The Time of Our Lives Read online

  Dana, a student who had been suspended ten times a year earlier, became a model student. Why? “Mr. Betts. He’s a very positive person and he has a good attitude. And being around people like that lifts your spirit. It helps you be a better person. So it’s all about Mr. Betts.”

  It was not just a parlor trick for Betts. He told every student that he cared about them.

  Tragically, Betts was murdered in his home in the spring of 2010. Two young men he met online were charged with killing him and stealing his car. His death was front-page news in the nation’s capital, and his students and their families mourned deeply for weeks, with good reason. Not enough inner-city students have a Mr. Betts experience.

  The absence of a teacher who is also a surrogate parent is not a condition confined to African American or Latino children. In the 1980s, in a documentary called To Be a Teacher, I interviewed Lenny Stanziano, who taught math in Toms River, New Jersey. He, too, stood at the schoolhouse door and greeted students by name, saying he was often the first person to acknowledge them that day.

  Many of his students were white, working- and middle-class kids, who lived with single parents or in households where both parents rushed off to work before dawn. Every student I talked to had high praise for Mr. Stanziano as a teacher and because he saw them as someone other than just a name in roll call.

  Stanziano worked weekends in a large liquor store, stacking beer cases in the refrigerator to supplement his meager teacher’s salary, which was just over twenty-six thousand dollars in 1976. His classroom skills and commitment to education paid off. For the past eleven years he’s been principal of Toms River High School South.

  Can we take a moment to remember Mr. Betts? And hope for more Denise Garisons and Lenny Stanzianos?

  They’re out there in small and large school systems across the country. I’ve come across them in Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Omaha, Montana, rural Texas, Georgia, and Maine—the foot soldiers of American education: dedicated and inspirational teachers and administrators who for six to eight hours every day take responsibility for educating, comforting, and protecting our nation’s most precious resource, its children. It is hard and noble work and, yes, it is not always done perfectly, but the failures of the system ought not to be blamed on the teachers alone. We all have a stake.

  CHAPTER 4

  Old School Ties and

  New World Requirements

  FACT: The best economic argument about education is in the numbers, period. With every passing year more education means more income in the short and long term. The median annual income for a wage earner with a bachelor of arts degree is $55,700.

  On average, that’s close to $22,000 more annually than a high school graduate can expect to earn. Wage earners who have completed just some college courses earn on average 17 percent more than high school graduates.

  QUESTION: What exactly does higher education mean in a modern global society, and how should it be organized for the masses as well as for the intellectually and financially elite?

  For all the income advantages of a college education, there are mitigating numbers as well. The increasing cost of higher education is a number that has to be factored into the dividend of getting a degree. College graduates entering the workaday world in the middle of an economic downturn may not do as well as, say, a high school graduate with a capacity for fixing or demystifying a computer program.

  The societal value of a well-educated citizenry is self-evident, but no one should have any illusions about the demands of the global economy. When young people with obvious aptitude announce they’re going to college to be a “mass com” (mass communications) major, adding that they hope to be an anchor on a news program shortly after graduation, I have to temper my reaction.

  While I try not to discourage them, I explain that the best journalists I know studied political science, history, economics, or biology, adding that they mastered their professional craft by working the police beat or covering the school board, city hall, or state legislature.

  “Taking any economics courses?” I’ll ask. “Or accounting or computer science or biology? How about writing?” The eagerness of my new young friends often turns to unease. “What is he talking about?” they seem to be thinking. “I want to be Diane Sawyer or Matt Lauer, not some wonk.”

  I was equally frustrated when a bright young African American student who won state honors at a Mississippi high school science fair announced he would be a marketing major when he enrolled at Boston University. He stuck to his plans despite my gentle efforts at dissuasion, and he graduated with honors in marketing. I am sure he’ll be a success. It’s his life, after all, but does America need another marketing executive rather than another scientist?

  THE PAST

  In the nineteenth century, a little remembered Vermont politician inspired a federal program that became one of the most important and enduring contributions to the development of modern America. It was the establishment of land grant colleges, the inspiration of Justin Smith Morrill, a Vermont congressman and later senator, who correctly surmised that the young nation needed a network of institutions to promote agricultural education, the mechanical arts, and military tactics, three pillars of nineteenth-century America. Now there is at least one land grant school in every state.

  The needs of our society have, of course, changed over time.

  A half century ago, when I was preparing to leave for college, I’m not sure anyone in our family even knew what that meant, exactly. Neither one of my parents had attended college, nor had any immediate relatives. Our high school had no organized college counseling program. In my graduating class, maybe half planned to attend college.

