hated, so ... unnecessary, that nothing could
protect them except the presence of the young white "freedom riders" from the
North.
So often I feel that the African-American children of poverty today are in
similar straits. No one cares about them, really. They are viewed as despised
"others" whose families are pathological, whose mothers want to bilk the
system, whose language is termed "guttural ghetto speak," whose intelligence
is constantly questioned. And who are stuffed away in forgotten neighborhoods
into ramshackle buildings called schools, with faulty plumbing, malfunctioning
heating systems, peeling paint and questionable electricity reminiscent of the
sharecropper shacks in Mississippi. Pizza Hut won't even deliver to the
"dangerous communities" in which these schools are located. As I visit many of
these urban schools, I cannot but wonder, Who cares? Who can protect them,y
There are no more white children to ride in and force the nation's attention.
There is one difference between todays children and the children of
Mississippi's past. Despite the nations neglect, the Mississippi children knew
who they were. They knew that their work was important, that they were right
and righteous and, whether they lived or died, their actions would be writ
large on history's pages. Today's children, like Pecola Breedlove in Toni
Morrison's The Bluest Eye, look at themselves with the loathing of the nation
that despises them. But unlike Pecola, not only do they turn the hatred inward
but their rage bursts forth as they seek to snuff out the lives of those who
provide mirror images of themselves in an effort to obliterate their own
perceived ugliness and unworthiness. You cannot seek to kill your image if you
value yourself.
But why has this country heaped neglect and hatred upon these children, Why
do middle-class white audiences give standing ovations to the author of The
Bell Curve when he insists that black children are genetically inferior to
white, when he recommends limiting the schooling of poor black children to
menial job training, when he suggests that poor black children be taken from
their parents to be raised in state institutions? Why is it so popular to deny
children food stamps or housing or medical treatment? Why do I so often see
fear or only thinly veiled stares of hatred when groups of boisterous
African-American youngsters enter a store or restaurant or bus?
I don't know why America still finds its brown children so despicable and
dispensable. And I don't know what to do about it. Somehow the thousands of
African-American children who failed to dodge successfully one of the bullets
regularly fired in their neighborhoods fade into oblivion. But when one white
child dies horribly from a gunshot because her parents turned into the "wrong"
street one night, the entire nation is in an uproar. Why is it that so many
people in this country don't care about children who look like mine? How can I
make them?
What can Bill Clinton do? Still haunted by the civil rights documentary,
I'm tempted to ask for a public service campaign to value African-American
children. I see brown children's bright-eyed faces with disheveled hair and
unkempt clothes fade into the adults they can become if we allow it --
doctors, lawyers, ministers, teachers. I want to shove in a resistant nations
face the humanity, the vulnerability, the neediness of those babies who need
our protection, who need us to hold visions for their futures so they do not
destroy themselves and one another as they bask in our, at best, "benign
neglect."
But I know that will serve no purpose. What I want of Bill Clinton is that
he value black children -- or at least act as though he does. There should be
a law that says no children should have to live in a neighborhood deemed "too
dangerous" for pizza delivery. He can push policy to insure that all children
are fed, have shelter and receive medical attention. He should insure funding
to repair the school buildings falling down on our children's heads, and
insist that state and local authorities make them welcoming havens. He can
push for systems that reward teachers who are willing to teach those children
who are least well served, and who do so in ways that the children, their
parents and their communities value.
What can I say? He can value the children. He can protect them. He can
care. We all can.
Lisa D. Delpit, a professor of urban education at Georgia State University, is
the author of Other People,s Children: Cultural Conflicts in the Classroom
(New Press).
I have been thinking a lot lately about the way we talk about school --
public school in particular. What do we hear on talk-radio, see on the evening
news, read in the paper? How do education issues get shaped in legislative
debates? How is school depicted in popular culture and how is it characterized
in "highbrow" media. of left, right or center persuasion? I think it's fair to
say that, with some exceptions, the talk and imagery about public school tends
to be negative, bleak, often cynical, at times vicious. Here are some examples
that I read or heard in a two-day period: "America,s schools are the least
successful in the Western world," Face it, the public schools have failed";
"The kids in the Los Angeles School District are garbage."
