Can our schools get better?

The answer is “possibly,” says Dean Goodlad. But reconstruction and improvement will require a new vision and a supreme cooperative effort by enlightened citizens and professionals. Here are basic considerations.

The generally accepted goal of improving our schools may be chimeric. This is not to say that school improvement is impossible. But it is to suggest that, given the circumstances surrounding schooling today and what is needed to effect improvement, we — that is, our society — may not be up to it. Indeed, given certain of these may increase circumstances and conditions, our schools may deteriorate, and dissatisfaction and disaffection may increase.

I do not personally accept the proposition that school improvement is an impossible goal. But I do not believe that our schools will be better simply by wishing them so or by trying harder to do much of what is now done. And my skepticism regarding many of our most popular beliefs about education and schooling and the practices stemming from them is such that I would more readily predict, from much of our effort, poorer rather than better schools for the future. But this need not be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The argument for or against my major proposition revolves around a set of related propositions. I shall state several of these and then discuss each in turn. Instead of waiting to the concluding pages to make some positive suggestions for school improvement, I shall advance a position regarding each subproposition, indicating what I believe is required if solid progress in education and schooling is to be realized.

The elements of debate

Proposition One: The norm by which the performance of schools is now judged is entirely inadequate, from one perspective, and, from another, corrupts the educative process.

Proposition Two: The fixing of responsibility for improved performance according to the standards used inhibits the creative processes required for significant progress.

Proposition Three: Virtually equating education with schooling has so burdened the schools with responsibility that satisfactory performance, even if appropriate norms and standards of accountability were applied, would be exceedingly difficult to attain.

Proposition Four: The widely accepted assumption that schooling is good and more is better has resulted in an enlarged system that serves, as often as not, to deprive the educational process of the nourishing resources it needs.

Proposition Five: Although much of the support for our system of schooling has been derived from rhetorical principles exhorting individual opportunity, egalitarianism, and openness, in actuality the system is quite closed with respect to principles of operation other than those on which it has been built.

Proposition Six: The prevailing theories of change that take as their model factories and assembly lines simply do not fit the realities of schooling, and so funds usually accompanying their application only compound the cycle of failure and disappointment.

Proposition Seven: In spite of some self-congratulatory rhetoric to the contrary, education is still a relatively weak profession, badly divided within itself and not yet embodying the core of professional values and knowledge required to resist fads, special-interest groups, and — perhaps most serious of all — funding influences.

Partly as a consequence of what some of these subpropositions imply, schools are not now in charge of their own destinies. Many of the changes and adaptations they should have initiated by themselves are now being forced upon them by court and legislative action. And, unfortunately, many people outside of schools who think they know what will lead to school improvement are not uniquely blessed with the special insight and wisdom that would tell them what is required.

The standard of success

Over a period of more than 300 years, the American people have enlarged their educational expectations for schools. Beginning with narrowly academic and religious goals in the seventeenth century, they added vocational and social goals in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and goals of personal or self-realization in the twentieth. These goals now encompass a wide range of knowledge, skills, and values and a kaleidoscopic array of scientific, humanistic, and aesthetic sources of human enlightenment. Nearly all of our children spend eight or nine years in the place to which primary responsibility for achieving these goals is consciously ascribed. Most spend 12 or 13 years there; some spend 16 or 20 or more.

And yet we are content to use various combinations of the first six letters of the alphabet and two numbers, sometimes representing total scores and sometimes percentile rankings, as virtually the sole evidence for passing definitive judgment on the adequacy of an individual’s or a school’s performance. Large numbers of parents apparently suffer no pangs of conscience in withholding support and love or inflicting pain and humiliation purely on the basis of these letters and grades. Others bestow gifts and lavish praise on their achieving children with little thought to whether their marks were obtained with little effort, through cheating, or at the expense of peers, some of them friends and neighbors.

What about this school administrator’ s criterion: “I know this is a better school now because the kids don’ t throw up as often”?

But neither these dissatisfied/satisfied parents nor their fellow citizen nonparents give much thought to whether the students’ curricula were well-balanced, their interest and curiosity aroused, their talents unleashed, their creativity fostered, or their sentiments and tastes refined. Presumably, the almighty letter grade and the SAT score tell it all.

We smile wryly when a speaker repeats the cliché: Half the students will always be below average, and we can never have most of the students above the fiftieth percentile. But next day we’re back in that old groove again, hard at work trying to get everyone above the mean. Clearly, by this criterion our schools never will be any better.

