High School Diploma

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

Elementary School

Kindergarten

Nursery School

Grade

(= School Year)

Age

EDUCATION 189

About 85 percent of American children attend public schools. The other 15 percent choose to pay tuition to attend private schools. Most private schools are run by religious organizations and generally include religious instruction. Since 1940, the education system in the United States has made significant advances in educating an ever greater proportion of the population. A 1985 Census Bureau study reported that in 1940 only 38 percent of those between the ages of 25 and 29 had received a high school diploma and only 6 percent had college degrees. In 1985, 86 percent of those surveyed said they had high school diplomas and 22 percent said they had college degrees. A 1981 survey showed that almost 32 percent of Americans 25 years or older had at least some college education. This contrasts with 17.3 percent of East Germans, 17.2 percent of Canadians, 15.5 percent of Swedes, and 14.5 percent of Japanese.

Percent of High School Graduates (18-24 years old) Enrolled in College

I Hispanics Blacks Whites

1980

20%

30%

40%

VARIED OPPORTUNITIES

Educational opportunities in the United States are highly varied. High school students at the same grade level do not take the same courses. Students who do not plan to go to college may be enrolled in classes such as basic accounting, typing, or agricultural science, along with "core" curriculum courses such as mathematics, social studies, science, and English. College-bound students may be enrolled in college-preparatory courses such as chemistry, political science, or advanced writing.

Which courses a student takes depends on his or her abilities and future goals, but also on the particular course offerings of the school. Some elementary schools offer computer and foreign language courses. Courses in scuba diving or Russian are available at some high schools.

In higher education, the wide variety of degree programs is remarkable. Besides colleges and universities which offer degrees in traditional fields of scholarship, there are also small arts colleges which grant degrees to students who concentrate in specialized fields such as ballet, film-making, and even circus performing.

Besides the diversified course offerings at all levels, variety also exists in schools' academic standards and reputations. The standards students must meet to attain a high school diploma are rigorous in some schools and lax in others. The same is true for college admission standards. Highly reputable

190 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

DECENTRALIZED FUNDING AND ADMINISTRATION

CURRICULUM

DEMOCRATIC IDEAL

INEQUALITIES IN EDUCATION

PRESIDENT JOHNSON'S GREAT SOCIETY

colleges such as Harvard and Yale accept only students of exceptional ability. At the other end of the spectrum are less desirable institutions, sometimes negatively referred to as "degree factories," which accept practically any high school graduate.

The main reason for such diversity in course offerings and standards is that there is no national education system in the United States. In public schools, decisions about school curriculum, teacher certification, and student achieve­ment standards are made by boards of education at the state and/or district level. Spending for public education is also determined by state and local education leaders.

Accordingly, education standards and requirements differ from state to state. For example, New York administers standardized competency tests to students. In some states, the selection of textbooks is decided by local officials, whereas in other states, textbook selection is made by state education officials. Some school systems require that a high school student complete three years of mathematics before graduation. The national average, however, is lower.

Although there is no national curriculum, certain subjects are generally taught in all public school systems across the country. Almost every elementary school instructs children in penmanship, science, mathematics, music, art, physical education, language arts (which includes reading, writing, and grammar), and social studies (which includes geography, history, and citizen­ship).

Most secondary schools require students to take English, mathematics, science, social studies, and physical education. In addition to this "core" curriculum, students choose "elective" courses in their areas of interest.

Traditionally, the American educational ideal has been to offer equal oppor­tunity for education to all citizens. The education system can boast that now more than 95 percent of all fourteen- to seventeen-year-olds attend high school compared with only 50 percent in 1930, and that America produces propor­tionately more college graduates than any industrial nation. Yet the education that each student receives is by no means equal.

The fact that public schools receive the bulk of their funds from local property taxes creates inequalities. Rural farming communities and poor inner-city districts have less money available for school buildings, learning materials, and teacher salaries. More money is spent for the education of a child living in a wealthy district than a child living in a poor community. The democratic ideal of providing equal education for all citizens has been hard to satisfy.

To eliminate inequalities, the federal government has increased its share of school financing and now contributes between 10 and 15 percent. Despite this injection of federal money, spending per pupil varies considerably, from $1,300 a year in Mississippi to $2,400 a year in Massachusetts.

The first major contribution of federal aid for education was in 1965 when President Lyndon B. Johnson proposed new programs as his instrument for realizing his liberal hope for a "Great Society" of greater equality and less poverty. His new federal programs, backed by 1.3 billion dollars, were initiated to provide remedial schooling for children from poor families. One plan that was established in the spirit of equality was the Economic Opportunity Act, which provides money for adult literacy programs and pre-school education for poor children. Another was the Higher Education Act, which offers govern­ment scholarships to needy college students.

EDUCATION 191

DESEGREGATION

Children being "bussed" to school in Boston. Opposition in the local white community was so strong that police were brought in from other states.

