Having gotten that out of the way, it’s also worth learning that while some of these state programs (especially Florida’s) are models of sound policy, efficient administration, and careful targeting of available resources, some others appear to be burdened by dubious practices on the part of schools, donors, elected officials, and maybe parents, too.

First, a brief refresher on what these programs are and how they work. Eight states allow individuals or corporations to take a full or partial credit against their state taxes for contributions they make to nonprofit groups that award private school scholarships. Some states, like Florida, award scholarships only to low-income students. Others, such as the programs in Arizona and Georgia, place no income restrictions on eligibility. None excludes participation in religious schooling (and, in fact, the majority of scholarship students attend faith-based schools).

Yes, they are cousins of voucher programs but they don’t involve checks written by the state (or district) to private schools, using money that has already entered the public coffers. The money, in fact, never enters the state treasury. Such programs thus skirt some of the statutory and constitutional obstacles that get in the way of vouchers—and in many cases enjoy smoother political sailing as well.

If Ms. Saul is to be believed, however, some of these programs are vulnerable to various forms of misbehavior, including parents getting cash in their pockets, politicians deciding which schools should benefit, even donors getting tax credits while underwriting particular students.

These programs involve credits against state taxes. Hence a state’s tax code determines what is and isn’t kosher. Certainly some of these alleged practices wouldn’t be acceptable to the Internal Revenue Service. (For example, one cannot make a federally-deductible gift to a college or school that is then used to provide tuition relief to one’s own kid. If that were allowed, nobody would pay tuition to Princeton; they’d make gifts instead—and benefit from the tax deduction.)

Even in Ms. Saul’s telling, it’s evident (from the Florida example) that such programs can be meticulously designed, well-run and close to fool-proof. But it also appears that some are loosey-goosey and vulnerable to chicanery. Which raises the question of whose job is it to set them right on behalf of the kids, parents, educators, and taxpayers who have every reason to expect that?

The state, of course, should do much of this. It’s a state program and the state equivalent of the IRS should be monitoring its collection and distribution of money. State watchdog agencies, too, should ensure that taxpayers are benefitting, as has happened in Florida. The state education department (or local school system) should be ensuring that the kids who benefit from it are attending bona fide schools that satisfy whatever are the applicable requirements for private schools to operate in that jurisdiction. And legislatures should examine the academic impact of these programs, as greater transparency often weeds out schools with shaky credentials and questionable business practices.

But aspects of this go well beyond state government and could well be superior to it. Should the private school “community,” such as it is, be monitoring its own members for their participation in and handling of such aid programs? (What is the Council for American Private Education and its state affiliates for?) How about the accrediting bodies that typically review many aspects of private schools and allow them (if they pass muster) to declare that they are accredited? What about advocacy groups (such as the American Federation for Children) that press for the expansion and replication of such programs and that presumably have an interest in their integrity and reputation? The private foundations (e.g. Friedman, Walton, DeVos) that underwrite such efforts? Why does this sector of school choice have no counterpart to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) to promulgate a code of sound practices and invite membership from organizations that adhere to these?

The more such entities do to ensure sound practices in state-level tax-credit scholarship programs, the less temptation there will be for government agencies to clamp down on them, with likely adverse effects on legitimate schools and needy pupils.

And the less hostile publications like the Times and gotcha journalists like Ms. Saul will have with which to make mischief.

PS: It’s not just “private” and “profit” that she abhors. Her piece on Tuesday was really a model of take-no-prisoners left-wing journalism! She hit at least five hot buttons: privatization, football, evolution, fundamentalism, and fracking! Somehow she missed climate change, phonics, and traditional family units.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Adam Emerson

Ed. note: Adam Emerson previously contributed to policy and public affairs initiatives for Step Up For Students, the scholarship organization responsible for administering the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship for low-income students.

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

Uncle Sam is dreadful at micromanaging what actually happens in schools and classrooms. What he’s best at is setting agendas and driving priorities. Through a combination of jawboning, incentivizing, regulating, mandating, forbidding, spotlighting, and subsidizing, he can significantly influence the overall direction of the K-12 system and catalyze profound changes in it (though the system is so loosely coupled that these changes occur gradually and incompletely).

It’s just as well that such big directional shifts don’t happen very often, because the change, however gradual, can be wrenching. And it isn’t apt to happen much more often in the future, either, because the “federal government” is no single entity. It is, at minimum, three branches, two political parties, 535 members of Congress, innumerable judges, the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and umpteen executive-branch agencies—a list that only starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly all of these stars must come into rough alignment before anything important begins to change. And that only occurs once in a while, often under extraordinary political or historical circumstances, usually when the country faces a big challenge, crisis, or widespread injustice.

Let’s look at seven examples of federal “agenda setters” in K-12 education, one per decade.

1950s. One could legitimately cite Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act, but the decade’s real game-changer was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, striking down government-mandated racial segregation in Southern schools.

1960s. In the name of fostering opportunity, ending poverty, and giving needy kids a boost, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the modern era of federal aid to K-12 education via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, and the Economic Opportunity Act, which incorporated such high-profile programs as Head Start, the Job Corps, and the “domestic Peace Corps” known as VISTA.

1970s. Enacted in 1976, and signed (with some public misgivings) by President Gerald R. Ford, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, righted another historic wrong by declaring that every youngster with disabilities is entitled to a “free, appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment.” Combined with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the law meant public schools now had an obligation to educate such children in ways that responded to their needs.

1980s. Though nominally just a commission report, A Nation at Risk (1983) told Americans that we faced a crisis of educational achievement and began to nudge the country through a 90-degree change of course from the “equity” agenda of the previous quarter-century to the “excellence” obsession of recent decades, complete with academic standards, tests, and results-based accountability systems.

1990 ushered in the first-ever state-by-state results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as the first-ever reporting of NAEP results according to newly established performance benchmarks. This dual development opened a new era of awareness of academic achievement in the United States and made possible the first bona fide comparisons of state performance at a time when state-based reform was in the ascendancy and governors craved such comparisons. It also launched what amounted to the first real set of standards by which to determine just “how good is good enough” when it comes to student achievement in various subjects.

2001 brought passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a momentous reauthorization of the ESEA, declaring not only that every single student should become “proficient” in math and reading, but also that every school in the land would have its performance reported, both school wide and for its student demographic subgroups, and that schools failing to make “adequate yearly progress” would face a cascade of sanctions and interventions. NCLB transformed the federal government from funder to would-be reformer of American public education. In the course of becoming a reformer, Uncle Sam also became a regulator as never before.

And the present decade opened with the Race to the Top, the brainchild of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, based on the bold hypothesis that sizable grants of federal dollars, disbursed via a competitive process, can induce states to jump through reform policy hoops that they likely would not otherwise have attempted.

Add them up: America desegregated its schools, with respect both to race and handicap. It inaugurated big-time federal aid to K-12 education, initially in the name of equitable opportunity, now more targeted on academic achievement and gap-closing. It devised new ways of assessing, judging, and comparing achievement across the states—and prodded those states to make politically difficult changes to reform a system that wasn’t producing satisfactory results. And in the process, unsurprisingly, Washington evolved from funder and equalizer into enforcer and regulator.

None of this worked as well as ardent advocates had hoped. All brought unintended consequences, pushback, and sizable financial burdens. But American education is a very different enterprise—and for the most part a better enterprise—as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington.

What causes some federal initiatives to function, at least for a while, as positive game-changers, while so many others almost immediately become duds? I see four conditions:

First, there needs to be a sizable, pent-up problem in need of a large solution—a lot of accumulated pressure seeking a release valve. That’s a very different thing from a notional seems-like-a-good-idea or scratch-a-minor-itch add-on to a pre-existing portfolio of programs.

Second, the problem needs to be one that affects the whole country (for example, economic competitiveness, social justice, national security), even if the solution focuses mostly on a region (the segregated South) or significant constituency (kids with disabilities).

Third, the solution needs to be something that can be crafted by implements in the federal toolkit, which is basically limited to financial incentives, regulation of state and district practices, research and data, and litigation or the threat thereof. (And, of course, the bully pulpit itself.)

Fourth, and finally, enough political stars must align—and stay aligned long enough to make a difference.

Not all of them need to be aligned, however. (If they were, the problem would likely have been tackled already.) Congress was not about to outlaw racial segregation in 1954, for example, and plenty of prominent educators declared A Nation at Risk wrong in 1983. Lots of states dragged their heels big-time on No Child Left Behind, and any number of psychometricians denounced the NAEP achievement levels.

But there has to be enough oomph of one kind or another—moral, economic, political, judicial, even occasionally (in the case of school segregation) military—behind these kinds of changes for them to overcome resistance and gain real traction. And when that oomph diminishes—whether because of fresh election returns, limited attention span, newfound prosperity, exhaustion, backlash, or whatever—what remains may be a country with its education direction lastingly changed for the better. Or it may be the husk of yet another federal initiative that was promising at the start but grew stale, obsolete, or oppressive. Or both.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared as a commentary in Education Week and is adapted from an essay in the book Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit (Harvard Education Press, 2011).

There’s still an increment, it turns out, but it’s been shrinking: from two years more schooling (by age thirty) for those born in 1955 down to just eight months more for those born in 1980. The implication, quoth the Journal reporters: “Without better educated Americans, economists say, the U.S. won’t be able to maintain high-wage jobs and rising living standards in a competitive global economy.”

This isn’t exactly news. Nor is the Goldin-Katz analysis the first time we have observed that the U.S. is no longer leading the planet when it comes to the quantity of education that its population receives. But is more education—more hours and days, more years and degrees—the cure for what ails us? Or are we already pigging out on the educational equivalent of fast food—fattening but not nutritious—and will supersizing our portions just make matters worse?

If we accept the Goldin-Katz view of what’s wrong with U.S. education, we will inevitably demand more preschool, more full-day Kindergarten, more high school graduations, more college attendance, more college and postgraduate degrees, etc. Supersizing is the standard American response. Indeed, it’s already on the election-year menu with both parties demanding that student-loan interest rates be made to stay low so that more people can afford more tertiary education. Not much talk about quality, though.

Singapore is one of those places that’s been going a mile a minute in boosting both the quality and the quantity of formal education that its population receives. For example, the proportion of Singaporeans aged twenty-five to thirty-nine that completed secondary school (meaning tenth grade) jumped from 25 percent in 1980 to 96 percent in 2010. At the same time, Singapore students beat almost everyone else in the world on international assessments of math and science knowledge.

To an American, however, it’s surprising how little rush there is to supersize Singaporean education. Kindergarten is optional. (The primary schools start at age six or seven.) And only about one in four young Singaporeans currently qualifies for the “junior colleges” (basically grades eleven and twelve) that are the usual path into the country’s four universities. Government policy is headed toward placing 30 percent of the age cohort in public universities; for now, as many as 40 percent of secondary graduates head into career-oriented “polytechnics” that resemble the best of American community colleges and some 20 percent attend the Institute of Technical Education, which emphasizes “hands-on” training.

There is, to be sure, public pressure to increase the number who can enter Singapore’s universities—and some private and non-Singaporean institutions have opened to accommodate some of that demand. (Other students travel overseas for their tertiary education.) But basically nobody is saying that every young person should go to university. And remember: this in an education-obsessed country with no other resources to speak of save its highly skilled populace.

Nor are they going to take the easy path (as England and Hong Kong have done in recent decades and as the U.S. started to do long ago) and put fancier labels onto existing institutions. They are not, for example, going to pretend that their polytechnics are really universities, as we have done with hundreds of ex-teachers colleges and quondam “normal schools.” They regard that kind of maneuver as both an affront to quality control at the university level and damaging to the real-world job-preparation work that the polytechnics specialize in.

The United States, of course, tends to reject both the benefits and the detriments of Singapore-style central planning in the education space, at least when it comes to planning from Washington. But the new Goldin-Katz data, combined with OECD trend data, make clear that our system (or non-system) isn’t doing a very good job of propelling more people onward to get more education than their parents got. And we know from plenty of other data (TIMSS, PISA, etc.) that the quality of much of what they’re getting isn’t so great, either, especially when viewed in international perspective.

Any number of reform initiatives are seeking to tackle one or the other problem. Some are focused on raising academic standards, others on keeping more people in the education system longer and seeing that they emerge with credentials. Some insist that the two goals are complimentary—and the mantra that “everyone should emerge from high school both college and career-ready” tends to blur the distinction and terminate the discussion.

But what will we do when we face hard trade-offs, such as the likely discovery that higher graduation standards will lead to a higher failure (and dropout) rate? Our track record in this regard leaves much to be desired. Even much-envied Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job of getting almost all who stay in school over the medium-high bar set by MCAS, has worrisome dropout rates, particularly among minority youngsters, and has been loath to raise its high school exit-bar to the level of true college readiness.

Are our presidential candidates crazy to yammer about cheap loans to make college more affordable for all? I understand that nobody (except maybe Rick Santorum) is going to campaign for the White House by urging fewer young Americans to go to college. But if more do in fact go and stay, will they really be getting a good education there? Or just a bigger bag of fries? What if, instead, more of them simply emerged career ready from our secondary schools, which already last two years longer than the norm in Singapore? Wouldn’t a whole lot of time and money be saved and a lot of heartache and dashed aspirations avoided?

I don’t expect these dilemmas to be resolved in Washington—though it would be fascinating to hear them discussed by Messrs. Obama and Romney in an upcoming debate. But it’s something our states had better come to grips with—including how they finance their P-20 education systems. It’s clear that rising tertiary education costs paid by consumers—and heavy debt burdens on many who enter and persist in college—are part of the problem. But only part. Maybe more attention to quality would do greater good.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

Most other distinctions are grayer today, involving degrees of difference about things like teacher evaluations, “common core” standards, and just how much discretion Washington should return to states.

Short of plain goofiness (as in “abolish the Department of Education”), vouchers are where bright lines get drawn. The conventional explanation is that Democrats don’t dare cross this threshold lest the teacher unions (already antsy about charters, merit pay, test-based accountability, etc.) forsake their traditional party—or simply sit on their hands come campaign season and election day, while Republicans tend to take the side of parents and don’t much care what the unions—or other parts of the education establishment—think or do.

It feels and acts like a political line—witness the political football known as the D.C. voucher program—yet not so many years ago this was primarily a split over platform language, and party positioning because vouchers were all but nonexistent. (For ages, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and a few wee towns in northern New England were the only places you could actually find any.)

That’s changed—and continues to. A few weeks back, one could already point to Indiana and Ohio, both with statewide programs. The D.C. program is back, at least for now. Louisiana moved the other day. And then there are kissing-cousin programs like tax credit scholarships in Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and beyond.

Vouchers and their cousins are real today, thanks partly to political realignments, partly to the Zelman decision (which took the Establishment Clause issue off the table as far as the feds are concerned), and partly to mounting dismay over the performance of public schools, as well as the meager returns from other education reforms of the past two decades.

As vouchers have become real, however, the political picture has grown more complex. Eight newish factors are worth noting:

First, while the U.S. constitution is no longer a deal-breaker, some thirty-eight states have sundry provisions in their own constitutions that make it difficult or impossible to aid private schools and/or religious institutions and/or any sort of education program that isn’t “free and uniform.” (This is what killed the Florida “opportunity scholarship program” in that state’s Supreme Court in 2006.) Hence there’s a practical limit to how far vouchers can really spread.

Second, as religion has loomed larger as a political issue, evangelicals (most often Republicans) are keener and keener for it to play a role in public policy, including religious education and church-affiliated schools, while secularists (more apt to be Democrats) are even more resistant to public support for such schools.

Third, other features of private schools—that have nothing to do with unions—also cause palpitations among liberals (most often Democrats), such as selectivity in the admissions office (and the risk of “exclusion” of poor or disabled or minority or other “diverse” kids). Such anxieties may not cause them to keep their own daughters and sons out of such schools but a double standard often comes into play where “public policy” is concerned.

Fourth, even as the pro-voucher team has picked up a handful (but only that) of influential Democrats, a lot of state and local Republicans have grown somewhat equivocal about school choice—charters, vouchers, inter-district transfers, and more. Their own suburban constituents, whether enrolled in public or private schools, are averse to welcoming many of those kids into their classrooms, and their proud suburban school systems don’t much want to lose their own pupils, either.

Fifth, what was for decades the strongest lobby in favor of vouchers (and tuition tax credits and more), namely the Roman Catholic Church, is today neither nearly as strong as it once was nor nearly as committed to revitalizing its own schools. It seems to have lost most of the wind from its sails.

Sixth, private schools in general are queasy about government entanglements and rules, worried about “accountability” requirements, alarmed at the prospect of forfeiting their distinctiveness, fretful about losing control of their standards and admission processes, leery of disclosing comparable data on their own educational effectiveness, and, sometimes, legitimately unsure that they really can do a good job with those kids. Nor has American private education shown much entrepreneurial inclination to grow to accommodate greater demand.

Seventh, with state and local budgets tight, the claim that vouchers save taxpayer money over the long run is met with incredulity by school systems that can only see revenue disappearing along with headcount. And the argument that vouchers will be a needless and, for the taxpayer, costly windfall for middle-class families whose children already attend private schools is not easy to refute. (Of course, a carefully designed program may aid only “new” students.)

Eighth, and finally, the word “private” has grown even more suspect in American education circles today than it was yesterday. “Privatization” has sometimes gone badly. Some private operators of charter schools are greedy, self-absorbed, and uninterested in educational quality. (Likewise for private SES providers and such.) Early evaluations have yielded mixed results for privately operated “cyber schools.” Private school (and college) tuitions keep rising without evidence of improved results. And in era of transparency and accountability, the reluctance of private educational institutions to disclose key information about themselves, their students, their academic gains, and their finances—even to private organizations such as GreatSchools.net—has made them at least slightly suspect. (Why are they so secretive?)

I’m still heartily in favor of more vouchers, provided that the program is structured with an eye toward serving the neediest kids first and making participating schools reasonably accountable for their results. I do expect the momentum in this direction to continue. But I don’t expect it to accelerate. And that’s not just because of hostility from Messrs. Obama and Duncan.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations.

Yet that same principal controls only a tiny part of his school’s budget, has scant say over who teaches there, practically no authority when it comes to calendar or schedule, and minimal leverage over the curriculum itself. Instead of deploying all available school assets in ways that would do the most good for the most kids, the principal is required to follow dozens or hundreds of rules, program requirements, spending procedures, discipline codes, contract clauses, and regulations emanating from at least three levels of government–none of which strives to coordinate with any of the others.

In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO’s but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats.

That cannot work well and most of the time does not, save for the occasional super-hero principal who must act like a maverick — breaking or ignoring most of the rules — in order to cope with an inherently absurd imbalance.

To top it off, today’s school principals get paid barely more than the senior teachers in their schools, though they typically work year-round versus the classic 180-day, 9-month teacher contract.

No wonder principals are retiring in droves. No wonder many of our ablest young educators –such as those emerging from the Teach for America program — shun the principal’s office, at least in district-operated schools. (Many gravitate to the charter-school sector, where principals have far greater authority.) No wonder entrepreneurs, risk-takers, and change agents seldom last long as principals, or that many of those who do endure are people content in middle-manager roles.

This situation grows worse with every passing year, as federal, state, and district programs multiply and become more rule-bound — by, for example, “special education” and “No Child Left Behind”; judges issue more rulings that bind the principal’s hands; union contracts lengthen and become more restrictive; funding levels off; and teacher layoffs become unavoidable, resulting in even less discretionary money at the building level and, because of seniority and tenure rules, less say over who works there.

The underlying causes are threefold.

First, a dysfunctional and archaic governance structure for public education that pays homage to “local control” yet turns into bureaucratic management of dozens or hundreds of schools from burgeoning “central offices,” rather than vesting any real control at the level closest to teachers, students, and parents. Setting policy for that system, typically, is an elected school board that itself has grown dysfunctional, particularly in urban America, as adult interest groups manipulate who serves on it. Atop all this sit state and federal agencies — multiple agencies at each level — as well as (in many states) county or regional administrative units.

Second, we’ve layered so many responsibilities on our schools that the teaching and learning of basic skills and essential knowledge has all but vanished under efforts to rectify injustice, foster diversity, provide multiple services to kids with varying needs, prevent drug abuse, adolescent pregnancy and obesity, forge character, keep children off the streets, ensure physical fitness, and observe a near-infinity of special events, holidays, and interest-group enthusiasm.

Third, every time something goes wrong anywhere, a blizzard of new rules and procedures descends upon the school’s obligations, lest that mishap recur anywhere else. Whether it’s bullying or a playground accident, an unwanted intruder or a disgruntled parent, a kid who doesn’t get into a particular course or a library book that offends someone, the checklists, regulations, and prohibitions multiply.

