Word: conant
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That gentle and thoughtful critic of schools, James B. Conant, this week illuminates another problem that the U.S. didn't quite realize it had. In a new book, he says that the way the country shapes educational policy-on teaching reforms in grade schools, for example, or standards for advanced placement, or teacher recruiting-is chaotic and costly. After a wistful salute to the policymaking ministries of education in Europe, Conant acknowledges that the U.S. Constitution prevents the Federal Government from taking on such an overriding job. So, with a touch of defensiveness ("I am well aware that there...
...Establishment. At present, says Conant in Shaping Educational Policy (McGraw-Hill; $3.95), decisions are made by a "jumble" of forces that include 4,000 decentralized school boards, state education departments often run by political hacks, the hydra-headed "establishment" of education professors and accrediting agencies, and fiercely competing public and private colleges. "The politics of education," he warns, "is rapidly becoming the politics of frustration...
Members of the Texas legislature, for example, told Conant that they were under heavy pressure from local constituents to allow junior colleges to become four-year schools. "Every institution is out for itself," confessed a lawmaker, "and when this happens education becomes a pork barrel." Only two states, California and New York, follow master plans for higher education. Planning for public and secondary schools is equally incoherent. A "classic example" is Indiana, where the state superintendent of schools is elected on a partisan political ballot and staffs the agency on the spoils system...
Advocating what he calls a voluntary "cooperative exploration of educational problems between the state and the federal government." Conant suggests that at least 15 or 20 of the more populous states form an interstate commission to plan educational policy...
...solution to the problem of segregated schools, Conant suggests that neighborhood schools be kept in the elementary grades but that children in junior and senior high schools be bussed as much as necessary to enure that each school's racial mixture is "as comprehensive as the total school district...