Massachusetts supposedly has the best public schools in the United States, and the best of the best are to be found in the affluent Boston suburbs—Belmont, Lexington and Wellesley, for example.

So when these top-flight schools decide that advanced honors courses in physics and chemistry are to be given the same weight in calculating a student’s official grade point average (GPA) as any other course, including cooking, check-book balancing, and make-up algebra, it becomes ever so clear—once again—that the country’s progressive educators have successfully pushed back the forces of school reform.  And it remains no less apparent that these same progressives continue to bash both talent and hard work.

Belmont and Lexington, with Wellesley in hot pursuit, have said that the official GPA shall no longer be boosted if the grades are earned in honors-level courses.  That antiquated practice of recognizing that some courses are more demanding than others creates social divides and denies students genuine course choice, it is thought.

Previously, students who wanted a top level GPA were forced to take the most challenging courses the school had to offer.  Now a student with a perfect GPA can become valedictorian of the class simply by accumulating a set of A’s in any old class whatsoever.

As usual, it’s a student who tells the truth.  “I feel that if you take the harder classes, that should be calculated in your GPA,” the vice president of the Wellesley student council told a Boston Globe reporter.

It is the Wellesley school board that prevaricates. A report from one of its committees told parents that “students who meet the expectation of a course should have a GPA that reflects the grade that they earned.”  (As if earning an A in computer science is the same as one in cooking.) To those who ask questions, school officials say that colleges pay no attention to GPAs anyhow—they look at the actual courses taken.  If it is not an honors course, the student is penalized by the college admissions office, so the change won’t really make any difference to student chances of getting into a good college.  They will need to take the honors courses anyhow.

Left unsaid is the fact that students are being misled when told every course counts the same.

Of course those from sophisticated families will see through the prevarication the education progressives have concocted in the name of social equality.  Those who suffer are only the bright kids from the less sophisticated families who foolishly believe what their school district tells them.

All this would be less painful to watch, were it not for the fact that what is happening in the best schools is inevitably going to shape what occurs elsewhere.

-Paul Peterson

On the whole, his piece is lightweight, trying to make a Santa Cruz mountain out of facts known to the ground squirrels swarming the university’s foothills.  (When at the Hoover Institution, located on the Stanford camps, those hills and squirrels are among my favorite companions.)

Auletta worries that Hennessy is too assiduous at harvesting the wealth of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Is science and engineering taking over?  Are the liberal arts about to be abandoned?  Are Stanford students too happy?  Where are the demonstrators? As if those are today’s raging issues in higher education!

Auletta rightly questions Hennessey’s effort to build a new, science-oriented campus in New York, but he then turns around and attacks the president for retracting the proposal when doubled crossed by the New York politicians. The idea of a second campus on the East Coast was always a distraction. It poured a hefty share of Stanford’s wealth into bricks-and-mortar thousands of miles from home. Why not take that same pot of gold—or, more exactly, a handful or two out of that pot—and start building a digital university for the ages?

Apparently, that much better idea is now on the agenda. After Hennessy’s New York real estate deal fell through, Hennessey, always better at thinking outside the box than most of his peers, seems to have come to the realization that digital learning could disrupt even the nation’s greatest universities. Stanford is already offering an online high school diploma to any young person the school admits no matter where they live.  That it is placing tight limits on enrollment only makes sense until its model is fully designed and tested.  But once affluent families begin comparing the strength and quality of a Stanford diploma with those offered by many local high schools, there could be a vast demand for its product.

And it may not be just high school that Stanford could reshape.  Auletta tells us that Hennessy’s “experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable…. Students in an online university could take any course whenever they wanted, and wouldn’t have to waste time bicycling to class.”  Apparently, Stanford’s president is mulling all this over during his sabbatical.

Like a good adventure story, Auletta’s tale gets better and better as it goes along and reads best of all at the very end.

- Paul E. Peterson

Unemployment insurance is supposed to help those unfortunate workers who lose their jobs as the result of an economic contraction or their own company’s need to regroup.  But those who work for the public schools, institutions that only seldom need to retrench and that hardly ever close their doors, have nonetheless found a way to convenient way to collect unemployment benefits.

As those who have followed the school battles in Wisconsin and Indiana know well, school employees enjoy generously funded health-care benefits and handsome defined benefit pension plans that are driving many state and local governments to the edge of bankruptcy.  Now, add still another give-away to the public employees of the nation’s schools—unemployment benefits for those weeks when kids are given their spring break.

I learned all this simply because the number of people seeking unemployment benefits went up last week, which may signal that the U. S. economy is at risk of falling back into another recession.

But, says the Wall Street Journal’s “Marketwatch” (April 19), we can’t be sure these numbers tell us much about the direction of the economy. “The weekly claims data is often hard to decipher in April because of the Easter holiday and spring break,” it reports, “when many school workers such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers are eligible to receive temporary benefits.”

I leave it to you, dear readers, to tell me just how bus drivers and cafeteria workers pull off this scam.  I had always thought the wages and salaries paid to public employees take into account school vacation times as well as the days they are on the job.  I thought the unemployed had to prove they had been fired from their job to get those marvelous (to coin a phrase) unemployment benefits.  How did bus drivers get access to those unemployment funds during holiday week?  Does this also happen in late December?  How about summer time? Who else gets them?

I’ve also heard the rumor that teachers are delighted when they get the spring pink slip in those years when the state legislature has yet to vote state aid for the schools the following fall.   Everyone knows that the legislature will eventually pony up the dollars, but school districts hand out pink slips to teachers anyhow, telling them they are fired, at least for now, because no one knows when the state dollars will flow.

Although sob stories about frightened teachers appear in the local paper, the truth, I’ve been told, is that the slip gives them the right to collect unemployment benefits even if they use the money to take a European tour prior to returning to school in the fall.

That’s the rumor I once heard.  Tell me it’s not so.  Tell me the wages and salaries and benefits that school employees officially receive are all that they get.

- Paul E. Peterson

We are informed that  “when possible, people simply prefer to do this in person with a live human being standing in front of them.”

Yglesias concludes that “affluent American parents will continue to foot the bill for their kids to get schooled in person” rather than making use of online learning.

His analysis would be totally persuasive were it not for the fact that  97 percent of all people who do yoga do their exercises at home, either with or without yoga videos.  When possible, people stretch and bend and twist at home, because they do not like other folks staring at them when they are contorting their bodies in a variety of embarrassing ways, especially when their yoga skills are under-developed.  A tiny percentage—no more than 3 percent—prefer to have someone coaxing them along or like to snigger at their less proficient classmates.

From these facts it can be concluded that Americans—both affluent and otherwise—will be insisting that their children take their high school classes online so that they are not bullied or embarrassed in the classroom when they are not as skilled as others.

You may wonder where I got my data. I picked it up from the same place Yglesias got his info—the distant corners of nowhere.

-Paul E. Peterson

The program took effect only in July 2011, and the Utah legislature is still tinkering with the specifics of the law, so it is too soon to draw firm conclusions.  However, early signs indicate that choices between online and brick-and-mortar courses will be limited to offerings within the student’s home school district.  Statewide competition may well be more the exception than the rule.

The program is designed to grow at a measured pace.  In the current school year, students may take 2 of their 8 credits online, with that number increasing by one each year until, in 2016-17, students may take three-fourths of their coursework online.  Such measured step-taking is not to be faulted, as it takes time to develop high-quality content and to put systems in place.  Still, it will be at least 5 years before the full impact of the Utah initiative can be assessed.

Keep in mind that digital learning is still but a speck on the public school horizon.  As of October 2011, nearly 550,000 pupils were enrolled in public schools in Utah.  But only one percent of that number–less than 6,000 students—has received credit for courses taken from the state-run Utah Electronic High School.  A harbinger of what may happen under the new program, course-taking at Electronic High has been hampered by state rules. To be eligible, students must be homeschoolers or seeking credit recovery (for courses which they failed or from which they withdrew)—unless guidance counselors at their home schools agree to include online courses in their education plan.

In principle, the new law opens the door to many more statewide providers in addition to Electronic High.  But in the first year of its operation, fewer than 200 students were enrolled in an online course offered by a provider outside their home districts.  Applications from close to one hundred additional students were rejected, mainly on the grounds that the online course had already begun or the student was trying to speed up their high school graduation by adding courses to the eight regarded as full-time load.

While any high school student is eligible to take two courses online, students enrolled in online courses may not earn more credits than those earned by students who take a full course load at a district school—unless they plan to graduate early according to their plan of study, which must be approved by the student’s guidance counselor. That is an unduly restrictive rule.  One of the most promising features of online education is that it can allow students to move forward at their own pace, not in lock-step with all the other students.  By expecting courses to start at the beginning of the school year, and by not allowing students to enroll in extra courses, Utah has placed an unnecessary barrier on the innovation. And by making district-paid guidance counselors the gatekeepers to digital education, the state has set up a barrier to student choice, even though the law says that guidance counselors cannot restrict the student’s selection of online courses.

Funding levels also seem to be designed more for the purpose of protecting school district revenues than encouraging the creation of exciting courses. Per pupil funding at Utah district schools is hardly generous—just short of $8,000 a year (as compared to a national average that runs close to $12,000 annually).  State funding for students attending charter schools is just 70 percent of the district level—less than $5700 per pupil annually. Online courses have been funded at about the charter school level—$726 per full-year course or $363 per term.  But if an amendment recently passed by the state legislature is signed into law by the governor, only language arts, math and science courses will be funded close to this level (at $350 per term).

Lighter-weight courses—health, fitness for life, computer literacy, financial literacy, and driver’s education—will be funded at $200 per term. That would be reasonable if academic courses were funded at a higher rate and the same rule were applied to brick-and-mortar schools.   But when funding for lightweight digital courses is tightened to the extreme, it removes the ballast that digital providers need to mount the poorly funded heavyweight courses. The point is non-trivial, as lightweight courses are among the most popular online options. Many students see little point in wasting their time in classrooms, day after day, just to learn how to balance their checkbook or take care of their acne.  The highly regarded Florida Virtual School relies on the revenue from such courses to provide expensive, high-quality academic courses. That option is being taken off the table in Utah.

It is nice that districts will receive about 25 percent of the revenue for courses that are being offered online instead of at their schools, as they have fixed costs that are ongoing regardless of whether a student takes 6 or 8 courses from them.  And one understands that states, strapped for cash, must search for ways to save their dollars.  But starving the digital baby is hardly the way to motivate the design of high-quality courses.

The demand for online learning is surely higher than indicated by the fact that only 200 students completed an online course outside their district in the first year of the new program. Within school districts themselves, online course enrollments are already over 5,000, a sign that students are being channeled into home-district offerings.  If this trend continues, local districts will be offering online courses to their own students—and hardly anyone else. A statewide market needs statewide promotion of alternatives.  But the risk is great that districts will implicitly sign a no-raid pact by not advertising their wares outside their own district. That way each district captures its traditional share of the revenue. It will take an energetic student or parent to secure that out-of-district placement, if guidance counselors, while obeying the letter of the law, nonetheless steer students toward the home-grown option.

One can only speculate at this early stage.  But there seems to be a shadow falling between the Utah rhetoric and the Utah reality.  On the surface, the Utah digital legislation is pathbreaking.  It seems to create multiple new choices for students and families.  But if online learning is going to be of the district, by the district, and for the district, the innovation is unlikely to be transformative.

-Paul E. Peterson

Neal McCluskey of the CATO Institute does not think the comparison should be made—on the grounds that the data are “too blunt to tell us much about a single administration’s policies.”  Perhaps, but the same can be said for the growth of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and the growth in the number of Americans who are employed. Both are gross, blunt numbers, affected by many factors other than presidential decisions, but the public holds presidents accountable for what happens under their watch. For that very reason, Obama is doing everything he can to pump GDP upward, and the White House staff seized up last Friday when employment figures revealed that the gains were only half what had been anticipated.

The public is right to insist that basic numbers on the ground move in the right direction, no matter how distant from direct presidential control they seem to be. When presidents know they are being held accountable for economic performance, they act more responsibly—or suffer the consequences. If presidents come to learn that they are also being held accountable for the nation’s educational performance, they will think more carefully about the consequences of their actions for students, not job holders.

But, says McCluskey, presidents can’t do much about education in any short period of time. Neither Bush nor Obama should not be given credit or blame for events that happen early in their term of office.   That wave of the hand allows him to slice and dice the numbers to suit his convenience.

But such hand-waving ignores one of Teddy Roosevelt’s keenest insights: The bully pulpit is the most powerful weapon in a president’s arsenal. True about governing in general, it’s of particular significance when it comes to education. For learning to take place, teachers, students, administrators, parents and neighbors must all be committed to the enterprise.

To mobilize broad movement toward a common goal is a job for presidents.  They are the ones best placed to energize a nation, and some presidents have done just that.

Ronald Reagan reversed the downward trend in SAT scores almost overnight when his National Commission on Educational Excellence galvanized the nation to take the educational crisis seriously. At the time Congress passed no law, and no pile of money was added to the pot, but the White House message had a major impact nonetheless.  (For details, see chapter 8 in my book, Saving Schools).

Similarly, George W. Bush, both in his 2000 campaign and immediately upon assuming office, insistently called for accountability reforms that would lead to No Child Left Behind (NCLB).  It was not the law’s rules and regulations but the national attention that had the impact.  Schools, students, and teachers were put on notice that more was expected.  NAEP scores jumped noticeably—from the very beginning of the Bush term.

Though presidents usually enjoy the biggest bully pulpit, Martin Luther King proved no less influential.  When he called for equal educational opportunity in the South, the test scores of African American students in southern states rose dramatically. The biggest gains were among the high school students most susceptible to the calls of the civil rights movement.

The U. S. Department of Education has encouraged a certain amount of reform with its convoluted Race to the Top initiative.  But President Obama’s first—and most powerful— education message to all Americans came with his stimulus package. He urged its passage not so that children might learn but in order that teachers might keep their jobs. That was precisely the wrong signal, and it is not surprising that NAEP gains slowed to a virtual halt.  The stimulus package did little for the nation’s GDP, and it has had a negative impact on its education GDP.

-Paul Peterson

Ladd elaborates the BBA theory in a lengthy paper in which she says school reforms—accountability, merit pay, school choice—are nefarious and harmful.  It would be much better, she says, to boost student performance by reducing the “incidence of poverty.”

In my critique of BBA theory, I show that much of the association between family income and achievement is a byproduct of other factors. Income’s causal impact is modest, smaller than the impacts of many reforms now under consideration.

In an ill-considered rebuttal, blogger Valerie Strauss denies that BBA disparages the value of school reform.  She even denies that either BBA or Ladd ever meant to say that income had much of an impact on achievement. She insists “Harvard’s Paul E. Petersen” has “mischaracterized” Ladd’s argument, “accusing her of saying things she didn’t say.”

“There’s no such thing as bad press, as long as they spell your name right,” said circus master P. T. Barnum. So I could have forgiven Strauss her error-prone post had she taken the trouble to figure out how I spell my name.  All Scandinavians may look alike, but Pedersen was the name given to my grandfather in Denmark, and Peterson was the name assigned to me when I was born and baptized, and it remains so on my American Express card to this day, but Petersen I was not, am not, nor will be, despite what Strauss says—not just once but five times within the space of three pages.

Since she can’t get my name right, she’s probably out of whack on other things as well. Let’s see.

Strauss denies that Ladd ever said that “the income of a child’s family determines his or her educational achievement.”  Instead, Ladd “speaks of income as one of many factors that characterize educational disadvantage.  [Ladd’s] entire argument is framed around the issue of economic and other types of disadvantage.”

Strauss even denies that BBA opposes the school reforms on the nation’s agenda.   The coalition, we are told, “doesn’t say schools and teachers shouldn’t be held accountable for how well they do their jobs.  In fact, its mission statement notes that school improvements should continue to be a priority though it doesn’t take sides on what those improvements should be.”

In fact, says Strauss, “there is not a particularly strong casual (SIC!) link between income and outcomes.”  Wow!  Read that sentence again!  If one corrects Strauss’s additional spelling error so it reads “causal,” not ”casual,” then Strauss summarizes  the very argument I am advancing, namely: THERE IS NOT A PARTICULARLY STRONG CAUSAL LINK BETWEEN INCOME AND OUTCOMES.

Does Ladd actually agree that “there is not a particularly strong causal link between income and outcomes?”  I wish that were true, but if that is indeed her belief she has done a fabulous job of hiding it.

Consider the following passage from Ladd’s essay: The “logical policy response [to low performance by students from low-income families] . . . would be to pursue policies to reduce the incidence of poverty….Many considerations…make a compelling case for the country to take strong steps to reduce income inequality.”

If the solution is to reduce income inequality, the cause must be the paucity of dollar bills in the hands of the poor.  There are not many other ways of interpreting the passage above.

Of course, Ladd is too trained a social scientist not to realize she skates on the slimmest of ice when she presses her poverty argument to the extent she has. She is well aware of the research literature that shows little evidence that family income has a large causal impact on student achievement. To protect herself, she refers to “correlation” even in contexts where she is making a strong case for a causal impact.

But that sleight- of-hand fools only those who either want to be deceived or who do not quite understand the meaning of   “correlation” (a relationship which may or may not be causal). Elsewhere, Ladd routinely slips into causal language.  Consider, for example, the passage in which Ladd characterizes school reformers as “deniers” of the “effects of poverty.” Here she makes it absolutely clear she is making causal claims, for if poverty has an effect that is being denied, then poverty must certainly be the cause of that effect.  Or consider the opening paragraph of the BBA mission statement, which claims to have identified “a powerful association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement.” How can an association be powerful unless it is causal?  Or consider Ladd’s accusation against school reformers that “denying the correlation is nefarious.”  It could hardly be nefarious if reformers were not ignoring an important cause!

Strauss further denies that BBA says “school choice or school accountability are ‘dangerous.’”  But Ladd, the group’s spokesperson, clearly said the following:  “Current policy initiatives are misguided because they . . . have contributed little—and are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing achievement and educational attainment gaps…. Moreover, such policies have the potential to do serious harm.”

As mothers well know, things that have the “potential to do serious harm” are dangerous, whatever Strauss might say.

Strauss tells us that BBA supports reform.  But Ladd says:  “Evaluations that place heavy weight on student test scores are likely to do more harm than good.”  “Governance changes [such as charters] do little . . . to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children.”  She denounces the “punitive test-based accountability that we now have in this country.”   Ladd concludes: Education reform policies “are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing [gaps in] achievement.”

It is true that BBA does not actually do much to advocate redistribution of income. It is more interested in growing jobs for public sector professionals. But Ladd makes it clear that she would prefer to reduce income inequality.  Alas, she says, it “is not in the cards, at least in the near term…unless the current protests in New York City and elsewhere…[put] income inequality back on the policy agenda.”

So Ladd and her union friends instead propose to fund a host of new social services as well as educational services outside the regular school day, such as summer school, pre-school, and after-school.  All that was done in the 1970s with Medicaid and Head Start and summer recreation programs and much more.  If those programs were the solution, why didn’t they lift the achievement of students from low income families?

A likely explanation is the stark increase in the number of single-parent households, a matter about which Ladd has nothing to say. Nor does Strauss like being reminded of that bitter fact.  “So it’s not apparently consequences of poverty, but the consequences of living with a single parent. Hmmm.”  How are we to translate that hum?  Does Strauss mean to say: “I know you are right, Peterson. If a child does not have two parents, that child is at risk—at risk of poverty and at risk of dropping out of school. But I don’t like your bringing up politically incorrect facts.”

In sum, Strauss denies that BBA and its ranking intellectual leader, Helen Ladd, oppose school reform and think poverty is the root cause of our current educational discontent. If she can deny that, she can deny most anything.

Still,  Strauss does an absolutely superb job of introducing the co-chair of the Broader Bolder coalition as “Helen Ladd, the Edgar T. Thompson Distinguished Professor of Public Policy and Professor of Economics at Duke University who has spent years researching school accountability, education finance, teacher labor markets, and school choice.” Despite our disagreements, Ladd remains a good friend, so I do not begrudge any accolade which comes her way.  But if Strauss is inclined to introduce professors fulsomely, she might let her readers know that I am the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Government and Director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University, who has spent years researching school governance, school choice, school accountability, and teacher effectiveness rather than referring to me as “Harvard’s Paul E. Petersen.”

But, then, in these days of online erasures, she could just deny she misspelled my name.