What’s a principal to do? If his or her state (like Florida or California) has a universal class-size limit, he or she cannot even rearrange student and teacher assignments to make the best use of the school’s instructional team. If a state tenure law or district union contract insists that, in a layoff situation, the newest teachers must be let go first, he or she will have no say over who ends up teaching in his school. (Never mind that the reduction in instructional force doesn’t obviate the class size limit!) If a district policy (or court order) says no student can be suspended or expelled regardless of the offense, simply maintaining order within the school may prove impossible. (In the opposite case, a “zero tolerance” law may leave the principal with no discretion even for a first offender who didn’t mean any harm. Remember those six-year-olds who bring TOY weapons for “show and tell”?)

This gigantic mismatch between responsibility and authority has no discrete remedy. What’s needed is a radical simplification, replacing rules with responsibility on the part of the people running our schools. If we don’t give principals the authority to do their jobs, we are going to have few competent leaders for our schools, which means we’re not going to have many effective schools or well-educated children tomorrow.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This essay was originally published by TheAtlantic.com as part of its “America the Fixable” series.

Is there a racist behind every tree in the American education forest? Photo by Stuart

The federal data (from 2009-10) cover a multitude of issues but what caught most eyes was the finding that black and Latino students are suspended or expelled from school in numbers greater than their shares of the overall pupil population. “The undeniable truth,” declared Education Secretary Arne Duncan, “is that the everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.” Declaring that the new data paint “a very disturbing picture,” Assistant Secretary (for Civil Rights) Russlynn Ali proudly informed the media that her office has “launched 14 large-scale investigations into disparate discipline rates across the country.”

Ponder the phrase: disparate discipline rates. This arises from the doctrine of “disparate impact,” a sly phrase coined as a means of boosting civil rights in the realm of employment law. It means, in effect, that discrimination may be afoot—and enforcement called for—whenever a seemingly neutral or universal policy gives rise to disparities (by race, gender, etc.) in whatever benefit or harm that policy leads to. But it’s by no means limited to employment any longer.

At the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR), the enforcers hunt for disparities in sundry realms of education from college admissions to Advanced Placement course access, as well as discipline and more. If they find that something good or bad isn’t getting bestowed across the entire eligible population in proportion to the basic demographics of that population, they sense “disparate impact” at work, which is invariably accompanied by at least a hint that discrimination must be the cause of it.

Such hints swiftly get picked up, echoed, and amplified. That’s what Wade Henderson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, was about when he  thundered that the OCR data “points [sic] to mass and systemic discrimination in our public education system” and it’s the Education Department’s duty to “investigate school districts…and take appropriate enforcement action.”

Ms. Ali, one senses, also sees that as her duty.

The primordial problem with this whole line of analysis, of course, is that an infinity of good and bad things get unevenly distributed across populations for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with the kinds of discrimination that are banned in our laws and Constitution. People who aren’t very smart are disproportionately rejected by the Princeton admissions office. People who aren’t very tall seldom make it onto varsity basketball teams. (It often appears that white and Asian students—pace Jeremy Lin—don’t either.) Those who can’t hear very well seldom play violin in the school orchestra. And on and on.

As for school discipline, there’s a reason for it. It’s to make naughty, disruptive, or disorderly kids behave or exit, both for their own good and for the good of the school as an educational institution. Enforcement ranges from keeping kids safe (from weapons and fighting, for example) to creating a calm, respectful atmosphere in which those who are serious about learning can study without disturbance. Discipline, in other words, isn’t only about those being disciplined. It’s even more important for everybody else.

The Wall Street Journal’s invaluable editorial writer, Jason Riley, picked up on this in a perceptive March 10 columntitled “What about the kids who behave?” “The Obama administration’s sympathies,” he wrote, “are with the knuckleheads who are disrupting class, not with the kids who are trying to get an education. But is racial parity in disciplinary outcomes more important than school safety? Going easy on the students who behave badly—especially in inner-city schools where the problem is pronounced—is an odd way of advancing black education and closing the learning gap. Black kids already tend to be stuck in dropout factories with the most inexperienced teachers. Must they be consigned to the most violent schools as well?”

Riley correctly added that data such as these create an even stronger argument for school choice—charters, vouchers, and more—to enable low-income families whose kids are serious students to escape intolerable schools for better ones. (Let’s hope Ms. Ali’s enforcers don’t bully the charter and private schools into disciplinary submission, too.) On some parts of the choice agenda—charters in particular—the Obama-Duncan administration has been positive. It’s been death on vouchers, though, even in inner-city Washington D.C., due in no small part to its pals in the teacher unions.

Apropos of which, another much-discussed pattern in the new OCR data is the presence of lesser-paid teachers in heavily minority schools. Again, the civil rights folk imply that this signals discrimination against black and brown kids. (“Give ‘em the cheap teachers.”) But in the real world it almost certainly stems from the fact that—as Riley noted—inner-city schools have, on average, less experiencedteachers, hence teachers with relatively lower salaries. Why? Many reasons, of course, including the disruptive and insufficiently disciplined atmosphere in some such schools, but also because—thanks, once more, to the teacher unions—veteran instructors enjoy contractual provisions that allow them to choose their schools and for some reason (badly behaved students, perchance?) more than a few shun inner-city postings. We shall see whether Mr. Duncan and Ms. Ali manage to move teachers around against their will to overcome this particular “disparate impact.” (There’s a big loophole in the spending-comparability requirements of the Title I program which, if closed, would prod such re-assignments.) Or if they push hard against discipline policies aimed at keeping inner-city (and other) schools orderly enough that those who do teach in them will come back.

They’ll be under plenty of pressure to do that. At the UCLA-based Civil Rights Project, for example, long-time activist Gary Orfield is calling for “stepped-up enforcement actions by the Office for Civil Rights to respond to the stark disparities in discipline, not to mention the many other indicators of injustice and inequity. For example, the number of “disparate impact” interventions has been disappointing… OCR should actively investigate the pronounced disparities revealed by the data. Where unjustifiable policies are to blame, OCR should use its enforcement authority as well as technical assistance resources to spur schools and districts to replace the ineffective policies with less discriminatory ones.”

Expect much more of this sort of thing—and don’t be surprised if Ms. Ali is quietly soliciting it!

One more point. The OCR data themselves emerged from an overhauled version of a long-standing biennial survey of schools and districts serving about 85 percent of U.S. students. They’re self-reported, however, and susceptible to error and misinformation at every level. Examine closely the results for any given district or school and you’re apt to find stuff that doesn’t make sense on its face. Consider, for example, the absurdity of the Seattle Public Schools reporting that they spent just $323.53 per pupil on instructional-staff salaries in 2009—about $2,623.14 less than the neighboring Shoreline School District. It was probably a misplaced decimal point—but it made it into the national data set, the averages and, presumably, the “disparities.”

Is such information robust enough to sustain enforcement actions? It obviously is in the eyes of Orfield, Henderson and others. The prior question, however, is whether “disparate impact” is a reasonable basis for such actions in the first place. What if it is simply true—regrettable, but true—that some kids or groups of kids break school rules more often than others?

-Chester E. Finn Jr.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper Blog

Let me now revisit a fifth potential asset, which is also the main reason that small-government conservatives should favor the Common Core or other high-quality “national standards”: This is the best path toward getting Uncle Sam and heavy-handed state governments to back off from micro-managing how schools are run and to return that authority to communities, individual schools, teachers, and parents.

It’s the path to getting “tight-loose” right in American K-12 education, unlike NCLB, which has it backward. (I refer to the well-known management doctrine that large organizations with many parts should be “tight about ends, loose about means.”) The proper work of conservatives going forward is to stop doing battle with the Common Core and instead do their utmost to ensure that the “loose” part gets done right. This could also be the path toward a viable political compromise on NCLB/ESEA reauthorization.

Common Core or other high-quality “national standards” are the best path toward getting Uncle Sam to back off from micro-managing how schools are run. Photo by DonkeyHotey.

Some on the Right don’t yet see any need for compromise because they expect to be in the driver’s seat in both houses of Congress and the Oval Office after November. Maybe that will happen. Maybe John Kline will have his way in the 113th Congress and at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., meaning that future federal K-12 dollars will be turned over to states with essentially no strings attached.

But I wouldn’t stake our kids’ future on the election working out that way. And even if it were to, there’s never yet been an ESEA reauthorization that wasn’t bipartisan to some extent. Which suggests to me that compromise is going to be needed and “tight-loose” is the right basis for it.

Here’s the core proposition: If all U.S. public schools embraced the same rigorous standards (for their curricular core), were assessed on the same tests, and had their results made public via a transparent system, then everybody would know how their own schools are doing and could decide for themselves whether to (a) leave things be, (b) demand a makeover, or (c) move their kids to other schools.

Communities would have grounds to rally in support of their schools, to fire the school board, to encourage charters and other innovators and entrepreneurs to arrive, etc. State-level voters would have grounds to fire the governor or legislature at the next election and to vote for higher or lower education taxes in the next referendum. Employers would know where to locate their education-intensive plants and offices and where to avoid. Philanthropists would know where to invest—or not. Reformers would know where to intervene with what. Above all, parents would know how content (or not) to be with the schools attended by their own kids.

Uncle Sam could then cease and desist from telling states and districts how to run their schools, how to “qualify” and evaluate their teachers, how and on what to spend their money, what to do about low-performing schools, to whom and how to provide choices among which sorts of schools and how many of them, etc.

But “loose” isn’t going to happen all by itself. Literally hundreds of federal programs (starting with but by no means limited to Title I and IDEA) will need to be reshaped by statute (or consolidated or abolished) for “loose” to work.

The brainpower and policy energy needed to prepare for that enormous undertaking isn’t going to be available if conservatives in the education space spend all their time battling against the “tight” part of the deal.

Remember, too, that “tight” is voluntary and should stay that way. No state needs to buy into the Common Core or the assessments now under development—as Education Secretary Arne Duncanunderscored in a letter this week to Utah’s state superintendent. (An important question for potential compromisers, however: If a state doesn’t accept “tight,” how much “loose” does it get and on what basis?)

Let me restate the essence of the compromise I’m suggesting: If everybody’s schools use the same academic targets and metrics to track their academic performance—duly reported by demographic subgroup, perhaps by individual classrooms, too—and if everybody has access to this information via a transparent reporting system, a powerful case can be made for getting “big government” to back away from managing schools. This case would be strengthened further if the education dollars—from every source—also accompany individual pupils to the schools they actually attend. Then those schools can and should be freed up to “run themselves” in the ways that matter most: budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule, and more. They can decide for themselves whether to pool resources for various external purchases and back-office operations (and where to obtain those). They can also decide for themselves what to teach on top of the “common” standards in the same or additional subjects. Schools will be freer than today to specialize in, say, art/music, STEM, technical-vocational education or history and literature.

This will lead to an overdue revolution in school governance at the state/local level, too, not just in Washington. The role of districts will change dramatically, at least in states that see this through to its logical conclusion. And the demand for outstanding building-level school leadership will soar.

Yes, this could all happen without the Common Core per se. It could be pegged to other widely agreed-upon academic standards and assessments—if such existed. Nor does any of this mean that the standards and assessments should come from the federal government. The tight-loose “compromise,” however, is mainly about the terms accompanying future federal K-12 funding and will need to be incorporated in some workable fashion into federal law.

This will, of course, be attacked from both sides. Some conservatives, as noted, will insist that the voters will soon vindicate their preference for restoring control and authority to states and districts with no expectation of common standards or tests. Some liberals will hate the “loose” part because they don’t trust states, communities, or schools to do right by kids and will therefore want continued heavy regulation from Washington. (How well has that worked, folks?)

But that’s the sort of “nobody’s pleased” situation that creates the possibility of compromise. Which would surely be better than today’s reauthorization gridlock cum waivers of dubious constitutionality (and continued heavy-handedness).

Compromise means everybody yields some of what’s important to them in return for getting (or keeping) another part that would be jeopardized if they didn’t also yield. It’s a term that’s fallen out of use in Washington of late. Can it return to favor in federal education policy in 2013?

- Chester E. Finn Jr.

This post originally appeared on Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog

• Its content-and-skill expectations for grades K-12 in English and math are, by almost everyone’s reckoning, about as rigorous as the best state-specific academic standards and superior to most.
• It was developed outside the federal government, voluntarily by states, using private dollars. (The related assessments are another matter.) And both standards and assessments remain voluntary for states.
• It opens the way, for the first time, to comparing student, school and district performance across the land on a credible, common metric—and gauging their achievement against that of youngsters in other countries on our shrinking and ever-more-competitive planet.
• Besides comparability, it brings the possibility that families moving around our highly mobile society will be able to enroll their kids seamlessly in schools that are teaching the same things at the same grade levels.

Ever since it landed, however, the Common Core has been the object of ceaseless attacks from multiple directions. The number of zealous assailants is small and, for a time, it all looked like a tempest in a highly visible teapot. That may yet turn out to be the case. But the attacks are growing fiercer; some recent recruits to the attack squad are people who tend to get taken seriously; and anything can happen in an election year. Remember the classic Peter Sellers movie, The Mouse That Roared? The Duchy of Grand Fenwick ended up triumphing over the United States of America. As you may recall, that happened in large part because the U.S. government contributed to its own defeat. In the present case, something similar could well transpire. Please read on.

Before examining the assaults, however, let’s remind ourselves what the Common Core is not. It is no guarantee of stronger student achievement or school performance. Huge challenges await any (serious) academic standards on the implementation, assessment and accountability fronts. To get traction in classrooms, states that adopt these standards (and all but four say they’re doing so) must take pains with curriculum, teacher preparation, assessment, accountability and more. To yield real rigor (and comparability), the currently-under-development assessments must avoid numerous pitfalls and incorporate hard-to-achieve consensus on genuinely challenging issues (such as where to set the “cut score”).

In and of themselves, academic standards merely describe the end point to be reached and the major stops en route. They don’t get you there. But it’s far better to have an education destination worth reaching, i.e. rigorous standards set forth with sufficient specificity, clarity, and rich content to provide real guidance to curriculum designers, classroom teachers, test developers and more. Few states have managed to do that on their own.

To be sure, other states could simply copy the best of those that already exist. But that’s more or less what the Common Core is: an amalgam of good standards put together by people who know a lot—and care a lot—about both content and skills.

So why the nonstop attacks against it? As best I can tell, they arise from six objections and fears.

First, a few earnest critics are convinced that the standards are substantively flawed, that the algebra sequence (or grade level) is wrong, the English standards don’t contain enough literature, the emphasis on “math facts” isn’t as strong as it should be, etc. This sort of thing has accompanied every past set of standards of every sort, and it’s perfectly legitimate. Insofar as such criticisms are warranted, the Common Core can be revised, states can add standards of their own, and jurisdictions that find the common version truly unsatisfactory can change their minds about using it at all.

Second, the Common Core will be difficult and expensive to implement. Many organizations are working hard to help states surmount these genuine challenges. Many philanthropists are kicking money into the effort. And some groups (Fordham included) are trying to cost it all out. Nobody denies that doing this right will be hard and costly (though some of those costs are already embedded in state and district budgets.) Of course, those who think the country is doing OK today have every reason to shirk that challenge and stick with what they’re used to.

Third, the Common Core won’t make any difference in student achievement—but may cause a politically-unacceptable level of student failure. As noted above, standards per se do not boost achievement. (Of course, standards per se don’t carry costs or failure rates, either. They don’t, by themselves, do much of anything!) And failure rates will worsen only if (a) the new assessments are truly rigorous and (b) schools neglect preparing their pupils to pass them.

Fourth, states have done as well, or better, on their own, and switching over to the Common Core will just mess them up. This criticism mostly emanates from Massachusetts, which has done a commendable job on its own and where the decision to adopt the Common Core was truly conflicted. Other states that prefer to go it alone, mostly notably Texas and Virginia, have simply declined to adopt the Common Core. Others are free to exit from it (though doing so would, for some, violate commitments they made in their Race to the Top proposals.)

Fifth, “national” is not the right way to do anything in American education. We retain a deep (if, in my view, unwarranted) affection for “local control” in this realm and constitutional responsibility for education is undeniably vested in the states. Some folks dread the prospect of a “national curriculum.” (Some simply mistrust the Gates Foundation, which has bankrolled much of this work.) Others are incapable (perhaps willfully so) of seeing any distinction between “national” and “federal”, though we seem to have no difficulty making that distinction elsewhere in education. (E.g. National Governors Association, S.A.T., A.P., ACT.)

Sixth, and closely related to the blurring of national with federal is the expectation that Uncle Sam won’t be able to keep his hands off the Common Core—which means the whole enterprise will be politicized, corrupted and turned from national/voluntary into federal/coercive. This is probably the strongest objection to the Common Core and, alas, it’s probably the most valid, thanks in large measure to our over-zealous Education Secretary and the President he serves.

Let’s face it. Three major actions by the Obama administration have tended to envelop the Common Core in a cozy federal embrace, as have some ill-advised (but probably intentional) remarks by Messrs. Duncan and Obama that imply greater coziness to follow.

There was the fiscal “incentive” in Race to the Top for states to adopt the Common Core as evidence of their seriousness about raising academic standards.

Then there’s today’s “incentive,” built into the NCLB waiver process, for states to adopt the Common Core as exactly the same sort of evidence.

(In both cases, strictly speaking, states could supply other evidence. But there’s a lot of winking going on.)

The third federal entanglement was the Education Department’s grants to two consortia of states to develop new Common Core-aligned assessments, which came with various requirements and strings set by Secretary Duncan’s team.

This trifecta of actual events is problematic in its own right, not because the federal government is evil but because Washington has become so partisan and politicized and because of angst and suspicion that linger from failed efforts during the 1990’s to generate national standards and tests via federal action.

What’s truly energized the Common Core’s enemies, however, has been a series of ex cathedra comments by President Obama and Secretary Duncan. Most recently, the Education Secretary excoriated South Carolina for even contemplating a withdrawal from the Common Core. Previously, the President indicated that state eligibility for Title I dollars, post-ESEA reauthorization, would hinge on adoption of the Common Core. Talking with the governors about NCLB waivers earlier this week, he stated that “if you’re willing to set, higher, more honest standards then we will give you more flexibility to meet those standards.” I don’t know whether he winked. But everybody knew what standards he was talking about.

It will, of course, be ironic as well as unfortunate if the Common Core ends up in the dustbin of history as a result of actions and comments by its supporters. But in March 2012 there can be little doubt that the strongest weapons in the arsenal of its enemies are those that they have supplied.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

That said, I’m also becoming convinced that the future of our economy and the acquisition of good jobs will hinge as much on well-developed technical prowess as on Aristotle, Shakespeare, Darwin, Rembrandt, and Mozart.

Recent weeks have brought multiple reports of U.S. jobs going unfilled, or being outsourced to distant lands, because too few American workers have the requisite skills to perform them well.

On January 21, for example, the New York Times explained why Apple has its iPhones, iPads, and such manufactured in China. Among the multiple reasons, not all of them praiseworthy, this one stuck with me:

Another critical advantage for Apple was that China provided engineers at a scale the United States could not match. Apple’s executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company’s analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States. In China, it took 15 days.

Companies like Apple “say the challenge in setting up U.S. plants is finding a technical work force,” said Martin Schmidt, associate provost at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In particular, companies say they need engineers with more than high school, but not necessarily a bachelor’s degree. Americans at that skill level are hard to find, executives contend. “They’re good jobs, but the country doesn’t have enough to feed the demand,” Mr. Schmidt said.

Further evidence turned up in The Washington Post a few days ago, with employers in several states lamenting the dearth of technically qualified workers for decently-paid jobs now going unfilled:

[A]s the 2012 presidential candidates roam the state offering ways to “bring the jobs back,” many manufacturers say that, in fact, the jobs are already here. What’s missing are the skilled workers needed to fill them.

A metal-parts factory here has been searching since the fall for a machinist, an assembly team leader, and a die-setter. Another plant is offering referral bonuses for a welder. And a company that makes molds for automakers has been trying for seven months to fill four spots on the second shift.

“Our guys have been working 60 to 70 hours a week, and they’re dead. They’re gone,” said Corey Carolla, vice president of operations at Mach Mold, a forty-man shop in Benton Harbor, Mich. “We need more people. The trouble is finding them.”

As such reports make plain, somewhere along the education continuum, America in 2012 needs to prepare thousands more people for jobs that do exist. The skills they call for, by and large, are technical and do not seem to require much of a “liberal arts” background, even if citizenship does. Many do not entail sitting at a desk or wearing a white lab coat. Rather, they involve today’s version of what used to be called “blue collar” and “foreman” work and the educational preparation for succeeding in them does not look much like what the “everyone should complete college” crowd seems to have in mind.

