Musings on Education
No Child Left Behind
By Ralph Lynn, Professor of History ret.
Baylor University
Editor`s Note: Ralph Lynn is a regular columnist for the Waco-Tribune Herald, in which these articles first appeared. At age 91, his pen and mind remain keenly sharp.
Our current president`s oft-repeated campaign slogan, "No child left behind," seems sadly hollow when one considers the realities of the nation`s public schools.
Since the Texas population is much like California`s except for California`s greater ethnic varieties, a recent appraisal of that state`s situation is also a reasonably accurate description of the school scene not just in Texas but in other states also.
What are some of its findings? What remedies are now being suggested? Do these remedies offer any hope of success? What of the future:
- Schools scoring in the lower brackets are overwhelmingly those with very high numbers of nonwhite, economically poor students whose native languages are not English.
- Poorly performing schools are significantly larger, with more crowded facilities, and are more likely to have non-credentialed teachers.
- Ninety-four percent of students with the lowest 10 percent of test scores are economically poor while just 7 percent of students in the highest scoring schools are economically poor.
- Only 4.2 percent of the students in schools with the lowest scores are white, while 71 percent of the students in the highest-performing schools are white.
- Despite the fact that the managers of schools which do poorly on tests try to test only their better students, the test score gaps are widening.
What remedies have been suggested and-sometimes-implemented?
Studies of academic standards and teaching methods are popular. There is much talk of reducing class sizes-especially on the elementary levels. More and more effective testing appears on most reform programs as well as more teacher training with emphasis on rewards for the better teachers and penalties for the others.
I think that we have been trying these "remedies" for a generation or two. Perhaps we keep trying them to kid ourselves that we, the responsible, are doing our part but that irresponsible parents, poor teachers, and lazy students are, at bottom, responsible for school failures.
Perhaps we do not realize that we are talking about millions of children "left behind." Perhaps we realize that schools can only reflect the society which maintains them. If this is so, we must make our total society more equitable if we really wish to leave no child behind.
Perhaps we do not realize that it would probably be cheaper in the long run to do the necessary restructuring of our society than to allow these millions of children to be left behind.
Short of the restructuring from which nearly all of us shrink, perhaps only one course of action is feasible: We need to allot all of the available public school funds we have on a per capita student basis regardless of the tax base of each school district.
Even this would be inadequate. Failing schools could be helped if, with high salaries and good facilities, we could bribe our best teachers to leave the affluent districts to work in areas so undesirable. But this is too idealistic.
The hollowness of our president`s slogan merely reflects the hollowness of most of us-leaders and people.
Perhaps we will get serious about solutions only when we are sufficiently frightened by the harvest we will reap from our past and present refusals to deal realistically with real problems.
