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.

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.

Payne, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, here sets out to explain “the sociology of failure” of urban reform. Drawing primarily on his experiences in Chicago, Payne considers the effects of social context, poverty, race, bureaucracy, and organizational dynamics, and uses them to raise hard questions for both progressive and conservative reformers. Arguing “there is just no doubt that one of the central problems in improving urban schools—arguably the central problem—is the problem of teacher resistance,” he critiques the progressive expectation that teachers can eventually be coaxed along through evidence on two key counts: first, it presumes that reformers and teachers share the same aims and metrics, and second, it presumes that reformers can marshal the evidence to convince the holdouts. Payne deems both assumptions wrongheaded. He is equally caustic when it comes to those who pursue change via accountability, incentives, and choice, faulting their failure to pay sufficient heed to the importance of local culture, social capital, and trust in making change real. Challenging simple verities of allstripes, Payne has delivered a volume well worth a closer look.

The price for having former public officials advocating for school reform is that we must every so often be subjected to a book like this one. In it, former West Virginia governor, former Congressman, and current president of the Alliance for Excellent Education Bob Wise piles up the platitudes and rings up the cash register. After serving up the familiar justifications for high school reform (e.g., social costs, changing demographics, dropout factories), Wise sets forth a threadbare list of the 10 elements of a successful high school (rigorous curricula, skilled teachers, community involvement, and so forth). He then launches into his litany of “more.” He wants the feds to provide funds for adolescent literacy programs and state data systems; to ensure that every school is staffed by “skilled” teachers and principals; for district efforts to “personalize the educational experience”; and much more; and he calls on Congress to establish “meaningful high school accountability” (though the details are vague). Given the amorphous prescriptions and the absence of price tags, it’s not clear whether Wise wants Congress to pony up 50 bucks or another $50 billion—only that he wants more. Talk about singing the same old song.

The idea that educators can learn from the business or nonprofit worlds used to be controversial. No longer. This textbook for aspiring superintendents and other district-level leaders, edited by two professors from Harvard’s business school and two from its education school, rests on the premise that effective management practices are similar no matter what the sector. It offers 19 “cases” from corporations, agencies, and school districts that embody coherent, high-performing organizations. These cases are organized into “modules” on five themes: making coherence concrete; finding and supporting personnel; building a high-performing organization; managing schools across differences; and sustaining high performance over time. Many examples will be familiar to readers of the “best practices” literature (Southwest Airlines, New York City Police Department, Long Beach Unified School District), but the book’s nearly 500 pages allow its editors to delve into details that will be fresh for most. This volume deserves to play a key role in education leadership programs nationwide, but even its heft won’t teach superintendents everything they need to know. Leading a big school system is as much about politics as management; maybe the next set of cases should be written incollaboration with Harvard’s political science department.

The Harvard Ed School’s Tony Wagner has written a thoughtful half-right book—and it’s safe to predict that the other half will get the most attention. He contends, correctly, that something more than basic skills and factual knowledge needs to be inculcated by our schools and colleges if young Americans are to do their part to keep us competitive in tomorrow’s flattening, shrinking world. He adumbrates seven “survival skills” (e.g., “critical thinking and problem solving,” “agility and adaptability”) that he believes must become education priorities. So far so good—if fundamentally familiar. And he identifies a few schools (High Tech High, for instance, Ted Sizer’s Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School, and Dennis Litky’s The Met) that in his opinion do a good job in these ways. Then—the book’s wrong half—in language that will get him lionized at school-establishment conferences (and, perhaps, speaking fees to rival Jonathan Kozol’s), he takes out after testing and standards and government programs like No Child Left Behind that emphasize such things. He deprecates knowledge. He deplores results-based accountability for schools, educators, and kids. It’s no wonder this book’s “blurbers” include Howard Gardner and Deborah Meier. It’s a paean to educational progressivism dressed up as a guide to economic competitiveness.

School Choice International: Exploring Public-Private Partnerships
Rajashri Chakrabarti and Paul E. Peterson, eds.
(MIT Press).

As the subtitle of this book suggests, the papers in this scholarly volume are less about the act of choosing a school than about the ways the private sector has worked in partnership with public education systems to enlarge and enliven the landscape of schools that can be chosen. A variety of public-private partnerships around the globe are illuminated here: vouchers and charter schools in the U.S., of course, but also publicly funded vouchers in Colombia and Chile, city academies with private sector sponsors in the U.K., fee-charging schools serving the rural poor in India, concession schools in Colombia (where the management of some public schools is turned over to high-quality private schools), government contracting with private schools to enroll students in areas where spots in public schools are scarce in the Côte d’Ivoire and the Philippines, and more. A number of initiatives are described in detail in these papers—written for a conference cosponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and the World Bank. Some initiatives are the subject of rigorous evaluations here, but more interesting than the case studies are the big-picture observations and arguments about the blending of public and private. One chapter, by Ludger Woessmann (coauthor of “School Choice International,” research, page 54) uses international data to show that systems that make greater use of public-private partnerships (ideally combining public funding with private operation) perform better than systems that do not. As other chapters illustrate, not only are public-private partnerships widespread and diverse, but the lines between public and private can be fuzzy and shifting. Thomas Nechyba argues in one paper that in the United States there is no such thing as a true public school, since access to public schools is rationed through private housing markets, and it is unlikely that there will ever by a fully private school, since private schools are subject to government oversight, and support for private schools is conditional on certain public aims being met. An antidote to the view that there are two kinds of schools, public and private, this volume suggests that a larger role for the private sector in publiceducation is more inevitable than radical.

By Charles Murray

Crown Forum, 2008, $24.95; 224 pages.

As reviewed by Peter Wehner

Charles Murray is one of the most influential public intellectuals of the last quarter century. His 1984 book Losing Ground: American Social Policy 1950–1980 helped bring about a sea change in how we view welfare programs and paved the way for the 1996 welfare reform legislation, perhaps the most successful social policy reform in modern times. Murray’s newest book, Real Education, in his words, “calls for a transformation of American education—a transformation not just of means, but of ends.” We need, Murray argues, “to redefine educational success.”

Real Education consists of five crisply written chapters. The first, “Ability Varies,” borrows from Howard Gardner’s classification of multiple intelligences. Murray identifies three—spatial, linguistic, and logical-mathematical—that he says constitute “academic ability.” Having stated a simple and uncontroversial truth—ability varies and it varies a lot—Murray argues that this has transmuted into an untruth: “that everyone is good at something, and that educators can use that something to make up for other deficits.” Murray goes on: “The core abilities that dominate academic success vary together,” he argues. “Schools that ignore those realities are doing a disservice to all their students.”

In chapter two, “Half of the Children Are Below Average,” Murray argues, in intentionally jarring language, that schools have “no choice but to leave many children behind.” (Murray clarifies his statement, saying that even the best schools will inevitably have students who do not perform at grade level.) Children in roughly the bottom third of the distribution of linguistic and logical-mathematical ability are “just not smart enough to succeed on a conventional academic track.”

Murray bases his empirical claims on what he calls “three reality tests”: The Coleman Report, published in 1966, assessed the effects of inequality of educational opportunity on student achievement. The expectation was that the report would document a relationship between the quality of schools and academic achievement. But, Murray says, “to everyone’s shock, the Coleman Report…found that the quality of schools explains almost nothing about differences in academic achievement…. Family background was far and away the most important factor in determining student achievement.”

Because he believes that poor children are disproportionately below average in academic ability, Murray’s second test is Title I, a popular federal program whose goal is to upgrade the schools attended by children from low-income families. Evaluations of Title I have, according to Murray, shown no significant positive impact on studentachievement.

The third test is No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the education reform law passed in 2002 whose goals include improving the performance of students in the lower half of the academic ability distribution. Murray argues NCLB will continue to fail in its effort to bring all the nation’s children to “proficiency,” however that is defined. All past efforts to raise the academic achievement of low-ability students, according to Murray, have failed, and so has NCLB.

Murray’s third chapter, “Too Many People Are Going to College,” argues that colleges are becoming obsolete, in part because of the Internet; that the provision of a liberal education should be done by elementary and secondary schools; and that “by making a college degree something that everyone is supposed to want, we are punishing the majority of young people who do not get one.” According to Murray, bachelor’s degrees have wrongly become a “symbol of first-class citizenship” and “[t]oday’s college system is implicated in the emergence of class-riven America.”

In chapter four, “America’s Future Depends on How We Educate the Academically Gifted,” Murray anticipates likely criticisms: “The proposition is not that America’s future should depend on an elite that is educated to run the country, but that, whether we like it or not, America’s future does depend on an elite that runs the country” [emphasis in the original]. He admits the idea is “instinctively unattractive.” Given where we are, however, we need to train our elite to be better citizens. Murray spends most of the chapter dilating on what that means: rigor in verbal expression, forming judgments, thinking about virtue and the good, and developing empathy and greater humility.

Murray concludes with sound prescriptions for improving education, including obtaining a first-rate assessment of every child entering elementary school, providing a safe and orderly classroom, teaching a core curriculum, allowing gifted students to go as fast as they can, doing a better job at teaching those who are workbound after high school how to make a living, expanding school choice, and using certifications (similar to CPA exams) to undermine the BA.

Real Education is provocative and powerfully argued and, like Murray himself, intellectually impressive and fair-minded. Murray is right in saying that students have varying abilities and when educators don’t take those differences into account, children suffer. He’s right in insisting that we’re not paying enough attention to academically high-achieving students. And he’s right that the goal to make all American students “proficient” in reading and math is simply unachievable, if the notion of proficiency is to retain any useful meaning.

Where Murray is wrong, in my estimation, is in his scorn for No Child Left Behind. David Brooks of the New York Times has pointed out that NCLB “has ushered in a data revolution, and hard data is the prerequisite for change.” And Chester Finn and Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute report that “NCLB and state-level efforts to impose standards and accountability on the schools are plainly boosting the kids who need it most—surely a good thing.” A new, 50-state report by the Center on Education Policy found that reading and math scores are rising and achievement gaps are narrowing, gains that are attributable in part to NCLB.

