The Bold Quest For Quality

By Ellie McGrath

COVER STORY

The nation's public schools are shaping up

The 19 students in a junior English class are discussing a George Eliot novel, which they have read in the three days between orientation day and the start of school. Five students are debating with the teacher about the time frame of the novel, as well as the use of first-person narrative. Near by, a class of sophomores listens intently as the teacher fires off volleys of French. Not a word of English is spoken. The same spirit of curiosity and dedication seems to flow through other rooms at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, where students from the ghetto mingle with those from glass palaces on the lakefront. Says French Teacher Maureen Breen: "Something is very definitely happening in the air once these kids walk through those doors. We can all feel it."

Kansas City threw a huge pep rally last month, complete with a 25-member song-and-dance troupe. Yet there were no football players proudly strutting through tissue-paper arches. The head cheerleader was president of the Chamber of Commerce. The team being hailed: the city's teachers.

Johnson Elementary School in Benton Harbor, Mich., is a one-story building that sits a few hundred yards east of Interstate 94, the heavily traveled highway between Chicago and Detroit. The impoverished school district does not have a sign to put on the building. But in the small lobby, which doubles as the school's library, there is an award from the Michigan Department of Education congratulating the school's fourth-graders for scoring 20% higher than their predecessors on a state assessment test. Beside the plaque, in bold construction-paper letters, is the school's motto: "We demand excellence."

As 44.3 million students settle down to another school year, a growing number are finding--and responding to--a new demand for excellence in the classroom. More required courses and tougher graduation requirements. No-frills curriculums featuring basic skills. Old-fashioned homework and computer literacy. Rigor without the customary mortis.

Once again, Americans have decided that good public schools are essential for the public good. Parents, educators, business people and politicians everywhere are forming grass-roots coalitions to raise standards and improve the quality of instruction from kindergarten to senior year. Their vigor is bringing a new vitality to education, the institution that has been called America's secular religion. Says Terrel Bell, U.S. Secretary of Education: "There is currently in progress the greatest, most far-reaching and, I believe, the most promising reform and renewal of education we have seen since the turn of the century."

Report cards on the nation's public schools have been dismal for a decade: teachers cannot teach; students cannot, or will not, learn. The shortcomings of the schools have been documented by lower Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, a national high school dropout rate of some 25%, the shrinking elite of students taking calculus and physics, the proliferation of remedial courses in colleges and in businesses to repair the damage. One study in the '70s found that 30% of 18-year-olds (47% of black youths) were functionally illiterate, unable to read or follow a set of simple directions.

Over the past year a flurry of reports have chronicled a nation with declining basic skills, foundering will and a diminishing ability to compete with a hi-tech rival like Japan. In May, the National Commission on Excellence in Education (NCEE) stirred the most concern when it reported that the U.S. was "at risk" from "a rising tide of mediocrity." Its judgment: standards are too low, the school day is too short, teachers are paid too little and education is too far down the list of national priorities. The report's ringing indictment: "If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war."

What the NCEE failed to report, however, is that the tide of mediocrity has already begun to ebb. There are plenty of weaknesses still, but excellence has once again become part of the agenda in hundreds of school districts across the country. Statistics only sketch out the dimensions of the turnaround. Over the past three years, 53% of the 16,000 school districts nationwide have increased the number of credits they require in such core subjects as English, science and math; 38% more will upgrade their standards by 1985. During this same period, 69% of school systems have launched efforts to increase daily attendance. No fewer than 20 states have passed tougher certification laws, with the goal of making sure that a teacher has mastered basic skills before ever entering a classroom.

What is remarkable is that all this activity comes at a time when student enrollment is shrinking and funding is scarce. In hard-pressed Michigan, for instance, where the recession lingers (last month's unemployment: 13.4%), some schools almost had to close hi the 1982-83 school year for lack of funds; during the same year 90% of all school tax renewal proposals were approved, a good showing under the circumstances. Poll after poll has disclosed that the public would pay higher taxes for better schools. David Gardner, chairman of the NCEE, now admits, "I hadn't realized how deep and wide the concern was. This is a classic example of why this country works."

