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Not all school systems are moving in that direction. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, a district with surprisingly low student performance given the substantial per-pupil resources at its command, the school committee has decided to try to boost student achievement by abandoning its K–8 model in favor of having separate middle schools that serve grades 6 through 8 (though, in an unusual twist, each of the latter will be housed in the same facility as an elementary school).

In short, policymakers nationwide continue to wrestle with a basic question: At what grade level should students move to a new school? In the most common grade configuration in American school districts, public school students make two school transitions, entering a middle school in grade 6 or 7 and a high school in grade 9. This pattern reflects the influence of enrollment pressures and pedagogical theories that, over the past half century, all but eliminated the K–8 school from the American education landscape. A small fraction of students do attend public schools encompassing grades K–8, 6–12, or even K–12, however. We exploit this variation by comparing the achievement trajectories of Florida students entering a middle school or a high school to those of their peers who do not make those transitions.

Our study extends research conducted in New York City (see “Stuck in the Middle,” research, Fall 2010), in which Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood found that entering a middle school causes a sharp drop in student achievement relative to the performance of those remaining in K–8 schools. It is hard to know whether one can generalize from results from the nation’s largest city (and school district), however, especially when it employs a complex procedure for assigning students to middle schools. Also, the New York City study was unable to follow students after 8th grade, making it impossible to know whether the negative impacts that were observed were temporary or extended into high school. This is a critical question inasmuch as a key rationale for middle school is its potential for easing the transition to high school. What is lost at the first transition may be more than gained at the second, which is presumably less abrupt for the middle-school child than for the one entering high school directly from an elementary-school environment.

To explore these issues, we use statewide data covering all students in Florida public schools who were in grades 3 to 10 between 2000 and 2009. Although a large majority of Florida students enter a middle school in grade 6, some do so in grade 7. Still others attend K–8 schools and avoid the middle-school transition altogether. To determine whether entering a middle school in grade 6 or grade 7 has any effect on achievement, we examine whether students experience a drop in test scores relative to students in K–8 schools that coincides with their transition to the new school. In the same way, we compare the learning trajectories of students entering high school in grade 9 to those of students who attend K–12, 6–12, or 7–12 schools in order to determine whether high-school transitions affect achievement.

Our results cast serious doubt on the wisdom of the middle-school experiment that has become such a prominent feature of American education. We find that moving to a middle school causes a substantial drop in student test scores (relative to that of students who remain in K–8 schools) the first year in which the transition takes place, not just in New York City but also in the big cities, suburbs, and small-town and rural areas of Florida. Further, we find that the relative achievement of middle-school students continues to decline in the subsequent years they spend in such schools. Nor do we find any sign that the middle-school students catch up with those who remained in the K–8 environment once all of them have entered high school. On the contrary, students entering a middle school in grade 6 are more likely not to be enrolled in any Florida public school as 10th graders (despite having been enrolled in grade 9), a strong indication that they have dropped out of school by that time.

We also find that the transition to high school causes a small drop in student achievement for all students who make this transition (as distinct from those in schools with 6–12 grade configurations). However, this drop holds far less policy significance both because of its size and because the decline does not appear to persist beyond grade 9.

The achievement drops we observe as students move to both middle and high schools suggest that moving from one school to another (or simply being in the youngest grade in a school) adversely affects student performance. The size and persistence of the effect of entering a middle school, however, suggests that such transitions are particularly damaging for adolescent students or that middle schools provide lower-quality education than K–8 schools provide for students at the same point in their education.

Data and Method

We draw the data for our analysis from the Florida Department of Education’s PK-20 Education Data Warehouse. The data contain state math and reading test scores for all Florida students attending public schools in grades 3 to 10 from the 2000–01 through 2008–09 school years. They also include information on the school each student attends and its location as well as student characteristics such as ethnicity, gender, special education classification, and eligibility for a free or reduced-price lunch.

We use different samples of students for different parts of our analysis. First, to estimate the effect of entering a middle school in grade 6 or 7, we examine only students enrolled in grade 3 between 2001 and 2004 who completed the state test in both math and reading in each of the subsequent five years. Second, to investigate whether the effects of middle-school entry persist through grades 9 and 10, we examine only students enrolled in grade 3 in 2001 or 2002 who were tested in both subjects each of the following seven years. Finally, to estimate the effect of entering high school in grade 9, we examine students enrolled in grade 6 between 2001 and 2005 who were tested in both math and reading in the following four years.

Our strategy for identifying the effects of alternative grade configurations on student achievement parallels and extends that of Rockoff and Lockwood’s study of New York City middle schools mentioned above. Specifically, we examine changes in individual students’ achievement over time, focusing on differences in the timing of students’ entry into middle school that result from the grade configuration of the school the student attended in 3rd grade. For example, we are interested in whether students who attended a K–6 school in 3rd grade experience a drop in their achievement in 7th grade relative to students who attended a K–8 school in 3rd grade and thus did not switch schools between grades 6 and 7.

The key assumption of our methodology is that there are no unobserved differences between students who in 3rd grade attended schools that had these different grade configurations that affect achievement precisely in the year when students enter middle school. In other words, we are assuming that the negative effect of a transition is not anticipated by parents and reflected in the choice of a school with a particular grade configuration in grade 3. We conduct an analogous analysis of high-school entry, taking advantage of the different grade configurations of the schools students attended in 6th grade.

Because we compare the achievement of individual students to themselves over time, our analysis takes into account all student characteristics (both observed and unobserved) that do not change over time. In addition, we also control for whether the individual student had been retained in a grade, whether the student had ever been retained, and whether the student attends a charter school (which in Florida are more likely than traditional public schools to have K–8 configurations).

The Middle-School Cliff

We find that students who will enter a middle school in 6th or 7th grade have positive achievement trajectories in math and reading from 3rd grade to 5th, relative to their counterparts who will never enter a middle school because they attend a school that continues through 8th grade. Achievement in both subjects falls dramatically in 6th grade for students who enter middle school in that grade. Students who will enter middle school in grade 7 continue to improve relative to their K–8 peers through grade 6, but experience a sharp drop in achievement upon entering middle school in grade 7.

Specifically, we find math achievement falls by 0.12 standard deviations and reading achievement falls by 0.09 standard deviations for transitions at grade 6 (see Figure 1). Students who make the transition at grade 7 experience even larger drops in their achievement of 0.22 and 0.15 standard deviations in math and reading, respectively. National data indicate that student achievement increases by roughly 0.30 standard deviations in math and 0.25 standard deviations in reading each year for typical 6th- and 7th-grade students. The drops in achievement we observe for students entering middle schools therefore amount to between 3.5 and 7 months of expected learning over the course of a 10-month school year.

Just as troubling is the fact that these students’ relative performance in both subjects continues to decline in subsequent middle-school grades. After three years in a middle school, students who entered in 6th grade score 0.23 standard deviations in math and 0.14 standard deviations in reading worse than we would have expected had they attended a K–8 school. After two years in a middle school, students who entered in 7th grade underperform by 0.31 standard deviations in math and 0.15 standard deviations in reading.

We also find little evidence that students who attend middle school make larger achievement gains than their peers in grades 9 and 10, by which time most Florida students have entered high school. In addressing this issue we must limit our attention to the two cohorts of students entering 3rd grade prior to 2001 or 2002, whose progress we are able to follow through the 10th grade. Although the math achievement of students who entered middle school in 7th grade improves by 0.05 standard deviations in 9th grade relative to students who attended K–8 schools, the same pattern is not evident in reading or in either subject for the much larger group of students who entered middle school in 6th grade (see Figure 2). In other words, we can safely reject the hypothesis that students who attend middle schools benefit at the transition to high school from their previous experience with school transition or from the specific educational programs available in middle schools.

Investigating the transition to high school, we find that students moving to a new high school between grades 8 and 9 suffer a small drop in achievement of 0.03 standard deviations in math and 0.04 standard deviations in reading (relative to those in grade 6–12 schools or schools with another configuration that requires no transition at this point). However, their relative achievement trajectories become positive again after this drop at the transition point.

We supplement our analysis on math and reading achievement with similar analyses of the effects of entering a middle school on the probability of students’ not being enrolled in a Florida public school in 10th grade (a proxy for dropping out of high school by this time) and on being retained in 9th grade (often a strong predictor that a student will leave school prior to graduation). Our results suggest that entering a middle school in 6th grade increases the probability of early dropout by 1.4 percentage points (or 18 percent). Although entering a middle school in 7th grade does not appear to increase early dropout, it increases the probability that a student will be retained in 9th grade by 1 percentage point. Both results provide additional cause for concern with the middle-school model.

Is it possible that our results reflect differences across school districts that employ alternative grade configurations? We explore this question by conducting our test-score analysis separately for schools in Miami-Dade County. With more than 345,000 students, Miami-Dade is the largest district in Florida and offers a wide range of grade configurations for students up through grade 8. We find that the negative effects of entering a middle school for grade 6 or grade 7 are, if anything, even more pronounced in Miami-Dade County than they are statewide.

Not Just an Urban Problem

This result for Miami-Dade County raises the possibility that the negative effects of middle-school entry are only notable in urban settings. We address this issue by looking separately at the effects of entering a middle or high school across communities of varying sizes. Using Census Bureau classifications, we group students into three categories according to the location of the school they attended in 3rd grade: 1) a large or midsize city, 2) suburbia (specifically, the urban fringe of a large or midsize city), and 3) towns and rural areas. The results suggest that the negative effects of entering a middle school are most pronounced in cities, but they remain sizable even in rural areas, confirming that the negative effects of configurations that separate the middle-school grades are by no means limited to urban school districts.

We also examine whether the middle-school effect varies across subgroups of students defined in terms of prior test performance, ethnicity, and gender. Students whose 3rd-grade scores were below the statewide median saw substantially larger declines in math scores at both the middle- and high-school transition points than higher-achieving students. These patterns are consistent with the theory that lower-achieving students have access to fewer educational resources outside of school and may therefore be at higher risk of being adversely affected by school transitions. We find no clear indication that the negative effect differs in size for higher- and lower-achieving students in reading, however.

Results for students of different ethnicities follow a similar pattern. Grade configuration has a larger effect on the math scores of traditionally disadvantaged subgroups than on other students. Black students in particular demonstrate large relative gains in math achievement prior to entering a middle school but then suffer larger drops both at and following the transition. Again, however, we find only small and statistically insignificant differences between the effects estimated for students of different ethnicities in reading. We find no differences in the effects for girls and boys.

Potential Explanations

Our results confirm that transitions into both middle schools and high schools cause drops in student achievement but that these effects are far larger for students entering middle schools. One possible interpretation of this pattern is that school transitions are more disruptive for younger students, perhaps because they are more susceptible to the negative influence of older students. Yet our estimates suggest that the effect of middle-school entry on student achievement is larger for students entering in grade 7 than for students entering in grade 6. Moreover, the fact that relative achievement continues to decline after students’ initial entry into middle schools suggests that average educational quality in Florida is lower in stand-alone middle schools than in schools serving grades K–8.

To explore why this might be the case, we first examine several characteristics of Florida elementary, middle, and K–8 schools. The most striking difference across school types involves cohort sizes (the average number of students in each grade). Although middle schools offer far fewer grades than K–8 schools, Florida middle schools on average enroll 146 more students than their K–8 counterparts; as a result, typical grade cohorts are almost three times as large. Florida middle schools also spend 11 percent less per student and have higher student-teacher ratios than K–8 schools, suggesting a potential role for differences in available resources. In contrast, we find no evidence that differences in observed teacher characteristics could explain our findings. Average teacher experience and average teacher salaries are similar across school types, while the share of the school’s instructional staff without prior experience is modestly higher in K–8 schools.

We conduct two analyses to shed light on whether these observed differences between middle schools and K–8 schools are likely to contribute to differences in school quality. First, we rerun our test-score analysis while controlling for these differences and find a similar pattern of results. Second, we examine whether the size of the drop in relative achievement suffered by students entering middle school in grade 6 varied with the characteristics of the middle school they attended. The results of this analysis again provide little evidence that low middle-school quality stems from differences in the school characteristics we can observe.

Middle schools could also differ from K–8 schools in their educational practices in ways that lead to lower student-achievement gains. To explore this possibility, we draw on a unique survey of Florida school principals conducted in 2003–04 to document responses to the state’s high-stakes accountability system. Confidentiality requirements preclude us from linking survey responses to specific schools, but we can document any differences in the average responses offered by principals of different school types.

We find few significant differences in the educational practices of the two groups of schools in our study. In particular, we observe no differences in the length of the school day or in measures of the extent to which schools had adopted specific policies to help low-performing students, policies to improve the performance of ineffective teachers, and incentives to reward highly effective teachers. If anything, these measures suggest that middle schools are more likely to have policies aimed at improving student achievement. We also find no differences across school types when we measure the degree of teacher autonomy.

A final set of survey items asked not about specific policies or practices but about the school’s overall climate. On these items, middle-school principals expressed significantly lower levels of agreement with statements indicating that their new and veteran teachers were excellent. This suggests that teachers in these schools may be less well equipped to deal with the challenges presented by their students. More middle-school principals also agreed with the statement that parents are worried about violence in the school. Although differences on the remaining items were statistically insignificant, they consistently point in the direction of middle schools having less-favorable school climates than K–8 schools.

In short, we find little evidence that the negative effects of attending a middle school are attributable to differences in resources, cohort sizes, or educational practices. We do, however, find suggestive evidence that the overall climate for student learning is worse in middle schools than in schools that serve students from elementary school through the 8th grade. This suggests a final potential interpretation of our results that is directly related to the choice of grade configuration: students may benefit from being among the oldest students in a school setting that includes very young students, perhaps because they have greater opportunity to take on leadership roles. This interpretation could account for both the gains in relative achievement made by students in K–5 and K–6 schools prior to entering middle schools and the superior performance of K–8 students relative to their peers in middle schools. A possible, if unlikely, alternative explanation is that students entering schools with different grade configurations have different growth trajectories for reasons having nothing to do with their schooling environment.

Taken as a whole, our results suggest that school transitions lower student achievement but that attending middle schools in particular has adverse consequences for American students. Especially when considered along with those of other recent studies, our findings clearly support ongoing efforts in urban school districts to convert stand-alone elementary and middle schools into schools with K–8 configurations. They are also relevant to the expanding charter-school sector, which has the opportunity to choose grade configurations without the disruption caused by school closures. More research is needed to see whether policy or pedagogical innovations can mitigate the effects of middle school. In the meantime, policymakers should exercise caution before extending the middle-school experiment to school districts that still enjoy the K–8 configuration.

Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard’s Kennedy School. Guido Schwerdt is a researcher at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany.

Education Next readers took this survey as well. See how their responses compared.

Public education has rarely been far from the national headlines over the past year. Efforts to limit teachers’ collective-bargaining rights led to mass protests in several states. The enactment of voucher programs renewed the debate over the role of private school choice in American education. Meanwhile, the first significant bud­get cuts in recent memory forced public school districts to tighten their belts in unprecedented ways. The Obama administration has encouraged a nationwide effort to develop common school standards. And let’s not forget Waiting for “Superman,” the high-profile documentary whose poignant portrayal of the charter-school admissions process, coupled with a critique of union power in public schools, was expected to have a significant impact on national opinion.

But how have Americans actually responded to these developments? Have they grown more supportive of the current direction of school reform, or are there instead signs of a backlash? And how do the views of teachers compare to those of the public at large?

These are among the questions we explore in this, the fifth-annual Education Next–PEPG Survey, which interviewed a nationally representative sample of some 2,600 American citizens during April and May of 2011 (see sidebar for survey methodology). In addition to the views of the public as a whole, we pay special attention in this year’s survey to two potentially influential types of participants in school politics: the affluent and teachers. To our knowledge, this is the first survey of a nationally representative sample of affluent Americans, defined as college graduates who are in the top income decile in their state. This is the third year we have surveyed a nationally representative sample of teachers, defined as full-time teachers currently working in public schools. Both the affluent and teachers pay more attention to public education and participate more actively in school politics than the general public, making their views worthy of close scrutiny (see sidebar).

Our findings reveal more stability than change in public opinion over the five years since the Education Next–PEPG survey began, suggesting that the momentous policy develop­ments of the past year were not caused by—nor have they yet produced—broad changes in popular views. The one exception to that generalization is a significant turnaround in support for school vouchers, which until this year had been in decline.

The views of the affluent resemble those of the general pub­lic, except that the affluent are more likely to hold strong opin­ions and even larger percentages support the positions taken by a plurality of the general public. However, the well-to-do are more skeptical of online learning. They also hold the public schools in their own community in comparatively high regard, perhaps because they have better access to good public schools.

Teacher opinion often diverges from that of both the afflu­ent and the general public. Teachers are much more likely to give schools high marks; on many issues, a majority of teachers takes the side opposite to that of the larger public, revealing tensions between what Americans overall think is best and what employees within the education industry prefer.

Teacher Rights and Policies

Wisconsin’s curtailment of the collective bar­gaining rights of teachers and other public employees was undoubtedly the top education news story of early 2011. In protest, teachers called in sick in droves, union members crowded the state capitol, and Democratic senators refused to attend legislative sessions. President Obama supported the protests, while Republi­can leaders lent their support to the embattled Wisconsin governor. Similar issues involving union rights and teacher prerogatives percolated in other states as well, including Indiana, Ten­nessee, Ohio, and even Massachusetts.

What was the public response? Are the opin­ions of teachers and the public converging or diverging? The short answer: Public opinion on issues involving teacher rights and prerogatives has remained essentially unchanged, but teach­ers’ opinions are diverging on key issues.

Teachers Unions. When asked whether teachers unions have a generally positive or negative effect on the nation’s public schools, 33 percent of the public gives a negative response, virtually unchanged from the 31 percent and 33 percent who perceived a negative impact in 2009 and 2010, respectively (see Figure 1). The share perceiving a positive union impact on schools hardly budged, changing only from 28 percent in 2009 to 29 percent in 2011. A siz­able plurality of 38 percent continues to hold a neutral position, suggesting that the debate over the role of teachers unions is hardly over. The views about teachers unions held by the affluent are more negative, with no less than 56 percent saying unions have a negative impact on their schools.

Among teachers themselves, opinion is moving in pre­cisely the opposite direction from that of the public at large. Only 17 percent now say that unions have a negative impact on the nation’s schools, down from 25 percent in 2010. Fifty-eight percent think they have a positive impact, up from 51 percent the previous year.

Teacher Tenure. Opposition to teacher tenure edged upward, but not to a significant degree. Between 2009 and 2010, those opposed to tenure shifted slightly from 45 percent to 47 percent, and in 2011 that percentage again ticked upward to 49 percent. Moreover, tenure supporters slipped from 25 percent in prior years to 20 percent in 2011. Unless the trend continues in future years, not much should be made of these small shifts. Among the affluent, opposition to tenure was much greater—no less than 67 percent. Meanwhile, teachers like tenure more than ever. Fifty-three percent now say they support tenure, up from 48 percent a year ago.

If tenure is to be given at all, the public thinks it should be based on demonstrated success in raising student perfor­mance on state tests. Those who say tenure should be based on student academic progress increased from 49 percent to 55 percent between 2010 and 2011. The well-to-do also like the idea, with 61 percent giving it their support. Teachers, how­ever, were far less enthusiastic about the idea, only 30 percent giving it a favorable nod.

Merit Pay. The issue of merit pay made national news in 2010 when then Florida governor Charlie Crist vetoed a controversial bill requiring that teachers statewide be paid based on their classroom performance. Although Crist’s veto brought him favor with the state’s teachers unions, his successor signed similar legislation in 2011. Meanwhile, states and districts around the nation continue to experi­ment with new models of teacher compensation.

The public tends to favor merit pay, and recent developments have not altered that fact in one direction or another. A near majority (47 percent) of the American public favors paying teachers, in part, based on the academic progress of their students on state tests, about the same percentage as in 2007. Only 27 percent of the public opposes the idea, with the balance undecided. Affluent respondents were only mod­estly more likely (52 percent) to favor merit pay. The idea remains anathema to teachers, however, with only 18 percent in favor, and 72 percent opposed (see Figure 2). Despite the Obama adminis­tration’s continued efforts to build sup­port for merit pay among teachers, the vast majority remains unconvinced.

Teacher Compensation. If teach­ers and the public disagree on many things, the public nonetheless wants to pay teachers well. Fifty-five percent of the public thinks salaries should increase, virtually the same percent­age that voiced that opinion two years ago. Support for higher teacher salaries among the affluent is slightly higher (59 percent). Those who do not favor increases think salaries should remain at current levels. Only 7 percent of the public as a whole thinks teacher salaries should be cut. Needless to say, salary increases for teachers is hardly an issue among teachers themselves. Eighty-two percent of them give the proposal their wholehearted support (see Figure 3).

Support drops, however, when those surveyed are told how much the average teacher in their state is currently paid. It falls to 43 percent, although a majority (52 percent) of the well-to-do still favors a salary increase. Learning the actual sal­ary levels had little impact on the think­ing of teachers themselves, over three-quarters (76 percent) of whom continue to back the idea.

When Americans are asked to choose between increasing teacher salaries and reducing class sizes, they regularly select the latter option. Even when they are told that “reducing average class sizes by three students would cost roughly the same amount as increasing teacher salaries by $10,000,” 44 percent of Ameri­cans select class-size reduction, whereas 28 percent select increasing teacher salaries. The affluent have similar views. By contrast, roughly equal numbers of teachers would choose salary increases as would choose class-size reduction.

Of course, teacher remuneration goes well beyond sala­ries. On average, teachers enjoy considerably larger pension benefits and health-care packages than do comparable profes­sionals in the private sector, a point of contention in recent policy debates. In April 2011, for example, Ohio enacted leg­islation requiring all public employees, including teachers, to contribute at least 15 percent of the cost of their health-care benefits. Yet the battle over the issue is far from over: The Ohio Education Association recently collected a one-time assessment of $54 from each of the state’s teachers, raising $5 million to advocate for the law’s repeal.

It is of interest, then, that the American public tends to look favorably on a proposal that would require teachers “to pay from their salaries 20 percent of the cost of their health care and pension benefits, with the government cov­ering the remainder.” By a nearly two-to-one margin, the American public favors this policy. The margin of support is even larger among the affluent, a majority of whom back this requirement. Teachers overwhelmingly reject this cost-cutting measure, with opponents outnumbering supporters more than two to one.

Teacher Certification. In most states, teachers must take approximately 30 hours of instruction at a school of education before they may be certified as a teacher. A substantial body of research demonstrates that such instruction does not translate into higher student performance. And the American public seems to have caught on. A plu­rality of Americans supports (42 percent, while 31 percent oppose) allowing principals to “hire col­lege graduates who they believe will be effective in the classroom even if they do not have formal teaching credentials.” As for the affluent, no less than 61 percent support the relaxation of teacher hiring requirements. Existing teachers, by contrast, steadfastly oppose the practice, perhaps because virtually all of them underwent the formal credential­ing process. Fully 60 percent of teachers object to the idea of prin­cipals being allowed to hire col­lege graduates who do not have formal teaching credentials, and only 28 percent support it.

All in all, the Wisconsin controversy seems to have con­tributed to a divergence of opinion between teachers and the general public. The biggest changes in opinion took place within the teaching profession, which moved further away from the views of the public at large. The public, and espe­cially the affluent, nonetheless want to pay teachers more.

School Choice

A strong case can be made that 2010 and 2011 were among the very best years school choice has yet enjoyed. The number of students in charter schools grew to 1.7 million, and several states raised caps on the number of charter schools that will be permitted to open in the future. Indiana, Ohio, Florida, Ari­zona, and New Mexico all passed voucher legislation of one kind or another, and Congress restored the federal school-voucher program it had previously shut down in Washington, D.C. What has been the public’s response?

Vouchers. Opinion on vouchers varies, depending on how the question is posed. We therefore randomly assigned respondents to two groups, one of which was asked a question that might be termed “voucher-friendly” in that it emphasizes giving a choice to parents. The other half was asked a question that might be termed “voucher-unfriendly” in that it empha­sizes students going to private school at public expense. Not surprisingly, members of the public are more likely to say they like vouchers (47 percent) if asked the first question than if asked the second (39 percent). (See Figure 4 for the wording of the questions and the pattern of responses to each.)

There is little scientific basis for deciding which of these questions is the “right” one to ask. Instead of focusing on the number obtained by either ques­tion, therefore, it often is more informative to look at differences between groups and changes that take place over time.

Viewed in these ways, three facts stand out. First, support for vouchers increased by 8 per­centage points between 2010 and 2011. This was the largest shift of public opinion over the course of the past year. If the public debate altered anything, it was regard­ing this specific topic. That the change in opinion is registered by responses to both questions leads one to conclude that the sur­vey identified a genuine political development. Second, the afflu­ent express more opposition to vouchers than the general pub­lic. The level of opposition is 12 percentage points higher in response to one version of the question and 4 percent­age points higher on the other. Third, teachers are the least enthusiastic about vouchers. Although their opinions, like those of the general public, shifted in a favorable direction in 2011, teachers are still as much as 25 percentage points more opposed to vouchers than is the public as a whole.

Tax Credits. Public opinion on other school-choice issues remains stable. When it comes to tax credits for education expenses for families attending either public or private schools, a majority is in favor, and opposition is less than 20 percent. Almost the same can be said for the more common approach of offering tax credits for individual or corporate donations to scholarship programs. On both items, though, little change is detected from previous years. Nor do either the affluent or teachers think much differently.

Charter Schools. When asked about charters, 43 percent of the American public comes out in support, hardly differ­ent from the percentage that did so in 2010 (see Figure 5). The most common response, though, continues to be “nei­ther support nor oppose.” When one segment of respondents was asked to choose between “support,” “oppose,” and “don’t know,” a similar proportion selected ”don’t know” as had selected “neither support nor oppose,” again suggesting that Americans either do not understand what charter schools are or have not made up their minds about them (see “Edu­cating the Public,” features, Summer 2009). These findings are all the more remarkable given that charter schools are now two decades in the making, and in just the last year they have received substantial media attention, been the subject of a major documentary, and enjoyed the endorsement of leaders of both political parties, including key members of the Obama administration.

The affluent are especially likely to favor charter schools, with 64 percent offering their endorsement. Interestingly, the biggest jump in support for charters seems to have taken place among teachers. Those favoring the idea increased from 39 percent to 45 percent over the past year, while opposition remained unchanged.

Single-Sex Schools. Once pervasive in American educa­tion, gender-specific public schools were until quite recently a vanishing species. The notion of educating boys and girls separately, however, received a boost in 2006 with the pub­lication of new federal regulations clarifying the legal status of single-sex schools and classrooms. The National Associa­tion for Single Sex Public Education reports that 524 pub­lic schools now offer students opportunities for single-sex education, including 103 in which students have all of their educational activities in a gender-specific setting.

Thirty-four percent of Americans support proposals that would give “parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls school,” while only 23 percent are opposed. Opinion has not changed since the same question was last posed back in 2009. Interestingly, the well-to-do are even more favorably disposed to the idea, with no less than 47 percent giving it their support. Teachers, too, like the idea. Given the widespread support for providing families a single-sex option, it is surprising no politician has made this issue an election platform component.

Grading Public Schools

Last year we reported that the public’s evaluations of the nation’s public schools had reached an all-time low. Only 18 percent of the public was willing to give the schools an A or a B, while 27 percent said they deserved no better than a D or an F. Those evaluations were decidedly lower than the grades given by those asked by the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll earlier in the decade, and even lower than the percentage reported by Education Next in 2007 (when only 22 percent gave their schools top marks).

Happily, in 2011, evaluations of public schools have ticked upward ever so modestly, with 22 percent again willing to give their schools an A or B, though 25 percent of those evaluations are still handing out either a D or F. The affluent are by far the toughest graders, with only 15 percent of them giving the nation’s schools the highest marks. Teachers, by contrast, are much more generous in their evaluations, with 37 percent saying that the nation’s schools deserve an A or B (see Figure 6).

The portrait of public satisfaction changes dramatically, however, if one inquires about Americans’ local public schools. No less than 46 percent of those surveyed give their community schools an A or a B, a slightly higher percentage than in 2007 (43 percent). The affluent, as critical as they are of the nation’s schools, are more content with their local schools than the public at large: 54 percent say their local schools deserve one of the two high grades. Teachers espe­cially like their own community’s schools, with 64 percent of them giving out an A or a B.

Spending on Public Schools

For the United States economy, the past three years have been hard times: The country has yet to recover fully from the recession that began in 2008. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent, salary increases are hard to come by, and public treasuries are steeped in debt. The stimulus package of 2009 provided a short-term revenue fix for school districts, but those dollars, at best, barely offset sharp declines from local tax revenues. In the spring of 2011, when this survey was administered, no one thought it would be easy for school districts to balance their budgets. Under the circumstances, it would not be surprising if the public concluded that cutbacks in school expenditures were appropriate.

Not so. When the public was asked whether govern­ment funding for public schools in their district should increase, decrease, or stay the same, 59 percent selected the first option, only slightly less than the 63 percent that gave that opinion in 2010, and dramatically more than in 2009 (46 percent). Affluent respondents were less willing to spend more for their district schools, but even among them a clear majority (52 percent) preferred an increase in expenditures.

A segment of those surveyed were asked the same ques­tion except that they were first told the level of per-pupil expenditure in their community, which averaged $12,300 for the respondents in our sample. For every subgroup con­sidered, this single piece of information dampened public enthusiasm for increased spending. Support for more spend­ing fell from 59 percent to 46 percent of those surveyed. Among the well-to-do, the level of support dropped dramati­cally, from 52 percent to 36 percent. Among teachers, sup­port for expenditure increases fell even more sharply—from 71 percent to 53 percent (see Figure 7).

When asked about the possibility of raising taxes to fund public schools, support for greater spending dropped further still. Only 28 percent of Americans believe that local taxes to support public schools should be increased, while over half believe that they should stay the same, and 16 percent believe that they should decrease. The views of the affluent do not differ notably from the public as a whole and even among teachers only 42 percent support higher taxes.

Digital Learning

Online education has become a growth industry, as a rapidly increasing number of high school and college students are taking some of their courses over the Internet. Some, includ­ing Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christian­sen, have gone so far as to predict that half of all high school courses will be taken online within a decade.

A year ago such projections seemed plausible, as public support for learning over the Internet jumped 10 points, to a total 52 percent, from where it had been the previous year. But if online learning is going to sweep the country, that percentage needs to continue to climb, and in 2011, support slipped modestly to 47 percent. Twenty-six percent of Ameri­cans now say they are opposed, up 3 percentage points over 2010 (see Figure 8).

Contrary to the standard image of the educated well-to-do as the first to adopt new technologies, the affluent were somewhat less supportive of the idea than the public as a whole. In fact, the affluent were evenly divided, with opposition as high as 43 per­cent. Nearly half (49 percent) of teachers also expressed approval, although that percentage was down by 6 percent from 2010.

In short, there are signs that support for online learning is reaching a political plateau, and important segments of the population—teachers and the affluent—are resistant to the idea. Yet, when respondents were asked about their own children, high levels of sup­port for online education are observed across the American public. A majority of Ameri­cans overall, and roughly two in three teach­ers, expresses a willingness to have one of their children take “some academic courses” in high school over the Internet.

School and Student Accountability

Nine years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, the public’s appetite for stan­dardized tests appears undiminished. More than two in three Americans believe that the federal government should “continue to require that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3–8 and once in high school,” whereas less than 10 percent actually oppose this requirement. Roughly three in four affluent respondents sup­port the regular administration of tests, as do similar shares of African Americans and Hispanics. Only among teachers does there appear a nontrivial segment of the population that opposes existing testing practices. Even so, majorities of teachers support annual testing of lower-school students and a single test for high school students.

