Radical: Fighting to Put Students First

Reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Memoirs should be written only by extraordinary people, and as we read Radical, Michelle Rhee’s chronicle of her Korean American upbringing, college years, Teach For America experience, tenure as D.C. schools chancellor and now as head of a national advocacy group, we should keep in mind what makes her noteworthy in the education world.

It isn’t because of her ideas about curriculum. Rhee emphasizes student learning again and again, but nowhere in the book does she discuss what students should learn. She says nothing about which books they should read, the right use of standards, the acquisition of 21st-century skills, and other current topics. Instead, she repeats reasonable but banal slogans such as, “When we give children the chance to succeed, they can” and “I do believe that schools and teachers can make a tremendous difference in the lives of [poor] kids who face these challenges every day.” Who would disagree?

It isn’t because of her ideas about classroom practice, either. Rhee mentions pedagogy only in her reminiscence of a few techniques she implemented during her stint as a school teacher in Baltimore. Those, too, are sensible but routine ones, such as a “simple rewards system,” visiting students’ homes, and recognizing that while students need “love and compassion,” they crave “rigid structure, certainty, and stability, as well.”

She also has no distinctive civic vision for public schooling. Radical contains no material on the distant or recent history of public education, and the right relationship of K–12 schools to outside entities such as specific industries and higher education goes unmentioned. Rhee announces no purpose for schools other than the complete education of all children.

Nor is Rhee remarkable for her oratory and analysis, as the prose of Radical amply shows. Her accounts of D.C. school visits; negotiations with Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers; and other tense occasions come and go in clipped phrases, as if Rhee simply hasn’t the time to probe the dynamics behind them. Her idiom often slips into that of adolescence, for instance, the modifiers “amazingly,” “incredibly,” and “definitely” popping up repeatedly. Of her first encounter with Joel Klein, then chancellor of the New York City schools, she writes, “This guy was no joke. He totally won me over.” Of one young hire who in an interview “knocked my socks off,” Rhee gushes, “He was incredibly impressive, and I thought he had the presence that one would need to wow the clients.”

So what makes Rhee noteworthy? Very simple: she fired people and closed schools. When Rhee assumed the chancellorship of the D.C. schools, she reviewed the system and drew obvious conclusions. Incompetence, mismanagement, corruption, and cynicism reigned—as everybody knew—but Rhee did what nobody had before. In early 2008, she fired 98 workers in the central office and proceeded to terminate 36 principals and 22 assistant principals. In year one, she closed 23 schools. She instituted procedures to identify and expel bad teachers, too, drafting a list of 266 for termination. And she shocked fellow Democrats by coming out in favor of vouchers (“People went nuts”).

The unions, city council members (including former D.C. mayor Marion Barry), and journalists threatened, denounced, and cajoled her, but she stood firm. They protested on Pennsylvania Avenue, brandishing placards declaring, “This is not Rheezistan,” she recalls, “But the rallies didn’t affect me.” Charges of racism, union busting, and shilling for Republicans followed, but they didn’t overcome her disgust with malfeasance and her courage to act. Joel Klein summed it up when he whispered to her at a Teach For America event, “No one has your kind of guts.”

That’s the key. At the first meeting of the central office in D.C., representatives of all the departments presented rosy portraits in glowing PowerPoint, everyone earnest and enthusiastic about the coming school year. How easy it would have been for Rhee to forget D.C. proficiency rates and embrace the mood. A new, young, and inexperienced official would naturally wish to make friends, win loyalty, and spread confidence. Instead, she judged it “a dog-and-pony show with graphs and charts” and vowed never to allow a meeting like that to happen again.

After Adrian Fenty lost the D.C. mayoral election in 2010 and Rhee left her post, she made a flat calculation. She had been able to institute changes in teacher hiring and evaluation, for instance, scrapping the “last-in-first-out” rule, but what guaranteed their survival in the coming administration? The unions despised her policies, and they wielded political clout that few politicians could resist, “millions of members and millions of dollars,” as the saying goes. You might win the war of ideas and corral all the facts and common sense, but unless a legislator and a council member heard from as many disappointed parents as they did from angry union leaders, unless as many of the former showed up for hearings as did the latter, politicians would favor the unions every time.

So Rhee started StudentsFirst. “I’m tired of us reformers getting our butts handed to us time and again,” she told the head of education at the Walton Family Foundation, which eventually gave $50 million. Other donors lined up as Rhee announced the formation of the group on The Oprah Winfrey Show. It has a well-defined mission to “balance the union’s clout,” to give politicians “air cover” when they cross the unions. When a legislative bill comes to the floor, StudentsFirst urges members to send e-mails, make phone calls, and write letters to newspapers. Before unions can smear an uncooperative politician who supports charter schools as hating teachers and betraying kids, StudentsFirst pays for billboards and advertising spots praising that legislator’s courage and concern.

It’s the right place for Rhee, a political battle zone in which intelligence, moral clarity, field knowledge, and civic virtue are ineffectual without fortitude.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

The future of the United States depends on its innovators. That’s the first premise of Tony Wagner’s vision of 21st-century schooling. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels declares on the back cover of the book, “In the equation of world success, superior innovation is the only factor that can keep America #1,” and diverse experts are quoted to that effect several times, as well as starring in videos embedded in the text that readers can access by using their smartphones to scan the code on the page. (All the videos were created by documentary filmmaker Robert Compton and are available at creatinginnovators.com.) We can’t restore the manufacturing that sustained the U.S. through the 20th century, Wagner insists, and we can’t rely on consumer spending when un- and underemployment are so high, and we can’t keep polluting the planet, so “We must outinnovate our economic competitors.”

But how do we create more innovation when innovation is unsystematic and unpredictable? That’s the question motivating Creating Innovators, and Wagner answers it by conversing with savvy employers and inspiring mentors, and by profiling eight millennial innovators whose examples point the way. The portraits fill up half the book, including a product designer who improved Apple’s iPhone and now works for a start-up trying to alter the electric power system; the founder of a company that created a nifty platform for 3-D design (purchased by Autodesk in 2010); a youth who secured funding to distribute malaria nets in Africa; and a shoe designer working with three universities to develop organic shoes.

Goal-oriented but selfless, smart but quirky, these innovators combine dazzling imagination with earnest compassion and real-world know-how. They don’t always earn good grades and hefty paychecks, but they “Think Big” and devise goods and services that meet others’ needs and aspirations, not to mention the world’s betterment. When we read about these individuals, we note how special they are, but for Wagner this is precisely the problem: “we need to produce more than just a few entrepreneurs and innovators.” Indeed, “To maintain our standard of living and improve our world, every young person needs to become an innovator.”

In light of abundant data on low academic achievement and effort among high school students, Wagner’s goal sounds impossible, but years of experience plus 150 interviews he conducted for the book convince him otherwise. The reason we don’t have 50,000 innovators graduating from high school and college every year, he maintains, isn’t because of what we have failed to do. It’s because of what we actually do over and over again.

The pattern begins in the home with mothers and fathers who, high on achievement, become helicopter parents and “tiger moms.” Instead of letting their kids play and imagine, experiment and fail, they schedule and monitor. It gets worse when children enter school and undergo an accountability system filled with unimpressive teachers teaching narrow content in the same boring way and valuing every student by a uniform quantitative yardstick.

The home and school habitats squelch the very attributes and experiences of innovators. Parents of the remarkable youths in the book acted differently, caring about homework and extracurriculars but ensuring hours of free time and unstructured play each day. They didn’t push a particular discipline or career, but rather watched where their kids’ passions went and facilitated their pursuits. They let children take risks and make mistakes, and they asked them to think altruistically and “give back.”

Wagner’s innovators thank their parents for the freedom and encouragement, but they regret the schools they attended. In his interview, engineering whiz Kirk “said not one word about the many academic courses he’d taken at Stanford.” Another innovator treasures peers more than professors: “I’ve learned more from doing this work with my colleague…than I have from most of my teachers at Tulane.” When Jamien was in high school, his teachers tried to cure his “shoe addiction,” and he ended up taking his inspiration during an internship at AutoZone from his boss, a graphic designer.

Their frustrations make sense, Wagner observes, for innovators are curious, experimental “design thinkers,” not test takers and homework drones. Their talents escape conventional assessments, and they care less about mastering the content of a discipline than doing something with it. As Paul Bottino, director of Harvard’s Technology and Entrepreneurship Center, tells Wagner, “More and more students are saying that education which is merely content delivery doesn’t work, doesn’t stick. For students like David [one of the profiles], it’s about applying what they know, in order to connect the dots.” The more we should admire them, then, for their outlook tallies better than the prevailing curricula the 21st-century situation in which “what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know.” The answer is clear: we should cultivate innovative minds by making homes more about play and passion and schools more about collaboration, interdisciplinary studies, and worldly projects.

That’s the argument of Creating Innovators. Traditionalists dislike the rationale for downplaying liberal arts knowledge, while accountability reformers consider its criticisms just one more rehearsal of antitesting points. But one can accept Wagner’s outlook and still identify a flaw that renders this book nothing more than a good idea to try out here and there in scattered high schools and colleges. It is that one cannot select a few unusual successes and build an entire institution upon them. Wagner regards his subjects as extraordinary persons; hence, their blossoming proves nothing about the fate of ordinary students. He believes that “every student starts school with unbounded imagination, curiosity, and creativity,” but without empirical backing, that assertion is sentimentality, not evidence. Besides, what about the kid who has a passion for basketball, devoting hours a day on the court but barely making the JV team? Should those hours be encouraged at the expense of math homework? And are there children who, perhaps because of their homes, desperately need the very discipline and structure of schools Wagner disparages?

To accept the advantages of innovation education, we need to know what happened to all of the students at schools and centers mentioned by Wagner, such as High Tech High—or to know what would happen to a broad range of students if they were admitted to them. Without those data, the insistence that every school and teacher be innovation-centered falls flat. Until we find out, such visions should be scaled back to more modest proportions, for instance, a district that devotes a few high-school classrooms to innovation education and monitors the outcomes for different types of students.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

We are getting used to explosive growth in the world of the Internet (note Facebook), but Salman Khan’s creation, in a few short years, of Khan Academy, with its potentially enormous impact on the slow-moving world of K–12 education, is still remarkable. The publicity material for Khan’s book says it is “the world’s most popular on-line learning site.” Khan tells us there are “more than six million unique visitors per month,…this number growing by 400% per year. The videos had been viewed over 140 million times and students had done nearly half a billion exercises through our software. I had personally posted more than three thousand video lessons—all free, untainted by commercials—covering everything from basic arithmetic to advanced calculus, from physics to finance to biology, from chemistry to the French Revolution.”

All this was not even an idea when Khan, at his wedding in New Jersey in 2004, learned that his 12-year-old cousin Nadia had done poorly on a math-placement exam back in Louisiana and would not be in a class for more-proficient students. Khan was then with a hedge fund in Boston; he had been a math whiz, earned three MIT degrees, and worked in Silicon Valley, and then came Harvard Business School and finance. He volunteered to tutor his cousin Nadia by long distance, “I’d equipped us both with inexpensive pen tablets that would allow us to see each other’s scrawls on our respective computers, using a program called Yankee Doodle.” He knew nothing formally about education or teaching, but he knew what he didn’t want: “the dreary process that sometimes went on in classrooms—rote memorization and plug-in formulas aimed at nothing more lasting or meaningful than a good grade on the next exam.” He learned very rapidly how to teach over the Internet as other tutees came in from his widespread family; in 2009 he left the hedge fund to devote himself full-time, as creator and sole employee, to Khan Academy.

Earlier, a friend had suggested that Khan post the lessons on YouTube so each student could consult them when needed. “YouTube?…that’s for cats playing piano, not serious mathematics. But three thousand videos later, I…wish I had thought of it myself.” Many people rapidly found their way to the lessons posted on YouTube, including Bill Gates, who, his blurb for the book tells us, “used these incredible tools with my own kids.” Gates’s blurb heads others by George Lucas, Eric Schmidt of Google, and Carlos Slim Helú, the Mexican entrepreneur who often challenges Gates as the richest man in the Western Hemisphere.

Support from the Gates Foundation and Google rapidly followed. An old schoolmate of Khan from Louisiana and MIT—another child of South Asian immigrants—was persuaded to leave McKinsey & Company to head the rapidly growing enterprise, which now includes, as one can see on the Internet, a few dozen young enthusiasts who seem a cross section of Silicon Valley.

Someone who does not own an iPhone or a tablet or an e-book reader and would be daunted by “Yankee Doodle” is probably not the best person to review The One World Schoolhouse, but I do find strong connecting links in the ideas Khan hooked onto in developing his educational vision. His animus toward the standard 50-minute lecture, which prevails from elementary school through college, and which very likely dates back to the medieval academy, where only the lecturer had access to the rare book, reminds me of an article I published in Harper’s in 1961. “The Wasted Classroom” laid out my observations after a few years of college teaching. Education should have changed once everyone had access to the book…and changed again when everyone gained access to almost everything through the Internet.

Khan’s well-shaped phrases call out to me, as they would to anyone with the experience of what schooling generally looks like. “Flipping the Classroom,” reads one chapter title: do the work at home, as the Khan Academy videos make possible and easy, and come to school for the teacher’s assistance with difficulties. “The Spirit of the One-Room Schoolhouse,” reads another: why do we have age-segregated classes, where the group is expected to progress at the same rate through the same material, when children learn at different rates and in different ways? Why not a mix, as was once necessitated by a thin population that gathered in one-room schoolhouses, where the older students could help teach the younger and thus add to their own learning?

Khan’s skeptical comments on tests and testing are not occasioned by the fear that regular school classes teamed up experimentally with Khan Academy material and approaches might not show up well, but by solid arguments against tests consisting of a crude sampling of what a student might know and that encourage teaching to the test. He is against “Swiss-cheese Learning,” in which holes are left: a curriculum should consist of learning the fundamentals well enough so one is able to handle the entire subject. Khan’s criticism of a 70 percent or even a 95 percent passing rate may be inspired by the South Asian parent who asks, “and where is the other 5 percent?” But his argument that knowing the subject means answering all the questions correctly is new and provocative.

There is much else that is persuasive in the Khan Academy. The lessons are presented by a voice and a blackboard, not a face. The short time span of the video lessons was perhaps initially required by the YouTube format but is well attested to by the research on how long students in a classroom typically concentrate, as Khan learned.

There will be no stock offering in Khan Academy: it is nonprofit, and its slogan is “A Free World-Class Education for Anyone, Anywhere.” The big question is, how can it connect to the traditional school system about which Khan is so skeptical?

Khan was approached by the Los Altos, California, school system and developed a program for experimental use of Khan Academy material in two 5th- and 7th-grade classes; the latter held children from “across El Camino Real,” the poorer part of Los Altos. Eventually, whatever Khan’s view of tests, the students had to take the California Standards Tests, and Khan was nervous about how they would perform. Brilliantly, it turned out, with enormous improvements for the poorer students.

One would like to know more of the details. The many millions of users of Khan Academy videos had come to it one by one, independently motivated, working, we assume, for the most part alone to supplement schoolwork or learn something new. How does one integrate such a program into a school? Were these classrooms really “flipped” such that students were expected to study the videos at their own rate at home and use the classroom and teacher for supplementary assistance? Will students really trade the homework that they now do so unwillingly for independent work at home on Khan Academy videos? Khan has great faith in the program’s ability to motivate students to do schoolwork—which in the end is what the videos really are.

One is left with many questions after reading this book. Clearly, the system was built on the model of mathematics and extended to other fields with a logical and systematic hierarchy of topics, with more advanced work building on more elementary work. How does it get adapted to the humanities, to history, the arts? Should it be?

But whatever the questions, what has already been done is potentially transforming, and accessible to anyone, anywhere.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Meira Levinson is not your run-of-the-mill or even your teach-for-democracy middle-school teacher. She taught in middle schools with minority and low-income children in Atlanta and Boston for eight years (she notes in passing that she was tenured in the Boston school system), after majoring in philosophy at Yale and receiving a doctorate from Oxford. (She is now associate professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.) She brings a new twist to the issue of the gap between American minority low-income children and middle-class children; what has engaged her passions and formidable abilities is not the academic gap, though of course she is fully aware of it, but the gap in the ability to participate effectively in the civic life, to influence political choices, the “Civic Empowerment” gap, as she labels it.

She begins with a telling story. She is coaching her Atlanta school’s National Academic League quiz bowl team, competing against a “white” school (in Atlanta, even a “white” school does not have many whites). Her team misidentifies Kurt Cobain, and the students on the other team laugh. On the way back from the event, reviewing how they did, the students wonder why the otherwise well-behaved opposing team laughed. Ms. Levinson asks, “‘How many of you have heard of Kurt Cobain?’” No one had. Levinson explains, “‘Probably 95 percent of White people under the age of thirty could tell you who Kurt Cobain is…. Your not knowing…seems as weird to them as it might seem to you to meet somebody who has never heard of Master P….’”

“‘Oh, but Dr. Levinson [one student replies]…. everybody has heard of Master P.’”

Two worlds, with scarcely a meeting point. The story could be used to insist that some minimal acquaintance with the other world is needed to be effective in it. Levinson would not disagree, I think, but this is not the point she wants to make: E. D. Hirsch’s many books arguing for such minimal common knowledge as essential for effective reading and schoolwork does not appear in her enormous bibliography (43 pages). Her argument is rather that her students are disempowered, and a key necessity of their education is to teach them how to increase their power, their effectiveness in the real world, beginning with their immediate environment: the world of school and neighborhood.

Perhaps if they were more effective academically they would be more effective civically, and again, I do not think Levinson would disagree, but the road to empowerment for which she argues is a more direct one: student involvement in the issues that concern them, and learning through that involvement. The aim is systemic change, and if learning is aided by it, good, but secondary to overcoming the gap in empowerment.

This is “Civics” of a sort, but of a sort I think many readers will find unfamiliar. “Struggle” is not the term we generally associate with civics or civic engagement, but it is one Levinson prefers. For her, whatever progress has been made in this nation in overcoming the disadvantages of our minorities is owing to their struggles, and there is still so much to do. “Action civics” is what is needed, and the range of activities that are now being promoted in many urban schools, though hardly any significant number of them yet, and that she retails, is astonishing. This activity is far beyond “service learning,” which is implemented in many schools, and for which students may receive credit: reading to the homebound, or collecting and turning in cans to aid the hungry, or the like. Rather, systemic change is required, and one can’t help being reminded of Marx’s disdain for the softer socialism of his time.

Levinson introduces the new (for me) and unwieldy term “Guided Experiental Civic Education” to describe the education for civic struggle she favors, and she goes far beyond education talk in showing how it has been worked into her own experience as a teacher, and how she hopes it will work in the future.

Having developed her ideas—perhaps in her earlier book, The Demands of Liberal Education (Oxford, 1999), perhaps in her work as a teacher in Atlanta—she had the rare opportunity, as a teacher in the Dorchester section of Boston in a very racially and ethnically mixed school, to put them into practice. Massachusetts had decided to reduce the inordinate amount of time devoted to testing (23 out of 180 school days!), dropping tests for history and social studies, and thus making it possible for a creative administrator to introduce a new course in 8th grade, “Civics in Action.”

Levinson takes us through the effort to define the course, in which she participated, but in the end she finds too many “key questions and concepts, more vocabulary words,…overall just more ‘stuff’ to cover.” This is also her complaint with the requirements in American history, which she formerly taught. She more or less goes her own way in teaching the course, but after the first year of “Civics in Action,” the Boston Public Schools introduce standardized, districtwide midterm and final exams for it, and Levinson worries how her students will do. “The materials that I developed to support my students’ citizenship projects are adopted for dissemination districtwide and even nationally…. But my students’ performance on the district midterms and finals is relatively mediocre because I skimp on the mandated curriculum—in Fall 2005, because we spend time on Hurricane Katrina instead, and in Spring 2006 because students want to investigate the increase in youth violence in their neighborhood.”

This leads her into a full and sophisticated analysis of the effect of the movement for standards, assessment, and accountability on this kind of civic action teaching, and it is clear there is a bad mismatch. Effective civic action has to be local, dynamic, connected to current realities and developments, and the usual static forms of assessment are unsuitable. It is, after all, a form of “authentic” education, and other kinds of assessment, such as portfolios, have to be developed. (Oddly, there are no references to the work of Howard Gardner, in her own Harvard Graduate School of Education, a leading exponent of authentic education.) And this leads her further into an equally sophisticated discussion of the relationship of what she is proposing and doing for democracy. On the one hand, action civics teaches students the ways of democratic activity and participation to effect change; on the other, it will run into conflict with the program and objectives that democratic control of the schools has implemented in many places, such as which heroes to place before the students for emulation. She sees no way of resolving this conflict: the two kinds of democracy, both valid, must remain in tension. This is Dewey updated, with education for democracy in conflict with democracy in action as it acts in the real world on education.

This is a strong book. The ideas that activate it are effectively presented, the detail of real school life (like how to fit action civics into a school structure of 45-minute classes—action civics demands much more) vividly brought to life. Ethnography is not so often successfully married to large ideas. In the end, though, it is hard to imagine many teachers performing at the level that Meira Levinson did, under any reforms envisaged for the school system. And one must remain skeptical whether any democratically controlled school system could accommodate the explosive potential of action civics as she describes it.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential
by Deborah Kenny
Harper, 2012, $25.99; 256 pages.

Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School
by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia
Jossey-Bass, 2012, $27.95; 176 pages.

As reviewed by David Steiner

On page 87 of Mission Possible, the account by Eva Moskowitz and Arin Lavinia of the work of their charter schools, the reader is invited to watch a video of a book discussion in 1st grade. A detour to the included DVD is instructive: in this Harlem-based, lottery-selected public charter school, we see a 1st-grade classroom that challenges any in the country for the intellectual engagement of its students without any reliance on the regimented, direct instruction that the clichéd objections imagine dominate all successful charter schools. Faced with such examples, and the academic record of Moskowitz’s Success Academies, one’s first reaction should simply be applause. Having served (briefly) as a board member for one of the Success Academies, I know that such video clips are not cherry-picked: teachers in every classroom in every Academy school are expected to create such spaces of intense and demanding thinking and learning.

A different but equally positive reaction is evoked by Deborah Kenny’s intensely personal account of the grit, resolve, and courage that led her to take the opportunity offered by the charter school movement and create a model school that her students were immensely lucky to attend. Her passion for bringing out the best in all who worked with her, her disarming throwaways (“it was the first five minutes of our first day, and already I’d made a mistake”), and her candid directness about necessary conditions for her work (“it is impossible to nurture a positive culture without the right to hire and fire at will”) make this an inspiring story.

Sharing boundless drive and self-discipline, and an equal commitment to proving that a child’s past is not her or his predetermined destination, Moskowitz and Kenny take justified pride in being mission-driven realists who, along with their handpicked colleagues, have radically recast the life chances of their students. But they have produced quite different books. Kenny’s more personal memoir does not reach her charter school until late in the narrative, and even then, the focus is squarely on forging a human culture, building a team whose members will go to the wall for their students, and for each other. For her, the disaster of American education is summed up by the line “we got here by disrespecting teachers.”

What Kenny means by respect is creating a culture of accountability for children’s learning that “enables freedom” and a freedom that “unleashes teacher passion.” Kenny explicitly eschews the cookbook vision of school reform: “Schools,” she writes, “are not products to be designed and replicated.” She goes on: “Every school in America has access to the same pedagogical ideas and methods we use. The problem is not lack of information but a lack of motivation engendered by the low accountability/low empowerment culture of our public schools.” Many of her sources of inspiration—Maxime Greene, Peter Drucker, Dennis Littky—are not your typical charter-school heroes. What connects them is not a method but a conviction that successful outcomes are all about people learning together, creating spaces of continual mutual feedback, encouragement, and empowerment. Kenny’s book is not and does not purport to be a how-to manual; it is a moving work about the power of well-placed determination matched to a political opportunity: the freedom through accountability that is the charter school.

Moskowitz and Lavinia set themselves a different task. Theirs is a self-proclaimed “how-to book.” As a result, the bar is in some sense higher: we expect to learn what the secrets are and how they can work. The answers in the book will enlighten readers who have heard about charter schools on the news but want to learn more. Moskowitz and Lavinia write at a relatively high level about effective techniques like the push to challenge students with the most rigorous and demanding material and instruction; the immediacy and constancy of granular feedback; the sharing of best practices; the focus on literacy instruction; the long school day and school year, including summer professional development for teachers; the constant coaching; and the agonizing care taken to choose each teacher from a vast pool of applicants. Each of these practices is standard at high-performing charters including KIPP, Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First, to take just three networks of such schools with which I am somewhat familiar.

What well-read educators and policymakers will want to know, and will not find in this book, is how it is that in New York City, in multiple instances, Success Academies, despite its astonishingly rapid growth as a school network, gets stronger academic results than even the top next-rung charter schools. Is it just that Moskowitz pushes even harder with even more rigor with even better-selected teachers on the good practices that the other charters are engaged in? If there are true secrets to the results from Success Academies, they are not on show here. A useful contrast in this respect is Paul Bambrik-Santoyo’s recently published Leverage Leadership: A Practical Guide to Building Exceptional Schools. The tools he lays out may or may not produce results at the level of the Success Academies, but those tools are in plain sight, in such unsecret forms as his “Observation Tracker.”

At the same time, these books will do nothing to silence the critics. There are, for example, no statistics on the percentage of ELL students in the schools, no numbers on the privately raised funds the schools put to use, and only cursory gestures, in Kenny’s book, to the controversy over students counseled out of or removed from these charter-school classrooms and to their teacher turnover rate.

In the end, the real contribution of these books lies neither in their appeals to the heart nor in the practices they catalogue, but in the moral condemnation each makes of our current education system. When Moskowitz argues that her practices can be adopted in any school, we are immediately tempted to say, Come on! Nine-hour days? Weeks of summer professional development? Responsiveness 24/7 to breakdowns in the classrooms, be it from noisy pipes or a single underwhelming lesson? Show me a public school system that could get there anytime soon.

But then we have to ask, why not? We have seen urban public schools successfully adopt many charter school “secrets,” including the nine-hour school day (e.g., United for Success Academies in Oakland); a rigorous, standard curriculum (e.g., the more than a dozen Chicago public schools that offer the International Baccalaureate); merit pay (e.g., the Washington, D.C., system); and the regular use of teacher video in professional development and evaluation (e.g., the Houston system, which was using video in this way as early as the 1980s).

Why have the results of the best-performing charter schools consistently eluded public school systems? The answer, unsurprisingly, has to do with the structures underlying public K–12 education. To bring to regular public schools the full panoply of successful charter-school practices we would need to rethink our labor practices, funding structures, reluctance to embrace a rigorous and specific curriculum, and all the other bêtes noires the national education conversation avoids or reduces to partisan caricatures.

If, rightly, we want to reject a zero-sum trade-off between our values, if what we need are a highly attractive long-term profession for successful teachers, accountability for student results, and a far more rigorous curriculum driving far higher learning outcomes for our students, are we willing to rethink the system from scratch and put everything on the table? If we cannot build a public school system on heroic individuals (and we surely cannot), how do we remake our school systems to make the standards Kenny and Moskowitz demand, and have largely achieved, the baseline of our public education? These books do not tackle these hard questions.

But no matter. One is left with the indictment and an urgent call to action, captured on page 136 of Kenny’s book: “‘This school’s a blessing!,’ exclaimed Jasmine’s grandmother when she found out they’d won the lottery. We hadn’t even opened our doors yet.”

David Steiner is dean of the School of Education at Hunter College and former commissioner of education for the State of New York.

The Diverse Schools Dilemma: A Parent’s Guide to Socioeconomically Mixed Public Schools
By Michael Petrilli
Thomas B. Fordham Institute (2012), $11.95

As reviewed by Michael Thomas Duffy

The dignitaries were gathered from far and wide — Garden State politicos like Republican Governor Chris Christie and Newark’s Mayor, Democrat Cory Booker; business leaders like Goldman Sachs’ CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and European financier Nicholas Bergrruen; real estate developer Ron Beit and in a bit of a homecoming, Newark native and noted architect, Richard Meier. The improbable group came together on a hardscrabble parking lot in downtown Newark last February for the groundbreaking of Teacher Village. When completed, the $140 million mixed-use development would consist of several hundred market-rent apartments, street-level retail that would include restaurants and a grocery store, and at its heart, three charter schools. Christie and Booker lent the project their political support and tax breaks, Blankfein and Bergrruen supplied the financing, Beit masterminded the plan and Meier provided his signature cool white modern design for the buildings and the streetscape they would create.

The event marked an inflection point of sorts, or at least that’s what civic boosters hoped. The urban decay that provided the backdrop for the groundbreaking just a few blocks from Newark’s ornate Beaux Arts City Hall, was once a neighborhood that bustled with people and thriving businesses. Just after the Second World War, Newark’s population stood at a high point of 440,000 before hemorrhaging residents to the surrounding suburbs. An astonishing 165,000 people picked up and left, as America’s idea of the good life was found among the lawns of nearby Montclair, not in the midst of the densely packed streets of Newark’s Ironbound neighborhood. The greatest number left after the riots and racial unrest of the late 1960′s, before the city’s population bottomed out by the end of the 20th century. Then, in the 2010 census, for the first time in 50 years, something remarkable happened: like new shoots pushing through the spring soil, Newark actually gained new residents.

Newark’s experience confirms the argument that author Alan Ehrenhalt makes in his recently published book, The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City, which is that in the last 10 years, many cities in North America are seeing small but perceptible rises in population in their urban core, often driven by increasing numbers of middle-class residents. Not only that, Ehrenhalt argues, there is a demographic inversion happening: the suburbs are where you will now find growing numbers of African-Americans and newly arrived immigrants choosing to live, not the city. By introducing the new concept of inversion he suggests a different paradigm than the racially loaded term gentrification. Ehrenhalt is describing a broader trend that isn’t defined by the displacement of one group by another, but an affirmative pattern of preferences by young people, African-Americans and recent immigrants alike. The implications for education in his book are found in his focus on the dynamics of urban demographics.

Throughout the book, which started out as a cover story in The New Republic called “Trading Places,” Ehrenhalt poses the question as to whether the younger professionals moving to urban enclaves, “…will still want to live there once they have children and whether they will stay when the children reach school age.” Key to answering this question is the quality of the public schools they are able to send their kids to. Part of what Ehrenhalt identifies as a trend has been noted elsewhere: the preference among many GenXers and Millennials to live in the kinds of city neighborhoods that generations before them had abandoned. Call it the Carrie Bradshaw Effect, for the character in the HBO series “Sex in the City” who made urban living seem so glamorous — either reflecting the times, or helping to shape them. If Carrie were to start a family (she did marry Mr. Big, after all — see the first “Sex in the City” movie) would she remain in Manhattan to raise her children? Ehrenhalt answers the question in the affirmative, a view consistent with my own observations looking around New York City, the city where I was born.

The book starts by examining the experience of a number of cities and neighborhoods not only in North America, but of European cities like Paris where for many years the inversion that he details has been the norm: the affluent live in the central arrondissements and low-income immigrants live in the suburbs. Unlike the riots that tore apart the core of Newark in the late 1960′s, civil unrest among the dispossessed in Paris happened most recently in the suburban ring far from the city center. Closer to home, Ehrenhalt devotes chapters to trends in Chicago’s Sheffield neighborhood, suburban Atlanta, the downtowns of Phoenix and Philadelphia, and the remarkable transformation of Lower Manhattan into a residential neighborhood.

In October of 2012, the Downtown Alliance, an advocacy group that promotes Lower Manhattan, released a report on the New York region’s shifting demographics that contains a line that could have come straight out of The Great Inversion, “Today, Lower Manhattan is surrounded by communities [meaning Brooklyn and Jersey City] that have an increasing share of the region’s high-value workers, while the far-off bedroom communities in Long Island, New York and Connecticut have seen their shares shrink.” Liz Berger, the dynamic leader of the Downtown Alliance, observed that because the streets of the financial district and its environs had not been a residential neighborhood for some time (Ehrenhalt points out that you have to go back to the census of 1800 to find a comparable number of people living in that area) no one is being displaced by the influx of new residents — an example of inversion, not gentrification.

The workers described in the Alliance’s report are moving to downtown, and unlike their counterparts only a short time ago, they are having children and staying in the city when their kids reach Kindergarten and first grade. According to Ehrenhalt

Couples who had moved to Lower Manhattan in the boom years not only stayed, they started families amid the chaos of the recession. One building on John Street with 147 condo units reported twenty-two new babies born in 2008 alone. For families that had not suffered serious financial losses in the preceding months, the issue of greatest concern seemed to be finding places for their children to go to school. PS 234, a K-5 school in the area that consistently records some of the highest test scores of any public school in Manhattan, was operating at 139% of capacity in the fall of 2008….They are about as eager as other parents in the five New York boroughs to use the public schools, as long as they can find decent ones.

Ehrenhalt notes that the 1970 census recorded 833 residents living South of Canal Street, most of them (likely men) living in what my grandfather, an NYC fireman, would have called flophouses. In September of 2012, the Census Bureau released figures that now show a population of 40,000 residents living in roughly this same area, up from some 15,000 at the time of the 9/11 attacks in 2001.

A May 2009 article in New York Magazine covered the surprising rise in school-aged children in Manhattan, providing further corroboration of Ehrenhalt’s thesis. “Five Year Olds at the Gate” detailed the fact that the number of children under five living in Manhattan had shot up by 32 percent in the preceding five years. Most of the growth came amongst white toddlers, whose numbers were up an incredible 40 percent, outnumbering their black and Latino neighbors for the first time since the 1960′s. (A graphic which accompanied that New York Magazine article, with data supplied by NYU professor (and downtown resident & dad) Eric Greenleaf, details the trend.)

The education entrepreneur Chris Whittle has founded a new network of private schools, called The Avenues, with exactly this cohort of successful downtown strivers in mind. The Avenues opened its first school just north of TriBeCa, adjacent to the High Line park, in September. Annual tuition for the 2012-13 school year is set at $39,750 and the school with its 1320 seats, is reportedly fully enrolled in this, its first year of operation.

In the wake of Superstorm Sandy, many will likely question whether the desire to live in Lower Manhattan will continue with the same enthusiasm. I spoke with one real estate executive familiar with the downtown market who suggested that the after-effects of the storm may actually hasten the transformation of Lower Manhattan into a residential neighborhood, as finance firms de-camp for Midtown and elsewhere and those office buildings are converted to apartments. Time will tell.

The chicken-and-egg question raised by growing numbers of middle-class families with children living in urban neighborhoods is what came first: the desirability of urban places like Lower Manhattan as a place for a family to live, or the quality of the public school options, like PS 234, where such families could send their kids. Ehrenhalt raises the question of whether it is good-quality public schools that attract middle class residents or whether those families move to a neighborhood and begin demanding that the quality of public schools — district-run and charter alike — improve. Like most chicken-and-egg questions, this one will be hard to settle. Until it is, developments like Teacher Village in Newark and the soaring demand for a high quality education in downtown Manhattan are demonstrating that urban vitality and good public schools — whichever comes first — are inextricably tied.

Now that Alan Ehrenhalt has settled the question of whether Carrie Bradshaw is going to move to the suburbs if/when she has kids, Michael Petrilli comes along to help sort out another dilemma the ‘Sex in the City’ character might face: where should she send her kids to school? A city-run public school? A charter public school? Private school? In a nifty, slender volume, The Diverse Schools Dilemma: A Parent’s Guide to Socioeconomically Mixed Public Schools, Petrilli details his own thinking as a father and respected education analyst (he is a frequent contributor to Education Next), starting where Ehrenhalt leaves off. “In the middle of the last decade, in urban communities across America, middle-class and upper-middle class parents started sending their children to public schools again” Petrilli writes, “schools that for decades had served overwhelmingly poor and minority populations.” He then goes on a readable, thoughtful and refreshingly frank exploration of the considerations that parents should take into account in choosing a school for their child.

After they were married, Petrilli and his wife settled in Takoma Park in greater Washington, D.C. — a hippie-dippy area with its own food coop and a sister-city relationship with Gotera, El Salvador. It is one of a similar group of leafy, urban neighborhoods around the country akin to Cambridge, Berkeley, Park Slope or the Sheffield neighborhood of Chicago that Ehrenhalt devotes a chapter to in The Great Inversion. After his first child was born, Petrilli’s day job thinking and writing about schools became less of an abstraction as he and his wife wrestled with their desire to send their son to a public school in the urban neighborhood they had come to love. Their focus on a public school was in part practical — they couldn’t afford private school tuition — but was also idealistic: he and his wife wanted their kid’s education to include interacting with children of different races, from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds.