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching last month released a thoughtful study that rejects the notion that public education has failed. After spending a total of 30 months com piling observations of high schools across the nation, the report's author concluded that the best American high schools, which educate 10% to 15% of all students, are the world's finest. Says Ernest Boyer, president of the Carnegie Foundation and former U.S. Commissioner of Education under Jimmy Carter: "School is in a very real sense a mirror of its community. Tune and time again, we saw that community support or community conditions were shaping the school. So, in a very real sense, the report card on the school is a report card on the nation."

No wonder that education is becoming a hot presidential campaign issue. Ronald Reagan was the first to sense the opportunity, demanding tougher standards and extra, or "merit," pay for outstanding teachers. But Reagan sees little role for the Federal Government or federal dollars in the quest for excellence. Indeed, the Administration got Congress to cut back 10% on public school funding over the past three years, and only recently stopped vowing to dismantle the Department of Education.

Caught off guard by Reagan, the potential Democratic candidates are trying to devise reform plans that will score points with voters. Walter Mondale has called for an $11 billion annual infusion of federal money for, among other things, a national $4.5 billion fund for excellence that would grant sums to schools to help them improve instruction. Senator Ernest Rollings wants $ 14 billion, in part to give certain qualified public school teachers $5,000 raises. Senator John Glenn's $4 billion plan would include loans to math and science majors that would be forgiven for students who go on to teach those subjects.

While the presidential candidates talk of their plans, the real leadership is coming from the state level: from Governors, from local superintendents, from business people. In a spirit of enlightened self-interest, state officials equate better schools with healthier economies. Some 45 states have put together task forces to consider school reform. In Mississippi, traditionally one of the educationally benighted states, Governor William Winter got the legislature to pass a $69 million bill last December to improve teacher pay and to implement compulsory attendance for the first time since the 1950s. Florida Governor Bob Graham's $228 million school-reform package, passed in June, will toughen student requirements, provide summer institutes for classroom teachers, buy computers for classes, and provide money to attract math and science teachers. Governor James Hunt of North Carolina, who led the Task Force on Education for Economic Growth and who has done part-time teaching during his gubernatorial tenure, has spearheaded everything from an elementary school reading program to the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, a public boarding school for the state's most gifted students.

In a sense, the prophets of doom and the harbingers of progress are both right about the public schools. The American education system is so complex and diverse that signs of hope mingle with tokens of disaster even within the same schools. Says Theodore Sizer, former headmaster of Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and head of a new study on high schools: "You find marvelous things going on and not so marvelous things going on." Any report card on the public schools would have to consider at least four major areas: curriculum and standards, teaching, funding and community support. In all of them, there is cause for rejoicing as well as alarm.

The Curriculum: Shows Progress

There is no question that expectations for curriculum and standards dropped over the past 20 years. In many schools, the art of diagramming sentences went the way of Wuthering Heights, and survey literature courses were transformed into cotton-candy electives like "Expressions of Love." Nationally, average scores on the verbal portion of SATS dropped more than 50 points from 1963 to 1980. A California survey found that many math and science texts now in use are ten to 20 years old. One book still used as a reference in a second-grade classroom near Cape Canaveral even tips off students: "Soon we may land on the moon. Watch for it."

Lowered expectations affect students at all levels. Says Northwestern University Sociologist Christopher Jencks: "What we are seeing is not so much a decline in basic skills as a decline in advanced skills." During the past few years, 13 states, from California to Florida, have sent a strong message to high schools by demanding more requirements of freshmen entering state universities; some have demanded higher grades as well. Says University of Chicago Education Professor Philip Jackson: "Any kid who can follow the intricacies of an N.F.L. football game can follow the turns of plot in a Jane Austen novel or a Dickens tale."