My subproposition, stated earlier, is that from one perspective the conventional achievement norm is an inadequate criterion of school success and, from another, it corrupts the educative process. If we are to use student outcomes as a major measure of school and student performance  — and I assume we will for a long time to come — then let us at least endeavor to appraise that performance in line with the four sets of goals for which our schools are responsible. This means developing and using tests geared to domains designated by these goals and not tests made up of often-irrelevant items designed to elicit 50% success and 50% failure — tests pitting student against student but telling us little or nothing about them or their schools.

But we must go far beyond such measurement into what is, surprisingly, little-explored terrain — namely, into qualitative appraisals of what goes on in schools. For the past several years my colleagues and I have been developing instruments by means of which to describe elements of the curriculum and teaching; to solicit administrators’, teachers’, students’, and parents’ views on aspects of schooling; and to compare and relate some of these data. The task is extraordinarily difficult — far more difficult than measuring student outcomes. Perhaps this is why so little along these lines has been done. Our purpose is not to evaluate schools but to emphasize the necessity of assembling data on schools as a basis for determining their present condition and beginning a process of improvement.

It seems to my associates and me that how a student spends precious time in school and how he feels about what goes on there is of much greater significance than how he scores on a standardized achievement test. But I am not at all sure that the American people are ready to put a rather straightforward criterion such as this ahead of the marks and scores we worship mindlessly in much the same way our supposedly more primitive ancestors worshiped the gods of thunder and fire. And so it will be difficult for schools to get better and even more difficult for them to appear so.

Accountability

Adherence to norm-referenced standardized test scores as the standard for judging student, teacher, and school performance has led quite naturally to a stultifying approach to accountability. There is nothing wrong with the idea of being accountable — that is, being required to give an account. The problems and injustices in contemporary approaches to educational ‘·accountability stem from the fact that all the richness, shortcomings, interpersonal relations, successes, and failures are reduced to a few figures, much as one records profits and losses in a ledger book.

This is the familiar, linear, reductionist model that squares nicely with the manufacture of paper cups and safety pins and the basics of bookkeeping. During the past two decades it has been applied to the preparation of school administrators, teacher education, planning and budgeting processes, and, most recently, the progress and graduation of high school students. We are all familiar with accountability by objectives, competency-based teacher education, PPBS, and proficiency tests. The expectation in using all of these is that education in the schools will improve as a consequence, with higher test scores serving as the ultimate criterion. There is no evidence to date that any such improvement has occurred. Indeed, the evidence appears to be precisely in the opposite direction.

The irony here is that the decline in test scores often is blamed on those “soft and tender” educational innovations of the 1960s, not on these “hard and tough” approaches to accountability. Yet there is growing suspicion that the much-touted supposed reforms of the sixties never occurred — they· were, for the most part, nonevents. On the other hand, there is all around us evidence to the effect that accountability by objectives, PPBS, competency-based teacher education, and the like have dominated the scene for some time. Is it not time to consider seriously the proposition that this cult of efficiency has failed to make our schools more efficient? Is the time not overdue for seriously considering other ways of accounting for what goes on in the educational system and our schools?

How about these criteria, just for starters: How many students officially registered in high schools were today absent, for reasons other than illness, and walking the streets of New York, Detroit, Atlanta, Denver, and Los Angeles? Why? How many high school and college suicides, worldwide, last year, occurred as a direct consequence of grades or test scores? What schools have trouble keeping students home even when ill because they are so anxious to come to school? Or what about this school administrator’s criterion: “I know this is a better school now because the kids don’t throw up as often”?

And how about the accounting implied in the following questions: What legislators have checked lately to determine how their legislation affected school principals’ paperwork, balance in the curriculum, parents’ willingness to assist the school, or teachers’ freedom to select methods and materials most suited to the needs and characteristics of their students? How recently, if ever, did the several dozen different kinds of specialists in your state department of education come together to determine what a secondary school would look like if all of their currently independent proposals came together in a single curriculum? How many school districts have adjusted their inservice education programs and credits so as to provide time and rewards for local school faculties seeking to improve the quality of life in their workplaces? How many researchers are moving from those studies of single variables in the learning process that have yielded no significant findings to those much more complex inquiries required for understanding school and classroom environments so that we might understand, also, how to improve them? And how many teachers have thought at least twice and then decided to keep their mouths closed before saying that educational research is a waste of time?