He opens the book with the case for a middle-class family to choose a diverse public school: segregated urban schools hurt the poor and minority students stuck in them; more affluent peers and parents can change the equation at these schools, improving outcomes just by being there; plus, middle-class kids gain a truer picture of the world they will grow up to inhabit, by being educated in an urban school. The strength of The Diverse Schools Dilemma as a handbook for urban middle-class parents is borne of Petrilli’s willingness to steer clear of cant. No pious lectures from him, and once he finishes making the case for enrolling in a multi-racial public school containing large numbers of poor kids, he turns around and makes equally strong counter arguments: schools serving affluent students are safer; the disruptive students found in greater numbers in low-income urban schools slow the pace at which lessons are delivered and learning happens; plus, what’s the point, if the ‘diverse’ minority and free/reduced lunch students are tracked into classes that separate them from their white, middle-class counterparts? Further complicating the picture: do middle-class parents and low-income parents even value the same attributes in a school?

Petrilli seeks a resolution to the diverse schools dilemma by visiting the district-run schools in Takoma Park that he might send his son to. He writes about doing the research, listing helpful resources like GreatSchools.org, and suggesting ways that parents on a similar quest could size up prospective schools: walk into a school and observe how it looks and sounds (“screams and shrieks that you could imagine emanating from a Justin Bieber concert or maybe a cockfight” was how he described one); go to a meeting of the PTA; interview the principal. This guide also introduces parents to the possibility of schools of choice — magnet and charter schools – that are typically open to families from a broad catchment area. One such school he describes is DC’s Capital City Public Charter School, where a third of the students are black, a third are white, and a third are Hispanic; half qualify for free/reduced lunch, half do not. Cap City seems to perfectly embody the diverse public school that Petrilli is seeking, but like all charter schools, admission is determined by lottery, rendering it too speculative an option for  many families to count on, especially when it comes to making a home-buying decision.

At the end of the day, the school options available to urban parents are uneven: you live inside the boundaries for a high-flying city-run public school like TriBeCa’s PS234, you’re set; you lose the admissions lottery at a place like Cap City Charter public school, you are out of luck; you have the resources of Katie Holmes, and you send your daughter Suri Cruise (no kidding!) to The Avenues, an expensive private school. As Petrilli and his wife wrestled with their choice, they found that the safest option — the one that would most guarantee a solid education for their child, in a home they could afford — was, like many generations of families before them, to be found in the suburbs. The thing I admire about Mr. Petrilli is his unflinching honesty in admitting that his kids would be going to Wood Acres Elementary, literally the least diverse school in the county where he now makes his home. After reading The Diverse Schools Dilemma, you understand the logic of his family’s choice, despite his desire for something different. If we are going to keep Carrie Bradshaw and the Petrilli family in the urban neighborhoods they love — and the vitality of our cities depends on them for the tax base and immense social capital they bring — we’re going to need more reliably good schools in the city.

Michael Thomas Duffy worked to launch the Great Oaks charter school in Newark last year and is helping to plan a second charter school serving Lower Manhattan; he is also an adjunct professor at NYU’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

On the publication of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book as important this year…,” but after an initial flurry of reviews and critiques, no further attention has been given. Yet it tells a story about a radical change in American society in the past 50 years that seems to have passed notice, whether popular or scholarly. We have heard a good deal about the increasing inequality in earnings and wealth, but Murray focuses on another and perhaps more vital aspect of inequality, an increasing difference in social behavior between an upper middle class and a lower middle and working class, with potentially enormous consequences for American society.

Murray’s earlier books—Losing Ground in 1984, on welfare policy, and The Bell Curve (with Richard Herrnstein) in 1994, on the significance of differences in intelligence as measured by intelligence tests—aroused controversy, because, implicitly or explicitly, they focused attention on black Americans, who play a disproportionate role in welfare policy, and as a group score lower than whites on IQ tests. Seeing the title Coming Apart, one might think he is again alluding to black-white difference, which is after all the great apartness in American history. But this book limits itself to white America. And what he tells us seems to have passed the notice of most sociologists writing on American society.

According to Murray, there has been a collapse in four key areas over the last 50 years of traditional and expected behavior in a good part of white America, the working class, as it once was called, the lower class, as it may be called. Murray contrasts whites who have less than a high school education and work in blue-collar, service, and low-level white-collar occupations, with whites who have a college education or more and work as professionals or managers. He calls the first group “Fishtown,” after a real neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been the subject of a number of books, and the second “Belmont,” drawing the name from the real Belmont, Massachusetts, a town adjacent to Cambridge. The contrasts that make up a good part of the book, despite reference to two localities, are of statistical assemblages, drawn from the census. Following Murray, I will refer to them as Fishtown and Belmont, dropping the quotation marks.

The two groups were quite similar in 1960 in what Murray calls the “founding virtues”: getting married and having children in wedlock; work (Murray calls it “industriousness”); honesty, revealed in statistics in crime and imprisonment; and religiosity. But by 2010 things had changed. A 10 percent difference between Belmont and Fishtown in marriage rates in 1960 expanded to a 35 percent difference in 2010. In the census that year, only “48 percent of prime-age whites in Fishtown were married, compared to 84 percent in 1969.” Related disparities arose in births out of marriage and in children living with a single parent—not much change in Belmont, a great change in Fishtown: almost 30 percent of white births are now nonmarital, up from just a few percent in 1960.

On work, Murray notes the great increase in the percentage of the population on disability payments, from under 1 to more than 5 percent of the labor force, and the growth in the number of prime-age males who are not in the labor force, contrasted with almost all in the labor force in 1960. On chart after chart reporting work behavior, we find stability in Belmont, with almost all males at work, a striking contrast to the large absence from the labor force, willed or unwilled, in Fishtown.

Although the scandal of mass imprisonment of blacks has begun to receive wide attention, Murray strikingly notes a fivefold increase in Fishtown prisoners, by definition all white, with no increase from the infinitesimal level of imprisonment in Belmont. The decline in religious behavior, measured by questions in surveys on attendance at services, has been similar in Fishtown and Belmont, but beginning from a higher level of disengagement in Fishtown.

These four indices to Murray are “the founding virtues” of “the American project”—also his term. They support that extensive civic engagement that astonished early visitors to the American democracy. But Murray reports that civic engagement has also declined in Fishtown, along with the founding virtues. Note the minimal act of voting in a presidential election: considerable stability over time, with more than 90 percent voting in Belmont, but a drop from 70 to 51 percent voting between 1968 and 1988 in Fishtown, with a modest rise in 2008. Murray labels one section “The Collapse of the Possibility of Community,” taking from political scientists Francis Fukuyame and Edward Banfield the importance of trust for a healthy community, and showing from longitudinal surveys its reduction, far greater in Fishtown than in Belmont. The statement “People can generally be trusted” elicited the agreement of more than 75 percent in Belmont in 1970, contrasted with 45 percent in Fishtown. In 2010, 60 percent in Belmont still concurred, but Fishtown was down to 20 percent.

Murray thus draws a picture of Fishtown, working-class America, supplemented by ethnographic reports on the real Fishtown, that is not far short of the “underclass” that was so widely discussed 30 years ago, when it was thought that white working-class America was in good shape.

But while Murray describes this as a decline in “virtue,” might it be a decline driven by the huge changes in the economy during this period, specifically, the decrease in good union-wage-paying manufacturing jobs? And are we not back to the more familiar issue of a growing economic inequality as responsible for these and other changes? Murray rejects in advance this criticism of his analysis. He somewhat complacently points to jobs that are still available (janitorial, cleaning office buildings), which, he asserts, even at the minimal wage should enable marriage and raising children. The interactions among employment possibilities and earnings, and marriage and responsible childbearing, are complex, and are not to be resolved in Murray’s book—or in this review.

While the major focus of the book, and the news in it, is what has happened in Fishtown, Belmont has also changed greatly in 50 years, if not in the four virtues and civic behavior: Belmont, Murray argues, and in particular its higher levels (graduates from more elite colleges), has withdrawn from contact with the rest of American society. The two classes were once much closer: in residence, in work, in schooling, in culture. They are now much more separate. Murray emphasizes in particular the degree to which the better educated and professional have concentrated in certain neighborhoods, and how opportunities for the upper middle class of college-goers to interact with and know neighbors of lower classes have declined. The American democratic project is endangered by this growing separation, which Murray demonstrates both statistically and anecdotally.

And what is to be done? Murray is a libertarian, and he certainly has nothing to suggest for government’s role. He does urge Belmont to celebrate and argue for the founding virtues in whatever way it can, and here perhaps there is a role for education, too: Murray quotes from McGuffey’s Readers, whose passing he notes with regret. He has nothing additional to say about the public schools, which do play a part in the shaping of children and must have had some role in creating the great divide he describes. But if Belmont should resist the plague, as he would name it, of nonjudgmentalism, in which almost any kind of behavior is excused and understood, should not the public school also resist the prevailing nonjudgmentalism and try to restore some of the moral authoritativeness practiced in the past and that we see today in many successful charter schools? Would that help change the behavior of Fishtown and bring it closer to the norms of 1960?

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character

As reviewed by E. D. Hirsch Jr.

Paul Tough follows his excellent book about Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children’s Zone with one on improving the school achievement and life chances of disadvantaged children. The title is How Children Succeed, and the chapter heads continue the how-to motif of the title: 1. How to Fail (and How Not To). 2. How to Build Character. 3. How to Think. 4. How to Succeed. 5. A Better Path. If the book really delivered on these headings, Tough would deserve immense success. I hope the book does sell well, though perhaps not too well. Its ultimate message is that “non-cognitive” abilities and traits are more important to success than mere academic achievement, and that message, while containing important truths, is overstated.

Tough gathers scientific results and personal observations from a number of estimable sources among researchers and practitioners, all supporting the idea that what really determines success is character and perseverance rather than raw intelligence and book learning. At the same time, he shows that what truly handicaps a child is horrible early upbringing and neglect. The term of art for the permanent psychic damage done is ACE: Adverse Childhood Experiences. This, by now well-attested finding is the best argument for the intrusion of outsiders into the homes of neglectful or cruel caregivers, and it is the best explanation for the observation that poverty accompanies lower achievement all over the world. This poverty argument (it’s not Tough’s) is also oversimplified, since, as the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) reports show, some parts of the world diminish the poverty-achievement correlation far more than the U.S., through better schooling.

What connects the ACE segment of the book (“How to Fail”) with more positive themes is the common “non-cognitive” feature. “How to Build Character” takes off from the successful KIPP schools and their emphasis on good manners and perseverance. The chapter goes on to show that a certain kind of test requiring no academic knowledge, only a willingness to persist in a boring task, is, other things equal, highly predictive of later success. “How to Think” focuses on how middle-school chess players from a low-income school manage consistently to beat advantaged students and even high-school chess teams. Focus and practice are the keys. In other words, perseverance and hard work are “how to think.” And “How to Succeed”? Also perseverance and hard work.

No one would or should dispute the importance of diligence and perseverance. Classic texts on education such as Plato’s Republic and Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education emphasize that character development and virtue are far more important educational goals than mere acquisition of knowledge. At the same time, those writers are quite explicit in setting forth the breadth of knowledge children need to acquire. If Tough had updated that “both/and” tradition with the latest reports from the field, he would have no argument from me. But he takes the view that an emphasis on knowledge acquisition, which he calls “the cognitive hypothesis,” has been tried and it has failed. Here is what he has to say in his introduction:

In the past decade, and especially in the past few years, a disparate congregation of economists, educators, psychologists and neuroscientists have begun to produce evidence that call into question many of the assumptions behind the cognitive hypothesis. What matters most in a child’s development, they say, is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years. What matters instead is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit, and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as non-cognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us sometimes think of them as character.

I sympathize with Tough’s judgment that “the cognitive hypothesis” (in his view of it) has failed. During the era of No Child Left Behind very little progress has been made in narrowing the achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. Yet it is hard to argue from recent reform efforts that the aim has been to increase the “information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years.” On the contrary, “mere information” has been disparaged in favor of how-to strategies and test-taking skills. What Tough calls “the cognitive hypothesis” with regard to academics might better be called the “how-to hypothesis,” paralleling his own how-to approach with regard to character. He does not cite the work of Jerome Kagan and others showing that many fundamental character traits tend to be innate and unchanging.

Moreover, there is strong evidence that increasing the general knowledge and vocabulary of a child before age six is the single highest correlate with later success. Tough alludes to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) studies, which show that a young adolescent’s score on the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT) is the best single predictor of later income. The AFQT is a math and verbal test. It is scored by doubling the verbal component before computing the overall raw score. This verbal component, largely a vocabulary test, is an index to general knowledge. General knowledge is also the best single predictor of later academic achievement among preschoolers and kindergartners, as has been shown by analyses of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K1992), which has followed the life paths of some 2,700 children over the past decade. After general knowledge, the next best predictor is fine-motor skill, which is correlated with the development of “executive function,” a cognitive ability. In third place come the non-cognitive features that Tough emphasizes in his book.

The critical missing element in Tough’s otherwise informative book is the phrase “other things equal.” He effectively shows that people who have more grit, character, and persistence will succeed better than those who have less, other things equal. Those other things are determined chiefly, though not exclusively, by “how much information we can stuff” into a child’s mind in the early years; a more neutral way of stating it is: “how much general knowledge and vocabulary we can impart in the early years.” The disparaging phrase “stuffing” is tendentious and inaccurate. Knowledge-based schooling is far more interesting to a child than how-to schooling, and far more effective.

There is a moment in Tough’s account when, good reporter that he is, he seems to acknowledge this fundamental qualification of his argument. He describes James, a middle schooler who by grit, brains, expert coaching, and intense focus has turned himself into a national-master chess player at age 12. Yet there’s a twist. James is preparing for an academic test that will determine whether he will be admitted to one of the selective high schools of New York City. He is being tutored intensively, by Ms. Spiegel, his chess coach:

In the middle of July, though, Spiegel told me she was starting to get discouraged. She was working hard with James on the test, and he was applying himself even on hot summer days, but she was daunted by how much he did not know. He couldn’t locate Africa or Asia on a map. He couldn’t name a single European country. When they did reading comprehension drills, he didn’t recognize words like infant, and communal, and beneficial…. “I feel angry on his behalf,” she told me. “He knows basic functions, but he doesn’t know geometry, he doesn’t get the idea of writing an equation. He’s at the level I would have been at in second or third grade.”

Tough ends the account on an upbeat note: “He’s only twelve, after all.” But this optimism is misplaced. Given the “Matthew Effect” (where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer) and the slowness of vocabulary acquisition, James has been disadvantaged permanently, just as if he had been the victim of ACE.

E. D. Hirsch Jr. is founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia.

“Multiplication Is for White People”: Raising Expectations for Other People’s Children

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Lisa Delpit has won awards from the MacArthur Foundation, American Educational Studies Association, and Teacher Magazine; her book Other People’s Children has sold 250,000 copies; and she has a named chair at Southern University. Nonetheless, she is angry. In fact, the phrase “I am angry” appears 11 times in the introduction to this summary critique of the education of African American students. Delpit’s anger stems from two things: one, the persistently low achievement of those students, and two, school policies and attitudes that cause and maintain it. Straight off, even the most generous reformers come under indictment. Bill and Melinda Gates, for instance, devote much of their gigantic philanthropy to getting black and brown kids ready for college, yet they earn her scorn for “corporate foundations, which indeed have those funds because they can avoid paying taxes that the rest of us must foot.” It gets worse, as she adds, “I am left in my more cynical moments with the thought that poor black children have become the vehicle by which rich white people give money to their friends.”

The charge extends to the very problem the Gates Foundation, the Broad Foundation, Teach For America, and other groups criticized by Delpit propose to remedy: low African American performance. She dismisses the usual explanations—poverty, poor preparation, homes with no books—and identifies two other causes, one the result of the other.

Low performance begins with American racism. Our society, Delpit writes, has a “deeply ingrained bias of equating blackness with inferiority,” and it “seems always ready to identify African Americans with almost all negative behaviors.” At tender ages, black students undergo a series of “microaggressions…small psychic insults” that debilitate them. Black males perform poorly because “our young men have internalized all of the negative stereotypes.” Sometimes black students are invisible, unnoticed, and disrespected, and sometimes they are “hypervisible,” their normal youth behaviors magnified into pathologies. They end up estranged from school culture (“disidentification”), mistrusting their own capacities and fulfilling belittling expectations.

Teachers misinterpret them again and again, Delpit alleges, mainly by disregarding the culture black students inhabit. This is the second cause of low achievement. The classroom is a white, middle-class space often hostile to African American norms. It downplays collaboration, she notes, even though these students need it to “feel more secure and less vulnerable.” It ignores past contributions to learning and science by African Americans. It neglects spirituality, whereas “traditional African education” incorporates “education for the spirit” into everyday lessons.

Delpit assembles classroom anecdotes, including her daughter’s experiences, with research on “stereotype threat” to prove the point. Voices of black students bespeak the demoralizing results, as with the middle schooler who announces, “Black people don’t multiply; black people just add and subtract. White people multiply.” On the other hand, Delpit provides counterexamples of success, for instance, Afrocentric assignments, inspiring teachers who love and sympathize but maintain rigor, and a beloved white teacher whom the students consider “black” for this reason: when asked “how he felt as a white man teaching black history…tears came to his eyes as he answered that when he learned about Emmett Till and other terrible things white people had done to black people, it sometimes made him ashamed to be white.”

Of course, tales and profiles and selective research don’t amount to proof, nor do they serve as grounds for policy revision. Delpit identifies a significant problem—the clash of school culture with African American out-of-school culture—but her racial lens casts it simply as one of respect and morale, not of effective education. She believes that the former produces the latter, for “African American students are gifted and brilliant,” and they would prosper if schools and teachers became sensitive to their culture.

But this translation of teacher sensitivity into student achievement is precisely what remains to be demonstrated. Delpit praises Afrocentric curricula, but her support focuses entirely on inputs and premises, not on outcomes. A unit that instills math by taking racial profiling as the subject wins her admiration, but her only evidence for its effectiveness comes from a student who professes, “now I realize that you could use math to defend your rights and realize the injustices around you.” But what about the math scores those students attain in 12th grade? What grades do they get in first-year college calculus? Delpit claims that schools impart the message that “you must give up identifiably African American norms in order to succeed,” but she never shows that embracing those norms produces higher college enrollment or workplace readiness.

If that evidence doesn’t exist, then Delpit’s argument isn’t with schools. It’s with U.S. history, society, culture, economics. Many pages in “Multiplication Is for White People” suggest that this is, indeed, the case, such as the indignant section on racist actions after Hurricane Katrina. If society at large is racist, though, then schools should receive more credit than Delpit allows. She asserts that “Typical university curricula leave out contributions of people of color to American culture, except in special courses in African American studies,” a flatly false claim. Syllabi in U.S. history, literature, music, and other areas at nearly every campus amply represent African American creators. Her complaint really is that schools haven’t sufficiently countered popular attitudes.

Delpit’s prescription that schools show more respect for African American culture, then, may have the effect of cultivating an adversarial posture among students. If American society is anti–African American, then a “culturally relevant curriculum” necessarily conflicts with it. If high schools offer an Afrocentric curriculum, will students find university offerings uncongenial and drift toward African American studies and away from STEM fields, where job prospects are brighter? Will a high school teacher ashamed of his whiteness alienate students from white college teachers and employers not so ashamed? Delpit notes that yelling is often assumed in African American culture to be a sign of caring, but won’t failing to inform students of the inappropriateness of yelling in public and in workplaces set them up for future tensions?

These are open questions, and this book doesn’t begin to consider them. We might easily dismiss it as an expression of resentment—the shadow of Jim Crow looms on every page—but we do better to take the starting point seriously: we have a culture clash in the classroom. Rather than expounding the pains and injustices and prescribing a “sensitivity” reform, however, let’s examine various schools and curricula on the standard accountability measure. Do they produce graduates who proceed to college and workplace and thrive?

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

President Obama and Education Reform: The Personal and the Political

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

This book, and this review, will be published while the presidential campaign is in full swing, and whether there will be anything more to be said about President Obama’s efforts at education reform, still fragmentary now, depends on the outcome of the election. President Obama and Education Reform was written when there was really only half a presidential term to evaluate: after the midterm elections of 2010, there was nothing the administration could do that was in any way dependent on Congress, and even the long-delayed effort to reauthorize the primary basis of the federal role in education, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, it was clear, would have to be delayed further, perhaps to the next administration.

Nevertheless, there is still a story to be told, and the essential part of it is that the program that education reformers have tried to promote now for decades—introduce more choices of schools for students, enable competition among schools, open up paths for preparing teachers and administrators outside schools of education, improve measures of student achievement and teacher competence, enable administrators to act on the basis of such measures, and limit the power of teachers unions—has been advanced under the Obama administration, in the judgment of authors Maranto and McShane.

They are political scientists steeped in the discipline’s current theories and methods, and there will be somewhat more of this than I think most readers will want. The authors are well aware of the limitation our complex political system places on any effort at change and reform, and in view of this complexity, they do not expect much: if some policy does more good than harm, that is good enough for them. They describe themselves as a “centrist conservative” and a “centrist liberal,” and one should expect neither enthusiasm nor denunciation from them. They differentiate themselves from those “progressive academics…who see the Obama reforms as destroying American schools” or those who see them “as shoring up a defunct system.” They appreciate that as a Democratic president Obama has had to act against the firmly held positions of major supporters of the Democratic Party, the teachers unions, but note that there are limits to how far he will go: yes to including data on effectiveness in teacher evaluations, no to providing private school vouchers for students in the District of Columbia. But Obama has certainly gone much further in the direction of reform than Hillary Clinton would have as president.

Noting how long it takes to introduce any major policy in our system, the authors divide presidents, following political scientist Michael Nelson, between “presidents of preparation” and “presidents of achievement.” Among the first they place Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Clinton. Among the latter is George W. Bush, because of No Child Left Behind, and possibly Barack Obama: “We think it likely [his] reform will make him a second president of achievement.” This is not because of any major legislative accomplishment, but because of the significant changes attributable to Race to the Top (RttT), the primary education-reform move of the Obama administration.

There is not much to go on in view of the limited time during which RttT has been in effect, and the even more limited time available to judge the effectiveness of the substantial sums disbursed to winning states. (The sum is “substantial” in one respect, at $4 billion, minor in another, compared to $80 billion to sustain teachers’ employment in the stimulus act, or to the total sums spent at state and local levels for schools and teachers.) The key point is that RttT rewarded states on the basis of how far they went in certain directions favored by education reformers. A good number of states changed their laws to permit administrators to use measures of teacher effectiveness in judging teacher competence, which has been a no-no to the teachers unions. This is in itself a remarkable accomplishment.

Maranto and McShane emphasize the strong push in Race to the Top in the direction of national standards. While the law establishing the Department of Education forbids the federal government to “exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, or administration or personnel of any educational institution…,” in Race to the Top, “the Obama administration tacitly gave its approval to a set of ‘Common Core Standards’ developed by a consortium of state school officers and tied Race to the Top dollars to participation in the program.” This may be a path to finally getting a set of national standards and overriding the standards the states set, which have in many states been pushed lower. This “race to the bottom” has made it easier to show adequate yearly progress (AYP) and avoid triggering measures required for schools that do not show AYP.

Despite alternative tendencies in academic political science, Maranto and McShane take seriously the role and motivation of the president in making policy, as against the requirements and restrictions of the larger forces affecting policymaking. (Note the book’s subtitle, “The Personal and the Political.”) Thus the authors review in detail the educational experiences and points of view of the last President Bush and President Obama, and they would argue that neither No Child Left Behind nor Race to the Top were written in the cards: the programs were specifically shaped by presidents whose own educational experiences demonstrated to them the need for effort and judgment. (Think of young George Bush, coming from a lax Texas school to the rigors of Phillips Andover, which he strained to meet, or young Barack Obama being awakened early in the morning by his mother in Indonesia so he could master the curriculum he would face once back in the United States.)

I should note that the “Education Industrial Complex,” or EIC, plays a large role in this book as the uniform enemy of school reform. The authors quote Jeanne Allen, president of the Center for Education Reform, as describing this as “more than 200 associations, federations, alliances, departments, offices, administrations, councils, boards, commissions, panels, organizations, herds, flocks, and coveys….” This makes too much of an amalgam, including everyone within education. Surely here and there are supporters of some of the measures the reformers, and Maranto and McShane, favor, and more differentiation would have been desirable.

Maranto and McShane conclude by noting four large forces that will shape the future of education and its funding: the increasing number and percentage of the aged, putting pressure on all other public functions, primarily because of the cost of medical care; the rise of the ”creative class,” as described by urban theorist Richard Florida, as those who work with ideas and demand more from teachers and schools; the new technology for education, rivaling and undermining traditional approaches and structures; and advances in measurement of achievement and competence, making the failings of current schools and educational approaches more apparent. This makes for a sobering future for traditional education: it will not be able to count on more public resources, and ideas will become more important than ever. Clearly, despite NCLB and Race to the Top, we are only at the beginning of an age of reform in education, whoever comes out ahead in the election.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard University.

Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems

As reviewed by Jay P. Greene

“Best practices” is the worst practice. The idea that we should examine successful organizations and then imitate what they do if we also want to be successful is something that first took hold in the business world but has now unfortunately spread to the field of education. If imitation were the path to excellence, art museums would be filled with paint-by-number works.

The fundamental flaw of a “best practices” approach, as any student in a half-decent research-design course would know, is that it suffers from what is called “selection on the dependent variable.” If you only look at successful organizations, then you have no variation in the dependent variable: they all have good outcomes. When you look at the things that successful organizations are doing, you have no idea whether each one of those things caused the good outcomes, had no effect on success, or was actually an impediment that held organizations back from being even more successful. An appropriate research design would have variation in the dependent variable; some have good outcomes and some have bad ones. To identify factors that contribute to good outcomes, you would, at a minimum, want to see those factors more likely to be present where there was success and less so where there was not.

“Best practices” lacks scientific credibility, but it has been a proven path to fame and fortune for pop-management gurus like Tom Peters, with In Search of Excellence, and Jim Collins, with Good to Great. The fact that many of the “best” companies they featured subsequently went belly-up—like Atari and Wang Computers, lauded by Peters, and Circuit City and Fannie Mae, by Collins—has done nothing to impede their high-fee lecture tours. Sometimes people just want to hear a confident person with shiny teeth tell them appealing stories about the secrets to success.

With Surpassing Shanghai, Marc Tucker hopes to join the ranks of the “best practices” gurus. He, along with a few of his colleagues at the National Center on Education and the Economy, has examined the education systems in some other countries with successful outcomes so that the U.S. can become similarly successful. Tucker coauthors the chapter on Japan, as well as an introductory and two concluding chapters. Tucker’s collaborators write chapters featuring Shanghai, Finland, Singapore, and Canada. Their approach to greatness in American education, as Linda Darling-Hammond phrases it in the foreword, is to ensure that “our strategies must emulate the best of what has been accomplished in public education both from here and abroad.”

But how do we know what those best practices are? The chapters on high-achieving countries describe some of what those countries are doing, but the characteristics they feature may have nothing to do with success or may even be a hindrance to greater success. Since the authors must pick and choose what characteristics they highlight, it is also quite possible that countries have successful education systems because of factors not mentioned at all. Since there is no scientific method to identifying the critical features of success in the best-practices approach, we simply have to trust the authority of the authors that they have correctly identified the relevant factors and have properly perceived the causal relationships.

But Surpassing Shanghai is even worse than the typical best-practices work, because Tucker’s concluding chapters, in which he summarizes the common best practices and draws policy recommendations, have almost no connection to the preceding chapters on each country. That is, the case studies of Shanghai, Finland, Japan, Singapore, and Canada attempt to identify the secrets to success in each country, a dubious-enough enterprise, and then Tucker promptly ignores all of the other chapters when making his general recommendations.

Tucker does claim to be drawing on the insights of his coauthors, but he never actually references the other chapters in detail. He never names his coauthors or specifically draws on them for his conclusions. In fact, much of what Tucker claims as common lessons of what his coauthors have observed from successful countries is contradicted in chapters that appear earlier in the book. And some of the common lessons they do identify, Tucker chooses to ignore.

For example, every country case study in Surpassing Shanghai, with the exception of the one on Japan coauthored by Marc Tucker, emphasizes the importance of decentralization in producing success. In Shanghai the local school system “received permission to create its own higher education entrance examination. This heralded a trend of exam decentralization, which was key to localized curricula.” The chapter on Finland describes the importance of the decision “to devolve increasing levels of authority and responsibility for education from the Ministry of Education to municipalities and schools…. [T]here were no central initiatives that the government was trying to push through the system.” Singapore is similarly described: “Moving away from the centralized top-down system of control, schools were organized into geographic clusters and given more autonomy…. It was felt that no single accountability model could fit all schools. Each school therefore set its own goals and annually assesses its progress toward meeting them…” And the chapter on Canada teaches us that “the most striking feature of the Canadian system is its decentralization.”

Tucker makes no mention of this common decentralization theme in his conclusions and recommendations. Instead, he claims the opposite as the common lesson of successful countries: “students must all meet a common basic education standard aligned to a national or provincial curriculum… Further, in these countries, the materials prepared by textbook publishers and the publishers of supplementary materials are aligned with the national curriculum framework.” And “every high-performing country…has a unit of government that is clearly in charge of elementary and secondary education…In such countries, the ministry has an obligation to concern itself with the design of the system as a whole…”

Conversely, Tucker emphasizes that “the dominant elements of the American education reform agenda” are noticeably absent from high-performing countries, including “the use of market mechanisms, such as charter schools and vouchers….” But if Tucker had read the chapter on Shanghai, he would have found a description of a system by which “students choose schools in other neighborhoods by paying a sponsorship fee. It is the Chinese version of school choice, a hot issue in the United States.” And although the chapter on Canada fails to make any mention of it, Canada has an extensive system of school choice, offering options that vary by language and religious denomination. According to recently published research by David Card, Martin Dooley, and Abigail Payne, competition among these options is a significant contributor to academic achievement in Canada.

There is a reason that promoters of best-practices approaches are called “gurus.” Their expertise must be derived from a mystical sphere, because it cannot be based on a scientific appraisal of the evidence. Marc Tucker makes no apology for his nonscientific approach. In fact, he denounces “the clinical research model used in medical research” when assessing education policies. The problem, he explains, is that no country would consent to “randomly assigning entire national populations to the education systems of another country or to certain features of the education system of another country.” On the contrary, countries, states, and localities can and do randomly assign “certain features of the education system,” and we have learned quite a lot from that scientific process. In the international arena, Tucker may want to familiarize himself with the excellent work being done by Michael Kremer and Karthik Muralidharan utilizing random assignment around the globe.

In addition, social scientists have developed practices to observe and control for differences in the absence of random assignment that have allowed extensive and productive analyses of the effectiveness of educational practices in different countries. In particular, the recent work of Ludger Woessmann, Martin West, and Eric Hanushek has utilized the PISA and TIMSS international test results that Tucker finds so valuable, but they have done so with the scientific methods that Tucker rejects. Even well-constructed case study research, like that done by Charles Glenn, can draw useful lessons across countries. The problem with the best-practices approach is not entirely that it depends on case studies, but that by avoiding variation in the dependent variable it prevents any scientific identification of causation.

Tucker’s hostility to scientific approaches is more understandable, given that his graduate training was in theater rather than a social science. Perhaps that is also why Tucker’s book reminds me so much of The Music Man. Tucker is like “Professor” Harold Hill come to town to sell us a bill of goods. His expertise is self-appointed, and his method, the equivalent of “the think system,” is obvious quackery. And the Gates Foundation, which has for some reason backed Tucker and his organization with millions of dollars, must be playing the residents of River City, because they have bought this pitch and are pouring their savings into a band that can never play music except in a fantasy finale.

Best practices really are the worst.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.

Shortchanging Student Achievement: The Educational, Economic, and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

This book comes to us with a remarkable range of recommenders: Glenn Loury, Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, Eric Hanushek, Ron Haskins, Heather MacDonald, David Blankenhorn, Chester Finn, and others. It is published as part of a series edited by Education Next’s own Frederick M. Hess. To my mind it is being recommended largely for the worthy cause in which its writer has been engaged for 20 years or more—deploring the breakdown of the traditional family. It is somewhat disorderly in presenting evidence for its central argument, and the author has an odd style in which almost every statement is hedged. This is not done as a matter of scholarly caution, but rather to preempt the charge that he is making too much of his thesis and thereby discounting other explanations for the educational, and subsequent occupational and economic, failure of so many American children.

But the central thesis, however presented, is hardly contestable: the fragmentation of the American family, in which the norm of two parents raising children in a marriage has been radically reduced by the increase of children born and raised out of wedlock, engenders grave problems for many American children and American society. As the first chapter puts it, we have moved “From Moynihan to ‘My Goodness.’” The “Moynihan” is, of course, Daniel P. Moynihan, author of the famous, or infamous, 1965 report on the black family. The “My Goodness” is our response to the enormous increase in the proportion of babies who are born out of wedlock or are illegitimate, terms one uses with embarrassment now but which may still have had some currency in 1965. The figures that so alarmed Moynihan—24 percent for blacks versus 3 percent for whites—have since ballooned to more than 70 percent for blacks and 30 percent for whites, figures that would have been unimaginable in 1965.

Pearlstein quotes a Swedish demographer: “The USA stands out as an extreme case with its very high proportion of children born to a lone mother, with a higher probability that children experience a union disruption than anywhere else…”

Mitch Pearlstein is director of a think tank in Minneapolis, the Center of the American Experiment, which he founded after a career working for University of Minnesota president C. Peter Magrath, for Minnesota governor Albert H. Quie, as an editorial writer for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and at the U.S. Department of Education with Chester Finn. Despite his solid Minnesota credentials, Pearlstein comes out of Far Rockaway High School in Queens, New York, whose decline from a nurturer of future Nobel prizewinners, furnishes much of the background to his distress over American education (as the decline of so many other once-great New York City high schools serves so many others, including this reviewer).

Pearlstein is more an advocate than an analyst. He is well aware of the expansive literature on the fragmentation of the American family, its causes and consequences, scholarly as well as popular. But he often mixes together childhood trauma and distress, family disruption, poverty, troubled neighborhoods, and still more, as possible causes. All are undoubtedly linked, but social scientists do try to pry these various forces apart using statistical techniques. Nevertheless, his main point holds: it stands to reason that being raised by a single mother is more difficult for a child than being raised by two parents.

Pearlstein is clearly more comfortable presenting the facts from whatever source than in advocating any solution:

No proposed solution in this book is equal to the central problem it aims to solve. There is no tax break, no welfare reform, no marriage education program, no public service campaign…that can reduce out-of-wedlock birth rates and divorce rates to what they were as recently as when the Everly Brothers beseeched “Little Suzy” to wake up lest their reputations get shot.

What is to be done? Pearlstein can reel off pages of programs that have attempted to raise educational achievement. He reminds us, if we have forgotten or never knew, that under the George W. Bush administrations more than 200 programs were instituted to aid marital stability. But he is no great advocate of any specific programs or approaches, whether to improve educational achievement or deal with the underlying problem of family fragmentation that makes life for children more difficult. He is of sociologist Peter Rossi’s persuasion, made popular by Moynihan, on the effect of social programs. As Rossi phrased the “iron law of evaluation,” “the expected value of any net impact assessment of any large-scale social program is zero.” Educational reform after reform, many that appear to have good effects, crumble under close evaluation, and with the passage of time. And those that manage to keep up a record of improvement with children who are expected to do poorly in school, such as KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), cannot be brought to scale, owing to the talents and energy they require.

All this is commonly known, and Pearlstein well reports what we have learned, which is not encouraging. In his chapter on “Strengthening Learning,” he has nothing new to propose. But he does like the emphasis on exercised authority—in loco parentis, schools in place of absent parents—that Gerald Grant and others have emphasized as making for an effective school. And he has a good word for the differentiated digital education that Clayton Christensen and his colleagues pressed for in Disrupting Class (see “Something’s Better Than Nothing,” book reviews, Fall 2008).

