Everyone needs standards

"Responsibility! Accountability! Discipline! Oversight! Rules!" So begins Dan Henninger's Wall Street Journalcolumn from yesterday, which, among other things, connects the lack of standards in the financial markets to the loss of standards in our schools.

Once we're done imposing Spartan discipline on the dining rooms of Wall Street, how about some of the same for the halls and classrooms of the average inner-city high school? A nation in panic at the sight of banks imploding has yawned for years while the public-school system melted down.

A handful of Supreme Court decisions going back 40 years relaxed standards of oversight for dress codes, comportment, speech and expulsion, and the average school principal or teacher threw in the towel on daily discipline. Not my job.

Many school administrators can relate to the frontline mortgage-lending officers, some of them old-school bankers who used to help young borrowers understand the difference between the real world and probable ruin. That's what high-school principals used to do. No more.

Suddenly, local lenders were toiling (if they survived) in the easier liar-loan world fostered by Congress, Fannie and Freddie and guys with great tans in Los Angeles. The old public-school system, once a tight ship in countless towns, knew that game. The schools learned to shove another class of semi-educated bodies into the street every June and call them "graduates" the same way lenders called zero-down-payment borrowers "homeowners."

I'm not so sure there was a golden age when??the public school system ran such a tight ship, but the rest of his analogy makes a lot of sense. Henninger goes on to spot "a ray of hope amid the past week's rubble in the financial markets. Something positive has been in the air this election, and all the calls now for a return to financial rectitude is part of it." He might find similar hope for education by reading David Whitman's recent book on inner-city schools where rigor and discipline have made a comeback.

"People want standards again because they work -- in business, in schools, in daily life," writes Henninger. Indeed.