Mr. Coates, one of the best writers you aren’t currently reading, describes here some of the challenges he’s facing in deciding how best to educate his young son in Harlem.  In brief, Mr. Coates finds that many, if not most, of the public schools near his home are more accurately described as test-prep schools designed to prepare students to achieve on the standardized tests that higher education uses as a proxy for determining likelihood of success in college.  The post touches on a couple different subjects, but there are two I’d like to explore more fully.

1)  The strong impression the reader gets is that public schools in poorer, urban areas serve a different purpose than the education provided by private schools or suburban public schools, namely to increase the prospects of college attendence.  This stands in contrast to what I’d view as the historical model of public education serving the same general purpose for all students in the country – to provide a baseline set of facts that society views as necessary to function and the tools to learn new facts and identify the relative merits of new theories.

Presumably most of the students in Mr. Coates area are coming from families in which they would be the first to attend college.  If you believe that college attendence is a positive, as I do, and view the correlation between college attendence and income levels as legitimate, this model offers some value.  And I’m completely sympathetic to the position that giving a kid that opportunity may outweigh any greater societal costs.  And, theoretically, a college education can fill any gap in more traditional learning that is sacrificed.  My fear is that given this country’s distaste for education in general and life-long learning in particular, every opportunity we have for sparking a flame for learning and thinking is a precious moment.  How many success stories do you hear today that sing the praises of a particular high school or middle school teacher that set a student’s feet on the path that led to their acheivement?  Can we sacrifice even one opportunity?

2)  At the same time, I worry about the dissolution of the education structure into multiple levels of service.  One of the strengths of the universal system serving everyone more or less in the same manner is that society has buy-in.  If you didn’t attend public school, chances are fairly good that you know someone who did.  Having a relationship with the public schooling system helps all of us want to see it succeed.  Alternatively, if urban public schools are the product sold to the poor as a tool to get the next generation into college, suburban schools the product for the middle-class to provide an avenue to (most likely) one of the nearby state universities, and the rich retreat to private schooling, all I see is increased societal stratification.  (I understand these are gross oversimplifications and hope you can get beyond them to understand the point).  Conservatives seem to believe that the public education model is a flawed, or worse failed, experiment.   How much easier will it be to chip away further at the institution, at one or multiple levels, if it is a product only used by a group to which the majority of the country doesn’t belong?

This isn’t a subject I have much in the way of answers.  Unusual, I know.  That said, for all of the platitudes that every leader in our society lays at the feet of education, I’m increasingly uncomfortable about its future prospects.