-Paul E. Peterson

Thinking otherwise is a group of advocates and interest groups, including leaders of the country’s two big teacher unions, that calls itself the Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA) to school reform.  Its mission statement says that “weakening [the] link [between income and achievement] is the fundamental challenge facing America’s education policy makers.”  In a paper given last November, Duke University Professor Helen F. Ladd, a BBA co-chair, makes the best case she can for the group’s position.   She shows that in fourteen different countries student achievement is higher if a student comes from a family with higher income.

But a correlation proves nothing about cause and effect, as I explain in a new article, “Neither Broad Nor Bold,” and in an op-ed in the New York Daily News. Years ago, Susan Mayer, former dean of the Harris School at the University of Chicago, showed that much of the connection between income and achievement is spurious, caused by other factors associated with both.  More recently two Brookings scholars, Julia Isaacs and Katherine Magnuson, updated the Mayer work by examining an array of family characteristics – such as race, income, mother’s and father’s education, single or two-parent family, smoking during pregnancy – on school readiness and achievement.  The Brookings study found that the distinctive impact of family income was just 6.4 percent of a standard deviation, which is generally regarded as a small effect.  The impact of the rise in single-parent families is likely to be much more important for student achievement than any changes in the distribution of income in the United States.

In the end, Ladd and her BBA colleagues seem to agree that income redistribution is not essential, as they quickly drop the idea in favor of an alternative dear to the heart of any public-sector union leader: Expanding the range of social services to include medical and nutritional services as well as pre-school, after-school, and summer programs. All those expensive programs outside the regular school day would undoubtedly add to the number of professionals available for recruitment by public-sector unions.  But none of them hold as much promise for student learning as any one of the many school reforms on the nation’s agenda—student and school accountability, school choice, and changes in teacher recruitment, compensation and retention policies.

Jay Matthews, of the Washington Post, says it is “galling,” at least to some, for me to have worried about the rising number of single-parent families while doubting the value of hiring more professionals.  But I am surprised he thought my common-sense observations were “thrilling.”  I concede that adjective to Jay only if he agrees that little boys are exhilarating when speaking frankly about emperors parading in birthday suits.

- Paul Peterson

Checked by Paul E. Peterson

Children raised in families with higher incomes score higher on math and reading tests. That is no less true in the Age of Obama than it was in the Age of Pericles or, for that matter, in the Age of Mao. But is parental income the cause of a child’s success? Or is the connection between income and achievement largely a symptom of something else: genetic heritage, parental skill, or a supportive educational setting?

The Broader, Bolder Approach to Education, a coalition of education professors and interest-group leaders, including the heads of the country’s two largest teachers unions, have concluded that family income itself determines whether or not a child learns. In the first paragraph of its mission statement, the coalition claims that it has identified “a powerful association between social and economic disadvantage and low student achievement.”

“Weakening that link,” the Broader, Bolder group goes on to say, “is the fundamental challenge facing America’s education policy makers.” For this group, poverty and income inequality, not inadequate schools, are the fundamental problem in American education that needs to be fixed. Other possible approaches to improving student achievement—school accountability, school choice, reform of the teaching profession—are misguided, counterproductive, and even dangerous. The energy now being wasted on attempts to enhance the country’s education system should be redirected toward a campaign to either redistribute income or expand the network of social services.

The Broader, Bolder platform has won the wholehearted support of the country’s teachers unions. But it’s much to the credit of the current U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan, that he has carefully kept his distance, insisting instead on accountability, choice, and teacher policy reforms that the Broader, Bolder group finds dispensable.

Inasmuch as the Broader, Bolder movement can be expected to gather steam in an election year, especially given the success of Occupy Wall Street and the “1 percent” campaign, it is worth giving attention to the scholarly foundation on which its claims rest. That is best done by looking closely at the presidential address given before the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management by one of the coalition’s cochairs, Helen Ladd, a Duke University professor, which she summarized in a December 2011 op-ed piece published in the New York Times.

The Platform

The central thesis of the Ladd presidential address is certainly sweeping and bold: The income of a child’s family determines his or her educational achievement. Those who come from low-income families learn little because they are poor. Those who come from prosperous families learn a lot because they are rich. Her solution to the nation’s education woes is almost biblical. According to St. Matthew, Jesus advised the rich man to “Sell what you possess and give to the poor.” Not quite as willing as St. Matthew to rely on the charitable instinct, Ladd modifies the biblical injunction by asking for government intervention to make sure the good deed happens. But she is no less confident than Matthew that wonderful things will happen when the transfer of wealth takes place. Once income redistribution occurs, student achievement will reach a new, higher, and more egalitarian level. Meanwhile, any attempt to fix the schools that ignores this imperative is as doomed to failure as the camel that struggles to pass through the eye of a needle.

Of course, Ladd does not put it quite that bluntly. But her meaning is clear enough from what she does say: education reform policies “are not likely to contribute much in the future—to raising overall student achievement or to reducing [gaps in] achievement.”

The “logical policy response,” she continues, “would be to pursue policies to reduce the incidence of poverty…. That might be done, for example, through macro-economic policies designed to reduce unemployment, cash assistance programs for poor families, tax credits for low wage workers, or or an all-out assault ‘war on poverty.’”

Ladd is particularly enthusiastic about her approach “given the current high unemployment rates and also the dramatic increase in income inequality in this country since the 1970s.”

She continues, “Many considerations…make a compelling case for the country to take strong steps to reduce income inequality.”

Though income redistribution is the preferred option, Ladd decides it is not politically feasible. “Such a policy thrust is not in the cards, at least in the near term…unless the current protests in New York City and elsewhere…[put] income inequality back on the policy agenda.” In the meantime, the best course of action is for the government to fund a host of new services for the poor.

Why do the better-off have higher-performing children?

Key to Ladd’s case is a graph that shows a correlation between family income and student achievement in 14 industrialized nations. To no one’s surprise, that graph shows that in every country students who come from higher-income families score higher on math and reading tests. But is the connection causal? Do some students do better than others because their parents earn more money? Or are the parents who make a better living also the ones who do a better job of raising their children?

In work published in 1997, Susan Mayer, former dean of the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies, tried to answer this question by carrying out a variety of tests, each of them an attempt to see exactly how much changes in income directly affect student achievement. In one test, she looked at those on welfare who lived in states where welfare benefits were higher. She found little if any benefit for those children living in one-parent families. Overall, she found that the direct relationship between income and education outcomes varies between negligible and small.

In a 2011 Brookings Institution report, Julia Isaacs and Katherine Magnuson explored this topic by looking specifically at the impact of family income on child readiness for school, a primary concern of the Broader, Bolder coalition. The authors rely on recently collected data from a U.S. Department of Education survey of a representative sample of U.S. families that tracked children from birth to the year they entered school. They look at the impact of a host of family characteristics on school readiness and student achievement in the first year of school. When they calculate the simple correlation between income and math achievement, Helen Ladd’s approach, they find that a $4,000 increment (a 50 percent increase in the $8,000 average income reported by the families in this study) in the income of the poor family will lift student achievement by 20 percent of a standard deviation (close to a year’s worth of learning in the middle years of schooling), a substantial impact that seems to support the Broader, Bolder claims. But when the authors adjust for other factors—race, mother’s and father’s education, single or two-parent family, smoking during pregnancy, and so forth—the distinctive impact of family income on math achievement drops to just 6.4 percent of a standard deviation. It is better than  twice as important for achievement that children living in a low-income family have a mother with a high school diploma (as compared to one without the diploma) than that the family has 50 percent more income.

Is it absolute income or relative income that counts?

Ladd claims that Finland, Canada, and the Netherlands have higher student performance because they have fewer children living in poverty. To arrive at this conclusion, she excludes the value of medical programs and other government services, the very items that later become part of her policy agenda. This is no small matter, as the U.S. poverty rate in 2003 was just 8.1 percent if those items are included, 23 percent less than the officially reported 10.5 percent poverty rate for that year (which fails to take into account food stamps, Medicaid, school lunch programs, earned income credits, and other cash transfers). In addition, Ladd defines poverty in relative, not absolute, terms. Anyone is poor if he has an income more than 1 standard deviation below the average. With that definition, she decides that only 4 percent of the children in Finland live in poverty compared to 20 percent of the children in the United States, despite the fact that average income in the U.S. is a third higher than it is in Finland.

Of course, one could also conclude that Finland’s rising test-score performance is due to the growing income gap in that country. In 2008, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reported that “the gap between rich and poor has widened more in Finland than in any other wealthy industrialized country over the past decade.” When one picks out stray facts from a country one likes, anything goes.

Using the sociologist’s relative definition of poverty, and not the absolute definition used by ordinary people, fits the Broader, Bolder agenda. The point is not to provide opportunities for the poor but to equalize wealth across society as a whole. Never mind if everyone, rich or poor, ends up with less.

Do changes between 1940 and 2000 explain the larger achievement gap?

Drawing on a study by Stanford education professor Sean Reardon, Ladd says that the gap in reading achievement between students from families in the lowest and highest income deciles is larger for those born in 2001 than for those born in the early 1940s. She suspects it is because those living in poor families today have “poor health, limited access to home environments with rich language and experiences, low birth weight, limited access to high-quality pre-school opportunities, less participation in many activities in the summer and after school that middle class families take for granted, and more movement in and out of schools because of the way that the housing market operates.”

But her trend data hardly support that conclusion. Those born to poor families in 2000 had much better access to medical and preschool facilities than those born in 1940. Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, summer programs, housing subsidies, and the other components of Johnson’s War on Poverty did not become available until 1965. Why didn’t those broad, bold strokes reduce the achievement gap?

What has changed for the worse during the intervening period is not access to food and medical services for the poor but the increment in the percentage of children living in single-parent households. In 1969, 85 percent of children under the age of 18 were living with two married parents; by 2010, that percentage had declined to 65 percent. According to sociologist Sara McLanahan, income levels in single-parent households are one-half those in two-parent households. The median income level of a single-parent family is just over $27,000 (in 1992 dollars), compared to more than $61,000 for a two-parent family. Meanwhile, the risk of dropping out of high school doubles. The risk increases from 11 percent to 28 percent if a white student comes from a single-parent instead of a two-parent family. For blacks, the increment is from 17 percent to 30 percent, and for Hispanics, the risk rises from 25 percent to 49 percent. In other words, a parent who has to both earn money and raise a child has to perform at a heroic level to succeed.

A better case can be made that the growing achievement gap is more the result of changing family structure than of inadequate medical services or preschool education. If the Broader, Bolder group really wanted to address the social problems that complicate the education of children, they would explore ways in which public policy could help sustain two-parent families, a subject well explored in a recent book by Mitch Pearlstein (Shortchanging Student Achievement: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation) but one that goes virtually unmentioned in the Ladd report.

Why do states differ?

Ladd tells us that states that have a high poverty rate—for example, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama, and Louisiana—have lower math and reading scores than states with low poverty rates, such as New Hampshire, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Utah, and Maryland. While Ladd comes close to saying that high state poverty rates produce low achievement, the opposite connection is more plausible. The New England states and Utah have the lowest child-poverty rates because the commitment to education in those states has deep historical and cultural roots, and the families in those states are more likely to remain intact. Meanwhile, the southern parts of the United States all but closed the school doors to African Americans and only opened them a small crack for all but well-to-do white students throughout most of the 19th century, and even well into the 20th. It’s easier to make the case that the wide range in educational opportunity and achievement among the states in the not-too-distant past is the cause—not the consequence—of the variation in state poverty rates today.

Even in contemporary America, the places that have strong education systems tend to attract business, industry, and a skilled workforce. Where high-quality schools are abundant, incomes are generally high and poverty low. If a state is well endowed with human capital, its citizens are prosperous and its students will be learning at school. Does anyone believe that the federal government could reverse Connecticut’s and Alabama’s places on the student achievement scale if it took the money from the Constitution State and gave it to the Heart of Dixie?

Of course, we are not making the claim that the quality of a state’s schools is the only thing that affects poverty levels. Economic life is too complex to be reduced to any single factor. No matter what the Broader, Bolder group says, any inference that might be drawn from a simple correlation between achievement and poverty is problematic.

Perhaps recognizing the weaknesses in her case, Ladd tries to bolster it by correlating changes in achievement with changes in the child poverty rate within states. She finds that in recent years a 1 percentage point increase in the poverty rate reduces achievement by about .03 standard deviations. But she does little to control for other factors that may be changing at the same time. If single-parent households in a state are increasing, they could be adversely affecting student achievement and child poverty rates simultaneously. And if the state economy is sliding, talented, eager workers might be moving elsewhere and leaving behind the less ambitious, who are likely to be those with low-achieving children. In other words, any simultaneous shift in poverty rates and achievement is likely to be the result of a third factor that affects both simultaneously. Even the most devoted Broader, Bolder fan can hardly claim that a child’s test scores bounce up and down with the number of bills in Daddy’s pocket.

Why do people deny the poverty reality and claim that schools can teach poor students?

Ladd is so confident of her data that she attacks as deniers those who question a strong correlation between income and achievement. “Can anyone credibly believe that the mediocre overall performance of American students on international tests is unrelated to the fact that one-fifth of American children live in poverty?” she asks in her New York Times essay. Well, yes, they can. Even if we compare with all students in other countries the math performance of only those U.S. students from families where one parent has a college degree, the U.S. ranks 19th among the nations of the world who took the 2006 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test; just 10 percent of students from college-educated families performed at the advanced level. More than 20 percent of all Koreans and Finns do that well, as do 15 percent of all Canadians. Surely, those telling facts about the state of American math education cannot be attributed simply to child poverty.

Attacking the Reforms

But if poverty is the Broader, Bolder whip, the horses to be flogged are those pulling the school reform chariot: not to get them to run faster but to punish them for their efforts. School reformers, she says, have been recklessly trying to improve education “by better use of information and incentives.”

She objects to the “no excuses” approach to education, which expects strong performance from students regardless of family background, saying that the few schools that are able to accomplish the task are unusual places filled with kids from families with especially devoted parents. She criticizes George W. Bush for worrying about the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” That kind of talk goes “a long way toward explaining why No Child Left Behind has not worked,” she says, overlooking the fact that gains in math and reading since its passage have amounted to 8 percent of a standard deviation, with even larger gains among minority students (see “Grinding the Antitesting Ax,” check the facts, Spring 2012).

Ladd condemns the use of test-score information for the purpose of evaluating and compensating teachers. “Extensive research shows that…valid and reliable measures of teacher effectiveness,” have yet to be generated, she says, blithely putting on ignore important work by Thomas Kane, Eric Hanushek, and Raj Chetty and his colleagues, which shows that students learn in any given year somewhere between 10 and 20 percent of a standard deviation more if they have an especially effective teacher rather than a very ineffective one.

Ignoring the potential impact that would accompany the recruitment and retention of more-effective teachers, Ladd condemns merit-pay policies based on student test performance on the grounds that such policies “provide…incentives for [school officials] to narrow the curriculum to the tested subjects of math and reading, and to direct teacher attention to basic skills away from student reasoning skills.” Even worse, it leads to “unfair and arbitrary treatment of teachers.” Once schools “place heavy weight on student test scores” they are “likely to do more harm than good.” One can hear the applause ringing out in union halls across the country.

Charter schools are rejected because that they constitute merely a “governance change” that “ignores the educational challenges facing disadvantaged children.” She worries that such schools are “draining funds from the traditional public schools,” even though there is not a single state that takes money away from public schools unless a child leaves them for a school the parent prefers. Ladd apparently thinks public schools should receive money whether or not they have students.

What Is to Be Done?

Eschewing all school reforms, and conceding that the rich cannot be robbed quite yet, what does Ladd actually want to do? When we turn to her practical agenda, we can see just how important the teachers unions are to the Broader, Bolder coalition: most of the key reforms Ladd proposes have nothing to do with ending poverty in any direct way, but instead are directed toward employing more professionals for tasks outside the regular K–12 classroom:

Establish preschool programs. Though she admits the evidence on the effectiveness of Head Start and other large-scale preschool programs is disappointing, she calls for their expansion. Yet the poor already have better access to government-funded preschool programs than other families do. If this were the solution to the achievement gap, we would already be well on our way.

Expand school-based health clinics and social services. Ladd wants to hire a vast new number of “school nurses, social welfare counselors and teachers” who would “meet on a regular basis to discuss and address the challenges of individual children,” as if that were not already part and parcel of the special education program into which 15 percent of school-age students already are placed. If that program has not borne fruit, why would its expansion do anything other than provide more adult employment?

Establish quality afterschool and summer programs. Rather than fix the regular day school, Ladd would have the United States pour its energy into programs that would extend the days and hours that children are in school. Although she admits that “research shows…that marginally expanding in-school time without improving how that time is used does not improve learning” she is confident that “high intensity summer programs” can do the job, as if any such program could be brought to scale.

Provide high-quality schools for disadvantaged students. “Children in schools serving large proportions of disadvantaged students “ must “have access to high quality teachers, principals, supports for students, and other resources, and…schools” must “be held accountable for the quality of their internal processes and practices.” Ladd plans to hold these schools accountable while at the same time ending the “obsession with test-based outcome measures” by making sure that every school has a certified teacher, shifting good teachers to schools teaching disadvantaged students (without telling us how to identify those teachers), and looking at the total climate of a school, not just its test scores, when deciding whether it is effective.

Eliminate No Child Left Behind. “In its place the federal government should implement strategies designed to help state and local governments address in a more constructive and positive manner the educational needs of low SES children.” Just exactly how schools themselves are to do this is left unsaid.

In sum, the Broader, Bolder platform is narrow, niggling, naïve, and negligible. Contrary to Ladd’s claims, the unique effects of family income on student achievement are only modest, less than the effects of many of the education reforms Ladd regards as inadequate or worse. Most of the proposals to lift student achievement offered by Ladd and her Broader, Bolder colleagues ignore the many hours children spend at school, proposing instead a potpourri of noneducational services; those services that do have an educational component are to be offered either to preschoolers or to students during their summer vacation or after school. Such initiatives will increase the number of unionized workers in the public sector, but they have never been shown to have more than modest effects on student achievement. They promise little hope of stemming the rising number of single-parent families, a major contributor to both child poverty and low levels of student performance. If reducing poverty and lifting student achievement are the goals, dollars would be better allocated by cutting the taxes on earned income paid by two-parent, working families with children.

Paul E. Peterson is director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Any time a high school student takes a course from a district other than the one where they live, a portion of Utah’s state aid shifts from the home district to the district providing the course online.

A district with a brilliant slate of online suddenly has the chance to solve its fiscal problems the easy way.

I learned about the Utah experiment at a conference held at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. While the details of the Utah experiment were not discussed, the basic idea is certainly intriguing.

No longer must students in rural Utah be denied the opportunity to take physics, chemistry, computer science or an esoteric language simply because the local district cannot afford teachers for courses with small enrollments.

No longer must a student in Utah take a social studies course from a teacher the student finds boring and unhelpful.

No longer must a student who cannot attend school on a daily basis—either because he or she is sick, or pregnant, or feels bullied, or wants to train for an Olympic sport—be denied the opportunity to maintain a regular schedule that will lead to a timely graduation.

Some find the policy unfair to smaller school districts, which lack the resources to create online courses.  To keep the playing field level, they say, each district should be allowed to provide online courses only to their own students. That way state aid would continue to flow to the district bearing the expenses associated with facilities management, extracurricular activities, transportation, the school lunch program, the guidance counselors, and much more.

If only a few students take just one or two online courses, the new policy may not pose too heavy a burden, but if student demand for courses outside their own high schools escalates rapidly, the inter-district competition could prove to be seriously disruptive for some districts.

One solution would be for the state to fund online courses outside the home district at something other than the full amount—perhaps at the 50 or 60 percent level.  The remainder would go to the home district. If Utah is not doing that already, it might consider an amendment along these lines.

If small districts want to keep all of their state aid, they should be able to save on upfront costs by contracting their online courses offerings out to other providers.  Florida Virtual School is already marketing such courses nationwide, and both commercial and university providers can be expected to follow, if they are compensated for each course taken.

Of course, there could be a race to the bottom, as each district looks for the cheapest provider.  If tests are easy, some students might be tempted to take a course no matter how poorly it is constructed.

Clearly, some kind of industry or state vetting of courses is needed if online learning is not to become the latest fad to go wrong.

Exactly how Utah is solving these problems is something I plan to share with you in a future post.  For now, I simply want to herald the idea of inter-district competition in the online world.  Whatever problems it may pose for some districts, it is hard to see why district needs should be put ahead of student ones.