  The University of Iowa was my only choice, and as an out-of-state student my total costs for the year were around two thousand dollars, including room, board, books, maybe a beer or two (okay—maybe more), and a modest but presentable wardrobe. Mother and Dad had saved for this big moment, and they sent me off with all their working-class hopes to be realized. I had a good public school education in the social and physical sciences.

  I had saved a couple of hundred dollars on my own for the first year and enrolled in general liberal arts courses, thinking maybe I’d go to law school at some point.

  Meredith’s parents were both college graduates and so there was some family tradition, but this was 1958 and young women were not often encouraged to prepare for demanding careers, nor did their parents have the same expectations for them as they did for the young men of our time. Two of our brightest high school friends, both male, were recruited by Harvard with generous financial assistance. Meredith and three or four other young women should have been candidates for Wellesley or Smith or one of the other so-called Seven Sisters, but as she remembers, it never came up.

  To the astonishment of her daughters today, Meredith made her entire college wardrobe at her Singer sewing machine. She was a skilled seamstress, and frugality was encouraged in her family. In her first year she attended a small women’s junior college in Missouri. When she was crowned Miss South Dakota in 1959, she qualified for a scholarship to an in-state school, so she transferred to the University of South Dakota.

  As Meredith puts it, her dad thought she’d go to college and get a “Mrs.” degree.

  Fortunately for me, that worked out, but I’ve often thought about how unfair it was that she and several other young women didn’t have a crack at an elite institution. For most of us at that time, I suppose, the goal was to get an education, get married—often right after graduation—then get an advanced degree or a job and start a family. This was 1962, and the future seemed to be an exciting challenge for our generation, with a new, young president, John F. Kennedy, summoning us to rise to the occasion.

  Russia was the major international concern, and many of my friends plunged into engineering classes as the nation’s industrial infrastructure geared up to meet the Sputnik challenge, when the Soviets beat us into space. In my political science classe
s I read about missile throw weight and the larger question of how to conduct foreign policy in the nuclear age, in a seminal book by a little-known Harvard professor by the name of Henry Kissinger.

  China was Red China, a closed, mysterious, and primitive cult with hundreds of millions of people marching in lockstep to the incantations of Chairman Mao. On the map of the world China might as well have been one of those blank spaces on the cartography of ancient mariners that read “Beyond here serpents lie.”

  Japan was beginning to produce a little car called Toyota and inexpensive electronics.

  Korea was still struggling to recover from the bitter and costly war that had so deeply divided that forbidding landscape. The United States was sending military advisers to a place called Vietnam, which the French had abandoned not too many years before.

  The overwhelming majority of students in American institutions of higher learning were white and from public schools. Most, I would guess, were adequately prepared academically for what was expected of them. The graduate schools—law, business, medicine—were dominated by white males. However misrepresentative that student profile may have been of the general population, it was adequate to the needs of a country that was so dominant in the world economy.

  THE PRESENT

  First-rate educations are available at what were originally land grant colleges—and not just at the best known of them, such as the University of California–Berkeley, Cornell, or Michigan State; they’re available at the smaller state institutions as well. South Dakota State University is the archrival of the school where I finished my undergraduate studies, the University of South Dakota, but I have to give State, as we call it, full credit for turning out important scientists, business leaders, political leaders, and educators.

  However, in the Great Plains states, as the population grows older and the young move on, taxpayers’ priorities change, and money spent on higher education struggles to maintain its place in the state budget.

  The charge for future generations in rural America is to make those schools even more competitive in a global environment, and to do that, the more sparsely populated states will have to make tough decisions. In the early part of the twentieth century it was politically and practically popular to have a number of taxpayer-supported colleges scattered throughout the state, because the agricultural economy meant farm kids had to divide their lives between class and harvest time. Now it is a drain on resources to have so many schools in various locations—resources that should be more efficiently applied to fewer campuses.

  Wouldn’t the state budgets and the population be better served by consolidating administrative costs and higher education resources on a regional rather than state-by-state basis?

  The cost of higher education, the elixir of a progressive society, is rising at an alarming rate. According to the College Board, published tuition and fees at public four-year colleges rose almost 5 percent a year beyond general inflation from the 1999–2000 school year to the term that started in 2009. Private college tuition and fee costs went up a little more than 2.5 percent above inflation during the same period, but private schools started at a much higher level.

  A working- or middle-class family hoping to send a child to a public four-year college—an institution paid for with their taxes—must, on average, pony up between eight and twelve thousand dollars just to get through the gate. That does not include computers, books, travel, wardrobe, laundry, social activities, or myriad other costs of just living.

  So if an insurance broker, school principal, or factory manager is making ninety thousand dollars a year and hopes to send his or her two kids to the local state college, more than 20 percent of the family’s gross annual salary disappears the day they’re accepted.