Breaking from existing law, however, Americans support the creation of a single national test in both reading and math. Under No Child Left Behind, each state develops its own test and benchmarks for determining student proficiency. Solid pluralities of both the general public and all subgroups, how­ever, believe that there should be one test and one standard for all students across the country. Roughly one in five, by contrast, supports different tests and standards in different states. A paltry number of respondents think that all state and federal tests should be abolished.

Just as Americans support tying teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests, so too do they want students’ eligibility to be promoted from one grade to the next and to graduate from high school to depend on dem­onstrated success on tests. Fully 70 percent of Americans support a requirement that students pass an exam before being eligible to move on to the next grade. Another 72 percent support a requirement that students pass an exam before being allowed to receive a high school diploma. Sup­port for student accountability, moreover, runs deep across all the subgroups we analyze, including teachers. Sixty per­cent of teachers support the idea of tying grade promotion to test performance, while 66 percent support high school graduation exams, even as these same teachers overwhelm­ing oppose the idea of linking their own remuneration to student test scores.

That Americans want students to be tested, however, does not mean that they are convinced that current test­ing provides accurate information about school quality. Indeed, only 7 percent of Americans claim that their state’s standardized test provides “excellent” informa­tion about the schools in their state, and only 34 percent claim that it provides “good” information. Forty-seven percent, however, believe that the test provides either “fair” or “poor” information. With just one exception, all of the subgroups follow national trends on this question. As their responses to other questions about testing might indicate, teachers hold standardized tests in the lowest regard. Only one in four teachers claims that the state’s standardized tests offer excellent or good information about the quality of schools, compared to the 69 percent who believe that the information is either fair or poor.

Conflicts with Teachers Likely to Persist

We have discussed only a few highlights from this year’s survey. The reader can glean much more information by taking a careful look at the survey questions and responses, available on the Education Next web site. Here we draw only three broad conclusions:

On many questions of education policy, opinion has not changed materially over the past year, despite the headline news coming from Wisconsin and elsewhere. We are not the first to have documented stability in the policy posi­tions taken by members of the American public. Only when external events require a rethinking of their position are they inclined to alter their views. For that reason, we find it to be of some significance that over the course of the past year the public has become much more supportive of school vouchers.

On most questions of public policy, differences between the affluent and the public at large are on the margins. In no case did we find the well-to-do favoring a policy that the general public opposed. Instead, those with ample resources tend to be even more supportive of the positions that were taken by a plurality of the public. Our data do not allow us to discern whether the affluent are leading or following public opinion more generally, but the findings do suggest a general synchronization of viewpoints. Still, it is the case the affluent are more skeptical of online learn­ing and more satisfied with their local schools than is the general public.

Finally, we find that a majority of teachers often takes posi­tions contrary to those of a plurality of both the public and the affluent on key issues such as teachers unions, the rights and prerogatives of teachers, and school vouchers. Plainly, the battles over school reform are far from over.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

“Managing the Teacher Workforce,” by Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald, looks at which teachers in WA state are laid off when budget problems force districts to reduce their staff numbers, and at who would be laid off instead under policies based on effectiveness rather than experience.

“Principled Principals,” by Brian Jacob, looks at the decisions Chicago principals made when they were allowed to dismiss untenured teachers with minimal hassle.

As Eric Hanushek explains, very few studies have looked systematically at the issue of teacher dismissal before these, in part because there have been very few evaluations that have been meaningful, and very few related dismissals aimed at producing a higher quality teaching force.

A transcript of the conversation is available here.

For more on spelling bees, and other academic competitions, please see “Competition Makes a Comeback” by June Kronholz in the Summer 2010 issue of Education Next.

On a range of issues, education “reformers” have made great progress in the last decade, certainly among policy elites, but also among the general public. Interviewed in October on the Today Show, President Obama seemed to be channeling a generation of conservative education analysts in stating bluntly that more money absent reform won’t do much to improve public schools. Waiting for “Superman,” a documentary chronicling the travails of five students seeking spots in heavily oversubscribed charter schools, drew rave reviews, star-studded premieres, and breathless talk of a new era of reform. While the American Federation of Teachers and a handful of liberal publications tut-tutted the film’s sharply critical portrayal of teachers unions, its clarion call for change has been embraced by opinion leaders across the political spectrum. Even zeitgeist queen Oprah Winfrey.

Poll numbers show the broader public, too, increasingly supports efforts to create new schooling options, overhaul teacher pay and evaluation systems, and provide strong incentives for improvement. Ideas such as charter schools, performance pay, and consequential accountability are much more widely accepted—and acceptable—today than they were a decade ago. Furthermore, advocates are no longer considered right-wing kooks for casting the teachers unions as a big part of the problem. Even a Democratic president or secretary of education can say so. Indeed, the influential Democrats for Education Reform expends much of its efforts spreading that very message.

Though support for these notions may be a mile wide, it appears to be little more than an inch deep—and to rest as much on pleasing sentiments and newfound conventional wisdom as on informed conviction. The 2010 Education Next poll reported that charter school supporters outnumber opponents by a 44-to-19 margin, but the vast majority of respondents don’t really know what charter schools are. Fewer than one in five know that charter schools cannot charge tuition, can’t hold religious services, and can’t selectively admit students. Charters sport a well-regarded brand, but their popularity rests on a shaky foundation.

And while virtually all Americans embrace accountability in the abstract, most remain reluctant to impose tough sanctions on schools, and especially on individuals, whose performance is found wanting. The 2010 PDK/Gallup poll reported that, when asked whether they preferred to keep a low-performing school in their community open with the existing teachers and principal and provide comprehensive support, to temporarily close the school and reopen it with a new principal or as a charter school, or to shutter the school, 54 percent chose to leave the school open. The EdNext survey asked respondents, “If a teacher has been performing poorly for several years, what action should be taken by those in charge?” Among the general public, just 45 percent thought the teacher should be removed.

Still, reformers have won some major battles over the past decade. The center of gravity in public debates has moved in important ways. But these successes have come with two big caveats. First, reform “support” resides with a mostly uninformed, unengaged public—one that isn’t especially sold on their ideas and that, in any event, is often outmatched by well-organized, well-funded, and motivated special interests. And second, and more unfortunately, many reformers are eagerly overreaching the evidence and touting simplistic, slipshod proposals that are likely to end in spectacular failures. In short, some forces of reform are busy marching into the sea and turning notable victories into Pyrrhic ones. To quote that wizened observer of politics and policy, Pogo: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.

The Icarus Problem

Advocates drive good ideas to extremes when they oversell their promise and undermine their integrity. Unfortunately, this pattern is all too common.

Problem One: Measures that are overly ambitious or poorly designed risk undermining popular support for sound and necessary reforms. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) took near-universal backing for tenets of accountability and deployed them in an overwritten federal statute that poisoned the NCLB brand. Indeed, EdNext polling in 2007 showed that describing the key precepts of NCLB without using its name drew 71 percent support, but the addition of the phrase “No Child Left Behind” reduced that figure by 14 points.

To be sure, reliable evidence (see “Evaluating NCLB,” research, Summer 2010) shows that NCLB has improved math achievement in states that did not previously have accountability systems in place. The data generated as a by-product of the law’s testing requirements have been a boon to the research community—and may ultimately yield a new body of evidence to inform education policy and practice. Yet the law’s “my way or the highway” approach in areas where best practices were (and remain) far from certain has arguably slowed the development of accountability systems that would provide a more refined view of school performance. In fact, the most convincing criticism of NCLB has come not from accountability skeptics but from states like Florida that were in a position to go beyond what the law requires but were forced to simplify their approach to comply with the law’s mandates. More than nine years after the law’s enactment, and four years after its scheduled reauthorization, the shortcomings of an accountability system organized around the utopian goal of universal student proficiency rather than continuous improvement are all too apparent.

We’re in danger of repeating this same mistake with the Race to the Top agenda. By demanding that states embrace a very prescriptive set of policy reforms in order to win federal funding, policymakers locked in the “best thinking” circa 2010. Just as definitions of Adequate Yearly Progress, Highly Qualified Teachers, and other core elements of NCLB, circa 2001, soon grew obsolete and problematic, so too will today’s conventional wisdom around teacher evaluations, charter caps, and all the rest. Rather than encouraging problem solving and policy tinkering, these “shoot the moon” initiatives freeze reform in one moment in time. And they run the risk of backlash if and when early results prove disappointing. A better means of driving reform would be to reward states and districts based not on unenforceable promises but on specific, concrete steps to overhaul anachronistic policies like teacher tenure, now granted in most states as a matter of course after just a couple of years in the classroom.

Problem Two: Overpromising. When they insist that ideas like school choice, performance pay, and teacher evaluations based on value-added measures will themselves boost student achievement, would-be reformers stifle creativity, encourage their allies to lock elbows and march forward rather than engage in useful debate and reflection, turn every reform proposal into an us-against-them steel-cage match, and push researchers into the awkward position of studying whether reforms “work” rather than when, why, and how they make it easier to improve schooling.

Consider performance pay. Just recently a three-year randomized evaluation of a Tennessee merit-pay experiment funded by the federal government’s Teacher Incentive Fund found that bonuses tied to test scores didn’t lead to higher performance in middle-school math. “Study Casts Cold Water on Bonus Pay,” read Education Week’s headline, and the news was widely interpreted as a setback for attempts to link teacher compensation to classroom performance. Yet the most compelling rationale for merit pay is not any short-term bump in test scores, but rather its potential for making the profession more attractive to talented candidates, more amenable to specialization, more rewarding for accomplished professionals, and a better fit for the 21st-century labor market. Whether or not bonuses linked to test scores had any effect on measured achievement in the short run says absolutely nothing on this score. Yet, the lust for simple answers and for research that “proves” those answers right has led many would-be reformers to adopt and defend half-baked versions of pay reform.

The primary goal of reform efforts should be to make it easier for problem solvers to gain access to and traction in the system, coupled with thoughtful public oversight of results. The impatient rush to “fix” teacher quality in one furious burst of legislating may instead lead to a situation in which promising efforts to uproot outdated and stifling arrangements become enveloped in crudely drawn and potentially destructive mandates. Rushing forward with statewide mandates to incorporate value-added assessments into teacher evaluation systems, for example, may wind up stifling innovation. Systems built around individual value-added calculations can stymie the smart use of personnel that reformers should encourage. Principals who rotate their faculty by strength during the year, or augment classroom teachers with online lessons, will find their staffing models a poor fit for evaluation systems predicated on linking each student’s annual test scores to a single teacher.

Uprooting the old, intrusive superstructure, not imposing a new one, must be the first order of business. And unwinding a century’s worth of accumulated detritus and replacing it with a functioning system will take time. Only after a few years of stripped-down tenure and evaluations focused on performance, and after a few locales craft some promising approaches, will it make sense for state legislatures to wade in more aggressively.

Problem Three: Obsession with “gap closing.” For the past decade, school reform has been primarily about “closing achievement gaps” by boosting math and reading proficiency and graduation rates, among black, Latino, and poor students. “Conservative” notions of accountability have been linked to old-school liberal conceptions of “social justice.” This is all admirable. At the same time, this emphasis signals to the vast majority of American parents that school reform isn’t about helping their kids. And, given that only about one household in five even contains school-age children, 80 percent of households are being told that extra dollars and energy should be redirected into urban centers simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Well, perhaps. But those policies that most often succeed in the U.S. are those that recall the Tocquevillian adage that Americans embrace the precept of “self-interest properly understood.” Policies that work are those that work for all families. Efforts to squeeze inefficiencies out of schooling or enrich instruction and improve services for all kids can command widespread support.

Like the architects of the Great Society nearly half a century ago, however, too many school reformers have an unfortunate habit of deriding apathy or opposition from middle-class families. They have blithely ignored lessons learned when the Great Society’s social engineers sought to sustain ambitious social programs on the backs of guilt-ridden white suburbanites, only to fail spectacularly. They dismiss concerns that their reforms do nothing for suburban schools or may adversely affect them. Until we enable suburban legislators to regard a vote for reform as a political winner, and not merely a vote they’re allowed as a display of political guilt, the underpinnings of reform will remain thin.

Looking Ahead

The latest silver bullet appears to be the lure of Hollywood. Since Teach For America and the KIPP Academies haven’t yet saved the world, 5,000 charter schools have not prompted the remaking of urban school systems, and we’re saddled with the disappointing legacy of NCLB, maybe what we’ve been missing all along is a sufficiently sentimental, gut-wrenching presence in the nation’s cinemas. Perhaps with the arrival of documentaries like The Lottery, The Cartel, and, of course, Waiting for “Superman,” this is the moment when the public will finally awaken and make its voice heard, and resistance will come crumbling down.

Rather than taking a hard look at why NCLB proved to be such a gross distortion of accountability, why so many merit-pay schemes eschew sensible principles of professional compensation, or why the public has so little understanding of charter schooling, some reformers may decide after seeing these films that they’ve paid too little attention to marketing. The problem isn’t overreach, bad politics, or bad proposals; it’s the need to fuel a greater sense of urgency. As Davis Guggenheim, the director of “Superman,” put it: “we’ve cracked the code” on how to make high-poverty schools work. All that’s needed now is the political will to make change happen.

This is a story we’ve seen before. We saw it with A Nation at Risk. We saw it when the nation’s governors gathered in Charlottesville two decades ago. We saw it with the Annenberg Challenge. We saw it with No Child Left Behind. We saw it with “ED in ’08,” the expensive and ultimately futile foundation-backed effort to boost education’s salience among voters in an election dominated by other pressing issues. We know how it ends.

Instead of more cheerleading, what’s desperately needed is more humility. Our current education system is the product of multiple generations of previous reforms, also promoted by well-meaning activists and educators. Building on the best of what remains of their architecture—and sweeping the rest out of the way—will take time and patience. But that’s what’s called for. We’re not urging delay or half-measures, but merely a willingness to see ourselves as problem-solvers, solution-finders, and tool-builders rather than warriors going to battle with intransigent educators. Let us proudly declare: we don’t yet know what works, but we’re committed to figuring it out, the best we can, along the way.

Frederick M. Hess, Michael J. Petrilli, and Martin R. West are all executive editors of Education Next.

As usual, teacher union watchdog Mike Antonucci lets the facts speak for themselves.

But the context for those facts is also telling. Over the past several years, Representative Gablinske played a pivotal role in a series of legislative changes that have boosted the prospects for education reform in the Ocean State. He backed legislation authorizing the creation of Mayoral Academies, mayor-backed charter schools allowed greater autonomy than other charters in the state. He helped lift the charter school cap in order to improve the chances of the state’s successful Race to the Top application. And, as a member of the House finance committee, he supported legislation that replaced Rhode Island’s backward school finance system with one in which all state funds follow children equitably to the school district or to a charter school. (Disclosure: I am on the board of Rhode Island Mayoral Academies and testified in favor of the mayoral academy and school finance bills in the Rhode Island legislature.) It is no wonder that NEA-RI identified him as a target.

Gablinske’s vote for the school funding bill was especially brave – and may ultimately have led to his downfall. For complicated historical reasons, the state’s school funding policy had for more than a decade sent several communities, Bristol included, far more money per pupil than comparable communities elsewhere in the state. Having amassed a clear majority in support of the new policy – and recognizing the risks to Gablinske of supporting it – Gablinske’s colleagues in the house urged him to vote nay. But Gablinske believed that enacting an equitable funding system that facilitated innovation would benefit not only the state as a whole, but even his own community. He was unwilling to compromise.

In short, Rhode Island citizens in November lost the services of a committed and courageous education reformer. While it seems unlikely that Leidecker’s unethical antics made the difference, it is hard to disagree with Gablinske’s characterization of them as “union thuggery.” “People on the outside have no idea the types of tactics used by unions during the campaigns and I don’t think the membership does either,” he went on. “They should be asking questions.” Indeed they should.

-Martin West

Though I did not know Pete well, a few years back I had the opportunity to have lunch with him just days after getting engaged. Recognizing that I would not often have the opportunity to sit down with someone who had been happily married for more than 70 years, I decided to ask what advice he would give to someone soon to be wed and hoping for a similar outcome. He responded without hesitation: “Learn how to fight.” The key, he went on, was to focus not on sorting out who is right and who is wrong but rather on “how to get yourselves out of the mess together.” It remains the single best piece of marital advice I’ve received.

It seems to me now that Pete brought that same forward-looking perspective to his work on public policy – and that this is one reason the Pioneer Institute was so effective under his leadership. Though never shy about criticizing policies and practices he believed to be misguided, his aim was not to cast blame. Instead, he and his associates worked tirelessly to put forward new, creative ideas that offered the hope of moving the debate forward. Let us hope that the Pioneer Institute carries on this legacy in his absence.

He finds evidence to support his suspicions in a new survey of American students conducted by the Josephson Institute Center for Youth Ethics.  Blow trumpets that fact that, among the 43,000 high school students completing the survey, males who attend religious private schools were most likely to report that they had in the past year bullied someone (60%, vs. 55% of males in public schools), used a racial slur or insult (54% vs. 51%), or mistreated someone because he or she belonged to a different group (27% vs. 26%).  (I had to look up the exact numbers myself.  Oddly for a column devoted to the visual display of quantitative evidence, Blow’s graphic simply includes check marks identifying the group most likely to have offered each troubling response.)  “While some public schools have issues with academic attainment,” he concludes, “it appears that some private schools have issues with tolerance.”

Where to begin?  Perhaps with the fact that the Josephson Institute survey is not based on a nationally representative sample of American students.  In fact, the Institute’s website provides no information whatsoever about the methods used to gather its data.   Yes, 43,000 students sounds like a lot!  But the most important principle of survey research is that it is not the size of the sample that matters, but rather the degree to which that sample is representative of the population under study.  Absent a random sampling process, a larger sample may simply mean more misleading data.  On this score, the fact that the share of private school high school students completing the Josephson Institute’s study (more than 15%, according to these tables) is roughly double the share of American high school students actually enrolled in private high schools provides ample reason to be skeptical.

Not only does Blow rely on data of doubtful reliability, he chooses to highlight only those findings that fit with his narrative.  No mention is made of the fact that religious private school students were 4 percentage points less likely to report that they were “prejudiced against certain groups” (19% vs. 23%).  Nor of the fact just 8% of religious private school students reported that physical violence was a big problem and 7% that they did not feel safe at their school, as compared with 39% and 27%, respectively, of public school students.

Blow’s column is especially puzzling in light of the fact that serious researchers have devoted considerable attention to the issue of tolerance in private schools.  In the Summer 2007 issue of Education Next, Patrick Wolf reviewed the findings of more than 21 studies of the effects of attending a private school on a range of civic outcomes.  Of the 13 experimental or quasi-experimental studies of the impact of attending a private school on political tolerance, 5 showed a positive effect and 8 showed no effect either way.

Blow is surely right that “some private schools have issues with tolerance.”  But the best available evidence suggests that those issues are, if anything, more widespread in the public sector.

1.  Can we believe the results?  It’s a fair question, as there is no lack of lousy research on middle schools.  As it turns out, though, New York is an ideal laboratory in which to study this question – and Rockoff and co-author Benjamin Lockwood know how to take full advantage. First, the grade configurations of the city’s public schools vary widely: some students move to middle schools in grade 6, some do so in grade 7, while still others attend the same school from kindergarten through grade 8.  Second, the district’s vaunted data system makes it possible to track the achievement of individual students over time as they move from one type of school to the next (or remain in a K-8 school).  Doing so reveals that students experience a drop in achievement (relative to other students remaining in K-8 schools) in the very same year they move into a middle school: in the 6^th grade for students making the K-5 to 6-8 transition, and in the 7^th grade for students moving from K-6 to 7-8 schools.

And Rockoff and Lockwood go one step further: rather than look at the schools students actually attended in the middle school years, the authors assign students to the type of school they would have been expected to attend based on the grades served by the elementary school they attended in grade 3.  In order to explain away their findings, one would therefore have to argue that parents who chose elementary schools with different structures differed in some way that caused their child’s achievement to drop in the exact year that they moved to a middle school (not before or after).  As the authors put it, “While we cannot definitively rule out the existence of such factors, we do not know of any plausible alternatives that would explain our findings.”

2.  Why are NYC middle schools less successful?  Here’s where the study’s evidence is less definitive.  Standalone middle schools in New York look pretty similar to K-8 schools in terms of spending, class sizes, and academic offerings.  The one difference that does seem relevant is the number of students at each grade level.  Because most NYC schools are roughly the same size, middle schools have many more students in each grade cohort than K-8 schools.  And this difference does appear to account for about 25 percent of the negative effect of attending a middle school.  But clearly that leaves a lot of room for other explanations.

3.  Would we get the same results elsewhere?  Again, it is difficult to say.  But there’s no obvious reason why NYC would be unique.  At a minimum, it seems safe to conclude that the same patterns would hold in other large urban districts.

As I read the study, I was reminded of the 2009 EdNext-PEPG Survey, which asked Americans to identify and assign grades to their local elementary and middle school.  We found that Americans rated their middle school far lower than their elementary school, even taking into account the fact that student proficiency rates tend to be lower in middle school.  In fact, the grades parents assigned middle schools were about 40 percent of a letter grade lower than elementary schools with similar student bodies and similar levels of student achievement.  Rockoff and Lockwood’s research suggests that parents are onto something – and that the emerging trend toward shuttering middle schools and replacing them with K-8s is an encouraging development.

Complete survey results available here.

Democrats and Republicans in Washington, D.C., are more polarized today than they have been in nearly a century. And among the general public, party identification remains the single most powerful predictor of people’s opinions about a wide range of policy issues. Given this environment, reaching consensus on almost any issue of consequence would appear difficult. And when it comes to education policy, which does a particularly good job of stirring people’s passions, opportunities for advancing meaningful policy reform would appear entirely fleeting.

Against this backdrop, the results of the 2010 Education Next–Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) Survey are encouraging. With the exceptions of school spending and teacher tenure, the divisions between ordinary Democrats and Republicans on education policy matters are quite minor. To be sure, disagreements among Americans continue to linger. Indeed, with the exception of student and school accountability measures, Americans as a whole do not stand steadfastly behind any single reform proposal. Yet the most salient divisions appear to be within, not between, the political parties. And we find growing support for several strategies put forward in recent years by leaders of both political parties—most notably, online education and merit pay.

Nearly 2,800 respondents participated in the 2010 Education Next–PEPG Survey, which was administered in May and June of 2010 (see sidebar for survey methodology). In addition to a nationally representative sample of American adults, the survey included representative samples of two populations of special interest: 1) public school teachers and 2) adults living in neighborhoods in which one or more charter schools are located. With a large number of respondents, we were able, in many cases, to pose differently worded questions to two or more randomly chosen groups. In so doing, we were able to evaluate the extent to which expressed opinions change when a person is informed of certain facts, told about the president’s position on an issue, or simply asked about a topic in a different way.

Grading the Nation’s Schools

Americans today give the public schools as a whole poor marks. When asked to grade the nation’s schools on the same A to F scale traditionally used to evaluate students, only 18 percent of survey respondents give them an “A” or a “B.” This equals the percentage that awarded one of the top two grades in 2009, which had been the lowest level observed across the three years of our survey. More than one-quarter of respondents, meanwhile, continue to give the nation’s schools a “D” or an “F.” These sentiments are shared widely. Fewer than one-quarter of African Americans and Hispanics give the nation’s schools an “A” or “B,” as do just 18 percent of parents of school-aged children. Most telling, perhaps, only 28 percent of teachers give the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” while 55 percent give them a “C” and 17 percent a “D” or “F.”

However, as in the past, the public’s assessment of the local schools is far higher. No less than 65 percent of those surveyed are willing to give the school they identified as their local elementary school one of the two highest grades, and 55 percent are willing to give one of those grades to their local middle school. Only 6 percent assign their local elementary school a “D” or and “F,” while 12 percent assign those low grades to their local middle school.

School Spending and Teacher Salaries

Though evaluations of schools remain low, the public appears as willing as ever to support more spending on schools—until, that is, it becomes clear that their own community would foot the bill. In 2010, amid mounting national, state, and local deficits, 63 percent of the public favor an increase in “government funding for public schools in your district,” about the same level as in early 2008, just before the economic recession.

Public support for additional spending is more fragile than it appears, however. When asked whether “local taxes to fund public schools in your district should increase, decrease, or stay the same,” only 29 percent of the public favor an increase (see Figure 1a). Such strong resistance to local taxation suggests that any increases in school spending are likely to come, if at all, from higher levels of government.

Whether or not the public supports higher teacher salaries also depends on how the question is worded. When the survey asked whether teacher salaries should be increased, 59 percent of respondents favor the idea in 2010 (see Figure 1b), well below the 69 percent support observed in 2008. Support for increased teacher salaries falls sharply when respondents are first told the average annual salary of teachers in their state. Supplied with that information, only 42 percent favor a salary increase.

It should come as no surprise that teachers are more supportive of additional school spending. Seventy-two percent favor more spending if no mention is made of taxes, and 45 percent continue to favor spending more even if that means a local tax increase. Teachers are also far more likely to think that their salaries should increase. In 2010, 75 percent support the idea, regardless of whether they are informed of average state salary levels.

Support for Reform

The public’s willingness to consider alternatives to traditional public schools and traditional public-school practices has expanded in many, though not all, directions. The public remains friendly to school choice, but the kinds of choices it prefers are changing. Meanwhile, support for policies that base compensation on teacher performance has risen, but backing for other proposals to introduce standard business practices into the education sector has stayed about the same. The public’s long-standing support for school and student accountability measures remains high, though it is expressed in slightly more qualified terms than in the past.

School Choice

When it comes to school choice, charter schools and online education are “in,” while private school vouchers are “out.” The charter option is especially popular among minorities and parents in neighborhoo ds where charter schools are already present.

Charters. Charter schools have emerged as the most widely discussed alternative to traditional public schools. Initiated in 1991 by a Minnesota law allowing private non-profit entities to receive public funding to operate schools if authorized by a state agency, the idea has spread to more than 40 states, and some 1.5 million students today attend charter schools. Charters have been praised for opening the schoolhouse door to entrepreneurial, energetic teachers and leaders as well as for raising student achievement in high-need regions. But the practice of chartering has also been criticized for allowing low-quality schools to remain in operation and for siphoning resources away from district schools.

To see whether the presence of a charter school within a neighborhood is correlated with public opinion—either favorable or unfavorable—we surveyed a representative sample of residents living in zip codes in which at least one charter school is located. The presence of charter schools in the community has not gone unnoticed. Forty-eight percent of all adults—and 50 percent of parents of school-aged children—living in a neighborhood with at least one charter school were aware of that fact.

After describing a charter school in neutral language, the survey asked respondents if they favor or oppose “the formation of charter schools.” The survey also gave respondents the option of staying neutral by saying they neither favor nor oppose the policy. Those holding the neutral position declined from 44 percent to 36 percent between 2009 and 2010, likely reflecting the heightened attention to charter schools in national debates over education reform (see Figure 2). Among African Americans and Hispanics, indications that opinion has begun to solidify were even stronger: The portion of African Americans holding the neutral position crashed from 48 percent to 23 percent between 2008 and 2010. For Hispanics, the drop was from 46 percent to 33 percent. Similarly, only 27 percent of the parents who live in charter neighborhoods take the neutral position.

Support for charter schools has remained reasonably steady over the last several years. Between 2008 and 2009, the portion of the public saying they favor charters fell from 42 percent to 39 percent, but that trend reversed in the past year, putting charter support at 44 percent in 2010. Opposition to charters now stands at 19 percent, giving supporters a better than two-to-one advantage over opponents.

Within minority communities, however, support for charters appears to be rising. Among African Americans the portion who support charters grew from 42 percent to 49 percent between 2008 and 2009 and leapt to 64 percent in 2010, with only 14 percent expressing opposition. Among Hispanics, levels of support grew from 37 to 47 percent across the three annual surveys.

In communities where at least one charter school is located, overall levels of support are only somewhat higher: 48 percent of the public favor the formation of charters, while 20 percent are opposed. But fully 57 percent of the parents in communities with charter schools favor them, compared to 51 percent of parents nationwide (a group that includes some parents living in communities with a charter school presence).

Both proponents and critics have noted that charter schools are over-represented in communities with high concentrations of minorities, yet this fact alone does not explain the higher levels of support in areas with a charter school. Among residents of communities with a charter school, 63 percent of white parents express support for the idea, as compared with 50 percent of white parents nationally. These numbers may be encouraging, then, for those who hope that the gradual spread of charters will strengthen support for this reform strategy. However, our data do not tell us whether the charter presence is causing opinion to change or whether charters took root in these areas because of underlying public support for charter schools. What we can say with confidence is that the presence of charters—and the intense local debates it often generates—has not been sufficient to undermine popular support for this policy option.

Bucking all of these trends, teacher opposition to charters has intensified. Support for charters among public school teachers fell from 47 percent to 39 percent between 2008 and 2010, while opposition grew slightly from 33 percent to 36 percent. Once leaning toward charters, teacher opinion is now almost evenly divided between support and opposition.

Although overall public support for charters shows signs of solidifying, key facts about charters remain unknown. Only 18 percent of the public know that charters cannot hold religious services, 19 percent that they cannot charge tuition, 15 percent that students must be admitted by lottery (if the school is oversubscribed), and just 12 percent that, typically, charters receive less government funding per pupil than traditional public schools. In each instance, the remaining portions either answer the question incorrectly or, more often, confess that they simply don’t know.

In several respects, parents in communities with a charter presence are only marginally more knowledgeable than the public at large. However, 30 percent of parents are aware that charters cannot charge tuition, and 28 percent realize charters must use lotteries if oversubscribed. In other words, parents with a charter nearby appear better informed about the mechanics of enrolling a child but no more informed than the broader public about other regulations on charter practices.

Virtual education. Online learning is rapidly penetrating the higher education system, and, according to some estimates, more than 1 million high school and middle school students are also taking courses online. As these changes take place, online learning is growing more acceptable to the public at large. In 2009, 42 percent of the public said they thought high school students should receive credit for state-approved courses taken over the Internet. Within one year, that number jumped to 52 percent. Opposition meanwhile fell from 29 percent to 23 percent. One-quarter of the public express indifference (see Figure 3).

Support for online coursework by middle schoolers, though not as great as for high schoolers, also increased from 35 percent to 43 percent between 2009 and 2010. Still, the practice of online learning remains nascent. Less than one-tenth of those interviewed said they personally know any high school or middle school student who has taken a course online.

School vouchers. Compared to charter schools and online learning, private school vouchers have long been a more controversial feature of the school politics landscape. In recent years, voucher supporters have suffered political defeat at least as often as they have enjoyed success. A recent federal study of the much-watched voucher program in Washington, D.C., for example, showed that using a voucher boosted a student’s chances of graduating from high school. That positive development for voucher supporters, however, was offset by congressional action, supported by President Barack Obama, that shut down the program.

So even as support for charters and online learning has grown, the popularity of vouchers has slipped. When in 2007 we asked the public about a program that would “use government funds to help pay the tuition of low-income students…to attend private schools,” 45 percent favored the idea, but that number has steadily fallen in the three subsequent years. In 2010, only 31 percent express approval. Meanwhile, opposition has grown from 34 percent to 43 percent (see Figure 4).

Support for vouchers is greater within the African American and Hispanic communities, but declines are evident there as well. Sixty-eight percent of African Americans and 61 percent of Hispanics supported vouchers in 2007, but only 51 percent and 47 percent of the two groups, respectively, take a similar position in 2010.

Interestingly, support for vouchers is higher in communities where charter schools are located. Forty-six percent of the parents in these neighborhoods support vouchers, as do 40 percent of all residents. Again, however, our data do not tell us whether the charter presence has caused opinion to change or whether charters have simply located in areas that are more hospitable to school choice.

