By James S. Kaminsky, Professor of Educational Leadership

Although it is monumentally unfashionable to argue, public education has been an unmitigated national success. The surest sign of the success is that, generally, educators now know how to help all children acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in modern society. The extent to which they are able to help our nation's children achieve their potential, however, depends on the willingness of Americans to support their public schools.

Critics of public education tend to ignore its numerous and significant accomplishments. Among those achievements, public education has delivered a national identity to a population of migrants; provided the means of obtaining literacy and the basics of mathematics to those same migrants; extended educational opportunity to women, people of color and the "differently abled"; provided the intellectual skills of the humanities and sciences necessary to drive the greatest economy in the world; and given the middle-class the intellectual means to achieve social and economic security.

Writers such as Linda Darling Hammond of Stanford University and Columbia's Lawrence A. Cremin have expounded these successes at length in their writings, but far too few in the political sphere have heard these arguments — and far fewer have taken them to heart.

However, Hammond and Cremin are part of a growing force of academic leaders and writers who are mounting a vigorous counterattack on behalf of public education.   Among this group is Richard Rorty, one of America's most widely read philosophers. Rorty notes that public education has helped populate the farms, suburbs and cities of this nation with courteous young men and women possessing a sense of moral worth and a commitment to their community. These young men and women — and the values they espouse — have made it much harder to be racist, sexist, parochial and intellectually intolerant in modern American society. Public schools have inspired a national pride that allows us to tell stories about what our nation has been and what our nation might be if the word "American" came to symbolize the entirety of what it means to be "free and human" for the whole world.

Insofar as American public schools are not living up to our expectations, the issue is largely economic — a matter of money. Gerald W. Bracey in his book "The War Against America's Public Schools" credits the resources that parents, cities and states have provided to education as the key to academic achievement in successful schools. Despite the crocodile tears of the nation's politicians, the various issues revolving around public schools and academic achievement can be, largely, solved by money.

Ever since "A Nation at Risk" was published during the Regan presidency, the nation's newspapers have been filled with declarations about the bankruptcy of American public education and proclaiming the end of the educational world. "The National Digest of Educational Statistics," however, demonstrates the effective job public schools are doing in educating the children we choose to educate.

Children we choose to education — children with teachers and administrators in schools with adequate resources to achieve levels of performance required by state and federal politicians — have no trouble meeting those goals. The students these schools graduate are competitive in our nation's best universities. If you want America's kids to do better or have a higher common level of academic achievement, you have to make an investment.

Public schools are imperfect institutions, but then it must be remembered that all human endeavors are imperfect in one fashion or another. Public education, despite its successes, will never be without problems for the same reason medical institutions, despite their successes, will always battle disease, legal institutions will always fight crime, and political institutions will forever labor to achieve and maintain democracy in a world that has a taste for dictatorships and tyrannies.

We owe America's public schools a vote of thanks. It is time for politicians to stop beating up America's public school.  It is time to acknowledge the good they do rather than forever berating them.

It is also time to drop the language of crisis and reform and start talking about development, improvement and enhancement. That is a better language with which to address the concerns our public schools face. The language of crisis and reform spends too much time in a search for the artificer or the immoralist who compromises public education. It's time to recognize that the problem facing public education is a simple issue of continuing to develop a large and complex institution dedicated to preparing our children — children who must participate successfully in an evermore complex world.

American public education, after all, is a national success story.

James S. Kaminsky is a professor in the Department of Educational Foundations, Leadership and Technology in Auburn University's College of Education.