by Dan Rather
The principal, Mrs. Simmons, was the smartest, hardest-working of them all, and she was a potent force in my early life. With the exception of my parents, she probably did more than anyone else to shape me into the person I would become. Mrs. Simmons ran her school as a kind of benevolent dictatorship. She personally hired every teacher. She knew every student’s name. She was in and out of all the classrooms every day, checking, directing, encouraging, and spreading her creed of “Love conquers all.” It was a play on the school’s name, of course, but it also formed the basis for her mantra: “We all love to learn and we love one another.”
Don’t be misled by all this talk of “love,” however. School under Mrs. Simmons was a protective place, but you weren’t coddled. She was a tough disciplinarian who had zero tolerance for any misbehavior. If you acted up in class, got into a shoving match on the playground, or disrespected a teacher, you wound up in Mrs. Simmons’s office. She would sit in her over-large upholstered chair behind her spartan desk, and you would sit on the single wooden chair before it. The Texas and American flags stood imposingly in each corner, and the mottled light filtered in through the two large oak trees behind her windows. It was the last place any kid wanted to be.
Mrs. Simmons would tell you in no uncertain terms of your punishment, and then she would call or write your parents. In our neighborhood, few people could afford telephones, and if they had a phone, they had only “party line” service, sharing their line with many other households. These phones were often busy, so Mrs. Simmons usually sent notes home. The notes would encourage (actually, require) your parents to come in for a chat. She minced no words. When she felt it was needed, she would remind you and your parents that her natural decency and kindness (her “Love conquers all”) should not be misunderstood; she could be—and, when necessary, would be—a lioness. Sometimes, to both break the ice and make a point, she would explain, “You know, there’s tough. There’s street tough—Heights tough . . . and then there is prison tough.” After a pause, she would invariably add, in a voice I can still remember, “And trust me, friends, I can be prison tough and beyond if I have to be.” She was joking, overstating, but not by much. Her talks were especially popular with fathers in the neighborhood. She spoke their language.
Mrs. Simmons and all the teachers lived in better neighborhoods than the Heights. Every day they would come to Love Elementary almost as if they were descending the social strata of Houston. You could tell this by how they dressed, in nicer clothes than what most of our families could afford. But more so, you could tell it in the way they spoke, with less of an accent. They didn’t drop their g’s (they were “going” somewhere, not “goin’ ”), and they didn’t turn their e’s into i’s (if you asked my friends how old they were in fifth grade, they would have said “tin”). But you never felt condescended to. All the teachers had a deep love for not only their students and parents, but also for our community, city, state, and country. I like to think these patriotic instincts are some of the same that prompt our best teachers to answer their calling.
I grew up at a time when regional identity was far greater than it is today, particularly in proud, independent Texas, but we were clearly being trained to be full and active citizens in these broader United States. We learned and reveled in the uniqueness of being American even as the world outside our school doors was mired in the Great Depression and World War II. However, we were also blind to the profound injustice of learning about the greatness of the United States as students in an all-white school. I didn’t even know where the nearest African American elementary school was for most of my childhood. The first time I ever saw it was in high school, when some African American kids I played street baseball with invited me to an outdoor party in their neighborhood. Walking there, I passed the elementary school. It was small and run-down, and didn’t have much of a school yard.
Despite this glaring deficit on race, my elementary school education started to give me the tools to understand my country, a path that would eventually allow me to realize America’s injustices as well as its strengths. Our teachers were true believers in the American Dream, and they drilled it into our impressionable minds all through elementary school: “Dream . . . you can do it,” they’d say, “but only if you study and work hard.” We discussed the meaning of the phrase “one nation, indivisible” as early as second grade and frequently in the years that followed. (It should be noted that the phrase “under God” was not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until the Cold War, after I had graduated from college.)
I was the first in my family ever to enter an institution of higher learning, and with our household income I was destined to attend a public college. Sam Houston State Teachers College in Huntsville, Texas, had a small, rural campus hidden behind pine trees. There was no ivy anywhere in sight. We didn’t have alumni who were presidents or Supreme Court justices. We weren’t a major athletic power or an academic powerhouse. My classmates and I didn’t have very lofty ambitions, but they seemed atmospheric at the time. We were college students and the pride in that was palpable. Many of my classmates were, like me, from Texas families who had never sent anyone to college. A large number of the male students had their tuition covered by the GI Bill. As a country we were determined to knock down the doors to the middle class, rebuild our nation, and use education as a ladder for not only our own growth but also for future generations.