Tax credits. A number of states—Arizona, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island, for example—provide tax credits for low-income families who send their children to private schools or to those who give to charities established for such purposes. Support for tax credits is much higher than for vouchers, especially if the question makes clear that credits may be used for school expenses at both public and private schools. Still, support for this policy has also lost ground in the past three years. In 2008, 64 percent of the public favored tax credits, whereas only 55 percent do so in 2010. Opposition has grown from 15 percent to 20 percent (see Figure 5).

The idea remains extremely popular among African Americans, however, with levels of support hovering around 70 percent during the last three years. Among Hispanics, support fell from 75 percent to 65 percent between 2008 and 2010.

Tax credits for donors to scholarship programs that help low-income students attend private schools garner twice as much support as opposition. Half the public support the idea, while only 22 percent oppose it. Support for this form of school choice is again greater in neighborhoods where charters are located, both among parents and the general public. And in contrast to other policies that would expand access to private schools, support for this idea increased modestly in the past year.

Teacher Policy and Teachers Unions

Public discussions of the best way to recruit, evaluate, and compensate teachers have proliferated of late, largely due to research demonstrating the importance of teacher quality for student achievement. But with one exception, public opinion on these issues has remained relatively stable.

Merit pay. That exception, paying teachers according to their classroom performance, received support from the Obama administration when it invited states to include this innovation in their proposals to obtain federal funds from its signature education reform initiative, Race to the Top.

To assess public support for this policy, commonly known as merit pay, the survey asked respondents in 2009 whether they favored “basing a teacher’s salary, in part, on students’ academic progress on state tests.” Only 27 percent opposed the idea, while 43 percent welcomed it. In 2010, support increased to 49 percent (see Figure 6), although one-quarter of the population continue to oppose the idea.

Teacher tenure. In February 2010, the superintendent of schools in Central Falls, Rhode Island, announced the dismissal of all teachers at her district’s high school on the grounds that the school was persistently underperforming. To the surprise of many, her actions received presidential approval. “If a school continues to fail its students year after year, if it doesn’t show signs of improvement, then there’s got to be a sense of accountability,” President Obama announced. “And that’s what happened in Rhode Island.” Eventually, the board and local teachers union reached a compromise, and media attention shifted to other topics.

Obama’s comments reflected the balance of opinion in the public at large. Opponents of the practice of offering tenure to public school teachers outnumber its supporters in 2010 by a margin of nearly two to one. Forty-seven percent of the public oppose teacher tenure, while only 25 percent are in favor (see Figure 6). Not surprisingly, the distribution of teacher opinion is almost exactly the opposite. The events in Rhode Island apparently were too isolated to alter national opinion on tenure policy, as responses remain essentially the same in 2010 as they had been one year earlier.

Teachers unions. Nor did public opinion concerning teachers unions change significantly, despite rising union opposition to many of the Obama administration’s education reform initiatives. Those who think unions have a “negative effect” on their local schools ticked upward from 31 percent to 33 percent between 2009 and 2010, while those who think unions have a “positive effect” remained unchanged at 28 percent. In both years, a plurality of roughly 40 percent took no position on the question.

Student and School Accountability

Few ideas are more popular than holding students accountable for their performance. In 2007, 85 percent of those interviewed said they thought students should be required to “pass an examination” in order to graduate from high school, as they are required to do “in some states.” In 2010, 76 percent of the public continue to express such sentiments. In both years, opposition hovered around 10 percent of the total. Support is high even among teachers, of whom 63 percent think students should be required to pass an exam to receive their degree.

Hardly less popular is the more stringent rule that students must pass a test before moving on to the next grade, as is currently required for 3rd graders in both Florida and New York City. Eighty-one percent supported that idea in 2007 and nearly the same percentage—79 percent—favor it in 2010. Again, in both years, opposition amounted to no more than 9 percent of the total. Teachers are nearly as likely to favor the idea, perhaps because it would help to ensure that their students are prepared for the material they are asked to impart.

It is surprising that an idea that is so popular does not find its way into the national political agenda. To be sure, there are some signs that the public’s appetite for student accountability measures may have waned somewhat. Overall levels of support have declined of late, and the percentage of Americans who profess to “strongly support” either of the proposals discussed above has dropped by even larger margins. More likely, though, elite politics are responsible for the exclusion of this policy reform from public debate. Teachers unions, which are core constituents of the Democratic Party, oppose these measures. And the Republican Party, with its historical support for local control, has thus far proved unwilling to step into the fray.

The nationwide practice of releasing to the public the average test scores for every school is slightly less popular than holding students accountable. The survey posed the question, “Do you support or oppose making available to the general public the average test scores of students at each public school?” In 2007, 60 percent voiced support, and 57 percent favor the practice in 2010. Opposition stood at 20 percent in both years. But only 45 percent of the teachers favor making this information available to the public. Clearly, school transparency is more popular with the public than with those who work inside the schools (see Figure 7).

Given the general level of support for student and school accountability, it is to be expected that the public supports those provisions of No Child Left Behind that require regular testing in grades 3 through 8 and once more in high school. When the survey asked whether respondents favor maintaining current federal testing requirements, 62 percent of the public say yes, though only 50 percent of teachers agree (see Figure 7). If the respondent is informed that President Obama proposed that these provisions be continued, support increases slightly to 66 percent of those surveyed (see Figure 8). If the president’s endorsement seems to have only slight general effect, it helps solidify support among a key constituency, as support among teachers moves decisively upward to 59 percent.

To further explore Obama’s capacity to shape public opinion, the survey asked half the respondents whether they favor “toughening” state standards used to evaluate student performance. Even with no mention of the president’s views, the idea appears to be popular, as 58 percent say they support the idea and only 15 percent oppose it. The support level is still higher among the half of the sample informed of Obama’s support for the proposal. Among this group, 65 percent support more rigorous standards.

Bipartisan Agenda?

A clear plurality, even a majority, of the American public support a wide range of policy innovations ranging from charter schools and tax credits to tougher standards, accountability measures, and merit pay for teachers. But pluralities and bare majorities are often not enough to alter public policy in a country where power is divided between two highly competitive and increasingly polarized political parties. If Republicans and Democrats disagree strongly on the options for school reform, changes are unlikely—despite clear signs that the public is concerned about the quality of public education.

To examine the extent to which self-identified Democrats and Republicans differ on education issues, we calculated the difference between the average position on key issues held by Democratic respondents and the position held by Republican respondents. On each issue, individual responses were placed on a 1–5 scale, ranging from “strongly oppose” (1) to “strongly support” (5). Figure 9 shows the extent to which Democrats, on average, differ from Republicans on a given issue. The longer the bar, the more polarized the party supporters. If the bar falls to the left side of zero, Democrats support the policy more than Republicans; if the bar falls to the right, Republicans support the policy more than Democrats.

Overall, there appears to be far less polarization between the parties than might be expected. On questions concerning their overall assessment of the nation’s schools, student and school accountability, and even the creation of charter schools, the distance between the parties amounted to less than 0.2 points on the 5-point scale. In the case of accountability measures, the combination of strong overall support and minimal partisan conflict suggests that such policies will continue to be central to the nation’s education reform agenda. In the case of charter schools, for which overall support is more mixed, it appears that the important divisions in public opinion are within rather than between the nation’s major political parties.

The divergence between the parties is slightly larger on school vouchers and tax credits for education expenses, at 0.22 and 0.25, respectively. But in contrast to the patterns observed among elected officials, ordinary Democrats are somewhat more supportive than Republicans of these policies, in part due to the strong support for private school choice within the heavily Democratic minority community. Thirty-five percent of Democrats express support for vouchers, compared to 30 percent of Republicans. And Democrats are more likely than Republicans to support tax credits by a 60 percent to 53 percent margin.

The key exceptions to the general story of cross-party agreement involve school spending, teacher tenure, and the influence of teachers unions. Democrats are more supportive than Republicans of increasing teacher salaries and especially overall school spending, for which the difference in average positions is larger than 0.5 on the 5-point scale. Fully 70 percent of Democrats support increased spending if no mention is made of taxes, compared to only 40 percent of Republicans. The differences on teacher tenure policy are even larger, as 62 percent of Republicans but only 34 percent of Democrats altogether oppose the practice. Most strikingly, Democrats have a far more sanguine view of the influence of teachers unions on their community’s schools: 39 percent consider them to have a positive effect, while only 19 percent see their effect as negative. Among Republicans, only 17 percent believe that teachers unions have a positive effect, and 50 percent believe they have a negative effect.

President as Opinion Maker

Our data do not allow us to identify all the factors that are reshaping public opinion. But inasmuch as the president of the United States has the largest “bully pulpit” and is in the best position to set the public agenda, it is reasonable to suppose that the Obama administration has contributed to some of the changes in opinion reported above.

At the same time, the president’s persuasiveness is likely to depend on his popularity with the general public. To investigate this possibility, we asked parallel sets of questions in March 2009, when President Obama was at the peak of his popularity, and in May 2010, when his approval ratings had fallen below 50 percent. On both occasions, one-half of respondents were asked their opinion on several issues only after being told the president’s position, while the other randomly chosen half were asked the question outright.

In early 2009, exposure to the president’s views had the effect of shifting public opinion in the direction of the president’s by 13 percentage points on merit pay and 11 percentage points on charters and vouchers (see Figure 8). Sizable increases were observed for both Democrats and Republicans. But one year later, Obama’s influence foundered. In the summer of 2010, public support for merit pay actually decreased by 1 percentage point when respondents were told that the president favored the idea. Among Democrats, knowing the president’s position increased support by 8 percentage points, enough to bring the share in favor of merit pay to 53 percent. Among Republicans, however, being told of the president’s position reduced support for merit pay by 12 percentage points, from 55 to 43 percent. Public opinion on maintaining federal testing requirements shifted in the president’s direction by only 4 percentage points when respondents were told of his position, with support falling by 1 percentage point among Republicans and increasing by 6 percentage points among Democrats. Finally, when respondents were told that the president opposed vouchers, public support fell by only 5 percentage points—less than half the decline observed on the same issue in 2009 (see Figure 8).

These experimental data suggest that by 2010 President Obama wielded few of the persuasive powers he brandished during the honeymoon months of his presidency. It is possible, though, that his influence in 2009 was put to good use. Between 2009 and 2010, public opinion on merit pay, charter schools, and vouchers all shifted closer to the president’s position. The public became 6 percentage points more supportive of merit pay, 5 percentage points more supportive of charter schools, and 4 points less favorable to vouchers. Of course, these data do not establish that presidential appeals are responsible for these changes in public opinion. The president, after all, is hardly the only opinion maker in society. But if opinion reflects the cross-currents of conversations taking place in a society, then the holder of the nation’s highest office may be able to alter opinion on the issues of the day, at least at those moments when presidential popularity is high.

Conclusions

Democrats and Republicans are at each other’s throats in the nation’s capital. On cable news and talk radio, the Left rants about the Right, and vice versa. More than any time in recent memory, American politics is defined by hectoring, sniping, and bullying. For those fond of democratic deliberation and consensus building, these are unhappy times.

The results of the 2010 Education Next–PEPG Survey, however, suggest that the public does not necessarily subscribe to all the positions taken by the most vocal elements in our society. Indeed, our results suggest the possibility of advancing meaningful policy reform. The American public shows growing support for online learning and merit pay for teachers and continued support for accountability, standards, testing, and charter schools—education innovations that have been endorsed by leaders in both major parties. No less important is the fact that opinion on many key education issues does not polarize the public along partisan lines. Moreover, we find suggestive evidence that while the current president’s persuasive powers may have waned, they appear to have had an impact.

Clearly, we mustn’t get carried away. With the exception of student accountability measures, no single policy reform garners the support of huge swaths of the American public. But taken as a whole, the results from this year’s Education Next–PEPG survey are cause for some optimism among school reformers. With appropriate leadership, a bipartisan majority may yet rally in support of a significant school reform package.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

It is often noted, for example, that Americans tend to rate their local schools more favorably than those of the nation–much as they regard their own members of Congress quite highly while disdaining Congress as a whole.  At the same time, the 2008 EdNext-PEPG survey revealed that citizens assign far lower grades to their community’s schools than they do to its police force and post office.

But do the ratings on which these comparisons are based reflect a school’s actual performance?  Or do they instead reflect such factors as the racial or socioeconomic makeup of their students?

Matt Chingos, Mike Henderson, and I explore these questions in a new study (“Grading Schools”) from the Fall 2010 issue of Education Next.*  In a nutshell, we asked a nationally representative sample of American adults to identify their local elementary, middle, and high school and to grade them on a standard “A” to “F” scale.  We then linked the grades given to each school to data on the school’s characteristics: its size, the size of classes at the school, the  racial and ethnic composition of its students, the percentage of students from poor families, and the percentage of students performing at proficient levels on state reading and math tests.

Our findings are encouraging in many respects and troubling in others.  Let’s start with the positive:

1. Student achievement matters (especially to parents):  Citizen ratings of specific local schools do reflect publicly available information on the level of student achievement in those schools.  After adjusting for student demographics and other school characteristics, schools with 25 percentage points more proficient students are rated 22 percent of a letter grade higher.  Parents of school-aged children rate such schools nearly half a letter grade higher.

2. Race doesn’t matter (not even to parents):  Neither citizen nor parent ratings appear to be influenced by a school’s racial or ethnic composition.  This is not to say that high-minority schools do not receive lower grades (they do).  But this relationship dissipates once poverty rates and student achievement are also considered.

3. Poor and minority citizens are just as informed:  Although many have speculated that low-income and minority citizens are less informed about or interested in school quality than more advantaged groups, we found no evidence that this is the case.

So far, so good: it would appear that citizens (and especially parents) have the information they need to evaluate schools in a way that lines up with student performance.  As suggested above, however, other findings are more disconcerting:

1. School poverty matters: Unlike race, the share of a school’s students who are poor remains a strong predictor of citizen ratings even after taking into account student achievement.

2. Grades reflect achievement levels, not gains: For residents of Florida, we were able to check whether citizen ratings more closely reflect the level of student of achievement in a school or how much its students are learning over time.  We found that levels matter more–despite the fact that they are influenced by factors outside of the school’s control.

3. Differences in state standards are ignored: It is well known that the definition of proficiency varies widely from state to state.  Our main analysis deals with this fact by comparing only respondents within the same state.  But we also looked to see whether citizens take into account the difficulty of their state’s standards when assigning school grades.  The short answer: they don’t.  A school with an 80 percent proficiency rate in, say, Massachusetts is rated no more highly than a school with the same proficiency rate in Texas–despite the fact that the state test in Massachusetts is far more difficult.

This last finding is of special interest given the ongoing push for common standards across states.  It may be that a common definition of proficiency would increase pressure for reform in states where many students perform poorly relative to the nation as a whole but are deemed proficient by their state.  U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has said that many states are “lying to children and parents” by setting low standards.  Our evidence suggests that parents are believing them.

NB: I discuss the findings of the study with Ed Next’s Paul Peterson in this video: How Good Are Parents At Rating Schools?

* Readers interested in the details of the analysis can find the full PEPG Working Paper here.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

Never before have Americans had greater access to information about school quality. Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), all school districts are required to distribute annual report cards detailing student achievement levels at each of their schools. Local newspapers frequently cover the release of state test results, emphasizing the relative standing of their community’s schools. Meanwhile, new organizations like GreatSchools and SchoolMatters aggregate this information and make it readily available to parents online.

But do all these performance data inform perceptions of school quality? Or do citizens base their evaluations instead on such indicators as the racial or class makeup of schools, regardless of their relationship with actual school performance?

In discussions of parental choice in education, researchers have frequently speculated that parents would base their evaluations of schools primarily on the characteristics of their student bodies. Columbia University professor Amy Stuart Wells, for example, concluded that the decisions of St. Louis parents participating in a voluntary desegregation program were based “on a perception that county is better than city and white is better than black, not on factual information about the schools.” And even if some parents base their decisions on educational quality, many observers worry that low-income and minority parents will be less informed about or interested in school quality, placing their children at a disadvantage in the education marketplace.

The evidence on these questions available to date comes from small-scale studies of specific school districts, making it difficult to reach general conclusions about the degree to which parents and the public at large are well informed about the performance of local schools. We are now able to supplement that research with data from a nationally representative survey of parents and other adults conducted in 2009 under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University. Because we knew the addresses of respondents in advance of the survey, we were able to link individual respondents to specific public schools in their community and to obtain their subjective ratings of those schools. We also gathered publicly available data on student achievement in the same schools, making it possible to compare respondents’ subjective ratings to objective measures of school quality.

Our results indicate that citizens’ perceptions of the quality of their local schools do in fact reflect the schools’ performance as measured by student proficiency rates in core academic subjects. Although citizens also appear to take into account the share of a school’s students who are poor when evaluating its quality, those considerations do not overwhelm judgments based on information about academic achievement.

Public Perception and Objective Quality Measures

The 2009 Education Next–PEPG Survey was administered to a nationally representative sample of 3,251 American adults, including an oversample of 948 residents of the state of Florida. The Florida oversample was conducted in order to link perceptions of school quality to the unusually rich information about school performance available in that state. The survey was administered over the Internet by the polling firm Knowledge Networks in February and March of 2009. (For methodological details and complete survey results, see “The Persuadable Public,” features, Fall 2009.)

Before conducting the survey, we geo-coded the address of each respondent to latitude-longitude coordinates and a census block. We also obtained latitude-longitude coordinates for every U.S. public school from the National Center for Education Statistics. Using census blocks to place respondents within school districts, we then linked each respondent to the closest elementary, middle, and high schools (up to five schools of each type) operated by the local school district.

The survey asked all respondents this question: “Each of the following schools in your area serves elementary-school students. Which one, if any, do you consider your local elementary school?” It then offered each respondent a personalized list of the five closest elementary schools from which to pick; respondents were also allowed to specify a school that did not appear on the list. After a specific elementary school had been identified, the survey asked the respondent to grade this school on a scale from A to F. This same process was then repeated for middle and high schools.

We converted the A to F grades that respondents assigned to the schools into a standard grade-point-average (GPA) scale (A=4 and F=0). Of the elementary and middle schools our survey respondents rated, 41 percent received a B grade, while 36 percent received a C. In contrast, only 14 percent of schools received an A grade, 7 percent a D, and 2 percent an F. This distribution corresponds to an overall GPA of 2.57, or just below a B-minus average. Interestingly, respondents assigned their local middle schools grades that were, on average, one-quarter of a letter grade lower than the grades they assigned their local elementary schools (see Figure 1).

We measured actual school quality as the percentage of students in a school who achieved “proficiency” in math and reading on the state’s accountability exams (taking the average proficiency rate across the two subjects). School-level data on student proficiency were drawn from SchoolDataDirect.org for the 2007–08 school year, the most recent year for which test-score data would have been publicly available when the survey was conducted. Although the rigor of state content standards and definitions of math and reading proficiency vary widely (see “State Standards Rise in Reading, Fall in Math,” features), we are able to adjust for these differences by limiting our comparisons to respondents within the same state when examining the relationship between proficiency levels and school ratings.

To be sure, the percentage of students achieving proficiency in core academic subjects is an imperfect measure of quality, even when comparing schools in the same state. Given the strong influence of out-of-school factors on student achievement, any quality measure based on the level of student performance at a single point in time will be heavily influenced by characteristics of a school’s student body. At the same time, proficiency rates are the only quality measure available for a national sample of schools. They are determined in part by the amount students learn in school, and research suggests that moving to a school with higher proficiency rates does produce achievement gains.

Nor do we wish to claim that any judgment of school quality that does not correspond to test-score performance is uninformed or irrational. The ability to promote math and reading achievement is hardly the only dimension along which citizens are likely to evaluate their local schools. But we suspect that high test scores go along with other aspects of school quality that citizens value in their schools, so that evidence of a connection between student achievement and public opinion likely indicates that parents and other members of the public have the information they need to make reasonable judgments about their schools.

National Evidence

These data enable us to provide the first evidence on the extent to which citizens’ subjective ratings of specific schools correspond to publicly available information on their actual performance. Because other school characteristics may also influence perceptions of school quality, we incorporated into our analysis data from the National Center for Education Statistics on the racial/ethnic composition of each school, the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch (an indicator of poverty), average cohort size (our preferred measure of school size), and pupil-teacher ratio (a proxy measure of class size) in the 2007–08 school year. We exclude high schools when analyzing the data for the nation as a whole because proficiency data are unavailable for many of them, and when available, typically reflect the performance of only a single cohort of students. We also adjust for whether the respondent was evaluating an elementary or a middle school to account for the fact that middle schools received systematically lower grades from survey respondents.

Figure 2 presents the strength of the relationship between citizen ratings of school quality and each of these school characteristics after taking into account the other key variables built into our analysis. The values of each variable except the one identifying elementary schools have been standardized to illustrate their relative importance. (In technical terms, the relationships presented for these variables reflect the effect of an increase of one standard deviation in the value of the characteristic in question.) The figure confirms that student proficiency rates are a significant predictor of citizen ratings of school quality. An increase of 18 percentage points in percent proficient (i.e., one standard deviation) is associated with a rating that is on average 0.16 grade points higher, or about one-sixth of a letter grade.

Examining the racial/ethnic and class makeup of a school’s student body in isolation would suggest that both are important predictors of citizen ratings, a fact that may explain the common perception that this is the case. In particular, schools with 25 percentage points more African American students received ratings that were 15 percent of a letter grade lower, while schools with 24 percentage points more Hispanic students received ratings that were 16 percent of a letter grade lower. Schools with 26 percentage points more poor students received ratings that were one-quarter of a letter grade lower.

However, when these variables are considered simultaneously and alongside school performance and resource measures, only the poverty indicator retains predictive power. Neither the percentage of students who are African American nor the percentage who are Hispanic is systematically related to perceptions of school quality. The percentage of students who are poor remains an important predictor of citizen ratings, with a relationship essentially as strong as that for proficiency rates.

Even after controlling for proficiency rates and other school characteristics, middle schools receive ratings that are, on average, 18 percent of a letter grade lower than comparable elementary schools. In other words, proficiency rates explain some, but by no means all, of the lower perceived quality of middle schools. This finding is of interest given recent research suggesting that middle schools have adverse consequences for student achievement (see “Stuck in the Middle,” research). In contrast, neither school size nor pupil-teacher ratio are important determinants of perceptions of school quality. In fact, the weak relationship between pupil-teacher ratio and school ratings is in the opposite of the expected direction: schools with larger classes receive somewhat higher grades, perhaps because effective schools attract more families to the neighborhood.

As noted above, it has often been speculated that disadvantaged groups are less informed about school quality than more-advantaged groups. But we find that the relationship between school performance and citizen ratings is as strong for African American and Hispanic respondents as it is for whites. The relationship between school quality and citizen ratings is also essentially the same for high-income and more-educated respondents as it is for low-income and less-educated respondents.

We also consider whether the relationship between school performance and citizen ratings is stronger for parents of school-age children, who are arguably the most connected to their local schools, or for homeowners, whose property values are influenced by school quality. Perhaps surprisingly, homeowners are no more sensitive to differences in school quality than are other citizens. However, the relationship between proficiency rates and school ratings is more than twice as strong for parents of school-age children than for other respondents (see Figure 2). An increase of one standard deviation in percent proficient is associated with a rating from parents that is one-third of a letter grade higher, as compared with 16 percent of a letter grade higher for the public as a whole. Parents also give low-scoring schools far lower ratings than do other local residents, but this difference narrows and eventually reverses direction as proficiency rates increase (see Figure 3). Like those of other citizens, parents’ ratings of local schools are not influenced by the schools’ racial/ethnic composition, school size, or pupil-teacher ratios. However, parents do appear to be somewhat more responsive than other citizens to school poverty rates and take an especially dim view of middle schools, assigning them grades that are 39 percent of a letter grade lower than otherwise similar elementary schools.

Finally, we consider the issue of differences in school quality across states. Because NCLB allows each state to set its own standards for proficiency, schools in different states with the same percentage of students achieving proficiency may be of markedly different quality if one state has high standards and the other low. The national sample allows us to examine the degree to which citizen ratings of school quality are responsive to performance levels relative to the nation or simply to differences in performance within specific states. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) conducted every two years by the U.S. Department of Education provides evidence on the average performance of 4th- and 8th-grade students in each state in mathematics and reading. We use data from the 2007 NAEP to see whether respondents in states with higher-scoring students rate their schools higher, on average, than respondents in states with lower NAEP scores. That is, if we compare respondents whose local schools have the same proficiency rate as measured by their state test, do the respondents in states with better schools, as measured by student performance on the NAEP, assign their school higher grades? We find no evidence that respondents in general, or even parents, have information about school quality beyond the information provided on the state assessments. In other words, citizens appear to be taking cues about school quality from local comparisons or from information provided by their state testing system without taking into account the relative rigor of state standards.

Levels or Growth?

Our analysis yields strong evidence that citizens, and especially parents of school-age children, rate schools in a way that lines up with publicly available information about school quality. As discussed previously, however, the percentage of students scoring at the proficient level on state tests is an imperfect indicator of school quality, contaminated as it is by the fact that student achievement is influenced by a host of factors outside of a school’s control. A better, if still an imperfect, measure of school quality is the amount of growth in student achievement from one year to the next. To examine the correspondence of citizen perceptions of school quality and measures of test-score growth, we turn to our representative sample of residents of Florida, where the state accountability system evaluates schools based on both test-score levels and test-score growth. Because high-school performance data are widely available in Florida, we are able to include high schools in this portion of the analysis.

Florida assigns schools letter grades based on a point system with eight main components, which we divide into two categories: level-related points (percentage proficient in math, English, writing, and science) and growth-related points (percentage making learning gains in math and reading and the percentage of the lowest 25 percent of students making gains in math and reading). The level variable is highly correlated with the school quality measure (percent proficient) used in the national analysis, but the correlation between the growth variable and percent proficient is considerably weaker.

Our basic strategy is to compare the ratings Florida residents assigned to their schools both to test-score levels and to test-score growth at those schools. Because measures of test-score growth are less stable over time than measures of test-score levels, we average the points awarded to each school based on levels and growth over the previous three years. Adjustments are also made for the same demographic and school characteristics as in the national analysis. To make the results as comparable as possible to those reported for the national sample, we also scale the point variables so that a one-unit increase in each variable corresponds to a shift of one standard deviation in the performance distribution of Florida public schools.

The results indicate that Florida residents’ perceptions of school quality are even more responsive to differences in student achievement levels than are those of the national public. An increase of one standard deviation in the level variable is associated with ratings that are almost one-third of a letter grade higher after taking into account other school characteristics. We also find that perceptions of school quality in Florida are unrelated to student demographic characteristics, including the percentage of students who are poor, once we take into account levels of student achievement. Although we cannot be sure, both Floridians’ greater responsiveness to test performance and their lack of responsiveness to student demographic characteristics could reflect the transparency and salience of the state’s high-profile school accountability system.

When both the test-score level and growth variables are examined simultaneously, however, the relationship between level-related points and citizen evaluations of schools is almost twice as strong as for growth-related points. This suggests that citizen ratings do reflect differences in the growth in student achievement across schools, but that this is primarily because of the correlation between achievement levels and achievement growth.

The Role of Accountability Systems

So far we have shown that citizens’ assessments of schools are strongly related to objective measures of performance made available by state accountability systems. Yet it is difficult to determine whether respondents’ apparent sensitivity to actual quality is the result of publicly available information or simply direct experience with schools. The fact that parental perceptions track actual school quality more closely than those of other citizens, but the perceptions of homeowners do not, suggests that direct interactions with a school may be a more important factor than simply having a vested interest in acquiring information about local school quality. But do accountability systems also play a role in shaping citizen perceptions?

Again, Florida provides an ideal case for more detailed analysis. As noted above, the Florida Department of Education uses the total number of points received (i.e., the sum of level- and growth-related points) to assign each school a letter grade between A and F. These grades receive considerable media attention in Florida, so we might expect citizen ratings to be correlated with them. This expectation is confirmed in the data: a school grade that is one point higher (again measured on a standard GPA scale) is associated with a respondent rating that is 0.2 grades higher.

To test the hypothesis that publicly available information has an impact over and above direct observation of school performance, we can compare the ratings given by respondents whose schools were very close to the cutoffs in the point system used by Florida to assign school grades. We know that schools with more points received higher ratings on average, but might also expect to see a “jump” in the average rating at these cutoffs. Because schools on either side of the cutoff should be of essentially the same quality, we can interpret any jump in the rating observed at the cutoff as the pure effect of information provided by the school grade on citizen perceptions of school quality.

We focus our attention on the B/C cutoff, because that is the only one for which we have enough respondents assigned to schools near the cutoff to yield results with a reasonable degree of precision. Comparing respondents’ ratings of schools on either side of this cutoff suggests a large positive effect of receiving the higher (B) grade, with an increase in the grades assigned to schools in the range of of 36 to 57 percent of a letter grade. That the publicized school grades have a direct effect on respondent ratings over and above the relationship between ratings and the underlying point variables suggests that the signals provided by the state’s school accountability system do in fact affect citizen perceptions of their local schools.

Implications

The findings reported above represent the first systematic evidence that Americans’ perceptions of the quality of their local public schools reflect publicly available information about the academic achievement of the students who attend them. Importantly, disadvantaged segments of the population are no less informed about school quality than other citizens. Although the mechanisms explaining this responsiveness are not entirely clear, our evidence suggests that both direct experience with schools and the public dissemination of performance data may play a role.

It is worth emphasizing several limitations on this evidence of responsiveness. First, the relationship between actual and perceived quality is modest for citizens as a whole, although it is quite strong for parents, who have the most opportunities to observe schools and arguably have the strongest incentives to be informed. Second, both parents and the public appear to be more responsive to the level of student achievement at a school than to the amount students learn from one year to the next. Finally, citizens appear sensitive to relative differences in school quality within their state (as reflected in school performance on state tests) but insensitive to information on school quality in the state as a whole (as measured by statewide performance on a national assessment).

Even so, at least two policy implications emerge from our results. First, our finding that accountability ratings influence citizens’ assessments of their local schools coupled with the fact that citizen ratings are more strongly associated with achievement levels than with achievement growth suggest that featuring growth measures more prominently in school accountability ratings could cause citizens to pay more attention to this barometer of school quality. Second, our finding that citizen ratings are associated with student performance on state tests but not with performance on a national assessment suggests that a closer alignment of state standards (or a move toward common standards across states) might help citizens form more accurate perceptions of their schools. In particular, it could lower perceptions of school quality in states where many students perform poorly relative to national norms but are deemed proficient by the state.

Matthew M. Chingos is a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Michael Henderson is a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s Department of Government. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive editor of Education Next.

Many states permit the formation of charter schools, which are publicly funded but are not managed by the local school board. These schools are expected to meet promised objectives, but are exempt from many state regulations. Do you support or oppose the formation of charter schools?

Respondents also had the option of saying they “neither support or oppose” charters – an important detail as our previous surveys have indicated that many Americans have yet to take a position on the issue.

The charts below compare the 2010 results with those obtained the previous two years, when we asked exactly the same question.  Support for charters among the public at large has remained relatively stable since 2008, ebbing slightly to 39 percent in 2009 before rebounding to 44 percent in 2010.  Among African Americans, however, support has increased from 42 percent to 64 percent, jumping 15 percentage points in the past year alone.  Meanwhile, Hispanic support for charters has increased from 37 percent to 47 percent.  And charters continue to have relatively few outright opponents, either in the public as a whole or among minorities.

It is puzzling, then, that a coalition of prominent civil rights organizations last week issued a statement criticizing the Obama administration’s current emphasis on chartering as a strategy to turn around low-performing schools and bemoaning the heavy concentration of charters in high-minority areas.

Fortunately, the president does not seem to have taken their concerns to heart.  He and his education secretary Arne Duncan, in separate speeches last week to the National Urban League, offered no apologies for their support for charter schools.  It would appear that the president (or perhaps his pollsters) has a better sense of the minority community’s views than does the NAACP.

