The project that Wendy Kopp launched with a 1989 college thesis placed 10,400 teachers in 2012, with plans to expand to 15,000 teachers and 60 sites by 2015. To hit that target, Beard told me, TFA will need revenues of a half billion dollars a year, up from $320 million in 2012. Overseas, entrepreneurs in 26 countries have launched TFA projects under a sister organization called Teach For All; projects in another 18 countries are in the pipeline.

And more changes are ahead?

Kramer, previously TFA’s president, portrays the leadership shift as little more than a change in business cards, formalizing Kopp’s evolution out of TFA’s day-to-day activities and reassigning some of her public duties to himself and Beard, who previously was chief operating officer. The new arrangement puts Kramer in charge of recruiting, training, fundraising, marketing, and administration, while Beard will run the regional operations and become TFA’s public face.

Kopp becomes TFA’s board chair and remains chief executive of Teach For All.

Kramer sees TFA as, yes, a pipeline of teachers into poor and neglected neighborhoods. Its teachers were in 3,200 public schools in 2013 (nationwide, two-thirds of those were district schools), and 57,000 college students applied to become corps members. But Kramer also paints a vision of TFA as an instigator of change, producing alumni that TFA expects—just expects—will become the sort of shake-up-the-beast leaders who will “do something radically different” for the schools.

The beast shaking seems well under way. TFA says 550 alumni are school principals, 100 are system leaders, and 70 hold elective office. Charter operators, education entrepreneurs, and philanthropists increasingly follow TFA into its new neighborhoods, “magnetizing talent,” Kopp calls it. (Indeed, several education entrepreneurs told me they wouldn’t expand their projects into cities where there isn’t a TFA presence because they couldn’t be sure of attracting the talent they need.)

A study by Harvard professor Monica Higgins and co-authors Wendy Robison, Jennie Weiner, and Frederick Hess (“Creating a Corps of Change Agents,” features, Summer 2011) found that of the 49 leading entrepreneurial organizations in education, 14 had at least one top manager who was a TFA alumnus. And Weiner contends that TFA alumni are driving the curriculum at education schools. “They come here wanting to know more about solutions” like charters, school choice, and teacher evaluation, she said. “The [TFA] commitment may end after two years, but there’s a forward momentum” that goes on and on.

I wondered how TFA has managed to keep that forward momentum after almost 24 years. After all, there are plenty of start-ups—in education and everywhere else—that have been slowed by middle-aged paunch. There probably are a lot of reasons, researchers, funders, and TFA’s fellow entrepreneurs told me, but here are four:

Common Vision, Regional Innovation

Josh Anderson is the executive director of the Chicago Teach For America project, which has 500 corps members dispersed in 187 schools and a staff of 64 to support them. Like all TFA executive directors, Anderson must raise his entire operating budget (the schools pay the corps members’ salaries), which is $12.8 million this year. The state and city put up $2.2 million of that, but the biggest share, almost $7 million, comes from individual donors and family foundations.

The Chicago project’s growth is on pace to meet its 2015 goals, he told me, so he has begun setting 2017 targets: 1,000 corps members and a budget “north of $20 million.” Like other executive directors, Anderson also sets his region’s education agenda, and among his plans is an “inspire zone” in seven contiguous neighborhoods. The idea is to concentrate corps teachers in the zone, install corps alumni as principals, and invite in high-performing charter networks to help leverage the impact.

Anderson, who is 31 and a former New York corps member, said it’s “the expectation” that executive directors develop and fund their own plans. “The ideas and vision for what needs to happen in Chicago emanates from Chicago,” he added.

Kopp has written about TFA’s earliest days, when everyone had a vote in every decision, and strategy sessions lasted much of the night. It began abandoning that folly about five years in, she says. Now, half of TFA’s 1,900 staffers are in the regions where TFA is teaching and 80 percent of its revenue comes from fundraising by the regional projects. Executive directors were told to start asking “what it’s going to take for every kid to get an excellent education” in their region, and then go out and do it, Kramer said.

That keeps TFA regions innovative and learning from one another, Jane Hannaway, director of the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, told me. But what keeps it from spinning off into 46 disconnected projects? I asked.

One explanation is a communications network that seems to hum with activity. There are thrice-yearly conferences where executive directors “problem solve” and “transfer knowledge,” Anderson said. There are phone briefings, a newsletter, conference calls, seminars, and an ongoing review of the “negotiables” and the “flexibles” in the TFA model, Elisa Beard said. “We don’t want it to feel like they’re entirely different organizations when we go from one region to another.”

Perhaps the bigger reason, though, is what Alex Hernandez, a partner in the Charter School Growth Fund, called “a superclear mission.” TFA has a concise manifesto that commits it to eliminating educational inequity. That vision is so central to TFA’s culture that it’s “imprinted” on corps members as a set of shared understandings, said Harvard’s Higgins.

“We’re working toward the same thing,” James Curran, the executive director in South Dakota, told me. “We’re just doing it in different ways.”

Data-Driven Improvement

Katie Jaron is TFA’s vice president for leadership development, a job in which she thinks about what would make corps members more effective teachers. In 2011, she asked a large consulting firm to study some school districts and charter management organizations that were known for giving robust support to their teachers.

TFA already provides a coach, called a manager of teacher leadership and development, to every corps member (TFA says 89 percent of its first-year corps members return for a second year, and 63 percent go into education as a career). But the consultants, and internal surveys, told Jaron that there were gaps in TFA’s coaching. So this year Jaron, who is 33 and a Houston corps alumna, launched a pilot project that adds content and classroom-management coaches in Houston and several other cities.

The content coaches offer technical advice on how to teach elementary grades, math and science, and the humanities. The management coaches are each equipped with a walkie-talkie and coach a corps member—who is equipped with an earpiece—through classroom behavior problems as they’re happening.

There’s more: in Jacksonville, executive director Crystal Rountree is piloting a summer training institute for 100 new corps members who will teach in Duval County schools next fall. Typically, TFA assigns its new teachers to one of nine summer training institutes that are spread around the country. Rountree, who is 31 and a former corps member in Atlanta, said that under that system, her new teachers would arrive in Jacksonville with limited understanding of the city and its schools.

So last year, she brought together Duval’s superintendent and board of education, the president of a local university, and others, and said, “Let’s do some thinking about what it would look like” to train TFA teachers locally. The teachers will arrive in their schools weeks earlier; they’ll supplement the district’s summer-school program and they’ll know their students even before school starts. Rountree already is planning weekly dinners for the new teachers with parents, veteran teachers, and city officials.

Still more: in South Dakota, Curran, who is 29 and a former Phoenix corps member, is part of a seven-region pilot project to build an incubator to prepare teachers in rural districts to become principals. It’s being funded with a competitive TFA “innovation grant” that the executive directors collectively applied for out of frustration that there was no infrastructure to develop principals for their schools.

The pilots—there are loads more—and other programmatic decisions “aren’t just hunches,” said Jane Hannaway, whose daughter is a TFA alumna. TFA is “constantly trying to figure out better ways to do things,” she added. (In addition to its internal research, TFA has a five-person team that cooperates with researchers on “dozens” of studies of TFA’s effectiveness and is looking for more, said Raegen Miller, TFA’s vice president for research partnerships.)

Even more compellingly, when the data show that something isn’t working—“and they’re always monitoring—they have the money and wherewithal to scrap it and redesign it,” said Susan Moore Johnson of Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. (Her daughter also is a TFA alumna.)

Based on all that scrutiny, TFA cut the number of corps members that each teaching coach supervises to 30 or fewer, down from 50 a few years ago (in Chicago, Anderson cut it further, to 20 teachers per coach). Corps members now teach “life skills,” like persistence and problem solving, and “access skills,” like note taking and skim reading, that will help students get into college.

“We are one of the most data-driven, matrix-driven organizations I know,” Annis Stubbs, the executive director of the Detroit TFA project told me.

Global Reach

Amy Black is vice president of development for Teach For All, which Kopp co-founded in 2007 after pleas from entrepreneurs in Britain—and then Germany, India, Lithuania, China, Lebanon, the Philippines—to help set up projects in their countries. Black said TFA concluded that the challenges were the same in every country—poor kids don’t have the same access to education as richer kids—and that TFA could “help shorten the learning curve” for those entrepreneurs.

TFA requires the international projects to place teachers in full-time jobs for two years, measure student performance, and be independent of their governments, among other things. But how, what, and whom they teach “are questions every program is answering,” Black said.

That experimentation will accelerate innovation (talk about crowd sourcing!), Harvard’s Monica Higgins and other researchers told me. The overseas projects will force TFA to examine its assumptions about how kids learn, teachers are trained, school systems are set up and funded, and more. “Nothing else is going to push them as much,” Higgins said.

Beyond that, exposure to different cultures will keep TFA “open to new ways of doing things,” which can be a challenge for young companies, Jon Schnur, a co-founder of two education nonprofits, America Achieves and New Leaders for New Schools, told me. “It will keep them learning from educators around the world.”

TFA already is taking lessons in “values leadership” from Teach For India, Black and Kopp both told me—that is, how to instill teachers with a sense of mission and urgency. It’s also watching how the projects in India and Israel recruit teachers, should it decide to expand its own recruiting outside college campuses. Both countries recruit older corps members—Israel because college graduates first must serve in the military, and India because it’s looking for corps members who are mature enough to move into jobs as principals as soon as their teaching commitment is up.

“There’s a ton of leadership literature out there, but the newest, freshest information we’re getting” is from Teach For India, Black said.

Stoking the Leadership Fire

Two years ago, in its annual alumni survey, TFA asked its 28,000 former corps members if they were interested in becoming superintendents or in taking other district-level posts. There was “overwhelming interest,” Andrea Stouder Pursley, vice president of alumni affairs and a former corps teacher in Phoenix, told me. But that interest didn’t correlate with the number of alumni who actually went into district leadership.

So Pursley enlisted another management consultant to figure out why and, beyond that, what kind of skills and preparation a successful superintendent needs. From there, TFA built a part-academic, part-on-the-job fellowship program that will place alumni in district offices for a year beginning this fall. Some 160 alumni applied for 20 spots; 25 districts asked for fellows.

Among the other molds TFA has broken, it has “reframed the way to think about alumni relations,” said Jennie Weiner, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Most organizations look to their alumni for what they can give back; TFA looks to its alumni to carry its mission forward.

Kopp says it was TFA’s vision from the start to get its alumni into jobs where they could influence—no, direct—education policy. “We’re not going to solve this problem in the classroom. We want [alumni] out there, pioneering new things we never thought of,” she told me.

That squares with a complaint I heard from Harvard’s Susan Moore Johnson, that TFA’s two-year commitment “isn’t designed to increase the capacity of a school over time.” Corps members come and go, but the school remains woefully the same (indeed, part of the reason for those life-skills and persistence lessons corps members now teach is to help students cope with a weak teacher they may be assigned the next year, or the year after that).

Getting TFA alumni into leadership roles, though, has meant first creating an enormous talent-building infrastructure of graduate-school partnerships, employer internships, an in-house career-counseling center, and an organization to help alumni win elected office. Almost one in 10 TFA staffers now works on alumni development, including a three-person “entrepreneurship team” that helps alumni with their education start-ups and hosts an annual “design camp” for innovators. Last year, 150 showed up to compete for $150,000 in start-up capital. (The big winner: GirlTrek, which encourages African American girls and women to lose weight through walking.)

TFA sets annual goals for the number of alumni it expects to become principals, school-board members, state school chiefs, even congressmen. Kopp wouldn’t share the goals, but told me they “seem like the right intersection between stretch and realism.” An early alumni survey showed that 5 percent of former corps members who were still in education were principals, so Kopp said she figured that 10 percent could make the jump if TFA provided some counseling and support. Within a few years, she said, 12 percent had.

Pushing the Limits

When I asked Elisa Beard, the new co-CEO, what was the greatest constraint on TFA’s growth plans, “leadership capacity” was at the top of her list, a surprise because of TFA’s focus on leadership development. But in early 2013, four TFA regions lacked executive directors, and Beard scrapped plans to open in two new cities in the fall because she hasn’t found qualified executive directors. Her solution is to launch—what else?—a pilot project to develop executive directors.

Kopp also named talent recruitment as “a big potential limitation,” but she meant teacher talent. For all the campus excitement TFA seems to generate, recruiting is a challenge, she said. TFA says that of the 48,000 people who applied in 2012, it accepted only 17 percent, about 8,200, and of those, just 5,800 took up its offer.

TFA’s costs average $40,000 per corps member over three years, including recruiting, pre-service training, in-service coaching, and overheads, and those costs haven’t come down even as TFA has grown. In part, that’s because “there are new ideas every day for things we need to do,” Kopp said (think of those design camps, the summer institute, the coaches). And in part, it’s because some expenses—Kramer named labor law, finance, accounting—don’t lend themselves to scale-up savings, he said. “What it takes to do things right at a bigger scale is more than it costs to do them right at a tiny scale,” he said. “It’s not at the top of my thinking that we have to slash,” he added.

TFA also claims favorable comparisons with other service organizations: it says the Peace Corps spends $78,000 to recruit, train, and support a volunteer for a two-year commitment (the National Peace Corps Association puts the cost at $50,000 a year). VISTA asks localities to pony up $11,000 a year for a community-service volunteer, to which it adds $12,000 in benefits.

Almost three-quarters of TFA’s revenues came from philanthropy in 2011—$194 million, up $40 million from the year before, according to the latest annual report—and Kopp said “it’s actually been powerful” to have to appeal to donors. “It’s forced us to get out in the world and sell this cause.” Funders encourage innovation by asking for results: they’d take their money somewhere else if they lost confidence. Just as important, they become what Kopp called “champions” of education reform.

Those champions no doubt will be watching Kramer and Beard—and those half-billion-dollar plans. I asked Kramer what he worried about as the co-CEO. “Whether or not we fulfill our potential,” he told me without a moment’s pause.

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor and a former Wall Street Journal education reporter, foreign correspondent, and editor.

Policies that fund phantom students take several forms:

• protections against declining enrollment

• hold-harmless provisions for districts competing with charters

• small district subsidies

• minimum categorical allocations.

In each case, affected districts receive funds in excess of what they would receive if only the students on their rolls were funded. An obvious downside is that these policies cause less funding to be available for all other districts. But such allocations also insulate district leaders from having to make tough (and often productivity-enhancing) changes in the way they serve the students they have. Policies intended to “protect” districts weaken the incentives that should drive change and adaptation as enrollments fluctuate.

The Economics of Enrollment

While state policymakers often try to base funding allocations to districts on “costs,” the fact is that costs and revenues are interdependent. It is true that a district with more funds per pupil than its neighbors can afford to offer more or better services (in the form of extracurriculars, smaller classes, and individualized learning time, for example). It is also the case that the cost of delivering the same services as neighboring districts can increase with revenues, often as the result of concessions extracted by employees as part of the collective bargaining process. Each year, districts are under pressure from constituents and employee organizations to match expenditures to available revenues. If expenditures are projected to be higher than revenues, the district, to avoid running a deficit, will need to reduce spending. But if revenues are projected to come in significantly higher than expenditures, districts will also have a hard time squirreling away the surplus. As one of us has noted in these pages (see “Mounting Debt,” forum, Winter 2004), a surplus may suggest to employee unions that a raise is due and to parents that class sizes should shrink. There is immense political pressure for surpluses to be quickly soaked up, often in a manner that raises the per-pupil cost of services without fundamentally changing their delivery.

This adjustment works as revenues rise but not so well as they fall. In times of shrinking enrollment, districts can suddenly find themselves with unsupportable cost structures. Many a district leader has found that raising salaries and reducing class sizes is quite a bit more palatable politically than vice versa.

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Consider a 10,000-student district that has an enrollment increase of 200 students from one year to the next. The district receives $10,571 in state and local funds per student enrolled, the national average in 2010. As Table 1 illustrates, insofar as state and local revenues are generated on a per-student basis, the school district will receive roughly $2.1 million in additional revenues for the new students.

Direct costs are unlikely to increase as dramatically. Even assuming that the additional students are all placed into newly created classes with new teachers making the average national salary, the additional costs are likely to be much less than the additional revenues. Assuming that no new schools are built to house these students, the district will have a large surplus to spend on other things, such as new district-wide programs, class-size reductions, and employee raises.

Now consider what happens in the same district when enrollment shrinks by 200 pupils and state and local funding declines accordingly. Assume the district reduces its teaching force by 10 teachers and no longer pays for these students’ supplies. It could reduce its expenses by about $910,000, but it is losing more than $2.1 million in revenue. If the $1.2 million surplus from prior growth is indeed being spent across the district, it will need to make general budget reductions or “cuts due to declining enrollment.” With their tendency to spend all that they have, districts create financial asymmetry around enrollment growth and decline.

A similar mind-set has dominated the thinking on small districts, namely that services should be delivered in small districts in much the same way as in large districts. Small districts, the argument goes, still require a full-time librarian, counselor, nurse, physical-education teacher, and so on, and thus some minimum level of fixed costs is unavoidable.

As a result, the discourse around enrollment loss and small district expenses often focuses on high “fixed costs.” This reflects a misunderstanding of what costs are fixed. Few in other industries consider personnel costs (which constitute the majority of district expenditures) fixed. Administrations could shrink, pay raises could slow, and schools could be closed if enrollment declines. In the case of small districts, many services could be purchased in smaller increments with part-time staff or by contracting with service providers (e.g., for online learning).

It does seem to be the case, however, that people feel worse about losing something they had than not gaining something they would like. As a result, declines in enrollment can be painful. And so state lawmakers have enacted phantom student-funding policies to help districts cope.

The annual cost of phantom student funding varies by the types of policies in place across different states. Table 2 highlights provisions in several states and computes their value as the portion of total state education funding to represent the relative scale of these policies. While the dollars at stake are obviously not a major driver of state education expenditures, they are significant, especially during times of tight budgets. At a time when districts may not be receiving funds to cover cost growth, however, even 1 percent of the state’s total spending is meaningful.

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Protections against Declining Enrollment

As the 2012–13 school year opened, districts in Tucson, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia, and elsewhere were facing steep enrollment declines and a corresponding dip in revenues. Five years before, Baltimore, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon, topped the list of districts in fiscal chaos brought on by falling enrollment.

Enrollment shifts are certainly part of the landscape, and at any given time just as many or more districts may be facing enrollment drops as are seeing enrollment gains. But each time enrollment falls, district leaders seem to be caught off guard, forced to dip into reserves, pare down extracurriculars, and make out-of-cycle pleas for rescue funding in order to avert salary freezes, seniority-based layoffs, or school closures.

And so it goes. States attempt to ease the pain by jumping in with extra funds. In California, core funding for students (known as the Revenue Limit) is made to districts on the basis of average daily attendance (ADA). When district enrollment declines year over year, the allocation is made on the basis of the previous year’s average daily attendance. While this provides districts with only a one-year reprieve, the amount spent is substantial. According to the Public Policy Institute of California, in 2005–06 the total cost of this protection was $402 million or about $111 per student in declining-enrollment districts. Taken together, the 89,234 phantom students funded last year by California’s declining-enrollment provision would have been California’s third-largest district, larger than Long Beach, Fresno, or San Francisco.

Massachusetts distributes state aid to districts on the basis of a complex formula that considers enrollment, student need, and local ability to pay. However, the state legislature usually inserts into the budget a “hold harmless” provision that does not allow total state aid to any district to go down, essentially ignoring the careful rationale behind the state’s own formula. Extra payments to select districts are projected to total $180 million in FY13, more than 3 percent of total state education spending. Districts that are overpaid have no incentive to attract new students, as their state aid would not go up, and, in fact, would be better off on a per-pupil basis if some of their current students left. In other states, protection policies take the form of one-off allocations made to large city districts as students disappear. Pennsylvania, for instance, funds the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia districts according to a different formula than it does all other districts in the state. The effect is to grandfather them in under a higher expenditure structure than their current enrollments warrant.

Holding Harmless Districts Competing with Charters

Buried deep in numerous state charter laws are promises to districts, often made during charter law negotiations, that they will be protected financially when they lose students to charters. Called double funding in some states, these provisions work much like the declining-enrollment protections. The state funds students attending charter schools while still funding districts as though those students had remained.

In Connecticut, districts receive revenues based on the enrollments of students living in their region, regardless of whether those students attend the district schools or attend charters (or technical schools). According to researchers Bryan Hassel and Daniela Doyle, double funding students in 2008 cost Connecticut $186 million.

In Massachusetts, charter school students take with them the per-pupil net school spending (state and local) from their sending districts. To soften the blow to sending-district finances, Massachusetts provides a partial tuition reimbursement for up to six years after the district starts paying charter school tuition. When a district incurs new tuition costs, the state reimburses the district for 100 percent of the cost in the first year and 25 percent of the tuition cost for the next five years. Thus, the state essentially provides districts with 225 percent of a year’s tuition for each full-time equivalent student lost!

These allocations could create a disincentive to improve services in an effort to retain more students. When students leave a district to attend a charter school, the district may see an increase in per-student revenues.

Subsidies for Small Districts

Although some small districts may have lower salaries and transportation costs than larger districts, and opportunities for creative and cost-effective service delivery certainly exist, it is often assumed that larger districts necessarily enjoy economies of scale from which small districts cannot benefit. The result is that smaller districts in many states receive more funds per pupil than do their larger counterparts.

According to a 2010 Education Week report, 29 states have an explicit “weight” in their state allocation formula to account for district size. Others fund some items (e.g., staff or programs) in “one per district” amounts such that when the costs of those items are divided by the lower enrollment of smaller districts, per-pupil price tags are quite high.

These small-district subsidies add up. In Washington State and New Mexico, districts with student enrollments between 100 and 1,200 spend $104 million and $69 million more, respectively, in total public funds than if they were spending the statewide average per pupil in these districts. In Maine, the largest districts spend, on average, $8,033 per pupil compared to $11,027 for the smallest districts. This subsidy amounts to $9 million in total, enough to educate almost 40 percent more students than the small districts serve. In California, districts with fewer than 100 students receive, on average, more than $18,000 per enrolled student, or more than twice as much as districts that enroll at least 1,000 students.

Not all states have bought into the need for small-district subsidies. As Figure 1 indicates, the extent to which small districts (here defined as having 200 to 1,200 students) receive extra funds varies enormously. In states like California and Georgia, smaller districts receive a subsidy of 15 percent or more of the average per-pupil spending levels in their larger-district peers. Minnesota and Wisconsin, in contrast, have small districts that operate at funding levels on par with their larger peers.

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Even if large districts do enjoy important economies of scale, small-district subsidies discourage merging or sharing services across districts, both potential means for gaining such economies. Charter schools (essentially single-school districts) have learned this lesson and often share purchasing, specialized services, or back-office functions. Even larger districts often share services across areas such as special education provision or vocational education.

Small-district subsidies also reinforce the assumption that there is one best method to deliver schooling: a traditional school building with a principal, a nurse, on-site teachers in all subjects including specialty courses, and so forth. This mind-set has prompted advocacy groups like the Rural School and Community Trust to seek both small-district subsidies and protection against loss of enrollment to charters. In contrast, some small and geographically isolated districts have found that with digital learning technology, they are able to provide students with better course options and at a per-pupil cost that provides for parity with other districts.

Minimum Allotments for Categorical Allocations

Formula minimums for categorical allocations create a fourth type of phantom funding. Forty-nine states target funds to specific programs or types of students, including bilingual education, nutritional programs, drug awareness, and dropout prevention. In some cases, the targeted allocation distributes a fixed-dollar amount for each eligible student (say, each bilingual education student) and then includes a minimum allocation for districts with very low numbers of the targeted population. Under such a policy, a district with only a handful of bilingual education students might receive a vastly inflated spending level for each of them.

Formula minimums usually have their origin in politics. Those proposing legislation for categorical allocations know that before understanding its justification, many legislators will flip through the bill to see how much money is at stake for their district: the minimums are included to entice legislators to vote in approval.

The result can be windfalls for districts that don’t have significant numbers of students who qualify for the funding. In previous work, one of us found that Washington State’s 2004 compensatory allocation formula ensured that affluent Bellevue School District, in which only 18 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, receives $1,371 per poor student in state compensatory funds, while large urban districts received less than half of that for each of their impoverished students (see Figure 2).

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The Hidden Costs of Phantom Funding

Declining enrollment, increasing competition, and small size all create financial challenges for school districts. If districts do not adapt by restructuring service delivery, they could go bankrupt. Perhaps funding phantom students is a reasonable state policy response.

We see three primary arguments against the funding of phantom students: First, by continuing to fund phantom students, states ensure that districts won’t restructure expenditures for smaller enrollments. If the district has a large professional development department, or too many kindergarten teachers, those positions may stay on the district payrolls because the extra state monies make it possible. A 2010 study of declining-enrollment districts by Pacey Economics Group found that, while districts face real challenges reducing transportation costs, they do have flexibility on “other categories such as other supporting operations and maintenance, instructional salaries and benefits, food service, and administration.” In other words, they can reduce costs when they have to.

Second, funding phantom students delivers the message that school districts should continue delivering education the way they have for the last century. If, indeed, we have found the “one best system,” this is all to the good. If we have not (which our relative international performance might suggest), or even if we are not sure, this system discourages needed experimentation.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, funding phantom students diverts public funding from other uses. Proponents of protections from declining enrollment or small schools rightly note the challenges of downsizing. In deciding whether to protect declining-enrollment districts, however, policymakers should consider alternative uses for that money. Clearly, the funds could be distributed more evenly across all schools, used for early childhood services or for augmenting children’s health care, or aimed at improving postsecondary options for students from lower-income families.

How States Can End Phantom Funding

Ending the funding of phantom students will not be easy politically or from an organizational standpoint. Even so, there are numerous actions states can take to prepare districts and the public for thinking about schooling and education funding differently and effect a fair transition.

Encourage districts to structure allocations in per-student terms. Education funding policy should address the misalignment between what drives revenues and what drives expenditures. On the revenue side, most funds are tied to student counts. For San Francisco, for example, a reduction in one student equates to a loss of $5,000 in state money.

The expenditure side is a different story. A loss of one student doesn’t automatically trigger any change in the budget. Districts have staffed their schools by estimating how many classes they’ll need and made sure each school has a counselor, a nurse, a parent coordinator, and so on. When a handful of students leave, these same line items cost more in per-pupil terms. Districts consolidate classes where they can, but then imagine that their only option is to pull some staff from the schools and eliminate programs.

Fluctuations in enrollment are inevitable. Knowing this, districts should create more nimble fiscal systems, in which expenditures (like revenues) are tied directly to enrollment. This means reconfiguring budgets so that allocations for schools and services are on a per-student basis. Each school would receive a specified dollar amount for each student so that its allocation automatically rises and falls with enrollment. School districts in Houston, Denver, and Oakland already allocate funds to schools in this manner.

Individual programs, too, might be funded in the same way. A program to create college awareness, for instance, might receive $100 per eligible student each year, instead of an allocation of some fixed number of staff. This kind of expenditure structure is currently being implemented for central departments in the Baltimore City Schools.

In this model, total spending on district schools and services automatically drifts up and down with enrollment, thereby better matching revenue trends. Within each school, incremental changes can be made on a yearly basis to reflect trends in the size of the student body. The more allocations that districts base on enrollment (not only to schools, but also to departments, services, operations, administration, and other district functions), the more protected the district is from sudden deficits stemming from shifts in the student population.

This kind of allocation model also protects programs from wholesale elimination with a drop in enrollment. College awareness services, for example, may need to be redefined when student counts drop, perhaps by rethinking delivery, or relying on part-time staff, but the program doesn’t go away. For each program or service, as enrollments decrease (or increase, for that matter), the per-pupil allocations stay the same. Where middle-school science was a priority, it is still a priority. Where parent engagement is thought to be important, the need may be met in a different manner than assigning a full-time staff person to each school to lead the effort.

It is true that as districts shrink, some district services will miss out on economies of scale. At this point, the department may need to provide the service jointly with another district or contract out for the service on a per-pupil basis. But rather than having district leaders make those cuts from the top, adjusting to current enrollment becomes the responsibility of each school and program manager. That’s where adaptation and adoption of innovations can happen. Leaders of a high-cost speech therapy program, for example, are driven to explore technologies that enable remote speech therapy and decrease staffing costs. In this model of budget management, adaptation happens within each department as it seeks to hold per-pupil costs steady amidst enrollment changes.

Restructure true fixed costs: unfunded liabilities. In education, costs are often assumed to be fixed that actually are not. While it is certainly easier to reduce a teaching position than to merge a school or restructure administrative operations and services, most operational and personnel costs of school districts are variable and could be structured to vary more directly with enrollment and revenues.

Yet there is a critical exception haunting many districts. Lifetime health benefits and defined-benefit pensions, sometimes guaranteed decades ago, have created ongoing costs for districts that are unconnected to revenues and enrollment and cannot be easily reduced. As of 2009, the Los Angeles Unified School District, a shrinking district, had an unfunded actuarial accrued liability of $10.3 billion for employees’ future post-employment health-care costs, more than 200 percent of the active payroll. In 2011, the district paid $240 million in health and medical benefits for retirees and their dependents. Note that this cost relates only to the number of retirees, not the number of current students or employees. Thus, as the district shrinks, the per-student cost will continue to increase.

One answer to this challenge might simply be “Too bad!” Districts entered agreements to fund these benefits and did not set any money aside—they made their own bed. This is not quite fair. Those who entered the agreements generally did so years ago, and the administrators, voters, and union leaders that allowed this are all long gone. Indeed, one wonders whether knowing that the payment on these promises was going to be someone else’s problem rendered them easier to make. Today, in any case, payments are coming due.

A possible way out of this mess is for states to execute a grand bargain. States could assume existing liabilities from school districts, effectively spreading the costs across all current providers. Simultaneously, though, states should adopt strict requirements that, from this point forward, districts (and other providers) must fully fund all employee benefits in the year that those benefits are accrued.

Limit districts’ short-term ability to make long-term commitments. States should also take additional steps to regulate the ability of districts to make financial commitments they may not be able to fulfill. Several states require districts to show that they will remain fiscally solvent for one or a few years, and some require this as part of collective bargaining agreements. While this is a step in the right direction, districts are required only to show solvency under one set of reasonable assumptions. Instead, districts should be required to consider multiple scenarios and build revenue contingencies into agreements.

Defined-benefit and pension programs could be replaced with defined-contribution programs (a change already taking place in some locales). Tenure systems might be modified to allow for more fiscal flexibility, perhaps by including provisions for declining enrollment, or limiting the portion of the staff that can be tenured. However, it is unlikely that any of this can happen without states providing political cover.

Limit state restrictions on how certain funds can be used. Some state funding policies explicitly assume certain school structures: a specific number of students are expected to be in front of teachers within schools that have principals within districts that each have a superintendent. As a result, small schools or districts cannot leverage distance learning or rethink service delivery to maximize student learning and minimize cost. The state essentially requires these smaller schools and districts to have high per-pupil cost structures.

Supporting more adaptive district budgets won’t be easy, as traditional budgeting practices are deeply rooted in district habits and in local politics. School board members facing reelection may be encouraged to make promises that wreak fiscal havoc in years to come. State legislators will be reluctant to make changes that result in fewer dollars going to their districts. But the benefits of moving to more nimble expenditure structures with multiyear budgets that plan for contingencies are real, not only in terms of long-term fiscal stability, but also in that priorities can be articulated in district spending patterns. Under these conditions, district leaders will be better able to seek out and adopt promising solutions to their cost challenges as scale changes.

Marguerite Roza is director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University and senior research affiliate at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington. Jon Fullerton is executive director of the Center for Education Policy Research at Harvard University.

Over the last few decades, criticism of teacher preparation has shifted away from a largely academic debate to the troubling performance of American students. Shocked by teacher education’s refusal to train teachers to use scientifically based reading methods, Reid Lyon, who headed a 30-year study at the National Institutes of Health of how people best learn to read, once stated, “If there was any piece of legislation that I could pass it would be to blow up colleges of education.” The suggestion was repeated in a 2009 speech by Craig Barrett, the former chair of Intel Corporation, who had been working to improve math and science education. Arne Duncan, the Obama administration’s secretary of education, having previously served as schools superintendent in Chicago, one of the nation’s most troubled school districts, gave back-to-back speeches early in his tenure decrying the state of the field: “By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges, and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom,” and “America’s university-based teacher preparation programs need revolutionary change, not evolutionary thinking.”

An occasional insider has joined the fray. Arthur Levine, former dean of what many consider to be the preeminent teacher-preparation program, Teachers College, Columbia University, has been savage in his criticism: “Teacher education is the Dodge City of the education world. Like the fabled Wild West town, it is unruly and disordered,” he wrote in 2006. He then swiftly abandoned his involvement with traditional teacher preparation altogether, starting up his own alternative pathway to teaching, the Woodrow Wilson fellowships. At the time, his remarks were viewed as mutinous by many of his colleagues, particularly his view that the primary accrediting body for teacher education, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), ought to be scrapped. Several years later, insiders conceded that Levine had been right. Accreditation is now being revamped under a new name, the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP).

The Perspective of Teacher Educators

Almost all teacher educators acknowledge that the field has deep problems, but their concern has seldom been about the issues raised by external critics such as lack of selectivity, an imbalance between content and pedagogy, or the lack of value delivered. These differences aren’t always recognized because the insider critiques often sound a lot like the external critiques. In reality, insiders are more concerned about the chaos in the field.