My college was full of dedicated educators who might not have had national reputations for the quality of their scholarship, but who were committed to teaching us with an idealism that today may sound a bit corny or unbelievable. As professors at a teachers college, their job was to train the educators of the future, to pass on the torch of their own chosen career. Maybe it was because we were in the immediate wake of World War II, maybe it was because of the older students who had seen service in that war, but for whatever reason there was a real spirit among even those of us who were young and immature that attending college was not just a rite of passage. Education was a gift, part of the panoply of blessings for having the good luck to be alive at that time and in those United States. The classes that really stood out for me were those in the new sociology department. Under the guise of explaining how modern cities worked, those professors also carefully broached the issue of race, and the disparities of segregated schools.
In hindsight, and with the clarity provided by the intervening years, I can see some of the limitations of my teachers, in their experiences and worldviews. We didn’t learn much about foreign cultures, let alone appreciate the different cultures within our own nation. Our literary canon was composed almost exclusively of white, mostly male authors. There was very little discussion about the great sins of our own history, even slavery, let alone the plight of Native Americans, religious minorities, and other marginalized groups. We didn’t appreciate the full importance of science or the need to protect the environment. Outside the classroom, we were far less sophisticated in identifying bullying and other forms of abuse. Even in the amber glow of nostalgia, my schools were a long way from perfect.
When I became a reporter, it didn’t take long for me to see how many of the inequities in our nation were grounded in the limitations of our educational system. I was on assignment as a fresh-faced correspondent for CBS News in the fall of 1962 when James Meredith bravely attempted to integrate the University of Mississippi, and while I knew the situation would be tense, I was not prepared for what followed. No one was. Just a few years removed from my own cherished college experience, I was deeply disturbed to be on a college campus, a beautiful one with a deep history, and see the hate for a man whose crime was that he simply wanted an education. It is too easy for those who today breezily dismiss the legacy of race and education to forget what happened in places like Oxford. Thousands of students and outside agitators were whipped into a murderous fury. Federal troops brought in to keep the peace confronted a riot of gunfire and arson, and two civilians were murdered. We still are living
in the shadow of this history. Over the years that followed, I would report on many stories that portrayed the great and dire inconsistencies in our public education systems. I would see it on Native American reservations and in dying rural communities and poor neighborhoods. I would see it in the ostracism of marginalized groups within schools and the struggles that young women faced to overcome academic exclusion and alienation.
Despite all these injustices, I still had the sense for most of my early career that by and large public education was on a steady march of progress, fueled by a spirit of bipartisan support. Recently I have begun to despair, as I see the very notion of public schools under threat. Instead of a national will to make free and open education a priority and strength, I see insidious forces overtly and covertly undermining our public schools.
The crisis of our schools, especially public schools, is complex. And difficult questions abound: Does the general school tax system need to be reevaluated or not? How do we assess the impact of charter schools, and are some voucher systems worthy of consideration? What about Wall Street’s increasing involvement in for-profit schools? What is the optimum role for teachers’ unions? The list goes on. But there should be no dispute that if American schools don’t improve, America will lose its world leadership. And I believe that whatever system emerges in the future, it must hew to our ideals of public education: It must be open to all, free of charge, and of the highest quality.
Instead, what we are seeing is a persistent (and in some cases increasing) de facto segregation of schools along fissures of race and economic class, between urban and suburban districts, as well as within cities themselves. We see rising tuitions at public universities and the under-resourcing of community colleges, one of the unheralded backbones of our educational community. We see educational standards based more on politics than on pedagogy. And when it comes to training future generations, there are few professions more important than teaching, and yet teachers are compensated at levels out of balance with their responsibilities.
During my travels to other countries, I have seen that they approach their public school systems differently. While our schools are mired in inconsistency and often plagued by poor performance, many of the world’s industrialized countries are achieving superior results. This is one of the most important news stories of our time, and I have been interested in understanding how other nations do it, so a few years back, my reporting team and I decided to compare two very different countries whose schools are highly acclaimed.
In Finland, children spend less time in class than almost any other developed country. They are given tremendous amounts of freedom and have very little homework. Public schools cater to everyone; there are almost no private schools in the entire country. In Finland, it isn’t just the best students who do well. The country’s commitment to building a system where every child, regardless of circumstance, has access to a good school has produced impressive results. Finland’s students regularly score among the highest in the world.
In Singapore, where students are also among the world’s highest scorers, schools are strict and rigid. Whereas there are very few standardized tests in Finland, in Singapore they form the basis for the educational system. The tests (multiple-choice exams, in addition to written and oral exams) help sort students into elite academic colleges, technical schools, or vocational training. These tests are so important that more than 90 percent of Singaporean students get private tutoring after school or on weekends to prepare.