So let’s have a look at what the people think:

Teachers with tenure cannot be dismissed unless a school district follows detailed procedures. Some say that tenure protects teachers from being fired for arbitrary reasons. Others say that it makes it too difficult to replace ineffective teachers.  We want to know what you think of tenure. Do you favor or oppose offering tenure to teachers?

Favor: 26 percent

No opinion: 28 percent

Oppose: 45 percent

Sample size: 953

Do you favor or oppose basing a teacher’s salary, in part, on his or her students’ academic progress on state tests?

Favor: 36 percent

No opinion: 26 percent

Oppose: 38 percent

Sample size: 311

President Barack Obama has expressed support for the policy of basing teachers’ salaries, in part, on their students’ academic progress on tests? What do you think of this policy?

Favor: 50 percent

No opinion: 21 percent

Oppose: 29 percent

Sample size: 300

On teacher tenure, those opposed to the practice outnumber supporters by 20 percentage points, although a sizable minority remains undecided.    Those opposed to tenure also appeared to hold their views more strongly: more than 16 percent reported that they “completely oppose” tenure, while fewer than 6 percent said that they “completely favor” tenure.

Roughly equal shares of Floridians favored and opposed merit pay, although again more than one quarter of the state was undecided.  Yet among respondents who were first told that President Obama supported the practice, support jumped to 50 percent.

As I read these results, the “people’s governor” need not worry that signing this legislation would be at odds with the public’s views.  At a minimum, he has the opportunity to show leadership, as public opinion has not completely jelled one way or another.

* The 2009 Education Next-PEPG Survey included an over-sample of 948 residents of the state of Florida.  Complete results for the national sample and details on methods are available here.

A follow-up study now available in the NBER Working Paper series [subscription required] puts these concerns to rest.  Jackson, who now has access to more refined student-level data than used in his previous study, confirms that students in participating schools attended college in greater numbers.  More important, he shows that the program increased their college GPAs and led to higher college completion rates among blacks and Hispanics.

As Jackson explains, the study provides an unfortunately rare example of a late-high-school intervention that seems to yield lasting benefits for students.  And while the Advanced Placement Incentive Program is not a “pure cash incentive program” (it also involves teacher training and curricular changes in earlier grades intended to insure students are prepared for AP courses), the results suggest that thoughtfully designed programs that include cash incentives for students can promote college readiness.

Apparently New Mexico, New York City, and schools around the country are implementing or considering similar programs.  Let’s hope they follow through and see similar results.

What do Americans think about their schools? More important, perhaps, what would it take to change their minds? Can a president at the peak of his popularity convince people to rethink their positions on specific education reforms? Might research findings do so? And when do new facts have the potential to alter public thinking? Answers to these questions can be gleaned from surveys conducted over the past three years under the auspices of Education Next and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). (For full results from the 2009 survey, download the PDF; for the 2007 and 2008 surveys see “What Americans Think about Their Schools,” features, Fall 2007, and “The 2008 Education Next—PEPG Survey of Public Opinion,” features, Fall 2008).

In a series of survey experiments, we find a substantial share of the public willing to reconsider its policy prescriptions for public schools. But this responsiveness is not uniform: presidential appeals are more persuasive to fellow partisans than to those who identify with the opposition party, research findings have the greatest impact when an issue remains unsettled, and learning basic facts has the biggest impact when those facts are not well known. None of this comes as a surprise, until one considers how stable aggregate public opinion has been over time.

Individual Volatility but Collective Stability
The opinions expressed by individuals, when surveyed on political issues to which they have not given much thought, can appear so fragile as to be meaningless. More than one psephologist has shown that it is not uncommon for people, when repeatedly asked the same question, to give a positive response the first time, offer a negative one on the second occasion, and then return to a positive position the third time around. In such situations, opinions seem to be so lightly held they lack any content whatsoever.

Our own data likewise reveal a fair amount of volatility in the views expressed in the three Education Next—PEPG surveys by individual respondents, many of whom participated in multiple years. Of those asked to grade the nation’s public schools in both 2008 and 2009, for example, only 59 percent assigned the same grade both years. Among those who gave a grade of “A” or “B” in 2008, 46 percent awarded a grade of “C” or lower in 2009.

Numerous respondents also expressed different views on controversial policy issues across survey years. Among those who either completely or somewhat supported merit pay in 2008, 34 percent did not give that support one year later. Conversely, 29 percent of respondents who either completely or somewhat opposed the policy in 2008 did not express that opposition the next year. Similar churning is evident in the responses to questions concerning single-sex public schools, charter schools, and national standards.

The flip-flop that characterizes as much as one-third of individual responses does not produce equally large fluctuations in aggregate public opinion, however. On the contrary, the percentage of Americans holding to a particular point of view typically remains stable from one year to the next. On two-thirds of the domestic issues studied by political scientists Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro, opinion did not change by more than 5 percentage points, despite the fact that years separated the fielding of different surveys. In the aftermath of major events—wars, economic recessions, or a terrorist attack—the views of the public as a whole may change abruptly and dramatically. More commonly, though, public opinion either holds firm or eases slowly in one direction or another.

Thinking on education policy follows the general pattern. In the three years of Education Next—PEPG surveys, we found little change in the responses to many of the questions posed in identical or similar ways across successive years (see Figure 1). Public opinion held steady on such issues as the introduction of merit pay for teachers, setting of uniform educational standards across the country, and the desirability of single-sex education.

Nor did the public’s evaluation of American schools change much between 2007 and 2009, despite the media drumbeat of negative information about dropout rates and test scores. Indeed, the percentage of those surveyed willing to give the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B” slipped by just four points, from 22 percent in 2007 to 18 percent in 2009. Meanwhile, the share of adults giving schools a “D” or an “F” hovered around 25 percent throughout the three-year period (see Figure 2).

What accounts for the differences between individual and aggregate public opinion? Undoubtedly, part of the explanation is measurement error. Some of those answering our survey questions may have simply misread or misunderstood the questions in one year or the other, so their opinion seems to have changed when in fact it did not. Ordinarily, that kind of error balances itself out, as mistakes by one individual offset opposite errors by another.

But it seems unlikely that a third of our respondents would make such mistakes, and a substantial body of research on political behavior suggests that something else is going on as well. One prominent theory emphasizes the influence of public discourse. When people answer a survey item, they often draw upon a recent media report they have heard or conversation they have had with friends, relatives, or co-workers. Individual responses, then, vary from week to week as people are exposed to different claims. Collective opinion, however, remains constant so long as the general discourse does. If that theory is correct, then opinion in the aggregate changes only when public discourse shifts—either by a major event or with the introduction of a new fact or a new political force.

On some education issues, public discourse has changed since 2007. For instance, support for the federal No Child Left Behind Act has eroded, as evidence accumulated that the federal law was not living up to the promise of its grossly overstated name and politicians in both major parties found it to be an easy target (see Figure 3). Between 2007 and 2008, the share of adults who thought the law should be renewed (with no more than minor changes) fell by 7 percentage points. Support for the law stabilized after 2008, however, and roughly half the population still supports its reenactment with no more than modest revisions. And as we saw in previous years, a randomly selected group of respondents who were asked about “federal accountability policy” rather than “No Child Left Behind” expressed even higher levels of support.

Similarly, as the current recession deepens, we see hints of growing taxpayer resistance to the rising cost of education. Support for increased spending on public education fell from 51 to 46 percent between 2007 and 2009. Confidence that spending more on schools would enhance school quality fell by a similar amount, from 59 to 53 percent. Still, these changes remain modest. Facing the most significant economic downturn since the Great Depression, most Americans continue to support increased spending on their local public schools.

What would it take, then, to move aggregate public thinking decisively in one direction or another? Might influential public figures, research findings, or factual knowledge lead at least some portions of the American public to update its thinking? To find out, we divided the more than 3,000 respondents to our 2009 survey into randomly chosen groups. The first group was simply asked its opinion about a policy question, while the second (and often a third or fourth) group was given some additional piece of information, such as the president’s position on the issue, a research finding, or a key fact. By comparing answers given by the different groups, which should be similar in composition, it is possible to gauge the impact of these additional sources of information on the public’s views. (For more methodological details, see sidebar.)

Professors or Politicians: Who Is More Influential?
We fielded our survey in March of 2009, when newly elected president Barack Obama enjoyed public approval ratings above 60 percent. The timing of the survey provided an ideal opportunity to estimate the impact an endorsement by a popular president can have on policy views.

To ascertain the president’s influence, we conducted some simple experiments. On three topics—merit pay, charter schools, and school vouchers—one group of survey respondents was asked its opinion without any special prompt. Another group was first told the president’s position on the issue before being asked for its own. A third group was instead told about evidence from research on the policy’s effects on student learning. We did not specify a specific study, as the point was not to estimate the influence of any particular piece of research but rather the potential impact such evidence might have.

Merit Pay: When asked for an opinion straight out, a slight plurality of Americans sampled—43 percent—supported the idea of “basing a teacher’s salary, in part, on his or her students’ academic progress on state tests.” Twenty-seven percent opposed the idea, with the remaining 30 percent undecided. As noted above, that pattern of opinion has hardly budged since 2007.

Such stability over time, however, masks a propensity of some Americans to alter their views in light of an appeal by a popular political leader. Those informed of President Obama’s support for merit pay favored the idea by 13 percentage points more than those not so informed (see Figure 4). Obama’s backing had a particularly dramatic impact on African Americans, whose support jumped by 23 percentage points. Even many teachers were persuaded. Initially, only 12 percent of those not informed of Obama’s opinion thought merit pay a good idea, but that number jumped to 31 percent among those told of the president’s position. Obama’s endorsement caused support among Democrats to rise from 41 to 56 percent. Among Republicans, too, backing for the idea rose, albeit by a lesser amount (from 48 to 59 percent).

By comparison, policy research on the topic had a modest impact on public thinking. Among those told that “a recent study presents evidence that students learn more when their teachers are paid, in part, according to their students’ academic progress on tests,” support for merit pay climbed by just 6 percentage points above the support given when that information was withheld. The one subgroup to register especially large changes was African Americans, among whom support skyrocketed by 28 percentage points. Democrats were somewhat more responsive to research evidence than other segments of the public, with their support for merit pay increasing by 10 percentage points.

School Vouchers: Public opinion on school vouchers varied somewhat, depending on the way in which the question was worded. To one group of respondents we presented the issue as follows: “A proposal has been made that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition. Would you favor or oppose this proposal?” In this instance, 40 percent of the respondents gave a favorable reply and 34 percent a negative one, with 27 percent taking a middling position. But when we posed the question slightly differently—asking about a “proposal that would use government funds to help pay the tuition of low-income students whose families would like them to attend private schools”—just 35 percent supported the idea. In this instance, a small alteration in wording shifted public opinion by 5 percentage points.

We also find that public support for vouchers declined by 5 percentage points between 2008 and 2009, perhaps as a result of the opposition to vouchers expressed by most Democratic presidential candidates during that party’s extended primary-election campaign, which conceivably could have altered the balance of public discourse. That interpretation is reinforced by the impact that President Obama’s position can have on public opinion. Overall, the percentage favoring vouchers was 11 points lower among those informed of the president’s opposition than among those not so informed (35 percent to 24 percent, see Figure 4). We also observed large partisan differences in the president’s influence on this issue. Whereas just 30 percent of Democrats expressed opposition to vouchers when asked outright, 52 percent did so after hearing of Obama’s opposition. By comparison, opposition among Republicans increased only slightly, from 50 to 54 percent. African Americans expressed higher levels of support for vouchers than did the population as a whole (57 percent), but support also was 12 percentage points lower among those African Americans told of presidential opposition.

A study that “presents evidence that students learn no more in private school than in public schools” depressed support for vouchers by 10 percentage points overall, an impact almost as large as presidential position taking. The same research evidence reduced support among Democrats by 15 percentage points, as compared to 6 percentage points for Republicans.

Charter Schools: Most Americans have yet to make up their minds about charter schools. Though 39 percent expressed support and only 17 percent signaled opposition in 2009, 44 percent remained undecided. These responses look much as they did in both 2007 and 2008, an indication that public discourse on charters has not changed significantly in recent years.

Despite that stability of public opinion about charters, aggregate support increased by 11 percentage points when respondents were told that Obama backed them (see Figure 4). We again found evidence that Obama’s impact has a partisan tinge. Among his fellow Democrats, Obama’s support is an unmitigated asset for charter school advocates, lifting support from 35 to 47 percent. But among Republicans, the percentage favoring charters increased by only 5 points (from 47 to 52 percent) upon learning of Obama’s endorsement. That endorsement actually decreased the proportion of Republicans who “completely” supported charter schools, from 22 to 15 percent.

When it comes to charter schools, research findings appear every bit as influential as a popular president. Told that recent research showed “students learn more in charter schools than in public schools,” support for charter schools rose by 14 percentage points. Among African Americans, the percentage who “completely” supported charter schools climbed by fully 23 percentage points, from 14 to 37 percent. Hispanics, meanwhile, were least persuaded by the evidence; only 5 percent altered their opinions. As they did on the previous items, Democrats appear to be more impressed by research than Republicans. Among those given evidence that charter schools enhance student learning, Democratic support for charter schools shot upward by 18 percentage points to 53 percent (compared to 35 percent among those not so informed), while the percentage of Republicans favoring such schools shifted by just 12 percentage points.

When all three issues—merit pay, vouchers, and charters—are considered together, a case can be made that new policy research, if communicated widely, can have an impact rivaling that of an influential president at the peak of his popularity. Admittedly, evidence from the research community does not have the same consistent impact on opinion as Obama’s position taking, which at the time of our survey could move overall public opinion by anywhere from 11 percentage points (in the case of charters) to 13 percentage points (in the case of merit pay). But the impact of a study is of comparable magnitude, ranging from 6 percentage points (in the case of merit pay) to 10 percentage points (in the case of vouchers) to 14 percentage points (in the case of charters). Research appears particularly influential among Democrats and when the general public’s own views have yet to take shape. That half the public has yet to make up its mind about charter schools may provide researchers with an opportunity to shape the public conversation going forward.

Stubborn Facts
How about raw facts concerning the state of American education? What does the public actually know about the performance of the nation’s public schools and the resources devoted to them? And is the public willing to update its views when told the truth?

We conducted additional experiments to investigate these issues. In 2007, we asked respondents to estimate average per-pupil expenditures within their local school district and the average teacher salaries in their states. When we discovered that those surveyed, on average, underestimated per-pupil expenditures by more than half and teacher salaries by roughly 30 percent, we wondered whether people had equally poor information about the performance of American high schools (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009). So in 2009 we asked a random third of our sample to estimate high school graduation rates and another third to estimate the international standing of U.S. 15-year-olds in math. The remaining two-thirds of the sample was told the truth about one or the other of these matters, allowing us to see whether people’s assessments of their schools differed when given accurate information.

To our surprise, the public had a far more accurate understanding of student performance than they had of teacher salaries and per-pupil spending. When it comes to high school graduation rates nationwide, the best available estimates from the U.S. Department of Education suggest that roughly 75 percent of those who enter 9th grade graduate within four years, a far cry from the goal of universal high school completion to which the president of the United States and all 50 governors in 1989 committed themselves to reaching by the year 2000. When asked to give their own estimate, without any hint or help as to what the right answer might be, those surveyed came up with an even more pessimistic estimate of 66 percent, 9 percentage points below actual levels. Excluding those respondents who gave answers of less than 25 percent (on the grounds that they may have misunderstood the question or not taken it seriously) increases the average estimate only slightly to 69 percent. Either estimate is nonetheless a good deal closer to, and a good deal less optimistic about, the truth than the wildly inaccurate estimates that the public offered about teacher salaries and school expenditures.

The public was only slightly less accurate when it came to estimating how well 15-year-olds in the United States do in math, as compared to students in 29 of the leading industrialized countries. Here the correct answer, according to the latest tests administered by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program on International Student Assessment (PISA), is 24th out of 29th. Both the average and median guess was 18th, a bit more optimistic than actual PISA results but not too far off the mark. Clearly, Americans have not been deceived into believing that our students are outperforming their counterparts abroad.

So what happens when the public is told the truth? Not much, it turns out, if people already have a pretty solid grasp of the relevant facts. When informed that 75 percent of students graduated from high school, the public took that as neutral to mildly good news, as the percentage giving schools an “A” or “B” increased by a trivial 2 points and the percentage getting a “D” or “F” dropped by 1 point (both statistically insignificant changes). Learning the truth about the international standing of American students had a bigger impact, reducing the share of respondents giving a grade of “A” or “B” from 18 to 13 percent and increasing the share of respondents giving a “D” or “F” by 10 percentage points (see Figure 5a).

In the case of spending, however, learning the truth shifted opinion by a larger margin (see Figure 5b). For the nation as a whole, overall support for higher spending levels dropped by 8 percentage points (from 46 to 38 percent) when respondents were informed of actual per-pupil expenditures in their own district. The impacts of this information varied widely across subgroups. Told the truth about per-pupil expenditures, the share of African Americans willing to support additional spending plummeted from 82 to 48 percent. Perhaps not surprisingly, teachers held firm in their commitment to higher spending.

Even larger impacts are observed on support for increased teacher salaries. When informed about actual average teacher salaries in their state, respondents’ support for higher salaries dropped by 16 percentage points (from 56 to 40 percent). In this instance, roughly comparable impacts are observed for all three ethnic groups. But as one might again expect, teachers’ support for high salaries was relatively undiminished, dropping just 6 percentage points (from 77 to 71 percent).

Why does the public have a generally accurate understanding of school performance but a gross misunderstanding of the amount that is spent on education? The answer may have to do with the availability of information on these issues. It is true that the U.S. Department of Education regularly releases information on all four topics in the same document, the Digest of Education Statistics. But student dropout rates and student performance on international tests receive much more extensive attention in the news media than information about per-pupil spending in individual school districts or teacher salaries in specific states. The cost of education is divided among federal, state, and local governments, and the total sums are difficult to assemble until that is done by the federal government several years after the fact.

It is unlikely that organizations outside of the media are likely to pick up the slack. With a large share of the population convinced that schools and teachers should be given more money, or at least be held harmless, few if any interest groups or politicians have an incentive to dramatize the fact that spending levels and teacher salaries are much higher than most people believe. So school reformers instead focus on low test scores and high dropout rates as justification for merit pay, school accountability initiatives, and other school choice reforms. The public may only learn about the true cost of education when a popular political figure stakes a political career on telling them. That, we suspect, is as likely as the Cubs winning the Super Bowl.

Surveys and Realities
Our experiments only hint at what could happen in the real world of school politics. It is one thing to inform a captive audience of survey respondents about the president’s position, the results from research, or a key fact about American education. Reaching the entire American public is a completely different matter. To change opinions, one must get the public’s attention. And that is no easy task, when jobs, family life, entertainment, and sports command a higher priority in most households. Only 38 percent of the respondents to our survey report paying “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention to education issues. And even the power of presidents is limited by the large number of issues to which they must attend. President Obama’s genuine thoughts on such matters as merit pay, charters, and vouchers, however deeply held, necessarily command far less of his time and energy than the multitude of foreign policy, economic, and other domestic problems to which he must devote his attention.

Still, our findings suggest that a well-publicized stance taken by a popular president on an education issue might shift the opinions of large segments of the American public. Similarly, scholarship appears to be a potent weapon for groups with policy agendas they wish to pursue, as the committed can broadcast research findings with great repetition. Indeed, any group that seeks to change public opinion without gathering research to back its positions is leaving a flank unprotected. Finally, advocates are well advised to search for facts the public does not understand, and then to communicate those facts as widely as they can. Just as nothing affects opinion about an ongoing war as quickly as communiqués from the front, so too a better understanding of the facts about the public schools could in the long run shape American education.

William G. Howell is Sydney Stein Professor of American Politics at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and editor-in-chief of Education Next.Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and executive editor of Education Next.

Nowadays, academic book reviews either stodgily summarize the book, then close with a few half-hearted compliments designed to ingratiate the reviewer with the author or, if not that, then take the opportunity as an occasion to denounce the author as a reactionary while writing a two-page, undocumented treatise on the same subject.

These thoughts came to mind upon reading the review of a book we edited entitled School Money Trials (Brookings, 2007) that recently appeared in the Journal of Law and Education. One looks in vain for an exploration of the arguments in any of the essays in the volume. That would require thought. It is much easier to say that the “writers are familiar to anyone acquainted with the conservative journal Education Next” and that “nearly all have worked with the Hoover Institute in other ways.”  (Fact check: To the best of our knowledge, only one contributor other than Paul Peterson has ever been on the Hoover payroll.)

Instead the reviewer, Julie Underwood, Dean of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s education school, criticizes the following three propositions. The propositions she constructed are nowhere to be found in our book but she criticizes them nonetheless:

1. “Adequacy litigation was devised as a strategy to reform public education.”  Wrong, says Professor Underwood.  “The objective is to apply state education clauses as a mandate to better ensure that high-need programs possess the means to provide all students with adequate opportunity to achieve to at least the minimum standards.”

Comment:  Is that not reform?  Michael Rebell, the leading litigator in the adequacy movement, certainly thinks so.

2. “Courts are unable to delineate legal standards for adequacy.”  Wrong, says Professor Underwood.  “Educational experts and analysts can offer sufficient evidence to enable courts to make these decisions.”

Comment: Asserting that something can be done does not make it so. Several essays in the volume – including one by Mathew Springer and James Guthrie which the Supreme Court cited it its 2009 Flores decision – show just how difficult the task of defining an adequate level of education spending truly is. More generally, Flores has jeopardized the future of the adequacy law suit, a trend already in place at the state level (as a number of essayists in our volume point out).

3. “School spending is entirely within the province of the elected officials.” Wrong, says Professor Underwood.  “Under the core principles of judicial review set forth in Marbury v. Madison . . ., the courts hold the authority to determine whether the actions of government, including legislatures, are consistent within the constitutional framework. . . . History . . .clearly exposes the fallibility of elected officials.”

It is a long ways from Marbury to a legal justification for the claims advanced by adequacy plaintiffs.  Marbury discerned the power of judicial review in the federal constitution in 1803, but no court attempted to find a constitutional definition of educational adequacy until 1989.  If Marbury is to be understood as giving the courts the power to correct elected officials at any time and in every instance when they are wrong, then we no longer have a democracy, but a judicial theocracy.

Still, we appreciate Professor Underwood’s concluding remarks that “it is to their credit that Brookings Institution published this volume…these contributors are noted scholars and authors.” There are some good things about the new style of book reviewing after all.

For a full review of Crossing the Finish Line, plese see “Can Johnny Graduate from College?” by Russ Whitehurst.

For more on this topic, please see “The Persuadable Public” in the Fall 2009 issue of Education Next.

As the New York Times notes, these encouraging results stand in stark contrast with those from the Grey Lady’s own “analysis” of the effectiveness of the principals from the APP, an analysis which was based on the district’s A-through-F report card grading system.  In May, the paper reported (in an article given the headline “Principals Younger and Freer, but Raise Doubts in the Schools”) that “schools with academy graduates were less than half as likely to earn A’s and almost twice as likely to earn C’s or worse” as other city schools.  Even compared to schools with novice principals, graduates of the APP were less than half as likely to earn an A.

What gives?  Well, in addition to using a much cruder measure of school performance, the earlier analysis by the Times ignored the fact that the schools in which APP graduates were placed were much lower performing before the new principals arrived—a fact that is clearly documented in the NYU study.  What’s more, the schools were on a steep downward trajectory in the years just prior to the APP graduates’ arrival.  As author Sean Corcoran told Education Week, “These were schools no one wanted.”  The simple step of taking into account their different starting points changed the story entirely.

The NYU study is not without its limitations.  It is not a randomized experiment, its authors did not have access to student-level data, and they could only look at principals who remained in their new schools for three years or more. Moreover, the positive effects were small (about 6 percent of a standard deviation by year three) and limited to one subject.  A close look at the results reveals that the APP graduates succeeded mainly in avoiding the loss in relative achievement ordinarily associated with new leadership rather than making progress relative to the city schools as a whole.

But this early evidence suggests that the Aspiring Principals Program is yielding positive results—and hardly deserved the premature and, as it turns out, misleading treatment it was afforded by the New York Times.  Perhaps the paper should stick to covering education research rather than conducting it.  (Of course, its track record on this front is hardly perfect, but it would still be a step in the right direction.)

See here for more local discussion of the new study, including additional comments and caveats from Corcoran.

While the participants were familiar, the challenges were in other respects unusual. Two of the cases involved programs offering tax credits for donations to scholarship funds, which have elsewhere avoided legal challenge since a favorable ruling from the Arizona Supreme Court in 1999. Equally uncharacteristic was litigation involving voucher programs for students with special needs and those in foster care. Politically popular and seemingly consistent with the practice of private placement under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, special-education voucher programs in Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Utah have not faced court challenge.

The longest-running of the cases, filed in federal court in 2000, alleged that Arizona’s individual tax-credit program violates the establishment clause of the U.S. Constitution by permitting organizations to provide scholarships to students that can be used only at religious schools. This, plaintiffs argued, means that participating parents lack “true private choice” as defined by Zelman. Defendants responded that the program offers choice to both taxpayers claiming the credit and parents accepting scholarships, thus achieving “a double attenuation separating the state and religion.” They also asserted that the program must be evaluated in light of the full range of choices available to Arizona parents, including interdistrict transfers and ample charter schools.

A Ninth Circuit panel that included the famously liberal Stephen Reinhardt sided with the plaintiffs. While it did not deem scholarship tax credits generally unconstitutional, the decision, if not overturned on appeal, will prevent religious organizations from participating in similar initiatives nationwide—including a parallel program for corporate donations upheld by an Arizona appellate court just weeks earlier.

The irony in the Ninth Circuit outcome is that the tax-credit mechanism, which Arizona adopted in order to avoid legal challenges, created a new pitfall; there is little doubt that a program that offered vouchers directly to parents instead would now be acceptable as a matter of federal law. Still, the value of tax-credit programs in states with strong constitutional prohibitions on aid to religious schools was confirmed by the near-simultaneous invalidation of Arizona’s new voucher programs.

The Arizona Supreme Court ruled in Cain v. Horne that voucher programs violate the aid clause of the Arizona Constitution, which states, “No tax shall be laid or appropriation of public money made in aid of any…private or sectarian school.” The court rejected the notion that vouchers aid students rather than schools, arguing that such an interpretation “would nullify the Aid Clause’s clear prohibition.” It thus ignored the state’s argument that the clause would still ban grants to private schools for such purposes as teacher salaries even if the complaint were dismissed.

The court also failed to distinguish the programs from other Arizona policies through which beneficiaries use public funds to attend private and religious schools. Foster children, for example, become eligible at the age of 16 for grants of $5,000 to be used at the college of their choice. And more than 1,000 special-education students annually are educated in private settings at public expense because their school districts could not meet their needs. If government officials, whose behavior the constitution is clearly intended to constrain, are able to make this choice, it is hard to see why parents should not also be able to do so.

Seven years after Zelman, court challenges continue to shape the pace and trajectory of choice-based reform in Arizona and elsewhere. The constantly evolving nature of the complaints suggests that opponents’ objections are politically—not legally—motivated. It is unfortunate that they are succeeding in getting the courts to revisit policy decisions made by more representative bodies.

Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an executive editor of Education Next.

Scholars have attempted to discern the effects of competition between the public and private sectors within the United States and in other countries, but no study, to our knowledge, has attempted to measure systematically the causal impact of competition by looking at variation across countries. Until now, research has been stymied by the fact that any simplistic statistical correlations between the extent of competition and student achievement that might be found are suspect. Countries where more people choose to invest in private schools may have other attributes, such as more income or a greater commitment to education, that lead to higher levels of achievement. If this is the case, any positive correlation between private schooling and student achievement could reflect a country’s income or educational commitment rather than any beneficial effects of competition. Or it may be the case that low-quality public schools increase the demand for private schooling. If so, then it could appear that competition lowered the quality of public schooling when in fact the causal connection was in the opposite direction.

In this study, we solve this conundrum by taking advantage of the historical fact that the amount of competition in education today varies from one country to another for reasons that have little to do with contemporary school quality, or national income, or commitments to education. The extent of private schooling stems in large part from the Catholic Church’s decision in the 19th century to build an alternative system of education wherever they were unable to control the state-run system.

Nineteenth-century Catholic doctrine strongly opposed Catholic attendance at state-run schools that were not controlled by the Church. In the United States, for example, Catholics perceived government-operated “common schools” to be Protestant-dominated institutions that were only ostensibly nonsectarian. Local parishes responded by establishing separate schools in which children received Catholic-infused instruction. The United States was not the only country where this happened. Catholic school systems developed in many other countries, but their size depended on the percentage of Catholics living in that country during this critical period (see sidebar). (In countries where Catholicism was the state religion, there was no perceived need for private schools, however.) As a result, even today the size of the private education sector—and thus the amount of competition between public and private schools—is related to the size of the Catholic population in 1900.

To connect the historical past to competition’s effect on achievement today requires two analytic steps. We first estimate the statistical relationship between the size of the Catholic population in 1900 and the extent of private schooling today in order to capture only that share of the private sector’s size that can be attributed to 19th-century Catholic policies—policies we assume to be otherwise unrelated to contemporary student achievement. Having estimated this relationship between Catholicity in the past and competition in the present, we then use that estimate to isolate the causal effect of private school competition on the achievement of individual students across 29 countries.

Our results confirm that countries with larger shares of Catholics but without an official Catholic state religion in 1900 have significantly larger shares of privately operated schools in 2003. More important, private school competition attributable to past Catholic policies generates higher student achievement in mathematics, reading, and science today. We also show that competition between the public and private sector positively affects the achievement of students attending public schools. Spending on education is also reduced, suggesting that school systems are more productive if they are more competitive.

PISA 2003

For the information on contemporary student achievement we rely on the well-regarded data sets compiled by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) in 2003. Working closely with official government agencies, PISA gathered information on the mathematical, scientific, and reading literacy of nationally representative student populations in all 30 OECD countries. The term “literacy” signifies that the PISA measured not only the students’ knowledge of math, reading, and science, but also their ability to use that knowledge to meet real-life challenges. In 2003, PISA made a special effort to measure math literacy, allocating 70 percent of testing time to questions in this subject. PISA assessed the achievement of 15-year-old students in each country, regardless of the grade they attended. This means that, in most participating countries, PISA tested students nearing the end of compulsory schooling.

For purposes of this analysis, we constructed a data set that contained pupil-level test scores for about 220,000 students. We also were able to obtain from PISA student reports of their background characteristics and administrator reports on the characteristics of each student’s school, including such things as school resources and whether the school was public or private. All that information was available from 29 of the 30 OECD countries. (France had to be dropped from the analysis because it did not supply any information on the characteristics of its participating schools.)

We defined a school as private if the principal reported that it was managed directly or indirectly by a nongovernment organization (e.g., a church, trade union, business, or other private entity). A public school was defined as one being managed directly or indirectly by a public education authority, government agency, or governing board appointed by government officials or elected by public franchise. We used these definitions to calculate the share of private schools in a country. Throughout our study, this figure serves as our measure of the extent of contemporary private school competition in each country.

The size of the private sector so defined ranges widely across countries. In the Netherlands, more than three-quarters of 15-year-old students attend privately operated schools. Private school shares in Belgium, Ireland, and Korea are also well above one-half. By contrast, the share of students attending privately operated schools in Greece, Iceland, Italy , New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and Turkey is below 5 percent. Just over 6 percent of the American 15-yearolds sampled by PISA attended private schools, a figure that corresponds closely to official estimates of private enrollment at the secondary level from the U.S. Department of Education (see Figure 1).