The core of insider complaints is not that the profession is marching in the wrong direction,  as some believe, but that too many of its foot soldiers are out of step, inadequately provisioned, and carrying the wrong weapons. This disarray is not surprising, given that the training takes place at 1,450 higher-education institutions in the United States, each of which houses anywhere from three to seven teacher-preparation programs. Fewer than half of these institutions have earned national accreditation—an anomaly not found in other professions—leaving the rest answerable to no one.

The most revealing insight into what teacher educators believe to be wrong or right about the field is a lengthy 2006 volume published by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Studying Teacher Education. It contains contributions from 15 prominent deans and education professors and was intended to provide “balanced, thorough, and unapologetically honest descriptions of the state of research on particular topics in teacher education.” It lives up to that billing. First, the volume demonstrates the paucity of credible research that would support the current practices of traditional teacher education, across all of its many functions, including foundations courses, arts and sciences courses, field experiences, and pedagogical approaches, as well as how current practice prepares candidates to teach diverse populations and special education students. More intriguing, however, is the contributors’ examination of the dramatic evolution of the mission of teacher education over the last 50 years, in ways that have certainly been poorly understood by anyone outside the profession.

Studying Teacher Education explains the disconnect between what teacher educators believe is the right way to prepare a new teacher and the unhappy K–12 schools on the receiving end of that effort. It happens that the job of teacher educators is not to train the next generation of teachers but to prepare them.

Far beyond Semantics

Though those two terms—train and prepare—appear to be interchangeable, they are not. This word choice is a deliberate one on the part of teacher education (“training” is never used) and signals a significant shift in the field over the last three or four decades. While few would disagree that new teachers generally get very little practical training before they enter the classroom, the reasons are profoundly misunderstood. It is not, as many have assumed, because of ideological resistance to various teaching methods. And it is not that teacher educators don’t understand the realities of the 21st-century classroom and need to come down from their ivory tower.

It is because training a teacher is viewed (if the AERA volume is accurate in its summation) as “an oversimplification of teaching and learning, ignoring its dynamic, social and moral aspects.” This evolution from a training purpose to a preparation purpose started in the 1970s and is described in detail by the AERA volume co-editor and Boston College education professor Marilyn Cochran-Smith, who dismisses training as a “technical transmission activity.”

In 2012, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute surveyed teacher educators, finding substantial evidence that most teacher educators do not see their role, at least not their primary role, to be a trainer of teachers. For example, just 37 percent responded that it was an “absolutely essential” feature of their job to develop “teachers who maintain discipline and order in the classroom.”

The Philosophy behind Teacher Formation

Harking back perhaps to teacher education’s 19th-century ecclesiastical origins, its mission has shifted away from the medical model of training doctors to professional formation. The function of teacher education is to launch the candidate on a lifelong path of learning, distinct from knowing, as actual knowledge is perceived as too fluid to be achievable. In the course of a teacher’s preparation, prejudices and errant assumptions must be confronted and expunged, with particular emphasis on those related to race, class, language, and culture. This improbable feat, not unlike the transformation of Pinocchio from puppet to real boy, is accomplished as candidates reveal their feelings and attitudes through abundant in-class dialogue and by keeping a journal. From these activities is born each teacher’s unique philosophy of teaching and learning.

There is also a strong social-justice component to teacher education, with teachers cast as “activists committed to diminishing the inequities of American society.” That vision of a teacher is seen by a considerable fraction of teacher educators (although not all) as more important than preparing a teacher to be an effective instructor. This view of a teacher’s role as transformational is not wrong, as teachers often serve as the means by which children overcome challenges inherent in their backgrounds. But it is one that is often taken to absurd extremes in practice. For example, a textbook used in a math course for elementary school teachers is entitled Social Justice through Mathematics, which explains why the view is so often disparaged.

Find Your Own Method

Nowhere is the chasm between the two visions of teacher education—training versus formation—clearer than in the demise of the traditional methods course. The public, and policymakers who require such courses in regulations governing teacher education, may assume that when a teacher takes a methods course, it is to learn the best methods for teaching certain subject matter. That view, we are told in the AERA volume, is for the most part an anachronism. The current view, state professors Renee T. Clift and Patricia Brady, is that “A methods course is seldom defined as a class that transmits information about methods of instruction and ends with a final exam. [They] are seen as complex sites in which instructors work simultaneously with prospective teachers on beliefs, teaching practices and creation of identities—their students’ and their own.”

The statement reveals just how far afield teacher education has traveled from its training purposes. It is hard not to suspect that the ambiguity in such language as the “creation of identities” is purposeful, because if a class fails to meet such objectives, no one would be the wiser.

The shift away from training to formation has had one immediate and indisputable outcome: the onus of a teacher’s training has shifted from the teacher educators to the teacher candidates. What remains of the teacher educator’s purpose is only to build the “capacity” of the candidate to be able to make seasoned professional judgments. Figuring out what actually to do falls entirely on the candidate.

Here is the guidance provided to student teachers at a large public university in New York:

In addition to establishing the norm for your level, you must, after determining your year-end goals, break down all that you will teach into manageable lessons. While so much of this is something you learn on the job, a great measure of it must be inside you, or you must be able to find it in a resource. This means that if you do not know the content of a grade level, or if you do not know how to prepare a lesson plan, or if you do not know how to do whatever is expected of you, it is your responsibility to find out how to do these things. Your university preparation is not intended to address every conceivable aspect of teaching.

Do not be surprised if your Cooperating Teacher is helpful but suggests you find out the “how to” on your own. Your Cooperating Teacher knows the value of owning your way into your teaching style.

As this frank (and substantively representative) example indicates, teacher candidates who are typically 21 or 22 years of age are asked to carry quite a heavy burden. The new teacher is effectively denied the wisdom, experience, and solid research that might make all the difference when confronting a classroom of students for the first time.

Nowhere is the abdication of training truer or more harmful than in the course work elementary teacher candidates take in reading instruction. It is commonly assumed that teacher educators opt not to train candidates in scientifically based reading instruction, instead “training” them in “whole language” methods. Actually, no such training occurs, as whole language methods require no training. Whole language is not an instructional method that a teacher might learn to apply, but merely a theory (flawed at that) based on the premise that learning to read is a “natural” process. It is no coincidence then that the whole-language approach tracks nicely with a philosophy of teacher education in which technical training is disparaged.

The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) has reviewed hundreds of syllabi from reading programs at more than 800 institutions across the country. What these programs most often teach is not to adopt the whole language approach but that the candidate should develop her own approach to teaching reading, based on exposure to various philosophies and approaches, none more valid than any other.

Academic Freedom’s Downside

The vilification of the training model of teacher education has been compounded by the principle of academic freedom run amok. The way that academic freedom is supposed to work is that individual professors are given license to decide what topics to teach, but not when evidentiary support for those topics is lacking.

Academic freedom only works if a field is willing to police itself on what constitutes acceptable content, which has yet to occur in the field of teacher education. Further, though case law surrounding academic freedom issues has clearly established that higher-education leadership can still require a professor to teach certain topics, overly expansive faculty contracts have led to a different outcome. Most faculty contracts contain language modeled on the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure. Contractual promises are legally binding, and AAUP’s policy on academic freedom holds that professors should have complete freedom to teach any topic, other than those that “suggest disciplinary incompetence.” Ideas are wrong only if they are rejected by an academic field, not if they lack experimental support. In other words, unless a faculty were to meet and decide what topics can or cannot be taught, individual professors are left to teach what they want.

What Should Teachers Learn?

In recent years, the primary focus of states has been, What should students learn? One result has been the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which have at this writing been adopted by 45 states and the District of Columbia. The CCSS make all the more pressing the need to train teachers to teach differently than they themselves were likely taught. Absolutely essential is the effective training of all candidates in necessary pedagogical tools and techniques before they enter the classroom:

• Early reading. We have the specific knowledge that would allow all but a small percentage of children to read. If we applied that knowledge systematically, we could reduce reading failure from some 30 percent to less than 5 percent.

• The Common Core and mathematics. As part of their own training, elementary teachers will have had to develop a fluid and conceptual understanding of numbers systems in all of their representations, something that we estimate is not currently happening in 75 percent of teacher education programs.

• The Common Core and English language arts. Teachers will have to adopt new protocols that consider a host of factors, including the careful selection of appropriately complex texts (with as much attention to nonfiction as to fiction), the delivery of a lesson, appropriate classroom activities, as well as the assignments that students are given. Ideally, new teachers should have practiced these protocols before they enter the classroom for the first time.

• Classroom management. Experience isn’t the only way to acquire classroom management skills; there are specific skills and techniques that can be taught and practiced to mastery. Behaviorists have contributed much of this research, but most of teacher education holds this body of work in disdain. The result is that teacher candidates are deprived of useful knowledge such as the clear principle that students need to hear a lot more praise than criticism if we are to maximize their engagement. Us eful guidance can also be gleaned from the practices of effective teachers, for example, the 49 techniques recently set down by Doug Lemov in Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, a book that serves as the antithesis of what most institutions espouse.

• Cognitive psychology. Understanding how individuals acquire expertise and how memory works would be tremendously helpful for new teachers, but such topics are largely absent in the current preparation model.

• Assessment. Assessment is playing an increasingly important role (in ways both good and bad), and teachers need to understand that role. NCTQ’s study of this issue found that few schools are providing the most basic instruction on assessment.

Moving the Higher Ed Mountain

The challenge then is to find ways to motivate institutions to change in the direction of effective training. This is a battle that will be fought on many fronts, but the critical change must come in the incentives that drive the market for new teachers. Applying a variety of metrics to program performance will create the information consumers need to make different decisions.

Currently, consumers of teacher education, both aspiring teachers and school districts, do not know which institutions are doing a great job and which are not. The binary and quite opaque approach of accrediting bodies, in which an institution earns a thumbs-up or -down, does not provide information that consumers can easily access or use. In any marketplace, consumers will be drawn to higher-quality products if they can determine key product features. This is true even of those aspiring teachers who are inclined to choose an institution within 50 miles of where they went to high school. One reason teachers may stay so close to home is that there is no objective measure of program quality or performance that might provide an incentive to relocate. That need not be the case. NCTQ is rating the quality of individual teacher-preparation programs using a set of measurable, objective standards that reflect what public school educators view as important attributes in new teachers.

The NCTQ Teacher Prep Review, slated for initial release in June 2013,  is rating teacher-preparation programs across the country. By examining the fundamental requirements of each program—admissions standards, course requirements, coverage of essential content, preparation in the CCSS, how the student teaching program operates, instruction in classroom management and lesson planning, and how teacher candidates are judged ready for the classroom—the Review will capture the information that any consumer of these programs would want to see, including aspiring teachers and school districts looking to hire the best teachers. The Review also looks at the degree to which programs track outcomes in an effort to improve their programs and whether there are student achievement data that reflect the average effectiveness of an institution’s graduates.

The goal for the review is to draw more “customers” toward the best teacher-prep programs and away from weaker programs, igniting reforms in the field that have long been sought but so far remain elusive. (See the NCTQ website, nctq.org, for more information.)

Engaging the consumers of teacher-preparation programs, in particular, aspiring teachers and school districts, offers certain advantages. For one, change would not depend on policymakers making the tough calls that the powerful higher-education lobby works hard to prevent. Across the country, only 8 out of 1,450 institutions were most recently identified by their states as low performing. Even these are likely to spend only a few years under the threat of probation before being returned to healthy status. It seems implausible that policymakers will take on the field’s dysfunction in the depth that is likely required.

For example, contrary to expectations that Louisiana would use the definitive data it has been collecting from its value-added examination of teacher-preparation programs for over a decade, it has yet to withhold approval from any program, believing instead that programs will choose to improve on their own without the state’s interference. It has only held one program accountable for its consistently low performance by reducing the number of new teacher candidates that the institution could admit. This is a sensible response, but one that should likely be applied to a lot more programs than simply the single worst.

Many states are moving in the same direction as Louisiana, employing value-added data, but none have yet figured out how to make their findings transparent and accessible to the public. There are also some statistical problems that will preclude all but the larger programs from ever being reliably rated. As a strategy unto itself, value added has limitations, but it could be a key component in any set of performance metrics. More promising is the possibility of tracing teacher evaluation ratings back to the institution, particularly in states that have embraced more rigorous evaluation systems.

Good Policymaking Still Has a Role

Policymakers can make a big difference to the quality of teacher preparation. Here’s how:

• Raise admissions standards. As Illinois has recently done, states should require that programs admit only students in the top half of their class.

• Make student teaching meaningful. Teacher candidates need to learn from the best. States should follow Indiana and Tennessee’s lead and require that student teachers are only placed with mentor teachers of demonstrated effectiveness.

• Use performance-based funding. Ten states make funding to public institutions of higher education contingent on meeting key outcomes. None has yet used this tool to improve teacher preparation programs; it’s time to try.

• Align teacher supply with what schools actually need. Programs routinely produce twice as many elementary teachers as will be hired. States should cap the number of licenses in areas of oversupply and lower tuition for high-need areas such as special education and STEM fields.

• Inspection.Take a page from the playbook of the United Kingdom and establish high-stakes, on-the-ground inspections of institutions. Unlike current on-site visits conducted by states and accrediting agencies, these would be much more public and would be done by trained former Pre-K–12  school leaders and teachers. Aspiring teachers in the U.K. review the results of these inspections, and policymakers actually limit slots at poor performing programs.

All of these strategies establish an important and unambiguous principle: teacher education exists to serve the needs of Pre-K–12 schools and public financial support should depend on its ability to do so.

Kate Walsh has served as president of the National Council on Teacher Quality since 2003.

At the same time, tuition continues to rise. Education schools have long been propped up by a variety of government subsidies, from federal support for tuition to state grants. Recent budget pressures have chipped away at these funds, revealing the true cost of these schools to students. From a societal perspective, such programs appear to be a questionable investment given the limited evidence that they, at least in the aggregate, are actually creating effective teachers.

Thus teacher preparation faces both cost and quality problems. Online teacher-preparation programs present an opportunity to change these dynamics. Innovative players are entering the space, including two that are profiled in this article: the Teachers College at Western Governors University and the MAT@USC at University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

A Disruptive Innovation

Two types of innovation can move industries forward. Sustaining innovations improve existing products and services, which can then be sold at higher prices to better customers. Universities, including schools of education, have followed a decidedly sustaining pathway. As they compete to be “the best,” they enhance their offerings by recruiting more highly recognized faculty, adding more courses, and expanding cocurricular options (even if these improvements do not bolster student learning). The schools have not focused on reducing the costs of their programs, which are passed through the system and ultimately increases the cost of teachers to district customers. Given that K–12 education is facing its own financial crisis and that teacher salaries have not risen along with tuition, rising costs for education degrees may make teaching a less attractive opportunity for talented individuals.

This situation has created an opportunity for a disruptive innovation, a product or service that, instead of competing head-on with existing players, serves new customers with a cheaper, simpler, or more convenient solution than current options. Eventually, the disrupter improves to the point that it can serve the upper tiers of the market with less expensive and good-enough performance, thereby transforming the industry into one that has lower costs and higher quality, and is more widely accessible.

Education schools, with their high costs and stranglehold on the teacher-preparation market, are ripe for disruption, and online learning is poised to offer the mix of cost and quality required. Although online learning is not universally better than brick-and-mortar education, it is predictably improving, not only as the Internet becomes faster and more accessible to a wider group of people, but also as software and hardware complements improve. Furthermore, because online learning does not require the student and the teacher to be in the same place at the same time, it allows higher education to happen in a much wider range of places, times, and circumstances, which increases its convenience and affordability.

With more than 30 percent of postsecondary students taking at least one online course, online learning is already permeating higher education, including teacher-preparation programs. The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) surveyed its member schools, and 73.7 percent of respondents claimed to offer distance-education courses in 2010.

Fully online initial teacher-certification programs remain relatively rare because of the challenges of incorporating a required practicum, but online master’s degreevs for those already certified to teach are increasingly common. For its annual university rankings, U.S. News & World Report identified 208 education schools that offer regionally accredited online master’s in education programs. Furthermore, online programs are gaining market share. The U.S. Department of Education reported that the four largest education schools, in terms of number of bachelor’s and postbachelor’s degrees granted in 2011, were online programs, including the University of Phoenix (5,976) and Walden University (4,878). The largest traditional education school, at Arizona State University, granted just over 2,000 education degrees, most of them through its campus-based programs.

There is a strong economic incentive driving the growth of online master’s in teaching degree programs. Most teacher contracts provide a substantial salary bump, upwards of $10,000 per year in some cases, to a teacher who earns a master’s degree, despite the fact that on average such degrees have no correlation with increased student achievement. This automatic increase in annual compensation makes the economics for additional education clear: the degree should be obtained at the lowest cost possible in order for the teacher to earn the highest return on the investment. Not only do online degrees generally charge lower tuition than traditional programs, but they also have limited opportunity costs. Students do not have to stop working while they earn their degree. Thus online programs are creating faster, less expensive ways for teachers to earn salary-boosting credentials.

University of Southern California—MAT@USC

Courses are delivered through interactive, web-based lectures. All class participants are visible to each other via individual video feeds and can signal to the professor when they want to speak.

One foray into online master’s in teaching programs is the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education partnership with online learning company 2U (formerly 2tor), the first program of its kind at a major research university. An advanced cloud-computing platform, developed and managed by 2U, delivers the courses required for a Master of Arts in Teaching, known as MAT@USC. As with USC’s traditional degree, graduates first earn a teaching credential in California, and then those interested in teaching out of state can either transfer their certification through interstate reciprocity agreements or apply directly for state credentials. At present, USC degree credentials are transferable to 43 states.

From the outset, USC and 2U invested significant time and money in designing a program that would be optimized for the online environment. Courses are delivered through interactive, web-based lectures, and classes are limited to 15 students. Similar to a webinar, students sign into a live session hosted by the professor. All class participants are visible to each other via individual video feeds and can signal to the professor when they want to speak. The professor can upload PowerPoint slides and other materials during the session. Each class is archived in a video library for later review on the student’s computer or mobile device. The program facilitates learning outside of class through online study groups and a customized social-networking platform for students and faculty.

Although all course content is delivered over the Internet, MAT@USC has an in-person practicum component. As in traditional master’s programs, teacher candidates are required to complete 20 weeks of in-classroom training. Students do not have to come to California for the practicum, however, as USC arranges partnerships with local school districts so that candidates can stay in their own communities. Student teachers have an on-site supervisor and are also armed with video cameras, which allow them to record and upload their lessons to USC faculty, peers, and others for feedback.

USC continues to operate its traditional on-campus master’s in teaching program. The online curriculum is the same as the original but optimized to fit the new delivery method. Online candidates apply through a similarly rigorous admissions process and receive an identical degree upon completion of the program. USC’s goal was not to replace its existing program, but rather to grow its overall enrollment without the constraints imposed by the brick-and-mortar model. The university’s success along this metric is clear: from 2008 to 2010, the USC program expanded from 100 to 2,200 degree candidates. The online program has not cannibalized residential program enrollment, which suggests that the online program has reached a distinct population. Indeed, participants are predictably different: online program participants are older, more likely to have full-time jobs and/or be parents, and are from geographically diverse locations, including 35 different countries, and thus unlikely to have previously enrolled in a master’s program for teaching.

Like other disruptive innovations, the major benefit of the program is greater convenience of consumption, both in terms of geography and time. Despite the university’s efforts to replicate the traditional program online, MAT@USC students do lose some of the learning benefits of an in-person, in-classroom experience. At the same time, the MAT@USC has worked to make innovative use of technology, which enhances the online program relative to its traditional counterpart.

So far, MAT@USC charges the same steep price tag as the on-campus program, about $40,000 for the 13-month degree. Because students can continue in their jobs, however, the opportunity costs are significantly lower than for an on-campus program, which makes the online model a disruptive innovation from the student’s perspective. Although the program is expensive at present, given the greater economies of scale of an online program, MAT@USC’s costs per student will fall as it expands, making it at least possible that the price tag will drop as well.

Western Governors University

Online teacher preparation takes a different form at Western Governors University (WGU), a nonprofit, fully online university founded, as the name suggests, by a consortium of governors from the western United States. WGU offers not only postbaccalaureate and master’s programs but, unlike USC, has also tackled the challenge of creating a bachelor’s degree program for aspiring teachers. WGU is home to the first fully online teacher-preparation program to receive accreditation from the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Graduates are certified first in the university’s home state of Utah but can then transfer that license to other states. All 50 states now recognize WGU credentials.

WGU is different from traditional colleges beyond its lack of a physical campus. Rather than a credit-based (e.g., time-based) system, WGU uses a competency-based model, grounded in the real-world skills and content required in the teaching profession, to measure candidates’ mastery of the content. Students pass a course as soon as they can demonstrate proficiency as measured by rigorous testing requirements delivered via an advanced assessment system. The assessment for each competency uses multiple formats, including traditional testing, portfolio assignments, and observations. As many students have significant professional experience, they can skip some course content altogether and proceed directly to the assessment. For example, a career engineer switching into teaching does not need to suffer through introductory science and math courses to become a physics teacher. Because graduation is based on competency and not on credit hours, students can spend significantly less time completing their degrees; the average WGU student receives a bachelor’s degree in two and a half years.

Teacher-preparation programs typically include subject-area content, foundations of teaching, instructional methodology, and a field or practical component. Traditional education schools provide these components in a highly integrated solution that carries high costs and little flexibility to innovate. WGU’s program is modular, so it can separate content delivery from the practicum. As with the MAT@USC, students complete their demonstration teaching near where they live. WGU has developed partnerships with hundreds of school districts that serve as training sites for student-teaching sessions and works with a network of local, clinical supervisors who observe candidates. In its 2011 report on student teaching, the National Council on Teacher Quality gave WGU a rating of “poor,” however, for not using a rigorous process to select cooperating teachers.

The capacity to modularize aspects of teacher education has broader implications. Teacher preparation is increasingly criticized for being too theoretical and failing to prepare teachers to be effective in classrooms. This has led to investment in high-priced, sustaining innovations such as teacher residency programs. These programs are demonstrating promising results but are expensive. Modular programs like WGU, however, can leverage disruptive technology to deliver parts of teacher education where performance is “good enough” (e.g., content delivery), thereby permitting greater investment where it is needed (e.g., field training/student teaching).

As a fully online school, WGU has no campus and offers a significantly different experience than a traditional undergraduate university, thus appealing to a different type of student. Like the MAT@USC, WGU targets nonconsumers, as 70 percent of its students come from traditionally underserved populations, including individuals from rural communities. The average age of students is 36, and most students work while they are taking classes, thereby saving on the substantial opportunity costs of earning a teaching degree. These students are less interested in a traditional college, on-campus experience.

Unlike USC, WGU is attractive to students because of its price tag. The school offers a flat rate of $2,890 for a six-month term during which students can take as many courses as they want. WGU is able to charge much less by maintaining a substantially lower-cost base. Because courses are delivered over the Internet, WGU reduces fixed costs by not having to own and maintain extensive real estate and facilities. WGU also has lower employee costs, as full-time faculty members serve primarily as student mentors and neither develop curriculum nor perform research (this also supports the school’s narrow value proposition of providing professional rather than academic training). Finally, WGU offers only a select number of high-demand degrees, including education, which allows it to gain the benefits of scale from the large number of students in each program. This lean cost structure was designed from the beginning to be different from that of a traditional university.

Although the current evidence is significantly limited, initial survey data from WGU suggest that the school’s performance is comparable to that of traditional education schools. WGU education program graduates have slightly higher rates of certification and employment than those attending comparison schools. Furthermore, in an initial survey of employers of WGU graduates, 100 percent of respondents believe the program prepared graduates equal to or better than other schools of education. Such unanimity raises eyebrows as to the survey’s research design, but WGU is planning further study to understand how effective its graduates are in the classroom.

Disruption in the Larger Market

At USC, students have an on-site supervisor and are armed with video cameras, which allow them to record and upload their lessons to faculty, peers, and others for feedback.

The opportunity to complete a degree while working makes both the MAT@USC and WGU programs disruptive in the eyes of their students. A teaching degree is suddenly possible for many individuals who could never fit a traditional undergraduate or graduate degree program into their lives. The two programs differ, however, in that only WGU’s teacher-preparation programs are disruptive to the market at large, threatening to upend incumbent players and transform the industry. Although incumbent firms, such as traditional universities, have a distinct advantage in delivering sustaining innovations, they struggle to manage disruptive innovations. This is because in an effective organization, the components of a business model—value proposition, resources, processes, and a profit formula—are tightly interlocking in a way that best serves existing customers. Because WGU began as a fully online university, it was able to develop a differentiated, low-cost business model and offer an accessible and affordable product to students. Conversely, USC has high overhead costs and requires large amounts of funding from multiple sources to survive. It can only support an online program whose margins are attractive relative to its existing product portfolio.

This constraint is particularly common for education schools given their “cash cow” status. As the schools and programs are entwined within a larger university system and not run as separate business units, resources flow to the areas that promote research prestige and away from the areas that do not, such as education. Accordingly, education schools are expected to generate more revenue than they require. The MAT@USC, while an innovative advancement in teacher preparation, is constrained from being fully disruptive to the broader university. It must keep its tuition high enough to remain financially attractive to the university, not to mention preserving USC’s brand with a premium product offering.

This constraint is not unique to USC. The university business model makes it nearly impossible for any existing education school to direct resources toward a smaller, lower-margin product like an online degree at the expense of the core, on-campus offerings. This does not mean that education schools are ignoring technology; they are just ignoring its disruptive potential. Many education schools will “cram” digital technology into their existing products and deploy them as sustaining innovations rather than create a product with a lower cost structure. As has been the path in other industries, true disrupters are more likely to come from outside the traditional system, where they are unconstrained by legacy business models.

Looking to the Future

Because the early stages of disruption are characterized by products that are not yet good enough, incumbents tend to sneer at innovations and dismiss them as inferior. When Netflix came to Blockbuster with a model for mailing DVDs, Blockbuster’s team famously laughed the Netflix team out of the room. The idea that customers who were used to getting a product instantly would be willing to wait days for a more limited selection was preposterous to the video rental giant. But as Netflix aggressively moved upmarket, it not only beat out Blockbuster on convenience and cost, but also on selection and video quality. Disruption allows the unimaginable to become the norm, and the customers are the winners.

Currently, many principals and district staff are skeptical of online-learning program graduates. And while early data are promising, it is too early to be certain as to the effectiveness of online teacher education in promoting student learning. With the growing awareness that traditional schools of education are failing to produce exceptional teachers, however, a national effort is under way to ensure that education schools are held accountable for the impact their graduates have on student achievement. This effort is not at odds with the potential of online learning. Online education programs will succeed if they are effective and affordable. In the years ahead, we will have the data to better understand the costs of these programs, as well as their effectiveness in training new and existing teachers.

Perhaps most encouraging, online learning in teacher preparation will make becoming a teacher possible for a broader population of candidates, which lends hope that the country’s education system can attract more talent and make the profession more competitive. The future is a teacher education industry that is both of higher quality and lower cost, welcome news for the nation’s students.

Meredith Liu is a visiting fellow at Innosight Institute.

“It was the first time I had ever received a grade lower than a B, and it was upsetting,” admits Mercado, a biochemistry and cell biology major at the University of California, San Diego. The first in her family to attend a four-year college, Mercado was a strong student dating all the way back to her days in middle school at San Diego’s KIPP Adelante Preparatory Academy. Perhaps as a result, she was “a little more cocky than I should have been” when arriving on campus for freshman year. Like many freshmen, Mercado experienced the distraction of being on her own for the first time, which took a toll on her grades. Holding down a job while taking more classes than she could handle didn’t help. “It all came crashing down on top of me,” Mercado says. Freshman year was “a big dose of reality,” she says.

Here’s another one: statistically speaking, Mercado might have been voted “Least Likely to Succeed” at birth. Low-income black and Hispanic students are by far the least likely U.S. students to graduate from high school and attend a four-year college. Those who are accepted to college are least likely to stick around and earn a degree. For each one who earns a bachelor’s degree, 11 fall short somewhere along the line, giving students like Mercado a mere 8 percent chance of graduating from college.

Mercado persists. Reenergized after a summer internship with the KIPP Foundation in Chicago, she is back on campus for the fall semester of 2012. She credits the habits of mind and encouragement she received in middle school, and the contacts she maintains five years later with KIPP teachers and administrators, for propelling her forward. “This year I’m coming in with a clear head. I’m more focused on my classes and what I want to accomplish. I’m going to do better,” she says. Her delivery communicates not hope or aspiration but conviction. “Nothing is going to keep me from graduating,” she insists, adding for emphasis, “nothing.”

Mercado’s story—both her struggle and her determination— will be repeated over the next several years on college campuses across the U.S. At one level, she’s just one more kid trying to pass biology, graduate, and make something of herself. But as the product of a KIPP school, Mercado is at the vanguard of a rapidly growing class of students whose success or failure could make or break the reputation of a closely watched group of charter schools and the sometimes-controversial, muscular brand of education they have pioneered. In 2015, more than 10,000 students from KIPP and other major charter-school highfliers will be on college campuses across the United States.

The Coming KIPP Bubble

You can’t play the ingenue forever.

For much of its brief history, there has been something of a halo over the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). Founded in Houston in 1994 by Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, a pair of Teach For America corps members, KIPP now has more than 100 schools in 20 states and Washington, D.C. It is the largest and best known of a class of charter-management organizations (CMOs) that includes Achievement First, YES Prep, Uncommon Schools, Mastery, Aspire, and others. This group shares a set of familiar characteristics: more and longer school days, with a college preparatory curriculum for all students; strict behavioral and disciplinary codes; and a strong focus on building a common, high-intensity school culture. Classrooms and halls are awash in motivational quotations and college banners, typically from the alma maters of the inevitably young, hard-charging teachers who staff the schools. The signature feature is high behavioral and academic expectations for all students, the vast majority of whom are low-income, urban black and Hispanic kids. It’s this last feature that led KIPP and the others to be branded “No Excuses” schools, a label not universally embraced within the category.

The reputation of the No Excuses model is complicated and often divisive among professional educators. Outside the education bubble in the broader public mind, however, these high-flying charters are much-adored, attractive young upstarts, and the antidote to the dark, dispiriting “dropout factories” of media caricature. For years, a central motif of the feel-good narrative surrounding No Excuses charter schools has been their college acceptance rates. Houston-based YES Prep, for example, has made much of the fact that 100 percent of their graduating seniors have been accepted to college; more than 90 percent are the first in their family to attend a four-year college. The original cohort of KIPP students attended college at more than double the rate of their demographic peers: bracing, affirming, “It’s Being Done” data points to warm the gap-closing hearts of ed reform hawks.

The April 2011 release of KIPP’s College Completion Report changed the No Excuses narrative almost instantly from “college acceptance” to “college completion.” A bold and laudable exercise in transparency, the report gave ammunition to KIPP’s boosters and critics alike. Thirty-three percent of the earliest cohorts of KIPP middle-school students were found to have graduated college within six years, four times the average rate of students from underserved communities and slightly higher than the figure (31 percent) for all U.S. students. It was a clear and unambiguous accomplishment. Yet two out of three former KIPP students were failing to reach the bar, however audacious, that KIPP itself had established as “the essential stepping stone to rewarding work, a steady income, self-sufficiency and success.” The affirming image of smiling, cap-and-gown–bedecked ghetto kids graduating high school and heading off to college and bright horizons beyond lost a bit of its luster.

KIPP has held fast to the idea that college is indispensable. The goal remains to see 75 percent of graduates earn a four-year college degree, comparable to the rate at which top-income-quartile students graduate. The bar has been set not by its critics but by KIPP itself: if KIPP and other No Excuses schools are to fulfill their promise as game changers in American education, and rewrite the script on reaching and teaching underserved kids, their graduates must not merely be accepted to college; they must demonstrate success once they get there.

KIPP has identified a number of factors it believes are critical to raising its students’ college-completion rates, including enhanced academic preparedness; a set of “character strengths,” like “grit,” self-control, and optimism; matching each student with the right college; social and academic integration once they arrive on campus; and college affordability. The organization is making an increasingly aggressive effort to exercise some measure of control over each of these factors through partnerships with at least 20 colleges nationwide designed to create a pipeline to four-year colleges able to offer the greatest possible commitment and support to KIPP alumni.

While there is broad general agreement on what makes “first-generation” college-goers stay in school and take a degree, less clear is what it takes to create those characteristics and conditions in the first place, and how much accountability for college completion should be attributed to a student’s K–12 education, his or her college, and the students themselves. KIPP’s rapidly growing “KIPP Through College” program offers support programs and services stretching from middle school through college and beyond, including high school and college placement, financial literacy, mentorships, college and career advisement, and one-to-one support from some of the 100 full-time KIPP staff doing college counseling and support work throughout its network.

KIPP’s recipe for getting students “to and through college” is about to be put to the test, if not quite at scale then in unprecedented numbers. In the 2012–13 school year, just over 1,000 former KIPP students are in college. Three years from now that figure will explode, with 10,000 KIPP alumni on America’s campuses. KIPP chief executive officer Richard Barth takes care to manage expectations for how this “KIPP bubble” cohort will perform. The 75 percent figure is a “long-term play” and does not apply yet. Fifty percent is “an aspiration.” Regardless, by staking their reputations on college completion, KIPP and other No Excuses schools are rapidly approaching something of a “put up or shut up” moment. The attempt to write the playbook on what it takes to get first-generation low-income black and Hispanic kids into the world with college degrees in hand will offer something of a referendum on KIPP and the No Excuses model.