But where I dissent most from Murray is in his assuming that students of low academic ability are achieving pretty much all they are capable of and that better schools, better teachers, and the right policies would make at best only a marginal difference when it comes to improving their achievement in reading and math. His conclusions run counter to what I have witnessed over the years. When I worked for then Secretary of Education William Bennett, he made a point of traveling to successful schools throughout America to highlight what works. In city after city, we saw outstanding schools and educators like East L.A.’s Jaime Escalante significantly improve the academic achievement of what were thought to be low-ability students.

Nor does Murray sufficiently explain documented success stories like the KIPP schools, a national network of free, open-enrollment charter schools serving more than 14,000 students, mostly low income and initially poorly performing. KIPP schools couple high expectations with a longer school day and no-nonsense instruction. The results are impressive: the average student who has been with KIPP for four years starts 5th grade at the 40th percentile in mathematics and the 32nd percentile in reading; after four years, these same students are performing at the 82nd percentile in mathematics and the 60th percentile inreading.

There are examples all across America of schools and educators who are similarly making impressive academic strides with students of more-limited academic abilities. These successes demonstrate that while there are certainly boundaries to what some can achieve academically, we can do much better. There remains an enormous gap between what all of our students are currently learning and what they are capable of learning. And playing off a line from Finn, it’s not obvious to me that American students are so much farther down the intelligence scale than their agemates in other lands.

To his credit, Murray is wholly uninterested in tinkering at the margins of policy debates. His goal is far more ambitious: to challenge key assumptions and fundamentally alter how we think about things. Real Education does that, and those who care about education and children should take Murray’s arguments seriously.

Peter Wehner, formerly deputy assistant to President George W. Bush, is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

By William Damon

Free Press, 2008, $25.00; 217 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

William Damon, a distinguished psychologist and the director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, has long been interested, along with Howard Gardner and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in the study of those who succeed, who do “good work” (the title of one of his books, coauthored with Gardner and Csikszentmihalyi),who care (Some Do Care, the title of another), and who manage to live fulfilled lives. The “purposeful” among us seem not to include much of today’s youth.

His latest book explores Damon’s concern that many American young people do not have meaningful or significant purpose to guide them, and do not get much help from their teachers. As he defines it, “Purpose is a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond the self.” Getting good grades and into college does not in itself fulfill the demands of purposefulness; even the desire to achieve these ambitions so as to make a good living and raise a family, while better, does not fully qualify.

Since 2003 Damon, along with collaborators, has been engaged in a study of 1,200 American youths between the ages of 12 and 26. He subdivides the young people in his study into four categories: the disengaged, the dreamers, the dabblers, and the purposeful. He considers one-fifth of the subjects to be purposeful; 25 percent he sees as disengaged, “showing no signs of anything remotely purposeful”; another quarter he labels dreamers, who have aspirations but have taken no steps to realize them; and another 31 percent are dabblers, “who have actively tried out a number of potentially purposeful pursuits, but without a clear sense of why they are doing so or whether they will sustain these interests into the future.”

Damon also provides readers with a description of some of the purposeful youth in the study. Consider Ryan Hreljac, who at age 12 “had been working six years [sic] to raise money for drinking wells in parts of rural Africa…With help from his family, Ryan started a foundation, established a Web site…, and raised over $2 million…. Ryan has won numerous awards, including the World of Children Founder’s Award, considered the equivalent of a Nobel Peace Prize for youth service.”

Nina Vasan, 19, in her second year at Harvard, “has played sports competitively, hosted her own radio show, received the $50,000 grand prize at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair, presented her research during the Nobel Prize festivities, was named one of the ten top Girl Scouts in the nation, ran the Olympic torch, and was a pageant winner as West Virginia’s Junior Miss. On top of all this, and more significantly, Nina founded and served as national President of American Cancer Society Teens….” And so on.

Clearly these are heroes, or superheroes, of purposefulness. Still, Damon is on to something when he detects a drift and flaccidness in much of American youth. He refers to the research of UCLA professor Alexander Astin on the values of college freshmen, which show a strong shift since the late sixties, away from “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” and toward “being very well off financially.”

Damon is astute in noting how little our schools encourage purposefulness. Teachers may open up for students a variety of areas of potential study and engagement, but without offering any significant guidance as to how to choose, what to choose, and to what larger end. He might have gone further in showing the dangers to teachers of giving such guidance today. Urging greater civic engagement and purposefulness in the public realm might in many communities be looked upon with suspicion. If the teacher chooses the traditional means of instilling purpose—teaching religion—other difficulties arise to inhibit him. The presidents of our early liberal arts colleges generally gave their students a summing-up course, whose very purpose was to instill purposefulness. What college president would do this today? He would rather call in a non-faculty celebrity to deliver some inspiring words at commencement.

What advice does Damon offer? He is cautious in his prescription for teachers, bolder in making suggestions for parents. His subheads might well be considered maxims: “Listen closely for the spark, then fan the flames”; “Take advantage of regular opportunities to open a dialogue”; “Introduce children to potential mentors”; “Convey your own sense of purpose and the meaning you derive from your work.” Well, that is a hard one. How many of us as parents have a “sense of purpose” and derive “meaning…from our work”?

Here Damon might well be faulted for taking for granted the model of professional life and assuming universal adoption of the values that classically are intertwined with the major professions, which in their ideal form do provide “purpose.” Only a minority of Americans are in occupations that give them at least a way of speaking about purpose in their lives. For most Americans, getting a job of some kind to support a family seems a sufficiently demanding purpose.

The notion of trying to discover what one is good at or for, and shaping a career to realize these potentialities, would appear very upper middle class to many Americans, even today, when most aspire to college. If they get there, most aim at careers that do not embrace the values typically identified with the classic professions. Damon is aware of the problem. He refers to the research that shows how many doing modest work gain satisfaction from their jobs and feel what they do is important. True enough, but when Damon asks that purpose include not only the intention to accomplish something that is “meaningful to the self” but that is also “consequential for the world beyond the self,” I believe he is making the path to purpose too difficult. We cannot expect even the first objective to be easily attainable for most people. Still, it is to the good that he has focused attention on the importance of an organizing objective for one’s studies and one’s life.

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

By Gareth Davies

University Press of Kansas, 2007, $39.95; 387 pages.

As reviewed by Luther Spoehr

Gareth Davies, a historian at Oxford University, brings care and precision to his study of the process that produced federal education legislation and regulation in the United States from the mid-1960s into the 1980s. His book illustrates both the possibilities and the limitations of this approach to the history of education policy.

Davies starts out by telling how President Lyndon Johnson, after his 1964 landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, made the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965 integral to his War on Poverty. Previously, federal involvement in education had been minimal, even after Congress responded to the Russians’ launch of Sputnik by passing the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) in 1958.

Initially, ESEA money had few federal strings attached; there was little oversight or accountability. The amount of money involved was relatively small—federal aid never amounted to more than 10 percent of the total cost of education—and vocal constituencies in districts around the country fought for every available dollar. Quoting historian James T. Patterson on the growth of “rights consciousness,” Davies notes that those constituencies often defended ESEA and demanded its expansion with the language and logic of the civil rights movement.

Davies’s biggest contribution comes in his discussion of the post-Johnson years, when he criticizes the master narrative that portrays post-1960s American politics as “a sustained reaction against Great Society liberalism.” While not denying that such a reaction took place, he finds that in education “the persistence and even growth of big government during a supposedly conservative era” matters more. Congressional votes are revealing: four-fifths of House Republicans voted against ESEA in 1965; when it was renewed in 1974, “conservative opposition had all but disappeared.”

Strong chapters on school desegregation, bilingual education, education for the disabled, and school finance all support Davies’s argument that “in the 1970s, reform often emanated from…within the federal bureaucracy, from the lower federal courts, and through the energetic efforts of congressional staffers, lobbyists, and public interest law firms.” Education reform’s “comparative detachment from…electoral politics” allowed the push for change to continue.

Reformers were opportunistic. Nobody who wrote or supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 thought that the term “minority” included so-called language minorities. But in 1970 the new head of the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), J. Stanley Pottinger, saw his opportunity and took it. New regulations eventually became law, and at the Supreme Court the solicitor general (strict constructionist Robert Bork!) successfully defended the “Lau remedies,” regulations stemming from Lau v. Nichols (1974) requiring, among other things, that students be instructed in their native language until deemed ready for English-only classrooms.

The same “minority rights” arguments appeared in the policy debates that led to the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (famous as PL 94-142). Davies observes that no “mass mobilization” of the disabled demanded change, and “the White House was completely absent from the story.” The essential participants were progressive public-interest lawyers, agreeable lower courts, and local school districts anxious that they not be stuck with the entire special education bill.

By the time the reader gets to the Carter-Reagan years, Davies has established his main point: in the 1970s, prior reforms were well protected, and disparate groups pushed, sometimes successfully, for more. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter made good on his promise to establish a separate Department of Education (more for political than educational reasons). Campaigning against Carter in 1980, and consistent with his claim that government was the problem, not the solution, Ronald Reagan vowed to dismantle the new department, only to find once in office this was easier said than done. Opposed by powerful institutionalized interests (who were aided by his own subtly subversive secretary of education, Terrel Bell), Reagan decided that the game wasn’t worth the candle. Then, with the luck that attended much of his career, Reagan made education reform his own when the National Commission on Excellence in Education announced in 1983 that the nation was “at risk.”

Still ahead were the “standards movement,” culture wars, the “education presidencies” of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and, of course, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). These are beyond the scope of Davies’s book. But the increasingly convoluted, intricate pattern of “policy innovation” he describes foreshadows future policymaking trends.