If digital learning is to advance beyond the pilot stage, it needs to work within the current system of public education, not against it.  Public school districts have a legitimacy unrivalled by any other institution in American education. Whether digital learning is blended into the classroom or offered online, or both, districts have to be part of the action.

The solution is to put districts into competition with one another within an overall framework that maintains course quality.  If that is done, then it will only take two or three entrepreneurial districts to convince the remainder that they need to adjust if they are to keep their students from slipping away, one by one, course by course.

I shall report later on the specifics of the Utah experiment.  For now, I simply want to herald the general concept.  Putting districts in charge of online learning, while allowing them to contract out to private providers if they wish, creates a competitive marketplace within a legitimate political framework.  If properly implemented so as to maintain course quality and integrity, it can give all students, no matter what their racial, ethnic, or religious background, no matter what their place of residence, an opportunity to take well-designed courses offered under the direction of truly high quality teachers, to be taken by students each at their own pace.

-Paul Peterson

A) give districts money?
B) deny districts funds?
C) subject districts to tight regulations?
D) force districts to compete for federal dollars by promis­ing to improve?
E) tell the truth while insisting parents be given a choice of school?

Policymakers have responded to this, the nation’s most challenging multiple-choice education quiz, with four different wrong answers. Now, with the release of the Koret Task Force report, policymakers have a chance to get it right, as they consider the reauthorization of the federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB).

President Jimmy Carter chose the first answer, swelling the federal share of education spending to an all-time high. Yet according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, high-school seniors perform no better today in math, reading, or science than they did when Carter held office.

President Ronald Reagan curtailed the share of K–12 education spending paid out of the federal treasury. That did not lift student performance either.

With the passage of NCLB, the George W. Bush administration subjected failing schools to sanctions if test performance did not improve. Notable gains were made, as Eric Hanushek points out in his provocative analysis of the benefits of the school accountability law. But NCLB’s complicated regulations proved to be unworkable and ineffectual.

Now, the Obama administration has sought to boost school improvement through Race to the Top by getting states and districts to compete for some federal dollars with promises to execute needed reforms. Not surprisingly, state and district promises are more easily made than kept.

Four strategies. Four failures. What should the federal government try next?

Why not do what the federal government has always done well? Collect the facts about schools and student performance and let the data speak for themselves. When the original Department of Education was founded in 1867, its main task was to collect school statistics on such fundamentals as student enrollment, dollars spent, and numbers of teachers hired. Gradually, the federal government acquired the capacity to compile a sophisticated battery of information on the state of American education. Indeed, the only reason we know that America’s schools have not improved much over the past 50 years is that the federal government has collected the information.

So why not use the power of the federal government to collect even more specific information on student learning? A giant step in the right direction was taken with NCLB’s original passage. When it is reauthorized, further steps need to be made so that accurate information on knowledge gained each year in each classroom is available to every parent.

And to receive federal dollars, districts must give parents the freedom to use this information to select the school of their choice—traditional public, charter, or private.

That is what the Koret Task Force has recommended. It’s the right answer to the nation’s multiple-choice education quiz.

- Paul E. Peterson

Since the National Education Association (NEA) can collect multi-millions of dollars through a check-off system that generates revenues directly from teacher paychecks (unless a teacher specifically objects), the NEA, a la Peachum, can invest in the work of less-advantaged non-profits that ostensibly have entirely different agendas.  Even a little bit of money can produce a valuable ally somewhere down the line.

During the 2010-11 fiscal year, the NEA invested $18.8 million dollars in a bewildering array of grateful non-profit groups and organizations, the Education Intelligence Agency tells us.

Some of the money goes to ostensibly independent research groups, such as a $250,000 grant to the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice (which has migrated to the University of Colorado at Boulder, which received another quarter million in direct funding), a $255,000 grant to the Economic Policy Institute, a reliably pro-labor “think tank,” and a $50,000 award to Phi Delta Kappa, which publishes a journal highly protective of union interests.

Research groups connected to the Democratic mainstream also collect money from the NEA.  The Center for American Progress was given $25,000 and the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability was awarded $20,000.

Even tiny research outfits can get something:  the Global Institute for Language and Literacy Development got $18,000, while the Employee Benefit Research Institute was awarded $7,500, and Media Matters, a group that attacks conservative groups and commentators, was treated to a $100,000 gift. The anti-accountability group, FairTest, bagged $35,000.

And some money goes to those who have the potential to write stories about unions.  The Education Writers Association, for example, received a grant of $11,500.

Groups representing the interests of education schools are another NEA favorite, strengthening the symbiotic relationship between schools of education and teacher unions.  Grants were given to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education ($400,373) and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards ($10,000)

NEA also likes to help out pillars of the education establishment.  The Council of Chief State School Offices received $50,417; the Council of State Governments got $19,750; the Education Commission of the States was awarded $60,000; the National Parent Teachers Association was given $6,250; the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association captured $50,000; and the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate was awarded $200,000.

A wide array of civil rights and minority groups appreciate the help they receive from the NEA, including the NAACP ($25,000), Congressional Black Caucus Foundation ($170,000), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund ($10,000), the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network ($7,500), the National Women’s Law Center ($10,000),  Rainbow PUSH Coalition ($5,000), People for the American Way ($128,000), National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Education Fund ($12,500), National Black Caucus of State Legislators ($5,500), National Association for Multicultural Education ($5,000), National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education ($17,500), and something called the Hip Hop Caucus Education Fund ($10,000). No wonder it’s nearly impossible to get a civil rights coalition to take on the teacher unions.

Even Republicans can cash in.  The Ripon Society, a liberal-leaning faction within the party, got $10,000.

The list goes on and on, as you can see by checking out the link given above. The recipients, big and small, help to build a broad, diverse coalition that can be called upon by a teacher union when help is needed.  Keeping the document handy may prove helpful if one wants to understand the interstices of the debate over school reform.  As “Deep Throat” advised, “Follow the money.”  Even a little money can go a long ways.  If you don’t believe me, ask Mrs. Peachum.

-Paul Peterson

That I think would be a serious mistake.  As I explain in an op-ed appearing on Sunday in the Chicago Tribune, the two party system is one of the bulwarks of American democracy.  When parties are limited to two (apart from tiny splinter groups), the public, in presidential elections,  generally gets a choice between two consensus-building political leaders who have the skills needed to lead broad, heterogeneous parties with significant internal cleavages.  They may seem to be unprincipled flip-floppers, but they have the ability to sense the public’s thinking, the ability to listen to a wide range of perspectives, and the pragmatism necessary to adapt to new circumstances.

We all would like to vote for leaders whose thinking reflects our own thoughts exactly, and in a world of three, four or five parties, it becomes easier to find such “principled” leaders.  But the countries of the world that have a multi-party system (Greece, Israel, Italy, France, Spain, to mention only the most obvious cases in point) hardly offer models of effective government.

It is the job of policy analysts and interest group leaders, in education as in other policy areas,  to clarify the issues and propose striking alternatives.  It is the job of party leaders to translate those ideas into laws that the public as a whole can accept.

I, for one, will resist the song of the third-party siren.

-Paul Peterson

Undoubtedly, the United States has much to learn from education systems in other countries. Once the world’s education leader, the U.S. has seen the percentage of its high-school students who are proficient trail that of 31 other countries in math and 16 countries in reading, according to a recent study by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG) (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011). Whereas only 32 percent of U.S. 8th graders are proficient in math, 50 percent of Canadian students and nearly 60 percent of Korean and Finnish students perform at that level. It may be misleading to point out that 75 percent of Shanghai’s students are proficient, as that Chinese province is the nation’s most advanced, but in Massachusetts, the highest-achieving of the states, only 51 percent of the students are proficient in math.

Given these performance disparities, it is only natural to think that there is something to be learned from practices elsewhere. Yet it is not easy to figure out what institutions and practices will translate into a different cultural milieu or how to do it. In the larger world of governmental constitutions, efforts to insert U.S. arrangements into distant political cultures have failed more often than not. Much the same could happen in reverse if the United States attempted to fix its schools simply by copying something that seems to work elsewhere.

It is tempting to undertake an in-depth study of those places that are performing at the highest levels—China’s Shanghai province, Korea, Finland, Singapore, Japan, the Netherlands, and Canada, for example. But a proper comparison requires that one contrast what successful countries do with the mistakes made by the less successful ones. International comparisons should look at information from all countries and adjust for factors that affect student performance, even though such rigorous studies typically face their own challenges, including collecting the requisite data. Moreover, countries are different across so many dimensions (from the political system to the cultural prestige of the teaching profession) that it is typically difficult to attribute differences between countries to any specific factors.

For these reasons, learning from international experience can be a bit like reading tea leaves: People are tempted to see in the patterns whatever they think they should see. But for all the hazards associated with drawing on international experience, the greatest risk lies in ignoring such information altogether. Steadfastly insisting that the United States is unique and that nothing is to be learned from other lands might appeal to those on the campaign trail. But it is a perilous course of action for those who wish to understand—and improve—the state of American education. If nothing else, reflection on international experience encourages one to think more carefully about practices and proposals at home. It is not so much specific answers that come from conversing with educators from around the world, as it is gaining some intellectual humility. Such conversations provide opportunities to learn the multiple ways in which common questions are posed and answered, and to consider how policies that have proved successful elsewhere might be adapted to the unique context of U.S. education.

That, perhaps, is the signal contribution of the August 2011 conference on “Learning from the International Experience,” sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Many who attended said the conference had sparked conversations well beyond the usual boundaries on thinking about U.S. education policy, whether the issue was teacher reforms, school choice, the development of common standards and school accountability, or the promise of learning online.

Need to Take Action

Anthony Miller and Susan Patrick

The conference opened with an urgent call from U.S. Deputy Secretary of Education Anthony Miller that action be taken. He highlighted two aspects of Harvard’s PEPG study in his remarks. First, by showing the dismal performance of students from families in which a parent has a college education, “the findings…debunk the myth that the mediocre performance of U.S. students on international tests is due simply to the presence of large numbers of disadvantaged students.” Indeed, the study shows that the percent proficient among U.S. students whose parents are college-educated or who are white is significantly less than the percent proficient among all students in countries such as Korea, Singapore, and Finland. Second, by breaking out results for every state, it shows that “the U.S. education system is comprised of 50 state systems, and therefore we must look at our performance on a state-by-state basis.”

Hoover Institution scholar Eric Hanushek built on Miller’s remarks by reporting that, according to work he did with University of Munich economist Ludger Woessmann, the United States could boost its annual GDP growth rate by more than 1 percentage point annually by raising student math performance to levels currently attained in countries such as Canada and Korea. That kind of increase in economic productivity could, over the long run, boost the U.S. economy by trillions of dollars. According to Hanushek, “the impact of the current recession on the economy is dwarfed” by the magnitude of the loss in wealth that has at its root subpar U.S. education performance.

Hanushek was careful to state that the goal was not to strengthen U.S. performance at the expense of other nations: The creation of well-educated citizens does not constitute a “a zero-sum game that countries or states are playing against each other,” but one in which every country and state can become more productive, and create more wealth for one another by boosting and sharing their talents. The United States can welcome the higher Canadian, Finnish, Korean, and Chinese performances even as those accomplishments make a compelling case for “changing the direction the United States is going.”

Further developing the case for reform, University of Arkansas scholars Jay P. Greene and Josh P. McGee (see “When the Best Is Mediocre,” features, page 34) provided conference participants with a glimpse of their new report, which identifies the international standing of nearly every school district in the United States. “People tend to think their own districts are OK,” even when the United States as a whole appears to be doing badly, Greene said. “But they really are not.” Even in expensive suburbs, student performance does not look very good from an international perspective, they said. “There is no refuge for ‘elite’ families in this country.” Greene and McGee reported that in 17 states they were unable to find a single district that performed at levels comparable to those reached by students in the world’s leading countries.

Teachers and Teaching

Mona Mourshed

Offering hope that urgent action can be taken, Mona Mourshed told the conference that she and her colleagues at McKinsey & Company have shown that “systems can achieve significant gains in as short a time as six years.” Mediocre systems can become much better, and “those that are good can become great.” In her view, there are “clusters of interventions” that are appropriate for each stage of system development, and for each one, the key driver of change is teachers. The most important factor for every system’s journey of transformation, she said, is to develop teachers’ capabilities to their full potential. And others agreed. As New Jersey’s chief education officer Christopher Cerf put it, “The single greatest in-school variable driving [learning] outcomes is the quality of the teacher.”

But how can we ensure high-quality instruction? According to Mourshed, much depends on the stage a school system has reached. If a system is mediocre and has only low-performing teachers, then it can make the most progress through strong administrative actions that identify clear expectations for teachers and are fairly prescriptive. This may involve scripted teaching materials, monitoring of the time teachers devote to each task, and regular visits by master teachers or school inspectors. But, as the performance of the system rises and the teaching force reaches a higher level of quality, it can move “from good to great” by giving those teachers both greater autonomy and support. Among other things, great school systems decentralize pedagogical methods to schools and teachers, and put in place incentives for frontline educators to share innovative practices across schools. “Teacher teams” collaborate to push the quality and customization of classroom materials even further, and the educators rotate throughout the system, spreading peer learning and enriching mentorship opportunities.

Fernando Reimers of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education said that most teachers are trained in academic programs that have low prestige and are far removed from the activities of the classroom. Students in these programs are asked to think about sociological, psychological, and policy issues rather than to discuss what it takes to teach a particular lesson effectively. In this regard, schools of education are unlike other professional schools. He gave the example of business schools, which are increasingly asked to link instruction directly to the work future managers will be expected to do. Reimers urged that education-training programs combine mastery of the subject matter, needed especially today in math and science, with the ability to adapt teaching to different learners, to use technology effectively, and to enable project-based learning and teamwork.

In making these points, Reimers built on the presentation on Finnish training programs given by Jari Lavonen of the University of Helsinki. Advanced training at an education school in Finland is “more popular than medical school,” Lavonen told conference participants. Those admitted are a select group, and acceptance virtually guarantees a well-compensated and prestigious career. Rigorous training programs expect future teachers to demonstrate content knowledge in both a major and a minor subject, research competence, and classroom effectiveness. He admitted that the pedagogical research component was often contested by students (“we are teachers, not researchers”), but, he says, alumni later tell him that it was one of the most valuable parts of their educational experience. In his view, it is this component that enables them to tackle complex classrooms situations effectively later on. But, Lavonen cautioned, the system works in Finland only because the political situation was stable enough that the country was able to take “consistent decisions over the course of 40 years.”

Gwang-Jo Kim

Gwang-Jo Kim, former education vice-minister in Korea and current head of UNESCO in Thailand, also stressed the quality of those entering the teaching profession. Koreans are known for their “high regard for teachers and for the teaching profession.” Primary-school teacher-training programs receive many more applicants than there are spaces. There are multiple routes to certification as a secondary-school teacher, but the chances of getting a job are as low as 5 percent, as positions are avidly sought. Similarly, in Singapore, applicants to teacher-training programs are carefully selected, with a large proportion coming from the top 30 percent of the college population.

Kim said the Korean and Singapore success stories could not be understood apart from deep-seated cultural factors. The demand for teacher excellence comes from parents, who want their children to do well on national examinations that determine future education and occupational opportunities. As a result, teachers are under a lot of pressure. With unionization of the teaching profession in Korea, Kim wonders whether the current model can be sustained.

Building on these insights, White House education adviser Roberto Rodríguez reported that the Obama administration is developing models of teacher mentorship and induction that will support new recruits into the profession and renew teacher-preparation programs. “We don’t have a system that recruits talent. There is not a high bar for ed schools,” Rodríguez said. In addition, he emphasized the current lack of high-quality professional development for teachers and adequate mentorship for new teachers. Rodríguez confirmed the administration’s intention to create differentiated tracks for master teachers, administrators, and specialist teachers, in which teacher compensation is tied to progress on those tracks. Currently, he stated, “we lose too many good teachers to administration.” Underlining a point made by Deputy Secretary Miller, Rodríguez reminded the conference that, to be effective, change must come not only from the federal government but from “high levels of energy at the state and local level.”

Agreeing that state action is vital, New Jersey’s Christopher Cerf told conference participants that successful education systems do the same thing high-quality businesses strive to do: recruit from the very best, maximize the productivity of employees, evaluate responsibly and helpfully, deploy its workforce where it can be most helpful, and have a clear talent-retention strategy. But in the United States, he said, “We do all of these things badly in education. We recruit from whatever the ed schools give us, there is no productivity angle and no pay for results. We have taken the view that doing teacher evaluations is so hard that we should do nothing at all, and our retention strategy amounts to saying to high-performing teachers, ‘please stay.’” To change that system and lift the quality of the teaching force to international levels won’t be easy, cautioned Gerard Robinson, Florida’s chief education officer. “It is all about brute political force; the rest is a rounding error.”

Jason Glass, director of the Department of Education for the state of Iowa, reminded the audience that “we cannot take the challenges one at a time if they refuse to stay in line.” Glass said his priority is to alter the “one-minute interviews” used to make decisions on teacher hiring in too many school districts. He also seeks to improve the mentorship that teachers receive in their first year of teaching, which he says is virtually nonexistent in parts of his state. He plans to introduce more sophisticated systems that will identify—and retrain or remove—the state’s least-capable teachers. In reforming Iowa’s public school system, he intends to get beyond the prevalent false dichotomies, such as “cash for test scores versus step-and-lane compensation” and “due process versus random firing.” Performance measures able to identify the least capable teachers can and should be found. He concluded with a hopeful warning: “Watch out for Iowa over the next few years.”

Choice and Autonomy

Shengchang Tang

Hindering the conversation on school choice was the fact that the mechanisms for choice in the United States do not resemble the choice mechanisms elsewhere. In the United States, private schools receive little government aid (except for transportation, lunch programs, and, in a few places, school vouchers), whereas in most other countries governments fund private schools at levels close to those for state-run schools. Charter schools are privately operated schools that are funded by the government, but they may not teach religion, while government-funded private schools in most other countries may do so.

Avis Glaze, former superintendent of the Ontario education system, correctly observed that Canada does not have charter schools, but others mentioned that the large number of religious schools that are both government-funded and subject to state regulation give Canadians even more choice than exists in the United States.

The conversation was also shaped by the recent release of a study by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), the same agency that collected the international data on which the PEPG report was based. According to the PISA study, international experience suggests that nothing is to be gained from expanding the private sector in education. Students in private schools do no better than students in public schools, once differences in family background characteristics are taken into account.

That finding, said Martin West, assistant professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, is both misleading and, paradoxically, exactly what one should expect. When undertaking an international analysis of school choice, he argued, one should not compare the effectiveness of the public and private sectors but should instead look at the extent to which competition between the two sectors affects the achievement of all the students in the country, regardless of whether they go to public or private school. In countries such as high-achieving Netherlands, a large percentage of students attend private schools, with government paying the tuition. In countries such as low-performing Spain, only a few students attend private school. Other countries fall in between these two extremes. Using a sophisticated statistical technique, West showed that all students in a country learned more when the private sector was larger. Specifically, the study by West and his colleague found that an increase in the share of private school enrollment of 10 percentage points was associated with better than a quarter of a year’s worth of learning in math, though somewhat less in reading. Moreover, this increase in performance takes place within school systems that spend 6 percent less overall.

A degree of choice can be introduced in the state sector if decisionmaking is shifted to the school level, as has been done in Ontario, Glaze said. The U.S. Department of Education should provide support and oversight to local decisions and push specific “nonnegotiable” programs, such as the literacy program Ontario implemented in the 2000s. Paul Pastorek, Louisiana’s former chief education officer, agreed that the Ontario experiment had been successful but said the United States needed a different approach. The story of school reform has too often been one of a strong district or state leader driving reform until the end of her tenure, with stagnation afterward. Only the powers of competition embedded within a system can lead to sustained improvements. “The problem is that we don’t know how to leverage competitive forces in the multibillion-dollar business that is education in this country,” said Pastorek. “Our education system is a communist system; we don’t have anything that relates what we pay for resources to the economic value they generate.”

The introduction of competition in New Orleans, where 85 percent of the schools are now charter schools, said Pastorek, provided a foundation for continued reform and improvement. But choice works only if choice systems are equitable, schools are held accountable by the state or school district, and parents are given readily understandable information about school quality. In the view of many, a great system would be one in which through the power of competitive forces, as Pastorek described, states create a system that “self-corrects, self-challenges, and self-innovates” to achieve better results for children.

