Governors and corporate leaders launch a new drive to demand more from students. History's lesson: Enemies are everywhere

   As head of a Texas school commission in the 1980s, Ross Perot railed against public schools' lax standards and misplaced priorities. His favorite story was about a vocational student who was permitted to miss 35 days of school to enter a pet chicken in livestock shows. Finally, a newspaper sent a reporter to the Houston Fat Stock Show to check Perot's claim -- and found what Perot declared "a new world champion," a student who had missed 42 days of school showing a sheep.

His folksy barbs were part of a national drive to redefine the mission of public education. Traditionally, public schools have primarily taught the majority of students vocational and "life" skills rather than rigorous academics, on the grounds that they could earn a middle-class wage in factories with diplomas that represented an eighth-grade academic education. Some high-standard schools have always existed, but the "excellence movement" of the 1980s argued that the increasing complexity of work demanded that schools ratchet up standards dramatically and give all students a shot at the sort of education traditionally reserved for the gifted and the privileged.

As a result, public schools are doing a better job of educating kids than ever before. Graduation rates are up. The share of high school students taking a core of academic subjects increased from 13 percent to 47 percent in the past decade. The gap between whites' and minorities' test scores has narrowed.

But the vast majority of American students are still educated at too low a level. Only a third of twelfth graders mastered rigorous reading passages in a 1994 test by the respected National Assessment of Educational Progress. Only 11 percent showed a strong grasp of history. NAEP reports that the average reading level of black 17-year-olds is about the same as that of white 13-year-olds. And the general standards of U.S. schools pale in comparison with those of other industrialized nations. Says Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers: "Very few American pupils are performing anywhere near where they could be performing."

This week, 45 governors and the chief executives of dozens of the nation's largest corporations are gathering in Palisades, N.Y., to explore ways to bring "world class" standards to American education. "Standards are the starting point, the sine qua non of school reform," says Louis Gerstner, chairman of IBM and cohost of the summit with Gov. Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin and Gov. Bob Miller of Nevada. And Americans seem anxious to respond. Three quarters of the respondents to a poll for U.S. News say academic standards should be raised. "Parents want to make sure in these anxious times that no matter where they live, the standards will be high," explains Celinda Lake of Lake Research, who conducted the survey with Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group.

But at present -- and in sharp contrast to other industrialized nations -- America has a patchwork system of widely varying standards set largely by some 15,000 local school systems. "We have had, in effect, no standards," says Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy. The Palisades summit will attempt to address the problem by getting governors to pledge to create high standards in their states within two years. A group of governors and business leaders is then expected to spend the next year creating a clearinghouse to help states set standards and recognize model standards with "seals of approval."

Yet, this new drive comes six years after a summit between President Bush and the nation's governors (including Bill Clinton) spurred a movement to build a national system of standards and tests. The effort has been plagued by opposition from both liberals and conservatives, and its many troubles suggest that if the Palisades participants are to meet their lofty aims, they will have to overcome these barriers:



A LEGACY OF LOCAL CONTROL

There's a huge conflict at the center of the standards movement: School reformers are skeptical that thousands of independent local school boards can produce the higher academic standards that the nation as a whole needs, but Americans have a long tradition of allowing communities to set their own policies. "We're not going to give up local control just because some CEO says we need statewide standards," insists Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, a conservative Republican. Leading liberal school reformer Theodore Sizer rejects state and national standards beyond basic skills because parents should have "rights over their children's minds."

While more than half the respondents to the U.S. News poll said they wanted standards set at the national or state level, the federal Department of Education has been pummeled by conservatives in the past two years for encouraging states to set "world class" standards as part of the Clinton administration's Goals 2000 initiative. The program is voluntary, no regulations were written for it, and states are given wide latitude on how they can use the $ 370 million authorized by Congress for the effort. But conservatives have attacked it as a "federal power grab" and "an attempt to have government determine official knowledge." GOP presidential candidates, including Lamar Alexander, blasted the effort. Alexander, who as education secretary under Bush promoted national standards as a "revolutionary" idea, charged that Goals 2000 assumed "Americans are too stupid to make decisions for themselves, and that experts and special-interest groups in the nation's capital know more about what should happen in schools than families, communities or states."