Nor is he more optimistic about most programs to strengthen marriage. When the first of “three sophisticated experiments” designed to test the effectiveness of marriage programs aimed at low-income couples was evaluated and reported on by Mathematica, the Rossi dictum again prevailed: “[Building strong families] did not make couples more likely to stay together or get married…it did not improve couple’s relationships.”

Pearlstein does strike a new note, not commonly seen among advocates of strong and stable families, when he raises the issue of the high incarceration rate in the United States generally, and the exceptionally high rates for blacks, which take so many black men out of the marriage market. Here he does have something new to propose: not anything that will reduce the incarceration rate, but some effort to reduce the extensive “collateral sanctions” that come with a prison sentence and make getting a job and rehabilitation so hard. Ohio may well be correct in forbidding ex-convicts to be auctioneers, but why should it forbid them a commercial driver’s license? He makes a surprising but reasonable point when he asks what has happened to “forgiveness.” When a prison sentence has been completed, should it not be easier to have a conviction vacated, after a spell or period of good behavior, so it is not a lifelong ball and chain?

On occasion Pearlstein argues that among the bad effects of the fragmented family is the increasing division in the United States between those who can make a good life on the basis of stable backgrounds and effective education, and those who cannot. He is speaking about increasing inequality, but not in the way it is usually addressed, in relation to tax policy. He pays no attention to how the effects of single parenthood might be moderated for children to some degree by economic measures, such as child benefits, as in Europe. He appreciates it when those on the left give attention to the problem of family fragmentation that so concern him. Might he not pay more attention to the economic and social policies they advocate that could moderate the harsh effects of single parenthood or the economic consequences of divorce? Even if less frequent in Europe, their effects, owing to social measures, are not so harsh and divisive there, and that could have been given more attention.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

Getting Smart: How Digital Learning Is Changing the World

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

“The revolution is on,” Tom Vander Ark declares in this review of digital learning circa 2011. With long experience in education, including time as a superintendent in Washington State, officer with the Gates Foundation, and CEO of Open Education Solutions, not to mention an endorsement from the former governor of West Virginia, Bob Wise, Vander Ark outlines the current moment as a welcome and overdue threshold in primary and secondary education. On one page alone he repeats, “The learning revolution underway is the shift from print to digital…,” “The revolution will yield powerful learning platforms…,” “The revolution will yield a new generation of schools…,” and “The learning revolution is underway but progress will be lumpy….”

As the subtitle indicates, we stand at a critical moment, and there is good reason for optimism, given the ways in which digital technology can customize learning and dismantle the old calendars and spaces of schooling. Extraordinary innovations have arrived—online curricula, learning games, customized play-lists—and they are ready for implementation across the land if only educators and public officials break with standard procedure and embrace them. It’s time to “get smart,” and hence this 10-chapter exhortation on the efficacious future. Every few pages Vander Ark adds a bold prediction sidebar: “In five years…Information from keystroke data will unlock the new field of motivation research…,” “In five years…Most learning platforms will feature a smart recommendation engine, similar to iTunes Genius…,” and “In five years…Science will confirm the obvious about how most boys learn and active learning models will be developed in response using expeditions, playlists, and projects.”

He accumulates rousing examples of individuals and institutions in breakthrough practice:

• students tapping into iTunes U, compiling e-portfolios, and editing web sites

• peer-to-peer learning sites and learning games such as Mangahigh

• online organizations such as K12 and School of One that replace wasteful “seat-in-class” time with customized learning time

• social networking that “will augment and then replace the classroom as the dominant organizing unit”

Experts, too, assert the radical advances of digital tools, such as Tom Chatfield, author of Fun Inc.: Why Gaming Will Dominate the Twenty-First Century, who says of games, “I’m in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we’ve ever invented has quite done before.” Vander Ark encapsulates the advent in a simple formula: “It changes everything when anyone can learn anything almost anywhere.”

As the effusions pile up, however, one wonders about how much the enthusiasm obscures some circumstances that complicate Vander Ark’s bold and sanguine vision. After all, broad, well-funded digital initiatives such as Maine’s statewide laptop program for middle schoolers have been around for a decade, and yet their academic impact has proven disappointing again and again. And Vander Ark affirms that social media “can help build a common culture and help make sense of a confusing world—and increasingly so for school communities,” but all he says about the dark side of social networking among teens—including excess peer pressure and gossip, sexting and bullying, cheating—is, “Some of their reasons for connecting will not be as noble as we’d like, so we’ll need to stay on top of this.”

These conditions don’t change the overall potential of digital learning, but more acknowledgment of them sustains a more sober, less partisan advocacy. Without it, Vander Ark slips too often into dramatic predictions and platitudes. He announces, “If we can help enough people get smart, I believe we can confront the challenge of climate change, public health, peace, and security,” as if smart people never pollute the earth or start wars. After glimpses of three bright kids learning online in creative ways, Vander Ark writes, “These portraits represent how millions of students could be learning with tools that are currently available to schools,” as if the cases of three prove millions more. And the trick of motivating kids, he says, has been found: “Any thirteen-year-old could tell you the answer. It’s game designers”—a too pat and blunt answer.

All this hype and prophecy is unnecessary. The digital future is here, and its main educational advantage, the individualization of learning, is recognized by everyone. At this point, the pressing questions are practical: how much it costs, how to overcome bureaucracy, for example. Vander Ark does include an appendix of concrete advice, such as urging state leaders to allow students to personalize their learning and base matriculation on demonstrated competency, not on seat time, but these are precisely the points to expound in the main text, not stick in an appendix. We don’t need any more puffy announcements of youth liberation, such as “This greater self-awareness and freedom brings with it new responsibilities and opportunities for students to better advocate for themselves.” And overdone assertions, such as “games have the motivational power to help us change the world,” don’t mean anything to public officials. What we need is sound evidence, presented without hyperbole, of scalable and cost-effective digital programs that yield higher reading, writing, and math achievement.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

What caring educator would not favor tests that allow students a choice in what they must answer?

What responsible college admissions officer wouldn’t grant applicants the right to withhold their SAT scores?

What committed Advanced Placement (AP) teacher wouldn’t expand access to as many students as possible?

What enlightened test developer wouldn’t prefer tests that identify each test-taker’s actual knowledge and skill levels and not those that just deliver a numerical score?

These aren’t just personal attitudes. They sway large organizations as well. The College Board repeatedly talks about “equitable access” to AP courses, and a 2008 report by the National Association for College Admission Counseling solemnly states, “there may be more colleges and universities that could make appropriate admissions decisions without requiring standardized admission tests such as the ACT and SAT,” and further, “some control clearly rests in the hands of postsecondary institutions to account for inequities that are reflected in test scores.”

But what happens when SAT scores are optional in college applications? When Bowdoin College allowed it, two results emerged, both predictable. One, applicants who withheld their numbers scored on average 120 points lower than did those who submitted their scores. Their withholding hence improved their applications, and it also boosted Bowdoin in the all-important U.S. News & World Report rankings (by making the average SAT score of the entering class look higher). But, two, the “withholders” hurt Bowdoin, for they performed 0.2 grade points worse than “submitters” did in first-year courses.

Or, what happens when tests allow students to choose the questions they answer, for instance, presenting a pool of essay questions from which test-takers choose two? First of all, you end up with inconsistencies: some questions are harder than others. And second, students often choose poorly, selecting the harder questions. Indeed, one study discovered, “the more that examinees liked a particular topic, the lower they scored on an essay they subsequently wrote on that topic!”

These outcomes belie the policies behind them, and they frustrate the generous souls who crafted the plans. Students end up performing worse than officials expected. Who wants to hear the bad news, though? Not many, and that’s precisely the complaint of distinguished statistician Howard Wainer in his book Uneducated Guesses, in which the preceding quotation and the Bowdoin case appear. Most educators stick to their faiths rather than follow the evidence, Wainer complains, and their stubbornness necessitates this blunt retort to education policies founded on bad evidence and good intentions. The volume’s subtitle, Using Evidence to Uncover Misguided Education Policies, describes the method. In 11 curt chapters, Wainer analyzes actual data and uncovers glitches, quirks, misconceptions, and unintended consequences of one practice after another, particularly those related to tests.

Each practice, from Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) to coscaling achievement tests, aims to solve a problem or address a need, but under Wainer’s withering assembly of numbers (scores, dollars, demographics), they collapse. He notes the discomfort people feel with the exclusive nature of AP courses, but wonders if it’s right to open them to students who have little chance of passing the exam. On principle, many would answer, “Give everyone a chance!” But, Wainer replies, such principles aren’t free. He takes the case of AP Calculus results in Detroit and estimates that if the city were to restrict the course to students who score 66 or above on the PSAT Math test, then the resulting cost per passing score on the AP test would be $1,167. If the city set the eligible score much lower, at 31, the cost per passing score would reach $4,513. “Would it be a better use of resources to provide a more suitable course for the students who do not show the necessary aptitude?” Wainer suggests.

In the case of CAT, educators favor the format because it calibrates questions to a student’s ability. If a test-taker misses a question, the next question shifts downward in difficulty. If he aces a question, the next one shifts upward. After a few dozen questions, the test identifies the competency level of the student—a better diagnostic than a simple percentage score. But it doesn’t allow test-takers to review and change an answer, which assessment experts consider important to accurate testing. If CAT does incorporate question review, Wainer warns, then when a subject finds an easy question pop up, he assumes he got the previous one wrong and backtracks to change it. Or worse, he deliberately answers every question wrong, ensuring easy questions all the way through. At the end, he returns to the beginning and answers every question correctly, yielding a near-perfect score. In other words, the very customization that educators praise allows savvy students to game the test. Wainer issued that caution in 1993, and he advises that we keep the original CAT because the benefits of item review don’t outweigh the risks of its abuse.  Nevertheless, he notes, test specialists have pressed forward with item review since then—another case of hope overriding evidence.

However sharp and persuasive these exposés, though, they stand at a disadvantage, and Wainer knows it. This idea sounded so right, that innovation so sensible and fair, and watching them fail is depressing. Wainer summons evidence and reality against the modifications, but at stake is not  just this and that policy but avid social hopes, sympathy for students, and feelings of injustice, too. One advocate for question review on CAT tests asserts that students “feel at a disadvantage when they cannot review and alter their responses,” their feelings apparently forcing a change in format. Another proponent begins with a basic condition of test-taking, namely, stress, leading the authors to craft methods that allow students more control over the test but that identify cheating (one recommendation they make is to limit changed answers to 15 percent of the total number of answers). Wainer cites both, but has only a dry reply taken from Albert Einstein: “Old theories never die, just the people who believe in them.”

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Steven Brill’s Class Warfare must be the most prominently reviewed book on education in decades: a lengthy front-page review by Sara Mosle in the New York Times Book Review, a lead review by Joel Klein in the Wall Street Journal, a critical follow-up piece on Brill on the news pages of the Times by Michael Winerip. Brill has had a varied career, founding The American Lawyer magazine and Court TV, writing books on the teamsters and on the effects of 9/11, but he had not dealt with American schools until he wrote a sensational article for The New Yorker on the “rubber rooms,” the rooms in which New York City teachers whom the administration believes should be fired spend their days and years—an average of three—getting their salaries, accruing their benefits, and doing nothing while the arbitration procedures dictated by the union contract grind on.

Class Warfare takes a wider view but one clearly influenced by the experience of the irrationality and inefficiency imposed by lengthy union contracts, which dictate in detail what can and cannot be done in disciplining or, indeed, leading and guiding teachers. For Brill and the reformers in his book, the unions are the enemy, with their defense of incompetent teachers, their hostility to charters, and their resistance to efforts to judge teachers by the achievement of their students on tests. Those who are trying to reform American schools are to Brill defined by their embrace of these measures. Brill tells the story of reform, particularly during the brief years of the Obama administration, beginning with the Race to the Top, through the experience of a varied group of reformers. He begins with a number of individuals shaped by their early experience in Teach For America (TFA), and he follows them and their careers—in New Orleans, Colorado, Washington, and New York—episodically through the book. They are supplemented in his account by political insiders; by Wall Streeters who have developed an interest in education reform; by vigorous administrators trying to implement reform measures, such as Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, Mark Roosevelt of Pittsburgh, and others; and by billionaire philanthropists such as Eli Broad and Bill Gates. Interestingly, almost all his reformers are Democrats, who face the problem of reconciling measures opposed by the teachers unions with the reality that these are the solidest supporters of Democratic legislators, governors, and presidents. Along the way, Brill gives background on Albert Shanker and the rise of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the 1983 report of President Reagan’s National Commission on Excellence in Education and what presidents have done since, the creation of TFA by Wendy Kopp, and on David Levin and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) and other successful efforts to create charter schools.

New York City, about whose public schools, teachers, and unions Brill learned a great deal in his research on the “rubber rooms,” looms large in the accounts, and recurrently we are introduced to Joel Klein struggling with the union on a new contract. Brill generally presents him announcing some victory, which on close examination seems less like a concession than it did at first glance. In his review of Brill’s book, Klein defends himself: the contract of 2005 resulted in “ending forced placement of teachers in schools based on seniority, recapturing a 45-minute period that had previously been given over to teachers…, eliminating certain grievance procedures, and extending the school day for some 300,000 struggling students by 150 minutes a week.” Of course, the perspectives of writer and of administrator, hemmed in by a legislature bound to the union, in a state in which almost everything needs legislative approval, must differ.

And yet in the book itself we learn the limitation of, for example, the ending of “forced placement.” Yes, teachers could not on the basis of their seniority impose themselves on a principal who did not want them, but neither could they be assigned to a school they did not want to teach in. Brill writes, “If either the principal or the teacher did not agree on a placement, then the teacher would stay in limbo as long as it took… but still on the payroll….” The result: “Within five years there would be more than one thousand teachers sitting on a list called the Absent Teacher Reserve. These were the teachers who had been excessed but had not taken positions elsewhere.”

One would have thought the scandal exposed by the rubber-room article would have led to correction, and indeed it did—to some extent. The rubber room had been radically reduced by the time of Brill’s book, from 744 to 83 teachers. But only 33 had been terminated as a result of arbitration. “Another 154 had been allowed to resign (typically in return for receiving some kind of severance payment and being able to keep their pensions)…474…had been…‘returned to service.’ Some went back into classrooms. But in a deft bureaucratic shell game, most of them—272 of these 474 cases—were simply added to the Absent Teacher Reserve list, where they were still paid to do nothing.”

Race to the Top, launched by a Democratic administration, did propose to give large sums to states (but still a pittance of their huge expenditures on public education), which, as part of a general plan for improvement, adopted certain of the favored reform measures, allowing the formation of charter schools and introducing evaluation and compensation of teachers based on the results achieved by their pupils. The necessary legislation has followed in many states, but Brill is not persuaded: in New York State, there is the proviso that “nothing in the law could override existing union contracts.” The procedures prescribed in union contracts remain valid. And, indeed, despite the law, the union is still disputing in the courts the degree to which tested student progress can be taken into account in evaluating teachers.

Despite 420 pages of what amounts to a brief against the unions, there is a surprising about-face in the last 20.

In conversation with David Levin at a New York KIPP school, Brill faces up to the enormous strain on teachers in KIPP and other achieving charter schools and in TFA, a strain that they can take for a few years but will not choose for a lifetime. Substantial improvement in the education of American schoolchildren has to be based not on those rare individuals who are willing to do this, but on raising the level of competence of a workforce of millions. Can one believe that the practices of those millions can be changed for the better by the competition of charter schools (1.5 million children versus 50 million in district schools), by promotion and compensation and dismissal based on test scores of their classes, by the elimination of “last in, first out” layoff rules? All would do some good. Could they amount to a revolution?

Brill proposes a radical step for New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg: appoint Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT, to the post of chancellor of the New York City schools. (“Never in a million years,” says the mayor.) As concerned about her place in history as Al Shanker was, Weingarten would find ways to do the right thing. The teachers and the unions have to be brought into the reform movement. Brill titles this last, surprising chapter “A Marathon, Not a Sprint.” Sara Mosle, in her judicious review in the New York Times, notes that although 1 percent of the New York City teachers may have been in the rubber room, 20 percent of teachers quit after the first year, and 40 percent have left after three years. Is the pay too low, the job too hard, are the wrong people recruited, and the wrong people staying? Dealing effectively with any one of these questions seems beyond the reach of the favored reforms that are at the heart of Brill’s account, worthy as they are.

I should note that Brill concentrates exclusively on those measures around which battles with the unions have been fought. There is almost nothing on possible changes in pedagogy, in school organization and structure, in curriculum: E. D. Hirsch is not mentioned, the push for a national curriculum gets only a few paragraphs. All these have to be part of the marathon.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors: Fighting for the Soul of America’s Toughest High School

By Alexander Russo

Jossey-Bass, 2011, $24.95; 232 pages.

Reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Neither “stray dogs” nor “saints” play any role in Alexander Russo’s account of how Green Dot, a nonprofit organization that creates new charter high schools, managed to take over Locke High School in the Watts area of Los Angeles, and what it achieved in its first year managing it.

Stray dogs are occasionally found on Locke’s substantial campus, and the “Saints” are its athletic teams, which on occasion have had great success. Alain L. Locke High School was built after the Watts riots of 1965. It opened in 1967 and was part of a substantial effort to improve conditions in Watts. For some years it was the pride of the area. But it was an inner-city high school, initially primarily black, in later years increasingly Hispanic, with all the attributes common to such: poor scores on the various tests, district, state and national, that have come over the years to evaluate schools; poor attendance; low graduation rates; and serious student discipline problems.

But Locke has received much more attention than any other inner-city high school. It was the subject of an earlier book, Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach For America by Donna Foote, which tells us that President George H. W. Bush visited it in 1988, President Bill Clinton in 1999. Tipper Gore, wife of former vice president Al Gore, Senator John McCain, Ice Cube, Muhammed Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and James Olmos, the star of Stand and Deliver, have all been visitors. Green Dot’s takeover of Locke was covered in great detail in the Los Angeles Times and in an article in the New Yorker.

Margaret Spellings, then secretary of education, visited a Green Dot school in Los Angeles in 2007, and the principal of Locke at the time, Frank Wells, then in his third year (he had lasted longer than his recent predecessors), spoke up about his frustrations. He had effected some improvement in school discipline and in academic tests, “but the district kept on sending him ineffective tenured teachers who were  extremely difficult to remove.” (In Relentless Pursuit, we learn of the final successful removal of one teacher, after three years of effort and a great mass of documentation.)

Reporters covered Spellings’s visit, and Wells’s intervention. “It sounded as though Wells was calling out his employers in public, proposing a Green Dot takeover of the school—and committing professional suicide.” Green Dot had already established some small charter high schools, which were attracting the better students of the neighborhood, a source of frustration to Wells. Steve Barr, a progressive political activist who had founded Green Dot, had his eye on taking over and remaking a large urban high school. Some teachers at Locke were interested in Green Dot and had met with Barr. And California law makes it possible for a vote of teachers in a school to turn that school into a charter. One would like to know more on how that law works, and what the state provides to such charters, but Russo is skimpy on these details, as on so many others.

After initial skepticism, Wells came to support the teachers pressing for a Green Dot takeover. A majority of teachers voted for it, at which point Wells was summarily removed from the principalship. Coming out of a meeting at 6 p.m., he was met by the area director, who told him “he was being reassigned to the district office and asked for Wells’s keys…. There was no opportunity for [Wells] to tell his teachers or explain to the kids. He never went back into the building. It was less than a week after he’d publicly voiced support for Green Dot.” One would like to know more about how this happened to a rather successful principal, one who had been doing better than his predecessors.

Despite union and district efforts to overturn the vote, the Green Dot supporters succeeded, and after a year of transition, in which there was a good deal of disorder, Green Dot took over the school, with a new principal and new teachers. (One distinction of Green Dot among charter school organizations is that its teachers are unionized, but we are not told anything more about the union except that it is not the one that had represented the Locke teachers.)

One would like to know more about Green Dot’s philosophy, practices, model, if any, but all one manages to learn is that, as one teacher explained to the students, “at the new Locke, teachers cared about their students, wanted to help them pass their classes, and would not abandon that effort [implying the former teachers did not ‘care,’ etc.?]. ‘I’m going to shake your hand every day, no matter what [one teacher tells her new class]…. Don’t worry about germs—I’ve got lots of hand sanitizer.’” There are no details about Green Dot’s recruitment of teachers, training, etc. The new teachers, as one of the holdovers notes, were much more white than the old Locke staff, “despite all efforts to recruit minorities.”

Wells was not selected by Green Dot for the principalship of the new Locke. He is African American, came out of San Francisco housing projects, and has been in military service. Veronica Coleman, his replacement, “is the product of a childhood on a Michigan farm and years playing sports.” Russo is rather sparse on details about race. One does not learn until well into his book that Wells is black.

What is clear about Green Dot is its commitment to small high schools, and so the reorganized Locke consisted of six schools. Efforts at creating smaller schools within Locke had already taken place, in response to No Child Left Behind prescriptions, but we are told little about these: their problems, successes, failures. In the new Locke there were to be a number of small baby Lockes, each beginning with one class of ninth graders, but scheduled to add an additional grade each year until they became full four-year high schools. The old Locke students were organized into two subschools, one called “white” and one “black,” with appropriate uniform dress requirements, and these were slated to disappear, losing a grade a year as the baby Lockes added new grades.

Russo, an experienced education journalist, received a Spencer Foundation Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia to write this book, which covers the story of Green Dot, of its efforts to take over an inner-city high school, and of its first year managing Locke, with briefer coverage of its second year. Predictably, attendance, academic achievement, and the rate of graduation improved. Locke had a new teaching body, one likely more enthusiastic, harder working, and perhaps better qualified in some respects than the old, and a new administrative .team. It saw the effects of this new effort: the Hawthorne effect, it has been named, after famous experiments on productivity in the 1930s.

Donna Foote, in her book on Locke written a few years before the takeover, focuses on four teachers who came through Teach For America (TFA), which had sent a good number of young teachers to the school. They made up for years a large percentage of Locke’s teaching force. It is not clear whether they still do under Green Dot’s management; Russo does not mention the TFA influence at Locke. One learns a great deal in Foote’s book about the remarkable effort TFA puts into recruiting the best possible students for its enterprise, the energy and resources it devotes to evaluating its recruits, and the awesome effort these young people put into their teaching. They get good results—no wonder. Some of those who feature in Russo’s book, we learn from Foote, came to Locke through TFA. One wishes Russo had told half as much as Foote does about how Green Dot recruits, trains, and evaluates its teachers.

The first year of Green Dot management of Locke was 2008–09, the second 2009–10; we are now past the end of the third year, at which point the old Locke fully disappeared, absorbed into the new smaller Lockes. One wonders how things are going. It is the unfortunate fact about school reform stories that by the third or fourth year many of the reformers are off doing other things: they have gone on to graduate school, become administrators and consultants, and the like. This is true of the TFA recruits, too, whose contract is only for two years. One wonders how well Green Dot holds its teachers. Perhaps a book on the third or fourth year of a successful reform would teach us something about how initial gains can be maintained.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard University.

Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools
by Terry M. Moe
Brookings Institution Press, 2011, $34.95; 513 pages.

Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Henig

Some 10 years in the making, this book comes at such a propitious time that one might wonder whether author Terry Moe held it waiting for this moment to arrive. For years Professor Moe has been pointing out the teachers unions’ tendency to use what he considers to be their vastly disproportionate powers to benefit their members at the expense of schoolchildren. Now, with Republican governors like Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio publicly taking on collective bargaining for public school teachers, replacing strict salary schedules with merit pay, and introducing value-added measures into decisions about salaries and tenure, events have caught up to his message. It seems Moe’s time has come.

When someone has been as prominently identified with an issue and a perspective as Terry Moe has been vis-à-vis teachers unions, potential readers might be prone to shrug off the announcement of a new book, assuming they know what’s inside. Let me dispose of that concern first. Whether you agree with its key themes or not—and I do not—this is an important book and one well worth reading.

Those familiar with Moe’s other books, journal articles, and various opinion pieces will recognize the trademarks: a strong dose of institutional theory, original empirical analysis, crisp writing, and sharp thinking. They’ll find a central argument that has not changed and some data they’ve seen before, but enriched by more historical context, new data, and a comprehensive view on unions not previously available from Moe and rarely approached by others.

Perhaps the distinguishing element of Moe’s perspective, one I find alternately appealing and exasperating, is his unrelenting refusal to let what he sees as trees distract from what he sees as forest. Moe understands that we live in a multicausal world and that serious efforts to disentangle “all the myriad, inter-related factors” that affect schools “would inevitably conclude with something like ‘it’s complicated.’” But “this isn’t very enlightening,” and so he sees his role to be one of filtering out less important considerations. “The task is not to capture everything of any relevance. It is to get to the heart of the matter.”

Despite this mission to simplify, Moe is too intellectually honest to hide all the complexities, and as a result there is much in the book that tugs against its central themes. The strongly critical view of unions that prevails when Moe steps back to look at the forest lives in tension with the more complex, nuanced, and interesting picture that emerges when he allows himself to step in amongst the trees.

Let me be clear here. Moe is neither contradicting himself nor softening his view. Rather, he’s wrestling with two anomalies. First, even the data and analysis that he compiles himself provide a cloudier image than do his theory and policy stance. Second, the obvious facts that teachers unions are being powerfully challenged, often defeated, and led to pragmatic and tactical compromise work against the air of crisis and indignation that Moe still wants to cultivate.

Moe’s institutional theories lead him to account for the power and behavior of political actors by zeroing in on laws and the incentives they create. In his historical narrative, the game changers are mid-20th-century laws about collective-bargaining rights and mandatory dues: “The key to the spectacular growth of public sector unions is that the laws changed. And what the laws did was to make union organizing and collective bargaining much easier, largely by setting up legal frameworks that allowed for elements of coercion.” If laws are indeed responsible for the creation of union power, the policy message for reducing union power would seem straightforward: one only need undo the offending laws. Yet, when he turns to the data, Moe’s own analyses show that union membership is high in states without pro-union laws, and that teacher support for unions is high whether or not they are legally forced into paying dues. “It seems to be a mistake, then, to think that somehow the great majority of teachers are forced to join the union because the laws push them into it.” When existing research, “warts and all,” does not converge on his expectation that collective bargaining lowers achievement, he writes that off to how difficult it is to empirically disentangle complex causal chains and reasserts his faith that “whether the exact effects of collective bargaining on achievement can be well estimated or not, rules that keep bad teachers in the classrooms are still bad for kids.” In an appendix, Moe presents a regression analysis that apparently confirms his expectation that state laws mandating union fees affect membership levels. But when his probit analysis, which he admits is more appropriate, does not produce the same results, his “inclination is to think that…the probit results are off track and misleading.”

Moe’s indignation about what he sees as union arrogance and his frustration with progress that is slower than he would like force him to downplay evidence that non-union forces have gained the upper hand in many arenas where education policies are shaped. He does not deny that unions are losing battles at all levels of government. Chapter 7 discusses New Orleans, New York City, and Washington, D.C. (at least while Michelle Rhee was in charge) as places where unions have had to acquiesce to reforms they initially opposed, but tellingly titles the chapter “Small Victories for Sanity” [emphasis added]. He chronicles the expansion of charters despite union opposition, but insists that when considering this “modicum of progress,” that “it is important to recognize, as a political baseline, that the union’s ideal—if they can get it—is to have no charter schools at all, with the possible exception of unionized charter schools.” He notes the prominent role of the Gates, Broad, Walton, and other foundations that decidedly do not toe the union line, but insists that they are only “at the periphery of power.” And while concluding that the union’s days of dominance are numbered, he emphasizes that this is only due to the confluence of “fantastically powerful” forces, a “lining up of the stars,” and an “accident of history.” The redeeming forces are the Obama-Duncan team and the unfolding effects of education technologies that will weaken the central power of labor. Lest reformers get complacent, he urges them on: “Just consider this sobering question: ‘What if Hillary Clinton had been elected president?’”[emphasis in original]…because “it easily could have happened.” And he tempers his story about the healing powers of technology by noting that its full impact is “many years down the road.”

Important as this book may be, I’m left to conclude that the timing may be off in the end. The growing muscle of non-union forces, the more pragmatic stances of progressive union leaders (whether sincerely felt or tactically adopted), and roughly 25 years of education reform that has gone against the traditional union vein leave Professor Moe sounding a bit like a tardy Paul Revere, sounding the cry that “the British are coming” when it is not redcoats in formation that he is hearing but the drumbeat around the wedding of Kate and William. Teachers unions retain considerable power, to be sure, and for this reason I think they necessarily must be drawn in to the reform movement if it is to make a serious and lasting mark. But unions are just one among several key players these days, and there are whiffs of anachronism around this larger-than-life portrait of their dominant role.

Jeffrey R. Henig is professor of political science and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Schoolhouse of Cards: An Inside Story of No Child Left Behind and Why America Needs a Real Education Revolution

Collision Course: Federal Education Policy Meets State and Local Realities
By Paul Manna
CQ Press, 2010, $32.95; 206 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Whatever Possessed the President? was the unlikely title of Robert C. Wood’s memoir of urban policy during the 1960s. The same thought springs to mind in reading these two books on the shaping and progress of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, the great expansion of federal education policy effected during George W. Bush’s first year in office. One wonders not only what he and his advisers could have been thinking, but what the lawmakers who implemented NCLB could have been thinking. Its aims were unbelievably ambitious—every child to be proficient in reading, mathematics, and science for the appropriate grade level by 2014; an array of required tests in every state for grades 3 through 8 and in high school; the elimination of persistent achievement gaps for minorities, those with limited English, children from low-income families, and perhaps even students with disabilities; graduated requirements to be imposed on schools and school districts that did not make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) toward these goals; and much else.

Eugene Hickok reminds us that education was a major theme in the campaign of the Republican candidate for president in 2000, despite Republican skepticism about any major federal role in education. Elimination of the Department of Education had been a frequent note in the party’s rhetoric for decades. But under Governor Bush, Texas education had made great progress, according to the state’s own tests, although this achievement was disputed during the campaign. Bush cited this improvement as one of his major accomplishments, and he hoped to take the measures that had led to it national. Bush further had managed all this while Democrats controlled the Texas legislature. Indeed, NCLB, formally an expansion of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, moved through Congress in 2001 with surprising bipartisan support. It radically implemented at the federal level a call for “accountability” in education, which had already led to substantial changes in many states.

Hickok, who served as undersecretary of education during the first George W. Bush administration, gives a detailed account of how the legislation and the key decisions were shaped. The president’s White House advisers played the dominant role; the secretary of education, Roderick Paige, former superintendent of the Houston schools, is not much in evidence, and neither is Hickok himself, despite his high office. He informs us that it was decided early on that accountability should be imposed on the individual school. To make the teachers accountable would not only have involved a statistical burden that states were not prepared to accept, but would have led to strong union resistance, which would have influenced the Democrats.

The administrative burdens at the federal and state levels, it can be imagined, were enormous. AYP was to be measured not only at the school level but for defined subgroups in each school. As a consequence for failure to make AYP, schools and school districts were required to undertake measures for improvement: To begin with, students would be allowed to move to any other school in the district or would get supplementary tutoring, and beyond that, in further years in failure, “corrective action” and “restructuring” would be required, by schools and school districts.

All this was spelled out in mind-boggling detail in the legislation: One can find a helpful summary in Collision Course. Paul Manna, a professor at William and Mary, is particularly oriented to the administrative problems the legislation created at the federal and state levels. Many states already required their own testing, which had to be conformed to federal requirements, and the federal government now required a huge amount of reporting by states of plans for implementation and, in time, test results. Inevitable “collisions” could be expected to occur, among federal and state, state and school district, school district and schools, with Department of Education officials enforcing the law, and elected officials responding to the local inability to fulfill federal requirements and trying to get relief from them. There were also conflicts among top officials in the Department of Education, though Hickok is curiously silent about his role.

One wonders how anyone informed about education could have expected the measures imposed on schools and school districts to have had great effect. The freedom to choose alternative public schools? In heavily minority urban areas, not to mention rural areas, there would have been few or no superior alternative public schools with available seats from which to choose, and few of those who became eligible to make this choice did so. In any case, freedom to choose among public schools was already widespread and one could see how minimal its influence was.

Manna meticulously and soberly reports on the statistics showing how few students who could did choose different schools, how many received tutoring—a good many more—and with what results, if any, for achievement. The “corrective action” required after the fourth year of missing AYP, and the “restructuring” required in the fifth and sixth year after missing AYP, have not for the most part occurred. But the current secretary of education says that 82 percent of schools may be expected not to reach AYP in 2010-11. Presumably many requirements in the law for schools in need of improvement for a number of years will simply not be upheld. Many school districts, on their own, such as New York City’s, undertake the kinds of “corrective action” and “restructuring” that the law calls for after a number of years of failing AYP, but without any great outcomes on achievement.

The most serious effects of NCLB I believe may be seen at the teaching level in the classroom. For the weaker inner-city schools, in particular, the required tests have come to dominate the curriculum (see “Inside the Testing Factory,” book reviews, Winter 2008). Reading and math instruction plays a dominant role in these schools and classrooms, with some positive results; social science and arts education have had to be shunted aside.

As many have pointed out, it is a good thing that NCLB has made student academic achievement a central concern nationally (see “Will NCLB Hit the Wall?” forum, Fall 2007). But many state tests set the “proficiency” bar low, the decision to mark schools as “proficient” or not is too crude, the AYP measure means that many good schools with less need to do better are pointlessly marked “in need of improvement,” and the remedial measures are insufficient. Should they be prescribed by the federal level in any case? The law needs a radical overhaul.

What is possible in the present Congress, so sharply divided and in which a good part of both parties might be happier to see NCLB dispensed with entirely? While Manna gives many suggestions for improvement, Hickok surprisingly calls for a radical and revolutionary overhaul of the whole education system to adapt to contemporary realities. Neither the lesser nor the larger suggestions will find many buyers in the current Congress.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard University.

The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes On the Nation’s Worst School District
By Richard Whitmire
Jossey-Bass, 2011, $24.95; 270 pages.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Soon after her widely publicized appointment as chancellor of the Washington, D.C., schools, Michelle Rhee devoted a day to school visits, some of them unannounced. At one, an odd thing happened. When Rhee and her party rang the bell at the entrance, the principal herself opened the gate and gazed at them questioningly. She had no idea who Rhee was.

That’s the first of many anecdotes in Richard Whitmire’s fast-moving chronicle of Rhee’s life and career that impart the strange, dismaying world of public schools in the nation’s capital. He focuses on her tense three-and-a-half-year tenure, the battle lines remembered by everyone—Rhee vs. the city council, Rhee vs. the teachers unions, vs. the Washington Post, vs. black parents. What isn’t as familiar, and sometimes downright perverse, are the many bizarre yet customary conditions under which Rhee operated, which Whitmire portrays in illuminating (and infuriating) detail.

The opening chapters chronicle Rhee’s pre-D.C. life. We learn of a pleasant childhood in Toledo, Ohio, college days at Cornell, training with Teach For America, three grueling but successful years in a Baltimore elementary school, leadership of The New Teacher Project, and testimony at an arbitration hearing where the New York Department of Education squared off against Randi Weingarten and the United Federation of Teachers (“She was dazzling,” former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein tells Whitmire). The aim is to humanize the portrait of Rhee against the prevailing caricature of an imperious, rude Asian woman, insensitive to poor blacks.

Several facts are striking or amusing in light of her later fame. When her little brother fared poorly in school, she was grounded. Her mother sent her away to college not to get a degree but to find a husband. At Teach For America, she proudly donned an “anti-Bush” button. In her first year of teaching, evaluators advised her, “We believe your classroom is a dangerous place for children and we think you should reconsider this career.” For a time at Cornell, a friend recalls, Rhee didn’t want to date any white men.

When Rhee enters the chancellor’s position, though, the narrative switches to a different reality:

• In spite of terrible test scores, in the year before Rhee’s arrival not one teacher was let go for ineffectiveness.

• One school Rhee visited was built for 600 students but had only 83.

• Twenty-seven D.C. schools faced restructuring for failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress, but when Rhee investigated, she says, “Most of the people I talked to were like, ‘What is restructuring? What is AYP?’”

• When Rhee closed 23 (!) dreadful schools, some of the loudest protesters were those with the most to gain: parents of students.

• When Rhee was blocked from firing staff, she found them so incompetent that she told them to stay home.

• Her fierce efforts to improve schools with high black enrollment often earned her credit for a “white agenda.”

