Whatever Happened To the Local School?

By Paul Hill, James W. Guthrie, and Larry Pierce

It's time to rediscover the primacy of a forgotten element of our educational system--the local school.

When we think of what's right about American education, we think of successful individual schools--like Central Park East in New York City or the Horace Mann School down the street. The school is the place where the buses deliver the kids, where students go to class, and where the community comes together around education.

Polls routinely show that while Americans are often down on education, they tend to think that their own local school is doing reasonably well. A new Gallup Poll undertaken cooperatively with the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Vanderbilt University and scheduled to be released this month, found that parents of school-age children are significantly more satisfied than other members of the public with the performance of American schools,...