Recall the provocative Pathways to Prosperity report from the Harvard ed school a year back, observing that just 30 percent of the jobs in 2018 will require a bachelor’s degree and arguing for a “multiple pathways” approach to K-12 reform. This didn’t get the attention it deserved—and still deserves. For it demands not only rethinking the “college for all” mantra but also launching a bold makeover of America’s “vocational” high schools (and kindred postsecondary institutions), bringing them into the 21st century rather than either jettisoning them or retaining them unchanged.

My home town of Dayton is setting a good example with the recently opened David H. Ponitz Career Technology Center. Plenty more schools have incorporated the word “technical” or “technology” into their names. But as you scan their curricula, you find many that have clung to the old programs (carpentry, metal working, auto body) that still sound worthy but may well lead to underprepared and ultimately unemployable people—and that’s even assuming that their students bring strong basic skills (and cultural literacy) with them into ninth grade.

In sum: Somewhere between the dead-end of old-style vocational high schools and the fashionable but ill-advised “college for everyone” campaign is a course of action that will actually equip young Americans for both successful citizenship and the real economy that they will inhabit.

-Chester E. Finn Jr.

This post also appeared in Fordham’s Education Gadfly Weekly

I refer to the long letter to House education chairman John Kline from the co-chairs of the Business Coalition for Student Achievement, namely Intel’s Craig Barrett, Accenture’s William D. Green, and State Farm’s Ed Rust, denouncing Kline’s new ESEA reauthorization bills because they deviate from the orthodoxy of No Child Left Behind. In particular, those bills would demolish NCLB’s version of a national “accountability” system with its cascade of metrics, timelines, labels, and interventions into schools that fail to make “adequate yearly progress.” (Judging from last week’s waivers, Duncan’s own version is just as prescriptive about accountability but in different ways.)

Never mind that none of that has done any real good over the past decade. Never mind that the number of schools “in need of improvement” has risen to the point of laughability. Never mind that NCLB has led states to set the achievement bar way too low. Never mind that the interventions most lauded by the Business Coalition Leadership (e.g. the “ability currently given to students attending low performing schools to choose higher performing schools and access free tutoring”) have not amounted to a hill of decent beans.

Never mind that the GOP center of education gravity has shifted to a far more modest federal education role. (Consider not only Kline’s recent proposals but also Lamar Alexander’s—not to mention any number of presidential wannabes.) Never mind that the only prominent political types apt to trumpet the BCSA missive are Democrats—plus of course Margaret Spellings and a few other holdovers from the Republican ancien regime in Washington.

At least in the K-12 education realm, those holdovers appear to haunt the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable, the twin entities that staff the BCSA. One must wonder whether the senior folks at those organizations (the distinguished, onetime STATE-based education reformer John Engler at the BRT and take-no-prisoners free-enterpriser Thomas J. Donahue at the USCC) are even paying attention to what’s being written on their letterheads.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

It’s vintage Jennings, perceptive about both what has happened and why and how it has (and hasn’t) worked, then incurably and relentlessly over-ambitious—in a classic, big-government, big-spending, liberal sort of way—about what federal policy should do tomorrow.

As to the past, and oversimplifying some points that he makes more subtly,

• Equity-based reform didn’t get very far because it amounted to add-on programs, suffered from limited funding, and failed to “generally improve the broader educational system.”
• School choice pleases parents but doesn’t raise achievement much, “an interesting case of convictions trumping evidence.”
• Standards-based reform has had more traction but has “gone astray”: too much testing, too much labeling, not enough real alteration in the quality of what’s taught and learned.

None of that is wrong. But his prescription for the future comes across as wishful thinking even if you’re disposed to agree with it. (I’m not.) Jennings favors a federal law declaring that “no child in the United States will be denied equal educational opportunity in elementary and secondary education through the lack of a challenging curriculum, well-prepared and effective teachers, and the funding to pay for that education.”

This would, of course, have the effect of transferring the responsibility for educating (and financing the education of) 55 million kids to Washington. I guess one might term this a “governance reform” but I don’t think it’s going to happen or that it would work well if it did. (Jack has done just about everything during the course of his long career EXCEPT work in the executive branch. If he had, he might harbor fewer illusions about its capacity in the realm of education.)

It’s notable, too, that he continues after all these years to put his faith in Uncle Sam to fix what ails American education. There’s no mention here of changes in the delivery system (e.g. technology), the system’s efficiency/productivity, or its structures and governance (except as noted above). He also downplays the value of “outsiders” (e.g. governors, mayors) as agents of change in K-12 education.

It is said that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Much as I respect and admire Jack Jennings, in spite of all his experience in this field, his main tool remains federal legislation, which I’ve come to believe is almost always wielded clumsily in pursuit of nails that either won’t budge at all or end up bent.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The longer, more informative, and more alarming of the articles was an extensive account of why Apple’s iPhones are now made in China rather than the U.S. The short version is that “the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their American counterparts that ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.”

Flexibility, diligence, and industrial skills. Hold that thought.

The second article previewed the President’s speech which, as predicted, focused heavily on the U.S. economy and ways to boost it. His proposals do, in fact, include some education and job-training initiatives, as well as macro-economic policies, several of them noted in the speech itself. But mostly what Mr. Obama did was trot out a bunch of government programs and rattle on about ways by which Uncle Sam should enhance the “fairness” of the U.S. economy, particularly its income distribution. (He used the words “fair,” “fairness,” or “unfair” eight times.) He didn’t talk about its efficiency, productivity, or industriousness. And his only reference to “hard work” was historical. Simply put, although the President spoke of restoring millions of manufacturing jobs to U.S. shores, it’s hard to picture Apple (or similar firms) responding, since the steps he has in mind to attract them are federal spending and tax programs and have little to do with the “diligence” of American workers, only a bit to do with “flexibility,” and a bit more to do with “skills.”

He deserves some credit on the skills front—a word he used five times. Instead of calling for everyone to complete college, for example, he called on community colleges and private firms—duly mustered and disciplined by Uncle Sam, of course!—to equip two million people with usable, job-related skills.

He addressed K-12 education, too, but only on the “compulsory attendance” and “teacher quality” fronts—and while the latter hinted at merit pay and nodded at schools having the flexibility to “replace” instructors “who just aren’t helping kids learn”—mostly what he did was urge more money for schools-as-we-know-them and those who teach in their classrooms.

As for “flexibility” and “diligence,” qualities important to Apple and myriad other firms—and qualities they’re apparently finding abroad—you didn’t hear anything about those in the State of the Union. My ear heard the opposite, actually, for all the talk about federal programs and tax policies enhancing “fairness” will exacerbate our nanny-state tendencies, our habit of assuming that government will provide and that we need not redouble our efforts to provide for ourselves. Instead, the President signaled that we should resent those who are better provided-for—and look to Washington to tug the levers of “fairness.”

Tuesday’s address was, in this regard, a reprise of Mr. Obama’s widely noted remarks in Osawatomie, Kansas last month. Here’s an excerpt. (You can find the whole speech at the White House website.) He began by recalling the values of what Tom Brokaw termed “the greatest generation” before fast-forwarding to the present.

Today, we’re still home to the world’s most productive workers. We’re still home to the world’s most innovative companies. But for most Americans, the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded. Long before the recession hit, hard work stopped paying off for too many people.

Read that last sentence again: “Hard work stopped paying off for too many people.”

What lesson were his listeners supposed to draw? Seems pretty clear to me: under the current rules, there’s no point in working hard. It doesn’t “pay off.”

Then read Charles Murray’s fine essay in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal (derived from a forthcoming book): “The New American Divide.” Murray contends that “the American way of life” has decayed and what he calls “the new lower class” (pretty much what we used to call the “working class”) has lost the value of “industriousness.”

Now put them together. Murray says that core value has badly eroded. The President says it no longer “pays off”—and the government must do something to foster “fairness.” And Apple says it has moved production to China because Americans lack “diligence.”

What has any of this to do with our schools? Could K-12 education contribute significantly to a revival of industriousness in the U.S. population? Could it lead our young people to believe—and act on the belief—that hard work does pay off? I believe so, even if Mr. Obama didn’t mention it, but to do this our teachers and policymakers will need to reverse now-widespread practices and beliefs. They will, to begin, have to reward rather than discourage hard work and actual achievement. They will have to make kids work harder than most are accustomed to doing. They will even have to foster competition and honor winners—while helping others to boost their own performance.

Today, as has been widely noted, U.S. schools and educators discourage competition in favor of “collaboration” (which has its place, albeit a limited one). They have short days and years and don’t assign much homework. They resist singling anyone out as better than others; hence the animus toward valedictorians and such. They generally engage in social promotion lest youngsters “fall behind their peers.”(Observe what a big deal it is when a state insists that children must be able, say, to read by the end of third grade in order to move on to fourth.) They inflate grades. They lower “proficiency” cut scores. And in the name of self-esteem-building they praise everybody all the time no matter whether the fruits of a student’s efforts are worth praising or not.

Stanford’s Carol Dweck and UVa’s Dan Willingham are leaders within a growing band of serious education scholars who have determined that the opposite is closer to the truth: unearned praise and unwarranted self-esteem are bad for kids. Instead, teachers should praise and reward students for genuine accomplishment—and the harder kids work and the more they learn and accomplish the more praise (and reward) they earn.

Will that make them more “diligent” and “industrious”? Maybe. It might also boost their knowledge and skills. It may even make the U.S. more competitive—and grow the economy by making firms likelier to locate jobs in this country. In the long run, it will boost opportunity and maybe even “fairness” within our economy. It won’t be enough to reverse what Charles Murray views as a vast deterioration of the civic culture in general. But I’ll wager that it would do more good than another federal program—or a war of resentment over income distribution.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

The post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

It is, indeed, a modern platitude that “we must do something to improve Americans’ knowledge of civics and government.”

But there is a problem in civics education, a sort of dividing line, about which there is far less agreement across society. On one side, we find an emphasis on infusing kids with basic knowledge about government, an understanding of the merits (as well as the shortcomings) of American democracy, and a sense of what can still be called patriotism: the belief that this country and its values need to be defended. (Stanford’s Bill Damon does a terrific job of elaborating on this viewpoint in his recent book, Failing Liberty 101.)

On the other side, we find much greater emphasis on civic participation and activism, on voluntarism and “service learning,” and on what is often termed “collective decision making” (or problem solving) and “democratic engagement,” which often boils down into the communitarian view that issues facing society are best dealt with through group action, by people joining hands and working together rather than through the political process.

I will admit, after watching the antics of Congress, many state legislatures, and the current GOP presidential candidates, that American society would benefit from more “working together” than our elected officials have displayed of late. (And I keep recalling the late David Broder’s remark that the death of Ted Kennedy marked the passing of the last of the Senate’s great “deal makers,” willing to compromise and work across party lines to accomplish something worthwhile, even if it wasn’t everything that either party wanted.)

Still and all, schools have a special responsibility to the young people in their care, which is to be exceptionally careful about providing lessons and activities of a political nature or enlisting them in adult causes, however worthy some may deem them. And Uncle Sam has a special responsibility not to “take sides” in the big debate—or, if it does, to come down on the side of patriotism. Unfortunately, a new report out of the U.S. Department of Education, one that appears to enjoy Arne Duncan’s strong personal backing, suggests that the executive branch is tilting toward the other side.

One is reminded, without pleasure, the ruckus that President Obama stirred up with his first back-to-school address in 2009—and the controversial “lesson plan” that the Education Department prepared to accompany it.

The “democratic engagement” faction within civics education has recently re-energized—even without Mr. Duncan’s help—and is pressing hard on schools to push kids into activism. You can see a vivid example of this in a recent publication called (cutely) A Crucible Moment and billed as “a national call to action.” Although it’s primarily aimed at colleges and universities, its authors make plain that its message is meant for primary and secondary schools, too. (Those authors, however, include absolutely nobody from the K-12 world.)

The publication sets forth a quintet of “essential actions,” among which I find three at least a bit troublesome, particularly when applied to compulsory public education of impressionable children rather than the voluntary education of young adults:

• “Advance a contemporary, comprehensive framework for civic learning—embracing U.S. and global interdependence—that includes historic and modern understandings of democratic values, capacities to engage diverse perspectives and people, and commitment to collective civic problem solving.”Global interdependence? Collective civic problem solving?
• “Capitalize upon the interdependent responsibilities of K–12 and higher education to foster progressively higher levels of civic knowledge, skills, examined values, and action as expectations for every student.” Values examined by whom? What sort of “action”?
• “Expand the number of robust, generative civic partnerships and alliances, locally, nationally, and globally to address common problems, empower people to act, strengthen communities and nations, and generate new frontiers of knowledge.” What exactly are “generative civic partnerships” and who in particular is supposed to be “empowered” to do what?

Are you with me so far? But you may be thinking that this is all kind of academic and irrelevant, isn’t it, just one more pious commission report?

Well, it would be, but for one big attention-getter: Uncle Sam putting his thumb on this side of the civics-education scale.

Check out the Education Department’s brand-new official publication, Advancing Civic Learning and Engagement in Democracy: A Road Map and Call to Action. Although this thirty-pager comes out of the Department’s postsecondary wing and is, once again, meant mostly for higher education, it, too, makes no real age-specific distinctions and explicitly urges the nation’s K-12 schools to, for example, “both expand and transform their approach to civic learning and democratic engagement, rather than engage in tinkering at the margins. At no school, college, or university should students graduate with less civic literacy and engagement than when they arrived.”

Duncan himself made a pretty big deal of this at a recent White House conference where he remarked that “Unlike traditional civic education, civic learning and democratic engagement 2.0 is more ambitious and participatory than in the past. To paraphrase Justice O’Connor, the new generation of civic education initiatives move beyond your ‘grandmother’s civics’ to what has been labeled ‘action civics.’”

Hmm, “action civics”?

To be sure, most of what the Department proposes to do itself in this realm is consistent either with longstanding federal practice (e.g. research, data) or with ingrained Obama-administration priorities (e.g. “public-private partnerships”). But there are policy hints that go farther, such as suggesting that the forthcoming ESEA/NCLB reauthorization should include a program to “assist states, local education agencies, and nonprofits in developing implementing, evaluating, and replicating evidence-based programs that contribute to a well-rounded education—including civics, government, economics, and history. Other disciplines included in the program could incorporate evidence-based civic learning and democratic engagement approaches—such as service-learning.”

Read that last bit again and ask yourself if this is really a proper federal role in K-12 education, keeping in mind that the kids to be affected probably cannot even name the mayor of their town or the governor of their state, nor have much idea what political parties are and how legislation gets passed (or not).

It’s well and good for the Education Department to seek a broadening of the K-12 curriculum and an overdue consolidation of too many discipline-specific curriculum-related programs into a single block grant. It’s not acceptable, however, for them to push “action civics” on our nation’s schools.

-Chester E. Finn Jr

This post was originally published in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly

Until something better comes along, I’m going to fancy myself a member of the Green-tea Party. Here are its seven tenets, one for each day of the week:

• Low taxes, efficient government, a balanced budget, a vigorous foreign policy (no more “leading from behind”), and a strong national defense.
• A full-bore, full-throated war on terrorism, terrorists, pirates and other such menaces, wherever they are.
• Decent provision for the truly dependent—and no help at all for those who can and should provide for themselves, their families and their neighbors.
• Decent respect for the environment—I’ve seen those glaciers melt and trash in the ocean—and for conservation of non-renewable resources.
• Minimal government regulation of just about everything else.
• That includes governments (and politicians) keeping out of adults’ lives, bedrooms, beliefs, orientations and practices. (Children are another story.)
• High education standards, plenty of quality school choices and lots more bang for the education buck.

Anybody want to join me? To run on this platform? You might even get more than one vote.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post also appears on Flypaper.

This much everybody knows. But unless we want to live out the classic definition of insanity (“doing the same thing over again with the expectation that it will produce a different result”), we need to focus laser-like on the barriers that keep us from making major-league gains. If we don’t break through (or circumnavigate) these barriers, academic achievement will remain stagnant.

The barriers I’m talking about are not cultural issues, parenting issues, demographic issues, or other macro-influences on educational achievement. Those are all plenty real, but largely beyond the reach of public policy. No, here I refer to obstacles that competent leaders and bold policymakers could reduce or eradicate if they were serious.

How much difference would that really make? It’s possible, of course, that we’re pursuing the wrong core strategies. Maybe standards-based reform has exhausted its potential (as Mark Schneider suggests in The Accountability Plateau). Perhaps choice and competition really cannot lift all boats. Possibly technology is overrated, alternate certification can never amount to much, teacher quality is doomed to mediocrity, principals don’t truly want authority, etc.

Could be. But from where I sit, the basic strategies aren’t ill-conceived. Rather, they’ve been stumped, stymied, and constrained by formidable barriers that are more or less built into the K-12 system as we know it.

Those barriers aren’t accidents. They’ve been erected by adult interests, bureaucratic routine, structural rigidity, and political stalemate. And they function to keep anything in education from changing very much. Eight such barriers are especially troublesome. Uninterrupted, they are likely to keep us from making major gains. One ought not, however, despair. On several fronts, promising interruptions and interrupters are emerging. Whether they can muster what it will take to tear down these walls remains unknown.

First and foremost is the archaic governance of K-12 education. I’ve written elsewhere about this problem, but it’s so fundamental and ubiquitous that we tend not even to notice it, much less to think that anything could be done about it. Instead, we take for granted (like it or not) that we’re stuck forever with local control in the form of school districts, separate from the rest of government and run by school boards that are particularly vulnerable to capture by adult interests, as well as with a marble cake of federal, state, and local decisions, regulations, and funding streams.

There are beginning to be exceptions, however, that illustrate what could be possible. Mayoral control of the schools in D.C., New York, Chicago, and several other major cities is one example. State-operated “recovery” school districts in Louisiana, Tennessee, and Michigan are another. The “parent trigger” idea is a third.

Second, our dysfunctional system of school finance puts the brakes on just about every reform while perpetuating inequity. We don’t fund learning, we fund programs. We don’t fund kids, we fund adult job slots. We don’t fund schools, we fund district-wide categoricals. We don’t blend the money from multiple sources into a single, flexible stream; rather, we leave it in discrete programs and silos, each with its own rules, uses of funding, and accounting obligations.

Here, too, small cracks can be seen in the glacier. Several states (notably Michigan, Indiana, and Vermont) have shifted their funding systems to mostly state dollars. Voucher programs, though still limited (but growing!), enable at least some of the money to accompany individual kids to the schools of their choice. A few cities have devolved as much budgetary authority as they can—district-wide teacher contracts are a huge constraint here—to the building level. Waivers can be sought (though seldom are) from states and Washington that allow enterprising superintendents to combine and redirect some of the categorical funds. And a few brave school-finance experts are probing deep into district budgets to see how much things really cost and where the dollars really flow.

Third, our academic standards are too low almost everywhere. It’s not just that too little is being achieved; it’s that too little is expected. Even where a state’s standards look great on paper—a few do—its “cut scores” for passing the tests aligned with those standards are rarely ambitious, and NCLB hasn’t helped one bit on that front. Fordham and others have been documenting these problems forever.

The silver lining in this cloud is widespread adoption of the Common Core State Standards for math and reading, and work now underway to produce a kindred set of multi-state standards for science. The Common Core itself turned out well, superior to the academic standards of most states and more or less on par with the best of them. The big questions now are whether it will be properly implemented, which means accompanying it with suitable curricula, assessments, and more—and whether public officials will have the fortitude to stick with it after scads of their current students turn out to be no match for it. Several state education leaders—Ohio’s Stan Heffner and Massachusetts’s Mitch Chester come to mind—are already walking the Common Core walk. In other jurisdictions, it may still be mostly talk.

Which brings us to weak-kneed accountability, the fourth great barrier to real achievement gains. About half the states have high school graduation tests that one must pass to qualify for a diploma but nearly all of these are easy—eighth- or tenth-grade content with low passing scores and multiple make-up opportunities. A few states have “promotional gates”—achievement benchmarks that determine whether you get to move on to the next grade. Many states give ratings or labels to schools according to their academic results and NCLB has added the (“made” or “failed”) AYP designation for schools and districts. Still and all, there are precious few tangible consequences for the adults in the system; it isn’t that demanding for the kids; and schools that find themselves subject to “interventions” or “reconstitutions” usually end up with the minimum-hassle version.

Whether the state consortia now developing Common Core-aligned assessments will be able to agree on demanding “cut scores” is an open question, to be followed by whether individual states using those tests will let those cut scores make any real difference in promotion, graduation, teacher retention (or reward), school reconstitution, and all the rest. Yes, there’s movement toward tying teacher evaluations and pay more tightly to student learning, but we’re still in the earliest stages of that ambitious project and there is much resistance to it.