State Standards and Accountability

Avis Glaze

Common standards and tests that evaluate performance against those standards are to be found in most of the countries that are performing better than the United States, whether they be in Europe or Asia. Shengchang Tang, principal of the Shanghai High School (the leading high school in China), said that the standards and examinations in the Shanghai province are a powerful tool that parents use to exert pressure on their children as well as on teachers and principals. (These particular standards and exams do not extend to the whole of China, which is deemed too large to have a single set of exams.) In his view, that pressure focuses attention in schools and fuels the drivers of the successful Shanghai education system, including higher investments, a high-caliber teaching force, and a strategy tailored to the specific situation faced by each school.

Tang questioned whether common standards would be effective in the very different U.S. context. Specifically, he was skeptical that such standards would catalyze more effective parent pressure on U.S. schools, given parents’ comparatively low expectations of their children and their schools. In contrast, in a recent poll in Shanghai, 85 percent of parents declared that they expected their children to be in the top 15 percent of their age cohort. Standardized exams, in Tang’s view, serve as a necessary tool to measure reality against these high expectations. For Angus MacBeath, former school commissioner in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, however, setting high standards in his home province allowed him to “tell the ugly truth,” and it was the necessary first step toward Alberta’s journey of educational improvement. Common standards allow parents, educators, and policymakers to be clear about current achievement levels so they can act on that knowledge.

This is perhaps the reason the Obama administration has lent its support to the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which has been embraced as a reform solution by 44 states and the District of Columbia. Still, many wondered with James Stergios of the Pioneer Institute in Boston whether one can set standards capable of driving high performance nationwide in a country that has great regional disparities in student achievement and a decentralized governmental system (where schools are “radically local,” as one panelist put it). Declaring himself “a massive opponent of common standards,” Stergios argued that the excellence achieved by Massachusetts so far could not be sustained if nationwide standards were substituted for state ones.

Gerard Robinson began his comments by acknowledging that he was chief education officer in Virginia while that state was opposed to common standards and is now chief in Florida, which is committed to common standards. He offered two reasons for embracing common standards: 1) students must compete with those in other states and, indeed, with students all over the world, and 2) companies need common standards in order to compare job applicants. “The difficult part is not to have consensus on having common standards,” he observed, “but on how to work on the political process to achieve them.”

In the end, the standards issue seemed to turn on the questions raised by Shanghai’s Shengchang Tang. Could the United States create common standards that were high enough to spur high achievement? While “having high state standards makes a big difference to underprivileged people,” as Christopher Cerf put it, common standards might be set too low and so, contrary to what the PEPG report showed, may not serve to raise standards of achievement when U.S. students are compared to their peers in high-achieving countries. He reminded the group that the same political context exists today as existed when No Child Left Behind was crafted. As prescribed in that legislation, every child was supposed to be proficient, but to comply with federal expectations many states “dumbed down” their definition of student proficiency.

Digital Learning

Paul Pastorek and Tony Bennett

In her opening remarks for the panel on digital learning, New Mexico’s chief education officer Hanna Skandera stressed that the new technologies provided new opportunities to address together all the reforms under discussion. Digital learning that exploits online courses and broadband capabilities can expand choice for students, ensure transparency and accountability for courses offered online, and create opportunities for many more students to come into contact with the very best teachers. Further, it can serve as a catalyst for higher standards and can do all this without driving up the cost of education.

Shantanu Prakash, of Educomp Solutions, informed the audience about the business he started and now heads in India. Educomp serves more than 12 million students in India alone and operates in a number of other developing countries where traditional schools have limited resources and set low standards for instruction. Educomp targets schools with products it says are not only inexpensive but user-friendly and easily combined with traditional classroom instruction. “The whiteboard can be used with millions of modules that are very good, that will support any teacher,” he noted. Prakesh expects the demand for his products to grow rapidly, as “the pressure of parents will make the introduction of digital materials into the learning of children in a meaningful way inevitable.” It is an obvious means for parents with high expectations all over India to ensure that their children receive high-quality instruction, in a context of scarce resources and low teaching standards.

Susan Patrick, president and CEO of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning (iNACOL), agreed: “Education is no longer a cottage and local industry,” but one in which true competition can thrive, improving standards and driving productivity gains. Digital learning can give students greater choice, even down to the specific instructor for a particular course. Digital learning is a growing reality in many other countries. Citing numerous references, Patrick told of its widespread adoption across the world. In Singapore, for example, all schools blend online learning with classroom instruction, and the country’s schools of education have made online instructional techniques an integral part of the curriculum. South Korea is once again a leader, and virtual education has become a rapidly growing industry, partly to reduce the cost to parents of the “cram schools” that families expect their adolescent children to attend.

Also participating in the conference was Julie Young, president and CEO of the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), the leading example of digital learning in the United States. Since its beginnings in 1996, FLVS has grown steadily and currently has nearly 200,000 course enrollments. The reasons for its success, according to Young, include student access to teachers seven days a week and beyond the regular school day, choice in assignments, and a constantly improving curriculum and instruction that is transparent to administrators, parents, and outsiders.

The main barrier to the spread of digital learning in the United States, iNACOL’s Patrick noted, are “policies that were created 30 to 40 years ago for a different world. Digital teachers cannot easily be qualified in multiple states, funding follows student and sometimes physical attendance, and there are no common standards across states that would reduce the costs of development.” Only when those policies are upgraded purposefully to accommodate and encourage a different kind of classroom environment will digital learning become an integral part of the American education system.

Tea Leaves or Tea?

Jari Lavonen

So what did the conference brew? No one can make the case that the conference provided secret bullets for school reform in the United States, and most every conference participant would agree that the particulars of the United States make it difficult to introduce wholesale many of the practices that have been successful abroad. Popular culture shows little appreciation for the educated citizen; a decentralized government arrangement with multiple veto points precludes rapid innovation; and education politics is marked by antipathy between teachers unions and school reformers. But a nuanced assessment of the conversation allows for at least preliminary conclusions that go beyond a simple call for urgent action:

• Teacher selection, teacher training, teacher evaluation, and teacher retention in the United States can be done much better than it is being done today. While no country has exactly the right model for the United States, none of the successful systems leave good teaching simply to chance the way the United States does.

• School choice plays a bigger—and perhaps more successful—role in the world’s educational experience than is usually recognized. It should not be seen as a threat but rather as an incentive for improvement for the public education system.

• Standards and testing systems that hold students accountable for their performance are part and parcel of most, if not all, of the world’s top education systems. If the United States has a heterogeneity that precludes the adoption of a uniform examination system as those found in Korea, Singapore, and in many parts of Canada, that provides no reason not to set clearer, and higher, expectations for students than is commonly the case.

• Digital learning has yet to prove itself fully and to develop into an integrated paradigm-shifting approach, but early stories of success are promising, provided digital learning respects the principles of transparency, accountability, and choice for students.

More than reaching any specific conclusion, the conference was most successful in inspiring participants with a renewed understanding of and dedication to their common commitment to a better system of education. The commitment is now informed by the experience of other countries with similar challenges that have managed, through sustained and consistent policies (as the Finnish representative, Jari Lavonen, insisted) to find solutions.

Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

At the bottom of this post are the results I reported to a packed house at the Association of Public Policy and Management in Washington, D. C. last Saturday. They show that, for fourth graders, the black-white test score gap had, in the 12 years prior to the passage of NCLB, opened up by 7 points.  The Hispanic-white gap had opened by 5 points.  No wonder there was a demand for an accountability system that required a special look at the learning experiences of minority students.

After the law was enacted, the black-white test-score gap closed by 2 points  and the Hispanic-white gap closed by 1 point.   That is a switch in the trend line of 9 points and 6 points, respectively.  Not as much as we would like, but better than what might have been.

At the 8th grade level, the black-white gap had remained unchanged prior to NCLB, but closed 4 points after its enactment. For Hispanics, the negative trend was 4 points prior to NCLB, and the positive trend 3 points after the law came into being.  That constitutes a direction switch of 7 points.

Notably, none of the reversal in the trend was due to a decline in average white test scores. As can be seen below, average white scores since 2002 are up–quite a bit in math, less so–but still positive–in reading.

I have not presented here a sophisticated study of NCLB’s impact on student performance. But others have, and they, too, report that NCLB’s impact has been, on the whole, modestly positive.

Of course, NCLB can be faulted for the exaggerated rhetoric contained in its title, but that should not prevent us from taking a thoughtful look at the actual NAEP record that has now become available.

When that is done, one must concede that NCLB is not the greatest thing since sliced bread.  But after its passage into law, white, black and Hispanic students all made gains and the widening of the white-minority test score gap was reversed.

When we asked our readers whether they favored or opposed school vouchers, 42 percent said they favored them, just a bit more than the 39 percent of the general public who gave a similar answer.

Our readers are more likely to have opinions on charter schools than the public as a whole (all but 7 percent take a position in contrast to the 39 percent of the public who take a pass on this item), but the ratio of support to opposition is roughly the same: about 3:1.

The same is true with learning online. All but 5 percent of our readers are ready to take a position on the issue, as compared to just 26 percent of the public as a whole.  But the ratio of support to opposition is, again, close to 3:1 among both readers and the national public.

Ed Next readers are also more likely to take a position on merit pay. All but 4 percent choose one side or the other, as compared to 26 percent of the public as a whole who take no position.  Readers are supportive of the idea but not by as wide a margin.  They are 15 percentage points more likely to support the idea than oppose it, as compared to a 20 percentage point difference among the public as a whole.

But as for teacher unions, readers are more likely to think they have done more harm than good.  While the public as a whole is split down the middle, readers are nearly twice as likely to think they are a stumbling block to school reform.

So I guess the editors of the journal can claim we are influencing public opinion.  The public thinks as our readers think, and our readers’ understanding is shaped by the facts and figures Ed Next reports.  But as one of our presidents once said, that would be wrong.  No such conclusion can be drawn.  All that can really be said is that our readers are more ready to take a position on the issues, and that our readers appear to constitute a cross-section of the thinking in the larger society.

-Paul Peterson

It is becoming increasingly obvious that digital learning systems can be tailored to the specific interests, learning styles, and levels of accomplishment of each student.  As digital curricular materials employ ever-more-sophisticated technologies—3-dimensional videos, game playing, interactive exercises, real-time provision of information on student performance to teachers and students alike, and more—they will be seen as essential 21^st century learning tools.

But we can expect a strenuous, highly politicized debate over the way in which digital learning should be provided.  On the one side will be those who propose that most digital learning in K-12 public education be of the “blended” variety, that is, take place within public school classrooms under the tutelage of a highly qualified teacher.

On the other side, “online” proponents will argue that blended learning alone is not enough.  American education can be transformed only if the power to drive change is placed in the hands of students, who are offered a choice of providers that include not only the blended classroom but also those who offer products  exclusively online, supplementing asymmetric video presentations of online materials with interactive systems that employ such tools as Skype, interactive games, social networking, email communications and phone conversations.

All of this became clear at the conference sponsored in San Francisco last week by the Foundation on Excellence in Education, the nonprofit headed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is promoting a strikingly innovative, bipartisan reform agenda that combines the Common Core standards promoted by the Gates Foundation and the Obama Administration with the accountability and choice principles to which he was committed during his eight years as Florida’s governor.

It is digital learning that holds together and gives spark to Bush’s agenda.  Common standards provide a nationwide platform upon which next generation curricular materials can be built; choice allows students to pick the courses most suited to their needs, abilities, and interests; and accountability ensures that learning is genuine.

Bush put on an impressive show.  His self-deprecating wit, extraordinary command of the subject, and undeniable passion generated a level of enthusiasm seldom found outside the confines of a well-orchestrated campaign event. When the former governor interviewed Melinda Gates about her support for Common Core standards, she relaxed noticeably, revealing a personal warmth and depth of knowledge less well displayed in her formal presentation.

But the true star of the show was Sal Khan, a former venture capitalist turned curriculum specialist, who has become a rock star of digital education. Unlike some other proponents of digital learning promoting their wares at the conference, Kahn taught his audience by both precept and example.  Not only did he advocate next-generation learning, but, in so doing, he blended a sweater-casual speaking style with a smoothly offered, high-tech digital presentation that was little less than astounding.  When he finished, only the most hard-nosed of skeptics walked away unconvinced that Khan had invented the one-and-only way to teach math to young people.

For Khan, next-generation learning combines simple, short, witty videos with problem sets that must be mastered before one moves to the next stage of instruction.  To motivate students, he uses, surprisingly, nothing more than badges and other phony rewards reminiscent of the stars that old-fashioned elementary school teachers used to post next to the names of high achievers.  Real-time data on success and failure is provided simultaneously to teachers, students, parents and anyone else authorized to access that information. You can learn all about the Khan method by looking at his videos on YouTube.

Yet Khan leaves the debate over blended versus online learning wide open.  On one side, the power of online learning is demonstrated by videos that are being viewed by Khan’s distant cousins as well as by the next generation of the Melinda and Bill Gates family, a saxophone player who is self-educating himself into an electrical engineer, and millions of young people in developing countries across the globe.

But the “blenders” will undoubtedly point to certain in-classroom keys to his accomplishments in the public schools of Los Altos, California.  There, student success at problem-solving is monitored in real time by teachers, serving as coaches, who intervene when videos are not enough. For blenders, the keys to the intervention’s apparent success include the use of real-time performance information by qualified teachers, not just the videos and problem sets.

Apparent success, it must be said, because the impact of neither the blended nor the online version of the Khan intervention has yet to be documented by a randomized trial.  Still, Los Altos school authorities are impressed enough to allow Khan Academy to expand from just a couple of demonstration classrooms to middle schools throughout the district.  And other charter and district schools are climbing on board this fast-moving train.

But the debate between blended and online learning will continue.  Too much politically is at stake for it to be otherwise.  It is not yet clear that blended learning a la Khan Academy will be any more efficient than the current bloated system of public education.  At a time of extreme fiscal exigency, legislators will look for ways in which technology can save money, not for new ways to add costs.

Meanwhile, school districts and teacher unions can be expected to fight publicly funded online learning that offers students a choice of taking courses outside their local district school.  If online learning should prove to be more effective than the learning that takes place within classrooms, it would provide a serious challenge to the school district-teacher union duopoly that blended learning does not.

-Paul E. Peterson

For that reason, one must give a great deal of respect to Sandy Kress’s opinions.  And so I am encouraged when he tells me that the moves away from accountability and merit pay that have taken place recently in Texas were forced upon Governor Rick Perry and Robert Scott, the state’s education commissioner, by legislative pressures beyond their control.

But the fact of the matter remains:  Texas is backing away from education reform under its current political leadership. That is a shame, because Texas has historically led the way, not least because of Sandy Kress’s own commitment to the cause and effective leadership skills.

There are still good things that can be said about Texan schools. As I said in my original blog post, students within each ethnic group in Texas—white, Hispanic, and African American—are among the nation’s top performers, in some cases surpassing even the levels achieved in Massachusetts. Let’s hope the Texas political leadership can resist the anti-accountability forces in the months and years to come.

-Paul E. Peterson

The rap against Texas is that its students trail, by a wide margin, the national average in achievement and graduation rates. That’s a false rap, because Texas faces the enormous challenges of a southern state that shares a long border with Mexico. When Texas’s performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress is broken out by ethnic background, its record comes close to that of Massachusetts, as Allison Sherry pointed out in her recent Ed Next article on the education policies advocated by several of the Republican candidates.

But if Texas is doing better than some have claimed, Perry can’t take much credit for that. Texas school reform was begun long before the current governor arrived on the scene.  As I discuss in my book, Saving Schools, the Texas accountability system was put into place in the 1980s at the urging of Ross Perot. It was Democratic governor Ann Richards who got things going and Governor George W. Bush who kept accountability in place during the eight years he spent in Austin.

Now, the pressures to dismantle the accountability system in Texas have risen within the state legislature, Commissioner Scott told his audience. Because accountability has become unpopular among powerful interests who have influence in the Texas legislature, Perry and Scott, borrowing a trick from President Barack Obama and U. S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan,  have agreed to giving 25 school districts waivers from the state accountability system, provided the districts come up with an acceptable alternative.  That number that could climb in the next few years, Scott bragged to the assembled group.

Under questioning, Scott insisted he remained committed to testing and accountability.  But special waivers for certain districts undermine the entire system.  What makes accountability work is the common assessment of all students within the state, allowing for comparisons across the board.  If the highest performing districts are dropped from the assessment, as Scott suggested would happen, then all other districts will look better when compared to the new, artificially deflated, statewide average.

Moreover, without solid, comparative information on student performance, basing teacher salaries on merit (student learning) becomes considerably more complicated, though that may not matter, as Perry has gutted merit pay as well.  Scott told the group that the fiscal crisis forced the state to drop its merit pay program, another sign the governor is giving in to special interests.

But it is the risk that the Perry Administration poses for the long-standing Texas accountability system that is most worrisome. Perry has sharply opposed national standards in education.  Now, it seems, his administration is about to undermine state standards as well.

This may be popular with teacher unions and local district officials in Texas, but the general public nationwide may think otherwise.  The 2011 Education Next poll identified overwhelming public support for student testing and school accountability.

Does Rick Perry really want to dismantle the Texas accountability system? Unless he does, he should not be using the same waiver technique the White House is using to gut No Child Left Behind.

-Paul Peterson

Not surprisingly, most are happy with what they get. No less than 54 percent of the college-educated, well-to-do respondents to the 2011 Education Next poll said their local schools deserved a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to grade students.  Only 15 percent of these affluent people gave one of these same grades to the nation’s schools as a whole.  Clearly, the affluent draw a sharp distinction between the problems in American education and the condition of their local public schools.

And, of course, it is true that students in suburban schools perform at a higher level on state tests than do the students attending inner-city schools. That is the kind of comparison usually reported in the daily newspaper.  Just last Sunday, for example, the Boston Globe gave a front-page story to the gap between the performances of Massachusetts students from higher- and lower-income families, a story that highlights inequities within the state but at the same time assures the affluent that all is well at their local schools.

Yet it turns out that many, probably most, of the schools in affluent neighborhoods deserve no better than a “C.”  In a just-released Education Next article, “When the Best is Mediocre,” Jay P. Greene and Josh B. McGee report that students in even allegedly high-speed suburban schools are only mediocre in math when their performance is compared to students in other developed countries.   Beverly Hills and Palo Alto, California: Ann Arbor and Grosse Pointe, Michigan: Plano, Texas; Evanston, Illinois; Montgomery County, Maryland; and Fairfax County, Virginia:  None of them do much better than the international average.

To uncover those dramatic findings, the two University of Arkansas researchers linked performance on state tests administered under No Child Left Behind to performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), and then linked NAEP performance to performance on the Program on International Student Assessment (PISA) tests, which are taken by students in developed countries around the world.  The linking is imaginatively done, though it requires a few assumptions with which others may quarrel. (Details are provided in this appendix to the study.)

Still, it is my bet that the Greene-McGee findings have a better chance of withstanding scientific attack than does the recent Swiss report that neutrons travel faster than the speed of light.

One fact is beyond dispute:  The speed with which American young people, even the most talented of them, are learning their mathematics and science is much too slow. One wonders how many 15-year-olds in the United States have any idea of how fast light travels, the time it takes for light to reach the earth from the sun, or the number of light-years it takes to cross the galaxy in which we live.

-Paul E. Peterson

NB:  The full study, “When the Best is Mediocre,” can be found here.

The Global Report Card, which includes results for over 13,000 school districts, is available here.

The methodological appendix for the study appears here.

An interview in which Jay Greene discusses the findings with Ed Next’s Marty West is here.

And a video in which Jay Greene explains the Global Report Card can be found here.

The lead proponent of the attempt to revive earlier restrictions on single-sex education is none other than a past president of the American Psychological Association, Diane F. Halpern.  She and her fellow “founders” urge the federal government to forbid single-sex schooling, an idea dredged up during the early days of the feminist movement but something Washington backed away from during the Bush Administration (with support from Hillary Clinton, who was educated at Wellesley, the country’s premier women’s college).

But of course, if there is no evidence as to which type of schooling is to be preferred, why not let parents choose which type of schooling is best for their child?

