Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for March 6, 2006 TO BLINDLY GO...

...where others have been before?

Is that anything like telling teachers that they have failed and then making them sit in a room together (or in rooms separately) after school or on SIP days with directions to "Invent the Wheel"?

Just wondering...

Get smart on education

By Stanley Crouch

It would be boring to continue to complain about public education if the teaching of our nation's children were not so important - and if its failures did not give us a very good sense of where our country will be in another 50 years. As it stands, we had better start manufacturing tin cups because many of our offspring will be out in the streets begging instead of singing for their supper. Much economic power will have shifted to India and China, with those two enormous populations popping the whip as the rest of the world jumps through hoops of fire.

Well, that is what it looks like right now because our education system does not adequately develop and serve our most important resource, our population, our remarkably diverse people, the flesh and blood behind every charismatic tradition or innovation, the group that holds all steady or moves ahead on what it can, when it can.

Everybody seems to be asleep at the wheel, assuming that it will be all right if we just remain patient. But we keep getting the same depressing reports, comparing our schools unfavorably to those in the rest of the industrial world.

Some seem to think that public schools will all be saved by allocating more money, while others reject that as making the same sense as administering first aid to a rotting corpse. The unions invariably take the former position and our free marketeers uphold the second, asserting that school choice and competition will force improvement because quality will then serve the self-interest of those who inhabit the unions.

I maintain that we still do not have enough information about those schools that have been successful at working against what would seem the most implacable odds. They are here, there and everywhere in the country, but no agency - not the federal government, not a think tank, not a philanthropic organization - has done a national study to see what techniques these effective schools have in common. Such information would give us a clue to triumphing over the troubles in our educational system.

Of course, we do not have to actually know what works. We can forever allow the two opposing sides to fill the atmosphere with hot air and continue to be mystified by poor performance.

But it is only with a meticulous examination of what succeeds that we will be able to chart a better future for our children and for the system that is supposed to serve them.

Had we such information - hard, straight, clear facts - the conversation would then have to shift from one of speculation to one built upon objective facts.

I think we have stood blindfolded before the elephant in the room long enough. Let us remove the blindfolds and get something done.

Stanley Crouch is a columnist, novelist, essayist, critic and television commentator. He has served since 1987 as an artistic consultant at Lincoln Center and is a co-founder of the department known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. In 1993, he received both the Jean Stein Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a MacArthur Foundation grant. He is now working on a biography of Charlie Parker.