Fifth, though choice programs of every sort are proliferating—virtual, charter, hybrid, voucher, and more—and though it can be demonstrated that more than half of all U.S. pupils now attend schools that they or their parents chose via one means or another, the facts remain that too many of those choices are mediocre (or worse), that the kids in greatest need of better options are least apt to be able to access them, and that our “schools of choice” for the most part labor under too much input-and-process regulation coupled with insufficient resources.

The best of the CMOs and a handful of one-off schools show that quality is possible, but even they face great difficulty replicating success and expanding their networks. The best state charter laws show that the regulatory and resource challenges can be tackled. But we’ve got a long way to go.

Sixth, although instructional technology holds enormous promise to transform education—in both its fully virtual and blended forms—it is stoutly opposed by the usual interest groups, is pushed (perhaps too hard) by politically connected profit seekers who care little about academic achievement, is ill-suited to existing governance and financing arrangements, and is shackled by absurd regulatory provisions that make scant sense even in a brick-and-mortar environment. The Digital Learning Council and others (including the Foundation for Excellence in Education and Fordham itself) are showing where and how paths through these thickets could be cut but politicians and policymakers will have to do the heavy cutting.

Seventh, our human resource practices and policies are sorely antiquated and anti-quality, particularly as regards teachers, whether one is looking at seniority provisions, uniform pay schedules, overly rich pension-and-benefit plans, licensure-and-certification rules, or a hundred other parts of public education’s HR system. There have been bold moves in several states to limit the scope of collective bargaining (a pillar of archaic HR practices), to modernize benefit structures, to make employment hinge more on effectiveness than on credentials and seniority, and to evaluate teachers (and sometimes principals) more on the basis of student achievement. But, once again, we have a very long way to go.

Eighth and finally, our preoccupation with “at risk” populations and with achievement gaps defined as the distance between demographic groups has led to the benign neglect of millions of kids, including but not limited to gifted students and high-achieving learners. America will never solve its international-competitiveness problem just by raising the bottom of the achievement distribution. Though a number of states and districts are trying to enlarge their Advanced Placement programs and to reward top students with college financial aid and other initiatives aimed at high achievers, it’s also the case that tight budgets have shrunk gifted-and-talented programs in many places. (And Congress has zero-funded the only federal initiative that tries to encourage such activities.) Note, too, that widening access to AP and such isn’t necessarily a good thing for the “talented tenth” who were already taking those courses and passing those exams.

With these eight problems unsolved—and more that could be added to the list—as well as gridlocked policymaking in Washington and open warfare in many state capitals, is there reason to be optimistic about the future of K-12 education?

I say yes, albeit cautiously. What gives me the greatest hope today is the emergence—and steadfastness—of a new cadre of change-minded people in positions of influence (think Jeb Bush, the “Chiefs for Change,” Joel Klein, Wendy Kopp, Kevin Huffman, Michelle Rhee, and yes, Arne Duncan) and the birth of a number of new-and/or-improved advocacy organizations, mostly operating at the state level (think 50CAN, Advance Illinois, PIE-Network, Democrats for Education Reform, Students First, Stand for Children, BAEO, the American Federation for Children, Parent Revolution). They’re still no match for the protectors of the status quo—i.e. bulwarks of the barriers enumerated above—but they’re slowly gaining. Let us wish them much clout in the New Year and beyond.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This also appears in The Education Gadfly.

So argues Mark Schneider, a scholar, analyst, and friend whom we once affectionately (and appropriately) named “Statstud.” Schneider, a political scientist, served as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics from 2005 to 2008, and is now affiliated with the American Institutes for Research and the American Enterprise Institute. In his new analysis, he digs into twenty years of trends on the National Assessment of Educational Progress—the “Nation’s Report Card.”

We originally asked Schneider to investigate the achievement record of the great state of Texas. At the time—it feels like just yesterday—Lone Star Governor Rick Perry was riding high in the polls, making an issue of education, and taking flak from Secretary Arne Duncan for running an inadequate school system. We wondered: Was Duncan right to feel “very, very badly” for the children of Texas? Had the state’s schools—once darlings of the standards movement and prototypes for NCLB—really slipped into decline since Perry took office? What do the NAEP data really show?

Schneider agreed to take on the project but quickly concluded that there’s a larger and more interesting story to tell than simply the saga of Texas. It was true, he noted, that Texas’s achievement slowed during the Perry years, particularly as compared to the rest of the country. But rather than pin that development on the governor, Schneider saw a more likely explanation: As an early adopter of standards, testing, and accountability, Texas got a head start on big achievement gains, most of which it realized in the 1990s when George W. Bush was governor—and also a head start on flat-lining thereafter, during Rick Perry’s tenure.

Indeed, the Lone Star State made Texas-sized gains from the early- to mid-1990s, as its accountability system got traction. But as other states followed suit, they too hit the achievement fast-track, leading to sizable national gains from 1998 to 2003. Since then, however, Texas’s progress has cooled, and the same is now happening to the country as a whole. It’s not that Perry was a worse “education governor” than Bush (or, for that matter, Ann Richards) before him, but that he presided over an accountability strategy that was running out of steam.

It’s an intriguing argument, and one that deserves serious consideration, even more so as the U.S. marks the tenth anniversary of the enactment of NCLB and tries to figure out what the next version of that law should entail. If school-level accountability, as currently practiced, is no longer an effective lever for raising student achievement, then what is? If we need another “meteor” to disrupt the system, where should we look? Mark suggests that the Common Core and rigorous teacher evaluations have potential. We also see promise in the digital-learning revolution. But other shocks to the system might work even better. What are they?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael Petrilli

To be sure, the Euro already exists in the real world—you can hold one in your hands and buy things with it—and its demise would likely trigger a worldwide economic crisis, whereas the Common Core so far exists only on paper and all of its implementation challenges lie ahead. If it fails to gain traction, the sky won’t fall; we’ll simply stick with the status quo.

If you find the status quo in American K-12 education acceptable, bully for you. I find it akin to the condition of Europe and its economy after World War II: weak, battered, and fragmented, in need of a major tune-up and tone-up. It needs more focus, too—and greater capacity to help states pull in the same direction instead of pulling apart.

Recognizing those woes, and sensing that their war-torn nations would be better served by joining forces, the post-war years saw a half-dozen visionary European leaders striving to construct something more coherent and viable. In 1957, six core countries signed the Treaty of Rome, creating the “common market,” or the European Union as it’s been known since 1967, which has slowly grown to include twenty-seven countries allied in a federation of shared economic and political interests. (Several more are “candidates” for admission.) Almost all of western and central Europe now participates, save Norway and Switzerland. Within the EU, a subset of seventeen countries (not including Britain, Sweden, Poland, Denmark, etc.) share the common currency known (since 1999) as the Euro.

Today finds the Euro (and, by association, the European Union) in jeopardy, because participating countries have handled their economies in radically different ways. Worsened by the 2008 recession, the real-estate collapse, and the banking crisis, some of them (Ireland, Portugal, Greece, and maybe more) have needed major outside help to keep going, while the better managed, less-indebted, and more prosperous nations (above all Germany and France) have been reluctant to “bail out” their embattled counterparts. That may change in the coming weeks—if the “Merkozy” plan to rewrite the treaties and reshape Europe’s political and economic structures finds favor across the continent.

Our states are not educationally inter-dependent in the same way, of course, and some may implement the Common Core well while others don’t. Unless Congress or the Education Department makes a dumb move and entangles the Common Core with ESEA reauthorization and federal funding, participation in it will remain voluntary and its implementation will likely be uneven.

That unevenness will be harder to sustain, however, when common assessments come on line, particularly if the multi-state consortia developing those assessments can actually (as their RTTT grant says they must) agree on common “cut scores” to denote student proficiency—and “college-career readiness”—in every participating state.

Those cut scores will be more like the Euro, a sort of common currency that moves across state borders much as EU passport holders are able to move across national borders. It will certainly make for easier comparisons of student and school performance than we’ve ever had before and is apt to forge various new uniformities in curriculum, teacher preparation, textbooks, and more. (It will also be a huge benefit to providers of virtual education for whom district and state borders have been an irksome and archaic obstacle.)

Texas, Virginia, Alaska, and Nebraska have not wanted to participate at all. Like Norway and Switzerland, they prefer to go it alone. So be it. The Common Core enterprise, like the EU, is voluntary and its main selling point is that participants will be better off in various ways than will the outliers.

The small but noisy band of Common Core critics and kvetchers, however, clearly wants the whole enterprise to go away. They mistrust claims of voluntarism and find the potential loss of state sovereignty a bigger threat to America’s educational wellbeing than today’s uneven standards and slipshod academic performance. They use scary language akin to the New York Times correspondent describing the major changes in treaties and governance that Merkel and Sarkozy hope the entire EU will agree to: “The changes…would effectively subordinate economic sovereignty to collective discipline enforced by European technocrats in Brussels.”

That’s what Common Core critics fear will happen here. They worry especially that the U.S. equivalent of “Brussels technocrats” (i.e. Uncle Sam) will end up taking over—and they’re mindful that no durable governance mechanism yet exists for maintaining the Common Core, managing the new assessments over time, keeping it all voluntary while keeping the states in charge. Nor has anyone made a serious move to create such a mechanism. (When we at Fordham suggested that something of the sort is needed, we were admonished by NGA and CCSSO to butt out.)

The critics’ angst is not baseless. The absence of a Common Core management mechanism for the long term—for the standards and especially for the assessments—is a problem and creates a vacuum that the “Brussels technocrats” may well be tempted to fill. It’s also true that uneven implementation by states, like uneven implementation of sound economic policy by the countries of Europe, could lead to a Merkozy-like call for greater centralization.

But is that grounds to abort the whole project—for states to pull back from it and presidential aspirants to denounce it? Depends, I think, on your view of the status quo and the risks you are willing to take to see it altered. Like Europe in 1950, the nation remains at grave risk, educationally and economically, and almost nobody looking at our long term prospects thinks we can climb out of this ditch without a major boost in educational effectiveness and productivity.

No, the Common Core does not assure that boost. Plenty of other things need to change, too—and every one of them has critics, kvetchers, and hostile interest groups. (So did the European Union: DeGaulle, for example, really didn’t want Britain allowed in.) It may be that Massachusetts and a few other states can do as well or better on their own. Perhaps the “Chiefs for Change” will eventually have fifty members. Or perhaps it’s acceptable for Arkansas and California and others to continue wallowing in mediocrity. Maybe we’re not a “nation” at risk, just fifty states with varying degrees of risk.

I for one hope this week’s summit in Brussels leads them to rewrite the treaties. And that the Common Core prevails over its critics. The people of Europe—and the world—are better off with the Euro than without it. And the people of the United States would be better off if all our kids were held to the same high educational expectations.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post also appears on Flypaper.

Sure, remarkable individuals can sometimes make it work, at least for a while: Michelle Rhee (backed by Adrian Fenty) in the District of Columbia; Joel Klein (backed by Michael Bloomberg) in New York City; Arne Duncan (backed by Richard Daley) in Chicago; Jerry Weast (abetted by a rising budget) in Montgomery County, Maryland. Readers can surely cite additional examples. But these are the exceptions that prove the rule.

The rule is that education-policy decisions are made in so many places—each with some capacity to initiate change but with even greater capacity to block it—that there’s really nobody “in charge.” Some will say that’s a tribute to our traditions of democratic control, checks and balances, pluralism, and federalism. Others will say it’s just a mighty wasteful and ineffectual way to run a system that is widely believed to need a thorough makeover.

Some have described education governance in the United States as a “layer cake,” others as a “marble cake” (because the jurisdictions and zones of control of different governments and agencies are so jumbled). Still others favor the image of a “loosely coupled train” where movement at one end doesn’t necessarily produce any motion at the other. We find a more apt analogy in a vast restaurant or food court with multiple kitchens, each thronged with many cooks, yet with no head chef in command of even a single establishment much less the entire enterprise.

Consider so seemingly straightforward a decision as which teacher will be employed to fill a seventh-grade opening at the Lincoln School, located in, let us say, Metropolis, West Carolina. One might suppose that Lincoln’s principal, or perhaps the school’s top instructional staff, should decide which candidate is likeliest to succeed in that particular classroom. But under the typical circumstance, the most the principal might be able to do is veto wholly unsuitable candidates. (And often not that, considering seniority and “bumping rights” within districts, their collective-bargaining contracts, and, frequently, state law.) The superintendent’s HR office does most of the vetting and placing, but it is shackled by the contract, by state licensure practices (which may be set by an “independent”—and probably union and ed-school dominated—professional-standards board), by seniority rules that are probably enshrined in both contract and state law, and by uniform salary schedules that mean the new teacher (assuming similar “credentials”) will be paid the same fixed amount whether the subject most needed at Lincoln is math or music.

Washington gets into the act, too, with “highly qualified teacher” requirements that constrain the school. By the end of the process, at least a dozen different governing units impede the principal’s authority to staff his school with the ablest (and best suited) teachers available.

And teacher selection is but one of many examples of the “too many cooks” problem. Much the same litany can be invoked for special education, for the budgeting and control of a school’s funds, or for approved approaches to school discipline. (Not to mention a more literal “too many cooks” issue: What to serve for lunch in the school cafeteria?)

What great leader or change-agent would want to become a school principal under these circumstances? Or a local superintendent? Or even a teacher? Well, maybe in a comfy (and probably smug) suburban setting. But not in the places that most need outstanding talent.

No, American education doesn’t need czars or dictators. Separation-of-powers and checks-and-balances are important elements of our democracy. Kids and communities do differ and there needs to be flexibility in the system to adapt and adjust to singular circumstances, changing priorities, and dissimilar needs. But today, our public-education system lacks flexibility and nimbleness of all sorts. Surely that’s not what the founders—or Horace Mann—had in mind. And it’s most definitely not what our children need.

It’s well past time to rethink, re-imagine, and reinvent education governance for the twenty-first century. We’d better get moving.

-  Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Michael Petrilli

Photo by A Florida Studio

Reagan vowed to undo this abomination, but Ted Bell could not find a single Senator willingeven to introduce the bill. (Howard Baker vowed to vote AGAINST the repeal!)

After the 1994 GOP sweep of Congress, a bunch of Gingrich’s feisty young House members vowed to try again. They got absolutely nowhere, not least because Bill Clinton, political magician, managed to make being against the Department of Education like being against small children and friendly teachers. (He did the same thing to Bob Dole in the 1996 presidential campaign when Dole said something critical of teacher unions.)

Undaunted, Rick Perry would try again. (Education, and Commerce and, er, uh, something else, maybe the National Zoo?)

This is, frankly, symbolic politics at its silliest. One could make a powerful case, and I (and many others) have, for radically altering the federal ROLE in education to make it more targeted, less controlling, smarter, more efficient. But that involves the heavy lifting of programs, authorizing statutes, regulations, bureaucracy, budgets and appropriations, not the name over the building’s front door. One could abolish the “Department” of education and absolutely nothing would change except that those hundreds of programs and tens of billions of dollars would be administered somewhere else in Washington, maybe back in a reincarnated Department of H.E.W.

Serious candidates will–and should–talk about the federal ROLE in education and how it ought to change. The current election campaign is impoverished by the fact that practically nobody is doing so. But just changing the sign over 400 Maryland Ave SW is a great big nothing burger.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post also appeared on Flypaper

Though the specific conditions that the White House and Secretary Duncan are attaching to statewide “flexibility waivers” are consistent with the Administration’s long-standing “blueprint” for reauthorizing NCLB, and also happen to be conditions that I think generally have merit, they amount to changing the law, not just waiving it. This raises Constitutional as well as statutory issues—though the administration’s response, not surprisingly or implausibly, is that “if a do-nothing Congress won’t act to solve problems, we’ll solve them ourselves as best we can.”

Yet the changes themselves—at least their timing and high-profile release—are motivated at least as much by election-year political considerations as by policy. This is not the first example, and surely won’t be the last, of appealing to key constituencies by undoing, suspending, or waiving government practices that they find onerous and unpleasant. Consider the non-deportation of illegal aliens who haven’t committed crimes. Hispanic (and other immigrant) voters will surely applaud this move and likely thank the administration in November 2012.

Today’s announcements mean that teachers and parents (and school-board members and administrators) will also breathe a sigh of relief at the suggestion that the President and his education secretary are taking the heavy hand of unrealistic achievement targets, school labels, and unwanted accountability burdens off their frail shoulders.

And they’ll be partly right, for the promised waivers, once issued, really do ease the most painful parts of NCLB—provisions that analysts and critics (ourselves included) have pointed to for a very long time as needing revision.

But they’ll be only partly right. For the administration is also imposing its own preconditions on states for waiver eligibility. Three in particular, all of which are wrenching and controversial in their own right, and at least one of which could result in an election-year firestorm. Teachers and principals will be concerned about the obligation of states to develop evaluation systems for them that incorporate measures of student progress. A variety of groups will be upset over the plan to impose “rigorous interventions to turn schools around” only on a small number of really low-performing schools and let merely-mediocre schools avoid the turnaround lash.

The greatest potential for political controversy, however, is the requirement that states seeking waivers “have already adopted college- and career-ready standards” in math and English language arts, which is preceded (in the White House document) by reference to the Common Core State Standards Initiative. This will surely be viewed by Common Core skeptics as entangling Title I with the heretofore state-driven initiative and creating new federal incentives for states to embrace those standards. I happen to think the Common Core standards are generally worth embracing, but I also understand that much of what’s good about them is their separateness from Uncle Sam. That distance is now disappearing.

One who might notice is the governor of Texas, who detests everything about the Common Core and has kept his state out of it—and who just happens to be Barack Obama’s likeliest opponent in the 2012 election.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This post also appears on Flypaper.

All this in the wake of Rick Perry’s recent entry into that race. Though the Governor has not (yet) put education on his campaign agenda—it is not, for example, one of the four issues highlighted on his new Perry for President website—he has, on multiple occasions, depicted Texas as an independent-minded model of educational progress. Everyone knows that he wanted no part of Race to the Top or of the Common Core standards. Nor is it any secret that he thinks the federal government should butt out of just about everything. Or that he has many bones to pick with higher education in the Lone Star State and beyond.

Last week Arne Duncan, usually a nonpolitical sort of guy, went after Perry, six-guns blazing, regarding the Texas education record. And the retaliation against Duncan’s attack has been swift and aggressive.

Perry’s folks have already responded to Duncan, as have many others (from within Texas and without). More such jousting will continue and probably intensify. But this issue isn’t just a Perry-Duncan (or even a Perry-Obama) thing. Shrinking the role of government—every government—in education is one of Michele Bachmann’s favorite themes. (Though she doesn’t yet have it on her website, either.) And it will end up being part of the policy arsenal of every GOP candidate.

Until late last week, however, I thought education would itself play a minor role in the 2012 election, as in 2008, partly because other issues loom larger but also because Duncan and Obama stole so much of the traditional GOP ed-policy thunder as to leave Republican candidates with little to say that’s fresh or differentiating on this topic. But I didn’t reckon with Perry and Bachmann. And I surely never imagined that Duncan himself would cast the first stone.

Perhaps he was glad to get even with Perry’s denunciations of RTTT. Perhaps Duncan got into stone-hurling mode under White House orders, or perhaps his pellets of attack just slipped out (twice). Perhaps the Texas governor has those in the White House worried. Perhaps they should be.

They’re wrong—fortunately. The new Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup survey makes clear that most adults value their children’s teachers. Seventy-one percent say they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools” and 67 percent say they would like to have one of their own children become a public-school teacher.

That’s tons more positive than the public’s view of schools in general: Just 17 percent give A or B grades to them (though Americans continue to give high marks to their own children’s schools—and this figure, say the pollsters, is rising).

Respondents were also asked to grade the teachers, principals, and school board in their own community. Here again, teachers fared best: Sixty-nine percent of respondents would award their town’s teachers either an A or a B versus 54 percent for principals, and a meager 37 percent for the school board. (This widening recognition of the governance failings of our public-school systems is, in its way, heartening.) Parents—interestingly—rank the worst: A discouraging 36 percent of respondents would give their communities’ parents top marks for “bringing up their children.”

So whence cometh the perceived public ire?  PDK and Gallup lift the lid a bit: Forty-seven percent of survey respondents feel that unionization (of teachers) has hurt “the quality of public education in the United States” compared with 26 percent who say it has helped. (Are you paying attention, Randi and Dennis? Your organizations don’t have a lot of fans. Even school boards fare better!)