The controversy over Goals 2000 guarantees that the idea of national standards and tests, in the short term, is dead. Federal standards are widely disliked, so the notion of national standards independent of the federal government was discredited, too. "We might get national standards eventually," says Governor Thompson. "But the only way it's going to happen is bottom up, through coalitions of states." The question now is whether tough statewide standards will fly. IBM's Gerstner is hopeful: "If the states set standards, we go from 15,000 standards to 50, let's do it."



SKEPTICAL TEACHERS

Surprisingly, many teachers and principals are "tepid" about "the value of advanced learning and study," according to a report prepared for the Palisades summit by the Public Agenda organization, which has done studies on teacher attitudes. "Far from being strong advocates for high-level learning in their own fields, [they] seem to downplay the importance of the very subjects they teach."

This prevailing anti-intellectualism is reinforced, says Tucker, by "a very strong belief that academic achievement is mostly a matter of natural ability." Indeed, in a poll by U.S researchers, 93 percent of Japanese teachers but only 26 percent of U.S. teachers said studying hard was the most important factor in math performance. Many U.S. educators and a number of civil rights advocates also argue that higher standards will hurt disadvantaged students by increasing dropout rates -- a notion school reformers reject.

Many educators are wary of the standards movement as yet another indictment of public schools, and they get defensive. They have new ammunition from authors of recent books defending public schools. Hundreds of attendees at a school administrators' convention in San Diego earlier this month cheered as David Berliner, co-author of The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud and the Attack on America's Public Schools, proclaimed the criticism of public education a right-wing conspiracy aided by the media. In part, educators feel they are being held responsible for factors influencing student learning, such as poverty and crime, that they can't control.

Their ambivalence about academic subjects is partly a reflection of the strong belief in the public education circles of the importance of students' emotional well being. In some states, that has led standards setters to focus on fuzzy, feel-good goals. A movement in public education known as "outcome-based education," or OBE, urges schools to shift from a "focus on curriculum traditions and content" to a focus on "significant life challenges and opportunities." This has sparked a huge conservative backlash; William Bennett calls it "a Trojan horse for social engineering."

The conservative attack on OBE helped the standards movement by prompting a number of states to drop their often vague pronouncements on nonacademic matters and focus on raising academic performance. But in as many instances, the attack undercut reformers' attempts to introduce tougher academic standards. "It took the good idea of setting standards and put a bull's eye on it," says Andy Plattner of the New Standards Project, a foundation-funded effort to draft national standards and tests, by tarring all standards drives as synonymous with OBE.



COMMUNITIES AREN'T CONVINCED

Many districts are ambivalent about tougher academic standards. They like their extracurriculars -- a lot. "The same people who say with straight faces that they cannot afford X or Y have no trouble outfitting a 150-member marching band or building a new football stadium," argues Thomas Corcoran, a researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who has studied the standards movement. "It comes down to priorities."

The U.S. News poll suggests where priorities lie. Nearly 60 percent say that sports and music and other extracurricular programs deserve the emphasis and resources they now receive; only 35 percent say some of the money devotedto extracurricular programs should be diverted into academic programs. In sharp contrast, schools in other industrialized nations clearly focus on academics.



WHOSE STANDARDS?

Convincing people that there should be tough standards is only half the battle. The second half is forging a consensus on what the standards should be in a vast and diverse nation. The release of model national history standards a year ago provoked a huge public outcry, particularly from conservatives, for downplaying the nation's greatness and failing to mention by name historical figures such as Paul Revere, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein. Even though the standards were revolutionary in their high expectations for students and their attention to the diversity of the American experience, the attack on them has made it very unlikely any future history standards will be widely adopted.

The difficulty in getting a consensus on standards has produced a number of massive, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink documents that are simply unwieldy. The history standards ran to 314 pages -- and still couldn't make anyone happy. Other groups have sought to dodge controversy by keeping standards short and vague. The organizations representing the nation's English and reading teachers, polarized by debates over how to teach reading and what students should read, recently released national "language arts" standards that fit on a single page. To be meaningful, reformers say, standards have to set an expectation and then be clear about what students and teachers need to do to meet it.