School districts have devised a variety of imaginative and promising strategies to challenge the unchallenged and to brighten the best. New York State is considering a proposal that would require foreign language proficiency by ninth grade. Tennessee has approved a program that will award "honors diplomas" to students who voluntarily complete an accelerated course of study with strong emphasis on English, math, science, arts and foreign languages. Louisiana has opened a residential state school in Natchitoches for students gifted in math, science and the arts, modeled on North Carolina's boarding school. In Iowa, where only 1,500 students took calculus last year (but 17,500 elected driver's education), the state is instituting an incentive program. Students who take upper-level math and science courses will be eligible for a special, onetime tuition grant of $500 to attend any college in the state. Furthermore, the Iowa legislature has approved bounties to school districts: $25 for each student who enrolls in physics, chemistry or advanced math courses, and $50 for each first-year foreign language student.

While the suburban schools got lots of credit for innovation and honors programs two decades ago, urban schools now appear to be on the cutting edge of reform. One reason, says Carnegie's Boyer, may be that many parents in ghetto areas fight fiercely for better schools for their children. The Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of 30 of the nation's largest urban school systems, reports that 27 of these predominantly minority systems have had increases in elementary school reading and mathematics test scores during the past five years.

To be sure, some of the progress came about because there was nowhere to go but up. But much of the improvement in inner-city schools is due to the energy and dedication of strong leaders who are imposing standards of discipline as well as excellence. Their strategy: make the students believe they can succeed.

When Alonzo Crim, 55, took over as superintendent of Atlanta's schools in 1973, the first year that a court-ordered desegregation program went into effect, only 30% of students were reading at the national norm. Says Crim: "We had to focus on reading. Handling the language arts is perhaps the most fundamental building block to the whole educational program. If you can't read, write, speak and listen, you won't do anything else well." In June, Crim announced that the average student in kindergarten through tenth grade was reading at the national level; math achievement was slightly above the norm. The dropout rate last year was 4% (down from 12% in 1973), and the average daily attendance was 94% (up from 86%). Says Crim proudly: "Our kids voted with their feet. They stayed in school."

Before Robert Alioto, 49, arrived in San Francisco in 1975 from Yonkers, N.Y., the school district was considered unmanageable. The superintendent's office did not even know how many teachers were at work. Alioto's first success was putting the district's finances in order. Then he began cutting down on the bureaucracy: of the 100 or so administrative jobs in 1975, only 42 are left. In 1978 he closed 30 schools because enrollment had dropped, a move that earned him many enemies in the community. Nor did he win friends among teachers by laying off 1,197 of them in 1979. Says Alioto: "Too many people in education are mealy-mouthed wimps. I think you can sleep better if you fight for what you believe in."

The performance of San Francisco pupils on achievement tests has improved so rapidly (reading scores of third-graders at one school rose nearly ten percentage points in one year) that the state education department conducted a secret check in 1978 to make sure everything was on the up and up; it was. As a result, about 1,000 private school students return to the public schools each year. In 1982 Mayor Dianne Feinstein showed her confidence in Alioto by giving $4 million of the city's surplus funds to the schools.

Anthony Alvarado, 41, was appointed chancellor of New York City schools last spring after working educational magic as superintendent of East Harlem's District Four, an area where rubble spills out of abandoned buildings and youths loiter in empty lots. When Alvarado, son of Puerto Rican immigrants, was assigned to District Four in 1973, it ranked dead last among the city's 32 districts on reading test scores: only 18.5% of students read at grade level or above. Last year the district ranked 15th in the city, and 48.5% of its students were up to par in reading. Alvarado's success was due in part to his ability to attract bright and dedicated teachers and his willingness to take risks with new programs. Says Alvarado: "My view has always been that you increase expectations and you support students at the same time."