The more schools take on, the more vulnerable they are to attack . . .

These and other accounting questions serve not only to suggest the breadth of responsibility we all must share in seeking to improve our schools but also the folly of concentrating the bulk of our time, energy, and resources on those ubiquitous test scores. Perhaps the greatest irony of all about the diploma mill is that even as we are regarding high grades with some awe, we don’t know what they mean. My colleague, Robert Pace, pointed out some years ago that school grades predict school grades and not much else — not compassion, not good work habits not vocational success, not social success not happiness.

If misplaced emphasis were the only consequence of focusing narrowly on the accounting process, the subject would not warrant impassioned attention. But what arouses one’s emotions are the many negative side effects already suggested what is curtailed, and what is driven out’. My guess is that those relatively low-level cognitive processes most easily measured and most emphasized in the current back-to-basics movement will show some improvement in test scores during coming years. But my further guess is that those more complex intellectual processes not easily measured will decline at an equal or greater rate.

And I am convinced that continuation along the impoverished curricular and pedagogical lines implied by “back to basics” would lead ultimately to educational bankruptcy in our schools, acceleration in alienation and dropout rates and in grades having even less relevance to life than they do now. But, fortunately, the weakness of schools demonstrated in their rhetorical zigging and zagging is also their saving grace. Just as the zig is becoming excessive, we start to zag. Regrettably, we often are out of sync — zigging when we should be zagging and zagging when we should be zigging — but that is a tale for another day.

We now need to turn from the reductionist process in schooling by which complex human goals and processes become measurable, relatively unimportant, and probably only remotely related to the important ideas with which we began. We  need to turn toward learnings rich in opportunities to derive varied meanings and devise creative, individual approaches to understanding and problem solving. Robert Rosen, the distinguished theoretical biologist, suggests the contrast between what we do and what we should do:

. . . [M)an has a biologically rooted need to engage in complex activities . . . . And it is the activities themseles which are [essential], not the ends which are supposed to be attained by them; these ends are the inessentials and the by-products. Somehow, we have gotten turned around so as to believe that, on the contrary, the ends are primary and the means secondary.*

More is better

Three of the propositions stated at the outset are so closely entwined that I shall group them for discussion purposes:

Three: The virtual equating of education with schooling has so burdened the schools with responsibility that satisfactory performance, even if appropriate norms an? standards of accountability were applied, would be exceedingly difficult to attain.

Four: The widely accepted assumption that education and, therefore, schooling is good and more is better has significantly enlarged the system but has not improved the education provided by that system.

Five: Although much of the support for our system of schooling has been derived from rhetorical principles exhorting md1V1dual opportunity, egalitarianism, and openness, in actuality the system is quite closed with respect to principles of operation other than those on which it has been built.

As stated earlier, our schools are expected to address four sets of goals. Performing the educational function implied is demanding enough, especially when one realizes the potential for internal conflict in seeking to achieve these complex goals. Successful development of the free self for example, is seen by many as sheer hedonism, interfering with the goal of responsible citizenship. But the other functions the school is expected to undertake virtually overwhelm the educational ones. They include at least the following:

1. The preservation of values and traditions thought to be central to the unification and welfare of previous generations. These interests are not always in the best interests of present and future generations, hence frequently interfere with their proper education.
2. The enhancement of values and traditions seen to be required by changing Ecological studies are seen by some people as essential for schools, but long-term ecological considerations interfere with short-term economic ones.
3. Significant contributions to the solution of critical human For example, school populations and professional personnel are shifted about to achieve desegregation, frequently making it more difficult for schools to achieve the stability they require for effective educational performance.
4. The performance of functions formerly performed by existing institutions or not yet assumed through the creation of new ones. With no accompanying changes m the resources, time and regularities of schools and, often conscious internalization of the new functions, subsequent performance usually is less than

It should not surprise us that schools receive few accolades for what they do in many new areas of responsibility. The behavior problems not dealt with in the home are not well dealt with in a school now, lacking what was once a home/ school collaboration. The more schools take on, the more vulnerable they are to attack and criticism. Further, the more they take on, the fewer resources they have for and the less attention they give to their educational function. Ironically, the more they take on, the less other institutions assume responsibility for education.

In effect, we have the grandest faith in and expectations for education accompanied by myopic concentration on a single institution in seeking fulfillment of these expectations. The pressures for increasing the educative role of other agencies and institutions are weak.