“All Hands on Deck”

To see KIPP’s effort to steer its alumni to “right match” colleges, visit Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Marshall College (F&M). A private liberal arts college with 2,200 undergraduate students, F&M was the first college to enter into a formal partnership with KIPP aimed at improving college persistence and graduation rates of KIPP alumni. In 2011, the school launched “F&M College Prep” and welcomed 23 KIPP students to the precollege summer-immersion program. The following year, the program tripled in size, adding students from Uncommon Schools, Mastery Charter Schools, Achievement First, and others. The three-week program is intended to give rising seniors from these schools their first taste of college life. Students take two classes a day taught by F&M professors, and attend workshops on college admissions, financial aid, and other topics—all intended to demystify college life.

The students from KIPP and the other schools “leave F&M and go into their senior year thinking, ‘I can go to college. It’s gonna be tough, but it’ll be fine. I know what my resources are. I know how to talk to professors and upperclassmen. I know how to navigate the system,’” says Shawn Jenkins, who runs F&M College Prep as special assistant to the dean of the college for strategic projects.

F&M’s approach to retaining and graduating minority students is modeled directly on the work of the Posse Foundation, a New York City–based nonprofit that sends group of students, a posse, to college together to act as a support system for one another. According to the Education Trust, F&M graduates more than 87 percent of its students within six years, but only 70 percent of its black and Hispanic undergraduates. F&M staff had long observed that students who came to the Lancaster campus through Posse tended to graduate at a much higher rate than other minority students. Jenkins states the challenge succinctly: “How do we create a support structure that can mimic the same outcomes for KIPP students, for Mastery students, for Cristo Rey students?”

Once admitted to F&M, students from KIPP and other “first gens” are placed into a newly created mentoring program, based on the Posse approach. Students meet in groups of 8 to 10 with a campus-based mentor one to two hours each week. The mentor, who is the students’ academic advisor, also meets one-on-one with each student at least every other week.

It is not an easy or natural transition to college for the students urban charters serve. Feeling comfortable enough to go to professors’ office hours and not feeling out of place among other students are challenges to be overcome. “If students become academically integrated and socially integrated, their probabilities of being retained and graduated go up enormously,” observes Kent Trachte, dean of the college.

Jenkins, himself an F&M alum (Class of 2010) and former Posse Scholar, describes the college’s approach as “all hands on deck.” But when it works, it is nearly invisible to the students. Indeed, Jenkins only recently came to see and appreciate “the intentionality” that made possible his own journey from a Harlem public school to a top liberal arts college and a career as a young college administrator. “I had no idea. I didn’t know that when the doors were closed, people were sitting around talking about strategies to engage me to do better. That’s what we’re doing. There are certain students who need a little more attention,” he says.

KIPP’s partnership with Franklin & Marshall has clear benefits to all parties. A high percentage of F&M College Prep participants apply to the school, thus creating a pipeline of highly qualified, diverse students. KIPP sends its graduates to the kind of small private college that is statistically most likely to be successful with first-generation students. The students themselves get a “high-touch” approach from professors and advisors, keeping them in place and on track. F&M president Dan Porterfield knows them by name.

The 20 partnerships KIPP has entered into with colleges, including the University of Houston, Tulane, Morehouse, Spelman, Syracuse, Duke, and New York City’s Hunter College, will improve KIPP’s graduation rates by 7 to 8 percent “even if we did nothing else,” says Barth. In a parallel effort, F&M convened a group of a dozen liberal arts colleges and CMOs that will form “the nucleus for a larger effort to connect some of the leading high performing charters to some of the leading liberal arts colleges,” promises Trachte. Founding members of the coalition include Dickinson, Gettysburg, Bard, and Trinity.

No Excuses 2.0

No Excuses schools as a class have advanced our understanding of what it takes to get kids to college. The unresolved question is whether the students have what it takes to thrive once they get there. That question has some within charter networks openly questioning elements of the No Excuses orthodoxy.

At KIPP, at least part of the answer is more KIPP. “We’ve made a commitment to start earlier with our kids and stay longer,” says Barth. As KIPP has expanded from 2 schools to more than 100, it has broadened its focus to include elementary and high schools. “Fifth to eighth grade, it’s amazing what we’ve done,” he says, “but we see the impact of being able to have them starting in kindergarten.”

As of 2011, KIPP students’ average SAT score was 1426; the average ACT score was 20. For the colleges KIPP is targeting for its alumni, “a 20 ACT ain’t gonna cut it,” Barth candidly admits. Increasing a student’s odds of admission inevitably leads to a hard look at “backward mapping” curriculum and formative experiences from the earliest moment. “This is high stakes,” says Barth. “As a 2nd-grade teacher, you are making this happen. What happens in your year ties to where they’re going to be [in college]…everyone owns this chain. Everyone has a link.”

Within the No Excuses world, a strong case can be made that YES Prep graduates are as academically ready for college as anybody. In 2011, the average SAT combined score for YES Prep African American students in reading, writing, and mathematics was 1556, far above the national average of 1273 for African Americans, and significantly higher than the 1500 national average for all students. Every student is required to take and pass at least one AP class in high school; most take two or more. Less than 5 percent of YES Prep grads require remediation in college. Getting admitted to a four-year college is a graduation requirement at YES Prep, which, like KIPP, has been admirably transparent about its college-completion rate, currently at 41 percent within six years.

“It wasn’t the academic piece that was holding our kids back,” notes senior director of college initiatives at YES Prep Donald Kamentz. “What we found hands down was it was the noncognitive piece—that tenacity, that grit—that allowed kids to harness those skills and persist when they faced difficulty.” Kamentz and Laura Keane of Mastery Charter Schools have been at the center of an effort, along with Angela Duckworth of the University of Pennsylvania, to design and test interventions aimed at enhancing student perseverance and improving college enrollment and graduation outcomes. Kamentz cites the work of Stanford University’s Carol Dweck as a key: students must be able to develop a “growth mindset” that creates motivation and productivity rather than seeing intelligence as fixed and immutable. “If they can work through that, their persistence through and graduation from college is off the charts,” he observes.

This is not an entirely new development at No Excuses schools. Nearly fetishized, “grit” is as much a part of the culture of KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools, and the rest as the college banners and teachers reminding students to “correct your SLANT” (Sit up straight, Listen, Ask and answer questions, Nod if you understand, and Track the teacher). The idea that character traits like perseverance, zest, and optimism have more to do with long-term success than even academics gained mainstream traction with the recent publication of Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed. Within No Excuses schools, some are starting to question some of their fundamental assumptions about what makes kids successful. When asked, Barth does not disagree with the observation that KIPP is “doubling down on grit.”

“What we’ve found with the ‘whatever it takes’ or ‘no excuses’ mentality is that it was very teacher-driven and less student-driven,” says Kametz, acknowledging this is a controversial line of thought in his own halls. A typical No Excuses approach might involve giving demerits or detention for missed assignments or turning in work that’s not “neat and complete.” Kamentz questions whether this tough-love approach helps create the self-advocacy in students they will need to be successful in college. “It’s the largest gaping hole with our kids in college,” he says. “They will constantly say, ‘You structured my life so much that I had to do very little thinking and structuring myself.’”

“Academic preparation is absolutely foundational,” says Jeremy Chiappetta, executive director of Blackstone Valley Prep in Cumberland, Rhode Island. “But what education looks like, to be truly prepared for college, probably is not the routinized learning that makes many of these schools, including us, really successful on standardized tests. I don’t think that’s the academic rigor that any of us want for college prep. I think it’s much deeper, much bigger,” he says.

Kamentz concedes that much more is known about what successful college students should look like than how to create them. “It’s the inevitable practitioner question,” he says. “I know all this stuff. Now what do I do?” Michael Goldstein, founder of Boston’s Match School agrees. “We don’t really know of many interventions that change grit significantly. It may be harder to change grit than other things like knowledge,” he observes.

In Loco Helicopter Parentis

Not every college is prepared, interested, or has the resources to go the extra mile for low-income kids of color. The idea that once you arrive at college that you’re here and should make your own way and figure it out “is still the dominant culture,” says Barth, who compares colleges to joining a gym: “You get the money, and if the kids leave, they don’t take the money with them.” At present, he believes, the U.S. higher-education system simply isn’t designed for the kinds of students KIPP and other No Excuses charters serve.

There is also at least a bit of cognitive dissonance that must be acknowledged: if KIPP and others are successful in turning out academically prepared, resilient, and optimistic graduates, shouldn’t they need less support, not more, on college campuses? If students need an army of college advisors and KIPP staff to act in loco helicopter parentis, just how gritty can they be?

Barth sees no disconnect. If KIPP kids get “X” support on their journeys to and through college, he says, “middle-class kids get 50X,” much of it simply baked into their lives in the form of educated parents who are not intimidated by college and financial aid applications. College tours, SAT test-prep help, and tutors? Been there, done that. There are siblings, relatives, and even consultants to advise kids on where to apply and what classes to take. The safety net is deep and broad. Perhaps most importantly, there is a baseline expectation among the children of the well-off and well-educated: they grew up simply assuming they would go to college. Middle-class kids, says Barth, get all this “without consciousness of it. It just gets done.”

Back at UC San Diego, Rebecca Mercado acknowledges she was embarrassed to tell anyone she was struggling in school. “I felt that my teachers and even people from KIPP might be disappointed that I had allowed my grades to slip as much as they had.” So just how hard has college been? After some mild prodding, Mercado sheepishly confesses her freshman-year GPA: 2.4. But this year it will be a 3.5 she insists. It’s hard not to be convinced by the self-assured, confident-sounding college sophomore. Her commitment is admirable, earnest, and understandable. Gritty.

And if she struggles, there are any number of people who will be there to lend an ear, give advice, or point to resources. And why not? A lot of people, many of whom she’s never met, have as much riding on Mercado’s success as she does.

Maybe even more.

Robert Pondiscio is a former South Bronx 5th-grade teacher and executive director of CitizenshipFirst.

Instead, he became a substitute teacher.

In the college town where he was living, an astonishing 47 percent of the school district’s 721 teachers were absent more than 10 days during the school year, according to data the district reported to the U.S. Department of Education for a 2009–10 study. That number rose to 61 percent in an elementary school with one of the district’s highest percentages of black, Hispanic, and low-income children.

Even at that, the district’s absences don’t appear to be record setting. U.S. teachers take off an average of 9.4 days (roughly 1 day per month) each during a typical 180-day school year. By that estimate, the average child has substitute teachers for more than six months of his school career.

Those absences provided full-time employment for my son. With a month-old bachelor’s degree, he taught history and Spanish, his majors; calculus and literature; 2nd and 4th grades (after his second day on the job, the district asked him to take the 2nd-grade class for the rest of the year); tennis (no, he doesn’t play); and gym to a class of severely disabled high schoolers. Once, he worked as a secretary at the alternative school; none of the four teachers assigned to the school showed up that day.

The district didn’t pay much: $60 a day. But it also didn’t ask much in the way of credentials: no teaching certification, teacher education classes, or training beyond a three-hour orientation that focused mainly on administrative details like time sheets. That isn’t unusual either: in some of the country’s larger school districts—including Maryland’s Baltimore County, Florida’s Hillsborough County, Georgia’s Cobb County, and Colorado’s Jefferson County—substitutes need only a high-school GED.

My son taught a high-school unit on World War II, his intellectual passion. But most often, teachers left behind worksheets, quizzes, and videos for him to monitor, amounting to what University of Washington professor Marguerite Roza calls “a lost day for most kids, regardless of the qualifications of the sub.” Indeed, many schools are looking for someone just to keep order rather than to teach differential equations.

“A lot of times, principals are just praying for basic safety,” said Raegen T. Miller, who has studied teacher absenteeism as associate director of education research at the Center for American Progress and as part of a Harvard University team.

No problem there: my son is, after all, a Marine.

Counting the Days

The education department reported after the 2003–04 school year that 5.3 percent of U.S. teachers are absent on any given day, and that’s still the number most researchers use. But districts account for absences differently: some would count the tennis coach absent if he left his gym classes in the hands of a sub to attend an out-of-town tournament with his team; others wouldn’t. Some count professional development days when subs are hired to take the class; others don’t.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employs a weekly absence measure and reports that in 2011, nationwide, 3 percent of the workforce worked less than a 35-hour workweek because of absences. Among public-sector workers, rates were 3.9 for federal workers, 4.2 for state, and 3.6 for employees of local governments.

Geoffrey Smith, who studies substitute-teacher management and founded the Substitute Teaching Institute at Utah State University, says, “A lot doesn’t get called in.” Each of Utah’s 42 school districts counts teacher absences differently, he told me, which means there’s little consistency in the data. Still, he said his surveys suggest that between 8 and 10 percent of teachers are absent on any given day, and there’s some anecdotal evidence on his side.

Last summer, for example, the Camden, New Jersey, school board outsourced its substitute hiring to a private vendor because the job was so onerous: between teachers calling in sick or on leave, the district needed to find subs for up to 40 percent of its teachers each day, it told the local newspaper. In a 2011 report for the Providence, Rhode Island, school board, researchers at Brown University’s Urban Education and Policy program found that the district’s 1,321 teachers took off an average of 21 days each per school year.

In the education department’s 2009–10 report—assembled by its Office for Civil Rights from surveys of 57,000 schools—on average, half the teachers in the 208 Rhode Island schools surveyed were absent more than 10 days during the year, surpassing teacher absences in Hawaii, Arkansas, Oregon, and New Mexico by only a whisker. Nationally, 36 percent of teachers were absent that often. And even in Utah, which reported the lowest absence rates to the department, 20 percent of teachers took off more than 10 days each school year.

Who are those teachers? Harvard researchers Raegen Miller, Richard Murnane, and John Willett studied a district they identified only as large, urban, and northern. Duke University researchers Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and Jacob Vigdor analyzed data from North Carolina schools. Both studies concluded that teachers in bigger schools were absent more often than those in smaller schools. Elementary-school teachers took off more time than did those in high school. Tenured teachers took off 3.7 more days than did those without tenure.

Teachers in traditional districts seem to take off more than those in charters. Using the education department’s Office for Civil Rights data, Miller estimates that about 37 percent of teachers are absent more than 10 days at district elementary and middle schools compared to 22 percent at charters.

Female teachers under age 35 averaged 3.2 more absences each school year than did men. Teachers who had a master’s degree or graduated from a competitive college took less time than those who didn’t. And teachers in low-income schools were absent more often than those serving higher-income families. One in 4 middle schools in the Duke study were among those with the highest absence rates, but that dropped to 1 in 12 among middle schools serving the district’s most affluent students.

Teachers argue that they’re absent as often as they are because they’re subject to all kinds of infections from sniffly-nosed youngsters and to intense stress in tough schools. Teaching—and particularly elementary-school teaching—is still a majority-female occupation, and child care still falls overwhelmingly on mothers, they add. When a teacher’s child is out with the flu, she may have little choice but to stay home, too.

But other research contends that teachers’ frequent absences are driven by generous leave provisions in their contracts, which typically include time off for illness and personal choice and, in many cases, family deaths, voting, religious observation, union business, conferences, cancer screening, even driver’s license renewal. The National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), which maintains a database on collective-bargaining agreements in 113 large school districts, reports that the contracts give their teachers, on average, 13.5 days of sick and personal leave per school year.

In Columbus, Ohio, the contract allows teachers 20 paid days off, in addition to school holidays and summer breaks. Teachers have 21 days in Boston, 25 days in Hartford, and up to 28 days in Newark, according to NCTQ. By contrast, only 73 percent of private-sector employers provide any sick leave in addition to paid vacation, according to the U.S. Labor Department, and they offer an average of eight sick-leave days during a 12-month work year. In New York City, even substitutes qualify for sick days, one per month.

Teachers certainly are exposed to all manner of classroom germs, but there’s also evidence that a lot of absences are discretionary. The Harvard study found that the highest percentage of absences at that northern, urban district were on Fridays, when 6.6 percent of teachers took off, providing themselves a three-day weekend. Only 4.9 percent took off Tuesdays. More than half the absences that the study examined were for “personal illness,” and more than half of those were for only a day or two. Perhaps coincidentally, the district required a doctor’s excuse for an absence of three days or more.

Substitutes typically earn less than $100 a day. But even at that, Raegen Miller puts the cost of substitute teachers at $4 billion a year, or about 1 percent of total K–12 spending. In Fairfax County, Virginia, whose 13,000 teachers are offered 11 days off a year, the district budgeted $19 million for substitutes in 2012. Cleveland, Ohio, whose teachers may take 18 days off, is budgeting $10.8 million for substitutes this year.

University of Washington’s Marguerite Roza calculated what districts would save yearly on substitute pay if teachers took leave at the same rate as other professionals, that is, 3 days during a comparable 180-day year. Her conclusion: $43 per pupil in savings, or about one-half percent of school budgets.

Cost to Learning

The costs are far more than just financial, of course. The Duke researchers found that being taught by a sub for 10 days a year has a larger effect on a child’s math score than if he’d changed schools, and about half the size of the effect of poverty. Columbia researchers Mariesa Herrmann and Jonah Rockoff concluded that the effect on learning of using a substitute for even a day is greater than the effect of replacing an average teacher with a terrible one, that is, a teacher in the 10th percentile for math instruction and the 20th percentile in English instruction.

There’s no research on how long that effect lasts. But because learning is cumulative, “you would expect that the effect would aggregate to a larger loss of achievement over an entire school career,” Mariesa Herrmann told me. In other words, “A teacher not in a classroom is a missed opportunity for learning,” says Kate Walsh, president of NCTQ.

Some of that learning loss comes from disruption to the classroom: subs don’t know the kids, the classroom routine, the school culture. They have no skin in the game, nothing to win or lose if no one learns Chaucer. Classroom management breaks down. Miller told me that even janitors know when there’s been a sub: “There’s more crap on the floor.”

Teachers often leave busywork behind, or no work at all. In math, particularly—where the roiling debate over how to teach basic computation continues—subs often are cautioned not to teach anything at all for fear of setting the class back. Given testing pressures and school-wide lesson planning, there’s little time to reteach a lesson.

Then, too, districts set fairly low standards for their subs, although the weak economy and teacher layoffs seem to be bringing more certified teachers into the sub pool. Of the 113 large districts in the NCTQ’s database, less than one-quarter require that subs hold any teaching credentials. Only 37 districts require a college degree; 1 in 11 asks for only a high-school diploma or GED.

Out of curiosity, I perused the Denver Public Schools “Substitute Teacher Handbook.” It told me subs can’t wear bedroom slippers to work, that they’re paid $90.40 a day, and that they can ask for, but shouldn’t expect, an evaluation. It didn’t say anything about their qualifications to teach.

Carrots and Sticks

With school budgets strained and learning loss evident, I wondered why districts didn’t try to claw back some of the days they’ve granted their teachers for illness and personal leave. Miller has calculated the learning loss attributable to teacher absences to be equal to about 5 percent of the achievement gap between black and white students. “If you had an intervention that would close the gap that much, it would be worth doing, wouldn’t it?” he asked.

The problem, NCTQ’s Kate Walsh told me, is that teacher quality has been ignored as a reform issue until fairly recently. Now that the focus has shifted, superintendents have so many bigger issues to confront—teacher-evaluation systems, tenure, differential pay—that “you can understand why they don’t go after this benefit,” she said.

“This is small change” to most districts, Miller added—they’re facing budget gaps way larger than that. And the issue touches such a nerve with teacher groups that “there’s profound reluctance to get into it at the bargaining table,” he said. “It’s an entitlement.”

“You should have seen the hate mail I got” after publishing a recent report on teacher absences, Roza told me.

Instead, districts have been turning to incentives to keep teachers at their desks. Almost all districts allow teachers to accumulate unused sick and personal days, and to cash them out when they retire or leave the district. The Detroit schools paid out $12.5 million for unused sick days in 2010–11, which was twice what it spent on subs. New York City employs hundreds of full-time subs who report daily to a “home” school and fill in where they’re needed. They provide some continuity for the school and soak up teachers who have been laid off by budget cuts or enrollment declines. Even so, says Columbia’s Herrmann, these “absent teacher reserves” account for only 10 to 15 percent of the teachers that New York needs every day.

But some districts, facing such huge eventual payouts, have begun capping the number of sick days teachers can accumulate, posing a use-’em-or-lose-’em dilemma for teachers. And for younger teachers, “in deciding whether to be absent, are you really thinking of your retirement?” Columbia’s Herrmann asked.

Researchers have proposed that districts pay teachers a bonus for the days they don’t take off, or give their schools the money that would have been spent on subs as a collective incentive, or set up a reward system for teachers with good attendance (the Columbia study found that only 3 percent of teachers had perfect attendance). The Duke researchers proposed increasing teacher salaries by $400 a year and then charging teachers $50 for each day they take off. They estimated that the scheme would reduce absences by about one day per teacher and largely pay for itself. (Among the arguments raised against the proposal: it would hit female teachers with children harder than it would hit men.)

Many private schools and some charters simply don’t hire subs. Colleagues fill in for absent teachers during their own nonteaching hours. That keeps the class on pace when, say, one 4th-grade social-studies teacher can fill in for another, especially since they’re likely to have drafted the lesson plan together. It also means that one teacher is imposing on another, which creates some accountability, or at least discomfort for the teacher calling in repeated excuses.

But union contracts often limit how many hours a public-school teacher must be in the classroom: that’s why a school may hire a substitute librarian rather than send everyone back to their homerooms when the full-time librarian is out. And some contracts require districts to pay their teachers to sub, usually at rates higher than they would pay a substitute. The Wichita district pays its own teachers $20 an hour; a full-day sub earns $99.

Research also shows that absences increase where districts install automated absence-management systems instead of leaving the job to school secretaries. Teachers log onto the system’s website to report they will be absent. Subs log onto the same site to choose the class they’ll teach.

But districts are adopting the systems anyway, as school support staffs are slashed and technology becomes cheaper. Among the largest of the systems, privately owned Aesop is in 3,000 districts. Aesop claims on its website that it saves districts money: its “fill rate”—that is, the number of classrooms it fills with a sub—is so high that schools don’t need to use more costly downtime teachers. The company adds that its data reports enable principals to track who’s frequently absent and “to work with teachers” who are.

But the automated systems mean that teachers no longer have to talk to the principal, and perhaps explain that they’re taking a day off for a wedding-gown fitting or an auto tune-up. The automated systems also give schools less control over who will fill their classrooms: schools still can call favorite subs, but when those aren’t available, an opening is listed on the website and anyone on an approved list, including the GED holder, can claim chemistry class.

Researchers have found that teachers are absent more often when their fellow teachers are, too. That can suggest there’s an “absence culture” in the school, as in “heck, everyone else is doing it.” It also suggests a struggling school, where teacher absences and student absences feed off one another until neither group shows up. Or it may suggest weak management and unhappy workers. “If you’ve worked in an effective organization, people show up. If you’ve worked in a dysfunctional organization, they take off,” NCTQ’s Walsh observed.

I wondered about that when I looked at the education department’s 2009 report on absenteeism and paged to high-performing Montgomery County, Maryland. The district reported that only 6.8 percent of teachers were absent 10 or more days per year at one school with a high percentage of black, Hispanic, and low-income children. But at two other schools with similar demographics, 42 percent and 19.6 percent of teachers took off that much time.

I asked the district about that. Then I asked again. As in every district I asked about teacher absenteeism, no one answered.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a regular contributor to Education Next. Her son has resumed active duty with the U.S. Marine Corps.

Around the same time, Boston teachers packed into their union hall to vote on a procedural change that would allow them to cast ballots by mail in biennial elections of officers. At the time, the Boston Teachers Union required its members to show up in person on a school day to vote at the South Boston union hall, which had the effect of ensuring a low turnout. Only 13 percent of the union’s members, including retirees, had voted in the previous election. The proposal to change that practice fell five votes short of the two-thirds majority it needed to pass. “Teachers’ voices matter,” a Boston teacher who supported the change wrote on his blog. “We can, and must, do better in our own union to make our professional organization accessible to, and responsive to, ALL of us.”

That same month, Orchard Gardens, a historically low-performing K–8 school in Roxbury, Massachusetts, wrapped up its second year operating with a Teacher Turnaround Team. The team is made up of top teachers recruited with a promise that they could lead the school’s improvement effort while earning a $6,000-per-year stipend. “As long as we get the ends, we have a lot of flexibility to decide on the means,” said Lynni Nordheim, 30, a 4th-grade teacher who came to the school after teaching six years in Las Vegas. T3, as the turnaround strategy is known, was developed by teachers Boston-based Teach Plus selected for its first 18-month education-policy fellowship in 2007. Teach Plus continues to recruit, develop, and support teacher leaders through partnerships with 13 schools in three districts, including Boston (see sidebar).

Teachers who join E4E are expected to support value-added test-score data in evaluations, higher hurdles to achieving tenure, the elimination of seniority- driven layoffs, school choice, and merit pay.

Each of these anecdotes represents a facet of a small but rapidly growing national movement to give classroom teachers opportunities to make a mark on their profession and on public education. Several new groups work to amplify the voices of top classroom teachers as they weigh in on controversial policy issues, as with the evaluations in Los Angeles. The Hope Street Group National Teacher Fellows, the New Millennium Initiative, and the Viva Project, a digital platform for crowdsourcing teachers’ ideas, all fall into this category.

The aim of another set of programs is to keep successful teachers in the profession by giving them opportunities to assume leadership roles, as with Teach Plus and its T3 project. A fellowship program launched in 2008 by Leading Educators, which began in New Orleans and is now operating in Kansas City and will soon  expand into Detroit and the District of Columbia, for example, provides a select group of teachers with training in education issues, management, leadership, and problem solving.

A third front in the so-called “teacher voice” movement pushes local unions to become more democratic. The move in Boston to change the voting rules began with a small group of union members, and in less than a month more than 1,200 teachers had signed a petition in support of the change. The issue was brought up for another vote last September, and it passed. Another such effort, NewTLA in Los Angeles, operates as a caucus within the union there.

Regardless of the approach, all of the groups unabashedly acknowledge that some teachers are more effective than others and that even the best teachers want to keep improving their practice. Rather than seeing themselves as adversaries to either unions or school districts, teachers who get involved in these groups tend to think of themselves as problem solvers. As a result, many district, state, and national education policymakers view them as more authentic classroom voices than union activists.

Union Limits

“We as teachers have this wealth of knowledge and expertise that oftentimes goes unrecognized in our profession,” said Geneviève DeBose, a 5th-grade teacher at the Bronx Charter School for the Arts. Last year, DeBose took a leave from her classroom to serve as a Teacher Ambassador fellow in the U.S. Department of Education, which is also working to amplify the voices of teachers. She and 15 others chosen for the honor organized more than 200 roundtable discussions attended by more than 3,000 teachers across the country, seeking their views on an Obama administration proposal to change how teachers are recruited, prepared, licensed, supported, promoted, and compensated. The conversations gave “teachers the opportunity to put their stamp on something before it becomes policy, which is usually not the case,” DeBose said. Last September, DeBose, a board-certified teacher, decided to continue her national leadership work by joining the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards as director of Educator Engagement.

In his 1975 book Schoolteacher, sociologist Dan Lortie explained that teachers have had little say over policy because, as a group, they do not believe they possess specialized technical knowledge out of the reach of nonexperts. Instead, they tend to think of what they do as a matter of personal style and preference. That makes teachers “less ready to assert their authority on educational matters and less able to respond to demands from society,” he wrote. Given teachers’ lack of confidence in their expertise outside the classroom, many legislators, school boards, and administrators “do not believe they require teacher participation” in important decisions.

The unions representing teachers emerged in the 1960s to make sure the interests of teachers were protected in those decisions, using such tactics as collective bargaining, legislative lobbying, and support of candidates friendly to their cause. Modeling themselves on industrial unions, they fought successfully for better and more equitable salaries, job security, and improved working conditions, such as limits on class size.

The unions did not, however, seek to gain influence over teaching itself. In part, that was because of the individualistic perspective on what it means to be a good teacher noted by Lortie. A bigger reason was that union leaders (an exception was, in his later years, Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers) believed that supervision and quality control was a management responsibility. The union’s role was to enforce fairness, through rigid salary schedules, a fetish-like attachment to seniority policies, and aggressive enforcement of due process rules.

That has left unions ill-prepared to respond to current demands on teachers and schools to boost test scores, increase graduation rates, and better prepare students for success in college or on the job. They’ve been unable to block the rapid spread of policies that seek to link tenure decisions, the order of layoffs, job security, and even compensation to performance. And, in a dozen states, including Wisconsin, Ohio, and Idaho, the unions have found themselves fighting just to maintain collective bargaining rights. Meanwhile, union membership is falling.

Both Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), and Dennis Van Roekel, president of the larger National Education Association (NEA), recognize the threat. In his keynote speech to NEA’s Representative Assembly in July 2012, Van Roekel said teaching is “OUR work…OUR profession.” But, he said, “that sure doesn’t stop everyone from having an opinion on how to do our work, does it?” Van Roekel said that “teachers are willing to take responsibility for student success—and they want and deserve a voice in how they’re trained, supported, and evaluated.”

The aim of Teach Plus and its T3 program is to keep successful teachers in the profession by giving them opportunities to assume leadership roles.

In 2010, Van Roekel appointed a commission to make recommendations on the role the NEA should play in improving teacher effectiveness. Led by Maddie Fennell, Nebraska’s 2007 State Teacher of the Year, the commission issued a report in 2011 that sketched out a vision of the profession in which teachers have a say in decisions about hiring, evaluating, promoting, and dismissing their fellow teachers. Fennell said the union “has to grapple with the fact that not all teachers are equally effective and some are not cut out to be teachers.” But, she said, even that obvious truth is controversial among union stalwarts. According to Fennell, the recommendations were embraced by NEA leadership but have met resistance from middle managers within the union.

Since then, Fennell has worked to increase the influence over education policies of the National Network of State Teachers of the Year, whose membership comprises current and former honorees.

A national survey conducted in the fall of 2011 for the Washington-based think tank Education Sector found that more than 40 percent of teachers want their unions to focus more on teacher performance and student achievement than they currently do. The same survey found that less than half of teachers consider unions to be absolutely essential. Another survey, conducted by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance on behalf of Education Next, found that only 43 percent of teachers have a positive view of unions, while the percentage of teachers holding negative views doubled from 2011 to 2012 to 32 percent (see complete results for 2011 and 2012 Education Next-PEPG surveys at educationnext.org). Of course, the latter survey doesn’t indicate whether teachers are ambivalent because the unions aren’t fighting hard enough against policy changes affecting job security or because they’re fighting too hard to defend poor performers.

Educators for Excellence

Among those who think that unions need to better represent the diverse views of their members are Evan Stone and Sydney Morris, former Teach For America corps members who worked for several years at the 2,000-student P.S. 86 in the Bronx, New York’s largest elementary school. They were in their third year on the job when they began to get frustrated. “We realized there was this weird juxtaposition,” Stone said. “Inside our classrooms we had so much autonomy and control, and outside we had no control or influence in the school, the district, or beyond.”

Initially, the pair thought that the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), in New York City, would provide them with the platform they needed to make their views known to district leaders. But they were disappointed. “We went to meetings and realized that much of the dialogue was one way,” said the 27-year-old Stone, a Yale graduate. “We were being told what to do, or what to think, rather than being asked what we thought.”

In March 2010, at a meeting of like-minded teachers in a coffee shop on Avenue B in the East Village, they decided upon a particularly American course of action: they would form an advocacy group with the audacious aim of transforming the profession that many of them had so recently joined. Soon after, the group, known as E4E (Educators 4 Excellence), issued a statement of “principles and beliefs,” most of which just happened to run counter to union orthodoxies. Teachers who want to join are expected to pledge to support using value-added test-score data in evaluations, higher hurdles to achieving tenure, the elimination of seniority-driven layoffs, school choice, and merit pay.

The Hope Street Group is a national think tank and consulting firm that formulated the language for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant program.

Stone said the manifesto is “somewhat of a line in the sand” but also an organizing tool to “bring together solutions-oriented teachers around a common set of beliefs” about issues relevant to their profession.

Since then, nearly 8,000 teachers have signed the manifesto; E4E has chapters in New York City, Los Angeles, and Minnesota; and Stone and Morris have left their teaching jobs to work full-time to expand the group nationally. In an e-mail, Morris, 27, a Tulane graduate, explained the group’s appeal by saying teachers “are tired of being treated as subjects of change, instead of as partners in transforming the education system.” She said E4E gives teachers an outlet for those impulses through its online and in-person community of like-minded teachers, events at which education officials such as New York state education commissioner John King hear from them directly and seek their advice, and opportunities to participate on committees that write specific policy recommendations.

In New York, recommendations by a group of E4E teachers on how appeals of low performance ratings should be handled were incorporated in the teacher-evaluation policy Governor Andrew Cuomo announced last year. Before that, a group of 11 teachers affiliated with E4E developed a proposal for an alternative to seniority in determining who would be let go in the event of layoffs. The group recommended that teachers who were frequently absent, those who had been judged unsatisfactory by their principals, and those who did not have a permanent job assignment should be the first to go.

Those ideas were welcomed by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg at a time when he was very much at odds with the UFT. Critics responded with scorn and hostility, calling E4E members “anti-union scum” and “union-busting plants” in online forums. One comment on a GothamSchools blog post complained that “in the past all young teachers paid their dues, and didn’t complain about being low man on the totem pole” in the union. Morris said E4E is not anti-union. “We’re trying to strengthen the union in the long run by having it become more representative of its members,” Morris said.

Susan Keyock is “school captain” for E4E at Metropolitan High School in the South Bronx. She became a special education teacher in Denver after several noneducation jobs and became involved there explaining to her peers the benefits of the performance pay program called ProComp. She wanted to push for similar ideas in New York but did not find the UFT to be receptive. Her affiliation with E4E has given her a chance to engage her fellow teachers in discussions about policies. “Teachers want a fair and transparent evaluation system so we can all become better teachers,” she remarked. She said teachers new to the field “want the union to be student-focused, achievement-focused, and data-focused and want their union to be perceived positively by the public.”

