Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 6, 1994 TAG: 9404070300
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
But the worst thing isn't the daunting distance between where we are and where we need to go. It's the fact that we aren't even moving toward the goals, not at least with a pace or purpose to suggest we're taking the goals seriously.
We'd better start soon.
The "Goals 2000" are as follows: (1) All children will start school ready to learn. (2) The high school graduation rate will rise to at least 90 percent. (3) Students will leave fourth, eighth and 12th grades demonstrating competency in challenging subjects. (4) U.S. students will be first in the world in science and math achievement. (5) Every adult will be literate. (6) Every school will be free of drugs and violence. (7) All teachers will have access to training for professional development. (8) All schools will involve parents in their children's education.
These goals are pie in the sky only in the sense of how far we are from achieving them. They represent, in fact, only some of the standards our country will have to achieve, educationally, to assure rising living standards for citizens and competitiveness for workers in the world economy.
If we're not making large, measurable strides toward the objectives when the new century arrives, count on being in a heap of trouble.
We're headed there now. A national bipartisan panel in a recent report called the current rate of progress "wholly inadequate" for achieving the education goals by the year 2000.
Among the report's findings:
Almost half of all U.S. infants begin life with one or more factors considered risky to their long-term educational development. (Such factors include tobacco or alcohol use by their pregnant mothers.)
Only about one out of every five fourth-graders and one in four eighth-graders now meet the goals panel's performance standard for mathematics.
Literacy of young adults declined in the past decade. In 1992, on tasks such as understanding and using information from a map or newspaper, the average scores of adults ages 21 to 25 were slightly lower than seven years earlier.
In 1992, about 20 percent of eighth graders reported being threatened with a weapon. Ten percent said they carried weapons onto school grounds.
Our nation and communities have to do better. We have to work on all the goals simultaneously. But a good one to emphasize is No. 1 - readiness to learn - on which the others largely depend.
A local "Goals 2000" task force, sponsored by the regional chamber of commerce and the county, city and Salem school divisions, has described what would constitute a serious effort to achieve this aim:
All disadvantaged children would have access to high-quality preschool programs. Every parent, as the child's first teacher, would devote time every day to helping his or her children learn. Parents would also have access to the support and training they need. And "children will receive the nutrition and health care needed to arrive at school with healthy minds and bodies, and the number of low birth-weight babies will be significantly reduced through prenatal health systems."
Shouldn't all this be basic? The long-term social costs of not ensuring readiness - from hospital care for premature babies to special education in schools to prison cells for criminals - are profound and enormous.
Yet the Child Health Investment Partnership - a successful public-private initiative offering primary care for children and family support services - has enough funding to serve only 1,200 at-risk children in Roanoke out of some 4,800 eligible. This is stupid.
It also poses the question starkly: Do we want all our children to be ready to learn, or not?
If meeting the goal is a condition for world-class education and economic competitiveness, shouldn't we at least begin to aspire toward it?
by CNB