Books in Brief: Straight Talk about American Education

Straight Talk about American Education, Theodore M. Black (Harcourt Brace, 307 pp., $14.95). The dust-jacket boasts that this is a book which offers some blunt truths about the failings of American education. And Black’s broadside does not disappoint. The former chancellor of New York State’s Board of Regents minces few words in scoring the public-school system as long on promises and short on results. Chief among his targets are those “modernist-liberal” educators who have turned schools into playpens where academic achievement has been subordinated to socialization. The author is appalled at the absence of scholastic standards and asserts that academics who rationalize the public schools’ many problems are the educational equivalent of those automakers who designed the Edsel. What is to be done? Black believes the public schools should stop making excuses and learn some lessons from their counterparts in the private sector. The book’s best chapter stresses that private schools succeed because they specialize in educating children. Were public schools similarly committed to providing a quality program in a safe and orderly environment, he argues, there would be no crisis in American education. But then this would require such changes as a return to basics, minimum competency tests for staff and students, stringent discipline and dress codes, and an end to liberal chimeras like forced busing and bilingual instruction. One more thing: Black favors tuition tax credits to ensure healthy competition between public and private schools. No wonder he was nicknamed “The Lone Regent.”