Meanwhile, our schooling-dominated educational system, like some stubbornly self-destructive dinosaur, seeks to adapt only by growing larger. It expands at the bottom by enlarging its feet, at the top by growing a longer neck, and sideways by expanding its girth. More is equated with good and still more with better. But before the system can congratulate itself for effecting these expansions, almost everyone is complaining that the schools are simultaneously declining in quality (the test scores are down) and costing more.

There are very few instances in our society of organizations increasing in size without increasing in complexity as well as in preoccupation with self-maintenance. our. educational system is, in functioning reality, an array of primary, secondary, and tertiary schools made systemic by a host of assumptions translated into rules and regulations for the operation of each unit. This system is held together by structural arrangements of such proportions that their maintenance consumes a large portion of the resources allocated to the whole. It becomes reasonable to seriously consider the possibility that making the system better, according to the principles by which it operates, actually makes the education provided worse.

In expanding our expectations for schooling, we shall almost invariably be disappointed unless we also broaden the criteria of evaluation. In expanding our definition of universal schooling, we raised the compulsory leaving age to 16 without significantly providing educational alternatives for a broader range of clientele. Now, decades later, some people are proposing a reduction in this age to 14 because many young people find little in school to attract them and disrupt those who have learned to adjust to the principles on which schools operate.

Similarly, we are taking more and more children of a younger age into the system and judging the success of this venture by how well these children perform on the conventional standards of achievement. We fail to ask what these children gave up in order to go to school earlier or how well the school is substituting for the declining role of parents. Nonetheless, on the scoreboard we chalk up another victory for universal education.

I am doubtful about all of this changing rapidly for the better through some kind of systematic, rational planning: But I do see signs of change, not necessarily portending only good things. It is not out of the question that the dinosaur will collapse because of its sheer weight and lack of mobility. Bills for sweeping voucher plans could and would pass in several states if it were not for uncertainty about the economic implications, some considerable worries about regulatory procedures (including those exercised by the bodies implementing the legislation), and fear that one dinosaur simply will be replaced by another.

Without fully realizing it, we may be at the end of an era. A new era will emerge in an evolutionary way and on a broken front. The view that small is good is affecting many aspects of our daily lives. Some responsible legislators are becoming aware of the fact that their good intentions, expressed in bill after bill — many of them underfinanced and most of them hopelessly tangled in regulations and procedures of accountability — are compounding the work of school personnel. It has been suggested by members of the California legislature that they declare a two-year moratorium on legislation pertaining to schools.

As more and more people become products of the system — especially the upper levels of the system — its values for personal advancement become less clear. As more people participate in the system, interest in virtues such as equal access declines. Only the most and least favored segments of the system fight for equality, the former because they are confident in their unequal status and the latter because they see the schools as still the avenue of access to social and economic equality. All the rest want the “best,” not equal education. Consequently, support for one standard system declines and the desire for alternatives increases. Even if the alternatives differ from the conventional only in rhetoric rather than program, they weaken the system, and this is not bad. Unfortunately, the alternatives do not necessarily provide better education.

There are two very significant signs of our being at the end of one era, even if we cannot yet discern the character of the next. First, principles previously unquestioned or questioned only by “radicals” begin to come in for more serious, popular questioning. For example, it is possible for me to question here the very concepts with which most of us have spent our lives and not be regarded as particularly dangerous – indeed, many of you identify readily with what I am writing.

Second, the less tenable long-established principles come to be, the more intense the ceremonial rain dances by those who fear the personal consequences of new ones. That is, threatened groups and individuals try harder to do what gave satisfaction before, however inappropriate and outworn the behaviors may be. For example, it is clear that we should have established, long ago, firmer collaborative bonds between the schools and business and industry for the conduct of vocational education. The schools should not have shouldered this burden to the degree they did. In so doing, they failed to produce the gratitude they expected from the private sector; today, business and industry complain more than ever about the failure of schools to teach the basics. As a consequence of the gap between the two, new institutions and arrangements for bridging education and work are emerging. As if to proclaim that the old order changeth not at all, segments of the established school-related vocational education community have been increasing the intensity of their rain dances. This is a sure sign that the times are changing.

Toward new models of change

And now I shall weave together Propositions 6 and 7:·

Six: The prevailing theories of change that take as their model factories and assembly lines simply do not fit the realities of schooling.

Seven: In spite of some self-congratulatory rhetoric to the contrary, education is still a relatively weak profession, badly divided within itself and lacking the necessary core of professional values and knowledge.