  The College Board, which oversees higher education testing and monitors college trends, conducted a study showing that a full 10 percent of 2007–08 college graduates had borrowed forty thousand dollars or more. That’s more than two hundred thousand college graduates with more than forty thousand dollars in debt as they start careers and, perhaps, families. How does that affect their ability to buy a home, finance more education, or raise a child?

  These debts were accumulated just as the economy went into free fall and jobs disappeared, many of them not to be seen again. Students emerged from commencement exercises with a diploma and a debt load that made them an instant credit risk and a burden for their parents or prospective mates.

  We simply must find a way to make higher education more efficient and more affordable.

  Consolidation is a logical place to begin.

  THE PROMISE

  The concept of higher education for everyone, with community colleges, state colleges, and universities, would remain intact but the horse-and-buggy constraints would go away. We’re a highly mobile society now, so why remain wedded to the constraints that define so many of our institutions?

  The University of Washington in Seattle has a world-class medical school that serves that state and aspiring physicians from Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana as well, sparing those three states the expense of building duplicate institutions. Why shouldn’t, say, North and South Dakota, Iowa, and Minnesota find a way to conflate their medical schools so duplicative costs go down and resources are spread more evenly for more efficiency? Curiously, much of the resistance to the consolidation of schools and colleges is rooted in conservative rural areas where legislators and voters demand fiscal efficiency in every other form of government.

  I have no illusions about the political difficulty of deconstructing what has been in place for so long. But if education is to be America’s best offense and defense against global competition, hard, big, and bold choices have to be made.

  Here are two realities that cut across all our hopes and expectations for improving education and its societal benefits in America.

  Poverty: During the Great Recession, the number of homeless children exceeded one million. Almost one in five kids lived in households at or below the poverty level. Those are not conditions disconnected from fulfilling the promise of education. They have to be addressed as well.

  School term: The time for the nine- or ten-month school term has come to an end. If American education is to measure up against global competition, time spent in the classroom or in some form of learning environment must be extended. In a society where more and more families have both parents working, we have a vast population of unsupervised kids disconnected from adult supervision and from the discipline of learning for two to three months a year. Education experts call that the “spring slide,” when students, especially those in lower socioeconomic groups, lose a lot of what they learned during the academic year.

  Nonetheless, the idea of extending the school term is not popular among parents. Most polls show the opposition running about two to one. A variety of reasons are offered, including interference with family vacations and the experience young people gain at summer camp or while working a summer job.

  Here’s a suggested start: Extend the school year to eleven months and make the eleventh month morning or afternoon only. For teenagers who need to earn income during the off-season, bring employers into the equation with tax credits for participating in work-study programs.

  CHAPTER 5

  Don’t Know Much

  About Geometry

  FACT: In China it is mandatory for all junior high students to study biology, chemistry, and physics; in the United States, only 18 percent of high school students take those courses.

  QUESTION: Where have the most exciting and beneficial developments in our life come from in the last quarter century? From science, right? From computer mavens and biomedical whizzes, from energy engineers and environmental biologists.

  The evidence is all around us, and success is not limited to the rock stars of that world—Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, or the Google boys, Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

  Sitting in a New York University hospital waiting room recently, awaiting a routine
checkup, I picked up the NYU medical bulletin and read about Dr. Jan T. Vilcek.

  Dr. Vilcek and his wife escaped to America from Communist-controlled Czechoslovakia in 1965, and he joined the NYU medical faculty. With a colleague he developed the popular anti-inflammatory drug Remicade.

  His royalties were astronomical so he began a program of giving $100 million to NYU for research and medical education, explaining, “We decided to base the scholarships on merit rather than need because my goal is to improve the competitiveness of our medical school and attract the most highly qualified and talented students.”

  THE PAST

  I wonder how Dr. Vilcek’s vision would fit in with Ben Braddock’s future?

  Remember the scene in the celebrated 1967 Mike Nichols film The Graduate, in which Benjamin (Dustin Hoffman), a young man caught between the conventions of his fifties-era parents and the zeitgeist of the sixties, gets advice from Mr. McGuire, one of his father’s friends?

  “Plastics” was McGuire’s laugh-out-loud key to the future.

  If Mr. McGuire were confiding in Benjamin in this age of computers, digital phones, and desperately needed new energy sources, the dialogue might go like this:

  McGuire: “I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.”

  Benjamin: “Yes, sir?”

  McGuire: “Are you listening?”

  Benjamin: “Yes, I am.”

  McGuire: “Science.”

  Science, not plastics, and if Benjamin were to continue, as he does in the film, by asking, “Exactly how do you mean?” I would hope even someone as intellectually constricted as McGuire would say, “Because, Benjamin, math, physics, science of all kinds, have always been important but never more so than now in this technological world. If you doubt me, visit a classroom in Singapore or Shanghai, Seoul or Mumbai.”