Some of the schools trying the hardest are those with the worst problems. About 30% of the students at Edison High School in Miami's riot-scarred Liberty City are Creole-speaking Haitians; another 14% are students, predominantly Hispanic, who are learning English as a second language. Principal Craig Sturgeon believes that discipline is essential for learning. "We make our expectations and the punishment clear," he says. "When people are late, they are taken to the cafeteria to work on their basic skills. The second time it happens, we contact the parents, and the third time, they are forced to do work around the school." The percentage of Edison's students who passed language assessment tests went up from 54% in 1981 to 83% in 1983. This fall the school is starting a special program in solving word, math and logic problems.

In Boston, Superintendent Robert Spillane is improving one of the nation's most racially torn school systems. An apt symbol is South Boston High School, where whites clashed with blacks in the mid-'70s. Today Southie is a well-balanced school with a population of 856 students that is 43% black, 34% white, 11% Asian and 12% Hispanic. In 1976 Headmaster Jerome Winegar began an in-school suspension program: students who get into trouble are assigned special help under a supervising teacher instead of being tossed out. Since the program's inception, three-day suspensions have dropped from 1,660 to 83 last year.

Southie is also the only district school that requires all ninth-graders to study a foreign language. In addition to a mandatory English course, ninth-and tenth-graders must take a reading and writing workshop that continues hi the eleventh and twelfth grades if the student does not do well. Daily attendance rates have risen 14% in the past year. Says Winegar: "You don't change a school with programs. You change a school with philosophy. We want to help young people battle their way into the mainstream."

In Benton Harbor, Mich., the adult unemployment rate is 32%, more than half of the city's 14,000 residents are on some form of welfare, and 77% of the 8,900 public school students are either black or Hispanic. Most of the town's central business district is boarded up. Benton Harbor's students had scored 40% below the statewide average for the past five years. Two years ago, with solid support in the community, Superintendent James Hawkins began a program that requires every student to master basic minimal skills before being promoted to the next grade.

Hawkins is willing to hold back even kindergarteners unless they can meet certain standards: they should be able to follow simple verbal directions, know at least ten letters of the alphabet, write numbers up to ten as well as their first name, and recite a four-line nursery rhyme. Results of the reforms: scores on the California Achievement Test have gone up 13% for first-graders and 24% for second-graders, but 15% of first-and second-graders have been kept back. Hawkins is unapologetic. Says he: "Retention is not necessarily destructive to self-image. If you really want to see trauma, go to a high school and see a twelfth-grader reading at fourth-grade level. That's trauma."

Another approach to higher standards favored by Alvarado and other reformers is the establishment within a district of a so-called magnet school, featuring specialized programs in the sciences, arts or humanities along with a core curriculum. Its purpose: to achieve integration by creating an inner-city school with an irresistible claim to academic excellence. Waller High School in Chicago, once a mere holding pen, was transformed by District Superintendent Margaret Harrigan into Lincoln Park High. It has a school of science with a college-level course in biochemistry, a school of languages that offers French, German, Italian and Spanish, and a school of arts that offers everything from the Stanislavsky acting method to Baroque music.

About 95% of the students at Waller were black; enrollment at Lincoln Park is 56% black. This year 200 applied for the 30 places in Lincoln Park's International Baccalaureate program, an academically demanding two-year curriculum, and students who scored in the 97th percentile on the entrance exam were turned away. Says Stephen Ballis, an insurance executive and neighborhood parent: "This used to be a half-filled building, isolated from the community. Now it's overcrowded. Excellence and expectations of excellence are contagious."

Teaching: Needs Improvement

The most ambitious plans for longer school days, more demanding courses and higher standards are meaningless without teachers who can make school worth attending. The cold truth is that the kind of inspired teachers who can transform an English class at Lincoln Park High or a kindergarten in Benton Harbor are in woefully short supply. Warns John Goodlad, former dean of the u.c.L.A. graduate school of education and author of A Place Called School: Prospects for the Future: "The proposed curricular changes, if not accompanied by substantial improvements in pedagogy, could increase the high school dropout rate."