Some aspects of school teaching seem permanent, even eternal, but in many ways teaching today has changed from my own student days and it’s likely to be even more different tomorrow.

In the last half-century, unionization has flooded the schools (and is now slowly starting to ebb—or be pushed back). Possibly more important, though, has been the sheer growth in the number of public-school teachers. In the 1950s, the crude ratio of students to teachers across American K-12 education was 27:1. Today it’s 14:1. That doesn’t mean everybody’s classes are smaller but it does mean that we now employ an enormous number of teachers—in the ballpark of 3.5 million—and essentially all the extra money we’ve put into public education has gone to pay for their salaries and benefits. That’s why teacher pay has simply kept pace with the cost of living and why these levels of compensation in much of the U.S. today aren’t sufficient to attract and keep a great many of our ablest college graduates. (Mercifully, they attract and keep some!) If today’s ratio were still 27:1, today’s school budgets would be sufficient to pay an average teacher salary north of $100,000.

As for what will be different in the teachers’ world tomorrow, five developments need to be noted and taken seriously.

First, technology is going to have a major impact, both on what happens within traditional schools and classrooms and, more broadly, on what we mean by “school” and where and when learning occurs. Most likely, it will mean that we need fewer flesh-and-blood teachers sitting in the classroom with Johnnie and Susie—though we may need more aides and tutors and such to provide face-to-face explanations, pats on the back, and (when needed) stern looks and reminders to remain on task. (Expect a paper soon from our “Creating Sound Policy for Digital Learning” series on the specifics of these shifts.)

Second, school budgets are going to be flat (or falling) for the foreseeable future—and looming deficits in retirement and pension funds almost certainly mean that the take-home pay of practicing  teachers will see no real-dollar growth and could well decline. (The only rational antidote to that is, in fact, employing fewer individuals and paying them better.)

Third, there’s a revolution underway in teacher evaluation and many of the HR practices associated with it, including retention, tenure, compensation, promotions, and layoffs. It’s rocky, to be sure, but we’re gradually coming to gauge teachers more by what their students learn and less by the credentials that they carry. (And this isn’t just a cause trumpeted by wonks and reform junkies. Per yesterday’s poll, 74 percent of adult Americans say that it’s important to incorporate student test-score data into teacher evaluations.)

Fourth, big changes are brewing in teacher preparation and licensure as ed schools come under fire, as “alternate routes” proliferate, as programs like Teach For America get greater traction, and as more attention is paid to what a teacher knows about her subject than to what pedagogy courses she took in college.

Fifth, though the system hasn’t quite made this adjustment yet, we’re seeing that a non-trivial fraction of teachers are people who want to do this work for a time, before or after they do something else, rather than make a lifelong career of it. We’ll likely evolve a set of arrangements that capitalizes on the short-termers as well as the classroom careerists.

As we contemplate this future, it will surely help if teachers themselves, with or (more likely) without their unions’ help, prove willing to experiment, to grow, to listen, and to learn. And it will help if all the rest of us—even the curmudgeonly crew at Fordham—pause to thank today’s hardworking educators for selfless, challenging, and not very well compensated work on which our kids’ future and our country’s prospects depend so heavily.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This criticism is separate from the quality-and-achievement challenges that beset many current schools and the “caps,” fiscal constraints, and political/bureaucratic barriers that continue to confront far too many of them in far too many places. Here I refer to accumulating signs of resistance among the movement’s own captains and admirals to schools that would fly the charter flag but don’t behave exactly like the typical charter schools of the past twenty years.

It would be a pity if the charter enterprise were now to grow rigid and intolerant, considering how well it has accommodated some extraordinarily interesting and unconventional schools, institutional forms, and uses of chartering unimagined back in 1991. Think of teacher-led schools sans principal, schools for disabled kids, and schools for dropouts. “Virtual” and “hybrid” schools, some of them operating statewide, some as part of national franchises. For-profit operators and multi-campus management organizations—even single charters harboring multiple schools with distinct operators. We have single-sex schools. Early-college schools. Schools with curricular foci that range from “back to basics” to “experiential.” Schools that restore “local control” to small towns aggrieved by excessive district consolidation. Schools that experiment with unconventional union contracts, even a couple of schools run by unions.

To its great credit, the charter movement has flexed and stretched and managed to take in, if not always to embrace. this sort of school diversity. Which is, of course, a major rationale for its existence in the first place.

But that may now be changing—and not for the better. Recent examples include:

• National charter spokesmen recently deploring the existence of selective-admission charter schools in New Orleans, even though these are conversion schools that were selective before they were charters;

• Also in New Orleans, respected national groups urging the school board not to renew charters for more than five years, even though several of the schools (which had requested ten-year renewals), by virtue of being conversion charters, have actually operated for many decades and are among the highest-scoring schools in Louisiana;

• Major funders and reform outfits shunning “middle class” charter schools as if those kids don’t also need better education options;

• Palpitations all over at the prospect of charter schools with a religious connection. Never mind that perhaps the most promising way to salvage urban Catholic schools—with their excellent track record of educating disadvantaged kids—is to reconstitute them as charters; and

• Outrage at the announcement last week by Douglas County, Colorado that it is going to operate its new private-school voucher program via a district-sponsored charter.

This wouldn’t be the first “reform movement” in the history of education to turn into an ideologically rigid, pull-up-the-gangplank-now-that-we’re-aboard sort of vested interest. But it would still be a great pity. The basic justification for chartering rests on two legs: providing quality alternatives for youngsters stuck in bad or ill-fitting schools, and functioning as a kind of R & D center or beta site for K-12 education where things can be tried that (for a hundred reasons) are hard to do in regular district schools.

In my view, any school that satisfies at least one of those two criteria should qualify as a charter school, so long as it’s clear—and transparent—about its mission and publicly accountable in some suitable way for its results.

It doesn’t have to be accountable in the “usual” way if its mission is better aligned with some other measure or mechanism. Long before NCLB, several states—Texas comes to mind—allowed for “alternate accountability” for schools dealing with dropouts, at-risk youth, etc. The school and its authorizer obviously need to agree on its accountability metrics—and be public about both targets and actual attainments. The school also needs to be public about its governance and finances.

But it doesn’t have to look like other charter schools—or any other school we’ve come up with so far. It can be academically selective if it wants—so long as everyone knows what the criteria are. (That’s not the same as the squalid New York charter operation that was recently busted for secretly shutting out kids who have “issues.”) Lotteries make sense in some circumstances but not in all.

It can even have religious ties. Before- and after-school “wraparound” religious-instruction programs, and released-time programs, ought to be no-brainers when someone else pays for them. But it’s reasonable for charters themselves to try religious education so long as they thread the Zelman needle. (Keep in mind that in most of the civilized world, government schools are routinely operated by organized religions and teach those religions on the government nickel.)

A charter school can also be affiliated in various ways with voucher-style programs that educate kids in what we’re accustomed to calling “private schools.” How is that different, really, from outsourcing the operation of existing charter (or district) schools to private firms, many of them profit-making? The same thing can be done one student at a time, with the public money continuing to follow the kid to this school or that.

More disruptive innovations will arise over time, and charter-movement leaders should be grateful and welcoming, not resistant. Besides, if they don’t cooperate, they’ll eventually get end-run, much as they did to district schools once upon a time.

- Chester E. Finn, Jr.

For more on this topic, please see “The 2012 Republican Candidates So Far: What they’ve said and done on education in the past, and what they might do about our public schools if elected,” by Allison Sherry, which will appear in the Fall 2011 issue of Education Next and is now available online. The article is summarized in this press release.

Please also vote in our readers’ poll: Which presidential candidate would be best for K-12 education?

But the big, glum headline over American K-12 education today is essentially the same as when we were declared a “nation at risk” 28 long years ago: our kids on average are woefully lacking in essential skills and knowledge across every subject in the curriculum.

Almost all the major trend lines are flat—at least until you decompose them by ethnicity. Sure, it’s great that minority students have made gains, but what does that do for our international competitiveness if the average score is unchanged or declining? Especially in a time when many competitor nations are moving up on some of those same metrics? And what’s the long-term payoff from early-grade gains if scores and outcomes in high school are flat or declining? Some say the early gains are like the pig in the python’s throat and it’ll just take time for them to reach the tail. But we’ve had enough experience by now with early-grade gains and high-school sags to throw major doubt on that hypothesis. We simply haven’t found—at least on a large scale—ways to sustain and build on academic gains as youngsters move from 4^th grade to 12^th.

This week’s NAEP geography results (based on 2010 testing) underscore the problem. Indeed, the National Assessment Governing Board’s own headline says it all: “Proficiency overall remains low; lowest performers show greatest improvement; grade 8 remains flat; grade 4 increases, while grade 12 declines since 1994.”

Geography, as we know, isn’t much taught in U.S. schools, a crime in its own right. But that’s not the only reason our kids don’t know much about it, because the NAEP geography results parallel the recent NAEP results in civics and U.S. history, both of which are taught, at least in our high schools. Yet here’s how many of our 12^th graders are at (or above) NAEP’s proficient level in those three subjects:

• Geography: 20 percent (down from 24 in 2001)
• U.S. History: 12 percent (level since 2006)
• Civics: 24 percent (down from 27 in 2006)

It takes chutzpah to say this glass is even a third full, much less that it’s filling. And only a naïf would say that we’re looking toward a bright future as a self-governing polity comprised of knowledgeable voters and discerning citizens if we’re producing high school graduates who know this little about their world and their country.

Critics retort that Americans have never known much of this sort of stuff but we’ve gotten by OK over the years as the land of the free and the home of the brave, so not to worry. Well, I worry. I look at the lousy choices we’re making at the voting booth and in the corridors of legislatures, school boards and Congress itself and I see plenty to worry about in this realm. I see colleges adding little or nothing to what young people know in fields like these. Then I see what’s on TV (including what passes for “news” these days and on the internet and in the theaters) and I do not conclude that our national prospects are improving.

The schools, of course, are not entirely, not even primarily, to blame for this situation. Recent immigration patterns, for example, have flooded classrooms with foreign born kids who arrive with scant knowledge of America and must first struggle with the language of the curriculum. But we’ve had immigrants before, lots of them, even. So that ought not be an excuse for long. And we do need to acknowledge that some of our education priorities aren’t helping one bit. Why teach history or geography, for example, if all your school is held accountable for are reading and math scores? Why do your homework for subjects that don’t really count? Why fuss about whether state requirements for licensing “social studies” teachers are light on history and oblivious to geography?

Mike can crack open the champagne if he wants to. But don’t pour me more than a thimble full.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

***

Folks, you know that our education system is tattered. Some of it is fine, but too much is mediocre or worse. Once the envy of the world, American schools are losing ground to those in Europe and Asia. Today, many countries are out-teaching, out-learning, and out-hustling our schools?—?and doing it for a fraction of the cost.

Meanwhile, failed education systems in our cities worsen the odds that the next generation will climb out of poverty into decent jobs and a shot at the American dream. And as much as many of us prefer not to notice, way too many of our suburban schools are just getting by. They may not be dropout factories, but they’re not preparing anywhere near enough of their pupils to revive our economy, strengthen our culture, and lead our future.

Turning this situation around has been the work of education reform for the past two decades. We’ve spent a lot of money on it. We’ve had any number of schemes and plans and laws and pilot programs. And we’ve seen some modest success. Graduation rates are starting to inch up again. The lowest-performing students have made gains. Many more families are taking advantage of many more forms of school choice. And our best public charter schools are demonstrating that tremendous success is possible even in the most challenging of circumstances.

Leaders from both parties deserve credit for these gains, including President Bush and, yes, President Obama. We need to appreciate his support for quality charter schools, rigorous teacher evaluations, and merit pay.

Yet not to confront the challenges of structure and governance in public education in our time is to accept the glum fact that the most earnest of our other “reform” efforts cannot gain enough traction to make a big dent in America’s educational deficit, to produce a decent supply of quality alternatives to the traditional monopoly, or to defeat the adult interests that typically rule and benefit from that monopoly.

The main structures of U.S. public education date to the 19th Century, when individual towns paid essentially all the costs of operating whatever schools they had, and to the progressive era, when it was deemed important to “keep education out of politics” so as to avoid the taint of patronage and partisanship. Better to entrust its supervision to expert professionals and to independent, nonpartisan school boards that would surely attract the community’s leaders to tend this crucial civic function. Don’t let the mayor or aldermen sink their grubby mitts into school affairs. Don’t entwine public education too closely with other governmental functions and agencies, either, lest it be contaminated.

Much the same thing happened at the state level, as states began to carve a role for themselves in the provision and regulation of public education. The New York Board of Regents launched back in 1784, though for decades its assignment dealt mainly with higher education. Massachusetts got its state board of education—focused on primary-secondary schooling—in 1837. It came in response to Governor Edward Everett’s admonishment of lawmakers. He told them that while locally-operated “common” schools were well and good:

The school houses might, in many cases, be rendered more commodious. Provision ought to be made for affording the advantages of education, throughout the whole year, to all of a proper age to receive it. Teachers well qualified to give elementary instruction in all the branches of useful knowledge, should be employed; and small school libraries, maps, globes, and requisite scientific apparatus should be furnished. I submit to the Legislature, whether the creation of a board of commissioners of schools, to serve without salary, with authority to appoint a secretary, on a reasonable compensation, to be paid from the school fund, would not be of great utility.

The very first secretary of that “board of commissioners” was, of course, Horace Mann, often termed the father of public education in the United State.

These early state boards, and almost all of those that followed (nearly every state now has one), were intended to be at least one step removed if not entirely divorced from messy electoral politics. Most are appointed—usually by the governor—for fixed terms. Most are separate from the rest of state government. Half of them appoint a state superintendent of schools (or “commissioner of education”) who is nearly always a career professional in the education field.

Although states bear formal responsibility for educating their citizens—the wording varies, but a typical example is Ohio’s constitutional charge to its legislature to “secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state”—all but Hawaii have opted to deliver schooling through “local education agencies,” also known as school districts. These vary greatly in size and number—Illinois has 1100 of them, Maryland just 24. Most are coterminous with a county or municipal entity (town, village, etc.) though almost never are they directly governed by that entity.

The four major problems with this set-up should by now begin to reveal themselves.

First, as the decades have passed, “local” has gradually become a less accurate way to describe, much less to organize, public education in America. Most school funding now comes from state and federal sources. (The “local” share varies but on average is 43 percent.) So does an ever-larger amount of regulation. In a mobile society, few people live out their days in the town where they were born. Many cross municipal borders every day and plenty of families move to different cities or states. A growing number of children now attend charter schools operated by regional or national firms with non-local “brand names” (e.g. KIPP, National Heritage, Achievement First) and a growing number of pupils now absorb at least part of the curriculum from online providers at the state or national (and, in time, planetary) level.

These new realities raise some interesting questions: why is 6th grade math in Portland, Maine different from that in Portland, Oregon? And what does it mean for Cincinnati, say, to be responsible for educating a child who is enrolled in the Ohio Virtual Academy or in a charter school operated by a New York firm and supervised by a Toledo-based authorizer?

Second, the dream of keeping education out of politics has turned into a nightmare. There may still be corners of the countryside where community leaders with no agendas of their own or axes to grind or interest groups to enrich or political careers to advance get elected to the board of education. But in far too many places, today’s school boards consist of an unwholesome mix of aspiring politicians, teacher union puppets, individuals with some cause or scheme they yearn to inflict on everyone’s kids, and ex-employees of the system with scores to settle.

Much the same thing happens at the state level, often with an additional dose of partisan politics. And as for placing disinterested “professionals” in charge, many do indeed have formal credentials th

Third, keeping primary-secondary education separate from the rest of the public sector now does more harm than good. Splitting its operation and policy-making off from early-childhood and postsecondary education is obvious folly. For instance, individual academic records cannot be tracked from one level of education to the next. And it is even harder to ensure that those systems harmonize their expectations and minimize duplication.

It is also folly to wall education off from juvenile justice, health care, social services, employment services and the rest. Kids are not compartmentalized. It should be easy to coordinate what they need to grow up well—or at least to coordinate the portions for which government is responsible.

Fourth, our inherited structures presuppose a quasi-monopoly over K-12 education—”one best system” that delivers essentially the same instructional package to every child in every neighborhood and that takes little account of individual differences or preferences, much less the potential of competing providers. In short, the public education system takes for granted that one size does fit all. Wealthy families have always been able to buy their way out of that system via private schools. Some middle-class folks have opted to educate their kids at home. But for almost everyone else, the choices were limited—and the system was designed to keep them that way.

Today, however, school choice in a dozen forms has proliferated. Public and private (both for- and non-profit) providers are educating kids in a dizzying array of institutions. Charter schools, STEM schools, “governor’s schools,” regional vocational schools, “tech-prep,” and “early-college” programs are only the tip of the iceberg. Yet nothing in the traditional governance of public education is suited to this flowering of options and operators. All sorts of improvisations and work-arounds have been devised to compensate for the blunt fact that the system itself is hostile to educational diversity, competition, and choice. As the system continues to push back against these alternatives, it constrains, weakens, or defeats them. Nobody benefits except, maybe, the old system.

We endure all this because we’re used to it. Few can imagine anything different. Others despair of changing it. Perhaps they’re right.

Or maybe they’re not. We’ve seen a few experiments of late suggesting that structural change is not totally impossible: mayoral control of schools in New York, for example; a statewide authorizer of charters in Colorado; the consolidation of “county superintendents” in New Jersey; and more. True, there haven’t been many such innovations and nobody can “prove” that they work better than the status quo. But they do demonstrate one thing: education governance can change.

at attest to the graduate degrees they earned in education schools, but far too many of them are beholden to the status quo, to its adult interests, and to the conventional wisdom in an enterprise that urgently needs a fundamental makeover. (Unfortunately, those who upend apple carts often find themselves seeking new jobs. Just consider the case of Michelle Rhee.)

What would we want from a changed system? School-level autonomy is essential, else educators become compliance-minded rather than innovators who welcome responsibility. Diversity and choice among schools is crucial, because kids differ, competition is productive, and monopolies are not.

Voluntary school networks, not necessarily geographically based, will often prove more efficient and do better quality-control than thousands of isolated organizations. (Think “systems of schools” rather than “school systems.”) Nor should individual schools have to invent everything from scratch or buy it in small batches; they should be free to join with others in acquiring food services, transportation, health insurance, speech therapists, and such. They should also be free to individualize instruction (and boost curricular quality and diversity while saving money) by providing instruction via technology.

Transparency about results will prove vital for parents, taxpayers, and policy makers alike. And when things really go off the rails in a school, some external authority needs to be able to intervene.

What might this look like in reality?

With the governor squarely in charge of education, states would wield most of the authority and provide most of the money, but those dollars would follow kids to the schools of their choice, which would largely run themselves, selecting their staffs, managing their budgets, etc. Most would be brick and mortar structures but many classes would be online. Some schools would be entirely “virtual.” All sorts of schools would join together for various purposes and purchase services (if they choose to) from regional centers that take the place of today’s school districts. Academic standards in core subjects would be the same across the land, as would tests and other gauges of performance.

Every school’s performance would be open for public inspection, as would its financial records and its staff’s qualifications and track record. Individual schools might have their own governing boards or turn that job—and whatever “central” management functions are needed—over to their networks. Schools (and networks) might entrust their education programs to outside firms while their boards remain accountable to the state or state-designated “authorizers.” Failed schools would lose their license to operate. Uncle Sam, meanwhile, would concentrate on quality data and civil rights enforcement—and federal dollars (to help educate disabled kids, say) would accompany state dollars to the schools that families select.

If people are not satisfied with their schools or their results, they would have three main options: move their kids to different schools, move their families to a different state, or elect a different governor.

Dream or pipe-dream, that’s the short version of a better way to organize American education in the 21st century. You may think it could never happen and you might be right. But we could get closer by passing, changing, or repealing a handful of laws.

Over the last 20 years, England didn’t abolish its “local education authorities”—Blighty’s version of school districts—but it conferred so much autonomy on individual schools and their boards of governors that it essentially marginalized those authorities. American states could do the same. They could also repackage their money and make it portable anywhere within their borders and perhaps beyond. They could enact “open enrollment” laws and uncap charters. They could make school results transparent. The federal government could pull back from telling states and districts what to do and instead focus on gathering solid, comparable data about academics and finances.

Yes, that picture is messy and incomplete. More thorough change might require some states to amend their constitutions. But that’s not needed to get considerably closer to a governance arrangement for American education that is better suited to today’s realities. The first step down that path, however, is to recognize that our inherited arrangement is archaic and dysfunctional—and that continuing to take it for granted is to consign almost all of today’s other earnest education reforms to frustration and failure.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

(This essay also appears in Defining Ideas, published by the Hoover Institution.)