TESTS AND MONEY

Tough standards require tough tests. "Standards without consequences are just more paper," says Christopher Cross, president of the Maryland State Board of Education. Many industrialized nations have rigorous subject-matter exams that both colleges and employers expect students to pass; the tests drive the nations' entire educational systems. But tests geared to high standards don't exist in the United States except at the Advanced Placement level. Widely used basic-skills tests drive down the level of instruction in many classrooms. The college-admissions process doesn't promote high standards either: Many colleges require only a high school diploma. "American high school students are among the only students in the world who have no incentives to take tough courses in school," says Tucker.

A few states are introducing tough new tests to spur higher standards. Maryland, for example, is designing 12 new end-of-course exams in academic subjects; the class of 2004 will have to pass 10 to graduate. In Kentucky, schools are eligible for state-funded bonuses of up to $ 2,600 per teacher if their students meet expectations on new statewide exams, and the incentives are spurring improvements. But the expense of putting the tests together and opposition from key voices in the education establishment don't bode well. A resolution passed last year by the National Education Association, the powerful teachers' union, proclaims the NEA's opposition to testing "mandated by local, state or national authority."

Moreover, translating higher standards into higher student achievement is going to cost a lot of money to improve textbooks and the skills of a teaching force that has traditionally only had to educate a relatively small number of students to high levels. One measure of the task: Only 63 percent of high school teachers now have a college degree in the academic subject they teach most frequently. Gerstner of IBM contends that "we should be able to do it out of money we spend today," by making tough choices. But others argue there are huge discrepancies in spending that will make national standards unfair unless the funding playing field is leveled.

So, for the governors at the Palisades conference, bringing world-class standards to American schools is an endeavor fraught with fiscal and political perils. The question is whether they are serious about the task or merely want to be seen talking about a popular issue in an election year.
 
WHO'S MAKING THE GRADE?

In a U.S. News poll, 87 percent say kids shouldn't graduate from high school without passing standard academic exams.

58 percent say firms should screen job seekers by standard exam scores and grades.

76 percent of U.S. high school seniors spend less than five hours per week on homework. In Japan, only 35 percent spend so little time on homework.

Japanese teachers earn 10 percent more than top civil servants. U.S. salaries are set locally.

High school students in Japan, France and Germany spend more than twice as many hours in class studying math, history and science as U.S. kids do.

In France, Germany, Israel and Japan, about half of all students take advanced

examinations; a third pass. Only 6.6 percent of U.S. kids take Advanced Placement exams; 4.4 percent pass.

Days in school year, on average:

Japan 240; Korea 222; Taiwan 222; Israel 215; Scotland 191; Canada 188; U.S. 178
 
AMERICANS' VIEWS ON EDUCATION ISSUES

National. Sixty-two percent of respondents in the U.S. News poll think the education kids receive around the nation is fair, poor or very poor.

Local. Forty-four percent think their local schools do a good job. Blacks and rural residents are among the most pleased.

Most serious problems. Thirty-four percent say parental uninvolvement; 22 percent, lack of discipline; 13 percent, inadequate funding; 24 percent, combination of factors. Pollster Celinda Lake notes that most people think the things that need fixing in schools don't cost more money. That's good for conservatives, bad for liberals.

Setting standards. Thirty-nine percent say the job should be left to local education authorities (especially those in South Central and Mountain states); 27 percent say state authorities should set them; 24 percent say national authorities (especially younger women; suburban parents; Hispanics).

Gifted students. Forty-six percent say talented kids should be taught in separate classrooms, while 44 percent think they should be taught in classrooms with other children. Whites favor separation of the gifted; blacks favor integration.
 
U.S. News poll of 1,000 American adults conducted by Celinda Lake of Lake Research and Ed Goeas of the Tarrance Group March 16-18, 1996. Margin of error: plus or minus 3.1 percent. Percentages may not add up to 100 because some respondents answered "Don't know."
 
Copyright 1996 U.S. News & World Report  
U.S. News & World Report