Manhattan Paper: Making Schools Better

Participants

Nathan Glazer is a Professor of Education and Sociology at Harvard University.
John Chubb is a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of What Price Democracy?: Politics, Markets, and American Schools.
Seymour Fliegel, formerly Deputy Superintendent of Community School District Four in East Harlem, is currently acting Superintendent of New York City's District Twenty-eight.

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Nathan Glazer—I am going to briefly introduce a theme that will be taken up in different ways by both John Chubb and Sy Fliegel. This theme is freeing up the management of public schools so that they can pursue their main academic goals, and opening up the choices of students and parents so that they can use the schools to the best advantage.

In New York such freedom has become quite difficult to come by. Lately I have been spending a considerable amount of time reading some of the numerous official and unofficial reports that come out of efforts to reform the workings of the city school system. These reports cover many subjects: recruiting teachers, getting supplies to the schools, renovating schools. And yet they all have the same message: "No matter what you are trying to do, it is too hard to do it in the New York City school system."

Invariably these reports list the 16 offices you must go through, or the 22 steps in any procedure. You read through these things and it becomes perfectly clear why it takes at best four-and-a-half years to prepare a plan to renovate a school; or why the supplies don't get to the schools; or why teachers from good colleges very often will give up in disgust and go off to a private school or to a suburban school district that is smaller and runs more easily.

These reports, by the way, are not brand new. If you go back five years, ten years, twenty years you'll be reading more or less the same reports. Every office has a history and every step has a reason. In 1912 something horrible happened and an office was created. In 1918 something else happened and we got a rule. In 1921 there was a general reform—which needed an office. In 1933 we needed a coordinating office. All terribly necessary. Yet, the fact is private schools, and not just prestigious private schools but parochial schools, manage to get their supplies, hire teachers, organize their curricula and fulfill state requirements, without the 4,000 or 6,000 people at central headquarters.

Would freeing up the organizational structure or finding a way around it make for better education? Under the aegis of the Brookings Institution, John Chubb has done an extensive study which addresses that question directly.

John Chubb—I'd like to start by providing a broad overview on what we think is wrong with American schools and what we think would make a difference.

Most of you are familiar with the state of American education. Just to give you some basic statistics, for roughly 20 years from the mid-1960s until the mid-1980s, the SAT scores of American students dropped sharply. Although scores have been going up for the last few years, they've recently stalled. Our students still are well behind where they were in 1965.

In addition, the dropout rate in the United States is about 25 percent. That is to say, 25 percent of our students are not finishing high school on time. In many of our large cities only half of the students finish high school on time.

Comparing the United States to countries around the world is even more depressing. In math and science, U.S. students rank dead last in any comparison with students from the nations that are our leading competitors. The top 5 percent of students in the United States achieve at the same level as the middle student in the Japanese system.

There is a bit of good news. For the last five years, Americans, mostly at the state level, have been trying very hard to turn things around. The amount that has been done is remarkable. Five years ago, when reports began to come out suggesting various ways to improve our nation's school systems, a lot of skeptics said we could never find that much money. But in those five years or so we have spent far more money than any of the skeptics thought possible.

Between 1981 and 1986 expenditures per pupil for elementary and secondary education went up 40 percent. In real terms we now spend four times as much per child as we did in 1950. In the first half of the 1980s, teachers enjoyed larger salary increases than any other occupational group in the country. Their salaries are still arguably too low, $29,000 per year, but they have gone up very quickly. We've also spent a good deal of money to reduce the size of classes.

There has been a crackdown on teacher incompetence. Teachers are being asked to take more tests, to demonstrate that they are able. There has been a crackdown on student underachievement. Graduation and promotion requirements are being boosted around the country.

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