ESTIMATING COMPETITIVE EFFECTS

Recall that our analysis involves two steps. First, we estimate the amount of contemporary private school competition across our 29 countries that can be accounted for by the share of each country’s population that was Catholic in 1900. Where Catholicism was the official state religion, we assign a value of zero for this variable (even though the size of the Catholic population was quite large). That decision is not as odd as it sounds, as we are interested in Catholicism only insofar as it was a factor contributing to the creation of a private sector, something that clearly was not the case in those countries where Catholicism was the state religion and Catholics had no reason to object to the education provided in state-run schools.

The second step uses the connection between past Catholicism and the contemporary size of the private sector to estimate the impact of competition on student achievement. Specifically, we measure the relationship between Catholic-induced private school competition in a country and the PISA test scores of individual students in math, reading, and science.

In taking this approach, we assume that the density of Catholics in 1900 is not directly related to student achievement today, independent of effects that may occur via school competition. While this assumption cannot be proven, there are good reasons to believe it is well founded. Protestant Christians have historically placed a greater emphasis than have Catholics on the value of education, because Protestants thought individual

Bible reading helped one along the road to salvation. Catholics placed greater emphasis on remaining connected to the traditions and practices of the Church. Interestingly enough, in those 22 majority-Christian countries for which data on literacy in 1900 are available, one finds a strong negative association between Catholic population shares and literacy rates. This strong negative correlation exists even after accounting for the lower gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, which is associated with lower literacy rates, in countries with larger Catholic population shares. So to the extent that we find any beneficial effect of Catholic-induced private school competition, its size is probably depressed by cultural values related to Catholicism. In other words, our approach is more likely to yield underestimates than overestimates of competitive effects.

Of course, the historical prevalence of Catholicism could also have had other consequences, apart from a greater reliance on private schooling, that indirectly affect student achievement. For example, the share of Catholics in a country could have an effect on current GDP per capita or education spending per student. We therefore account for the effect of both of these factors in all of our analyses.

In estimating the effect of private school competition on student achievement, we also adjust for the effects of a host of other factors that can affect individual student performance. In addition to the country-level factors of per capita GDP and education spending per student, we include in our analysis information on the presence or absence of external exit exams (which research suggests are associated with higher achievement) and information on whether the country had a Communist government in 1970 (which may have affected both the size of the private sector and achievement). Student and family background characteristics used in the analysis include a student’s gender, immigration status, exposure to early childhood education, the number of books in the home, and parental occupation and work status. Finally, we account for school resources such as class size, availability of materials, teacher certification and preparation, and amount of time for instruction.

PRIVATE SCHOOL COMPETITION AND STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

The first step of our analysis confirmed the existence of a statistically strong relationship between the extent of private school competition in 2003 and a country’s Catholic population in 1900, much as the historical record would suggest. A 10-point increase in the percentage of Catholics in 1900 is associated with a 4.7-percentage-point increase in the share of students enrolled in privately operated schools in 2003 (see Figure 2). These results support our basic reasoning that as long as Catholics could not be sure that the emerging public school systems of the 19th century would provide education in line with their church’s demands, they tended to resist state schooling and establish their own private schools alongside the state sector. The consequences of historical differences in denominational shares across countries persist to this very day.

The results from the second step of our analysis are equally striking. Let us begin with the results related to student achievement in mathematics, the subject most extensively assessed in PISA 2003. A 10-percentagepoint increase in the share of national student enrollment in private schools attributable to a historically larger share of Catholics induces an improvement in PISA math scores of 9.1 percent of a standard deviation (see Figure 3). As a benchmark for interpreting the magnitude of this effect, note that the difference in average mathematics test scores between the two grades with the largest share of 15-year-olds (9th grade and 10th grade) in the PISA study was 22.1 percent of a standard deviation. This “grade-level equivalent” provides a rough idea of how much a typical student learns during one school year. By this metric, our estimate of the effect of a 10-percentagepoint increase in private school enrollment is equivalent to 41 percent of a year’s worth of learning in high school.

Because we are able to draw on evidence from a relatively small sample of only 29 countries, the statistical precision of our estimate is not very high. That is, we can say with 95 percent confidence that the effect of a 10-percentage-point increase in the private school share is between 3.9 and 14.2 percent of a standard deviation in test scores. Still, this means we have a very high degree of confidence that the real effect is larger than zero. The bottom line is that students in countries whose larger shares of Catholic population in 1900 induced them to have larger shares of privately operated schools today performed significantly better on the PISA 2003 math test.

As an additional step to address any lingering concerns about Catholicism’s direct influence on student achievement, we conducted both stages of our analysis again, this time accounting for the relationship between contemporary differences in the share of Catholic adherents in a country and student achievement. We found that historical Catholic shares continue to be a strong predictor of the extent of private school competition in a country. In addition, the estimated effect of Catholic-induced private school shares on student achievement increases relative to our first version of the analysis, which did not account for contemporary Catholic adherence. There is now a 12.2 percent of a standard deviation increase in test scores for each 10-percentage-point increase in the private school share in a country. This larger estimate suggests that the true effect may be closer to the upper bound of the interval we identified above.

Why the stronger relationship between private school competition and student achievement? We reason that this may be because, in the latter approach, the Catholic-induced school share was reflecting the slightly negative direct effect of contemporary Catholic adherence on student achievement, a relationship that reveals itself in this version of the analysis, although the estimated effect is just shy of statistical significance. Considered together, these results increase our confidence that we are describing a real, causal relationship between private competition and student performance, rather than effects of cultural differences related to religious adherence.

The estimated effects of the private school share on student achievement are somewhat smaller in science and reading than in math, but they remain substantial, positive, and statistically significant (see Figure 2). A change in the historical Catholic population share that produces a 10-percentage-point increase in the extent of contemporary private school competition generates an improvement of about 5.5 percent of a standard deviation in both science and reading—or more than one-fifth of a grade-level equivalent in these subjects.

To gain additional insights, we also re-ran both stages of our analysis while accounting for the average share of funding that private schools receive from the government. The inclusion of this variable hardly affects our results, suggesting that our findings reflect competitive effects stemming from the private operation of schools and not from differences in funding policies.

EFFECT ON PUBLIC SCHOOL STUDENTS

The previous portions of our study investigated the impact of private competition on student achievement in the educational system as a whole. But what about the effect of private school competition on public schools? To answer this question, we removed all students attending a privately operated school from the sample in each country and analyzed only the academic achievement of students in the public sector.

These results are somewhat more difficult to interpret than our findings above, as they combine the effects from competition with the consequences of student sorting. In other words, some of what we find may be due to high-ability students (and their parents) being more likely to choose private schools, leaving the weaker students in the public sector.

Nonetheless, the results suggest that public school students profit nearly as much from increased private school competition as do a nation’s students as a whole. While our estimates of the effects are somewhat smaller than the estimates for students in both the private and public sectors, the results are not statistically distinguishable. It therefore appears that much of the increased performance of education systems with higher levels of private school competition accrues to students who attend public schools.

EDUCATION SPENDING

The analysis so far has been limited to educational outcomes, estimating the effect of private school competition on students’ achievement. In doing so, we have controlled for possible effects of differences in educational inputs such as class sizes, availability of materials, and aggregate expenditure per student in the country. We wondered, though, whether private school competition also affects the input side of the educational process, specifically educational spending per student.

We again used a two-stage process, with the first stage using historical Catholicism to predict the Catholic-induced share of current private school competition in each country. Then, in a second stage, we measured the relationship across countries between the Catholic-induced share of competition and the cumulative educational expenditure per student up to age 15—a measure that includes both public and private spending. We continued to account for a range of country- and student-level characteristics when making these comparisons, but we now excluded measures of school resources that are likely to be affected by spending levels.

Our results show that private school competition, in addition to raising student achievement, substantially reduced the average spending level of the educational system. Changes in historical shares of Catholics in the population that are associated with a 10-percentage-point increase in the private school share today lead to a $3,209 reduction in cumulative spending per student, or 5.6 percent of the average OECD spending level of $56,947 (see Figure 3).

CONCLUSION

Our findings from an international study of 29 countries speak quite clearly. Competition from private schools improves student achievement, and appears to do so for public school as well as private school students. And it produces these benefits while decreasing the total resources devoted to education, as measured by cumulative educational spending per pupil. Under competitive pressures from private schools, the productivity of the school system measured as the ratio between output and input increases by even more than is suggested by looking at educational outcomes alone. Ironically, although Catholics historically placed less emphasis on education than did adherents of many other religions, their resistance to state-run schooling in many countries helped create institutional configurations that continue to spur student achievement.

Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next.
Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich and heads the Department of Human Capital and Innovation of the Ifo Institute for Economic Research.

Local public schools receive lower marks than they did a year ago. More significantly, perhaps, survey respondents claim that their local post offices and police forces outperform their local schools. Meanwhile, support for the most far-reaching federal effort to reform public schools—the No Child Left Behind Act—has slipped. A considerable portion of the public remains undecided about charter schools. And the poll found no enthusiasm for the use of income rather than race as a basis for assigning students to schools.

This does not mean that Americans are unwilling to explore alternate ways of educating young people. A large majority of Americans would let their child take some high school courses for credit over the Internet. An equally large majority favor the education of students with emotional and behavioral disabilities in separate classrooms rather than “mainstreaming” them, as is common practice. A plurality support giving parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls public school. And a rising number of Americans know someone who is home schooling a child.

These and other findings appear in the 2008 Education Next –PEPG survey, which once again examines the views of U.S. adults taken as a whole, as well as those of white, African American, and Hispanic subgroups. In addition to the opinions of respondents from different ethnic backgrounds, we take a special look at those of public school teachers. Responses for the public as a whole and for the subgroups are reported in the tables that follow. We have also posted responses to additional questions not discussed in this essay.

Before turning to the main findings, we note an innovation in this year’s survey: the increased use of survey experiments, which are rarely employed in national education surveys. By randomly asking respondents slightly different questions about the same issue, we were able to investigate whether adjustments to policies such as national standards, affirmative action, school vouchers, and tax credits could attract broader support. In most cases, the types of policy distinctions that loom large among policy experts have little impact on public opinion. But in one or two instances, most notably the purposes for which online courses might be used, policy changes elicited quite different levels of public support.

Satisfaction with Public Schools

When asked to grade the nation’s public schools as a whole, Americans offer decidedly mixed assessments. Most notably, more of them give the schools a D or an F than assign an A or a B. Only 20 percent of survey respondents give the schools in the nation as a whole one of the two top grades, over 50 percent give them a C, and no less than 25 percent grade them with a D or an F. African Americans and Hispanics are even more likely than whites to give the nation’s schools low marks. But teachers offer the schools systematically higher grades than the rest of the public. Thirty-four percent give the schools an A or a B, while only 14 percent give them one of the two lowest grades (Q.1).

On the whole, survey respondents offered slightly lower evaluations of the nation’s schools in 2008 than they did in 2007, and some groups posted sharp declines. Twenty-seven percent of African Americans gave the public schools an A or a B in 2007, but in 2008, that figure fell to 20 percent. Meanwhile, the share of African Americans giving schools a D or an F rose from 20 percent to 31 percent. The share of Hispanics awarding schools a similarly poor grade doubled during the period, from 16 to 32 percent. For results from the 2007 poll, see “What Americans Think about Their Schools,” features , Fall 2007.

As other surveys have shown, the public’s evaluations become somewhat more favorable when the subject turns to the public schools in their own communities (see Figure 1).Forty percent of the public give the public schools in their community an A or a B, while a quarter give them a D or an F. African Americans assign lower marks: only a quarter give their local public schools an A or a B, while a third give them a D or an F. Public school teachers, meanwhile, offer the highest assessments of their local public schools: fully 61 percent give local schools an A or a B, while only 16 percent assign them a D or an F (Q.2).

Comparing Public Schools to Other Local Services

Ratings of local public schools stand in stark contrast to assessments of post offices and police forces. Over 60 percent of respondents give the post offices and police force in their local community an A or a B, and only 10 percent give them a D or an F. Even teachers assign the local post office and police force higher marks than local public schools (see Figure 2). In fact, teachers are twice as likely to give the local post office an A and 50 percent more likely to give the police force an A than they are to similarly grade the local public schools. Teachers are more than twice as likely to assign their public schools a D or an F as they are to give this rating to the post offices or police in their communities (Q. 3, 4).

A slight majority of those surveyed, nonetheless, think that the public schools in their community are improving. Fifty-six percent of the public say that the local public schools are heading in the right direction, compared to 44 percent who believe they are on the wrong track. In this respect, Americans’ views of the nation’s education system appear to be considerably more optimistic than their views about the affairs of the nation more generally. When Gallup, NBC and the Wall Street Journal , and the Associated Press used the same language to ask Americans about the direction of the nation as a whole while our survey was in the field, less than one-quarter reported that it is on the right track (Q. 5).

No Child Left Behind and School Accountability

With the presidential election in high gear, and Democrats fixing their attention on President Bush’s signature education achievement, public support for the No Child Left Behind Act appears to be waning. Whereas 57 percent of the public in 2007 suggested that Congress renew the act as is or with minimal changes, only 50 percent of the public do so in 2008. Comparable declines in support are registered among whites, African Americans, and Hispanics.

Public school teachers are especially critical of the No Child Left Behind Act. Only 26 percent of teachers suggest that Congress renew the act as is or with minimal changes. By contrast, 33 percent suggest that Congress completely overhaul the act, and another 42 percent recommend that Congress not renew the act at all.

Last year, we presented evidence from an experiment suggesting that the very words “No Child Left Behind” were politically charged. This year we repeated the experiment, which randomly assigned individuals to one of two conditions: the first referred to the act by name, and the second simply identified “federal legislation.” The main findings reappear, though the differences are not as large (see Figure 3). Whereas in 2007 the mere reference to “No Child Left Behind” led to a 14-point decline in public support (from 71 to 57 percent), in 2008 support dropped by only 7 points (from 57 to 50 percent) (Q.6).

Setting National Standards

Though support for No Child Left Behind is dwindling, Americans continue to believe that schools should be held accountable through national standards and tests. No less than 69 percent of the public think the federal government should set standards for the country and administer tests in math, science, and reading.

But who should set these standards? Washington politicos continue to debate whether the federal government alone or the states together should write these national standards. Other Americans, perhaps to their credit, seem unable to tell the difference. We discovered this by randomly dividing our respondents into two groups, asking one group whether the federal government should set national standards and tests, while asking the other group whether the states jointly should set those standards and tests. Either way, the same high level of support is observed (see Figure 4): exactly 69 percent favor national standards and testing (Q. 7).

Online Education

One of the latest education innovations to go mainstream is online education, wherein students receive credit for courses taken over the Internet. According to the North American Council for Online Learning, enrollment in online courses in 2000 totaled 45,000. By 2007 enrollments had reached 1 million, about 70 percent of which were for high school courses.

Online education, however, is not immune from political controversy. In December 2007, a Wisconsin state court ruled that virtual charter schools, in which students take Internet-based courses under the supervision of their parents, violated the state’s legal requirement that all public school teachers be properly licensed. Subsequently, the Wisconsin state legislature allowed existing virtual schools to continue operating, but imposed restrictions on their expansion.

Our respondents, meanwhile, seem quite receptive to the idea of online education for their own children. Fully 69 percent of the public, and a solid majority of every subgroup, say that they “would be willing to have a child [of theirs] go through high school taking some academic courses over the Internet” (Q. 8).

As a matter of public policy, however, the public’s willingness to endorse online education very much depends on the justification given for it (see Figure 5).To explore the issue of public funding, we randomly assigned respondents to one of four questions that identified different targets of online education: rural residents, advanced students, students who dropped out of school, and home-schooled children (Q. 9).

When considering online education for either students in rural communities who have “access to only a limited number of course offerings in their public schools” or advanced students interested in taking courses for college credit, the public expresses considerable support. In these two instances, over 60 percent of respondents support public funding for online education. Across the various subgroups, a majority always express support, and no more than 21 percent of any subgroup ever express opposition.

Support for online education declines precipitously, however, when the subject turns to “children who drop out of high school.” For those students, just 40 percent of respondents support public funding for courses taken over the Internet. Another 30 percent neither support nor oppose public funding for online education for students who drop out of high school, and 31 percent oppose funding.

When told that “some parents prefer to educate their high school children at home” rather than to “send them to a school,” support falls even further. Only 26 percent of the public support public funding for courses taken for credit over the Internet by home-schooled youngsters, another 30 percent neither favor nor oppose public funding, and 44 percent oppose. With the exception of African Americans, a plurality of every subgroup, and sometimes a majority, oppose public funding for online education directed at home-schooled children.

Home Schooling

The advent of online education may be among the factors contributing to the extraordinary growth of home schooling in the United States. The most recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate that, as of 2003, 1.1 million American students were being educated at home, up from 850,000 in 1999. Some home-school advocacy organizations place the current totals at more than 2 million.

The ongoing expansion of home schooling is evident in our survey (see Figure 6). Forty-five percent of our respondents report that they know a family that home schools a child, up from40 percent in 2007.African Americans are least likely to know a home-schooling family, with only 25 percent responding affirmatively. In contrast, 64 percent of public school teachers report knowing a home-schooling family (Q. 10). These numbers are all far higher than the 12 percent of Americans who report knowing students who have taken a course for middle or high school credit over the Internet.

Charter Schools and Vouchers

As they did in 2007, a plurality of the overall public and every subgroup continue to support charter schools. Indeed, supporters of charter schools outnumber opponents more than two to one. The modal response, however, continues to be “neither support nor oppose.” Roughly 40 percent of the American public remain undecided about the merits of these schools, even as enrollment in charter schools has expanded to more than 1.2 million students nationwide (Q. 11).

Though Americans have yet to render a verdict on charter schools, they appear evenly divided on vouchers (see Figure 7). For the public as a whole, the number of supporters equals the number of opponents, with only one-fifth of the population refusing to stake out a position one way or the other. As we observed last year, support for vouchers is highest among African Americans and Hispanics. Within these two groups, supporters outnumber opponents by as much as five to one. By contrast, a majority of public school teachers oppose vouchers (Q. 12).

School choice advocates often debate on the relative benefits of directing vouchers toward all children or just to those of low-income families. Some argue that vouchers targeted to low-income families more clearly serve the goal of enhancing equal opportunity and will win broader political support for that reason. Others insist that universal vouchers, available to all families, will have stronger political backing and are the only way to generate the competition between the public and the private sectors that is needed to stimulate broad improvements in school quality.

To gauge the public’s views about such matters, we conducted another experiment. First, we randomly assigned respondents to one of four groups. One group was asked their opinion about the provision of school vouchers to low-income families so their children could attend private schools. Another group was asked the same question but was also told that some people say such a program would create greater equality of opportunity. A third group was asked their opinion about vouchers for any family that desired to send their child to private schools, regardless of the family income. A fourth group was asked the same question but was told that some people say such a program would create more competition for public schools. For the most part, both the public as a whole and the various groups appear equally likely to support proposals that would use government funds to help pay the private school tuitions of either “low income students” or “all students.” African Americans and Hispanics slightly prefer targeted voucher programs, while whites prefer universal programs.

Nor do appeals to competition and equal opportunity hold much sway over the American public (see Figure 8).When told that some people say that a universal program “would introduce much needed competition to the public school system,” overall support for vouchers increases by just a few percentage points. Among African Americans, the percentage who “completely favor” the program actually drops by 22 points. And when told that some people say that a universal program “would improve the educational opportunities available to the poor,” overall support for vouchers does not change at all (Q. 12b-d).

Tax Credits

School Integration

In June 2007, a bitterly divided Supreme Court ruled that public school districts may not foster integration through enrollment programs that take explicit account of students’ race. The justices’ landmark decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 struck down voluntarily adopted integration programs in Seattle and Jefferson County, Kentucky, and called into question similar race-based systems that operate in hundreds of other districts.

Now that districts may not consider the race of students when assigning them to schools, some policy experts argue that family income might be employed as a substitute criterion. Since minority students tend to come from lower income families, racial integration might be achieved indirectly by giving low-income families their choice of school, whenever that would facilitate integration across socioeconomic lines. The Wake County school district in North Carolina, among others, has won favorable media coverage by introducing such a policy.

To investigate the public’s views about race- and income-based enrollment programs, we asked Americans one of two variations of the following question: “In order to promote diversity, should public school districts be allowed to take the racial background [family income] of students into account when assigning students to schools?”

To the version of the question asking about “racial background,” the public reacts very negatively. Only 16 percent of the public respond that districts “definitely” or “probably” should be allowed to take students’ racial background into account when assigning them to schools. Another 21 percent of the public are unsure, while fully 63 percent of the public say that school districts should not take into account students’ racial background. African Americans are much more likely to support the idea, but still only 30 percent of them think districts should be allowed to take race into account (Q. 14a). Though the Supreme Court was closely divided in the Seattle case, the majority decision has broad public support.

But what if the policy is adjusted to use family income as the basis for assigning students to schools? Does public support then increase? Not at all. In fact, public support for the idea dips slightly (see Figure 10). Just 13 percent of respondents report that they support using family income as a basis for assigning students to a school, while 62 percent say that they are opposed, with the balance uncertain (Q. 14b). Legal experts who wish to circumvent the recent Supreme Court decision by shifting from race to family income clearly have yet to make much headway in the court of public opinion.

Mainstreaming the Disabled

Approximately 15 percent of the country’s elementary and secondary school population have been classified as needing special education, which is partially supported by federal funding under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA).Diagnoses can range from minor learning problems to autism and severe mental retardation to a range of emotional and behavioral disabilities. Whatever the disability, the law mandates that a disabled student be educated in the “least restrictive environment,” a phrase that implies differential treatment depending on the disability, but increasingly has come to mean the “mainstreaming” in standard classrooms of all but those with the most severe disabilities. According to the U.S. Department of Education, the share of disabled students considered to be “fully mainstreamed” has risen from a little more than 30 percent in 1989 to over 55 percent in 2005. Between 1995 and 2005, the share of “emotionally disturbed children” who spend more than 80 percent of their time in a regular classroom jumped from 17 to 35 percent.

Neither teachers nor the public as a whole express much support for the practice of mainstreaming emotionally or behaviorally disabled children. When asked whether students “who have been diagnosed with emotional and behavioral disabilities should be taught in regular classrooms with other students,” only 25 percent of teachers, and 28 percent of the public, favor the idea. The rest say they should be “taught in separate settings instead” (Q. 15).

Single-Sex Public Schools

Recent years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in single-sex public schools. Once derided as harmful and anachronistic, the notion of educating boys and girls separately received a major boost in 2006 with the publication of new federal regulations clarifying the legal status of single-sex schools and classrooms. The National Association for Single Sex Public Education projects that, in fall 2008, roughly 400 public schools will offer students at least some opportunity for single-sex education, and a quarter of these schools will enroll only boys or girls.

The American public seems moderately sympathetic to this development (see Figure 11). Thirty-seven percent of respondents support the idea of public school districts offering parents the option of sending their child to a single-sex school, 25 percent oppose the idea, and the remainder are undecided. Support for providing the option of single-sex education is stronger among public school teachers, 47 percent of whom support the idea (Q. 16). Interestingly, women respondents are modestly more likely than men to support single-sex alternatives (39 versus 35 percent).

We also asked parents of school-age children whether they would consider enrolling their own child in a single-sex school. Here responses are more mixed, with more parents reporting that they probably or definitely would not consider doing so than report that they would. Still, 42 percent of all parents, 48 percent of public school teachers, and fully 53 percent of African Americans say that they would consider sending their child to a single-sex school (Q. 17).

The 2008 Presidential Election

Conclusions

With the election season in full swing, this survey offers certain lessons for the two contenders for the U.S. presidency. If Barack Obama and John McCain want to walk in step with the American public, they should acknowledge the flagging performance of schools, for while Americans retain an abiding commitment to public education, the grades that they assign the nation’s schools are increasingly mediocre. Additionally, the candidates should convey support for the principle of accountability, while recognizing the faults of the particular accountability system mandated by No Child Left Behind. Finally, the candidates should remain open to new models of education provision. Though Americans continue to reflect upon the merits of charters, vouchers, online education, and home schooling, an overwhelming majority profess support for at least one of these alternatives to traditional public schools.

William G.Howell is associate professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Martin R.West is assistant professor of education at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next. Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and editor-in-chief of Education Next.

In the contentious world of education politics, the need to spend more on public schools stands out as a rare point of agreement. Our recent national survey of American adults (“What Americans Think about Their Schools,” features, Fall 2007) found that those who support increased spending on public schools in their district outnumber those who want spending to decrease by a five-to-one margin. What’s more, a solid majority (59 percent) of Americans express confidence that spending more on the public schools in their district will increase student learning.

Our findings paralleled those of other surveys, which routinely show that Americans rank inadequate funding among the most important problems facing the nation’s schools. According to the 2007 Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll, for example, 22 percent of U.S. adults identified a lack of financial support as the biggest problem facing the schools in their community. The second-ranked problem, a lack of discipline, was mentioned by only one in ten respondents. It is no surprise, then, that every Democratic candidate for the presidency in 2008 has called for increased federal spending on education, and that no Republican candidate (with the exception of libertarian Ron Paul) has proposed a spending cut.

Yet while the public’s views about spending on education are well known, the same cannot be said about the information on which those views are based. Do Americans have an accurate grasp of how much is currently being spent on public education?

The 2007 Education Next–PEPG Survey directly addressed this question. In addition to asking Americans whether school spending should be increased, we asked them to estimate both per-pupil expenditures in their districts and teacher salaries in their states. We then used data on actual spending and salaries, matched geographically to each respondent’s school district or state, to compare the public’s perceptions with reality.

The results are striking: Americans dramatically underestimate the amount spent on the public schools in their district, even when prompted to consider the full range of uses to which school spending is devoted. They also think that teachers earn, on average, far less than is actually the case. The public’s strong preference that more be spent on public schools is based, at least in part, on faulty information.

Measuring Knowledge about Spending

In February and March of 2007, we surveyed a nationally representative sample of 2,000 American adults about a wide range of education issues. (For overall results, see “What Americans Think about Their Schools”) Within an extensive battery of questions, we included the following: “Based on your best guess, what is the average amount of money spent each year for a child in public schools in your school district?”

Half of the sample, randomly chosen, was also offered a prompt to encourage them to consider the full range of costs associated with educating a child. These respondents were told that “Individual student costs go toward teacher and administrator salaries, building construction and maintenance, extracurricular activities, transportation, etc.” With this prompt, we anticipated, respondents would have an easier time answering the question.

We also asked people to estimate the average annual salary of a public school teacher in their state. We asked about teacher salaries at the level of the state, rather than the specific district, because that is the lowest level of aggregation for which information on actual salaries is readily available nationwide. With information about where survey respondents lived, we then compared their answers to actual per-pupil expenditures in their districts and to teacher salaries in their states in 2004–05, the most recent year for which this information is available (see methodology sidebar, below).

Not Even Close

The amount of money actually spent annually on children in school districts across the United States varies widely. For the districts in which our sample members live, per-pupil spending in 2004–05 ranged from $5,644 to $24,939,with an average of $10,377. This last figure is slightly higher than the true national average of $9,435.

How well informed is the public about these financial commitments? Not very. Among those asked without the prompt listing possible expenses, the median response was $2,000, or less than 20 percent of the true amount being spent in their districts. Over 90 percent of the public offered an amount less than the amount actually spent in their district, and more than 40 percent of the sample claimed that annual spending was $1,000 per pupil or less. The average estimate of $4,231 reflects the influence of a small percentage of individuals who offered extremely high figures. Even so, the average respondent’s estimate was just 42 percent of actual spending levels in their district (see Figure 1).

Closer to the Truth?

Are some citizens better informed about education spending than others? To explore this question, we looked at whether the accuracy of Americans’ beliefs about spending and salaries varied among different groups within the overall sample.

Some interesting differences emerged. For instance, the responses of men to both items were significantly higher—and therefore closer to the truth—than were those of women. On average, men thought that per-pupil spending was $1,483 higher and teacher salaries were $2,065 higher than did women. The magnitude of these differences, as well as those reported below, attenuate somewhat when accounting for respondents’ demographic backgrounds. It bears mentioning, though, that the more accurate responses offered by men do not appear to stem from the fact that they are more likely to be in the workplace; the same pattern emerged when we restricted the comparison to men and women working full time.

All else equal, parents of school-age children also gave more accurate responses about teacher salaries, perhaps because they are in regular contact with working teachers. But they were no better informed than nonparents about per-pupil spending levels.

Homeowners, who pay the property taxes that typically account for local spending on education, have a clear incentive to stay informed about spending levels. On average, the estimates of per-pupil spending offered by homeowners were $427 higher than those of non-homeowners, a difference that is not statistically significant. But homeowners do appear to be much more responsive than other Americans to higher spending levels in their districts. In districts spending more than $10,000 per pupil, for example, the responses of homeowners were more than $1,100 higher—and therefore closer to actual spending levels—than those of individuals who rented or lived with other families.

Homeowners were also much better informed about teacher salaries, offering responses that were $7,502 higher than non-homeowners’ responses.

Again, these differences were even more pronounced in states that had especially high teacher salaries, indicating that homeowners’ information may be more responsive to marginal changes in spending than the rest of the general public.

It is important to keep in mind, however, that the differences observed between all of these groups are dwarfed by the overall gap between the public’s understanding of school expenditures and teacher salaries, and the truth. Even homeowners, for example, were off by more than $5,000 on average for per-pupil spending and by more than $11,000 for teacher salaries.

Knowledge and Views on School Spending

Does ignorance about these factual matters bear on public attitudes toward school spending? As noted above, the public as a whole expresses strong support for increasing or at least maintaining current spending levels on public education. More than half of Americans say that spending on the public schools in their community should increase, compared with 38 percent who say it should stay the same and only 10 percent who say it should decrease.

It is quite possible that information plays an important role in explaining overall levels of support for school spending. On average, those who support increasing spending on their local schools underestimated per-pupil spending by nearly $6,000 (see Figure 2). In contrast, those who said that spending should decrease underestimated spending by only $4,267.The estimates of those who felt that spending should remain the same fell in between these two extremes, at $5,602. In short, while even supporters of decreased spending substantially underestimated true spending levels, their estimates were considerably closer to reality than those of supporters of increased spending.

Similar patterns emerge when looking at the difference between estimated and actual teacher salaries, though the differences are slightly less pronounced. Respondents who support increased school spending underestimated teacher salaries in their state by almost $15,000, while those who wanted to see school spending remain the same offered estimates that were $14,230 below the truth. Those who support decreased spending offered modestly higher figures, underestimating teacher salaries by only $11,896, on average.

Americans with more accurate knowledge of school spending also tend to be less confident that increased spending will improve student learning. Among those who offered a figure for per-pupil expenditures within $5,000 of the truth, 20 percent were “not confident at all” that more spending would lead to higher achievement. People who either grossly underestimated or overestimated actual spending, by contrast, report lower levels of skepticism about the rewards of higher spending.

Note, however, that these findings do not necessarily support the contention that misunderstandings about school finance cause people to support spending increases. It is quite possible, after all, that the public’s assessment of how much is being spent may derive from, rather than contribute to, their policy views. Based on direct observations of conditions in local schools, for instance, some portions of the public may decide that whatever is being spent is not enough. When they are asked to hazard a guess, these concerns may lead them to underestimate actual spending.

In point of fact, we do find that Democrats offer significantly lower estimates of teacher salaries than do Republicans. (Differences between Democrats and Republicans on per-pupil expenditures disappear when accounting for respondents’ demographic backgrounds.) It is difficult to explain such a finding by reference to the two groups’ prior knowledge about school finance. Rather, we suspect that Democrats are especially likely to believe that the government does not give teachers either the professional respect or support that they deserve, and that such underlying convictions lead Democrats to offer lower estimates of teacher salaries. Indeed, the Democrats in our sample are 25 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say that they are either “very confident” or “somewhat confident” that additional spending on schools would improve student learning.

Conclusion

In sum, Americans think that far less is being spent on the nation’s public schools than is actually the case. The vast majority of the public thinks we spend amounts that can only be described as minuscule, and almost 96 percent of the public underestimate either per-pupil spending in their districts or teacher salaries in their states.

