New Jersey’s supreme court in May restored $500 million in added spending for the state’s poor, urban schools, known as the “Abbott districts” (31 out of 591 districts in total), which particularly benefit from nearly 40 years of its constitutional rulings. Otherwise, a divided court left intact school spending cuts in the budget of Republican governor Chris Christie, an outspoken critic of the court, who promised to abide by its decision.

In deciding how to rule, New Jersey’s court was guided by earlier decisions on behalf of the Abbott districts, stating, “Like anyone else, the State is not free to walk away from judicial orders enforcing constitutional obligations.” We are guessing that other courts that receive petitions asking for restoration of funds will attempt a similar approach and will seek to defend positions staked out on grounds of equity or adequacy, but will avoid picking fresh fights with governors and legislatures if they can.

Budget cutting has precipitated another issue: the pension rights of public employees, among whom are this country’s heavily unionized teachers.

In June, the Florida Education Association (FEA), the state’s teachers union, filed suit in a circuit court in Tallahassee against the governor and other officials on behalf of the more than 550,000 state employees, among them 140,000 FEA members, who participate in the Florida Retirement System (FRS), charging that changes in the system made by a Republican legislature violated Florida’s constitution in three ways: They impaired the employees’ contract with the state, took private property without compensation, and impaired the employees’ right to bargain collectively.

Participation in the FRS is mandatory for state employees. Underlying the union’s complaint were revisions that would take effect on July 1, 2011. Although the FRS was created in 1970 as a contributory system, it had been noncontributory since 1974. The legislature now returned to a contributory plan under which 3 percent of a member’s pay would be deducted monthly and credited to an account with the FRS. A second change addressed provisions for cost-of-living adjustments following retirement. Under the plan of 1974, retirees were to receive an annual cost-of-living increase of 3 percent without regard to the number of years of credited service or when the service had occurred. Under the revised plan, the 3 percent adjustment would be subject to a fractional reduction for years of service after July 1, 2011. The union’s petition objected that these changes had been made unilaterally rather than having been the subject of collective bargaining. It asked for temporary and permanent injunctions, and that the funds at issue be segregated and placed in an interest-bearing account until the lawsuit was settled.

“This pay cut was used by legislative leadership to make up a budget shortfall on the backs of teachers, law enforcement officers, firefighters, and other state workers,” FEA president Andy Ford said. “It is essentially an income tax levied only on workers belonging to the Florida Retirement System,” he added, apparently hoping to cast as hypocritical Republicans who are opposed to tax increases.

Florida is one of only five states with a constitutional protection for collective bargaining rights, though the language is strangely ambiguous. Without specifically granting the right, the law guarantees against its abridgement. This invites discretion from a supreme court that has a pro-union past but today is composed of a narrow majority of Republican appointees.

More or less simultaneously with the filing of Florida’s suit, state district judges in Minnesota and Colorado threw out public employees’ suits against governments that had reduced cost-of-living adjustments to their pensions, ruling that they were not contractually protected. The Florida plaintiffs, citing both statutes and the constitution, assert such protection. The state, citing past supreme court decisions in support of its position, asserts that the FRS is entirely prospective and must allow for modification of future benefits by the legislature.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

It’s sunset over Manhattan, and from the 35th floor of a Park Avenue skyscraper the vista is pure gold. The soaring buildings are bathed in the deep rich colors of, well, money. As visitors take their seats in the sedately cavernous room, a slim, middle-aged man is pacing in front of a large projector screen with a picture of a black child and the words, “A Right Denied: The Critical Need for Genuine School Reform.” (www.arightdenied.org)

If it is a jarring juxtaposition, it is meant to be. The slim man in the gray suit is there, at a meeting of the New York chapter of the Young Presidents’ Organization, to talk about something that many of these financiers and business people don’t often talk about because they can afford not to: fixing public schools.

“I’m Whitney Tilson,” he says, as if the 60-plus individuals in the standing-room-only meeting didn’t know. The 46-year-old hedge-fund manager (he has a Harvard MBA and is the founder and managing partner of T2 Partners LLC and the Tilson Mutual Funds) writes a regular column on value investing for Kiplinger’s, is a CNBC contributor, and in 2007 was named one of 20 “Rising Stars” by Institutional Investor. In his “free time” (his words), he has become one of the education-reform world’s most prolific gadflies, creator of an infamous and widely read e-mail shout-out about education reform. Tilson was also a cofounder of Democrats for Education Reform, is a board member of KIPP NYC, and is friend and champion of education reform glitterati from Joel Klein to Wendy Kopp.

With very little fanfare, and none of that introduction, Tilson launches into a PowerPoint presentation that might best be described as bringing rich people to the Jesus of school reform. It is at times riveting, at times scary. “Spending for education has skyrocketed,” he says, throwing a chart on the screen with lines running at decidedly different trajectories, “driven mainly by a tripling of the number of teachers.” But despite all this money, he tells his audience, our various performance indicators—he quickly explains NAEP, ACT, SAT—are all flat.

“We’ve stalled,” Tilson says. “Teacher quality has been falling rapidly. Our school systems are dysfunctional.” The “scary part,” Tilson tells them, is that “the longer kids stay in school the farther behind they fall.” It’s “terrifying,” he says. “Game over by age 10.” The audience is with him, transfixed, if unnerved, by one devastating fact after another. “We have spent trillions of dollars and we have almost nothing to show for it,” says Tilson, who moves through the show quickly, with a practiced gait. “All of this dysfunction comes with enormous costs and horrible consequences,” he says, “Over $260,000 is lost for each high school dropout.” These are numbers that this crowd gets.

All the News…

It is fascinating to see Tilson in action. His soft-spoken manner and easy smile bear little resemblance to the passion of his words, especially his e-mail blasts. “Hedge Fund Guy Single-Handedly E-Mails Obama to Victory” was a headline on Alexander Russo’s blog in September of 2008. “Reformy Cheerleader Sends Massive Emails” wrote Russo last year. Tilson’s e-mails, which began as something he sent to a few friends, now arrive in some 4,000 digital mailboxes two or three times a week, with 8 to 12 education-reform news items each. He is famous for his breathless “STOP THE PRESSES!!!” to announce good news, which means anything good about charter schools, vouchers, teacher evaluations, reform superintendents, mayors, senators, or presidents—as in “Mathematica just released the most comprehensive and rigorous study of KIPP ever…and the results are STUNNING!” (June 25, 2010). Or “GRADING THE TEACHERS: Who’s teaching L.A.’s kids?” (August 18, 2010). They get your attention, but there’s also plenty of substance behind these headlines. Tilson is as much a shrewd news aggregator as he is an opinionator. If the New York Times runs an education story, he will tell you about it, but not without also telling you exactly what he thinks about it. Tilson is education reform’s gonzo journalist; “Kooks” is a favorite term. As are “hatchet job” and “insane” (as in “what’s best for kids always takes a back seat to bureaucratic rules/imperatives, no matter how insane” [October 16, 2009]). Randi Weingarten is a preferred target (“Kudos to the Washington Post for holding Randi’s feet to the fire,” [February 3, 2010]), as is Stanford’s Linda Darling-Hammond. But no one has earned as much consistent enmity from Tilson as Diane Ravitch, to whom he has devoted a separate section on his A Right Denied web page called “Rebutting Ravitch.”

Maniac or Messiah?

“I’m often asked why I spend so much time on this issue,” says Tilson, in a recent post, writing about his education reform obsession. And he answers, “certainly not because I have any direct self-interest—no…I’m not profiting from my involvement in charter schools (in fact, I shudder to think of how much it’s cost me), and I have little personal experience with the public school system because I’m doubly lucky: my parents saw that I wasn’t being challenged in public schools, sacrificed (they’re teachers/education administrators), and my last year in public school was 6th grade; and now, with my own children, I’m one of the lucky few who can afford to buy my children’s way out of the NYC public system [in] which, despite Mayor Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Klein’s herculean efforts, there are probably fewer than two dozen schools (out of nearly 1,500) to which I’d send my kids.”

When I speak with Tilson, in person, I note that he talks almost as fast as he seems to write, though with fewer exclamation points. He is, after all, a Harvard man, though he should have been a Yalie. In fact, Tilson was born in the New Haven hospital where his father and grandfather were born, and would have been fourth-generation Yale had he not gone crimson. “Broke my grandfather’s heart,” he says.

But the crusading education gene is not hard to detect, as Tilson’s father, Thomas, took two years off after his junior year at Yale and joined the Peace Corps, where he met, at training camp in Hawaii, a graduate from the University of Washington. “My dad, Thomas, was 19, and my mom, Susan, was 20,” he says. “They fell in love and got engaged within three weeks of meeting each other…. [They] married in the Philippines, neither family having met the other.”

Tilson’s dad went on to graduate from Yale, then got his PhD in international education from Stanford, specializing in what were then called third world countries. His mother was a teacher until the kids arrived, Whitney and a younger sister. They lived in Africa, Central America, and various American towns until settling in Northfield, Massachusetts, where Thomas was academic dean at the prestigious and private Northfield Mount Hermon School, and where his son and daughter would get their world-class educations. (Tilson’s parents are now 69 and 70 and living in Kenya, where Thomas still consults on education.)

Whitney didn’t follow his father to Yale or into education; he graduated from Harvard with a degree in government, then got his MBA from Harvard Business School. But the times they were a-changing, and during his undergraduate days at Harvard, Tilson met a Princeton student named Wendy Kopp, who was then running an organization called the Foundation for Student Communication. Kopp, recalls Tilson, “organized conferences for Fortune 500 company CEOs to get together for a few days and talk with college kids from around the country.” When he later heard that Kopp was starting a nonprofit to bring Ivy League students into inner-city schools as teachers, he immediately volunteered to help. “Ordinarily, I would have said, ‘some pie-in-the sky, Birkenstock, fuzzy idea,’” Tilson recalls. “But I saw what Wendy did with those CEOs and knew that if there was one graduating student in the country who could pull this off it was Wendy.”

He also recognized the Peace Corps provenance in Kopp’s Teach For America (TFA) idea. “They’re very analogous,” he recalls. “A two-year commitment after college to try to make a difference in the world.”

Tilson spent several months in New York helping Kopp launch TFA, in 1989 and 1990. (“I take no credit for what TFA has become,” he says, “but I take full credit for identifying a great idea and a great entrepreneur.”) The rest is history, of course, and Tilson was there as TFA celebrated its 20th anniversary earlier this year.

Factors, Not Excuses

So what does motivate Tilson? “OUTRAGE!” he writes. “Almost every day, I read and hear stories that shock and infuriate me.” Interestingly, the “OUTRAGE” of his writings is not apparent when you meet Tilson. The passion is, however. He believes that “there is still no school district in America that is doing an adequate job of educating low-income children.” That doesn’t mean he thinks it’s easy to do so. Schools face “extraordinary difficulty.” But he believes that “the great majority of these kids, the vast majority of these kids, can be put on a different trajectory, so they have a really good shot in life, they can go to a four-year college and with that you have a pretty good chance in life.”

And why does he care? “I believe very deeply in the promise of this country,” he explains, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But there is nothing more fundamental about what America stands for than equality of opportunity. That it doesn’t matter who your parents are or what color your skin is or what neighborhood you were born in—every kid in this country should get a fair shot at the American dream. And there’s nothing more important to that than getting a decent education.… The outrage comes from the fact that we have a public education system in this country that systematically delivers a massively inferior education to low-income and minority kids. The kids that most need a good education, to escape the disadvantages of the life they were born into, are systematically given a lousy education. That violates every sense of fairness, every belief I have about this country and thus the outrage.”

He acknowledges “the massive deficits kids face outside the schools” and says, “I’m not a ‘It’s all the teacher unions fault’ guy. I’m very cognizant of how difficult it is to educate these children who come from poverty, single-parent households, little or no support from home.” But he doesn’t buy the argument that you can’t fix schools until you get rid of poverty.

“It’s exactly the opposite,” he says defiantly. “You can’t cure poverty until you have good schools.”

And do you think you can have good schools for poor kids?

“I don’t think, I know,” he says, “with 100 percent certainty, because I’ve been to dozens, if not hundreds, of such schools that are successfully educating these kids to a very high level. The most disadvantaged kids. I’m not saying it’s easy. It is incredibly difficult, but there’s no question that it’s absolutely possible. And it’s possible at scale, not just one classroom.”

That, Tilson admits, is not something he thought possible 15 years ago. And he’s bullish about the future.

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life Magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

It’s called “the flipped classroom.” While there is no one model, the core idea is to flip the common instructional approach: With teacher-created videos and interactive lessons, instruction that used to occur in class is now accessed at home, in advance of class. Class becomes the place to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning. Most importantly, all aspects of instruction can be rethought to best maximize the scarcest learning resource—time.

Flipped classroom teachers almost universally agree that it’s not the instructional videos on their own, but how they are integrated into an overall approach, that makes the difference. In his classes, Bergmann says, students can’t just “watch the video and be done with it.” He checks their notes and requires each student to come to class with a question. And, while he says it takes a little while for students to get used to the system, as the year progresses he sees them asking better questions and thinking more deeply about the content. After flipping his classroom, Bergmann says he can more easily query individual students, probe for misconceptions around scientific concepts, and clear up incorrect notions.

Counterintuitively, Bergmann says the most important benefits of the video lessons are profoundly human: “I now have time to work individually with students. I talk to every student in every classroom every day.” Traditional classroom interactions are also flipped. Typically, the most outgoing and engaged students ask questions, while struggling students may act out. Bergmann notes that he now spends more time with struggling students, who no longer give up on homework, but work through challenging problems in class. Advanced students have more freedom to learn independently. And, while high-school students still occasionally lapse on homework assignments, Bergmann credits the new arrangement with fostering better relationships, greater student engagement, and higher levels of motivation.

Once Bergmann’s and Sams’s lessons were posted online, it wasn’t long before other students and teachers across the country were using the lessons, and making their own. Across the country in Washington, D.C., Andrea Smith, a 6th-grade math teacher at E. L. Haynes, a high-performing public charter school, shares Bergmann’s enthusiasm, but focuses on a different aspect of the flipped classroom. Smith, who has taught for more than a decade in both D.C.’s public charter and traditional district schools, immediately saw the benefit for students, but says she was most captivated by the opportunity to elevate teaching practice and the profession as a whole. As Smith explains, crafting a great four- to six-minute video lesson poses a tremendous instructional challenge: how to explain a concept in a clear, concise, bite-sized chunk. Creating her own videos forces her to pay attention to the details and nuances of instruction—the pace, the examples used, the visual representation, and the development of aligned assessment practices. In a video lesson on dividing fractions, for example, Smith is careful not to just teach the procedure—multiply by the inverse—but also to represent the important underlying conceptual ideas. Like Bergmann, she makes it clear that the videos are just one component of instruction. She’s keen on the equivalent of a motion picture’s “director’s cut,” where a video creator might explain the reasoning behind the examples chosen and how she would extend those activities into class time.

“Flipping” is rapidly moving into the mainstream. Bergmann and Sams have completed a book, are in high demand across the country at educator conferences, and even host their own “Flipped Class Conference” to train teachers. The chief academic officer at Smith’s school, Eric Westendorf, is taking the tools he has piloted at the school and building them into a platform for teachers everywhere to create and share videos. Most notable, though, is the emergence of the Khan Academy, an online repository of thousands of instructional videos that has been touted by Bill Gates and featured prominently in the national media.

Given education’s long history of fascination with new instructional approaches that are later abandoned, there’s a real danger that flipping, a seemingly simple idea that is profound in practice, may be reduced into the latest educational fad. And, in today’s highly polarized political environment, it also runs the risk of being falsely pigeonholed into one of education’s many false dichotomies, such as the age-old pedagogical debate between content knowledge and skills acquisition.

But the ideas behind flipping are not brand new. For over a decade, led by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), dozens of colleges have successfully experimented with similar ideas across math, science, English, and many other disciplines. NCAT’s increasingly impressive body of practice shows that thoughtful course redesigns lead to improved learning. Carol Twigg, NCAT’s president and CEO, says there is no magic: course redesign is “a hard job.” She’s not assuming students love homework. But redesign offers an opportunity to reengage students and improve their motivation, while setting proper expectations and monitoring to “push school to the top of the list.” And while many course redesigns focus on incorporating more project-based learning opportunities, Twigg’s experience leads her to quickly dismiss pedagogical extremes: “If you don’t have basic math skills, you can’t do an interesting physics project.”

