Our nation is at a profound moral and intellectual crossroads in education—but it will take more than school reform to improve the education that American children receive. Unless we as a nation establish a new partnership with our children, families, and schools, America's students will remain at risk.
The obstacles to learning that American children face reach far beyond school walls. The Social Health Index of our entire nation has declined. Low birth weight, teenage parenthood, and the number of children living in poverty or in single-parent homes have all increased, with devastating impact on schools and learning.
Therefore, while continuing to improve schools, we must also help to create the conditions in families and communities that will allow all children to succeed in school. According to "America's Smallest School: The Family," a recent policy report by the Educational Testing Service, As long as the focus of attention remains solely on how we can make the schools do a better job, it is quite unlikely that the nation can reach such ambitious goals as being first in the world in science and mathematics achievement by the year 2000. The efforts of schools are launched from the platform of readiness and support for learning, which are products of the home.The resolve of American society to achieve the national education goals set for the year 2000 will be tested both by the changed priorities and behaviors of American families as well as by progress in restructuring education. And for homes ill equipped, and lacking resources to provide the supports for learning, policies that strengthen the family are also policies to raise the platform from which schools provide better education.
When children are hungry, abused, or living in despair, education reform is an illusion. As Jonathan Kozol, author of Savage Inequalities, said in a recent address to the Education Commission of the States, "Structural reform without equity is like rearranging broken furniture. . . . All you have is restructured destitution; all you have is more inventive insufficiency."
Ernest Boyer has said, "It is not the schools that have failed. It is the social partnership [of parents, communities, and businesses] that has failed in the education of our children; but schools alone have been asked to respond to the pathology of our culture." And, in my view, we cannot do this without forging new alliances and partnerships.
- Help strengthen families through family support and parent education programs. We need to educate parents about child rearing and involve them in the educational nurturing of their children.
- Elicit the support of the community in the education of its children.
- Provide a full array of school-based services that dissolve the boundaries between child care, health care, family education, and student learning.
- Establish partnerships with private organizations in the community to develop and promote community-based family support systems.
Of all the goals our nation embraced following the Governors' and President Bush's historic education summit two years ago, Goal No. 1 must remain our top priority—ensuring that all children come to school ready to learn.
Beyond this, Americans as a society must make a bold moral commitment to rewrite the present social covenant that says it's okay to have a bifurcated system of haves and have-nots in America's schools. And we must focus the nation's will to act on the belief that all children can learn, regardless of where they are born or live, what color their skin is, or whether or not they come from a single-parent household.
To paraphrase President-elect Clinton, America does not have a child to waste. As Abraham Lincoln said many decades ago, "A child is a person who is going to carry on what you have started. . . . You may adopt all the policies you please, but how they are carried out depends on him . . . the fate of humanity is in his hands."