Important questions about the public’s understanding of school spending remain. Why are their estimates so low? Is this phenomenon unique to education, or would we find the same thing if people were asked about the salaries of other public servants, say, postal workers or police officers? And crucially, does the public’s understanding of school finance shape their policy preferences, or do the public’s policy preferences shape their understanding of school finance?

At this point, though, one matter seems certain: whatever motivates people’s concerns about school finance, it is not sound information about what is actually being spent.

William G. Howell is associate professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Martin R.West is assistant professor of education at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next.

Checked by Martin West

Heads understandably turned last October when the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel announced the release of a new study concluding that “school choice isn’t a powerful tool for driving educational improvement in Milwaukee Public Schools.” Since the early 1990s, Milwaukee has been home to an increasingly varied array of school choice programs that now includes the nation’s oldest voucher program, numerous charter schools, and extensive inter- and intra-district public-school choice systems. Had credible evidence emerged that these programs were for naught?

Equally startling was the study’s source: the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank funded in large part by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the nation’s leading backers of school choice.

“The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find,” wrote George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute and former secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Administration, in a foreword accompanying the study. Lightbourn lamented the study’s central finding that, despite the impressive array of school choice options available to Milwaukee parents, “only 10 percent have been the active consumers that would exert market-based influence to [sic]the school system.” He fretted, too,about low levels of parental involvement in the district, especially among parents of older children. “For children ages fourteen to seventeen,” he wrote, “only 11 percent of MPS [Milwaukee Public Schools] parents are actively involved both in the school setting and at home.”

Lightbourn may well have spared himself this agonizing. The study contains no direct information about the actual behavior of Milwaukee parents whatsoever—and certainly nothing that would justify the very specific claims stated above. Its author,“ David Dodenhoff, Ph.D.,” makes no claim to have interviewed a single Milwaukee parent, nor to have surveyed any of them by mail or on the Internet.

Instead, Dodenhoff bases his study on information gathered from a national sample of parents, not from anyone in Milwaukee. His approach assumes that, when it comes to school choice, the behavior of Milwaukee parents is identical to that of parents of similar demographic background nationwide, despite the fact that Milwaukee’s school choice environment is unique.

The method is akin to estimating the share of Hawaiians who surf by counting the number of surfers nationwide, no matter their proximity to a beach, the height of the waves, or the warmth of the water.

A flawed approach

Milwaukee has the most extensive system of school choice in any American city. As of 2005, more than one-third of the city’s parents chose either to enroll their child in a charter school, use a voucher to go to a private school, or seek out a place in a suburban public school. All other students in Milwaukee may choose among the city’s traditional public schools, a policy put in place years ago to foster school integration. Each winter, the school district asks parents to list up to three schools they want their child to attend the following fall. The vast majority of those who complete an applicationreceive their first choice.

Dodenhoff set out in his study to assess the potential for public school choice to improve student achievement in Milwaukee Public Schools. Despite the fact that such information is readily available, he did not find out how many public school parents are sending their children to suburban schools, or selecting a charter school, or filling out the form listing their three school choices within the traditional public sector.

Instead, Dodenhoff looked at what parents around the United States are doing, as reported in the National Household Education Survey conducted in 2003 by the U.S. Department of Education. That survey asked parents to report on whether they chose their child’s school, whether they chose from among more than two schools, and whether they took academic considerations into account when doing so. He uses this information to estimate the relationship between four parental characteristics (ethnic background, educational attainment, whether both parents are in the home, and mother’s employment status) and whether the parent is choosing the child’s school.

Dodenhoff claims that these characteristics are highly correlated with the likelihood that a parent will be choosing a school, but he presents no direct evidence on this point. He simply notes that another U.S. Department of Education Study based on a different data set showed that the variables he uses were “particularly influential determinants of parental involvement.” He does not report on their usefulness for predicting the likelihood of exercising school choice,in his data set or any other.

Dodenhoff then employs census data to estimate the distribution of Milwaukee parents on each of the four characteristics and uses their relationship with choice activity nationwide to estimate of how much choosing is going on in Milwaukee. The validity of his results thus depends on the four characteristics perfectly predicting a U.S. parent’s likelihood of choosing a school and the assumption that Milwaukee parents do exactly what parents are doing everywhere else.

Nonetheless, Dodenhoff straightforwardly reports that “just under 35 percent of MPS parents actively choose a school for their child, rather than simply opting for the default neighborhood school.” Worse, he reports less than 10 percent do so from among multiple schools based on academic considerations. He ultimately concludes that promoting school choice “may be a distraction from the hard work of fixing the district’s schools.” Of course, Dodenhoff’s failure to examine any data from the Milwaukee school district renders this conclusion entirely unsupported.

What if his estimate is correct?

But what if Dodenhoff were correct that only 35 percent of Milwaukee parents choose, and only 10 percent choose from among more than two schools, using academic criteria for their judgment? Would that prove that efforts to promote school choice are misguided?

Consider this thought experiment: What if only 10 percent of Americans purchased cars based on comparisons they made regarding the quality of the engineering? Would the quality of cars decline, or would the well informed consumers set the trends that others follow?

Most analysts agree that even when only a few consumers are making smart choices, those few still drive competition in the marketplace, in part because information spreads outward from the better informed to others. As education scholars Mark Schneider and Paul Teske have explained, “Competitive markets do not need all consumers to be informed—competitive pressures can result even if a relatively small subset of consumers engage in informed, self-interested search.” At least in theory, a few quality-conscious consumers can drive systemwide improvement and lead to a better matching of parents and schools, even in the absence of extensive choice activity.

Dodenhoff clearly believes that far more than 10 percent of parents need to base their school decisions on academic considerations if school choice is going to enhance school quality. In this regard, he could be right. But to know whether or not 10 percent of Milwaukee’s parents are making informed judgments, he needs to talk to a few hundred of them, randomly chosen. So far he has talked to none. That will not do.

-Martin West is an assistant professor of education, political science, and public policy at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next.

The public, however, also appears selective in its desire for change. Americans balk at some market-based reforms, such as paying more for teachers who work in fields like math and science, where quality teachers are in scarce supply. And substantial percentages remain undecided about charter schools and other reform initiatives, suggesting that the current national debate over school policy has the potential to sway public opinion in one direction or another.

All this—and more—is indicated by a new national survey of U.S. adults conducted under the auspices of Education Next and the Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) at Harvard University. (For survey methodology, see sidebar) Here we report the opinions of both the public at large and three ethnic subgroups (whites, African Americans, and Hispanics). We also distinguish the views of those who have worked for the public schools from those who have not. Except for opinions on school choice issues, differences across ethnic groups are generally smaller than those between public school employees and those who have never been employed by the schools. Responses to survey questions are provided at the bottom of the ensuing pages.

Accountability

Perhaps the most popular school reforms are those that hold students and schools to account for their performance. Accountability policies take many forms, but the public generally supports the concept in all its guises, including the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

No Child Left Behind

On the most high-profile issue of the day—the debate over extending the life of NCLB—a majority of those polled indicate that they support the law’s reauthorization with no more than minor changes (see Figure 1). NCLB requires states to establish performance standards in math and reading; to test students against those standards annually in grades 3 to 8 and again when students are in high school; and to intervene in schools that fail to make adequate annual progress toward the goal of near-universal student proficiency by 2014. The 2002 law is scheduled for reauthorization this year.

Despite NCLB’s bipartisan origins, controversy has beset the statute ever since its passage. The law places unprecedented demands on the states, several of which have passed resolutions critical of it. Reporting on recent grass-roots efforts to overturn the law, Time magazine noted that “more than 30,000 educators and concerned citizens have signed an online petition calling for the repeal of the 1,100 page statute.”

It is perhaps surprising, then, that the American public holds NCLB in reasonably high regard. When asked for their view on the matter, 57 percent of respondents prefer that Congress renew the act either as is or with minimal changes. Still, the intense debate over NCLB appears to be eroding public support for the law as a symbol. When NCLB is described as “federal legislation” rather than mentioned by name, as was the case for a randomly selected half of our survey respondents, support for extending its accountability provisions rises to 71 percent (Q. 1a, 1b).

Similar levels of support are observed across ethnic lines, with never less than one-half of African Americans, Hispanics, or whites recommending that Congress renew the act as is or with minor changes, regardless of how the question is asked. Current and former public school employees, however, consistently register lower levels of support for NCLB.

National Standards

Just because the public favors reauthorization of NCLB does not mean that it opposes efforts to amend the act by establishing a single national standard. Currently, NCLB asks each state to set its own standards, design and administer its own tests, and establish its own definition of student proficiency. A number of prominent Washington think tanks, including the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and the Center for American Progress, have argued that proficiency standards vary so widely that they should be replaced by a single national definition. But other groups, on both the right and the left of the political spectrum, oppose any single standard as unnecessary federal intrusion into local matters. Given the controversy surrounding all proposals to establish a uniform national standard, it is noteworthy that nearly three-quarters of the American public support the concept (Q. 2).

Student Accountability

Separate and apart from NCLB, which focuses on the performance of schools and districts, the public strongly supports reforms designed to hold individual students accountable for their performance on state tests. Currently, only a few states (e.g., Florida) and cities (e.g., Chicago and New York) require students to pass a test in order to move from one grade to the next, thereby modifying the practice of “social promotion,” which keeps youngsters with their peers by passing them to the next grade regardless of academic performance. Twenty-three states currently require students to pass an examination in order to graduate from high school, but the rest, a group that includes Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, do not.

Despite the fact that holding students accountable for their performance is far from a universal practice in American education, student accountability commands widespread public support (see Figure 2). No less than 81 percent of all respondents support requiring students in certain grades to pass an exam before they proceed to the next grade, and 85 percent support requiring students to pass an exam before graduating from high school. Only 10 percent of respondents oppose either policy. African Americans, Hispanics, and current and former school employees are all modestly less likely to support graduation exams than other respondents, but in no case does more than 16 percent of a subgroup oppose the policy (Q. 3, 4).

Although Americans appear quite willing to use test results to determine the pace of students’ progress through school, they are less enthusiastic about using them to open up alternative routes into higher education. Only 45 percent of respondents support allowing students who pass an exam at the 10th-grade level to transfer immediately to a community college, as recently proposed by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. Rather, 55 percent of all respondents, and roughly the same share of each subgroup, support requiring students to complete four years of high school (Q. 5).

School Accountability under NCLB

High-stakes student accountability is more popular than the simple practice of publishing the average test performance of each school’s students. Only 60 percent of those surveyed support the latter policy, which is less stringent than the NCLB requirement that states publish the percentage of students in each school, and of various subgroups within it, that are proficient in math and reading. Just 20 percent of the public oppose publishing average test scores at the school level, with another 20 percent expressing neither support nor opposition (Q. 6).

NCLB also requires that schools be reconstituted if they fail to meet state-mandated performance benchmarks for five years in a row. Currently, states and districts are granted a great deal of flexibility in deciding how to reconstitute schools. Options range from minimal reorganization to replacing teachers and administrators to conversion into charter schools. When asked about these options, Americans express greater support for replacing teachers and principals than for converting failed district schools into charter schools. Roughly two-thirds of the adult population support replacing teachers and/or principals at persistently failing schools, and only one in ten opposes such options. Just 29 percent support converting the schools into charter schools. Still, that doesn’t signal widespread opposition to charter schools, a topic we return to below. Only 25 percent of the population actually opposed charter-school conversion, while fully 46 percent take no position one way or the other (Q. 7).

School Choice

Many accountability initiatives have long enjoyed the support of policymakers and the general public. More controversial in state and national policy discussions have been proposals to enable parents, especially low-income parents, to exercise greater choice over their children’s education through school vouchers, tax credits, charter schools, or home schooling. Despite that controversy, a plurality of the general public supports choice initiatives. African Americans and Hispanics express more support for school choice than do white Americans. Opponents of most forms of choice, meanwhile, constitute a fairly small segment of the American public, though many adults have yet to be persuaded one way or the other.

Vouchers

Few education reforms inspire as much debate as do proposals to provide low-income families with vouchers that would allow them to send their children to private schools. Apart from programs serving disabled students, only Wisconsin, Ohio, and Washington, D.C., have publicly funded voucher programs in operation. Elsewhere, state legislatures, referenda, and/or state courts have defeated proposed voucher initiatives.

Despite the legislative and legal disputes, a plurality of the public supports the voucher idea (see Figure 3). Forty-five percent of those surveyed favor offering vouchers to low-income families, 34 percent oppose the idea, and 20 percent neither favor nor oppose it. Both African Americans and Hispanics are markedly more likely to support vouchers than are whites. Indeed, 68 percent of African Americans and 61 percent of Hispanics favor vouchers, compared to 38 percent of whites. Only 15 percent of African Americans and 23 percent of Hispanics oppose vouchers, compared to 40 percent of whites (Q. 8).

When asked about the design of a school voucher program, 85 percent of Americans support allowing parents using vouchers to choose both religious and nonreligious private schools, a practice the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in 2002. Though African Americans appear slightly more likely to support the option of sending a child to a religious school, subgroup differences on this matter are small (Q. 9).

Tax Credits

Tax credit programs that help defray the cost of a private education are a less publicized, but more widely available, form of school choice than vouchers. Such programs exist in one form or another in several states, including Pennsylvania, Arizona, Minnesota, Illinois, and Florida. The greater incidence of tax credit programs could be due to the broader public support for this approach than for vouchers. Nationwide, 53 percent of adults favor tax credits, while only 25 percent oppose them, with another 23 percent neither favoring nor opposing the idea. As with vouchers, African Americans and Hispanics express the highest levels of support for tax credits (Q. 10).

Charter Schools

Compared to school vouchers and tuition tax credits, state legislatures have generally found charter schools to be more politically palatable. Charter schools are public schools of choice that are privately managed under a renewable performance contract that exempts them from many of the regulations that apply to other public schools. The first of these schools opened its doors in Minnesota in 1992, and their numbers have grown steadily since. In the 2006–07 school year, roughly 4,000 charter schools served 1.15 million students across 40 states and Washington, D.C.

For the most part, Americans either express support for charter schools or opt not to take a position one way or the other (see Figure 4). Forty-four percent of respondents support their formation, and another 42 percent neither support nor oppose them. Only 14 percent of Americans oppose charter schools. Differences across subgroups are reasonably small, with slightly higher proportions of African Americans supporting charter schools and school employees opposing them (Q. 11).

Three-quarters of Americans also believe that charter schools should be given at least the same amount of funding per child as district-operated public schools, in contrast to the widespread state practice of awarding charter schools less funding. Even 68 percent of present or past school employees endorse funding charter schools at levels equivalent to (or better than) those of traditional public schools (Q. 12).

Though Americans appear cautiously supportive of charter schools, most are confused about them. For example, when asked whether charter schools are free to teach religion (they are not), or whether they can charge tuition (they cannot), almost two-thirds of the public confesses to not knowing the answer and another quarter offers the wrong answer. Indeed, only 13 percent of adults nationwide correctly note that charter schools cannot teach religion and 16 percent correctly observe that charter schools may not charge tuition (Q. 13).

Importantly, support for charter schools appears especially high among those adults who reveal higher levels of knowledge about them. Fully 66 percent of those adults who correctly answer both of the knowledge-based questions support charter schools, as compared to 38 percent of those who answer both incorrectly. Similarly, 81 and 68 percent of the two respective groups claim that funding for students in charter and other public schools should be equalized. Opposition to charter schools, to the extent that it exists, appears to be highest among those who know less about them.

School Choice under NCLB

Under NCLB, if a school has failed to meet the law’s accountability provisions two years in a row, parents have the option of sending their child to a higher-performing public school within the same district. But only about 1 percent of those eligible to move to a different school under NCLB have taken advantage of this option. As a result, choice advocates have proposed revisions in the legislation that would expand the range of options available to parents.

A clear plurality of the public at large supports revisions in NCLB to increase the number of choice options available to parents whose children attend low-performing schools. Sixty percent support allowing them to select a school in another district, a step that would vastly expand the range of options, yet has not received serious consideration in Congress. Only 14 percent oppose it. Meanwhile, 47 percent support giving parents the option of sending their child to a private school, and only 23 percent oppose it (Q. 14).

Americans reveal low levels of support for the option of sending children to a failing school within the same district. Only 25 percent express support, probably because the public sees scant benefit from moving a child from one failing school to another.

The number of American families opting to teach their children at home has increased dramatically in recent years. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about 1.1 million students were being home schooled in the United States in 2003, the most recent year for which official data are available, up from roughly 850,000 students in 1999.

Forty percent of the public say they know a family that currently home schools its children. And most Americans support allowing home-schooled children to take advantage of public school resources (see Figure 5), including attendance in selected classes and participation in sports and other extracurricular activities. Americans who know a home-schooling family are especially likely to support a more expansive array of schooling options for them. Fully 68 percent of adults who themselves know a home-schooled child believe that such children should have the option of taking selected classes at local public schools, and another 61 percent support allowing them to participate in sports and extracurricular programs, as compared with 48 percent and 51 percent, respectively, of adults who do not know a home-schooled child (Q.15, 16, 17).

Teacher Pay and Licensure

Just as lively (and divisive) as the controversy over school choice and home schooling has been the debate over teacher pay and licensure. On these issues, pluralities of the public support some, but not all, reform proposals.

Differential Pay

Although most scholars agree that teachers represent the single most important school contributor to a student’s academic progress, consensus breaks down as soon as the question turns to how best to design compensation systems to enhance teacher quality. On one side, the National Education Association defends the current practice of paying all teachers the same amount, except for differences based on past experience and graduate coursework. On the other side, groups such as the Teaching Commission, and the Progressive Policy Institute have proposed that we pay teachers according to how much students are learning in their classrooms (often as measured by test results), the difficulty of the teachers’ classroom environment or how hard it is to recruit quality teachers knowledgeable in a particular subject.

Though willing to entertain some reforms, the public is in no rush to abandon the traditional compensation system. Forty-five percent agree that a teacher’s salary should depend in part upon students’ academic progress while 31 percent disagree, and the remaining 24 percent choose not to express an opinion (see Figure 6). (Opinions about merit pay do not differ notably if Americans are asked about basing a teacher’s pay on “students’ academic progress” or on “students’ academic progress on state tests.”) A bare majority of Americans support increasing the salaries of those teaching in challenging school environments instead of using the same funds to offer all teachers a smaller pay increase. By a two-to-one margin, however, respondents would prefer to see new funds for teacher pay distributed equally across all teachers rather than targeted toward those in high-demand subject areas, such as math and science (Q.18, 19, 20).

State Licensure

To be fully certified, public school teachers in nearly every state must complete a requisite number of courses in education and the subject matter appropriate to their chosen area of instruction. In recent years, however, some states have modified this practice by allowing principals to hire college-educated individuals who have not completed the coursework ordinarily required for certification. The innovation remains controversial, as many education schools and teacher organizations believe that a teacher is only qualified after completing appropriate pedagogical training.

A plurality of the public, however, supports a more permissive teacher-recruitment policy. Forty-eight percent of those surveyed say that principals should be allowed to hire college graduates who lack formal teaching credentials, while only 33 percent oppose the idea, and 20 percent express no opinion. A larger share, 41 percent, of current and former school employees oppose the idea (Q. 21).

School Spending

The average amount of money spent per pupil by U.S. public schools has more than doubled in real terms since 1970, and the number of pupils per employed teacher has declined from 22 to 15. Teacher salaries have only barely kept pace with average wages nationwide, and the gap between teacher salaries and those of other college-educated workers has actually widened. Given these facts, some policy analysts claim that current spending levels are more than adequate and that further cuts in class size are unnecessary, while others say much more needs to be done, especially on the teacher salary front.

The public is closely divided on this issue (see Figure 7). Specifically, 51 percent say that spending on public education should increase, while 38 percent think it should remain the same and 10 percent favor spending cuts. Support for additional spending is highest among African Americans, Hispanics, and current and former public school employees, with more than 60 percent of each of those groups calling for increases in public school budgets (Q. 22).

Most Americans also express confidence that spending more on public education in their local school district would result in increased student learning. Fifty-nine percent of the public is at least somewhat confident that spending would increase student learning, as are 80 percent of African Americans, 70 percent of Hispanics, and 64 percent of school employees (Q. 23).

Given the stagnation of teacher salaries in the last three decades and the concomitant decline in class sizes, it is somewhat surprising that the public continues to prefer further cuts in class size over increases in teacher salaries. When asked whether education dollars are better spent increasing teacher salaries or decreasing class size, fully 77 percent prefer the latter option. Though scholars continue to debate the benefits of class-size reductions, the general public would appear convinced (Q. 24).

Voting in School Board Elections

The expanding reach of federal and state policies notwithstanding, responsibility for the day-to-day management of the nation’s 14,000-plus school districts still lies primarily with locally elected school boards. Yet turnout for school board elections, which are often held at dates different from those of general elections, is notoriously low, often lingering in the single digits. Such dismal figures may make it possible for a motivated group, such as the local teachers union or advocates of a particular curricular innovation, to disproportionately influence election outcomes. One wonders, then, whether the relatively small number of voters who show up on election day share the general views of other district residents.

When using poll data to examine turnout, it is important to keep in mind that Americans consistently overstate their propensity to vote in U.S. elections. As a result, the precise proportion of Americans who claim to vote in school board elections—40 percent, in our survey—is less informative than differences in reported turnout across the various subgroups. Whites and African Americans appear slightly more likely than Hispanics to have voted in their last school board election (Q. 25). Important differences, meanwhile, are observed among public school employees and the rest of the population. Indeed, current and former public school employees are 21 percentage points more likely to claim that they voted in their last school board election than is everyone else (see Figure 8).

Support for school choice in all its forms and for NCLB appears to be somewhat weaker among voters in school board elections than among the population as a whole. Compared to the rest of the population, those who claim to have voted in the last election are 8 percentage points more likely to oppose school vouchers, 7 percentage points more likely to oppose charter schools, and 9 percentage points more likely to oppose tax credits. Voters are also 10 percentage points more likely to oppose the renewal of NCLB when the law is mentioned by name, than is the rest of the population; but when the law is described but not named, nonvoters are actually 2 percentage points more likely to oppose its renewal.

Overall Assessment

When asked to grade the public schools, respondents in this survey offer assessments that look much like those observed in other national surveys of education attitudes (see Figure 9). Forty-three percent give the schools in their own community an A or a B, 38 percent assign a C, and 18 percent give a D or F. When asked about public schools around the nation, these grades drop. Just 22 percent of Americans give public schools in general an A or B, 55 percent a C, and 24 percent a D or F.

Among the various subgroups, some interesting differences emerge. When asked about the schools around the nation, whites, Hispanics, and African Americans offer similar assessments, as do public school employees and the remaining population. When asked about the schools in their own district, however, African Americans and Hispanics give notably lower marks than whites. Fully 48 percent of whites award the schools in their community an A or B grade, as compared to 40 percent of Hispanics and 27 percent of African Americans. The responses of public school employees and everyone else do not differ significantly (Q. 26, 27).

For the most part, how Americans evaluate the public schools in their own communities does not strongly correlate with their support for the reform proposals included in this survey. One exception, though, bears mentioning. Though respondents who give their schools a C, D, or F are just as likely as respondents who give their schools an A or B to support increases in school spending, the former group is twice as likely to express no confidence that more spending will improve student learning.

Conclusions

This survey reveals a U.S. public that continues to support its public schools, but also one that wants these schools to become more effective and is willing to endorse a wide variety of reforms it thinks will bring that about. Americans, for the most part, are pragmatists. They are searching for something that works. It could be accountability, it might be choice, it could be class-size reduction, and it may be changes in teacher recruitment and pay. Reform proposals in each of these areas have pluralities in support of them. In some instances, though, sizable portions of the public remain unpersuaded by advocates on either side.

Clearly, the debate over American education is far from over.

William G. Howell is associate professor in the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at Brown University and an executive editor of Education Next. Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He serves as editor-in-chief of Education Next.

Checked by Paul E. Peterson and Martin R. West

No Child Left Behind (NCLB),the federal school-accountability law, is widely held to have accomplished one good thing: require states to publish test-score results in math and reading for each school in grades 3 through 8 and again in grade 10. The results appear to be telling parents whether their child’s school is doing a better job than the one across town, in the neighboring city, or across the state.

But accountability works only if the yardstick used to measure performance is reasonably accurate. Unfortunately, the yardstick required by the federal law is not. Our analysis of its workings in Florida reveals it to be badly flawed and not as accurate as the measuring stick employed by the state of Florida for similar purposes.

To her credit,  Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has apparently recognized the need to fix the NCLB yardstick. In November 2005, she announced a pilot program that would allow a few selected states to incorporate student growth into their AYP grading scheme. Although 20 states initially requested to participate, only 2-Tennessee and North Carolina-have so far been given the go-ahead, and the modifications they have been allowed to make are relatively minor. Meanwhile, the yardstickto be used by the other 48 remains asdefective as ever.

Part of the problem is that NCLB makes only crude distinctions between schools achieving performance benchmarks and schools not doing so.Florida’s grading system divides schools into five different categories, just as teachers do when they grade students on a scale from A to F. (See Figure 1 for the number of schools that received each mark.) Another part of the problem is that the federal approach pays only a passing nod to the improvement made by individual students, while Florida’s own method takes into account how much specific students have learned in a given year-exactly what parents care about.

It is not that Governor Jeb Bush(and his legislature) got it exactly right, while his brother (and Congress) ran amuck. But there is little doubt that NCLB needs repairing, something that Congress can do when the federal law is reauthorized.

Measuring Quality

Finding the right yardstick is no easy task. Not everyone agrees on what makes for a good school. Some reject test scores, while others care more about building students’ character than boosting their academic achievement. But Congress took a clear stance on the issue in NCLB when it determined that a school with subpar student test scores in reading and math is not doing its job. Most Americans would agree that schools should aim to ensure that all students are proficient in these core subjects.

NCLB requires states to divide schools into those making “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) toward the goal of having all of their students proficient in math and reading by 2014 and those that aren’t. While the term “progress” would seem to imply that the law considers how much students are learning over time, the federal system in fact is  based on a series of snapshots that fail to track individual students from one year to the next. Instead, to make AYP, schools must meet statewide targets for the percentage of students each year who are proficient. Those targets are gradually increased until they reach 100 percent in 2014. The percentage of proficient students within various subgroups, broken out by ethnicity, income, disability, and English-language-learner status, must also meet these same targets. If a school does not make AYP for two consecutive years, parents are given the choice of another school and, after five failing years the school is to be restructured.

But does the AYP yardstick actually distinguish between higher- and lower-quality schools? The answer to this question is best obtained by looking at how much students at the school know at the end of the year, as compared to how much those same students knew one year previously. If students are making large achievement gains, the school would seem to be more effective than if student improvement is meager or nonexistent.

Surprisingly, in much of the United States, it is not possible to track an individual student’s achievement over the course of a year to determine how well the federal yardstick identifies schools where students are learning the most. In Florida, however, the topic can be explored systematically because that state’s Department of Education has assembled an impressive warehouse of data on student performance.

As long as students remain within the state, it is possible to track how well most of them are doing from one year to the next on the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT), the exam the state uses to comply with NCLB requirements. (Privacy concerns preclude general release of the data, but qualified researchers who sign a confidentiality agreement can apply for access.)

Checking the Federal Yardstick

We drew on this information to calculate how much students learned, on average, in each school in Florida during the 2003-04 school year. We first subtracted from each student’s test score performance the child’s demonstrated knowledge the previous year.We then adjusted those one-year-gain scores to take into account a statistical property that artificially generates larger gains for initially low-performing students (and smaller gains for high performers). Finally, we compared the average gains by students in schools meeting and not meeting the requirements for AYP.

The results were telling. On average, students in schools making the AYP target gained on their math achievement test an amount that was only 9 percent of a standard deviation more than the amount gained by students at schools said not to be making the AYP grade. The difference in gains in reading was just 7 percent of a standard deviation (see Figure 2). A full standard deviation’s worth of progress equates to about four years of elementary schooling, so gains of 9 percent total a bit more than a third of a school year. A difference of that magnitude is surely worth noting, yet it is hardly enough to warrant saying one school is adequate while the other is not.

Nor is it the case that schools making AYP are those doing a much better job with minority student populations. In math, the differences in gains made by African Americans and Hispanics at AYP schools and non-AYP schools are 11 and 12 percent of a standard deviation, respectively. In reading, the difference in gains for both groups is 6 percent of a standard deviation. Clearly, such differences are not so dramatic as to be the basis for federal intervention.

Schools face varying challenges that depend in part on the populations they serve, so perhaps the federal yardstick does better when those challenges are considered. But that proved not to be the case. When we adjusted the gains made by students in each school to take into account a wide variety of individual and peer-group background characteristics, such as ethnicity, English language-learner status, family income, and student mobility rates, the yardstick’s performance actually worsened. In fact, the apparent benefit of attending a school that had made AYP was only 4 percent of a standard deviation in math performance and just 2 percent of a standard deviation in reading. To be credible, a grading system must do better than that.

Still another way of thinking aboutthe accuracy of the NCLB yardstick isto calculate the probability that AYP identifies correctly the higher-performingof any two schools being compared. Of course, any two-category classification system will get it right 50 percent of the time, by chance alone, just as one can guess correctly half of the time which way a coin will flip.

How much better than chance did the NCLB grading system do in Florida in 2004? In math, a school that made AYP outperformed a random non-AYP school 71 percent of the time. In otherwords, 29 percent of the time the school in which students are making smaller gains is the one that passed AYP, a pretty hefty error rate (see Figure 3). In reading,that error rate was 28 percent. To be wrong nearly three times out of ten does not inspire confidence-especially when one can get it right half the time simply by random guessing.

So error-prone an emissions-testing program would soon invite the wrath of the auto-owning public.

Testing Florida’s Approach

But can any other accountability system, especially one put together by a legislative body, do any better? Are we using the perfect to criticize the good? We can check this by comparing the federal yardstick with the one used byFlorida as part of its state accountabilitysystem.

Florida’s A+ Plan for Education(A+ Plan) rewards schools for ensuring that their students reach a minimum level of proficiency in math and reading, just as NCLB does. But unlike the federal grading system, the A+ Plan bases half of its points on the percentage of students in each school who improved their performance against state standards over the previous year. Equally important, it divides schools into five easily recognized categories that range from A to F, instead of just the two bureaucratically labeled categories employed by the federal government.

The Florida accountability system has its own limitations. But by having five categories, A through F, it provides parents and taxpayers with a good deal of useful information. Admittedly, some of the finer distinctions attempted by the Florida A+ grading scheme do little better than the federal AYP grading scheme. In 2004, for example, average learning gains in math were only 7 percent of a standard deviation higher in A schools than in those given a B (see Figure 2).

But the performance of the A+ Plan improves when schools are assigned significantly different grades.The math learning gap between A and C schools was 11 percent; between A and D schools it was 14 percent, and the gap between A and F schools differed by 25 percent of a standard deviation. Put in more familiar language, the one year difference between A and F schools amounted to more than a full year’s worth of learning. In reading, the differences were almost as large.

As with AYP, we calculated an error rate for the Florida grading system, the chance that one would make a mistake-that is, pick a school where average learning rates were lower-if one picked a school solely on the basis of its official grade. Once again, the Florida A+ Plan can be seen to be employing a more accurate measuring stick than the NCLB one, where the error rate, it should be remembered, was nearly 30 percent. Under Florida’s own accountability plan, parents would make an error 30 percent of the time if they chose an A school over a B school on that basis alone. But as Figure 3 shows, mistakes happen much less frequently if one picks an A school rather than a C, D, or F school. Indeed, one can haveas much confidence in Florida’s distinction between an A and an F schoolas the Food and Drug Administration requires when evaluating drugs subject to rigorous clinical trials.