Rhee’s outsider status helped her enact reforms against these nonsensical circumstances and brave the repugnance of the Washington Teachers’ Union, Washington Post columnists, and city council members. Unfortunately, it also kept her from recognizing the full import of her decisions. At one point, as she waits for tardy D.C. city council member Marion Barry outside a failing elementary school, she drifts across the street to chat with residents. They tell her, “We don’t need another boarded-up building in this neighborhood.” When she puts bad and weak teachers on notice, she doesn’t realize that she’s targeting a historic avenue of middle-class employment for African Americans in the city.

The mismatch between Rhee’s vision and local culture pops up again and again. She insisted that the most important factor in a classroom is the quality of the teacher, but Nathan Saunders, then vice president of the teachers union, tells Whitmire, “That doesn’t work in our community.” Religion and extended family play that role, the teacher belonging to a “system” in which “you were apt to lose your children, where harm could come to the child or the family unit.” She spoke with black parents frequently, holding more “living room” sessions in the all-black Ward 8 than anywhere else, Whitmire notes, but she underestimated the “respect” factor in the black community. At town hall meetings, parents rose up to chide her not so much for decisions she made, but for giving them no voice in the process. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert wrote that “concerns raised by parents about Ms. Rhee’s take-no-prisoners approach were ignored. It was disrespectful.” Herbert said nothing about the nature of Rhee’s actual policies.

It is hard to weigh policies when roiling psycho-political attitudes unbalance the scales. In Whitmire’s telling, Rhee’s saga reveals that vested interests aren’t the only impediment to reform. True, the school system often functions as a jobs program for adults, but jobs and money aren’t the reason the mother of a second grader who has a derelict teacher regards someone pledging to fire the teacher as a demon. They don’t explain why administrators in an out-of-control school allow athletic coaches total control over their players. They don’t explain why high school counselors aren’t aware of their own school’s graduation requirements.

This is more than incompetence and guaranteed paychecks: It’s dysfunction, a creeping neurosis. Rhee came in and shocked the system. Her example has inspired others, Whitmire concludes, the strategy among reform-minded school leaders in 2011 being “Michelle Rhee without the drama.” One wonders, though, whether it wasn’t Rhee’s confrontational style that produced the advances in D.C. Keep the same policies but advocate them with “Michelle Lite” (Whitmire’s term) and the dysfunction might smoothly absorb them. Perhaps change can come only through conflict.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

The Same Thing Over and Over: How School Reformers Get Stuck in Yesterday’s Ideas

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Ask a dozen educators why public schools seem to be in perpetual crisis and why successive reforms so often fall short and they’ll answer with familiar reasons: not enough money, union contracts, teacher certification, too much testing, NCLB…

Education policy researcher Rick Hess doesn’t always disagree, but he adds to the list a circumstance that traverses them all: Education reform itself is in a pathological condition. His title underscores the irrationality of the enterprise, “the same thing over and over,” as do the book’s many epithets to describe its workings (“aimless charade,” “frenzied tinkering,” “unduly attached,” “talismanic significance,” “ossified mantras,” “ill-conceived fad”). Reformers hype the latest solution to low test scores and high dropout rates as a stunning breakthrough, the future of schooling. Slogans such as “education is the new civil right” sound forthright, but they burden practical policy discussions with tense personal and ideological commitments.

It is true that the education establishment often meets reform proposals with heated denunciation:

…the education reform movement in Massachusetts and the nation is part of a decades-long corporate and government attack on public education and on our children.

Vouchers are designed to destroy public schools and end education as a public institution.

Our primary concern is that voucher programs could end up resembling the ethnic cleansing now occurring in Kosovo.

Such excessive expressions signify a psycho-political state, one that resembles a neurotic person who agonizes over this behavior and that feeling but never burrows down to deeper causes and structures. Reforms address class size, school size, teacher “dispositions,” parental choice, alternative certification, and other features of the system, but the basic machinery remains in place. The debates can be ferocious, Hess writes, but “seen from an arm’s length removed, the diagnoses generally amount to a concession that everyone can more or less go on about their business, so long as we demand more, do more, and spend more.”

To go beyond tinkering, he insists, we need an attitude adjustment. Certain basics of education policy have hardened into inevitabilities—the brick-and-mortar building and uniform learning goals, for example—and to put them on the table for examination strikes many as radical, irresponsible, or just plain malevolent. People need to disinvest from this routine and that, and lower the volume of their opinions. More humility and less contentiousness, Hess advises, and more experimentation and less stiffness. Most of all, stop trying to solve everything. Look at how often reform has failed before.

Indeed, the long-term perspective is the first step in the process, and so Hess devotes much of the book to setting current cruxes in the shadow of history. We argue over vocational vs. academic curricula, but the ancients did, too (Sophists vs. the Socratics). We complain about the costs of textbooks and ponder other methods of delivery; in the Middle Ages, students rented manuscripts directly from the authors! We consider summer vacation a fact of nature, but in the 1840s the school year in northeastern cities lasted more than 240 days. Some of Hess’s remembrances produce ironic results:

•Reformers pushed for smaller schools a few years back to improve instruction and deepen the curriculum, but 100 years ago reformers created large schools for precisely the same reasons.

•Reformers continue to develop new “dispositions” in teacher certification on grounds of diversity and multiculturalism, but reformers devised dispositions long ago on grounds of emotional and physical vitality. The latter look ridiculous today, so what makes the former not potentially ridiculous a few years hence?

•Reformers aim to curtail school boards in order to make administration more efficient (or less dysfunctional in the case of some boards), but, as with school size, reformers created school boards 100 or so years ago for precisely the same reasons.

•Policymakers often defend public schools as more democratic and diverse than private schools, but in the past public schools served as a restrictive mode of socialization — for instance, when they were advocated as a bulwark against private Catholic schooling.

These cases advance because of forgetfulness, which in turn licenses a damaging form of certitude and conceit. People proceed without recognizing that “there are no permanent solutions in schooling” and that ideas announced today have been announced before with equal fanfare. A little more background might temper their claims. “History humbles,” Hess declares.

More institutional memory will advance the debate, too, “emancipating” (a favorite term here) reform from unreasonable expectations, overdone claims of novelty, and us versus them groupings. With a sober awareness of past disappointments, we can bore down into existing structures and envision new, genuinely new, ways of education, “rethinking the structure of schooling.” One example is the School of One program in New York City in which the old model of one teacher handling 25 students at once in one classroom is broken up into a new model of each student being assigned each day to a large class, a tutor, a computer simulation, or a small group, whatever works best at that moment, until the student meets the learning objective. Another idea Hess floats is to break up the monopoly of school boards by nationalizing the services boards provide, so that an effective approach or policy could be imported from one state to another without going through the costly bureaucracy of the importer. Still another is to transfer the sites of teacher certification from universities to K–12 schools on a hands-on apprenticeship model.

Of course, the interests against such innovations are strong (where would all the ed school profs go?), and pathologies inevitably form defenses against the designs that would cure them. This past October, Hess wrote an op-ed in the New York Daily News on the end of Michelle Rhee’s three-year run as D.C. schools chancellor. Rhee and Mayor Adrian Fenty began with the rational expectation that “if they could deliver impressive academic results in the first couple of years, their critics would melt away.” Scores did rise significantly, but “the criticism and conflict only built.” At the end, only 30 percent of the African American community in D.C. supported Rhee.

As for Hess’s sober and sensible calls for muting the rhetoric of policy debates, it’s hard to feel much optimism. In the Fall 2010 issue of UCEA Review (available at the University Council for Educational Administration web site), former UCEA president and UNC-Chapel Hill professor Fenwick W. English has an essay titled “The 10 Most Wanted Enemies of American Public Education’s School Leadership.” Scroll down to the list at the end of the article and there he is at number 5: Frederick M. Hess.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Five Miles Away, A World Apart: One City, Two Schools, and the Story of Educational Opportunity in Modern America

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

The two schools referred to in the title of this book are Thomas Jefferson (“Tee-Jay”) High School in Richmond, Virginia, and Freeman High School, in suburban Henrico County. They show the contrasts we would expect between a high school in an urban and predominantly black school district, and one in a suburban, predominantly white, and middle-class county. But these schools do not play the central role in this book: they make intermittent appearances, illustrating a very detailed account of how legal efforts have failed in the 56 years since the historic Brown decision to overcome the effects of the segregation of black and poor students.

The overall verdict of the author, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, is that these efforts have failed primarily because we have not been able to bring together urban and suburban school districts to reduce the concentrations of black students. His plea for greater integration as the road to improving educational outcomes for poor and black students closely echoes that recently made by Gerald Grant in his Hope and Despair in the American City: Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh (see “Tale of Two Cities,” book review, Spring 2010). This may well be true, but it is surprising to see such strong advocacy for the racial integration of schools at a time when the prospects for any public action—executive, legislative, or judicial—to combine for purposes of integrating urban and suburban school districts are just about nonexistent.

None of the other legal approaches show much promise, Ryan argues. He reviews the complex tangle of legal efforts to increase state support for urban schools, by way of litigation based on state constitutions. This followed another Supreme Court check to federal action to equalize or increase support to urban schools. Little has been accomplished after decades of litigation and much admonition of state legislatures by state supreme courts. Nor is Ryan optimistic that the problem would have been ameliorated if these efforts had been more successful: “Tee-Jay” already spends in excess of $4,000 more per student than Freeman, with worse results. And he refers to the enormous increase in expenditures for Kansas City schools in the wake of a desegregation suit, and its limited results (see my review of Complex Justice by Joshua M. Dunn, “Finding the Right Remedy,” book review, Spring 2009).

Increased expenditure, Ryan argues, is a poor substitute for integration: It “take[s] as given—either as a matter of strategy or necessity—that poor and minority districts will remain separate from white and wealthier ones…. [It] channel[s] resources to poor struggling districts, which are usually in urban or rural areas, while protecting the independence and sanctity of wealthy districts, which are usually in suburbs. Save the cities, and spare the suburbs.” Ryan again and again argues that the suburban middle class has been able to protect its schools from what it sees as the threat of integration.

Ryan is more positive about the varieties of school choice—whether within school districts, or by way of charter schools and vouchers, and of course he favors interdistrict choice—but the legislative and judicial obstacles (not to mention practical ones) to the expansion of this route are clear. Nor is Ryan optimistic about the impact of the standards and testing movement, primarily because the bars have been set too low, which means that the urban schools, placing all their efforts into passing, manage to do so, while the suburban schools easily surpass the state’s yardsticks. So “Tee-Jay” does not look so bad when tested by Virginia’s standards, but Freeman pays the state standard little mind, as its students go on further to AP courses and tests: “A reform that might have tied urban and suburban schools together has been transformed into yet another one that reinforces the gap that separates them. Standards and testing promise, essentially, that urban students will learn the basics. Meanwhile, the suburban students, while not immune from standards and testing, are certainly not limited by them.”

Ryan argues for integration not only because he believes it will improve educational outcomes for black students, but also because of his commitment to the ideal of the common school, which promises to bring together Americans of all economic circumstances, and all races and groups. Ryan is distressed that this hope seems to play so small a role in our politics and public discussion. “In Search of Ties That Bind” is the title of his penultimate chapter, in which he explores the possibilities of integration in the current bleak situation. He is aware that “it is unfashionable these days to talk seriously about ways to increase racial and socioeconomic integration. The goal seems not only impossible but also increasingly beside the point…. To talk about integration is to talk about a relic from the past or a distracting frill.”

In this situation, he places his hopes for integration on the varieties of free choice and, seeking signs that we may yet become a more integrated society, finds some promise. The proportion of minorities in the population is increasing, which inevitably means more minorities in predominantly white schools. More blacks are moving to suburbs (as increasingly are other minorities, e.g., Asian and Hispanic), and more whites are returning to (some) cities. We should not exaggerate the significance of these moves: minorities do not share the same interests and ideals in schooling, and even the least advantaged ones, blacks and Hispanic Americans, may not look on their situations the same way. And the movement of blacks into suburbs very often re-creates the economically struggling neighborhoods they have left in the cities. Nevertheless, it is promising to note that “Tee-Jay” has a substantial white minority student body (16 percent), while Freeman has a sizable black minority (13 percent). That still makes them black and white schools, but this is quite different from the 100 percent black and white schools of 1954, and for many years after. Ryan is encouraged by the example of Montclair, New Jersey, and some other municipalities in maintaining integrated communities over time, and by the longtime maintenance of METCO in the Boston area, and hopes that further interdistrict programs might be launched.

One cannot be too optimistic about the reach of these developments that are increasing integration: they are operating slowly. In the end, is there any escape from the reality that the improvement of educational outcomes for a large section of the black population will have to take place, if it is to come about at all, in schools with a black majority?

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard University.

Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College

The first five words of Doug Lemov’s book Teach Like a Champion are “Great teaching is an art.” This is not a promising start.

Over 3 million women and men stand in front of classrooms every day in the U.S. It is too much to hope for, and always will be, that more than a small percentage of them will be artists, great, bad or mediocre. The degree to which we pin our hopes for large-scale school improvement on attracting artists and rock stars to the classroom is the degree to which we plan to fail.

Yet all is not lost. After dispensing with five poorly chosen words, Lemov spends the next 300 pages completely contradicting them, demonstrating in convincing detail that teaching is not an art at all, but a craft, a series of techniques that can be identified, learned, practiced, and perfected. His focused, obsessively practical study of what makes teachers effective could—and should—shift the terms of our increasingly vitriolic national debate from “teacher quality” to “quality teaching.” This is no mere semantic distinction. The difference is not who is in the front of the room. The difference is what that person does. Lemov’s achievement is to examine teaching at the molecular level. By doing so, he may have rescued education reform from its implicit dependence on classroom saints and superheroes. It is an indispensable shift. If teaching effectively is something for the best and the brightest, rather than the merely dedicated and diligent, education reform is finished, now and forever.

“Many of the techniques you will read about in this book at first may seem mundane, unremarkable, even disappointing,” Lemov begins apologetically. Don’t be fooled by his modesty. The managing director of Uncommon Schools, a network of successful charter schools in New York and New Jersey, Lemov has invested thousands of hours in classroom observations, work that has made him a sought-after consultant to ed reform icons such as KIPP, New Leaders for New Schools, Teach For America, and others. Under Lemov’s watchful eye, the subtle magic of solid craftwork is revealed: Stand still when giving directions; ask students who have not raised their hands to answer a question; use “wait time,” a few seconds’ pause after asking a question before calling on a student to answer it. Each technique is intended to improve classroom management, enhance student engagement, raise expectations, and to do so briskly.

Lemov is obsessed with time and the amount of it wasted moving from one place to another, putting materials away, or transitioning to a new lesson or activity. “There isn’t a school of education in the country that would stoop to teach its aspiring teachers how to train their students to pass out papers,” he writes, “even though it is one of the most valuable things they could possibly do.” As Lemov calculates, the time saved on such mundane tasks quickly adds up to days of extra instructional time over a school year.

If Teach Like a Champion fails to become a standard text in our schools of education, however, it will not be a function of the utilitarian thrust of Lemov’s observations, but his refusal to pay even lip service to the standard homilies of effective practice. Guide on the side? Self-directed learning? Lemov favors students in rows as the default classroom structure. Culturally relevant pedagogy? Substitute rap lyrics for lyric poetry? “Content is one of the places that teaching is most vulnerable to assumptions and stereotypes. What does it say,” Lemov asks, “if we assume that students won’t be inspired by books written by authors of other races?” Volumes have been written on differentiated instruction. Lemov gives it a single, not very deferential paragraph. Group work is “as likely to yield discussions of last night’s episode of American Idol as it is higher-order discussions of content.” Asking frequent, targeted, rigorous questions of students, he believes, “is a powerful and much simpler tool for differentiating.”

“One of the biggest ironies I hope you will take away from reading this book is that many of the tools likely to yield the strongest classroom results remain essentially beneath the notice of our theories and theorists of education,” he writes. It is hard not to agree.

At no point in Teach Like a Champion does Lemov explicitly state that his goal is to wipe out the beau ideal of the rock star teacher. He doesn’t need to. If we’re fortunate, it will wither away once Lemov’s taxonomy takes root. In the popular imagination, fueled by Hollywood, hero teachers are charismatic figures, endowed with an unshakable will, and a deep, abiding belief in the untapped genius of their (inevitably) unruly students. Miracle-working mavericks, they defy the forces of mediocrity arrayed against them and magically transform a class full of those kids—the ones the “system” and every other adult in the building—nay, the world—has long since given up on. Good-bye, poverty, gangs, and mean streets. Hello, Harvard. And if one teacher can work such wonders, surely it is not too much to expect them all to do it. The exceptions prove what the rule should be. No excuses. Whatever it takes. Relentless pursuit. What part of “every child can succeed at the highest level” do you not understand?

Readers hoping for stock tales of hero teachers will be disappointed. Teach Like a Champion features many teachers, but they are master craftsmen, not superheroes. Describing grammatically correct complete sentences as “the battering ram that knocks down the door to college” is as close to hyperbole as Lemov gets. He sees high expectations as essential to student achievement, but not an occasion for grandstanding and motivational speeches. Instead, it’s about running a classroom where participation is not optional, standards are clear, and no apologies are made for rigor. Mastering sound teaching techniques “will be far more productive than being firm of convictions, committed to a strategy, and, in the end, beaten by the reality of what lies inside the classroom door in the toughest neighborhoods of our cities and towns,” says Lemov.

Teach Like a Champion is not a perfect book. Its advice is broadly applicable, but its sweet spot is elementary and middle-school teachers in low-performing urban schools. Veteran teachers who work in other settings may wonder what all the fuss is about, and Lemov’s definition of effective teaching as getting big test gains in low-income schools may be too narrow for some.

Still, Uncommon Schools runs 17 charter schools in New York, which as a group outperform state averages in both math and English language arts (ELA). Two of its Brooklyn schools have posted math scores that were the best in the state, Excellence Boys Charter School (6th grade) and Kings Collegiate Charter School (7th grade); ELA test scores of 8th graders at True North Rochester Preparatory Charter School in Rochester placed that school at number 6 out of 1,450 schools tested. While that’s not proof positive of effectiveness, there is an intuitive, even visceral appeal to Lemov’s techniques. Keeping all students engaged and attentive is surely better than failing to do so. There is no conceivable downside to lengthening learning time by wasting less of the school day. Teachers seem not to be waiting for gold-standard research to validate the 49 techniques in Lemov’s taxonomy as effective. Six months after publication, Teach Like a Champion was still a top education book and overall best seller on Amazon.com. Doug Lemov has struck gold, and a nerve.

Seldom has a book been better timed or more urgently needed. Walk into a struggling urban school and you will mostly find well-intentioned people working hard and failing. More often than not, they’re failing despite doing precisely what they’ve been trained to do. The proper question is not how do we get rid of bad teachers, but how can we make our existing teacher corps more effective? Thus, perhaps the highest praise that one can heap on Mr. Lemov’s book is that, for the first time, it makes helping teachers improve their craft on a broad scale seem not merely sensible, but achievable.

A former 5th-grade teacher, Robert Pondiscio writes about education at the Core Knowledge Blog. For his take on Steve Farr’s Teaching as Leadership, see our blog.

If we were talking about the 1960s, I could easily offer Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age as the articulation of that era’s strategy of increasing resources devoted to education, particularly for minority students. The revival of progressive education, with open classrooms, student-centered learning, and whole language, which was all the rage in the 1970s, could be found in a few influential books of that time. Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity and Charles Silberman’s Crisis in the Classroom come to mind. If we were talking about the 1980s and the growth of the standards and accountability movement, we could credit E. D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy. And the case for school choice was laid out in the 1990s by John Chubb and Terry Moe’s Politics, Markets, and America’s Schools.

The first decade of the 21st century has also had a dominant strategy: incentive-based reforms, such as increasing competition among charter and district schools, merit-pay plans to improve teacher quality, and school-level accountability based on testing. But no single book or set of books stands out as the voice of these reforms.

Rather than articulating a broad, theoretical case for reforms that have been embraced by policymakers, the books of the “aughts” were more likely to engage in debates over evidence, articulate a strategy that had not been adopted, or do battle against the strategies that policymakers did adopt. (See the results of a web poll that invited readers to vote for their favorite education books.)

My own book, Education Myths, may have bolstered efforts to enact the incentive-based reforms that dominated the decade, but it did not provide the conceptual rationale for the movement. William Howell and Paul Peterson’s Education Gap was more a review of the evidence from voucher experiments than it was a call to arms for incentive-based reforms. Eric Hanushek and Alfred Lindseth’s Schoolhouses, Courthouses, and Statehouses and Frederick Hess’s Common Sense School Reform both make a case for incentive-based reforms, but they are also primarily reviews of the current research rather than the articulation of a new reform strategy.

Some books from the aughts did make theoretical arguments for new reforms, but those reforms have not been embraced by policymakers, at least not yet. Terry Moe and John Chubb’s Liberating Learning, Paul Peterson’s Saving Schools, and Clayton Christensen et al.’s Disrupting Class all make the case for technology-based schools that substitute computers for human instruction. Someday that may be the dominant education-reform strategy, but that day is not today.

The most common type of education reform book from the period argued against the dominant strategies. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education, Richard Rothstein’s Class and Schools, Daniel Koretz’s Measuring Up, Tony Wagner’s The Global Achievement Gap, and Deborah Meier’s In Schools We Trust, among many others, are notable for their opposition to incentive-based reforms. There have always been books opposing reforms embraced by the Establishment, but they were usually outliers. In the aughts, however, a large number of prominent books stood in opposition.

Why is it so difficult to identify a book that embodies the incentive-based reforms of the decade and relatively easy to list books that argue against them? One reason is that books have lost their place as primary vehicles for shaping education policy. Just like in other realms, books are being displaced by other media.

A film like Waiting for “Superman” can have considerably more influence over education policy than any book. Articles and reports can be released on the Internet as soon as they are written. Even blogs are swaying education policy discussions to a greater extent than books. The power of blogs is especially clear when it comes to debating the merits of the research on various policy questions. There is little point in writing a book that reviews and adjudicates research findings when online articles and blog posts can do the same thing and be available within days or even hours.

The lack of policy influence that is attributable to recent education-reform books is not for lack of sales. Some have even become national best sellers. The problem is that policymakers and other elites are less likely to be among their readers. Instead, the buyers increasingly seem to be those actively participating in education reform debates; the people actually shaping policy appear to be paying relatively little attention.

For example, teachers and others hostile to incentive-based reforms consume works by Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Tony Wagner to affirm their worldview. These books are not setting the agenda for policymakers. They are feeding the resentment of practitioners to an education reform agenda that draws its inspiration from nonbook sources and is advancing despite the hostility stirred by such books. These best-selling volumes are, in the words of their intellectual nemesis, “standing athwart history, yelling stop.”

But books are no longer up to the task of significantly altering, let alone stopping, education policy trends. Policy agendas are being shaped by online debates, articles, conferences, and documentary films—not by books. In policy terms, the education reform book is dead, even as education reform thrives.

There is hope. To paraphrase Miracle Max, the education reform book is only mostly dead. Its policy influence can be revived if authors steer clear of topics that are better addressed by other media. Blogs can evaluate research as it comes out and are quicker and cheaper to write as well as to read. Emotionally charged anecdotes can be shared to far greater effect in a documentary film. Books shouldn’t try to do what other media can do better, faster, and with greater ease.

Moreover, if book authors seek policy influence, they have to write with policy elites as their target audience. It may sell a lot of books to write for teachers or education school students, but those people no longer dominate policymaking discussions. There is a new set of elites interested in education policy who do not come from the traditional teaching or education school worlds. These people tend to be young and technology savvy, getting more of their information from the Internet than from books. They can still be reached by books, but the volume would have to be written with them in mind rather than the traditional educator audience.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with books that are not written with policy influence as their primary objective. The book geared for an academic audience or designed to encourage a partisan base will continue to have its place. But if there is a lesson from the last decade of education reform books for enhancing policy influence, it is that the education reform book is dead—or at least mostly dead.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, senior fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, and contributing editor at Education Next.

Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go?

University of Washington professor and Gates Foundation advisor Marguerite Roza is the Indiana Jones of school finance. In her short but powerful new book, Educational Economics: Where Do School Funds Go?, Roza uncovers the hidden caves and tunnels that store the treasure of the public school system. Revealing where the money goes requires intrepid sleuthing, detailed analysis, and occasionally braving hostile natives.

The main finding of Roza’s explorations is that education dollars are allocated in ways that are sharply at odds with the stated priorities of public school systems. Education leaders say they want to devote greater funding to low-income students, but within most school districts per-pupil spending is higher at schools with more-advantaged students. Education leaders say they want to focus resources on the core subjects of math, reading, history, and science, but per-pupil spending tends to be much higher for electives, extracurricular activities, and sports. Education leaders say they want to emphasize remedial instruction to help lagging students catch up, but in most school districts per-pupil spending is significantly greater for Advanced Placement (AP) and gifted classes than for remedial ones.

The chief culprit in this misallocation of resources relative to stated priorities is the uniform salary schedule for teachers. In virtually every public school throughout the country, teachers are paid primarily according to their credentials, seniority, and “additional” work assignments and not at all according to subject taught, number of students served, or the difficulty or importance of their assignments. The net effect of this arrangement is that labor costs, the bulk of per-pupil spending, are distributed by formulas that are completely unaligned with stated priorities.

Schools with more low-income students tend to receive less per-pupil spending within districts because the higher-paid teachers with greater experience often transfer to schools with more-advantaged students who are less difficult to educate. Non-core electives, like art, music, gym, and shop, receive higher per-pupil spending because they tend to have fewer students per class than required core subjects, like reading, math, history, and science. Since all teachers are paid the same regardless of the subject they teach, smaller classes necessarily translate into higher per-pupil spending. Extracurricular activities and sports receive higher per-pupil funding because fewer students participate and teachers receive extra pay for assuming these “additional” assignments. Per-pupil spending on AP and gifted classes exceeds remedial classes because, again, fewer students tend to be in those advanced classes.

“How can those inside and outside the system allow such blatantly contradictory spending patterns to persist in their own schools?” Roza asks. Her first explanation is ignorance: “They generally do not know these patterns exist, as district budgeting and accounting practices make it incredibly difficult to identify detailed spending patterns.” But elsewhere Roza suggests that the problem is less benign than ignorance. She writes, “Powerful forces work to protect the interests of those who benefit from the present allocation of resources. Among those who benefit from the status quo are the more experienced teachers, influential parents with children in high-achieving schools, and board members who represent wealthier neighborhoods.” She also highlights the role that teachers unions play in determining the allocation of resources by championing the uniform salary schedule, transfer rights for more experienced teachers, and work rules.

Roza’s ambiguity about the causes of the mismatch between stated priorities and actual spending undermines her ability to propose solutions. If the problem is caused primarily by ignorance, then the solution lies in greater transparency through more rigorous and open accounting policies. But if the problem is caused primarily by the influence of powerful interest groups, then a political restructuring of incentives is required. If poor kids get the short end of the education stick because teachers unions and wealthy parents pursue their own benefit with indifference to the consequences for those less fortunate, then those interest groups have to be stripped of their control over allocating resources. This could be achieved by empowering families with direct control over education resources via vouchers or a weighted student-based formula for allocating government funds.

For most of the book, Roza leans toward the ignorance explanation: “The most important answer is that they don’t know about real spending patterns … Bad information leads to mistaken assumptions and ultimately misguided strategic resource decisions.” Unfortunately, this explanation for misallocated school spending is unsatisfying and fails to yield compelling solutions, even according to Roza herself. She lists a variety of school-finance reforms and argues that they are all “guaranteed to fail” because they do not address the “entire package of incoherent, inefficient, and inequitable spending.”

The solution, she acknowledges in the final two chapters, requires a more comprehensive restructuring of the education system than just transparency measures. On the final page of the text, she reveals how that restructuring might take shape when she emphasizes “the need to separate the functions of allocating resources, setting standards, and defining accountability from the function of making decisions about resource use. If states could recognize that they play some role in the first three, they might be convinced that they should not also take on the fourth.” This sounds like vouchers or weighted student-based funding, where the government funds education and establishes accountability for results while decentralizing to the family or individual school the power to decide how money is spent.

The book would be stronger if the political restructuring of the education system were addressed earlier and more fully. As it stands, readers are likely to get the mistaken impression that ignorance is the primary cause of the failure of school funding systems and improved awareness the solution. Ignorance is a problem, but it is the willful ignorance of malicious indifference. No solutions are possible without addressing that.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute.

Patriotic Pluralism: Americanization Education and European Immigrants

Americanization, argues education historian Jeffrey Mirel in Patriotic Pluralism, both the process and the term, has been widely misunderstood and too narrowly interpreted in the literature and scholarship on the assimilation of the American immigrant. The iconic picture is that of the melting pot, literally interpreted, as in the ceremony that capped Americanization education in the Ford Motor Company in the 1920s: immigrants, dressed in traditional costume, lined up to walk into a stage-set melting pot, to emerge on the other side identically dressed. In this view, immigrants were to be stripped of language, customs, national identities, to become like all other Americans, who were assumed to be near-identical. Such a ceremony did take place and it did epitomize one version of Americanization, but that was only one version, and the most extreme.

Mirel’s correction of the traditional picture comes about through a close examination of the schooling of immigrant school children and Americanization education for immigrant workers in Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, all major concentrations of immigrants in the early 20th century. He draws evidence from an enormous mass of translations of editorials and articles from the immigrant press in Chicago and Cleveland, made by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the late 1930s and early 1940s. (The WPA also played a key role in the education of immigrant adults in the run-up to World War II, supporting naturalization classes in English and American government.)

The curriculum for children was far from the “multiculturalism” of recent decades. This education was nevertheless in the liberal spirit, as Mirel notes in making an important distinction: the education of immigrant children was in “civic nationalism,” not “ethnic nationalism.” The latter insisted that Americanism must have a distinctive ethnic base and disparaged the new immigrants as ethnically so different from the mass of 19th-century Americans as to make them incapable of becoming good Americans. Civic nationalism, in contrast, insists that anyone can become a good American, for Americanism depends on loyalty to principles rather than some specific ethnicity. Mirel is clearly on the side of civic nationalism. Despite the triumph of ethnic nationalists in the new immigration legislation of the 1920s, educators and their allies “ignored the restrictionists’ view about the uneducability of the immigrants and persisted in using the schools and the other educational venues to Americanize immigrants and their children…. These programs would produce tens of thousands of new citizens who embraced in varying degrees the values of civic nationalism they had been taught.”

Teachers and curricula in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland in effect assumed the new immigrant children were capable of becoming good Americans and provided them with the kind of education that would make them so. “The reading programs for elementary students…immersed children in the western literary tradition…from their earliest years…. Detroit educators introduced simplified versions of ‘classic myths and fairy tales’…Suggested reading for first grade included several of Aesop’s fables; the stories of Cinderella, Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty; some of Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales; brief biographies of Columbus, Washington, and Lincoln; … poems by … Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. For fourth grade, educators recommended stories from Homer’s Odyssey, Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle,’ Howard Pyle’s adventures of Robin Hood, and biographies of Magellan, De Soto, and William Penn.” They were being inducted into becoming Americans, as that was understood at the time.

The foreign-language press, in Mirel’s analysis, fully supported the efforts of the schools. It encouraged the learning of English; it also encouraged naturalization, and not only because if its practical benefits (protection from deportation in the Red Scare of the 1920s, for example). The foreign-language press supported America’s role in World War II, even if the countries we fought against were the homelands of many immigrants; it steadily educated immigrant readers in American history, and through the parents also tried to educate the children. It linked America’s heroes to homeland heroes who fought in American wars. Thaddeus Kosciusko, who fought as a colonel in the Revolutionary War before leading Poland’s 1794 uprising against imperial Russia, makes many an appearance in the Polish press, for example. It is noted not only that he had the same birthday as Lincoln (Lincoln was a particular favorite of the immigrant press—he was because of his humble background seen by the immigrants as a welcoming figure who valued their contribution to America), but also that in his will “Kosciusko requested that the large tracts of land he received for his service in the Revolutionary War be used to help end slavery.” Mirel notes that, while the immigrant press was enthusiastic about America and its freedoms, it could also criticize Washington and Jefferson as slaveholders: but this criticism, too, was clearly an education in Americanism for its readers.

Mirel extends the story beyond the period of mass immigration into the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, when a new form of Americanization education emerged in the intercultural education movement. Here the African American for the first time enters the story in a significant way: the mission of intercultural education was not only tolerance for immigrant minorities but also for America’s blacks. Despite the uniqueness of the black experience, blacks were incorporated into intercultural education as another minority group.

Tolerance, the goal of intercultural education, does not seem much to ask for when we look back from our age of multiculturalism, which calls for much more. But in its time it was an advance. “Patriotic pluralism” is a good description of what education in Americanism became: it assimilated immigrants yet taught all Americans more than tolerance for the culture that immigrants brought, and the culture that blacks had created here in America. Had Mirel extended his story into the last few decades, I am sure he would also have corrected today’s overly narrow view of “assimilation,” which does not require the loss of all distinctive identity, and of “multiculturalism,” which, except in its most excessive forms, also teaches appreciation of American freedoms.

Americanization has meant acquiring citizenship, enlisting and fighting in the American army in World War II, and embracing American patriotism, while accepting the retention of language, religion, and attachment to another identity, and finding no contradiction in this amalgam. Many great American leaders defined Americanization as including all that. Franklin Delano Roosevelt commended immigrants who “may still retain their affection for some of the things they left behind—old customs, old languages, old friends,” and “wove into the pattern of American life some of the color, some of the richness of the cultures from which they came…. We gave them freedom. I am proud—America is proud—of what they have given to us.… They have never been—they are not now—half-hearted Americans.” These are sentiments every American president since could have embraced.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

As Good As It Gets: What School Reform Brought to Austin
By Larry Cuban
Harvard University Press, 2010, $25.95; 288 pages.

Larry Cuban is a prolific and insightful chronicler and analyst of our efforts at urban school reform and improvement over the last few decades. In As Good As It Gets he adds the case of a successful school superintendency, that of Pat Forgione in Austin, Texas, from 1999 to 2009. When Forgione arrived the district was in turmoil, marked by micromanagement by the school board. The Texas Education Agency (TEA) had just rated the Austin Independent School District (AISD) “unacceptable” because the dropout data it had submitted were deemed “unreliable.” TEA was investigating charges of cheating on state tests, and national bond-rating agencies had placed AISD on a “negative watch” because of these troubles. When Forgione left, Cuban writes, “his performance matched that of big-city superintendents who have received national awards for their district’s improvements, such as Carl Cohn in Long Beach, Calif., Beverly Hall in Atlanta, and Tom Payzant in Boston.”

Forgione had to contend with the ever more intrusive state and national requirements (under No Child Left Behind) for testing and progress, the loss of confidence in school management, new budgetary problems under Texas’s efforts to equalize funding between prosperous districts (such as Austin) and impoverished ones, and the permanent problem of low-achieving minority schools at a time when efforts at integration had been abandoned (see “Is Desegregation Dead?” forum). After a long-running legal suit, Austin’s schools had been decreed “unitary” in 1986, and as was typical after such a release from desegregation requirements, a modest degree of integration had unraveled. Early in his tenure Forgione had to deal with the protests and threats of the Eastside Social Action Committee, which represented minority Austin. Forty-six years after Brown, it pointed out, “our schools are still separate and unequal.” The school committee rejected proposals to bring in the Edison Schools to manage some underperforming schools and the establishment of a Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) school. Forgione then poured resources into the schools with large minority enrollments. He replaced five of six principals in the lowest-performing schools, added math and reading coaches, introduced the Open Court reading curriculum, and mandated summer staff training.

Forgione’s superintendency was marked by a flurry, indeed a storm, of innovations. “AISD officials had to struggle with the competing agendas of numerous outside partners such as Austin’s business leaders, the ‘First Things First’ program of the Institute for Research and Reform in Education, the University of Pittsburgh Institute for Learning’s work in ‘Disciplined Literacy,’ the Dana Center for Mathematics at the University of Texas, the Gates and Dell Foundations, and other organizations… As one upset veteran high school teacher put it: ‘We’re getting this academy, and then…we’re going to do this and that…. When did that happen? It’s like ‘we’re the last to know.’”

