It's education, Stupid.

A decade has passed since the mantra of Bill Clinton's drive to the presidency--"It's the Economy, Stupid"--found its way into daily discourse.

For America's cities that are pursuing strategies to attract investment, ameliorate poverty, streamline and improve health and social services and focus resources, two things are even more fundamental.

The first of these is that Americans need to relearn how to sustain commitments over long periods of time. We have become a nation of short-term thinkers and instant gratifiers. So many factors reinforce this collective state of mind--fast food, easy credit, planned obsolescence, fast forward, weekly sales quotas, quarterly earnings reports, annual budgets and instant access to data about practically everything--that it is hopeless to think about casting it out.

If perhaps our most durable cultural quality has become the transience of our commitments, this also raises an opportunity to better define a small number of long-term priorities by contrasting them with this chronic, high-speed shifting and restlessness.

Leading Priority

The second idea, important in all communities but especially our cities, is that one public service is associated with practically every economic, social, public health and civic strength, and its absence or failure is associated with nearly every economic, social, health and civic problem. That service is public education.

The data supporting this conclusion are vast. The Federation for Community Planning's recent family health survey in Ohio showed that those with less education were less likely to be employed, more likely to have lower and sub-poverty incomes, more likely to report themselves as being in poorer health and less likely to have health insurance.

The compelling conclusion we should draw from these two ideas is this: For a defined, extended period of time, at least the balance of this decade, education should be acknowledged as the top urban priority at the national, state and local levels, Further, it should be accorded such status that all of our other public systems serving children and their immediate families--county, municipal and nonprofit--are expected to demonstrate tangible contributions toward this end.

This is not to question the existing centrality or longstanding durability of public education. Indeed, its prominent place in American public policy since the mid-19th century might be cited as contrary evidence to the suggestion of shortening attention spans. This dominant position has both spiritual and tangible roots. It is at once essential to our mythology (the foundation of individual success in a land of opportunity open to all) and to our economy (a growth-oriented market economy depends as much on skilled workers as ambition, capital and executive skill).

Public schooling has withstood attacks from the left and the right; maintained its base at the state and local levels of government through a century of ceaseless growth in federal power; accommodated enormous changes in the intellectual environment, ranging from natural selection, psychoanalysis and pragmatism to quantum mechanics and creationism; and managed to accommodate movements supporting both professional career administrators and professional teacher unions.

The endless posturing over educational policy by recent presidents and both political parties in Congress (notwithstanding the secondary federal role) and the perennial wrangling over educational finance in state capitals are testimony to the powerfully important role public education plays in our society. However resolved, whatever the outcomes, these controversies themselves keep public education front and center.

Shifting Attention

Why, then, should public education receive even more as our overriding, long-term urban priority? Because in most American cities, enormous numbers of young people are not even close to achieving acceptable academic outcomes. Leaving the controversy of proficiency tests aside, a much more widely understood measure of academic performance, high school graduation rates, is commonly below 50 percent in large cities.

The most important factors contributing to our failure in primary and especially secondary education are largely beyond the reach of the schools. These factors lie in impoverished living conditions, reinforced by the multiple layers of social pathology that accompany poverty-broken homes, mental illness, poor physical health, crime, abuse and neglect. These impediments to learning are each targeted for improvement by some agencies of government, some private initiatives and some faith-based organizations. But they are the subjects of shifting priorities, short-term financial commitments, vested interests and multi-jurisdictional power sharing. More importantly, they are usually addressed remotely or even in isolation from the schools.

Adopting education as an overriding priority in the health and social services arena is vitally important. While most cities are mobilized in almost every way imaginable to address the economic and social conditions impeding the success of our schools, they are all too often equally poised to go off in many directions at once, establishing priorities on top of priorities, pointing proudly at all of our action and achieving absolutely nothing. We need something to bind them together: Leadership from school system executives in partnership with public and private health and social service organizations.

Collaboration Starters

Some specific actions that might facilitate the foundation of such partnerships include:

* Explicit adoption of educational attainment as the top priority for the first decade of the century by mayors, city councils, county executives and leading business, voluntary and pastoral organizations.

* Explicit, shared requirements by major funders that the individual case plans of every public and private agency serving children and families that receive funding address actions that support academic success.

* Adoption by major funders of standards for sharing data and establishing the compatibility of electronic data systems used by family service agencies and schools.

* Expansion of social services delivered in schools, during and after the school day, especially for middle and high school students.

Beyond these, we must sustain the goal for a decade or more.

Only through such single-mindedness and persistence will we change the conditions impeding educational attainment. Only in this way will we have the workforce needed to reclaim the economic vitality of inner cities. And only in this way will we create the conditions necessary to unleash the hopes and individual initiative of tens of thousands of young people who can, in turn, pass on their knowledge and gifts to their children.

John Begala is executive director of the Federation for Community Planning, 1226 Huron Road, Suite 300, Cleveland, OH 44115. E-mail: [e-mail]