But they tend not to. Rick Perry’s imminent entry into the 2012 GOP presidential race suggests that, for the second time in less than a dozen years, we could see a Texas governor try to make the federal role in education conform to his own preconceptions and lessons learned in Austin.

That’s what happened in 2001 when Gov. George W. Bush carried with him from Texas the essential elements of policy and practice that (after much fiddling by Congress) became the No Child Left Behind Act.

And something similar could happen again in 2013 should Perry win the Oval Office and endeavor there to implement the conclusions he has reached about education during his dozen years running the Lone Star State.

Besides (and partly due to) its enormousness, Texas is a proud, sometimes arrogant, and seriously self-absorbed place. One need only stand under the immense dome of the state capitol — taller than the one in Washington — and gaze at the six flags depicted in the terrazzo floor. All have flown over Texas. One senses that its current affiliation with the United States is a sort of fling, another dalliance that could one day end.

No surprise that Texas governors can be a bit cocky. Bush took for granted that the standards-based education reforms that had worked pretty well back home, particularly for poor and black and brown kids (as even the RAND Corporation attested back in 2000), would work for America. They entailed standards in core subjects, plenty of testing, reams of (disaggregated) data, lots of transparency regarding school outcomes, and accountability measures tied to those outcomes.

And they had brought gains (primarily at the bottom) that the state’s leaders and educators had reason to be proud of.

There was no reason they shouldn’t work in other states, too, Bush reasoned, and of course there was precedent for Uncle Sam nudging states in that direction, initiatives like the Clinton-era “Goals 2000” and “Improving America’s Schools” legislation.

With the benefit of hindsight, however, we can see that Bush didn’t fully appreciate how much the tools available to the federal government differ from those wielded by state leaders. That’s the main reason NCLB has been a . . . well, choose your own term, any from “damaging flop” to “less than complete success.” (I’m somewhere in the middle, myself.)

Washington simply has no capacity to compel states and districts to follow the Texas model — or any other model. Yes, it can make them go through the motions, submit plans, and report data. It can dole out and (rarely) withhold money. But it cannot make anyone set rigorous standards, select good tests, establish reasonable “cut scores” (part of the Texas formula involved slowly raising those targets), or successfully intervene in failing schools or districts. Nor can it guarantee decent school choices or competent teachers.

NCLB tried. It tried harder than any federal-education law in history. Its shortcomings are due in large measure to its architects’ failure to distinguish between what a state government in a place like Austin can make happen in K-12 education and what Uncle Sam can bring about.

Governor Perry heads into his presidential quest with a different blind-spot, in some ways the obverse of Bush’s. He is best known in education (and several other domains) for his adamant refusal to let Texas be pushed or pulled at all by Washington or other forces outside the Lone Star borders. That’s why he vehemently refused to seek Race to the Top funding. (Texas’s share could have been $700 million.) About RTTT he said: “We would be foolish and irresponsible to place our children’s future in the hands of unelected bureaucrats and special-interest groups thousands of miles away in Washington.”

But Uncle Sam isn’t the only education scarecrow in Perry’s wheat field. Consider the “Common Core” standards for reading and math. Several months before the draft product of that initiative was even ready for inspection, he declared that that “I will not commit Texas taxpayers to . . . the adoption of unproven, cost-prohibitive national standards and tests.”

Along with Virginia, Texas is now the most prominent refusenik in the Common Core effort. Which is its right and not necessarily a bad decision, for Texas’s own standards are good, at least in English and (recently) in math, and it has spent serious money implementing them. (Having a strong economy helps a bunch — and made it easier to shun RTTT.) In recent years, however, school outcomes in the Lone Star State have flattened. Texas no longer ranks among the strongest states in boosting minority-student scores — or white scores, for that matter. Its overall performance (gauged by the National Assessment of Education Progress) resembles treadmill-running.

One must ask, too, whether Perry’s Texas experience — plus his towering self-assuredness — would blind him to the droopy reality of more typical states and the prodding and political cover they might need from outside if they’re ever to pull up their education socks.

Texas is anomalous in so many ways: a vast, growing, and relatively prosperous place with a sophisticated state education apparatus and not much by way of labor unions. Perry is plainly a “states’ rights” Republican and that may be what Americans want in the Oval Office. (Some may wonder, however, why a guy who seems to abhor just about everything about Washington would want to move there!) But will pulling way back on federal efforts to reform education — most likely by putting the money on a stump and letting states do whatever they like with it — benefit the other 49? How about gravely ill jurisdictions like Ohio and Michigan where Uncle Sam might help reformers duke it out with entrenched unions? Or seriously poor places like Mississippi and Alabama, which may need some outside bucks to leverage change? Or educationally inert states like Nebraska and South Dakota that may just need a kick in the pants?

Yes, one can pledge allegiance to the 10th Amendment and declare that such challenges are the states’ problems to solve if they want to and can. But is that the best thing in the 21st century for a big, modern country that is being outpaced in education (and economic growth) by nations around the planet? And is it the best thing for 55 million kids, many of whom today face dim futures that could be brightened by a better education? Few deny that the federal role in K-12 schooling needs major surgery. But with a deft scalpel, not a cleaver. If Perry brings only a Texas chainsaw to the task, it could turn out that projecting one more set of Lone Star precedents upon all of American education would be another mistake.

— Chester E. Finn Jr.

(This post also appears on National Review Online.)

Which isn’t to say I always agree with him. And that’s true of his latest paper, too—drawn from a book coming out in September. He seeks to determine “what education policy might look like in the United States if it was [sic] based on the experiences of our most successful competitors.” In that role, he casts Canada (Ontario), Finland, and three East Asian lands (Japan, Singapore, and the Shanghai region of China.) And in fifty pages he offers a wealth of insights that are surely perceptive yet not entirely applicable on these shores, much as Marc would have us think they are.

Some are both familiar and basically applicable, such as “set clear goals,” have checkpoints along the way to gauge (and control) student progress, worry a lot about teacher quality (principals, too), finance schools equitably, strike the right balance between autonomy and accountability, strive for a coherent “system,” etc. Such observations are not new to readers of McKinsey and others who have gone down this path.

Where Marc gets into trouble (with me, anyway) is how he tries to convert some of these lessons for domestic use—especially the part about “consider[ing] the education system as one coherent whole.” Four of his overseas ”benchmark” examples have national education systems, run by the central government, and he seems at ease with America moving in that direction, not just via voluntary comings-together of states (e.g. the Common Core) but also through forceful actions by Uncle Sam.

The more useful example for us among those he has examined is Ontario, for Canada has no federal education department nor (to my knowledge) any involvement by the national government in the delivery or financing or even policy-setting for primary-secondary education. Marc never quite resolves the extent to which Ontario sticks out like a structural sore thumb, nor does he quite draw the lesson that might be most applicable here: American education surely needs a major overhaul of its education governance before it can successfully put into place the other changes in policy and practice that Marc urges (and that these other countries do). And yes, that will lead us away from “local control” as traditionally defined and operationalized in U.S. education. But it will and should lead us not to Washington but to a proper redefinition of the role of states (akin to Canadian provinces) and to the roles of individual schools, parents, and choice. Marc’s biggest blind spot, at least within the context of U.S. education reform circa 2011, is his “system knows best, just get the system right” mindset and his dismissal of the potential of competition and choice, properly structured and appropriately accountable, for accelerating the change we need in American education.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

A whole bunch of folks, mainly conservative policy wonks and grumps, have spent a whole bunch of time in recent weeks declaiming that Arne Duncan is a sinner if not a lawbreaker because his Race to the Top program encouraged states to adopt the new “Common Core” academic standards and because he gave a bit of federal money to the two assessment-development consortia to help pay for instructional supports and curricular materials related to their forthcoming tests (which are, in turn, supposed to be aligned with the dreaded Common Core).

This debate is no longer confined to the blogosphere and think tanks, however. In the last couple of days it has drawn in Duncan himself as well as House education chairman John Kline.

I guess people were born too late—or have short memories. Arne Duncan has plenty of precedents in both parties—and none of them were jailed, impeached, or even criticized, save perhaps for their curricular judgment. Because there have been umpteen earlier efforts by the federal Education Department to develop, foster, encourage, and evaluate specific academic standards and curricular materials for U.S. schools. Consider, just for starters, the old National Diffusion Network and the dollars that Secretaries Lamar Alexander and Dick Riley committed to the early-1990’s development of national academic standards in history, English, etc. Some of these turned out to be big wastes of money, even damaging, but that speaks to judgment rather than law.

A still earlier example, with which I was involved and then-Education Secretary Bill Bennett was deeply involved, was the promulgation of recommended K-8 and high school curricula by Bennett and the Education Department in the late 1980s. Dubbed “James Madison High School” (1987) and “James Madison Elementary School” (1988), these were, in fact, detailed and explicit curricular recommendations, developed and paid for by the Education Department and bearing the Secretary’s very own name as author. And pretty good curricula they were—and are—if I say so myself.

This was so long ago that Al Gore hadn’t yet invented the internet but fugitive copies of both reports can be found online if you search hard enough. (See, for example, here and here.)

And if you look on page three of the high school document, you’ll find Bennett’s careful distinction between “recommending” a curriculum that has merit and “imposing” one on the nation’s schools. That distinction was genuine a quarter century ago and it remains legitimate today.

The paranoids among us will reply that what Duncan is about is trying—without acknowledging it—to IMPOSE a curriculum. The Secretary can, of course, speak for himself, but I think—and am pretty sure Bill Bennett thinks—that this is utter nonsense.

And if you want a pretty darn good example of a pretty darn good curriculum, developed, paid for, and promulgated by the U.S. Department of Education, check out James Madison. I wouldn’t change a word of it today. And our kids would be better off if schools all over the land were to put it into practice.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

First, let us dispatch some silliness. To the best of our knowledge, and based on all evidence that we’re aware of, neither the signers of the Shanker Institute manifesto, nor leaders in the Obama/Duncan Education Department, advocate a “nationalized curriculum” that would “undermine control of public school curriculum and instruction at the local and state level” and “transfer control to an elephantine, inside-the-Beltway bureaucracy.” Nor is anybody calling for “a one-size fits all, centrally controlled curriculum for every K-12 subject.” We certainly wouldn’t support such a policy—and can understand why the conservative luminaries who signed the counter-manifesto wouldn’t want it, either. As parents, grandparents, charter-school authorizers, and champions of school choice in almost all its forms, we believe deeply in the importance of schools having the freedom to shape their own unique educational approaches.

So let us be clear: While the assessments linked to the Common Core State Standards will be mandatory (for schools and districts in states that choose to use them), the use of any common curricular materials will be purely voluntary. We don’t see any evidence to indicate otherwise.

We also find curious the attack line, penned by Jay Greene, that “centralization of education is bad for everyone except the central planners.” This faux-populist rhetoric is compelling until you consider that many of the counter-manifesto’s signatories have been deeply involved in efforts to centralize education decision-making at the state level for years. Weren’t Sandy Stotsky’s (praiseworthy) struggles to ensure that all students in Massachusetts had exposure to scientifically-based reading instruction and high-quality literature exercises in central planning and top-down control of curriculum and pedagogy? What about Bill Evers’s push in California to mandate rigorous math instruction—including Algebra in eighth grade? Some libertarian signers of the counter-manifesto may indeed believe that we should let schools, districts, and parents make every single educational decision no matter how irresponsible, hare-brained, or even harmful to kids. But the vast majority of reformers who support standards-based reform have already acknowledged that “local control” should have its limits—beginning with academic standards.

And that brings us to the substance of the attack on the Common Core project. Its opponents’ most persuasive argument is the concern that the Common Core standards and assessments may wrap schools into a curricular straightjacket and diminish opportunities for educational innovation. They might be at least partly right to worry about this. The question is: Will it be worth it? Let’s look at this from both sides.

Supporters of the Common Core, ourselves included, peer out across this vast nation and see a hodge-podge of standards, tests, textbooks, curricular guides, lesson plans—little of it of high quality or particularly “innovative” (with much of the “innovative” stuff being faddish and silly), and none of it aligned with much else in any meaningful sense. We look with some envy at other countries that can boast curricular “coherence”—a clear vision of what students should know and be able to do, a reasonable plan for getting teachers trained to impart it, and rich materials to help students and teachers reach the Promised Land. Attaining consensus on the standards and the assessments—the core part of Common Core’s work—is a huge leap forward. But why not go the last mile? Why repeat the mistakes of the state standards movement, in which we demanded that teachers boost their pupils to higher levels of achievement but failed to provide helpful tools or guidance in getting them there? Why pretend that more than a handful of the nation’s 14,000 school districts (and 5,000 charter schools) have the capacity to create the instructional materials that many teachers crave? And why leave it to hegemonic textbook companies—vendors, too often, of thoroughly mediocre stuff—to fill the gaps?

No, government must not mandate the particular curricular or instructional materials that schools and teachers use. But why not make lots of good stuff available for free? Why not work to make the “default” option in American public education far better than it is today, and aligned with the excellent Common Core standards? Schools (and teachers) can veer from that default, or build upon it, or excavate under it, if they have the interest, capacity, and drive to do so. But by offering tools, guides, and all the rest, maybe we can bring the floor up significantly for the vast majority of schools and classroom practitioners that lack those traits.

At the same time, we can understand the heartburn this whole endeavor gives to promoters of innovation and diversity in education. We agree with Rick Hess, for example, that “through-course assessments”—high-stakes tests to be taken a half dozen times a year—will pressure schools to follow a particular scope and sequence—and that this is a serious infringement on school-level autonomy. (That’s going to be especially hard on charter schools.) It’s one thing to ask schools to demonstrate solid performance on an exam once every spring. It’s quite something else to expect them to prepare students for tests six to eight times during the year. We agree that this is a bridge too far.

So here’s where we stand: First, states should be encouraged to stay the course with the Common Core standards and assessments, at least until we see what the tests look like. While the standards aren’t perfect, they are vastly better than what they are replacing in most states. Second, à la the Shanker manifesto, efforts should be made to develop all manner of tools, materials, lesson plans, professional development, curriculum, and more that will help teachers implement the standards in their classrooms—and to help students master them. We have no particular concern with the federal government—or philanthropists and venture capitalists, big and small—helping to pay for those activities, as has been done so often in the past. But, third, it should be made crystal clear that the use of all such materials will be completely voluntary for states and, we would argue, for districts within states, schools within districts, and teachers within schools. And fourth, the two consortia now building new Common Core assessments should take pains not to cross the Rubicon into micromanaging schools’ curricular and instructional decisions.

Now for some specific advice:

• Drafters of the counter-manifesto: Make sure your signers—including the famous ones—understand that nobody is calling for a single mandatory “national curriculum,” and see how many folks you lose.
• Shanker Institute: Make clearer than your original document did that you are not proposing that there be only one “common” curriculum for all schools.
• Secretary Arne Duncan: Ask the two testing consortia to sign agreements swearing not to mandate—directly or indirectly—the use of curricular materials they develop.
• The PARCC consortium: Figure out a way for schools to opt out of the through-course assessments and take a single end-of-year test instead.
• Supporters of the Common Core: Encourage states to enact laws barring their education departments and state boards from mandating any particular curricular or instructional approaches—including those developed through the Common Core effort.
• And big funders and nonprofits that care about this stuff: Devise a really powerful version of “Consumer Reports” by which to vet curricular materials (commercial and “open-source” alike) that purport to be “aligned” with the Common Core so as to gauge their validity—and whether they’re quality materials worthy of the attention of practicing educators.

These steps won’t resolve all the tension between national standards and “local control.” But they offer some reasonable safeguards and a clear path forward. Any takers?

- Mike Petrilli and Checker Finn

These arrangements, though they differ some from place to place, generally display four characteristics that make them obsolete at best and dysfunctional at their all-too-common worst:

First, while formal constitutional responsibility for educating kids belongs to the states, the actual delivery of that education falls squarely on local education agencies, typically called districts, which are geographically defined, most often by the boundaries of a city, town, county, or other municipality. Kids are generally educated in public schools operated by these districts.

Second, though states have shouldered some responsibility for financing public education, usually by decreeing a minimum or “foundation” level of per-pupil spending, sizable portions of education revenue are locally generated through property taxes, bond levies, and such. Those amounts differ enormously from place to place within the same state and are uncommonly vulnerable to interest group manipulation and local politics.

Third, at both the state and local levels, public education usually operates under governance arrangements that are separated from the rest of state and municipal governments, most commonly by being answerable to a separate board of education, most often elected, sometimes appointed, rather than directly to the governor, mayor, county commission, city council, or whatever. Historically, this was intended to buffer education from conventional politics and patronage.

Fourth, overall education governance has multiple layers, always at least three, often four and sometimes more. At minimum, these layers represent decisions made in, and funding arising from, Washington, the state level, and the local level. Besides all that, governance-type decisions may be made at the building level—and frequently at intermediate levels within a big district or region of a state.

I’ve come to believe that, whatever sense this set-up may have made fifty or a hundred years ago, it doesn’t make much today. Indeed, none of those four elements makes sense.

The multi-layer decision-making structure, while faithful in its way to American federalism, mainly serves nowadays to pull schools apart in response to funding and regulatory streams emanating from different levels of government, to foster bureaucracy, confusion, and tension and, maybe most importantly, to give every level a functional veto over reforms initiated at any other level. It doesn’t matter how much a state may want to participate in Race to the Top, for example, when each district in that state decides for itself whether to join in. Conversely, a district may yearn to bring Teach For America to town but the alternative certification rules for that district are set by the state. And these examples don’t even touch upon NCLB or the myriad other ways that Uncle Sam confounds and complicates how states and districts run their schools.

Separate governance for education doesn’t make much sense, either, not when we recognize that developing kids doesn’t just involve their cognition but also their physical health, social development, character, and much else. Why is education governance divorced from health, welfare, recreation, and the rest? Observe how often we burden the schools with obligations to prevent drug abuse, make kids fit, teach them character, get them inoculated, keep them off the streets, and on and on. How much more sensible it would be to place the same folks in charge of schools, juvenile justice, nutrition, public health, family services, etc.?

We now live in a highly mobile society and one that’s highly metropolitanized: over 80 percent of Americans live in urban locales and nearly 15 percent change residences in any given year. We’re no longer a land of small towns with geographically rooted, multi-generation families. There’s no reason for primary-secondary education to be different, or differently governed, or differently financed, from Anne Arundel County to Prince George’s County, MD, or from Arlington to Alexandria to Fairfax, VA. The same goes for Brookline to Newton in MA and Evanston to Winnetka in IL. In fact, these boundaries often impede student learning, restrict choice, and confound budgets. Think about kids attending schools across district lines, charter schools, or virtual schools that may operate statewide or in multiple states. Why are we jamming these educational realities and funding flows onto the traditional municipal system? If a kid who lives in Dayton attends the Ohio Virtual Academy, or Oakwood or Kettering High School (in nearby suburbs), or splits his time between the Ponitz Career Technology Center and Sinclair Community College, who exactly is responsible for that kid’s education? And who is paying for it? As the system is currently defined, that burden is mainly owned by the Dayton Public School district, just because that kid’s parents happen to live within the city limits of Dayton this month.

As for school boards, I’ll concede that in some suburbs, small towns, and rural communities, the elected board may still consist of selfless community leaders who want only the best for kids. In our cities, however, and in plenty of other places large and small, I challenge you to point me to more than a handful of examples of local districts that, over a prolonged period (e.g. a decade), have been able to devise, execute, and stick to a kid-focused, quality-driven reform agenda for their schools. Too often, imaginative, energized, and forward-looking superintendents are undermined, shackled, and distracted by seven or nine member boards, each consisting of seven or nine separate agendas.  And far too often for the good of the kids in their community, those seven or nine people fit into three types. There’s the aspiring politician for whom the school board is a step toward the legislature, county council, or wherever. Then there’s the single-issue zealot, bent on a particular curriculum, neighborhood, patronage arrangement, weird cause, or adult interest, often tugged and manipulated by outside constituencies, including teacher unions. And, third, there’s the vengeful former employee of that very district, bent on getting the superintendent or someone else fired and replaced.

This is no good way to run a railroad, much less our children’s educations. We need to find a better one. I’m not yet ready to spell out some possible solutions, but I’m sure ready to declare that we have an enormous problem in need of fresh alternatives, not more of the same.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This piece is an adaptation for remarks made at Fordham’s recent event: “Are School Boards Vital in the 21st Century.” View the video of the event and read a recap of the discussion.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Most of them were considered political “moderates”—mind you, that was neither a slur nor an endangered species in the ‘80s—and they definitely came from both parties. Prominent among them were Dick Riley (D-SC), Tom Kean (R-NJ), Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Jim Hunt (D-NC), John Engler (R-MI), Bill Clinton (D-AR), Tommy Thompson (R-WI), Ann Richards (D-TX), and Rudy Perpich (DFL-MN)—to name a few.

