Tall Order

Confidence in America’s public schools is beginning to grow. It can continue to grow only if politicians and educators pick their way carefully along the path to full education reform.

One path worth attention at the top has been charted in a recent report on teaching from the Carnegie Forum on Education and the Economy, supported by the Carnegie Corp. The report’s authors say that the nation must regard teachers as professionals, pay them as professionals, recruit talented college students who want to be professionals and provide classrooms and support worthy of professionals.

Thousands of teachers who have grown gray with the postwar baby boom will retire in the next decade, just in time to miss the next baby boom and the wave of new students who have immigrated to this country. Thousands of new teachers must take their places. Carnegie Forum chairman Lewis M. Branscomb of IBM says that the demand for new teachers and renewed interest in education presents the United States with a rare opportunity for basic reforms in teaching.

How basic? The report thinks that teachers of the future should major in arts and sciences, not in education, as undergraduates. A national board for professional teaching standards should be established to set criteria for teachers and to certify that applicants meet them. Teachers should earn higher pay in return for greater accountability for students’ progress. “Lead teachers” would accept greater leadership in helping other teachers and upholding high standards. And far more active efforts must be made to recruit minority teachers because they may soon make up only 5% of the total teaching force.

The report’s underlying premise is that the nation’s education system cannot be repaired but must be rebuilt. That is a tall and visionary order that already have come under attack from some of the very educators who would have to supervise the rebuilding. And the attack has not even focused as yet on the cost--perhaps $50 billion over the next 10 years.

Is a major rebuilding of public schools possible when the nation’s teachers, teacher-training institutions and school administrators have such a stake in the status quo? The first answers to that question may come at the national governors’ conference in August, when education will be at the top of the agenda.

Many governors and business leaders have rediscovered a truth that somehow went underground during the 1960s and 1970s. Their states and their economies depend on a work force educated to deal with both modern technology and a world that is not only a global village but also a global marketplace. The time was, the report says, when the United States prospered because it produced more goods with machinery that workers with low-skill levels could operate. Now other nations have learned that trick, and perform it at wage rates so low that the United States cannot compete with them. To remain competitive today, more companies need employees who can manage advanced technology and think for themselves.

At their August conference, the men and women who provide political leadership in the 50 states should break the Carnegie report into two parts: the difficult, which they can implement immediately, and the impossible, which will take a little longer. The report is vulnerable in many ways to carping and inertia. But it is right about this: An opportunity to make the kinds of major reforms that are needed to complete reforms in American education may not come around again until well into the 21st Century. It is an opportunity that the nation cannot afford to miss.