Radio Commentary
Recognizing the importance of
education to our national well-being, the early leaders of our country created publicly
funded schools to educate children from all walks of life.
They were seeking
to achieve more than just teaching children reading, writing, and math.
They believed
that a system of publicly supported schools ought to achieve seven major goals:
• prepare
people to become responsible citizens
• improve social conditions
• promote cultural unity
• help people become economically self-sufficient
• enhance individual happiness and enrich individual
lives
• dispel inequities in education, and
• ensure a basic quality level among schools
These goals are worthy of our great
democracy. But they are hard to measure.
In fact, many of these goals cannot
be evaluated for many years, when we can finally see how students have applied their
studies.
We hear critics of public schools call
for alternatives that shift funding and responsibility for education to the private
sector. And we hear calls for ever-more reliance on test scores to measure school
achievement.
When we weigh
these ideas, it is important to remember the whole picture of what we seek from
public education.
We need to see
whether the suggestions meet the lofty goals we had in mind when public education
was first conceived. They remain essential in a democratic and free market society.