Davies’s dissection of these complexities scuttles any notion that things turn out as they do because a single powerful person or group wants it that way. His narrative spotlights the compromises, unintended consequences, miscalculations, and ad hoc adjustments that make laws and regulations the products of chance and circumstance. At the same time, his story fits neatly into another master narrative, one about the decline of federalism in the United States. With “states rights” and “local control” discredited by association with segregationists, people resisting federal involvement in education lacked an ideology to justify their stance and the political means to sustain it. Davies notes, “conservatives have…decisively [abandoned] the small government faith of their forefathers.”

Davies is consistently persuasive; his research is prodigious, particularly in his exploration of government archives, as well as memoirs and oral histories by policy participants. But his approach has significant limits. Although Davies says his “analysis is predicated on the assumption that compensatory programs…have fallen short of the buoyant expectations of the mid-1960s,” and notes that even at the time there was a “lack of convincing evidence that federal dollars were improving the quality of American education,” he does not explain why those expectations existed, or why dissenting voices went unheeded. Writers and educators who generated outrage or excitement, such as Jonathan Kozol, Herbert Kohl, Ivan Illich, and others, go unmentioned. James Coleman’s famous 1966 report, dubious about the ability of schools to promote equality, gets less than a full sentence. Were policymakers unaware of these views?

In short, Davies shortchanges the role of the Zeitgeist and ignores important parts of the context (schools, for instance) where policy played out. His narrow vision lets him dodge the question that should ultimately engage historians of American public education: to what extent, if any, were schools, teachers, and students better or worse off as a result of federal involvement in education policymaking? Good as it is, See Government Grow also shows why we need to keep “education” in the study of “education policy.”

Luther Spoehr is lecturer in the departments of education and history at Brown University.

By Clayton M. Christensen, with Michael B. Horn and Curtis W. Johnson

McGraw-Hill, 2008, $32.95; 288 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Clayton Christensen is a professor at the Harvard Business School and the author of a widely used book on innovations in business titled The Innovator’s Dilemma. Published originally in 1997, with the subtitle “when new technologies cause great firms to fail,” The Innovator’s Dilemma went into a second edition in 2000 with a new tag line, “the revolutionary bestseller that changed the way we do business.” I note further editions published in 2003 and 2006. Clearly there is something here that has been of interest in the world of business schools and businessmanagement.

Christensen is an expert on Silicon Valley, its changing products and fortunes, but in his new book, written with two colleagues, he draws on the history of many other fields of business enterprise, from making automobiles and radios to launching new kinds of investment opportunities. His central idea is there is a kind of “disruptive innovation” that causes great companies to fail and new start-ups to replace them. Here he applies the theory of disruptive innovation to the field of education. What can we learn from this transfer of tools of analysis, apparently helpful in business, to education?

Christensen sets the stage by asking why it is so hard to improve schools, running through some common explanations: We don’t spend enough money on them, we don’t use enough computers, students have become lazy and media- and game-addicted, schools are just too traditional. And then there are the teachers unions. While he accepts that all may play a role in school failure, he sees another as the central problem: education and schooling are not childcentric and in particular do not respond to the reality that children are different and learn differently. He is a strong advocate of the work of Howard Gardner on “multiple intelligences,” supporting Gardner’s theory that there are many kinds of intelligence, and many ways of learning, and that different children bring different kinds of intelligence to the learning endeavor. Thus, according to Christensen, the traditional classroom, with children of a given age being taught by a single teacher using a common pedagogy, will not do. Effective reform requires “customization” of the process of teaching, to adapt to the varying styles of different children. And the way to attain this new model of education is through the computer, with its ability to present a nearly infinite variety of ways of teaching in almost any field. But standing in the way of such a transformation is the fixed structure of the school, the age-determined set of classes, slotted into a curriculum where one learns certain things at a certain age and must move on to the topics determined as suitable for the next year.

“Disruption” of this pattern is required, and Christensen leads us through his theory of “disruptive innovation,” which he contrasts with “sustaining innovation.” “Sustaining innovation” is one improvement after another in a given product—the automobile, the telephone, the business computer—which the product innovation departments of established companies introduce. But there is another kind of innovation, which the established companies do not recognize, or do not consider profitable, or cannot fit easily into their established patterns. Christensen offers many examples from business history: the large business computer was displaced by the personal computer, the fixed radio set by the small transistor-driven portable. Leading corporations were blind-sided by these disruptive innovations. This is what education needs if we are to see improvement (see “How Do We Transform Our Schools?” features, Summer 2008).

Are charter schools this kind of disruptive innovation? Teachers unions and public school systems think so, but they will not quite do for Christensen, though he recognizes some as being truly innovative. Does the huge expansion in the number of computers in schools serve as an appropriate disruptive innovation? It could, but it doesn’t, because they are used primarily to supplement old practices rather than establish the new ones that are truly disruptive and innovative. The truly disruptive innovation, according to Christensen, is one that is directed to the nonconsumer of the established product. This seems to be a key feature of his theory: The small personal computer did not supplement the large business computer of the early days of the computer revolution, but instead served those who didn’t have any computers at all; the transistor-driven small radio was embraced by those who had no other access to radios.

But how do we apply this story, based on histories of business successes and failures, to schools? By way of Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences and the computer’s capacity to provide different ways of teaching and learning. Christensen heads each chapter with a vignette featuring students, teachers, and administrators in an imaginary high school. In one of these vignettes Maria, an able student interested in learning Arabic, which is not offered in the school, is directed to a computer program and shown happily learning the new language. This is an example of the “nonconsumer”—this student was not already taking Arabic, though she may have been studying another language. Rob is an able athlete—an example of Gardner’s “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence”—who is having difficulty with chemistry. He also gets connected to a computer program, which teams him up with a Japanese student who is eager to learn English and will in exchange help him with his chemistry. One is less optimistic that this approach to improving chemistry for Rob will work as well as the Arabic program for Maria. One wonders, too, whether there is any kind of specialized computer program imaginable that will make use of bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to improve knowledge of chemistry.

Christensen is aware of the strong class differences among children as reflected in school achievement, but he is convinced by research that shows that a great part of intellectual ability is determined by the experience of the first 36 months of life, particularly the amount and kind of language directed to children. Nothing much can be done about that when the children reach school, even in pre-kindergarten, so he puts his money on multiple intelligences and the computer.

Christensen acknowledges the many problems that are involved in what he hopes will be a revolutionary change in how education works, when many kinds of imaginative computer programs addressed to all kinds of students are in use. The lockstep system of education is bolstered by many institutions, such as the production and adoption of widely used uniform textbooks, and Christensen hopes that they will be undermined by the rapid advance of computerized teaching programs, adapted to different children. He sees opportunities for this kind of disruptive innovation in the small rural schools that cannot offer many subjects, in urban secondary schools in low-income areas with similarly restricted course offerings, and for homebound and home-schooled students. He sees the beginnings of a market response in companies such as Apex Learning, established by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. Enrollment in online-delivered courses rose from 45,000 in 2000 to 1 million in 2007. From a perspective based on the experience of innovative growth in other areas, Christensen writes that “the data suggest that by 2019 about 50 percent of high school courses will be delivered online.” This is an astonishing projection, and one doesn’t know what to make of it. Is it really possible? Christensen shows a surprising self-confidence on other matters as well. Critical of contemporary education research, he touts an approach which seems not particularly different, but from which he expects great results. “Other fields,” he writes, “have bodies of research that allow people to predict with great certainty the results of actions.” “Great certainty?” I wonder.

Disrupting Class breathes a degree of confidence that is on the whole foreign to the world of education, one that may be characteristic of the world of the business school. In business case studies, one learns just why businesses succeed or fail, and the course of action that would have avoided failure. In the world of real business, things are of course not so simple. Undoubtedly more, and one hopes better, use of computers will be made. Perhaps they can be adapted to different styles of learning. Christensen envisages this as emerging from “user networks” developing “user-generated content.” That certainly seems more feasible, if it can be done, than the enormous up-front expense incurred in developing a large array of courses adapted to different kinds of students. But one cannot resist a degree of skepticism. What we have learned to value in schooling is verbal and mathematical skills, and perhaps we have been excessive in the degree to which we value the kinds of intelligence that lead to high achievement in these competencies. But such achievement cannot be attained by every style of intelligence, using distinctive means adapted to it. So I remain skeptical of the prospects for “disruptive innovation” in our education system if its success will rely on heightening the role of other kinds of intelligence.

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

Tom Loveless, editor

(Brookings Institution Press)

While math scores are bandied about in the modern era, how much do we really know about what they mean or what they can teach about practice and policy? In this dense but thought-provoking volume, Brookings scholar Tom Loveless and an impressive cast of international scholars make it their task to find out. Several decades of international data demonstrate that substantial variation exists among nations; that leading nations succeed with virtually all of their students; and that wealth, cultural support, and curricular content matter. Extending William Schmidt’s decade-old observation that the U.S. math curriculum is “a mile wide and an inch deep,” Schmidt and Richard Houang find evidence that coherence and focus have a substantial impact on math achievement. They recommend that nations focus on fewer math topics, approach those in a sequential manner, and focus on deep mastery. Contributors also challenge conventional nostrums in reporting no evidence that student achievement in math benefits from “reform-oriented” instructional practices championed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, smaller schools, or the use of technology in math classes. Ultimately, Loveless argues that we can learn much more from international tests than how the U.S. fares in the “horse race”—and this collection points the way.

Generation Digital: Politics, Commerce, and Childhood in the Age of the Internet

Kathryn C. Montgomery

(MIT Press).

Montgomery, a professor of communications at American University and founder of the Center for Media Education, examines how the new media landscape is changing the nature of childhood. Ranging from issues like lawsuits over illegal music file sharing to the programming of the Nickelodeon network to online politics, Montgomery charts the new world of the Internet and cable television. For policymakers, parents, and educators for whom the emerging communications landscape can be a blur—pocked by vaguely understood brands like MySpace and Facebook—Montgomery’s account provides an invaluable tour guide to the new terrain. She notes the eagerness of Madison Avenue to market to youth through emerging media, and hails the creation of “parental empowerment” tools like filtering software and rating systems, while noting their limits and sometimes tangled politics. Where the volume may disappoint is when it comes to conclusions or takeaways. In the final pages, the straight-shooting Montgomery lapses into calls for more multidisciplinary research, funding for research on the new media, and thinking about how we might use new media to promote political and civic engagement. Weak stuff, especially given her thoughtful and enlightening narrative. Still a volume well worth reading.