By the standard measures of success, Forgione was a successful big-city school superintendent. The rating of “unacceptable” that the AISD had received was removed, and there were “higher district scores year after year in elementary schools, marginally higher graduation rates, lower dropout statistics, and increased college attendance for most secondary schools.” But Cuban does not leave it at that. He has seen these flurries and storms of innovations before. What interests him are the links down to the classroom level: Isn’t it there that we want to see change and improved practices leading to improved results? “The…policy logic of the decade-long reforms contains a fundamental assumption that creating new structures…will reshape teaching practices, and that those different classroom lessons will produce better student outcomes…”

This is the nub of Cuban’s examination of the Forgione superintendency and its achievements. When change as measured by test performance occurs, we don’t know what has led to it. Perhaps Cuban presses his skepticism about policies implemented from above and their effects too far. And yet he does have an important point, and one that is echoed by another major student of school reform, Richard Elmore, in a recent essay in the Harvard Education Letter. We battle over controversial matters such as school choice, school competition, charters and vouchers, and compensation linked to performance, but we rarely are able to connect these policies with teacher behavior and how it changes. “In [Austin], except for occasional stories told by administrators and teachers, few top officials know what kind of teaching occurs in the district’s nearly 6,000 classrooms. No systematically collected classroom data exist…”

Cuban is skeptical as to whether we know enough about the classroom effects of any major reform from above to embrace them wholeheartedly. So he raises cautions about a number of currently popular ideas, such as the need for the large high school to be broken into smaller learning communities, advocated by many reformers, including Forgione in Austin. Cuban’s position strikes a positive chord with me; I attended what then proudly called itself the largest high school in the world, in the Bronx, New York, without apparent ill effects to me and thousands of others.

Despite Cuban’s insistence that we don’t really know enough about what works, and why, he is willing to make some recommendations, most prominently, as we might expect, “systematically monitor whether new structures, programs, and materials aimed at improving academic achievement alter or perpetuate traditional classroom practice.” There are others, some surprising: “Raise the ceiling for schools in the uppermost tier of achievement.” “Lift the floor for the lowest performing schools.” “Expand school choice for middle- and high-school students.” Finally, he writes, we have to combine school improvement with the use of community resources to alleviate the effects of poverty and racial segregation. But there is no way of escaping the inevitable dilemmas of school reform: more choice means more variation, which reduces equity. Concentrating on test-score gains conflicts with efforts to build the capacity of school staffs.

Austin, he concludes, is “as good as it gets,” pronounced not triumphantly but with awareness of how difficult the effort is.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

Making the Grade: The Economic Evolution of American School Districts

How did American schools come to be structured as they are, with age-graded schools in relatively autonomous school districts and school calendars that begin in August and end in June? Look in the mirror, suggests William A. Fischel in his highly readable new book, Making the Grade. Schools evolved into the current system because we—homeowners nationwide—wanted it that way. As Fischel puts it, “local voters, not state authorities, are responsible for the creation of the system. Educational leaders such as Horace Mann headed parades that proceeded on routes selected by the marchers, not the grand marshal.”

Fischel’s approach differs from most histories of the American school system. In other accounts, the school system developed in response to elite preferences about how it should be structured. In those tellings, the grand marshal led the parade. Pronouncements from a series of blue-ribbon commission reports and hard-charging education leaders swayed legislators to reshape schools.

True enough, concedes Fischel, but why did people accept those particular changes while rejecting a host of recommendations from blue-ribbon commissions that we have long since forgotten? The conventional “top-down” history of American education is at best incomplete. Instead, Fischel offers a “bottom-up” history that, with a few parsimonious concepts, explains quite a lot about the development of the American school system.

Two such concepts carry most of the burden. School systems have been structured to enhance homeowner property values while facilitating the build-up of place-based social capital. The first goal, enhancing property values, explains the evolution of the school system. The second, building place-based social capital, explains the system’s abiding resistance to reformers trying to change it. Fischel’s account is much more persuasive on the former than the latter.

How the drive to enhance property values shaped the development of schools is relatively straightforward and compelling. The Northwest Ordinance of 1784 and 1787 and the Land Act of 1785 set aside a portion of land in each township as an endowment for local schools. Like any modern property developer, the federal government understood that quality schools would help attract buyers and raise prices for the land it was trying to sell.

Given an agrarian society with poor transportation, schools could only draw enough students to populate one-room schoolhouses. With few students of the same age and with child labor on farms causing irregular attendance, the efficient arrangement was to group students by ability rather than age. But as transportation improved and demand for a high-school education increased, the one-room schoolhouse organized into “recitation groups” no longer sufficed. School districts consolidated, creating enrollment areas large enough to support a high school. And schools  enrolled enough pupils to form age-based grades, which could offer focused instruction in specific subjects and prepare students for high school.

These changes occurred, Fischel argues, not just because education luminaries recommended them, but because homeowners understood that modern schools would enhance property values. Schools became remarkably standardized, adopting a similar calendar and covering similar material in each grade so that new residents could move into an area with relatively little disruption to their children’s education. As with the adoption of the Microsoft operating system or VHS, communities accepted these near-universal standards and structures with no central authority imposing them. Local homeowners everywhere understood that they had to incorporate these changes to compete with other communities for new residents.

Schools are designed the way they are, Fischel suggests, because we want them that way. And they continue to be that way, despite the efforts of reformers, because people generally prefer the existing system. As he puts it, “Nobody loves local public schools but the people.”

What they love, in particular, is the place-based social capital that school districts provide. Because schools enroll children according to where they live, they become a natural vehicle for people getting to know their neighbors. And knowing more neighbors enhances people’s ability to work on issues of common concern with regard to municipal government. If students had access to vouchers, then more students would go to school in other neighborhoods and even other cities. We would not know as many of our neighbors and so would be less able to join forces to get the city to put in speed bumps or clean up the local park.

As proof of general resistance to school choice, Fischel references failed voucher ballot initiatives in California and Michigan. Leaving aside whether ballot initiatives are the best measure of popular support, Fischel has to explain the growing popularity of charter schools. He attempts to square that circle by claiming that “most administrative rules give preference to students who reside in the local district” for admission to charter schools, while vouchers generally lack place-based restrictions. Fischel goes so far as to say this distinction in residential restrictions between charters and vouchers is “critical” to the greater success of charters. “If charter schools were in practice open to all comers, the ability of a locale to benefit from their success would be limited, and so would local support for charter schools.”

Unfortunately, the facts do not fit Fischel’s story. Other than conversion charters and charter schools in a limited number of states, the bulk of charter schools place no residential requirements on admission. In California, for example, which has the most charter schools of any state, the law stipulates that “admission to a charter school shall not be determined according to the place of residence of the pupil…” In Texas, another important charter state, the law prohibits “discrimination in admission policy on the basis of…the district the child would otherwise attend….” Conversely, many voucher programs, including those in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Washington, D.C., offer vouchers only to residents of those districts to attend private schools within the district boundaries. Many proposed but unsuccessful voucher programs had similar geographic constraints.

If residential restrictions do not distinguish charters from vouchers, then something other than place-based social capital has to explain the greater relative success of charters. The obvious alternative explanation is that teachers unions are more threatened by vouchers than by charters, and their organized political power, not widespread preferences, has thwarted vouchers and stymies even charters.

But Fischel seems determined to avoid this sort of political or top-down explanation, so determined that he twists himself into an inaccurate explanation to preserve his bottom-up theory. The book would be much more compelling throughout if he offered his bottom-up theory for the development of school structures but conceded that, once created, those structures engender organized interest groups that make the structures inflexible to changing needs and potentially better ideas. Perhaps we have met the enemy and this time he isn’t us: he’s the teachers unions.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

E. D. Hirsch has contributed what is to me the most persuasive idea of the past half century on how to improve the performance of American education. It is a simple idea, but has large implications. These were first spelled out in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know, in 1988, and explicated further in subsequent works. In his new book, The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools, Hirsch presents this simple and powerful idea again. This time it is supplemented with new research, along with a backward look at the ideals guiding the development of American public education and how we have moved away from them in recent decades. Hirsch, a professor of English literature at the University of Virginia—his first books were on Wordsworth and Blake—became interested in the problem of teaching reading to young pupils, who would in time become his students at the college level. Rather than involving himself in the technical question of how to teach reading, he argued that students couldn’t become competent readers because they knew less and less of the simple and necessary information that surrounded what they were reading, the context that any writer has to assume is shared by his readers. Hirsch’s term for the missing knowledge was “cultural literacy.”

His energy in presenting this idea has been matched—surprising in a tenured professor in a major research university—by the enormous work, with colleagues, of spelling out, grade by grade, in detail, what students must know in a variety of fields if they are to be competent and understanding readers. He gives as an appendix to this new book the “History/Geography thread” of the curriculum developed by his Core Knowledge program for kindergarten and 1st and 2nd grade. It seems remarkably comprehensive and demanding to this reader. Hirsch has also created a system of Core Knowledge schools to teach this curriculum, and a Core Knowledge Foundation for research on American education. He is committed to the value of a common curriculum, which some nations have and which the United States once had, remarkably enough, despite the absence of any dictates to establish it. When so many young students, primarily from disadvantaged homes, move from school to school, a common curriculum would have clear and great advantages in permitting continuity in their education.

“This book,” he tells us, “concerns itself…with overcoming low literacy rates and narrowing the achievement gaps between demographic groups but places those themes within the broader context of the founding ideals of the American experiment, which have been a beacon to the world and ourselves.” We may hear an echo in these words of a subject that once played a larger role in American education, civics, but Hirsch is rather more concerned with the role of a common system of public schools in educating a citizenry to the level necessary to maintain a democracy. The founders, as many have pointed out, looked to a common education as one of the strongest supports of the new republic.

Hirsch is well aware of the whiff of conservatism involved in invoking the white male founders and a common curriculum, and protects himself by invoking the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, who argued for the education of the working man to the level of the bourgeoisie if the hegemonic system that maintained capitalism was to be overcome. A common education to a high level is necessary to any effective public action, whether we dub it “Right” or “Left.”

A common curriculum is not a necessary implication of “cultural literacy,” but it comes into the picture if an entire populace is to be raised to a minimum level of literacy. It is also the best way to avoid one of the most damaging divisions in a society, that between the prosperous and the poor. Hirsch insists that raising the level of achievement in American education will not increase this division, but rather will mitigate it. He notes that in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) assessments, countries “with the highest verbal scores are also the ones that have most effectively narrowed the equity gap between groups of students. The highest achieving countries are Finland, Canada, Ireland, Japan, and Korea, and these are the very countries that show the least variation in eighth-grade performance between advantaged and disadvantaged students.”

Much of Hirsch’s discussion of what he sees as the decline of American education in the past half century centers on a critique of “progressive” education. Progressive education came in many forms, but one thing has been clear from its origins: those children who did not come from educated and middle-class homes would suffer, because the background knowledge that came from being raised in these homes, of hearing a wider vocabulary and reference to a large range of events, facts, and objects was not available to them, and was also not being taught systematically in progressive schools. This mattered somewhat less for mathematics, where the home environment provides little foundation: it mattered decisively for reading, and all the subjects dependent on it. This was not the only factor that explained the backwardness of the disadvantaged. But I am convinced, as Hirsch is, that it was an important one.

Hirsch ends his book with a number of photographs: of a standard columned and pediment-fronted American school of the twenties or thirties, of the grand-columned building of the New York State Education Department. Following these images are pictures that will be unfamiliar to most of his readers, but are very familiar to me: the collegiate gothic City College of New York, its Great Hall, and the huge mural of “The Graduate” in it. As an alumnus of City College, I was touched: why these? Because of the “spirit of aspiration and equality [that] animated the creation in 1847 of the Free Academy (later City College) in New York City. The college’s founder, Townsend Harris, proclaimed: ‘Let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect…’” Hirsch makes clear with this conclusion that he is promoting his great idea, whatever its conservative implications, primarily to advance the interests of our democracy, by raising the level of competence and facilitating greater equality.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of sociology and education at Harvard University.

The Secret of TSL: ?The revolutionary discovery that raises school performance
By William G. Ouchi

When I first saw the title, never having heard of TSL, I thought this might be a late-night infomercial about a new diet supplement designed to make all students attentive. Not far into the book, I discovered that TSL was Total Student Load, which, unfortunately, did not help me very much. Then to the hypothesis on the cover: The key element of a school’s organization is the number of students that a teacher regularly sees (TSL), and if this number is small (say, 80), achievement will be high.

The hypothesis is really an assertion based on a vaguely described analysis. And while it is a discernible undercurrent throughout the book, TSL is not the volume’s central feature. The book presents a series of case studies of large, and distinctly nonrandom, districts. Within those case studies, the focus is twofold: decentralization of decisionmaking and the quality of the superintendent. The book provides an in-depth look at districts that have in one way or another followed the advice given in one of Ouchi’s previous books, about the benefits of weighted student funding, whereby schools receive funds based on the make-up of their student populations, and decentralized decisionmaking. This book includes additional observations of schools where the principles of fiscal decentralization are evident.

What is good and interesting about The Secret of TSL? Ouchi traces the evolution of district policies under several high-profile leaders—Joel Klein (New York), Arne Duncan (Chicago), Arlene Ackerman (San Francisco), Rod Paige (Houston), Randy Ward (Oakland), Pat Harvey (St. Paul)—whose stories are both compelling and informative. The perspective is that of a management professor, one trained in understanding decisionmaking styles and models and the interactions of institutions and individuals. This approach is one not commonly taken by education researchers, who more often focus on what is happening in classrooms and the interactions between students and teachers. Here, an experienced observer looks at the overall structure of how education is produced. The higher-altitude view is both useful and intriguing.

The story line that emerges, perhaps unintentionally, is that the individual leaders have very different views about how to organize and run schools. No one would accuse Randy Ward of having the same style as Arlene Ackerman, even though they were for a time separated only by the Bay Bridge. Indeed, almost as an aside to the title page, the districts that are described in detail follow very different policies that lead to wholly different TSL measures.

What does not work in the book? Well, start at the beginning. There is no sense in terming TSL a “revolutionary discovery.” While TSL is calculated in each of the case studies, there is no evidence that the measure is correlated with overall district performance or district growth in achievement. In fact, the “revolutionary discovery” looks more like a required element of a standard management book aimed at the New York Times best-seller list. In the tradition of that genre, there are two numbered lists: the “five pillars” of school empowerment and the “four freedoms.” These lists largely drop out of the sky except that some of the included items appeared in Ouchi’s earlier “revolutionary” book, Making Schools Work: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Your Children the Education They Need. In actuality, the lists are not bad: choice, school empowerment, effective principals, accountability, and weighted student funding matched with control over budget, staffing, curriculum, and scheduling. But there is little explanation about how these notions are implemented, what impact might be expected, and what the trade-offs among the elements might be. In the separate case studies, the leaders sometimes pay attention to the elements on these lists, and sometimes do not, and it is hard to see that those who heed the lists do better than those who do not.

In the end, it is difficult to tell whether the story is about some gifted leaders or about decentralized authority and specific programs. At this point, the case study methodology breaks down, because it is impossible to separate structure and institutions from personality.

But, returning to TSL, the argument is compelling in an intuitive sense. How can one expect a teacher to really get to know 150 different students during a year? How can a teacher possibly assign regular and demanding homework to such large numbers if it is necessary to review and grade all the assignments?

There are, however, some crucial issues of interpretation that beg for serious empirical analysis. For example, the discussion leaves out whether TSL is expected to have an impact while all other things are held constant, such as budget, teacher expertise, curriculum, and support services, to name a few. Or, does it enhance achievement to trade some of these attributes for a smaller TSL? It would be particularly valuable to marry these organizational views with separate analyses of teacher effectiveness. Current discussions of the importance of teacher quality for achievement generally ignore such environmental features as district management and decisionmaking. Could it be that some of the observed variation in teacher quality really reflects unmeasured differences in the organizational features that Ouchi highlights in his case studies? These are testable propositions, and ones that could provide important insights into where the revolution in student achievement is most likely to occur.

Eric Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a member of the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education.

She admits that she’s changed her mind.

Diane and I go back a very long way–three decades, give or take–and in addition to the personal friendship we have, during that period, shared a basic diagnosis of what’s awry in U.S. education. It boils down to this: Most kids aren’t learning nearly enough of the important stuff that they ought to be learning.

That was true in 1981, when we jointly launched the Educational Excellence Network, and it’s still true today. Our view of the central problem needing to be solved has, I believe, remained constant, and there is no daylight between us on that score.

We also share a number of disappointments and frustrations arising from reform efforts that have been mounted to solve that problem. Standards, in many places, have proven nebulous and low. “Accountability” has turned to test cramming and bean counting, often limited to basic reading and math skills. That emphasis, in turn, has diverted what was already weak-kneed attention to history, literature, art, etc. Efforts to rectify the “basic skills” problem have led to the folly of “21st-century skills” rather than a solid liberal arts curriculum. Textbooks, by and large, suck. No Child Left Behind has brought as many problems as solutions. Technology has wrought no miracles. Teacher education, with rare exceptions, is still appalling. Charter schools are uneven at best.

I could go on. A lot of innovations and reforms, meant to solve the underlying achievement problem, have failed to do so–hence our essentially flat test scores and graduation rates these past three decades–and some have had malign side effects. That’s what Diane reports, and in many areas I agree.

Yet when it comes to the future, we mostly disagree about what course America should follow. She has become more conservative, while I have become more radical.

She would undo most if not all of the “structural” reforms that have been put in place in recent years–mayoral control, performance-based pay, charter laws and other choice schemes, reliance on entrepreneurship and market incentives, federal efforts to incentivize and prod the system to change in constructive directions, testing- and results-based accountability and more. She would, instead, look to the “great American school system” and a (somehow) renewed culture and family structure to do right by our children.

Yes, she would augment that system with better-educated (and compensated) teachers, a strong core curriculum, a different (curriculum-based) approach to assessment, greater emphasis on behavior and attitudes and a number of collateral “social” changes such as better families and home environments. At the end of the day, however, she has concluded, after all the policy fumblings of the past couple of decades, that the public school system and its custodians and employees are best suited to make education decisions that will benefit the nation and its next generation.

I agree about the curriculum part but not much else. The failures of recent years have left me angrier than ever with that system, its adults-first priorities, its obduracy, inertia and greed, as well as its capacity to throw sand into the gears of every effort to set it right. Unlike Diane, I don’t trust teacher unions to do right by children (or to do right by great teachers, for that matter); I don’t expect locally elected school boards to put kids’ interests first; I see “neighborhood schools” as education death traps for America’s neediest youngsters; and I think the “Broader, Bolder” social-reform agenda is on the one hand naive (most of these things just aren’t going to happen on their own and can’t be made to happen) and on the other deeply mischievous (because it lifts responsibility from schools for all that they could and sometimes do accomplish pretty much single-handedly.)

Where I come out–you can read more in “The End of the Education Debate”–is that America needs not less education reform but far more fundamental and radical reform. I want every child to have quality school choices, I want stronger (and broader) external standards, I want more open paths to becoming an educator, I want empowered school leaders (really empowered, in ways that would also break the union stranglehold) who are compensated like CEOs, I want super pay for great instructors and no pay for incompetents, and I want a complete makeover of “local control.” The system needs a shakeup from top to bottom, not a restoration.

Diane thinks my prescription is guided by wishful thinking and unproven theories and would destroy an honorable and needed institution. I think that, while her analyses of past failures are often spot-on and frequently aligned with my own, her prescription for the future is guided by wishful thinking, nostalgia and unwarranted faith in an antiquated institutional arrangement that was already demonstrating its failure when we founded the Educational Excellence Network and has done nothing since to renew itself.

For all that, Diane and I still like and respect one another. We adore each other’s families. We agree about a thousand things outside of K–12 education. And we agree about what a good education consists of and why it’s crucial for everybody’s children. It’s the next fork in the road to that destination to which we are now headed–in different directions.

This piece originally appeared on Forbes.com.

As part of the World Bank’s broader campaign to mobilize private sector engagement in education, this new volume builds on commissioned research and internal assessments of private-public partnerships in a number of struggling regions. An earlier Word Bank publication, The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education, was a primer on the theory and practice of PPPs in education, and included guidelines for running these projects successfully. In this new volume, Barrera-Osorio and his co-editors have returned to take a closer look at a wide range of private providers and public-private partnerships and to explore their effects on student performance. While originally focused on Latin American programs, the volume was later expanded to include providers in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa (including Korea’s booming private tutoring industry, the crowded madrasas of rural Bangladesh, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, where a whopping 70 percent of schools are faith-based). The cases demonstrate just how pervasive public-private partnerships are  around the globe, especially where traditional providers have failed to adapt to shifting conditions and student needs.

The research included in this volume suggests that vouchers and faith-based programs had slightly positive effects relative to the traditional education systems in several nations (for instance, Chile, Columbia, and Sierra Leone), but the volume also includes some evidence that serves to counter an overly-optimistic view of PPPs. Students from privately-run madrasas in Bangladesh performed worse than other students when they later switched to public providers, for instance. And the positive findings for many faith-based programs were tempered with cautions from the authors about selection bias. (High-performing faith-based schools in Cameroon, for instance, primarily educate students from wealthy–and likely more academically-engaged–families, and the schools don’t have to deal with the corrupt local officials that plague state schools.)

Those looking for silver bullets will be disappointed by this volume. Context, the editors remind us, is all-important, and the incredibly diverse on-the-ground conditions faced by the profiled providers make it hard to draw broad policy recommendations from the chapters in this volume. However, this volume brings together valuable research on the important work of a growing class of public-private education providers, especially in those regions where creative new solutions are most needed.

Olivia Meeks is a research assistant in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

Lighting Their Fires: ?Raising Extraordinary Children in a Mixed-up, Muddled-up, ?Shook-up World

It’s likely that Rafe Esquith is the nation’s best-known teacher. He has pocketed an impressive number of awards and honors, including, even, membership in the vaunted Order of the British Empire, a nifty designation he picked up by way of directing the Hobart Shakespeareans—a troupe of young actors plucked from his 5th-grade class at Los Angeles’s Hobart Elementary School—who travel the world performing the Bard’s works. Esquith has also appeared on Oprah and been praised by the Dalai Lama.

And he has written widely—?op-eds, articles, and books. Esquith’s first volume on education, There Are No Shortcuts (2003), is somewhat self-explanatory; his second, Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire (2007), is less so. The eccentric title refers to an incident when Esquith, deeply enmeshed in a science lesson, did not realize, until his students began screaming, that he had set his hair alight with an alcohol burner. A cooler-headed Esquith later explained the book’s theme on National Public Radio: “If I could care so much I didn’t even know my hair was on fire, I was moving in the right direction as a teacher—when I realized that you have to ignore all the crap, and the children are the only thing that matter.”

Perhaps because Teach Like Your Hair’s on Fire ended up a New York Times best seller, Esquith has stuck with the ignescent symbolism for his latest book, Lighting Their Fires. It’s a guide of sorts, the main point of which is that good children are made and not born. The author recounts a trip he took with five students to watch a baseball game at Dodger Stadium. They arrived early to take a tour, after which their guide breathlessly confided to Esquith that the pupils were “so confident but so sweet,” and “so beautiful” that they “glow.” Then “she paused, searching for the right adjective. ‘They’re extraordinary,’ she said in almost whispered respect.”

Esquith counters, “But here’s the secret. These students weren’t born extraordinary—they became that way.” And Lighting Their Fires tells us how they did it.

They did it, unsurprisingly, by being taught by one of the country’s most dedicated and obsessive teachers, a man who believes that low-income 5th graders for most of whom English is a second language can learn to love Shakespeare. He also believes that hard work, far more than talent or innate propensities, produces success. Before taking the kids to see the Dodgers, Esquith taught them to score games while they all watched the World Series on television, encouraged them to play baseball daily on the playground, and required them to view Ken Burns’s 181?2-hour-long documentary, Baseball, over spring break. When they attended a major-league game, they would enjoy it because they worked at enjoying it.

But there’s a difference between being a great teacher and a great author, and the examples and lessons put forth in Lighting Their Fires are soggy tinder when it comes to lighting a reader’s interest. Esquith trots out a lot of commonsense stuff. That children should learn the importance of being on time, or that they shouldn’t spend hours immobilized by television or computers, aren’t observations that will have any reasonable person shouting eureka. Policy hounds won’t find anything of substance in the book, either, and are bound to be disappointed.

Most readers of Lighting Their Fires will be disappointed, in fact. Allegedly an explanation of how to form “thoughtful and honorable people,” the book is really part self-help manual for parents and, notwithstanding its preaching about the virtue of humility, part self-aggrandizing memoir. Hobart Shakespearean that he is, Esquith skillfully plays the role of the modest, righteous, self-fulfilled, patient, and wise educator who—though surely he could work in other more-prestigious and remunerative professions—nobly remains in the classroom, quietly going about his saintly business. This is not exaggeration. Examples of Esquith’s self-absorbed, self-imposed martyrdom are ubiquitous. Consider the book’s first sentences:

It was 5:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in May at Hobart Elementary School in Los Angeles, and most of the dedicated teachers and administrators had long since left campus. I wished I could have escaped with them. I was exceedingly tired. It had been a particularly long week.

In fact, it had been a long year.

Nice touch, adding that bit about “dedicated teachers and administrators”; they’re committed, of course, just not that committed. A similarly sly autolatrous tactic, plentifully deployed, is Esquith’s portrayal of just about everyone he meets as well meaning but misguided, whether it’s the Dodger Stadium tour guide who mistakenly believes that his angelic preteen coterie is “extraordinary,” or the TSA employee who can’t comprehend that his wholesome pupils would choose not to tote Game Boys onto an airplane, or the flight attendant who can’t grasp that his cherubic students won’t need DVD players for their traveling duration—that, as Esquith tells her, “they’re going to read.” (The kids are going to…read? Someone canonize this man!)

I could go on—for instance, Earnest Esquith gets himself cursed out at the baseball game by two different spectators whose obnoxious manner he publicly corrects, and he somehow validates his own actions by quoting the injunction of Anne Frank’s father to confront evil in the world—but to do so would be like electrocuting fish in a barrel. Suffice it to say that Esquith has, in Lighting Their Fires, ostensibly written a book for adults. He shouldn’t speak to them as if they were children.

Liam Julian is a Hoover Institution research fellow and managing editor of Policy Review.

Hope and Despair in the ?American City: Why there are ?no bad schools in Raleigh
By Gerald Grant
Harvard University Press, 2009, $25.95; 226 pages.

Syracuse, New York, does not appear in the title of this book, as Raleigh, North Carolina, does, but its experience is the reason for it. Author Gerald Grant was born in Syracuse and educated through high school there. He lived for years in Washington, where he became education reporter for the Washington Post, and in the Boston area, where he gained a doctoral degree at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and worked with Daniel P. Moynihan, David Riesman, and the writer of this review. Grant returned to Syracuse in the 1970s to become a professor at Syracuse University. He has lived through and experienced, as observer, analyst, and deeply involved citizen, the decline of Syracuse similar to the slide experienced by northeastern and midwestern industrial cities in the last half century. One part of the story of that decline and the brave attempts at reversal and recovery has been told in his excellent 1988 book, The World We Created at Hamilton High. The canvas is greatly extended in this volume.

The story of Syracuse is familiar: misguided attempts at urban renewal in the 1960s, destruction of old neighborhoods by interstate highways penetrating the city center, expansion of suburbs facilitated by federally funded highways and tax benefits for new housing; movement of many industrial facilities to the South; and redlining of old city neighborhoods so they could not get necessary mortgages and insurance for home purchase, rehabilitation, and maintenance. The resulting separation between white suburbs with new schools and middle-class students and an increasingly minority central city are all vividly recounted by Grant, who with his wife was deeply involved in efforts to counter the decline, and who in one neighborhood had some success in doing so. But in the end, there remains an ailing minority-dominated school system in Syracuse in which fewer than 3 of 10 8th graders pass state tests in reading and math.

And then there is Raleigh, where more than 8 of 10 pass, and the visiting researcher is told—and it seems true—“there are no bad schools in Raleigh.” (State requirements, of course, do vary widely, and North Carolina’s are among the least rigorous, but even so the differences between the two cities are huge.) One of the first schools Grant visited in Raleigh, in the historic black district, serves a student population that is majority black with one-third of children from low-income families. The school nevertheless “attracted whites from across the county to its [magnet] programs in art and science. In 3rd grade 94 percent of white children and 79 percent of blacks passed the state math test. By 5th grade 100 percent of both blacks and whites passed the test.” There are very few such public schools in northeastern and midwestern cities of similar size. And if there are, they are generally in rapid transition to becoming all-black. There may be the occasional KIPP or charter school that is predominantly minority and scores high. But Grant is describing a traditional public school, and all Wake County public schools seem to be similar in achievement and attractiveness.

“County,” there is the rub, and the explanation, according to Grant. Raleigh did not resist the mandates of Brown v. Board of Education as fiercely as other southern cities. Grant records a degree of good race relations even under the reign of Jim Crow in Raleigh that seems exceptional, although the schools were separated until the late 1960s. “Whites began to bail out of the system in the 1970s, as they did in Syracuse…. The line dividing the inner-city schools from the growing suburbs ‘had been frozen by the county,’” the black former superintendent of schools tells Grant. “We were locked into the inner city. The black count in the Raleigh schools was approaching 40 percent.”

But then, in 1976, without any court order or apparently any threat of one, the Raleigh city and county schools merged to create the Wake County School System. And that created the basic underlying condition that Grant believes made possible the remarkable success of the Raleigh–Wake County schools. Of course, more was necessary: vigorous and energetic superintendents, strong efforts to create magnet schools and to attract high-quality teachers and principals, publicity to draw students to them. A touch of the iron fist in the velvet glove, a program of assignment of students to schools by race sought to prevent black dominance, but affected it seems only a small number of pupils. More recently, this has been replaced by balancing schools according to socioeconomic status, limiting the number of students in each school eligible for subsidized lunches to under 40 percent (see “Fraud in the Lunchroom?” check the facts, Winter 2010) to evade the possible judicial striking down of a race-based program.

Syracuse did not merge with suburban districts, and even resisted any voluntary program, such as METCO in the Boston area, that permits inner-city black children to transfer to willing suburban school districts. It is astonishing that the Wake County and Raleigh schools merged, and I wonder whether there is even one other example of such a merger independent of legal pressure.

What were the circumstances that made possible this remarkable event in Raleigh–Wake County? There are no details in the book. I am informed that merger was rejected in a local vote, and then imposed by the state legislature. But even this is remarkable. (One should note that countywide school districts are more common in the South, which may have made easier the state vote and the acceptance of a countywide school district for Wake County.)

And then what made possible the equally remarkable success of the magnet schools, which enabled racial balance with little in the way of direct assignment? This has not been the common experience of other districts with magnet-school programs. In particular, one thinks of the Kansas City experience, as described in Joshua M. Dunn’s Complex Justice (see “Finding the Right Remedy,” book review, Spring 2009). Huge sums of money were appropriated by Missouri under court order to build and rebuild inner-city schools and establish magnet programs to draw suburban white children, with nothing like the success we witness in Wake County. Everywhere, except in the most exceptional cases, we have seen the resistance of suburban white parents to sending their children to inner-city schools with near majorities or majorities of black children.

Grant is well aware this resistance is not a product of simple racism and is more to be ascribed to parents wanting the best for their children. But then why is Raleigh–Wake County different? One hesitates to jump to the conclusion that Wake County and Raleigh are simply more enlightened, liberal, and tolerant than most American communities. And if they are, what can explain it?

One explanation might be that Raleigh was growing by leaps and bounds, economically and demographically: North Carolina was attracting some of the industry that was leaving Syracuse. While we are not given the specific figures, apparently the percentage of black students—and concentration in the inner city—was similar in Syracuse and Raleigh. Growth may have created optimism and concern over maintaining it with the good schools that integration facilitates, and that may have contributed to the success of the merger effort. Blacks and whites in Raleigh, we get a hint, were not as separated geographically as in Syracuse, reflecting a common southern pattern. Raleigh is the state capital and that certainly anchors to some degree a middle-class population. But what happened in Raleigh was so exceptional it deserves further analysis.

There are hints in the book that this exceptionality is now threatened. A local woman—who moved in 1989 to Raleigh with her young children from Lexington, Massachusetts—heads Assignment by Choice, an organization that attacks the pupil assignment policies that keep the Raleigh schools in socioeconomic (and racial) balance. “Her campaign started…after her son was rejected several times to schools she had hoped would help him with his attention-deficit and hearing problems.” Her efforts to get supporters elected to the school board at first failed, but a local election in October 2009 gave the board a majority of neighborhood-school supporters.

And there are other clouds: The number of families from Mexico and Central America is rising. The percentage of schools with more than 40 percent subsidized-lunch students has doubled in six years. Grant devotes a good part of the book to the story of how a Supreme Court with four Nixon appointees in 1974 stopped a program to bring together Detroit with its suburbs to make possible a greater degree of integration in the Detroit schools, and thus called a halt to a constitutionally imposed merger of central-city and suburban schools. But could anything have saved such mandates given the fierce popular opposition to school busing at the time?

Nor has this weakened much over the years. Despite the remarkable story of how the Raleigh–Wake County schools raised the achievement of black school students, this is still a task that in large measure will have to be accomplished in black and minority-dominated schools.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count.

There is no end to the debate over intelligence: how to define and measure it, how much of it is hereditary versus environmentally determined, and the extent to which it can be altered via purposeful interventions. The latest book-length entry into this debate is University of Michigan psychology professor Richard Nisbett’s rebuttal of Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, Arthur Jensen, and other “hereditarians.” The volume also serves as a partial, if unintended, rebuttal of today’s “broader, bolder” crowd and their assertion that schools cannot boost the life prospects of poor children. With Howard Gardner and others, Nisbett contends that intelligence takes multiple forms; that traditional IQ (and achievement) tests fail to capture this rich variety; that environment and education play larger roles than genetics; and that a handful of purposeful schoolcentric interventions (e.g., KIPP, Reading Recovery, Perry Preschool) have shown promise in boosting the intelligence of poor and minority youngsters. He acknowledges, though, that home, family, and culture matter enormously, and that a major source of today’s gaps is the extraordinarily discrepant experiences that children have outside of school. This leads to advice for parents “to increase the intelligence of your child and yourself,” though Nisbett focuses on such “21st-century” skills as “problem-solving” rather than reading books, acquiring knowledge, and gaining understanding. Of course, the parents most apt to follow his recommendations already have kids on the upside of the learning gap.

Liberating Learning: Technology, Politics, and the Future of American Education. Terry M. Moe and John E. Chubb (Jossey-Bass).

These two political scientists, authors of a best-selling provoucher publication, Politics, Markets and America’s Schools (Brookings, 1990), have shifted their bets from that spoke of the school-reform roulette wheel named “school voucher” to one marked “technological innovation.” The descriptions of the latest uses of educational technology both within schools and over the Internet are just as compelling as the evidence provided that teachers union leaders today are little more than modern Luddites. The latest publication is as much required reading as the one the authors penned 20 years ago, and it can be expected to spark almost as much controversy. But the analysis is better at isolating the political obstacles to be surmounted than identifying the political support for technological innovators who, according to Moe and Chubb, will nonetheless persevere. All the best.

Unlearned Lessons: Six Stumbling Blocks to Our Schools’ Success. W. James Popham (Harvard Education Press).

Testing impresario Jim Popham has penned a volume that mixes anecdote, personal experience, and scholarly analysis to ask why American schooling has had such a terrible time designing, adopting, or employing good assessment. Popham provides a pithy and highly readable treatment of key challenges in standards, testing, and assessment, one that is particularly timely as governors and influential supporters move to embrace some version of common standards (with hundreds of millions in federal dollars pledged to finance the ensuing tests). Popham argues that assessment in the United States has suffered from six crucial, recurring problems: too many curricular targets; the underutilization of classroom assessment; preoccupation with instructional process; the dearth of “affective” assessments, i.e., those focused on attitudes, interests, and values; instructionally insensitive accountability tests; and the reality that educators “know almost nothing about educational assessment.” Readers may take issue with some of Popham’s critiques and assertions, or the shape of his recommended remedy, which is explained in an enthusiastic treatment of Wyoming’s current assessment and accountability system. Even skeptics, however, would benefit from Popham’s insights regarding how and why high-quality assessment is a matter of politics, policy, and practice, as well as technical expertise.

Leading for Equity: The Pursuit of Excellence in Montgomery County Public Schools. Stacey M. Childress, Denis P. Doyle, and David A. Thomas (Harvard Education Press).