Grass Roots or Astroturf?

NewTLA functions as a reform-motivated caucus within the Los Angeles teachers union. Last November, the caucus got 85 of its members elected to the 350-member union House of Representatives.

Leo Casey, a UFT vice president, said he doubted that E4E has as many supporters among New York teachers as it claims. Most teachers, he said, are opposed to being judged based on student test scores and believe that the current seniority system is fair and necessary. He said that E4E is seen by many in the union as too close to Bloomberg. “The issue of being hand in glove with the mayor’s campaign on seniority raises real questions about the group’s independence,” Casey said. “The perceptions of them are pretty strongly fixed at this point.” In January, the UFT and the school district ended negotiations over a new evaluation system in the city, which could lead to the loss of $450 million in state and federal aid.

Some opponents of unions have indeed applauded the emergence of alternatives. But Brad Jupp, a former teachers union leader who is an advisor to U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, said, “We have to resist turning these teacher voice groups into foils for the union or seeing them as flanking operations.

“What they want is personal efficacy, and they look at unions and districts alike as organizations that do not nurture personal efficacy,” he said. “Policy influence can give them that.”

AFT president Weingarten said E4E “tends to be a wedge against the union” and that “people are really skeptical about groups formed with other people’s money.”

These groups do face the challenge of proving that they represent the grassroots views of teachers and are not part of a foundation-funded “Astroturf” campaign to discredit unions. The groups do not charge dues and so are completely dependent on grants. Funders include the Ford Foundation, the Chicago-based Joyce Foundation, the Stuart Foundation in California, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation of Houston, the Hewlett Foundation, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, the foundation created by New York’s mayor. The largest source of funding is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which currently has $13.5 million invested in nine teacher-advocacy groups, including $975,000 over two years going to E4E. But the foundation has also given $4 million to the AFT and $500,000 to the NEA to fund similar projects.

Gates is a major supporter of the Hope Street Group, a national think tank and consulting firm that formulated the language for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top grant program, which is opposed by many teachers and union leaders. Founded in Los Angeles in 2003 by “pro-market” business executives and professionals who believed in the power of incentives to affect behavior, the group’s consultants are now helping five states develop teacher-evaluation systems. The group believes teachers should earn higher salaries and be “rewarded for what matters most: good classroom outcomes.” The Hope Street Group’s teaching fellows program was created to help spread that message. Seventy teachers applied for 50 slots for this school year. Those chosen received a $5,000 stipend and, in return, are expected to help states implement the new teacher evaluations, using a “playbook” created by Hope Street.

Another nonprofit organization that offers fellowships is America Achieves, founded in September 2010 in New York City by a group that includes Jon Schnur, who has been an advisor to President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. The organization’s goal is to give educators greater influence over policies, promote “evidence-based” reforms, and raise student achievement, principally through the Common Core State Standards. Fellows are chosen based on their track record for improving student achievement, and are given opportunities to advise local, state, and national policymakers at convenings, as well as informally. As of spring 2012, 50 educators, including eight principals, were participating.

The New Millennium Initiative (NMI), another “teacher voice” fellowship, was launched in 2009 by the North Carolina–based Center for Teaching Quality. Teachers selected for the fellowship want to be the “chief agents of change” in their local communities, according to the organization. Jessica Keigan is a fellow based in Denver, one of five locales with an active NMI group. A high-school English teacher in her ninth year, Keigan and other fellows have been involved in shaping the details of SB 191, the Colorado reform bill that made major changes to teacher-related policies, including evaluations and tenure.

Keigan said the Colorado Department of Education invited the NMI fellows to participate in the process after they wrote a paper about it. “While most of us have concerns … we’re trying to make sure the implementation is the best it can be,” she said.

All of these groups make heavy use of social media for connecting participants and sharing their views. None more so than the Viva Project, which stands for Vision, Idea, Voice, Action, and was started by a Chicago-based community organizer and policy activist involved in promoting the spread of charter schools in the state. The organization’s motto is “classroom teachers should be the defining voice in education policy.” The project creates virtual “idea exchanges” and invites teachers in a given district or state to contribute video or written commentaries. Those who are most active are asked to join a “Writing Collaborative.” The collaboratives produce reports, which are put in the hands of policymakers. Viva teachers have influenced policies related to extending teaching time in Chicago, principal evaluations in Minnesota, teacher evaluations in New York, the implementation of Common Core standards in Arizona charter schools, and the U.S. Department of Education’s efforts to increase teacher professionalism.

A New Unionism?

Randi Weingarten said she is open to working with groups that don’t share the union’s point of view and that Teach Plus has been an ally in some instances. But, she said, “it’s the union that can bring long-term, systemic changes to the system” through collective bargaining. She said such groups should “work with the union and try to advocate for changes within the union” rather than going it on their own.

Julia Koppich, a policy analyst who has studied unions and union-district relationships and has consulted with Teach Plus, agreed with Weingarten. She said such groups are naive if they think policy changes occur based on the power of a report. Of the Teach Plus group in Memphis she said, “They were disappointed because they went to the school board and got lip service and nothing happened. I told them you have to organize. It’s really hard work and maybe these groups will grow into it.”

But, she said, “the new generation of teachers aren’t collectivists, they’re pretty much individualists. They don’t understand unions. And the unions don’t understand them.”

In November of 2011, the NewTLA caucus got 85 of its members elected to the 350-member union House of Representatives and helped elect a candidate for president of the union who was thought to be more amenable to reforms. Soon after, the union agreed to grant individual schools flexibility over the school calendar, hiring, and assignment of teachers. Then, last February, the caucus supported asking UTLA’s membership to direct the union to negotiate with the district on the creation of a new teacher-evaluation system. The measure won easily. “We’re seeing that teachers are rejecting this false dichotomy between traditional unionism and some of the transformational changes that are needed in education,” said Michael Stryer, who had a career in international sales and marketing before becoming a high-school social studies teacher in Los Angeles eight years ago. He joined as one of the organizers of NewTLA because he believed the union had to become more focused on student achievement and the professional growth of teachers if it were to continue to protect members’ interests.

“In urban areas, we need to get really, really good teachers involved in the union,” he says. Stryer has taken a leave from teaching to promote that idea around the country as director of new unionism for Future Is Now Schools, formerly Green Dot America.

Stryer is optimistic about the future because of the sustained focus on student achievement and accountability, and also because of the “changing face of education and the possibility that the traditional interests are perhaps not going to be the prevailing ones in the future.”

Even so, despite the urgings of the caucus and the local chapters of E4E and Teach Plus, UTLA refused to endorse the Los Angeles district’s application for a $40 million Race to the Top grant, because it required the adoption of a teacher-evaluation system based in part on student achievement. In January, however, the district and UTLA agreed on a plan to do just that and it won the approval of two-thirds of the teachers who voted.

Longtime education journalist Richard Lee Colvin is an independent writer, editor, and strategic communications consultant based in Washington, D.C. He also is a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.

When Weisberg’s team asked the principals why they couldn’t attend the hearings by phone, he notes, “The answer we first got was, ‘No, we can’t do it. We’ve never done it that way.’ And we said, ‘Where is that in the contract? Where is that in some policy?’ And the answer was nowhere. So we just did it. It was a small thing, but it showed principals that we cared, that we understood this was very burdensome and we were trying to make their lives easier…. It had a concrete impact in encouraging principals to take action to document poor performance.”

When it comes to reforming American education, today’s would-be-reformers get it half right. They correctly argue that statutes, rules, regulations, and contracts make it hard for school and school-system leaders to drive improvement and, well, lead. They are wrong, however, to ignore a second truth: school officials have far more freedom to transform, reimagine, and invigorate teaching, learning, and schooling than is widely believed.

It’s true that prescriptive union contracts and procurement processes, rules and regulations like the federal “supplement not supplant” provision, state laws, board policies, and the like hinder school officials in all kinds of ways, making it difficult to repair a fence, hire talented staff, or schedule grade-level team meetings. But it has become increasingly clear that much of what administrators say they can’t do, think they can’t do, or just don’t do is in fact entirely possible. Contracts, rules, regulations, statutes, and policies present real problems, but smart leaders can frequently find ways to bust them—with enough persistence, knowledge, or ingenuity.

The problem is not just the very real statutory, regulatory, and contractual barriers, but the “culture of can’t,” in which even surmountable impediments or ankle-high obstacles are treated as absolute prohibitions. This mind-set threatens to undermine the success of hard-won reforms and can make policy impediments appear more severe than they truly are.

The Bogeymen of Leadership

We often hear from principals about all the things they’d like to do but that are impossible due to circumstances beyond their control. Perhaps the most commonly cited sources of frustration are, first, teachers’ contracts and, second, state and federal policies that tie the principals’ hands when it comes to teacher assignment, compensation, hiring, professional development, instructional time, and much else.

Yet a closer look raises some questions about these common complaints. For example, in a 2008 analysis of the collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) of the 50 largest U.S. school districts, Coby Loup and I found that although one-third were highly restrictive, the majority included much room to maneuver. Lehigh University professor of education and law Perry Zirkel notes that the perception that it’s nearly impossible to let go of low-performing, tenured teachers arises from “the substitute of lore for law. The lore is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to win a performance-based termination of a tenured teacher. The reality is quite different.” In his study of court decisions on teacher terminations for competency, Zirkel found that “defendant districts prevailed over plaintiff teachers by better than a 3-to-1 ratio.”

What of complaints about state and federal regulation? Columbia Teachers College professor Hank Levin recounts that when the California legislature allowed districts to apply for waivers if they could demonstrate that laws or rules were hampering school improvement, “Fewer than 100 [waivers] were made in the first year” in a state with more than 1,000 districts. More telling, notes Levin, “The vast majority of all requests for waivers were unnecessary” [emphasis added]. Nearly all the proposed measures were permissible under existing law. Either superintendents and boards mistakenly thought their hands were tied or, Levin added, they were using laws and regulations “as a scapegoat…to justify maintaining existing practices.”

Collective bargaining agreements and intrusive policies can present real headaches. But these are made far worse by the self-defeating mentality adopted by so many superintendents, school boards, and principals.

When Myth Becomes Mind-Set

Learned helplessness has become embedded in the field of educational leadership. Ariela Rozman, CEO of The New Teacher Project (TNTP), says she’s seen this often. “We went into [one troubled midwestern district] and expected to find that they had a really tough contract.” Instead, Rozman recalls, “We found a very, very limited, small contract that didn’t touch anything. And the reason they were doing a ton of forced placement was because that’s just the way the district operated. But the superintendent believed it was better to be out there lambasting the union rather than cleaning up his house internally.” Mitch Price, a legal analyst with the Center on Reinventing Public Education, noted in a 2009 study of teacher contracts that “a lot of these contractual issues are ‘smoke screens’ for those people who don’t want to do something.”

Even when school officials are given greater latitude, they often operate as though they’re still hemmed in. Take Indiana, where the legislature acted to limit the scope of collective bargaining in 2011. Despite the new law, dozens of districts left intact language that restricted flexibility, even though it was now in violation of state statute. Former Indiana superintendent of public instruction Tony Bennett says, “There were systems that put their contracts into compliance. Then there are those who went on with business as usual, just leaving the silly stuff in the contract. I think many of those see this as the path of least resistance. They don’t want to create an uncomfortable life for themselves in the communities in which they live.” Tennessee commissioner of education Kevin Huffman says he observed similar behavior when his state reduced the scope of collective bargaining. “Honestly, districts don’t know what to do differently,” Huffman notes.

The Experts Agree

The “culture of can’t” is unchallenged, if not encouraged, by the authorities on education leadership, who dismiss talk of levers, contracts, and legal strategy. A look at the relevant professional publications for the period from January 2009 to September 2012 illustrates the point. Over that span, Educational Administration Quarterly featured just one mention of general counsel or legal counsel, and just four mentions of the word attorney—and none of those involved using attorneys to address legal questions. Educational Management Administration & Leadership, in total, included just one mention of the terms attorney, general counsel, or legal counsel. Meanwhile, Improving Schools, Management in Education, and the Journal of Research on Leadership Education made no mention of any of those terms.

Hundreds of education leadership programs and widely read tomes on education leadership not only treat contracts, regulations, and policies as unworthy of attention, but go so far as to denounce efforts to address these things as distractions.

Thelbert Drake and William Roe argue in The Principalship, for example, that “running a tight ship” is a “distortion of the goal of educating children.” On the question of what to do about ineffective teachers, Michael Fullan and Andy Hargreaves explain in What’s Worth Fighting For in Your School? that principals should “find something to value in all the school’s teachers. Even poor or mediocre teachers have good points that can present opportunities to give praise and raise self-esteem…. The worst thing to do is to write off apparently poor or mediocre teachers as dead wood, and seek easy administrative solutions in transfers or retirements…. Try doing the hard thing, the right thing, the ethical thing, and explore ways of bringing these teachers back instead.”

This is a profession in which close to 100 percent of administrators have been trained in educational leadership programs at schools of education and have learned that it’s wrongheaded to focus on managing operations or removing mediocre employees. Moreover, even the bulk of the new leadership programs embrace a notion of “instructional leadership” that single-mindedly focuses on pedagogy, coaching, and curriculum while remaining largely uninterested in the policy and legal context within which schools operate.

Combat Strategies

The lesson is decidedly not that reformers should retreat from their present efforts. Rather, it’s to recognize that policy can make schools and systems do things, but it can’t make them do things well. Happily, there are a number of steps that can help combat the pervasive “culture of can’t.”

Get Crafty about Contracts

The best leaders heed the advice of Los Angeles Unified superintendent John Deasy: “Most people see the contract as a steel box. It’s not. It’s a steel floor with no boundaries around it. You’ve just got to push and push and push.”

Adrian Manuel, principal of Kingston High School in Kingston, New York, explains that his first order of business is always to familiarize himself and his team with the contracts. “The very first thing I did was have the secretary make photocopies of every contract—teacher, support staff, clerical—for all the administrators,” says Manuel. “We have four assistant principals and one vice principal. At the first couple of meetings I gave them copies and said, ‘How many of you have read through these things?’ Some people had been there for nine or ten years and hadn’t read through it.” Manuel’s previous school rose in three years from the bottom 5 percent of New York City middle schools to the upper one-fifth.

Newark, New Jersey, superintendent Cami Anderson (see “Newark’s Superintendent Rolls Up Her Sleeves and Gets to Work,” features, Winter 2013) recalls that when she served as area superintendent for New York City’s alternative schools and programs, the district had two “conventional wisdoms” when it came to evaluating guidance counselors and social workers: “The first was you’d be violating student confidentiality if you observed guidance counselors or social workers interacting with kids one-on-one, and the second was, if you weren’t licensed as a clinical supervisor, you didn’t have the authority to evaluate or document performance for these people.” Anderson says she had to “debunk the urban myth” before being able to focus on staff performance. “I finally pulled the contract, asked our labor lawyers to take a look, and found out that the contract is relatively silent on how guidance counselors and social workers are evaluated. We had more latitude, not less, when it came to these individuals.” Anderson instituted a performance-based evaluation system for these staff, and says, “This piece was key when you’re working with kids in jail and kids who’ve dropped out. Outcomes like attendance and retention started going up.”

Lawyer Up

Perhaps the single greatest impediment is the dearth of talented attorneys helping school administrators find their way. Chris Barbic, founder of the Houston-based YES Prep Charter School network, led YES when it was named the best place to work in Houston, the only time a school or school system has been so honored. Yet when this culture-first leader took the helm of Tennessee’s new Achievement School District in 2011, he concluded that anyone’s first move in that role ought to be, “Get a great lawyer, understand the legislation, and understand what you can and cannot do right out of the gate.”

District officials need someone aggressive, wily, and intrepid if they’re to figure out what’s possible and what’s not. General counsels who work for districts aren’t necessarily equipped or inclined to play this role. Lawyers who work for districts tend to play defense, unless you instruct them otherwise. Dan Weisberg, now at TNTP, explains: “Converting the mission of the legal team is vital. In a school district, you’re in a compliance culture…where people are very nervous about making any decisions without getting approval from a lawyer. But while many district lawyers see their job as being about risk avoidance, good lawyers are skilled at finding creative ways to help their clients reach their goals. All it takes is a difference in viewpoint. The goal is not to make sure there is no legal risk, which is impossible in a district undertaking serious reform. The goal is to increase student achievement. If you change the mission of the general counsel’s office [that way]…then you’ve got a sea change.”

An alternate approach for districts is to draw on local law firms or attorneys to provide pro bono support. The American Bar Association reports that nearly three-quarters of attorneys provide an average of 41 hours of free legal counsel each year. This means that in Michigan, where there are more than 32,000 active lawyers, it’s a safe bet they perform more than 1 million pro bono hours every year; in New York, the figure is 5 million. Given that many law firms expect attorneys to devote time to pro bono work, even a small firm may offer up dozens of hours of free counsel. Districts should put their expertise to work, especially if they have experience in employment, regulatory, administrative, or contract law.

Another source of legal talent may be new law school graduates, especially those who’ve previously taught via Teach For America or participated in Education Pioneers. Recent grads will be inexperienced and untested, but they’ll also be free of the defensive mind-set and are frequently willing to work long hours for relatively low pay. It’s hard for districts to compete with the salaries being offered by private-sector firms. But according to U.S. News & World Report, each year more than 10 percent of graduates from the top 20 law schools (or more than 700 new lawyers) take jobs in the public sector that offer a median salary of $52,000. They go to work in district attorneys’ offices and at nonprofits because they’re eager to gain hands-on experience and do important, socially meaningful work.

Engage Outside Partners

Finding outside talent and support to drive improvement is a crucial part of the job. Few schools or systems have the tools or the muscle to succeed by themselves. They need to seek out and cultivate allies and partners. National networks, the local business community, and philanthropy can all play invaluable roles.

When Lillian Lowery (now Maryland state superintendent of schools) took the helm of the Delaware Department of Education, she sought talent from all over the country: “I was a Broad Academy affiliate, and one of the first calls I made was to the Broad Foundation. They helped me select people who could help with the work and challenges here. [Delaware’s] Rodel Foundation also knew people from all over the country, in nonprofit and entrepreneurial environments.” Washington, D.C., has created a competitive summer internship program that brings dozens of graduate students to the district, giving leaders a chance to check them out and creating a deep bench of talent.

In Nashville, the business community helped secure the district’s top candidate for associate superintendent. “We brought Jay Steele in for a speech on his work with [small learning communities],” says Ralph Schulz, president of the Nashville Chamber of Commerce. “[Superintendent] Jesse Register stands up and says, ‘I’m convinced of the idea, and that’s our guy. How are we going to get him?’” One of the local CEOs in attendance offered to lend the use of his private plane. Schulz recalls, “So a delegation got in the plane a couple of weeks later, flew down [to Florida], and met with Steele. And he saw the commitment of the business community, and thought Nashville was the place to be.” Nashville mayor Karl Dean notes the value of that kind of support. “You know how complicated it is for government workers to get plane tickets,” Mayor Dean says. “Business can say, ‘Let’s get in the plane and go down there.’” When they so desire, business and philanthropy can move with an alacrity that public systems cannot match.

Don McAdams, founder of the Center for Reform of School Systems, says that philanthropy typically involves modest dollars but can have an outsized influence because of its agility and public impact. Since most districts spend 80 percent or more of all funds on salaries and benefits, they’ve little ability to repurpose funds. This is where philanthropy can provide crucial fuel. McAdams and Lynn Jenkins have written, “Philanthropic dollars are especially valuable because they can be invested in activities that have no political constituency but are high priorities for reform leaders.” Philanthropy can also build local enthusiasm, inspire other funders, and garner national interest, attracting additional talent and support, and getting that flywheel spinning.

Conclusion

Reformers are right to fight for policy change, and to offer moral and political support to bold education leaders. At the same time, they’re wrong to imagine that changing policies regarding teacher evaluation, school turnarounds, or school choice will deliver as hoped, absent efforts to help school officials to think differently and then provide the support they need to tackle rules, regulations, and contracts in new ways.

Thus, reformers struggle to narrow the scope of collective bargaining, only to see administrators fumble the hard-won opportunities. They enact teacher evaluation and turnaround policies whose efficacy and impact rest entirely on the ability of officials to execute them competently and aggressively in the face of contracts, embedded routines, and recalcitrant cultures.

More than a few reformers appear to be pinning their hopes on the dream that hundreds of thousands of great school and district leaders can be recruited or trained. That seems an unlikely bet. Far more manageable, and plenty promising in their own right, would be efforts to enable today’s competent but hemmed-in administrators to start to see differently. To be sure, there are admirable organizations and programs, including New Leaders for New Schools, the Broad Academy, Education Pioneers, KIPP’s Fisher Fellows, and Rice University’s Education Entrepreneurship Program (REEP), that seek to develop in selected individuals the capabilities that are needed. But these organizations are the exception.

Of course, educational leadership is about instruction, and reformers need to overhaul problematic contracts and policies. But unless they also help district superintendents and principals change the “culture of can’t,” instructional leadership will continue to be compromised, and the reform agenda will inevitably be frustrated. Until and unless would-be reformers get serious on this count, they’ll keep battling to change laws that don’t need to be changed—or fighting for changes that will go unexploited.

Frederick M. Hess is executive editor of Education Next and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Whitney Downs is a student at the George Washington University Law School. This article is adapted from Frederick M. Hess, Cage-Busting Leadership (Harvard Education Press, 2013).

“No,” says a boy named Max in a black rock band T-shirt. “He was on PCP.”

A few nod their heads in agreement. They could be talking about a sophomore who got wasted over the weekend or a senior who got busted in the parking lot, by all appearances, but they’re actually discussing the president of a road-racing company, a man whose crimes had nothing to do with illegal substances. He earned the attention of these students through a poorly written letter, one that caught the eye of Ms. Andrea Bassett, an Honors English teacher at Needham High School in Massachusetts.

Max reads a printout of the letter to the other boys as if he were dropping meat into a shark tank. “‘In trying to formulate what to say in regards to yesterday’s events,’” Max quotes, “‘I realized that what I said over and over to the folks I helped get on returning shuttle buses was exactly what should be said to all.’”

“What?” someone exclaims. Everyone laughs. “He just throws in words!” Max says. He goes on to finish the opening paragraph.

“‘While it became repetitive, it was no less from the heart in any one time from the other:’”

“He ended with a colon,” says a boy who didn’t shave that morning.

“You can pretty much revise the first paragraph,” says Mike, his cheek on his hand.

A stocky kid named David chimes in. “That’s not just bad grammar,” he says, indignant. “That’s, like, bad PR.”

His comment catches the attention of Ms. Bassett, who is making rounds to each cluster of students. “David,” she says, “the life lesson here is that bad grammar is bad PR. You guys remember that.”

Ms. Bassett is the newest faculty member of the English department at Needham High, a lean, athletic blonde who chose to show this letter to her students as a good bad example. It was an apology for a poorly managed 15K, a race that Ms. Bassett herself ran, averaging a 10-minute mile. In the letter, the president of the road-racing company tried to explain how the runners had gotten misdirected and why there was no water at the finish line. Ms. Bassett thought the greater indignity was enduring an apology from a president whose prose waddled along for 40 paragraphs, weighed down with extra words and never-ending sentences.

“He would definitely fail a grammar assignment in this class,” she says, to wide classroom approval. Ms. Bassett is part of a department that has decided to take grammar seriously. Too many students were claiming that nobody had ever taught them the rules. Needham High School’s seniors, mostly from upper-middle-class families, were graduating without knowing the parts of speech or parts of a sentence. They would sometimes write “u” instead of “you” in their essays, or a lowercase “i” instead of “I.” The high school, like many others, had been suffering from a lack of standardized grammar instruction throughout the grades. Over the summer of 2011, the English department created a series of PowerPoint presentations to coordinate grammar instruction across the grades, hoping to provide their students a better, more uniform understanding of the rules. The goal was to set a baseline for Needham High students, allowing them to review old lessons and master new ones through the slides.

“They actually like it. They like something in front of them that’s task-oriented,” says Ms. Bassett. The PowerPoint slides look like blueprints, with their simple, white-on-blue form, and they lay the rules out in a straightforward way. Needham High’s teachers have been using them for more than a year, and Ms. Bassett believes that they have made a subject that was once confusing “concrete and quantifiable.”

Battling Barbarism

Sloppy English usage may seem like a modern problem, but the laxness that has led to this moment in grammar’s history bears a strong resemblance to the atmosphere in early-18thcentury England. At that time, decades had passed since the golden age of English, with its production of the King James Bible (1611) and the plays of William Shakespeare (1564–1616). Many began to fear that the language was going to the dogs.

“Our language is in a manner barbarous,” poet John Dryden complained in 1693. Theologian Thomas Stackhouse agreed. “We write by guess, more than any stated rule,” he said in 1731, “and form every man his diction, either according to his humour and caprice.”

Dryden and Stackhouse weren’t complaining about rule breakers, as Needham’s teachers do; they were complaining about a lack of rules in the first place. In the early 1700s, no English-specific grammar or dictionary existed. Writers worried that in a few generations their work would become as unintelligible as Old or Middle English was to them. As Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels, put it in 1711, “Such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.”

Much of the concern sprang from the English Civil War (1642–1651). The overthrow of the monarchy and the turmoil that followed had dirtied the image of English, a green, unsure language at the time. With Oliver Cromwell leading the country and the king himself beheaded, the King’s English was in jeopardy. An expansion of printing during the war had allowed writers of less means to publish material. “Such an infusion of enthusiastic jargon prevailed in every writing, as was not shaken off in many years after,” said Swift. “To this succeeded the licentiousness which entered with the restoration, and from infecting our religion and morals fell to corrupt our language.” Religion, morals, language—they had all grown shoddy by the 1700s, many thought. The English language needed help. Fast.

Generation Gap

In the English department lounge at NHS, teachers sit at a long table, sipping on water bottles and pulling out home-packed lunches. They too believe that English needs help, and they want to fix it. Jonathan Cooke thinks the decline of grammar is a recent one. The only person with gray hair in the room, he’s a former lawyer who switched to teaching 15 years ago. He remembers a time in the early 1970s when virtually every student could identify a direct object. “I learned that all through middle school,” he says. “By the time I got to high school, it was more funky. You could take a course in just satires.”

Brent Concilio, a young, Dartmouth-educated teacher with a turkey wrap in his hand, thinks the shift in the 1960s came from the ideas of John Dewey (1859–1952), a reformer who pushed for a child-centered education. “In the interest of making English class more ‘relevant’ to students’ lives, we began having students read contemporary novels and talk about how those novels made them feel.”
“Wicked cool,” says Cooke.

“But any time you make room for something, something else has to go,” says Concilio. “And what went was the systematic teaching of grammar.”
This shift in priorities was only one of the factors in the abandonment of grammar instruction. Another factor was a public campaign against the concept of a single correct way of speaking.

The Conference on College Composition and Communication in 1972 stated that students had a right “to their own patterns and varieties and language.” The resolution, which was adopted in 1974 by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), went so far as to say that correcting language was “immoral” because it was really an attempt by one social group to exert dominance over another. Suddenly, grammar was oppressive. It was stodgy. It was all but banished from many classrooms. The pendulum swung far away from the prescriptive, rules-oriented English once taught in schools.

After the sixties, grade-school students, by and large, didn’t learn grammar the way their parents had, and now, decades later, they don’t reinforce the rules very well with their own children. Without this reinforcement at home, much of the burden to teach students correct English lies with teachers.
The problem with that idea, of course, is that many teachers today didn’t learn much grammar when they were in school, either. “It’s now been gone for a generation,” Concilio says. “A lot of people, I think, really don’t understand the value of it.”

Rules of Order

The pushback we have seen over the past few decades could have been less severe if the architects of English grammar had set up the rules to be more respectful of actual usage. The early grammarians were reacting to disorder, though, and they weren’t afraid to leave a few people behind in their drive for structure.

One of the first of the language reformers was the writer Dr. Samuel Johnson. In 1755, he published A Dictionary of the English Language, a mammoth work of scholarship that he spent nine years writing. The dictionary was a tremendous step toward preserving the language, but Johnson complained that he had to create it with “no assistance but from general grammar,” meaning Latin grammar, because nobody had systematized the English language yet.

The call for a unique English grammar grew louder. It was the greatest void in the language, now that a dictionary had been written. Eighteenth-century scholars and politicians believed that such a grammar would dignify the language on the world stage, helping to emphasize England’s political autonomy from the European continent.

Writers were begging for standards not only for their own guidance, but for their legacies.

Robert Lowth stepped up to the challenge. Lowth, a clergyman and eventual bishop of London, believed that correct grammar was next to godliness, and that the King James Bible was the gold standard of the language. English, he said, was becoming far too loose, and it needed “stiffening up,” a claim that would resonate several centuries later with Needham High School’s English teachers.

Lowth’s Short Introduction to English Grammar, published in 1762, was not the first English grammar ever written, but it outsold all the others on the market. The most notable of the competing guides was a descriptive grammar by theologian and chemist Joseph Priestley (1733– 1804). Robert Lowth’s grammar proved more popular because Britain in the 18th century, still recovering from the English Civil War, wanted prescription, not description; rules, not the reality—especially not the reality of the lower classes.

The only problem was that “stiffening up” the language left English a bit too stiff. Lowth often looked to Latin for inspiration rather than to customary usage when he settled a question. For example, he frowned on the expression “It is me” because it ended in the objective case. “It is I” matched the Latin construction, and was therefore better, according to Lowth. It has remained the rule for proper usage ever since, but has always been too awkward to gain traction among most English speakers.

Lowth also disapproved of prepositions at the end of sentences. “The placing of the preposition before the relative is more graceful,” he said. The rule worked for Latin, but not so well for English speakers, whose sentences ended naturally in prepositions. Lowth at least acknowledged that this tendency was “an idiom which our language is strongly inclined to,” showing that the inclination bent strongly in his direction, too.

He called double negatives improper, and grammarian Lindley Murray (1745–1826) later proved this claim with algebra, even though Shakespeare was known to use a double negative occasionally. Lowth also preached against verbs that had merged tenses over the years. He preferred strong verbs that had a distinct past tense: drink and drank, write and wrote, for example. Verbs whose past tenses merely ended in “ed” were the result of a natural streamlining of the English language. Lowth wanted to fight against this tendency and supported usage that kept verb tenses distinct and intact, like Latin verbs, which were in no danger of merging because the language had been dead for centuries.

Lowth’s ideas pleased the class conscious because his rules were too pedantic for the lower classes to adopt. They allowed social climbers a clever way to blend in with the upper class. They fit the zeitgeist because 18th-century England, with its zeal for classical ideals of logic and reasoning, was fertile ground for anyone who wanted to explain something rationally, even something as irrational as the English language.

A Short Introduction to the English Language ran 22 editions in the 18th century and led several decades later to an important spin-off grammar by Murray, which became a staple in 19th-century schools on both sides of the Atlantic. What began as one man’s guidelines eventually became hard rules, enforceable with a switch. Even when Americans began producing their own textbooks, in the mid-19th century, they rehashed most of Lowth’s and Murray’s ideas.

To be sure, Lowth and his fellow reformers stabilized the language, but their prescriptive, top-down approach also set the stage for the instability we have now. The gap between proper written English and actual usage is wider today than Needham High School’s football field.

Today’s Torchbearers

Grammar instruction has been mocked and marginalized for decades, partly because the rules were too cold and unfeeling. Lately, the rules have been making a bit of a comeback. Educators are starting to believe that English grammar, even with its quirky rules, is far better than nothing, after they’ve seen the results of nothing. The SAT added grammar questions to its format in 2005 in response to pressure from college administrators. Parents have begun to push for more English language instruction. The NCTE has softened its position, and now we see a growing number of teachers bringing grammar, the forgotten spinster of school subjects, back to the party.

“In the work force, grammar will be as important as this training of analyzing literature,” says Ms. Bassett. “[These students] are not going to be paid in 20 years for analyzing literature.

They’re going to be paid to present something to their company.”

Her colleagues list several benefits that come from grammar instruction: clear cover letters, stronger writing skills, and an easier understanding of a foreign language, to name a few. If there is a bias toward one “correct” way of speaking, well, they want their students to learn it.

And so the legacy of the English language lies heavily with teachers like Ms. Bassett, a recent convert to grammar herself, and her students. They may go too far in their reforms, as their predecessors have, or they may achieve a balanced approach. At any rate, the appearance of today’s grammarians, in their hoodies and sneaks, bears little resemblance to that of their forerunners.

A boy named Leo, in a Red Sox cap, raises his hand to make a suggestion in Ms. Bassett’s class. “You could put an em dash here: ‘Our race director quickly came up with a contingency plan—real time, on the spot—in the horror of what could have been a disaster.’”

“Oh, my gosh, you are an em-dash king. Nicely done,” says Ms. Bassett.

David raises his hand. “This is the dumbest thing,” he says, pointing to a paragraph in the memo: “‘Finally, we start the race. What happens next defies belief, absolutely and completely!!!’ Like, why are there three exclamation points?”

“What sort of tone does it create to use three exclamation points?” asks Ms. Bassett.

“Colloquial,” a few answer back.

“Yeah,” she says. “Third grade. Like a tween looking at Justin Bieber.”

At the end of the hour, as Max, Mike, and David put their pens away and zip up their bags, Ms. Bassett warns her students that there are consequences to becoming successful and writing with poor grammar: “You’ll get ridiculed in my class.”

