The Deep Secrets of Good Schools.

Americans tell pollsters that improving schools is just about their highest public priority today. Yet there is no consensus on the best way to do this. People are profoundly uncertain of how to judge the scads of faddish educational reforms now in circulation. One of the most constructive things that can be done to improve education, therefore, is simply to observe successful schools in practice. What exactly does each offer to students? Why do they work while others fail?

For more than a year now, we've been doing just this sort of observation for you. Our investigators have visited schools from California to Connecticut, and Michigan to Mississippi. In the pages that follow, you'll find 14 intriguing profiles of schools that truly teach. Collectively, they can tell us a lot about what poor-to-middling schools (and there are far more of these in our land than you may realize) ought to be doing that they aren't.

The schools you're about to tour vary enormously--they include public, private, charter, and for-profit schools, a Catholic school and a Jewish school, a military academy, rural boarding schools, big-city schools, schools that are mostly black, others that are mostly white, elementary schools and high schools. We emphatically did not seek institutions that turn out all Harvard students. The nation doesn't want many more Harvard graduates; the nation wants a mix of perspectives, skills, and training. Our profiles are of schools that produce disciplined, striving, competent graduates ready to contribute to America in one of the thousands of ways our country needs help--whether through academic pursuits, commercial creativity, diligent military service, or just plain good character and decent citizenship.

We picked schools that do a lot with what they are handed at the start. Obviously a school packed with doctors' kids will produce high SAT scores. Big deal. What we looked for were institutions that make strong forward progress given the human potential they begin with--advancing children as far as possible from where they entered in intellect and character.

As much as they differ, it's extremely interesting how many common traits are shared by the successful schools we profile. A remarkably similar basic formula applies in almost all of these places: high demands on students, strict discipline, a strong and unapologetic moral component, including a respect for religion, an emphasis on teaching intellectual basics, a preference for time-tested books and curricula, clear standards of dress, grooming, and comportment, and an insistence on politeness, respect, and courtesy.

And one other thing: most of these schools are comparatively "hard." They push kids, and demand effort. That alone distinguishes them from many other U.S. schools. In an article in The Executive Educator, an Israeli mother named Judith Koren who relocated her two children to one of the best public schools in Westchester County, New York, laments that "at the start of the U.S. school year, my son's sixth-grade class was getting about an hour of homework a day. But after three months, a group of parents complained to the school that their children were overworked.... The teachers cut back on assignments." She concludes that"no one expects very much of American kids,' and warns this is why U.S. students often test lower than foreign counterparts. Arriving from Israel, Koren reports, "my sixth-grader was a full year ahead of his classmates in mathematics, and my third-grader--who could barely read English on arrival--tested only six months below the class average."

So what secret formulas, potent technologies, and rich financing methods do overseas teachers rely on? How do they make learning so much fun for their students? The answer is, they don't. The secret ingredient in most successful education is cost free. It is exceedingly low-tech. And it has little to do with fun in the simplest sense. That ingredient is brow sweat.