Posted on: Thursday, April 24, 2003

EDITORIAL
Task of education is a job for everyone

If you were looking for something to dramatize how difficult it is to make improvements in our public schools, take a look at a recent report from the New York-based policy organization Public Agenda.

In a roundup of surveys of teachers, parents, students and others, the organization discovered there is far more on the minds of Americans than the currently popular "standards and accountability" movement. Standards and accountability are at the heart of the federal No Child Left Behind education law.

And while most people surveyed agree that standards should be raised and the education system held accountable for achieving those standards, they have other concerns that carry more weight.

Among them: discipline problems in public school classrooms, parents who do not care about their child's education, bureaucratic interference with teaching, and principals who lack authority to manage their schools as they see fit.

Anyone who has struggled to make change in the Hawai'i school system will recognize that list.

What this really says is that the idea of standards and accountability cannot be applied strictly within the classroom environment.

Raising standards means raising standards for everyone involved in education, from the individual teacher to the managers of the school system to the families of schoolchildren and the children themselves. Every player must be put on notice that our expectations are going up.

And the same goes for accountability. Yes, individual teachers and individual schools must be held accountable for their performance. This is the heart of the No Child law, which applies both sanctions and assistance on schools that fail to perform to standards.

But education managers ("bureaucrats," if you will) must also be held to the standards/accountability test. Are their actions truly helping schools achieve their mission, or are they getting in the way? Are there any sanctions available for bureaucratic red tape that gets in the way of improving education?

And what about families? Are parents held accountable for their role in their child's education? Is there any way to sanction parents who let their child drift, who fail to insist on homework being completed and who never engage with their child's teacher?

Some schools have experimented with a parental "report card" that in a gentle way advises parents on how they are doing with their part of the educational mission. There may be other innovations that can both encourage or even shame parents into becoming more active.

And finally, there are the students. The poll found that most Americans believe that students are disrespectful, disorderly and not interested in listening to adults.

While some of that may be attributed to a perception gap between children and adults that spans the ages, it may also recognize an erosion of discipline in our public schools.

No one is proposing a return to the day of the cane and paddle. But clearly our schools must be allowed to educate in an orderly and respectful environment.

Teachers must have the authority to remove or isolate students whose behavior disrupts the entire class and eliminates the possibility of any real teaching.