And in a society that has neglected grammar for so long, mockery may be just what grammar needs to come back into vogue. Only now, the ridicule is coming from the bottom up, from 17-year-olds who specialize in snark, who know the rules better than their future bosses, who write clean sentences but don’t appear very close to godliness. They may be Robert Lowth’s best hope.

Elise Hahl contributed to Choosing Motherhood (Cedar Fort, Inc., 2013) and has written for the online magazine “Outside In Literary & Travel.”

And so it is quite remarkable to see that whirl in a school, as I did last summer in Boston when former president and first lady George W. and Laura Bush visited one of the Brooke Charter Schools. There is also nothing like a roomful of 1st graders, blissfully unaware of who exactly these two big people are or why their classroom is suddenly filled with a couple dozen adults peering at them as they sing “This Land Is Your Land” and wave American flags. Indeed, six-year-olds have a way of sucking all the trappings of celebrity right out of a room, if not out of the celebrities themselves: the Bushes seemed as relaxed and cheerful as any regular person would be. Laura Bush, former teacher and librarian, was a natural.

Walking in and out of classrooms in her stylish ivory jacket, Mrs. Bush looked right at home. “Are you all having fun?” she asked a group of 5th graders in Julie Gilbody’s math and science classroom. (“Yeah!” was the cry.) “So nice to meet you. This is very exciting.”

She walked between the desks, asking students what they were working on, what they wanted to do when they grew up, what their goals were. She read Seuss to 1st graders (after answering tough questions about life in the White House), encouraging the kids “to read for 30 minutes every day at home.” And then, “Do you want to hear about our animals?” The class erupted. “We have two dogs and a little kitten. He used to catch rabbits, but we tamed him and now he eats cat food.” The kids were transfixed.

After visiting the classrooms, the former first lady agreed to chat with Education Next about the new George W. Bush Institute and its ambitious plans to continue to build on the Bush education-reform legacy.

Education Is the First Priority

“It’s a full-time job,” says Mrs. Bush, sitting at a student desk in a classroom (empty, except for several aides and a watchful Secret Service agent). “It’s what we’ll do for the rest of our lives through the policy institute.” The Bush Policy Institute will be part of the Bush Presidential Library, set to open in the spring of 2013. The Dallas Morning News described the three-year-old institute as “advanc[ing] a robust policy agenda,” most of it, so far, out of public view. The Bushes have made several trips to Africa, for instance, promoting HIV and cancer prevention programs. Global health is one of the institute’s four major “areas of engagement,” the other three being human freedom, economic growth, and education reform.

“These are the core policy areas that were the most important to us when George was president,” says Mrs. Bush. “They are just important to us. They’re just really American values. They’re not just for one party or the other, but in fact they’re for all of us.”

While keeping a low profile and staying out of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) debate, the Bushes have built an education think tank that is pursuing an ambitious education-policy agenda, focusing on school leadership, middle school improvement, and standards and accountability. One of the institute’s first education initiatives was the Alliance to Reform Education Leadership (AREL), a nationwide network of principal preparation programs with a mandate, as a 2010 press release put it, “to transform the way school districts identify, recruit, prepare, empower, and evaluate their leaders.”

“Our very first fellow at the institute was an education fellow,” says Mrs. Bush. “Dr. Jim Guthrie brought us the idea of principal recruiting and training and working with principal training groups around the country…. We wanted education to be the first of the four policy areas that we worked on because we think it’s so important. There is an urgency about what we’re doing—there should always be an urgency.”

Education Roots

It is clear where Mrs. Bush came by her sense of urgency for, and expertise on, the subject: she wanted to be a teacher at age eight. “My 2nd-grade teacher, Miss Gnagy,” she explains. “I wanted to be just like her.” And 14 years later, Laura Welch graduated from Southern Methodist University (SMU) with a degree in education and became a 2nd-grade teacher in an inner-city school in Dallas. She also mentions Dr. Harryette Ehrhardt, her professor of children’s literature at SMU, as one of her education heroes. Ehrhardt went on to become a liberal Democratic state representative at the same time as Laura’s conservative Republican husband became Texas governor. But to this day, says Mrs. Bush, she still talks about, and with, Ehrhardt. “I visited her for lunch just a couple of weeks ago.”

After becoming first lady of Texas in 1995, Mrs. Bush spearheaded initiatives on early childhood education, which she continued to do as first lady of the country, while expanding her education interests to include serving as the ambassador for the UN Literacy Decade, visiting schools and promoting girls’ education through the Africa Education Initiative, making seven trips to Africa and three trips to Afghanistan.

The Bushes are a true education couple. Her husband’s sense of urgency about education, Mrs. Bush says, came from his tour of duty as governor. “George got interested in education policy when he was campaigning for the office. At the time, he said education is to a governor what defense is to a president. In a state, education is the most important issue. You’ve got to make sure that every single child is educated…. He ran for governor on that issue, on the issue of education, and then he ran for president on the same issue.”

So, says Mrs. Bush, it was natural for them to establish a policy institute devoted to education once the presidency was behind them. “We had conversations over the dinner table about it.” And she notes that having been president gives one “a convening power” that regular folks don’t have. “Right after we moved home, we flew in a whole lot of people from our administration. We met over two days to talk about these four policy areas that were the most important when he was president. We could stay involved with policy, but stay out of politics. We chose the four policy areas that were the most important to us, and education was the first one we chose.”

Too Many Goals Means No Goals

It is clear in speaking with Laura Bush, even if one doesn’t know the history, that she is no token education spokesperson; she knows the territory. I ask how the decision to focus on education leadership was made.

“We knew that we would only want to focus on one or two policy issues within each of our four big policy areas. As George said today, sometimes you have so many goals you don’t have any goals. And we don’t have that big of a staff!” The institute currently has 44 full-time employees and 22 part-time fellows.

About the institute’s Middle School Matters initiative, she says, “Middle schools are always left out, and it’s because no one really wants to be around middle school–age kids. I know…. I had two 13-year-old girls once and I know what that was like….”

She smiles, but then quickly talks about the research. “There’s a lot of research, developed in the last decade or so, about how to intervene in middle school to bring kids up to grade level. A lot of people have come to think that middle school is when kids actually ‘drop out.’ They just leave in high school. Middle school’s the last chance that you have to be able to be successful in high school. If you can’t read when you get to middle school, then you won’t be able to succeed in high school.”

Mrs. Bush is equally articulate about “backpack spending” (the institute is sponsoring a project on school-district productivity that includes 20 different researchers’ papers); teacher autonomy (“Obviously, if you are held accountable as the principal of your school and you don’t have the authority to change anything, by either hiring or firing, or setting up another structure that your school district doesn’t allow, then how can you be really accountable?”); and NCLB, which, she says, “was not designed to tell the school districts what to do.” It was up to the states and districts to devise a curriculum, she explains. “It can’t be top down, because if the federal government says, ‘This is what you have to teach for so-and-so,’ then they can say, ‘Oh, well, we did that. We did what you said, but we failed,’ instead of, ‘We came up with the idea and we did it and we failed or we succeeded.’”

Laura Bush is hands-on, and she intends to stay that way. She convenes monthly meetings of the institute staff for regular updates and reads all the papers the institute produces. She cares about education. And it is clear that the Bush Institute will be a major player in the education reform movement in the future.

Peter Meyer is former news editor at Life Magazine and contributing editor at Education Next.

In the following essays, we identify some of the key findings from the sixth annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens interviewed during April and May of 2012 (for survey methodology, see sidebar). Highlights include

• the Republican tilt of the education views of independents

• the especially high marks that Hispanics give their public schools

• strong support among the general public for using test-score information to hold teachers accountable

• lower confidence in teachers than has previously been reported

• the public’s (and teachers’) growing uneasiness with teachers unions

• the shaky foundations of public support for increased spending

• majority support for a broad range of school choice initiatives.

In addition to the views of the public as a whole, in this year’s survey special attention is paid to Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers, all of whom were oversampled in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. And in an effort to assess the sensitivity of respondents’ opinions to information and question wording, we embedded in this survey, as we have done in previous ones, various experiments. Responses to all questions are posted on our website, educationnext.org.

Independents lean Republican in their views of teachers unions and school spending—and support private school choice.

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck and neck, the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election. And in the days leading up to the national conventions, education policy, though hardly at the top of the public agenda, did assume a more prominent role in both campaigns. Which candidate is best positioned to use education to bring undecided voters into the fold? The answer may be surprising.

Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assign him a “fair” or “poor” rating. And on the education policy issues that most clearly divide the parties—the role of teachers unions and support for school spending—the views of independents hew closer to those of Republicans than of Democrats. Moreover, independents are more supportive than members of either party of expanding private school choice for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of Governor Romney’s proposals for K–12 education reform.

Whereas 25 percent of respondents to the EdNext-PEPG survey report that they are Republicans and 34 percent say that they are Democrats, fully 41 percent claim no affiliation with either major party. Of this group, 52 percent claim that they lean Democratic, while just 40 percent lean Republican. On key education issues, however, these independents express views that better align with Republicans.

No single education issue divides Republicans and Democrats more sharply than the role of teachers unions (see Figure 1). Seventy-one percent of Republicans report that the teachers unions have a generally negative effect on schools, as compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. Though independents come down in between, a majority of them (56 percent) agree with Republicans that unions have a negative effect.

Republican and Democratic voters also diverge in their preferences on school spending and teacher salaries. Figure 2 shows that when not provided with information about current spending levels, 79 percent of Democrats say that spending on public schools in their local district should increase, as compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 57 percent support increased spending, again placing them closer to Republicans in their view of the issue. And when respondents are informed about current spending levels, the gap between Republicans and independents vanishes: 39 percent of both groups support spending increases, compared to just 51 percent of Democrats.

The same pattern holds for teacher salaries: when respondents are not provided with information about current salary levels, 60 percent of independents support increasing teacher salaries, placing them closer to Republicans (54 percent of whom support increases) than to Democrats (75 percent). Providing information on current teacher salaries in their state reduces support for salary increases among independents to 34 percent—exactly the same as among Republicans. Information also shrinks the share of Democrats supporting salary increases to 41 percent.

Governor Romney has made the expansion of school choice for disadvantaged students central to his campaign, calling for the expansion of the Washington, D.C., voucher program and for allowing low-income and special education students to use federal funds to enroll in private schools. It is perhaps surprising, then, to find that Republicans are less supportive of this concept than are Democrats (see Figure 3). Just 42 percent of Republicans express support for the idea, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Voucher support among independents appears to be as high as (or greater than) it is among Democrats, at 54 percent.

Hispanics like public schools but not all union demands in contract negotiations.

Increasingly, both the Republican and Democratic parties have sought ways to court Hispanics. Though they lean Democratic—63 percent of Hispanic adults approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president—they are not as blue as is the African American community, 92 percent of whom give Obama a thumbs-up.

Those seeking the Hispanic vote in 2012 should know that education is an issue that resonates with the Latino community. Almost 60 percent of those we surveyed say they are “very” or “quite a bit” interested in education issues, as compared to less than 40 percent of African American and white voters.

On many topics—including school vouchers, charter schools, digital learning, student and school accountability, common core standards, and teacher recruitment and retention policies—the views of Hispanic adults do not differ noticeably from those of either whites or African Americans.

But in certain domains—estimates of school costs and school quality, support for teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher pensions—the views of Hispanics differ rather substantially. Their judgment of the American school is generous, perhaps because they compare public schools in the United States to much less effective institutions in Mexico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. They also underestimate the costs of running public schools, though they revise their thinking rather substantially about the merits of spending increases once they learn the facts. They are less supportive of unions and union demands than are African Americans.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to evaluate schools (see Figure 4). When asked about the public schools in their community, no less than 55 percent give such favorable assessments. By comparison, whites and African Americans express significantly less enthusiasm about the nation’s schools. Less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans accord the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” and only around 40 percent give the schools in their community one of these two top grades.

Hispanic respondents think American students perform better academically than is actually the case. American 15-year-olds ranked no better than 25th among the 34 developed democracies participating in the latest round of international tests. Yet nearly 45 percent of Hispanics say student math performance in the United States ranks among the top 15 countries in the world in math. Only 30 percent of white and African American respondents place the United States that high.

Hispanic respondents also think the public schools cost a lot less than they actually do. While annual per-pupil expenditures run around $12,500, Hispanics, on average, estimate their cost at less than $5,000. Whites and African Americans estimate the costs to be more than $7,000.

The same goes for teacher salaries, which average about $56,000 a year. On average, Hispanics think teachers are paid little more than $25,000 a year; blacks, on average, think they are paid around $30,000 a year; and whites estimate salaries at $35,000.

When told just how much schools cost, however, Hispanic respondents adjust their thinking quite dramatically. When informed about actual per-pupil expenditures, Hispanics’ support for higher taxes to fund spending increases drops from 46 percent to 25 percent. When given the actual amount teachers receive, their support for higher salaries plummets nearly in half—from over 60 percent to little more than 30 percent.

Although learning the truth about costs and salaries has a similar impact on white opinion, African Americans remain more committed to higher spending. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans favor higher taxes, even when told how much is currently being spent, only a slight dip from the 42 percent favorable when that information is withheld. When given the facts about teacher salaries, African American support for higher salaries drops 20 percentage points—from 74 percent to 54 percent.

Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics do not appear especially sympathetic to teachers union demands in collective bargaining negotiations. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic adults think teachers should pay 20 percent of their pension and health care costs, as do 56 percent of African Americans.

By an overwhelming margin (87 percent), Hispanic respondents favor proposals to condition teacher tenure on their students’ making adequate progress on state tests. Whites and African Americans also favor such proposals but not to the same degree (75 percent and 80 percent, respectively). When it comes to whether teachers unions are playing a more positive or a more negative role in their local community, Hispanic adults come out in the middle—at 59 percent in support, they are more supportive than whites (45 percent) but less supportive than African Americans (75 percent).

Use test scores for evaluations, says the public (but not the teachers).

Teachers have long been paid primarily on the basis of their academic credentials and years of experience, creating in most parts of the country a lockstep pay scale that does not account for a teacher’s classroom performance. This approach is often justified on the grounds that it precludes favoritism on the part of principals, school board members, and other administrative officials.

As teacher effectiveness has become an increasingly visible policy issue, standard approaches to salary and tenure decisions are undergoing substantial change. More than 20 states now require that student test-score gains be used in key personnel decisions, often including tenure and salary determinations. Four states go so far as to prohibit a teacher from receiving a top rating if students do not exceed a certain level of accomplishment, while another 10 require that achievement gains constitute at least 50 percent of each teacher’s evaluation.

Is the public onboard with these changes? And what do teachers think about them? To find out, we randomly divided those interviewed into two groups (see Figure 5). The first group was given a stark choice: How much weight should be given to test scores and how much should be given to principal recommendations?

Given this simple dichotomy, the public says test-score gains should be given more than half the weight (62 percent) in making salary and tenure decisions. Teachers, by contrast, are prepared to place only a quarter of the weight (24 percent) on this information, with the other three-fourths of the weight being given to principal recommendations.

The second half of the sample was asked a more complex question, which required giving weights to test scores and evaluations from four different sources: principals, parents, students, and fellow teachers.

When the question was posed this way, the public and the teachers once again disagree. The public would place about one-third of the weight (32 percent) on test scores, but teachers would assign them less than one-fifth (19 percent). Conversely, teachers would give principal recommendations nearly half the weight (44 percent), while the public would give their recommendations less than one-quarter (23 percent).

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are unenthusiastic about being evaluated by their fellow teachers. Like the rest of the public, they divide up the remaining weight more or less equally among the three remaining sources of evidence (students, parents, and fellow teachers).

An even bigger gap between teachers and the public emerges on the desirability of releasing information about teacher performance to the public at large. In both New York City and Los Angeles, newspapers have published such information, provoking an outcry among teachers, who felt their privacy had been invaded. When we asked respondents about this as a general practice, 78 percent of the public expresses support, compared to just 33 percent of teachers (see Figure 6).

When given the option of expressing neutrality on the issue (as another randomly chosen half of the sample was), 60 percent of the public still says it supports the publication of information about teacher performance, while only 13 percent is opposed, the remaining 27 percent taking the neutral position. Teacher opinion is almost the mirror image. Fifty-four percent oppose making information on test-score impacts publicly available, 30 percent express support, with the remaining 16 percent not taking a clear position either way.

Are teachers unions undermining teacher popularity?

Teachers have long held a cherished place in American popular culture. In such films as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society, Hollywood has highlighted the power of teachers to utterly transform the lives of their students.

But is this now changing? Are Waiting for Superman, Bad Teacher, and Won’t Back Down (forthcoming “A Takeover Tale,” cultured, Winter 2013) harbingers of a new, more skeptical depiction of teachers? At first, it would seem that public trust in teachers is widespread. When we asked half of the respondents in our survey whether they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” no less than 72 percent say “yes” (see Figure 7). This is almost exactly what Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), a publication sympathetic to teachers unions, found in its 2012 poll and about the same as in PDK polls in previous years.

When we expand the possible response categories, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Only 4 percent of the American public has “complete” trust and confidence in teachers, and just 38 percent has “a lot” of trust and confidence in them. Meanwhile, 49 percent has “some” trust and confidence, and 9 percent has “little” trust and confidence. In other words, 58 percent of those surveyed express less than “a lot of trust and confidence” in the teaching force.

Since this is the first time the public has been asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories, we cannot document any trends over time. But we do know that public opinion toward teachers unions—and teachers’ opinions of them, too—has turned in a negative direction. The portion who thinks that teachers unions have had a positive effect on their local schools has dropped by 7 percentage points over the past year. Among teachers, the downward shift is no less than 16 percentage points.

In this year’s survey, as we have done in the past, we asked the following question: “Some people say teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What is your opinion? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive view on your local schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Respondents could choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.

In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40 percent of respondents took the neutral position, saying that unions had neither a positive nor a negative impact. The remainder were divided almost evenly, with the negative share just barely exceeding the positive.

This year, however, the teachers unions lost ground. While 41 percent of the public still takes the neutral position, the portion with a positive view of unions dropped 7 percentage points in the last year, from 29 percent to 22 percent.

The drop is even greater, in both magnitude and significance, among our nationally representative sample of teachers. At a time when, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has lost 150,000 members over the past two years, and projects to lose 200,000 more members by 2014, teacher discontent appears to be rising. Whereas 58 percent of teachers had a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43 percent do so in 2012. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled during this period, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

But when that same question was posed in either/or terms to the public as a whole, respondents split down the middle: 51 percent say unions had a negative impact, while 49 percent say their effect was positive. Teachers, meanwhile, offered a more positive assessment. When forced to choose between just two options, 71 percent of teachers claim that unions are a force for good, whereas 29 percent see them as a stumbling block to reform.

Support for school spending is shaky.

With the U.S. economy trying to crawl back to recovery, an unemployment rate above 8 percent, and state and local governments facing the prospect of insolvency, many school districts have found it necessary to cut expenditures and personnel. In California, the cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have declared bankruptcy. In Michigan, the financially bankrupt Muskegon schools have been handed over to a for-profit charter organization. Cuts in arts programs and extracurricular activities are becoming commonplace. Nationwide, the number of school employees has drifted downward by as much as 5 percent in the past few years.

Still, the American public continues to support increasing spending on local public schools. Or at least it appears to do so (see Figure 8). Sixty-three percent of the general public says it prefers an increase in school expenditures in the local district, well up from levels in 2007 when only 51 percent of the public called for expenditure increases. Not surprisingly, teachers are even more enthusiastic about increasing expenditures, 68 percent of whom like the idea.

When one investigates the issue just a bit further, however, fractures can be detected in the public’s willingness to spend more on public schools. Though most Americans still offer their support for spending increases in the abstract, their enthusiasm ebbs rather substantially when the taxes needed to pay for the increased expenditures are broached and when information about actual expenditures and salaries is provided.

Part of the explanation for this is the widespread ignorance on the part of the general public about just how much already is spent on public schools. When asked to estimate per-pupil expenditure in their district, Americans guess that expenditures are about $6,500 annually, when in fact they are around $12,500. That is only a slightly better set of estimates than the ones given in 2009, when Americans thought $4,231 was being spent per pupil and the reality was closer to $10,000 (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009).

When respondents are told the correct figure, support for spending on public schools shifts sharply downward. Support for increased spending on our standard question drops by 20 percentage points, a much bigger drop than what was observed in 2009, when support for increased spending fell only 8 percentage points (from 46 percent to 38 percent).

In another sign of less-than-wholehearted support for an education spending spree, only 35 percent of the public says taxes should increase to fund the schools. Support drops by another 11 percentage points—to just 24 percent—when those interviewed were first told how much was currently being spent.

Teachers, who stand to benefit from increased expenditure, remain committed to more spending when told the realities of the expenditure situation in their district. Their support slips only 8 percentage points from the high of 68 percent when no information is supplied about current expenditures. But even teachers are 17 percentage points less likely to support higher taxes to fund increases in education spending.

When the subject turns from per-pupil expenditures to teacher salaries, the same pattern emerges (see Figure 9). When asked without any accompanying information, nearly two out of three Americans think that teacher salaries should go up. Among teachers, support for a salary boost registers at no less than 85 percent.

As they do on per-pupil expenditures, however, Americans hold markedly inaccurate views about actual teacher salaries. When asked to hazard a guess, Americans estimate that public school teachers in their states receive, on average, about $36,000 in salary annually. The true figure, even without accounting for benefits, pensions, and the like, sits at about $56,000 nationwide.

Support for higher salaries plummets, however, when Americans are told how much teachers actually make in their states. Of those given the facts, only 36 percent favor an increase, which amounts to a whopping 28-percentage-point decline from the 64 percent favoring an increase when no information is supplied.

When teachers were given accurate information about salary levels in their state, their support slips by only 10 percentage points, probably because they are thinking about their own paycheck. Also, they have a better sense of teacher salaries in their state than the public has, estimating them to be about $44,000 annually.

Is public support for charters really that much higher than for vouchers and tax credits?

As a policy reform, school choice shows no signs of slowing. The number of states with school-voucher and tax-credit programs has escalated since 2010, the number of students attending charter schools climbs steadily year by year, and new technologies for online learning are being promoted by a cascade of new entrepreneurs.

The contours of elite debate about school choice, however, are not replicated in the larger public. While charter schools and digital learning are thought to be the safest choice options for political elites to promote, tax credits are even more popular than charters, and vouchers, the most controversial proposal, also command the support of half the population when the idea is posed in an inviting way.

Vouchers and tax credits. When it comes to school vouchers, apparent levels of public support turn on the wording of the question. For the past two years, PDK has asked whether respondents “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Even with the rather loaded “at public expense” phrasing, PDK reported that support shifted upward from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2012.

If one asks the question in a more inviting manner, as we have, support jumps further still (see Figure 10). Told about a proposal “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,” 50 percent of the American public comes out in support and 50 percent expresses opposition.

Still, support for vouchers does not match public willingness to back tax credits, even though most economists think the difference between vouchers and tax credits more a matter of style than substance. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of the public favors a “tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” We find little evidence that support for tax credits has changed significantly since 2011.

Charters. Figure 11 shows that when given a choice of supporting or opposing charter schools, 62 percent of the public says it favors ”the formation of charter schools,” nearly identical to what PDK finds (66 percent favoring ”the idea of charter schools”). Support for charters, however, is softer than it might seem. When respondents are given the opportunity to take a neutral position that neither supports nor opposes charters, no less than 41 percent choose that option. Among the remainder, the split is nearly three to one in favor of charters.

Meanwhile, public knowledge about charters remains as impoverished as ever. As our survey did two years ago, we asked respondents a variety of factual questions: whether charter schools can hold religious services, charge tuition, receive more or less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, and are legally obligated to admit students randomly when oversubscribed. We found little change in the level of public information over the past two years. Large percentages of respondents still say they don’t know the answers to these questions. Among those who hazard a guess, they are as likely to give the wrong answer as the correct one. Although teachers do a better job of accurately identifying the characteristics of charter schools, even a majority of teachers get many of the answers wrong or say they don’t know.

Online education. As major universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others—are joining community colleges and state universities in a nationwide dash toward online learning in higher education, many states are exploring ways of incorporating new digital technologies into secondary schools.

A substantial share of both the public and the teaching force seems ready to consider the expansion of online learning. When asked if high school students should be allowed to take “approved classes either online or in school,” opinion splits down the middle, with a bare majority (53 percent to 47 percent) favoring the idea. Teachers are more enthusiastic, among whom no less than 61 percent feel students should be given an online option.

The public, however, is not equally enthusiastic about all uses of the online tool, nor is support for the idea gaining strength. The most popular uses are for rural education and advanced course taking. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed think students in rural areas should have online opportunities, with only 14 percent opposing the idea. That is down modestly from the 64 percent who supported this use in 2008. Similar percentages of support and opposition are expressed for advanced courses taken online for college credit. But once again, levels of support have slipped since 2008 (from 68 percent to 57 percent in 2012).

Less popular are online courses for dropouts and home schoolers. Only 44 percent favor, and 30 percent oppose, using public funding to help dropouts take courses online. Many home schoolers find online courses to be a valuable tool, but the public remains dubious. Only 28 percent favors public funding for such uses, and 38 percent opposes it. Those percentages have not changed materially since 2008.

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

In the 21st-century workplace, mathematical capability is a key determinant of productivity. College graduates who majored in subjects such as math, engineering, and the physical sciences earn an average of 19 percent more than those who specialized in other fields, according to the American Community Survey of 2009 and 2010. Precollegiate mathematical aptitude matters as well: math SAT scores predict higher earnings among adults, while verbal SAT scores do not.

These facts help explain our national focus on improving math performance. International comparisons made possible by standardized testing reveal just how American students lag behind their global peers (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011). Judging the nation purely by its own historical performance yields the same conclusion. Between 1972 and 2011, real GDP per capita doubled in the U.S., but the average math SAT score of college-bound high-school seniors and the proportion of college graduates majoring in a mathematically intensive subject barely budged.

Concern about our students’ math achievement is nothing new, and debates about the mathematical training of our nation’s youth date back a century or more. In the early 20th century, American high-school students were starkly divided, with rigorous math courses restricted to a college-bound elite. At midcentury, the “new math” movement sought, unsuccessfully, to bring rigor to the masses, and subsequent egalitarian impulses led to new reforms that promised to improve the skills of lower-performing students. While reformers assumed that higher-performing students would not be harmed in the process, evidence suggests that the dramatic watering down of curricular standards since that time has made our top performers worse-off. Even promised improvements in the lower part of the distribution have at times proved elusive, a point illustrated below by the disappointing results of a recent initiative to accelerate algebra instruction in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district.

America’s lagging mathematics performance reflects a basic failure to understand the benefits of adapting the curriculum to meet the varying instructional needs of students. Recently published results from policies such as Chicago’s “double dose” of algebra, which groups students homogeneously and increases instructional time for lower-skilled math students (see “A Double Dose of Algebra,” research, Winter 2013), support differentiation as the best way to promote higher achievement among all students.

Decades of Hand Wringing

Figure 1 uses data from the American Community Survey of 2009 and 2010 to track a basic indicator of math proficiency over a 75-year span: the proportion of college graduates who majored in a math-intensive subject (math, statistics, engineering, or physical sciences) in each cohort. The sample is limited to male college graduates in order to address possible concerns about changing gender composition of the college-graduate population, although the figure looks similar if females are included.

Fluctuations in this indicator over time support a basic argument: American attempts to homogenize the math curriculum in secondary schools, although sometimes successful at improving the performance of the average student, have come at the cost of preparing the nation’s most promising students for mathematically intensive study.

At one point in time, 3 college graduates in 10 majored in a math-intensive subject. These cohorts grew up in an era when advanced math topics—algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—were considered “intellectual luxuries,” worthy of instruction to a select few, but of little to no relevance for the vast majority of the workforce. From the 1930s through the mid-1950s, educational practice codified these beliefs. Less than one-third of all high-school students enrolled in algebra, substantially fewer in geometry, and only 1 in 50 proceeded to trigonometry.

Among cohorts educated in the post–World War II era, there have been three distinct periods of decline in this measure of math performance. The first decline is modest and occurred very soon after World War II. Students graduating in the 1950s and early 1960s majored in math-intensive subjects less often than those graduating in the late 1940s. Trends in college completion, also shown in Figure 1, suggest that this early decline in math intensity corresponds with a run-up in college attendance and completion associated with the GI Bill. Given the restriction of advanced mathematical training to a select group of high school students in the first half of the century, it’s reasonable to think that the expansion of college access, presumably to less-prepared students, explains this first decline.

Expansion of access might explain a portion of the much larger decline occurring between 1962 and 1974. But the access and math-intensity trends don’t line up perfectly, and changes in enrollment and completion rates are not sufficiently large to explain the full decline in math intensity in these years.

If the admission of mathematically marginal students can’t explain this decline in math-intensive study, what can? One might hypothesize that math-intensive subjects are subject to “fads,” implying that college enrollment fluctuations have little to do with the underlying ability of students. The midcentury decline in math intensity, however, occurs at a time when math-intensive study should have enjoyed great popularity. The graduating class of 1974 commenced its formal education immediately following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, and graduated from high school shortly after the United States put a man on the moon. Nevertheless, this cohort chose math-intensive majors at roughly half the rate of classes from the 1940s.

The midcentury decline in math intensity coincides with the rise of the “new-math” movement. This movement to improve the math skills of average students was sparked in part by national security concerns. During World War II, many rank-and-file soldiers were unable to calculate the trajectory of artillery shells, among other things, in an era when hand computation in the field was still a necessity. The Cold War–era “arms race” and “space race” amplified calls to steer more American students toward math, science, and engineering. The new-math movement reflected a shift in curriculum design from professional educators to professional mathematicians. Where “old math” was pragmatic, focusing students’ efforts on tasks they were likely to perform in the course of their future careers, “new math” valued mastery of fundamental concepts, some of them quite abstract. It is during the new-math era, for example, that calculus was introduced as a high school subject, albeit only for a select group of students. Ironically, a curricular reform designed to introduce new rigor and bring higher-order subjects to more students in secondary school appears to have resulted in a strong movement away from math at the collegiate level.

Given that the substitution of rigor for practicality appears to have turned students off to math, it stands to reason that substitution in the reverse direction would undo the effect. And indeed, the wane of the new-math movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s might explain the resurgence of interest in math-intensive majors, the only such episode observed over a period of 75 years, among those graduating from college in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The resurgence was short-lived. From the 1984 class onward, the proportion of college graduates completing math-intensive majors dropped steadily. This second major decline in math intensity reflects a second nationwide effort to improve the math performance of average students. The alarm bells sounded by the influential A Nation At Risk report in 1983 pointed not to the performance of the elite but rather to the prevalence of remedial education in colleges and universities. It lamented the fact that a small fraction of high school students managed to complete calculus, in spite of the fact that most attended a school that offered the course.

Six years after A Nation At Risk, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics introduced new standards that favored calculators over pencil-and-paper computations, cooperative work over direct instruction, and intuition over solution algorithms. Educational rhetoric of the “No Child Left Behind” era has continued to prioritize the performance of average or even below-average students. The proficiency standards mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act impose sanctions on schools that fail to serve their worst-performing students, but enact no penalty on schools that accomplish this goal by shifting resources away from their top performers. Studies have verified the predictable consequence: gains to students just below the proficiency level have in some settings been offset by losses among more-advanced students.

No Improvement in High School

Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides further indication that curricular reforms have improved performance in basic subjects without providing a stronger foundation for more advanced study. Successive waves of testing show that students born in 1981, for example, outperformed the 1977 birth cohort at ages 9 and 13, but had lost their advantage by the time they reached 17. The performance of American 15-year-olds on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam in 2000 and 2009 confirms the lack of progress among secondary school students. The United States is among those countries whose math performance worsened over this time period. American students also fell behind those from several other countries: Luxembourg, Hungary, Poland, and Germany. International comparisons focused on younger students, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), however, show more signs of progress in the United States relative to other nations.

This evidence of stagnation among secondary school students seems at odds with statistics on the math course–taking patterns of American students. In the mid-1980s, about one student in six took Algebra I in middle school. In more recent years, the national average has been closer to one-third, a doubling over the course of a generation. In some areas, including California and the District of Columbia, the majority of students take Algebra I as 8th graders.

How can students simultaneously proceed to advanced coursework earlier and perform no better on national and international assessments? Figure 2 yields some insight by listing the tables of contents for two introductory algebra textbooks: George Chrystal’s fifth edition, published in 1904, and Algebra 1, published by Prentice Hall exactly one century later. While there are similarities in the curricula outlined by these books—both, for example, cover quadratic equations late in the manuscript—the early book covered many more topics in greater detail. There is no mention of series in the later book, nor logarithms, interest and annuities, complex numbers, or exponential functions beyond the quadratic. Ironically, the only topic covered in greater detail in the 2004 textbook is inequality—of the mathematical variety.

A distaste for inequality has clearly motivated mathematics curricular reforms over the past quarter century. While the intent of equality-minded reforms is to boost low-performing students, in the case of American mathematics achievement, decline among higher-performing students has been part of the bargain. Furthermore, results from Charlotte’s algebra acceleration initiative indicate that an unthinking pursuit of equality can in fact harm all students, not just those at the top.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Algebra Initiative

This section summarizes research I undertook with Duke University colleagues Charles Clotfelter and Helen Ladd. The complete report, available as a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, studies the impact of an algebra acceleration initiative in one of North Carolina’s largest school districts.

