COMMENTARY Friday, May 19, 1995 San Ramon Valley Times Educators must listen to and act on wishes of public The group Concerned Women for America is concerned about the state of the nation's education. Me, too. So I'm delighted to know there are so many bright, energetic people dedicated to dislodging the anti-intellectual philosophy that dominates today's schools, even though their reasons are not at all like mine. Last Saturday I attended a meeting of the group at Rolling Hills Community Church in Danville devoted to "outcome-based education.' About 30 people, mostly women, turned out in the rain to pray, to listen and to share food. As far as I can tell, I disagree with the typical CWA member about a lot of things. I'm not religious, I think evolution and not creationism should be taught in biology classes and I don't believe there's anything morally wrong with homosexuality per se. So I probably wouldn't like a public school system designed by CWA any better than. I like the one we have. But then, there's no likelihood that the group's memebers would be in any position to design a school system and force other people's chidren to attend it. They, on the other hand, are being forced to send their children to schools based on ideas they find repugnant. Of course, parents can opt out, provided they have the money or the time, by sending their children to a private school or teaching them at home. And that's what they should do, rather than allow their children's spirits to be twisted in ways the parents think are wrong. But families shouldn't have to do that. The schools are public schools; they should be responsive to the wishes of the public. And if the public is divided, as it is, into groups whose wishes are incompatible, then why not offer families greater choice within the system? There are plenty of ways to do that without running into constitutional problems. School districts could allow charter schools that respected parents' values. Explicitly religions public schools may be unconstitutional, although it's worth noting that they existed for a good portion of the nation's history without destroying either their students or the Constitution. Such schools would surely face determined legal challenges, however, that they probably could not overcome. But schools that merely refrained from contravening parents' beliefs, as . one option among several available in a district, should be acceptable. Vouchers are another possible solution. But any alternative that seems to the educational establishment to reduce its power and its funding is fiercely resisted. Sometimes it is at the local level that teachers and administrators are dead set on installing their own favored curriculum. In other cases, local authorities are simply responding to the pressures imposed on them by the states. In California, where virtually all school funding flows from Sacramento, such pressures are almost impossible to resist, even where districts are inclined to try. Centralized control of education has been a disaster in California. When results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress were released in April they showed California children just about at the bottom of the heap. And the problem isn't primarily money; state-by-state comparisons show that increased spending correlates with decreased achievement. No one is arguing that spending more is what makes the results worse, just that the evidence doesn't prove it makes results better. The problem is that one untried theory after another captures the fleeting attention of state bureaucrats, and is then imposed on children through the state's "frameworks" for curriculums. Once it was "whole language," the process of teaching children to read English words as if they were Chinese ideograms. Former Superintendent of Public Instruction Bill Honig presided over that debacle for more than a decade, until his 1993 conviction on felony conflict-of-interest charges. Now he's a university professor, and he visited Walnut Grove Elementary School in Pleasanton May 10 to talk about his ideas for reading reform. Apparently he's discovered that many teachers abandoned phonics while the state was pushing "whole language." But he doesn't seem to have noticed whose fault that was. The current educational fad in California is the "new-new" math, a teaching style developed to fit the mathematics framework constructed during the Honig years. That was one of the issues riling people at the CWA meeting. The San Ramon Valley school district adopted a curriculum guide and textbooks based on the framework at its May 2 meeting, after months of internal discussion but little public debate. Will it work? Possibly, but the question parents are asking is why it's being implemented statewide before anyone knows the answer. A lot of people are fed up with having their children used as the raw material for educational experi- ments, and even more with being told, mendaciously, that they are the only ones complaining. The educational establishment cannot indefinitely ignore those complaints, especially when the people who are dissatisfied gather together and realize just how many of them there are. In recent years, school districts- have encountered increasing difficulty in persuading voters to sup- port them financially whether it's in local bond issues or with parcel taxes. There's never any lack of handy villains to blame, but districts seldom ask themselves whose interests they are serving, or why so many people reject what they are trying to do. During the question-and-answer period, one woman called for the abolition of public education, and seemed slightly surprised by the warmth of the audience's reaction. Homeschooling is on the rise, especially among evangelicals, and several people at the Danville meeting were considering it. This isn't an organized boycott -- not yet. But unless public education begins to pay more attention to the differing values of its diverse constituencies, that's what it could be facing.