Better schools: it takes money & standards.

In her Christmas television special this past year, singer Jessye Norman interspersed her songs with tributes to the teachers who were influential in her life. They, in turn, spoke of her with pride and affection and reminisced about the girl they had known. Her education had made a difference in her life, and in theirs. That was clear.

I know how pleased they felt. One of the most heart-warming letters I received in 1998 was from the alumnae office of the college where I taught, telling me that I was a nominee for the year's award as a teacher who made a difference in the lives of students. It is many years since I taught and to be still remembered today as such a teacher is gratifying indeed.

Both Jessye Norman's teachers, I suspect, and I taught in schools where strong beneficial relationships between teacher and student could develop and were made possible by the atmosphere and requirements of the school community. A spate of news stories after the November election made it clear that such schools have been rare in recent years. According to William Booth in the Washington Post (November 23, 1998), the overriding concern to voters was schools - more important to them than crime, the environment, abortion rights, or the economy. The winning governors and state legislators were those who pledged to make their schools better. This was true the length and breadth of the country - in California, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida, and Texas.

What has happened to the schools to cause such concern? There was a time - not so long ago - when a high school diploma was a school's assurance that its graduate was prepared to enter college or to join the work force. A diploma was a student's recommendation and a certificate of accomplishment. And it meant that the student had significant test scores. Unfortunately, this is no longer true. The diploma now is often no more than a record of having put in time and of being promoted from year to year without necessarily any substantive academic achievement.

The resultant circumstances are dismaying to say the least. In California, half of the graduates going into the state's university system need remedial classes in math and writing, and these graduates were in the top third of their graduating class! Even worse, Pacific Bell found that only one in seven high school graduates had enough math and language skills to qualify as a telephone operator.

Although present-day California, once a shining example of good public education, now ranks near the bottom on education assessment tests - its fourth graders were in last place with Louisiana in reading and ranked only just above Mississippi in math - it is not alone in dismaying statistics. In the state of Virginia, remedial courses for students in its colleges are estimated to cost $40 million a year. Only $15 million of this amount is borne by the students and their families; the rest is a burden on the taxpayers. The State Council of Higher Education is preparing a proposal to require local systems to issue a "warranty" on their graduates and to promise to pay the cost of remedial classes taken by students in college.

Virginia had earlier imposed guidelines for what should be taught in schools and when. Educators now plan a follow-up with a series of examinations to test the students' grasp of these things. (One wonders why this was not the measure of a school's effectiveness prior to imposing financial incentives like warranties.)

Other states are trying varying methods of turning the schools around. Maryland has a new list of required "content standards," something like the Virginia guidelines. These are the facts, topics, and skills that educators have agreed children need to learn at various stages in their school life. The published list is impressive. By the end of the fifth grade, for example, they will be expected to know the components of the U.S. Constitution in the subject of government, be able to read and interpret information from such tools as maps in geography, as well as to understand and use fractions, decimals, percentages, and other material of this difficulty in math. By the end of high school, they should be able to analyze the roles of political parties, campaigns, and elections in U.S. politics; evaluate the changes brought about by the end of the cold war; and be able to use calculators, spread-sheet databases, and graphing programs, as well as algebra and geometry. By 2004, all students will be required to pass a series of new statewide tests on this content in order to earn a diploma.

(Interestingly enough, Maryland, in contrast to Virginia, seems to have gone at this backwards. Eight years before the guidelines were issued, all elementary and middle school students had to take the Maryland Student Performance Assessment Program - a series of tests intended to hold schools to higher standards. Some people argue that such a program was necessary to show people the importance of standards, and this may well be true. Certainly indifference to standards helped bring about the precipitous decline in school accomplishment.)

The District of Columbia is putting its hope for school improvement in the Stanford Achievement Test Series, Ninth Edition. Students are to take a battery of tests in math and reading in the fall and again in the spring. Principals will be evaluated annually on how the students do, and students who do not do well will have to attend summer school. The District is also facing up to a situation all school systems face - the problem of incompetent or poorly motivated teachers. The District's superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, has instituted a new speeded-up evaluation process of District teachers. There is now a ninety-day probationary period after an unsatisfactory evaluation, And once dismissed, a teacher cannot return to any school in the system unless he or she wins an appeal. Nothing is as important to a school system as good teachers; eliminating the poor ones is bound to help.

Will any and all of these efforts solve the problem? Schools today exist in a world where there is a general relaxation of standards everywhere, where television is often deleterious to students' attention spans and imaginative power, and where many students come from backgrounds with no appreciation of education. Still Gray Davis, new governor of California and a strong proponent of education, is probably right when he says "higher expectations will bring about substantial improvement." Then schools will once again be places in which dedicated teachers thrive and students benefit.