Such a sensible view of the matter is taken by a clear majority of those members of the American public who have thought about the subject enough to have a clear position on the matter.  Last spring this journal, Education Next, asked a representative sample of the American public whether or not school districts should “offer parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls school.”   We found that a large share of the population—42 percent—took a middling position, saying they neither supported nor opposed the idea.  But of those who took a position, supporters of giving parents the single-sex option exceeded their opponents by a sizeable margin—34 percent to 23 percent.

Teachers, too, liked the idea.  Among teachers, supporters outstripped opponents by a better than 2:1 margin– 46 percent to 19 percent.

And the highest-income, best-educated segment of the American population also favored the idea by better than a 2:1 margin—47 percent to 21 percent.

Nor is this just a rich, conservative, white person’s idea.  Among African-Americans, supporters of a single-sex option also exceed opponents by a virtual 2:1 margin—35 percent to 18 percent.  Among Hispanics, supporters amount to 33 percent of the population, while just 23 percent oppose the idea.

“I’d rather be governed by the first ten names in the telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard University,” someone once said.  Let’s rephrase that:  “I’d rather be governed by the first ten names randomly drawn from Google than by the past presidents of the American Psychological Association.”

-Paul E. Peterson

Now that President Obama has let both the expenditure and revenue-raising shoes drop, it is clear that the costs to state and local governments of the new jobs bill could very well equal—perhaps exceed—the benefits they might receive.

In his speech before Congress last week, he proposed approximately $200 billion in new inter-governmental aid to state and local governments so they could hire teachers, build roads, and so forth.  That is roughly the same size as the 2009 stimulus package, which spread approximately $400 billion over two years.

Unlike his 2009 stimulus package, the president this time added a tax plan to cover the costs.  It includes placing a limit on one of the biggest tax loopholes:  the ability to deduct from one’s income the interest received from investments in state and local bonds.  The president wants to limit the deduction to the 28 percent tax rate, instead of the approximately 40 percent marginal rate that well-heeled investors (the folks who generally buy these things) would otherwise pay.

Elsewhere, I discuss the unfortunate impact of Obama’s “tax and spend” plans on the U. S. federal system.

My point here is simpler: state and local governments, not investors, are the primary beneficiaries of the tax deduction loophole.  When bonds are fully tax-deductible on federal income tax returns, as most state and municipal bonds now are, investors will accept a lower interest rate on their investment.

In other words, state and local governments are now able to borrow money much more cheaply than others do.  Often they can get a lower rate than the federal government.

Those who invest in state and local bonds accept that lower rate because, after the tax advantage is figured in, they come out slightly ahead, but that advantage is relatively small, as the highly competitive bond market erodes away all but small advantages.

Yet the loophole is of great value to state and local governments, as they pay a lot less interest than they otherwise would.  Take some of it away and it could cost states and municipalities another $200 billion dollars or more over the next ten years.  I don’t know what the exact number is, because it will take a computer program to figure it out.  I expect someone will run the numbers shortly.

My post fetched a response from a dedicated group of young people raising money to give children in Uganda a chance to go to school.  Apart from the worthy cause, they tell you a good deal about the rising cost of education.

Go to calculateit.org.

They ask you to state the year of your birth, the state in which you went to school, and whether you went to public or private school, then they will tell you how much it cost to provide you with an education in grades 1 through 7.

I found out that the government spent less than $13,000 on me, but nearly $60,000 on my son, and will certainly be spending well over $100,000 on my grandson when he begins school.

The site does not get down to the school district level, as education.com does, but it is a fun exercise anyhow.

While I am on the topic, let me reply to  Anne Clark, a reader of my original blog post, who complains that I did not do my homework before writing that post.  She asserts that the information on the cost and performance of the Wellesley middle school is readily available on a Massachusetts website.  All one has to do is google “Massachusetts MCAS.”  I tried that and found that I had to do a great deal of navigation to get the information she reports.

Even if the data is there, why should any parent have to know that the way to get expenditure and performance data on the Wellesley public schools is to google Massachusetts MCAS? And then navigate through a complex website to find a category called budget and then divide by enrollment to get per pupil expenditure?  All of that is possible, but it is hardly user-friendly.

What’s more, if Clark is correct, that website is handing out erroneous information.  She says Wellesley per pupil expenditures are about $12,000 when in fact the true cost is over $15,000. So says education.com, which gets its data from the U. S. Department of Education, a stickler for accuracy in these kinds of things.

(By the way, in my hunt for the missing information, I went to the official website of the Wellesley Public Schools, not its middle school website, as Clark alleges.)

Bottom line:  Information on the cost and performance of the Wellesley Public Schools may be available somewhere else in the vast reaches of the internet, but to quickly access accurate information you have to go to education.com

-Paul E. Peterson

In a recently released report, the U. S. Department of Education uses data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to rank the relative rigor of each state’s proficiency standards.  Its study is based upon data that is now more than two years old.  Its cost? It must be at least a million dollar study, if all the direct and indirect costs are calculated, as the study involved a complicated data collection effort.  I invite interested readers to inquire of department officials as to just how much its study added to the nation’s debt.

Since Ednext released pretty much the same information a year ago, the U. S. Department of Education could have saved itself a bucket of dough simply by putting our study up on its website.

Of course, it’s always useful to have the official U. S. government seal of approval on Ednext work, and it’s true that while the two studies virtually replicate one another, they are not a perfect match. Ednext took a census approach to data collection (relying upon the official results released by states) while the Department gathered data from a sample of schools.  Each approach has its own pluses and minuses, as I pointed out in a previous blog post.

But the bottom line is that the two studies get to virtually the same place. The correlations between Ednext and U. S. government rankings are as follows:

4th grade reading: 0.86

4th grade math: 0.88

8th grade reading: 0.85

8th grade math: 0.87

When you get that high a set of correlations between two sets of rankings, there is not much difference left to quarrel about.  Interested readers can check this out by looking at the side-by-side rank ordering of states in both studies in the attachment below.

Click to enlarge

So, for example, Ednext ranked Massachusetts, Missouri and New Jersey as the three states with the highest standards in 4^th grade reading.  So did the Department.

Ednext  identified the four states with the lowest standards  in 4^th grade reading (in order from the bottom) as: Tennessee, Nebraska, Georgia and Alabama. The Department provided no information on Nebraska but agreed that the other three were at the bottom. It added Oregon as the fourth, while Ednext ranked Oregon a bit higher.

Colorado is the one state where we provide substantially different rankings. Ednext ranked it 4^th; the Department says it is 45^th.  I suspect the difference is due to a change in standards in Colorado, but I invite readers to throw light on the discrepancy.

The top 3 conclusions of the Department report are as follows:

1. “There is wide variation among state proficiency standards.”

Yes, Ednext shows that clearly by grading states on an A to F scale.

2. “Most states’ proficiency standards are at or below NAEP’s definition of Basic Performance.”

Yes, Ednext gave most states a grade of C or below, which meant they diverged dramatically from the NAEP proficiency standard (which is set considerably higher than the basic level).

3. “For those states that made substantive changes in their assessments between 2007 and 2009, most moved toward more rigorous standards as measured by NAEP.”

Yes, Ednext reports more rigorous standards in reading. However, it shows a slight slippage in math standards.

In short, we have no complaint about the U. S. Department of Education report other than the authors failed to cite the Ednext one. We do not know whether the Department’s ranking is more precise—or less precise—than the Ednext’s ranking.  A good case can be made for the merits of either study’s methodology.

But as to the cost-benefit equation, there is little doubt.  The Ednext study was conducted at modest cost—and none at all to the taxpayer.  The U. S. Department of Education study needlessly added to the national debt.

- Paul E. Peterson

That 32 percent proficiency rate compares to a 50 percent or better proficiency rate in  Korea, Finland, Switzerland, Japan, Canada and the Netherlands. In Shanghai, the proficiency rate is no less than 75 percent.  Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent).

Only four additional states—Vermont, North Dakota, New Jersey, and Kansas—have a math proficiency rate above 40 percent.

Some of the country’s largest and richest states score below the average for the United States as a whole, including New York (30 percent), Missouri (30 percent), Michigan (29 percent), Florida (27 percent), and California (24 percent).

Proficiency in Reading

The U.S. proficiency rate in reading, at 31 percent, compares reasonably well to those of most European countries other than Finland. The U.S. takes 17th place among the nations of the world, and only the top 10 countries on PISA outperform the United States by a statistically significant amount. In Korea, 47 percent of the students are proficient in reading. Other countries that outrank the United States include Finland (46 percent), Singapore and New Zealand (42 percent), Japan and Canada (41 percent), Australia (38 percent), and Belgium (37 percent).

Within the United States, Massachusetts is again the leader, with 43 percent of 8th-grade students performing at the NAEP proficient level in reading. Shanghai students perform at a higher level, however, with 55 percent of young people proficient in reading. Within the United States, Vermont is a close second to its neighbor to the south, with a 42 percent proficiency rate. New Jersey and South Dakota come next, with 39 and 37 percent of the students identified as proficient in reading. The District of Columbia, the nation’s worst, performs at a level that cannot be distinguished statistically from that of Turkey, Russia, and Bulgaria. Students living in California (about one-eighth of the U. S. school-age population) are statistically tied with their peers in Slovakia and Spain.

Data and Approach

A national proficiency standard was set by the board that governs the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and generally known as the nation’s report card.

We provide information on student performance in both reading and mathematics, but our main concern is the relative performance of U.S. students in mathematics. That information is obtained by comparing student performance on NAEP math and reading tests with the performance of students from across the world on similar examinations. If the NAEP exams are the nation’s report card, the world’s report card is assembled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which administers the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to representative samples of 15-year-old students in 68 of the world’s school systems.

Since the United States participates in the PISA examinations, it is possible to make direct comparisons between the average performance of U.S. students nationwide and that of their peers elsewhere. But because PISA exams do not set proficiency standards in the same way that NAEP exams do, one cannot calculate the percent proficient in the various countries of the world without performing a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA. Once that crosswalk has been performed, it is possible not only to provide estimates of the percentage of students who are proficient in various countries but also to view from an international perspective the performance of students from particular social groups as well as those living in specific states.

A crosswalk is made possible by the fact that representative (but separate) samples of the high-school graduating class of 2011 took both the NAEP and PISA math and reading examinations. NAEP tests were taken in 2007 when the class of 2011 was in 8th grade and PISA tested 15-year-olds in 2009, most of whom are members of the class of 2011. Given that NAEP identified 32 percent of U.S. 8th-grade students as proficient in math, the PISA equivalent is estimated by calculating the minimum score reached by the top-performing 32 percent of U.S. students participating in the 2009 PISA test.

Performance of U.S. Ethnic and Racial Groups

The percentage proficient in the United States varies considerably across students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. While 42 percent of white students were identified as proficient in math, only 11 percent of African American students, 15 percent of Hispanic students, and 16 percent of Native Americans were so identified. Fifty percent of students with an ethnic background from Asia and the Pacific Islands, however, were proficient in math, placing them at a level comparable to students in Belgium, Canada, and Japan, if lower than that of students in Korea and Taiwan.

In reading, 40 percent of white students and 41 percent of those from Asia and the Pacific Islands were identified as proficient. Only 13 percent of African American students, 5 percent of Hispanic students, and 18 percent of Native American students were so identified.

While the 42 percent rate of math proficiency for U.S. white students is much higher than the averages for students from African American and Hispanic backgrounds, U.S. white students are still surpassed by all students in 16 other countries. A better-than-25 percentage-point gap exists between the performance of U.S. white students and the percentage of all students deemed proficient in Korea and Finland. White students in the United States trail well behind all students in countries such Japan, Germany, Belgium, and Canada.

White students in Massachusetts outperform their peers in other states; 58 percent are at or above the proficient level in math. Maryland, New Jersey, and Texas are the other states in which a majority of white students is proficient in math. Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state’s white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the national average.

The United States could enjoy a remarkable increment in its annual GDP growth per capita by enhancing the math proficiency of U.S. students. Increasing the percentage of proficient students to the levels attained in Canada and Korea would increase the annual U.S. growth rate by 0.9 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points, respectively. Since long-term average annual growth rates hover between 2 and 3 percentage points, that increment would lift growth rates by between 30 and 50 percent.

When translated into dollar terms, these magnitudes become staggering. If one calculates these percentage increases as national income projections over an 80-year period (providing for a 20-year delay before any school reform is completed and the newly proficient students begin their working careers), a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests gains of nothing less than $75 trillion over the period. That averages out to around a trillion dollars a year.

-Paul E. Peterson

On August 17, 2011 Paul Peterson discussed the findings of this study in a free online webinar. An archived recording of this webinar can be found here.

At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. Despite high unemployment rates, firms are experiencing shortages of educated workers, outsourcing professional-level work to workers abroad, and competing for the limited number of employment visas set aside for highly skilled immigrants. As President Barack Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union address, “We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

The challenge is particularly great in math, science, and engineering. According to Internet entrepreneur Vinton Cerf, “America simply is not producing enough of our own innovators, and the cause is twofold—a deteriorating K–12 education system and a national culture that does not emphasize the importance of education and the value of engineering and science.” To address the issue, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education Coalition was formed in 2006 to “raise awareness in Congress, the Administration, and other organizations about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leader of the global marketplace.” Tales of shortages of educated talent appear regularly in the media. According to a CBS News report, 22 percent of American businesses say they are ready to hire if they can find people with the right skills. As one factory owner put it, “It’s hard to fill these jobs because they require people who are good at math, good with their hands, and willing to work on a factory floor.” According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, of the 30 occupations projected to grow the most rapidly over the next decade, nearly half are professional jobs that require at least a college degree. On the basis of these projections, McKinsey’s Global Institute estimates that over the next few years there will be a gap of nearly 2 million workers with the necessary analytical and technical skills.

In this paper we view the proficiency of U.S. students from a global perspective. Although we provide information on performances in both reading and mathematics, our emphasis is on student proficiency in mathematics, the subject many feel to be of greatest concern.

Student Proficiency on NAEP

At one time it was left to teachers and administrators to decide exactly what level of math proficiency should be expected of students. But, increasingly, states, and the federal government itself, have established proficiency levels that students are asked to reach. A national proficiency standard was set by the board that governs the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and generally known as the nation’s report card.

In 2007, just 32 percent of 8th graders in public and private schools in the United States performed at or above the NAEP proficiency standard in mathematics, and 31 percent performed at or above that level in reading. When more than two-thirds of students fail to reach a proficiency bar, it raises serious questions. Are U.S. schools failing to teach their students adequately? Or has NAEP set its proficiency bar at a level beyond the normal reach of a student in 8th grade?

One way of tackling such questions is to take an international perspective. Are other countries able to lift a higher percentage—or even a majority—of their students to or above the NAEP proficiency bar? Another approach is to look at differences among states. What percentage of students in each state is performing at a proficient level? How does each state compare to students in other countries?

In this article, we report results from our second study of student achievement in global perspective conducted for Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In our 2010 PEPG report, we compared the percentage of U.S. public and private school students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 who were performing at the advanced level in mathematics with rates of similar performance among their peers around the world (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011). The current study continues this work by reporting proficiency rates in both mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.

Comparing U.S. Students with Peers in Other Countries

If the NAEP exams are the nation’s report card, the world’s report card is assembled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which administers the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to representative samples of 15-year-old students in 65 of the world’s school systems (which, to simplify the presentation, we shall refer to as countries; Hong Kong, Macao, and Shanghai are not independent nations but are nonetheless included in PISA reports). Since its launch in 2000, the PISA test has emerged as the yardstick by which countries measure changes in their performance over time and the level of their performance relative to that of other countries.

Since the United States participates in the PISA examinations, it is possible to make direct comparisons between the average performance of U.S. students and that of their peers elsewhere. But to compare the percentages of students deemed proficient in math or reading, one must ascertain the PISA equivalent of the NAEP standard of proficiency. To obtain that information, we perform a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA. The crosswalk is made possible by the fact that representative (but separate) samples of the high-school graduating Class of 2011 took the NAEP and PISA math and reading examinations. NAEP tests were taken in 2007 when the Class of 2011 was in 8th grade and PISA tested 15-year-olds in 2009, most of whom are members of the Class of 2011. Given that NAEP identified 32 percent of U.S. 8th-grade students as proficient in math, the PISA equivalent is estimated by calculating the minimum score reached by the top-performing 32 percent of U.S. students participating in the 2009 PISA test. (See methodological sidebar for further details.)

What It Means to Be Proficient

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP, the determination of proficiency in any given subject at a particular grade level “was the result of a comprehensive national process [which took into account]…what hundreds of educators, curriculum experts, policymakers, and members of the general public thought the assessment should test. After the completion of the framework, the NAEP [subject] Committee worked with measurement specialists to create the assessment questions and scoring criteria.” In other words, NAEP’s concept of proficiency is not based on any objective criterion, but reflects a consensus on what should be known by students who have reached a certain educational stage. NAEP says that 8th graders, if proficient, “understand the connections between fractions, percents, decimals, and other mathematical topics such as algebra and functions.”

PISA does not set a proficiency standard. Instead, it sets different levels of performance, ranging from one (the lowest) to six (the highest). A student who is at the proficiency level in math set by NAEP performs moderately above proficiency  level three on the PISA. (See sidebar for a statement of the 8th-grade proficiency standard and sample questions from PISA and NAEP that proficient students are expected to pass.)

Crossing the Proficiency Bar

Given that definition of math proficiency, U.S. students in the Class of 2011, with a 32 percent proficiency rate, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA. Performance levels among the countries ranked 23rd to 31st are not significantly different from that of the U.S. in a statistical sense, yet 22 countries do significantly outperform the United States in the share of students reaching the proficiency level in math. Six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong had majorities of students performing at least at the proficiency level, while the United States had less than one-third. For example, 58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students performed at or above a proficient level. Other countries in which a majority—or near majority—of students performed at or above the proficiency level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands. Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent). Figure 1 presents a detailed listing of the scores of all participating countries as well as the performance of the individual states within the United States.

Shanghai topped the list with a 75 percent math proficiency rate, well over twice the 32 percent rate of the United States. However, Shanghai students are from a prosperous metropolitan area within China, so their performance is more appropriately compared to Massachusetts and Minnesota, which are similarly favored and are the top performers among the U.S. states. When this comparison is made, Shanghai still performs at a distinctly higher level. Only a little more than half (51 percent) of Massachusetts students are proficient in math, while Minnesota, the runner-up state, has a math proficiency rate of just 43 percent.

Only four additional states—Vermont, North Dakota, New Jersey, and Kansas—have a math proficiency rate above 40 percent. Some of the country’s largest and richest states score below the average for the United States as a whole, including New York (30 percent), Missouri (30 percent), Michigan (29 percent), Florida (27 percent), and California (24 percent).

Click image to enlarge

Proficiency in Reading

According to NAEP, students proficient in reading “should be able to make and support inferences about a text, connect parts of a text, and analyze text features.” According to PISA, students at level four, a level of performance set very close to the NAEP proficiency level, should be “capable of difficult reading tasks, such as locating embedded information, construing meaning from nuances of languages critically evaluating a text.” (See sidebar for more specific definitions and sample questions.)

Click image to enlarge

The U.S. proficiency rate in reading, at 31 percent, compares reasonably well to those of most European countries other than Finland. It takes 17th place among the nations of the world, and only the top 10 countries on PISA outperform the United States by a statistically significant amount. In Korea, 47 percent of the students are proficient in reading. Other countries that outrank the United States include Finland (46 percent), Singapore,  New Zealand, and Japan (42 percent), Canada (41 percent), Australia (38 percent), and Belgium (37 percent).

Within the United States, Massachusetts is again the leader, with 43 percent of 8th-grade students performing at the NAEP proficiency level in reading. Shanghai students perform at a higher level, however, with 56 percent of its young people proficient in reading. Within the United States, Vermont is a close second to its neighbor to the south, with 42 percent proficiency. New Jersey and Montana come next, both with 39 percent of the students identified as proficient in reading. The District of Columbia, the nation’s worst, are at the level achieved in Turkey and Bulgaria, while the one-eighth of our students living in California are similar to those in Slovakia and Spain. (See Figure 2 for the international ranking of all states.)

Click image to enlarge

Ethnic Groups

The percentage proficient in the United States varies considerably among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. While 42 percent of white students were identified as proficient in math, only 11 percent of African American students, 15 percent of Hispanic students, and 16 percent of Native Americans were so identified. Fifty percent of students with an ethnic background from Asia and the Pacific Islands, however, were proficient in math, placing them at a level comparable to students in Belgium, Canada, and Japan.