Toward Excellence with Equity: An Emerging Vision for Closing the Achievement Gap

Ronald F. Ferguson

(Harvard Education Press)

Kennedy School economist Ron Ferguson has assembled here eight of his better papers, written over the past dozen years, that deal with the achievement gap and how to tackle it; he has updated several and integrated them via a perceptive new introduction and conclusion. Ferguson ranges well beyond schools into economic factors, teacher attitudes, parenting practices, cultural constructs, community views, and some interventions (such as his own “Tripod Project”) designed to narrow the achievement gap. The volume provides an illuminating and alarming tour of today’s racial gaps (white-black, mainly, but also white-Hispanic) and the many factors that feed them. Along with revealing data, perceptive analysis, and welcome candor, however, comes a certain skittishness in sensitive areas such as African American parenting practices, a bit of folly (encouragement of dialect and street language in English class), and some sky-pie about “collective action” and national leadership to solve problems for which there are no easy solutions.

Turning Around Failing Schools: Leadership Lessons from the Organizational Sciences

Joseph F. Murphy and Coby V. Meyers

(Corwin Press)

The best thing about this book is its title; unfortunately, its pages fail to fulfill the promise of its cover. Rather than offering actionable insights for education leaders drawn from the corporate world, it provides a 250-page review of the literature on business turnarounds, with two education chapters stapled to the back. The whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. And its parts aren’t even that good. The literature review is mind-numbing and jargon-laden. Do we really need scholars to tell us that there is “considerable support for the claim that ‘turnarounds may vary in nature’ and that ‘no two [turnaround firms] are alike’”? Meanwhile, the education chapters offer the not-so-stunning conclusion that there’s very little research to guide school turnaround efforts, though some evidence shows that the strategy can work, under the right conditions, with the right leadership. Perhaps the National Staff Development Council and the American Association of School Administrators, which helped to publish the volume, figured that their members could draw out clearer lessons for themselves. To which we say: good luck with that.

Not as Good as you Think: Why the Middle Class Needs School Choice

Lance T. Izumi, Vicki E. Murray, and Rachel S. Chaney

(Pacific Research Institute).

This California-centric volume contends that many middle-class families live under the illusion that their kids’ schools are swell and that it’s only poor families whose children are trapped in bad schools and therefore need charters, vouchers, open enrollment plans, and other policies and programs designed to afford them access to better options. The Pacific Research Institute authors further contend that policymakers who confine school-choice programs to low-income youngsters are failing to solve America’s education quality and equity problems. Bottom line: just about everybody would benefit from school choice and lawmakers need to understand that.

No doubt that’s so. What weakens the argument in these pages is the elaborately anecdotal nature of most of the evidence that the authors present, more an imaginary tour of handpicked California schools and communities than any aggregate data or cogent generalizations. There’s no denying that a number of that state’s schools serving nonpoor communities have weak academic performance records, that some are also mismanaged and fiscally wasteful and that plenty of families don’t realize this, and that more than a few real-estate agents benefit from their ignorance. Plenty of examples are provided. But the reader ends up with no clear sense of how widespread and generalizable those problems are—and much of the book consists of familiar rebuttals of hackneyed objections to school choice.

By David L. Kirp

Harvard University Press, $26.95; 333 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

A holiday-themed campaign ad for Hillary Clinton showed the candidate affixing to boxes wrapped in shiny paper gift tags marked with campaign issues, with the final tag marked “Universal Pre-K.” Beyond this brief nod to the issue, preschool education has made few appearances in the 2008 presidential campaign, and I suspect that when this review appears in print, the economy, Iraq, and health care will still be the dominant themes.

David Kirp, judging by his detailed survey of where we stand in the effort to expand education to the years preceding kindergarten, hoped differently. He reminds us of that moment in 1971 when Richard Nixon vetoed “legislation that would have underwritten child care for everyone. ‘No communal approaches to child-rearing,’ Nixon vowed.” That put an end to a major effort to expand the web of government services to include the care of preschool children, and to the liberal hope that we would match the welfare states of Europe on this measure. But in the decades since, there has been a substantial change in opinion, and very often, as Kirp shows, on the right as well as the left.

In the 1960s and 1970s, government-supported child care was seen by its advocates as something that an America still economically dominant should be able to provide to its citizens, and particularly the poor. Making child care available was viewed by many as a component in the “war on poverty,” though of course it was also seen as assistance to the increasing numbers of hard-pressed families in which two parents were at work. An education component to child care was not a significant part of the public discussion then: the issue was relief for parents. Today, a more economically challenged America sees that it is necessary to compete educationally, and thus economically, with a Europe as wealthy as the United States, and an economically resurgent China and India. Kirp tells us, “Ambitious statesmen from both sides of the political aisle…[now] see the issue as a winner—a strategy for doing well by doing good.”

Although pre-K education remains below the horizon of national debate, it has advanced variously in a number of states: Georgia, Illinois, North Carolina, Texas, Oklahoma, Florida, and New Jersey. “Between 2004 and 2006, state lawmakers boosted annual pre-K funding by $1.25 billion,” writes Kirp. “More than 800,000 three- and four-year-olds attend pre-K classes… and enrollment continues to climb.”

Kirp recounts the stories, not generally known, of the efforts to advance pre-K schooling. It turns out, to the surprise of this reader, that Oklahoma “ranks first nationwide in the proportion of four-year-olds enrolled in pre-kindergarten, and those classes meet stringent standards for quality.” Not that Oklahoma has undergone an upsurge of liberalism, generally. But “a handful of shrewd bureaucrats, unassuming politicians, and philanthropically minded business leaders” have advanced pre-K schooling beyond anything its politics would suggest.

The advocacy organizations and state programs, with their clever names (Smart Start, More at Four, Every Child Matters, Vote Kids, Invest in Kids, Pre-K Now, Abecedarian, etc.), impress one with the ingenuity of those who are promoting the pre-K expansion. Enlightened foundations have been in the lead. Kirp specifically details the substantial efforts of the Pew, Hewlett and Packard foundations. Economists of all stripes have calculated cost-benefit advantages of early education. Among them is James Heckman, a Nobel Prize–winning economist at the University of Chicago.

In a number of states, efforts have been launched to make pre-K education a constitutional requirement, succeeding in Florida, failing in California. In New Jersey, the Supreme Court’s reinterpretation of that state’s constitutional requirements for education has helped expand pre-K education. In other states, such as Georgia, the legislative route, promoted by an energetic governor, has been effective. Despite the remarkable diversity of the programs and their requirements (see “Pre-K 101,” features, Summer 2007), according to Kirp, a number of common issues emerge as significant.

One, which Kirp emphasizes, is securing the resources for high-quality pre-K education. He cites the landmark Perry preschool experiment of the 1960s, which was costly and of high quality, with well-trained teachers earning public school teachers’ salaries and working with remarkably small classes of five children or so. How can any school system today, or state program, support such standards for large numbers of students? According to Kirp, spending is frequently inadequate: “Even as the numbers of children enrolled in pre-K grew by 20 percent between 2004 and 2006, the amount of money spent on each child was cut by nearly 10 percent, to $3,500…. While New Jersey spends $9,305 per pre-K youngster, other states spend less than a fourth as much.”

A second, which Kirp does not emphasize sufficiently, is how we determine quality and who sets the standards. He seems to take it for granted that public school salaries and authority are necessary for quality, and perhaps he is right. But this brings to mind the studies of the effectiveness of Catholic schools, which are not under public school authority and are not paying public school salaries.

A third issue is how closely pre-K education should be linked to the public schools. Kirp notes that “politicians have made market sovereignty and parental choice the policy bywords,” and as a result, in Florida, for-profit and faith-based preschools enroll 88 percent of the state’s four-year-olds. The quality as measured by teacher salaries and credentials is low, and faith-based schools feel free to teach the faith. But others think the Florida pre-K program is better than Kirp’s description suggests. He recognizes the virtue of competition between different systems and approaches, but rather reluctantly.

A fourth is the topic of what we have to call “curriculum”: learning readiness, not just care, is today an important criterion for the judgment of pre-K schooling. Kirp prefers a developmental approach, as do almost all authorities. But one wonders whether something more systematic, such as direct teaching, may not be more suitable for children from low-income and working-class families. Some research suggests as much. One is not reassured of Kirp’s full grasp of this matter when he places “Allan Bloom and E.B. Hirsch” [sic] together on one side of the issue, Jonathan Kozol and Jean Piaget on the other. It is possible to prefer the combination of E.D. Hirsch and Jean Piaget.

Finally, a key issue given little attention in the book is the continuing wide educational disadvantage of poor, particularly black, children, and the hope that educational intervention in the early years may reduce it. Kirp quotes researchers who report that “by the time they are four years old, children growing up in poor families have been exposed to 32 million fewer spoken words than those whose parents are professionals. Four-year-olds from professional families have larger vocabularies than the parents of the poorest three-year-olds.” We have known this for a half century or more. Remedying this seems to call for a degree of intervention in family affairs that no public authority is willing to undertake, and that would give anyone pause. Isn’t there a role for pre-K education to at least narrow the odds?

Kirp has written a remarkably well-researched and comprehensive book on where we stand today on pre-K education. The variety of approaches different states have taken to extend education downward is impressive, and it is hard to see how or whether any “one best system” will emerge. Here is an issue that clearly deserves more research and fuller exploration.

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

By J. Wesley Null

Peter Lang, 2007, $32.95; 334 pages.

As reviewed by E.D. Hirsch Jr.