God knows, there is a lot wrong with our schools -- from the way we educate
teachers to the often patronizing curriculum we offer our students, the
tangles of school politics and the terrible things we assume about the
abilities of kids from poor communities. I don't dispute that, have taught in
the middle of it, have tried to write about it. And I surely don't dispute the
legitimate anger of people who have been betrayed by their schools. But the
scope and sweep of the negative public talk is what concerns me, for it
excludes the powerful, challenging work done in schools day by day across the
country, and it limits profoundly the vocabulary and imagery available to us,
constrains the way we frame
Mike Rose is a Professor at U.C.L.A.'s Graduate School of Education and
Information Studies. His Possible lives: The Promise of Public Education in
America was recently released in paperback by Penguin. problems, blinkers our
imagination. This kind of talk fosters neither critique nor analysis but
rather a grand dismissiveness or despair. It plays into equally general and
troubling -- and equally unexamined -- causal claims about the schools'
responsibility for our economic woes and social problems. And this blend of
crisis rhetoric and reductive models of causality yields equally
one-dimensional proposals for single-shot magic bullets: Standards will save
us, or charter schools, or computer technology, or the free market. Each of
these can have merit, but careful, nuanced reflection about education gets
lost in such fall-from-grace/ redemption narratives.
When was the last time you heard extensive, deliberative public talk that
places school failure in the context of joblessness, urban politics, a
diminished tax base, unequal funding, race and class bias? Or heard a story of
achievement that includes discussion of curiosity, reflectiveness,
uncertainty, a willingness to take a chance, to blunder? How about accounts of
reform that present change as alternatively difficult, exhilarating,
ambiguous, promising -- and that find reform not in a device, technique or
structure but in the way we think about teaching and learning? And that point
out how we need a language of schooling that, in addition to economy, offers a
vocabulary of respect, decency, aesthetics, joy, courage, intellect, civility,
heart and mind, skill and understanding? For that matter, think of how rarely
we hear of a commitment to public education as the center of a free society.
We need a richer public discussion than the one we have now.
Deliberation about school funding and teachers' salaries, about charter
schools and national standards, about multicultural education and
school-to-work programs and which method of reading instruction to adopt --
all take place within a discourse of decline. This language has been with us
for so long -- at least since the publication of A Nation at Risk in 1983 --
that we accept it as natural and miss the ways it affects our thinking about
what public schools should accomplish in a democracy and why and how they
fail.
An important project for the left -- and though I focus on schools, this
applies to a range of social issues -- will be to craft a language that is
critical without being reductive, that frames this critique in nuance and
possibility, that honors the work good teachers do daily and draws from it
broader lessons about ability, learning and opportunity, that scrutinizes
public institutions while affirming them.
Norm Fruchter
Norm Fruchter, the director of N.Y.U.'s Institute for Education and Social
Policy, was an elected school board member in Brooklyn.
The critical task for urban education is to improve our poorly performing
city schools. In contrast to conservative strategies that trickle down
resources or cream the best students, raising the floor of academic
performance in city school systems can improve outcomes for all our students.
How prevalent are poorly performing urban schools? The Chicago Schools
C.E.O. recently put 20 percent of that city's schools on probation. The New
York State Commissioner and New York City Schools Chancellor have identified
100 city schools that desperately need improvement. If, as the Chancellor has
indicated, another hundred could easily be added, at least 20 percent of New
York City schools need immediate intervention.
Since most city schools serve poor students of color, these lowest 20
percent serve the poorest students. In many cities, newspapers publish school
rankings based on standardized test scores. If those newspapers ranked schools
on a poverty index, the results would be substantially the same. As a nation,
we get the schooling results we pay for, and we don't pay enough for the
education of poor kids of color in cities.
How can urban systems improve the schools that fail to serve these
students? Unfortunately, there are no magic bullets. Poorly performing schools
are cultures of failure developed over many years. Richard Elmore, in a recent
Harvard Educational Review article, argues that successful reform must change
"the core of educational practice," the deep structure of how teachers think
about knowledge and how students learn, as well as how teachers organize their
classrooms, group and assess students, work with other teachers and
effectively communicate student outcomes. If this deep structure of belief and
practice needs to change in at least 20 percent of our urban schools, radical
intervention is required. Yet most urban systems' bureaucratic response is to
require poorly performing schools to design their own improvement.
Changing the core structures of belief and practice in failing schools
depends on new leadership and the support of other professionals skilled at
helping failing cultures change. (For how to recruit, prepare and support such
professionals, see the recent report of the National Commission on Teaching
and America's Future, directed by Linda Darling-Hammond.) Such change also
needs time for the change processes to develop, as well as funding to support
the collaborations and professional development involved. Where will the
necessary resources come from?
Protracted political struggles in New Jersey, Texas, Alabama and
Connecticut demonstrate both the potential and the difficulties of one
approach to resource provision -- attacking school financing through the
courts. (As the current challenge by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity against
funding inequity for New York City schools gathers momentum, New York State
will become another site for fierce school finance struggle.) If such efforts
do not ultimately resolve urban funding shortfalls, they do reduce the
inequalities, produce more funding for the entire state system and force
confrontation about how much we are prepared to tolerate public schooling that
underfunds other people's children.