These leaders ushered in statewide academic standards, new tests, the concept of results-based accountability, some fresh thinking about teachers and principals, charter schools, and plenty more. Teamed up (in 1989) with the first President Bush in Charlottesville, they also produced a set of “national education goals” such as this land never had before, and they helped to comprise a new panel in Washington to monitor the country’s progress toward those goals.

What charged them up at the time was the need for economic development and competitiveness for their states, complaints from their employers and universities about the unreadiness of local high school graduates, and mounting costs, coupled with the frustration that education consumed huge chunks of their budgets, yet they had relatively minimal control over what those funds purchased. (They were also fired up by A Nation at Risk.) So they exerted themselves as never before.

Their organizations and affiliates revved up, too. Most notable was the National Governors Association (NGA), which had not historically had a great deal to do with K-12 education but, beginning in 1986 with a five year Alexander-prompted project called “Time for Results,” bestirred itself both to push for education reform across the states and to monitor progress made by them.

With the 1990s came increased federal involvement in education reform, as governors of that time helped to activate and animate the feds. Though Bush 41 and Lamar Alexander (as his second secretary of education) didn’t get much through the Democratic Congress, President Bill Clinton signed major legislation in 1994 on which George W. Bush—Texas’s education-reform-minded governor of the late 1990s—built when he reached the White House a few years later. The result, of course, was No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

As Washington pushed harder, however, some governors backed off. By and large, the first decade of this century was not a time of huge gubernatorial initiative on the K-12 front. Reforming education seemed for a while to be Uncle Sam’s job. (Massachusetts under Bill Weld and his successors and Florida under Jeb Bush are notable exceptions.)

Today, however, Saturn has completed a full revolution and a new crop of reform-minded governors is reclaiming its territory in an efflorescence of leadership and state-level initiatives. Some of this shift back was triggered by discontent with NCLB and some was stimulated by Race to the Top. Either way, many have perceived that the nation is still at risk—and so are its states; that looking to Washington to solve problems is mostly futile and sometimes damaging; and that, in the end, states bear primary constitutional and financial responsibility for K-12 education. What’s more, with states running out of money and education consuming so many billions, eking greater bang from the available bucks is both irresistible and unavoidable.

The NGA is back in action, too, with the Common Core State Standards Initiative (co-created with the CCSSO and a bunch of foundation dollars). That happened before the 2010 election, which swept into office a bunch of new governors who have set out to reform public education while cutting its budget, something more or less unprecedented. They haven’t all been Republicans (consider Phil Bredesen in Tennessee and Jack Markell in Delaware, for example—both of their states round one winners of Race to the Top, also before the 2010 election) but most are. Prominent among them are Mitch Daniels (R-IN), John Kasich (R-OH), Scott Walker (R-WI) and Chris Christie (R-NJ). This time, however, few of them would be described as “moderates” and their states are awash in vivid partisan clashes.

That’s mostly due to budget cuts and related policy changes. Austerity defines the era and the leadership and reform strategies of these chief executives. Yes, they want to boost achievement and to foster more school choices. Some of them murmur about governance changes and technology. But what really seems to kindle their fires is saving money while rewriting the ground rules by which teachers in their schools are employed, rewriting them in ways that (a) economize in response to diminished revenues, (b) purge the ranks of incompetents, (c) reward merit, (d) open up both the pathways by which new teachers enter and those by which veteran teachers exit, and (e) weaken the public sector unions that have been stalwart supporters of the status quo (and of their political opponents).

Two of the “education governors” from the 80s and 90s went on to become president; two others became secretary of education. Will today’s crop of state leaders ascend to those heights? Time will tell. But we already know this: Like Saturn, the governors are back. And if they are able to implement their reform agendas, preferably without totally alienating their teachers, America’s kids will be the better for it. So will our taxpayers and our competitiveness.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This piece originally appeared in today’s Education Gadfly.

Tenure didn’t come down from Mt. Sinai or over on the Mayflower. Though people occasionally refer to its origins in medieval universities, on these shores, at least, it’s a twentieth-century creation. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) began pushing for it around 1915, but tenuring professors didn’t become the norm on U.S. campuses until after World War II (when the presumption of a 7-year decision timeframe also gained traction) and it wasn’t truly formalized until the 1970’s when a couple of Supreme Court decisions made formalization unavoidable.

In some states, public-school teachers began to gain forms of job protection that resembled tenure as early as the 1920s, but these largely went into abeyance during the Great Depression and were not formally reinstated until states—pressed hard by teacher unions—enacted “tenure laws” between World War II and about 1980.

The original rationale for tenure at the university-level, articulately set forth by the AAUP, was to safeguard academic freedom by ensuring that professors wouldn’t lose their jobs because they wrote or said something that somebody didn’t like—including, on occasion, donors who paid for their endowed chairs. This justification gained plausibility during the post-war “Red Scare” and McCarthy era.

The corresponding rationale for school teachers was that they might lose their jobs for arbitrary and capricious reasons, such as not doing personal favors for the principals or irking some influential parents or board members. The civil-service version of tenure had more to do with establishing a “merit” system and keeping politics and patronage at bay in government employment. As for federal judges, lifetime tenure is enshrined in Article III of the Constitution. Hamilton termed it “an excellent barrier to the despotism of the prince.”

Speaking of the Constitution, however, various job protections for all manner of public employees, including most teachers and professors, can also be found in that document. Check out the clauses protecting individuals from actions by government (at first federal, then also state) that would “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

The “due process” concept has authentically ancient roots—a version of it appears in Magna Carta—and has developed dozens of statutory and courtroom precedents, protections, and procedures to safeguard individuals from arbitrary dismissal from their jobs.

Adding “tenure” on top of that is a bit like wearing both a belt and suspenders.

As for the alleged kinship between K-12 and higher-ed tenure, two points are noteworthy. First, on college campuses, it typically takes about seven years to “win” tenure—and by no means does everyone get it then. University faculties and administrators go through elaborate procedures to determine which instructors will be “awarded” tenure. It is in no sense a right. In public education, however, it’s pretty nearly automatic and usually comes after just two or three years of employment.

Second, the proportion of “tenure track” positions in higher education has been steadily declining. NCES data show that, across a post-secondary teaching-faculty universe of 1.3 million individuals in 2009, fewer than one in four were tenured and about two-thirds weren’t even employed in tenure-track positions.

In public education, on the other hand, essentially everyone with a teaching certificate is automatically a candidate for tenure as soon as he or she is hired by a school system. (Only if these instructors are really dreadful in the classroom or change their minds as to their career do they—maybe—not make it to the second- or third-consecutive contract that typically yields tenure.)

Federal judges aside, public-school teachers now appear to be the most heavily tenured segment of the U.S. workforce.

Which gives rise to all manner of problems, of which the most conspicuous and offensive, though maybe not the gravest, is the difficulty of dismissing that relatively tiny fraction of classroom instructors who are truly incompetent—and the cost, both in dollars and in pupil achievement, of keeping them on the payroll. (If they’re in class, the kids suffer. If they’re in “rubber rooms” or other non-teaching duties, the taxpayers suffer, along with the reputation of the teaching profession.)

Tenure brings other troubles, too. Because it is nested within a set of HR practices and protections that include seniority-based job placements and reductions in force, tenure contributes to principals’ inability to determine who teaches in their schools and superintendents’ inability to let the least qualified or least needed (or most expensive) teachers go during a time of cutbacks. Because tenure—job security in general—is a valuable employment benefit that substitutes in part for salary, it tends to hold down teacher pay, which in turn affects who does and doesn’t seek to enter this line of work and who does and doesn’t stay there. Because tenure pretty much guarantees one a job regardless of performance, it reduces teachers’ incentive to see that their pupils really learn—and their incentive to cooperate in sundry reforms that might be good for their schools and their students.

No wonder a bunch of folks, including the new crop of GOP governors, want to eliminate or radically overhaul teacher tenure.

And so they should. To repeat, it didn’t come down from Mount Sinai—and there are plenty of other ways to safeguard public employees from wrongful dismissal besides guaranteeing them lifetime jobs.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr

Many education reformers are feeling optimistic these days, willing to claim that they have won the war of ideas and that all that remains is mopping up a few leftover messes and working out the details of the new education regime that already exists in their minds. Arkansas professor Jay Greene has declared flat-out victory, claiming the teachers unions have become indistinguishable from the tobacco industry, determined to defend turf that is now utterly indefensible.

Giving credit where it’s due, the reform campaign has had successes. Prodded by Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and other veteran private-sector reformers, the Obama administration has lent unexpectedly forceful support to such causes as common standards, better assessments, charter schools, merit pay, refurbished teacher preparation, and the removal of ineffective instructors. A left-leaning celebrity filmmaker has entreated viewers of Waiting for “Superman” to ponder the sad reality that poor students cannot attend good schools without winning a lottery in which the odds are stacked overwhelmingly against them.

The new federal initiative, Race to the Top, inspired statutory changes in a dozen states. Hundreds of millions of philanthropic and federal dollars are flooding toward such national organizations as KIPP and Teach For America as well as to local and state-specific ventures in a hundred places.
A brigade of governors, led by New Jersey’s Chris Christie and Indiana’s Mitch Daniels, has pressed a wide school-reform agenda and many state legislators—including Democrats in places like Colorado—are participating in the process. In New York City, the mayor is replacing one reform-minded outsider, Joel Klein, with another, Cathleen Black, despite strenuous union maneuvers to block the appointment. Even the defeat of District of Columbia mayor Adrian Fenty, who backed schools chancellor Michelle Rhee’s dramatic efforts to reboot public education in the nation’s capital, has not proven too dispiriting. Rhee was too strident, it is said; a subtler, more sophisticated approach may still work. Meanwhile, she negotiated a path-breaking contract.

In state after state, the teachers unions are indeed besieged on multiple fronts. The momentum is with the reformers. So say some.

The Arsenal

Alas, we’re not so sanguine. It’s way, way too early to declare victory. Atop the cliffs and bastions that reformers are attacking, the opposition has plenty of weapons with which to hold its territory.

For this is no single war and nothing can be done at the national level to win it. Most of the crucial decisions about how U.S. schools run and who teaches what to whom in which classrooms are still made in 14,000 semi-autonomous school districts, nearly all of them run by locally elected school boards, often with campaign dollars supplied by those with whom they negotiate collectively, and managed by professional superintendents, trained in colleges of education and socialized over the years into the prevailing culture of public education.

That culture is in no way reform-minded. It believes that educators know best, that elected school boards are the embodiment of democracy in action, that colleges of education are the path to true professionalism, that collective bargaining is necessary to protect teacher rights, and that any failings visible in today’s schools, teachers, and students are either the fault of heedless parents or the consequence of incompetent administrators and stingy taxpayers.

Nor is it just at the local level that vested interests are entrenched. In corridors and committee rooms of state legislatures, lobbyists and campaign contributors also safeguard the interests of employees and vendors. Teachers unions are still the number-one source of political contributions and, in places like California and Minnesota, they appear stronger than either political party. Statewide tenure laws remain largely intact, as do laws that require a specific set of education-school courses before a teacher can be certified, despite the paucity of evidence that such courses (or certification) yield benefits in the classroom. Most states have set their student proficiency bars at a low level, and no state—not even Florida, which came the closest—has been able to mandate that teacher pay be calibrated to classroom performance. Few jurisdictions have passed significant voucher and tax-credit legislation, and most have hedged charter laws with one or another of a multiplicity of provisos—that charters are limited in number, can only be authorized by school districts (their natural enemies), cannot enroll more than a fixed number of students, get less money per pupil than district-run schools, and so on. Thus, the (in)famous lottery that propels the Superman story forward.

Even in Washington, where reformers place much hope for change, the push is pretty much limited to Race to the Top, an executive-branch initiative lacking a clear legislative mandate. Congress has not been able to repair and reauthorize No Child Left Behind, despite some thoughtful recommendations from the White House. All this might change with the incoming Congress, but many pundits think the odds are against it. More Republicans than ever are worshiping before the false god of local control, and too many Democrats have learned from their union friends that local control ain’t so bad after all, especially when free money flows to local districts and teacher paychecks arrive courtesy of the U. S. Treasury. In any case, neither party sees more to be gained politically from compromise than from deadlock.

As if this weren’t enough to force reformers to haul victory flags back down the cliffs, the U.S. education system is structured in such a way that initiatives undertaken at any level can be stymied, blocked, or derailed at the other levels. Some analysts have used the term “loosely coupled” to characterize the connections among the various levels of government. Even when the policy train’s engine is chugging mightily, no movement occurs in the caboose. A crusading local superintendent’s effort to change his district’s teacher recruitment and retention practices can be brought to a halt by the state’s seniority law, tenure law, and collective-bargaining statutes. A governor who enacts a charter law may find that no school board will actually authorize such schools or allow them access to empty buildings owned by the district. (Such problems have long frustrated charter advocates in Maryland, Florida, Colorado, and California.) A U.S. secretary of education who puts billions on the table for teacher evaluations to be tied to pupil achievement is apt to find that states and districts do better at promising than at delivering cooperation.

And all of this is before you even get to the fundamental fact that, when 3.5 million classroom doors swing shut on a Tuesday morning, those teachers are pretty much free to teach (or not teach) whatever they like, regardless of thunderous commands, incentives, pleadings, and resources from district, state, or Uncle Sam. Such freedom gives scope to thousands of brilliant, dedicated teachers in schools across the country, yet the mechanisms for separating out weak performers are not in place. And with the exit of Michelle Rhee, who made the design of such a system her primary objective, brave will be the superintendent who heads down that path. As a result, No Child Left Behind holds schools accountable but, when a school fails, tenure and seniority assured by statute and/or collective bargaining agreements allow lemons to dance on to the school down the street.

In Search of Allies

The unions show no genuine evidence of endorsing reform measures, however much their leaders may pose as agents of change. For all the artful dodging around tenure and performance pay by American Federation of Teachers president (AFT) Randi Weingarten, local union affiliates almost always kill any but the mildest changes. They oppose the accountability provisions of No Child Left Behind, they everywhere resist the formation of charter schools (and let us not even speak of vouchers), and they can be relied upon to muster their vast electoral strength and whopping campaign contributions behind whichever candidates promise not to cause them any grief. This is not new. The late Albert Shanker, president of the AFT, was a towering figure in the national standards and school accountability debates of the late 20th century, yet nearly all of the AFT’s state and local affiliates refused to buy what their own leader was selling.

Often, too, reform is just one passenger in a crowded vehicle. Although the Obama administration put $4 billion into its reform-minded Race to the Top contest, the bulk of its new education funding—more than $100 billion handed out in two rounds of stimulus packages—financed the status quo. If one looks strictly at the flow of federal dollars rather than the flow of talk, one sees that in 2010 maintaining jobs for teachers trumped fixing schools for kids.

Nor have Republicans shown much inclination to carry the reform torch forward. The 2010 elections were dominated by jobs, taxes, and deficits. Yet it’s hard to see how good jobs can be lastingly restored to the American economy without boosting the quality of the U.S. workforce. Jobs and education are complementary issues, not competitive ones. In November 2009, Republican gubernatorial candidates won office in New Jersey and Virginia in part by making education a top issue. Still the GOP leadership has not crafted a comprehensible education agenda from that success.

It’s early days yet for the 2012 presidential race, to be sure, but apart from Mitch Daniels, the likely GOP candidates have barely mentioned the topic. Other than former Florida governor Jeb Bush, who heads the Foundation for Excellence in Education and seems even more committed to reform than his brother was, and Lamar Alexander, another former governor who “gets” this issue and cares deeply about it, party leaders seem uncertain as to what needs to be done or how to go about it. Even on issues that conform closely to the larger Republican agenda, such as freedom of choice, teaching the talented, and creating a workforce that will preserve the nation’s role in the world economy, ideas and conviction are scarce.

Perhaps it’s unfair to ask politicians to reform schools if the public is not demanding it of them. Unfortunately, there is little sign that the U.S. public has embraced education reform with gusto. In the latest Education Next poll (published in November 2010), support for vouchers slipped. Charter and merit-pay supporters outnumbered opponents by 2:1, but a near plurality of the public refused to take a position on either issue, revealing just how much further into the public consciousness reform ideas need to penetrate. Similarly, only a quarter of those surveyed think teachers should have tenure, but more—nearly 40 percent—have no opinion on the matter. Support for holding students accountable slipped somewhat and opinion on extending No Child Left Behind remained split. As many people saw teachers unions as a positive force as thought that their role had been negative.

It’s true that the public thinks the country’s schools are doing poorly. Only 18 percent gave them an A or a B grade. Yet a clear majority thought their own elementary and middle schools were doing quite well, with 65 percent conferring honors grades on their elementary school and 55 percent awarding such marks to their middle school. The prevailing view seems to be that “schools are bad except for those in my neighborhood. These do not need changing—and they are the schools I really care about.” That provides little basis for comprehensive education reform.

If the public, the political parties, and the most powerful interest groups are either apathetic about or hostile to education reform, how can the reformers prevail? In the case of the tobacco industry, the courts did much of the heavy lifting, giving cancer victims standing to sue and allowing juries to award billions of dollars in punitive damages.

It doesn’t work that way in education. With the important exception of school desegregation, judges have more often retarded than advanced the reform agenda. When the courts declared state education systems inadequate, the only relief they provided was a pile of taxpayer cash—to be spent by the same bureaucracy that was said to be inefficient and inadequate. The Supreme Court found in the Constitution student rights to protest and to lengthy legal procedures before they could be suspended, but it has never discovered a constitutional right to a choice of school. And when it finally declared that vouchers do not violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment, state courts began to discover that they violate various provisions of state constitutions. Charter schools and tax credits have also suffered setbacks in state courts from Florida to Arizona. Union contracts and tenure provisions fare well in court proceedings, forcing superintendents to rehire teachers that they tried to fire and reopen schools that they tried to close. Meanwhile, today’s schools remain almost as segregated as they were in the 1970s.

Victory Signs

What will be the first sign that reformers are truly winning? It was clear the tobacco industry had met its match when the surgeon general made smoking a national health issue, when the mass media and entertainment industry abandoned the Marlboro man, when juries discovered that companies were responsible for the lungs of their consumers, and when powerful figures on Capitol Hill eschewed donations from tobacco magnates in favor of those contributed by trial lawyers who made billions from suing them.

What will be the equivalent signs of success for school reform? Will a big-time university president make K–12 education a personal cause—as Harvard presidents Charles Eliot and James Conant did decades ago? Will an election year come when Republican and Democratic candidates try to outbid one another with proposals for expanding charters, setting high standards, formulating tough accountability regimes, and curbing union power? Will a state supreme court, as part of its remedy in a fiscal equity lawsuit, decree that all children be given a choice of any school, public or private, with the state paying the cost? Will the dean of education at a high-status university campaign for the end of state-mandated certification? Will a legislature—in a state with collective bargaining—require every school system to design and implement a merit-pay plan as a precondition for continued state aid?

Such signs would herald victory—at least in the war of ideas. Until that day arrives, however, keep in mind that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. It’s dangerous to think a battle is over when it has just begun.

Paul E. Peterson is editor-in-chief of Education Next. Chester E. Finn, Jr. is the journal’s senior editor and Marci Kanstoroom an executive editor and senior web editor.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. argues that the war has not yet been won, that there have been advances but a lot of pushback, and a lot of heavy lifting still to be done. Mike Petrilli argues that the war of ideas has been won, that fringe reform ideas have gone mainstream, but that reformers may be pushing the ideas in a direction that may not be productive. Should reformers be more worried about the education establishment or about their own allies?

In the Spring 2011 issue of Education Next, the editors of the magazine debate this topic at greater length in “Taking Stock of a Decade of Reform.”

No doubt it was a fine thing for Sino-American relations when the Windy City rolled out its big red carpet for Chinese President Hu Jintao on Thursday, much as official Washington had done earlier in the week. But the Obama administration deserves a bit of credit for engaging in some pointed warnings and tough talk about problems that the U.S. has with China, ranging from human rights to the undervalued renminbi to the support that China gives rogue states like North Korea and Myanmar. For all the glitterati (and rib-eye steaks) at the White House state dinner in Hu’s honor, his visit to the nation’s capital was no simple love-in.

