Mend the relationship between schools and communities by establishing formal and informal programs that allow citizens and civic leaders to exchange ideas and collaborate. Use the community as a classroom. Hold classes in such places as hospitals, museums, theaters, concert halls, nature centers, public parks, newspapers, and radio and television stations. Schools should form partnerships with public and private organizations that have an educational mission, including libraries, health and motor vehicle departments, youth and religious organizations, and ethnic and cultural groups. In reality, schools systematically perpetuate inequality, with affluent districts providing every educational advantage, and low-income districts providing an education that leads nowhere.
Schools are only as good as their teachers, and the profession needs to be strengthened.
To attract the best candidates, schools must pay wages competitive with other professions. As it is, the U.S. devotes a smaller percentage of its national income to teacher salaries than all but three of 29 industrialized nations, according to a 1999 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Parents and taxpayers are angry, employers and professors are frustrated, and caught in the crossfire are teachers and administrators who say they feel like scapegoats as society's expectations and problems spill into the classroom. I f Y2K fever passed into oblivion without a whimper, our actual entry into the New Millennium is similarly anticlimactic. Our advances are fueled by an ever-expanding definition of literacy, and our liberty depends upon our achieving greater success in extending this literacy to all.