Tyrus Cobb: Society dumps its problems on the teachers

Sometimes I don't think we stop long enough in our critiques of public education to fully understand the challenges faced by K-12 teachers and administrators. It was brought home forcefully to me recently when reading an Internet posting on blueberries, of all things, that illustrated how facile some of our comparisons between the private sector and public education are.

The posting wrote about a discussion between a smug businessman, the proprietor of a firm using blueberries in its trademark ice cream product, and a teacher. The educator asked the businessman what he did if he received a delivery of berries that were inferior.

"Obviously," he said, "I'd send them right back."

"That's right!" the educator barked, "but we can never send back our blueberries. We take them all - big, small, rich, poor, gifted, exceptional, abused, frightened, confident, homeless, rude and brilliant. We take GT, ADHD, ADD, SLD, EI, MMR, OHI, TBI, DD, Autistic, English as their second language, etc. We take them all! Everyone!"

Sen. Daniel Moynihan once noted that the primary determinate of success in schools was the home situation from which the students came. He knew that schools couldn't compensate for the disintegration of families and communities he was witnessing, a sad situation that has only gotten worse.

The famous Coleman report of the 1960s concluded that students' socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweighed what goes on in the schools as determinants of educational success. As columnist George Will notes, "No reform can enable schools to cope with the 37 percent of all children and 70 percent of black children today born out of wedlock, which means among many other things, a continually renewed cohort of unruly adolescent males."

In Northern Nevada, the diversity of our student population continues to grow. The minority student population in the Washoe County School District is now close to 50 percent, resulting in substantially increased free and reduced lunches as well as LEP (Limited English Proficiency), PBS (positive behavior systems), and "specialized study group" programs. In Clark County, the white percentage of the district has dropped to 34.6 percent.

More attention has been directed, appropriately, to educating the increasing number of English Language Learners (ELL) entering the system. At Jeffer's Elementary (Clark County), 72 percent of the students come from homes where English is not the primary language, and 30 percent of all Clark students are classified as ELLs. This has necessitated adding ELL teacher aides in the classroom, specialists who also try to build rapport with outside communities and families.

Other societal trends are not helping. More kids are being raised by single parents. Their home life is often characterized by excessive TV watching, poor nutrition and exposure to violence on a daily basis. They come to school ill-prepared to absorb the daily lessons and teachers are forced to devote much of their time to maintaining discipline. As a result, students who are not ELL, ADD, GT, OHI, or whatever - your average kids - are neglected and often left to fend for themselves.

Critics of the demand for raising Nevada's per pupil funding (PPF), which is close to the lowest in the nation, argue that increasing these expenditures will have little positive impact. Unfortunately, they are probably right. There are charter schools which certainly have achieved success with at risk and other disadvantaged students, but their PPFs (e.g. the Andre Agassi School) are almost double the school districts' per student funding. It will take a lot of new funding to move the bar upwards.

At the same time it will be difficult for K-12 to even tread water at current funding levels. Given our fiscal constraints and the student population we Nevadans send to our schools, don't look for any significant upticks in student test scores or graduation rates anytime soon.

• Tyrus W. Cobb is a former Special Assistant to President Reagan.