The Florida system also does a better job of isolating the seriously defective schools, helping state and local officials identify exactly where attention is needed. In 2004, only 47 of the state’s 2,649 schools were given an F, while 184 were given a D. Meanwhile, under the federal yardstick, 75 percent of schools did not make AYP, including more than half of the schools Florida had given an A (see Figure 1).

As these numbers suggest, having two accountability systems operating simultaneously has generated a great deal of confusion in Florida, as it has in other states. Things could be improved by melding both systems into one, but only if the revised system can do a better job of identifying schools where student achievement is rising and of isolating the worst-performing schools for remediation.

A National Problem

The shortcomings of the federal law’s yardstick have a ready explanation. Because NCLB schools are evaluated primarily on the basis of achievement levels, the evaluation cannot readily detect how much growth is taking place within a school, simply because children come with dramatically different educational endowments. The correlation between school average levels and growth in the 2003-04 school year was just 0.63 in math and 0.71 in reading-a positive relationship, to be sure, but hardly one on which to construct a meaningful accountability system.

Some may argue that our focus on student growth is misplaced, that Congress, when devising its formula for gauging AYP, did not intend to distinguish good schools from less effective ones. Its sole aim was to make sure that every school would by 2014 bring every student up to proficiency,and a level-based system is needed to direct reformers’ attention to those schools and districts with the farthest distance to go.

But such claims are difficult to square with the legislators’ designation of schools as not making “AdequateYearly Progress,” much less with the fact that the law gives families the option to attend another school if their school twice fails to make AYP. Why let families move to another school without evidence that their children will learn more at the new address?

Of course, we have direct evidence about how the NCLB grading system is playing out from only one state. But scholars from the Northwest Evaluation Association have similarly documented the loose connection between growth scores and the level-based measures of school performance that underpin the AYP grading system in their database of 840 schools in 22 states, suggesting that the problem we have identified is hardly limited to Florida. Since the federal yardstick fails to zero in on how much each student is learning, it can hardly be otherwise.

It must also be admitted that most states could not have used growth scores when NCLB was enacted, simply because most states had not constructed the tracking system Florida has put together. Congress may have done all that it could in 2002. But since other states are now beginning to build their own warehouses of data that follow the progress of individual students, the time has arrived when a legislative fix should be feasible.

It will take Congress to do the job, since the original law was written with such specificity that it is virtually impossible to correct it through administrative action alone. Experienced authors know there’s no such thing as good writing-only good rewriting. Let’s hope that when NCLB is reauthorized Congress can avoid partisan bickering and use the information coming back from the states to improve on their first draft. People deserve to know that when the federal government says a school is not working, it means it.

-Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Martin R.West is an assistant professor at Brown University. Both serve as editors of Education Next.

Reducing class sizes is one of today’s most popular education reform strategies. The Education Commission of the States estimates that such efforts cost states $2.3 billion during the 1999-00 school year alone. The federal government contributed another $1.6 billion in 2000-01 toward meeting the Clinton administration’s goal of decreasing class size nationwide in the early grades to no more than 18 students. During the past year or so, the deteriorating condition of state budgets and the Bush administration’s new emphasis on accountability have made class-size reduction less of a priority. Yet it remains popular among parents, teachers, and the teacher unions, which often promote it as an alternative to vouchers.

The motivation for reducing class size is intuitive: with smaller classes, teachers should be able to devote more time to each student, both in the classroom and in giving feedback on homework and tests. The concern is at least threefold. First, reducing class size is remarkably expensive, since it requires hiring more personnel. There may be less costly reforms that are at least as effective as class-size reduction. Second, hiring more teachers may dilute the quality of the workforce, thereby negating any gains among the students of good teachers. Finally, the intuitive relationship between class size and teachers’ effectiveness may not actually hold true—teachers may be no more successful with 18 students than with 23.

The most persuasive evidence of the benefits of class-size reduction has come from the Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) experiment in Tennessee, where students were randomly assigned to classrooms of varying size. Smaller classes appeared to yield substantial gains among kindergartners and possibly 1st graders in the first year of the program—gains that were maintained throughout their school years. However, a large body of research literature on class-size reduction contradicts the findings from Project STAR.

To lend a fresh perspective on this issue, we use data from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) to compare the effects of class size around the world. While Americans squabble over whether class size should be 18 or 25 students, teachers in Korean schools routinely face classrooms of more than 50 students. These and other differences, such as the quality of a nation’s teachers, can be valuable tools in discerning where, if ever, class-size reductions are likely to be beneficial.

Photograph by Getty Images.

Two Strategies

Ascertaining the effect of class size is less straightforward than it might appear. The central problem is that students are not assigned to classrooms randomly. For instance, schools often establish small remedial classes for lagging students or small enrichment classes for the so-called gifted and talented. In addition, school systems may direct students into schools with different average class sizes on the basis of their performance.

Parents also may influence their children’s class sizes. They may work hard to move their children to schools with smaller classes, where they are likely to receive more attention. Thus variation in class size may be simply the result, rather than the cause, of differences in student achievement. Estimating the true effect of class size on student performance requires a strategy that looks only at variations in class size that are unrelated to students’ previous achievement.

In principle, two such strategies are available. The first is to conduct a randomized field trial along the lines of Project STAR in Tennessee. Unfortunately, while it used a powerful research design, the Tennessee study was flawed in its implementation. For one thing, no data were collected on students’ performance before they were assigned to their classrooms, making it impossible to know whether the assignment was truly random. In addition, the teachers were aware of their participation in Project STAR, as in almost any true experiment. This has led some to question whether its findings can be expected to hold under more typical conditions. It is also worth noting that the evidence here comes from an experiment conducted in a single U.S. state during the mid-1980s, in which classes were reduced from 22-25 students to fewer than 17. In that sense, the findings may not apply to school systems in other parts of the world.

The second strategy, quasi-experimental research, relies either on special types of variation in class size or on econometric techniques to make appropriate comparisons. However, the conditions that must be met in order to use this approach make credible quasi-experimental studies possible for only a small number of school systems. For example, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton used data on black students in South Africa during apartheid to measure the effects of class size. They argued that the black population of South Africa during this time lacked the power to influence class sizes, making the assumption that students were randomly assigned to classrooms of different size more plausible. But the South African school system under apartheid was obviously unique; in some districts, the average class size reached 80 students.

While Case and Deaton found that smaller classes were modestly beneficial, Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby’s careful quasi-experimental study of elementary schools in Connecticut suggests that Case and Deaton’s results may not be relevant for more developed countries. Hoxby analyzed variation in class size due to random fluctuations in the number of births and restrictions on maximum class sizes. She found no evidence of even trivial class-size effects. However, her approach requires a long panel of rich data and has yet to be applied in other contexts.

East Asian countries feature large classes, with an average of more than 30 students. Photograph by Getty Images.

International Evidence

Taking data from TIMSS, we used a quasi-experimental design to take a broader look at how class size affects student achievement in different nations around the world. Conducted in 1994-95, TIMSS was the largest international study of student performance ever, with more than 40 countries participating initially. Each country administered the test to a nationally representative sample of middle-school students, defined as those students enrolled in the two adjacent grades that contained the largest proportion of 13-year-old students at the time of testing (grades 7 and 8 in most countries).

Our strategy takes advantage of the fact that data were collected on both actual and average class sizes and on students’ performance and socioeconomic backgrounds for more than one grade level in each school. We looked at whether 7th graders in a particular school performed better than the same school’s 8th graders (relative to the national average for their respective grades) when, on average, the 7th-grade classes were smaller than the 8th-grade classes. With this strategy, the variation in class size we considered is strictly a consequence of fluctuations in the cohort size from one grade to the next. This excludes variation in class sizes within the same grade and from school to school, both of which can be subject to the influence of parents and school-system policies that tend to sort students into classrooms by their performance. The remaining differences should be essentially unrelated to student performance.

This approach forced us to restrict the sample to schools in which both a 7th-grade and an 8th-grade class were actually tested and in which data on the actual class sizes and average class sizes were available for each grade. We ultimately conducted our analysis on the 18 countries in which data for at least 50 schools in both mathematics and science remained after applying these criteria.

As shown in Figure 1, Portugal exhibits the lowest average combined test scores in math and science among the 18 countries in our sample, Singapore the highest. Iceland has the smallest average class size, with just 20 students per classroom. At nearly 53 students per class, Korea has by far the highest average. The other East Asian countries also feature large classes, with an average of more than 30 students. In general, the countries with the smallest classes tended to be the worst performers. The reverse is also true: high performers tend to have larger classes. While this does not say much about the effectiveness of reducing class sizes in various environments, it does demonstrate that it is possible to have a high-achieving school system with relatively large classes.

Results

Let’s look first at the results of a straightforward comparison that adjusts the data on student performance for students’ socioeconomic background and grade level (since 7th and 8th graders were tested), thereby attempting to isolate the effects of class size. This initial analysis is of interest primarily because it is analogous to the approach used in most research on class size. Comparing these results with those obtained by a more reliable strategy will provide an indication of what biases may exist in other studies.

In 11 of the 18 nations, the estimate of the effects of class size were positive and statistically significant, suggesting that students in larger classes perform significantly better than students in smaller classes. In other words, a naïve strategy that does not account for the ways in which students are sorted into classes of different size leads to the counterintuitive result that students fare better in larger classes. Moreover, this result seems universal: it emerges in western Europe (Belgium, France), eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Romania), Australia, and East Asia (Hong Kong, Japan). No country showed students in smaller classes outperforming their peers in larger classes.

Let’s turn now to the preferred strategy, which controls for the fact that students performing at different levels may be sorted into smaller or larger classes both between and within schools. The first notable feature of this approach is the disappearance of the counterintuitive result that students do better in larger classes. In 16 of the 18 countries, none of the results was statistically different from zero. In the other two countries, Greece and Iceland, smaller classes did appear to elicit superior student performance. Moreover, the benefits appear to be substantial: Students scored just over two points (or 2 percent of the international standard deviation) higher for every one student fewer in their class.

The evidence suggests that capable teachers are able to promote student learning equally well regardless of class size. Photograph by Getty Images.

Precision Testing

What can be learned from the 16 countries where the results were statistically insignificant? Does this suggest the lack of a causal relationship between class size and student performance? Or is it merely the result of statistical imprecision? In four of the countries, Australia, Hong Kong, Scotland, and the United States, the standard error of the estimated effects of class size was extremely large, indicating that little confidence should be placed in the results. The lack of precision in these cases seems to be a direct consequence of our research strategy’s rather demanding data requirements. These school systems simply exhibit little variation in average class size from one grade to the next—the type of variation on which our strategy relied.

The remaining 12 countries can be further distinguished by comparing their results with those from other studies. We chose first to compare our results with those reported by Princeton economist Alan Krueger in his reanalysis of the Project STAR data from Tennessee, which produced some of the highest estimates of class-size effects among credible studies. Krueger performed a very rough cost-benefit analysis, in which the economic benefits of class-size reduction, in terms of the increase in future earnings due to higher test scores, appeared to approximate the costs.

Krueger’s results indicate that students in kindergarten classrooms that had 7 to 8 fewer students than regular-sized classes performed about 3 percent of a standard deviation better for every one student fewer in their class. Converted to international scores on TIMSS, this is equivalent to three test-score points. This is greater than the two-point gain we found in Iceland and Greece, but it is within the standard error of these estimates, suggesting that the actual effect of reducing class size in Iceland and Greece could be as large as Krueger found in the United States.

For 11 of the 12 countries with relatively precise yet statistically insignificant estimates, the possibility of class-size effects of the same size as Krueger found can be rejected with at least 95 percent confidence. There could still be class-size effects in these nations, just not of the magnitude estimated by Krueger. Note, however, that Krueger’s effects were found in kindergarten and 1st grade, while these estimates are for students in 7th and 8th grades.

We further tested to see whether a one-student reduction in class sizes would increase TIMSS scores by just one point, or 1 percent of an international standard deviation. An effect of this size would be so small as to be essentially negligible from the standpoint of public policy; a one-point gain is too little to justify the expense of class-size reduction. Regardless, even the possibility of this small an impact can be rejected with at least 90 percent confidence in 6 of our 12 school systems with reasonably precise results.

In short, the effect of class size on student performance varies across the 18 countries in our sample (see Figure 1). We can rule out even a minimal relationship between class size and TIMSS scores in the middle grades in six school systems: those of Flemish Belgium, Canada, Japan, Portugal, Singapore, and Slovenia. In an additional five school systems, we can rule out the possibility of large class-size effects: French Belgium, the Czech Republic, Korea, Romania, and Spain. These results cast doubt on the desirability of class-size reduction in the middle grades as a reform strategy in many countries. In Greece and Iceland, by contrast, smaller classes were clearly beneficial. (In five countries—Australia, France, Hong Kong, Scotland, and the United States—our strategy led to inconclusive estimates that do not allow for any confident assertions about the effects of differences in class size.)

Quantity versus Quality

Why would class-size reduction elicit improvement in Greece and Iceland but not elsewhere? One might expect class-size effects to be related to such characteristics as a nation’s overall level of resources. For instance, it is feasible that countries with relatively large classes would glean substantial benefits from reducing class sizes. However, there is no clear pattern in countries’ average class sizes that distinguishes the two countries where substantial class-size effects exist from either the six countries where we ruled out any noteworthy class-size effects or from the five countries where we ruled out at least large class-size effects. Greece’s average class size is similar to the mean class size among the nations where no class-size effects were found, and Iceland’s average class size is substantially lower (see Table 1).

One possibility is that class-size reduction has a large impact in relatively ineffective school systems. Both Greece and Iceland performed considerably below the international average on TIMSS, while the countries where class-size reduction did not have even a small effect performed above the average. Also, even though Greece’s class sizes are roughly at the mean and Iceland’s were substantially lower than the mean, education spending per student in both countries is substantially below the average of the two comparison groups. This suggests that Greece and Iceland spend rather little per employed teacher, which is reflected in the data on teachers’ salaries. Teachers’ salaries in Greece and Iceland are below the mean of the other countries in absolute terms, in terms of salary per teaching hour, and relative to the country’s per capita GDP (see Table 1).

A low average salary for teachers suggests that a country may be drawing its teaching population from a pool of less-skilled workers. If this is the case, different countries appear to be making different tradeoffs between the quantity and quality of their teachers: with class sizes low, Greece and Iceland employ many teachers of low quality. The countries where class-size effects were not observed appear to employ relatively fewer teachers, but of higher quality.

This assumption is borne out by the available data on teachers’ educational attainment. In Greece, the highest level of education reached by the vast majority of teachers is the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree without any teacher training. In Iceland, about one-third of the teachers surveyed by TIMSS had not even completed secondary education, with only some basic teacher training. Meanwhile, about 60 percent of the teachers surveyed in the other countries held either a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in addition to their training as teachers.

This evidence suggests that capable teachers are able to promote student learning equally well regardless of class size (at least within the range of variation that occurs naturally among grades). Less capable teachers, however, do not seem to be up to the job of teaching large classes.

This interpretation is corroborated by teachers’ responses in TIMSS when they were asked to what extent their teaching was limited by a high student-to-teacher ratio in their classroom. In Greece and Iceland, 45 percent of teachers reported that their teaching was limited “a great deal” by a high student-to-teacher ratio. The comparable statistics averaged only 19 percent and 25 percent among countries where no class-size effects and no large class-size effects were found, respectively. This is despite the fact that average class sizes in Greece and Iceland were lower than in either comparison group.

In short, our evidence suggests that the existence of class-size effects is related to the quality of the teaching force. Smaller classes appear to be beneficial only in countries where average teacher quality is low. If teacher quality is a key input in education, this interpretation can explain why class-size effects exist in some countries but not in others and at the same time why the countries in our sample where we did find sizable class-size effects also exhibit poor overall performance. Greece and Iceland exhibit class-size effects and poor performance because they employ a population of relatively less capable teachers, while other countries exhibit no class-size effects but high overall performance because they employ good teachers. This suggests that it may be better policy to devote the limited resources available for education to employing more capable teachers rather than to reducing class sizes. The merits of this admittedly speculative conclusion are a promising topic for future research.

-Martin R. West is a research fellow at the Harvard University Program on Education Policy and Governance and the research editor of Education Next. Ludger Woessmann is a senior researcher at the Ifo Institute for Economic Research in Munich, Germany.

In my high school, rumor had it that Richard Brockhaus was the toughest grader in the state. Others disagreed. They insisted it was the whole country.

When as a senior I finally braved his Advanced Placement calculus course, Dr. B did nothing to dispel these rumors. For all my efforts, it seemed that I could not live up to his expectations. My grade for the fall semester remains the only C on my academic record.

Dr. B was not wholly devoid of sympathy. A relentless encourager, he constantly reminded us that the material we were trying to learn was “not rocket science.” Thus motivated, I managed to improve my grade modestly in the spring.

When we arrived in May to take the course’s final exam, to our surprise we found a TV perched awkwardly on Dr. B’s desk. In lieu of taking an exam, we would be watching Stand and Deliver, the film documenting Jaime Escalante’s success in teaching AP calculus to disadvantaged students in East Los Angeles. Apparently our work had met his expectations after all.

Still, those of us who had struggled through the course had little idea of what to expect as we headed into the official AP exam later that month. As it turned out, the College Board’s questions were among the easiest we had encountered all year. Dr. B had taught “to the test” and well beyond it; every member of our class passed with flying colors.

Contrast my experiences with those of 300 11th and 12th graders in Boston, Springfield, and Worcester surveyed in 2003 by the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute. In the 10th grade, these students had failed in their first attempt at the statewide Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam.

Yet more than 45 percent of them reported having a B average or better in the 2002-03 academic year; fewer than one in ten reported an average of D or F. This despite the state’s insistence that students who do not pass the MCAS demonstrate no more than “a minimal understanding of the subject matter and do not solve simple problems.” Their teachers, it would seem, had signaled success when in fact the students were floundering.

Today in Massachusetts, as in many states, students who fail to pass the statewide graduation test are prevented from receiving a diploma. Teachers who hand out misleading grades thereby allow some students, already let down by a school system that has failed to prepare them adequately, to be blindsided. Only because the state provides multiple opportunities to pass the MCAS do such students have some chance at redemption.

In this issue, David Figlio and Maurice Lucas take a systematic look at the effects of grading practices on elementary students in Florida (“The Gentleman’s-A‘,” p. 60). Their findings confirm what Dr. Brockhaus understood: Students learn far more from rigorous teachers than from those with lenient grading standards.

Regrettably, teachers with high standards appear to be as scarce in Florida as they are in Massachusetts. Only 50 percent of students awarded As and 11 percent of those with Bs performed at an A or B level on the corresponding section of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

Teachers clearly need some discretion in deciding how to distribute grades; situations will arise where they feel the need to award a higher grade than warranted in order to sustain a student’s morale or to reward exceptional effort. But grades that are consistently too high send the wrong message. They tend to discourage students from making a serious effort and increase the odds that serious problems will go unidentified until it is too late.

Is the era of unchecked grade inflation already behind us? Perhaps. As external assessments become a regular part of the American education system, parents may demand that report cards offer accurate information about their children’s progress. And principals responsible for ensuring that their schools make “adequate yearly progress” will need to ask teachers to keep standards high.

-Martin West

Diana Jean Schemo, “Nation’s Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal,” New York Times, August 17, 2004, page A1

It is not unusual for interest groups to issue reports that further their own political agendas–and to muddle the facts in the process. For this reason, newspapers generally ignore them, treat them with great skepticism, or make sure they properly vet the research with independent observers.

Not so in the case of the study of charter schools leaked by the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) to the New York Times, which then placed it in the right-hand column of the front page of its August 17 edition–a slot typically reserved for the day’s biggest story. Headlined “Nation’s Charter Schools Lagging Behind, U.S. Test Scores Reveal,” the story sent shock waves through the charter school movement and left more than a few education reformers scrambling for cover.

Using the data tool on the National Center for Education Statistics website, the authors of the AFT study called up some basic numbers on the performance of students from a nationally representative sample of charter schools. Their conclusion: “Charter schools are underperforming.” Their evidence: data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the nation’s report card, showing students in charter schools doing less well than students in other public schools nationally, as well as in a small number of more focused comparisons.

The Times had a field day with the news. The AFT’s findings, the paper reported, “dealt a blow to supporters of the charter school movement, including the Bush administration”–a blow made all the more powerful (and credible) by the fact that the AFT had “historically supported charter schools.” Amy Stuart Wells, a sociology professor at Columbia University Teachers College, was quoted as saying the data were “really, really important” as they “confirm what a lot of people who study charter schools have been worried about.” Would that it were that simple.

Where do we begin to sort out the outlandish claims of the AFT study–and those made by others on its behalf? For starters, saying the AFT has historically supported charter schools is like saying that the Chicago Cubs are historically a World Series champion baseball team. While technically true (legendary AFT president Albert Shanker helped introduce the concept in a 1988 speech to the National Press Club), the union’s position on the issue has changed so markedly that it is now one of the staunchest opponents of charter schools around the nation. In recent years the AFT has criticized charter schools in a series of reports, of which August’s was only the latest and best publicized.

But hardly the most sophisticated. Indeed, on a methodological level, the AFT analyses are sufficiently pedestrian to be laughable. And most mainstream newspapers around the country–once the Times had made it the story of the hour–had the good sense to present a more critical view of the study’s import. In the title and lead paragraph of its coverage, USA Today noted that “achievement [is] not so simply measured” and that critics had already pointed out that “the report is hardly a fair look at whether charter schools help kids improve.” The Seattle Times quoted University of Washington researcher Mary Beth Celio’s dismissal of the study as “one of the most unsophisticated, low-level analyses I’ve ever seen.” The editorial board at the Chicago Tribune went further, deeming the AFT findings “about as new as a lava lamp, as revelatory as an old sock, and as significant as a belch.”

A Flawed Report

What’s wrong with the study? The basic problem is straightforward: raw comparisons showing charter school students scoring lower than public school students on standardized tests may simply reflect the fact that charter schools serve students in low-performing districts with high concentrations of poor and minority children. Many states allow charter schools to form only where students are having difficulties, and many charter schools are then asked to accept the most challenging of students. Any credible analysis of their effectiveness must account for these facts on the ground.

Indeed, if the AFT believes its own findings, it must also concede that private religious schools outperform public schools (see Figure 1). According to the same NAEP data that are the basis for the new AFT study, religious private schools outperformed the public schools nationwide by between 9 and 17 points, a gap at least as large as the public school-charter school difference that the AFT–with considerable help from the Times–is trumpeting. On past occasions, the AFT has objected vehemently to interpreting such findings as evidence that religious schools are superior on the grounds that they attract an especially able group of students. But for charter schools, it seems, the problem of selection effects need only be addressed in the most superficial of ways.

The authors’ sole strategy to “enhance the fairness of the analysis” was to look separately at students in 14 categories, including those from six different states, those who qualified for the federal free-lunch program (and those who didn’t), those from different ethnic backgrounds, and those living inside and outside a central city. As a strategy to control for the background characteristics that differentiate students in charter and traditional public schools, this approach is feeble. At best it can eliminate the effects of differences with respect to one background characteristic at a time. But it may not even be effective for that purpose if, for instance, the students eligible for a free lunch who attend charter schools come from even poorer families than eligible students in traditional public schools.

Even so, in most of the comparisons holding just one characteristic constant, the performance differences between charter and traditional public school students attenuate to the point of statistical insignificance. Twenty-one of the 28 comparisons the AFT conducted using 4th-grade average scale scores are statistically insignificant. As previous research has found that ethnic differences in achievement are large, it is especially noteworthy that all comparisons within ethnic groups in the NAEP charter school data cut against the AFT’s overall conclusions. The small differences that remain when looking separately at white, African-American, or Hispanic children are all statistically insignificant–a fact that is not apparent in either the Times story’s text or the tables that accompanied it.

But do any of these comparisons–within ethnic groups or otherwise–tell us anything meaningful about the quality of traditional public, charter, or religious private schools? Not a bit.

Plainly, to account adequately for the influences of a child’s family, home environment, and community on his or her learning capacity, one must do much more than look separately at students grouped by free-lunch status, ethnicity, or school location. At a minimum, it is essential to gather detailed data on students’ background characteristics and to put them to good use. Control variables now standard in education research include parents’ education and marital status, household income, and the quality of learning resources in the home, to name but a few. And rather than using aggregate comparisons within subgroups to eliminate the effects of differences in one background characteristic at a time, as the AFT has done, the influence of all of these factors must be addressed simultaneously.

But all this may just scratch the surface. As schools of choice, charters are likely to attract students who are not doing well in their traditional public schools. Moreover, many charter schools explicitly target “at-risk” students. Both of these facts would lead you to expect students in charter schools to perform at a low level even after taking into account their observable back.ground characteristics.

Ideally, one would therefore study charter schools in the context of a randomized field trial, assigning students randomly to attend either a charter or a traditional public school, gathering data on their performance at baseline, and tracking their progress over time. In the absence of that possibility, it is vital to use data from multiple years to track the learning trajectory of students in both charter and traditional public schools.

Yet another critical flaw in the AFT’s analysis is its failure to account for the length of time that a charter school has been in place–a factor known to affect any school’s performance. Having just hired new staff and teachers, implemented new curricula, and acquired building facilities, new schools often face considerable start-up problems. Almost one-third of the charter schools nationwide were less than two years old when the 2003 NAEP was administered, raising doubts about whether even meaningful findings about charter school performance would apply when more of them are well established.

Encouragingly, research on charter schools using more reliable methods to gauge school quality is under way. Nonetheless, it will be some time before definitive conclusions about the merits of one of the nation’s most prominent, and popular, reform strategies can be drawn. In the meantime, the AFT’s study does not even amount to a good interim report.

Why All the Fuss?

Given all of these problems, why would the Times see fit to bestow instant credibility on the AFT study by granting it glowing, page-one coverage? While we have no special insight into the motives of the newspaper’s editorial staff, the coverage itself suggests two factors that are important.

The first concerns alleged chicanery by the U.S. Department of Education, which, reported the Times, had buried the flawed charter school findings in “mountains of data . . . released without public announcement.” According to the authors of the AFT study, “a combination of intuition, prior knowledge, considerable digging, and luck” was required just to locate the data. Such sleuthing makes for dramatic storytelling–for the next best thing to doing it oneself, in the newspaper business, is reporting (exclusively, one hopes, so you can break the news) on someone else’s discovery of a cover-up.

As Bella Rosenberg, one of the report’s three authors, explained to the press, “Analyses are always welcome, but first things first. . . . Surely the interests of children are better served by timely and straightforward information about whether charter school performance measures up to the claims made for it.” In a letter to the Times, educational psychologist Howard Gardner praised the AFT for its act of public service in issuing the study and then asserted that the Department of Education’s decision not to highlight the findings was ideologically driven: “If the results had been positive, the Education Department would doubtless have heralded them. Across the policy spectrum, the pattern of the administration is all too clear: Call for evidence-based results, tout them when supportive, hide them when not, spin them when possible.”

Perhaps. But we draw a slightly different conclusion. Timeliness and transparency are important, but bad information is worse than none. And uncovering misleading information and presenting it out of context does a greater disservice to the “interests of children” than the Department of Education’s decision not to issue a report that does not control for student background characteristics. From this perspective, the AFT study and the Times‘s breathless coverage of it only made a bad situation worse.

The second probable reason for the prominent attention the Times gave the study stems from the fact that charter schools represent one of several remedies for schools deemed chronically failing under George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. (Other remedies include replacing much of the school’s staff or turning its operations over to the state or to a private company.) Thus the story’s import was magnified by the politics of education reform: it suggested a flaw in the Bush administration’s game plan. The very next day, the lead Times editorial heralded the report as “a devastating setback” to the Bush administration’s education program.

Ironically, however, it is not at all clear that political cleavages over charter schools follow strictly partisan lines. Indeed, federal financial support for the charter school movement has its origins in the Clinton era. Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry was an enthusiastic supporter of charter schools. And while Secretary of Education Rod Paige was a vocal proponent of charter schools, President Bush said hardly a word about charters on the campaign trail–nor, for that matter, did he say much about them from the White House.

What the NAEP Data Do Tell Us

While the statistics on the nation’s charter schools currently available from the NAEP are not at all useful for assessing these schools’ effectiveness, they do offer, for the first time, a glimpse of the makeup of a nationally representative sample of the students who attend them. As a result, one important fact about charter schools now appears incontrovertible: they are not bastions of wealth and privilege.

As Figure 2 shows, almost 62 percent of the roughly 3,000 4th graders in the NAEP charter school sample attend a school located in a central city, compared with just 32 percent of NAEP 4th graders in traditional public schools. Roughly 33 percent of the charter school students are African-American, compared with only 18 percent of the public school students. Fifty-four percent of elementary charter school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch programs, compared with 46 percent of public school students. The analogous differences for the 8th graders tested by the NAEP are even more pronounced, perhaps reflecting the fact that a large number of middle and high school charters target at-risk students.

Given the conditions under which states and districts accept charter schools, the language of their mandates, and the characteristics of families most eager for alternatives to traditional public schools, these differences can hardly come as a surprise. For the foreseeable future, charter schools are likely to serve high concentrations of poor and underprivileged students. What remains unclear is how much they can do for this population. Sadly–and despite the impression given by the gray lady of American journalism–the AFT study tells us nothing about that.

William G. Howell is an assistant professor of government at Harvard University. Martin R. West is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and the research editor of Education Next.

Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policies?

By James J. Heckman and Alan B. Krueger
Edited and with an introduction by Benjamin M. Friedman

MIT Press, 2003, $40.00; 370 pages.

As reviewed by Martin R. West
In the first half of the 20th century, a rapidly industrializing American economy intensified the need for a more highly skilled workforce. White-collar workers were in demand, and blue-collar laborers were being asked to follow written instructions, decipher blueprints, and perform basic calculations.

As wages for workers who could perform these tasks grew, so did Americans’ appetite for schooling. School districts across the country built a vast number of new high schools and adapted their curricula to employers’ needs. By the time the United States entered the Second World War, roughly 50 percent of American teenagers were completing high school, up from less than 20 percent just two decades earlier. This heavy investment in education gave the nation a huge edge over other countries in the amount of “human capital” in its workforce-an edge that helped drive the American economy in the decades that followed.

The time Americans spent in school continued to grow after the war, due in part to policies like the GI Bill that encouraged students to attend college. Indeed, for a time it appeared that Americans might actually be receiving too much education. When the first of the baby boomers entered the job market in the 1970s, many of them holding freshly minted college diplomas, the economic value of a bachelor’s degree plummeted, leading Harvard labor economist Richard Freeman to fret over the plight of the “overeducated American.”

But concern about too much education has long since dissipated. The students who came of age in the 1970s set a benchmark for attainment of education that subsequent generations have surpassed only recently, and then barely. College participation rates leveled off sharply for individuals born after mid-century, native- and foreign-born alike. While 62 percent of those born in America in 1950 attended at least one year of college, the comparable figure for those born in 1975 (and who came of age in 1995) was just 59 percent (see Figure 1).

Meanwhile, technological advances-in particular the spread of computers-accelerated the economy’s need for skills, once again boosting the wage premium received by more-educated workers (see Figure 2). Yet unlike the early decades of the century, when higher wages quickly spurred greater enrollment, the educational response in the late 20th century was slow and uneven. Although the share of the labor force enrolling in college increased modestly in the 1990s, college graduation rates remained essentially flat.

In contrast, education levels elsewhere in the developed world continue to rise, with college graduation rates increasing roughly 5 percentage points among the other countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) over the past 20 years alone. As a result, America’s longstanding international advantage in the share of its adult population with college degrees, while still sizable, shows signs of eroding (see Figure 3).

Recent high school graduation statistics are even more alarming. The percentage of American students completing high school has actually fallen since 1970-a trend masked in official statistics by the growing number of students receiving alternative credentials like the General Educational Development, or GED, certificate. This decline, along with the arrival of a sizable immigrant population that has relatively little education, has bequeathed the United States a pool of low-skilled adults exceptional in the developed world.

