Who's the real culprit?
One in four high school students drop out by their senior year. Nearly half of all grade school students appear to be struggling academically.
The problems sound serious. Administrators say they may not be as bad as they sound. But whenever anything seems to threaten a community's children, even if the risk is slight, it must be acted upon.
Throwing more money at the school system or more insults at it or students and parents will accomplish nothing. Proud as we might wish to be of our schools and young people, clearly there are problems that require more than knee-jerk answers.
At times it seems as if school has become little more than brief respites of babysitting inbetween various sports and activities. The blame for this is shared on all sides:
— Parents, who don't respect teachers and let their kids know it, seem more concerned with junior winning a medal for 39th place in the five-yard dash than they do with whether junior can read and write.
— Students, emboldened by the attitudes of their parents, view themselves as "education consumers" who shouldn't be expected to work, should always be rewarded for every effort they make and ultimately are the bosses, not the charges, of their teachers.
— Teachers, discouraged by all of this, demand plush air-conditioned hallways, bigger salaries for fewer hours of work, ridiculously easy- to-obtain job security, tiny class sizes, personal aides and at least as many frivolous extracurricular trips (and vehicles for them) as parents and students do.
— Administrators, increasingly bureaucratic, orchestrate more and more of the district's operations, sweeping real problems under the plush new carpeting while consigning elected board members to the task of fumbling around with demagogic pseudo-issues and organizing support groups with more counselors than students to counsel.
It's time education got back to basics. That means putting teachers back in charge of their classrooms and encouraging parents, students, administrators and officials to let them teach without second-guessing.
The tradeoff is that what they teach should not be musings from personal pulpits about trendy, politically correct issues or self-indulgent forums of cultural-studies deconstructionism. Rather, it should be the basic, traditional skills students need to function in society.
It's also time that we as a community stop pampering ourselves and our children. One sport at a time is more than enough. A band, a chorus, a class play and in-school debate sessions ought to suffice. Kids shouldn't be spending more time in locker rooms, auditoriums and music rooms than classrooms.
Most of these activities exist mainly to provide showcases through which parents can vicariously live their children's lives. What once was justifiable pride has cancerously grown to pathological, micro- niche fanatacism.
Having scarcely more than a dozen students, instead of close to three dozen, in a classroom was supposed to make things better. It hasn't.
If a teacher can't handle two dozen students or needs an assistant to do so, there's something wrong with the teacher or the students or both.
Lowering the expectations for teachers and students isn't the answer. Raising those standards, and imposing real penalties for failing to meet them, is.
If you can't do the work, you lose your job or flunk the class. And you don't go running to unions or parents or school boards to complain.
Finally, those of us not in school, not teaching, not administering, not serving on the school board must wake up. Schools are by far the biggest expenditure of local tax money, and for good reason. Supporting the schools doesn't mean attending extracurricular events. It means taking an active interest in and appreciation for the education that goes on inside the school.
To find the real culprit behind the miserable performance of our school system, we need look no further than our own mirror.
We've known all these things. We've thought about all these things. We've done nothing to address them.
We've just come through a long battle over what was billed as a threat to the future environmental quality in our community. For all the bluster spent on that debate, we managed to allow something even more precious to the future of our community to degrade: the quality of our education. Shame on us.
— ERIC MEYER