This self-described “celebration” of the Montgomery County Public Schools, a 140,000-student behemoth in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, is no doubt meant to add the district to the list of superstar systems worthy of national attention. No longer an exclusive enclave of affluence, the county has witnessed an influx of poor and minority students over the past quarter century. Ten years ago, Superintendent Jerry Weast divided the system into the leafy “Green Zone,” which he mostly (and benignly) ignored, and the struggling “Red Zone,” where he poured new resources, staff, and “capacity.” Test scores in the Red Zone are up, as is participation in Advancement Placement courses. The authors see much worth lauding, though one wishes for more of a critical eye. What to make of the white-black SAT test-score gap, for instance, which is bigger than ever? And is any of this replicable, anyway? Weast’s spending spree was enabled by the housing bubble, which pushed local property values—and property taxes—sky high, along with a liberal population willing to see its burgeoning tax revenue siphoned off to help needy students. For better or worse, history might show the “Leading for Equity” story to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not a model for others to emulate.

Columbine
By Dave Cullen

This book is clearly the last word on Columbine. The author has reported on the Columbine high-school massacre in various magazines and newspapers since 1999; he has interviewed, it appears, everyone interviewable; he has studied all the many official reports and all the evidence, listed here in a bibliography of 14 pages; and one can only regret the form in which he has chosen to cast his account. There have been many such shootings over the years, and one, the Virginia Tech massacre, far exceeded in numbers those killed at Columbine High in Colorado on April 20, 1999, but Columbine—it is no longer necessary to define for American audiences what it was—had some distinctive features that helped impress it into the American mind as the epitome of school killings.

There were two killers, rather than one, suggesting a degree of collaboration or conspiracy that made Columbine different from the typical school shooting by one disturbed or deranged perpetrator. It was the first school killing covered live on continuous news television, which contributed to both widespread knowledge and widespread confusion as to what drove the killers. The two young students had also left an enormous trail of video recordings, web pages, notebooks, and all kinds of other evidence of acquisition of guns and bomb-making materials, which could be, and were, used to determine how the plot developed, why they did it, what they had in mind.

Perhaps of greatest interest to school administrators and teachers, the two left a substantial trail of recorded misdemeanors, crimes, and treatment for them that raised the question, How could their preparations, undertaken over months, for the killing of hundreds—fortunately, partly foiled by the failure of the two huge bombs they set up to explode in the lunchroom—not have received notice in time for someone to stop them?

Cullen tells the story of the massacre twice, both times weaving in stories about students, victims, teachers and administrators, parents, and investigators, about whom we learn more than we need to know, in the style of The New Yorker. The first telling has the virtue of communicating the confusion attendant as the events occurred. Hundreds of police officers surrounded the school and prepared to invade it; the TV news stations were on the spot almost immediately (“breaking news,” after all); terrified students were calling parents, 911, and news channels on their cell phones; and many things heard contradicted other things. All this is well documented by Cullen.

But early on, when information about the intended targets and even the number of killers was unclear (as they appeared and reappeared in different locations and shed the trench coats they had worn for their initial shootings), there emerged a widely accepted story line: Two marginalized students had been subjected to sneers and social rejection and in revenge were shooting athletes and Christians. Actually, the killers were not marginalized, were good and even popular students, were not members of the Gothic “trench coat mafia,” and were killing at random. All initial views of their motivation were misguided.

The second telling of the massacre, incorporating all we have learned since, concentrates on the development of the two killers and their ideas and plans, and on their encounters with the law and school authorities. One was clearly a psychopath, and Cullen has a good and extensive discussion of what we know of this disease and how to treat it. The second was dominated by the first and suffered from an extreme version of lovesickness directed at a student whom he never addressed. The first killer, influenced apparently by admiration for Germans, from Nietzsche to the Nazis, thought that the world and all its people were terrible and deserved to die, and he was ready to die with them. He was able to persuade the second killer, who was miserable, but just why is unclear. Both boys killed themselves when they ran out of available targets and weapons.

Despite the general confusion during the massacre and for some time later, the identity of the two shooters became available almost immediately, presumably from reports by students streaming out of the school and being rapidly interviewed by police. “A simple search on Jeffco [Jefferson County] computer files found something stunning. The shooters were already in the system. Eric [Harris] and Dylan [Klebold] had been arrested junior year. They got caught breaking into a van to steal electronic equipment. They entered a 12-month juvenile treatment program, performing community service and attending counseling. They’d completed the program with glowing reviews exactly 10 weeks before the massacre.

“More disturbing was a complaint filed thirteen months earlier by Randy and Judy Brown, the parents of the shooters’ friend Brooks. Eric had made death threats against Brooks. Ten pages of murderous rants printed from his web site had been compiled. Someone in Battan’s [the lead investigator] department had known about this kid.”

We learn in the course of the book a good deal more about the available record. There was apparently no way for the counselors in the treatment program to unveil the murderous intent of their counselees, who put on a good show of remorse. The papers that called for a search as a result of the Brown complaint, a search that might have uncovered astonishing evidence of intended mayhem in Eric’s room had it been executed, were never acted upon, and the file on the case kept getting lost, owing one assumes to the embarrassment it would cause the Jeffco officials.

Consider also a paper written by Dylan Klebold shortly before the massacre: “His instructor, Judy Kelly, read it and shuddered. It was an astounding piece of writing for a seventeen-year-old, but she was deeply disturbed… Dylan’s protagonist was killing civilians, ruthlessly, and enjoying it. Kelly wrote a note at the bottom instructing Dylan to come to see her…. ‘You are an excellent writer and storyteller, but I have some problems with this one,’ she wrote.”

The teacher went further. She called Dylan’s parents and spoke with them. “They did not seem too worried.” Both sets of parents were middle-class and ran respectable households, and while they were held in some way responsible by public opinion, they hardly seem to deserve censure from this account. Judy Kelly went on to the school counselor, who spoke with Dylan and “downplayed it again…. Kelly had done the right thing: she’d contacted the three people most likely to have information on Dylan…. If the counselor or parents knew Dylan had been setting off pipe bombs and showing them around at Blackjack Pizza [where he worked], they could have connected fantasy with reality and NBK [the boys’ code name for the massacre] might have come to an end. They did not. Jeffco investigators had most of the pieces. Most of the adults close to the killers were in the dark.”

Lessons? “The FBI and the Secret Service each published reports in the first three years, guiding faculty to identify serious threats. The central recommendations contradicted prevailing post-Columbine behavior [which was “zero tolerance,” “every idle threat…treated like a cocked gun. That drove everyone crazy”]. They said identifying outcasts as threats is not healthy. It demonizes kids who are already struggling…. Oddballs are not the problem. They do not fit the profile. There is no profile….

“The FBI compiled a specific list of warning signs…. It was a daunting list…. Few teachers were going to master it. The FBI recommended that one person per school be trained intensely, for all faculty and administrators to turn to.”

Cullen gives references to these reports, which are clearly worth reading. But the main effect of his well-researched book is to leave one sober about any program that might prevent such horrible events from recurring in the future.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

All Together Now:
Creating Middle-Class Schools through Public School Choice
by Richard D. Kahlenberg
Brookings Institution, 2000, $29.95; 379 pages.

Richard Kahlenberg makes the kind of very clean and uncompromising argument typical of believers in forced desegregation, whether based on racial or, in this case, economic status. The same is often true of promoters of school choice, among both private and, as in this case, public schools. The book not only makes a clear argument but also recalls a very rich political and scholarly period in the history of American education. It brings us back to Brown v. Board of Education and forward to Abbott v. Burke, the New Jersey Supreme Court decision holding that an “adequate” education, as required by the state constitution, requires a certain level of per-pupil funding. It links James Coleman’s seminal report on education and poverty to the latest findings on school choice and to some of the economics literature on educational achievement.

The argument of the book can be stated as a series of propositions, with the material in brackets added by this reviewer:

• The American educational system is considerably segregated by economic class [and race].

• Students in schools with large majorities of disadvantaged students [who are disproportionately likely to be racial minorities] do poorly on measures of educational achievement, and their schools are likely to have higher rates of disciplinary problems.

• In what is known as the “peer effect,” poor students [and minority students] do better in schools where the student body is more middle class [white].

• Therefore, the way to improve the educational achievement of poor [nonwhite] students is to desegregate schools by economic class [race].

• Public-school choice can create a certain socioeconomic balance within schools with minimal conflict.

My use of brackets attempts to emphasize that this argument is something of a reworking of the racial desegregation arguments that prevailed from the 1960s through the 1980s. This is not to imply that the original argument can simply be readjusted in light of the failure of the desegregation movement. This is to emphasize that one cannot simply “find and replace” race with economic class. Sadly, they are not the same.

In Kahlenberg’s opinion, the primary means for achieving economic integration while avoiding the controversy of racial integration is controlled choice. Controlled choice requires all parents to choose schools, often within “subdistricts” that are defined by their racial and economic mix of students. The district then assigns the children, taking into account a range of factors: parental choice, economic integration, racial integration, distance to school, and school enrollments. Ideally, transportation is provided to all students.

The problem with districts in which a majority of the students are low income is the need to add middle-class students. Kahlenberg claims these districts account for only 14 percent of all districts, but this understates the problem: these districts represent considerably more than 14 percent of the nation’s students. In addition, Kahlenberg’s “ideal solution” is district consolidation, which he implies is a viable alternative given our 70-year history of consolidation. However, this would obviously require consolidating inner-city and suburban districts. There is no political comparison between that type of coercive consolidation and the consolidation of small rural districts, and even that was hard-fought in many states. I cannot imagine a legislature in this country authorizing such consolidation unless the districts voluntarily came forward.

A personal note may emphasize the depth of the problem of integrating inner-city and suburban districts. In my first foray into education policy in the mid-1980s, I led a study of the Milwaukee metropolitan public school districts. The commission for which I served as executive director of research was established as an attempt to forestall a lawsuit by the Milwaukee School Board intended to force metropolitan racial integration. The commission failed; the lawsuit went forward and was settled out of court by extending an existing voluntary city-suburbs exchange program.

During the deliberations concerning the commission’s report, I became an advocate of a proposal to divide the Milwaukee School District (100,000 students) into between eight and ten pie-shaped districts extending from the Milwaukee inner-city to the suburbs. The idea was to integrate based on socioeconomic status. In part the rationale was based on a “tipping theory” hypothesis for schools that Kahlenberg supports. I am still convinced that the theory is correct–that when the share of a school’s students who are disadvantaged reaches 60 percent or more, the focus, morale, and educational environment shift dramatically. Teachers have reduced time to teach, are forced to teach many remedial courses, and generally seek to leave; middle-class parents of all races do the same.

What is telling for Kahlenberg’s recommendations is the reception that greeted these proposals. I gave three speeches in the Milwaukee suburbs promoting the plan. The response wasn’t frigid; it was blatantly hostile. No arguments could overcome the hostility, though I explained how not all kids would be bused to the inner-city; how magnet schools would be used (the mid-1980s version of choice); and how extra resources could be provided. After an absolutely dead-on-arrival reception in the legislature, the plan was dropped and has never reemerged in any fashion.

I am not as persuaded as Kahlenberg is by the peer-effect data showing, he claims, that economic integration supports achievement, but I generally agree with his goals and his solution. The problem, unfortunately, is that it is not practical in present-day America. Because of our geographic segregation by class, students will have to be bused and some, if not many, will have to be coercively bused. Busing has never been popular, and there is no reason to believe it will be more agreeable when the focus shifts from race to economic class.

The case studies of economic desegregation in the book’s last chapter are dominated by a city in my state, La Crosse, Wisconsin. I am familiar with that case and a parallel case Kahlenberg mentions in Wausau, Wisconsin. The problem of extending La Crosse as model for the larger problems of inner-city education in America will be obvious to most readers. La Crosse has a wide middle-class majority and to most observers would be mistaken for a suburban school district. The minority population is 12 percent Asian (mostly Hmong) and 3 percent black. Wausau, in the northern, rural area of the state, actually has an even larger Hmong population in the schools, 24 percent. Even with these small minority populations, the conflict generated in these cities over efforts to move students to achieve economic balance in the schools was considerable. In Wausau, as Kahlenberg dutifully notes, the attempt to “integrate” led to the defeat of the school board and the replacement of the district superintendent. The La Crosse effort was more successful, but not without strife.

My point, and I hope it is debated rigorously, is that substituting economic assignment for racial assignment will not fool anyone. Magnet schools failed to save racial desegregation; it’s unclear why, in light of this failure, wider choice options would promote economic desegregation. As the La Crosse plan attests, and as controlled-choice options based on race (such as that in use in Boston) confirm, unless neighborhoods are economically integrated, the only way to facilitate desegregation is through some coercive element, such as quotas. La Crosse is not a large city, yet school population “targets” were still needed. There is no evidence that cities in America are willing to accept forced busing based on either race or economic status.

I share Kahlenberg’s goals, and at one time I favored his solution, but I doubt that his proposal has any chance of working in the near future in America.

-John F. Witte is director of the Robert La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A half-century of court orders has dismantled the legal regimes of racial segregation without achieving much integration in the schools. It was right for the justices to declare the principle of Brown v. Board of Education; perhaps it was right to attempt heroic remedies that would challenge sheer physical separation. However, the law has failed and today is in retreat toward its de jure redoubt.

Richard Kahlenberg attributes much of the law’s failure to its very focus on race. The real problem, he claims, is consistent segregation by family income or wealth. In America a child’s classmates tend to come exclusively from his own social class. Focusing on the incendiary racial hook has distracted us from this more fundamental pathology.

Kahlenberg persuades us that children from the bottom third of society’s economic ladder simply do not prosper academically when they are taught in homogeneous platoons conscripted from the neighborhood. They can learn, however, when some stroke of luck enrolls them in a mostly middle-class school. Afforded the influence of bourgeois peers, they transcend the limits of the urban classroom–and they do so without systematic injury to their middle-class schoolmates; the poor win, and the rich don’t lose. This premise whets the author’s legal appetite for a “right to attend middle-class schools.”

One could question such a right while affirming this general rebuke to the system. The social balkanization created by government schools renders them both inefficient and thoroughly undemocratic. In this country the middle class simply buys the schooling it prefers, shopping for it in the clumsy but effective real-estate market that sells state-run education. But while the middle class maneuvers, the rest of America is herded. Their schools are labeled “public,” but this is a name hijacked from more democratic state enterprises to which all have access. Unlike the street, the library, the public park, or the museum, the school maintained by the state excludes the family that cannot afford to be its neighbor. The result: Beverly Hills and Grosse Pointe are private in all but name. The liberal’s calling is not to reform the public school, but at long last to create it.

Kahlenberg styles his crusade “economic integration,” meaning that there should be a substantial presence of non-rich children in schools that carefully maintain a middle-class majority. He ponders a possible constitutional claim to such an environment, but little in federal doctrine suggests it. Of course, judges (state as well as federal) can have exotic insights, and lawyers will suggest them. Kahlenberg will not object: “Court decisions are less democratic, but . . . the judiciary should promote certain important principles.”

Happily for this reader, the bulk of the book centers not on the courts but on politics and democratic values, at least as the author understands them. Prudent programs of economic integration could, he argues, fetch the allegiance of a middle class that has nothing to lose and a conscience to quiet. The ideal design of any such program, however, proves enigmatic and elusive, most evidently in Kahlenberg’s nervous probes toward parental choice. Repeatedly the book seems poised to consider choice for the poor as a distinct and substantive objective. In the end, however, it provides only scraps of the various theories that might justify choice as an independent value.

All Together Now cannot make these foundational arguments because it views choice merely as one instrument of the grand objective, economic mixing. Hence the book’s mantra is not choice, but that opaque locution, “controlled choice.” Its reports of successful integration involve marginal and attenuated forms of parental freedom. The flagship example is La Crosse, Wisconsin, where the primary means of integration was the redrawing of attendance zones. Kahlenberg is comfortable with coercion of this sort even in his endorsements of charter schools; these should be made available, he says, where choice will contribute to the proper mix of rich and poor.

This helps to explain the book’s neglect or superficial treatment of a generation of proposals that honor both integration and choice as strong yet distinct values to be pursued simultaneously. Chosen integration is substantially more humane and stable than any potpourri achieved by command. The two objectives can be natural allies. Indeed, since 1969 scholarly models of family choice have consistently stressed both values by including rules ensuring that state and participating private schools alike will share in the integration of the social classes. In those cases where the legislative models are designed to make children from all economic levels eligible for vouchers, the means of integration have varied from full and partial admissions lotteries to modest set-asides of a portion (often 20 percent) of a school’s new admissions for low-income applicants. Such admissions policies would be coupled with a rule that either forbids tuition beyond the amount of the state subsidy or requires that any charges be means-tested. The grant or scholarship must also be large enough to stimulate the formation of new private schools without the need for tuition supplements. Otherwise they are useless to the poor once the existing private schools are filled. Finally, the state must ensure appropriate transportation and information for low-income families

The three legislated systems of choice now actually operating (in Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Florida) all deploy these “controls” or their equivalents, even though children from low-income families are their targeted and primary beneficiaries. The programs there are achieving substantial economic integration in private schools and in charter schools that have been created by the states to face the new competition. There is a distinct possibility that, under such programs, even government schools will become authentically public.

In light of this distinctly liberal history and practical experience, why does Kahlenberg repeatedly engage in the unscholarly and misleading bashing of vouchers? For example, “Vouchers have failed because they generally produce greater socioeconomic concentration not less; divert funds to the wealthy; and will further divide Americans by race and religion.” What can this possibly mean? In our entire history, no voucher system has existed other than the three now operating. Is the Milwaukee system, in Kahlenberg’s terms, “a tool by the right wing to undercut public education,” one that diverts money to the wealthy? Quite the contrary. In fact, Wisconsin has provided the poor their first experience of an integrated and truly public education. Moreover, it has shown the families there the fundamental respect that also can justify their trust–and that of their children–in a democratic order.

-John E. Coons is a professor of law emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

In 1994, fresh from a two-year stint with Teach For America, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin inaugurated the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) in Houston with an enrollment of 49 5th graders. By this Fall, 75 KIPP schools will be up and running, setting children from poor and minority families on a path to college through a combination of hard work, long hours, innovative teaching, and a “no excuses” school culture.

Jay Mathews, education columnist at the Washington Post, has written for more than two decades about schools where children from low-income families succeed academically. His articles about mathematics teacher Jaime Escalante, whose disadvantaged East L.A. students regularly aced the AP calculus exam, inspired the film Stand and Deliver. Mathews also developed the Challenge Index for rating high schools according to their success in encouraging students to take college-level Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.

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Mathews’ latest book, Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America was published by Algonquin Books in January 2009 and chronicles how two young teachers created the most talked-about school reform in the U.S. today. The excerpts below tell the story of how the KIPP network began and reveal why the KIPP model works so well.

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The Seeds of KIPP

In January 1992, as Levin and Feinberg were writing up their applications for Teach For America, a tall, dark-haired former U.S. Education Department policy aide named Scott Hamilton was showing up for his first day at a new job. He had been hired by the Washington office of the Edison project, an effort to improve inner-city schools and make a profit. The only person Hamilton found there was a talkative red-haired 23-year-old researcher named Stacey Boyd, in whom he took an immediate interest.

In the annals of the charter school movement, the meeting of Hamilton and Boyd would take on considerable significance, particularly in the history of KIPP. By the time they married in 1997, as Feinberg and Levin were completing the second year of their new schools, Hamilton was the chief charter school official for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Boyd was establishing what would be a successful Boston charter school as she completed her MBA at Harvard. By 1999, the couple was in San Francisco, where Boyd had started a new company, Project Achieve, developing a way to assess the progress of every child in a classroom. She was also working with schools in Chicago and had hired Colleen Dippel to help there. Hamilton was working in San Francisco for two of the richest people in the country, Don and Doris Fisher, founders of the GAP clothing stores. They wanted him to find education projects where money from their new Fisher Foundation could make a difference.

Boyd, Hamilton, and the Fishers were too busy to watch much television. None of them had seen the “60 Minutes” report on KIPP in September 1999. But several city mayors and state governors had, and were enthralled. Some called Feinberg and Levin, asking if they could open another 15 or 20 KIPP schools right away. Such calls were naive, but they intrigued Feinberg. He urged Levin to join him in the effort to take KIPP national. Levin agreed that something had to be done. He liked the idea of teaching successful inner-city teachers how they might start their own schools. Feinberg looked for people who, unlike them, knew something about building large organizations. One of his first calls was to Boyd. She was an entrepreneur. She was very familiar with how his school worked and what it could do. She was thrilled with the idea and called Hamilton right away.

Hamilton promised to check it out. In the back of his mind, though, was the memory of the Fishers’ cautionary note when they hired him. They said they did not want to start anything new. They were too old to launch another GAP. They wanted Hamilton to find worthwhile projects to support and help grow, but no start-ups. Hamilton visited KIPP Houston, observed Feinberg at full speed, and saw what Boyd was talking about. He visited KIPP New York and got a dose of Levin’s wily charm. Hamilton hadn’t discussed KIPP in any detail with the Fishers. At the end of 1999, Hamilton popped a tape of the “60 Minutes” report into the VCR in Don Fisher’s office. When the segment ended, Fisher’s comment was, “What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

“I don’t know yet, but something,” Hamilton said. “This is worth something.”

Dining at their favorite San Francisco restaurant, Plump Jack, Hamilton asked Boyd what she thought of an idea forming in his mind—business training for charter school founders, focused on what made KIPP work. Boyd liked it. Hamilton got moving, still not telling the Fishers what he was up to. They did not want to do anything new. What he was thinking was very new, and very big. He invited Feinberg and Levin to meet him in Chicago in late January 2000 to conceive a KIPP master plan. Each of them could bring one other person. Hamilton asked Boyd to come. Levin selected his sister Jessica. Feinberg brought one of his most innovative reading teachers, Elliott Witney, who would eventually become principal of the original KIPP school in Houston.

The conversation in a suite on the 37th floor of the Fairmont Hotel lasted eight hours. Hamilton began with a PowerPoint presentation. He predicted that by the third or fourth year they could be training 150 school leaders. What would the KIPP schools have in common? Hamilton brought in a large easel, flipping over each page as it filled with ideas. The big points seemed obvious: high expectations for all students, a longer school day, a principal totally in charge, an emphasis on finding the best teachers, rewards for student success, close contact with parents, a focus on results, a commitment to prepare every child for a great high school, and, most importantly, college. They decided to call the main principles the Six Pillars, later whittled down to five. Some people said it sounded too Islamic, too T. E. Lawrence. But the Five Pillars stuck.

Boyd thought the meeting was going too well. New organizations were breeding grounds for dissent. They had to talk about that. By afternoon she was at the easel, picking at scabs in the Levin-Feinberg relationship, looking for unresolved issues in what had been their surprising and exciting but largely unexamined success.

She saw the three big men at the table. (At 6-foot-4, her husband was taller than even the KIPP founders. Witney, aware he was the least prominent person present, was 5-foot-4.) They had plenty of youth and energy and big ideas, but how were they going to make decisions together? If two of them thought an applicant for the leadership program should be accepted, and the other disagreed, how would they resolve that? If one of them thought that corporate human relations training should have two full days in the leadership course, and the others thought it only needed a couple of hours, how would they work that out?

They nodded patiently and said they could handle that. The idea was to give each school leader the same freedom to innovate that Levin and Feinberg had enjoyed, just so they showed good results. They had the confidence of youth. Three of the six people in the room, Levin, Feinberg, and Witney, had not yet reached their 30th birthdays. The oldest person was Jessica Levin, about to turn 35.

Hamilton still had to persuade two members of a very different generation, Don Fisher, 71, and Doris Fisher, 68, to give a large chunk of their money to these kids. He took the Fishers to see Levin’s school, starting the tour in the P.S. 31 portion of the building so they could contrast the noise and disorder with the quiet intensity of KIPP’s fourth-floor sanctum. (Doris Fisher was pleased to discover that one of Levin’s grandmothers was the daughter of her father’s law partner.)

Hamilton spent several weeks writing and rewriting a business plan. It was going to cost at least $15 million. He did not think the Fishers were going to react very well. It was a start-up, and it wasn’t going to be a certain success. He confessed to Boyd a sense of doom, and a pugnacious willingness, if the Fishers said no, to quit and find some other backer for the KIPP expansion. He sent one copy of the business plan to each of the Fishers. Despite his apprehensions, the Fishers loved the idea.

Don said he had never thought of running schools in the same way he ran a company. But as he considered the KIPP plan, it dawned on him that schools were a business, and charter schools in particular were a business. They needed principals who were trained in management fundamentals and could make their own decisions. He might have sounded gruff after he saw the “60 Minutes” video, but he had actually been moved by it. He wanted to get going right away. He welcomed Feinberg and Levin to a meeting at his office overlooking San Francisco Bay.

“So Mike and Dave, you’re really thinking you can pull this off, huh?”

“Well, Mr. Fisher, I don’t know,” Levin said, “but we’d be more than happy to use your money to find out.”

It was eventually decided that Feinberg, with Dippel, would move to San Francisco to be the chief executive officer of the new KIPP Foundation. No one was surprised. Feinberg told friends, including Levin, that Levin would be content to raise enough money to fully endow his school, sign an agreement that would guarantee KIPP New York enough space for the next 100 years, keep teaching fifth-grade math, and be as happy as a pig in a barnyard. For a while they amused themselves by pretending the decision was up in the air. If they were in a bar with a dartboard, Levin would declare that the first to hit the bulls-eye would go to San Francisco.

Feinberg moved west and discovered that Don Fisher was even more impatient than he and Hamilton were. Laura D’Andrea Tyson, the former chief economic advisor to President Clinton and the dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley, quickly said yes when Fisher, chair of her school’s board, asked if she could provide space and faculty experts for the business training part of what they were going to call the Fisher Fellowship leadership course. Feinberg, Hamilton, and Levin were pleased that Tyson, unlike other business school deans they contacted, did not suggest they involve education school faculty in the project. All three of them distrusted education schools. Feinberg and Levin planned to do most of their recruiting among Teach For America veterans like themselves. They thought such people would have the most drive and imagination, and the most experience improvising in difficult circumstances.

But it seemed to Hamilton they were rushing it. The original plan was to start that summer. The principals in training would take classes at Haas for two months, while they completed the paperwork that would launch their schools. In the fall they would work at one or both of the KIPP schools. By the new year, they would be in the cities they had chosen for their schools, recruiting teachers and students and finding a space for 70 to 80 fifth graders in the summer of 2001. Like Levin and Feinberg, they would add a new grade every year until they had fifth-through-eighth-grade middle schools of about 300 students.

It was already May. Hamilton felt they did not have enough time. They had selected four Fisher fellows. One dropped out, and the other three looked good, although headstrong. Susan Schaeffler, who would start the KEY Academy in D.C., and North Carolina teacher Caleb Dolan had rejected Feinberg and Levin’s request that they start schools in Atlanta, where Governor Roy Barnes was drooling over the KIPP results. The third fellow, a teacher at KIPP Houston named Dan Caesar, was happy to start a second school in Houston, as he was asked to do.

Hamilton went to see Don Fisher. “We’ve got to pull the plug,” he said. “We’ve got to take a breath and then do all this next year so we have time to plan it and do it well. I think we are just throwing stuff together here too fast.”

Fisher smiled. Feinberg, Hamilton, and Levin had no business training. He figured they would make mistakes. He explained to Hamilton, based on a half century of experience, that it was much better to get started and address problems as they came up, rather than sit at a desk and try to plan for everything that could go wrong. “Let’s keep throwing stuff together,” he said. “You are going to learn more by just getting started than you are going to learn over the next year studying this. Even if it is imperfect, I promise you it will be better this way.”

It’s the Teaching

By October 2005, a crisis had developed at one of Levin’s new schools, the KIPP STAR College Prep Charter School in Harlem. The sixth-grade math class was not going well. The new teacher was not performing up to the school’s standard. At almost any other public school, the problem would have been considered minor, and the solution long term. But Levin and KIPP STAR leader Maggie Runyan-Shefa were considering getting rid of the teacher right away, only three months into the school year.

The soft-spoken young man had come well recommended. He appeared to know his subject. He loved children. But he was a poor classroom manager and motivator. The aisles of his classroom were cluttered. His students were inattentive. A look at their work showed they were falling behind where KIPP wanted them to be.

In most urban schools such failings would have been difficult to detect because the standards were so low, a result of the widespread feeling that not much could be expected from such disadvantaged children. If a teacher’s flaws were enough to catch the attention of a principal, she would talk to him and ask that he observe some of the school’s veteran instructors. She would encourage him to borrow their techniques. She would never consider firing him in the middle of the term. Anyone she might be able to replace him with would almost certainly be worse.

In the normal course of events, the teacher’s disappointing performance might earn him a bad mark on his end-of-year evaluation, and a request that he take more courses and try harder. At the end of his probationary period, if he made no significant improvement, he might be let go. But by that point he would have been in the classroom for three years. The several dozen students he taught during that time would have had to settle for less than adequate instruction. Their chances of success in math in seventh grade, and beyond, would have been sacrificed to administrative inertia and no ready alternatives to bad hiring decisions.

KIPP schools were different. The longer school day made class schedules more flexible. The intense recruiting of the best available educators meant the administrators, including principals like Levin, Feinberg, and Runyan-Shefa, often had exceptional classroom skills and could take over a class if needed. If the sixth-grade teacher at KIPP STAR did not improve, Levin and Runyan-Shefa planned to turn the class over to the school’s vice principal, who had a master’s degree from Columbia University Teachers College. Runyan-Shefa, as well as Levin’s trouble-shooter Jerry Myers, had been working with the math teacher. Levin had stepped in one day, toward the end of the teacher’s lesson, to show him some techniques. He showed up the next morning to teach a complete class.

In the little world of KIPP math instructors, Levin was a legendary figure, the best math teacher many of them had ever seen. Runyan-Shefa hoped his reputation would help the young teacher see how much better he could be. Levin had observed the sixth-grade class. He had talked to the teacher and to Runyan-Shefa. He knew that one of the teacher’s stumbling blocks was one disruptive student. Levin had this in mind when he walked up the stairs of the five-story brick school on a residential Harlem street, and approached room 433, where the young teacher taught three classes of sixth-grade math every day.

The teacher had his 28 students lined up in the hallway, as he had been asked to do. Levin went to the front of the line and stood outside the closed classroom door. “Everyone face me, please,” he said. “Let’s go. I’m missing one person’s eyes.” He waited a moment. “Thank you. I wanted the joy of getting back with you today to finish up what we started yesterday. We need one minute in the room to finish setting up.”

Levin reached out to the 11-year-old chief miscreant, who had been asked to stand near the front of the line. He escorted the child, just him, inside the classroom. He shut the door, leaving the other members of the class, and their teacher, out in the hall while he had a private chat with the boy. He shook the sixth grader’s hand. “Hi. I’m Mr. Levin. You remember me from yesterday. You don’t know me very well, but I think you will find it a bad idea not to listen today. You will enjoy being my friend. Any other options are off the table.”

He asked the student about himself. He had the boy help him rearrange the desks and chairs, making the aisles wider and the rows straighter. He opened the classroom door and welcomed everyone in to start on their introductory problems. “Thank you. Go to your desks. We will do the first five problems. Don’t worry about putting stuff into your binders. We will all put it into our binders at the end. Directions are on the board. They are also on the sheet, to be done by yourselves. Any questions? Okay. I am missing one person’s eyes.”

He waited. It was time for the formal opening of the class. “Hi, Kippsters!” Levin said with a smile.

Just two voices said, somewhat uncertainly: “Hi, Mr. Levin.”

“How many remember when I spoke to you last? How many of you actually remember what my name is? Veronica?”

“Mr. Levins?”

“Mr. Levin. There is no ‘s’. It is like the number eleven without the e in the front.”

He tried again: “Hi, KIPP STAR!”

“Hi, Mr. Levin,” came a somewhat louder response. He asked them to try again.

“I would like everybody’s attention, and do me a favor. When you bump into someone on the street, you don’t whine their name, do you? You don’t say (he adopted a very languid tone) ‘Yo, . . . what’ssss up?’ You’ve got to deal with someone. So we are going to learn to interact normally.”

“Hi, KIPP STAR.”

“Hi, Mr. Levin!”

“Hi, KIPP STAR.”

“Hi, MR. LEVIN!!”

“Good,” he said. “Not any whining, not that long drawn-out thing.”

The students were sitting straighter than they had been when they sat down. This teacher was annoying, but he had energy. “All right! You smile, right? So we are going to go about 30, 35 minutes together. In that 30 to 35 minutes I do really want to hear from everyone, all different groups and individuals. If I know your name, I will call on you by name, but if I don’t know your name, tell me your name before you start speaking so I can kind of learn your names. With all these beautiful and handsome ladies and gentlemen in the room, I should at least know your names.”

To Levin, a class was a conversation that involved every child. He had to stay positive, and pass that feeling on to them. “This is going to be good, going to be good,” he said, pacing in front of the class. “I love this stuff. All smile. Did you all know that smiling keeps your brain awake? You didn’t know that? When you sit up, you smile. Your brain gets oxygen and when your brain gets oxygen you are smarter and it makes you better looking, and some of you really need to smile a lot more. All RIGHT!”

The problems on the board involved long division. “Shamira, how does 21 go into 42? Two. Anyone confused by that? I am missing one person. Does the two pop up? What is two times 20?”

“40!” several voices said.

“What did I do wrong, man? What did I do wrong on purpose?” he said. The intentional error on the board was an old trick for keeping everyone engaged. Tricky teachers needed close watching. Eleven-year-olds loved correcting their elders.

“I can’t hear you,” he said. A few voices identified the mistake. “Exactly, right under here. Two minus zero?”

“Two!” they said.

“Perfect. Check this out. Raise your hand if you can count by 20s. Okay, now raise your hand if you can count by 62s. Not so easy, right? But the steps are exactly the same. We are going to take a look at this one, we are going to take some notes and you are going to be able to do it on your own.” He employed a standard motivator, the reach for a challenge. Each class was a team. They were drawn to the excitement of fighting and beating a tough opponent. Smart teachers would often offer a problem that, they said, was beyond what kids in other schools were getting.

“How many of you like chicken wings?” Levin asked. “You order them mild, medium, and spicy, right? Mild, medium, and spicy.” He chose metaphors for which he had a genuine passion. His students seemed to enjoy the vibe. “Raise your hands if you want a mild problem to start? How many want medium? Spicy?”

He started with medium. He called on several different children. He needed to be reminded of some of their names, but as the minutes passed he recognized more of them. No one could avoid participating. He kept moving around the room. “Raise your hand if I lost you. Raise your hand if this is seeming easier to you. Raise your hand if you are almost ready to do it by yourself.”

Every child had to get the concept. He was not going to pull too far ahead. “Raise your hand if you got it,” he said. “Everyone check me for a second. Everyone track me for a second. This is an important number. You have to pay attention here. This number cannot be bigger than what? This number cannot be bigger than what? Fatima?”

She gave an incorrect answer. He tried a few other students who did not get it. “One step too far,” he said. “Eyes up please. Eyes up. We will give you the next one on your own again. Watch this. We said we were going to be done by nine and we are pushing up on the time. You guys are pretty close, though. So watch this.”

The period was over. Twenty-eight children had watched intently and responded to questions for more than 45 minutes. They seemed to be holding their own. The class bad boy, Levin’s special project, had been a model student. The young teacher had taken many notes. There would be several more weeks of extra work for him. Then, still unsatisfied, Runyan-Shefa with Levin’s approval would find another job for him in the school not as demanding or as important as sixth-grade math.

The New York State Assessment tests were given to the KIPP STAR sixth graders the following spring. Seventy-three percent of the 78 sixth graders scored at the proficient level or above, compared to 45 percent of all sixth graders in the same Harlem district, and 60 percent of sixth graders in New York State [see Figures 2 and 3].

Ninety-two percent of those KIPP STAR sixth graders were from low-income homes. Ninety-seven percent were black or Hispanic. They had been taught to listen, think, and respond. For most of them it had worked. Their teacher had struggled, but for them the standards had remained high. They would be ready for seventh-grade math, which at KIPP schools was beginning algebra, begun two years earlier than at most American schools.

Video: author Matt Chingos talks with Education Next

Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson
Princeton University Press, 2009, $27.95; 392 pages.

In his February address to a joint session of Congress, President Obama announced a new national goal: “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world…. That is a goal we can meet.”