In reading, 40 percent of white students and 41 percent of those from Asia and the Pacific Islands were identified as proficient. Only 13 percent of African American students, 5 percent of Hispanic students, and 18 percent of Native American students were so identified.

Given the disparate performances among students from various cultural backgrounds, it may be worth inquiring as to whether differences between the United States and other countries are due to the presence of a substantial minority population within the United States. To examine that question, we compare U.S. white students to all students in other countries. We do this not because we think this is the right comparison, but simply to consider the oft-expressed claim that education problems in the United States are confined to certain segments within the minority community.

While the 42 percent math efficiency rate for U.S. white students is considerably higher than that of African American and Hispanic students, they are still surpassed by all students in 16 other countries. White students in the United States trail well behind all students in Korea, Japan, Finland, Germany, Belgium, and Canada.

White students in Massachusetts outperform their peers in other states; 58 percent are at or above the math proficiency level. Maryland, New Jersey, and Texas are the other states in which a majority of white students is proficient in math. Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state’s white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the nation as a whole.  (Results for all states are presented in the unabridged version of the paper.)

In reading, the picture looks better. As we mentioned above, only 40 percent of white students are proficient, but that proficiency rate would place the United States at 9th in the world. Its proficiency rate does not differ significantly (in a statistical sense) from that for all students in Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, but white students trail in reading by a significant margin all students in Shanghai, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In no state is a majority of white students proficient, although Massachusetts comes close with a 49 percent rate. The four states with the next highest levels of reading proficiency among white students are New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, and Colorado.

Are the Proficiency Standards the Same for Math as for Reading?

Has NAEP set a lower proficiency standard in math than in reading? If so, is the math standard too low or the reading bar too high?

At first glance it would seem that the standard is set at pretty much the same level. After all, 32 percent of U.S. students are deemed proficient in math and 31 percent are deemed proficient in reading.

But that coincidence is quite misleading. When compared to peers abroad, the U.S. Class of 2011 performed respectably in reading, trailing only 10 other nations by a statistically significant amount. Admittedly, the U.S. trails Korea by 16 percentage points, but it’s only 10 percentage points behind Canada. Meanwhile, U.S. performance in math significantly trails that of 22 countries. Korean performance is 26 percentage points higher than that of the United States, while Canadian performance is 18 percentage points higher. Judged by international standards, U.S. 8th graders are clearly doing worse in math than in reading, despite the fact that NAEP reports similar percentages proficient in the two subjects.

A direct comparison of NAEP’s proficiency standard with PISA’s proficiency levels three and four also indicates that a lower NAEP bar has been set in math than in reading. To meet NAEP’s standards currently, one needs to perform near the fourth level on PISA’s reading exam, but only modestly above the third level on its math exam.

Clearly, the experts set an 8th-grade math proficiency standard at a level lower than the one set in reading. Perhaps this is an indication that American society as a whole, including the experts who design NAEP standards, set lower expectations for students in math than in reading. If so, it is a sign that low performance in mathematics within the United States may be deeply rooted in the nation’s culture. Those who are setting the common core standards under discussion might well take note of this.

Of course, it could be argued that the math proficiency standard is correct but the reading standard has been set too high. In no country in the world does a majority of the students reach the NAEP proficiency bar set in 8th-grade reading.

What Does It Mean?

Many have concluded that the productivity of the U.S. economy could be greatly enhanced if a higher percentage of U.S. students were proficient in mathematics. As Michael Brown, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, has declared, “If America is to maintain our high standard of living, we must continue to innovate…. Math and science are the engines of innovation. With these engines we can lead the world.”

But others have argued that the overall past success of the U.S. economy suggests that high-school math performance is not that critical for sustained growth in economic productivity. After all, U.S. students trailed their peers in the very first international survey undertaken nearly 50 years ago. That is the wrong message to take away however. Other factors contributed to the relatively high rate of growth in economic productivity during the last half of the 20th century, including the openness of the country’s markets, respect for property rights, low levels of political corruption, and limited intrusion of government into the operations of the marketplace. The United States, moreover, has always benefited from the in-migration of talent from abroad.

Furthermore, the United States has historically had far higher levels of educational attainment than other countries, with many more students graduating from high school, continuing on to college, and earning an advanced degree. It appears that in the past the country made up for low quality in elementary and high school by educating students for longer periods of time.

As we proceed into the 21st century, none of these factors remains as favorable to the United States. While other countries are lifting restrictions on market operations, the opposite has been occurring within the United States. The U.S. has also placed sharp limits on the numbers of talented workers that can be legally admitted into the country. Our higher education system, though still perceived to be the best in the world, is recruiting an ever-increasing proportion of its faculty and students from outside the country. Meanwhile, educational attainment rates among U.S. citizens now trail the industrial-world average.

Even if some of these trends can be reversed, that hardly gainsays the desirability of enhancing the mathematical skills of the U.S. student population, especially at a time when the nation’s growth in productivity is badly trailing growth rates in China, India, Brazil, and many smaller Asian countries. Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann have shown elsewhere that student performance on international tests such as those we consider here is closely related to long-term economic growth (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008). Assuming past economic patterns continue, the country could enjoy a remarkable increment in its annual GDP growth per capita by enhancing the math proficiency of U.S. students. Increasing the percentage of proficient students to the levels attained in Canada and Korea would increase the annual U.S. growth rate by 0.9 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points, respectively. Since current average annual growth rates hover between 2 and 3 percentage points, that increment would lift growth rates by between 30 and 50 percent.

When translated into dollar terms, these magnitudes become staggering. If one calculates these percentage increases as national income projections over an 80-year period (providing for a 20-year delay before any school reform is completed and the newly proficient students begin their working careers), a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests gains of nothing less than $75 trillion over the period. That averages out to around a trillion dollars a year. Even if you tweak these numbers a bit in one direction or another to account for various uncertainties, you reach the same bottom line: Those who say that student math performance does not matter are clearly wrong.

Given the integration of the world economy, a global perspective is needed for assessing the performance of U.S. schools, districts, and states. High-school graduates in each and every state compete for jobs with graduates from all over the world. Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has warned, “America faces many challenges…but the enemy I fear most is complacency. We are about to be hit by the full force of global competition. If we continue to ignore the obvious task at hand while others beat us at our own game, our children and grandchildren will pay the price. We must now establish a sense of urgency.”

Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich. Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. An unabridged version of this paper is available here.

I discovered that Wellesley spends no less than $15,383 per pupil, more than $2,000 more than the national average.

It has much too big a middle school, as it enrolls more than 1,000 students in grades 6 through 8.  That means there is something close to 325 wild-eyed youngsters in each and every grade. Whew!

But the middle school has the equivalent of 1 full time teacher for every 12 students– pretty good even by Harvard standards.

Over 90 percent of the 8^th graders were deemed proficient in reading by the State of Massachusetts, but only 77 percent were said to be proficient in math, and just 44 percent in science.

What is this rich school doing with all of its money? Can’t it teach its affluent students math? Can only half of them learn science?

Now that I know how much is being spent, I realize little more is to be gained from spending more—though it is rumored that the town is about to ask me and the other homeowners to pony up money to build a new—and, of course, bigger—middle school to go along with the $125- million-and-counting high school now being constructed.

I am not the only person to get annoyed when I find out how much is being spent on schooling. As I discuss in an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal, the 5^th annual PEPG/Education Next poll shows public support for more spending drops precipitously when people learn how much schools are currently spending.  They, like me, don’t think they are getting their money’s worth.

So, three cheers for education.com  The site tells me a lot more about the schools in my town than does the official Wellesley website.  From a quick perusal of that site, I learned that you can’t bring dead skunks to school, but I was unable to find any information on either per pupil expenditures or student test performance.

Check out your school on education.com The site may be a bit clunky, but it is one of the few places you can pretty easily find how much you are paying for—and what you are getting from—your local school.

-Paul E. Peterson

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.

Of course, state courts have yet to weigh in on all the new legislation, and in the past they have proved an even greater obstacle than state legislatures. But in the court of public opinion, vouchers are waging something of a comeback, according to results from the Education Next-PEPG Survey released in this issue.

In the past, our annual poll has been nothing but “Bad News Bears” for vouchers. Over the four years between 2007 and 2010, support for vouchers slipped from 45 percent to 31 percent among those who were asked whether they favored or opposed “a proposal…that would use government funds to pay the tuition of low-income students who choose to attend private schools.” Those expressing opposition to such a proposal increased from 34 percent to 43 percent over that period of time. Each year, the news got worse for voucher enthusiasts. It seemed as if Milton Friedman’s idea was going the way of the buggy whip.

But in 2011, voucher support among the general public revived noticeably. Thirty-nine percent now say they support vouchers, an 8-percentage-point reversal from the 31 percent support the idea received just a year ago. Opposition to vouchers slipped by 5 percentage points.

The news from the Education Next poll had become so bad we were accused of asking an unfriendly voucher question (it referenced the “use” of “government funds to pay the tuition”), so we agreed to split our respondents into two equivalent groups and ask the second group a “friendly” voucher question instead: “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.” The idea conveyed by the two questions is essentially the same, but the wording—“wider choice,” “government helping”—is more positive than the wording in the “unfriendly” question. When the question is posed in a friendlier manner, vouchers, even on their darkest day (2010), gathered support from another 8 percent, with 39 percent in favor and just 32 percent opposed.

So which question tells us the truth about public opinion? Both, probably, if you look at trends over time rather than at the percentage in any given year. When the public was asked the friendly question in 2011, support for vouchers climbed to 47 percent, 8 percent over the previous year, the same amount of gain revealed by the unfriendly question.

So both questions show an 8 percent turnaround for vouchers. Rather than continuing to head downhill, vouchers are the “comeback kid.” We suspect vouchers gained in public favor because Republicans are in a better position to promote the idea, just as Obama’s opposition to vouchers had probably induced the slide in support between 2008 and 2010. In 2011, the shoe switched feet.

— Paul E. Peterson

Here is the relevant clause from the 14^th Amendment: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law… shall not be questioned.

The language is ambiguous. The context for these words is the immediate Civil War situation, as the amendment makes clear that the United States refuses to honor the debts of the seceding states but insists that its own debts are inviolable.  But the amendment’s language is broad enough that a president could claim those words give him authority to raise a debt ceiling by executive action. It might take the courts years to say he was wrong.

The New York Times, whose articles often reflect Obama Administration thinking, has  run at least two stories suggesting that the 14^th Amendment allows the president to raise the debt ceiling on his own. Already, at least one Democratic member of Congress has insisted that the president should take such action. And it should be noted, above all, that Bill Clinton has told reporters that there is no doubt in his mind that he would have invoked 14^th Amendment authority had he faced this situation.

Obama already has shown he is more than willing to use executive power when faced with opposition on Capitol Hill.  With presidential backing, Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, has announced that states can get a waiver from NCLB requirements should they agree to the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top guidelines.  Substituting presidential preferences for explicit laws passed by Congress is an extraordinary invocation of executive power, but Duncan says it is necessary to take such actions because of the legislative stalemate.  Well, that NCLB stalemate is small potatoes compared to the debt crisis agonizing the nation today.

So if President Obama is willing to gut NCLB on his own hook, there is no reason to think that he will hold back once the debt crisis reaches its 11:59th hour.  Indeed, a plan to invoke such authority is a likely explanation of presidential actions thus far.

So far the president has made no explicit publicly presented proposals to resolve the crisis other than calling for a “Clean Bill,”—that is, no spending cuts whatsoever—which is exactly what the executive order would achieve. At one point, Obama and Speaker Boehner were alleged to have come close to a “grand bargain,” but at the last minute the president killed that supposed deal by demanding a 50 percent increase in tax revenues, an extraordinary last-minute demand that implied the president did not take the negotiations seriously. Most certainly, they brought the negotiations to an end, as Boehner no longer trusted his negotiating partner.

As strange as that perverse presidential action was, it is understandable—even predictable–if he, from the very beginning, sought a crisis that would force executive action to save the nation from bankruptcy.

Nor have the president’s Democratic allies in the United States Senate shown any desire to bring the crisis to an end.  From Harry Reid there is talk of possible legislation, but, as of now, no bill has yet been brought to the floor for action. Is this because Reid has been unable to get the super majority he needs, or is it part of the plan to create the crisis requiring the invocation of the 14^th Amendment?

Assume Speaker Boehner in the House of Representatives manages to rein in the Tea Party and gets his bill through the House.  Assume the Democrats in the Senate refuse to agree to the House legislation and are unable to pass any legislation on their own. At that point, if the president wanted to solve the problem through legislative action, he could publicly ask the Senate Democrats to reach a compromise with Boehner.  He would very likely succeed, as their future is tied to his.

But perhaps the president wants a stalemate, so he can invoke his executive authority. At that point he says nothing other than to blame the Republicans for the crisis. Then, if the Senate does not act, the president can say he is left with no choice but to invoke the ambiguous language in the 14^th Amendment.  He can issue an executive order raising the debt ceiling—despite the fact that no president previously has ever dared to do just that.

There is a risk.  The public could become outraged at such a usurpation of legislative power.  Certainly, the Republicans will say that he has become a modern-day Caesar, seizing the powers of the legislative branch for his own purposes.  But the president, whose poll numbers currently are falling, may gamble on the fact that such an exercise of presidential authority could solidify his image as a strong president.

There is nothing in Obama’s presidential history that suggests that he is unwilling to make such a gamble.  Remember stimulus, remember Obamacare, remember the election of 2010.  In each and every case, Obama went “all in.”  He is not a compromiser; he plays his hand carefully but he is not afraid of trying to run the table.

I am not saying this will happen. But if Obama’s handling of the NCLB stalemate provides any precedent, then debt-limit-lifting by executive action is as likely as any other outcome the prognosticators are forecasting.

- Paul E. Peterson

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

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

-Paul E. Peterson

The RCP approval rating sums up all the polls out there, averaging out the idiosyncrasies and biases of each. It seldom changes by more than a point or two in any given day, and often it does not shift at all. With more than a year until election day, it’s the best forecasting number available, much better than the misleading mock races against hypothetical opponents that get so much press attention.  History shows that presidents cannot win re-election if their popularity rating falls well below the 50 percent mark.

Only a couple of months ago, Osama bin Laden’s demise had given the president a ten point jump in the approval ratings, but the public now seems to have totally forgotten that triumph, as the economy’s woes reassert themselves.

Until the latest economic dip, it seemed that the Republican leaders in Congress had settled for control of the House and maybe the Senate in November 2012.  If that’s all they really care about, the best way to hold their jobs was to simply work closely with the president, fashioning budgetary compromises, designing bipartisan education reform legislation, and getting other governmental business in hand.  Moderate majorities can be found in Congress for such actions, as long as the president is willing to abandon the left wing of the Democratic Party and embrace divided government, letting Republicans control one or even both of the congressional chambers.

But with the president’s popularity turning negative, legislative politics are giving way to presidential politics.  A key signal this weekend was the joint attack on the Obama-Boehner debt-increase compromise by all the major Republican presidential candidates.  Faced by such opposition, as well as a revolt by a good share of the Republicans in Congress, Boehner could do nothing other than go back to the drawing board, even if his new, tougher line places at risk a number of  Republican representatives in critical swing districts.  With the Republicans taking a tough line, that may leave the President with no option but to stand by the most partisan of his friends in the legislative branch, who are hoping to put congressional Republicans on that electrified Social Security rail.

So both sides are going “all in” in 2012. Republicans see a one-term presidency, while Democrats expect to win everything back, if not by the margin achieved in 2008.  That means a continuing tussle over the budget.  And it leaves No Child Left Behind on the books, even if the executive branch has put the law on ignore.

Of course, all this can change again. The economy can recover, or another foreign policy victory can be achieved, and President Obama may stand as tall as he did the day Osama’s number came up. If he regains his presidential stature, Republicans and the president will find a way to make up after all.

To guess whether that will happen, watch two numbers—the big unemployment one and the crucial, if little known, RCP job approval rating.

-Paul E. Peterson

It is now fashionable for directors to forget any ideas Wagner himself had about the production and invent their own interpretation of the story.  Nowhere is that kind of thing done more brazenly than in San Francisco.  Our gods were New York hedge-fund investors, our dragon was a machine, and the beautiful, flowing Rhine river, where maidens guarded the Ring, became a cesspool.  As the New York Times reviewer, Anthony Tommasini (NYT, July 5 2011)  generously put it, the director should have put all of her ideas on a single page and then cut a third of them.

Twelve hours into the opera, distraught, I let my mind wander.  Would it be possible to get some opera company— perhaps students at some adventurous school for the performing arts—to do a school-reform Ring cycle?  The story might unfold at a New Jersey school board meeting, and the characters would be school board members, union leaders, ed school professors and so forth.

I envision school board president Wotan and his fractious board member, Fricka, fighting over the child, Freia (the beautiful girl with the youth-preserving golden apples that she brings to school each day), who has been doomed by the collective bargaining contract signed with the Teacher Union Giants, AFT Fafner and NEA Fasolt, to have four years in classrooms managed by dreadful teachers–who would have been fired were it not for that contract.

Meanwhile, Fafner and Fasolt, in exchange for beautiful Freia, have built the palatial school administration building, Valhalla.  Duly elected with union money, Wotan and the rest of the board will enter the palace if only they can free Freia from her contractual fate.

To the Nederland Wotan goes to meet Chief Dwarf Professor Alberich, the ed school guru, who has the Ring that he had stolen from frolicking, book-reading, math-computing, Rhinemaiden school children by promising that he would never love another child nor create a school where kids could learn.

Empowered by the Ring, he rules the education world with his brilliant lectures—and pockets the gold received on the lecture circuit (where shriek his minions, the Niebelungen).  When Wotan tricks Professor Alberich into turning himself into a toad. Wotan captures the ring. The Professor curses all who shall ever touch that Ring.

Wotan ignores the curse but is forced to give the Ring and the gold to the Union Giants.  It goes to pay union membership dues and pension fund contributions under the control of the Union Giants in exchange for Freia, who escapes her fate by taking her golden apples with her to classes with effective teachers.  No sooner do the Union bosses get the Ring than they fight over it. Fasolt kills his buddy and turns himself into a dragon where he hoards the gold.

The education world would be altogether lost were it not for the series of unlikely accidents that produce Siegfried Duncan and Brunnhilde Rhee, strong-willed, valiant education reformers.  Siegfried kills the Union Dragon and retrieves the Ring, but is then killed by Professor Alberich’s son, Policy Analyst Hagen. Yet Brunnhilde finds a way to rescue the Ring, then sacrifice her life to return it to the Rhinemaidens, bringing the era of the School Board Gods to an end. Analyst Hagen drowns himself in a futile effort to grab the Ring from the children swimming in the water, now happily learning their lessons.

Sorry, Wagner, for the happy ending, but this production is for young people.

- Paul E. Peterson

In my recent Education Next essay, I identified the biases and inaccuracies in their report on Rhee’s chancellorship. Specifically, I pointed out that gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress under Rhee’s tenure were much larger than average gains for the other ten urban school districts participating in the assessment in 8^th grade math and in 4^th grade reading and math. (I also reported that 8^th grade reading results are less favorable for the District of Columbia.)

In their reply to my critique, co-chairs Robert Hauser and Christopher Edley say that D. C. gains were “reliably higher than that of only two districts (Austin and Cleveland) in grade 4 mathematics and one district (Cleveland) in grade 4 reading—but no others. This finding has no particular ideological or political bent; it is the result of careful and straightforward analysis of data.”

Methinks thou dost protest too much, Messrs. Hauser and Edley.  You are both good enough statisticians to know that averages across multiple cases (which I reported) are more informative than case-by-case comparisons (which you rely upon), each of which is noisy and therefore more likely to show no statistically significant difference.

In other words, average performance across ten cities provides a more precise and therefore more informative estimate of the underlying truth of the matter than do noisy individual city-by-city comparisons.

To knowingly elevate noisy data over more precise information is to pursue a “particular ideological or political bent.”

What is disturbing about all this is Robert Hauser’s new role as head of NRC’s education division.  When the leader of a key division at NRC is engaged in promoting his own ideological agenda, all kinds of misleading reports can emerge from an allegedly scientific agency dependent upon government funding.  Members of Congress should take special notice of this fact when asked to fund still another NRC study.

The evidence for all this comes not just from the DC report discussed here.  For more on what is going on at the NRC, take a look at the recent report on school accountability, which Eric Hanushek has subjected to withering criticism.