But then he and his entourage flew to Chicago, which appears to have staged a love-in pure and simple, reminiscent of the city-wide swoon and Grant Park soiree that followed Obama’s own election two years back. Beginning with outgoing mayor Richard Daley, community leaders fell all over the Chinese as part of their multifaceted effort to transform Chicago from a city of meat packers and rail yards into the hub of Sino-American commercial activity of every sort. Chicago, it seems, yearns to be the place that manufactures and sells today’s version of the rope to which Lenin (maybe) referred. Included among the goodies assembled by the city was a million dollar Pritzker Foundation grant to bring Chinese designers to study at the Art Institute of Chicago.

But it isn’t just commerce and art at stake here, much less China’s immense stash of U.S. bonds and growing leverage over our national economy. Chicago also seems willing to turn its school kids over to Beijing—and Beijing is only too happy to help cover these costs. It’s not the only place in America where this is happening, to be sure.

On Friday morning, he and his entourage visited Walter Payton College Prep, a decade-old, high-achieving, selective-admission public high school that focuses on science, math, and languages and which has hosted a “Confucius Institute” since 2006. This is one of almost 300 centers like this now operating worldwide. All are affiliated with and financially supported by Hanban, the executive arm of the Chinese Language Council International, which in turn consists of representatives of a dozen government ministries, including foreign affairs, commerce and the “State Council Information Office” which is responsible for, among other things, internet censorship.

Hu announced that his government would bring twenty Payton students and teachers to China this summer, and of course the kids cheered. Who wouldn’t relish such a trip?

But it’s insane to think this is only about cultural understanding and international comity. That’s not how China works—though any number of American educators seem oblivious or uncaring about this topic. The Chinese regime is advancing its own interests in the West—including Walter Payton College Prep—by, in effect, bribing school systems, educators, and students to see the world through Chinese eyes and, of course, to turn blind eyes and deaf ears toward anyone who might raise concerns about the innumerable threats that Beijing poses to America’s future.

I’m not sure whether senior Chinese government officials have much of a sense of humor, but I’ll wager that they are at least smiling at the gullibility, pliability, and naïveté of Western educators—and how cheaply China can buy them off. They are, one might say, giving us the rope with which they will shackle and bend us to their will.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Ed Next readers picked their own best and worst events for 2010 here.

Too melodramatic? Maybe you’d prefer “Sixty-three years after Sputnik caused an earthquake in American education by giving us reason to believe that the Soviet Union had surpassed us, China delivered the aftershock.”

It came via yet another wonky study, The PISA 2009 Results: What Students Know and Can Do, reporting that on a test of math, reading and science given to fifteen year olds in sixty-five countries in 2009, Shanghai’s 15-year-olds topped those in every other jurisdiction in ALL THREE SUBJECTS. What’s more, Hong Kong ranked in the top four on all three assessments.

Though Hong Kong took part in earlier rounds of the OECD’s PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), the 2009 testing cycle marked the first time that youngsters in China proper participated. To be sure, it was only Shanghai, the country’s flagship city in so many ways, a single megalopolis on which Beijing has lavished much investment and attention, many favorable policies and even (for China) a relatively high degree of freedom. But Americans—and the rest of the world—would make a big mistake to suppose for one second that this Shanghai result is some sort of aberration or unique case.

I have the gravest misgivings about China and the threat that it poses to U.S. interests in the years ahead, but I have the utmost respect for that nation’s capacity to accomplish its own ends and attain its goals, however ruthless it must be. If they can produce top PISA scorers in one city in 2009—keep in mind that Shanghai’s population of 20 million is roughly that of Florida, New York State or one-third of France—they can do this in ten cities in 2019 and fifty in 2029. Or maybe faster.

I admit to misgivings about PISA, too, about how it defines knowledge, what it tests, and how it tries to divorce itself from school curriculum. But its international rankings are widely trusted as a reliable barometer of how young people in different countries compare in core academic subjects. And what the 2009 results show is that China, what it sets out to do well on PISA, is fully capable of doing so.

How did Shanghai accomplish this? The OECD folks offer some explanations, terming Shanghai a “leader in reform” and citing in particular its near-universal education system, its competitiveness (including admission both to universities and to the best secondary schools), a very high level of student engagement, a modernized assessment system, an ambitious new curriculum, and a program of intervention into weak schools.

Most of China isn’t doing those things today. Tomorrow, however, is apt to be a very different story.
Also near the top on PISA in 2009 were a half dozen countries that we’re used to seeing there: Singapore, Taipei, Finland, Korea, Japan, etc. In reading, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the Netherlands also did well. The United States was, once again, in the middle of the pack in reading and science and a bit below the international average in math. We didn’t do badly. We’re not getting worse. But we’re not getting better, either, and other countries are.
Plenty of people have been pointing this out for a long time now. Our trend lines are essentially flat while others are rising. But until this week we could at least pretend that China wasn’t one of those countries that was a threat in education. We could treat Hong Kong as a special case—the British legacy, you know, combined with prosperity. We could believe that China was only interested in building dams, buying up our currency, making fake Prada bags, underselling everybody else, and coating our kids’ toys with toxic paint, while neglecting its education system. Yes, we knew they were exporting Chinese teachers to teach Mandarin (and who knows what else) in our schools while importing native English speakers to instruct their children in our language. But we could comfort ourselves that their curriculum emphasized discipline and rote learning, not analysis or creativity.

Today that comfort has been stripped away. We must face the fact that China is bent on surpassing us—and everyone else—in K-12 education, too, and that they are accomplishing precisely that goal, today in Shanghai but tomorrow in many more parts of that vast land.

Will this be the wake-up call that America needs to get serious about educational achievement? Will it be the Sputnik of our time? Will it stir us out of our torpor and get us beyond our excuse-making, our bickering over who should do what, our prioritizing of adult interests and our hang-ups about the very kinds of changes that China is now making while we dither?

I surely hope so. You should, too. This is serious.

– Chester E. Finn, Jr.

As in her much-discussed book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane has it half right. She pinpoints genuine shortcomings in NCLB and failings in a number of other federal education programs, and correctly observes that many of the school-reform efforts and innovations of recent years have not yielded the desired achievement gains.

But she’s wrong about the remedy for these failures and about the course that Republicans (and, for that matter, reform-minded Democrats) should follow in the days ahead.

The weak and generally stagnant academic performance of most American school kids, our scandalous achievement gaps, the country’s sagging performance vis-à-vis other countries, the skimpy preparation of many teachers and principals, the shoddy curricula, the fat and junky textbooks, the innovation-shackling union contracts, the large expenditures with meager returns—these are not the result of an overweening federal government. They are, in fact, almost entirely the product of state and local control of public education—as it has traditionally been defined and structured in the United States. They are the product of failed governance, bureaucratic mismanagement, and the capture of the K-12 system by powerful organizations of adults who assign lower priority to kids’ needs than to their own interests. They are maladies caused by, and worsened under, the aegis of the very system that Diane trusts to cure them.

It’s never smart to expect those who cause, or even those who tolerate, problems to be any good at solving them. Blithely consigning America’s education fate to the traditional structures of “state and local control” won’t work any better tomorrow than it did yesterday, and Republicans (and Democrats, too) should spurn such advice.

What they should do instead is re-imagine local control, clear out the dysfunctional bureaucratic underbrush, disentangle the responsibilities of different levels of government, make everyone accountable for their performance (as gauged primarily by student learning gains), quit throwing good money after bad, and unshackle education innovators and entrepreneurs so they can give their all to solving problems and creating alternatives.

Local control, properly re-imagined, is vested in individual schools—“mom and pop” charters are examples—that control their own personnel, budgets, schedules, and curricula, that are voluntarily attended by children whose families choose them, that are fully funded and freed from nearly all regulatory and collective-bargaining shackles, but that are absolutely transparent and accountable with regard to what they do, how they spend their money, what goods and services they buy from where, and, above all, how well their pupils do (or don’t) achieve.

Local control, properly re-imagined, is vested in parents free to choose among—and fully-informed about—a wide array of quality schools (and other education delivery systems, including virtual education), and in financing systems that vary the per-pupil amounts according to kids’ differing needs but then send every single dollar to the schools they actually attend, instead of allowing that money to get caught up in bloated central offices and unnecessary bureaucracy.

Local control, properly imagined, abolishes the quasi-monopolies of “school systems,” “central offices,” and system-wide collective-bargaining contracts. It treats every successful school as an independent, self-propelled entity, accountable for its governance to those who work in and attend it but accountable for its results to state-level performance-monitoring systems with authority and wherewithal to pull the plug on bad schools. Those state-level systems, in turn, are united—at least those that wish to be are—by voluntary national academic standards and high-quality tests, the results of which can be compared from school to school and state to state, and communicated to teachers and parents. Other unifying forces—and reasons to discard traditional districts—include well-run CMO’s and the burgeoning “virtual” options that leap across municipal and state borders.

Yes, Uncle Sam’s future role in all this is far less intrusive than today. Washington supplies additional funds to underwrite the education of disadvantaged and special-needs kids, it pays for innovation through competitive-grant programs, it conducts research and supplies a wealth of assessment and other data, and it safeguards individuals from violations of their civil rights. That’s about it.

What do such structural recommendations have to do with the successful teaching and learning that must be at the core of any well-functioning education system? First, they remove all sorts of obstacles and constraints. Second, they concentrate the resources and decision-making authority where they belong (as close as possible to the kids—Diane has that part right). Third, they clarify expectations and make everyone’s performance transparent. Admittedly, in the near term that doesn’t prevent a foolish teacher or ill-run school from selecting a bad reading program or substituting silly social studies for real history. It doesn’t ensure brilliant lesson planning or inspired instruction—but it does allow for tailored instruction and flexible teaching models. In the medium term, however, it frees principals to make changes and liberates parents to exit. And in the long run it makes the school’s very existence hinge on whether it delivers the goods.

That ought to be an approach for tomorrow that Republicans (and reform-minded Democrats) can embrace. But it’s a very, very different model than “restoring” the failed systems of yesterday.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

Earlier, Paul Peterson and Chester E. Finn, Jr. discussed what the election results would mean for federal education policy. That video is available here.

Yet Pat might as easily have been featured in that day’s piece on education reform, thanks to his role in another transformation of American society that, as it happens, began just a year after the Moynihan Report. I refer to James S. Coleman’s Equality of Educational Opportunity, a massive study that, as Pat often recalled, was quietly released over the Fourth of July weekend in 1966 by a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare that hoped nobody would notice it.

Well, Pat noticed it, swiftly grasped its significance, and began a multifaceted campaign to get it noticed by others. As a result of his efforts, American education these past four decades has been profoundly altered.

The Coleman Report and its data have been exhaustively analyzed and reanalyzed. But this key finding has never been successfully challenged: School inputs—money, teachers, teacher credentials, etc.—have little correlation with pupil achievement and differences in achievement cannot be significantly accounted for by differences in school resources.

Pre-Coleman, the formula was simple. More money plus more teachers (and more whatever) made for better schools which yielded better results. Nearly everyone took this for granted. Yet Coleman showed that, by and large, it isn’t true. And of course that conclusion is why HEW found the report so awkward. For Lyndon Johnson was still president and had spent the previous two years persuading Congress that the way to end poverty and equalize achievement in America was to lavish federal dollars on the education system (and particularly its poorest corners) via a host of big new programs like Title I and Headstart.

Coleman said, in effect, that such programs wouldn’t do much good. Which meant, of course, that if one cared about boosting achievement one had to find other ways to do it, beginning with a new focus on the achievement itself rather than on resources.

It’s taken a while for that lesson to sink in and it still hasn’t done so everywhere. We still find the occasional input-based initiative like statewide mandates to reduce class size. Yet the single greatest change in American K-12 education these past four decades is that we now focus overwhelmingly on the results themselves—on measuring them, understanding them, comparing them, fretting about gaps in them, setting standards for them, creating assessment and accountability systems keyed to them, and devising new strategies to alter them, strategies that range from charter schools to online learning to Teach For America and more.

That change can be traced pretty directly to the Coleman Report and its foremost interpreter, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan—and especially his time in the White House where, as a senior policy advisor to the President, he crafted Richard Nixon’s major education-policy proposals of March 1970.

Though much of what Nixon proposed that year was initially ignored by Congress, the basic analysis underlying it is today taken for granted in federal, state, and even district education policy. And that was Moynihan’s Coleman-based analysis, put into the President’s voice, transmitted to Congress and spread across the land. Far from continuing in Great Society mode, Moynihan—via Nixon—began to point the country in a very different direction.

As President Nixon explained in his March 1970 message to Congress on elementary and secondary education:

We must stop congratulating ourselves for spending nearly as much money on education as does the entire rest of the world…when we are not getting as much as we should out of the dollars we spend.…There is only one important question to be asked about education: What do the children learn?

Less than four years after Coleman’s study, his central finding had made its way to the nation’s foremost bully pulpit and had become the basis for a substantial White House initiative.

Three decades before George W. Bush put the “achievement gap” and the “soft bigotry of low expectations” indelibly onto the national agenda with his No Child Left Behind Act, Richard M. Nixon was deploring the same things, linking equity concerns to weak academic performance, decrying the education system’s proclivity to focus on inputs rather than results, and insisting that schools instead be judged on the basis of their students’ achievement. He even demanded that the new National Institute of Education that he proposed—this one did come to pass a couple of years later and, after several reincarnations, is today’s Institute of Education Sciences—devise “new measures of educational output” by which “accountability” could be assured. “School administrators and school teachers alike are responsible for their performance,” Nixon declared, “and it is in their interest as well as in the interest of their pupils that they be held accountable.”

Remarkably, he also tiptoed onto the treacherous terrain of national standards—though without quite calling for them. “For years,” Nixon said, “the fear of ‘national standards’ has been one of the bugaboos of education.…The problem is that in opposing some mythical threat of ‘national standards’ what we have too often been doing is avoiding accountability for our own local performance. We have, as a nation, too long avoided thinking of the productivity of schools.”

Well, standards and results—higher standards and more equitable results—are the name of the education game today and, especially in a time of tight resources, productivity has never been more important.

I cannot assert that Richard Nixon transformed American education policy. He was ahead of his time and the transformation took decades. Indeed, we’re still in the middle of it. But he rolled this ball forward and that would not have happened had Pat Moynihan not placed Coleman’s analysis in his hand, explained what it was and why it mattered, and encouraged the President and his administration to give it a good firm shove in the right direction.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This piece originally appeared in this week’s Education Gadfly and is adapted from a talk given at the “Moynihan in the White House” forum, held at AEI on November 10, 2010 and sponsored by the Richard Nixon Foundation. More information, including a full video of the event, can be found here.

Don’t yawn yet. This report also brings the first-ever state-level results on 12th grade NAEP for the eleven states that opted to participate, and no doubt much will be made of these at a time of keen focus on state-level education reforms. As expected, they’re predictable.

The big news, alas, isn’t news at all, which is that proficiency levels remain dreadfully low in both reading and math (worse in math), that gains have been tiny, that college readiness is nowhere near what it ought to be, that the achievement gap hasn’t narrowed by a micron, and that an awful lot of spending and reforming and earnest hard work has not yet paid off for a country that needs fundamentally different outcomes for K-12 education.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

For more on this topic, see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” by Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann, which appears in the Winter 2010 issue of Education Next.

For further details, see the full report: “U.S. Math Performance in Global Perspective: How well does each state do at producing high-achieving students?“

Very promising, yes? Now, open the Wall Street Journal’s recent spread on “The Turf War for Tots” and learn there that Hollywood is trying to jettison the time-tested cognitively-based “Sesame Street” approach to pre-school television in favor of Disney-style entertainments and faddish “social” skills. Why this matters is that most little kids spend a lot more time watching TV than in preschool. If the Journal’’s data (drawn from Nielsen) are to be believed, two-to-five-year-olds average thirty-two plus hours of television per week. What’s on the tube probably matters more for their development than what happens in preschool. But “Disney Junior,” says the Journal, soon to become a 24-hour cable channel in its own right, will “focus on feel-good stories rather than core curricula.”

Yikes.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

If a recent spate of Wall Street Journal articles is any clue, a week before the election we could be sitting on a tectonic fault with the potential to turn into an education earthquake—and that might actually be a blessing. It has to do with teachers, their unions, and U.S. politics—all of which would benefit from some profound movement.

Writing in the Journal on October 19, Eric Hanushek declared that “there is no ‘war on teachers.’” Three days later, a pair of Journal reporters displayed the National Education Association as the fifth biggest contributor to 2010 election races. And on the same day, in a piece headed “Gov. Christie’s Ultimate Test,” reporter Monica Langley described the Garden State’s feisty chief executive as “well aware that the fate of his fight with the teachers union could determine his own.”

All three are true. Hanushek’s key insight is that “we are seeing not a war on teachers, but a war on the blunt and detrimental policies of teachers unions,” especially when it come to purging classroom ranks of a smallish number of chronically weak instructors.

The reporters are right, too. The campaign-finance data show that both national teacher unions and their affiliates rank among the largest contributors—nearly always to Democratic campaigns at both national and state levels. This has been true for at least two decades and is true again this year. Nor do such dollar tallies count the many phone banks, door bell ringings, backpack enclosures, and other “in kind” offerings they supply to chosen candidates and preferred parties.

As for Governor Christie, he seems to understand that his titanic battle with the New Jersey Education Association—centering on public-education spending, but bearing many policy ramifications—may well be a fight to the death. Yet he appears undeterred. As Andy Rotherham noted in the article, Christie is “on to something big—that the huge cost for public schools is no longer sustainable.” And as both sides surely recognize, this state-level tussle is but one front in a nationwide war between taxpayers and teacher unions. (In the same article, Rick Hess termed New Jersey “the canary in the coal mine.”)

These three examples illumine the convergence of four big developments that could shake the bedrock of education policy and possibly of American politics. From the teacher union standpoint, this is seismic activity to be feared. From a reform perspective, however, it’s a much-needed disruption of the status quo.

* The country has come to understand the wide range of teacher quality and its crucial link to school effectiveness and student achievement, thanks in part to research ranging from Hanushek back to Bill Sanders’ early work in Tennessee. Big-name players like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan—as well as a handful of courageous superintendents (e.g. Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Terry Grier)—have picked up on this, and federal and foundation investments have eased their way. Combine this with the huge recent increase in longitudinal student-achievement data, and suddenly it’s no longer taboo—or impossible—to evaluate instructors based on the education value they add to their pupils or to do something about those who perform dismally. Tenure and seniority are no longer sacred, either, and the unions no longer get much traction with their declaration that it’s inherently unfair to gauge teacher performance on the basis of student learning. (It’s not unfair. It’s just difficult to do well!) If you don’t believe that other influential Democrats favor this form of evaluation, check out the Title I bill recently introduced by Reps. Jared Polis and Susan Davis.

*Economic hard times are posing major challenges to state and local treasuries, of which huge fractions consist of public education, within which 75 to 80 percent of the money typically goes into salaries and benefits, mostly for teachers. Barring more big federal bailouts—which this year’s election would seem to make ever less likely—school budgets are going to be strapped for years to come and cost-cutting, together with eking greater value out of the remaining dollars, is going to occupy the education-policy center ring. For most districts, this will force a rethinking of everything from salaries to instructional delivery. Online learning and “hybrid” schools are beginning to come into their own, for both quality and economic reasons, and America may finally face up to the fact that over the past half century we have reduced the student/teacher ratio from twenty-seven-to-one to fourteen-to-one with no matching gains in achievement.

* Recession, unemployment, and the Tea Party have fueled an intensifying resentment of the privileged status of public employees, their job security, their (relatively) generous pay, and their lavish but sorely underfunded benefits, which threaten to place an unsustainable burden on future generations of taxpayers. This one goes far beyond teachers—and all the public-employee unions know it (and so are pouring money into next week’s election). If Republicans do make major gains in Congress and the statehouses on Tuesday, the public sector may well lose some of its privileges. If Andrew Cuomo is serious, this might happen at the hands of Democrats, too.

* We’re witnessing a gradual but nontrivial change in public perceptions of teacher unions and their power over the system. Whether it’s Waiting for ‘Superman’ and other recent films, Oprah, NBC’s Education Nation, the L.A. Times’s publication of individual teacher data (and signs that something similar will soon happen in New York), or the emergence of a cadre of bona fide Democratic education reformers, tremors can be felt. The unions (and other established education interests) are scrambling to re-establish their once-solid footing by contradictorily pushing back against reform while trying to position themselves as champions of it (think Randi Weingarten).

As Election Day 2010 arrives, the education stakes are big, even if few voters are placing this issue atop their priorities. The unions may never be the same again. Nor the Democratic Party. Nor maybe, even, the GOP. Seismic events are generally feared for the damage that they do. But sometimes they cleanse corruption (consider Noah’s flood) or make way for new developments.  (The post-meteor dinosaur die-off enabled mammals to flourish.) The schools our children and grandchildren attend could benefit from something of the sort.