Why can't our schools be like they used to?

Education commentator/Sacramento Bee columnist Peter Schrag did a nice job exploring the mass bashing of our educational system in an article in Harper's — the full version locked up tight behind Harper's firewall, but a shorter version here in the Fort Wayne, Ind., paper.

SCHOOLHOUSE CROCK
50 years of blaming America's educational system for society's woes
By Peter Schrag

In 1951, when historian Henry Steele Commager first observed that “no other people ever demanded so much of schools and of education as have the Americans,” he couldn’t have dreamed how much more would be demanded.

Win the Cold War; beat the Germans and the Japanese in the battle for economic supremacy; out-duel the Chinese and Indians in the training of scientists and engineers; Americanize millions of children not just from Southern and Eastern Europe, which Commager celebrated, but from 100 Third World cultures he thought little about; make every child “proficient” in English and math; educate the blind, the mentally handicapped and the emotionally disturbed to the same levels as all others; teach the evils of alcohol, tobacco, illegal drugs and premarital sex; prepare all for college; teach immigrants in their native languages; teach driver’s ed; feed lunch to poor children; entertain the community with Friday-night football and midwinter basketball; sponsor dances and fairs for the kids; and serve as the prime (and often the only) social-welfare agency for both children and parents.

Some of those things were on Commager’s list. Many others are responses to more recent demands and stresses, particularly the rapidly growing gaps in earnings between the very rich and almost everyone else. Given the mandates, is it any wonder that so many Americans think the schools are lousy?

When you think about it, a nation's leadership normally tries to put the best spin on its national institutions. War in Iraq? Mission accomplished! Levees in New Orleans? Heckuva job! So it is really weird that Bush and really most of our national leaders are eager to put our schools in the worst possible light, to exaggerate them as crashing failures. Not that I'm against openly discussing problems, but it's still strange and inconsistent behavior.

— Caroline