North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS) district is generally regarded as a model education agency. It serves more than 100,000 students, ranking among the 30 largest in the United States. Among the 18 large school districts identified in 2009 NAEP assessment results, CMS ranked first in 4th-grade math performance, the only large district to post scores exceeding the national average. The district covers an entire county, incorporating both urban and suburban communities. While it is more affluent than most large districts in its NAEP peer group, it has a higher student poverty rate than North Carolina as a whole. A majority of students in the district are either black or Hispanic.

A decade ago, CMS superintendent Eric Smith instructed middle school principals to enroll a larger proportion of students in Algebra I, the first course in the state’s college-preparatory high-school sequence. He told PBS that middle school math is “the definition of what the rest of the child’s life is going to look like academically.” His goal was to “make sure that kids were given that kind of access to upper-level math in middle school.”

Figure 3 documents the impact of the policy initiative, using administrative data on CMS students from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center. It divides students into five groups of roughly equal size (quintiles), based on their performance on the state’s end-of-grade math assessment as 6th graders. Students are further divided into five age cohorts.

Students whose 6th-grade test scores place them in the top quintile of the distribution are consistently likely to take Algebra I by 8th grade. For students closer to the middle of the 6th-grade distribution, however, Algebra I enrollment rates varied considerably across cohorts. In the cohort entering 7th grade in 2000–01, about half of moderately performing students (those between the 40th and 60th percentile) took Algebra I as 8th graders; low-performing students in the same cohort had virtually no chance of taking algebra in middle school.

Over the next two years, the effect of Smith’s algebra policy can be readily observed. Moderately performing students in the 2002–03 7th-grade cohort had an 85 percent chance of taking Algebra I as 8th graders; even the lowest-performing students had a one-in-six chance.

Just as quickly as the policy was introduced, a return to the status quo appears in the data. The cohort of students entering 7th grade in 2004–05 took Algebra I in 8th grade at rates similar to or even lower than their counterparts in the first cohort. One might conclude from the rapid reversal that the policy did not lead to the anticipated effects. We’ll present the evidence on that score momentarily.

Smith’s initiative was inspired by basic observational evidence. In the United States, as elsewhere, students observed taking advanced courses at an early age tend to accomplish more later in life. In a later interview, Smith cited evidence documenting higher rates of AP course completion and better SAT scores among students who had taken Algebra I by 8th grade. But to infer from this that early entry benefits students, one must assume that the students in the advanced courses were no different from their counterparts, on average, before taking the course. This assumption is clearly misguided. As Figure 3 shows, those who in 2000 had the highest math scores in 6th grade (the top two quintiles) were much more likely than those with lower scores to take Algebra I by 8th grade. While it is theoretically possible that early progression to advanced coursework compounds this advantage, empirically it is very difficult to disentangle this benefit from the profound baseline differences between early and late algebra takers.

The CMS policy initiative provides a rare opportunity to perform this disentangling. Moderately performing students born just two years apart were subjected to radically different algebra placement policies. Were students in the accelerated cohort more likely to perform well in Algebra I? In the standard follow-up courses of Geometry and Algebra II? Figure 4 summarizes the evidence, which is based on student performance on North Carolina’s standardized end-of-course tests in the three subjects. The analysis on which the figure is based isolates the impact of Algebra I acceleration by comparing the performance of otherwise identical students who were subject to different placement policies by virtue of belonging to different age cohorts.

Students perform significantly worse on the state’s Algebra I end-of-course test when they take the course earlier in their career. The decline in performance is approximately one-third of a standard deviation, or 13 percentile points for an average student. The course material forgone in the acceleration process, plus the additional maturity that comes with a year of age, contribute positively to Algebra I performance.

The decline in end-of-course test performance implies that students’ risk of failing the course increase when they are accelerated. One could adopt a relatively sanguine view, arguing that accelerated students who have to retake the course ultimately aren’t any worse-off than those who weren’t accelerated in the first place. And the second effect shown in Figure 4 supports this view, showing that in spite of their worse performance, accelerated students actually become a bit more likely to pass the course on a college-preparatory schedule, that is, no later than their 10th-grade year. For most of these students, the acceleration provided three chances to pass the course rather than two.

It’s a different story when we consider the next outcome: whether students manage to pass the state’s end-of-course test in geometry by the end of their 11th-grade year. Accelerated students were 10 percentage points less likely to meet this threshold, in spite of the fact that acceleration gave them two chances, rather than one, to retake a course in the event they did not receive a passing grade.

By forgoing a year of prealgebraic math, students miss an opportunity to receive some instruction in fundamental topics underlying geometry. Although certain topics in geometry flow naturally from algebra—translating an equation with two unknowns into a line in a two-dimensional plane, for example—there are others that do not. In North Carolina’s standard curriculum, geometry incorporates emphasis on area and volume calculations, trigonometric functions, and proof writing, topic areas with zero coverage in the standard Algebra I curriculum.

To complete the college-preparatory curriculum in North Carolina, students must at a minimum pass the set of courses culminating in Algebra II. Accelerated students were neither more nor less likely to clear this hurdle by the time they would ordinarily complete 12th grade. The data show that many accelerated students who passed Algebra II did so without ever passing Geometry, implying that they had not completed the full college-preparatory math sequence. The struggles of accelerated students undoubtedly explain why CMS so rapidly reversed course, returning to its initial placement policy after only two years of acceleration.

Policy Implications

American public schools have made a clear trade-off over the past few decades. With the twin goals of improving the math performance of the average student and promoting equality, it has made the curriculum more accessible. The drawback to exclusive use of this more accessible curriculum can be observed among the nation’s top-performing students, who are either less willing or less able than their predecessors or their high-achieving global peers to follow the career paths in math, science, and engineering that are the key to innovation and job creation. In the name of preparing more of the workforce to take those jobs, we have harmed the skills of those who might have created them. Although there is some evidence of a payoff from this sacrifice, in the form of marginally better performance among average students, some of the strategies used to help these students have in fact backfired.

To some extent, the nation has reduced the costs of this movement through immigration. Foreign students account for more than half of all doctorate recipients in science and engineering, two-thirds of those in engineering. Many of these degree recipients leave the country when they finish, however, limiting their potential benefit to native-born Americans. Immigration policy reform that emphasizes skills over traditional family reunification criteria, much like the policies in place in Australia, Canada, and other developed nations, could change this pattern.

A second possible policy option would be to implement a curricular reform more radical than tinkering with the timing of already existing courses. Many schools have adopted the so-called “Singapore math” model, which emphasizes in-depth coverage of a limited set of topics. There are concerns, however, regarding whether a curriculum developed in a different cultural and educational context could produce similar results here. Singapore’s public schools, for example, use a year-round calendar, obviating the need to review basic subjects after a summer spent out of the classroom. Evidence also indicates that Singapore’s teachers have a firmer grasp of math than their American counterparts.

The United States need not import its science and engineering innovators, however. It need not borrow a faddish curriculum from a foreign context. And it need not sacrifice the math achievement of the average student in order to cater to superstars. It need only recognize that equalizing the curriculum for all students cannot be accomplished without imposing significant lifelong costs on some and perhaps all students.

Curricular differentiation might, for its part, exacerbate test-score gaps between moderate and high performers, if high performers move ahead more quickly. A narrow-minded focus on the magnitude of the gap, however, can lead to scenarios where the gap is closed primarily by worsening the performance of high-achieving students—bringing the top down—without raising the performance of low-achieving students. Society’s goal should be to improve the status of low-performing students in absolute terms, not just relative to that of their higher-performing peers. A growing body of evidence suggests that this type of improvement is best achieved by sorting students, even at a young age, into relatively homogenous groups, to better enable curricular specialization. Recent results from Chicago, cited above, provide evidence that differentiating the high school mathematics curriculum can have long-run benefits, even for students assigned to remedial coursework.

Not all children are equally prepared to embark on a rigorous math curriculum on the first day of kindergarten, and there are no realistic policy alternatives to change this simple fact. Rather than wish differences among students away, a rational policy for the 21st century will respond to those variations, tailoring lessons to children’s needs. This strategy promises to provide the next generation of prospective scientists and engineers with the training they need to create jobs, and the next generation of workers with the skills they need to qualify for them.

Jacob Vigdor is professor of public policy and economics at Duke University.

Many upper-middle-class parents are willing to have their children be “the first” white kids in a school and are comfortable with the idea of their child being a superminority. When the idea takes on an actual shape, however, diversity’s nonsuperficial elements often batter their sense of right and wrong, and they leave. After interviewing more than 50 of these gentrifiers about their school-choice process, I concluded that it is the substantive differences in parenting styles between the white, upper-middle-class parents and the nonwhite, less-affluent parents that are hindering school integration, as these parenting styles directly affect school culture and expectations. This article explores how the disparate cultures found in gentrifying neighborhoods clash in schools, and the pivotal role school leaders play in determining whether integration succeeds or fails, based on their ability and willingness to bridge the two worlds.

Culture Clash

The cultural differences between the newcomers and the old-timers in gentrifying neighborhoods can be easily, though inadequately, summarized: white, upper-middle-class families prefer a progressive and discursive style of interaction with their children, both at home and in school, and lower-income, nonwhite families prefer a traditional or authoritarian style of interaction with their children in these same venues. Annette Lareau’s book, Unequal Childhoods, delves deeply into these contrasting styles and how they play out over a lifetime. In my research on school choice, one cultural disparity came up repeatedly as a reason for why white parents leave the schools they are trying to integrate. They were put off by near-constant yelling—from principals, teachers, school aides, and nonwhite parents who come to drop off and pick up their kids. The white parents were surprised to discover that not only is the authoritarian end of the schooling spectrum alive, which would be tolerable if not ideal, but also that their gentrifying neighborhood schools exhibit what these parents perceive to be an extreme and outdated education environment, characterized by strict discipline with yelling adults.

Avery (pseudonyms are used for all of my interviewees), a white mom who was clearly resigned to the pervasiveness of this norm at her newly integrating school, explained that she was leaving “primarily because of the discipline issues. I figured the older, the higher up you got, the more effect there would be on him. I didn’t know enough about the upper-grade teachers to automatically be comfortable, because I know there were some yellers in the bunch. And I didn’t want him to get a yeller. It’s a crapshoot every year who you’re going to get.”

Amber was “appalled” by what she “saw in the hallways and in the cafeteria with the way some of the teachers would speak to students.” She remembers many teachers “screaming at the students,” and quickly concluded that “the pre-K was fine, but there was no way she was going to see the kindergarten year of that school.”

Erich used the word “insanity” to express his disdain for the yelling and strictness norm, which he attributed primarily to the administration: “There was just a lot of yelling in the halls, a lot of screaming at the kids. If the kids were acting up they would be punished by not allowing them to go to recess. You need to give them more recess time if they are acting up! Punishing the whole class if one kid is acting up is insanity to me.”

Cindy’s son “hated” school, and she attributed it to a classroom that “was kind of disorganized. There was a lot of yelling and there was no standard of discipline in place.” Clearly trained in diplomatic speak, Cindy expanded on how the yelling drove her out of the school: “I do think it is a little strange when you’re walking down the halls of the school and you hear teachers shouting and screaming ‘shut up’ at the kids. That is not a good thing. Our kids get yelled at enough at home, but to have to go to school and get yelled at too, it is not a good thing. So, I just wanted out of the school at that point.”

Meredith was not just concerned about “the policing of kids” and the impact this was having on her own children, she was especially aggrieved by the way the yelling seemed to target the young black boys in the school. She described a scene in which the black boys were “being treated like prisoners, lined up against the wall, like they’re being incarcerated already!” She was clearly pained recalling this story: “It was so tragic, so, so tragic. You know I was so aware of my own privilege in the situation, knowing I could pull my kids out at any time. And there are some parents for whom this is their chance!”

Lisbeth was equally horrified by the way the school aides’ yelling always seemed to hone in on the black boys, and she told her principal, “They would never dare speak that way to my children. They speak that way to the black boys. So not only is it horrible for everybody, but they’re reinforcing a stereotype that black boys can be spoken to in a way that white boys and white girls are not spoken to.”

In Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit explores the dissimilar styles of communication exhibited by people from different racial and class backgrounds, and how these differences might have a negative impact on learning. For example, Delpit sees a problem when a typical white, middle-class teacher uses a passive communication style with her low-income black students, such as asking them to take their seats instead of telling them to take their seats. She argues that this passive communication style is confusing because of low-income black children’s expectations of how authority figures should act, and this mismatch hinders their academic progress. She asserts that white, liberal educators who value student-centered pedagogy and soft, conversant, negotiated power end up alienating and confusing children who are used to explicit instructions and assertive, strong authority figures, a parenting style more common in the black community. My research suggests that this cultural mismatch also appears to work the other way. The teachers in predominantly poor, minority schools, who are reportedly mostly black and have adopted the more teacher-centered, authoritarian style of instruction that they view as appropriate for their students, are turning off white, upper-middle-class parents who want school climates similar to their own progressive homes, where problems are discussed. The “yelling” described by my interviewees could simply be a misperception of Delpit’s described assertiveness. What they think of as “yelling” might just be a firmness and directness that these parents are not used to, that is not part of their culture. Regardless, it hampers integration, because the white, upper-middle-class parents who send their children to schools in their gentrifying neighborhood do not want them spoken to in that way, whatever its label, and they often reconsider their schooling decision.

Different Sensibilities

The parents I interviewed who were taking their children out of their gentrifying neighborhood’s school shared stories of cultural dissonance that were minor affairs, but that crystallized for them the discomfort they felt as newcomers, and their inability to find a niche. In one example, the newcomers were trying to organize volunteers to come in to the cafeteria at lunchtime to help manage what they called “the chaos,” only to be kept out by fear of child molestation. As Meredith recounts with both humor and horror, some of the nonwhite families in the school responded to the lunchroom volunteer proposal with, “How do we know who is coming into the school? We need to protect our children! How do we know these people aren’t going to molest our children?” To which Meredith sarcastically replied (in her mind only, of course), “Yeah, right, that is something we really need to be afraid of!”

Avery explained to me how the lower-income parents in the school wanted these lunchroom parent volunteers to go through a Learning Leaders program before they could come in and open milk cartons. She was baffled by the resistance to something that seemed so innocent and helpful: “You know, it was basically bringing hands and ideas. It was not trying to change curriculum, nothing dramatic. It was simply, ‘Let’s ease the hardest part of the day, when you have no teachers and few adult hands in the lunchroom.’ We were literally going in and opening up milk cartons and handing out sewing cards. And yet somewhere along the line, there was an ego that got trip-wired. I don’t know what it was. But all of a sudden, ‘Oh, you have to go through the Learning Leaders program before you can even volunteer in the lunchroom! No, you cannot touch the students at all!’ I heard yelling at a meeting, from another parent, ‘I don’t want you in the lunchroom opening my kid’s milk unless you’ve gone through Learning Leaders! I don’t want you touching my kid!’ Like heaven forbid you put your arm around a kid’s shoulder!”

Since my study focused on the perceptions of the white, upper-middle-class families, I don’t know why there was such great concern about child molestation at this school. The parents I interviewed who were at the school at the time didn’t know either, and in the course of debating this parent lunchroom volunteer proposal, they never found out. It was as though they couldn’t have a conversation about it. Each side was so taken aback by the other’s sensibilities that there was no room for discussion.

Principals Matter

The reaction of the principal in a gentrifying neighborhood’s school to the arrival of more-demanding parents largely determined whether the white, upper-middle-class families stayed at the school in spite of the yelling and other incidents, or left. Those school leaders skilled at bridging gentrification’s cultural divide were able to retain the newcomers. They assured the white parents that they were welcomed and valued members of the school community, even as they continued to hold the respect of the families who had long been part of the school. This took political savvy, and perhaps a special talent for code switching. It was easier to do in schools with a diverse nonwhite population, and in neighborhoods that were further along in the gentrification process, where the battle over who it belongs to isn’t as raw. Interviewees described those school leaders who were unable to meet the needs and expectations of both groups of parents quite negatively and identified the principals as the ultimate reason for their departure.

At Timothy’s school, for example, all of the white families I interviewed rated the teachers “very good,” “great,” or “excellent,” so the principal, Dr. Fox, had a solid starting point for retaining the new families. But the parents described Dr. Fox as exacerbating the cultural tensions, tensions stemming mostly from different expectations about lunch and recess, with his “race baiting” and by “bad-mouthing some parents in the neighborhood to other parents.” He reportedly said things like, “Oh these nouveau riche parents want to come in and take over, remember how our neighborhood used to be before all these nouveau riche people showed up?’” One parent described him as “acting like Al Sharpton.” Another said he fostered an “us-against-them environment,” and he allegedly sent “horrible, stupid, hostile, mean, petty, threatening” e-mails to two of the white parents at the school, accusing them of “trying to bring down a strong black man.”

Parents complained that Dr. Fox tried to turn any criticism about the school into a racial issue. Shawn described him as “thwarting every attack by saying, ‘It’s these white people, they’re racist, they want private school, they want this, they want that, they want to make this school into a cooperative,’ things that make no sense at all.” But if his goal was to drive away the white families, his tactics were effective. As Shawn concludes, “If you say enough of it, and people want to believe you, they’ll believe you. So, eventually, we all just sort of left, in fear and in shame. Having to take my daughter out of the school, it hugely undermines what I’m trying to teach her about race relations. It’s really weird; it’s a weird situation.”

Power and Protocol

Weirdness is a common theme in parents’ recollections of school leaders who were both unwelcoming and unaccommodating. Cindy explained how her son got in trouble in his kindergarten class for raising his hand during a lesson, “because apparently you can’t do that.” He now lived in fear of getting in trouble and having to sit under the big T for Time Out. Cindy found this disciplining for hand raising so “bizarre” that she took her concerns to the principal. Dr. Caraway didn’t think it was strange at all and did nothing to help mediate the classroom culture disagreement between one of her teachers and one of her parents.

Kate was driven to tears within the first week of school by Dr. Caraway. She unknowingly violated protocol by inviting fellow pre-K families to a pizza party without first getting Dr. Caraway’s approval to distribute the invitation. It was Dr. Caraway’s peculiarity about the situation that Kate found so maddening, as she describes, “We were at a meeting with parents about procedures and things, and the principal was talking about how—I mean the way she was talking you would think that somebody had distributed some kind of communist propaganda—she is talking about how somebody had the audacity to distribute something without it going through her office! And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, how horrible, what did this person do?’ I had no idea that she was talking about my pizza party invitation. Then once it finally dawned on me, I don’t know how I made the connection that she was talking about me inviting my child’s classmates to pizza, on a Saturday in the park, but I went up to her and tried to talk to her calmly about it. She was just so defensive, trying to hold on so tight to whatever little power she had left. She just made me feel like I had done something awful. I invited the kids to pizza! I just don’t get it!”

Paula described an even stranger interaction with this same principal. She and a few other families in the school organized getting Barnes & Noble to give $4,000 worth of book cards so all the teachers would have a $100 gift card for books. According to Paula, Dr. Caraway thought they were “trying to bribe the teachers and turn them against her,” so she left a message on Paula’s answering machine telling her, “Oh you can’t do this, the DOE, it’s against the rules,” and then, thinking she had hung up, continued to say on the machine, “Just wait til Ms. —— and Ms. —— (referring to Paula and her friend) hear that! Ha ha ha ha ha (cackling like a witch).” Paula concludes, “It was so bad, it was straight out of the movies.”

Navigating Diversity

It isn’t clear what drove these principals to reject the white, upper-middle-class parents and their attempts to bring resources to the schools. Some interviewees thought these school leaders felt threatened and were trying to hold onto their power base; some simply thought the various principals were “not the brightest bulb in the box,” “insane,” “crazy,” “incompetent.” A few parents blamed themselves and thought that perhaps their tactics were insensitive to the existing school culture and off-putting to the nonwhite, lower-income families in the school. Despite their having the best intentions, given the cultural divide, they simply couldn’t find a way to enter the school and offer what they had without inciting tension.

Paula thought that successful integrators “showed the proper respect to teachers and parents,” whereas those who were not successful “felt like they were a little better than everybody, they didn’t mesh with the old parents, they didn’t know how the dynamics of the school really worked.” Among these dynamics were the “school is your job, home is my job” attitude common among lower-class parents. This was truly confusing to upper-middle-class parents, who had never really interacted with families with this attitude about school.

Avery offered a critique of herself and her peers for possibly failing to have the proper “cultural sensitivity” in their integration efforts. Her reflection on what happened is an attempt to take some of the blame off of the school leader: “There wasn’t enough, honestly, ego stroking or catering, there was not enough acknowledgment. It came across as, ‘You’re broken and you need fixing,’ rather than, ‘We’ve got extra hands, we’ve got extra energy, let’s build up what you already have.’ The perception, for whatever reason, was, ‘You’re judging what we have as inadequate.’ I think that there needed to be a bit more weaving of the parents together. Before saying, ‘We’re doing this,’ there needed to be more weaving.”

The weaving together of extremely different groups of people is not easy, especially when there is an undeniable hierarchy. Those at the economic top can exercise their privilege and exit a situation when it proves untenable. Despite believing in equality, they discover in their gentrifying neighborhoods that this concept isn’t pure, and diversity isn’t always a pleasant and stimulating panoply of interesting experiences. Non-superficial diversity can be extremely difficult to manage, especially in a school setting, where relationships are intimate. Overcoming the attendant challenges requires an adroit school leader who understands the value of racial and socioeconomic integration, who can infuse optimism into the integration skeptics within the school community, and who can skillfully shepherd such a motley flock. Without that kind of leadership, parents are too likely to reach the same conclusion as Peter, an urban dad who was bused for integration as a child, and who now struggles to navigate the parental responsibility of educating his own children: “I have my doubts about integration. It’s supposed to be about building understanding, but I find that it just makes people want to be even further apart.”

Jennifer Burns Stillman is a research analyst at the Office of Innovation in the New York City Department of Education and author of Gentrification and Schools: The Process of Integration When Whites Reverse Flight (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), from which this article is drawn.

This was the First Family’s first official public-school visit, just a few short weeks after President Obama was sworn into office. Obama’s enthusiastic support for charter schools was one of the things that set him apart from his Democratic predecessors and marked him as a “pro-reform” Democrat.

Even accounting for the usual political exaggeration, the president seemed pretty impressed by what he saw: “The outstanding work that’s being done here…is an example of how all our schools should be,” said Obama. “I’ve asked Arne Duncan to…make sure that we’re reforming our schools, that we’re rewarding innovation the way that it’s taking place here.”

Little noticed at the time, the school the White House chose for the visit wasn’t exactly a typical urban charter. Based on the Expeditionary Learning model and begun by a group of parents in 2000, Capital City is located in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse part of northwest Washington, rather than in a high-poverty area. It recruits a mix of black, Latino, and white families, in contrast to the homogeneous groups of low-income minority students urban charters generally serve. Last but not least, its teaching approach is designed to work with both advanced and struggling students, and intended to foster abstract skills like creativity, depth of thought, and problem solving, rather than focusing on remediation and basic reading and math skills.

Fueled by a confluence of interests among urban parents, progressive educators, and school reform refugees, a small but growing handful of diverse charter schools like Capital City has sprouted up in big cities over the past decade: others are High Tech High in San Diego; E. L. Haynes in Washington, D.C.; Larchmont Charter School and Citizens of the World Prep in Los Angeles; Summit in Northern California; the five-school Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) network; Community Roots, Brooklyn Prospect Charter School, and Upper West Success Academy in New York City; and Bricolage Academy, planned for New Orleans (see sidebar, page 33).

These schools attract children of city workers, project residents, New York Times reporters, and government officials, and simultaneously attempt to address the weaknesses of “no-excuses” charter schools, progressive education, and school segregation: “Usually in the places that are all about accountability it doesn’t feel like there is a ton of learning going on as the primary outcome,” says Josh Densen, a former KIPP teacher who is set to open Bricolage Academy next year. “In schools where it’s all about learning, discovery, and projects and teamwork, there seems to me to be an absence of or a reluctance to have any kind of accountability.”

While it is too soon to say whether they are effective over time or at scale, these diverse charter schools are revealing themselves to be popular, controversial, and—not surprisingly—complicated to operate.

Diversity at Community Roots

On a sunny fall afternoon, a group of 5th graders at Community Roots in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, looked over a short passage about the Montgomery bus boycott, practicing how to find extra information in captions and headlines. Some were struggling to get started or needed a review of the basic concepts from one of the two teachers in the room. Others zoomed ahead and were encouraged to think about more advanced ideas like inference and themes. Some had on fashionable ankle boots, while others wore threadbare T-shirts. Their names ranged from Gabe to Ilios to Amira to Bella.

Created in 2005, Community Roots is housed on the third floor of P.S. 67, Dorsey Elementary School, which is surrounded by a church, a post office, and the sprawling Ingersoll Gardens housing project. Its students come from some of the highest and lowest income brackets in the city, range from gifted to severely behind, and are largely taught together in the same classrooms. The student body is 38 percent black, 31 percent white, 12 percent multiracial, and 6 percent Hispanic. Forty-four percent qualify for free lunch. Almost 20 percent receive special education services.

Teachers use many of the same methods and materials you’d see in traditional charters: math manipulatives, relentlessly positive reinforcement, claps and countdowns to help with transitions from one activity to another, walls covered with concepts and procedures. But there are some obvious differences: two teachers are assigned full-time to each classroom, one of them certified in special education, to make sure every student is getting the help (or the push) he or she needs. The school offers physical therapy along with a social studies–oriented curriculum. While the atmosphere is informal, the teachers are deadly serious about helping every kid, including the numerous special-education students, learn.

“We try to provide access to the content of the lesson on as many different levels as possible,” says David Moisl, a 2nd-grade teacher. “On an average day, I think we’re getting to all the kids.” Reaching everyone, and knitting parents and students into a community, doesn’t end at the classroom door. Community Roots schedules play dates—for parents. Four times a year, mixed-income groups of parents in each class get together, either at the park or in one of their homes or on some sort of field trip.

“It doesn’t mean they’re all going to be best friends,” says one parent who helps promote the get-togethers. “There’s this acceptance the more they get to know each other, real understanding that we’re all different, learn differently, play differently, and that’s OK.”

Engaging the Middle Class

Looking back, the reasons that schools like Capital City and Community Roots are being created and attracting flocks of parents seem obvious: a mix of idealism, desperation, and pent-up frustration with the pace of improvement and the focus on a fixed set of interventions.

By the time the First Family visited Capital City in early 2009, No Child Left Behind was already seven years old, long overdue for an update. A series of highly touted reform ideas—small schools, alternative certification, “no-excuses” charter schools, higher academic standards, and better accountability for teachers and administrators—had helped but not yet transformed the nation’s $600 billion, 50-million-student elementary and secondary education system.

“It’s about time that we get a new surge of energy in the ed reform movement,” says Todd Sutler, who until recently taught at Community Roots. “There needs to be something fresh.”

In the meantime, some traditional educators who have long derided charter schools started to come around to the notion that charter autonomy was an extremely useful thing. “I think that this [charter] model is the only model that can be principled and serve the needs of kids,” says Tony Monfiletto, a progressive educator who cofounded the Amy Biehl Charter High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “You have to have the autonomy.”

In urban areas especially, the supply of good schools hasn’t nearly kept pace with the demand, and the old standbys for middle-class parents (moving or paying private school tuition) have become less viable options in a “down” economy going through a housing crisis. Magnet schools, once a core strategy for retaining middle-class parents and promoting school integration, have dwindled to just 2,000, according to the National Association of Magnet Schools. Just 80 districts and charter school networks are actively promoting integration, according to a 2011 report from the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg.

Here and there, a few school-reform advocates began to realize that diverse charter schools might be a way to engage middle-class parents, and that focusing exclusively on high-poverty minority communities was an understandable but flawed strategy.

“Is this when things start to really change?” asks a Brooklyn mother of three who has been working in education for nearly 20 years, “When upper-middle-class charter parents start bragging to their friends?”

No Easy Feat

A newly created charter school with a focus on diversity has the flexibility and responsiveness that comes with charter status. Its parents know what they are getting into from the start. There’s no “gentrification gap” during which a neighborhood school is losing its poverty funding but doesn’t yet have enrichment grants (and, typically, parent contributions) to make up the difference (see “The Elephant in the Classroom,” features, Winter 2013). They’re schools that educators can imagine spending an entire career at, or even sending their own kids to. And, at the best moments, being in a public school classroom of kids with diverse backgrounds and skill levels is delightful and unnerving, a busy kitchen humming during the dinner rush, a blur of individual activities brought together only momentarily before splitting apart again.

But creating a successful, truly diverse charter school is enormously difficult to pull off, a daily and weekly high-wire act that only the most determined educators are confident or foolish enough to try. The wide range of abilities and backgrounds creates obvious challenges: “the kids who know about therapods, and the kids who can’t pronounce the word ‘dinosaur,’” said an Upper West science teacher. Careful design, highly skilled teaching, and a degree of compromise among teachers and parents who come from different cultures and professional backgrounds are all required.

Indeed, the list of strategies applied is a long one: frequent online assessments to diagnose and direct students to the appropriate activity; open-ended assignments allowing kids of varying skill levels to engage at their own levels; coteaching in which two teachers share responsibility for a group of kids; and looping, in which teachers follow kids from one grade to the next.

“Everybody likes diversity until it comes to the ramifications,” says Daniel Rubenstein, cofounder of Brooklyn Prospect, a middle and high school now in its fourth year.

In one Brooklyn Prospect classroom, the English teacher makes as many of her lessons open-ended as she can and coteaches half of her classes with a special education teacher. She also offers additional uncredited projects called “Seekers” so that kids who want to can go faster without disadvantaging kids still working on basic skills. The kids who volunteer to do more aren’t always the kids with the stronger academic backgrounds. “That is the really cool thing,” says the teacher. “You think you know who’s going to ask to do the extra assignment, but then you’re wrong.”

At their worst, classes at diverse charters feel choppy and fragmented, like a PowerPoint presentation with too many slides or a TV show with too many unrelated strands of plot, leaving advanced kids bored and struggling kids feeling anxious. Teachers are trying to reach too many kids too quickly. Classrooms may exhibit the features of progressive education—the projects, the integrated curriculum—but lack the rigor and attention required to keep fast kids humming and slow kids engaged.

“You can’t just put a heterogeneous population together and think it’s going to work,” notes Summit founder Diane Tavenner, speaking generally. “That’s why most schools are tracked.”

Maintaining the Mix

When TFA Los Angeles executive director Brian Johnson first walked into Larchmont Charter School, he realized that he’d never seen a school like it before.

Begun in 2005 and expanded in 2008, Larchmont was created by Hollywood and Hancock Park parents who lamented the lack of quality and diversity at local elementary schools and wanted an alternative to private education. The educational philosophy is constructivist, which means lots of small-group instruction, projects, and integration of subjects traditionally taught in isolation. Classes are small. There is a teaching garden. There are lots of readers’ and writers’ workshops.

Accustomed to working almost exclusively in high-poverty schools in far-off neighborhoods, Johnson was attracted by the idea of doing something in his own community and getting involved in an approach that he described as “strategically important to the reform movement.”

When Johnson left TFA and joined Larchmont as its executive director, however, the school was facing a challenge experienced by many diverse charter schools: the annual admissions lottery was being flooded by white, relatively well-off parents, creating the danger that the school would lose the socioeconomic and racial diversity it was created to promote.

The strategies that diverse charters adopt to promote and protect diversity vary. Some, like Larchmont, implement lottery priority systems designed to give at-risk students a better chance of acceptance even if they apply in smaller numbers. Larchmont’s at-risk priority increased the percentage of poor kids from a low of 29 percent up to 42 percent. Schools now using various kinds of weighted priority systems include Brooklyn Prospect, DSST, Upper West Success, and Community Roots.

Other schools, including Capital City and Summit Prep, maintain diversity through aggressive recruitment efforts: school visits, knocking on doors, distributing flyers. The 2009 Obama visit to Capital City led to a spike in applications (1,500 for 100 spots in 2011), but still there was no weighted lottery. Even after the surge of interest following its 2010 Waiting for Superman appearance, Summit Prep continues to operate without lottery priorities.

There are lots of reasons to avoid weighted lotteries, which have to comport with underlying city and state requirements (and stand up to a potential legal challenge). Adopting a weighted lottery or priority system also means giving up a chance at federal charter-school start-up funding, which is limited to schools with a single lottery. Most immediately, weighted lotteries and priorities create the possibility for mistrust.

“There are plenty of people who already doubt what we’re doing,” says Summit founder Diane Tavenner. “We don’t want to give them any more reasons to be confused.”

Critical Backlash

In September 2011, Success Academy opened its newest location inside an Upper West Side Manhattan high-school building, marking the first attempt by an established charter network to try its hand at the diverse model. Dubbed “Upper West,” the school’s students wear orange-and-blue uniforms complete with jumpers and clip-on ties, just like at the other locations. There is absolutely no talking in the hall. But there’s also chess, time to play with wooden blocks, outside recess, and daily science class. The model is, according to Success Academy officials, “Parochial on the outside, progressive on the inside.”

In one 1st-grade classroom, red-haired Maddie sat next to Mohawked Taquan. Scraggly-haired Alex read on the carpet while little Mariella filled out her reading log. The grown-ups who come to pick up the children at the end of the day include parents, older siblings, and nannies.

Success Academy plans to operate 40 schools in total, and its expansion into middle-class neighborhoods—the Upper West Side last year, Brooklyn this year—has pushed concerns into overdrive. Charter schools have long been accused of perpetuating racial isolation, relying on uncertified teachers, and not serving their fair share of special education and English language learners. Now the concerns center around white, middle-class kids and the schools they are leaving to attend charters.

”Why not use that same money to try to turn some of Brooklyn’s less-popular elementary schools into institutions that…attract parents from across the socioeconomic spectrum?” wrote a Brooklyn parent opposed to Success Academy’s expansion.