The model of change most commonly applied to educational improvement comes from the same root and stem as the criteria for success, models of accountability, and patterns of funding referred to earlier. All are part of a theory of rationality that calls for the precise delineation of goals to be accomplished, the use of goals to justify means, and the measurement of previously defined goals. Applied to the improvement of schooling, the model usually assumes an institution incapable of improving itself, an institution not devoid of goals, not with differ ing goals, but with inadequately defined goals. The model also assumes more intelligence outside of schools than in them and a relatively impotent, passive target group of personnel.

“The principal is central to the attainment of the kind of school implied.”

For brevity, let me pass quickly over these assumptions, which undoubtedly are causing some consternation in your mind now that I have made them explicit. Let me simply say that I think they are wrong and that the more one probes into schools as social systems and subcultures, the more firm one becomes in the conclusion that the model encompasses the problems of school improvement quite inadequately. At any rate, intense utilization accompanied by unprecedented funds has not produced the intended effects in the products.

Whether one explores past or present instances of schools achieving marked success in whatever they set out to accomplish, one comes out with a quite different picture from the above in regard to how success was achieved, however fuzzy and perplexing that picture may be. The elements in that picture appear to be at least the following:

1. The school as a unit has a great deal of autonomy in the system or is itself the total educational system for a given population of students in its community One immediately thinks of Evanston Township High School or New Trier High School in an earlier era. The superintendent or principal was headmaster of a single school, relatively well paid and free to travel and participate as a person of importance on the national scene. Or one thinks of that handful (5%) of the all-black schools that produced 21% of the black Ph.D.s during one period of our history. Among them were McDonough 35 High School in New Orleans (California State Superintendent Wilson Riles graduated from it); Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore; Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C.; and Booker T. Washington High School in Atlanta. Of course, many other factors were involved, but this is part of my point: The schools will not be improved by single interventions, however well funded.
2. The school has a sense of mission, unity, identity, and wholeness that pervades every aspect of its functioning — not just its interscholastic athletic The people connected with it have a sense of ownership, of belonging to a special institution. “I teach at” or “I attend Union High” is spoken with a sense of pride. Currently, many aspects of American life work against such a school Zeitgeist. Consequently, achieving such a school requires extraordinary dedication, commitment, and hard work on the part of everyone.
3. The principal is central to the attainment of the kind of school She or he, far more than any other person, shapes and articulates the prevailing ambiance and creates a sense of mission. In recent studies of schools effecting integration with some success, almost invariably the principal was identified as strategic. In the successful black schools referred to earlier, again the significance of the principal — his or her values, dedication, and strength — came to the surface. Almost invariably, too, the principal is a person with a strong sense of personal worth and potency, one who takes a position on issues and is not regarded as a pawn of the superintendent or of strong individuals or groups within the community.
4. The surrounding infrastructure is The superintendent recognizes the school as the key unit for change and improvement, encourages principals to be captains of their ship, works directly with them as often as possible rather than building a wall of central office administrators between them and himself, and supports them even while disagreeing with them. A significant part of the budget -the discretionary part -is built from the bottom up, with each school principal bringing forward plans projected several years into the future, plans developed collaboratively at the site level.

You will be thinking, “Of course, anyone can succeed in such an ideal setting.” But this is to miss my point. Ideals are not given; they represent conditions to be achieved.

The school milieu and characteristics described will not in themselves assure high attainment in the academic, social, vocational, and personal goals set for our schools. But they do suggest some necessary but insufficient conditions generally neglected in society’s efforts to improve schooling. And they certainly suggest the folly of employing simple panaceas designed to affect some small part of the instructional process. A school that is well along toward becoming a good place to work and study is the school that can take on virtually any project with reasonable expectations of success.

It goes almost without saying that much more is required for successful educational performance. But most of the rest lies in the classroom and is up to teachers. Again, however, the principal plays a key role in providing the support, encouragement, and resources required — the very conditions he or she requires for effective performance as a principal.