There is also some danger that the flipped classroom could be seen as another front in a false battle between teachers and technology. Yet Bergmann and Sams emphasize that the “only magic bullet is the recruiting, training, and supporting of quality teachers.” And while Khan Academy’s prominence engenders fear of standardization and deprofessionalization among some critics, Bergmann, Sams, and Smith see instructional videos as powerful tools for teachers to create content, share resources, and improve practice. Smith admits that if such tools were available when she first started out, she “would have run to this every week when planning.”

It seems almost certain that instructional videos, interactive simulations, and yet-to-be-dreamed-up online tools will continue to multiply. But who will control these tools and whether they will fulfill their potential remains to be seen. As Scott McLeod, one of the nation’s leading thinkers on educational technology and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, observes, the “reason Sal Khan is so visible right now is that nobody did this instead. It would have been great if the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had been doing this, but someone from the outside had to fill the vacuum.” His guidance to educators: “Start making!”

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

My classmates complained that her class was too hard.

One of my other instructors spent class sessions badly summarizing the readings, instigating awkward and often one-sided class discussions, or trying to explain the homework assignments and projects she thought up. When she assigned one of her own articles for us to read, it became clear that despite having completed a doctorate at our university, she could not write a coherent academic article.

Desperate for a more challenging academic experience, I increased my course load for the second semester and handpicked my instructors. I actually enjoyed most of my classes that semester, but it was at this point that I began to deeply question the university’s approach to preparing future teachers.

It baffled me, for example, that I could get a master’s degree in teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL) after having completed only one rudimentary course in linguistics and one in English grammar. Almost all of my classmates struggled greatly in these two courses, leading me to wonder whether perhaps the admission requirements might also need refining. A class in adolescent development was useful, but the program offered no course in child development, despite the fact that my certification would be for grades K–12. It seemed that they were skimming over the important topics while bogging me down with courses in “theory and practice,” which did little to make me feel prepared to begin teaching on my own.

The focus of the third and fourth semesters was student teaching. My first placement was in high-school foreign language, for which I was also receiving certification. I was fortunate to work with a relatively strong supervising teacher; the infuriating aspect of this first placement was how I was evaluated. A supervisor from the university observed me during three lessons over the course of the semester. After each observation, she completed a write-up and made a few minimally helpful suggestions. During the final observation, she leaned over to my supervising teacher and casually asked, “So, what grade would you give her?” No criteria for evaluation, no request for a report on what I needed to work on. Fortunately, I did receive some valuable feedback from my supervising teacher that semester; I cannot say the same about my English as a Second Language student-teaching placement the following semester.

The final task I was asked to complete for the program was an “individualized project,” which sounded to me like a dumbed-down version of a thesis or capstone project. I have to confess that I took the easy way out. I knew I wasn’t going to get the kind of academic support I would need to complete an actual thesis, so I settled for designing a unit based on what I was already working on with my ESL students. After meeting with the professor a few times and receiving some vague suggestions, I handed in a project that earned me the last of a full transcript of easy As, with a friendly note on the cover and not a single comment or suggestion for how the unit could have been improved.

After observing and teaching in a variety of classroom settings over the course of my graduate studies, I have concluded that good teaching depends on three things: mastery of the subject, a keen understanding of how children learn, and an ability to maintain a disciplined yet positive learning environment. It is hard for me to express how disheartening it is to have spent two years and more than $80,000 in student loans on a program that did justice to none of those objectives.

The author earned a masters degree in education at a private university in the Northeast. Julia Harvey is a pseudonym.

A 35-year-old former teacher, John White headed to New Orleans in late April to become superintendent of the Big Easy’s Recovery School District (RSD), quite an accomplishment for such a young man. But, with his bags barely unpacked, he found himself nominated by Governor Bobby Jindal to be interim chief of all of Louisiana’s public schools (thanks to the sudden resignation of Paul Pastorek, who had recruited White), in addition to running RSD. Newspapers claimed that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was calling members of the state’s school board, praising White as “an extraordinary leader [who is] committed to reform and is a great asset to the state.” Is your head spinning?

John White’s wasn’t. He told the press that he was flattered by Jindal’s offer, that he had come to the Bayou State to run the New Orleans schools, but if they wanted him in Baton Rouge, he’d be glad to help out. Cool. Calm. Collected.

“I’ve got more gray hair than I should at my age,” he says, smiling, during our interview in a first-floor chancellor’s conference room at New York City’s education department headquarters just a few days before he left for New Orleans. Tall, boyish, soft-spoken, White is cordial, even gracious, but never flip. When I ask if we should wave to the mayor, whose “bull pen” office windows were visible from where we sat, he responds that such proximity to the mayor is “a beacon for accountability and the priority that this mayor has placed on public education.” Accountability is a word White frequently used during our talk.

Where did this rising education star come from? The short answer is Teach For America (TFA). He is one of a growing list of wunderkind school leaders produced by this moon shot idea of Princeton University student Wendy Kopp (20 years ago) to put smart college grads in the nation’s worst schools. White, son of a lawyer and “private wealth advisor” father and television journalist mother, grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended the prestigious private St. Albans School, where he learned, he says, “that education starts with relationships between adults and students and among students, who then reinforce the high expectations that are held for them.” But he never thought of being a teacher. In fact, there was a time in high school when he wanted to be a naval officer. As he looks back, he says he was attracted to the military’s “faith to mission, the commitment to excellence because of the deep understanding that they cannot fail.”

Instead of the military (his younger brother and only sibling did become a naval officer), White entered the University of Virginia (UVA), where he majored in English and was aiming at journalism for a career until he discovered an interview of William Faulkner, who had taught at the school, describing Ike McCaslin, protagonist in Go Down, Moses. “There are three kinds of people in the world,” he recalls Faulkner saying. “And I’m paraphrasing. There are people who don’t know there’s a problem. There are people who know there’s a problem and choose not to do anything about it. And then there are people who know there’s a problem and say, I’m going to do something about it. And the power of reading that one night on my couch in my apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, knowing that it had been spoken only half a mile from where I was living, and amidst this incredibly complex book and this incredibly complex writer and man, but the simplicity of that call literally was a life-changing moment for me. The next day I applied to Teach For America.” And he never looked back.

Into the Crucible

TFA sent White to Jersey City, to 3,000-student Dickinson High School, overlooking the Holland Tunnel, where he taught English for three years and learned that “there are a lot of challenges and we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The school itself was not organized to serve every child. It’s a huge school. Kids come and go. They oftentimes come and go without ever having formed a strong relationship with the adults who are supposed to serve them.” White met “heroic educators who were saving lives,” and he saw quickly “what an impact one teacher could make, and I thought, what an extraordinary thing it would be if we started creating groups of teachers and even schools and school systems that were doing this kind of thing.”

He gives TFA credit for “keeping me in the mission…. We all know each other,” he says of fellow alums like Michelle Rhee (Washington, D.C.’s superintendent at age 38) and Cami Anderson (who took over Newark’s troubled district at age 39), and “those are people who have fueled my commitment just as I hope that I fuel theirs.” After his teaching stint, White went to work for TFA in its New Jersey region coaching and mentoring the new recruits. He was then sent to Chicago to do the same thing. While there he met Arne Duncan. “I count Arne as a friend and advisor and mentor,” he says. “And he once told me, ‘If you want to lead and you want to lead change, just go find a place where it’s happening. Go find a school system where it’s happening and go do it.’”

“Part of the problem with the current system,” says White, is that “the schedule and the curriculum are organized around a time-based, space-based model.” Technology will help teachers meet children at their level and “move them to mastery.”

From the Big Apple to the Big Easy

That was 2006 and the happening place was New York City, where Joel Klein was four years into remaking the nation’s largest public school system. Klein immediately offered White a job on his portfolio planning team, which meant leading the process of closing bad schools and creating new ones, one of the bull’s-eye issues in the massive system’s turnaround efforts. “I was part of the team that was catalyzing change at a very rapid pace,” says White.

Several years later, when Pastorek called and invited him to audition to take over for veteran reform educator Paul Vallas, who was bound for the private sector, White was running the district’s Division of Talent, Labor and Innovation. One of the most important parts of the job was overseeing the Innovation Zone, a network of nearly 100 New York City schools focused on using technology as a catalyst to personalize education. “We wanted to organize schools around the needs of individual kids,” he says. “And I want to emphasize that last point. I think that it’s a question of providing an individual education for each child, which doesn’t mean education isolation, but one where literally every child is having a program daily that is tailored to his or her specific needs.”

As a UVA graduate, White is keenly aware of the groundbreaking work of E. D. Hirsch, who taught at UVA for several decades and is the intellectual godfather of the modern standards-based curricular movement. “Part of the challenge,” says White, “has been a standards-based education that has for too long meant that we don’t differentiate, whereas a child-centered education has meant that we, for too long, don’t hold children to standards.” White believes that “we can marry those two things…. You don’t water down the common core standards; in fact, you adopt them and you implement them.” He knows that technology is no silver bullet, but White believes it will help bring school systems “to where student progress is not being determined by whether he or she sits in a seat for 54 hours or 108 hours, but is instead seeing what each child is capable of achieving in the common core.”

His three years in the classroom at Dickinson High gives White a firm grasp of these fundamental teaching challenges, including trying to teach the same content to a room of children where the proficiency spread may be two to three grade levels. “It is, of course, every teacher’s goal to bring every child to a place of proficiency. On the other hand, we also need to make sure that we’re not holding children back from achieving something beyond proficiency…. Similarly, if a child is just really behind, limiting their education in that subject to 50 minutes makes absolutely no sense.” Part of the problem with the current system, says White, is that “the schedule and the curriculum are organized around a time-based, space-based model.” Technology will help teachers meet children at their level and “move them to mastery.”

White knows that the challenges of running New Orleans’s 70 Recovery District schools are great, despite Paul Vallas’s amazing progress in rebuilding a system that most educators agreed was among the worst in the nation before Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 80 percent of its 127 schoolhouses (see “New Schools in New Orleans,” features, Spring 2011).

“I think there are three critical challenges in New Orleans,” says White. “One, a system that has moved from tremendous problems to providing an adequate education for many kids still needs to provide a great education for all kids. Two, serving all children, including our hardest-to-serve kids: kids who are over-age, kids with severe learning needs, kids who have been out of school, kids who are moving back. Three, doing it in a way that understands the needs of family, of community, and of parents—that’s critical to being successful.”

A Leader and a Partner

New York—if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere—is certainly a great training ground for meeting and overcoming challenges. And White has the energy and intelligence and grit of a reformer. But as he sees it, the keys to success in the New Orleans RSD, where 37 of the 70 schools are charters, will be “communicating with parents” his “deep belief that parents need to be a partner in education,” that “they need to understand the options for their kids, and the need to make the best choice possible for their kids, knowing what the likely outcome is going to be.”

His responsibility “as a leader,” he says, is “to share information about the opportunities and the constraints that you’re facing. You need to be honest with people about what you can do and what you can’t do. You need to give them a rationale for why you’re doing what you are doing. You need to hear their opinion of the proposal. You need to consider it and you need to be honest with them when you come to a decision…. It’s when we either make promises that we can’t or don’t intend to keep, when we hide from people, when we don’t face the brutal facts, that’s when you know you’re not qualified to be a leader.”

And the one brutal fact that drives this young education reformer is that “without a great education system for all our children, we simply will not be the nation that we imagine ourselves to be.”

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

Like some other states, such as Vermont and Texas, Kansas has responded to school finance litigation by limiting how much school districts can spend. Following a 1991 trial court decision in Mock v. State invalidating an existing plan, the legislature under a state judge’s supervision enacted a sweeping reform that met his standards for equity yet made a concession to wealthier districts with provision for a local-option budget. The state would provide a base level of funding per pupil but allowed districts to levy additional local taxes up to a cap of 25 percent of their base. By 2010 the cap had risen to 30 percent or, with approval of district voters, 31 percent.

In the wake of the recent economic downturn, the state reduced its base payment to all districts. Noting Shawnee Mission’s nearly $20 million in budget cuts over two years and plans for school closures, the plaintiffs asked the court to enjoin the local cap.

The plaintiffs asserted that the cap violates several constitutional guarantees. Citing Supreme Court decisions in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which held that the liberty guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause includes a right of parents to control the education of their children, the plaintiffs charged that the local cap infringes on that right. As well, by forbidding additional taxes it limits their right to use their property as they wish. Still more inventive, they invoked the First Amendment right of assembly, saying that the cap prevents voters from expressing their collective wishes at the ballot box. These violations together, they contended, constitute a denial of equal protection of the law.

In the 2008–09 school year, at $4,701, Shawnee Mission was 265th out of 296 districts in state funding, receiving $2,643 less per pupil than the average. At $12,174 per pupil, the district’s spending was almost $500 below the state average. That a rich district could perversely become poor is explained by the fact that the base amount provided by the state is subject to complicated weighted increases that favor sparsely populated western and urban eastern districts while disfavoring suburban eastern ones such as Shawnee Mission. The local cap prevents districts from closing the difference.

In making their novel legal claims, which they summarized with the phrase “collective political freedoms,” the plaintiffs were assisted by high-powered legal talent from Kansas City’s Shook, Hardy & Bacon, famous for cutting its teeth in defense of cigarette makers; Washington, D.C.’s boutique firm Massey & Gail; and Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, who as special consultant to Massey & Gail signed the district’s brief. This talent, however, could not secure a favorable decision. In March 2011, U.S. District Court Judge John Lungstrum dismissed the case. The school district, as an entity of the state, he said, has no right to tax beyond what the state allows. Nor could the local cap be severed from the rest of the school funding statute. Striking it down would require striking down the entire school finance structure, an option Judge Lungstrum was unwilling to entertain.

The parents have said that they will appeal. But if the local cap cannot be severed, federal courts will likely remain reluctant to wade into the state’s school funding choices. Given the problems generated in Kansas and elsewhere by school finance litigation, federal judges might reasonably doubt whether courts are suitable venues for resolving such disputes. Late in 2010, 63 Kansas districts, including Kansas City, filed a class action against the state charging that it is violating the state constitution by failing to fund schools adequately. It remains to be seen whether the Kansas courts will embrace one more round of battle in a state with a long history of finance litigation and growing signs of legislative resistance, including a revived interest among the Republican majority in amending the state constitution to discourage future school-finance litigation.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Richard was considered a home schooler at the time, but “hybrid schooler” would have been more accurate: He took classes from an online provider, a small private school, and a performing arts program.

Richard made the team, and by midseason lots of new baseball buddies were hanging around our house on weekends. Soon we discovered that Richard wasn’t the only “hybrid student” on the ball club that year. Leon’s first baseman spent his mornings taking online courses through the Florida Virtual School, the knuckleball pitcher was taking a “dual enrollment” English class through the community college, and the left-handed pro prospect had enrolled in a financial management course at a local college (in case he was drafted).

Moreover, one of Leon’s outfielders had figured out an ingenious way to get a music education few families could afford out of pocket. This kid took mostly music classes at Leon by day and then several online courses at night and during the summer. He ended up being a four-time All-State musician and getting a college offer from Juilliard.

When I first encountered all these hybrid students, I figured there must be something in the water at Leon High. But I came to realize that many of these unconventional schooling options were the by-product of reforms former governor Jeb Bush had initiated, especially the creation of the Florida Virtual School.

The rise of hybrid schooling bodes well for students whose needs, gifts, interests, and learning styles do not align with the factory school model of the 20th century, and for parents who know that no school can maximize the potential of every child every year in every way. (There is a Magic School Bus, but no magic school.)

Customized education is good for all kids and not just for academic reasons. Several years ago, Richard entered a local talent competition structured much like American Idol. Different singers would perform at big community gatherings and then people would vote for the ones they considered the best. Richard kept advancing week after week, until on the night of the finals, one of the organizers took me aside and said, “I don’t get it. You guys just moved here a year or so ago, and yet Richard seems to have a really strong base of support.”

As Richard’s proud papa, I wanted to tell this guy, “Of course, Richard’s got lots of support—he’s the best one.” But I knew what this guy was getting at, so I explained, “See that guy over there? That’s Richard’s drama teacher at Young Actors Theatre. He gets all his thespian friends to vote for Richard.” Then I said, “See that family over there? They know Richard from baseball. Those kids over there took classes with Richard at the classical Christian school. The college students way back there know Richard from Young Life youth ministry. And those kids over there are in the AP classes Richard is taking at Leon.”