This argument resonates with many middle-class parents, who clutch to their hope to win admission to a “good” district school, no matter how unlikely that may be. Many also have political objections to nonunion charters. They often lack personal familiarity with charter schools, and they’re unused to hearing that their neighborhood schools aren’t succeeding.

“Middle-class communities don’t want to be told that the options they have are not good enough,” notes Success Academy’s Jenny Sedlis. “There’s an unwillingness to accept the fact that their schools are just not excellent.”

These concerns can increasingly be seen in the mainstream media. Recent accounts have tended to emphasize the downsides of diverse charter schools, and the controversy. Bloomberg News profiled a charter school in affluent Los Altos, California, accused of failing to serve its fair share of bilingual and special education students. The LA Weekly revealed a short-lived initiative to give wealthy parents spots at Larchmont by rotating them through the board (whose members get a priority for admission).

Some critics worry that schools that appeal to middle-class parents can’t effectively serve kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. Only a few diverse charter schools, like Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley Prep, have been able to attract middle-class families without using progressive elements, either superficially to help promote diversity or structurally as part of the core pedagogical vision. Research has generally shown that racially and socioeconomically diverse schools can help low-income, low-skill students improve their academics. But a 2010 U.S. Department of Education charter-school study found that suburban charters, presumably with progressive elements, performed less well than comparable district schools.

What’s Next?

Brooklyn’s Community Roots has been approved to expand into middle school this fall and considers its new lottery priority a success: roughly 600 families applied for a kindergarten class of 50. Los Angeles–based Citizens of the World has been approved to open a school in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, along with two Brooklyn Success Academy schools. Brooklyn Prospect is moving to a new, permanent home and enrolling its first class of 9th graders.

The Obama administration has issued new priorities for its charter-school grant program, among them support for schools that “promote diversity in their student bodies, including racial and ethnic diversity, or avoid racial isolation.”

Education philanthropies have finally started to take diverse charters seriously, too. Among the first to receive funding was DSST, whose head, Bill Kurtz, pushed for several years to be funded and viewed like any other successful charter-management organization. According to Kurtz, funders including Walton, Charter School Growth Fund, and NewSchools Venture Fund now support diverse charters at some level.

“What is the [charter] movement going to do for the 98 percent of American kids who aren’t going to our schools?” asks Kurtz, who previously headed a traditional charter in Newark, New Jersey. “People who come to DSST are often asking, ‘What’s next?’”

Alexander Russo is a freelance education writer and blogger who lives in New York City. An expanded version of this article will appear in his next book, School of Politics.

Sometimes called “exam schools,” these academically selective institutions have long been a part of the American secondary-education landscape. The schools are diverse in origin and purpose. No single catalyst describes why or how they began as or morphed into academically selective institutions. Some arose from a desire (among parents, superintendents, school boards, governors, legislators) to provide a self-contained, high-powered college-prep education for able youngsters in a community, region, or state. Others started through philanthropic ventures or as university initiatives. A number of them were products of the country’s efforts to desegregate—and integrate—its public-education system, prompted by court orders, civil rights enforcers and activists, or federal “magnet school” dollars.

Exam schools are sometimes controversial because “selectivity” is hard to reconcile with the mission of “public” education. Even school-choice advocates typically assert that, while families should be free to choose their children’s schools, schools have no business selecting their pupils. Other people are troubled by reports of insufficient “diversity” among the youngsters admitted to such schools.

With such criticisms in mind, we set out to explore this unique and little-understood sector of the education landscape. Wanting first to determine how many there are and where they are located, we also wondered whether the “exam school” could be a worthy response to the dilemma of how best to develop the talents of our nation’s high-performing and high-potential youth in a climate consumed with gap closing and leaving no child behind. Could the selective public high school play a larger role in educating our country’s high-achieving pupils?

Nearly all schools we surveyed engaged in earnest, wide-ranging outreach to expand or diversify their applicant pools.

Who Goes There?

Almost all the schools have far more applicants than they can accommodate. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed accept fewer than half of their applicants. About one-quarter also reported rising numbers of applications in recent years, perhaps due to media attention, awards, school performance, population growth, and the closing of underperforming schools in the area. Respondents also noted changes in the composition of their applicant pools, mainly increases in the number who are female, Asian, or Hispanic. Several schools reported a decrease in the number of white applicants in recent years. Nearly all schools we surveyed engaged in earnest, wide-ranging outreach to expand or diversify their applicant pools. A few also engage in “affirmative action” within the selection process.

The schools’ actual admission criteria and procedures are interesting, variegated, and somewhat sensitive. Some school officials are uneasy about the practice of selectivity, given possible allegations of “elitism” and anxiety over pupil diversity. Still, most rely primarily on applicants’ prior school performance and scores on various tests.

Viewed as a whole, selective public high schools have a surprising demographic profile. Their overall student body is only slightly less poor than the universe of U.S. public school students. Some schools, we expected, would enroll many Asian American youngsters, but we were struck when they turned out to comprise 21 percent of the schools’ total enrollment, though they make up only 5 percent of students in all public high schools. More striking still: African Americans are also “overrepresented” in these schools, comprising 30 percent of enrollments versus 17 percent in the larger high-school population. Hispanic students are correspondingly underrepresented, but so are white youngsters. Individual exam schools often qualify as racially “imbalanced”: in nearly 70 percent of them, half or more of the students are of one race.

Inside the Schools

The schools we visited were serious, purposeful places: competitive but supportive, energized yet calm. Behavior problems (save for cheating and plagiarism) were minimal and students attended regularly, often even when ill. The kids wanted to be there, and were motivated to succeed. (Bear in mind that many of the schools seek such qualities in their applicants.)

In general, the schools structured their schedules in ways that facilitate in-depth learning and prepare students for the typical college schedule: staggered start times, eight-hour days, class periods of varying lengths, fewer class meeting days per week, and dedicated time for collaborative and independent research projects. Most classrooms we observed were alive, engaged places in which teachers appeared to have high expectations for their pupils and planned their instruction around the assumption that students can and want to learn.

Most schools offered Advanced Placement (AP) courses or the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Several noted that they “only offer honors and AP courses.” A few schools noted that students do not take AP courses per se, either because they take actual college classes (at host colleges or through dual-enrollment arrangements) or because they earn college credit for advanced courses taught within the school itself.

We also came upon other kinds of specialized and advanced courses, in addition to or in lieu of AP and IB. Schools with a STEM focus or university affiliations, for example, reported an array of upper-level science and math courses that few ordinary high schools—even very large ones—could offer. Among them were Human Infectious Diseases, Chemical Pharmacology, Logic and Game Theory, and Vector Calculus.

There’s lots of homework but ample extracurricular opportunities, too. We encountered literary magazines, robotics competitions, sophisticated music and theater offerings, most of the usual clubs and organizations, plenty of field trips, and no dearth of sports—though champion football and basketball teams were rare!

Our site visits revealed faculties consisting mostly of intelligent, dedicated individuals, well grounded in their fields. Turnover was low. Most teachers belong to unions and are paid on the “contract scale,” but many receive additional compensation for longer days and extra duties. They tended to come early, stay late, and design complex assignments and lesson plans that may take as much time for them to formulate and grade as for their students to complete.

One assumption about selective public schools is that they have more and “better” teachers. It turns out, however, that their pupil-teacher ratio is actually a bit higher (17:1) than in all public high schools (15:1). (One likely reason: not much “special ed.”) The percentage with doctoral degrees is higher, too (11 vs. 1.5 percent), as is the percentage with master’s degrees (66 vs. 46 percent.) Nontrivial numbers of teachers also have experience in industry, science, and universities.

Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents indicated that teacher-hiring decisions are made at the school level. As for the criteria they employ in selecting faculty, of greatest importance are subject-matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and expertise, and the ability to engage adolescent learners. Many schools also seek proven classroom-management strategies, compatible teaching philosophies, technology prowess, and collegiality. Some require demonstration lessons and interviews by current teachers (and sometimes students). And some criteria are clearly aligned with the schools’ singular missions and student bodies (e.g., PhD in biology, training in AP instruction, ability to work with gifted pupils).

The schools’ principals hailed from various backgrounds. As a group, however, they exhibited traits that one would expect of leaders of successful high schools that in some cases are the pride of their communities and in every case are closely watched: extraordinarily dedicated and hard-working individuals who are also politically astute.

Schools with a STEM focus reported an array of upper-level science and math courses that few ordinary high schools could offer.

Governance and Finance

The schools are remarkably varied when it comes to history, mission, structure, and organizational arrangements. The oldest among them—New York’s Townsend Harris High School, Boston Latin School—have been around in one form or another for centuries, while half the schools for which we have such information are creations of the past two decades. With rare exceptions (mainly in Louisiana), however, the schools are not charters. Although they’re “schools of choice,” they are operated in more top-down fashion by districts, states, or sometimes universities rather than as freestanding and self-propelled institutions under their states’ charter laws.

We asked survey respondents about waivers and exemptions from the customary rules and regulations within which public schools operate. Because many of the schools on our list occupy distinctive niches within their local communities, districts, or states, we were also curious whether their teachers are fully subject to the provisions of collective-bargaining contracts. Most certainly are, but almost one in five is not (or not fully) subject to seniority-based staffing decisions.

A handful of responding schools said either that they are not required to hire teachers with state certification, or that other credentials (e.g., PhD in relevant field) preempt certification, at least for several years. In general, however, routine regulations and contract provisions prevail. We were struck by how few schools reported explicit freedom from them. Principals did say, however, that they could usually “work things out” as needed.

The schools vary widely in funding levels and other resources, from those that can barely make ends meet on per-pupil allotments that are lower than other high schools in the area to a few schools that amass large budgets from multiple sources and boast extraordinary technology and staffing. But all the schools we visited were worried about budget cuts associated with economic distress and pressure on state and local resources.

Leaders of these schools felt doubly vulnerable as attention—and resources—were concentrated on low-performing schools and students. (“Smart kids will do fine, regardless, and in any case are not today’s priority” was the undertone they picked up.) Many had become accustomed to having at least some extra resources, often for transportation or smaller classes. While some schools benefit from certain categorical funds (e.g., magnet dollars, STEM, or tech-voc dollars), many don’t qualify for other state and federal programs, such as Title I, bilingual education, and special education. Most engage in supplementary private fundraising to sustain resources for transportation, smaller classes, or other school features to which they and their students, parents, and teachers are accustomed.

Despite such challenges, the schools seem to enjoy levels of support that mitigate the budgetary distress and bolster their resilience. Most, for example, benefit—politically and in other ways, such as fundraising—from exceptionally devoted friends, sometimes in high places, including alums, local politicians, business and university leaders, even journalists. Many have ties with outside organizations, including universities, labs, and businesses, which bring expertise and some resources into the school, afford it some political protection, and supply it with venues for student internships and independent projects.

Some schools are also viewed as magnets for economic development and talent recruitment for their community or state. School-board members and district leaders believe that the presence of the school encourages middle- and upper-middle-class families to stay in town and stick with public education.

Perhaps most importantly, the schools are blessed with overwhelming advocacy from alumni and the parents of their students, many of whom feel that their children are receiving a private school–quality education at public expense. That parents strongly believe the schools provide safety (physical, emotional, intellectual), short- and long-term academic and career opportunities, and social benefits for their children will likely go a long way toward ensuring the survival of the schools, if not their expansion or replication.

The AP Quandary

Our site visits revealed faculties consisting mostly of intelligent, dedicated individuals, well grounded in their fields.

Nearly every school on our list offers a host of AP courses and has a huge number of students enrolling in them (either by requirement or by choice) and racking up solid scores on the AP exams. At northern Virginia’s celebrated Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, for example, students take an average of seven AP tests—four are all but universal—and do extremely well, earning scores of 3 or better on a mind-blowing 98 percent of the 3,357 AP exams that they sat for in 2010. Here and at many (though not all) schools on our list, students compete—and are pressed by parents—to rack up as many AP credits as possible.

Yet today’s scramble for entry into top-tier colleges plus the premium placed (by multiple players) on taking and passing AP exams plus standardized-test-based accountability pressures emanating from government do not add up to an optimal environment for these high schools. Here they don’t raise standards as much as they standardize. They press on students, parents, and teachers in ways that are plausibly said to discourage experimentation, risk-taking, unconventional thinking, unique courses, and individualized research, as well as pedagogical creativity and curricular innovation.

We spoke with frustrated teachers and exasperated administrators, well aware that they’re riding the back of an AP tiger from which it’s hard to dismount, especially for a public school that must weigh the priorities of parents, taxpayers, and voters. We talked with highly motivated students, too, who were (as one young man put it) “exhausted” from carrying course loads that included as many as six AP classes a semester in pursuit of a high school transcript that would wow the admissions committees of elite universities.

Some school leaders are pushing back, encouraging teachers to develop challenging courses that don’t fit the AP mold, or offering college-level courses shorn of the AP label. But only a few—such as the statewide, residential Illinois Math and Science Academy—have succeeded in putting their own stamp on the entire curriculum and withstanding the AP tsunami.

At northern Virginia's celebrated Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, students take an average of seven AP tests and do extremely well, earning scores of 3 or better on a mind-blowing 98 percent of the 3,357 AP exams that they sat for in 2010.

Are Exam Schools Effective?

The selection criteria employed by these schools all but guarantee students who are likely to do well academically, which raises the question of whether the schools’ generally impressive outcomes are caused by what happens inside them—their standards, curricula, teachers, homework—or are largely a function of what the kids bring with them. The schools’ peer culture likely has some influence on their pupils, too, as do high teacher expectations. Much like private schools, which are more apt to trade on their reputations and college-placement records than on hard evidence of what students learn in their classrooms, the schools on our list generally don’t know—in any rigorous, formal sense—how much their students learn or how much difference the school itself makes. As one puzzled principal put it, “Do the kids do well because of us or in spite of us? We’re not sure.”

The schools themselves are only partly culpable, however. They’ve seldom been asked to justify themselves in terms of learning gains. They’re flooded with eager applicants, media attention, and accolades. They can proudly demonstrate intricate research projects, cases full of academic prizes, science-fair and robotics-competition ribbons, National Merit lists, and messages from grateful alums. But they have access to little “value-added” data. Nearly all the tests their pupils take show “mastery”—like earning a 5 on an AP exam or racking up a lofty SAT score—rather than serving as before-and-after assessments. And insofar as their states impose graduation tests as prerequisites for receiving diplomas, the passing score is generally a cinch for these students.

The research community has mostly ignored these schools, too. One recent study by Duke economist Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Joshua D. Angrist and Parag A. Pathak of MIT—the first of its kind, say the authors—set out to explore this territory. Using a sophisticated methodology to look for value-added effects (gauged by scores on state tests and SAT and AP exams) in six prominent “exam schools” in Boston and New York City, they didn’t find much to applaud:

Our results offer little evidence of an achievement gain for those admitted to an exam school…. In spite of their exposure to much higher-achieving peers and a more challenging curriculum, marginal students admitted to exam schools generally do no better on a variety of standardized tests.

A similar study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie was confined to the three oldest and most famous of New York’s “exam schools” and used similar methods. It found that “attending an exam school increases the rigor of high school courses taken and the probability that a student graduates with an advanced high school degree” but “has little impact on Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, college enrollment, or college graduation.”

These pioneering studies are sobering, albeit limited both by their focus on “marginal” students (those barely over and just under the schools’ entry-score cutoffs) and by their reliance on short-term measures of effectiveness. The schools’ effects on other kinds of outcomes and over the longer haul are simply unknown, as are their effects on youngsters whose exam scores were well above the cutoff. This is obviously a ripe area for further investigation and analysis, but today it’s legitimate to observe, even on the basis of this limited research, that the burden is shifting to the schools and their supporters to measure and make public whatever academic benefit they do bestow on their students versus what similar young people learn in other settings. The marketplace signals, however, are undeniable: far more youngsters want to attend these schools than they can accommodate. Many applicants go to exceptional lengths to prepare for the admissions gauntlet, which may well lead to more learning in earlier grades than the same youngsters might have absorbed without this incentive. And we also know that most of those who are admitted stick with it through graduation; an average graduation rate of 91 percent was reported by the schools responding to our survey.

Would America Benefit from More Exam Schools?

Perhaps most importantly, the schools are blessed with overwhelming advocacy from alumni and parents.

At a time when American education is striving to customize its offerings to students’ interests and needs, and to afford families more choices among schools and education programs, the market is pointing to the skimpy supply of schools of this kind. Moreover, if the best of such schools are hothouses for incubating a disproportionate share of tomorrow’s leaders in science, technology, entrepreneurship, and other sectors that bear on society’s long-term prosperity and well-being, we’d be better off as a country if we had more of them.

This challenge, however, goes far beyond the specialized world of selective high schools. It’s evident from multiple studies that our K–12 education system overall is doing a mediocre job of serving its “gifted and talented” youngsters and is paying too little attention to creating appealing and viable opportunities for advanced learning. What policymakers have seen as more urgent needs (for basic literacy, adequate teachers, sufficient skills to earn a living, for example) have generally prevailed. The argument for across-the-board talent development has been trumped by “closing the achievement gap” and focusing on test scores at the low end.

American education could and should be doing much more to help every youngster achieve all that he or she is capable of. A major push to strengthen the cultivation of future leaders is overdue, and any such push should include careful attention to the “whole school” model. Such institutions can develop a critical mass of instructional tools and equipment, financial resources, reputations, alumni/ae, and outside supporters that is hard to assemble for a smallish program within a comprehensive school. And the critical-mass effect is visible in the curriculum, too. Instead of isolated honors and AP classes, single-purpose schools can amass entire sequences at that level. They can also develop courses that go beyond AP offerings, do more with individual student projects, concentrate their counseling efforts on college placement, and muster teams of eager students (and teachers) for science competitions and the like.

Insofar as students benefit from peer effects in classrooms, corridors, and clubs, and insofar as being surrounded by other smart kids challenges these students (and wards off allegations of “nerdiness”), schools with overall cultures of high academic attainment are apt to yield more such benefits.

Finally, viewed as a community asset, having an entire school of this sort to show parents, colleges, employers, firms looking to relocate, real estate agents, and others can bring a kind of élan or appeal to a place that may also help with economic development, the retention of middle-class families, and more. It’s also a fact, however, that in times when resources are tight, communities and states are unlikely to hasten to create many more selective high schools, even where the reasons for doing so may be compelling.

Whether we deploy many more “whole schools” of this kind or opt mainly for specialized courses and programs within ordinary schools, the kinds of rigorous and advanced education that selective-admission schools seek to provide, and the youngsters that they serve, need to rise higher in our national consciousness and our policy priorities.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Jessica Hockett is an educational consultant specializing in differentiated instruction, curriculum design, and teacher professional development. This article is based on the authors’ forthcoming book, Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools (Princeton University Press), a joint undertaking of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K‒12 Education and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

In the largest study of instructional practice ever undertaken, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project is searching for tools to save the world from perfunctory teacher evaluations. In our first report (released in December 2010), we described the potential usefulness of student surveys for providing feedback to teachers. For our second report, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) scored 7,500 lesson videos for 1,333 teachers in six school districts using five different classroom-observation instruments. We compared those data against student achievement gains on state tests, gains on supplemental tests, and surveys from more than 44,500 students.

So far, the evidence reveals that my son’s strategy when choosing a team of superheroes makes sense for teacher evaluation systems as well: rather than rely on any single indicator, schools should try to see effective teaching from multiple angles.

Achievement Gains and Predictive Power

A teacher’s track record of producing student achievement gains does one thing better than any other measure (even if it does so imperfectly): it signals whether a teacher is likely to achieve similar success with another group of students. Not surprisingly, this is particularly true when the outcomes are being measured with the same test. In comparison to classrooms of students elsewhere with similar baseline achievement and demographics, a teacher’s achievement gain in one year is correlated at a rate of .48 in math and .36 in English language arts (ELA), with the average growth of students in another year. Such volatility notwithstanding, a track record of achievement gains is a more reliable predictor of the gains of future students than classroom observations or student surveys.

Unfortunately, state tests do not measure every outcome parents and taxpayers (and students) expect from schools, and cost is a factor in determining what gets measured. Given the higher cost of scoring constructed-response items, many states rely heavily on multiple-choice items to measure student achievement. The shallowness of the items on the test does not necessarily translate into shallow teaching. (For example, although spelling can be tested with low-cost items, a language teacher may find it useful to briefly summarize the reach of the Roman Empire while explaining the appearance of many Latin roots in the English language. A conceptual understanding can provide a framework for learning the fact-based knowledge examined on state tests.) In our study, the teachers with larger gains on low-cost state math tests also had students with larger gains on the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics, a more-expensive-to-score test designed to measure students’ conceptual understanding of mathematics.

Our results did raise concerns about current state tests in English language arts, however. Current state ELA assessments overwhelmingly consist of short reading passages, followed by multiple-choice questions that probe reading comprehension. Teachers’ average student-achievement gains based on such tests are more volatile from year to year (which translates to lower reliability) and are only weakly related to other measures, such as classroom observations and student surveys.

We supplemented the state tests with an assessment requiring students to read a passage and then write short-answer responses to questions about the passage. The achievement gains based on that measure were more reliable measures of a teacher’s practice (less variable across different classes taught by the same teacher) and were more closely related to other measures, such as classroom observations and student surveys. In order to provide clearer feedback on teacher effectiveness, states should hasten efforts to add writing prompts to their literacy assessments.

We expect schools to do more than raise achievement on tests, however. Parents hope their children will learn other skills that lead to success later in life, such as an ability to work in teams and persistence. Just because these skills are hard to measure and are not captured directly on any state test need not imply that effective teachers are ignoring them. Indeed, building student persistence may be an effective strategy for raising achievement on state tests. Recent evidence suggests that the teachers with larger student-achievement gains on state tests also seem to have students with greater long-term career success. As Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff reported recently (see “Great Teaching,” research, Summer 2012), being assigned to a teacher with a track record of student achievement gains is associated with higher earnings and rates of college going.

In sum, the “superpower” of the student achievement–gain, or growth, measure is its ability to “foresee” the achievement gains of future students and future earnings of students. But, like my son’s flawed heroes, it also has drawbacks. One key weakness of the student achievement–gain measure is the limited number of grades and subjects for which assessment data are currently available. In many school districts, fewer than one-quarter of teachers work in grades and subjects where student achievement gains are tracked with state assessments.

In addition, student achievement gains provide few clues for what a teacher might do to improve her practice. A performance-evaluation system should support growth and development not just facilitate accountability. Teachers need to be able to see their own strengths and weaknesses clearly and recognize where they need to hone their skills. That is not information a value-added measure can provide.

Classroom Practice

One way to develop such feedback is by means of classroom observation by a trained adult. Over the years, education researchers have proposed a number of instruments for assessing classroom instruction. To test these approaches, the Educational Testing Service trained more than 900 observers to score 7,500 lesson videos using different classroom-observation instruments. Depending on the instrument, observers received 17 to 25 hours of initial training. At the end of the training, observers were required to score a set of prescored videos. If the discrepancy between their scores and the master scores was too large, they were prevented from participating. (Across all the instruments, 23 percent of trained raters were disqualified because they could not apply the standards accurately.)

Every video was rated at least three times: once using the Framework for Teaching, developed by Charlotte Danielson; once using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), developed by Bob Pianta and Bridget Hamre at the University of Virginia; and a third time using a subject-specific instrument. The math lessons were scored using the Mathematical Quality of Instruction (MQI), developed by Heather Hill at Harvard. The ELA videos were scored on the Protocol for Language Arts Teacher Observation (PLATO), developed by Pam Grossman at Stanford. Finally, the National Math and Science Initiative scored a set of 1,000 math lessons, using the Uteach Observation Protocol.

I’m often asked, “Do you really think you can quantify the ‘art’ of teaching?” I argue that is not the right question. Of course, it is impossible to codify all the nuances that go into great teaching. But an instrument need not capture all the dimensions of great teaching in order to be useful. Each of the classroom-observation instruments proposes an incomplete but discrete set of competencies for effective teaching and provides a description of differing performance levels for each competency. The instruments’ usefulness depends not on their completeness but on the demonstrated association between the few discrete competencies and student outcomes.

For example, one of the competencies highlighted by the Framework for Teaching is questioning skill. A teacher would receive an “unsatisfactory” score if she asked a series of yes/no questions, posed in rapid succession, to the same small group of students. A teacher would receive an “advanced” score on questioning skill if she asked students to explain their thinking, if the questions involved many students in class, and if the students began asking questions of each other. Depending on the instrument, observers tracked 6 to 22 different competencies, including “behavior management,” “time management,” and “engaging students in learning.”

The goal of classroom observations is to help teachers improve practice, and thereby improve student outcomes. A classroom-observation system that bears no relationship to student outcomes will be of no use in improving them. As a result, we tested the relationship between classroom observations and a teacher’s average student-achievement gains. All five of the instruments yielded scores that were related to student achievement gains, in the classroom of students where the teacher was observed as well as in other classrooms of students taught by the same teacher.

In theory, classroom observations allow teachers to be more discerning about their own practice, and their improved practice will yield improved student outcomes. This is as yet a “potential superpower” of classroom observations, since there’s not a lot of evidence that providing such feedback leads to improved student outcomes.

The poor track record of professional-development interventions provides ample reason for caution. Yet there is some reason for optimism. Eric Taylor and John Tyler report that midcareer teachers in Cincinnati saw significant improvements in student outcomes in the years during and after intensive observations (see “Can Teacher Evaluation Improve Teaching?” research, forthcoming Fall 2012). In fact, the gains in student outcomes were similar in magnitude to those seen during the first three years of teaching. It may be that professional growth must begin with an individualized (and honest) assessment of a teacher’s strengths and weaknesses. We need better evidence in the coming years on the types of feedback and support that lead to improved student outcomes.

There are some downsides to classroom observations. First, if they are the sole basis for a teacher evaluation (as is true in many systems now), they may stifle innovation, forcing teachers to conform to particular notions of “effective practice.” Second, each of the instruments requires judgment on the part of observers. Even with trained raters, we saw considerable differences in rater scores on any given lesson. Moreover, possibly because different content requires teachers to exhibit different skills, a teacher’s practice seems to vary from lesson to lesson. Even with trained raters, we had to score four lessons, each by a different observer, and average those scores to get a reliable measure of a teacher’s practice. Given the high opportunity cost of a principal’s time, or the salaries of professional peer observers, classroom observations are the costliest source of feedback.

Student Surveys

Student evaluations are ubiquitous in higher education, where they are often the only form of feedback on instruction. (Student achievement gains and classroom observations are rarely used at the college level.) The MET project investigated the usefulness of student evaluations in 4th-grade through 9th-grade classrooms.

To collect student feedback, the project administered the Tripod survey, developed by Ronald Ferguson at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Rather than being a popularity contest, the Tripod survey asks students to provide feedback on specific aspects of their classroom experiences. For example, students report their level of agreement to statements such as, “In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes,” “Our class stays busy and does not waste time,” and “Everybody knows what they should be doing and learning in this class.” While administering the survey, we took steps to protect students’ confidentiality, such as providing students with thick paper envelopes for submitting paper-based surveys or secure passwords to submit web-based surveys.

We learned several important lessons: First, students perceive clear differences among teachers. For example, in a quarter of classrooms, less than 36 percent of students agreed with the statement, “Our class stays busy and does not waste time.” In another quarter of classrooms, more than 69 percent of students agreed.

Second, when teachers taught multiple sections of students, student feedback was often consistent. The between-classroom correlation in Tripod scores was .66. This is higher than we saw with the achievement gains measure. Attaining a comparable level of consistency with classroom observations required scoring four different lessons, each by a different observer. We had to average over multiple observations by multiple observers to generate reliable scores. Even if the typical student is less discerning than a trained adult, the ability to average over many students (rather than one or two adults), and having students experience 180 days of instruction (rather than observe two or three lessons), obviously improves reliability.

Third, the student responses were more correlated with teachers’ student-achievement gains in math and ELA than the observation scores were. (Just as we did with classroom observations, to avoid generating a spurious correlation between student survey responses and achievement scores for the same group of students, we estimated the correlation across different classrooms of students taught by the same teacher.) In other words, student responses were not only consistent across classrooms, they were predictive of student achievement gains across classrooms.

For those many states and districts that are struggling to find ways to measure performance in non-tested grades and subjects, well-designed student surveys should be an attractive option for supplementing classroom observations. They are also among the least costly of the measures.

The Case for Multiple Measures

As with superheroes, all the measures are flawed in some way. Test-based student-achievement gains have predictive power but provide little insight into a teacher’s particular strengths and weaknesses. Classroom observations require multiple observations by multiple observers in order to provide a reliable image of a teacher’s practice. The student surveys, while being the most consistent of the three across different classrooms taught by the same teacher, were less predictive of student achievement gains than the achievement-gain measures themselves.

Fortunately, the evaluation methods are stronger as a team than as individuals. First, combining them generates less volatility from course section to section or year to year, and greater predictive power. Figure 1 compares the three different methods (classroom observations, student surveys, and student achievement gains) on reliability and predictive power. On the horizontal axis is the reliability of each method. (We report reliability as the correlation in scores from classroom to classroom taught by the same teacher.) On the vertical axis is predictive power, or correlation with a teacher’s average student-achievement gain working with a different group of students in 2009–10. Both predictive power and reliability are desirable traits, so values in the upper-right-hand corner of the graph are more desirable. The student achievement–gain measure is most highly correlated with student achievement gains but has lower reliability than student surveys. Student surveys have the highest reliability but are less correlated with student achievement gains. Classroom observations, based on the Framework for Teaching, are less reliable and less correlated with achievement gains.

Figure 1 also reports two different combinations of the three measures: an “equally weighted” combination (standardizing each of the measures to have equal means and variances and then applying a weight of .33 to each) and a “criterion-weighted” combination. (To generate the weights, we regressed a teacher’s average student-achievement gain in one class against the three different measures from another class, resulting in weights of .758, .200, and .042 on value-added, student survey, and classroom observation, respectively). The “criterion-weighted” measure offers more of the two desirable properties—predictive power and reliability—than any of the measures alone. (Even though classroom observations do not add much predictive power, it is hoped that classroom observations excel on a third dimension, not captured in the graph: the ability to diagnose specific strengths and weaknesses.) The next MET project report will explore weighting strategies in depth (see sidebar, page 40).

A second reason to combine the measures is to reduce the risk of unintended consequences, to lessen the likelihood of manipulation or “gaming.” Whenever one places all the stakes on any single measure, the risk of distortion and abuse goes up. For instance, if all the weight were placed on student test scores, then the risk of narrowing of the curriculum or cheating would rise. If all the weight were placed on student surveys (as happens in higher education), then instructors would be tempted to pander to students and students might be more drawn to play pranks on their teachers. If all the weight were placed on classroom observations, then instructors would be tempted to go through the motions of effective practice on the day of an observation but not on other days.

The use of multiple measures not only spreads the risk but also provides opportunities to detect manipulation or gaming. For example, if a teacher is spending a disproportionate amount of class time drilling children for the state assessments, a school system can protect itself by adding a question on test-preparation activities to the student survey. If a teacher behaves unusually on the day of the observation, then the student surveys and achievement gains may tell a different story.

There is a third reason to collect multiple measures: conflicting messages from the multiple sources of information send a signal to supervisors that they should take a close look at what’s going on in the classroom. Suppose a teacher is employing unconventional teaching methods that don’t correspond to the classroom-observation instrument being used in a state or district. If the teacher is getting exemplary student-achievement gains and student survey reports, a school leader should give the teacher the leeway to use a different instructional style. Likewise, if a teacher is performing well on the classroom observations and student surveys but had lower-than-expected student-achievement gains, a school leader might give the teacher the benefit of the doubt for another year and hope that student achievement gains will rise.

Implication for Practice

The MET findings have a number of implications for ongoing efforts to provide more meaningful feedback to teachers:

The main reason to conduct classroom observations is to generate actionable feedback for improving practice. Therefore, the standards need to be clear and the observers should not only be trained, they should demonstrate their understanding of the standards by replicating the ratings given by master scorers. School systems could certify raters using prescored lesson videos, such as we did in our project. They should also conduct multiple observations by more than one rater, and audit a subset of observations to track reliability.

Student surveys are an inexpensive way to add predictive power and reliability to evaluation systems. They could be particularly useful to supplement classroom observations in the grades and subjects where student achievement gains are not available. Although our results suggested such measures could be reliable and predictive, even with students as young as 4th grade, more work needs to be done to evaluate their usefulness in younger grades. To reduce the risk of pressure from teachers or peer pressure from fellow students, it is important that schools take steps to ensure the anonymity of individual student responses.

When it comes to measuring teachers’ effectiveness, the state ELA assessments are less reliable and less related to other measures of practice than state math assessments (or the assessment of students’ short-answer writing responses we used to supplement the state tests). The implementation of new literacy assessments in line with the Common Core state standards may help. In the interim, schools might adapt their classroom observations and student surveys to look for evidence of student writing or add questions to the student survey asking students to describe the quality of feedback they receive on their writing.

None of the data collected for MET were used for high-stakes personnel decisions. It may be that the measurement properties of student surveys, or classroom observations, or achievement gains could be distorted when stakes are attached. If principals inflate (or lower) their scores, or if students use the student surveys to play pranks, such changes should become evident in changing relationships among and between the measures. As a result, school systems should monitor those relationships as such systems are implemented.

Finally, we need many more studies evaluating the ways in which better feedback can be paired with targeted development investments to raise teachers’ effectiveness in improving student outcomes.