More than 60% of Houston public school teachers taking a competency exam last spring failed. The example is not surprising. Nationwide, education majors tend to come from the lowest strata of students: last year they scored 32 points below the national average on the verbal portion of the SAT test and 48 points lower on the mathematics section. Says James Guthrie, former chairman of the department of education at the University of California at Berkeley: "In the past, the quality of American education was maintained by women and minorities. Now these people can do other things."

The lack of talented and trained teachers is especially critical for math and science. Only 50% of such teachers are qualified in their subjects; most have been recycled from other areas. The undergraduates who excel at math or physics are smart enough to know that they can make considerably more money in industry than in teaching. From 1971 to 1980, the number of math teachers dropped 78% nationwide. Massachusetts universities produced only two graduates last June certified to teach chemistry on the high school level and only two who could teach physics. Berkeley, the proud flagship of the California system, did not graduate a single one.

Some 33 states have passed, or are considering, incentive programs to attract students and qualified teachers to science labs and math classrooms. In Kentucky, 95 students last year received up to $2,500 toward their college costs; if they spend one year as math or science teachers in a Kentucky public school, one year of their loan will be canceled. At least half a dozen states are reconsidering their certification procedures to emphasize knowledge of subject matter over teaching methodology. Such changes could open the teaching field, largely dominated by education majors, to graduates with liberal arts degrees.

Still, teachers' hours remain long (at least for the conscientious), working conditions are often poor, and the pay is terrible. While the average teacher's salary is just over $20,000, that figure reflects the pay of a corps of veterans. The average salary for beginning teachers with a B.A. is $12,769, about $4,200 less than a fledgling accountant can make. Even worse, after 15 years the accountant will probably be making between $40,000 and $50,000, while the teacher will be earning less than $25,000. A Carnegie Foundation report last month concluded that teachers' salaries declined 12.2% between 1972 and 1982, when inflation was factored in, while total personal income increased by 17.8% in real dollars during the same period. Reason enough for sporadic strikes. Chicago teachers, for instance, may go out this week.

To improve the situation, Reagan and Mondale, among others, have recommended some form of merit pay for good teachers. However, teachers' unions--the American Federation of Teachers (580,000 members) and the National Education Association (1.7 million members)--have traditionally opposed merit pay, out of suspicion that bonuses would be given out unfairly and would cut into general pay raises for entire faculties.

As interest in merit pay has increased, both the A.F.T. and, more reluctantly, the N.E.A. have agreed at least to consider the proposal, provided that some mechanism can be worked out to make sure the selection process is fair. A study conducted this summer by the American School Board Journal found that nearly two out of three teachers support the concept of merit pay. Seven states now have some form of it in one or more local school systems, nine more are considering specific legislation, and 29 are studying the idea. But the jury is still out on the potential impact. In Los Angeles, 200 of the city's 25,000 teachers last year were awarded $1,008 extra for superior performances and extra work; the program is generally well received by the teaching staff. It has also worked for more than 30 years in the Ladue School District of suburban St. Louis, and more than 20 years in Dalton, Ga. Darien, Conn., however, halted its three-year experiment in merit pay because the paperwork involved had become a bureaucratic nightmare.

The Dallas school system has just started a trial year with what may be the nation's first computerized merit-pay plan. Says the district's Director of Employee Relations Robby Collins: "Once you have human beings evaluating other human beings, the systems produce jealousies, morale problems. The beauty of our system is that it's done totally by computer." Each school will receive projections on how students should score on national achievement tests, based on the past three years' performances. In schools that outperform the computer projections, every teacher will pocket an extra $ 1,500.