Isaac Kandel was an eminent professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, during its heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1940s, when an American commission, made up mainly of university presidents, was asked to reconstitute the education system of a defeated Japan, Isaac Kandel was one of two Teachers College professors selected to serve. He chaired a key committee and, being the most deeply knowledgeable member of the commission, was influential in creating what has turned out to be the most democratic and effective education system in Asia, one that since the 1940s has outstripped the school system of the United States in equality of educational opportunity and level of achievement.

Knowledgeable he was. He authored or coauthored some 65 books and monographs, many concerned with the school systems of the world, and over 200 articles. He was literate in nine languages, including Greek and Latin. His breadth of learning and mental acuity made him the intellectual equal of Dewey, for whom he had a high regard, regretting only that Dewey’s education disciples had narrowed and debased the wisdom of the master. Kandel may have been the originator of that received view. My own view is less charitable. Dewey did little to correct the “misinterpretations” of his acolytes, but rather “like Cato, gave his little senate laws, and sat attentive to his own applause.” Kandel was less politic than Dewey and more forceful in his denunciations of the anti-intellectual self-righteousness of the progressives who, he rightly predicted, would do a great deal of harm to social justice and to the nation as a whole.

In taking this view Kandel was joined by another important member of the Teachers College faculty, his friend William C. Bagley. Together, they were formidable foes of the romantic excesses of their progressivist colleagues at Teachers College. Now we have up-to-date biographies of these two figures, both written by Professor J. Wesley Null, of Baylor University, a careful and thorough scholar and, given the uniformly progressivist sentiments of schools of education today, a courageous one. (His biography of Bagley is entitled A Disciplined Progressive Educator: The Life and Career of William Chandler Bagley.)

Professor Null has also coedited with Diane Ravitch an important anthology of writings by the chief figures of the resistance movement that failed: Forgotten Heroes of American Education. It was in that valuable anthology that I first read the following illuminating remarks of Isaac Kandel:

Rejecting…emphasis on formal subject matter, the progressives began to worship at the altar of the child. Children should be allowed to grow in accordance with their needs and interests.… Knowledge is valuable only as it is acquired in a real situation; the teacher must be present to provide the proper environment for experiencing but must not intervene except to guide and advise. There must, in fact, be “nothing fixed in advance” and subjects must not be “set-out-to-be-learned.”… No reference was ever made to the curriculum or its content…. The full weight of the progressive attack is against subject matter and the planned organization of a curriculum in terms of subjects.

Kandel went on to describe the ferocity with which this view was supported through ethical and political polemics. He said that those who favored a definite core curriculum were called “authoritarian,” inducers of passivity and docility rather than independent-mindedness. They claimed, he said, that under a definite curriculum “individual differences are disregarded, and promotion is determined by a standardized lockstep.” Proponents of a core curriculum were called “reactionary in political and social affairs,” whereas progressive educators were “radicals who advocate their educational theories and practices to reconstruct society and change the social order.”

Kandel made these observations in 1939, but I read them only a year or so ago and was struck by how incisive and accurate they were as an account of the attack that my own views would receive from the education world 50 years later in the 1980s and ’90s. Kandel made me realize that few of the reasons that are marshaled in opposition to a specific core curriculum are the real objections to it. It’s not weakening of local control, nor claimed insensitivity to other cultures, nor closing off of creativity, nor elitism, nor Eurocentrism. People who pronounce such complaints, having been trained in our schools of education, believe them. But these aren’t the fundamental objections. Kandel made me realize that the more fundamental, and usually hidden, issue is whether there should be any definite core curriculum at all.

If you doubt that Kandel identified the key issue, you can make a simple test: When you hear an objection against a definite content curriculum, say that of cultural insensitivity, or a vast vague need for more global literacy, ask yourself whether any definite proposals for the content of a curriculum follow. This never happens. For the real objection is to a definite core curriculum that is planned out in detail and in advance, the very thing that is most desperately needed to raise achievement and narrow the achievement gap between groups.

History is written by the victors. The history of American education as taught today to prospective teachers makes scant mention of Kandel. In the typology of educational theories, he is labeled, if mentioned at all, an essentialist. If you are not familiar with the current labels, reprinted from one textbook to the next, they are essentialism, perennialism, progressivism, existentialism, and behaviorism. Of these, only progressivism and existentialism, the latter described as an up-to-date version of progressivism, are cast as humane. They are the only “philosophies” that stress problem-solving and critical-thinking skills, promote cooperation and tolerance, and address the “whole child.” They alone are student centered. Views like Kandel’s, by contrast, which advocate teaching definite subject matter, are “teacher centered.” These see the child as an empty vessel to be filled up. The child sits passively in rows listening to lectures. Essentialism has affinities with Skinnerian and Pavlovian behaviorism.

It is worth noting that this supposedly neutral historical typology is empirically wrong in connecting a core curriculum with lecturing and student docility. Kandel and Bagley never advocated boring, lecture-driven pedagogy. Existing schools around the world simply disprove ed-school propaganda that a definite core curriculum, such as Kandel advocated for the sake of equal opportunity and national solidarity, must be connected to a lecture style of teaching. In the United States and elsewhere in the world, a specific curriculum is being taught with so-called progressivist methods: hands-on learning, concern for the individual student, projects, and field trips. Kandel was dead-on when he described the real issue among current education “philosophies” as whether there should be a definite grade-by-grade core curriculum in elementary school. Period.

Kandel was, like Bagley, a democrat in every sense. He was baffled and annoyed by the successful rhetorical move of the progressives to equate educational with political progressivism. He shrewdly observed that educational progressivism is at bottom an individualistic idea that springs from European romanticism. It focuses on the development of the child according to its individual nature. Political progressivism, by contrast, is communitarian. Kandel thought that a politically progressive and democratic education should offer equal opportunity to all students and also strengthen the solidarity of the nation by providing all students with common learning.

More than 60 years ago, Kandel exposed the rhetorical bullying that connects specific content with “standardized lockstep,” with “disregard of individual differences,” with “passivity and docility,” and with being “reactionary in political and social affairs.” The labeling of the deeply democratic Kandel as a reactionary illustrates how useful an informed analysis of the tendentious misinformation that is being force-fed to our prospective teachers would be. One of the most fruitful results of such an analysis might be a weakening of the artificial, historically contingent connection between progressivist concepts of education and the views on education adopted by the Democratic party, which has unwisely bought into the tale told by the victors. The best interests of both political parties, of teachers, and of their unions is in creating a public school system that works, a thing that cannot be accomplished on anticontent, progressivist principles. Professor Null has performed a valuable service in writing this illuminating biography. Kandel, thou shouldst be living at this hour!

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

Myron Lieberman (Rowman and Littlefield).

The equal-opportunity, granddaddy longlegs of all curmudgeons, Myron Lieberman, manages in one volume to savage teachers unions, education schools, the Education Writers Association, the New York Times, the Washington Post, education research, egalitarian school-choice proponents, and conservatives Diane Ravitch, Terry Moe, Frederick Hess, and Chester E. Finn Jr. A style thought to be reserved for left-wing agitators and trade-union swat teams surfaces from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Lieberman’s fact-filled, right-handed punches land solidly, entertainingly, time and again, but so pugilistic is the attack dog he forgets his alleged purpose: overcoming the education stalemate. For him, nothing works—neither merit pay, nor test-score accountability, nor alternative certification, nor class-size reduction, nor education schools, nor choices for low-income families. All fall short of the glory of the free-market ideal.

A few positive suggestions nonetheless intrude. Told not to pay good teachers more, we are instead asked to give extra cash to those teaching math and science. Told to be more critical of charter schools, we are asked, in a brief passage, to let them continue.

Lieberman is such a well-read, critical thinker it is a shame he cannot turn off the invective spigot long enough to construct the viable politi cal and policy strategy none other has been able to devise. Unfortunately, Lieberman, in style, cannot escape his own trade-union past, however distant.

No Remedy Left Behind: Lessons from a Half-Decade of NCLB.

Frederick M. Hess and Chester E. Finn Jr., editors (AEI Press).

Few would dispute the claim that No Child Left Behind needs an overhaul. Yet with the deadline for the law’s on-time reauthorization now past, a consensus about its future has yet to emerge. The bulk of this important book consists of 12 detailed studies of how the law’s mandated remedies for schools identified for improvement are playing out in states and districts across the country. The findings, if unsurprising, are nonetheless sobering: the extent of public school choice has been negligible; participation in supplemental educational services, while rising, remains low; and the law’s restructuring requirements for schools and districts are being deployed in their mildest forms. Confronted with unrealistic goals and an array of legislated loopholes, most local officials have chosen simply to run out the clock. Hess and Finn, in hard-hitting chapters that bookend the volume, call on Congress to set realistic expectations for student performance based on national standards, to provide districts with initial flexibility when intervening in failing schools, but to establish tough consequences for superintendents and principals if those efforts are unsuccessful. Policymakers looking for easy advice heading into 2008 should turn elsewhere. But those seeking to convert NCLB from a utopian mandate into a coherent, workable system for school improvement will find welcome counsel in these pages.

Education for a New Era: Design and Implementation of K–12 Education Reform in Qatar.

Dominic J. Brewer et al. (Rand-Qatar Policy Institute).

Any volume endorsed by Dr. Sheikha Abdulla Al-Misnad, president of the University of Qatar, and Education Next editorial board member Paul Hill calls for a closer look. Here, the RAND team that has been working with the oil-rich Gulf nation Qatar on a radical redesign of the emirate’s education system offers a straightforward account of their handiwork. Detailing Phase I of the RAND-Qatar effort, which spanned 2001–04, the authors explain the creation and implementation of curriculum standards, national testing, independent government-funded schools, annual report cards, and parental choice. They don’t present evidence regarding effects of these initial efforts on student achievement but do explain how RAND diagnosed the weaknesses in the Qatari system, devised the Education for a New Era reform model, and the challenges of implementing standards, independent schools, and the Qatar Student Assessment System. Written in a prose style by turns reminiscent of a government white paper (e.g., “while achieving the goal of free, standardized education is commendable”) and a social studies textbook (e.g., “in 1907, Qatar’s resources consisted of 1,430 camels, 240 horses, and 817 pearl boats”), this slender book is nonetheless packed with interesting information.