-Paul E. Peterson

Even though Woessmann’s innovative study was executed with great care and sophistication— and a version is now available in the Economics of Education Review—a group which calls itself the National Education Policy Center—a group which receives substantial funding from teacher unions—has persuaded a reviewer to write a misleading critique of the paper. Such critiques are standard practice for the NEPC. It critically reviews many studies, no matter how well executed, if the findings from that study do not lend support to positions the unions have taken.  Fortunately, Woessmann has agreed to take the time to reply to a review more disingenuous than thoughtful.  His response is highly technical, but for those interested in the methodological specifics, it is worth a careful read.

Ludger Woessmann replies:

The NEPC review. which makes a number of critical and partly strident claims about my paper, “Cross-Country Evidence on Teacher Performance Pay,” is a perfect example of a case where there is a lot of new and correct material in the text – but alas, what is correct is not new and what is new is not correct. Let’s start with the “not so new” statements.

Not New

The reviewer states: “The primary claim of this Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance report and the abridged Education Next version is that nations ‘that pay teachers on their performance score higher on PISA tests.’ After statistically controlling for several variables, the author concludes that nations with some form of merit pay system have, on average, higher reading and math scores on this international test of 15-year-old students.” This is not a “claim,” but simply a factual statement of a descriptive fact. Not even the reviewer can deny that.

The bottom-line criticism of the reviewer is that “drawing policy conclusions about teacher performance pay on the basis of this analysis is not warranted.” That statement is hardly new.  Compare it to my own conclusion in my abridged version in Education Next: “Although these are impressive results, before drawing strong policy conclusions it is important to confirm the results through experimental or quasi-experimental studies carried out in advanced industrialized countries.” Where’s the substantive difference that would justify the strident review?

Next, the reviewer states repeatedly that “attributing causality is problematic” in such a study based on observational data. Right – this is exactly what my paper states very clearly a number of times, and addresses with a number of additional analyses. Even in the abridged version of the study, I take substantial care to highlight the cautions that remain with the study. It is seriously misleading for a reviewer to repeat the caveats highlighted in the study itself.

Additional limitations of the analysis highlighted in the paper and simply repeated by the reviewer are that the number of country observations is limited to 28 OECD countries and that the available measure of teacher performance pay is imperfect. In particular, the measure does not distinguish different forms and intensities of the performance-pay scheme. The value added by such repetition is unclear to me. However, what is ignored by the reviewer – and what starts to bridge the case from “not so new” to “not so correct” – is that all these factors play against the findings of the paper. They limit statistical power and possibly bias the coefficient estimate downwards – and, in this sense, make the finding only stronger.

Not Correct

Now for the directly “not correct” statements. The review claims that dropping a single country can overturn the results. This is not correct. As stated in the study, qualitative results are robust to dropping any individual country, as well as to dropping obvious groups of countries. (Of course, the point estimates vary somewhat, albeit not in a statistically significant way – what else should be expected?) The review also claims that the “geographical distance between countries, or clusters of countries,” may drive the results. But the study reports specifications with continental fixed effects and specifications that drop different clusters of countries, both of which speak against this being a “serious concern.”

The press release for the review (although not the review itself) claims that “The data are analyzed at the country level.” In fact, all regressions are preformed at the level of over 180,000 students, controlling for a large set of background factors at the student and school level. The information on the possibility of performance pay, though, is at the system level.

The press release also highlights the point raised above about heterogeneity in the performance-pay schemes by stating that “Perhaps one type of approach is beneficial, while another is detrimental.” Right – but the whole point is that on average they are positively related to achievement.

The method used in the paper – clustering-robust linear regressions – may not be well known to the reviewer, but – contrary to the reviewer’s claim – it does in fact take care of the hierarchical structure of the error terms. Monte Carlo analyses have even shown that they do so in a way that is usually more robust than the methods suggested by the reviewer (multilevel modeling).

The reviewer wrongly claims that my “report concludes … that the threat of omitted variable bias is .. proven to be negligible.” I am not aware how any empirical study could prove such a thing – “proving” that omitted variable bias is negligible is clearly scientific nonsense.

Learning from International Data

The bottom line is whether, despite the caveats that my study itself mentions, we can learn anything from the cross-country analysis. Of course we can. The paper presents new empirical evidence that complements existing studies on performance pay, not least because the cross-country design goes some way to capture general-equilibrium effects of teacher sorting that have eluded existing experimental studies. Some evidence, combined with extensive robustness checks, is clearly better than no evidence, also as a basis for policy discussion.

The reviewer did not present a single attempt to test whether his claims have any validity. By contrast, the reviewed study has put clear evidence on the table, and shown that it is robust to a forceful set of validity checks (the more demanding of which are not even discussed in the review). It is up to the reader which approach – the one of the original study or the one of the reviewer – is more convincing. But it even seems that the reviewer, despite the strident  language contained in the press release that summarizes his analysis, in the end agrees with my assessment: “The study presented in the Harvard Program on Education and Governance report, and abridged in Education Next, is a step in the right direction.”

- Paul E. Peterson

Adjusting for National Trends

Ginsburg: “Crucial to Peterson’s claims is that the DC score improvement should be computed only as the excess above the national average NAEP gain….This criticism makes little sense.”

Reply: Should we adjust for national trends when assessing how well a particular district is doing over a specific period of time?  In Ginsburg’s view, the nation is too heterogeneous to be commonly affected by the financial disaster of 2007 or the impact of NCLB, or some other broad, national trend.  Generally speaking, trends within districts more often parallel national trends than diverge from them, and it is for that reason that the adjustment I made is routinely undertaken when estimating impacts.

But in this case there is a more specific reason for adjusting for national trends—the variability in NAEP’s own test.  Although NAEP attempts to standardize its test from one administration to the next, its efforts in this regard are more strenuous when administering the Long-Term Trend version of NAEP (LTT) than when administering the main NAEP (MAIN), upon which Ginsburg depends for his conclusions.

MAIN measures student performance in grades 4 and 8, while LTT measures student performance at ages 9, 13 and 17.  It is the preferred measure for estimating trends, because age-dependent developmental factors affect student performance and one cannot be sure that the ages of students in 4^th and 8^th grade remain constant over time.

None of this would matter much, were it not for the fact that the two tests have been yielding divergent results.  As Brookings scholar Tom Loveless has pointed out to me, students in 4^th grade are making spectacular gains on MAIN, but those gains have not been duplicated on the LTT.  Between 1990 and 2009, 4^th graders gained 27 points on the MAIN math test (just 7 points less than the size of the  gap between DC and U. S. performance in 2000), but they gained only 13 points on the LTT test. For 8^th graders, the gains in math were 21 points on the MAIN but only 11 points on the LTT.   We don’t know if the difficulty is that MAIN was simplified during this period, or whether LTT was made more challenging (though, as I said, the LTT test is designed especially to get a stable measure over time). But any look at trends over time needs to adjust for likely variation in the design and administration of MAIN.

The best available solution is to examine the extent to which changes in district performance close the gap between the district and the nation, as I have done.  Ginsburg argues against such an adjustment, saying it “makes no sense” but, then, within the same paragraph, engages in an analysis similar to what I have recommended, saying, to wit: “For math…DC gains at grade 4 were higher than any state” over the full 2000-07 period.

Such comparisons need to be carried out, not anecdotally, as in Ginsburg’s comment, but systematically, as I have done, by looking at the extent to which DC closed the gap between its performance and that of the nation.

Annual Gains

Ginsburg says he did not fail to adjust for the fact that “Rhee was in office for only two years.”

Reply: It is true that Ginsburg’s tables report annual gains, but his summary material does not.  On page 8 of his paper, in the first statement of the findings in the main text of the paper, under the heading “overall results,” one encounters the following words:

“For math between 2009-09, Vance accounted for 46%, of the share of the total gain in NAEP scores for both grades 4 and 8, Janey 30%, and Rhee 24%…..For reading between 2003-09, Janey accounted for 65% of the total gain in NAEP scores over grades 4 and 8, and Rhee accounted for 35%.”

Beyond any shadow of a doubt, those prominent statements in his report constitute a misleading comparison that fails to adjust for the fact that “Rhee was in office for only two years.

Accurate Data

Ginsburg defends the accuracy of his data as follows: “My report clearly specifies that I used the state NAEP series because of its consistent treatment of charter schools over the full 2000-2009 period.”

Reply: Ginsburg’s “consistent treatment of charter schools” is to include the students attending them in his assessment of Rhee’s performance without informing his readers of that fact.  This is no trivial matter, as nearly a third of the DC students are attending charter schools, which operate autonomously of the district.

In my essay, I did my best to put to one side data for those students who were attending charter schools not authorized by the district.  Another way to proceed is to remove all students attending any charter schools in the District of Columbia (no matter what entity is the authorizer). That solution, I have now learned, can be followed for the years 2003 to 2009 in math and 2005 to 2009 in reading.

The chart below displays results when all students attending charter schools are excluded from the analysis for all years for which information on charter schools is available.  The chart shows the extent to which students closed the District-National performance gap annually during the years when the District was under Rhee’s Chancellorship and that of her predecessors. As can be seen, students did better under Rhee’s reign in both 4^th and 8^th grade reading and math.

Retraction

Ginsburg now seems prepared to agree with me that the case against Rhee has yet to be established. He says that “longitudinal tracking of students is essential to estimating DC gains.”  Inasmuch as Ginsburg never had the data to do the “longitudinal tracking” that he now admits is “essential,” he, in essence, has retracted his original claims.

- Paul E. Peterson

Opinion on this question is deeply divided. “The sage on the stage” versus “the guide on the side” is how the debate is often framed. Proponents of the former ruled the education roost throughout the 19th century, but in the 20th century a child-centered doctrine, developed by John Dewey in the gardens surrounding the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School, then refined at Columbia University’s Teachers College, gained the high ground, as “inquiry-based” and “problem-solving” became the pedagogies of choice, certainly as propounded by education-school professors. In recent years, the earlier view has staged something of a comeback, as KIPP and other “No Excuses” charter schools have insisted on devoting hours of class time to direct instruction, even to drill and memorization.

As an instructor myself, I’ve had trouble making up my mind. I can cover a lot of ground in classes where lectures consume about two-thirds of the time. But those classes get less enthusiastic student evaluations than some smaller classes where students are encouraged to solve problems through discussion. I, too, like those problem-solving classes. They require less preparation and are easier to teach.

So I can easily understand why progressive pedagogy has proven popular. It’s more enjoyable for all concerned, even if sometimes you worry that you are not teaching very much.

The question of which approach works best for student learning has seldom been a topic for careful empirical inquiry. So when Guido Schwerdt and Amelie Wuppermann of the University of Munich figured out a way to test empirically the relative value of the two teaching styles (see “Sage on the Stage,” research), it is worth trumpeting the findings. These analysts took advantage of the fact that the 2003 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS) not only tested a nationally representative sample of U.S. 8th graders in math and science, but also asked their teachers what percentage of class time was taken up by students “listening to lecture-style presentations” rather than either “working on problems with the teacher’s guidance” or “working on problems without guidance.” Teachers reported that they spent twice as much time on problem-solving activities as on direct instruction. In other words, U.S. middle-school teachers have drunk deep from the progressive pedagogical well.

To see whether this tilt toward the problem-solving approach helps middle schoolers learn, Schwerdt and Wuppermann identified those 8th graders who had the same classmates in both math and science, but different teachers. Then they estimated the impact on student learning of class time allocated to direct instruction versus problem solving. Under which circumstance did U. S. middle-school students learn more?

Direct instruction won. Students learned 3.6 percent of a standard deviation more if the teacher spent 10 percent more time on direct instruction. That’s one to two months of extra learning during the course of the year.

The students who benefited most from direct instruction were those who were already higher-performing at the beginning of the year. But even initial low performers learned more when direct instruction consumed more class time. Sadly, U.S. middle-school pedagogy is weighted heavily toward problem-solving.

— Paul E. Peterson

Never has a pay increase been so aptly titled.  The longevity increase goes to those teachers who have reached the highest step on the salary scale but want more money nonetheless.  They are the best-paid teachers in the system and, often, the most powerful members of the teachers union.   Since the longevity increase goes only to a few teachers, the cost to the district is not as great as an across-the-board increase. No wonder negotiators give in to the union on this one.

All of this would be just fine, if the most experienced teachers were the best teachers. But as I discuss in a previous post, teacher effectiveness actually tails off in the latter years of teaching.

Not that the longevity increase is the item that most irritated the Watertown school committee. The proposed contract calls for a 1.5 percent across-the-board increase in salaries in the coming year, and another 2.5 percent the following year—at a time when many Watertown taxpayers feel lucky if they just have a job. According to the town manager, the contract “would result in the layoff of eight young teachers” next year and “16 to 17 teachers” in the year following.  Young teachers get fired first, because those with longevity also have the seniority that keeps them in place, no matter how ineffective they have become.

Since the average Watertown teacher is already getting $70,826 as well as free medical care and a pension at no cost, the manager thought the town needed to give higher priority to the $1.5 million deficit it was facing.

But it is the longevity increase that strikes me as the most bizarre part of the proposed contract.  Why are we paying people just for aging in place?    How widespread and deep-seated is the practice? When and where was it invented? My hometown of Wellesley just gave their longevities an increase, and I heard about this practice in Illinois many years ago. But are those the exceptions?

If you know of it going on in your community, I would love to hear about it.

Still, I am not altogether opposed to longevity increases.  I’ve been at Harvard for 23 years and, even though my salary has crept upward nearly every year, it’s time my longevity be acknowledged. I’m going to the Dean about the matter next week. Harvard’s fiscal crisis is not so serious that he can’t comfort and support the more advanced members of the community. It won’t cost all that much.

- Paul E. Peterson

A footnoted version of this article is available here.

Recently, two separate studies—one by Alan Ginsburg, a former director of Policy and Program Studies in the U.S. Department of Education, the other by a committee constituted by the National Research Council (NRC)—have sought to discredit the work of Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of schools for the District of Columbia.

According to Ginsburg, Rhee was no more effective—probably even less effective—than her predecessors. Not surprisingly, his argument was quickly picked up by American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. In a Wall Street Journal interview, she asserts that Michelle Rhee “had a record that is actually no better than the previous two chancellors.” In a blog post dated March 29, 2011, Diane Ravitch makes the same point: “The gains under Rhee were no greater than the gains registered under her predecessor Clifford Janey, who did not use Rhee’s high-powered tactics, such as firing massive numbers of teachers.” Yet the evidence Ginsburg musters to support such claims falls well short of its mark.

In the second study, the NRC committee does not deny that student performance in the District of Columbia improved under Michelle Rhee’s chancellorship between 2007 and 2010, but it says there is no scientific evidence that proves the work of the chancellor is responsible for those gains. “The problem was the [test score] changes that seem to be going in the right direction can’t be attributed to the specific changes in the system,” the study committee’s co-chair Robert M. Hauser told an Education Week reporter. While it is certainly true that one cannot, in the absence of experimental evidence, establish a connection between policy changes and test-score outcomes, Hauser added a carefully worded slap at Rhee: “All districts should be cautious about generalizing from the kind of aggregate overview data that have been used to suggest successes of changes made in the district to date.” The reporter is then informed that “students’ NAEP scores started to improve before the overhaul law passed, as noted in a report last month by Alan Ginsburg.”

The NRC study bears the more prestigious imprimatur, but it is the Ginsburg study that is most likely to be cited in future discussions of merit pay, teacher tenure, and the like. So our fact-checking of the two studies begins with his contribution to the discussion.

The Ginsburg Report

Alan Ginsburg, though now retired, was until very recently the ultimate Washington insider. For more than a generation he was known as the Department of Education’s data-collection guru, the person inside the bureaucracy who understood best what information to collect and how to collect it. So it is of considerable interest that Ginsburg has now chosen to give aid and comfort to Weingarten and other union leaders by leveling a hard-core attack on “The Rhee DC Record.”

To an Education Week reporter, Ginsburg insisted that his critique of “The Rhee DC Record” is not “intended to be anti-Rhee.” He is reported as saying that he acted only because “he believes they [his findings] should serve as a check on a policy of mass dismissals of teachers as a way to improve districts. ‘For me, it’s the much larger question in this country of building a large teaching force.’” It is nonetheless quite disconcerting that he—and those who rely on his work—say that she was engaged in “large-scale firing” and “mass dismissals” when in fact she released in 2010 just 241 teachers for low performance.

Ginsburg excludes any and all information coming from the D.C. exams, known as the Comprehensive Assessment System (CAS), required by the federal law known as No Child Left Behind. He explains that decision on the grounds that “performance levels for 2006 and afterwards are not comparable with those from prior years.” But that does not preclude a comparison of Rhee’s record for the years beginning in 2007 with the situation in the year before she arrived. Had Ginsburg taken a look at that information, he would have found an acceleration of the gains in the percentage of students deemed proficient. Before Rhee’s tenure, or between 2006 and 2007, the percentage increase in proficiency was about 1 percentage point in reading and 4 percentage points in math. But between 2007 and 2010, the gains in percent proficient were 9 percentage points in reading and 15 percentage points in math.

District Performance on National Assessment of Educational Progress

Although these gains are impressive, a USA Today investigative team has expressed concerns that, at least in some schools, those test-score results might have been improperly inflated. No conclusive evidence of cheating has yet been established, but it may well be prudent to focus, as Ginsburg does, on the performance of D.C. students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the nation’s report card. That is a low-stakes test taken only by a representative sample of students, none of whom answer all the questions and for whom no results are reported by student, teacher, or school. As the NAEP is not part of any accountability system, incentives to cheat on the test are minimal, and no allegations of cheating have been made.

At first glance, Ginsburg does not seem to have much of a case against Rhee. D.C. scores on the NAEP shifted upward during the first two years Rhee was in office. In both 4th-grade math and reading they jumped by 6 points, and in 8th-grade math they leaped by 7 points, though they slipped a point in 8th-grade reading (see Figure 1).

But Ginsburg says those gains are actually no greater than the ones students had been making in prior years, when superintendents Paul Vance and Clifford Janey were in charge. He reports, “With respect to the distribution of DC’s total gains in NAEP scores over grades 4 and 8 between 2000-09, Vance accounted for a 46% share of the total gain, Janey 30% and Rhee 24%.”

Though headline-grabbing numbers, they are quite misleading. Between 2000 and 2009, Rhee was in office for only two years, while Vance was in office for three, and Janey for four. If gains were rising at the same rate over the nine-year period, then each superintendent should account for 11.1 percent of the gains for each year in office: Vance 33.3%, Janey 44.4%, and Rhee 22.2 %. So based on Ginsburg’s own calculations, Rhee outperformed her immediate predecessor.

More significantly, Ginsburg ignores the fact that the D.C. NAEP sample in 2009 did not include students attending charter schools not authorized by the district, while in 2007 all charter school students were included. Because charter schools outside district control were outperforming district schools, the latter appeared to be doing better in 2007 than they actually were. NAEP corrected its data-collection procedures in 2009, but, except for 8th-grade math, it failed to provide the data that allow for an apple-to-apple comparison between 2007 and 2009. For 8th-grade math, NAEP explains that had NAEP followed the same policy in 2007 that it adopted in 2009, 8th-grade math scores under Rhee would have increased by 7 points, a statistically significant gain, not just the 3 points that are officially reported.

Similar underreporting of gains may have occurred on the 4th- and 8th-grade reading exams and the 4th-grade math tests, but NAEP unfortunately does not tell us how large they were. Its report only says that giving us that information would not alter the findings as to the statistical significance of gains. So in the analysis below, I provide the corrected results for 8th-grade math, but I cannot provide corrected results for the other exams.

Closing the Gap between District and National Performance

Most importantly, Ginsburg did not adjust for national trends in student performance occurring between 2000 and 2009. Unless one adjusts for national trends, one does not know whether gains in the district are due to district-specific events or to some larger developments in the nation, such as changes in the economy, or the waning effectiveness of No Child Left Behind, or permutations in the design and administration of the NAEP examination, or some other large-scale factor.

The most straightforward way of adjusting for national trends is to look at the extent to which D.C. closed the gap between its students’ performances and those of students nationwide. Once that adjustment is made, it can be shown that Rhee did considerably better at that task than did her predecessors (see Figure 2). For example, during the Rhee years, 4th-grade students, in both reading and math, gained an average of 3 points each year relative to the scores earned by students nationwide, a gain twice that of Rhee’s predecessors.