An extra 1,500 bucks will not revitalize a profession, though. More important than better pay, say disgruntled teachers, is the need to improve the prestige and power of the job, to restore its practitioners' self-respect. Says A.F.T. President Albert Shanker: "We give people poor salaries, then we lock them in a room with a bunch of kids and instead of letting them teach a subject they know--Shakespeare or math--we have them doing everything else, teaching 'Living,' 'Loving,' 'Life Adjustment.' " Maintains San Francisco School District Administrator Carlos Cornejo: "We don't give teachers the recognition they need. We have them teaching in leaky rooms and supervising the boys' John in between classes. We're going to have trouble until we make teaching a profession again."

There is one reform that could go a long way toward revitalizing the profession of teaching. It would provide something that does not now exist in most school systems: a career ladder that offers opportunities for advancement. Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander's "master teacher" plan, which has yet to pass the state legislature, would provide more money ($115 million a year) and four career steps: apprentice, professional teacher, senior teacher and master teacher. Movement through the four stages would give teachers more pay for more responsibility. Those at the top could earn as much as 60% more than the base salary. The A.F.T.'s Shanker, for one, endorses the idea.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., boasts another intriguing teacher-development program. With the help of his faculty, Superintendent Jay Robinson is now working out a career plan that would identify 26 qualities an instructor should exhibit. Teachers would receive extensive training through a center that already houses a library of curriculum materials and sets up workshops to sharpen skills. Favorable evaluations would lead to pay bonuses as teachers advanced up a three-step career ladder to tenured status. Says Robinson: "Merit-pay plans attempt to identify excellence and reward it. Our plan's emphasis is on creating great teachers through training them and then putting them on a career salary schedule."

Higher education is beginning to take some responsibility for the improvement of public school teaching. One such program is the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute. Each semester eight senior Yale professors conduct seminars with 80 city teachers on such topics as Greek and Roman mythology and the elements of architecture. In addition, the teacher "fellows" become part of the Yale community, with privileges ranging from parking to library use. Says junior high Math Teacher Sheryl DeCaprio: "It sort of makes you feel professional again."

Colleges and universities are also trying to send more talent the way of the public schools. Faith Dunne, head of Dartmouth's education department, has helped put together a 15-member Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education, made up of 15 top private colleges that will use exchange programs to pool resources and attract able students. Says Dunne: "I think we could have better teachers if we got to the point where influential professors would stop discouraging their students from going into elementary and secondary school education."

Dunne has found one unexplained source of opposition: the parents of some students she has encouraged to become teachers. Asks Dunne angrily: "Why is it that people will go from suburb to suburb refusing to buy a house until they figure out where the best schools are, and at the same time forbid their children to become teachers?"

Harvard's Graduate School of Education started an elite program this fall to help professionals switch to teaching in midcareer. One of the seven "students" in the pilot program is Jim Selman, 59. With his children through college and his mortgage paid off, Selman is quitting his $50,000-a-year job as an electrical engineer at Mitre Corp. Mitre is paying Selman's $8,320 tuition. When he finishes the program, which includes 14 weeks of student teaching, Selman will be accredited to teach science and math in Massachusetts schools, and he is looking forward to being "able to effect a permanent change in a student's intellect or attitude."

Funding: More Required

Behind all the plans for reform is a fundamental but unanswered question: Who will pay? Traditionally, America's public schools were financed primarily by local property taxes. A surge of court decisions in the 1970s found that such funding had fostered great inequalities between wealthy and poor local districts. School funding became more of a state matter. Today, on average, states provide 50% of the money for community public schools and local taxes 42%, while the Federal Government contributes only about 8%. As Dade County Assistant Superintendent Paul Bell has observed: "We have had a major shift of control from the local level to the state board of education, with the legislature acting as a superboard."

State legislatures, hit hard by the recent recession, have tried to hold down taxes and, with them, school funding. But a few states have been able to buck the trend and raise taxes to fund education reforms. When the Florida legislature turned down his costly reform program this spring, Governor Graham countered with proposals for taxes on liquor and corporate profits earned abroad. By late June, when legislators reconvened for a special session, Graham showed that he could raise an extra $100 million to lengthen the school day, increase teacher pay by 5% to 7% and purchase new science equipment.