The contest organizer realized that Richard’s social network was far larger than he’d expected. What I marveled at was how diverse his friendship network was. Gay. Straight. Christian. Non-Christian. Jocks. Thespians. Nerds. Cool kids. Richard’s friends reflect the diversity of his hybrid-schooling life.

Now, I’m not so naive as to think that hybrid schooling will eradicate high school cliques or classroom bullying. But customized schooling can offer kids a far richer, and more varied, social experience than they might otherwise get. And when you add these social benefits to the educational advantages of customized schooling, you can see why I’m glad that Jeb Bush and other reformers had the Hank Greenberg–like chutzpah to change the way that Florida does education.

William Mattox is a resident fellow at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida.

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul E. Peterson

If this sounds alien to you, clearly you haven’t signed up for Twitter. This five-year-old phenomenon allows individuals to dash off short comments to their friends, families, professional colleagues, and whoever else might be interested in their stream of consciousness. The technology has already been credited with bringing down oppressive regimes and creating whole new ways of reporting breaking news. It’s a truly open marketplace of ideas, with no editors, gatekeepers, or quality control. So what does it mean for the education debate?

The first thing to understand about Twitter is that most of its messages amount to, “Hey, check this out,” followed by a link to a newspaper article or blog post. It’s a handy device for telling the world (or at least the people in your own world) about news or columns that you find compelling. It’s also a form of self-promotion; quite a few tweets announce posts the tweeter herself has written.

But in the hands of a gifted provocateur, Twitter can be so much more. Take scholar-turned-reform-apostate Diave Ravitch, who according to Klout.com is the most influential tweeter in the education policy space (see sidebar). As Alexander Russo, a freelance writer and blogger, remarked sardonically, “a 72-year-old grandmother has won the Internet.” She’s done it not only by linking to columns and articles she agrees with, but by offering bumper sticker–style statements that tend to set the web aflame. For instance, “Accountability is only for teachers and principals, not for students, families, elected officials, district leadership.” Or: “Last places to go to find out how to ‘reform’ schools: Congress/State Legislature/US Dept of Education.”

Want to follow the top tweeters in education?
Twitter lists made up of the Top 25 Education Policy/Media Tweeters and the
Top 25 Education Tweeters may be found at the Education Next Twitter page.

This might not exactly be H. L. Mencken, but it surely provides raw emotional relief for educators and others who feel besieged by the modern-day reform movement. They “retweet” Ravitch’s rants and, thanks to the multiplication effects of networks, soon tens of thousands of people receive them. In fact, Ravitch’s tweets are so influential that an anonymous someone has created the Twitter handle “@NOTDianeRavitch” to argue the positions held by the education historian before she changed her mind on most education policy issues.
Not that reformers don’t have their own Twitter heroes. Former District of Columbia schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is within striking distance of Ravitch’s influence and serves up a steady diet of can-do reform truisms. Tom Vander Ark, an entrepreneur formerly of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, offers an optimistic take on the burgeoning field of online learning. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan promotes his administration’s policies via @arneduncan. And @EdTrust offers its patented progressive take on education and social justice.

It’s hard to know whether all this tweeting adds up to anything significant. Of course, much the same was once said of blogs; now it’s well-accepted that a well-written blog post can be just as influential as a newspaper op-ed. Twitter offers a nonstop stream of views, ideas, opinions, and emotions; get yourself in the flow or be left behind.

Not that it’s easy. If I had a dime for every time someone said, “Oh that must be a piece-of-cake job,” or “I would love to sit at home all day,” I would be a wealthy teacher.

However, for this full-time virtual teacher and mother of three, it works. My day begins at 6 AM, a quiet time in my house. I spend the early hours working on grade books. I teach 6th- and 7th-grade math to 90 students. Parents and students go online to the grade book to view the student’s progress. My goal is to give each one of them the productive, positive, and personalized feedback that will enable the student to turn mistakes into learning opportunities.

FLVS provides the curriculum, so I don’t have to plan lessons or develop tests and can easily individualize instruction. I can personalize my classroom via the announcement page, which works like a virtual bulletin board.

By 8 AM, grading is done and overnight e-mails are answered. I view my calendar, noting any scheduled meetings and appointments. I sit down for breakfast with my youngest son, nine-year-old Camron, to prepare him for his day. Camron is enrolled in the FLVS full-time virtual instruction option for elementary school students and follows an accelerated curriculum for gifted students. I make sure he has his assignments organized before he traipses off to his own virtual world. Being able to oversee his schooling is a major benefit of working as a virtual teacher.

I jump back to the computer and my morning call list. My students vary in how much one-on-one instruction they need. Some students I speak to weekly, others less often, but at least once a month. Whenever students do not understand a concept, they can pick up the phone and call me for help. If their questions require that they be able to see what I am talking about, we have two options: We can use the “whiteboard,” where they can see what I am doing and talk to me on the phone at the same time. Students can write on the whiteboard and go step-by-step through a problem so that I can see where they are making mistakes. We can also use the web-based program Elluminate to work through problems together using a microphone instead of the telephone.

Navigating through FLVS courses is easy for students. Tabs enable them to move around the site at the click of a button. The lessons tab is where they learn the content, see examples, and work on practice problems. The assessment tab is where they submit their assignments for grading. If they want to, students can go to the grade book to reset an assessment and do the assignment again for a new grade. They can interact with each other in the discussion board area.

Before I know it, it is time for lunch, and I can step away from my computer to enjoy some quality time with my son: eat a sandwich, go for a walk, or play a video game. Pretty soon, it’s time to get back to work.

This afternoon, I’ll be taking my job on the road. Camron plays travel baseball for Gatorball Academy in Gainesville, an hour’s drive away. I make a call list: Who needs a welcome call? Monthly call? Do any of my students want to go over an assignment? I pack up my computer, grab my list and cell phone, and out the door we go. For the next few hours, I make good use of my cell phone, calling my students, answering their cries for help, letting parents know how wonderfully well their child is doing.

Once we’re home, I make a few notes for tomorrow. The day is done.

Is this a typical virtual teacher’s day? Will tomorrow be the same? There is no telling. What I can say, and what my students know, is that together we have the tools and the flexibility to meet whatever challenges the day brings.

Karen Faucett taught middle-school math in a traditional school setting for 13 years before moving to virtual education.

Now, a host of new web sites, from A to Z Teacher Stuff to Lesson Planet to Lessonopoly, are trying to solve that problem and make it easier for teachers to share, find, and make better use of lesson plans and accompanying materials. One, TeachersPayTeachers, a sort of Craigslist for educators, says it has paid more than $1 million in commissions to teachers, who have sold everything from classroom hand puppets to lesson plans on the Civil War. The site even hosts a “lesson plan on demand” auction, in which teachers advertise for, say, 4th-grade materials on Texas history and other teachers bid to fulfill the request.

But context matters. Teachers want to know whether something will work with their instructional style, in their classroom, and for their kids. Trust matters, too. While the sites offer ratings by users and rankings of the most popular items, these may not identify the highest-quality offerings. So how do novice teachers, who lack experience developing lessons and stand to benefit the most, know that a lesson plan will actually be effective? The answer may not lie in cyberspace, but in real communities.

One of the most promising new entrants to the growing online market of lesson plans is BetterLesson, a small Cambridge, Massachusetts, company started by former educators that has been called the “Facebook for teachers.” Any teacher can join for free, manage her lesson plans, organize teaching materials, and share (or not) with her school, a wider professional learning community, or the entire world. As with Facebook, the site’s technology and user interface are sharp, and users can easily register a positive reaction, in this case by clicking “Helpful.” But more important, BetterLesson shares Facebook’s initial focus on social networks and trusting relationships that already exist. While the site is currently open to any teacher, the company wants to leverage existing communities—school networks, alumni groups, and grade or subject affinity groups—that already share an identity and language around teaching.

BetterLesson’s Intranet package targets existing school networks. One early adopter, Achievement First, the highly regarded network of public charter schools in Connecticut and New York, is tailoring BetterLesson to extend the work of its instructional coaches and teacher learning communities. A coach working with a teacher can share concrete examples from the lesson plans and videos of effective teachers. “Remember what we were talking about at our last professional development session?” she can say. “Well, this is what it looks like.”

Since the examples are drawn from schools with similar cultures, expectations, and records of achievement, they are more likely to be trusted and used. As of February 2011, Achievement First had logged 15,000 downloads. KIPP and Rocketship Education (see “Future Schools”) have also signed on. In the first semester of use, KIPP teachers downloaded more than 20,000 lessons and related materials. But in the wider teaching community, BetterLesson has plenty of competition (see Figure 1).

Dan Cogan-Drew, Achievement First’s director of digital learning, emphasizes that the BetterLesson tools build on school cultures that are already collaborative. They are “an extension of the relationships that coaches are building with teachers,” he says, adding, “If it works for us, it’s because of the people and structure we have.”

Andrew Mandel, a vice president in charge of Teach For America’s Resource Exchange, a similar set of tools for TFA members, agrees with the importance of extending existing relationships. He says that TFA’s successful site is “not so much about the technology. [We’re] much more concerned with the user side.” This past fall, 75 percent of TFA’s 8,131 members downloaded materials from its site. And more than half of Achievement First’s 19 schools were active on BetterLesson in its first full year of use.

It is these real-world ties, along with recognition from their peers, that motivate successful teachers to spend the time and energy to organize and upload their materials. The site’s ease of use, as well as the tools to organize a teacher’s own lessons, is also critical. But sharing lesson plans is not just a one-way exchange. Teachers can also get feedback to ensure that their lessons are always improving.

There are other rewards, including one not normally associated with teaching but always possible on the Internet: fame. While teachers can keep their lessons within their trusted networks, they can also share them in such a way that they end up “going viral.” Alex Grodd, BetterLesson’s founder, former 6th-grade English teacher, and Teach For America alum, says it’s important for these networks to live on the same platform so that teachers can share beyond their individual networks, between districts and charters, and even across countries. The site can also offer outsiders a glimpse inside the classroom, notes Cogan-Drew; he says it lets prospective Achievement First teachers “step into our world.”

Just as Mastering the Art of French Cooking can’t magically transform a kitchen rookie into Julia Child, great lesson plans won’t turn novice teachers into experts. But the plans can help those novices lighten their load, allowing them to focus on other areas like classroom management and student engagement. As for the great teachers, they now have a way to capture tangible artifacts of what’s working and to spread them across hundreds of classrooms. And even the best chefs borrow recipes from each other. Highly effective veterans are constantly looking for ways to improve specific components of their instruction, such as opening up an explanation of quadratic equations. Perhaps sometime soon, we’ll see great lesson plans join the Star Wars kid, piano-playing kittens, and sneezing pandas as Internet sensations.

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

At a 2003 party, Swanson and other school officials took away a student’s gift bags because they contained candy cane–shaped pens with an attached card explaining the religious origins of candy canes. Swanson also forbade students from writing “Merry Christmas” on cards sent to retirement homes. At another school in 2004, the principal, Jackie Bomchill, prohibited a student from giving tickets to a Christian drama to her friends. She threatened to call the police when the same student asked to distribute pencils with “Jesus Loves Me This I Know, For the Bible Tells Me So” during her class birthday party. The principal also threatened to expel the young girl if she attempted to distribute “Jesus pencils” again. The principal did allow her to give out pencils embellished with a moon design. As a result of these incidents, parents sued, claiming that their children had been subject to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

The school district responded in 2005 by defining when such materials could be distributed: 30 minutes before and after school, at three annual parties, during recess, and throughout school hours, but only passively, at designated tables. This policy, except for a prohibition on distribution during lunch periods, survived in court, but the larger issue, officials’ claim of qualified immunity, remained to be decided.

The Supreme Court’s free-speech doctrine is relatively clear. The Court has said that government must be viewpoint neutral when regulating speech, meaning that it cannot restrict speech because of the motivating ideology of the speaker. Such restrictions are almost always found unconstitutional. But the complicating question here was, what free-speech rights do elementary school students have? The officials argued that the Supreme Court has never held that the Constitution prohibits viewpoint-based discrimination in elementary schools and they were therefore entitled to qualified immunity, which would free them from personal liability. School officials under this view could engage in all the viewpoint-based discrimination they wanted. Zoroastrian speech could be allowed, while Mormon speech could be suppressed. Pencils saying “Jesus Does Not Love Me This I Know” could be distributed, while those contending that he does could be confiscated.

Federal courts, so far, have not been sympathetic to this broad claim of arbitrary authority. Over the past two years, the Plano officials have lost their request for qualified immunity at trial and on appeal. A Fifth Circuit panel ruled that they should have known that under Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) and other cases like Good News Club v. Milford (2001), elementary school students have speech rights. Plano’s counsel apparently detected more ambiguity in these precedents than did the Fifth Circuit. Tinker, the court explained, allows for nondisruptive student speech, while Good News Club applied the free-speech clause to elementary-school-age students and prohibited viewpoint discrimination in the use of school facilities. Summing up, the court said that the officials had consistently argued “that qualified immunity should be granted because elementary school students do not have any First Amendment rights. No law supports Appellants’ novel proposition.” The Fifth Circuit has agreed to hear an en banc appeal of the officials’ claims, but we suspect they will not fare any better. Even if the school officials do manage to win qualified immunity and escape personal liability, courts will almost certainly never sanction the kind of discrimination alleged in Plano, leaving school districts solely liable for the conduct of their employees.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul E. Peterson

Cell phones are a significant feature in kids’ daily lives. According to Generation M², a 2010 Kaiser Foundation media study, nearly two-thirds of 8- to 18-year-olds have cell phones. Among 8- to 10-year-olds, 31 percent have their own phone, as do 69 percent of those ages 11 to 14. Eighty-five percent of teenagers 15 to 18 have them. A study by Mediamark Research & Intelligence found that most of the younger kids use the phone to contact their parents. Girls are more likely to use the phones for social uses, while boys are more inclined to play games or access the Internet.

The Pew Research Center in April 2010 released results from a survey that confirmed the ubiquity of cell phones among teenagers, some of whom manage to send text messages from class, even when the technology is banned in their school. While the Pew survey focused on texting, kids use their cell phones for all kinds of things. Along with brief calls to their parents and hours spent texting their friends, kids use their cell phones to listen to music, play games, and watch videos. Kids whose cell phones have cameras take pictures and send them to their friends. Older teens use smartphones like iPhones and Blackberrys to check Facebook and e-mail, get directions, and to obtain any other information they might need during the day.

Businesses have certainly caught on. Phone manufactur­ers and wireless carriers target their advertisements to young people. (Nearly all backpacks have cell-phone pockets.)

So have other groups. The New York Times has reported a rise in education apps, as they’re called. At a summer camp held at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, kids used smartphones and probes with Bluetooth capabilities to test and record levels of air pollution, part of a project run by New Youth City Learning Network. With other new mobile applications, students can take a picture of an insect or his­torical site, send it off, and receive a message back with full identification of the image.

Surely schools could make productive use of a technology that is relatively cheap, por­table, and already in the hands of the majority of U.S. schoolchildren.

The simplest use for students’ cell phones is keeping track of assignments. Rather than carrying around an assignment notebook, stu­dents could use their phones. The calendar and reminder functions can easily handle home­work and tests. Kids are much less likely to leave the phone at home, at school, or some­where else than they are a notebook.

A pilot program in North Carolina extends the cell phone’s reach far beyond keeping track of deadlines. Project K-Nect, a pilot program in Onslow County, uses smartphones as a learning tool in math classes, supplementing traditional math instruction with alternative teaching strat­egies. The project provides at-risk high-school students who lack computer or Internet access at home with smartphones. Teachers assign math problems for students to solve on the smart­phone. If students need help, they can connect with their classmates through instant messaging and dedicated blogs. If they still can’t solve the problem, they can access digital content through the phone. Project Tomorrow, which has evaluated the pro­gram, found improvement in student test scores, engagement and participation in class, and collaboration among students.

Cell phone use is typically forbidden in public school class­rooms. Teachers rightly object to phones ringing and students updating their Facebook profiles or texting during class. But educators could view cell phones differently. For adults, they are engaging, interactive tools—for communicating and for storing and accessing useful information. The same could be true for kids in school.

Rebecca Fortner teaches special education in Livingston County, Kentucky.

As standards of qualification, the law names possession of a bachelor of arts, subject-matter competence, and certification or licensure by the state. Importantly, it leaves standards of certification to the states.