The discrimination against blacks which prohibited black children from attending white schools was finally declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1954 landmark case, Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka. Subsequent court decisions ordered schools to begin desegregation immedi­ately. During the 1960s, Congress passed laws denying federal aid to school districts that failed to comply with the ruling.

Another measure introduced to speed up integration was the compulsory "bussing" of black children to schools in white areas and white children to schools in black neighborhoods. Before the Brown case, schools for blacks were not only separate but unequal. Three times as much money was spent per pupil in white schools as in black schools. In the deep South, it was five times as much.

The attempts of the last 30 years to achieve fully integrated schools have resulted in successes and failures. In some cities, compulsory bussing has worked. Yet in many areas, people reacted strongly against it. When bussing was first introduced as a way to achieve integrated schools, whites began sending their children to private schools or moved to the suburbs.

Although progress has been slow, integration has succeeded in narrowing the education gap between blacks and whites. The dropout rate among black high school students has declined significantly. U.S. Census Bureau statistics show that the dropout rate among blacks declined from over 22 percent in 1970 to 16 percent in 1980 and to 12.6 percent in 1985.

Brown v. the Board of Education: see page 113.

bussing: carrying students by bus to a school in a different area where the pupils are of a different race, especially as a compulsory integration measure.

192 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

PROTECTING THE HANDICAPPED

NEED FOR QUALITY EDUCATION

A NATION AT RISK

In the 1970s, measures to protect minorities from discrimination were ex­tended to handicapped children. Because public schools were ill-equipped to handle their special needs, handicapped children used to have to attend expensive private schools. In 1971, federal courts ruled that public schools should take measures to accommodate handicapped children.

Aside from the schools' task of socializing and equalizing youngsters of different social, cultural, and economic backgrounds, schools have the obvious task of providing quality instruction. The public's concern for better schools and more learning is increasing as results of standardized tests show a con­tinual decline in students' academic achievement.

The 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, by the National Commission on Excellence in Education asserted: "The education foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity." The following statistics of the report bear out this claim:

• 13 percent of all seventeen-year-olds in the United States are functionally
illiterate;

• among minority teenagers, the figure may be as high as 40 percent;

• average achievement of high school students on most standardized tests is
lower than in the mid-1950s;

• reading, writing, and math skills are so poor among young people that
employers have spent millions of dollars on remedial education and training
programs for their employees.

The commission's recommendations for improving student achievement, widely supported by the public, include the following points: 1. stronger academic curricula, with a back-to-basics emphasis on reading, writing, math, and science; 2. stricter standards for students, including a heavier homework load and higher grading standards; 3. higher salaries to attract and keep talented, well-qualified teachers.

By its democratic standard, America has succeeded in educating the many and has made gains in evening out inequalities. The challenge for American education today is to improve the quality of learning without sacrificing these gains.

part в Texts

by Diane Ravitch.

⁰American Educational Philosophies

SINCE THE MIDDLE 1940S, AMERICAN schools have been at the center of a tug of war between competing educational philosophies. With striking regularity, educational policy has swung from domination by "progressives" to domination by "traditionalists" in roughly ten-year periods....

Progressivism in the late 1940s was called "life adjustment education" by friend and foe alike.... It judged every subject by its everyday utility, substituting radio repair for physics, business English for the classics, and consumer arithmetic for algebra. Under the rubric of life adjustment education, schools were encouraged to merge traditional subjects like English and history with health and guidance to create "common learning" courses, in which students could examine their personal and social problems.

Beginning in 1949, critics complained that "how-to" courses and socio-personal adjustment had been substituted for history, science, mathematics, foreign languages, and literature. Life adjustment education was condemned by some because it was anti-intellectual, and by others because it aimed to teach group conformity....

After the Russians orbited Sputnik in 1957, the national press was filled with indictments of American schools for ignoring science and mathematics. The Russian's feat served as evidence for

many of the critic's worst complaints about the softness of American education....

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, educators shifted their focus from "meeting the needs of the whole child" to "excellence". Programs were developed to identify talented youth at an early age and to speed their way through rigorous courses in high school and college.... The political climate, typified by the brief presidency of John F. Kennedy, also stimulated the popular belief that the identification of talent and the pursuit of excellence were appropriate educational goals. Part of Kennedy's image was the idea that youth, talent, intelligence, and education could right society's problems. The drive for excellence was in high gear during the early 1960s, and enrollment in advanced courses and foreign languages rose steadily, along with standardized test scores. The sudden and remarkably quiet disappearance of the "pursuit of excellence" in the mid-1960s showed how dependent it was on the socio­political climate. A series of cataclysmic events shook national self-confidence: violence against blacks and civil rights workers in the South; Kennedy's assassination; the rediscovery of poverty; American involvement in Vietnam. By 1965, the nation's competition with the Soviets for world supremacy had lost its motivating power. As the Cold War appeared to fade, students in elite universities — the

194 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

1. continued

presumed beneficiaries of the post-Sputnik years — protested against technology, against the middle-class values of their parents, and against the meritocratic pressures of an achievement-oriented society....

