Education advocate makes difference

Like a ship’s whistle piercing the fog on a murky morning, there is at least one voice in America cutting through the diverse rhetoric on education. It belongs to former Florida newspaper publisher David Lawrence, who has devoted his second career to education.

Not content with helping the Miami Herald win five Pulitzers, Lawrence retired from the newspaper in 2000 to expand on early childhood learning and related issues. Lawrence was keynote speaker April 23 at a conference of the Washington Association of Educational Service Districts at the Hilton Vancouver Washington. ESD112 of Vancouver was host. I attended because my wife, Marilyn, is a member of the ESD 112 board.

Over 30 years, Lawrence has received 12 honorary doctorates and a plethora of honors and distinctions, including: Henry M. Flagler Award for visionary leadership; American Red Cross Humanitarian of the Year award; co-founder of a non-profit vocational-technical school in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and more.

He is qualified to speak about education in America, and has plenty to say. While he has visited this state nine times, he instructed his audience: “Please know that everything I will say this morning is with the full realization you know far more than I about the realities for your 6.5 million people and the more than 90,000 babies born each year in this special state … You’ve made significant progress in lowering both the teen birth rate and the infant mortality rate … I can see … a growth percentage of Washington state families headed by a single parent. There is a high school dropout rate that you won’t yet want to brag about.” He said data tell us one in every four of this state’s elementary students cannot read at even minimally proficient levels, that “one in every eight of your children live in the full federal definition of poverty and … that more that 130,000 of your children have no health insurance … .”

We can do better

Lawrence knows we can do better, and tells his audience what teachers know — “that more than a third of entering kindergarten students are ‘ill-prepared to learn’ and see so frequently the tragedy of the first-grade student who already feels like a failure.” Delivering more children to school eager and ready to learn would “burn out far fewer teachers,” he said. The consequence? “Half the teachers in America are gone from the system within five years of entering it.” Teachers, like journalists, he observed, “are idealistic people who want to make a difference … but they so often quickly find themselves spending less of their time actually teaching, and increasing portions of time managing, controlling and triaging.”

Wasted dollars, Lawrence said, are spent on “prison, police, prosecutors” and remediation. Investments that make a difference, in his view, are in high-quality child care, and parent skill-building. “Nothing is more central than loving, caring parents with the skills to know how to best help their children succeed.” Lawrence explained how early years shape the child: “If 100 children leave first grade not really knowing how to read, then by the end of the fourth grade, 88 of them still have not become good readers.”

He worries, too, about monstrous deficits built from the “ethos of greed and got-to-have-it-now mentality;” an abandonment of curbs established in the 1930s on excesses. Lawrence is concerned about the loss of self-discipline and the rise of permissiveness. He is bothered by the “uncivil nature of what passes for public discourse” that shows up in sound bites “that trash anyone and everyone in public service.”

Education remains both a hope and a challenge. “The society that allows large numbers of its citizens to remain uneducated, ignorant or semiliterate squanders its greatest asset, the intelligence of its people,” Lawrence said.

This former newspaperman, an early-learning enthusiast, knows we can’t save the world, but we can “save many people, and “the true joy of life is about service. Making a difference.”

Ending his rally for education, Lawrence exited to a standing ovation.

Tom Koenninger is editor emeritus of The Columbian. His column of personal opinion appears on Wednesdays. Reach him at koenninger@comcast.net.