One of the nation's most ardent advocates of reform, California's new Superintendent of Public Instruction William Honig, has conquered the land of Proposition 13. Last November Honig, a former elementary school teacher, beat the incumbent and popular superintendent by hitting again and again on the need for homework, discipline, high standards. California had ranked among the top three states in the nation on school spending per pupil until the mid-1960s. It dropped to 17th place in 1969, and after Proposition 13, to 31st place in 1981-82. And a marked decline in California education performance accompanied the decline in funding.

Soon after his election, Honig asked Sacramento legislators to toughen high school graduation requirements, raise beginning salaries for teachers to $18,000, make loans for teacher training, and fund master teacher programs. Cost: $800 million. Governor George Deukmejian, who had won office on a promise of fiscal austerity, balked. But a public opinion poll indicated that Californians by a 2-to-l majority would support increased taxes to improve public schools.

Honig immediately started a campaign that rivaled his bid for office. In one day in July, he held press conferences in three different cities. Then he talked to the California Round Table, a group of 88 chief executive officers already concerned about educational reform. The Governor began to get letters. "Dear George," wrote J.R. Fluor, head of a multibillion-dollar engineering and construction firm, "I am urging you to reconsider the position you took during your campaign--a position which we all admired at the time--and relent just a bit so that sufficient revenues can be raised to ensure the reform and then the financial support so necessary to improve the quality of education here in California." Deukmejian relented, and the bill passed this summer.

Across the country, the business community is acknowledging a responsibility and stepping in to help. Corporations are "adopting" schools, providing everything from laboratory equipment to volunteer instructors. In Chicago, 176 firms have established links with 600 schools; in Los Angeles, the figures are 189 and 225. Seven of Atlanta's largest banks, as well as the local Federal Reserve branch, have collaborated in establishing the city's newest magnet school, Harper High. The banks provide not only money but their own employees for financial courses and internships for interested students. Such programs have a variety of benefits. Memphis Schools Superintendent W.W. Herenton believes that business involvement in his area has been partly responsible for the return of 1,400 white students from private schools in the past two years.

Another new source of funding is a variation on the old parent bake sale. Citizens are banding together into public school foundations to raise extra money. In California, at least 60 such organizations sponsor phonathons and benefit events to finance important extras, including theater arts, special math programs, remedial reading classes and even computers. In Washington, D.C., the Parent Group Fund taps local and congressional donors to fund field trips and special tutoring for public school children Early this year, the Ford Foundation set up the Pittsburgh-based Public Education Fund, which will help start up some 40 local education foundations across the nation in the next five years.

Community Support: Growing

The great fear of educators like Carnegie's Boyer is that the current enthusiasm for school reform will not endure the face of rising costs and slow progress.

It has happened before. After the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the nation un derwent a similar convulsion of reforming zeal as schools geared up to beat the Russians. The ardor cooled after the suc cess of U.S. space explorations made it seem that America was first once more.

Just as the Sputnik reforms were waning, the nation was also subjected to a decade of social turbulence. The civil rights movement raised issues of equal opportunity, and the Viet Nam War shook faith in American institutions. The public schools were directly affected: by busing, by a de cline in discipline, by the drive for equity. Says Christopher Jencks: "In the late '60s and early '70s, there was a collapse of consensus about what was worth teaching and what was worth learning." In addition, with many of the functions for merly assigned to home, com munity or church also break ing down, schools suddenly had to advise students on love, divorce and drugs. The Federal Government further complicated the schools' role by demanding that those who could not speak English be instructed in their native languages, that the disadvantaged be given free lunch at school, and that the handicapped be accommodated in all classrooms.