Schools and the Equal Opportunity Problem.

Ludger Woessmann and Paul E. Peterson, editors (MIT Press).

Can schools overcome the highly variable influences of family so that the opportunities of all students are equalized? Since 1966, when the Coleman Report first shined its bright light on the extent of the achievement gap and revealed how little schools were doing to ameliorate it, school reformers have sought ways to raise the educational achievement of disadvantaged students and researchers have analyzed these efforts. The 11 papers in this conference volume were contributed by American and European researchers who marshaled the tools of economic analysis to assess recent efforts to close the achievement gap in the U.S. and abroad. These reforms fall under three headings: changing the peer group, refocusing resources, and implementing standards and choice. The Coleman Report identified the peer group at school as an important factor affecting learning, but several papers in this volume suggest that the socioeconomic status or academic ability of peers has little effect on academic performance. Other papers cast doubt on the premise that focusing additional material resources on disadvantaged students will raise their academic outcomes; in one paper, Julian Betts and John Roemer estimate that schools would need to spend 8 to 10 times as much money on the education of blacks as whites to achieve equity across racial groups. On the other hand, exit exams and higher graduation requirements may raise academic achievement, and properly designed choice programs may also help disadvantaged students. The chapters in this book raise as many questions as they answer, leaving the door open for many future conferences and books on this topic.

The Dissenting Tradition in American Education.

James C. Carper and Thomas C. Hunt (Peter Lang Publishing).

American education has a long and well-documented history of dissenters. During the past 25 years, education historians James C. Carper and Thomas C. Hunt separately have published many essays on 19th-century Catholic and Protestant public school opponents; they have also analyzed recent home-schooling initiatives and written about private Christian day schools. This new book brings together material from eight previously published articles as well as a chapter on the bishop of New York City, John Hughes (1797–1864). The essays cover 19th-century Catholic and Protestant opposition to public schools, including Bishop Hughes’s efforts to obtain public monies for Catholic schools and those of church leaders to encourage their parishioners to create alternative parochial schools rather than send their children to secular public schools.

The “final thoughts” chapter provides some of the most intriguing and intellectually challenging contributions of the book. As they ponder the future of dissent in American education, the authors note that “in some respects the current educational landscape, with its diversity of options, is starting to resemble the landscape of pre-common-school America.” They also consider whether “the time [today] is indeed ripe for Americans to consider, in the words of authors Rockne McCarthy, James Skillen, and William Harper, ‘Disestablishment a Second Time.’”

Standards-Based Reform and the Poverty Gap: Lessons for No Child Left Behind.

Adam Gamoran, editor (Brookings Institution Press).

This conference volume has an identity crisis. Its marketers clearly want to ride the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) wave, but at least half of the book (the more interesting half!) is only marginally related to the federal law. Consider Meredith Phillips and Jennifer Flashman’s examination of standards-based reform in the 1990s, which finds evidence that testing and accountability can change teacher behavior in positive ways. Or look at the dandy of a chapter by Thomas Dee and Brian Jacob, which studied the impact of high school exit exams—not required by NCLB—on various student outcomes, including college completion and future earnings. Their bottom line: these tests, by and large, depress high school graduation rates while failing to predict success in college or work. Still, the effort provides at least a few morsels for the NCLB-obsessed. Tom Loveless pens a provocative piece on the politics of the federal law, finding support for NLCB strongest among minorities and the middle class. It’s a worthwhile read, just not cover to cover.

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Columbia University Press, 2007, $29.95; 552 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

“Madman or Visionary?” reads the publicity material that accompanies this biography of Albert Shanker. The dust jacket describes the paradigmatic moment in Woody Allen’s 1973 movie, Sleeper, in which a future Rip Van Winkle awakens to learn that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.” Five years earlier, Shanker, leader of the New York City teachers union, shook the city with a series of strikes to defend the rights of teachers who had been dismissed from Brooklyn schools. The schools were part of an experiment in “community control,” an approach to school reform then favored by liberals and black activists. The community in this case was black, and those governing the schools under the experimental program demanded black teachers and black principals. There were few in the New York City public schools at the time. Many teachers and principals were Jews, and members of that religious group, as schoolteachers, social workers, shopkeepers, and small landlords, were seen by black militants as the exploiters of African Americans. These Jewish occupational specialties were hardly at the heights of the economy, or the power structure, but from the perspective of the black ghetto, they were the power structure. Among whites with whom poor blacks came into contact, the book notes one observer saying, only the policeman was not Jewish. Community control over city schools pitted blacks against Jews. When, during one of these disruptive strikes, an anti-Semitic leaflet appeared, Shanker did not hesitate to reproduce it in the hundreds of thousands to paint his black opponents as Jew-haters. He was denounced for exacerbating group tensions in a difficult time.

In the early 1960s, Shanker had played a leading role in organizing 50,000 of New York City’s public school teachers. He was one of a group of tough union leaders who in defiance of state law led strikes by public employees, disrupted the lives of millions, and went to jail as a result. Mike Quill, the leader of the transit workers union, shut down the subways, to the outrage of millions of commuters, and went to jail as a result. Who remembers Quill? But everyone remembers Al Shanker, who once said in response to a question about the rights of schoolchildren, “they don’t pay the dues in this union.” Despite the similarities and the similar headaches they gave Mayor John Lindsay, Shanker was very different from Mike Quill. He was drawn from a radically different milieu, the Jewish working class, and those origins foreshadowed his transformation. Alongside his defense of teachers’ rights, there was always a larger vision, which made it possible for him to escape from the execration that liberals heaped on him in the 1960s.

Shanker graduated from fierce union leader to education statesman and leader in the world of education reform. Indeed, he does warrant a biography; no trade-union leader of the last 40 years, in the age after John L. Lewis, Sidney Hillman, Walter Reuther, David Dubinsky, and other shapers of American unionism, is so worthy of one.

Shanker came from a world that no longer exists, one in which bright young people with political interests were divided between Socialists and Communists. The conflicts between the two—in school arguments, in college organizations, in trade unions, in local politics—shaped a generation that was defined by two dominant traits, an unbending anti-Communism and a defense of unions and worker’s rights. One can only understand Shanker, and the paradoxes he presents to contemporary liberalism, from the point of view of those origins.

Shanker attended New York’s Stuyvesant High School, an examination school for the gifted, where he excelled in debate, and the University of Illinois, where he joined the Young People’s Socialist League and showed his organizational talents by drawing unexpectedly large audiences for Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate for president. His heroes were John Dewey and Sidney Hook, and he went on to study for a Ph.D. in philosophy at Columbia. But he ran out of “money and patience,” and at the age of 24 took a job as a teacher in a “tough East Harlem elementary school.” At the time, 1952, we are told, there were 106 teachers’ organizations in the New York City school system. The Teachers Guild, which Shanker joined, was part of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). John Dewey held card #1 in the New York City local. The Communists were at the time powerful in New York City’s white-collar unions of teachers, social workers, and the like. The Teachers Guild and the AFT were fiercely anti-Communist, demanded collective bargaining (then controversial for teachers), and held a larger progressive social vision than most unions. For example, the AFT refused to charter segregated locals and filed an amicus brief in support of desegregation in Brown v. Board of Education.

Shanker rose rapidly in the union ranks, becoming president in 1964. Liberals (and Socialists, as Shanker was) were then united around the issues of civil rights, workers’ rights, and anti-Communism. In the wake of the community control struggle, this unity dissolved. Affirmative action split the liberals: Shanker was for affirmative action, but always against quotas. At the time, he even had important black allies, such as civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. Complicating the anti-Communist cause was the war in Vietnam. Shanker supported the war; to him it was a means to prevent the expansion of Communist totalitarianism, but to many other liberals and Socialists it was a doubtful effort at American hegemonism. Even workers’ rights divided liberals: with the rise of identity politics, and the shift of blue-collar voters to Nixon in protest of liberals’ anti-Vietnam war and pro–affirmative action stance, trade union issues lost their pristine value to many liberals. Shanker thought of himself as a liberal, indeed a Socialist; but for many liberals he seemed a racist conservative, as he maintained his fierce anti-Communist stance, supported American military power in defense of democracy, and insisted on the primacy of the trade-union movement in making a better society.

One detects in this complex of attitudes the seeds of present-day “neoconservatism,” which evolved among Socialist anti-Communists, and in time became the intellectual footing for a militant American foreign policy. Shanker was deeply committed to this orientation and defended strongly the AFL-CIO’s international work in support of free trade unions and against Communism. But that was only one of the roles he played. More significantly, he began to look at the problems of education from a larger perspective than that of organized teachers’ rights. He was an early proponent of charter schools, but turned against them as he saw some launched by black militants or religious conservatives. He wanted to implement a professional model for school teachers and supported peer review and tests for veteran teachers, which were not popular with the rank and file. Influenced by E. D. Hirsch, he supported a national curriculum and serious and high-stakes national tests and was a major figure in the painful evolution of this effort. In these enterprises, he became close to leading businessmen, governors, and presidents. For more than two decades as the leader of the smaller but more energetic and enlightened of the two major national teacher organizations, he became perhaps the single most important figure in the difficult effort to improve American schools.

Richard Kahlenberg is well known for his advocacy of affirmative action on the basis of economic criteria rather than racial identity, which was also Shanker’s strong preference. Kahlenberg has written a richly detailed and well-researched account of Shanker’s development, the positions he adopted, the influential roles he played. He finds little to criticize in Shanker’s career, and it was indeed for the most part an admirable one. It has no equal in American teacher unionism, or in the world of organized labor generally, and his story is an important contribution to the history of American education reform.

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

Phil Gonring, Paul Teske, and Brad Jupp (Harvard Education Press).

