Noel Epstein has an interesting essay in the Washington Post today looking at the myriad of functions that public schools have taken on in the past century or so.

They not only provide before-school programs, breakfasts, lunches, after-school care, afternoon snacks and sometimes dinners (as well as summertime meals). They also instruct children about sex and, in many places, teach them to drive. They face growing pressure to take tots as early as age 3 in pre-kindergarten programs. They share responsibility for keeping children off drugs, making sure they don't carry weapons, instilling ethical behavior, curbing AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, battling alcohol abuse, preventing student suicides, discouraging cigarette smoking, tackling child obesity, heading off gang fights, providing a refuge for homeless children, ensuring that students are vaccinated, boarding some pupils, tending to toddlers of teenage mothers and otherwise acting in loco parentis in ways not anticipated a generation ago.

Though critics bemoan this trend, there's little chance of fundamentally altering it, for several reasons. Chief among them is that schools generally are reacting to what the public wants. Many people seem to think that adults' worries about schools center mainly on student achievement. That's wrong. While test scores certainly keep business, political, media and other elites up nights, they are not what most trouble the wider citizenry, as polls have long shown.

According to a Public Agenda analysis of opinion surveys, for example, Americans in 1999 said that the top three problems facing public schools were lack of parental involvement, drug use and undisciplined students. Academic standards came in seventh. Similarly, that year's annual Gallup education poll found far more concern about violence, gangs and other student behavior than about academics, which trailed in ninth place. By last year, when Gallup ranked the public's top five school concerns, academics were not cited at all (inadequate funding led the list), and this year's poll showed again that student achievement wasn't among the public's main worries.

He rightly points out that this isn't a terribly new development and that schools have long been looked to as places to serve a public purpose whether it be citizenship developmet, sex education, or student meals.

And he is also correct that we're not going to get rid of all these programs any time soon. It is political death for any politician to advocate cutting any program once it has been put in place in the schools. Whether or not the program is effective is beside the point if it sounds like it is addressing a need the public wants addressed. For example,

Similarly, an evaluation completed this year of the main federal after-school initiative -- the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program -- showed that the $1 billion-a-year effort didn't reduce the number of "latchkey" children (there are about 8 million, from 5- to 14-years-old) or produce academic improvements, two of that program's goals.

What Epstein argues for is a recognition that we're addressing all these non-academic needs and take those programs out of the hands of school officials and put them in the hands of people trained for that purpose such as nurses and social workers. Let the schools focus on academic goals and let others, housed perhaps in the schools, but not part of the school faculty.

If we are unable to cut some of these programs, I'm all for anything that takes the burden away from teachers and administrators.

In community schools, non-academic services mostly are provided by outside partners, not educators. Many centers, for instance, have health clinics where nurse practitioners, social workers, physicians and others minister to students' physical and mental needs, reducing demands on school staff. As the Coalition for Community Schools puts it, "Teachers in community schools teach. They are not expected to be social workers, mental health counselors and police officers."

Amen.