Teaching values: what does the public really want?

• Author: Johnson, Jean

Despite the controversies over sex education and multiculturalism, parents are more concerned about safety, discipline, and instruction in basic skills.

THESE ARE difficult times for educational reformers. Despite broad leadership consensus about how to improve the public schools--a strategy centering on raising academic standards, increasing course work in science and math, and introducing tougher assessments designed to encourage critical thinking and problem-solving--reform agendas have become unraveled in the face of unexpected opposition from parents, teachers, and community and religious groups.

In the summer of 1994, Public Agenda, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research and education organization, undertook a project to explore the public's perspective on the controversies causing turmoil in the schools. The resulting report, First Things First: What Americans Expect from the Public Schools, is based on a national telephone survey of more than 1,100 Americans, including 550 parents with offspring currently in such educational institutions. It includes detailed views of white and African-American parents, including those who identify themselves as traditional Christians. The report finds overwhelming public support for making the schools safer and more orderly, as well as for placing a renewed emphasis on basic skills. Reform agendas that fail to address these fundamental concerns, the study suggests, in all likelihood will fail to receive public support.

First Things First also sheds light on a topic that has received a great deal of media attention in recent years: values disputes in the schools. In a number of communities, discussion about how to improve student skills has taken a back seat to debates over what should be taught. Bitter quarrels over the content of history and science courses, selection of textbooks and library books, and, most prominently, sex education and AIDS prevention have surfaced in school districts in all parts of the nation.

In comparison to safety, order, and the basics, values issues are not a priority for most Americans. They are not preoccupied by concerns about sex education and multiculturalism that have caused such acrimonious debate in various communities.

Despite the attention they have attracted in the press and the genuine turmoil they have created in some school districts, "values" disputes about how history and science should be taught, how minorities are portrayed, what textbooks should be used...