These numbers seem small, but they add up. In 2000, the gap between D.C. and the nation in 4th-grade math was 34 points. Had students gained as much every year between 2000 and 2009 as they did during the Rhee era, that gap would in 2009 have been just 7 points. Three more years of Rhee-like progress and the gap is closed. In 8th-grade math, the gap in 2000 was 38 points. Had Rhee-like progress been made over the next nine years, the gap would in 2009 have been just 14 points, with near closure in 2012. In 4th-grade reading, the gap was 30 points in 2003 (scores are unavailable for 2000); if Rhee-like gains had taken place over the next six years, the gap in 2009 would have been cut in half.

None of this proves that Rhee could sustain the gains observed over a two-year period. That is too short a time to draw conclusions about a leader based on NAEP results alone. Also, no improvement in 8th-grade reading is detected. The overall results do, however, cast doubt on Ginsburg’s claim that Rhee did no better than her predecessors.

But perhaps the other report, the one issued by a committee of the prestigious National Research Council, makes a more persuasive case that Rhee’s performance is less than it seems.

The National Research Council Report

The National Academy of Sciences dates its lineage back to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, who asked three scientists to help in the “war against the rebellion.” Operating under its aegis, the NRC has positioned itself as the only nonprofit organization that can sign contracts with federal agencies without submitting a competitive bid. In the hard sciences, NRC periodically issues major reports of public significance. But on too many occasions it exploits its reputation for objectivity by wandering into domains where scientific knowledge is thin.

NRC has expanded its operations beyond reports to federal agencies. In the case at hand, it acted on a 2007 request of the D.C. City Council “under the leadership of Vincent C. Gray” to carry out an independent evaluation of D.C. public schools. Despite the fact that Gray was already planning his run for mayor, NRC responded enthusiastically to his request by undertaking an energetic fundraising campaign that supplemented the council’s own $325,000 in funding with a like amount from a variety of foundations and agencies, including the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation (which contributed $200,000), and the World Bank (which contributed $25,000).

With $650,000 in hand, NRC staff formed the 14-member, largely academic Committee on the Independent Evaluation of DC Public Schools, consisting of a variety of professors and researchers. Its co-chairs are Christopher Edley, the left-leaning dean of Berkeley law school and, as mentioned, Robert Hauser, former University of Wisconsin sociology of education professor, a liberal critic of accountability systems, who has recently assumed the leadership of NRC’s division responsible for education reports.

Guidance for a Future Evaluation

The committee’s official assignment was not to carry out an independent evaluation, as its title implies, but only to 1) “provide guidance on how to structure” that evaluation and 2) “provide feedback about implementation” of the Rhee reforms. As part of its “guidance,” the committee calls for “systematic yearly public reporting of key data as well as in-depth studies of high priority issues.” One needs to look at more than just “student test scores,” it says. One needs to establish “suitable indicators” that “track how well the city’s public schools are doing.” “In-depth studies should be designed to provide deeper analysis of specific questions about high priority issues,” such as “teacher recruitment and retention.”

If most of this guidance consists of harmless bromides, one recommendation has an edge to it: The evaluation “must be independent of school and city leaders and responsive to the needs of all stakeholders.” Read in the context of D.C. politics, this seems to say: Keep the mayor and chancellor out of any independent evaluation, but let the unions play a major role. Now that Vincent Gray is mayor, one wonders just how eager he will be to act on that recommendation!

The committee has not issued a final document, but it has put out a press release and a prepublication version of an unedited version of the report. The rush to print seems to have been necessary in order to carry out the committee’s second objective: providing “feedback” on the Rhee record, which it apparently wanted to accomplish before her successor officially assumed office. The first substantive information in the committee’s press release reads as follows: “Data suggest that a modest improvement in student test scores has continued…but the committee cautions that it is premature to draw general conclusions about the reforms’ effectiveness at this time.” Note that the press release talks about a “continuation,” not an “acceleration,” in “modest,” not “striking,” improvement in student achievement. An Education Week reporter explains that “the evaluators confirmed that students’ NAEP scores started to improve before the overhaul law passed, as noted in a report last month by Alan Ginsburg.” Clearly, the NRC committee leadership was willing to put an NRC stamp on Ginsburg’s claims.

Do Teachers Need to Be at School for Students to Learn?

How did the committee cast doubt on Rhee’s effectiveness? The general strategy is to admit the evidence on school improvement in D.C., but then insist that it is impossible to see any connection between that improvement and the work of the chancellor. Of course, it is, as we have said, quite impossible, without experimental evidence, to prove connections between Rhee policies and changes in student gains, but that is not the committee’s agenda. Not in its executive summary, in its press release, or anywhere in the report does the committee call for the conduct of experiments that could establish causal relationships between policies and outcomes. On the contrary, the committee recommends gathering still more trend data and conducting old-fashioned case studies that in the end will prove little more than what is already known. And in the pursuit of its second objective, giving feedback on the Rhee reforms, it does not carry out even minimal case-study research to see whether a probable relationship may exist between Rhee policies and classroom outcomes.

Take, for example, the decline in student and teacher truancy. According to 8th-grade student self-reports, the rate of absenteeism declined significantly between 2007 and 2009. Teacher absenteeism also dropped noticeably over these same two years. The days on which 98 percent or more of the teachers were at school climbed from about 68 percent to approximately 85 percent.

Instead of congratulating the district on this improvement, the committee cautions: “It is important to note…that the fact that teacher absenteeism is correlated with achievement does not mean that the absenteeism causes the low achievement. There are many other factors, such as school safety, that affect both teacher absenteeism and student achievement. This is just one example of the many limitations of these data.”

In this passage we see a certain bias at work. The incidence of student and teacher truancy declined, the committee admits. But that hardly proves Rhee was a success or that students, in order to learn, need the stability that comes with the presence of their regular teacher. Perhaps school safety also improved, but the committee makes no effort to gather statistics on this point or carry out a case study to see whether Rhee had worked to make schools safer. We are simply left with the caution that a drop in the rate of absenteeism might not prove anything.

Comparing D.C. to Other Big Cities

The committee also acknowledges a notable climb in test scores on the DC CAS test and says that “NAEP shows increases similar to those seen on the CAS.” But, it says, “in comparison with other urban districts, the District’s scores were similar; many others also showed consistently significant gains.”

Really? At the 4th-grade level, D.C. students in math and reading gained 6 scale score points between 2007 and 2009, while the average gain in the other 10 cities for which comparable data are available was only 1 point and 2.2 points, respectively. In 8th-grade math, the D.C. gains were 7 points, as compared to an average of 2.9 points for the other cities. Only in 8th-grade reading does the District of Columbia lag behind, dropping a point, while the others gained 1.7 points (see Figure 3).

Do Demographics Explain Gains?

The committee next worries over whether the gains may be due to a change in the composition of the student population in D.C. “The composition of students tested in DCPS…has changed markedly since 2007,” the report says. “These patterns could bias the…statistics.” Education Week’s reporter was told that “the numbers of students with disabilities or limited English proficiency fell during that time. The district also had fewer black students and more white and Hispanic students by 2010.”

But is there any reason to believe the gains on the NAEP between 2007 and 2009 were attributable to a shift in the D.C. demography? Did high-income whites and blacks bring their children into the district’s public schools, while low-income blacks and Hispanics moved out? According to the committee’s own report, signs point in the opposite direction. The percentage of students identified as economically disadvantaged grew from 63 percent in 2007 to 70 percent in 2009. The percentage African American slipped slightly from 85 percent to 83 percent of the total, but the percentage Hispanic increased from 9 percent to 10 percent, while the white population rose from 4 percent to 5 percent. Those needing instruction in the English language increased from 7 percent to 10 percent. It’s true that the percentage identified as in need of special education budged downward by 1 percentage point, but the participation rates of special education students on the NAEP increased by 1.5 percent over the two-year period. Nothing in these data indicates that the D.C. schools had fewer challenges in 2009 than they had in 2007.

Rhee’s Record

In all the numbers Rhee’s critics have assembled, the two facts that stand out have nothing to do with test scores, but rather with student and teacher absenteeism. One does not know how quickly leaders can have an impact on student learning, but strong educational leaders are known for their impact on school culture. If we take Rhee at her word, changing culture was what she was trying to do, and those falling absenteeism indicators suggest that she may have had an effect, even in a short period of time. It’s even possible that a change in the D.C. school climate accelerated learning gains. About that one cannot be certain when only two years of NAEP data are available. But one can be quite sure that a case against Rhee has yet to be established.

Paul E. Peterson directs Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.

A footnoted version of this article is available here.

In a blog post, Diane Ravitch makes the same point: “Gains under Rhee were no greater than the gains registered under her predecessor Clifford Janey, who did not use Rhee’s high-powered tactics, such as firing massive numbers of teachers.”

Yet the evidence to support such claims falls well short of its mark.

What’s the evidence that Rhee was no better than her predecessors?  And that other cities are doing just as well?

In “The Case Against Michelle Rhee,” I correct the data Ginsburg (and, presumably, Ravitch, who presents no data of her own) use and adjust it to take into account national trends.  The data need to be corrected so as to exclude the scores of students attending charter schools not under district control (whom NAEP included in 2007 but not in 2009).  And it is standard practice to correct for national trends when looking at district-specific factors that affect performance.

Once the data are both corrected and adjusted, it becomes evident that during the Rhee years, 4^th grade students, in both reading and math, gained at a pace twice that observed during the tenures of her predecessors.  The gains in math by 8^th grade students were nearly as great, though no 8^th grade reading gains are detected.

Gains are not enormous in any one year, but over time they add up.  In 2000 the gap between D.C. and the nation in 4^th grade math was 34 points.  Had students gained as much every year between 2000 and 2009 as they did during the Rhee era, that gap would have been just 7 points in 2009. Three more years of Rhee-like progress and the gap would be closed.  In 8^th grade math the gap in 2000 was 38 points.  Had Rhee-like progress been made over the next 9 years, the gap would be just 14 points in 2009, with near closure in 2012.   In 4^th grade reading, the gap was 30 points in 2003; if Rhee-like gains had taken place over the next 6 years, the gap would have been cut in half by 2009.

Of course, two years is too short a time to evaluate a Chancellor’s impact on student test-score performance, as Ginsburg wants to do. But his work is nonetheless taken as authoritative by Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers. The reality is something quite other.

For my detailed findings, read “The Case Against Michelle Rhee.” You can also read a summary of the study in this press release, or you can listen to a podcast in which I discuss the findings here.

- Paul E. Peterson

Two separate studies, one by Alan Ginsburg and one by an NRC committee, argue that D.C. students did not make very impressive gains when the schools were under Michelle Rhee’s leadership.

A closer look at the data, however, reveals that Rhee has outperformed her predecessors.

For more information, please read “The Case Against Michelle Rhee.”

The key decision both school boards and mayors must make is the selection of the administrative head of the school system.  They depend heavily on that person to guide them through the complexities of operating a complex, modern bureaucracy.  Both boards and mayors have too many other obligations to attend to even the important details involved in running schools.

When mayors make mistakes, as Bloomberg did, they have strong incentives to correct those errors quickly.  Their popularity can be seriously endangered, as Bloomberg soon found out.  But school boards, both when hiring and terminating chief education officers, have to form a consensus, or at least put together a majority, before they can act.  That takes time, and too often ineffective superintendents remain in office until the end of their contract.

That, of course, is the reason the writers of the Constitution created a presidency, instead of letting a committee of Congress continue to exercise executive powers, as had been the case under the Articles of Confederation.  Alexander Hamilton gives the explanation in the Federalist papers: “A feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.”  No one has made a better case against school boards.

In New York City, Black was clearly finding it difficult to wrap her mind around the budgetary, administrative and political challenges of managing the country’s largest education system, and within three months of taking office, those closest to the Chancellor’s door were well aware that the tight ship managed by Joel Klein for so many years was floundering near a rocky shore.

It is hard to imagine a school board finding a way to reverse its decision within a three-month period.  But for Bloomberg, the price was too high. If he was to keep his own mayoralty on track—and leave open the possibility of a presidential bid—he had to master the problem at Tweed Hall now, immediately, without delay.

So he chose a consummate insider to replace Black, a man who knew the political ropes but still identified with the mayor’s agenda.  Smart move.

- Paul E. Peterson

So Boehner deserves a thank you from the children of the District of Columbia for knowing how to play the one best policy card at his disposal.  But Boehner could not have played that card had he not had convincing evidence that the voucher program he was trying to restore had been effective.  For that evidence, we must thank the official evaluation of the voucher program conducted by University of Arkansas Professor Patrick Wolf and his research team.  That evaluation was conducted as a randomized experiment—something akin to a pill-placebo comparison that informs medical research.  All sides admit that these kinds of experiments are the gold standard for establishing what works and what does not.

A randomized evaluation proved possible in DC because more students wanted to use a voucher to go to private school than the number of vouchers available and the vouchers were distributed by means of a lottery (a la “Waiting for Superman”). When the results from the DC voucher experiment showed that the voucher students, who won the lottery, were going to college at a noticeably higher rate than those who had lost the lottery and remained in public schools, few could question the effectiveness of the program.

Just before this study was released, Obama signed into law a bill killing the program. Although government officials knew the study’s results at the time the president affixed his signature, the results were released to the public by the U.S. Department of Education only after the program had been killed.

So two years ago, the DC voucher story seemed to prove that research, no matter how well conducted, is generally too little and too late to have any impact.  Having conducted much of the early voucher research that led up to the DC evaluation, all these events were truly disappointing.  So in the account given in my book on the history of school reform (Saving Schools, Ch 7 & 8), I reluctantly came to the conclusion that the school choice movement may have to look to alternatives to school vouchers.

Boehner has proven me wrong. His tactical skill and personal commitment has resurrected a program in the District of Columbia—and a strategy for reform—that seemed as dead as Jack Robin. And policy researchers can be pleased that their work can, if circumstances are correct, provide a Speaker with the instrument needed to recall even politically contested programs, like school vouchers, to life.

- Paul E. Peterson

Rita is taking courses from University of the Air, known today as “Open University,” an idea invented by the British in the 1960s. Students, even those without the usual academic credentials, could enroll in a public university which offered courses on television supported by materials sent through the mail.  Students like Rita came from all walks of life, including Liverpudlian hairdressing salons.

To complete a course on British prose and poetry, Rita has to pass an external examination by writing an essay that demonstrates she can write serious literary criticism.  To help her get the hang of it, she is entitled to a weekly visit with a tutor, who in Rita’s case is a university lecturer moonlighting in order to get the extra cash needed to support his vast consummation of hard liquor, served neat.

As the story begins, the drunken slob faces a serious challenge. Asked to suggest a solution to the problems encountered by stage directors of Henrik Ibsen’s “Peer Gynt,” Rita writes a one line essay:  “Do it on the radio.”  That answer, he explains, won’t survive the scrutiny of the external examiners.

Exactly how Rita learns what is needed to pass the examination is hard to figure out from anything that happens on stage.  Her instructor seems more interested in her remarkable figure than helping her figure things out. So it must have been off-stage, when she was getting her on-line instruction, that Rita gradually learned how to think and write.

By the end of the story, the instructor is so besotted he embraces Rita’s anarchic view of literature—what’s good is what you like—but clever and hard-working Rita, knowing she has to pass that external examination, learns how to turn a phrase to good advantage and wins a “good pass,” which in the days before grade inflation was high praise indeed.

I leave the rest of the story for you to watch on your telly. But like all literary critics, I cannot resist giving away the moral to the tale:  if the technology is not 21^st Century, the basic design for Educating Rita today, online, is there for all to see.

- Paul E. Peterson

Nor is Wellesley an oddball in this regard. In Florida, the average school district, in 2010, paid 10 percent more for a teacher with 8 years of experience as it paid a first-year teacher. But after a teacher has been around for nearly a decade, salaries to climb more rapidly.  A teacher with 22 years of experience is earning 26 percent more than an eighth-year teacher.

Florida does not allow collective bargaining between teachers and school districts.  In Denver, where such bargaining does take place, salaries rise even more steeply. In 2007, the average teacher in the eighth year of teaching was collecting 18 percent more than a beginning teacher, and that eighth- year teacher would get another 24 percent increment five years later.

And when it comes to pensions, it is the longtime teacher that benefits the most.  In most parts of the country, teachers get no pension benefits at all if they leave teaching or move to another state within the first five years of teaching.

Unions like to concentrate big salary gains—and pension benefits—on the more experienced teachers, because those are the teachers who tend to have clout within the schoolhouse and inside the union.   There is nothing new about this.  When my wife, in her third year of teaching, was asked to serve on the bargaining committee, she discovered that all of her fellow union leaders were old-timers who quickly made a deal with the school district: pay nothing more to new teachers next year, but give those at the top of the salary schedule an extra salary boost.

School districts agree to such demands because there are fewer longtime teachers than rookies, making it cheaper—in the short run—to raise the salaries and the benefits of those with more experience.

All that would be fine, if more experienced teachers were far and away the most effective ones in the classroom. But according to a study Matthew Chingos and I just completed, teachers get better in the first few years of teaching, and then their performance slips in later years. Our findings are particularly interesting because they allow, for the first time, the tracking of a specific teacher’s performance over an eight-year time period.  So, for example, we can tell whether a teacher with 10 years of experience becomes even better 8 years later. Generally speaking, they do not.  Although teachers improve in the first years of teaching, the trend for the average teacher turns negative in the later years of teaching.

Nothing in our results says that we should not pay more experienced teachers more if indeed they are better teachers.  But it does call into question the standard salary schedule which rewards teachers for each year of teaching without paying any attention whatsoever to the quality of that instruction.

- Paul E. Peterson

But when walking through the virtual forest, one stumbles up and down many an ancient pedagogical  divide. For some (put me on this right-hand side of the canyon), digital learning provides advanced students with the opportunity to learn challenging materials at an early age, and students with limited backgrounds an opportunity to learn at the pace appropriate to their skill level, and all students a chance to learn at any time, any place, take any path, at any pace, as the motto of Florida Virtual School puts it.  That’s also the vision of  “School of One,” about to go national after a trial run in a few schools in New York City and of Khan Academy, the open source math curriculum getting a trial in Los Altos, California.

But for others (on the left-hand side of the canyon), digital learning is not about learning fractions, long division, Mandarin, chemistry or calculus.  It is about cooperating with diverse groups of students from across the globe, playing games, and creating new things. Through such unstructured activities, a student will acquire the 21^st Century skills of creativity, openness, playfulness, and cooperation.  One presenter at the Harvard event impressed us by displaying a student-created website built with a simplified programming toolkit.  A big fish ate little fish, with the number of little fish consumed recorded accurately. Nor was this concept of digital learning an outlier.   Many words were spoken in favor of creativity, cooperation, new modalities, and 21^st century skills, but little attention was given to the best way of designing a three-dimensional biology course.

In one intense conversation, pedagogical differences exploded into political ones.  On  one side, there were those (such as myself) who were worried about intellectual property rights and the best way of ensuring that entrepreneurs would be compensated for their contributions.  If incentives to invent are not available, no one will design the fabulous physics, chemistry, language and history courses that are potentially better than those now available.

But many others disapproved of polluting the field of education with such mercenary motives.  Digital courses should be created and distributed freely by schools, universities and selfless servants of the public.  Perhaps there is some connection between this perspective and the notion of what is to be taught in a course.  If one only needs to teach creativity, cooperation and 21^st century skills, then course construction may be done as a hobby or left to students themselves.

And who should decide what should be taught?  Most participants assumed that digital learning would take place mostly within schools as we know them today.  They did worry about disseminating the innovation within a school system that consisted of many small school districts that were hampered by regulations and collective bargaining agreements. They knew that most teachers and administrators were so hide-bound in their thinking that it would not be easy to get them to change their ways.  But they resisted the idea of side-stepping the status quo by letting students choose their own courses from whatever vendor they preferred.

In the end, I found a fundamental self-contradiction in the perspectives of those on the left-hand side of the canyon.  On the one hand, they thought young people could teach each other better than any adult could teach them.  But on the other hand, they wanted to make sure some group of adults—whose values were not unlike their own—told students which courses to take.  But those on the right-hand side had their own challenge, though it was never fleshed out at the conference.  If students are to select government-funded courses from a multiplicity of competing vendors, what is the best way of ensuring that the available courses are ones of high quality.

Digital learning is coming, but the battle over its form and content is just beginning.

- Paul E. Peterson