School
Size, School Safety, School Structures:
Perspectives
from the Popular Press
by
John
A. Beineke
July
2001
With the public and popular journalistic obsession with standardized testing, it comes as a pleasant surprise when the press takes note of other school related issues. Two popular magazines, Newsweek and The New Republic, recently addressed three topics that are important to educators ¾ school size, school safety, and the status of our school infrastructure.
Anna Quinlin in Newsweek raised the concern over school size. Smaller is better was her conclusion and as she does with most topics, presented an evenhanded reflection the issue. She tethered the school safety issue to school size by quoting from James Garbarino, probably the most credible voice on youth violence in the country. Garbarino indicated that three out of four teenagers go to a high school with an enrollment of more than 1000. Realizing that schools will not be torn down, Quinlin suggested “schools within schools” or just splitting current high schools in two. She correctly notes that often school boards and the public are reluctant to reduce the size of schools for athletic reasons. Try it, Quinlin suggests ¾ smaller could be better.
The New Republic published two pieces on schools in its March 26 issue. One, by Marcia Yablon entitled “Building Trade.” After giving a pep talk to an elementary school in Washington, DC in support of higher test scores, President George W. Bush returned to the White House and axed $1.2 billion from the New Urgent School Repair Initiative, a Bill Clinton program. The hit on the District of Columbia elementary school with the rising test scores is $7 million. Yablon reported that nearly 60 percent of the nation’s schools need major repairs and that they are usually the schools that serve our most at-risk children. The Bush administration is using the term “redirection” of the funds, but they are also saying the school repair is a state and local issue. To get the tax cut through at the size he wants, President Bush may be indirectly raising taxes on states and localities who will eventually have to pay for the needed school repairs and probably will have to raise local taxes to do so. Taxpayers may get a tax reduction from the federal level of government only to turn around and write a check for taxes closer to home.
Gregg Easterbrook, also in The New Republic, wrote about school safety in connection with kids who get hit by cars while going to school. In 1999, the year of the Columbine shootings, 28 students nation-wide were killed in schools. That same year 840 students were killed as they walked to school. “Pedestrian deaths,” writes Easterbrook, “are deemed, well, pedestrian.” Again, it seems that most of the victims are from the poorer schools districts and therefore we hear less about the tragedies. Speeding in schools zones, oversized SUV’s making visibility of children more difficult for the drivers, and distraction by the drivers who may be smoking or using a cell phone. Easterbrook suggests using strobe lights to draw greater attention to school crossing, stricter enforcement and tougher penalties for violators, and giving the issue higher visibility with parents and community.
The popular press does need to move beyond the banalities of the testing wars and view schools as complex entities within our society that have multiple issues. I was at one time the fan of larger schools for curricular reasons. Now I’m not so sure. The infrastructure of our schools, though, is an issue that has been with us for years. My children were shipped out of a public school in Michigan for weeks while an environmental problem within their building was rectified. Funding became an issue. And at that same school, there were many mornings when I would flinch when I saw drivers make dangerous moves after dropping their kids off that were riskier than those made by professional race drivers. I hope these examples are just the beginning of more mainstream journalists joining the dialogue on schooling.