The authors have delivered a straight-shooting, inside account of the design, politics, and implementation of the much-discussed Denver ProComp teacher pay plan—a plan the Denver Post termed “the nation’s most ambitious.” Widely regarded as the most substantial departure to date from the traditional “step-and-lane” pay scale, the “Professional Compensation plan for teachers” required Denver’s teachers to vote for a new pay model and local voters to boost taxes by $25 million annually to fund the program. How the plan’s champions won these two unlikely victories forms the backbone of the tale. The book first recounts the technical challenges in reforming teacher pay and the reasons for teacher resistance, then how trial and error, tough negotiation, and assiduous efforts to win hearts and minds convinced teachers to endorse the plan in 2004. Opening with a broad discussion of the case for reforming teacher pay and closing with some reflections on what has been learned thus far, the narrative is detailed, pithy, and highly readable. The volume obviously benefits from the contribution of Brad Jupp, a former Denver Classroom Teachers Association official and a maverick who played a key role in crafting ProComp.

Charter Schools: Hope or Hype?

Jack Buckley and Mark Schneider (Princeton University Press).

Long before becoming commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, Mark Schneider had embarked with his current deputy, Jack Buckley, on this ambitious, multiyear study of Washington, D.C., charter schools and the families who attend them. They surveyed parents from both charter and traditional public schools on four occasions between 2001 and 2004 and launched an innovative web site that allowed them to track the search behavior of parents seeking out school options. Although they find modest advantages for charters in terms of parental satisfaction, school-based social capital, and civic instruction, they emphasize that these differences—some of which diminished over time—fall well short of the promises made by the charter movement’s most ardent supporters. They also note that parents devoted as much time online to learning about the racial composition of schools as about student achievement. Overall, this is a careful, balanced analysis of a unique new data set on charter schools from a city in which they have made considerable headway. It is unlikely to change anyone’s opinion about charter schooling’s potential as a reform strategy, however, not least because of the lack of information about student achievement.

The Last Freedom: Religion from the Public School to the Public Square.

Joseph P. Viteritti (Princeton University Press).

Joe Viteritti’s new book is a fresh take on what might at first seem to be a tired topic: the role of religion in America and the state of religious freedom. The author’s bold claim is that a prejudice against religious belief has become legitimized in American life and that those who take religion seriously have become increasingly vulnerable. Many of the controversies explored in this book involve education, and Viteritti makes a strong case for resisting the urge to drive religion from the public (school) square, for allowing religious institutions to perform some public functions, and for granting deeply religious parents greater accommodations when their children attend public schools.

The Education Mayor: Improving America’s Schools.

Kenneth K. Wong, Francis X. Shen, Dorothea Anagnostopolous, and Stacey Rutledge (Georgetown University Press).

The prose in this volume will appeal more to the citation-enthralled political scientist than to the informed citizen, but the study itself brings together the best available evidence on the consequences of mayoral efforts to reform big-city school systems. Wong and his colleagues make a solid, if still preliminary, case for shifting power away from school boards to a single, elected leader who can be held accountable to a citywide constituency. Combining anecdotal material with quantifiable data from a nationwide sample of large cities, they find positive impacts on both school management and elementary school achievement.

By Daniel H. Pink

Riverside Books, 2006 (Revised edition, paper), $15.00; 275 pages.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Readers of Education Next have probably observed the oscillation that music, dance, theater, and visual arts teachers suffer in their professional lives. At one pole, they love their material, and recounting what the arts do for young minds sends them into effusive testimonials to the unique powers of their disciplines. At the other pole, they regret the marginal place of the arts in the curriculum. With employers demanding better workplace skills from recent graduates, they say, and No Child Left Behind pushing reading and math, the arts scramble to maintain a foothold in the school week. Those are the dominant themes—a practice that sparks creative and disaffected kids, and a system that shunts it aside.

The situation leaves arts educators ever on the lookout for help. Howard Gardner has bolstered them for decades, his theory of multiple intelligences granting the arts a special role in the education of the whole mind. A few years ago, economist Richard Florida argued that demographic and technological factors have produced a “creative class” of artists, writers, and designers, and also software developers, media entrepreneurs, and hip capitalists. This creative class, he maintained, provides the energy to foster urban renewal and growth. Cities that invested in the arts, bike paths, architecture, etc., thrived throughout the 1990s, and other cities better do the same if they want to survive, Florida warned. Now comes another theorist who has captured the enthusiasm of arts educators. Daniel Pink is a business/technology writer who two years ago proclaimed in “Revenge of the Right Brain” (Wired, February 2005) that a sweeping paradigm shift was under way. Pink phrased it in capital-letter terms: the Information Age of the 1990s rewarded “linear, logical, analytical talents measured by SATs and deployed by CPAs,” but we have entered a new epoch, the Conceptual Age, whose economy runs on “inventive, empathic abilities.” The skills of computing, calculating, diagnostics, and basic legal work are losing their value in the United States. They retain their importance, Pink assures, but any activity that can be reduced to rules and instructions will go into a software program, such as TurboTax®, replacing tax accountants, or end up “migrating across the oceans” to India and China.

The two forces he labels “Asia” and “Automation” have changed the U.S. job market forever, pushing domestic labor into more creative practices. Another one, “Abundance,” adds a consumer factor to the evolution. In the last 30 years, Pink says, wealth has spread and deepened. Life is good, and “the information economy has produced a standard of living that would have been unfathomable in our grandparents’ youth.” With material needs met, people want more than functionality from their goods. They want pleasing aesthetics, and they elevate “less rational sensibilities—beauty, spirituality, emotion.” It’s a Big Idea, this epochal transition from Information Age to Conceptual Age, and the analysis of it could lead into demographic, financial, and geopolitical fields. In A Whole New Mind, Pink tracks it down to a smaller but still central terrain, the individual mind. For the transformations in jobs and goods, he claims, have a complement in the physiology of the brain, and in the styles of cognition that go with it. The Information Age solicits the powers of the left hemisphere, the aptitudes of analysis and numeracy and information management. The Conceptual Age solicits the powers of the right hemisphere, aptitudes of imagination, invention, and empathy. The left side, L-thinking, deals in pieces and series, while R-thinking makes pictures and discerns patterns. L-thinking breaks things down into parts. R-thinking assembles them into wholes. L-thinking conceives things by how they work, R-thinking by how they give pleasure and are meaningful. L-thinking fits a data-oriented economy, R-thinking an idea-oriented one.

That we have entered the latter condition Pink treats as plain. The example of Target stores proves the ascendancy, as it hires world-class designers to provide sleek toilet brushes and cool wastebaskets for budget-conscious consumers. But a problem lingers, he says: Information Age habits and assumptions remain in force. Information Age skills have served so well and yielded so much well-being that people don’t realize the conversion in process.

Pink’s book is an announcement of the turn, and an advice manual. The paradigm shift he takes care of in 60 pages, then devotes six chapters to ways of developing “a whole new mind.” Each chapter covers a new “sense” in a nomenclature that will thrill arts educators: Design, Story, Symphony, Empathy, Play, Meaning. Design adds beauty to function, Story adds drama to argument, Meaning adds, well, meaning to material plenty, etc. Pink supplies concrete tips for joining the movement: “Keep a Design Notebook,” he counsels, and “When you see a great design, make a note of it.” To cultivate empathy, eavesdrop on conversations and try to feel the others’ feelings. To deepen the sense of play, join online communities for gamers, or dissect a joke. Take an acting class, read Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames, and learn to draw on the right side of the brain.

But while the case for arts programs in the Conceptual Age might seem logical, educators should proceed cautiously. For one thing, whether such creative, higher-order skills of the Conceptual Age can prosper without lower-order aptitudes being mastered first is a debatable proposition. I’ve seen too many students being told that “critical thinking” and “meaning-making” activities are the talents they should master, even though they struggle with algebra, misplace commas, and commit basic fallacies. Second, perhaps artistic geniuses can get by without learning to spell or multiply, but the rest better learn the fundamentals. Target isn’t hiring thousands of designers for its goods. It hires “titans such as Karim Rashid and Philippe Starck.” Besides, the outsourcing trend may be exaggerated. For instance, the number of highly skilled industrial jobs in the United States jumped by 36 percent from 1983 to 2002, and cities such as Dubuque, Iowa; Grand Forks, North Dakota; Charleston, South Carolina; and Savannah, Georgia, have become sizzling economies for skilled blue-collar workers (see “The Myth of Deindustrialization,” Wall Street Journal, 6 Aug 2007).

As with any paradigm assertion, larger questions arise, especially in this case, the tempo implied. The Industrial Revolution took decades to happen. The subsequent Industrial Age lasted a couple of centuries before the Digital Revolution arrived 20 years ago. According to Pink, the Information Age has already petered out, at least in the United States. Has the lifetime of ages so contracted that before most people adjust to them they have already ended? Can human beings and human societies change that quickly?

Most of all, are students ready for right-brain conceptualization when only 23 percent of 12th graders reach “proficiency” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress math exam, 35 percent on the reading exam, and 13 percent on the U.S. history exam? For now, keep them on grammar and long division. Ten years from today, A Whole New Mind will join the long list of futurist visions that had its moment and disappeared.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English and director of the Program in Democracy and Citizenship at Emory University.

By Linda Perlstein

Henry Holt and Company, 2007, $25.00; 320 pages.

“It’s Being Done”: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools

By Karin Chenoweth

Harvard Education Press, 2007, $26.95; 238 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

No Child Left Behind, aside from its other effects, has generated a new kind of “successful schools” book, one which looks at schools that have done better than expected on mandated state exams. Linda Perlstein spent five years writing on education for the Washington Post and decided to research one such school. Tyler Heights enrolls 300 students, kindergarten to 5th grade, in Annapolis, Maryland. Half of its students come from housing projects. It is just the sort of school it was hoped would be improved by the legislation. In 2000, only 17 percent of the children performed satisfactorily on a state exam. A new principal, the central figure in Perlstein’s story, arrived that year. At the end of the 2004–05 school year, 86 percent of the students passed Maryland’s test in reading, 92 percent passed in math; black and Hispanic students were almost up to those figures. What could explain such remarkable change, and could it be maintained? Pearlstein spent the following year studying the school. Its incredibly hard-working principal, often at the school from 6:30 AM to 10:30 PM, and its teachers hardly rested on their laurels. They focused all energies on the state tests to come in March.

