Education in the cities

Teaching Pre K-8, Nov/Dec 1997 by Raymond, Allen

Over the past several months I've been visiting well-known educational leaders throughout the land, most of whom are idealists - that is, missionaries out in the field working to improve education for kids everywhere. You'd like them.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the office of Dick Riley, our country's Secretary of Education. Last August, when Patricia Broderick and I visited with him, we expressed our admiration for his ability to withstand the slings and arrows of an articulate and not always approving public. That's when he told us there were those in his native South Carolina encouraging him to return. "I told them," he said, "that I can't return; I have a cause up here."

Obviously, Dick Riley fulfills my criteria, and probably yours, of a practical idealist, and that's no oxymoron. He's a missionary, but not a tub-thumper. Rather; he's someone who, with the practicality born of experience, quietly and with commitment goes about his mission. He's someone you and I can like and trust.

"Okay," I said to myself, "perhaps a man like this can give me guidance on a pet project of mine" - the creation of a new educational organization which, for a working title, I'm calling The Association for Education in the Cities.

There is a need for such an organization, if only because the media - and the public - continue to dump on city schools. In the meantime, there is no cohesive national voice of teachers and, yes, parents, community leaders and administrators, concentrating exclusively on the problems and successes to be found in city schools - and we're talking about the smaller cities as well as the big ones.

Educators haven't given up on the cities, of course, as evidenced by an article in the The New York Times Magazine of August 31, 1997. In a profile of Dr. Rudy Crew, who in November, 1995, became New York City's Schools Chancellor, The Times lauded his accomplishments, describing Dr. Crew as "the country's most important urban educator."

With its million-plus students, New York's school system has often been considered unmanageable, but Dr. Crew, seemingly undaunted by the task, seeks to create "a more perfect school system."

"Most urban systems," Dr. Crew says, "have demonstrated the capacity to reform single schools in individual communities.

"The real issue," he adds, "is not some points-of-light theory in which I create five schools and go out and show them to everybody and say, `Look at what I'm doing in New York City!'

"The real question for urban America," he continues, "is, can you replicate it, can you do it in a cost-effective way and can you create the organizational culture that gives rise to it on a scale that impacts the lives of every child in the system?"

To make an impact, not only in New York City but in small and large cities throughout America, educators like Rudy Crew - and the teachers, parents and community leaders involved in their city's schools at a neighborhood level - must devise ways to replicate their successes on a massive scale.

We believe our proposed Association for Education in the Cities offers the potential to move toward those goals, and we were flattered when Dick Riley suggested he'd circulate our proposal within the Department of Education for comments. We can't ask for more than that. We of course invite your comments, too.

ALLEN RAYMOND