Better Schools For Everyone

I found there to be something very odd about the tone of both the Hess/West/Petrilli contribution to Education Next's 10th anniversary issue and also the Peterson/Finn/Kanstoroom piece that allegedly represents "the other side of the debate." But I thought that both sets of authors agreed on one important issue.

Here's the Hess/West/Petrilli version of the point:

For the past decade, school reform has been primarily about "closing achievement gaps" by boosting math and reading proficiency and graduation rates, among black, Latino, and poor students. "Conservative" notions of accountability have been linked to old-school liberal conceptions of "social justice." This is all admirable. At the same time, this emphasis signals to the vast majority of American parents that school reform isn't about helping their kids. And, given that only about one household in five even contains school-age children, 80 percent of households are being told that extra dollars and energy should be redirected into urban centers simply because it's the right thing to do.

And here's the Peterson/Kanstoroom/Finn version:

>It's true that the public thinks the country's schools are doing poorly. Only 18 percent gave them an A or a B grade. Yet a clear majority thought their own elementary and middle schools were doing quite well, with 65 percent conferring honors grades on their elementary school and 55 percent awarding such marks to their middle school. The prevailing view seems to be that "schools are bad except for those in my neighborhood. These do not need changing—and they are the schools I really care about."

To put this point my own way, apocalyptic talk about "failing" schools and intense elite focus on the problems of the least-privileged students tends to obscure the more banal reality that most schools are non-optimal in lots of ways. And this is bad. It's bad even though most middle class white kids do basically okay. It's bad not just because many kids aren't middle class white kids. It's bad, fundamentally, because in the aggregate the K-12 education system in the United States is really big. Its comprised of a millions-strong workforce, countless buildings and buses, lots of money, etc. and consequently its various inefficiencies and pathologies are, in the aggregate, a big wastage of national potential.

It's worth noting that an exaggerated view of how terrible "the public schools" are goes hand in hand with exaggerated complacency about one's own local school. If you walked around thinking that the average American male was 5'3″ then you'd also walk around thinking that you and your friends and neighbors are really tall. It would actually be more politically useful to have people more focused on the modest but real problems in their own local schools than have them morbidly obsessed with semi-mythical tales of a "broken" school system that they're fortunate not to be stuck in.