What's Your Pick?

Fail, fail, fail.

A retired member of Congress who once chaired the House Education Committee ranted a few years back during an important bill-drafting session, "We've had 30 years of failed programs. I'm sick of hearing [we don't spend enough on schools]."

This denunciation came from the dean of education in the House of Representatives, a one-time AASA member and a former public school administrator.

Why? Why do they attack us? Is it politics or sheer lack of understanding?

You wonder when the last time a policymaker of this stripe set foot inside a schoolhouse. On the other hand, over the years sympathetic legislators, such as Pat Williams, formerly a congressman from Montana, would urge educators to invite their House member and senators to visit the public schools in their congressional district and state. He urged them to ask their legislators to talk to a schoolwide assembly. If they want to invite the press along, fine. It will shed some positive light on the school system.

But don't let their first-hand experience stop after the assembly in the gym. Take your legislators on a classroom tour. Show them a Title I classroom. If you have a schoolwide project, give the lawmaker exposure to the changes you've been able to make with your federal dollars: the books, the instruments, the computers, the educational quality, the experienced extra staff and, of course, the test scores that demonstrate student progress over time.

Choices Everywhere

Elected officials who clamor for choice don't know the half of it. Children and their parents and guardians have, as my dear Mom would say, more choices "than you can shake a stick at."

In many school communities, families can pick a school building other than the one to which their child is assigned. Magnets offer program choices such as arts, a science and technology focus and foreign languages. On the secondary school level, you have International Baccalaureate, advanced placement courses, auto mechanics or machine shop training. A nephew of mine who learned welding at his high school now works successfully at the trade to which he was attracted.

We know through separate national studies--such as those conducted by Adam Gamoran and D.D. Goldhaber in 1996 and cited by F. Howard Nelson in "Two New Studies Reaffirm that Private Schools Fail to Improve Student Performance More than Public Schools"--that we offer an equally matched opportunity." Nelson reports that secular private school results show "no advantage" and "a Catholic school advantage only in math at best." Further, Nelson cites another 1996 study by John Witte: "... if private school users have any significant advantage in achievement gains, the gains are small enough to have little policy importance. Nelson concludes, "The results do not show private schools to outperform public schools."

If you're in a town with a rapidly declining tax base--where it's mighty difficult to pass a bond referendum or tax increase because 85 percent of the community have no link to a school-age child--the state and federal coffers are the only ones to which you can appeal for help.

Many state legislators want nothing to do with equalization because they see it as taking funds away from some of their own high-tax revenue districts. Somehow, every one of those who badmouth the efforts of public school leaders wants the local taxpayer to think the answer is to test kids again and again. That sure saves them from having to eliminate the funding inequities and the overcrowded, understaffed, aging places of learning.

Raising state taxes--the most equitable revenue source that puts the financing burden on those who can best pay it--is political suicide, they say.

So to whom can we turn? President Bush? Local congressional reps? While the treasury is overflowing, schools are begging.

The federal responsibility is to even out inequities and provide genuine learning opportunities to every child.

Wise Use

We do offer choices. We're creating more public school choices every day. We report to local school boards run by local citizens, the ones who know what's going on in schools. If schools are well run, they put on the pressure and should provide the resources to do what they can. But only Washington can really lend us the hand we need.

Lawmakers need to choose. An illprepared citizenry can scarcely be counted upon to preserve the economic and political vitality of our nation in the coming years.

We say to them, "You have the power to make it happen. Use it."