In short, America’s supply of educated workers is simply not keeping up with demand.

A Hard Row to Read

Why not? And what, if anything, should the government do about it? These were the questions put to Alan Krueger and James Heckman at a 2002 symposium at Harvard University. Heckman, the recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize for Economics, and Krueger, formerly the chief economist at the Department of Labor and now a professor of economics at Princeton University, have long been among the most prominent observers of the policies that affect the skills of the American workforce. Their answers, along with the discussion they provoked among such authorities as Harvard president Lawrence Summers and Stanford economist Eric Hanushek, have now been compiled in this important volume from MIT Press.

Before running out to purchase a copy of Inequality in America, however, readers are warned that the authors have made disappointingly little effort to present their ideas and evidence in a way that is intelligible to noneconomists. Moreover, the book’s format-lengthy essays by Krueger and Heckman (who teamed up with fellow economist Pedro Carneiro, now of University College London, for his contribution), followed by commentaries from five scholars, each with a favorite bone (or nit) to pick, then by extended responses and final rejoinders from the lead authors-makes it hard to find the forest for the trees.

That said, readers willing to invest the effort to make sense of it on their own can expect a healthy return. Krueger offers an energetic, if ultimately unconvincing, call to expand existing education and training programs for people of all ages, focusing especially on the most disadvantaged. In contrast, Heckman and Carneiro advocate reallocating resources toward the youngest students (especially preschoolers), expanding mentoring programs for disadvantaged adolescents, and raising the quality of the nation’s public schools, not by augmenting their resources, but by enhancing parental choice. Together these prescriptions for enhancing America’s stock of human capital clarify the range of policy options.

More of the Same: Money

For Krueger, the flaws in America’s human capital policies stem less from the design of existing programs than from the level of resources devoted to them. Krueger would increase spending first and foremost on compensatory programs for the disadvantaged. These investments will be especially effective, he contends, because low-income groups often lack either the resources or the desire to invest adequately in their own education. By the same token, Krueger rejects the notion that policymakers should focus new investments in education on a particular age group, such as the very young: “Old dogs can learn new tricks,” he says, and the benefits of programs for teenagers and adults are apparent more quickly than those for young children. He would therefore expand education and training programs for people of all ages, from preschool to underemployed adults.

For school-age children, Krueger would begin by reducing class size and increasing teachers’ salaries, especially in schools serving low-income communities. He would also increase the quantity of schooling by lengthening the school year (or offering disadvantaged students vouchers for summer school) and extending the age for compulsory schooling to 18. Finally, for those not yet or no longer in the public school system, Krueger would increase funding for programs sponsored by Head Start (programs for disadvantaged preschoolers) and the Job Corps (programs for high school dropouts) until all those eligible can participate-and expand adult training under the Workforce Investment Act.

Implementing even a fraction of these recommendations would require massive new resources. Unfortunately for policymakers with fixed budgets, Krueger makes no effort to prioritize among them. He settles instead on a “policy of giving ample resources to local governments in low-income areas to invest in the initiatives they think best meet their needs-and holding the local governments accountable for the results.”

Krueger says nothing about how such accountability might work. And why would he? If existing programs are doing the best they can with what they have, surely they can safely be trusted to put new resources to good use.

Elusive Evidence

But does Krueger demonstrate that current investments in education and training on this scale could be worthwhile? He contends that the return on investments in education in low-income individuals compares favorably with the return on investments in the stock market. On its face, this fact would seem to justify increased spending on a wide range of costly interventions.

Elsewhere in the book, however, former treasury secretary Summers reminds readers that any returns of the Krueger program would need to be balanced against the cost of forgoing other policies, within education and beyond, and against the drag on the economy due to increased taxation. Krueger, even though allowed to respond to Summers’s critique, makes no effort to account for these costs.
And a close look at the evidence Krueger uses to calculate the expected return on investments in education reveals that it is, at best, highly selective. Krueger mounts his case like a seasoned lawyer, presenting the evidence most likely to sway the audience to his position, all the while downplaying doubts as to its validity and ignoring evidence to the contrary.

To justify his call for class-size reductions, for example, Krueger relies heavily on evidence from Tennessee’s Project STAR, a large-scale class-size experiment conducted in the 1980s. But it remains unclear whether improvements of the kind identified in Project STAR would justify the costs of reducing class sizes-particularly if it were attempted on a large scale. Although Krueger’s own cost-benefit analysis paints a modestly optimistic picture, it ignores the fundamental tradeoff between quality and quantity that school districts face when hiring teachers. Likewise, Krueger’s interpretation of the much larger body of nonexperimental evidence on class-size reduction (he considers these studies supportive of class-size reduction) is at best open to debate.

The empirical support for Krueger’s other proposals is equally tenuous. While teachers’ salaries have declined relative to other occupations requiring a college degree since midcentury, there is no evidence to suggest that across-the-board raises would improve student outcomes enough to justify the expense, particularly if they were not accompanied by changes that would link teachers’ pay to their performance in the classroom. Moreover, the apparent success of the famous Perry Preschool Program and several other intensive early-childhood interventions is insufficient to justify an expansion of the less-intensive federal Head Start program.

While the evidence Krueger reviews does not prove his program will be effective, neither does it prove the opposite. This is hardly surprising. As Heckman and Carneiro argue elsewhere in the book, “A purely empirical approach to assessing policy proposals is never effective, because the data almost never dovetail with the proposed policies.” They go on to point out, however, that it is essential that analysts draw on “all available data and theory.”

Fortunately, elsewhere in the volume, Eric Hanushek provides key evidence that Krueger ignores: the United States has been reducing class size and otherwise increasing the resources invested in the public school system for more than four decades. The results of this large-scale “experiment” are far from ambiguous: while school resources, adjusted for inflation, have more than tripled since 1960, student achievement has hardly budged. Meanwhile, as noted above, high-school dropout rates have increased, and college graduation rates have been essentially flat.

This dismal record indicates the need to reassess the nation’s basic approach to improving education. Krueger’s failure even to acknowledge the need for such a reassessment, much less contribute to it, is disappointing.

A Fresh Approach

It is encouraging to find that Heckman and Carneiro begin their analysis with a discussion of the process by which individuals acquire skills. Their point of departure is the observation that skills acquired by a given time affect not only performance levels at that moment, but also the learning tools available going forward. For example, 1st graders who learned to read while in kindergarten not only excel on reading tests, but also are able to use books to learn new material more quickly. Likewise, students with a demanding 3rd-grade teacher may learn more as 4th graders because of work habits and study skills developed during the previous year.

The notion that human capital accumulation is a dynamic process has one crucial implication: delay is costly. All else being equal, education interventions for young students should be more cost-effective than interventions later on. It is no surprise, then, that most public job-training efforts have had disappointing results. As Heckman and Carneiro put it, such programs must “work with what families and schools supply and cannot remedy twenty years of neglect.” They would have the government exit the field of job training almost completely and rely on employers to make whatever investments in adult workers will be profitable.

In contrast, programs for very young students should be especially cost-effective. Here Heckman and Carneiro call attention to the evidence demonstrating that intensive intervention programs for disadvantaged preschoolers can be quite successful. They are quick to acknowledge the limitations of this research, in particular, the small number of programs that have been rigorously evaluated. Nonetheless, they are prepared to recommend that aggressive (and expensive) preschool interventions be central to any effort to enhance the skills of the American workforce.
Heckman and Carneiro also advocate the expansion of mentoring programs for disadvantaged teenagers, such as Big Brothers Big Sisters. But they maintain that these interventions should focus on noncognitive outcomes, such as social skills, work habits, and motivation, which are more malleable at that age than cognitive skills. In fact, they argue that the cognitive abilities of eight-year-olds are basically fixed, in the sense that their IQs correlate very closely with their IQs later in life. This is not to say that older students cannot improve their academic achievement, or that such improvements will not reflect the acquisition of valuable skills. Indeed, the long-term importance of skills that do not necessarily show up on standardized tests is an important secondary theme of Heckman and Carneiro’s essay.

Perhaps the most compelling evidence on this point comes from Heckman’s own research on the GED program (first published in the American Economic Review in 2001). It is well established that GED recipients do better in the job market than high school dropouts without a GED-a fact that has led some to conclude that the program is a success. But as Heckman has shown, GED recipients also tend to have stronger cognitive abilities than other dropouts; after all, they passed a test to earn their credential. Controlling for this difference, GED recipients earn considerably less than other dropouts. The same characteristics that lead students with considerable academic potential to leave high school before graduation apparently make them less-productive workers later in life.

The apparent implication is that the GED has become a mixed signal for employers: it identifies the smart but undisciplined individuals within the larger pool of dropouts. The relatively low wages GED recipients receive, controlling for their cognitive ability, show that discipline matters.

The Need for More Competition

Although Heckman and Carneiro devote markedly less space to the public school system than to the failure of job training programs, the potential effectiveness of early-childhood education, and the importance of noncognitive skills, they do document a “growing consensus” that schools’ material resources are only weakly related to their students’ earnings later in life. Simply increasing those resources is therefore unlikely to stimulate more disadvantaged students to attend college. In fact, they note, this pattern implies that the United States could be spending too much on students-at least given the incentives schools currently face.

Heckman and Carneiro would aim to change those incentives. Specifically, they call for families to be given more choice over the schools their children attend. The resulting competition among schools to attract students should force schools to reduce costs and increase quality. As Heckman and Carneiro point out, the evidence on the benefits of competition within education is limited-a necessary consequence of the lack of serious experimentation with meaningful choice-based reforms. Nonetheless, they make a persuasive case that “policies that promote such competition are much more likely to raise schooling performance than policies that increase schooling quality and do not change the organization of schools.” (Though this is an example of the sometimes wooden prose that can make this book a workout, what they mean is that it’s better to give schools more competition than more money.)

More puzzling is Heckman and Carneiro’s failure to discuss the most prominent current strategy for encouraging schools to put their resources to good use: test-based accountability. By the early 1990s, several states were experimenting with policies that reward or sanction schools based on their students’ performance on tests that are aligned with statewide standards. In 2001, the No Child Left Behind Act mandated that all states adopt such policies as a condition for receiving federal aid. With each student in grades 3 through 8 now being tested annually in at least two subjects, and schools’ progress assessed largely on the basis of the results, there is no corner of the American public school system left untouched.

Heckman and Carneiro’s inattention to the accountability movement is consistent with the low regard in which they hold evidence from standardized tests and with their emphasis on the importance of noncognitive skills. Throughout the volume, they are critical of analysts who evaluate education interventions solely on the basis of “arbitrarily scaled test scores” and of “proposed systems for evaluating school performance” (read: No Child Left Behind) that take this same approach. Their enthusiasm for school choice suggests that they are more confident of parents’ ability to sense whether a school or teacher is effective and to act on that knowledge.

In my view, however, they are too quick in their otherwise thorough survey to dismiss the accountability movement’s potential to improve the productivity of America’s schools-even with respect to the outcomes they consider most important. While standardized tests are necessarily limited in scope, well-designed assessments can and do measure skills that are essential components of what we expect schools to impart. Moreover, the very process of preparing to take them can be expected to cultivate in students many of the same noncognitive skills Heckman has shown to be so important later in life, all the more if states go beyond the requirements of No Child Left Behind and create incentives for individual students to do well. Given that we do not yet know how to measure students’ discipline, motivation, and social skills directly, setting high expectations for skills we are able to measure and holding students accountable for meeting them may well be the best ways to improve all of the above.

-Martin R. West is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and the research editor of Education Next.

The unabridged version of this article may be found at www.educationnext.org.

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether collective bargaining in education hasn’t become something more like collusion. In fact, the best evidence to support that position may be the steady decline in labor unrest. Despite some high-profile incidents–like the teacher “sick-out” which shut down 53 of Detroit’s 235 schools last spring–strikes by teachers have become increasingly rare since 1975, a high-water mark, when there were 241 nationwide. By 2004 there were just 15. During this same period, the number of public school teachers rose from 2.2 million to more than 3.1 million, several times the rate of increase of the students they serve, whose numbers edged up only slightly, from 44.8 million to 48.4 million.

The current era of labor peace is typically attributed to laws in 31 states barring teachers from striking and mandating mediation or binding arbitration procedures. In addition, both sides have gained negotiating experience. However, that’s not the whole story. Superintendents in cities like San Diego, Milwaukee, and Houston have reported being urged by civic officials, business leaders, and philanthropists to seek “consensus” and to “partner” with the local union.

Has all this labor peace actually been good for education? Is it perhaps time for some discord?

The suggestion at first seems absurd. Parents and the voting public frown on labor conflict and teachers’ strikes for good reason, not least among them the disruptions for family and schooling that are caused by even temporary school closings. Yet the public’s aversion to conflict, combined with the political heft of teacher unions, can make school boards unduly deferential to union demands.

Despite the National Education Association’s claims to be an advocate “for children and public education,” we should not expect unions at the bargaining table to be for anything but their own interests. Naturally enough, those interests favor existing arrangements, which protect jobs; limit the demands placed on members, including their accountability for student performance; and safeguard the privileges of senior teachers. Teachers who entered the profession under these rules and patiently served their time, waiting for the rewards of seniority, are understandably resistant to measures that would significantly alter pay scales, job protections, or work rules.

As Robert Barkley, former executive director of the Ohio Education Association, explained, “The fundamental and legitimate purposes of unions [are] to protect the employment interests of their members. It is the primary function of management to represent the basic interests of the enterprise: teaching and learning.”

These roles have been too often conflated.

What’s Good for the Goose … Is Good for the Goose

Collective bargaining agreements demonstrate the failure of school boards to fight for the interests of students and taxpayers, not to mention the prerogatives of sensible management. The contracts are long, complicated, and replete with both tediously detailed and needlessly ambiguous restrictions on administrators. The 199 collective bargaining agreements for teachers on file at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in January 2005 averaged 105 pages in length. And the topics covered in those pages extend far beyond bread-and-butter questions of salary and benefits; there are dozens of clauses covering a district’s ability to evaluate, transfer, terminate, and manage the workload of teachers, all having potentially serious effects on the management of schools and student achievement.

The Jefferson County, Kentucky, contract, for example, mandates that the district may not use student test scores “in any way to evaluate the work performance of employees unless they agree voluntarily.” Restrictions on matters as important as evaluations of teachers can also be maddeningly ambiguous. The Little Rock, Arkansas, contract, for instance, specifies: “An individual teacher’s lesson plan book shall be subject to the review of the principal at any time.” But then it clarifies: “Teachers shall not be required to make their lesson plan books available on a scheduled basis.”

Collective bargaining agreements also typically restrict the amount of time that teachers may be required to spend working with students, the number of students a teacher will instruct, and the number of lesson plans a teacher will prepare. In some cases they stipulate, as in Multnomah County, Oregon, that professional development “funds will be allocated based upon seniority of the unit members who make application,” thus converting these expenditures from a lever for school improvement into a perk for long-serving faculty.

Similarly, when it becomes necessary to fill a classroom vacancy or to remove an ineffective teacher, district officials are often hobbled by contract language. A 2005 study by the New Teacher Project, the national nonprofit organization that works with school districts to recruit high-quality teachers, examined five urban districts and concluded that seniority-based transfer privileges written into contracts often force principals “to hire large numbers of teachers they do not want and who may not be a good fit for the job and their school.” All but five states have laws giving teachers lifetime tenure after three years or less. While procedures for removing tenured teachers for “just cause” appear in most contracts, the available procedures are so burdensome that they are rarely used. A recent study of Illinois public schools found that, since 1986, an average of just two tenured teachers a year have been removed–in a state with more than 95,000 tenured teachers. The New Teacher Project report cited above found just four tenured teachers out of 70,000 fired for poor performance in the five districts studied.

Tellingly, teachers themselves agree that current policies on termination protect those who should not be in the schools. According to Public Agenda, 78 percent of teachers nationwide report that there are at least a few teachers in their school who “fail to do a good job and are simply going through the motions.” The same Public Agenda study quoted one New Jersey union representative: “I’ve gone in and defended teachers who shouldn’t even be pumping gas.” A Los Angeles union representative bragged, “If I’m representing them, it’s impossible to get them out. It’s impossible. Unless they commit a lewd act.” While such admissions may be startling, they highlight an important aspect of the union’s role: having been granted the exclusive right to represent teachers in the district, the union is legally bound to advocate for all of them. This obligation limits the capacity of unions to serve as partners in reform.

Passive Implementation

Once negotiated, collective bargaining agreements do not implement themselves. And the manner in which superintendents, school boards, and district personnel interpret and apply the often ambiguous contract language has significantly aggravated the problem. As one former school-board member from a large urban district noted, “Too often school boards and superintendents complain that they cannot do something because of the teachers union contract. Often what they complained was restricted wasn’t actually prohibited … but might cause some political difficulties or raise some public issues.” Boards and their appointed administrators seemingly find it easier to sink into this “zone of ambiguity” than to take stands that may provoke visible unrest, negative publicity, or a work stoppage.

Some of management’s reticence is understandable. When a union believes that management actions violate contract terms, it typically files an appeal or a grievance in accordance with procedures spelled out in the contract. Critics of teacher unions assert that resources and specialized expertise give the union a pronounced advantage in the ensuing proceedings. A striking example of union capacity is the National Education Association’s UniServ system, a nationwide network of 1,650 full-time and 200 part-time NEA employees who provide guidance to local affiliates on matters such as negotiations and grievance resolution. The NEA itself touts the UniServ program as “a vast cadre of human resources,” on which it spent some $50 million in 2001, but it also attempts to downplay the system’s impact, saying that each employee has multiple responsibilities and works with multiple districts. What UniServ offers, union proponents claim, pales beside the legal, staff, and budgetary resources available to school boards.

In truth, unions seem to navigate the grievance process more adroitly than district officials, but that is only partly due to resources. It is also because they aggressively exploit contract language, while school boards and superintendents are often more interested in avoiding confrontation than in asserting managerial prerogatives.

More Pay and Benefits, Less Quality

If we assume that better salaries attract better candidates, it would initially seem that compensation is an area where collective bargaining advances the interests of students as well as teachers. However, while unions have fought to increase salaries and to improve benefit packages, they have resisted efforts to ensure that this spending recruits, rewards, and retains the most essential or effective teachers.

Virtually all teachers’ collective bargaining agreements establish salary schedules based strictly on years of experience and accumulated graduate credits. These “step-and-lane” schedules, which legislatures and school boards have accepted, reflect union preferences for wage agreements that increase member solidarity and benefit the most union members. Unfortunately, there is good reason to believe that they have contributed to the well-documented decline in the aptitude of new teachers and to shortages in high-need subject areas. At a minimum, the rigidity of existing salary schedules restricts superintendents’ options for remedying these problems.

Nearly all contracts also still call for defined-benefit retirement plans, which provide a traditional pension and disproportionately reward educators who stay in place for 20 years. As Matthew Lathrop of the American Legislative Exchange Council has noted, “The guaranteed benefit is only good for those who spend a substantial part of their career with one employer. That’s an enormous drawback in today’s economy, when even public employees are less likely to stick with a single employer.”

Evidence similarly suggests that teachers’ benefit packages are poorly equipped to deal with the rising costs of health care. A 2005 study by the Rhode Island Education Partnership, for example, found that public school districts in that state uniformly allowed employees to select their own health carrier and plan design and that 73 percent of districts offered no-cost health benefits for retirees; not one of the private-sector firms in the state the study examined offered these perks. In short, much like troubled industrial-era firms General Motors (GM) and United Airlines, many school districts are sinking enormous sums into benefit plans that are poorly designed to attract new talent and may ultimately prove unaffordable.

Unions and Education Politics

One reason school boards are hesitant to take a stronger stance in negotiations and in contract implementation may be the firm hand that unions exercise in education politics. Quite simply, school-board elections offer teacher unions the unusual opportunity to influence the makeup of the management team they will face at the bargaining table. (See Terry Moe, “The Union Label on the Ballot Box.”) It is as if the board of directors of General Motors were not selected by its shareholders, but by the residents of Detroit. The result of such a scenario would be a management team focused on workers’ concerns more than on holding down costs or chasing efficiencies.

Actually, it is worse than that, as GM is ultimately subject to the discipline of the marketplace. If the company allowed efficiency to decline too far, it would be driven into bankruptcy by competitors, domestic or foreign. In public education, however, such market pressures are muted by the lack of market competition and organizational inertia. A union official in Cleveland offered a telling insight when discussing a negotiator who was demanding concessions after a state takeover. The union official recalled: “We looked at [the negotiator] and said, ‘Why do we have to do that?’ His background was in the private sector, where he can threaten, ‘If you don’t do this, we’re moving the factory to Mexico.’ Well, we knew the school system wasn’t moving to Mexico, so we just said, ‘No, we’re not doing that.’”

And since school-board elections are typically low-turnout affairs, organized and energized interests, like teacher unions, can exert even more influence on the outcome than their raw numbers would suggest. Almost 60 percent of board members nationwide say the teacher unions are “very active” or “somewhat active” in their local elections, according to research published by the National School Boards Association. By comparison, fewer than one-third of the board members reported that business groups were “very” or “somewhat” active in elections in their districts.

Unions are also active in state and federal legislatures, using their lobbying clout to safeguard their collective bargaining muscle and to ensure that negotiations unfold on a hospitable playing field. Union dues provide resources to pursue ever more favorable laws. And the dues are augmented by dollars deducted from the paychecks of nonmembers as a result of state laws that allow unions to collect funds from all teachers covered by the contract. Ironically, even the No Child Left Behind Act offers a telling example of union influence as the first federal law to recognize explicitly, and ultimately defer to, collective bargaining’s role in education governance. In theory, the law empowers districts to replace staff members at persistently low-performing schools. This provision was promptly eviscerated at the behest of the unions: the Department of Education sheepishly allowed that the authority can be exercised only if the district’s contract allows it.

The False Promise of “New Unionism”

The case for reforming the collective bargaining process has become so strong that even some union supporters have sought to persuade union locals to abandon an industrial model of contract negotiations for a more collaborative “new unionism.” Thoughtful, well-intentioned advocates such as Charles Kerchner and Adam Urbanski call for unions and districts to work together to foster professionalism, create pleasant working conditions, and involve teachers in governance and decisionmaking (see “Reform or Be Reformed,” forum, Fall 2001). The “new unionists” point to the 1996 formation of the Teacher Union Reform Network and to widely touted collective bargaining agreements in Dade County, Florida; in Seattle; and in Cincinnati and Toledo, Ohio.

Many union sympathizers contend that new unionism has already changed the character of the nation’s major teacher unions. Wayne Urban, professor of education and an expert on teacher unions, notes that NEA president Robert Chase gave a pivotal address on behalf of new unionism at the National Press Club in 1997, calling for “the transformation of his organization away from the adversarial stance institutionalized in collective bargaining toward one that was more professional.” He says for the next half decade, Chase “tirelessly advocated his new union agenda.” Likewise, a handbook written in 2006 by Linda Kaboolian, a respected academic proponent of reform unionism (see also Kaboolians’ essay “Table Talk,” forum), asserts that “a great deal of collaborative innovation exists and has been ongoing for many years.” In short, serious voices believe that the teacher unions have already committed themselves to new unionism.

In reality, sustained attempts to instill new unionism have occurred in just a handful of districts, and the results have been fairly disappointing. This bleak track record should be no surprise. Union leaders are elected by current members to protect their interests, and most teachers remain highly satisfied with their unions’ conduct of collective bargaining. A national poll of teachers conducted by Terry Moe in 2003 revealed that 84 percent of union members report that they are either somewhat or very satisfied with the job their unions do in representing their interests in collective bargaining. Predictably, incumbent union leaders who have embraced a strategy of collaboration or have simply been regarded as too cooperative have been voted out of office by teachers seeking more combative leadership. (See sidebar.)

Unions in any industry are loath to contemplate givebacks. Even when firms have declared bankruptcy or are on the verge of doing so, as in the airline and auto parts industries in recent years, union leaders frequently resist concessions on wages, benefits, or work conditions. Historically, unions have agreed to concessions only when the leadership calculates that the costs of holding firm outweigh the losses they’ll be giving up at the table–and when they can convince their members that is the case. Sometimes, as when the United Steel Workers chose to watch the American steel industry sink rather than accept concessions, this moment never comes–or comes far too late. In such cases, the only option is to watch the Titanic slowly go under and then repair to a shipyard with new blueprints. That option is not available in public education, at least not without disruption on a scale that would dwarf the fallout of even the most bitter teachers’ strike.

Getting Serious

Those looking to reinvent American schooling for a new century must recognize that unions are holding fast to contracts designed to address the challenges and inequities of an earlier era. Union leaders often invoke norms of justice when seeking to ensure that veteran teachers continue to enjoy the same perks and protections they were implicitly promised when they entered the profession a quarter century ago–despite intervening changes in the larger world, in the needs of students, and in management and organizational practice. One can sympathize with union locals and simultaneously see the contracts they’ve negotiated as enormous obstacles to retooling schools for the 21st century.

The answer, then, is not in fond hopes that union leaders will be sweet-talked or shamed into embracing change. With rare exceptions, their position simply won’t permit it. At the same time, eliminating collective bargaining is not a useful goal. Not only is it politically hopeless, but evidence from other industries suggests that unions can be a constructive force given the proper conditions.

Established practices in negotiating teachers’ compensation and the rules governing hiring, termination, and work routines need to come of age. The challenge is not in deciding what changes are needed, as there is already broad agreement on many of the desirable modifications. The challenge is making them happen. Changing collective bargaining means changing the environment in which it is conducted. A crucial first step, already under way, is establishing meaningful competition and accountability for schools–creating pressure on management and giving union leaders the cover to say to their members, “We need to deal, because if the schools don’t improve, all the alternatives are going to be uglier still.” But we also need more transparency, accompanied by a big change of heart.

Promoting Transparency

The habits of district-union collusion are due in large part to the public’s ignorance of what collective bargaining agreements say and to a strong desire for tranquility and smooth school operations. Experience suggests that when parents, policymakers, or civic leaders are made aware of the costs, rules, and protections the agreements impose, they are much less willing to accept the status quo and more willing to back hard-nosed district leadership.

The failure of the general public and more than a few policymakers to understand the stakes is largely due to the scant attention the media give these dealings. A 2005 study of how newspapers cover collective bargaining revealed that in 12 out of 20 large school districts, the local daily newspaper printed no more than one article on the contract negotiations. A national union official explained, “Bargaining is conducted behind closed doors. Neither side ‘goes public,’ even to its own members, until the entire contract is done.” While productive negotiations require the confidence to float ideas without fear that they will appear in tomorrow’s headlines, greater transparency would force both the union and management to justify their demands in the face of public scrutiny.

Local officials could take a page from the playbook of former New York City councilwoman Eva Moskowitz (see forum) and hold hearings on the local contract, inviting public scrutiny and media coverage. The Moskowitz inquiry was especially valuable in providing reporters a context for writing about the contract’s implementation and its impact on district operations. Officials and civic leaders should also ensure that influential members of the local media are aware of the contract’s provisions and have information on the nature, conduct, and outcomes of grievance and arbitration proceedings. While beat reporters and education editors may not be in a position to redirect coverage or to invite controversy on their own authority, publishers and editorial writers are able and willing to do so when convinced the matter is a pressing issue of broad public concern.

Acting Decisively

Most managers prefer to avoid conflict. However, when nimble competitors, irate stockholders, and the need for self-preservation demand it, executives in the private sector take a deep breath and accept the inevitability of painful fights over staffing, operations, and work rules. Only a similar firmness of purpose will enable school boards and superintendents to do what must be done. In particular, they need to:

Negotiate hard. If you haven’t missed an airplane recently, management consultants tell us, you’re spending too much time in airports. Considering the contracts that school boards have come to accept, one might similarly conclude that boards that don’t provoke a work action once in a while aren’t pushing hard enough at the table. In the short run, schools may need more, fiercer, and uglier contract disputes. That would show that school boards and superintendents are fighting hard for the children, the community, and the taxpayers. Superintendents and board members are not independent agents, however. They can’t do it alone.

Rally the public. Newspaper editorial boards, civic leaders, local chambers of commerce, and parent groups have made it eminently clear that they want everyone to find a way to “get along,” and they expect district leaders to find a way to avoid upsetting the apple cart. These stakeholder groups need to rethink their belief that labor unrest is uniformly a sign of leadership failure. Labor unrest can be a good thing when the alternative is to continue to accept an anachronistic, stifling, and perversely constructed status quo. Taking back prerogatives and language that unions have won in previous rounds of negotiations will inevitably be a bruising, unpleasant struggle–one that only the staunchest district officials will undertake, and one that they will win only if the community is committed to seeing it through. As long as they cannot count on community support in the face of labor unrest, sensible board members and superintendents will continue to fold on the important questions.

Make arbitration work for students. Some states, like New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, have well-defined mediation or arbitration procedures that kick in when the parties can’t reach agreement. These policies can effectively take the bat out of a school board’s hand, sometimes imposing mandatory settlement terms on even those boards willing to drive a hard bargain. There is surprisingly little systematic research on the outcomes of the arbitration process. However, arbitrators and mediators, who must be approved by both sides, tend to be risk-averse consensus seekers who  frown on calls for radical changes to existing provisions. This tendency is undoubtedly aggravated in some cases by “past-practice” contract clauses, which treat established routines as controlling. The availability of arbitration therefore highlights two additional considerations for would-be reformers: the need to scrutinize state laws governing a contract impasse to ensure that they do not stack the deck in favor of union interests and the importance of raising public awareness of contract provisions that arbitrators might otherwise leave untouched.

Implement smart. It’s not enough to stand firm at the table. District officials must also aggressively exploit existing language or interpret ambiguous language in whatever way provides the most flexibility to respond to student needs. With their hands stayed by the desire to maintain a cordial working environment, a fear of negative publicity, and concern about costly and time-consuming grievance proceedings, administrators frequently treat the absence of clear managerial prerogatives in contracts as an excuse for inaction. This suggests that district leaders need a new mindset about implementation. It also shows how important it is to thrash out at the bargaining table language that minimizes the “zone of ambiguity” regarding managerial rights on issues like compensation, termination, teacher transfer, and work rules. Ultimately, however, district leaders must ensure that their staff members know how to take advantage of management rights, and school boards must charge the superintendent and senior staff with actually making full use of managerial prerogatives.

Increasing Capacity

Finally, we must recognize that school boards are relatively weak governing bodies, composed of part-timers with other obligations, limited expertise, and little incentive to engage in contentious negotiations. A 2001 National School Boards Association survey found that most school-board members are unpaid, devote fewer than ten hours a week to board-related business, and have served on the board for five years or less. It is asking a lot to expect these part-timers, even with the aid of experienced attorneys, to go toe-to-toe with seasoned union leaders in the kind of public controversy engendered by a contract standoff. Board positions need to be made more attractive and augmented with research and staff support, or districts need to move toward alternative forms of governance in which the costs of inefficiency and lagging achievement become intolerable.

Above all, school-board members and those who elect them must never lose sight of the fact that collective bargaining is an adversarial process. Ironically, the current crop of teacher union leaders seem less like such labor lions as Samuel Gompers and Walter Reuther and more like Charlie Wilson, the imperial president of General Motors. “What’s good for GM is good for the country,” Wilson blithely remarked in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee a half century ago. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers have long argued that what is good for America’s teachers is good for America’s children–and, by implication, for America itself. The willingness of too many superintendents, school boards, and legislators to act as if this were true has been a crippling handicap for America’s schools. It is time to move beyond utopian dreams, or overwrought efforts to goad unions into good behavior, and to recognize that labor strife may be the birth pains of real school reform.

Frederick M. Hess is a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at AEI. Martin R. West is a research fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and the research editor of Education Next.