Having to Defend Public Education?

Here Are Some Answers to Those Thorny Questions

Public education has always been an important part of our lives. And a hot topic when community members worry out loud about what's happening in our schools. Perhaps you've found yourself in the middle of a discussion where you've had to defend public education. Or explain why it's important for every educator to join the Association. If so, you're not alone.

But don't worry. Now you can have the answers to the most commonly asked "tough" questions right at your fingertips -- in a book from the NEA Professional Library:

Q&A - I Am the NEA: The Most Provocative Questions Asked of Education Professionals Today and How to Answer Them. 
By David L. Smith and Lynn Coffin. 96 pp. Member Price: $9.95.

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Here is an excerpt from the book:

We've heard that public  schools are failing our kids. Why aren't our kids getting a good education? 
Despite all the hand-wringing in some quarters about the sorry state of public education, America can and should be very proud of its schools. Today, dropout rates are lower than ever; students in the 4th and 8th grades are scoring higher than ever on the reading and math portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress; SAT scores have trended steadily upwards since the 1970s; and more students than ever are going on to post-secondary education.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 48.2 million students will walk through the doors of American schools this year -- that's over 48 million young people with incredibly diverse backgrounds and abilities. The figures indicate the breadth of diversity: 7.9 percent are English language learners; 13.3 percent are special needs children; 36.6 percent are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches. No other nation on earth attempts to educate all of its children to the extent that America does – not Japan, where only a tiny minority of students attend university, not Germany, where students are rigorously separated at an early age into career tracks, not Korea, where the population is virtually homogeneous. Americans expect every child to have a solid K-12 education and access to a post-secondary education if he or she so chooses.

So where does the notion that American kids aren’t doing well come from? Well…to some extent it comes from individuals who favor privatizing public education and creating a marketplace where schools compete for students. It is not to the advantage of the privatizers to admit that schools are doing well – it ruins their argument. Having said that, however, it is also true that there are schools in the United States that don’t measure up and there are students at the bottom of the achievement scale. Let’s look at the reasons behind this.

According to education analysts, the United States has both one of the top educational systems among industrialized nations and also one of the worst. Not surprisingly, the problem begins the funding. Unlike other industrialized nations and states such as Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong, which tend to both administer and fund their schools centrally, American depends heavily on local property taxes to carry most of the burden. Because of this, affluent neighborhoods have a huge advantage over low-income ones. In many cases, affluent neighborhoods spend more than three times as much per student as low-income neighborhoods in the same state. The curriculum is the same, the standards for teachers are the same, but the outcomes are often dramatically different. It seems that America has two education systems, one for the affluent, and one for the poor.

The challenges that educators face in these underfunded schools are enormous. Imagine the frustration of trying to meet state requirements with only obsolete – or even no – textbooks available. Imagine teaching children in schools overrun with rates and infested with termites, which eat not only bookshelves, but books and school records as well. Imagine pupil-teacher ratios of over 40 to 1. No wonder children who go to these schools lag behind their peers!

So what can be done to erase inequities so that all students actually have the opportunity to succeed in school? Look at some of the facts:

• Seventy-five percent of our nation’s schools are either outdated or overcrowded.
  
  
• Title I funding for disadvantaged students is well below the level that would provide all eligible children with Title I services.
  
  
• The number of teachers leaving the profession outnumbers those entering it by 23 percent. Overall, teacher salaries are about 20 percent below the salaries of other professionals with comparable education and training.
  
  
• Only 34 percent of 4th graders, 51 percent of 8th graders, and 53 percent of 12th graders report having newspapers, encyclopedias, magazines, and books at home.
  
  
• The proportion of 17-year-ods who have said they read for fun at least once a week declined by 17 percent between 1984 and 1999.
  
  

As we pointed out earlier, American students are, on balance, doing very well. If America truly wants to ensure that we leave no child behind, however, our leaders must make a commitment to closing the achievement gap between poor and minority students in under-resourced schools and their more affluent counterparts.

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For more information and to order the book, see the NEA Professional Library site.