If he was talking about four-year degrees, we will have to increase degree attainment rates by 1 percent a year over the next decade among the population of 25- to 34-year-olds just to pull even with the current leader for that age group (Norway), and no one expects the rest of the world to stand still while we try to catch up. Our graduation rate will have to rise 1.6 percent a year if the definition of college graduates includes two-year as well as four-year degree holders.

How can we get there from here? A lot of the action will have to be through increasing persistence and completion rates. Enrollment rates among recent high school graduates have shown dramatic gains in recent decades and now approach 70 percent, whereas completion rates have stagnated below 60 percent. It will likely prove much easier to get students who have gained admission to college to the finish line than to boost completion rates among the 30 percent of high school graduates who do not enroll in the first place.

Enter Bowen, Chingos, and McPherson with a Herculean effort to examine the correlates of degree completion at America’s public universities. (Click here to see author Matthew Chingos interviewed by Education Next). Wielding the unique access and influence available to the president emeritus of Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (Bowen) and the former president of Macalester College and current president of the Spencer Foundation (McPherson), the authors have assembled longitudinal databases on student persistence and completion for 21 of the nation’s flagship public universities, and for the entire state university systems in four states. They’ve obtained data from sources that typically maintain a close hold, e.g., the College Board and the ACT, and linked it to the state and institutional databases, as well as data from the National Student Clearinghouse (used by most higher-education institutions and student loan providers for enrollment and degree verification). In addition, the database on the North Carolina state system includes information on student academic performance beginning in the 8th grade, making it a rich resource for examining how college enrollment and graduation is related to student preparation and characteristics of high schools. That FERPA (the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act) was probably violated multiple times in assembling this valuable database while no student’s privacy was placed at the slightest risk is a good reason for Congress to rethink laws in this area.

Although the new database is massive and rich, it will be important for readers to be aware that it supports correlational and descriptive rather than causal analyses. The authors have mined their data powerfully within this constraint. For example, we learn that student withdrawal rates at selective public universities occur steadily across the years of enrollment, whereas they are concentrated in the first few semesters at less-selective institutions. This means that retention strategies will need to differ across these types of institutions. We also learn that the predictive power for college graduation of high school grade-point average (GPA) is roughly four times as large as for SAT or ACT scores, and that this relationship holds across different tiers of high schools. This points the way toward institutions being able to serve a broader range of students while simultaneously increasing their completion rates if they adopt admissions policies that focus more on high school achievement and less on tested aptitude.

The authors are on shakier ground when they draw causal inferences. Consider what will likely be a highlight from the book: “The frequently disappointing graduation rate outcomes for students from underrepresented minority groups and for students from low-SES backgrounds are due in no small part [emphasis added] to the fact that a number of them were ‘undermatched.’” By undermatched, the authors mean students who had high school GPAs and SAT or ACT scores that would have made them eligible to attend a more-selective institution than the one they attended. The evidence used to adduce the negative impact of undermatch is that students attending less-selective institutions than they were qualified to attend graduated at lower rates than similar students attending more-selective institutions. The authors try to control for background differences between the undermatched students and their peers in more-selective institutions by adjusting statistically for SAT scores, high school GPA, race/ethnicity, gender, family income, and parental education.

Let’s imagine that these control variables were measured perfectly, even though most required high levels of imputation, e.g., family income and high school GPA were available for only about half of the sample. Think of two students with identical GPAs, SATs, and family socioeconomic status (SES). Both are qualified to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (the state flagship). One does, while the other enrolls in Western Carolina University (a much less selective institution). The first student graduates. The second student does not. Why?

The authors would have us believe that the first student graduated because she was surrounded by highly capable classmates, experienced a campus climate in which graduation was expected, had access to superior faculty and facilities, and received more financial aid. They acknowledge “suspicion of a modest [emphasis added] association between enrollment at the most selective flagship universities and unobservable characteristics of entering students, such as ambition and drive.”

Why shouldn’t we suspect that the association between these omitted variables and college graduation is large rather than modest? Why should we think that campus climate, facilities, and faculty have anything to do with the higher graduation rates at more-selective institutions? Researchers Stacy Berg Dale and Alan Krueger, using a national database, found that students who attended more-selective colleges did not graduate at higher rates or earn more in later life than students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less-selective colleges.

On this and other points of possible conflict with the existing literature the authors of Crossing the Finish Line choose not to alert the reader or engage in a comparative defense of their work. Nor do they spend much time anticipating and countering likely criticism. Leaving that aside and assuming that their analyses are superior to all others and free from major flaws, we still need prospective controlled studies of the interventions they champion, e.g., reducing undermatch, before it would be prudent to jump on a policy bandwagon. The history of education policy is filled with examples of failed programs and policies that were rushed to scale with no hard evidence of effectiveness.

While Crossing the Finish Line doesn’t provide strong evidence on what will work to increase college graduation rates, it points to four areas that will very likely have to be part of the equation:

Elementary and middle school preparation. The authors found that 8th-grade math and reading achievement scores in North Carolina “are tremendously consequential determinants of subsequent college enrollment patterns,” and that “the level of the high school…matters much less…than most people seem to assume it does.” This suggests that moving college enrollment rates substantially higher will require a continuing and unrelenting focus on improving foundational skills.

Affordability. The authors learn that states with lower levels of tuition in their public colleges and universities have higher attendance rates. This finding joins other research that indicates the importance of price of attendance for students from lower-income families. Policy initiatives in this area are almost all focused on increasing need-based financial aid, and that is the direction taken by the authors. It will also be important to develop policies to rein in costs and increase productivity in higher education lest increases in financial aid always chase increases in tuition.

Retention and on-time graduation. The authors’ case for reducing the leaks and stoppages in the pipeline to graduation is overwhelming. Federal and state incentives at both the institutional and student level for higher on-time graduation rates are needed, as is longitudinal data that would allow institutional graduation rates to include part-time students and those who graduate from institutions other than the one in which they initially enrolled.

Consumer information. Higher education looks like a competitive industry in that there are thousands of institutions from which students can choose. However, in the absence of real information on institutional performance, student choice is frequently uninformed or misinformed. If there are higher labor market returns to a student graduating from Chapel Hill vs. Western Carolina, or majoring in engineering vs. sociology, there should be a web site where that would be evident. If the net price of attendance at a flagship is likely to be lower than at a less-selective institution because of more campus-based aid, that shouldn’t be a mystery. And so on.

Crossing the Finish Line is an essential book for anyone interested in higher education policy. It demonstrates the high value of information locked away in administrative databases, and suggests new and potentially powerful approaches to increasing the nation’s population of college-educated citizens. We’re not likely to again lead the world in the proportion of college graduates unless we figure out how to build on this important foundation.

Russ Whitehurst is senior fellow and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The very publication of this edited volume—from the Harvard Education Press, no less—confirms that alternative certification has gone mainstream. According to Grossman and Loeb, the number of teachers coming through nontraditional routes increased 10-fold from 1995 to 2005, to nearly 60,000. Yet, the editors explain, “Despite the pervasiveness of alternative routes, most researchers now agree that the label of ‘alternative’ says little about how teachers are actually recruited and compared.” Indeed, the great variation within this growing niche of the teacher preparation world makes it all but impossible to study. This book is a fair attempt. Particularly helpful is a chapter by Loeb and Marsha Ing that reviews the research literature on alternative certification, such as it exists. (The bottom line: a highly selective program such as Teach For America is particularly useful in recruiting top-notch talent into high schools, though elementary school teachers might benefit from more pedagogical training than these fast-entry initiatives can provide.) Loeb and Grossman conclude the book by proposing a reasonable typology that could be used to better study these programs. And, as appears mandatory for any volume like this, the editors wrap up with a call for more research and experimentation. But in this field at least, that’s a call well worth heeding.

When Mayors Take Charge: School Governance in the City.
Joseph P. Viteritti, ed. (Brookings Institution Press, 2009).

When the New York state legislature gave control of the New York City schools to the mayor in 2002, a sunset provision was included, with a deadline of June 2009. To prepare for the time when the law would be either renewed or allowed to expire, the legislature asked the public advocate for the City of New York to appoint a commission to study the issue of mayoral control and make recommendations to the legislature. Joseph Viteritti, a self-proclaimed “early and consistent proponent” of mayoral control, was named executive director of the Commission on School Governance, and in that capacity he solicited and edited the papers for this volume. The book includes general overviews of mayoral control; case studies of mayoral control in Boston, Chicago, and Detroit; and chapters looking at school governance, past and present, in New York City. Readers who are searching for a quick answer to the question of whether mayoral control improves student performance will likely be frustrated. Mayoral control can create greater capacity for change in a school system that has resisted innovation. But what happens next will of course depend on the mayor (as well as many things beyond the mayor’s control). The Commission on School Governance solicited these papers from experts in an attempt to separate the assessment of the governance arrangement from the assessment of the Bloomberg administration. But when New Yorkers debated whether to extend mayoral control in spring 2009, most people’s assessment of mayoral control reflected their assessment of Mayor Bloomberg. As for the Commission on School Governance, it released its own report to the legislature in September 2008, long before this book was published (though presumably informed by earlier drafts of these papers), urging that mayoral control be maintained but that the power of the mayor be checked and that the public be given meaningful opportunities to offer input into policy decisions.

From A Nation at Risk to No Child Left Behind: National Education Goals and the Creation of Federal Education Policy.
Maris A. Vinovskis (Teachers College Press, 2009).

The University of Michigan’s Maris Vinovskis is undoubtedly the most diligent, thorough, and prolific historian of education goings-on in Washington over the past quarter century, particularly when it comes to standards, assessments, and compensatory programs. He is deeply knowledgeable, incredibly industrious, and skilled at recounting complex sequences with lots of telling detail. He’s less adept at summarizing, synthesizing, and generalizing, which limits his readership. His latest volume offers readers a peerless reconstruction of the sausage factory of federal education policy between 1983 and 2008, with emphasis on the setting of national education goals by Bush I and the governors in Charlottesville in 1989, and subsequent efforts by Bill Clinton and both

Bushes to develop policies and programs—especially successive iterations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—that would bring the country closer to attaining those goals. There’s probably more here than you want or need to know. Yet you are surely grateful that Vinovskis has recounted it in such meticulous and fair-minded fashion.

Inside Urban Charter Schools: Promising Practices and Strategies in Five High-Performing Schools.
Katherine K. Merseth and coauthors (Harvard Education Press, 2009).

With 4,000 diverse charter schools scattered across the land, and with critics, opponents, and analysts leveling forests to publish criticisms of charter schooling, it’s refreshing and heartening to find a thoughtful analysis of successful charters. The Harvard ed school’s Kay Merseth, with a platoon of research helpers and fueled by a federal research grant, examined five high-performing (urban) charters in the Boston metro area to see what makes them tick, and what they have in common. The resulting book is first-rate: five insightful case studies of individual schools followed by analytic chapters on “cross-school themes.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, these themes include school culture, leadership, personnel, “structures and systems,” and curriculum and instruction. It’s no cookbook or instruction manual; it doesn’t tell you how to create a successful charter from scratch, much less how to turn around those that are lacking. But it lucidly describes, depicts, and explains the crucial elements that these five schools have put into place that very likely account for their success.

The Role and Impact of Public-Private Partnerships in Education.
Harry Anthony Patrinos, Felipe Barrera-Osorio, and Juliana Guaqueta (World Bank Publications, 2009).

This slender volume provides an invaluable overview of the role that private ventures can play in K—12 schooling. The topic is especially timely given that, as the authors note, the percentage of students in private schools worldwide has doubled from 5 to 10 percent since 1991, according to UNESCO. Patrinos and his coauthors explain the array of possible arrangements and survey the international experience and research findings to provide clear guidance to policymakers. The best-known form of public-private partnership in schooling is a voucher plan that includes private schools. But the authors flag the many different roles that private providers play around the world when it comes to professional services (think teacher training or textbook delivery), support services (think meals and transportation), school management, and facilities. Examples illustrate how public agencies in various nations, from New Zealand to Pakistan, arrange for private operators to handle services. Patrinos and his colleagues argue that partnerships can deliver competition, flexibility, and risk sharing, and that sensible attention to arrangements can minimize potential downsides. In particular, they emphasize the importance of transparent and competitive processes for selecting private partners, the need for public agencies to separate the roles of purchasing and service provision, and the importance of sensible performance metrics and outcome goals. All in all, a useful primer for reformers and policymakers.

The Latino Education Crisis: The Consequences of Failed Social Policies.
Patricia Gándara and Frances Contreras (Harvard University Press, 2009).

Are our schools serving Latinos, the largest immigrant group of our time, as well as—or better than—our schools served immigrants in the past? Or are they suffering systematic discrimination and deprivation that will doom them to marginal status for generations? Is it better to be quickly immersed in the language of the host country or to be taught in one’s native tongue? Little is known about such matters. Gándara and Contreras do a better job of delineating the knowledge gap than filling it. For example, not much attention is given to the desperate state of the Mexican education system that has helped prompt the emigration across our borders. If the authors are quite objective in their summary of existing research, they, as their title suggests, do a better job at assigning blame than identifying anything other than standard remedies.

By Malcolm Gladwell

Little, Brown, and Company, 2008,
$27.99; 309 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Malcolm Gladwell, a writer for the New Yorker, has become wildly successful mining the findings of social scientists to support ideas or hypotheses that it turns out have been of interest to great numbers of readers. The hypotheses may not be very original or earth-shaking to social scientists themselves—for example, that one can find circumstances in which some phenomenon that has plugged along suddenly undergoes a rapid change (The Tipping Point), or that an idea or plan that comes in a flash may be as good as something developed with a great deal of research and much thought (Blink), or that success may be based more on special opportunities and hard work than on native gifts (the current Outliers). No matter: The Tipping Point, as I write, has been on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list for 230 weeks, Blink for 72 weeks, and Outliers high on the new nonfiction list for 15 weeks. And Gladwell has become an enormously successful and well-paid speaker to business groups.

His current book is of particular interest to educators because, as its subtitle tells us, it is “The Story of Success,” and much of it deals with success in education. It fits well with the current widely accepted dogma that “all children can learn,” because it downgrades the role of high native intelligence as indicated by IQ tests, and is optimistic that we can close current gaps in achievement by class and ethnic group by properly applying research on what leads to educational success. So it takes on both native gifts and unmodifiable cultural background as explanations of differential educational achievement and the kinds of success in life that higher education makes possible.

Gladwell is a wonderful storyteller and he cannot resist telling a good story, even if it is only marginally related to his central thesis. So he begins Outliers with the story of the town of Roseto in Pennsylvania, settled by immigrants from the town of the same name in Italy and still peopled by them and their descendants. Roseto has remarkably low rates of heart disease and has been studied by a physician and medical scientist, Stewart Wolf, and a sociologist, John Bruhn, who concluded that neither diet nor exercise nor genes nor location explains this anomaly: it was a family- and church-based lifestyle, “culture,” we might say. The connection to success? Well, it is certainly success in living, if not in education and occupation and profession. There is no indication that Rosetans do well by these measures, and their deep attachment to family and native place suggest otherwise. But “cultural legacy,” as Gladwell puts it, does come up again in the book and becomes one of the factors that do explain success in the wider world.

Consider a KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) school in the Bronx. The children come from circumstances that lead regularly to academic failure and dropping out, but in this school they do very well indeed. By the end of 8th grade, 84 percent of the students perform at or above grade level, compared to a figure for the district schools in the area of 16 percent. “KIPP is…an organization that has succeeded by taking the idea of cultural legacies seriously.”

Huh? What can he possibly mean, one asks, since this is a school of black and Hispanic children, whose “cultural legacies” have not ordinarily been thought of as education-enhancing? It is a complex connection. The story of KIPP follows a fascinating chapter on the culture of the rice paddies of southern China. Rice, contrasted with wheat, for example, demands very hard and steady work almost year-round. This has influenced, we are left to conclude, the educational culture in rice-growing societies. While the U. S. school year comprises about 180 days, South Korea’s has 220 days, Japan’s 243. And while there is no indication that the founders of KIPP knew anything about this, they too believe that steady and very hard work will bring success. So they run Saturday and summer classes, and a long school day, which means the KIPP children spend 50 or 60 percent more time in school than the typical public-school student in this country. It shows. But this use of “cultural heritage” as an explanation is a stretch.

A rigorous or systematic reader may find many a hole in the chains whereby Gladwell makes his case, but the stories along the way are wonderful. Along with gaining insight into the hard work of the rice paddy, we learn there is something special about the Chinese number system: first, each word for a number is very short, and it seems memory of numbers—from research Gladwell reports—is affected by the length of time it actually takes to sound out the number. In addition, the Chinese number system is very regular: there are no illogical jumps, as English has in its second decile, from twelve (for 12) to thirteen (for 13). Chinese numbers are a direct copy of the numerical system. I never knew those facts and find them intriguing; and indeed they may play a role, along with the long school days, in the superiority in mathematics of East Asian schoolchildren. But then one thinks, don’t all the Chinese kids in Stuyvesant High School in New York City use English in doing their mathematics?

Gladwell’s account of why a Korean airline had a series of horrendous crashes and how it overcame them is the longest in the book. It seems in Korean culture it wouldn’t do to interrupt a superior, and Korean pilots had to be taught to do this to prevent the captain from ignoring a danger that was obvious to an underling. The incentive to change was enormous: the airline would have failed if it hadn’t better managed to prevent disastrous accidents. Presumably, we are to conclude that other deep-lying cultures can also be changed. But this coheres uneasily with his main thesis.

In fact, Gladwell is riding two horses when it comes to the story of success. One emphasizes accident—for example, that Bill Gates had access to a computer in 1968 when there were few around and to another more advanced one at the University of Washington when it was not easy to spend endless time free on a computer, and this helped make him what he became. But the other horse is culture, even though Gladwell seems to argue that its effects, when they contradict success, can be changed. So the story of a group of very successful Jewish lawyers in New York not only points to the period when they were born, a time of low birth rates, which meant that the New York City public schools they attended were uncrowded and gave a good education, but also to a Jewish propensity to seek out and seize opportunity.

And his own success? Gladwell ends with the story of his Jamaican grandparents, who were school teachers and whose daughter managed to get to England for an education, where she met and married an English mathematician, whose son is Malcolm Gladwell. Heritage, opportunity, accident, maybe genes after all? He leaves it to the reader to sort out.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.

By Raymond Wolters

University of Missouri Press, 2008,
$44.95; 313 pages.

Steady Gains and Stalled Progress: Inequality and the Black-White Test Score Gap

Katherine Magnuson and Jane Waldfogel (editors)

Russell Sage Foundation, 2008,
$42.50; 355 pages.

As reviewed by Gareth Davies

Each of these books attempts to characterize the educational impact of the civil rights movement. Wolters is a historian at the University of Delaware who has written widely on 20th-century race relations in the United States. Magnuson and Waldfogel are professors of social work, at Wisconsin and Columbia respectively, and their 16 co-contributors to Steady Gains and Stalled Progress are all social scientists as well.
That disciplinary divide results in some marked differences in approach. Wolters constructs a largely chronological history since the first half century of the 1954 Brown decision, and his case studies of desegregation-in-action are drawn from contemporary news coverage and subsequent historical, legal, and political science scholarship. How, he asks, did judges come to embrace highly ambitious goals of school integration, having initially believed that the Constitution forbade official discrimination but did not require actual mixing of the races? What have been the consequences of that shift for American race relations? And what have been the consequences for schools, and for learning outcomes?

Contributors to the Magnuson and Waldfogel collection are interested only in the third of those questions, with specific reference to the test-score gap between African American and white children. Seeking to isolate the multiple factors that combine to determine educational outcomes, the social scientists mine the mother lode of educational research in the United States: the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Between 1971 and 1988, according to NAEP data, the reading gap between white and black 12th graders declined from 52 points to 20 (the gap also diminished for 4th and 8th graders, albeit not quite so sharply). By 2004, though, it had widened again, to 29 points, meaning that African American 12th graders were reading at about the same level as white 8th graders. The curve for math is flatter, but follows the same basic trajectory.

Both of these books make for uncomfortable reading. The essays in Steady Gains and Stalled Progress frequently bring to mind the 1966 Coleman Report, which found, to the great surprise of the author and others, that none of the obvious aspects of educational inequality (class size, teacher experience and pay, age of buildings, library and laboratory facilities) seemed to explain the black-white gap in schooling outcomes. Four decades on, one senses the determination of Magnuson, Waldfogel, and their colleagues to avoid a similar finding. Time and again, however, these scrupulous researchers are forced to conclude that the evidence is mixed or unclear. Just occasionally are they less equivocal, as when they observe that aggressive integration policies helped black children during the 1970s, that mounting socioeconomic inequality after the late 1980s contributed to the subsequent widening in the test-score gap, and that inequality in the preschool environment plays an important role in determining later educational outcomes. When encountering these passages in Steady Gains and Stalled Progress, one grasps for them, welcoming the momentary clarity of the findings and the possibility that they might be usable by policymakers. Yet the sense of relief does not last, for these islands of clarity are invariably surrounded by a broad sea of circumspection and equivocation that leave one adrift, wondering just how reliable they and similar assertions are, and just how policymakers might go about using this book to improve educational outcomes for minority children. One is left wondering whether educational research is intrinsically doomed to provide the classic illustration of Rossi’s Law: “the expected value for any measured effect of a social program is zero.”

Wolters’s book is discomfiting for a different reason. He considers it likely that there are hereditary differences in intelligence between blacks and whites, argues that human beings are intrinsically and elementally race conscious and race proud, and concludes that social engineering efforts to force the races together are doomed to have profoundly unhappy consequences. For all this, Wolters does not hanker after Jim Crow: he considers legally enforced segregation to have been wrong, and—shades of Abraham Lincoln here?—he believes that blacks as individuals deserve an equal opportunity to go so far as their talents will carry them. In order to distance himself from charges of racism, he argues that many of his views about race mixing were common among African American intellectuals in the past, not least W. E. B. Du Bois (whose career and ideas were the subject of his previous book).

Race and Education takes a close look at the five jurisdictions that were directly at issue in Brown and its companion case, Bolling v. Sharpe: Topeka, Kansas; the District of Columbia; Wilmington, Delaware; Prince Edward County, Virginia; and Clarendon County, South Carolina. Because these locales are so very different from one another, they give one a potentially rich opportunity to probe the determinants of success or failure: what difference did it make whether desegregation was being attempted in a depressed agricultural region with a black majority, a northern industrial city with a medium-sized black population, or a plains community with comparatively few African Americans? Wolters finds that wherever integration was attempted, the result was disastrous to the education system, to both races, and to race relations.

Yet this is surely not the whole picture. To return to Magnuson and Waldfogel, if desegregation was such an educational failure, why did the test-score gap diminish so markedly during the 1970s and early 1980s? Whether or not desegregation contributed to that outcome (the evidence is inconclusive), it does not seem to have done any harm. Wolters seems unable to assimilate any evidence that might suggest a more positive assessment, while grasping at whatever anecdotal evidence or source best substantiates his tale of woe. Whereas contributors to Steady Gains and Stalled Progress extrapolate agonizingly tentative findings from rigorous reading of the available statistical evidence, Wolters derives sweeping conclusions from a strikingly limited empirical foundation. In each case, the approach is likely to prevent the volume from having a very substantial impact.

Gareth Davies is a historian at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, and author of See Government Grow: Education Politics from Johnson to Reagan (University Press of Kansas, 2007).

An unabridged version of this review is available here.

by Mark Bauerlein

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin 2008, $24.95; 272 pages.

As reviewed by Ted Kolderie

The Dumbest Generation is an assault on people under 30. In chapter after chapter, the author, a professor of English at Emory University, rails at how little they know, how little they read, and how their fascination with screens (television and computer) fails to produce learning. What they write is full of “bad grammar, teen colloquialisms and shallow ironies.” Books are losing out. Unlike many, the author worries about the consequences less for the country’s economic future than for its intellectual future. “We need a steady stream…of strong military leaders and wise political leaders, dedicated journalists and demanding teachers, judges and muckrakers, scholars and critics and artists.” The problem is not so much school as it is what young people do in their private time: their “social and leisure dispositions are killing the culture, and when they turn 40 and realize what they failed to learn it will be too late.”

Bauerlein is even angrier with the “digital enthusiasts,” who equate an interest in the new media with learning, “the custodians of culture…the teachers, professors, writers, journalists, intellectuals who will not insist upon the value of knowledge and tradition.” And he is especially angry with those who tell young people they are a wonderful generation, the vanguard of a new literacy.

Surely not all young people are Zipper Harris in Doonesbury. Perhaps medieval scholastics felt the same way about printing.

But let’s stipulate the behavior he describes, even its consequences. Let’s agree that the digital age does stupefy young Americans, that it does jeopardize our future, and that teenagers are ignorant, unaccomplished, and unengaged except in their friends, music, clothes, and digital devices.

What to do? Well, we might start with a question Bauerlein does not ask: Is the problem with adolescents or with adolescence?

Psychologist Robert Epstein, at the University of California San Diego, in The Case Against Adolescence, agrees about the moronic behavior of many teenagers. But he explains: Adolescence infantilizes young people. Deny them serious responsibilities, keep them out of real work, give them virtually no contact with adults, tell them they have no function except to be schooled…why wouldn’t they behave as they do?

Sheldon White, while professor of psychology at Harvard, described adolescence as “a separate society” for the young, prolonging childhood. It was created by a coming together of the child-labor laws 100 years ago, the new high schools, and special legislation for juvenile offenders. After 1950 its effects were compounded by the shift public-opinion analyst Daniel Yankelovich details in New Rules from the ethic of self-denial to the ethic of self-fulfillment. So many people had so much money it was impossible to say “No” to cars, clothes, guitars, computers. No wonder youth behavior changed dramatically. Adults imposed new rules, which bred resistance and defiance, which produced still more restrictions. Curfews. Can’t drive. Can’t drink. “No entry except with adult.” Blocked access to the Internet. Criminalize sex under 18. No cigarettes. Dress codes. “Parental consent required.” And in school, metal detectors, video surveillance, armed guards, and No Cell Phones!

“Our high schools used to be filled with children,” Mary Lee Fitzgerald said in July 1999 while directing education programs for the Wallace Foundation. “Today they’re filled with people who are essentially adults—being treated still as children.” Young people are not challenged with serious responsibilities. Instead, they are told, education is the way up. The world of work is closed until you have the credentials. So study hard. Yet the schooling we offer is one that most find neither motivating nor relevant, offering them little say in what they study or how they learn or in the way their school runs.

When challenged, young people can perform impressively. Writing about the years 1815 to 1830, Paul Johnson described in The Birth of the Modern the remarkable accomplishments of teenagers from truly disadvantaged backgrounds. With little formal education they started work early and, importantly, were allowed to rise as fast as their abilities would take them. Michael Faraday, the scientist, “was born poor, son of a blacksmith. He had only a few years at a school for the poor, but as a bookbinder’s apprentice he read the works he bound.” Henry Maudsley, “perhaps the greatest of all the machine-tool inventors, began work at 12 as a powder-monkey in a cartridge works.” Matthew Murray, “the great engine designer, began as a kitchen boy and butler.”

In The Maritime History of Massachusetts 1783–1860, Samuel Eliot Morison writes about Mary Patten, wife of the captain of a clipper ship. “In 1858 on a voyage around Cape Horn, her husband fell ill. The first mate was in irons for insubordination; the second mate was ignorant of navigation. Mrs. Patten had made herself mistress of the art of navigation during a previous voyage. She took command, and for 52 days she navigated the ship of 1800 tons, tending her husband the while, and took both safely into San Francisco.” She was 19.

Bauerlein almost gets there. “Young Americans are no less intelligent, motivated, ambitious and sensitive than ever…. It’s not the under-30s who have changed…(but) the threshold into adulthood, the rituals minors undergo to become responsible citizens, the knowledge and skill activities that bring maturity and understanding.” The digital realm could aid in that, he says, “but not the way young people use it. The popular digital practices of teens and 20-year-olds…close the doors to maturity, eroding habits of the classroom…” But he proposes no changes in school or in society to offer them serious responsibilities for learning and for life. His remedy is essentially to take young people by the shoulders and shake ’em until they come to their senses about the need to be serious in school, to read books, and to think. And here we come to the issue. This is what many in the policy discussion favor and seem to believe will work.

The other approach is what Epstein proposes: Move the young people who can demonstrate maturity into adult life. Epstein would let them “test out” of adolescence. John Goodlad years ago suggested ending high school at age 16. Minnesota now has schools in which young people make more decisions, individually about the pace and nature of their learning and collectively about the rules by which their school runs. Get beyond the technology of teacher instruction; let students explore the world of organized information now available digitally, with teachers as their guides. Let them do real work, for money and for academic credit.

The education policy discussion needs to consider all this because, as White noted, school is part of the institution of adolescence. Almost certainly this country could be getting far more from its young people than it is. We know how to design and run schools that treat young people as adults. These exist. They work. But they are marginalized by a policy discussion that is locked into narrow conceptions of learning and of achievement and into a concept of adolescence it does not even think to question.

-Ted Kolderie is senior associate with Education|Evolving.

The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves.
James Tooley (CATO Institute).

James Tooley, the eminent British scholar who introduced the Western world to the thousands of “six dollar a month” private schools that serve millions of poor families in the third world, has penned an important book that recounts his own discovery of these schools, why they’re important, and what lessons might be drawn from them.

Most educators, international development experts, and aid organizations assume that education for all but the rich can only be provided by government, especially in poor regions. Tooley proves them wrong and isn’t afraid to note the failure of public schooling in many such places. With the World Bank documenting that in vast tracts of India on any given day, one public-school classroom in five has no teacher present, parents craving an education for their kids must look to other providers. In India, but also in China, Africa, the Philippines, and beyond, Tooley found private entrepreneurs educating enormous numbers of children at modest fees that are within the reach of most families, and in schools that typically best the government’s offerings in integrity, efficiency, and quality. “In the fissures of crumbling public education systems,” he writes, “a vibrant and confident education industry is beginning to emerge. It is serving the poor as well as the rich. It is bringing much higher standards than appear possible under public education. And with judicious support, it can engage to meet the needs of all, and can innovate through competition to improve teaching and learning and expand the curriculum, in ways that are unimaginable under public systems….My hunch…is that the educational enterprise will go from strength to strength in India and China, and in Africa too. And if for India, why not for us?” Why not, indeed?

The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem.
Patrick J. McCloskey (University of California Press).

With inner-city Catholic schools closing by the dozens due to financial pressures, this timely book offers a vivid reminder of what is being lost. Journalist Patrick McCloskey spent the 1999–00 school year embedded at Rice High School, an all-boys school in Harlem whose initially white student body had long since been replaced by the predominantly African American (and mostly non-Catholic) young men it serves today. The result, unlike many in-the-trenches accounts of high-performing urban schools, will not be confused with an advertising brochure. McCloskey candidly, if empathetically, describes the challenges the school faces and its occasional failures alongside its undeniable successes. But no one who reads his book will remain untroubled by news that yet another Catholic school has shuttered its doors.

Reforming Boston Schools, 1930– 2006: Overcoming Corruption and Racial Segregation.
Joseph M. Cronin (Palgrave).

No one has a better feel for the political history of the Boston schools than Joseph Cronin, a scholar and administrator who has spent a lifetime acutely observing the school system’s life and times, fully aware that its governing committee treated it mainly as a job-placement firm. His fact-packed account distills the racial controversies of the sixties and concludes with two full chapters on Boston’s teachers and their union with the following assessment: “Teacher negotiations generally retard the pace of urban school reform.” The book’s best line exemplifies the dry humor sprinkled throughout: “New Boston school custodians were paid as much as teachers and grew better paid with seniority.” Accordingly, the tone is more an avuncular chronicle than a passionate critique. Cronin has seen too many education disasters over the decades to become too disturbed about Boston’s current situation. “The Boston schools have work to do but are on the path to revival,” he assures us, not very convincingly.

The Leader in Me: How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time.
Stephen R. Covey (Free Press).

Steven R. Covey, best-selling author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, wrote this book to promote the efforts of principals around the globe who are preparing children for the 21st century by organizing their schools around Covey’s “7 Habits,” a sort of accidental comprehensive school-reform model created by fans. This book tells the story of the first such school, launched by Muriel Summers, an elementary-school principal from North Carolina. Summers believes (as does Covey) that factual knowledge is no longer the key to success, and that the 21st century will reward those who are creative and have strong people skills. She wanted to run a school that would teach kids what Covey calls leadership: taking responsibility for their actions, working with others more effectively, managing their time more efficiently, and doing the right thing. Summers surveyed teachers, parents, and the local business community and found that these basic life skills were what everyone most wanted kids to get out of school, not academics, so she changed the theme of her school to leadership, 7 Habits–style. Summers’s school (like the other leadership-themed schools described in the book) is a funny mix of progressive (lots of teamwork and decisionmaking activities) and paternalistic (students learn catchy songs emphasizing the 7 Habits and keep notebooks, graphs, charts, and diagrams showing their goals and the progress they are making toward them). Like the founders of “no excuses” schools, Covey laments the fact that today’s children are not learning basic character and life skills at home or in church. But while today’s high-achieving schools for low-income students (Knowledge Is Power Program [KIPP], for instance) are passionate about cultivating both character and traditional academic skills, schools built around the 7 Habits are focused on training confident kids who are good at planning, goal setting, and decisionmaking.

Changing the Odds for Children at Risk: Seven Essential Principles of Educational Programs That Break the Cycle of Poverty.
Susan B. Neuman (Praeger Publishers).

Susan Neuman is a former assistant U.S. secretary of education in the Bush administration who has enjoyed a bit of fame (and in some circles, infamy) for recanting her support for No Child Left Behind. In this book, as in other venues, she argues that not only is that law an imperfect piece of legislation, but its target is off the mark. If policymakers really want to close achievement gaps between rich and poor students, she writes, they should stop focusing on schools and start paying attention to what happens before children ever get to kindergarten. “Good schools can go a long way toward helping poor children achieve better, but the fact remains that educational inequity is rooted in economic problems and social pathologies too deep to be overcome by schools alone.” Such rhetoric will cheer fans of the “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a manifesto published last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which Neuman has signed and promoted. But the book itself doesn’t so much argue against school reform as highlight promising interventions for the under-five set, from prenatal care for poor mothers to rigorous preschool programs. As such, it doesn’t offer anything particularly fresh, beyond Neuman’s cheerful (and sometimes compelling) descriptions of the best of these initiatives in action. There’s a lot of do-gooding going on, no doubt, but nobody (including Neuman) has figured out how to bring these programs to scale and maintain their efficacy.

The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey into How the World’s Poorest People Are Educating Themselves. James Tooley (CATO Institute).

James Tooley, the eminent British scholar who introduced the Western world to the thousands of “six dollar a month” private schools that serve millions of poor families in the third world, has penned an important book that recounts his own discovery of these schools, why they’re important, and what lessons might be drawn from them.

Most educators, international development experts, and aid organizations assume that education for all but the rich can only be provided by government, especially in poor regions. Tooley proves them wrong and isn’t afraid to note the failure of public schooling in many such places. With the World Bank documenting that in vast tracts of India on any given day, one public-school classroom in five has no teacher present, parents craving an education for their kids must look to other providers. In India, but also in China, Africa, the Philippines, and beyond, Tooley found private entrepreneurs educating enormous numbers of children at modest fees that are within the reach of most families, and in schools that typically best the government’s offerings in integrity, efficiency, and quality. “In the fissures of crumbling public education systems,” he writes, “a vibrant and confident education industry is beginning to emerge. It is serving the poor as well as the rich. It is bringing much higher standards than appear possible under public education. And with judicious support, it can engage to meet the needs of all, and can innovate through competition to improve teaching and learning and expand the curriculum, in ways that are unimaginable under public systems….My hunch…is that the educational enterprise will go from strength to strength in India and China, and in Africa too. And if for India, why not for us?” Why not, indeed?

The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem. Patrick J. McCloskey (University of California Press).

With inner-city Catholic schools closing by the dozens due to financial pressures, this timely book offers a vivid reminder of what is being lost. Journalist Patrick McCloskey spent the 1999–00 school year embedded at Rice High School, an all-boys school in Harlem whose initially white student body had long since been replaced by the predominantly African American (and mostly non-Catholic) young men it serves today. The result, unlike many in-the-trenches accounts of high-performing urban schools, will not be confused with an advertising brochure. McCloskey candidly, if empathetically, describes the challenges the school faces and its occasional failures alongside its undeniable successes. But no one who reads his book will remain untroubledby news that yet another Catholic school has shuttered its doors.

