ODYSSEY PART 23 - I: `Odyssey’ item on education – Part I

In your book you write at length about education: organizing efforts with Milwaukee's inner-city students; teaching university seminars on policy issues; helping to found two innovative inner-city public schools; and serving on university commissions grappling with the future of higher education.

While our schools in Plymouth and Sheboygan County and our post-secondary colleges and vocational institutions are all struggling to offer quality education, there is a huge national challenge facing America: we are losing our competitive edge in the global economy.

At the beginning of your chapter on “Wake-up Call to the Learning Establishment,” you mention a national conference your department organized, when economist Robert Theobald discussed the implications of his new book “The Rapids of Change.” He asked the audience if they thought today's educational system was preparing our youth to cope with the swift currents rocking the world. The people chuckled at such a preposterous question and no hands went up.

Q. What helpful ideas and models emerge from your experience that could offer value for us here and for this great national need?

A. When the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, it shook up the educational establishment, stimulating a great debate in the 1960s for educational reform. The prevailing idea was that society was failing because our scientific education was falling behind. The debate has never let up. In 1983 it resulted in the publication “A Nation at Risk,” a report of the National Commission on Excellence in Education appointed by the U.S. secretary of education. The commission concluded: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed it to happen to ourselves...”

In the following years, hundreds of reports have come out in every aspect of school reform. While this movement initially focused on primary and secondary schools, it quickly extended into higher education. It was becoming obvious that the educational establishment was a conservative institution, ill-prepared to match the transformations taking place in our society and the world. In earlier years many articulate individuals voiced new thinking, but later reform efforts were more “official,” involving state boards of education and governors, local school superintendents, major education associations and professional groups. Naturally, there were interlocking directorates where authors and policy-makers belonged to the same networks using common conceptual frameworks. Despite this huge investment of energy, however, results have been very mixed.

After I joined the university in the early 1960s, some of my main efforts focused on the inner city. A 60- block survey convinced us that the biggest single issue facing the youth was the reading problem. Once kids had fallen behind several grades by junior high school, everything started to go wrong. We organized pilot programs for reading and eventually established a network of tutorial centers scattered through the inner city, usually operating out of church basements, using mostly volunteers, and cooperating with the university reading clinic. We developed a widely used manual on how to organize a first-rate tutoring program. Over subsequent years, every research study has confirmed the basic importance of reading.

Our next big initiative was to figure out how to build better cooperation between school and community, to overcome the anger and alienation toward authority generally and schools specifically. The tension was intense between inner-city leaders and the conservative public school board – considered unresponsive to community needs. Threat of violence was always there. We organized the Central City Teacher Community Project, where teachers used any legitimate creative way to win the confidence of each kid and motivate the family for learning. At one time this high-impact program reached one-quarter of all Milwaukee inner-city schools.

We trained a couple hundred block leaders who were incredible forces in winning trust. They were expert in identifying community needs that had to be dealt with and gaining political support. Although the reading problem and alienation were central to low school achievement, an effective response had to recognize a whole package of factors. This meant training teachers and administrators so they could reach the child with a relevant curriculum; recognizing the role of a safe and stable home environment and parental support and dealing with single-parent and alcohol and drug issues; noting conditions of physical and mental health, including nutrition; the employment situation and family economic security and the question of whether the child must work at an early age; ability to buy books and wear presentable clothes; the home situation, including sanitation and heating and study space. In essence, school reform really required comprehensive community development, which led to our helping to found the Harambee Revitalization Project and other community development initiatives. It also pushed us to design a “community health” model that viewed “health” in a holistic sense.

It's not surprising that planners of school reform often produce meager results in low-income areas; it's because they conceive the school as a stand-alone entity instead of belonging to the surrounding community infrastructure.