The Bold Quest For Quality

COVER STORY

The nation's public schools are shaping up

The 19 students in a junior English class are discussing a George Eliot novel, which they have read in the three days between orientation day and the start of school. Five students are debating with the teacher about the time frame of the novel, as well as the use of first-person narrative. Near by, a class of sophomores listens intently as the teacher fires off volleys of French. Not a word of English is spoken. The same spirit of curiosity and dedication seems to flow through other rooms at Lincoln Park High School in Chicago, where students from the ghetto mingle with those from glass palaces on the lakefront. Says French Teacher Maureen Breen: "Something is very definitely happening in the air once these kids walk through those doors. We can all feel it."

Kansas City threw a huge pep rally last month, complete with a 25-member song-and-dance troupe. Yet there were no football players proudly strutting through tissue-paper arches. The head cheerleader was president of the Chamber of Commerce. The team being hailed: the city's teachers.

Johnson Elementary School in Benton Harbor, Mich., is a one-story building that sits a few hundred yards east of Interstate 94, the heavily traveled highway between Chicago and Detroit. The impoverished school district does not have a sign to put on the building. But in the small lobby, which doubles as the school's library, there is an award from the Michigan Department of Education congratulating the school's fourth-graders for scoring 20% higher than their predecessors on a state assessment test. Beside the plaque, in bold construction-paper letters, is the school's motto: "We demand excellence."

As 44.3 million students settle down to another school year, a growing number are finding—and responding to—a new demand for excellence in the classroom. More required courses and tougher graduation requirements. No-frills curriculums featuring basic skills. Old-fashioned homework and computer literacy. Rigor without the customary mortis.

Once again, Americans have decided that good public schools are essential for the public good. Parents, educators, business people and politicians everywhere are forming grass-roots coalitions to raise standards and improve the quality of instruction from kindergarten to senior year. Their vigor is bringing a new vitality to education, the institution that has been called America's secular religion. Says Terrel Bell, U.S. Secretary of Education: "There is currently in progress the greatest, most far-reaching and, I believe, the most promising reform and renewal of education we have seen since the turn of the century."

Report cards on the nation's public schools have been dismal for a decade: teachers cannot teach; students cannot, or will not, learn. The shortcomings of the schools have been documented by lower Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, a national high school dropout rate of some 25%, the shrinking elite of students taking calculus and physics, the proliferation of remedial courses in colleges and in businesses to repair the damage. One study in the '70s found that 30% of 18-year-olds (47% of black youths) were functionally illiterate, unable to read or follow a set of simple directions.

Over the past year a flurry of reports have