Parents are another resource for Improving poorly performing schools. In
spite of all the pieties about parental involvement, parents are still
marginalized in most urban schools. Yet contrary to the relentless national
press assault on the Chicago reform that mandated significant parent
decision-making through local school councils, research indicates much promise
in such efforts. Studies by the Consortium on Chicago School Research
demonstrate that Chicago schools with strong democratic councils also generate
deep structures of schoolwide reform, and that such reform efforts eventually
produce significant academic improvement.
Local organizations could provide other crucial resources. Community
development corporations, neighborhood improvement associations and
youth-serving organizations are increasingly realizing that school failure
limits the effectiveness of their own work. These organizations have strong
neighborhood roots, active memberships, full-time staffs and well cultivated
political connections. Such organizations have often been viewed with
suspicion by urban systems; if collaboration could replace hostility, critical
new support for school improvement could result.
Improving the lowest-performing schools in urban public systems can help to
improve academic achievement in all our city schools. Investing the necessary
resources is not impossible; what's required is the political will to
transform the life chances of our nation's most imperiled children.
Herbert Kohl
Herbert Kohl is the author of I Won't Learn From You and Should We Burn
Babar? (both New Press).
President Clinton will soon formally announce a national literacy program,
calling for more than a million volunteers to teach reading to underachieving
children from poor communities. The emphasis will be on catching the children
when they're young, before the third grade. This is an instance of the
Administration recognizing the right problem while proposing the wrong
solution.
There is no doubt that an outrageous number of poor and particularly
African-American and Latino children never learn to read on a fundamental
level. This failure begins to show up dramatically in the fourth and fifth
grades. Despite Sesame Street, Head Start, Upward Bound and volunteer reading
programs, not to mention the efforts made by teachers and reading specialists,
the problem remains intractable. There is some disconnection between children
and texts that takes place at school, and there is no reason to believe that
sending volunteers into the early grades on an episodic basis will be more
useful than any of the other efforts made at increasing literacy among the
poor.
However, there is another approach to tackling the problem that might, if
implemented on a large scale and in a qualitative way, make a difference in
developing literacy and at the same time lead to a partial solution to other
social problems that the Administration and the legislature created during the
last session of Congress. At this point there are no literacy workers in the
schools -- people whose sole purpose is to develop and implement reading
programs based on continuous personal contact with children over their entire
school careers. In fact, the teaching of basic reading skills disappears from
the classroom after the fourth grade, and there is certainly no direct reading
instruction in high school other than in specifically remedial classes.
However, adult literacy programs have succeeded throughout the world, and it
is clear that it is never too late to learn how to read well. The actual
skills needed to teach reading are no more complex than the skills needed to
repair a car or renovate a house.
A new category of school workers whose specialty is literacy can be
created. The prerequisites for such people might be as simple as decent
reading skills, a sensitive knowledge of the culture and strengths children
bring to school, and a level of comfort within poor communities that would
allow literacy workers to function in parks, apartments, churches and social
service centers, as well as within the relative security of the school
building.
Many people who live in poor communities have these skills and, more to the
point, many people about to be required to work have them. I suggest that the
President propose a federally developed, state- and federally supported
program lodged at junior colleges to train people to become literacy workers,
with a special emphasis on reaching out to people currently on welfare. This
would provide dignified work with the potential for future advancement. A new
Associate of the Arts degree in literacy education could lead to work within
schools and community organizations. Clinton's volunteers can also have a
role. Since they have time to donate, they can use it to raise funds to create
permanent jobs for this new category of teachers.
The President should also offer two additional years of college free for
five years of literacy work in the schools and put such people on a fast track
to getting B.A.s and full teaching credentials. This would create a pool of
potential African-American and Latino teachers, solving a major problem facing
public schools these days -- a decline in the number of teachers of color at
the same time as an increase in the number of students of color.
Looking to the volunteer sector to improve education is like looking to the
generosity of corporate leaders to keep their workers employed. What we need
is new people in the schools, committed not so much to the world-class
standards mouthed by educational professionals as to world-class children.
Deborah W. Meier
Deborah W. Meier, the author of the Power of Their Ideas (Beacon), has
worked in public schools for the past thirty years.
Contrary to popular wisdom, Americas schools are not an utter failure. When
I was a kid in the thirties, fewer than half our fellow citizens even started
high school, much less finished it. The United States still ranks at the top
in international tests of literacy And we remain one of the worlds most
productive nations.
But our schools are not good enough. Most of them are far too big,
impersonal and factorylike; they're too standardize -- trying to satisfy
everyone by never taking a stand on anything -- and they leave too little
power in the hands of the families and teachers who know the kids best. The
most sought-after schools defy all three of these -- they're mostly small,
self-chosen and self-governing.
