Needed: Caring Schools

By Joseph Sanacore

The media are packed with stories about failing schools. Inner-city schools, in particular, are portrayed as bureaucracies unable to help minority students achieve. With notable exceptions, such as James Traub's examination of the roots of underachievement published in The New York Times Magazine on Jan. 16 of last year, most journalists blame schools alone for poor test scores, and rarely look deeper. Regrettably, the worth of schools is usually determined by standardized-test results, which, at best, provide a rough index of academic achievement.

Although helping students achieve academically is a major goal of public education, children come to school with a wide variety of needs, and therefore should be treated as whole people rather than as detached receptacles for academic knowledge.

Consider, for example, the impact on children of...