Five years ago, when A Nation at Risk was published, the country turned its attention to the question of "excellence" in education. State after state followed through with mandates for students to take more math, more science and to do more homework. For the most part, making schools tougher was (and is) very popular. But there were many who worried about this emphasis. Would the push for excellence mean that we would abandon equity? Would our efforts now be directed at getting the best and the brightest to do better at the expense of those who couldn't even make it under the old and less demanding system?
The response was very quick. No sooner had the nation started talking about excellence than there appeared a simultaneous move to pay attention to "at-risk" students. There were pleas that we be compassionate to those in greatest need, but there were also citations of the demographic reality that blacks and Hispanics would soon become one-third of our nation's workforce.
There could have been a conflict between the push for excellence and the call for equity. But there wasn't. Almost every report that followed A Nation at Risk addressed the at-risk children at least as much as it dealt with the thrust toward excellence. The two reports issued by the Committee on Economic Development are examples. They called for tough standards for students and teachers but also for high quality early-childhood programs for children who lives in poverty and health and nutritional care for pregnant teenagers to reduce the incidence of infants born at risk.
The efforts to do something about those at risk have been helped by the publication last year of a remarkable book, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (University of Chicago Press), by William Julius Wilson, professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. Wilson brilliantly surveys a wide range of economic and social issues to explain the deteriorating conditions of many urban blacks. Central to his analysis is the fact that there has been a great change in ghetto communities. "In the 1940s, 1950s, and even the 1960s, lower-class, and middle-class black urban families all resided more or less in the same ghetto areas .... " But since the 60s, middle-class professionals - doctors, lawyers, teachers, social workers and others - and working-class blacks have moved out. According to Wilson, the exodus of these groups has had a profound effect, especially on ghetto youngsters.
In the old days, "a perceptive ghetto youngster in a neighborhood that includes a good number of working and professional families may observe increasing joblessness and idleness but he will also witness many individuals regularly going to and from work; he may sense an increase in school dropouts but he can also see a connection between education and meaningful employment; he may detect a growth in single-parent families, but he will also be aware of the presence of many married couple families; he may notice an increasing in welfare dependency, but he can also see a significant number of families that are not on welfare; and he may be cognizant of an increase in crime, but he can recognize that many residents in his neighborhood are not involved in criminal activity." In other words, the presence of adults who are making it increases the child's chance of making it, no matter how poor.
Things are very different when you live in a neighborhood where no one is working, where there is no one to tell you about job possibilities or to recommend you for one, where there are few role models for a better life. And that's where many disadvantaged urban youngsters are today - concentrated in totally poor neighborhoods and therefore "increasingly socially isolated from mainstream patterns and behavior. Under these conditions "joblessness, as a way oflife, takes on a different social meaning; the relationship between schooling and postschool employment takes on a different meaning. The development of cognitive, linguistic, and other educational and job-relates skills necessary for the world of work in the mainstream economy is thereby adversely affected. In such neighborhoods, therefore, teachers become frustrated and do not teach and children do not learn. A vicious cycle is perpetuated through the family, through the community, and through the schools."
Wilson's analysis has implications for at least two important educational issues - funding and choice.
For the most part, educational funds are distributed to schools on a per pupil basis. Federal dollars are specifically targeted to students in poverty. Some state moneys also are aimed at students from poor families. But if Wilson is right, and the evidence he presents is overwhelming, a poor kid who is surrounded by peers whose parents are working is in much better shape than that same poor kid surrounded by hopelessness and near total and perpetual unemployment. This suggests that while federal and state governments should give help to all who are poor, they should give much more to schools and school systems where there are great concentrations of poverty. Chapter I funding now incorporates such a factor, but not enough to overcome the effects Wilson describes.
Wilson also gives us a valuable perspective on school choice, another hot issue. The right to choose is an important value in a democratic society, and the movement to allow parents to choose which public school they wish their children to attend is a good one. But Wilson's analysis suggests that unrestricted choice may carry a heavy price. If students who are learning and are role models migrate from inner-city to suburban schools, the remaining students could be left in much the same condition that the flight of the middle - and working-class has left the ghetto underclass.
Does this mean no choice? Not at all, any more than one would prevent middle -and working-class blacks from moving out of the ghetto. But we should proceed carefully and weigh the consequences.