OF READING, WRITING -- AND RAISING KIDS

It's time to put an end to all the headlines about achievement
problems in our schools -- a far easier chore than most people
imagine. All we need to do is two things: First, stop calling those
establishments simply schools, when they're really hybrid institutions
that are raising many of our children, not just educating them. Then
ensure that those who deliver family-like services there are devoted
exclusively to those tasks, so that the educators can focus fully on
academics.

Few people recognize the extent of what's happened, but as I
discovered while doing research for a book, the public schools have
clearly evolved into public child-rearing institutions, something
closer in that respect to the Israeli kibbutz, or commune.

They not only provide before-school programs, breakfasts, lunches,
after-school care, afternoon snacks and sometimes dinners (as well as
summertime meals). They also instruct children about sex and, in many
places, teach them to drive. They face growing pressure to take tots
as early as age 3 in pre-kindergarten programs. They share
responsibility for keeping children off drugs, making sure they don't
carry weapons, instilling ethical behavior, curbing AIDS and other
sexually transmitted diseases, battling alcohol abuse, preventing
student suicides, discouraging cigarette smoking, tackling child
obesity, heading off gang fights, providing a refuge for homeless
children, ensuring that students are vaccinated, boarding some pupils,
tending to toddlers of teenage mothers and otherwise acting in loco
parentis in ways not anticipated a generation ago.

Though critics bemoan this trend, there's little chance of
fundamentally altering it, for several reasons. Chief among them is
that schools generally are reacting to what the public wants. Many
people seem to think that adults' worries about schools center mainly
on student achievement. That's wrong. While test scores certainly keep
business, political, media and other elites up nights, they are not
what most trouble the wider citizenry, as polls have long shown.

According to a Public Agenda analysis of opinion surveys, for example,
Americans in 1999 said that the top three problems facing public
schools were lack of parental involvement, drug use and undisciplined
students. Academic standards came in seventh. Similarly, that year's
annual Gallup education poll found far more concern about violence,
gangs and other student behavior than about academics, which trailed
in ninth place. By last year, when Gallup ranked the public's top five
school concerns, academics were not cited at all (inadequate funding
led the list), and this year's poll showed again that student
achievement wasn't among the public's main worries.

Another common belief is that the school's enlarged family role is an
inner-city phenomenon. That's wrong, too. Columbine and other school
shootings (and the anti-violence programs they've spawned) aren't a
function of inner-city problems, just as school strategies to deal
with early childhood care, drunk driving, drug abuse and the estimated
3.75 million teens with sexually transmitted diseases know no
geographic, class or racial boundaries.

Still others think the communal child-rearing trend is part of some
grand plan hatched by the left. Wrong again. It's more a grand
hodgepodge, created by those on the left, the right and in between.
Conservatives, for example, push character education, sexual
abstinence classes and random student drug testing. Liberals focus on
issues such as school condom distribution, substance-abuse counseling
and tolerance toward gay students. The Committee for Economic
Development, a major business voice on policy matters, calls on
schools to provide pre-kindergarten programs for all 3- and
4-year-olds.

Some of the family functions that schools have taken on are American
traditions, traceable to the early days of the republic or periods
like the 1890-1920 Progressive Era. The development of student
character has been a classroom responsibility since the beginning of
U.S. schools, and early childhood care and education were not invented
for today's working parents. Schools in early America enrolled
children as young as 2, freeing mothers to toil on farms. "Infant
schools" for toddlers as young as 18 months were created in the 1820s
and 1830s, chiefly for poorer working mothers, though more well-off
women soon began using them as well.

Sex education and student meals have also been around for a century or
more and are not about to be discontinued. Both initially were opposed
by cultural conservatives, who worried about making children "wards of
the state." Yet while there are still lively debates about what should
be included in (or omitted from) sex education or school lunches, they
are now widely accepted as school programs.

It's only reasonable, of course, for some family-like school services
to be challenged, especially if they fail to meet goals. While almost
nobody was watching, for example, the federal government last year
completed a three-year experiment to determine whether all elementary
school students, rich or poor, should be eligible for free breakfasts.
A subsequent study, however, found that the program had "no noteworthy
effects" on daily classroom functioning or on standardized achievement
tests, two of its aims.

Similarly, an evaluation completed this year of the main federal
after-school initiative -- the 21st Century Community Learning Centers
program -- showed that the $1 billion-a-year effort didn't reduce the
number of "latchkey" children (there are about 8 million, from 5- to
14-years-old) or produce academic improvements, two of that program's
goals.

Disappointing results like these, though, don't mean that critics will
be able to shrink or kill such programs. President Bush discovered
this in 2003 when he tried to slash $400 million from federal
after-school funds. The Republican-controlled Congress balked,
particularly after Arnold Schwarzenegger, who soon would announce his
California gubernatorial bid, came out in their defense.

Political careers aren't helped by cutting funds for anti-drug
programs, for ensuring that children don't carry weapons, for dealing
with student depression and suicide, or for discouraging drunk
driving. In short, it's simply exceedingly popular to heap family
roles on schools.

The chief question, then, is how to manage these hybrid institutions
so that both non-academic and academic programs get a fair shake. For
answers, it's useful to look at what are most often called "community
schools" but also are known as family resource centers,
settlement-houses-in-schools, full-service schools or simply community
centers.

Typically, the estimated 3,000 to 5,000 such centers in the country
are open year-round, usually until 9 p.m. and commonly on weekends and
holidays as well. They are essentially one-stop academic,
medical-care, mental-health, drug-education, homework-help,
pregnancy-prevention, crisis-intervention, tutoring,
violence-reduction, adult-education and anything-else-that's-needed
institutions. One elementary school in Portland, Ore., for example,
houses more than 130 programs. Although these institutions mainly
target the poor, some serve affluent families as well. That's the
case, for example, with Schools of the 21st Century, the brainchild of
Yale University professor Edward Zigler, an architect of the Head
Start program.

In community schools, non-academic services mostly are provided by
outside partners, not educators. Many centers, for instance, have
health clinics where nurse practitioners, social workers, physicians
and others minister to students' physical and mental needs, reducing
demands on school staff. As the Coalition for Community Schools puts
it, "Teachers in community schools teach. They are not expected to be
social workers, mental health counselors and police officers."

In addition, local governments often initiate school-community
collaborations, especially to reorganize city services while using the
school as the hub, and they (along with other government and
foundation programs) also play an important part in funding them.
Mayor David Cicilline of Providence, R.I., was a driving force in
bringing community schools to that city. Similarly, the SUN (Schools
Uniting Neighborhoods) centers in Portland, Ore., and surrounding
Multnomah County were spearheaded by a city commissioner and the
chairman of the county council.

The question of who then controls family-like programs in schools can,
of course, raise sensitive questions. For example, New York City's
Beacon centers, created by that city's Department of Youth and
Community Development as a drug-free after-school refuge, had to
overcome "battles over control, turf and ideology," as the journal
Education Week observed.

It also can be argued that the need to coordinate multiple public
services -- youth and family aid, recreation, health, police and other
services -- bolsters the case for mayors to be in overall charge of
the schools, as they are now in a handful of cities, such as Boston,
Chicago and New York, and as Mayor Anthony A. Williams has long sought
for the District of Columbia.

However power is distributed, though, the foremost requirement is to
ensure that others tend to the many non-academic responsibilities of
the communal child-rearing institutions while school superintendents,
principals and teachers concentrate on imparting academic skills.
That's the only way we'll have a fighting chance of improving student
achievement while also working to improve children's lives.