What’s the answer?

by Jack Stapleton Jr.

At the recent National Governors’ Association meeting in St. Louis (when members were away from their own education departments, teacher’s lobbies and only a handful of reporters on hand to hear what they had to say), the chief executives assembled let loose with a barrage of criticism most wouldn’t have dared voice in their own state capitols.

One governor (and I think it was Gov. Parris Glendening from Maryland but I wouldn’t swear to it if I’m ever called as a witness in a slander suit) blasted the quality of American education and blamed it on, and I quote the honorable official, “Let’s face it, the teachers are to blame. Too many of them are lousy, primarily because we’re doing a lousy job of training education students when they get to our colleges and universities.”

None of the assembled governors, including our own Mel Carnahan, took exception to the remarks of the Marylander whose views were promptly seconded. Then came the exculpatory testimony of the governor of North Dakota, Edward Schafer, who told his distinguished colleagues that his state had encountered some poorly trained teachers but had devised a plan to supplement the training of baccalaureate-degreed teachers by forming an academy that would elicit better instructional performance.

Everyone in the room seemed to jump on the bandwagon. Before long, the teachers, both the good and the bad, stood indicted by the NGA before members turned to another subject of far less importance. Most seemed to agree that the subject had been thoroughly debated; the culprits were chastened and the solutions obvious even to those who weren’t paying much attention to anything that had been said for the previous two hours.

I watched one of the conference’s heavy hitters during the entire lynching-all-the-teachers exercise. He caught my attention by his constant telephoning and almost continuous summoning of one or the other members of his staff. This governor was either dealing with a prison riot back home or his wife had just run off with the speaker of the House of Representatives. He was busy doing something else except when it came time to verbally castrate the teachers. Then he found eloquence undreamed of since the days of Thomas Paine. “We must do a better job of educating our teachers!” he demanded without benefit of any of the previous indictments, which he couldn’t have heard prior to his eloquent summation.

It later occurred to me that the governors’ inconclusive discussion of the problems facing our nation’s public schools closely resembled the way most of us have approached this serious, often debilitating dilemma. Each of us has our own pet idea of what’s needed to restore value to our educational system so that it prepares today’s students for tomorrow’s world. One group pushes charter schools; another believes that home teaching is the answer; still others would like to see a voucher system inaugurated and let parents search out the best opportunities for schooling. Another segment would like to see a major effort to reduce the number of students per teacher while others believe the whole problem can be resolved with more money, yours and mine.

I don’t know the right answer. I strongly suspect that if we locked our state education commissioner, Bob Bartman, in a room with all the state’s elected officials and the members of both legislative education committees for a full year, they still couldn’t come up with a formula that even half would endorse, much less support. Public education has gone political, as if there weren’t enough problems already.

We Missourians spent $3.4 billion to transform the public schools in St. Louis and Kansas City into educational marvels. Even Gov. Ventura knows that didn’t work: Kansas City can’t even hire a school superintendent who will stay a full semester and St. Louis’ schools are losing their accreditation. What happened to all those billions? They went down the drain because money is obviously not the total answer; neither is any other single plan and until we find the right one this problem will stay with us, without resolution, until someone more determined than the rest of us finally comes along.

And now, turning to problems we think are solved….

[Missouri News & Editorial Service, Inc. Copyright (C) 1999 MNES Corp.] C1017992