California, like many states, has relied heavily on interns, such as members of Teach For America (TFA), to staff schools in poor areas. Public Advocates claims that it has been able to do this because a Department of Education (DOE) regulation fails to implement the law faithfully. The offending regulation provides that teachers enrolled in “alternative routes” to certification—which is government-speak for Teach For America and similar programs—may be found qualified if they are making satisfactory progress. Public Advocates, on behalf of Californians for Justice, the California chapter of ACORN, and individual parents of children in Title I schools, says that this creates an impermissible loophole in the law: that to be certifiable, enrollees must have completed their alternative route. About 10,000 teachers in California fall short of the standard that the lawsuit seeks to enforce.

The suit has followed a quixotic path. Initially, in 2008, a district judge held for the U.S. secretary of education, ruling that the department’s regulation did not violate the discernible intent of Congress. The plaintiffs appealed. On appeal, the federal government introduced the argument that they lacked standing because their case failed a test of “redressability.” Even if the court ruled in their favor, the secretary could not tell California how to define certification.

At first, the appellate court embraced the government’s claim, and remanded the case with instructions to dismiss for lack of standing. But one of the judges evidently had second thoughts, because the court granted the plaintiffs’ petition for a rehearing, and in September 2010 reversed both its own decision about standing and the district judge’s ruling about the validity of the department’s regulation. It found that the regulation does violate the intent of Congress.

Much of the discussion within the court centered on how California would respond to a decision for the plaintiffs, and how the  federal government might induce a response that would redress the alleged injury.

The court majority did not dispute that NCLB leaves certification to the states, but said that even if the secretary could not dictate California’s standards, he could threaten to withhold grants-in-aid from a state that is not in compliance with the law. The court seemed to think that this would be a viable course of action.

Beyond the federalism question lies the deeper issue, seemingly of less concern to the court majority, of where to find highly qualified teachers to staff classrooms in poor and minority areas. Even when reinforced by a court, Congress cannot solve this problem by decree. As Judge Richard Tallman said in dissent, California cannot order highly qualified but unwilling teachers into schools where they don’t want to teach. Teachers, he averred, “are human beings…not pawns on a chessboard that can be distributed at will.”

We very much doubted that the secretary of education would threaten the country’s most populous state, which teeters on the brink of bankruptcy, by holding back funds. Congress, under pressure from TFA and perhaps taking account of the severe disruption of schools that could result from the 9th Circuit’s decision, resolved this judicially created imbroglio by writing the DOE’s regulation into law. In typical congressional fashion, it added language to December’s continuing resolution to fund the government until March. The 9th Circuit, which is routinely overturned by the Supreme Court, can add Congress to the list of institutions dissatisfied with its legal judgment.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

A year previously, a group of us—Chester Finn, Jay Greene, Marci Kanstoroom, and I—decided the country needed a new education journal, one free of all connections to institutions with a vested interest in the status quo. We also agreed that good design and good writing were as important as good ideas.

Either the timing was perfect or we were dumb lucky, most likely both. The Hoover Institution had just launched its own education initiative, the Koret Task Force on K–12 Education, and both Hoover and its task force lent the undertaking their vigorous support. We asked the Smith Richardson Foundation for a small grant to help set up shop. Our draft proposal placed all four of us in charge of the journal. At that, Phoebe Cottingham, the foundation’s officer, simply laughed, shrewdly refusing to release monies until an editor-in-chief had been named. When all fingers were pointed at me, I accepted, with the proviso that a managing editor be someone upon whom I could depend. Shortly thereafter, several other foundations made major grants, a manuscript editor and a designer were found, and the first issue arrived only three months late.

All of this seemed too good to be true. And it was. No sooner were we launched than a small consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts, filed a lawsuit, complaining that our journal, Education Matters, had stolen its name. It was tempting to fight for the moniker, but, as Mark Zuckerberg concluded more recently, we decided that time and resources were better devoted to substance, not lawsuits. And so we are Education Next.

Over the decade, we have witnessed—perhaps contributed to—the advance of school reform: the proliferation of school choice from vouchers to tax credits, charters, and online learning; the evolution of accountability’s focus from schools to teachers; renewed attention to national standards; and a more realistic understanding of the uncertain connection between educational expenditures and school quality.

Space is too short to highlight every noteworthy feature, but here are a few that have stood time’s test: E. D. Hirsch’s placement of progressive education within the Romantic tradition (first issue), Joel Best’s skeptical view of school violence (2002), Michael Podgursky’s discovery of the well-paid teacher (2003), Bruno Manno’s and Bryan Hassel’s takes on the charter movement (2003), Brian Jacob and Steve Levitt’s technique for catching teachers who cheat (2004), Barry Garelick’s jeremiad against progressive math (2005), Frederick Hess and Martin West’s exposé of school “strike phobia” (2006), Roland Fryer’s identification of “acting white” (2006), Clay Christiansen and Michael Horn’s vision for virtual learning (2008), and Milton Gaither’s authoritative look at home schooling (2009).

This past year a cornucopia of outstanding pieces have emerged, including James Guthrie and Arthur Peng’s crisp analysis of rising school costs, the inside story of charter authorizing by Terry Ryan and his colleagues, and Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood’s eye-opening research on middle schools.

Key to our success have been the journal’s photos and graphics—from the first issue’s bird-sphinx to the cartoons depicting Margaret Spellings, Michael Bloomberg, and Michelle Rhee; from the Magritte-style school teacher to the haunting, Hopperesque truancy hangout; from the Woodish portrayal of the public to the New Orleans reconstruction photo.

Let me not forget the journal’s annual survey of public opinion, which celebrates its own 5th anniversary this summer. Thank you, readers, for your support over the decade.

— Paul E. Peterson

Then, in the 1990s, New York City introduced CompStat, and this equation changed forever. The NYPD compiled and continuously updated reams of crime data, which were used to identify hot spots and problem areas. In weekly meetings, precinct commanders were held accountable for quickly addressing crime spikes. Suddenly “management by results” became possible—not just in the Big Apple, but in police departments nationwide.

But something else also happened in the ’90s: video cameras were installed in thousands of patrol cars all across the country. The rationale was simple: people who got pulled over could be told that they were under surveillance, making dangerous behavior during traffic stops less likely. Moreover, if cops knew that they, too, were being observed, they would be less likely to engage in brutality or unjust searches. Maybe their supervisors couldn’t ride along with them, but video cameras could serve as partial surrogates.

Wilson also pointed to schools as prime examples of coping organizations. “A school administrator,” he wrote, “cannot watch teachers teach (except through classroom visits that momentarily may change the teacher’s behavior) and cannot tell how much students have learned (except by standardized tests that do not clearly differentiate between what the teacher has imparted and what the student has acquired otherwise).”

As with police, education reformers have spent the last two decades trying to change these assumptions. On the “managing by results” side, there has been the big battle over the use of test data for accountability purposes (CompStat for schools), culminating in the fight over value-added measurement of teacher performance. Perhaps now we can finally “differentiate between what the teacher has imparted and what the student has acquired otherwise.” Yet even advocates acknowledge the imperfections of this approach. What if a teacher gets great results in student learning, but does it by “teaching to the test,” or, worse, cheating? What if she ignores important parts of the curriculum that aren’t easily assessed? Or, on the flip side, what if her value-added scores show lackluster student progress, but it’s due to factors completely outside her control?

Understandably, teachers and their unions don’t want test scores to count for everything; classroom observations are key, too. But, as Wilson pointed out two decades ago, planning a couple of visits from the principal is hardly sufficient. These visits may “change the teacher’s behavior”; furthermore, principals may not be the best judges of effective teaching. Some just aren’t much good at that.

So why not put video cameras in classrooms, and use the recordings as part of teachers’ evaluations? That’s a question Tom Kane has been asking. Kane, an education and economics professor on leave from Harvard University, leads a massive initiative supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that is developing new approaches to evaluating teachers, with high-definition, 360-degree cameras at the center. Three thousand teachers in six cities are participating; for doing so, they receive stipends and lots of feedback from experts.

“There are a number of huge advantages to video,” Kane told me. “One is it gives you a common piece of evidence to discuss with an instructional coach or supervisor. Second, it will prove to be economically much more viable because you’re not paying observers to drive around to various schools to do observations.” Furthermore, he contends, “If a teacher doesn’t think that their principal is giving them a fair evaluation because of some vendetta, they can have an external expert with no personal ax to grind watch and give feedback.”

The Gates project is focused on using video only for teacher evaluation, not regular monitoring. Teachers are videotaped only four times a year, not every day. But why not go further? “That right now for us is a bridge too far,” said Kane. “When the camera rolls out of the room, teachers know it’s rolled out of the room.” And in many places, including Washington, D.C., collective bargaining agreements explicitly restrict the use of “electronic monitoring equipment.”

But it feels like just a matter of time. Already one company—WatchMeGrow—sells Internet video-streaming services to child-care centers; parents can log on to their computers at work and watch little Johnny or Cassie all day long. (Cameras are placed in classrooms, on the playgrounds, and in other common areas.) It’s not hard to imagine these parents wanting the same opportunity once their kids graduate to kindergarten and beyond. And think about the possibilities for curbing school violence or guarding against child abuse.

Teachers may scream about infringements on their “professionalism,” but effective teachers will have little to fear. Already, their expectation of complete autonomy—that they close their doors and do what they want—has been undermined by standards, tests, and other reforms of the modern era. Why not watch teachers in action? Sooner or later, that little video camera, always on, will just fade into the background.

The darling of reformers, data have clear potential to help educators make better decisions. But however much they are touted, most data initiatives remain far from realizing their potential. Historically, the collection of data has been top-down, designed almost exclusively to show compliance with state and federal regulations. And while the amount of data collected continues to grow—Texas school districts respond to 104 data collections by the state each year, costing the districts in excess of $300 million—their quality and usefulness are questionable. Thus many state data systems function as de facto data morgues, used more often in autopsies of failed programs than to help educators and policymakers improve existing ones.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that while Texas is data-rich, it is still information-poor. A 2008 TEA study found it likely that some state data are erroneous, even if the same data are accurate in the district systems. It also found that districts must constantly reformat their data to meet state requirements, adding to the cost and to the opportunity for introducing errors.

More important, once districts submit data, they receive little if anything of instructional value in return. Much of the information the state collects, such as the number of 7th graders eligible for Title I funds at a particular school, governs the flow of dollars, but it is not on its own useful for improving school operations or performance. Other data, such as Lubbock’s results on state assessments, could be useful. But that information arrives at the district office late each summer on computer disks, and it must be integrated with the district’s own system for storing student information, along with a third system that houses interim assessment results. By the time school personnel are able to compile reports for teachers, the information is “already cold,” says Kelly Trlica, Lubbock’s chief academic officer.

Because of experiences like Lubbock’s, when it came time to update the state’s 25-year-old data system, officials decided to make some big changes. Instead of gathering a group of technicians in Austin, state education officials talked to 2,200 educators and administrators across the state about the data they needed. Overwhelmingly, they said that the information had to be directly accessible to and relevant for educators. Middle-school teachers, for example, need access to special education identifications, test results, and other information to create appropriate instructional groupings and interventions. And they need that information well before school starts. Principals, for their part, want data to evaluate the many instructional software and intervention programs that are purchased each year. Moreover, frequent educator use is an important means of preventing, or catching and correcting, data errors. If those people closest to the data—teachers—are actually using the data, they will update class rosters and other student information on a regular basis.

To enable schools, districts, and state officials to more easily share and use data, the TEA is developing a more flexible information-system platform. The platform will offer smaller districts a shared, state-sponsored student-information system. It will also make it easy for districts with existing systems to connect to a new data platform that will serve as the hub for district-specific data, feeding relevant student, classroom, and campus information directly to educators and enabling seamless reporting of compliance data to the state. For example, the district might enter attendance data just once. That information would then be available to teachers and counselors, in real time and in dashboard formats, where it would flag students with potential problems. That same attendance data would be automatically reformatted for easy transmission to the state. If successful, the new system will not only reduce costs and streamline the existing accountability process, but will also equip educators with relevant information they can use to help their students.

Building a student-centric system that serves the diverse needs of the state’s 1,235 local education agencies, which range from districts with fewer than 500 students to those with more than 150,000, will not be easy. But this year, educators in Lubbock’s five high schools are getting a start. They will be the first to test-drive the early-warning dashboard, a tool that provides easy access to student attendance, assessment, and credit attainment records, as well as other data that will allow educators to quickly identify potential dropouts and get them back on track.

More than 160 educators are serving as advisors to ensure the system delivers what teachers need. And, true to the spirit of TEA’s new open approach, the public can read the specifications, make recommendations, and watch the system unfold at www.texasstudentdatasystem.org.

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

Americans tend to think their local elementary and middle schools are much better than those of the nation as a whole. The problems with schools, people seem to believe, are found somewhere else: Schools are dreadful in the inner city, perhaps, or in other parts of the country, maybe. My local schools are just fine.

On some measures, they may be right. Yet schools across the country fall short when it comes to challenging the best and brightest. In this issue’s cover story (“Teaching the Talented”), my colleagues and I find that schools in 29 countries are doing a better job of lifting students to the highest level of accomplishment in math than are schools in the United States.

In honor of W. E. B. Du Bois, I like to refer to the students who can reach the highest levels of accomplishment as the “talented tenth.” Du Bois, renowned scholar, activist, and founder of the NAACP, believed it would take a small group with exceptional talent to lift his fellow African Americans out of poverty into the mainstream of American society. His vision has been proven more right than wrong by the many outstanding black scholars, educators, entrepreneurs, musicians, and community leaders.

Du Bois’s insight applies as much to countries as to ethnic minorities. It takes some portion of the total community who have exceptional talent to sustain an increasingly productive national economy. That portion is not fixed at 10 percent, however. The percentage of a generation who are of high accomplishment can be as little as 1 percent or as high as 25 percent. It depends very much upon how they are educated.

Unfortunately, the United States educates only a little more than 6 percent of its students to an advanced level in math according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a small percentage when compared to the proportion in many other countries that score at a comparable level on the international PISA test. The countries that do better spread from just north of the 49th parallel (Canada) across Europe (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) to nations crossed by the Arctic Circle (Finland, Iceland, and Sweden) to the farthest reaches of Asia (Taiwan, Korea, and Japan) to just short of the South Pole (Australia and New Zealand).

Some people blame the state of the American school on a rising immigrant population or the black-white education gap. But the picture does not change much when one looks only at white students (only 8 percent of whom score at the advanced level) or at those who have a parent with a college degree, only 10 percent of whom are advanced. Even for these more-advantaged groups, achievement in math is well below what many other countries are doing for all of their students, regardless of ethnicity or parental education.

Countries with good schools become more productive and watch their economies grow, while those with poor schools eventually pay the price. If the United States is ever to pay off its vast and rising public debt, as well as the growing deficits in its teacher pension accounts, it will have to fix not only the nation’s schools but local ones, too.

–Paul E. Peterson

In March 2010, to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Joel Klein’s chagrin, a New York State trial judge stopped the planned closure of 19 chronically failing schools in New York City. As a result, 19 demonstrably dreadful schools will remain open for at least another school year.  Yet the case and its aftermath show that school districts can, with sufficient effort and creativity, partially maneuver around such judicially imposed obstacles.

Klein, who has sought to close underperforming schools as part of his effort to improve the lagging district, had announced that he would seek to both close the schools in December of 2009 and to recycle some of the facilities as charter schools. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) attempted to manufacture a political controversy over the closures by renting 50 buses to transport protestors to hearings before the city’s Panel for Educational Policy. In the final hearing, which lasted nine hours, the panel approved Klein’s recommendations. The UFT promptly sued and was joined by the local branch of the NAACP, which claimed, despite the dreadful education that the schools inflicted on pupils, that children’s rights had not been considered.

The lawsuit centered on the state legislature’s 2009 revision and reauthorization of mayoral control of the school district. The revised law set out the conditions that the city must follow when closing or significantly changing the use of a school. The requirement under dispute is that the city must provide an “educational impact statement” (EIS) for each school slated for closure. The UFT claimed that the city’s impact statements were insufficient. Naturally, the city thought that it had provided the requisite information, including the budgetary implications, effects on administrators and teachers, and the schools’ progress reports and graduation rates.

Judge Joan Lobis sided with the union. While admitting that “the statute does not specify the information that an EIS should include,” she nevertheless ruled that the city’s impact statements contained “boilerplate” and insufficient details. Significantly, Lobis’s ruling failed to explain what information the city would need to provide to satisfy the law. The city appealed but fared no better. In July, an appellate court, echoing Judge Lobis, ruled that the city had failed to meet its obligations by providing only “obvious” information.