Karin Chenoweth, another former Post reporter, took a different course in tracking school success in unlikely circumstances. She searched for schools that exceeded on state tests what was expected on the basis of their social composition. She reports on 14 such schools, elementary, middle, and high, scattered throughout the country. Of course her accounts cannot be as full or intensive as Linda Perlstein’s study of a single school. One gets immersed in the life of Tyler Heights; there is no such effect possible from the brief studies in “It’s Being Done.”

Is one reason for the success of schools with low-income children the quantity of resources that we may be able to invest in one public school? Astonishingly, for its 300 students, Tyler Heights had a staff of 43, only 18 of whom headed classes. Title I helped employ many of the additional specialized staff and also enabled acquisition of copious teaching aids and supplies, ordered in an end-of-the-fiscal-year rush. One wonders how typical this is. I note in a New York Times article that a failing Newark school of 487 students has a staff of 79, including 33 teachers, similar in student-to-staff ratio to Tyler Heights.

But as the Newark school demonstrates, such resources do not guarantee success. Most striking in the account of Tyler Heights is the detailed prescription of the curriculum and how it should be taught. A new superintendent had imposed Saxon Math and the Open Court reading curriculum on the Annapolis schools. The teachers—more than half are in their first or second year because the school loses so many each year—come in fresh and with great enthusiasm for ways of teaching they will not have a chance to exercise. Emissaries and consultants from the central office impose or propose ways of teaching. One introduces the teachers to “explicit instruction,” weekly lessons completely orchestrated for the teacher, from what questions she should ask to what answers she should look for. “A line drawing of a bank teller popped up on the PowerPoint, and the presenter enthused, ‘A bank teller could pick up the lesson immediately.’”

The principal mutters under her breath, “Why not just go and hire a bunch of bank tellers?” She had just spent the summer trying to get the most qualified and creative teachers to come to Tyler Heights.

Finally, the tests are over (the results come months later), and Tyler Heights explodes into what the teachers and Ms. Perlstein believe to be real education—science and social science, arts and music, field trips. The kits they have ordered and never had a chance to use are opened. “It Feels Like a Different School” is the title of the chapter describing life after the tests.

In striking contrast is a school of similar social composition, successful on state tests, that Karin Chenoweth describes in “It’s Being Done.” This school is also in a condition of post-exam-stress relaxation. The students mill around, the teachers are without energy, the principal—in contrast to the admirable principal of Tyler Heights—is not present. When she arrives, and Chenoweth joins her to visit classrooms, the classrooms are noisy, and the principal yells unprofessionally at disruptive students. She explains apologetically, “Once the state tests are done, we don’t do a lot of instruction—we’re doing field trips and getting ready for the end of the year.”

What explains the difference from Tyler Heights, with its high morale, despite being tightly run, and its joyful explosion in new educational possibilities after the mandated tests? Chenoweth suspects the high scores of the dysfunctional school she presents in contrast to her other successful schools “had not been attained in a legitimate way.”

It is not clear what she has in mind. Actual cheating? The schools that have achieved their unexpectedly high scores in what she feels is a legitimate manner are so varied, in size, in region, in their approaches to curriculum and instruction, that it is not easy to extract general rules from her accounts. (Only one is an E. D. Hirsch Core Knowledge school.) The book does end with 26 generalizations, beginning with “They teach their students” and “They don’t teach to the test,” and ending with “To sum up: The adults in ‘It’s Being Done’ schools expect their students to learn and they work hard to master the skills and knowledge necessary to teach those students.” From my reading of the 14 case studies I would rate high the role of energetic and committed principals. But they don’t show up in Chenoweth’s list until item 17: “Principals are a constant presence.”

I wonder what Chenoweth would think of Tyler Heights. It certainly “teaches to the test.” It does expand into other kinds of activities when the tests are done, but its principal and its teachers seem steadily in control. The schools in Chenoweth’s sample, from my reading, also take the tests very seriously. From the more detailed account of a single successful school in Linda Perlstein’s book, and other accounts, one has the impression the teachers chafe under the requirements of the tests. But the tests are the coin of the realm: it is they that permit Chenoweth to select her school sample, and the results increasingly drive our judgment of schools. There is a lot of ideology in the criticism of the large role of tests. Yet I find it troubling that the judgment of so many teachers is that the tests distort what they feel they should be doing and ideally what the schools should be doing. Would better tests—perhaps those tracking the child rather than the grade or the school, as have been proposed—help resolve this conflict? They might. But if our most creative teachers do not seem to be enamored of the testing regime that now dominates the schools, this is something that needs further and systematic exploration, beyond even excellent ethnographic and journalistic accounts.

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

By Joe Miller

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006, $26; 480 pages.

As reviewed by Diane Ravitch

A genre of books and movies emerged in the past generation that portrays an inspired teacher who miraculously transforms a group of hard-luck students into champions. Outsiders say it can’t be done, but this great teacher does it. One thinks of Jaime Escalante, who taught calculus to poor Hispanic kids at Garfield High School in Los Angeles and was celebrated in a book by Jay Mathews and in a movie called Stand and Deliver. Or the movie about and books by Erin Gruwell, a writing teacher in Long Beach, California (see cultured, page 87), or the books by Rafe Esquith, who teaches Shakespeare to 5th graders in central Los Angeles.

The story has a familiar line: No one thinks much of these students; their life prospects are limited. Once they enter the classroom of the inspired teacher, however, something wonderful happens. Despite initial obstacles, the students amaze everyone with their achievements. The music reaches a crescendo, the story ends.

Cross-X is not that story, although the reader is led to believe that it will be. An assortment of students, all poor and black, join the debate team at Central High School in Kansas City, Missouri. Most of them speak the argot of the ’hood, not standard English. The coach, Jane Rinehart, who is white, is set up to be the miracle worker. We learn about the impoverished lives of the students and the struggles of their families. We expect that from this unpromising material, Coach Rinehart will fashion a championship debating team.

But the conventional story line never happens. The first inkling of the counternarrative occurs when the coach tells her recruits that the greatest joy of debate is to make the other team cry. Early on, it becomes clear that the book is implicitly (and often explicitly) a narrative about racism, oppression, segregation, and poverty. The reader picks up the theme early on, when Coach Rinehart tells the debaters to discard their infantile notions that the purpose of education is (as a student put it) “to give you a chance to be what you want to be” or “to make money.” No, says the coach, the purpose of schooling is to perpetuate the status quo. She tells them that “one hundred families control 80 percent of the wealth,” and none of them went to Central High. She is not one to encourage belief in the American dream of opportunity.

Later in the book, the author, journalist Joe Miller, decides to stop observing and reporting on the story and to become part of it; he grows so intrigued with the game of debate and so deeply involved in the lives of the students that he becomes an actor in the story, watching as they engage in risky personal behavior, then joining up as a debate coach.

Miller describes the many debates that the team from Central High participates in, often in mind-numbing detail. Sometimes they win, sometimes they lose, but Miller leads the reader to believe that racism is behind many, if not most, of their losses to teams from prestigious suburban public schools and elite private schools. Large portions of the book consist of the students’ conversations, which are usually so studded with expletives and sloppy language that it is hard to imagine how these students were able to succeed on the debate circuit against better-educated kids. To read this book, one must have a high tolerance for four-letter words and various forms of misbehavior, some of it involving illicit drugs. The reader also needs a great deal of patience, as the book is twice as long as it needs to be.

Just when the reader thinks it is impossible to endure another detailed description of yet another debate, Miller has an epiphany. He discovers Paulo Freire and The Pedagogy of the Oppressed and shares it with his young charges. The light goes on in his head and in theirs, too. The students suddenly realize that debate is a form of institutionalized racism, and they change their presentation at debates to raps about racism and oppression. Some opposing teams are insulted, but the kids from Central win a few competitions with their new format.

In the background of the story looms Central High, a depressing institution with low achievement, low aspirations, gangs, fights, and a prisonlike atmosphere. Miller briefly relates the tale of the $2 billion court-ordered desegregation plan in the mid-1980s for Kansas City, in which teachers’ salaries were raised, class sizes slashed, and beautiful facilities created. A new Central was built at a cost of $32 million, with special programs in computer technology and classical Greek studies. The federal court hoped that the low-performing, segregated district would have such splendid facilities and programs that suburban whites would enroll and that test scores would rise along with integration. Although Central attracted some white students, it remained a predominantly black school. And at Central High School and in the Kansas City district, achievement remained low, despite the substantial additional spending by the state of Missouri.

Certainly, much more should be written about what went wrong in Kansas City. But Joe Miller’s book is not the place for that sort of in-depth analysis. Miller is outraged by the poverty and terrible circumstances of the young men (they are all young men) that he befriends. He frequently contrasts the dismal material circumstances of their lives with those of affluent white students who live elsewhere. He rages against racism, poverty, and inequality, which he believes (like Coach Rinehart, Paulo Freire, and another hero, Jonathan Kozol) is designed into the American social system.

At the end of the book, after the debaters begin presenting their arguments about racism in rap format, he happily reports that the debate circuit has begun to take notice. Somehow, Coach Joe Miller has become the center of the story, not Coach Rinehart. He sees hope that a revolution will occur, as Jonathan Kozol predicted in a visit to Central, after the affluent white oppressors in privileged schools are enlightened by their encounters with the rapping Kansas City debate team.

One wonders: Will those privileged white students lead the revolution that Miller, Freire, and Kozol long for? Or would the students at Central be better off believing in the American dream, the one that says that hard work, clean living, and a good education is the key to rising out of poverty?

Diane Ravitch is research professor of education, New York University, and a member of the Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.