Flunking a Legend

Once upon a time American schools served, in Horace Mann's words, as "the great equalizer of the conditions of men." They took in the ragged, ill-fed sons and daughters of European immigrants, educated and Americanized them and turned them out productive members of the middle class.

Such, in any case, is the theory cherished by many educators, who believe that if the schools had enough money, teachers and equipment, they could work the same miracle for black and Spanish-speaking peoples, the "new immigrants" of today. That theory is false, according to a new study by Colin Greer, The Great School Legend (Basic Books; $6.95). "The truth is that the immigrant children dropped out in great numbers--to fall back on the customs and skills their families brought with them to America. It was in spite of, and not because of compulsory public education that some eventually made their way."

Greer, 30, a revisionist historian and an administrator at City University of New York, studied school records, surveys and census reports dating from 1890 and concluded: "School performance seems consistently dependent upon the socioeconomic position of a pupil's family." For 70 years, public schools have failed to teach about 40% of their pupils, Greer writes, though poor children today drop out during high school rather than at the elementary level. Thus the schools still have the effect of "screening out the poor and sending them back into the cheap labor market." That market, however, has shrunk dramatically over the years, so that while the dropout of 1900 could find work as a laborer, his counterpart of today often cannot.

Is Greer correct? Other scholars find his argument thought-provoking but hardly conclusive. "Greer exposes the bankruptcy of an institution." says Marvin Lazarson of the Harvard School of Education, "but he deals with these important questions too loosely. The argument is still open." If Greer is right, however, the schools are a far more limited instrument for solving the problems of race and poverty than most people think. He concludes: "The local business, the local church and local fraternal society, followed by the factory, the union, the political machine, were agents of mobility and Americanization before the school."

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