Basic to the principal’s role in instructional improvement are at least two major kinds of understanding. First, the criterion of accountability for the principal is development of a comprehensive educational program – one that does not shift from one emphasis to another, neglecting the arts when “back to basics” is the popular slogan and stressing responsible citizenship only in time of national crisis. Second, the principal purges from his views of instruction any and all commitments to panaceas and simple solutions. We know now that no innovation or intervention consistently and unambiguously makes a difference in student outcomes. Successful teachers orchestrate 10 or more major contributors to learning in order to assist student progress. These include assuring that students understand directions before embarking on the task, maintaining momentum, keeping students involved, using positive reinforcement but not unrealistic praise, varying instructional techniques, alternating the length of learning episodes, providing regular and consistent feedback, and on and on. Teachers are more likely to engage in these arduous, demanding teaching techniques when what they do is known to and supported by the principal. Teaching, like administrative leadership, is a relatively lonely activity.

I have implied throughout that schools will be better if legislators, school board members, parents, and superintendents see themselves as responsible and accountable for enhancing the effectiveness, unity, and sense of mission of the single school. This may mean passing less rather than more reform legislation, reducing rather than increasing districtwide programs and demands, giving more rather than less autonomy to principals and teachers, and using contextual as well as outcome criteria as measures of successful performance. But, clearly, this does not mean that schools automatically will be better. Whether or not they will, even given the support implied, depends on the education profession, and one must ask, seriously, whether we are up to it.

We are a badly divided profession, with each segment perceiving only a part of the whole, lacking awareness of and commitment to the systemic, collaborative functioning required for significant improvement. Much of what I have said is threatening to many superintendents who see power as finite and the decentralization of it to the principals as undermining their authority. Many are more preoccupied with massaging the system than with assuring that resources and support get to the school ships at sea. They are more preoccupied with budgets, crisis management, and public affairs than with educational goals and programs. Relatively few have internalized, let alone articulated, the view that the prime measure of their success is the quality of life in the schools under their jurisdiction.

Far more threatened are those second and third-level managers and supervisors who, not clear on their role to begin with, view increased autonomy and resources at the site level as restricting and delimiting their role even more. Their fears are not unjustified. I am convinced that education is improved to the degree that qualified personnel and instructional resources get close to students. As I said earlier, beyond a level of vital, priority need, adding highly paid personnel to the central office often makes education worse rather than better.

For principals, there is a certain stultifying protection in the ambiguity of the role. Being caught up in the demands of the district office and the routines of management, most of which could be done better and less expensively by someone else, the principal has no time for the development of programs and people within the school. This ambiguity conspires with . status elements of the job to cause principals to play their cards close to their chests, making their lonely jobs even lonelier. Association with peers usually occurs through the conduct of interscholastic athletics and so tends to be competitive rather than collaborative. And yet principals long for collegial relationships with peers in settings where, perhaps with the help of a supportive colleague or university professor, they can explore openly the problems for which they were not prepared.

The departmental structure of high schools for both governance and program development violates most of what we know about policy development, chops up the curriculum into fiefdoms that make significant change all but impossible, and immobilizes the school in the face of pervasive problems such as violence and institutional erosion that cut across departmental lines. Teachers, in turn, are more tied to their disciplines and the teaching of content than oriented to the personal needs of children and youth, a situation reinforced by their professional associations and the prevailing system of accountability. The principals and teachers of elementary, junior high, and secondary schools rarely come together to examine the total educational programs for children and youth.

Teacher educators, for the most part, assume that teacher education begins and ends with the admission and graduation of students and has little or nothing to do with the school and classroom environments of teaching and learning and the role schools of education should play in their improvement. Too many researchers are preoccupied with research on single instructional variables that rarely account for more than 5% of the variance in student outcomes. Too few study the complex phenomena of schooling in their natural environment, developing the needed new methodologies instead of seeking to adapt the old.

One could go on and on in this vein, citing also the precarious nature of a large, divided profession constructed on the flimsiest base of core knowledge and professional beliefs. We have much to do together and little energy to waste on bemoaning the shortcomings of legislators, parents, and o.ne another. We have met the enemy and he is us. What is challenging to me and, I hope, to you is that most of the paths we must walk are reasonably clear, blocked with debris at many places but visible nonetheless. And most of them are paths along which only you and I need walk to assure that a significant part of what is required to make our schools better will be accomplished.

Our schools can and should be better. But educators must take the lead, together, to make them so. Large numbers of parents and students are ready to join us, I believe, in making our schools, one by one, better places in which to live and work. The slogans for improvement are, for the most part, meaningless rhetoric. Our schools must be reconstructed, one by one, by citizens and educators working together. Nothing less will suffice.

*Robert Rosen, “Do We Really Need Ends To Justify the Means?” Center Report, ‘February, 1976, pp. 29, 30.