NCJ Number
118932
Date Published
1985
Length
196 pages
Annotation
This book expands the study of the decline of the nation's schools first aired on ABC television on September 4, 1984.
Abstract
Eighty-nine percent of America's elementary and high school students are now in public schools. Problems now associated with these schools are drug use and violence, sinking test scores, increasingly overloaded and underfunded classrooms, drift and confusion over actual goals and purposes, and unsettling signs of a tendency toward separation into two unequal class divisions. Students drop out in massive numbers; 25 percent nationally. Teaching has become an imperiled profession. With lower pay and public esteem and distracted and hostile students, a national shortage is predicted. The final great threat to public education is the danger that the vast middle class will abandon the public school system, depriving them of the vital leadership and support they so desperately need. Appendixes and source notes.