Although Singapore and Finland are polar opposites in their educational philosophies, they have some important similarities besides just the high results for their students. Both countries have come a long way, fast. As late as the 1950s, Finland’s economy was largely agrarian and stagnant, until the country’s leaders made a commitment to educate every child. In Singapore in 1965, an estimated 40 percent of the population was illiterate, but then the country’s leaders undertook a radical educational overhaul. So both Finland and Singapore have a rigorous commitment from their national governments to make quality schools, evenly distributed in their population, a top priority. And there is another important key to their success: Schoolteachers are held in high esteem in both countries, and they get a lot of training and support.
Given the current struggles within the United States, it may be hard to remember that up until relatively recently our school system was the envy of the world. That was an outgrowth of our changing country, for while some public schools existed early on, it was really the rise of educational reformers in the antebellum era that set us on the path to true public education. Few loom larger than Horace Mann, who argued that a truly free populace could not remain ignorant, and that communities must provide nonsectarian public schools, staffed by trained teachers and open to students of diverse backgrounds. His reforms for primary and eventually secondary education, begun in Massachusetts, soon spread to other parts of the country, especially as the nation was shifting from an agricultural to an industrial economy, and from rural areas to cities.
The United States has also historically been a leader in public education at the college and university level. Before the Civil War, higher education was an opportunity that was available to only a tiny fraction of the population. But as the nation grew, America needed a better-trained citizenry to compete in the industrial age. So in 1862, in the midst of the Civil War, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Morrill Act, which set up the land grant college system. States were given federal land to either use or sell to establish the “endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts.” These schools would be focused on agriculture and engineering, but they would really become general universities—schools such as the University of California, the University of Nebraska, the Ohio State University, and many others. The states viewed higher education as a central governmental service they would provide to their citizens. I, and millions of others like me, benefited from this civic mission.
Despite this broad national effort to expand access to education, local and state control of schools and state colleges has always been a pillar of our system. In a positive sense, this has allowed our schools to more nimbly respond to the needs of our communities—such as in California, one of the most diverse states in the Union, which recently passed a law that will create ethnic studies classes in high schools. It’s not just curriculum; having differing state policies on education provides diverse laboratories for innovation.
But all the advantages of this decentralized system are predicated on state and local governments believing in the importance of funding high-quality education, an instinct that is in steep decline in many places. A system of local control can also distribute funding unfairly, as we see often today when rich suburban districts have resources that poorer and urban ones do not.
Since local control also gives communities great power to shape curriculum, whether it is teaching about evolution, civil rights history, or climate change, the hyper-partisanship of our nation is trickling into the classroom. In several states, boards of education have adopted standards that undermine the futures of the very students these schools are supposed to serve. My beloved state of Texas has been a particularly egregious example, where new guidelines for textbooks have even downplayed the role of slavery as the cause of the Civil War. The reactionary wing of the American political spectrum is making its mark in this arena, and to great effect. And because schools are controlled on a local level, the federal government is hard pressed, and often resistant, to step in to address curriculum issues. But the fight for the soul of American public education is one from which none of us can afford to shrink. It is in essence a battle for the heart, soul, and future of the United States.
One of the great strengths of the public education system is that it provides a
world of second chances. I have seen many late bloomers struggle in their early years at school and later go on to a community college and transfer to a four-year school. Education is not about just planting a seed; it is also about nurturing, over many decades, a productive, meaningful, and happy life.
One of my most vivid memories from Love Elementary School was how the now-overlooked Arbor Day holiday was always a marked occasion on the school calendar. Mrs. Simmons would take a great personal interest, directing the yearly activity of planting a tree on the school grounds. Each year we would gather around to see a delicate sapling go into the soil. Our responsibilities had but just begun. We were formed into rotating teams in the months after the planting, tasked with nourishing the young trees into maturity. We took that job very seriously, an instinct I would like to think we learned from our teachers.
On a recent trip to Houston with one of my grandsons, we drove past my old school. In many ways it looked the same as when I had gone there, and as we paused for a moment I could see the echoes of my much younger self. Each school day, Love Elementary is once again filled with girls and boys who have their entire lives ahead of them. They will grow, and they will have to be nurtured. I was happy to see that five of the six trees we students planted during my time at the school remained standing. There was that marvelous magnolia. There was one of the solid oaks. I thought of what a wonderful metaphor these trees were for education. They were planted as an investment in the future. They have weathered many storms to provide shade to the generations who followed me. They stood tall, and proud. They had taken root and been allowed to thrive under a canopy of love. And so had I.