While the city vowed to eventually close all 19 schools, Klein appears to have found a less controversial, if still partial and delayed, route around this judicial roadblock. The city announced in June, prior to the appellate ruling, that it was going to “transform” 11 of the district’s schools and dramatically overhaul or close 23 others under a $300 million federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Eight of those 23 were on the original list of schools the district wanted to shutter. Under the grant program, the options for the 23 schools are established by the federal Department of Education. The district can impose one of three plans: turnaround, restart, or closure. The turnaround plan requires firing the principal and at least 50 percent of the teachers. The restart plan replaces the district school with a charter school. The closure plan’s consequences are self-evident. These reforms, though, will not be implemented until the 2011–12 school year. The transformation model, reserved for the 11 “least-worst” schools, involves replacing the principal, bringing in more support services, and making curricular changes. Opposing these measures would put the teachers union in an uncomfortable position since it would mean rejecting the federal money. So far the UFT has not announced plans to sue in the event that the district chooses to close or restart any schools, the two most likely options for the schools previously slated for closure.

In addition to sidestepping litigation, this grant program has helped the city convince the teachers union to accept a limited form of performance pay for teachers. Schools scheduled for transformation will be able to hire teachers with two new designations, master teacher and turnaround teacher. Teachers at both levels will receive 30 percent more in their base salary. To receive this designation a teacher must have demonstrated the ability to raise student test scores.

Since students in 19 schools will be subjected to at least one more year of educational mediocrity, this outcome is hardly optimal. But the city’s response shows that school districts and their long-suffering students do not have to be completely victimized by litigation.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

I was stuck between (F) the screech owl, because its call rarely approximates a screech, and (I) the long-eared owl, because its real ears are behind its eyes and covered by feathers. The passage explains that owls hear through holes behind their eyes, so the term long-eared owl seemed misleading. Then again, a screech owl that rarely screeches? That is pretty misleading, too.

According to the FCAT creators, each question on the practice tests corresponds to a specific reading skill or benchmark. Teachers are supposed to discuss test results in afterschool “data chats” and then review weak skills in class.

Here is a sample conversation from a data chat, as imagined by promoters of this idea:

First Teacher: Well, it looks like my students need some extra work on benchmark LA.910.6.2.2: The student will organize, synthesize, analyze, and evaluate the validity and reliability of information from multiple sources (including primary and secondary sources) to draw conclusions using a variety of techniques, and correctly use standardized citations.

Second Teacher: Mine, too! Now let’s work as a team to help students better understand this benchmark in time for next month’s assessment.

Third Teacher: I am glad we are having this “chat.”

Here is a conversation from an actual data chat:

First Teacher: My students’ lowest area was supposedly synthesizing information, but that benchmark was only tested by two questions. One was the last question on the test, and a lot of my students didn’t have time to finish. The other question was that one about the screech owl having the misleading name, and I thought it was kind of confusing.

Second Teacher: We read that question in class and most of my students didn’t know what approximates meant, so it really became more of a vocabulary question.

Third Teacher: Wait … I thought the long-eared owl was the one with the misleading name.

At this point, data chats often turn into non-data-related gripe sessions.

When I interviewed teachers for See Me After Class, the unintended consequences of high-stakes tests came up most often among language arts teachers. They know that answering comprehension questions correctly does not rest on just one benchmark. Separating complex skills into individual benchmarks may well work in math class. Symmetry and place value, for example, can be taught independently of one another, and benchmark-based data may indicate which of these skills needs work.

Reading is different. After students have mastered basics like decoding, reading cannot be taught through repeated practice of isolated skills. Students must understand enough of a passage to utilize all the intricately linked skills that together comprise comprehension. The owl question, for example, tests skills not learned from isolated reading practice but from processing information on the varying characteristics of animal species. (The correct answer, by the way, is the screech owl.)

Unfortunately, strict adherence to data-driven instruction can lead schools to push aside science and social studies to drill students on isolated reading benchmarks. Compare and contrast, for example, is covered year after year in creative lessons using Venn diagrams. The result is students who can produce Venn diagrams comparing cans of soda, and act out Venn diagrams with Hula–hoops, but are still lost a few paragraphs into a passage about owls. When they do poorly on reading assessments, we pull them again from subjects that give them content knowledge for more review of Venn diagrams. Many students learn to associate reading with failure and boredom.

It is difficult to teach kids to read well if they don’t learn to enjoy reading. It is impossible to teach kids to read well while denying them the knowledge they need to make sense of complex material. Following the data often forces teachers to do just that.

Roxanna Elden is the author of See Me After Class: Advice for Teachers by Teachers. She teaches high-school English in Miami, Florida and is a National Board Certified Teacher.

How do people evaluate their local schools? Are their ratings based on reliable measures of effectiveness? Or do they base their evaluations on other kinds of information? With this issue of Education Next, we can now answer this question. Using an innovative technique made possible by Internet surveys and geo-coding technology, Martin West and his colleagues at Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (“Grading Schools,” research) were able to match each member of a nationally representative sample of adults to the specific elementary and middle schools that serve his or her neighborhood. As a result, respondents’ grades for their local schools could be compared to the actual performance of those schools on state math and reading tests. The analysts also collected publicly available information on the school’s average class size, racial and ethnic composition, and the percentage of students who were of low income.

From their findings, we learn that American citizens know quite a bit about the local schools. Indeed, schools that score high on statewide tests receive high evaluations from those surveyed. Within the larger population, parents turn out to be particularly adept at determining which schools are good and which are not—welcome news, indeed. And despite all the hoopla over class size, citizens’ judgments about a school’s quality are unrelated to how large or small its classes are.

Critics of school choice often claim that parents ignore quality when evaluating schools and draw their conclusions on the basis of the school’s racial or ethnic composition. But this study shows that parents are indifferent to student race as long as a school’s pupils perform well. (They do, however, give higher marks to schools with fewer low-income children.)

Citizens are less impressed with their local middle schools. Only 49 percent were willing to give them an A or B, and they were almost twice as likely to assign middle schools a D or F than they were elementary schools (12 percent vs. 7 percent). In the second research study in this issue (“Stuck in the Middle,” research), Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood show that judgment is also right on target. Their analysis of student achievement in New York City middle schools confirms parents’ conclusion that children learn more if they stay in an elementary-school setting through grade 8 than if they move to a stand-alone middle school.

That finding called to mind what it was like when I was introduced to junior high school in 7th grade many years ago. Suddenly, bells rang, kids ran around, teachers shouted, lockers banged, and no one learned a thing. Not at all like the tranquil elementary school I had previously attended.

A final caveat. Parents tend to compare their local school to others within their own state. Those living in parts of the country with lower-quality schools apparently have little idea that schools in other states are, on average, a lot better. Could such provincialism be corrected by grading all schools on a common, nationwide scale, such as national standards advocates propose? Or are all school judgments inevitably just as local as streetwise politician Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill said of all politics?

In February 2010, for the first time, a state judge overturned a school district’s choice of a high-school math curriculum. In May 2009, the Seattle school board in a 4–3 vote adopted the “Discovering” math curriculum. The Discovering series, which the Seattle district already used in elementary and middle schools, allegedly allows students to learn math principles on their own through “inquiry-based learning.” The texts and methods discourage “direct” instruction in which teachers teach students the best method for solving problems. Instead, students “discover” mathematical principles on their own through “cooperative learning groups” and by playing with objects. Students, no doubt to their delight, also begin using calculators early in elementary school as part of the series’ emphasis on using “technology to build conceptual mastery.”

When considering the curriculum, the board received conflicting evidence about the effectiveness of the Discovering series. The Washington State Office of Public Instruction ranked the series second out of four competing curricula, while a report from the Washington State Board of Education called the series “mathematically unsound.” The board also heard criticism from parents and expert reports about the series.

In response to the board’s decision, three plaintiffs—a retired high-school math teacher, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, and a mother of a high-school student—filed suit, calling the Discovering series deficient and dumbed down. The plaintiffs argued that the curriculum would widen rather than narrow Seattle’s achievement gap between minority and white children. One of the plaintiffs, Professor Cliff Mass, wrote in his blog, “Seattle Public Schools picked high school math books that are not only bad for everyone, but they are PARTICULARLY bad for the disadvantaged who don’t have extra cash for tutoring or whose parents don’t have the time or backgrounds to help their kids.”

In February 2010, Judge Julie Spector agreed with the plaintiffs in a terse three-page opinion devoid of any analysis. She simply asserted that the district behaved arbitrarily and capriciously and that there was “insufficient evidence for any reasonable member of the board to approve the selection of the Discovering Series.” The decision surprised both plaintiffs and the Washington education community. During the litigation, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Keith Scully, said winning seemed unlikely since “no judge wants to second guess the school board.” After the decision, the executive director of the state board of education, Edie Harding, said the decision was a “surprise” and that in Washington “the local board is always the prime decision-maker on curriculum.” Likewise, David Stolier, an assistant state attorney general, said that “the courts ought not to be making decisions about curriculum,” noting the state supreme court had ruled “it’s not the role of courts to be micromanaging education.”

There might be very good reasons to reject the curriculum. One can easily understand why parents wouldn’t want to expose their children to the faddish ideas afflicting the Discovering series. But there should be no mistaking what happened. The judge substituted her educational judgment for that of the school board, and didn’t bother to give an explanation. Her ruling then was far more arbitrary and capricious than the school board’s decision, even if it might have salutary effects.

The dispute in Seattle is a small, but significant, skirmish, in a growing debate over the lucrative and controversial textbook market. The Seattle school district is appealing Judge Spector’s decision. Parents have filed a lawsuit against the wealthy Issaquah school district since its adoption of the Discovering series; the similarly wealthy Bellevue school district is also facing a possible lawsuit. No doubt other concerned parents around the country will be following Washington’s lead. Prior to the Seattle case there appears to have been only one unsuccessful Plano, Texas, lawsuit over a math curriculum.

Supporters of the Discovering series, including its publisher, are not immune to the temptations of litigation. When the Washington State superintendent of public instruction, Randy Dorn, dropped the Discovering series from the recommended list of textbooks, Key Curriculum Press, the publisher of the Discovering series, unsuccessfully sued the state claiming, naturally, that his decision was arbitrary and capricious.

Regardless of the efficacy of “direct instruction” or “inquiry-based learning,” such pedagogical disputes are beyond the courts’ proper constitutional role and institutional capacity.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

But as they confront their chaotic lives, kids in jail share the same goals as their peers in the world outside: get a high school diploma, secure a decent job, go to college, make something of themselves. These young men wanted their school, albeit a cramped space off a noisy prison corridor, to be a “real school.” Though beaten down by negative experiences as learners, they still set high expectations for themselves. My job was to prepare them for the state’s comprehensive and demanding English exam. Curriculum would be the key.

New York State allows individual districts to choose literary texts based on community demographics and students’ educational needs and interests. I designed a curriculum that would be engaging and relevant, yet honored the state’s standards. Students read Greek, Norse, and Aztec mythology and such works as August Wilson’s play, Fences; the poetry of Luis J. Rodriguez and Pablo Neruda; and Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy.

Although the readings hooked students as they came to identify with characters and situations, I knew we had to go beyond cultural relevance if they were to pass the state test. So we slowly assembled the skills they would need. Working with the “critical lens,” they learned how to respond to such statements as, “All literature must teach a lesson as well as entertain,” explaining why they agreed or disagreed. Students compared and contrasted readings. Two favorites were the urban classics Manchild in the Promised Land and Down These Mean Streets. They worked to identify and explain the use of foreshadowing, allusion, and conflict (something they felt well grounded in). I encouraged them to hone their facility with these concepts by applying them to situations they encountered on the cell block, the music they listened to, and the TV shows they watched.

My students not only discussed, they wrote. They wrote every day. They wrote persuasively—taking a stand on a current issue, as one young man said, “Like a lawyer in court”; informatively—gathering, organizing, and presenting facts on topics such as drug prevention and teen violence; and critically—analyzing a story, novel, or poem. Most hated writing, but they knew writing skills were crucial for their diploma. Instruction was a blend of mechanics and content development, confidence building and critiquing, as students learned to identify “audience,” establish “voice,” structure arguments.

Understandably, not every student mastered the skills of analysis, evaluation, and synthesis. No matter what progress they made, it was still jail. A kid might come to class with a bruised face from a fight on the block or be missing for weeks, put on disciplinary lockup. The temptation is to “dummy down.” Too many of my students had been shortchanged by that approach in the past, and they knew it.

Through all the disruption and turmoil, most of the young men managed to sustain their connection to school, even showing pride in what they were doing, be it organizing thoughts into paragraphs or discussing the role of institutionalized discrimination in Mark Mathabane’s South African autobiography, Kaffir Boy. Occasionally, some young man might even quip about his situation, to show what he had learned. One I recall in particular said, “It’s pretty ironic, Mr. C. Here I am locked up in jail, but finally going to school.”

He may have casually dropped that literary term into conversation, but the mischievous glint in his eyes spoke volumes about what he had accomplished.

David Chura is author of I Don’t Wish Nobody to Have a Life Like Mine: Tales of Kids in Adult Lockup and a frequent lecturer and advisor on incarcerated youth.

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Charter schools don’t play by union rules. So when Harlem Success Academy, a charter group in New York, proposed to take over P.S. 194’s building after the school was shut down for poor performance, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and the New York Civil Liberties Union took the obvious step: they filed a lawsuit claiming that the state pressed forward without proper consultation with local school boards.

Such resistance has dogged the school choice movement for years, producing a fog of politics cleared all too rarely by moments of forthrightness. Clearing some of the fog is The Lottery, a new documentary film by Madeleine Sackler that tracks four families hoping to enroll their kids in one of the Harlem Success charter schools. During the film’s 79 minutes, we watch UFT president Randi Weingarten on the Charlie Rose Show blurt out “No!” to Rose’s assertion that only 10 of 55,000 tenured teachers in the New York City school system were fired the previous year. (The U.S. Dept. of Education counts, precisely, 10.) We witness ACORN workers armed with megaphones fill the sidewalk outside a charter school meeting protesting the very existence of charters in the community. We hear again how the average black 12th grader performs as well as the average white 8th grader. On and on.

These familiar facts and events form a galling and sad backdrop for the real story of the film, parents desperate to find a better school. For them, it means a route away from poverty and despair, even prison. “I just want my daughter to have the best in life,” signs a deaf mother who dropped out of high school to help her grandmother. One father sits in a cell serving 25 to life. Tears in his eyes, he moans that if only someone had entered his life early on and steered him toward college, or had just given him some faith in his own intellect, he wouldn’t be there.

Harlem Success teachers do just that. That’s why so many families show up for lottery day. More than 3,000 individuals apply for admission, but the schools offer only 475 slots. Ponder those odds in light of Weingarten’s explanation to the New York Times for the P.S. 194 lawsuit blocking the expansion of Harlem Success: “Parents should have a voice when it comes to their children’s education, and by eliminating community schools without public hearings, the D.O.E. is taking away that voice.”

There you have the perverse logic of vested interests and power politics in public education. It would be laughable if it didn’t produce actual perversities such as the annual rite of charter school lotteries, which offer pathetically low chances of winning. That’s where The Lottery climaxes and where charter school advocates find their best persuasion. Observe these real people in tough circumstances attending the drawing with futures on the line. A little boy dons a shirt and tie, and his mother notes he looks like Barack Obama. “I feel a lot like him,” he replies. Another child prays to be chosen. Anxious families line up all the way down the block and file inside for the proceedings. New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein tells attendees, “Grow the options and let parents vote with their feet.”

Harlem Success administrators and teachers take the stand and the selection begins. Names roll out—and the heartbreak begins. “If they don’t call your name,” one mother mumbles to her son partway through, “it’s okay.” A father and son stare at the screen where names appear as they are called, their faces growing stony as the minutes pass and spaces run out. At the end, the father mutters, “You’re not in,” then he hesitates. He looks around as if the outcome hasn’t quite registered. “They didn’t call your name.” What else is there to say?

“Maybe my name’s gonna come next time,” the boy says.

“Yeah, next year. Not today. Next year.”

Watch and weep.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Even to the casual observer, this sudden celluloid absorption with schools seems less than serendipitous. Surely, there’s a master strategy at work? A clique of wealthy funders who have decided that reaching the masses through film is the next arrow in the school reform quiver? Clear evidence from other documentary successes, like Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, that the movies are a great way to change public opinion?

