(1) In praise of public education. You may think I'm no fan of public education, and it's true that the U.S. version often exasperates me. But recent world news has underscored society's obligation to see that its young get educated, acculturated and socialized. In the past few weeks, we've seen how the virtual collapse of public education in countries like Afghanistan and Pakistan has driven tens of thousands of boys into "madrasahs" - Islamic schools where they learn militancy, radical Islamic lore and hyper-nationalism, but little else. (Girls, of course, are not welcome, so most end up with scant formal education of any sort.) Wealthy families - there are few in Afghanistan but many in Pakistan - pay tuition for their sons and daughters to attend private schools, where they learn science, geography, languages, etc. The poor, however, end up in hothouses for terrorism.
What really happens there? Let me quote from an October 2 account by reporter Peter Fritsch in The Wall Street Journal, after he interviewed a youngster attending such a school in Pakistan:
"The battle for Arshad's heart and mind may be over.... The 11-year-old, who doesn't offer his last name, rises each morning at 4 to pray and recite the Koran at the Central Martyrs madrasah in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. In his village...there is no public school. His parents paid the equivalent of $2 a month, a large sum in Pakistan, to put his older brother through a private high school, but he has yet to find work years after graduation, Arshad says.
" 'The madrasah is free' - and includes room and board - 'so why waste money in such a way?' he asks. Following typical madrasah rules, the boy hasn't seen his parents in nine months and probably won't have any contact with them for at least another few years.
"Arshad has learned little about the modern world. A visitor asks him whether a man has ever walked on the moon. 'This isn't possible,' the boy answers. What is two times two? Silence. Eager to impress, though, he announces that dinosaurs exist. 'The Jewish and American infidels have created these beasts to devour Muslims.'"
Let's hear it for universal education, complete with a liberal arts curriculum, state standards, mandatory testing and accountability. That's not an argument against school choice - or for a government monopoly of schooling. It's an argument for ensuring that the public gets decently educated.
"With Pakistan's Schools in Tatters, Madrasahs Spawn Young Warriors" by Peter Fritsch, The Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2001. (available only to subscribers)
(2) Teaching Patriotism. Curriculum expert and former Humanities Endowment chairman Lynne V. Cheney, who also happens to be married to Vice President Dick Cheney, said it well the other day. Addressing the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, she argued for teaching children "the ideas and ideals on which our nation has been built." Cheney was reacting to the flurry of educators who contend that the proper response of schools to the terrorist attacks upon the U.S. is to stress (in the words of New York City deputy chancellor Judith Rizzo) "tolerance...and awareness of other cultures." Not so, Cheney responded. The suggestion that our schools should place greater emphasis on teaching world cultures "implies that the events of September 11 were our fault, that it was our failure to understand Islam that led to so many deaths and so much destruction...that somehow intolerance on our part was the cause." Instead, Cheney said, "If there were one aspect of schooling from kindergarten through college to which I would give added emphasis today, it would be American history." Bravo!
To read Cheney's speech, see "Remarks by Lynne Cheney: Teaching Our Children About America," Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture, October 5, 2001.
(3) Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The end game may finally be nearing for this long awaited (and much diluted) legislation. With an agreement evidently reached on how much Washington will spend on education in fiscal 2002 (about $4 billion higher than the initial Bush request), the remaining wrinkles are slowly getting ironed out of the ESEA bill. The "big four" conferees (Messrs. Kennedy, Gregg, Boehner and Miller) have been meeting privately, and rumor has it they've agreed on all but one or two of the major issues. On the controversial matter of requiring state participation in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), we understand that the decision is yes - but that a state's NAEP score won't "count" in any high-stakes sense. Also that NAEP's 4th and 8th grade reading and math tests will be given every two years instead of annually. We also hear troubling reports that Congress wants to impose new restrictions on NAEP test items and background questions. Some members seem to believe that it's bad to pose such queries to kids as whether there are any newspapers in their homes. They evidently don't realize that it's only with data like these in hand that we can explain why some youngsters get higher reading scores than others. (It's not only the schools' doing, after all.) Moreover, NAEP is only given to a sample of children and no individually identifiable data ever emerge. Let's hope that a mandated NAEP doesn't turn out to be a weakened NAEP. Meanwhile, groups are suddenly emerging with last-minute advice for the ESEA conferees. I was part of one such, together with Bill Bennett, Lisa Keegan and Krista Kafer. If you'd like to read our policy recommendations, go to http://www.empoweramerica.org/ea/servlet/dispatcher/Articlewebcmd?ACTION=getArticleContent&articleId=431. To see a rather surprising "kill the bill" message from the National Conference of State Legislatures, go to http://www.ncsl.org/statefed/ESEA.htm. Their main beef - reportedly shared by the National Governors Association - is that the only major action-forcing provision of the entire bill (the annual testing requirement) represents too heavy a federal hand.
For the latest on the ESEA bill's progress, read "State Officials, School Groups Worried About Education Bill," by David S. Broder and Michael Fletcher, The Washington Post, October 10, 2001.
(4) Why Certify Teachers? You will read below about an important new study of teacher certification, released this week by the Baltimore-based Abell Foundation. Please take it seriously. It shows, in effect, that the "research" cited to "prove" that state-certified teachers are superior to non-certified teachers is little more than a pile of words and numbers. It's not robust social science. Which raises a very big question: if certification is based on no substantial evidence, why do we make people undergo it before being allowed to teach in public schools? Not only do such restrictions worsen the teacher quantity problem; they do nothing to solve the quality problem, which was their primary rationale. Note, too, that private and charter school teachers, many of them not certified, seem to do a perfectly adequate job of imparting skills and knowledge to children.
Go to Teacher Certification Reconsidered: Stumbling for Quality, by Kate Walsh, The Abell Foundation, October 2001.
What do these observations have in common? A strong belief in a well-educated society coupled with a keen aversion to what Orwell termed smelly little orthodoxies.
