Continuance

Continuance Fall / Winter 2003-2004

Center Story

While there is a single system of education underlying all the segments, the lack of effective links from pre-K to the university threatens to undermine success at every level of education. This problematic relationship only now is beginning to receive the attention that it warrants.

Over a decade ago, this author published All One System (1985) which presented the argument that a nation's graduate schools were dependent in part on the quality of its kindergartens, that there was a single system of education underlying all of the segments and that only the students ever saw the whole thing. (Although it seemed a radical idea at the time, it had actually been developed earlier in a 1968 publication from the Education Commission of the States written by Michael Usdan and others: The Politics of Elementary- Secondary Education.) Both reports were based on a common view--people in one segment existed in almost total regard of all the other segments. Mathematics professors cared not a whit for the efforts of elementary schools, even in math! No faculty member in higher education ever got tenure because of a concern for the linkage of higher education with "lower education."

 As the 1990s came to a close, things started to shift slightly. While public schools are still basically run by 14,000 locally elected school boards and colleges by about 4,000 governing boards, there are any number of new linkage ideas which are starting to change the way Americans think about their investment in education, from K-16 councils to joint meetings of Chief State School Officers and State Higher Education Executive Officers. There are some new jurisdictional issues as well. While the U.S. Department of Education acts like a centralized ministry of education at times, it provides only 9- 11% of all education funding, and states and localities are clearly not going to surrender their responsibilities to a federal system. However, who will establish and implement the new academic standards (between local, state and federal levels) is an open issue. Today, national standards, if not national tests, as well as state testing programs, are on the front burner and equity issues get less attention than in the past. Standards and equity are difficult to keep in balance, in that when one is up, the other is down. In the sixties, equity received national, state, and local attention, while standards were openly shunned. Today, everyone is talking assessment and standards, while equity discussions are few and far between, and anyone in favor of affirmative action may be branded in some quarters as an enemy of quality. It is important to keep both quality and equality in mind, as we need a set of equity linkages that will help reduce the effects of economic and social differences, and a set of content-based linkages that will smooth students' passage through the system and allow them to achieve at the highest levels possible.