Get Real on Education (Commentary)

In 1989, when I was an education writer for the Arkansas Gazette, an elementary school principal I was interviewing repeatedly described children in his school as “at risk.” I asked him to define the term.

I expected him refer to race or poverty or academic performance, or all three. Instead, he surprised me by saying:

“These days we almost take the position that every child who comes through the door is at risk.”

I was reminded of that principal, Stanton Strauss, when I attended the Blue Ribbon Commission on Public Education meeting during the “Speak Up, Arkansas” event earlier this month.

Most of the people who came to North Little Rock High School’s East Campus to participate in the statewide event were educators — administrators, principals, teachers. It didn’t surprise me, then, that improved salaries and more parental responsibility were common themes emerging from the small-group brainstorming sessions on ways to improve our schools. It is impossible to argue with such obviously valid ways to improve schools from both the supply and demand side. If we had better teachers, which better pay would attract, and better parents delivering better prepared, more respectful and disciplined children to the schoolhouse door, better schools would be a given.

But let’s get real. As long as we keep expecting the quality of parents to improve before we improve the quality of our schools, we are never going to get anywhere. Of course it is unfair to expect the schools to make up for homes in which there are more televisions than books and parents who can’t make subject and verb tense agree on a bet. But what choice do we have? Every time we promote a kid to fourth grade when we know he’s still having trouble sounding out words, we have doomed him to a life of frustration and failure and, very possibly, crime. What’s more, we have doomed his children — but we’ll blame him for it.

We can’t expect parents who were failed by our inadequate and inequitable educational system to turn around and be model mentors for the next generation of students. Yes, we can and should adopt programs to encourage parents to do right. Parental failure is certainly a reason for student failure, but we have to stop making it an excuse, especially since any student who walks through the door may be at risk.

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Another theme coming out of the discussion that night was the reminder that not all children are going to be “college material.”

This line of reasoning, like the need for more parental involvement, is impossible to argue against. Just as I once heard Lt. Gov. Winthrop Paul Rockefeller say, no combination of computer keystrokes will unclog a toilet.

But, folks, Arkansas is third from the bottom in percentage of adults with degrees. It’s a bit premature to be worried that we are going to run out of workers who haven’t gone to college.

The scariest thing I heard at Speak Up, Arkansas was a suggestion that the minimum age at which children can legally drop out of high school be lowered. The same brainstorming group also suggested raising teacher pay. I was told that the people in that group were mostly teachers.

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Gov. Mike Huckabee is notoriously stingy when it comes to risking any of his rich supply of political capital, so I find it curious that he is willing to look so bad by railing against the limits on gifts he can accept.

This governor — the same one who said poor Arkansans were too proud to take a handout like Medicaid for their children at the same time he was accepting $112,000 in handouts himself — is arguing through his lawyer that only bribes given in exchange for specific actions should be forbidden.

He seems so sure of his position that one wonders why every state in the union and the federal government ever dreamed of limiting gifts to public officials.

Of course, Huckabee’s ethics and motives are above suspicion, and anyone who suggests that he is just sore because he was pressured into taking a $100,000 cut in his standard of living must be a partisan cynic. The governor has said that his conscience is clear, and that should be good enough for anyone.

But what if we happened to elect someone less perfect, someone not innately immune to temptation, someone more closely resembling former Tennessee Gov. Ray Blanton or former state Sen. Nick Wilson? Can you imagine Huckabee arguing that Bill Clinton and Jim Guy Tucker should have been able to rake in gifts hand-over-fist as long as they didn’t meet the strict legal definition of a bribe?

Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. E-mail her at [email protected].