Reforming Boston Schools, 1930– 2006: Overcoming Corruption and Racial Segregation. Joseph M. Cronin (Palgrave).

No one has a better feel for the political history of the Boston schools than Joseph Cronin, a scholar and administrator who has spent a lifetime acutely observing the school system’s life and times, fully aware that its governing committee treated it mainly as a job-placement firm. His fact-packed account distills the racial controversies of the sixties and concludes with two full chapters on Boston’s teachers and their union with the following assessment: “Teacher negotiations generally retard the pace of urban school reform.” The book’s best line exemplifies the dry humor sprinkled throughout: “New Boston school custodians were paid as much as teachers and grew better paid with seniority.” Accordingly, the tone is more an avuncular chronicle than a passionate critique. Cronin has seen too many education disasters over the decades tobecome too disturbed about Boston’s current situation. “The Boston schools have work to do but are on the path to revival,” he assures us, not very convincingly.

The Leader in Me: How Schools and Parents Around the World Are Inspiring Greatness, One Child at a Time. Stephen R. Covey (Free Press).

Steven R. Covey, best-selling author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, wrote this book to promote the efforts of principals around the globe who are preparing children for the 21st century by organizing their schools around Covey’s “7 Habits,” a sort of accidental comprehensive school-reform model created by fans. This book tells the story of the first such school, launched by Muriel Summers, an elementary-school principal from North Carolina. Summers believes (as does Covey) that factual knowledge is no longer the key to success, and that the 21st century will reward those who are creative and have strong people skills. She wanted to run a school that would teach kids what Covey calls leadership: taking responsibility for their actions, working with others more effectively, managing their time more efficiently, and doing the right thing. Summers surveyed teachers, parents, and the local business community and found that these basic life skills were what everyone most wanted kids to get out of school, not academics, so she changed the theme of her school to leadership, 7 Habits–style. Summers’s school (like the other leadership-themed schools described in the book) is a funny mix of progressive (lots of teamwork and decisionmaking activities) and paternalistic (students learn catchy songs emphasizing the 7 Habits and keep notebooks, graphs, charts, and diagrams showing their goals and the progress they are making toward them). Like the founders of “no excuses” schools, Covey laments the fact that today’s children are not learning basic character and life skills at home or in church. But while today’s high-achieving schools for low-income students (Knowledge Is Power Program [KIPP], for instance) are passionate about cultivating both character and traditional academic skills, schools built around the 7 Habits are focused on training confident kids who are good at planning, goal setting, and decisionmaking.

Changing the Odds for Children at Risk: Seven Essential Principles of Educational Programs That Break the Cycle of Poverty. Susan B. Neuman (Praeger Publishers).

Susan Neuman is a former assistant U.S. secretary of education in the Bush administration who has enjoyed a bit of fame (and in some circles, infamy) for recanting her support for No Child Left Behind. In this book, as in other venues, she argues that not only is that law an imperfect piece of legislation, but its target is off the mark. If policymakers really want to close achievement gaps between rich and poor students, she writes, they should stop focusing on schools and start paying attention to what happens before children ever get to kindergarten. “Good schools can go a long way toward helping poor children achieve better, but the fact remains that educational inequity is rooted in economic problems and social pathologies too deep to be overcome by schools alone.” Such rhetoric will cheer fans of the “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a manifesto published last year by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, which Neuman has signed and promoted. But the book itself doesn’t so much argue against school reform as highlight promising interventions for the under-five set, from prenatal care for poor mothers to rigorous preschool programs. As such, it doesn’t offer anything particularly fresh, beyond Neuman’s cheerful (and sometimes compelling) descriptions of the best of these initiatives in action. There’s a lot of do-gooding going on, no doubt, but nobody (including Neuman) has figured out how to bring these programs to scale and maintain their efficacy.

By Paul Tough

Houghton Mifflin, 2008, $26; 296 pages.

As reviewed by Cara Spitalewitz

“The clock is ticking,” Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone, tells New York Times Magazine editor Paul Tough. He is referring to the necessity that Promise Academy Charter School deliver satisfactory citywide test results to its board of trustees. But he is also referring to something much larger: the urgent need to save our nation’s poor children. “We better do something today to save these kids,” he says. “We want to be able to talk about how you save kids by the tens of thousands, because that’s how we’re losing them. We’re losing kids by the tens of thousands.” Canada’s sense of urgency is palpable throughout Tough’s Whatever It Takes, a breathless account of Canada’s attempt to transform the lives of some 7,500 children inhabiting 97 blocks of Harlem.

Canada’s goal is to create what he conceives of as a web of supports. By changing every aspect of a poor child’s life—schools, families, neighborhoods—he believes that the Harlem Children’s Zone can give youngsters the resources they need to succeed when all odds are against them. Since he founded the Harlem Children’s Zone as a one-block experiment in 1997, he has expanded it to include parenting classes (Baby College and Three-Year-Old Journey), a full-day preschool (Harlem Gems), two elementary schools (Promise Academy I and II), and a middle school (Promise Academy). He also has created afterschool programs for each developmental stage, public health initiatives targeting asthma and obesity, and guidance programs for adolescents transitioning into college or employment.

If children receive the appropriate interventions at each stage of life, Canada argues, they will be able to remain on a “conveyor belt” that will eventually lead to college and entrance into the middle class. To use another of his metaphors, their success at each stage will “contaminate” the neighborhood; if enough children receive the same positive messages about education, these messages will become normative, and self-improvement will become a realistic goal.

For Canada’s conveyor belt to be most effective, children need to get onto it early, even before birth. One of the major focuses of Whatever It Takes is early intervention, a movement that Canada initially found to be “invisible” above 110th Street. Several of Canada’s programs therefore target the 0–3 set and their parents, and Tough cites a number of research studies highlighting how parenting practices can influence early cognitive skill development (and how these outcomes can be measured by brain scans).

Canada makes it clear that eradicating poverty is a science and that a broad swath of Harlem is his laboratory: there are methods and techniques that will work, and he will implement and manipulate them methodically until they do. At the same time, Canada insists that early intervention is only one piece of his strategy. Even if science suggests otherwise, he refuses to give up on children who got onto the conveyor belt too late. Similarly, although he stresses that parents are invaluable to childhood development, he refuses to allow disengaged parents to be used as an excuse for their children’s failure.

Tough has been interviewing and observing Canada for five years, and his knowledge of the inner workings of Canada’s programs and the ideas driving them is striking. He provides overviews of the current research on early intervention as well as the evolution of poverty theory, from the controversy surrounding the 1965 Moynihan report to the debate between sociologist William Julius Wilson and political scientist Charles Murray about the root causes of poverty.

Although a varied and massive array of programs comprise the Harlem Children’s Zone, its charter schools have garnered perhaps the most attention, particularly in the context of controversial New York City school reforms and the larger conversation in the education world about high-stakes tests, charters, and No Child Left Behind.

Tough presents particularly compelling narratives about the progress of one Promise Academy elementary school and the middle school, the former achieving dramatic increases in test scores, and the latter temporarily closing its doors to new students as a result of poor (albeit improving) performance. He offers a glimpse of the challenges and frustrations in the middle school with a scene from a sixth-grade math class that stretches on for pages. It takes students the majority of a class period to figure out how to read aloud a 12-digit number written on the blackboard.

The question among policymakers, of course, is how to quantify the successes and failures of Canada’s experiment. Tough mentions a lack of hard data proving the effectiveness of some of the Harlem Children’s Zone programs. We have Promise Academy test scores and anecdotal evidence about Baby College, he notes, but we do not know how well the other programs that make up Canada’s safety net are working.

However, the data from the schools are a strong interim measure of success: 97 and 100 percent of the 3rd graders at Canada’s two elementary schools performed at grade level on the state math test in 2008. Although 3rd-grade reading scores were lower—68 and 81 percent proficiency—the numbers still topped the citywide average.

How much of this academic success is due to instruction? How much influence do the other safety-net programs have? Roland Fryer, a Harvard University economist, is currently looking at longitudinal data in order to disaggregate the various factors contributing to the success of the Zone’s children.

This research will be particularly useful in attempts to replicate the program. In one of his campaign speeches, President Barack Obama declared his intention to implement the Harlem Children’s Zone model in 20 cities nationwide. Elementary school test scores indicate that it is a promising experiment worthy of replication. As policymakers incorporate ongoing program evaluation and extensive data collection into each new Zone in each new city, we will learn more about the generalizability of the model.

Tough covers a great deal of ground, but what runs through all of his reporting is Canada’s staunch pragmatism. As competing education manifestos vie for policymakers’ allegiance, “which side are you on?” distressingly seems to be a more important question for many than “what works?” Canada, along with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, is one of the few education leaders to have signed both manifestos. Who can focus on philosophical debates when we are losing children by the tens of thousands?

What makes Canada’s approach so refreshing is that he does not seek to align himself with one set of policy prescriptions or the other; instead, he picks and chooses from each. For Canada, schools can’t do everything on their own, but they can do a lot more than they are doing now. For those who still seek to categorize him as a supporter of one side of the debate or the other, the answer is he is for both. He is for Whatever It Takes. The clock is ticking.

Cara Spitalewitz is an Urban Scholar at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future

by Mark Bauerlein

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin 2008, $24.95; 272 pages.

As reviewed by Ted Kolderie

The Dumbest Generation is an assault on people under 30. In chapter after chapter, the author, a professor of English at Emory University, rails at how little they know, how little they read, and how their fascination with screens (television and computer) fails to produce learning. What they write is full of “bad grammar, teen colloquialisms and shallow ironies.” Books are losing out. Unlike many, the author worries about the consequences less for the country’s economic future than for its intellectual future. “We need a steady stream…of strong military leaders and wise political leaders, dedicated journalists and demanding teachers, judges and muckrakers, scholars and critics and artists.” The problem is not so much school as it is what young people do in their private time: their “social and leisure dispositions are killing the culture, and when they turn 40 and realize what they failed to learn it will be too late.”

Bauerlein is even angrier with the “digital enthusiasts,” who equate an interest in the new media with learning, “the custodians of culture…the teachers, professors, writers, journalists, intellectuals who will not insist upon the value of knowledge and tradition.” And he is especially angry with those who tell young people they are a wonderful generation, the vanguard of a new literacy.

Surely not all young people are Zipper Harris in Doonesbury. Perhaps medieval scholastics felt the same way about printing.

But let’s stipulate the behavior he describes, even its consequences. Let’s agree that the digital age does stupefy young Americans, that it does jeopardize our future, and that teenagers are ignorant, unaccomplished, and unengaged except in their friends, music, clothes, and digital devices.

What to do? Well, we might start with a question Bauerlein does not ask: Is the problem with adolescents or with adolescence?

Psychologist Robert Epstein, at the University of California San Diego, in The Case Against Adolescence, agrees about the moronic behavior of many teenagers. But he explains: Adolescence infantilizes young people. Deny them serious responsibilities, keep them out of real work, give them virtually no contact with adults, tell them they have no function except to be schooled…why wouldn’t they behave as they do?

Sheldon White, while professor of psychology at Harvard, described adolescence as “a separate society” for the young, prolonging childhood. It was created by a coming together of the child-labor laws 100 years ago, the new high schools, and special legislation for juvenile offenders. After 1950 its effects were compounded by the shift public-opinion analyst Daniel Yankelovich details in New Rules from the ethic of self-denial to the ethic of self-fulfillment. So many people had so much money it was impossible to say “No” to cars, clothes, guitars, computers. No wonder youth behavior changed dramatically. Adults imposed new rules, which bred resistance and defiance, which produced still more restrictions. Curfews. Can’t drive. Can’t drink. “No entry except with adult.” Blocked access to the Internet. Criminalize sex under 18. No cigarettes. Dress codes. “Parental consent required.” And in school, metal detectors, video surveillance, armed guards, and No Cell Phones!

“Our high schools used to be filled with children,” Mary Lee Fitzgerald said in July 1999 while directing education programs for the Wallace Foundation. “Today they’re filled with people who are essentially adults—being treated still as children.” Young people are not challenged with serious responsibilities. Instead, they are told, education is the way up. The world of work is closed until you have the credentials. So study hard. Yet the schooling we offer is one that most find neither motivating nor relevant, offering them little say in what they study or how they learn or in the way their school runs.

When challenged, young people can perform impressively. Writing about the years 1815 to 1830, Paul Johnson described in The Birth of the Modern the remarkable accomplishments of teenagers from truly disadvantaged backgrounds. With little formal education they started work early and, importantly, were allowed to rise as fast as their abilities would take them. Michael Faraday, the scientist, “was born poor, son of a blacksmith. He had only a few years at a school for the poor, but as a bookbinder’s apprentice he read the works he bound.” Henry Maudsley, “perhaps the greatest of all the machine-tool inventors, began work at 12 as a powder-monkey in a cartridge works.” Matthew Murray, “the great engine designer, began as a kitchen boy and butler.”

In The Maritime History of Massachusetts 1783–1860, Samuel Eliot Morison writes about Mary Patten, wife of the captain of a clipper ship. “In 1858 on a voyage around Cape Horn, her husband fell ill. The first mate was in irons for insubordination; the second mate was ignorant of navigation. Mrs. Patten had made herself mistress of the art of navigation during a previous voyage. She took command, and for 52 days she navigated the ship of 1800 tons, tending her husband the while, and took both safely into San Francisco.” She was 19.

Bauerlein almost gets there. “Young Americans are no less intelligent, motivated, ambitious and sensitive than ever…. It’s not the under-30s who have changed…(but) the threshold into adulthood, the rituals minors undergo to become responsible citizens, the knowledge and skill activities that bring maturity and understanding.” The digital realm could aid in that, he says, “but not the way young people use it. The popular digital practices of teens and 20-year-olds…close the doors to maturity, eroding habits of the classroom…” But he proposes no changes in school or in society to offer them serious responsibilities for learning and for life. His remedy is essentially to take young people by the shoulders and shake ’em until they come to their senses about the need to be serious in school, to read books, and to think. And here we come to the issue. This is what many in the policy discussion favor and seem to believe will work.

The other approach is what Epstein proposes: Move the young people who can demonstrate maturity into adult life. Epstein would let them “test out” of adolescence. John Goodlad years ago suggested ending high school at age 16. Minnesota now has schools in which young people make more decisions, individually about the pace and nature of their learning and collectively about the rules by which their school runs. Get beyond the technology of teacher instruction; let students explore the world of organized information now available digitally, with teachers as their guides. Let them do real work, for money and for academic credit.

The education policy discussion needs to consider all this because, as White noted, school is part of the institution of adolescence. Almost certainly this country could be getting far more from its young people than it is. We know how to design and run schools that treat young people as adults. These exist. They work. But they are marginalized by a policy discussion that is locked into narrow conceptions of learning and of achievement and into a concept of adolescence it does not even think to question.

Ted Kolderie is senior associate with Education|Evolving.

By Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz

Belknap Press, 2008, $39.95; 496 pages.

As reviewed by Daniel Gross

Many of the briefs for American exceptionalism, from de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America, focus on the nation’s political and economic systems. Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, two historically minded economists, advance the claim that America has followed a path of development unique among nations by rapidly building a comprehensive education system. Ultimately, they argue, America surged to global preeminence and created immense, widespread wealth by turning what was once the province of the elite into a utility for the masses. “That the twentieth century was both the American Century and the Human Capital Century is no historical accident,” the authors write. “The nation that invested the most in education, and did much of that investment during the century in which education would critically matter, was the nation that had the highest level of per capita income.”

Goldin and Katz delineate the historical process through which technology and education encouraged economic growth. It’s not quite a dialectic, but more of a race “between the growth in the demand for skills driven by technological advances and the growth in the supply of skills driven by demographic change, educational investment choices, and immigration.” But the story of the race is also a cautionary tale of how progress has stalled in the past 30 years, contributing to corrosive inequality and “late twentieth-century angst.” Goldin, professor of economics at Harvard, and Katz, a Harvard professor of economics who worked as chief economist at the Labor Department, cover subjects that generate a great deal of cable-news and op-ed-page heat, such as the stagnation of incomes and the failures of public education. But partisans expecting to have their biases confirmed won’t find much succor here. The book’s conclusions are based not on talking points but on deep dives into data, like the 1915 Iowa Census, and much considered number crunching.

The story starts in the early 19th century, when the “virtues” of the American education system took shape. By virtues, Goldin and Katz mean “a set of characteristics that originated in basic democratic and egalitarian principles and that influenced the educational system.” Among them were public funding, decentralization, the separation of church and state, an open and forgiving structure, and a lack of gender bias. The result: “By the middle of the nineteenth century the United States had the most educated youth in the world.”

When most of those youths were working on the farm, all that elementary education didn’t give America much of an edge. But at the turn of the 20th century, the introduction of electricity and the widespread adoption of capital-intensive technologies boosted the demand for skilled mechanics, technicians, clerks—people who could read manuals and do algebra. By 1920, Goldin and Katz found, more than one-quarter of workers had jobs in occupations for which a high school or college education was expected. This change spurred the wholesale construction and development of a post-elementary school system. By 1940, 70 percent of American youths were enrolled in high school. The result of the rapidly expanding supply of high-school-educated workers was, ironically, a diminishing return on the investment. In the first half of the 20th century, the high school wage premium, the amount of money high school graduates earned greater than those who hadn’t graduated, declined.

Americans didn’t respond to such diminished returns by cutting back on education. Quite the opposite. The revolution in high school education was closely followed by a rapid expansion in higher education. About 4 percent of those born in 1900 would graduate from a four-year college; 24 percent of those born in 1950 would. Once again, the rising supply of alumni helped shrink the wage premium that accrued to those with college educations. And so in the middle decades of the 20th century, the U.S. experienced excellent economic growth without noticeable increases in inequality.

But the uniquely American process of expanding educational achievement and income compression ground to a halt in the 1970s. High school graduation rates stopped rising, and college completion rates—for decades the envy of the world—haven’t kept pace with those of many other developed countries. “Clearly, the United States no longer leads the world in the education of young adults,” the authors write. More worrisome, and not coincidentally, productivity growth has sagged and income inequality has spiked to levels not seen since the 1920s. How are these phenomena related? It’s a simple matter of supply and demand, explain Goldin and Katz. In the past 30 years, the demand for workers with a college education (driven in large part by advances in technology) has continued to rise steadily, but supply hasn’t kept up. From 1960 to 1980, they write, the relative supply of college workers rose 3.77 percent per year, but between 1980 and 2005 it rose just 2 percent annually. The result: a rising premium for college-educated workers. “Overall, simple supply and demand specifications do a remarkable job of explaining the long-run evolution of the college wage premium.” Thus the imperative is to increase the supply of better-educated workers by improving education, starting with preschool and ending with more financial aid for college students.

It’s a compelling argument that masterfully applies cool reason and data to hot-button contemporary issues. But one may wonder whether the complex question can be so easily reduced to the supply and demand of college-educated workers. For example, many economists believe the rapid influx of comparatively less-educated foreign immigrants has been a factor in suppressing wage growth at the lower end of the income scale (and hence in increasing inequality). Goldin and Katz characterize any impact from immigration as “a small drag,” and “modest compared with the changes for the native-born population.” I put down the book thinking that the two highly rational economists hadn’t grappled with some of the noneconomic forces that are contributing to depressed achievement. Consider this paradox: The economic returns to higher education are as good as they’ve been at any time in the past century. And yet for three decades, Americans, who have generally shown themselves to be rational economic actors, haven’t been pursuing the profitable path of education in sufficient numbers. Clearly, there are deeply rooted social, psychological, and cultural factors that explain why significant portions of the population don’t see the apparently obvious connection between education and economic well-being. If the solution to the problems of educational achievement were as simple as boosting financial aid and providing more funds to preschools, a few well-intentioned foundations could easily transform large chunks of the education system.

Daniel Gross, the author of several books on U.S. economic and business history, is a columnist at Newsweek.

This is a book that does not live up to its provocative title. For sure, some of the author’s analysis rings true: K–12 education reformers sometimes try to scare the public and policymakers into action (think “A Nation at Risk”), and the Right may use the language of a “strict father” when arguing for testing, standards, and sanctions for failing schools. But Kumashiro comes from such a Far Left perspective (the book is part of a series edited by none other than bomber turned ed school professor William Ayers) that the thrust of his arguments is easily marginalized. In the author’s conspiracy-laden world, the Right works to “maintain the status quo, particularly its hierarchies and privileges” and to “undermine public education.” Vouchers, charter schools, testing, alternative certification, and other now-mainstream reforms are part of this broad effort to eliminate the public schools and oppress poor people. This puts Kumashiro into a bit of a bind, as he is forced to admit that there are some on the Left who support these ideas, too. Only those on the Right, however, support these positions for nefarious reasons. The author ties himself in similar knots when it comes to efforts to close the achievement gap, which he sees as “a strategic move by the Right,” as it “masks the other ways that oppression plays out in schools,” such as “the structural racism that is exemplified in the historical, economic, and curricular causes of inferior education for students of color.” Readers will learn a little bit about “the Right” by reading this book, but much, much more about the loopy Left.

The great frustration of books about heroic principals “succeeding against enormous odds,” five of whom are vividly and admiringly profiled here, is that the U.S. has constructed a public education system in which a strong school leader with a successful school is the exception rather than the rule. There’s no shortage of such books and every reason to welcome another one in this genre (penned by an emeritus Boston University professor fittingly named Leader, who runs his own Leadership Institute). But there’s a woeful shortage of such principals and schools. The subjects of this volume are five former principals in the Boston Public Schools over the past two decades. The “odds” despite which they succeeded are familiar in large urban districts: changing pupil demographics, set-in-their-ways teachers ill prepared for these unfamiliar students, leadership vacuums, tight budgets, rigid bureaucracies, unhelpful parents, inadequate data systems, new standards, external accountability testing, and so on. Despite all that, these men and women started smart, built teams, used data, “leveraged” the state testing program, selected their own staff, engaged parents, and more. Leader’s concluding chapter, distilling 10 lessons from their examples, is insightful enough but frustrating just the same, because the lessons seem as obvious as they are helpful. Why do we build education systems in which adroit school leaders are rarities?

Hugh Price, former head of the National Urban League, licensed attorney, and former editorial writer for the New York Times, begins by recalling that he thought it the mission of the Urban League to “galvanize communities to create a pervasive culture of achievement that celebrates and, yes, provides protective cover to achievers [and] that neutralizes negative peer pressures.” That same no-illusions practicality runs through the whole of this little gem of a volume. Leaving grand designs aside, Price has penned a smart book about what teachers, schools, and communities can and should do to help disadvantaged students succeed. He shares lessons learned by the military, advice that General Colin Powell once gave him regarding the importance of rites of passage, and insights from the Urban League’s Achievement Month initiatives. Price shares straightforward guidance on how schools can employ recognition and rituals and on what community groups should do. Refreshing is Price’s blunt expectation that children can and will take responsibility for their actions, but only if responsible adults “bestir themselves to inspire them.”

Education reforms based on accountability, autonomy, or choice became popular long before there was much hard evidence that they actually lead to better student performance. This book—short, dense, and likely to be particularly prized by those who love tables full of statistics, though the prose is very clear—is an important contribution to the growing collection of high-quality studies finding that greater accountability, autonomy, and choice do, indeed, make for a better education system and greater student learning. The book also showcases an approach to learning from international evidence very different from simply sending researchers to Finland to observe Finnish math teachers in their classrooms. The research in the volume is based on data from the PISA 2003 international student achievement test taken by students in 37 countries. The authors—economists and a political scientist from the U.S. and Germany—have created a framework that controls for the effects of a large set of student, family, school, and country characteristics. They find that not only do greater accountability, autonomy, and choice (in various configurations) in a country’s school system boost student achievement, they also boost noncognitive skills and increase equity (breaking the link between student achievement and socioeconomic status). Students perform better in countries with more choice and competition and in schools with both hiring autonomy and external exit exams. Incentives work around the globe, it turns out.

This wide-ranging collection asks what it will take for educational entrepreneurship to foster broad improvement in American schooling. Editor Frederick Hess’s introduction divides school reformers into two broad camps, finding each wanting. Capacity builders trust troubled school districts to reform themselves from within, not noticing that it is typically new organizations that in other sectors generate breakthrough improvements. Choice-based reformers, in contrast, look outside of districts for solutions but have failed to see that “markets characterized by insufficient quality-control mechanisms, a lack of transparency, a scarcity of human or investment capital, and harmful regulatory and institutional barriers are more likely to produce mediocrity than effective solutions.” The essays that follow survey nascent “supply side” strategies to boost human capital, attract investment, control quality, improve research and development, and remove the political barriers that too often hinder the growth of new providers of educational services. Told their efforts have not been sufficient to transform the quality of American schooling, choice-based reformers may complain that Hess does not assign them due credit for advocating necessary changes. But they would do well to heed his call to ensure that greater competition in education in fact leads to more innovation and ultimately to improved quality.

By Richard Rothstein, Rebecca Jacobsen and Tamara Wilder

Economic Policy Institute and Teachers College Press, 2008, $19.95; 263 pages.

As reviewed by Chester E. Finn Jr.

Some may take this wrong-headed book seriously, given the credentials of lead author Richard Rothstein, former New York Times education columnist, all-around smarty, and veteran maneuverer on the education-policy chessboard. Its timing is deft, too, as it savages the federal No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) and offers recommendations for its overhaul (overthrow, really) just as a new administration and Congress face itsreauthorization.

Rothstein and a pair of junior colleagues advance three central theses, all of which are wrong—though they’ll appeal to a strange alliance of progressive educators and (up to a point) conservative Republicans.

First, and most NCLB-relevant, “We should get the federal government out of the business of monitoring education at the school or student level.” But it’s not just Uncle Sam who should quit judging performance by students (and schools and districts) via “short-term test score measures of basic skills.” So, too, should the states. The authors view all such accountability measures as agents of educational corruption.

That’s because, thesis two, education has in their judgment eight “fundamental goals,” of which “basic academic knowledge and skills in reading, writing, math, science and history” are but one. The others include physical and emotional health, social skills, work ethic, appreciation of the arts, and community responsibility. These are equally important, insist the authors, and must all be incorporated into any self-respecting accountability system.

Third, they want NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, rolled back to a reporting system that contains no standards or cut scores, only a numeric scale that nobody understands. At the same time, they would widen its subject coverage to span all eight “fundamental goals,” employing “performance assessments” of various sorts to appraise progress in areas unsuited to paper-and-pencil testing.

This is not just wrong-headed; it’s dangerous. It plays into the hands of union-backed efforts to exonerate schools from responsibility for student achievement. It aligns with a faction within the Democratic Party (and some key Obama advisors) as they seek to gut standards-based reform in general and NCLB in particular. It also appeals to the yearning of some GOP lawmakers and libertarian policy wonks to get Uncle Sam completely out of the school-accountability business (though they’ll gag on Rothstein’s demand for buckets more in federal dollars for those unaccountable schools and sundry other services to kids). And it would leave educators, policymakers, and parents with fewer navigational aids as they try to determine whether American students and schools are making progress in a competitive world.

It’s true that NCLB’s laser-like focus on reading and math skills in grades 3 through 8 encourages schools to concentrate their resources and teachers their energies on those subjects. It’s also true that the law’s use of a single proficiency “cut score” to judge school performance discourages attention to kids who are already succeeding—and those so far below proficiency as to have little chance of getting there. Dozens of other NCLB critics have reached similar conclusions, and scads of proposals for that law’s rewrite offer remedies, such as including more subjects in the accountability system and giving schools credit for student growth across the achievement spectrum.

Rothstein is correct, as well, that NCLB’s reliance on states to define “proficiency” however they like has produced wildly discrepant results across the land. (It escapes me why he then urges that states be placed in sole charge of school standards and accountability with no federal involvement at all.) But he draws a bizarre link between that problem and his scorn for NAEP’s achievement levels, wrongly asserting that the National Assessment Governing Board’s decision to fix the “proficient” level at an ambitious “aspirational” level was folded into NCLB’s mandate to states to set their own proficiency targets. That’s crazy. Had Congress and the White House had the political guts in 2001 to use NAEP, rather than states’ own inconsistent standards, as the primary No Child Left Behind benchmark, we’d have avoided some of today’s woes, including the paltry aspirations promulgated by many states.

The authors’ misunderstanding of NAEP is comprehensive, however, as is the harm that would be done were it to be reshaped to their liking. They yearn for a NAEP-that-never-was, rattling on for 20 nostalgic pages about the glories of a 45-year-old plan prepared by a high-status committee of educators chaired by the late Ralph Tyler, most of which was ignored from day one by Congress, the executive branch, and the National Assessment Governing Board.

Rothstein ardently dislikes the board’s execution of a 1988 statutory mandate to establish “appropriate student performance levels for each age and grade in each subject area to be tested” under the National Assessment. (That’s the correct language; Rothstein misquotes it.) The board, on which I served for eight years and chaired for two (though Rothstein also misstates how I got there, apparently not knowing that board members are appointed by the secretary of education, not the president), after gathering extensive advice from every quarter, opted to set three such levels and to designate the second of those “proficient.” After gathering tons more advice as to what method to use for applying those levels to actual assessments, the board settled on a process named (sorry about this) the “modified Angoff method.” And to make a long story short, the terminology, the method, and the changed way of reporting NAEP results have been under fire ever since from analysts and educators, even as they’ve gained traction in the real world.

Those performance levels turned out to be as useful to policymakers, parents, and journalists—a true gauge of student progress at the state and national levels, the closest America has yet come to any sort of national standards—as they are unloved by some experts. Note, though, that critics such as Rothstein never suggest a better way of setting such levels. They just don’t like this one, or don’t want any standards in the first place, preferring the inscrutable “scale score” reporting system that renders no judgments about “how good is good enough.”

If the authors were to prevail, NAEP would become blurry and weak, standards-based reform would nearly vanish, and NCLB would be undone rather than revamped. Let us hope that right-thinking people, encouraged by this review, will see the errors of Rothstein et al. and opt to ignore them.

Chester E. Finn Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation and senior editor of Education Next.

By Joshua M. Dunn

University of North Carolina Press, 2008, $37.50; 226 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

If there are any school districts still under tight federal supervision of efforts to desegregate schoolchildren, more than a half century after Brown v. Board of Education, one does not hear of them. With the present posture of the Supreme Court it is unlikely any would be so hampered if an appeal against court supervision were carried that far. But until recently, school districts did operate under such supervision, often for decades after a case had originally been brought, and long after the original conditions that had motivated the case had radically changed. The Kansas City, Missouri, case, known through its long legal history as Jenkins v. State of Missouri, was perhaps the most notorious of the tortured efforts to overcome state-sanctioned segregation.

It was notorious for many reasons: First, the court ordered enormous state and city expenditures, intending to attract white schoolchildren from the suburbs to the Kansas City schools so as to provide the minimum number of white children that proponents of desegregation considered necessary for a desegregated or “unitary” school. Second, it was an extreme example of how our legal order permits judges, and unrepresentative plaintiff lawyers, to decide how to run schools in the effort to eliminate the evil of segregation. Third, it eventually demonstrated the wide gap between what the courts and the lawyers advising them thought was necessary to improve the educational achievement of black students, and what the black community thought necessary and desirable in the education of their children.

Most cases in school segregation began when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) or another group sued a school system for failure to overcome segregation. In Kansas City, uniquely, it was the school district itself that sued. In Missouri, and some other states, state-required separation of schoolchildren by race ended shortly after the Supreme Court decision in 1954. Indeed, Kansas City had received effusive praise for its voluntary compliance from the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, from Time magazine, and from The Nation.

But a good deal had changed between 1954 and 1977, when the Kansas City Metropolitan School District (KCMSD) brought its case. Eighteen percent minority in 1954, the schools were more than 60 percent minority in 1977. Blacks were moving into cities; whites with schoolchildren were disproportionately moving to suburbs outside city boundaries. Some whites undoubtedly moved because they resisted sending their children to schools with a majority of blacks, some moved because they economically were able to and preferred the suburbs, and some feared growing urban crime in the 1960s and 1970s. Whatever the reasons, in large urban school districts, which encompassed an ever-larger proportion of black children, the only way to achieve desegregation was through busing away from neighborhood schools, a remedy approved by the Supreme Court in 1971, unpopular almost everywhere, and often ineffective as white schoolchildren could move to private schools or to the suburbs.

The KCMSD—with its schools in disrepair, without what it considered adequate funding, and having endured damaging teacher strikes—took the ingenious route of suing the state, suburban school districts, and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and other federal government agencies for its inability to desegregate majority black schools. The case came up before Judge Russell Clark, born 1 of 10 siblings in rural southwestern Missouri, educated in a one-room schoolhouse, and appointed by President Jimmy Carter. In 1984, after a “tortuous” seven-year discovery process and a six-month trial, Judge Clark dismissed all the defendants except the state of Missouri, and “realigned” the KCMSD as a defendant along with the state. Apparently a federal judge can turn a plaintiff into a defendant. But since the KCMSD was no longer the plaintiff, who in our adversary legal system was to represent the new plaintiffs, now presumably the black students? The NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the American Civil Liberties Union, all turned down the opportunity. Then stepped forward Arthur Benson, a committed liberal lawyer who was to live with the case and, together with Judge Clark, shape it, for the next 20 years or so.

Judge Clark found the state and the school district liable for segregation, and then the issue became, what was the remedy? Kansas City schools were already predominantly minority, and the Supreme Court had ruled in the Detroit case that surrounding school districts not found guilty of segregation could not be pulled into a case to provide more white students for desegregation. The approach that was developed, with the advice of education-school professors, was to create “magnet” programs, which it was hoped could draw white children from Kansas City suburbs. The judge, following the experts, decreed the rebuilding of many schools for the purpose of making them attractive to the hoped-for suburban children, an expensive enterprise. And here the chief characteristic of this case emerged: The judge, in effect, imposed higher taxes on Kansas City, and on the state, to build the new magnet schools. The appeals court and the Supreme Court (by a bare 5 to 4) approved. The figures that eventually were spent in this effort to make the schools more attractive reached, in author Joshua Dunn’s estimate, $2 billion. That may not appear to be much these days, when a single failed firm may gobble up $85 billion in government money, but recall that this was a school district, in 1984, of 37,000 students (it had fallen from 51,000 at the beginning of the case), with a budget of less than $100 million.

The distinctive contribution of Dunn’s book is to emphasize the degree to which the district judge was not acting arbitrarily (though to some degree he was), but was constrained in what he could do by an appeals court following Supreme Court decisions. Judge Clark had to find the KCMSD schools “segregated,” according to these higher-court decisions, and had to respond, limited by the Supreme Court decision that he could not require the suburbs to participate. Magnet schools with elaborate facilities to attract suburban white children was the answer proposed by the education experts, supported by the plaintiff lawyer, and implemented by the judge. It did not sit well with the black community, which by the 1980s, certainly the ’90s, was more interested in getting better education for black children than in following the will-o’-the-wisp of integration. It found the magnet school approach mystifying and infuriating. Slavic studies? A classical Greek curriculum? That is not what our children need! And even when parents and children were interested in the magnets, they were limited in getting admission because the judge had decreed there must be four whites for every six blacks in each magnet school, and often too few whites were available to expand the black quota. Despite huge expenditure, integration was not much advanced.

Finally, the Supreme Court, responding to one of many state appeals, decreed in 1995 by a 5–4 vote that Judge Clark could not impose a program of magnet schools to attract white students from the suburbs. The district remained under judicial supervision, but by then black community leaders controlled the school district, which reinstituted neighborhood schools. Judge Clark’s successor, a Reagan appointee, finally succeeded in dismissing the case in 2003. Attorney Benson, still on the case, opposed the dismissal.

The schools seemed as dysfunctional at the end as they had appeared at the beginning. But by this time, the state had approved charter schools, and substantial numbers of Kansas City’s black schoolchildren were patronizing them. In 2005–06, some 26,000 children attended the public schools, 6,000 the charter schools.

Dunn’s final word: “The court and the black community disagreed on what the problems were. Legal doctrine asserted the problem was racial isolation. The black community asserted it was substandard education.” Dunn’s contribution is to show that the issue was not an imperial judiciary that wished to reshape the schools, but a course of successful litigation in which the concentration of black children, whatever the cause, became the only target at which the courts could aim. But in the end one wonders why the Supreme Court, which the appeals courts and district judges had to follow, was so slow in recognizing the impracticality of all the measures available to try to achieve integration in major cities with large black communities.

Nathan Glazer is professor emeritus of education and sociology at Harvard University.