Responding to changes in the social and cultural milieu, educators sought to adapt the schools to the new conditions and to placate their numerous critics. The innovation that had the most influence in the public schools was the open education movement.

The open education philosophy answered perfectly the need for a set of educational values to fit the countercultural mood of the late 1960s; it stimulated participatory democracy; it justified the equal sharing of power between the authority figure (the teacher) and the students; it made a positive virtue of nonassertive leadership; and it insisted that children should study only what they wanted. At the high-school level, the open philosophy led to dropping of requirements, adoption of mini-courses, schools-without-walls, and alternative schools.

On paper, open education was ideal. Once it was put into practice, the problems

appeared. Many schools removed classroom walls, hired open educators, sent their veteran teachers to workshops to be retrained, and provisioned classrooms with the obligatory gerbils and sensory, tactile materials. Despite their training, some teachers couldn't handle the open-ended situation; children wandered about aimlessly, got into fights, demanded that the teacher tell them what to do. In some districts, parents complained bitterly that their children couldn't read, that the classroom was chaotic, and that there was no homework. By the mid-1970s, the open education movement had gone into decline....

The swing away from open education was hastened by the public reaction to the news in 1975 that score on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) had dropped steadily since 1963. Regardless of explanations blaming such factors as Vietnam, Watergate, drugs, the effect of television, and working mothers, a substantial part of the public believed that the decline of standards in the school was primarily responsible for lower test scores. The College Board's 1977 report on the score drop confirmed that part of the drop was in fact due to lowered standards, grade inflation, absenteeism, and the widespread decline of critical reading and careful writing.

Ravitch, Diane: associate professor of History and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Scholastic Aptitude Test: (SAT), standardized admission test for college. Watergate: see page 29.

EDUCATION 195

What Makes Great Schools Great

A Tough School Pays Off

^^^■^^^нн LOS ANGELES By 8:01 a.m. at the inner-city campus of Thomas Jefferson High School, students already have learned the first lesson about attending classes here: Be on time.

Starting at 7:30, Principal Francis Nakano is standing by to greet the school's nearly 2,000 predominantly Hispanic and black students as they arrive. Promptly at 8, Nakano locks the gates to keep out unwanted visitors.

Tardy students are screened by security personnel and sent to a holding room to wait for one period so that they won't disrupt classes for others. Students who are late three times in one month are assigned to 20 minutes of work cleaning up the campus.

"Now, we have students running to classes," says Alberta Moss, who heads the tardiness program. From February, the monthly number of late students dropped from 1,049 — more than half of the school — to 430 in May.

Getting students to school on time is only one of the disciplinary measures adopted by the 46-year-old Nakano that have changed the fortunes of a troubled campus. When Nakano, a third-generation Japanese American, came to Jefferson High two years ago, he found a graf­fiti-marred campus that openly showed its latest scars: The blackened hulls of three administrative offices gutted by fire. Students freely roamed halls that crackled with an ever present threat of gang violence about to explode.

"Climate for learning." Nakano immediately master­minded an overhaul of the buildings. "When people feel safe, you have a climate for learning," he says. The burned-out area was sealed from view, and a new $85,000 full fire-and-security alarm system was installed.

An aging sprinkler system was repaired, bringing back green grass and fresh plants to the campus. Students felt proud of their school again.

There have been no gang fights on campus for 18 months, observes Eric Parker, who becomes student-body president this fall. Unlike before, he says, "I'm not

afraid any day I go to school. Dr. Nakano is trying to make school a good place."

With physical changes has come a renewed attention to learning. Top scholars are recognized at an annual academic banquet where they receive Olympic-style medals for their efforts. Honors programs were started last year at each of the three grade levels in English.

Still, serious academic problems remain. Standardized test scores remain low, although the percentage of students scoring in the bottom quarter has steadily declined.

"Sixty percent of our 10th graders read at fifth-grade level от below," says Barbara Shealy, head of the English department. "But we're getting kids who care more about school and are willing to work."

Principal Nakano has brought order to Jefferson High School.

196 AMERICA IN CLOSE-UP

2. continued

About 225 sophomores with low scores will enter the 8-month-old School Within a School program this fall. Participants sign learning contracts in which they accept responsibility for their own progress in exchange for special individual instruction.

More parents are coming to once sparsely attended school meetings, and local business is actively lending its support. Last spring, Hughes Aircraft Company provided a "quality circles" training program to help teachers identify and propose solutions to school problems.

The Knudsen Corporation, a large dairy 3 miles from campus, provides on-site internships to students and donates dairy products for school fund-raising events. One morning when school officials needed paint to cover graffiti, the dairy delivered it within an hour.

In a school once plagued by fear and hopelessness, teachers, students and the community again believe that anything is possible.

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