So this intrepid analyst surmised, until I started digging into the back stories of these documentaries and found that what drove their development wasn’t a strategic plan but something much simpler: the creative impulses of the filmmakers themselves.

Take Kelly Amis, the writer, director, producer, and sometimes videographer of Teached, a forthcoming film about inequities in education. A former Teach For America corps member, Amis has spent most of her career in the education reform world, including a stint overseeing policy and research at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (one of the sponsors of Education Next and my employer). She wrote her documentary six years ago, “just had it on the shelf,” she told me. “Just over a year ago, the stars aligned.”

What motivated her was a fervent belief that film could reach new audiences beyond the policy elite—and with emotional storytelling that would be much more powerful than anything written on the printed page. “The information we know in the education policy world gets stuck in ivory towers. Even the way we discuss it keeps it in ivory towers.”

A similar sentiment drove Bob Bowdon, the writer, director, producer, and financier of The Cartel, an exposé of the teachers unions and other special interests in education. A television reporter-turned-filmmaker, he relayed moviegoers’ reactions to his film. “People all the time come to screenings and thank me. They tell me that everyone is afraid to say these things. ‘I had no idea that a janitor could make six figures. That superintendents could make 470K. Thirty-million-dollar football fields.’ Or, ‘really, there’s a teacher that reads on a 4th-grade level but worked for 17 years? I had no idea this could happen!’ It feels like I’m changing minds.”

Yet convincing reform-oriented foundations that moviemaking is a worthy investment has been a tough nut to crack. Bowdon shot his whole film, entered a festival, and even won an award before getting a dime of outside help. Amis managed to raise a modest amount to help cover her direct expenses, but has volunteered her own time for the better part of a year.

But the reason that these funding woes haven’t been deal breakers is because the cost of shooting a documentary has plummeted in recent years. “The quality of high-def video cameras has gone up as fast as the prices have gone down,” Bowdon said. But that’s not all. “When I first got into TV, people would rent these editing rooms with big leather couches and fancy equipment. Nowadays you can find college kids who sit in apartments and work on laptops and edit films. That has changed the gatekeeping equation such that the quality of an idea is the determiner of a project rather than fundraising ability.”

But even though the funders weren’t enthusiastic supporters of projects like Bowdon’s at the outset, they are starting to climb on board. The Gleason Family Foundation, for instance, is now helping to distribute The Cartel nationally. Tracy Gleason explained that movies fit well with her foundation’s focus on marketing school choice. “This is a very neglected area of the movement. We have no trouble connecting with the elites. But with average people we are sort of pathetic.”

Education Reform Now, a spin-off of the well-funded Democrats for Education Reform, has also seen the light (of the theater projector). It’s currently helping to promote The Lottery, which follows four families as they try to get their kids into one of the Harlem Success charter schools (see “Luck of the Draw,” cultured), with special screenings for targeted audiences. (It will likely do the same for Waiting for Superman, a big-budget documentary by An Inconvenient Truth director Davis Guggenheim.) Van Schoales, the group’s executive director, reiterated the potential for reaching beyond the “usual suspects.” His group will aim for “low-income families that are most affected by terrible urban schools, suburban/urban (mostly moms) that are for the most part satisfied with their schools, and, finally, business leaders,” he said. “Each of these audiences will be critical in building a broader-based education reform movement that goes beyond the wonks, advocacy groups, and charter folks.” Plus, as he pointed out, documentaries like these will soon be available to tens of millions of home viewers through various on-demand services.

But for all this enthusiasm for transcending the “echo chamber,” what’s the evidence that movies can actually do so? Everyone points to the success of An Inconvenient Truth in creating a sense of urgency around the global warming issue. But, as Rick Hess (an executive editor of this journal) wrote on his blog recently, that film had little long-term impact on public opinion. NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls found that about one-quarter of respondents in 1999 agreed that “Global climate change has been established as a serious problem, and immediate action is necessary.” It went up to about one-third of respondents after the film came out in 2006, but returned to one-quarter by 2009.

Still, with the expense of producing full-length documentaries at a fraction of the cost of sophisticated research studies, expect to see more philanthropic support for these efforts in coming years. They might not transform public opinion writ large, but even if they energize a few thousand activists, they will be worthwhile investments.

Charter schools are created under state statutes, but they often retain a private character. Can they qualify as “state actors” for a plaintiff’s purpose of using Section 1983 of Title 42 of the U. S. Code, which is the main gateway for achieving relief? In the case from Arizona that the Ninth Circuit decided, the answer was no, and the claims of the plaintiff were dismissed.

The plaintiff, Michael Caviness, had been employed for six years as a teacher of health and physical education and a track coach at Horizon Community Learning Center, a nonprofit corporation that operated a charter school in Phoenix. A female student filed a grievance charging that he had crossed “the student-teacher boundary.” At a hearing, Horizon’s governing board learned that the student had a “crush” on Caviness and that the two had been communicating by telephone. The board concluded that he had exercised questionable judgment and kept him on paid administrative leave until his contract expired. When he applied for a job in the Mesa Public Schools, Horizon’s executive director declined to evaluate him, and Caviness claimed that what the director said to Mesa was “purposely false and incomplete” and intended to harm him. He further claimed that some Horizon employees had defamed him by falsely calling him a pedophile.

Caviness filed a complaint under Section 1983 alleging that Horizon had, without due process, deprived him of his liberty interest in finding work, in that it had not granted him a hearing to clear his name. To establish that the school was a “state actor,” he made five arguments: that Arizona law defines a charter school as a public school; that a charter school is a state actor for all purposes, including employment; that a charter school provides a public education, a function that is traditionally and exclusively the prerogative of the state; that a charter school is a state actor in Arizona because the state regulates the personnel matters of such schools; and that it is a state actor because charter schools, unlike traditional private schools, are permitted to participate in the state’s retirement system.

The district court granted Horizon’s petition for dismissal for lack of federal jurisdiction. It found no evidence “with respect to [Caviness’s] specific employment claims, that Horizon acted in concert or conspired with state actors, was subject to government coercion or encouragement, or was otherwise entwined or controlled by an agency of the State.”

Three circuit judges concurred that the actions that Horizon took or failed to take were all connected with its role as Caviness’s employer, and that what it did as such did not constitute “state action.” State action, it said, “may be found if, though only if, there is such a close nexus between the State and the challenged action that seemingly private behavior may be fairly treated as that of the State itself.”

Caviness failed because he did not establish the close nexus. It was not enough to argue that under Arizona law all charter schools are state actors. Without facts to show that Horizon was acting as “the government,” Caviness had no federal case.

While the Caviness case could be a harbinger of more cases to come, we would be surprised to see federal litigation lead to a broad characterization of charters as private actors. Charters will likely increase in both number and federal financial support under President Obama, and with federal aid comes the force of laws emphasizing charter schools’ public character. Charters are explicitly obliged to abide by federal statutes prohibiting discrimination, for example. And while no federal law applies, the Department of Education’s guidance has made clear that charter schools must be nonreligious as well. Balking at either constraint would put charters at risk of losing not only federal aid but also their status as public schools, which has been critical to the charter movement’s success.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Economist Joseph Schumpeter saw it another way. In his view, it is in the nature of markets that good producers “cre­atively” destroy firms of the middling variety, then are elimi­nated themselves by still better competitors. Few doubt that the public school today is a troubled institution. If school districts were firms operating in the marketplace, most would quickly fall victim to Schumpeter’s law.

Yet Ravitch sees no hope for choice and competition in education, asking us to leave public schools alone apart from articulating voluntary national standards without holding any­one accountable for meeting them. She blames the sad state of affairs on events occurring long after schools had stagnated: a federal law, No Child Left Behind, enacted in 2002; mayoral governance recently instituted in a few cities (see “Palace Revolt in Los Angeles?”); and a small number (4,638) of charter schools that—despite steady growth—still serve less than 3 percent of the nation’s students.

According to a 2009 Education Next survey, the public approves steady charter growth. Among African Americans, those favoring charters do so by a four-to-one margin. Even among public school teachers, the percentage favoring char­ters is greater than the percentage opposed.

A school can have short-term popularity without being good, of course. The best studies of school quality are randomized experiments, the gold standard in both medical and education research. Stanford’s Caroline Hoxby and Harvard’s Thomas Kane have organized randomized experiments that compare students who win the charter lottery with those who applied but lost. The students lucky enough to win the lottery and be admitted to a charter school subsequently scored higher on math and reading tests than did those who lost the lottery and remained in district schools.

What makes charters so important today is not so much their current success, on average, but their long-term poten­tial to innovate. When RCA sneered at transistor radios, Sony captured the audio market by first putting out tinny pocket transistors for teenagers, then expanded its base with steady technological improvement. In a decade or two, RCA fell vic­tim to Schumpeter’s law.

Educational opportunity is about to be revolutionized by powerful notebook computers, broadband, sophisticated cooperative and competitive game playing over the Internet, curriculum in three dimensions, and the open-source develop­ment of curricular materials. If American education remains stagnant, the innovations will spread slowly, if at all. But if the charter world continues to expand, the conditions ripen for competition among charters, districts, and state virtual schools that can be truly transformative. It is “in the nature of markets” that those who make the best use of new technologies will become dominant—to the benefit of us all.

Alternative East High School in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, was modeled after the famous Parkway alternative school in Philadelphia. From 1971 to 1983, Alternative East drew students from Philadelphia and the surrounding suburban school districts of Abington, Cheltenham, and Springfield. The principal, Gisha Berkowitz, took the job after first becoming known as an “active parent.”

At Alternative East, students could create their own courses. As long as the course met college entry requirements, students could develop it, find a faculty member to teach it, and then advertise the class on a poster. If 15 students expressed interest, they could register for the course during master scheduling days held twice during the year. Students seldom sat in classrooms all day. Instead of looking at slides, for example, an art class piled into a van to visit local galleries.

Alternative East was continually evaluated and received positive reviews. Berkowitz carefully kept the budget from getting “out of balance.” So why did the school close?

As is often the case, the answer at the time was money. In 1983, Abington’s school board, in a 5–4 vote, withdrew the district’s participation, forcing the school to close its doors. Nevertheless, minutes from board meetings praised Alternative East and its programs, which included production of a children’s play at a local mall and learning activities in genetics. The board justified its decision by saying that district schools had “highly skilled, highly paid people, and we should be able to provide for the needs of these [students].”

The underlying causes were probably more deep-seated. Times had changed. When the school opened, according to Berkowitz, students were politically alienated by the Vietnam War, racial segregation, and traditional schooling. There was a passion for hands-on, personally relevant education. But by the 1980s, Berkowitz explained, the students at Alternative East were “less interested in exploring.” The teachers weren’t as enthusiastic either, and that sapped energy out of the school. “The political milieu has to be [there]—everything has to be ‘right’…and unfortunately, [that] doesn’t happen enough.”

Even the storied Parkway Program, which in 1970 Time magazine called “the most interesting high school in the U.S. today,” fell victim to the changing political climate. Parkway was known as the “school without walls,” because students learned about journalism at local newspapers, auto mechanics at auto shops, and art from museum historians. I spoke with Dr. Leonard Finkelstein, the second director of Parkway, who said that as a concept, Parkway was “magnificent.” But reality did not always match up to its promise. Some students thrived in the loosely structured environment, while it became a “free-for-all” for others.

Dr. James Lytle, Parkway’s first principal, said that by the late 1970s and early 1980s the middle-class students angry at the system had disappeared. Parkway became a safe alternative to the neighborhood schools and had to recruit “very aggressively” to maintain a diverse student population.

In 1990, the district asked Ms. Odette Harris to become Parkway’s principal. For more than 30 years, Harris had been the principal of William Penn, a large, traditional urban high school. Her style and Parkway’s had little in common, and she remained principal long enough to alter most things alternative. As Ms. Catherine Blunt, Parkway’s union representative at the time, put it, the school changed “because we were in the district.”

As districts like Philadelphia seek to “turn around” their public schools, let’s not forget the lesson of the lost alternative schools. Inventive programs, even when successful, are easily swept aside and replaced by standard fare.

Lynne Blumberg is an ESL and English instructor and freelance writer.

These contraptions, which go by brand names like SMART Boards and Promethean ActivBoards and cost about $5,000 a pop, are giant computerized screens that crackle with video, audio, and Internet connectivity. When hooked up to a computer, they enable teachers to present multimedia lessons meant to catch the eyes (and brains) of a generation addicted to Wii, iPhones, and IMing. They also serve as an old-fashioned blackboard (teachers and students write on them with special markers) but with a twist: whatever is scribbled on the board can be captured, digitized, and saved for later. This is particularly helpful for students who miss class and can in effect replay the lesson at their leisure. It also allows teachers to “rewind” and explain a point made 15 minutes or 15 days earlier.

But for the technorati and the pedagogical constructivists, this isn’t nearly transformative enough. (Or, in Clay Christensen’s words, “disruptive” enough.) As 6th-grade teacher (and edu-tech expert) Bill Ferriter recently asked in Teacher Magazine, “Do we really want to spend thousands of dollars on a tool that makes stand-and-deliver instruction easier? …Why are we wasting money on interactive whiteboards—tools that do little to promote independent discovery and collaborative work?”

If there’s common ground between “individualized learning” gurus and whiteboard fans, it might come in the form of “learner response systems.” These clickers allow all students in the class to answer a teacher’s question at once. Their responses can be instantly aggregated and displayed on the whiteboard; teachers can look at their computer screens and know right away which of their students gave the wrong answer. It’s “formative assessment” taken to the extreme, and allows a teacher to know which students need more explanation, and when the class is ready to move on. A nonexperimental study conducted by Robert Marzano and funded by Promethean found positive results for 79 teachers who used the clickers in conjunction with the boards.

And it’s not hard to understand why these things are spreading like kudzu. Karen Lockard is the principal of Bethesda-Chevy Chase (BCC) high school in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C.; Promethean boards are now installed in two-thirds of her school’s classrooms. She told me this fall, “I had a parent call me the week after school started and she said, ‘My son can’t learn in this classroom this year because his teacher had a Promethean board last year and now she doesn’t. And now my kid can’t learn.’ I didn’t ask her, what did he do the year before that when [the whiteboards] didn’t exist?”

Of course, the golden age of the interactive whiteboard might soon come to an end, as the recession, the crash in property taxes, and competition from the baby boomers’ retirement expenses take their toll on school budgets. But these technologies still might be worth the investment, if they allow teachers to be just as effective with a class of 30 students as a class of 20. (If they can keep students more engaged, why not?) With that sort of efficiency, the whiteboards will pay for themselves. Will the teachers unions go for that sort of deal? Or will they view it as too “disruptive”?

On the latest tests of achievement, one sees some progress among 4th graders, even a bit among 8th graders. But the performance of students at age 17 has shown virtually no improvement since nationwide testing began in 1969. Whatever extra students achieve early on is washed away by graduation.

Nor is graduation day itself any more likely for today’s young people than it was for their predecessors in 1970. About 30 percent of all 9th graders still fail to finish high school within four years.

The quality of high school teachers has also slipped in recent decades. They are less likely to have scored strongly on the SAT and less likely to come from selective colleges. Moreover, it’s the secondary-school teacher whose salary has declined the most relative to other college-educated workers. Putting specialized high-school teachers on the same uniform pay schedule as elementary-school generalists has proven to be a step backward.

Yet the primary and middle-school years have captured most of the reform attention. No Child Left Behind requires testing in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, but only once in high school. Most charter schools serve mainly elementary students, and young children make up the largest share of the few voucher programs that have been attempted.

Perhaps it is this focus on the early grades that helps to explain the less-than-overwhelming success that either the accountability or choice movements have had. Like the proverbial drunk who hunts for his keys near the lamppost, school reformers have searched for the educational keys to success by looking where the solutions are the easiest, not where the problems are most severe. It is easier to create a new school for young children, and educators almost always prefer to grow their school’s enrollment from the bottom up. Elementary-school costs also lag those of high school.

So it is worth highlighting the charter high school findings in this issue. Kevin Booker and his colleagues (“The Unknown World of Charter High Schools,” research) find that such schools in Florida and Chicago do better than their traditional counterparts at helping students reach graduation day and ensuring that graduates go on to college. Of course, researchers need to see whether similar results are being produced by charter high schools elsewhere. But if the findings prove robust, charter authorizers and charter-friendly foundations should devote at least as many resources—and perhaps even more—to creating alternatives for high school students as they do to opening charter doors to kindergartners.

