The Failure of High Schools and the Progress of Education.

Abstract

For many Americans, the verdict is in: the high schools are failing. Americans are better educated and have higher standards of living than ever, but popular magazines and academic journals attack the decline of academic standards. Public schools have made considerable progress toward equality for students from poor or minority backgrounds in recent decades, yet newspapers feature stories about student disobedience and violence.1 More high-school students than ever are working, yet educators fret about the weakening connection between school and work. For many, the evidence is convincing. In the sixties we worried chiefly about elementary schools and concentrated most improvement efforts there. Toward the end of the decade the problems of adolescence began to claim more attention, and within a few years collective attention seemed riveted on the disobedience of teenagers and the disasters in their schools. Since then the news has been steadily bad. The high schools are a paradox, yet there has been little debate about the diagnosis of failure. There has, however, been considerable dispute about what caused the problems. Among the most popular explanations are a decline in the quality of teaching, the growth of an anti-intellectual youth culture, the replacement of reading by viewing, and the daily curriculum of explicit sex, violence, and insubordination offered by television and movies. The decline of the family, for several centuries Americans' favorite explanation for whatever ails them, is also high on the list. Each of these accounts has something to recommend it, but each evokes a time when things generally did work well.2 The satisfactions of this belief about the past seem to be a partial compensation for the sense that our time is out of joint. Appealing as these explanations may be, we prefer a contrary notion? namely, that the problems we see now are in good measure the result of past educational successes. Perhaps the most signal success of American public education has been providing nearly equal access to elementary and secondary school for all, an achievement quite distinct in human history. The high schools have been charged with providing equal education since early in this century, but for a long time students from the working class and from minority groups stayed away in disproportionately large numbers. As a result, high schools remained a special institution for many decades?special, because although they were open to the public and thus in some sense egalitarian, their enrollment was drawn heavily from those most willing and able to use the education provided. 69