Mention the crisis in public education and people quickly start talking about inner city schools -- their crime, crumbling facilities and the disastrously high dropout rates of their predominantly black and Hispanic students.
The assumption is that with the advantages of greater resources and more serene surroundings, kids in suburban school systems are getting a good education. And it's true, suburban schools appear to be more successful. They have less violence and vandalism, well-stocked science labs, up-to-date textbooks and thicker course catalogs. A greater proportion of suburban high school graduates go to college.
But look at the nation's suburban schools up close -- particularly junior highs and high schools -- and it's all too clear that despite their outward trappings of success, they do a poor job of educating many of their students.
One measure of the problem: though suburban schools educate one-quarter of the nation's students, a recent federally-funded study revealed that only 5 percent of the nation's high school seniors are adequately prepared in mathematics to study the subject in college. When rich suburban school systems are producing second-rate results, they are no less part of the nation's education crisis than are their troubled inner city counterparts.
Standards are astonishingly low in many suburban classrooms. One big-spending Florida school district recently responded to newly legislated graduation requirements by drafting a new sequences of science courses that progressed from "introduction to earth/space science" to "earth/space science," "general science" and finally to "physical science" -- four years of science without biology, chemistry or physics.
I visited a suburban high school in Texas where enrollment in introductory chemistry dropped by half and in Algebra II by a third following the implementation of the state's infamous "no-pass, no-play" law in 1985. "They don't want to take the chance of failing the tougher courses and becoming ineligible for extracurriculars," the principal of the school told me.
Do local educators push such students to enroll in tougher courses? Not exactly. Guidance counselors in Texas and other places with no-pass, no-play rules readily acknowledge that they tell students to keep up their grades by taking less-demanding courses.