Palmer v. Waxahachie started innocently but quickly escalated into a full-blown First Amendment storm. In September 2007, Paul Palmer, a 10th-grade student, wore a T-shirt to school that said simply “San Diego.” The district’s dress code prohibited T-shirts with printed messages. After school officials informed Palmer of his offense, his parents gave him the John Edwards shirt to substitute for “San Diego.” This too fell afoul of district policy.

In response, Palmer sued in federal court, asking for preliminary and permanent injunctions along with damages and attorney fees. He claimed that Supreme Court doctrine allowed student speech to be restricted only if it would cause a substantial disruption, was indecent, was school-sponsored (in a school newspaper, for example), or promoted illegal drug use.

At an initial hearing, the district informed the judge that it had changed its dress code, which prompted the court to dismiss Palmer’s claim without prejudice. The new code was more comprehensive in its restrictions, forbidding polo shirts with messages, shirts with logos of professional sports teams, and clothing with university logos and messages. The revised code did allow shirts with logos smaller than two inches by two inches. Students could also wear clothing promoting school spirit or school-sanctioned clubs and teams. Also permitted were bumper stickers (even attached to clothing), political pins and buttons, and wristbands.

Upon receiving the new code, Palmer submitted three shirts to school officials for approval: the original John Edwards T-shirt, a John Edwards polo shirt, and a T-shirt with “Freedom of Speech” on the front and the text of the First Amendment on the back. The school replied that the Edwards paraphernalia were forbidden and so was the First Amendment representation.

Palmer sued again, but the district court denied his request for an injunction. On appeal, the school district contended, and a Fifth Circuit panel agreed, that its policy was fully compliant with settled doctrine on student speech. Even though Palmer’s sartorial choices were not disruptive, lewd, school-sponsored, or drug-related, the district’s policies were content-neutral and thus permissible. According to the court, the school district’s policy exhibited no hostility to the message conveyed by Palmer, but instead simply regulated his manner of expressing it. The court appeared particularly concerned that siding with Palmer “would spawn endless line-drawing litigation.”

But why did LLI find the travails of the cantankerous Mr. Palmer so compelling? The answer is that Christian public-interest firms like LLI now see the Supreme Court’s 1969 decision in Tinker v. Des Moines as the last bulwark protecting student religious speech.

Tinker had established that students “do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse door.” At the time, it was criticized by conservatives as one of the Warren Court’s intemperate assaults on America’s constitutional and moral fabric. Jay Sekulow, who championed the Christian Right’s free-speech legal strategy at the American Center for Law & Justice (ACLJ), now argues that Tinker is the decision “you have to hope to hold onto.” Hence, religious conservatives are now some of its most adamant defenders. For groups like LLI and ACLJ, the fear is that if schools can suppress John Edwards T-shirts and Bong Hits banners, then they can just as easily suppress John 3:16.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.
Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

I have been able to travel all over the country to compete and train because online schooling has afforded me extra time. But don’t think online schools are not as challenging as traditional ones. At Kaplan, students choose their course loads, and each course has a syllabus of 8 to 12 modules. Each module includes lessons, quizzes, and a final test or two. In my AP English class, each module typically covered a specific genre and focused on a central novel. By the end of the year, I had read 12 literary classics, exploring each one by analyzing its components and comparing and contrasting it to other works of literature. My junior year I took six classes: three APs, two honors level, and an SAT prep course. I pushed myself academically while I trained and competed athletically.

Although one might think an online school experience would lack student-teacher interaction, Kaplan courses require regular contact between students and teachers. At the beginning of every semester, each teacher works individually with each student by phone, e-mail, or both to create an outline of dates and assignments. With my tennis schedule, attending to my schoolwork isn’t always easy, but with clear deadlines, courses become manageable.

My teachers have been my companions while I travel, whether it’s my physics teacher giving me computer passwords at 11 at night or my history teacher taking time on a holiday to explain a concept. Questions I have on everything from homework to college and my future have me calling them to talk at least once or twice a week.

I’ve formed lasting friendships with teachers I’ve never met in person. One of my English teachers has even become a very close friend. How is this possible when I live in Texas and she lives in Indiana? We’ve come to know each other through essays, poems, short stories, and seemingly endless piles of outlines and rough drafts. Whether I was writing my own rendition of Cinderella, creating a sonnet in iambic pentameter, or learning to appreciate the romanticism in Frankenstein, this teacher has been on call and ready to discuss my work.

During my travels, I have been able to augment my education by visiting the homes of authors and the settings of many of the stories I’ve read in my classes. I’ve experienced the tranquillity of Walden Pond; I’ve studied in Harlem, England, Scotland, Spain, and other locales across the globe. I’ve followed the path taken by the characters in The Grapes of Wrath and I’ve walked through plantations reminiscent of those in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Frederick Douglass’s autobiography. At every tournament site, my mom and I try to take a little time to find a bit of history in that place and learn about it. To have that frame of reference has made my schooling infinitely more colorful and tangible than it would have been had I spent the time in a classroom.

Brett Ellen Keeler lives in Austin, Texas, and is a nationally ranked tennis player. She plans to attend college in the fall and study pre-law and public policy.

Please join me on a short, visionary tour circa 2025, and let us glimpse the central role that data have come to play in American K–12 education.

Perhaps the most profound advance since 2010 is that individual achievement and attainment records for every subject are saved (with elaborate safeguards) in cyberspace and secure state databases, where “unique student identifier” numbers make it possible for data to be readily aggregated without revealing individual identity and for analysts to investigate things like learning gains by pupils in various schools and circumstances.

Student assessments (formative, summative, informal) are completed electronically, many through adaptive online programs. Software automatically analyzes the resulting information to create a data dashboard for each pupil, showing what has been mastered and what still needs work. Most assessments are graded by computer, although teachers read essays and occasionally offer separate “hand-graded” scores on other assignments. Instant preliminary feedback is the norm, and the official results, checked over by a data team, are available soon thereafter.

An artificial intelligence program periodically “sifts” each student’s cumulating education record to answer—especially for parents, teachers, and counselors—such key directional questions as whether the student is on track for college when she completes high school. Are there any warning signs of academic (or other) problems that warrant a change of course, maybe even a swift intervention?

Parents can log on and view their child’s cumulative report card, which is continually updated, not just with test results but also with sample work, attendance data, and teacher comments.

Multiple teacher web sites offer resources for planning lessons and obtaining supplementary materials. These include most everything an instructor might need, from student readings, workbooks, assignment ideas, web links and mini-tests to audio and video snippets for classroom use. The online curriculum vault includes thousands of videos of master teachers delivering lessons, and interactive web sites host discussion groups (most enable participants to view as well as hear and read each other). Increasing portions of students’ days are given over to virtual education: watching lectures, participating in online discussions, making productive use of software programs, e-mailing or conversing with distant experts, and teaming up with peers as much as half a world away.

Principals keep electronic files of data (as well as eyewitness impressions, pupil and parent and peer ratings) on individual teachers’ pedagogical strengths and weaknesses. Linked teacher and student databases are used to formulate professional development activities for each teacher. Classroom sessions are periodically recorded and viewed by online mentors who offer quick feedback to new or struggling teachers. Pupil achievement consultants review students’ data files and advise teachers on working with challenging students.

Schools regularly calculate gain scores for each pupil and every state has a Tennessee-style value-added scoring system that spits out data on the effectiveness of its teachers, schools, and districts. Analysts can now control for outside factors affecting achievement. Districts and schools can also use them to evaluate the effects of particular textbooks, teaching units, and professional development activities.

Information about individual performance is aggregated across pupil populations at the classroom (and teacher), school, district, state, and national levels and cumulated over time. Such data enable principals, superintendents, and state officials to determine which institutions, programs, and individuals are on track to attain their targets. The public gets data, too, and can gauge the return on its education investments. Media outlets faithfully publish England-style “league tables” showing raw scores, value-added results, and change over time for every school.

The progress in education data over the past two decades surpasses that made during the entire previous century. Considering the size and decentralized nature of U.S. education, the sluggishness with which it has reacted to many demands for reform, and the modest political oomph behind such mundane activities as crafting data systems, the gains are remarkable. The best explanation seems to be that the millions of people in public education have finally come to realize that the more you know the better off you are.

Chester Finn is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and senior editor of Education Next.

Next in order of publicity was Forest Grove School District v. T. A., a case from Oregon in which the Court held 6 to 3 that parents could receive reimbursement for private school tuition even when their disabled child had never enrolled in a public school special education program. A brief filed by urban school districts raised the specter of wealthy parents gaming the system and driving up costs, but the effect of this decision will also likely be limited. Certainly, some parents will try to use the decision to fund private school, but significant requirements under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) remain in effect. For families to be eligible for reimbursement, an administrative board or court will still have to find that a public program could not meet the child’s needs. In general, the cost and incidence of private placements appear to have been exaggerated in the media (see “The Case for Special Education Vouchers,” features, and “Debunking a Special Education Myth,” check the facts, Spring 2007).

Receiving almost no attention but potentially of utmost significance was Horne v. Flores, a case about English-language learning in which the Court divided narrowly along ideological lines, with Kennedy joining the five-member majority. The central issue is whether Arizona has satisfied the Equal Educational Opportunity Act (EEOA) of 1974, which provides that no state shall fail “to take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal participation…in its instructional programs” (see “Language Barriers,” legal beat, Winter 2009).

The case called for the Court to weigh in on several controversial issues, the most important of which is the extent to which the judiciary should be able to dictate education spending by state and local governments. In considering whether Arizona was meeting the requirements of the EEOA, Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion faulted the district court and the Ninth Circuit for focusing on the “narrow question” of funding, and ignoring whether managerial and instructional reforms had brought the state into compliance. The plaintiffs and lower courts had consistently used funding as the barometer of quality. Alito jumped headlong into the funding debate by citing “a growing consensus in education research that funding alone does not improve student achievement.” While the case does not bind state courts, it provides an important source of support for those opposing state school-funding lawsuits.

The Court also emphasized that cases such as Flores risk making the courts a manipulated contestant in disputes where one side uses litigation to insulate its policy and spending preferences from political debate. The majority was clearly distressed at the often collusive nature of institutional reform cases, as illustrated by Flores, in which then Governor Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, supported the lawsuit against the state as a way to leverage more school spending out of the Republican legislature.

Flores, then, sent perhaps the strongest signal of any of the cases that the Roberts Court was seeking to define a path of judicial modesty. Indeed, Roberts himself seemed to say as much at a judicial conference soon after the strip-search decision. Asked about it, he replied, “You can’t expect to get a whole list of regulations from the Supreme Court. That would be bad. We wouldn’t do a good job at it.”

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

Recessions cause lots of harm, but they also eliminate bloat, fat, even fraud. What is politically impossible in good times can be readily justified when profits fall and deficits loom.

Few deny the long-term value of Ponzi-scheme elimination, better banking practices, and the reshaped automobile industry that the present recession is beginning to produce. The bloated higher-education system may also emerge a healthier industry now that it has been forced to retrench. My own arts and sciences faculty at Harvard University has squeezed $77 million out of its budget this past year by closing an underused library, sharing information online instead of through the mail, eliminating hot meals at breakfast, and cutting redundant administrative positions. Elsewhere, I have seen administrators take forceful actions long overdue.

Unfortunately, public schools skipped the recession. When everyone else was forced to rethink their priorities, school districts found themselves nicely bailed out by the federal government’s $100 billion stimulus package. It doubled the size of the federal contribution to schools and allowed schools in most states to continue operating without missing a school lunch or reassigning a guidance counselor to the classroom. That, of course, has not kept news outlets such as the New York Times from screaming that “Schools Aided by Stimulus Money Still Facing Cuts.” Admittedly, districts in a few states, California being the most notable, are unable to hire as many new teachers as they had planned, but overall the public school sector has been protected from recession, just as James Guthrie and Arthur Peng (“The Phony Funding Crisis,” features) say has happened in the past.

If the recent sharp uptick in industrial productivity and a rising stock market are harbingers of the economic future, business is already readying itself for a new growth spurt. The recession drove inefficient firms from the market, talent has been reallocated to more productive work, and many firms have been forced to make the tough choices necessary for economic revival. None of this has happened without pain, but growing economies have time and again turned recessions into positive breakthroughs. Only a decade ago, the collapse of the technology sector set the stage for its dramatic rebirth.

Not so for K–12 public education, unfortunately. When the economy turns south, school districts do not cut the fat but push for new revenue sources: more state aid, money from gamblers, fees for services, and now a federal bailout. Each new revenue source, proposed in times of crisis, soon becomes a permanent part of the funding stream, and education costs climb higher and higher; they more than tripled in real-dollar terms over the past 40 years.

So what will happen when the stimulus package dries up in less than two years’ time? One can predict with fair confidence that school districts and teachers unions will scream “Another Fiscal Crisis.” Their friends in the media will act as megaphones. Will Obama stare them down and become the first president to cut federal aid to education from the levels reached in his first year in office? Stay tuned—and, taxpayers, watch your wallets.

At some point, all parents must rely on others to tell them what is going on with their children. When ours were in day care, we knew what they ate, saw, and drew, and the frequency of diaper changes. It was easy to believe that we, as parents, were part of the action.

All that went out the window when real school started. Apart from injuries and stomach aches, the school day was one big black hole. From time to time, the school would invite parents in to observe the action, but it was clearly staged, and the children were not behaving as they would on a normal day.

Now the burden of finding out what is going on in school falls largely to the family dinner. We are a household that dines together. One of the benefits of having our dual incomes come from academia and public service is that we can all be at home by five or so. And that means dinners together almost every night.

There are studies showing that family dinnertime is a good thing. Dinner is where the meaningful conversations take place. From this, I take it that continual pleading to sit still or eat your vegetables or don’t wipe your dirty face on your shirt doesn’t cut it. At our dinner table that last one leads to instant shirt removal without replacement, so our dinners could, to an outside observer, look like a one-sided game of strip poker.

“How was your day at school?” meets the typical response: “Good” or “I don’t want to say”—this one always piques my interest, making the child wish he hadn’t said he didn’t want to say. Sometimes the response is more intriguing and we hear about playground politics and engage in thoughtful responses of how to deal with it.

“So-and-so won’t let me play this and that.”

“Well, have you tried asking nicely?”

“Yeesss, it doesn’t work. They just tell me to go away.”

“Well, maybe this and that is pretty dull. How about doing something more interesting? You play something else and that just shows them!”

“There isn’t anything more interesting.”

“You know maybe I can just come into school and flog those creeps for ignoring you.”

“Dad, you’re not helping.”

And so it goes. On a good day we can find out that a child actually learned something (e.g., do long division), although more often than not they learned not to do something (e.g., leap off the fence). With the latter we can balance the affront to civil rights against a legitimate concern for public safety.

This is surely far removed from the intellectual discussion that is thought to be associated with dinnertime togetherness. We are supposed to reinforce the learning or journey together in a process of joint discovery. So sometimes one attempts to engage by dropping an interesting fact into the conversational mix:

“So they think they discovered water on Mars today.”

“We already have water here.”

“True and we have life here, too. If they find water on Mars that might mean there is life there, too.”

“Why can’t they just look around for the life and not bother with the water?”

“Well, it may be that the life died out many years ago. So the water indicates life might have been there.”

“In that case, the water didn’t do them much good, did it?”

“I guess not.”

When it comes down to it, maybe our problem is that we, as parents, try to take an increasingly active role in our children’s schooling while our children are becoming more independent and less in need of our intervention. Perhaps technology might one day provide the solution: the schools will keep us well informed about what our children are learning and what, if anything, is needed from us. Then we can just sit at dinner, eat, and smile knowingly at one another.

Joshua Gans is professor of management (information economics) at the University of Melbourne and author of Parentonomics: An Economist Dad Looks at Parenting (The MIT Press, 2009).

To get a better sense of how research can influence the real world of policymaking, consider recent events in Massachusetts, where Boston’s longest-serving mayor (1993—present), Thomas Menino, is seeking reelection for an unprecedented sixth term. “Mumbles,” as the mayor is affectionately called, is best known for his commitment to snow removal, neighborhood parks, and symbiotic relationships with political insiders. On education matters, he appoints the school board and lets the members run the Boston schools as they please—so long as they avoid upsetting the local teachers union. But on the eve of his current campaign, Menino asked the legislature to expand charter school operations in Boston.