Some of the duties taken on by the schools were positive, notably much of the new egalitarianism. Diane Ravitch of Columbia University, who chronicles the postwar history of school-reform movements in a new book, The Troubled Crusade, says, "The challenge is to turn [that egalitarianism] into a commitment to educate all children and to educate them very well. We must watch in our passion excellence that it doesn't bear only on the elite, that it means we are going to have a school system that works for everyone and not just 'the winners.' "

There are forces today, however, that may impede public school reform in the near future. The U.S. is an aging nation with fewer children and a population that may be less eager to increase taxes in support of schools. Warns Carnegie's Boyer "In many ways, we're addressing not just a school problem, but a youth problem We have a generation of young people who feel essentially unattached, who are genuinely adrift." The alienation between the young and the old, he adds, could intensify over how tax moneys should be used. Furthermore, with a declining white birth rate, minorities could make up one-third of public school enrollments by 1990 (they are already 27% today). If, as a result, public schools are perceived as institutions for the underprivileged, middle-class support may diminish even more

The driving force behind much of the current revolution is the desire for economic revival. What will happen ten years from now if the results are spotty? Theodore Sizer worries about present motivations: "The rhetoric of toughness is so predominant today. There isn't the idealism and compassion that has been behind significant school reform in the past."

In short, Americans still need a larger vision of their schools' educational mission. Says Ravitch: "We went through a period of ethnic revivalism and separatism, and it may be that we are now ready to go beyond thatto think about our common needs as people and as Americans, our needs as a community."

Virginia Beach, Va. (pop. 262,000) has already tried to work out its goals for the future and how to gain them. The school board in this tidewater city near Norfolk has spent two years and $250 000 to develop a 21st century reform plan that recommends 138 changes in the present school system. Phase 1 began a month ago when classes resumed, and included such currently celebrated reforms as longer days and stronger basics. But Virginia Beach will go much further. Students will be encouraged to take harder courses by a new grading system that will assign added weieht to an A in an upper-level course.

Phase 2, to begin this year, will call for innovative teacher training and in some cases retraining, so that as competence improves, a teacher's higher expectations will inspire student performance. Visiting scholars will be invited to address both students and teachers. Says School Superintendent Ed Brickell: "It was time to stop peratmg piecemeal, patching here, adding on there; it was time to redesign our entire system."

AIthough the Virginia Beach plan could cost taxpayers as much as $14 million during the next few years, the community is behind Brickell. When the city manager cut $5 million from the school budget two years ago, 30,000 citizens signed petitions opposing the cut; hundreds came to a public hearing to praise the school system and attack the city manager. "Revolutions happen not suddenly but after a long accu- mulation of grievances and awareness of defects," says Philosopher Mortimer Adler, who is optimistic that the re-forms will continue. "This is the first time that the central matter is being discussed teaching and learning. Not civil rights or free lunches or girls vs. boys." If state legislatures, public forums and PTA meetings are any indicators, Americans seem to be reaffirming a strong commitment to education. A Gallup poll shows that 84% of Americans believe that a superior educational system is "very important" to the nation, while only 47% believe that a strong military force is as important. "There is now considerable resolve to see reform through to the end," says Chester Finn, a professor of education and public policy at Vanderbilt University. Yet he warns, "These changes will take some years, and when they happen they will be characteristically American, which is to say, uneven and sporadic." After watching the past year's crescendo of public concern, Ruth Love superintendent of Chicago's rallying system, says, "Whenever we get in trouble as a nation, we always turn to education, and those of us in education must seize this op- portunity"it won't be here always." California's Honig agrees that educators must make the most of this golden moment. But he notes, "There is no one secret answer to turn our schools around. It takes the commitment of thousands and thousands of people, people who are committed to kids and education and good human values." Those people appear to be rallying. --ByEllieMcGrath.

Reported by Dorothy Ferenbaugh/New York, J. Madeleine Nash/Chicago and Dick Thompson/ San Francisco

With reporting by Dorothy Ferenbaugh, J. MADELEINE NASH, Dick Thompson This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.