Meanwhile, the more we complain about our schools the bigger, more
standardized and less powerful they become] Every complaint produces a new
level of bureaucracy, a new mandate. Policy-makers from left to right want to
make sure that all schools teach their brand of truth, and academics have
always wished kids came to them already knowing more about their particular
speciality. Between them they are busy designing high-stakes national tests to
make us all more like them. What they can't seem to tolerate is that there
isn't a single definition of being smart and never will be -- specially in a
democratic society.
The policy-makers also forget that education depends on relationships
between people, and nothing they invent in their ivory towers will work if we
don't get those right. We won't grow thoughtful adults in thoughtless schools.
And thoughtful adults don't all subscribe to the same version of the perfect
school.
There are five things we need to do immediately to turn our schools around:
1. We need schools that are human-size -- a few hundred kids in each. Small
enough for everyone to know and be known well, for adults to gather together
to make decisions that they agree on. Where families and teachers can get to
trust one another, over time. We don't have to get rid of all the big
buildings. Big buildings can house separate small schools. The cost? Minimal.
2. As far as possible, parents, kids and staff should have choices among
schools. No two schools should or can be alike. Even where they start alike,
over time they develop different styles, priorities and ways of organizing
themselves. Some have mixed age groups, emphasize phonics, have put their
resources into instrumental music instead of camping, are more or less formal,
etc. To parents and teachers these differences are matters of importance. Not
having a choice means people waste precious time fighting over such matters or
water down their ideas to get a consensus.
3. If we want schools to be responsible for results, they need to have
sufficient power over the factors that help produce success -- like staffing,
spending money, scheduling, curriculwn and assessment. There's no point in
knowing one another well if we don't have the power to make decisions based on
that knowledge.
4. Small, self-governing schools of choice are necessary but not
sufficient. We need to design ways for parents, teachers and the public to
have access to credible and user-friendly information and to create places for
them to talk. This takes time and access to expertise. It can be helped by
enlightened public policy, for example, requiring employers to give parents
time off, encouraging teachers to visit other schools, using public television
to share public stories, developing peer and school accountability.
5. Finally, it takes a fair distribution of resources. Having advantages is
an advantage; were fooling ourselves if we ignore the inequalities it
produces. But to make matters worse, we provide less public funding for those
already in communities of poverty. The resource gap is shameful -- whether
we're talking personnel, technology, books or physical facilities. Changing
people takes money just as much as changing machinery.
Two currently popular nostrums, school vouchers and a national testing
system, head us in precisely the wrong direction. Vouchers will subsidize the
abandonment of public education, mostly in ways that will hurt the most needy.
National testing -- sometimes called national standards -- will take away even
more authority from local school communities. Teachers and communities shorn
of the capacity to use their own ideas, judgments and initiative in matters of
importance can't teach kids to do so. Producing responsible citizens is best
done in places where responsible citizenship is at the heart of the schools
life.
Randall Cole
Randall Cole works at the Hetrick-Martin Institute in New York City, a
social service, education and advocacy organization serving lesbian, gay,
bisexual and transgender youth.
Today's youth face social problems ranging from substance abuse, violence
and poverty to H.I.V/AIDS. These problems are compounded for gay and lesbian
youth, many of whom live in fear and secrecy. Without role models and support
networks, 80 percent of gay, lesbian and bisexual youth report severe
isolation. In addition, gay and lesbian young people face violence in school
perpetrated by both students and teachers. Frequently, they drop or pushed out
of school. Most alarming is the study conducted by the Health and Human
Services Department that found that gay and lesbian youth are two to three
times more likely to attempt suicide than other young people, and that
approximately one-third of youth suicides are carried out annually by gay
youth.
Of the estimated 20,000 youths who find themselves without a permanent
residence in New York City, more than a third self-identify as gay, lesbian or
bisexual. Many of them are kicked out by their families or flee because of
abuse. Moreover, gay and lesbian youth are at a higher risk for contracting
H.I.V. because of their isolation and lowered sense of self-esteem.
Since the founding in 1985 Of the Harvey Milk School, the nation's first
high school designed specifically for gay and lesbian youth, sponsored by the
New York City Board of Education, the number of applicants has steadily
increased. We can now accept only about 30 percent of the 100 students who
apply each year. The school was founded in recognition of the fact that many
students drop out rather than face abuse from teachers and classmates.
However, our objective is not to segregate gay and lesbian students from their
straight peers, but to change the way we all think about education.
Hetrick-Martin staff and youth educators go to classrooms from kindergarten to
high school to educate students and their teachers about the issues faced by
gay and lesbian youth. This sets up a model for dialogue both in the classroom
and at home that helps to combat homophobia.
From the President to the local school boards to families, we must
demonstrate our commitment to educating all young people regardless of class,
gender, race, sexual orientation and language or cultural background. We must
make our schools places where all children feel safe and valued. Until then,
the need for organizations such as the Hetrick-Martin Institute and its Harvey
Milk School programs will continue. Our goal is to one day make ourselves
obsolete.
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