Why did Mayor Menino suddenly get charter school religion? Only recently, teachers unions seemed to be riding high in the saddle, enjoying for the first time in more than a decade a government unified under the union-friendly leadership of a Democratic governor and a legislature controlled by the same party. The mayor has generally distanced himself from education issues, and Boston’s best-known school reform consists of “pilot” schools, which have more than usual autonomy but are still subject to the district’s education-crushing collective bargaining agreement. Governor Deval Patrick, in a nod to the mayor, backed legislation that would expand pilot schooling throughout the state while curtailing charter school operations (see “Accountability Overboard,” features, Spring 2009).

The nail in the charter school coffin was expected to come with the release of a charter and pilot school evaluation initiated by the Boston Foundation, a reliable public school supporter. The foundation had nonetheless arranged for its evaluation to be conducted under the leadership of economist Thomas Kane of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, who has considerable credibility on all sides of the charter school debate. The study was designed as a gold-standard randomized field trial, in which students were (by means of a lottery) randomly given the opportunity to go to charter schools or not. The achievement of students who won the lottery and attended charter schools was compared with the achievement of students who entered but failed to win the lottery. Ditto for pilot schools.

To the surprise of the Massachusetts education establishment, the charters won—and the pilots lost—the research contest. No matter how the data were analyzed, charter schools routinely outperformed both Boston’s pilot schools and its traditional public schools. Pilots turned out to be no improvement on the status quo whatsoever.

The research findings reinforced the pro-charter campaign led by a local think tank, the Pioneer Institute. Statewide, newspapers editorialized in favor of charters and against the governor’s so-called reforms. Even the liberal Boston Globe climbed on board the school reform train. It didn’t hurt that the state legislature was riddled by scandal and Governor Patrick’s tax, fiscal, and transportation policies were going nowhere.

Politically, it was time for Mayor Menino to separate himself from the nonsense emanating from the state capitol. The best way for a popular mayor to remain that way is to catch a changing wind before it acquires gale force, in this case a wind set in motion by the Kane evaluation. When circumstances are right, professors can be as powerful as politicians.

Well…let’s not exaggerate. Mayor Menino may have climbed out of the teachers union bed but only into a twin bed in the same room. The mayor’s call for action will need to be accompanied by well-timed use of mayoral muscle inside the state legislature if more charter schools are to come to Boston. Still, research has nudged the thinking of one of Massachusetts’s most savvy politicians—no small feat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

Last spring, in Fairburn, Georgia, officials in two schools piloted a startling attendance program. If struggling 8th and 11th graders showed up for study hall, they could earn $8 an hour, and if their grades and test scores rose significantly, they would receive a bonus. An Associated Press story termed the policy a “bribe,” and a Georgia State University professor on National Public Radio declared it “morally bankrupt.” But Ben Chavis, then principal of American Indian Public Charter School in East Oakland, California, had started paying students for attendance years ago with steady results, doubling math scores in the school over time. “Poor people love money,” he explains, so why not let it motivate the kids? He even met with drug dealers off campus and offered them $5 for every truant they brought back. The cash came from creative budgeting, for instance, no computers for the kids. (“They can’t read,” he declares, “they don’t need a computer!”)

Chavis is one of a handful of school mavericks profiled in Flunked, a 45-minute documentary narrated by actor Joe Mantegna. The film reviews 50 years of public school investment, from Sputnik to No Child Left Behind, and derives a simple lesson: the claim “more money makes more success” is a myth, “the tallest tale of them all.” In spite of massive investment and however you measure it, one commenter says, academic achievement “looks like somebody just died—it’s just a flat line.” Success lies not in raising dollars but in changing the organization.

The “all-stars” in Flunked illustrate how it can happen. They are “entrepreneurial principals,” headstrong heroes who rescue failing schools, run charters, tighten discipline, and lower dropout rates. Steve Barr runs Green Dot Public Schools in Los Angeles, which divides dysfunctional high schools into small charter schools. His first principle: get every dollar into classrooms. He pays teachers well and grants them wide latitude in the classroom in exchange for a “dismissal-for-cause” condition in their contracts. Howard Lappin, who took on a high school in L.A.—“1,600 kids, out-of-control school, violent, terrible test scores”—recites his message for kids: “if you’re not in class you’re in trouble—your parents are gonna be in—we’re gonna talk to you—you’re not gonna be here—you got to do what you got to do because this is a school—this is not a playground.”

The ingredients are plain and they don’t include “Give us more money.”

• Provide strict discipline, longer hours, high expectations
• Give teachers high pay and discretion in the classroom, but hold them to professional standards
• Reduce bureaucracy

A sound approach for these schools, but on the evidence of another recent school documentary, the lessons of Flunked may not apply as we move up the U.S. public school ladder. Two Million Minutes profiles two high schoolers in Bangalore, India, two in Shanghai, China, and two in Carmel High School outside Indianapolis. Ranked in the top 5 percent of U.S. public schools, Carmel has loads of money and top-notch facilities. No need to fire any teachers or collar truants. But, as the film unfolds, a striking deficiency among the American students emerges, one that no in-school policy can address—the drive to compete with their peers.

“Competitiveness,” of course, has become a touchstone of education debate. Two years ago in the Washington Post, Bill Gates warned that unless Americans hit the workplace with math and science skills, they will sink in the knowledge economy and take their nation with them. But American students appear unaffected by what one commenter after another says in Two Million Minutes: We are in a global competition, and we’re losing. From 1985 to 2004, the proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded in math or science in this country fell from 21.7 to 15.8 percent. Engineering went from 9.8 to 6.2 percent, and the numbers won’t improve soon. On the 2006 American Freshman Survey, only 0.8 percent of entering college students intended to major in math, 0.5 percent in physics. These fields are a micro-niche.

For Asian students, though, math and science degrees are the way to prosperity. These students live with “economic uncertainty,” the film explains, and view math and science study as a form of “economic opportunism,” a “passport out of poverty.” The girl from India wants to be rich, and she terms engineering the “safest” field. She attends a two-hour math tutorial that starts at 7:45 each Saturday morning, and after a break, three more hours of class follow. The boy from India aims to be a physicist (as are his father and sister), and he spends 12 hours a week in evening sessions preparing for the Indian Institute of Technology entrance exam. A half million take the test and only 5,000 win admission. The Chinese boy took his first standardized test in 1st grade, and his regular school day lasts nine hours. He doesn’t claim to be number one, but he loves to win and is, in fact, the top math student in his school. It’s not all math and science. Though the Chinese girl wants a biology career, along with her full school schedule she studies ballet and violin.

And the suburban American kids? The boy is senior class president and a National Merit semifinalist, and the girl ranks in the top 3 percent of her class. He admits, though, “Occasionally, I do homework,” and for a big class project due on Monday he starts preparing a day earlier. She claims to “set high expectations,” but adds, “I’m not that 9-to-5 kind of girl.” She favors medicine because “you get an awesome feeling, it’s really a rewarding experience, I think, being able to, um, save lives.” She’s “well-rounded,” which means doing homework with friends while watching Grey’s Anatomy. He doesn’t “ever want a cubicle,” so he works 20 hours a week in a pasta joint and does graphics for the school paper.

Teachers reflect the same laxity. When handing out an exam, the Carmel teacher assures his students that on one question, “I will accept three of the four answers.” In the Indian classroom, the teacher explains the steps in a calculation and concludes, “Nobody should say ‘I don’t know how to find the tangent.’” When the students pause, she blurts out, “Why are you simply standing there?” Nobody chides the American kids like that.

The American boy wins early admission and a full ride to Purdue, while the American girl gets into Indiana University. They are accepted into top universities, so why work any harder? The policies advocated in Flunked are not the answer here. More money in the classroom and less bureaucracy in the schools will make no difference, nor will stricter discipline or higher expectations as long as the college acceptances come through.

Not one of the Asian kids gets into the first-choice college. That outcome explains the relative efforts, and it puts the American high performers in a dismaying light. Asian kids don’t talk about their “awesome” feelings of helping people. They talk about how it feels to beat the kids sitting next to them. If the American boy and girl landed in an Asian classroom, they would sink to the bottom in a week. Call it classroom Darwinism with predictable results. It’s a survival-of-the-smartest world, with few survivors.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Fortunately, after spending just a few days instead of a few years in lockup, I was exonerated. Two weeks later, I met my wife, Lisa, dedicated myself to reading two books a week to improve my speaking and writing skills, changed my peer group, and moved on with my life.

In 1993 I returned home to Madison, Wisconsin, from Hampton, Virginia, having spent three years in the U.S. Navy and one year attending Hampton University. I immediately went to my old neighborhood to check in with everyone, to see my guys and the girls on the block where I’d spent so much time as an adolescent. I was shocked and dismayed to find that so many of the young men I grew up with had succumbed to the crack cocaine trade and were either addicted to it or selling it, died or were killed for it, or were in jail because of it. Most of those still around were not in the labor force, were not attending any education or training program, and expressed little optimism about their future or their value to society.

I switched my academic major at the University of Wisconsin from pre-medicine and nutritional sciences to urban education and spent the next decade working with city youth. I soon became determined to expose how unproductive our education system was at graduating students and preparing them for college. I enlisted the support of a then up-and-coming researcher named Jay Greene to help me identify a reliable formula for calculating high school graduation rates and secured the support of the organization I was then presiding over to spend $15,000 on a study.

At the time, I was concerned that “dropout” statistics were masking a much larger problem that many in government knew existed but weren’t sharing: hundreds of thousands of black and brown students nationwide were not graduating high school. That initial study and others that followed have stimulated national interest and growing financial investment in high school graduation and college-readiness initiatives. But the central problem that drove me down this road in the first place—the lack of educational and career success among young black and brown men—has garnered very little attention.

As we celebrate the election of our country’s first black president, I can’t help but ponder how very few black males are being prepared to successfully complete a college education and assume leadership roles in the fields of business, industry, government, family, and community. How will this brain drain affect the future of families and children in our country? How will this affect our economy and national interests? How many public and private prisons are we willing to pay $38,000 annually per inmate to have black men imprint license plates and pick up debris on U.S. highways?

The 2008 Schott Foundation report on high school graduation among black males found that only 19 percent of black males in Indianapolis, 20 percent in Detroit, 27 percent in Norfolk, Virginia, 29 percent in Rochester, New York, and 47 percent nationally were graduating from high school. When I read that report, I felt as if I’d been impaled by fragments from a hand grenade. I asked myself, If our school systems are producing such small numbers of graduates, what is the purpose of K—12 education for black males? Why are we allowing our children to languish in schools and school systems that produce far more failures than successes?

Kaleem Caire is the president and CEO of Next Generation Education Foundation, an organization that prepares young men to succeed in college, careers, leadership, and life.

Walking out of the second-floor elevator, one enters a football-field-length waiting area with a single, if very substantial, desk visible down near where a virtual goal post would stand. As the day progresses, one moves from one capacious office to another, all decked out with large, well-appointed work stations and sizable meeting areas that enjoy the Sunshine State’s prized natural resource. Florida Virtual School is clearly doing very well (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features).

So well that the visitor is regularly informed that the furnishings have been donated and the school’s lease costs less than the rent once paid for cramped quarters within the Orange County school system.

Florida Virtual’s success is no accident. Its chief executive officer, Julie Young, has constructed an energetic, dedicated team who watch the clock no more closely than does the inner core of an entrepreneurial Internet start-up. The school’s mission is carefully crafted to fit in with—not fight with—that of Florida’s school districts. The school offers courses that are not available at district schools, or that do not fit well into a student’s schedule, or that a student has to take for a second time.

Florida Virtual also offers instruction to home schoolers. But it eschews any hint of social conservatism in favor of a progressive-style approach that frees students from the prison of the bell and clock. Students are even given a four-week grace period during which they can withdraw from a course without penalty.

Florida Virtual does not collect any state dollars if a student withdraws or does not earn at least a D. If that is not much of a standard, it beats the one Florida imposes on its district schools. They get their state per-pupil funding whether a student stays or drops out, passes or flunks.

Some competition between the virtual school and district schools persists. If a student takes two semesters’ worth of virtual courses, it costs the district one-sixth of the state’s per-pupil allocation. But Florida Virtual can save districts headaches by offering replacement courses if a district loses a physics teacher or can’t afford to  offer an elective course. So the virtual school’s course enrollments have soared above the 150,000 mark.

One of the school’s most popular courses—physical education—is required of all high school students, but is one that some do not wish to pursue via the school locker room. The course emphasizes good health practices. Students report their health objectives, exercise and eating habits, and changes in pulse and weight. The course appears to have provided one student with the incentive to lose 80 pounds.

Every effort is made to make sure the academic work submitted is the student’s own. Students take tests throughout the course period, and they write essays and papers. These are electronically scanned to check and see if material was copied from another student paper or from something on the Internet. Teachers grade and give feedback on assignments, and they call students at least once a month, and much more frequently if distress signals are detected. An honor code is given heavy emphasis.

Only one barely perceptible fly can be found in the virtual ointment: As elsewhere in American education, but even more so when teacher and student are physically separated, it is not always easy to detect whether students have mastered the material. Apart from those in Advanced Placement or other courses subject to an external exam, only a small portion of the total, students take no proctored examinations. But without such exams, the teacher in the end must infer just how much is being learned. May both virtual and district schools learn how to surmount this challenge well before the year 2145.

— Paul E. Peterson

In Bush v. Holmes (2006), the state supreme court struck down Florida’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, a small voucher program serving fewer than 800 students, on the grounds that it fell afoul of the state constitution’s “uniformity” clause, which allegedly prevents the state from funding any program outside of or “parallel” to the public school system.

Florida judges have been at it again. Late in 2008, a lower court struck down the Florida Schools of Excellence Commission, which was formed at Governor Jeb Bush’s urging in 2006 to provide alternative authorization for charter schools. Without the Excellence Commission, only local school boards can authorize new charter schools. School districts understandably can be loath to see their pupils—and, more important, the state funding that follows them—go to charter schools.

The statute that created the Excellence Commission allowed local school boards to petition the state board of education to retain exclusive authority to sanction charter schools within their districts. Thirty-one of Florida’s 67 local school districts requested such exemptions, but the state board granted only three: to Orange, Polk, and Sarasota, districts that had already created a significant number of charter schools (20, 24, and 9, respectively).

In response to having been denied an exemption, 14 districts led by Duval County challenged the constitutionality of the commission and thus sought to preserve their exclusive authority over chartering. The attorney representing the Duval school board, Ron Meyer, had also represented the Florida Education Association, the statewide teachers union, when it challenged the Opportunity Scholarship program in Holmes.

The plaintiff districts claimed that the commission fatally violated a provision of the state constitution holding that the local “school board shall operate, control and supervise all free public schools within the school district.” The court agreed with the school districts and went beyond just striking down the commission. Harking back to Bush v. Holmes, it ruled that the “statute [creating the commission] permits and encourages the creation of a parallel system of free public education escaping the operation and control of local elected school boards.”

The logic of the ruling leaves many other programs vulnerable to legal challenge. Florida’s virtual school, university-run laboratory schools, schools for juvenile offenders, a school for “high risk” boys including sex offenders, and the state school for the deaf and blind would all count as “parallel” public schools uncontrolled by local boards. Meyer declined to speculate if these other programs would be subjected to a legal challenge.

Members of the commission foresaw the ruling but expected the state board of education to appeal. The board said that “the issue received a fair hearing” and claimed that it “had no legal basis to pursue an appeal.” The Republican governor, Charlie Crist, supported the board’s decision, prompting education reformers to lament the loss of Jeb Bush, who they believed would not have been so submissive.

Supporters of the commission argued that the state constitution makes public education a shared responsibility between the state and local school districts. When the state bears significant funding responsibilities and monitors curricula, teaching credentials, and student assessment, school boards are not exclusively operating, controlling, and supervising schools in their districts. On the other hand, an appeal would have taken the issue to a state supreme court in which success was unlikely. Four of the justices in the Bush v. Holmes majority are still on the seven-member court although one of the four is subject to mandatory retirement this year. Avoiding an adverse decision from the supreme court could make it easier to undo the lower court ruling should conditions become more favorable.

As with the Opportunity Scholarship Program, the elimination of the Excellence Commission will not have a significant immediate effect on Florida schoolchildren. Of 54 charter requests submitted, only one eventually received approval. Had the commission been able to develop as a real alternative to local authorization, larger numbers of charter schools could have been established, and that likely would have created a powerful political constituency in support of charter schools, capable of resisting jealous attacks from the public education establishment.

Joshua Dunn is assistant professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.