No information is perfect. But better information on teaching effectiveness should allow for improved personnel decisions and faster professional growth. We need to keep in mind the rudimentary indicators used for high-stakes decisions today: teaching experience and educational attainment. When compared with such crude indicators, the combination of student achievement gains on state tests, student surveys, and classroom observations identified teachers with better outcomes on every measure we tested: state tests and supplemental tests as well as more subjective measures, such as student-reported effort and enjoyment in class.

Thomas Kane is professor of education and economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He was formerly deputy director within the U.S. education group at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he led the Measures of Effective Teaching project. This essay draws from research done jointly with Douglas O. Staiger from Dartmouth College.

With so much activity, school choice moved from the margins of education reform debates and became the headline. In January 2012, Washington Post education reporter Michael Alison Chandler said school choice has become “a mantra of 21st-century education reform,” citing policies across the country that have traditional public schools competing for students alongside charter schools and private schools. “It took us 20 years to pass the first 20 private school–choice programs in America and in the 21st year we passed 7 new programs,” says Scott Jensen with the American Federation for Children (AFC), a school-choice advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “So we went from passing, on average, one each year, to seven in one fell swoop.” Programs enacted in 2011 include

• a tax-credit scholarship program in North Carolina

• Arizona’s education savings account system for K–12 students

• Maine’s new charter school law, which brings the total number of states, along with the District of Columbia, with charter schools to 42

• a voucher program in Indiana with broad eligibility rules.

School-choice laws also passed in Wisconsin, Washington, D.C, Oklahoma, and Ohio, some as new reforms and some that expanded existing options.

“Legal challenges to school-choice programs have become as inevitable and painful as death and taxes,” says Clint Bolick.

Now, in 2012, it is still not clear whether the legislative advance of school-choice bills in 2011 made more education options available or simply ushered in a bevy of new lawsuits. Maybe both. Many of the laws, including Indiana’s voucher program, Arizona’s savings accounts, and a new voucher program in Douglas County, Colorado, were challenged in court shortly after passage. These legal challenges stalled reform and kept the school choice movement fighting for a clear identity. Is school choice just for certain student groups, like low-income children, or can it actually change the public school system?

For some laws, such as Indiana’s, a legal challenge did not prevent thousands of students from participating in the program’s first year. In other cases, as with Colorado’s voucher initiative, courts shut down the program just as the school year began, leaving hundreds of students uncertain as to whether they could remain at their new schools.

“Legal challenges to school-choice programs have become as inevitable and painful as death and taxes,” says Clint Bolick, vice president for litigation at the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute. Bolick has defended school-choice laws around the country, from Arizona to Ohio to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We should view legal challenges as a good sign that we are accomplishing something,” he says.

Perhaps 2011 was an unusual year for school reform only because of the number of school-choice programs enacted, which was significant by any measure, but not because students swarmed to the new programs (Indiana is a notable exception). We must wait to see which laws will survive legal challenges and whether students will enroll while judges consider the programs’ constitutionality. While school-choice laws arrived en masse in 2011, and the laws that passed are bolder than ever, lawsuits keep the systemic change reformers hope for just out of reach.

Vouchers

On May 5, 2011, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels signed into law the most inclusive voucher program in American history.

On May 5, 2011, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels signed into law the most inclusive voucher program in American history. Indiana’s “Choice Scholarships” were designed with broad eligibility rules that include middle-class and low-income students.

Voucher programs are often designed with “means testing” in mind, which specifies the income level for eligible students’ families. Typically, means-tested programs limit student eligibility to students from families with household income levels at or below a specified percentage of the poverty line.

The voucher amounts and household income levels for Indiana’s program are on a sliding scale. For example, a household of two parents with a combined income of $42,643 and two children would receive vouchers worth 90 percent of the state’s per-pupil funding figure (or approximately $4,500). As long as household income does not exceed $63,964, the two children in this household could still receive scholarships worth 50 percent of the state’s per-pupil amount.

“Indiana’s program is significant because it bridges the divide between advocates of means-tested choice and advocates of universal choice,” says Bolick.

Indiana education commissioner Tony Bennett said he “fully expected litigation.”

Indiana education commissioner Tony Bennett said he “fully expected litigation,” and the state teachers union filed a legal challenge in July 2011. Over the next several months, the lawsuit progressed through Indiana’s court system, and in March 2012, the Indiana State Supreme Court announced it would hear the case. As this article went to press, no date had been set.

Bennett’s expectations were likely shaped by the history of voucher programs in states such as Ohio, Florida, and Arizona. In those states, teachers unions and other education associations challenged and—in Florida and Arizona—overturned vouchers. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (concerning Ohio’s program) that vouchers do not violate the U.S. Constitution, but the decision hasn’t prevented courtroom battles from taking place from state to state over the past decade.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding Indiana’s legal challenge, 3,919 students from 185 Indiana school districts signed up in the program’s first year. This marks the largest inaugural enrollment in a voucher program in U.S. history. More than 250 private schools have been approved by the department to receive voucher students. Even with the inclusive eligibility rules, the Indiana Department of Education reports that 85 percent of new voucher students qualify for the federal free or reduced-priced lunch program. This indicates that these students are from families that would not otherwise be able to access private schools.

The school board in Douglas County, Colorado, located about 30 miles south of Denver, also created a voucher program in 2011. The American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State immediately challenged the program in court, and Denver district court judge Michael A Martinez issued a permanent injunction in August. Douglas County’s program is unique because board members designed it as a district initiative, rather than working with state lawmakers to draft a bill. The system would have awarded up to 500 students vouchers worth $4,575.

Leslie Hiner, vice president at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, says, “Those who oppose parental choice, they’ll always fight back, but that’s OK.” The foundation has monitored school-choice developments in the U.S. since 1996, and Hiner says Colorado’s program is evidence of a shift in opinion among education leaders.

“The realization was that the only thing that really matters is that every child has an opportunity to learn. If you keep that out in front of you at all times, then it’s easy for a public school board in Colorado to pass a voucher because they want all kids to learn,” she says.

Education Savings Accounts

In 2011, Arizona enacted a system of education savings accounts, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs), for students with special needs (see sidebar). Families can use the money for private school tuition, or choose from a list of approved education expenses that includes textbooks and online classes. By September 2011, 75 students had completed their applications and enrolled in the program. Participation doubled in December when the department reopened the application window.

Bolick says ESAs are the future of school choice. “ESAs are a real game changer,” he says. “They have the potential to completely change the delivery of educational services while at the same time surviving legal challenges that have forestalled voucher programs.” Bolick and the Goldwater Institute, along with Arizona schools superintendent John Huppenthal and the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm, are defending the program from a lawsuit filed by the Arizona teachers union and state school boards association.

“Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are just another form of these vouchers trying to bypass the law,” Arizona Education Association president Andrew Morrill told the local ABC News affiliate. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled vouchers unconstitutional in 2009, citing state constitutional provisions prohibiting public funding for private or religious purposes.

“In a state rich in both public and private choice, parents overwhelmingly choose public schools,” he said.

Yet ESAs continue to push the envelope of education reform, consistent with the theme of 2011’s other school-choice programs. If Indiana’s vouchers are notable for how many students are eligible and Colorado’s program because district leaders designed it, ESAs are remarkable for the variety of allowable uses. ESAs are distinct from vouchers because parents can use the funds for different education services, while vouchers can only be used for private school tuition. The program adds a new element to debates over education reform: Can families use state funds to customize a child’s education?

Arizona has a charter school law, three tax-credit scholarship programs, and an open enrollment law that allows students to choose from schools across the state, so the question of whether parents should be able to choose a school for their child is settled. The question has become whether the system can successfully enable parents to shape a child’s entire schooling experience.

The Parent Trigger

“Things got so bad in L.A. that parents recognized no one is coming to their rescue,” says Ben Austin.

Among the school choice-based education reforms enacted in recent years, the Parent Trigger Act may be the most drastic. As passed in California, Texas, and Mississippi, the Trigger Act allows parents to petition to convert a school to a charter school, close the school, or replace school leadership. At least half of the parents with students in a school must sign the petition. Though three states have passed laws since 2010, most of the “trigger” activity occurred in California in 2011.

“The basic reason why it happened when it did was that things got so bad in Los Angeles that parents began looking around and recognized that no one is coming to their rescue,” says Ben Austin of Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles–based organization leading the movement (see “Not Your Mother’s PTA,” features, Winter 2012).

“If things are going to change, we are going to have to be ‘Superman,’” he says, referring to the title of the 2010 documentary film Waiting for Superman, which drew attention to the long waiting lists at many charter schools. Austin’s group is “unambiguously” opposed to vouchers, which means student- and parentcentric reforms are coming from both sides of the political spectrum. Austin, who worked in the White House for President Bill Clinton, says many on his staff are politically left of center.

“Parents became informed about a nuanced public policy. With that power comes real responsibility.”

The first parents to petition for reform did so at McKinley Elementary School in December 2010, and the process lasted well into 2011. Fewer than 20 miles south of Los Angeles, McKinley is located in the Compton Unified School District, one of the lowest-achieving school districts in the state. In February 2011, district officials rejected the parents’ petition, and parents responded by filing and ultimately losing a lawsuit against the district. While a new charter school was not allowed to move into McKinley, the Celerity Educational Group opened Celerity Sirius Charter School near McKinley in September 2011.

As many as 20 states considered trigger legislation in the 2011 and 2012 legislative sessions, but the new bills struggled to find support. In 2012, bills failed in Arizona and Florida, two states that, historically, have been receptive to school-choice programs (the two states have nearly a dozen choice laws between them). Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal signed a parent trigger law in April 2012 as part of a package of reforms that included a significant expansion of the state’s voucher program.

As state lawmakers continue their debate, some contend the program makes for exciting headlines but will not lead to effective school reform.

“The parent trigger reform is a dead end and makes no sense,” says Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews. He suggests that parents, no matter how committed to the cause, don’t have the time or political savvy to lead effective school change. “It’s an interesting idea that sounds exciting on its face,” he says, “but it’s not going anywhere.”

Austin would disagree and points to California’s example. “Parents became informed about a nuanced public policy. With that power comes real responsibility,” he says. More than a dozen local Parent Revolution groups have formed in California, and in June 2011, Time magazine reported Parent Revolution advocates were at work as far away as Buffalo, New York.

Expansions

As new programs appeared in 2011, some existing programs saw expansion.

In Milwaukee, Governor Scott Walker removed the cap on the city’s voucher program. Students in the program receive vouchers worth up to $6,422 to attend a private school of choice.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker removed the cap on the city’s voucher program. Students in the program receive vouchers worth up to $6,442 to attend a private school of choice. Milwaukee’s voucher program is the oldest in the United States.

The 2011 expansion also extended voucher eligibility to all low-income district students and those next door in Racine. The Racine school board considered legal action over the program, though none has been filed to date. The means test for Milwaukee and Racine students is also on a sliding scale, similar to Indiana’s Choice Scholarships. Students from families with household incomes up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line (slightly less than $70,000 for a family of four) are eligible, making these programs more examples of inclusive school-choice programs created last year. In Milwaukee, more than 23,000 students were participating as of September 2011, with more than 200 Racine students enrolled in the expansion.

Tax Credits

Like vouchers, tax-credit scholarships also allow students access to private schools, though these scholarships depend on private contributions and the state tax credits that follow. Individuals and/or corporations contribute to scholarship organizations, which then award private school scholarships to qualifying students. Donors receive a credit on their taxes for their contribution, with credit amounts usually capped at certain limits.

In 2011, Oklahoma and North Carolina enacted scholarship tax-credit programs, and Arizona expanded its existing law in 2012 after a veto in 2011. Oklahoma’s program is means-tested, and students from families with household incomes of up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line are eligible to participate. This program arrived one year after Oklahoma lawmakers passed a voucher program for students with special needs, and it should come as no surprise that districts filed suit to stop the vouchers (a little surprising, though, that districts sued the students and their parents, instead of the state).

North Carolina passed a “personal use” tax-credit program in 2011, which allows families to receive a credit for education expenses. Under the law, families of students with special needs can take a credit of up to $6,000 annually for expenses such as private school tuition and therapy services. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction estimates that more than 120,000 students and their families may be eligible to make use of the credits.

“This is a large leap forward for a movement that a lot of people thought was dying on the vine,” says the AFC’s Jensen. “It’d been quite a few years since we’d had a tax credit pass for a family’s educational expenses, and $6,000 changes a family’s ability to choose a school.”

Governor Jan Brewer vetoed an expansion to Arizona’s 15-year-old scholarship tax-credit program in 2011, citing a negative impact on the state budget. Bill sponsors, including Republican state senator Rick Murphy and representative Debbie Lesko, revised the measure in 2012 to specify that any students receiving scholarships under the proposed expansion would be new scholarship recipients switching from public school to private school.

Under the new bill, individual (as opposed to corporate) donations to scholarships would be capped at $1,000 ($2,000 for married couples), double the previous limit. Brewer signed the expansion in 2012.

Does Passing Laws Equal Success?

Success implementing new school-choice laws in 2011 must be considered state by state. Students in Arizona and Indiana have more options but await rulings from the court system. In Colorado, many families are left wondering what to do next. Wisconsin parents in Racine must look over their shoulders for any sign of future litigation.

Legal issues aside, will enough students participate in choice-based reforms to change the status quo?

“My general view,” says the Post’s Mathews, “is that the voucher path is a dead end because we are never going to have nearly enough spaces in private schools for the kids who need it.

“No matter how much the laws change, I don’t see them ever leading to a place where there are enough spaces,” he says. Historically, voucher initiatives have struggled to gain support, says Mathews, because of persistent Democratic Party and educator opposition.

Voucher programs have long been considered a “Holy Grail” of sorts among school-choice advocates because they allow students to use state funds for a private school. But in 2011, reformers set ambitious goals for how many options could be afforded to parents, so even if participation is light, the range of choices that parents and children have in education should cause everyone to think twice about how public schools have been operating. Programs like Arizona’s provide parents with more options than vouchers. Likewise, California’s “trigger” law has radical implications, by giving parents the power to act without waiting for reform to happen to them.

“We are living in a revolutionary moment where the public as well as policymakers are open to thinking in new ways about issues in a way that hasn’t happened in a generation,” says Parent Revolution’s Austin.

Furman University professor Paul Thomas says that choice-based reforms became law in impressive numbers in 2011, but these reforms lack an agenda for comprehensive change.

“One thing that is telling to me about school-choice advocacy is that the claims and the goals are constantly shifting,” says Thomas, author of Parental Choice? A Critical Reconsideration of Choice and the Debate about Choice. “The school-choice movement has always been an ideology movement,” he says.

Others insist that, until recently, only a few choice programs had passed into law, so we should expect the results to be small and scattered.

“The reality is that we’ve had very small expansions in the use of market forces, so, not surprisingly, we’ve had modest effects from choice programs,” writes Jay P. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, in Why America Needs School Choice (a book that arrived in the midst of the 2011 activity).

“Programs tend to include relatively few students,” he said.

The Friedman Foundation’s Hiner says legislation and litigation are only the beginning. “Keep in mind that the goal is not to pass legislation. The goal is to enact a program that you can nurture and grow well into the future so that you can serve as many children as need a different type of education,” she says.

Tipping Point

School-choice laws took great strides in 2011, both in the number of programs that succeeded across states and also in the size and scope of the adopted programs. Yet education associations and teachers unions wasted no time in challenging the laws in court, as has been the case for school-choice reforms for the past 20 years. In almost every instance, school-choice advocates had little time to celebrate before looking for an attorney.

Some, like the teachers unions, contend that choice programs exist in isolation from mainstream public school reforms and point to limited participation rates. And others say choice advocates have not convinced people of the programs’ effectiveness.

“Since choice is not really very popular, I don’t think the public is for it,” says Furman’s Thomas.

Either because of public opposition, lawsuits, or the modest scope of voucher and tax-credit scholarship laws, only some 200,000 students nationwide attend private schools through choice systems, a paltry figure compared to the 50 million students in public schools across the United States.

Nevertheless, the school-choice laws that passed in 2011 were a departure from previous reforms in both size and scope. From Wisconsin to California, more students were included in the new laws, and the laws gave them more options.

Parent Revolution’s Austin says lawmakers are considering ideas today that in the not-so-distant past would have been considered outrageous.

“What normal people care about and what policymakers are beginning to care about is the very simple idea of giving parents real power over the educational destiny of their own children,” he says.

Jonathan Butcher is education director for the Goldwater Institute.

“The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy.” Such was the dire warning issued recently by an education task force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations. Chaired by former New York City schools chancellor Joel I. Klein and former U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, the task force said the country “will not be able to keep pace—much less lead—globally unless it moves to fix the problems it has allowed to fester for too long.” Along much the same lines, President Barack Obama, in his 2011 State of the Union address, declared, “We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

Although these proclamations are only the latest in a long series of exhortations to restore America’s school system to a leading position in the world, the U.S. position remains problematic. In a report issued in 2010, we found only 6 percent of U.S. students performing at the advanced level in mathematics, a percentage lower than those attained by 30 other countries. And the problem isn’t limited to top-performing students. In 2011, we showed that just 32 percent of 8th graders in the United States were proficient in mathematics, placing the U.S. 32nd when ranked among the participating international jurisdictions (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011).

Admittedly, American governments at every level have taken actions that would seem to be highly promising. Federal, state, and local governments spent 35 percent more per pupil—in real-dollar terms—in 2009 than they had in 1990. States began holding schools accountable for student performance in the 1990s, and the federal government developed its own nationwide school-accountability program in 2002.

And, in fact, U.S. students in elementary school do seem to be performing considerably better than they were a couple of decades ago. Most notably, the performance of 4th-grade students on math tests rose steeply between the mid-1990s and 2011. Perhaps, then, after a half century of concern and efforts, the United States may finally be taking the steps needed to catch up.

To find out whether the United States is narrowing the international education gap, we provide in this report estimates of learning gains over the period between 1995 and 2009 for 49 countries from most of the developed and some of the newly developing parts of the world. We also examine changes in student performance in 41 states within the United States, allowing us to compare these states with each other as well as with the 48 other countries.

Data and Analytic Approach

Data availability varies from one international jurisdiction to another, but for many countries enough information is available to provide estimates of change for the 14-year period between 1995 and 2009. For 41 U.S. states, one can estimate the improvement trend for a 19-year period—from 1992 to 2011. Those time frames are extensive enough to provide a reasonable estimate of the pace at which student test-score performance is improving in countries across the globe and within the United States. To facilitate a comparison between the United States as a whole and other nations, the aggregate U.S. trend is estimated for that 14-year period and each U.S. test is weighted to take into account the specific years that international tests were administered. (Because of the difference in length and because international tests are not administered in exactly the same years as the NAEP tests, the results for each state are not perfectly calibrated to the international tests, and each state appears to be doing slightly better internationally than would be the case if the calibration were exact. The differences are marginal, however, and the comparative ranking of states is not affected by this discrepancy.)

Our findings come from assessments of performance in math, science, and reading of representative samples in particular political jurisdictions of students who at the time of testing were in 4th or 8th grade or were roughly ages 9‒10 or 14‒15. The political jurisdictions may be nations or states. The data come from one series of U.S. tests and three series of tests administered by international organizations. Using the equating method described in the methodology sidebar, it is possible to link states’ performance on the U.S. tests to countries’ performance on the international tests, because representative samples of U.S. students have taken all four series of tests.

Comparisons across Countries

In absolute terms, the performance of U.S. students in 4th and 8th grade on the NAEP in math, reading, and science improved noticeably between 1995 and 2009. Using information from all administrations of NAEP tests to students in all three subjects over this time period, we observe that student achievement in the United States is estimated to have increased by 1.6 percent of a standard deviation per year, on average. Over the 14 years, these gains equate to 22 percent of a standard deviation. When interpreted in years of schooling, these gains are notable. On most measures of student performance, student growth is typically about 1 full standard deviation on standardized tests between 4th and 8th grade, or about 25 percent of a standard deviation from one grade to the next. Taking that as the benchmark, we can say that the rate of gain over the 14 years has been just short of the equivalent of one additional year’s worth of learning among students in their middle years of schooling.

Yet when compared to gains made by students in other countries, progress within the United States is middling, not stellar (see Figure 1). While 24 countries trail the U.S. rate of improvement, another 24 countries appear to be improving at a faster rate. Nor is U.S. progress sufficiently rapid to allow it to catch up with the leaders of the industrialized world.

Students in three countries—Latvia, Chile, and Brazil—improved at an annual rate of 4 percent of a standard deviation, and students in another eight countries—Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia, and Lithuania—were making gains at twice the rate of students in the United States. By the previous rule of thumb, gains made by students in these 11 countries are estimated to be at least two years’ worth of learning. Another 13 countries also appeared to be doing better than the U.S., although the differences between the average improvements of their students and those of U.S. students are marginal.

Student performance in nine countries declined over the same 14-year time period. Test-score declines were registered in Sweden, Bulgaria, Thailand, the Slovak and Czech Republics, Romania, Norway, Ireland, and France. The remaining 15 countries were showing rates of improvement that were somewhat slower than those of the United States.

In sum, the gains posted by the United States in recent years are hardly remarkable by world standards. Although the U.S. is not among the 9 countries that were losing ground over this period of time, 11 other countries were moving forward at better than twice the pace of the United States, and all the other participating countries were changing at a rate similar enough to the United States to be within a range too close to be identified as clearly different.

Which States Are the Big Gainers?

Progress was far from uniform across the United States. Indeed, the variation across states was about as large as the variation among the countries of the world. Maryland won the gold medal by having the steepest overall growth trend. Coming close behind, Florida won the silver medal and Delaware the bronze. The other seven states that rank among the top-10 improvers, all of which outpaced the United States as a whole, are Massachusetts, Louisiana, South Carolina, New Jersey, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Virginia. See Figure 2 for an ordering of the 41 states by rate of improvement.

Iowa shows the slowest rate of improvement. The other four states whose gains were clearly less than those of the United States as a whole are Maine, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Nebraska. Note, however, that because of nonparticipation in the early NAEP assessments, we cannot estimate an improvement trend for the 1992‒2011 time period for nine states—Alaska, Illinois, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, Oregon, South Dakota, Vermont, and Washington.

Cumulative growth rates vary widely. Average student gains over the 19-year period in Maryland, Florida, Delaware, and Massachusetts, with annual growth rates of 3.1 to 3.3 percent of a standard deviation, were some 59 percent to 63 percent of a standard deviation over the time period, or better than two years of learning. Meanwhile, annual gains in the states with the weakest growth rates—Iowa, Maine, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin—varied between 0.7 percent and 1.0 percent of a standard deviation, which translate over the 19-year period into learning gains of one-half to three-quarters of a year. In other words, the states making the largest gains are improving at a rate two to three times the rate in states with the smallest gains.

Had all students throughout the United States made the same average gains as did those in the four leading states, the U.S. would have been making progress roughly comparable to the rate of improvement in Germany and the United Kingdom, bringing the United States reasonably close to the top-performing countries in the world.

Is the South Rising Again?

Some regional concentration is evident within the United States. Five of the top-10 states were in the South, while no southern states were among the 18 with the slowest growth. The strong showing of the South may be related to energetic political efforts to enhance school quality in that region. During the 1990s, governors of several southern states—Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas—provided much of the national leadership for the school accountability effort, as there was a widespread sentiment in the wake of the civil rights movement that steps had to be taken to equalize educational opportunity across racial groups. The results of our study suggest those efforts were at least partially successful.

Meanwhile, students in Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, and Indiana were among those making the fewest average gains between 1992 and 2011. Once again, the larger political climate may have affected the progress on the ground. Unlike in the South, the reform movement has made little headway within midwestern states, at least until very recently. Many of the midwestern states had proud education histories symbolized by internationally acclaimed land-grant universities, which have become the pride of East Lansing, Michigan; Madison, Wisconsin; St. Paul, Minnesota; and Lafayette, Indiana. Satisfaction with past accomplishments may have dampened interest in the school reform agenda sweeping through southern, border, and some western states.

Are Gains Simply Catch-ups?

According to a perspective we shall label “catch-up theory,” growth in student performance is easier for those political jurisdictions originally performing at a low level than for those originally performing at higher levels. Lower-performing systems may be able to copy existing approaches at lower cost than higher-performing systems can innovate. This would lead to a convergence in performance over time. An opposing perspective—which we shall label “building-on-strength theory”—posits that high-performing school systems find it relatively easy to build on their past achievements, while low-performing systems may struggle to acquire the human capital needed to improve. If that is generally the case, then the education gap among nations and among states should steadily widen over time.

Neither theory seems able to predict the international test-score changes that we have observed, as nations with rapid gains can be identified among countries that had high initial scores and countries that had low ones. Latvia, Chile, and Brazil, for example—were relatively low-ranking countries in 1995 that made rapid gains, a pattern that supports catch-up theory. But consistent with building-on-strength theory, a number of countries that have advanced relatively rapidly were already high-performing in 1995—Hong Kong and the United Kingdom, for example. Overall, there is no significant pattern between original performance and changes in performance across countries.

But if neither theory accounts for differences across countries, catch-up theory may help to explain variation among the U.S. states. The correlation between initial performance and rate of growth is a negative 0.58, which indicates that states with lower initial scores had larger gains. For example, students in Mississippi and Louisiana, originally among the lowest scoring, showed some of the most striking improvement.  Meanwhile, Iowa and Maine, two of the highest-performing entities in 1992, were among the laggards in subsequent years (see Figure 3). In other words, catch-up theory partially explains the pattern of change within the United States, probably because the barriers to the adoption of existing technologies are much lower within a single country than across national boundaries.

Catch-up theory nonetheless explains only about one-quarter of the total state variation in achievement growth. Notice in Figure 3 that some states are well below the line (e.g., Iowa and Maine) while others are well above  (e.g., Maryland and Massachusetts). Note also that Iowa, Maine, Wisconsin, and Nebraska rank well below that line. Closing the interstate gap does not happen automatically.

What about Spending Increases?

According to another popular theory, additional spending on education will yield gains in test scores. To see whether expenditure theory can account for the interstate variation, we plotted test-score gains against increments in spending between 1990 and 2009. As can be seen from the scattering of states into all parts of Figure 4, the data offer precious little support for the theory. Just about as many high-spending states showed relatively small gains as showed large ones. Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey enjoyed substantial gains in student performance after committing substantial new fiscal resources. But other states with large spending increments—New York, Wyoming, and West Virginia, for example—had only marginal test-score gains to show for all that additional expenditure. And many states defied the theory by showing gains even when they did not commit much in the way of additional resources. It is true that on average, an additional $1000 in per-pupil spending is associated with an annual gain in achievement of one-tenth of 1 percent of a standard deviation. But that trivial amount is of no statistical or substantive significance. Overall, the 0.12 correlation between new expenditure and test-score gain is just barely positive.

Who Spends Incremental Funds Wisely?

Some states received more educational bang for their additional expenditure buck than others. To ascertain which states were receiving the most from their incremental dollars, we ranked states on a “points per added dollar” basis. Michigan, Indiana, Idaho, North Carolina, Colorado, and Florida made the most achievement gains for every incremental dollar spent over the past two decades. At the other end of the spectrum are the states that received little back in terms of improved test-score performance from increments in per-pupil expenditure—Maine, Wyoming, Iowa, New York, and Nebraska.

We do not know, however, which kinds of expenditures prove to be the most productive or whether there are other factors that could explain variation in productivity among the states.

Causes of Change

There is some hint that those parts of the United States that took school reform the most seriously—Florida and North Carolina, for example—have shown stronger rates of improvement, while states that have steadfastly resisted many school reforms (Iowa and Wisconsin, for instance), are among the nation’s test-score laggards. But the connection between reforms and gains adduced thus far is only anecdotal, not definitive. Although changes among states within the United States appear to be explained in part by catch-up theory, we cannot pinpoint the specific factors that underlie this. We are also unable to find significant evidence that increased school expenditure, by itself, makes much of a difference. Changes in test-score performance could be due to broader patterns of economic growth or varying rates of in-migration among states and countries. Of course, none of these propositions has been tested rigorously, so any conclusions regarding the sources of educational gains must remain speculative.

Have We Painted Too Rosy a Portrait?

Even the extent of the gains that have been made are uncertain. We have estimated gains of 1.6 percent of a standard deviation each year for the United States as a whole, or a total gain of 22 percent of a standard deviation over 14 years, a forward movement that has lifted performance by nearly a full year’s worth of learning over the entire time period. A similar rate of gain is estimated for students in the industrialized world as a whole (as measured by students residing in the 49 participating countries). Such a rate of improvement is plausible, given the increased wealth in the industrialized world and the higher percentages of educated parents than in prior generations.

However, it is possible to construct a gloomier picture of the rate of the actual progress that both the United States and the industrialized world as a whole have made. All estimations are normed against student performances on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 4th and 8th grades in 2000.  Had we estimated gains from student performance in 8th grade only on the grounds that 4th-grade gains are meaningless unless they are observed for the same cohort four years later, our results would have shown annual gains in the United States of only 1 percent of a standard deviation. The relative ranking of the United States remains essentially unchanged, however, as the estimated growth rates for 8th graders in other countries is also lower than for estimates that include students in 4th grade (see the unabridged report, Appendix B, Figure B1).

A much reduced rate of progress for the United States emerges when we norm the trends on the PISA 2003 test rather than the 2000 NAEP test. In this case, we would have estimated annual growth rate for the United States of only one-half of 1 percent of a standard deviation. A lower annual growth rate for other countries would also have been estimated, and again the relative ranking of the United States would remain unchanged (see the unabridged report, Appendix B, Figure B2).

An even darker picture emerges if one turns to the results for U.S. students at age 17, for whom only minimal gains can be detected over the past two decades. We have not reported the results for 17-year-old students, because the test administered to them does not provide information on the performance of students within individual states, and no international comparisons are possible for this age group.

Students themselves and the United States as a whole benefit from improved performance in the early grades only if that translates into measurably higher skills at the end of school. The fact that none of the gains observed in earlier years translate into improved high-school performance leaves one to wonder whether high schools are effectively building on the gains achieved in earlier years. And while some scholars dismiss the results for 17-year-old students on the grounds that high-school students do not take the test seriously, others believe that the data indicate that the American high school has become a highly problematic educational institution. Amidst any uncertainties one fact remains clear, however: the measurable gains in achievement accomplished by more recent cohorts of students within the United States are being outstripped by gains made by students in about half of the other 48 participating countries.

Politics and Results

The failure of the United States to close the international test-score gap, despite assiduous public assertions that every effort would be undertaken to produce that objective, raises questions about the nation’s overall reform strategy. Education goal setting in the United States has often been  utopian rather than realistic. In 1990, the president and the nation’s governors announced the goal that all American students should graduate from high school, but two decades later only 75 percent of 9th graders received their diploma within four years after entering high school. In 2002, Congress passed a law that declared that all students in all grades shall be proficient in math, reading, and science by 2014, but in 2012 most observers found that goal utterly beyond reach. Currently, the U.S. Department of Education has committed itself to ensuring that all students shall be college- or career-ready as they cross the stage on their high-school graduation day, another overly ambitious goal. Perhaps the least realistic goal was that of the governors in 1990 when they called for the U.S. to be first in the world in math and science by 2000. As this study shows, the United States is neither first nor catching up.

Consider a more realistic set of objectives for education policymakers, one that is based on experiences from within the United States itself. If all U.S. states could increase their performance at the same rate as the highest-growth states—Maryland, Florida, Delaware, and Massachusetts—the U.S. improvement rate would be lifted by 1.5 percentage points of a standard deviation annually above the current trend line. Since student performance can improve at that rate in some countries and in some states, then, in principle, such gains can be made more generally. Those gains might seem small but when viewed over two decades they accumulate to 30 percent of a standard deviation, enough to bring the United States within the range of, or to at least keep pace with, the world’s leaders.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Paul E. Peterson is director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance. Ludger Woessmann is head of the Department of Human Capital and Innovation at the Ifo Institute at the University of Munich. An unabridged version of this report is available at hks.harvard.edu/pepg/

Hostetter might just as surely have been talking about Relay, which aims to transform teacher education to fit the needs of urban schools. The amazing—or at least attention-getting—improvement on the wheel is that New York–based Relay is linking the success of its students to the success of their students.

During their second year in Relay’s two-year masters-degree program, elementary-school teachers are asked to show that their own students averaged a full year’s reading growth during the school year. They must also set a reading goal for each child, perhaps two years’ growth for a child who is three years behind, for example. Students can earn credit toward an honors degree if 80 percent of the children they teach meet their individual reading goals.

To earn their degrees, elementary-school teachers are also asked to show that their students earned, on average, 70 percent mastery on a year’s worth of state or Common Core Standards in another subject, usually math. In other words, a math class would meet the goal if students’ individual mastery scores, when averaged, were 70 percent or better. Middle-school teachers use the same yardstick, but only in their specialized subject.

Relay’s cofounder and president, Norman Atkins, talks movingly about the crisis in inner-city teaching and the need to “grow a pipeline of effective teachers who can make an immediate difference.” But the true value of Relay’s model may go beyond potentially improving the teaching in the classrooms where Relay’s graduates work. Robert Pianta, dean of the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, explained that Relay is creating a “feedback loop,” using child-level data to measure the outcomes of its teacher-training program, and using those measures to make decisions about program design. “This is how systems get better,” he told me.

Spreading accountability from the teacher back to the education school is an idea the Obama administration is also promoting in its efforts to remake teacher training. This spring, a federal panel looking at teacher-preparation programs debated, among other things, rating ed schools based on how much their teachers add to student learning. That possibility riles ed school deans, among others, but “individual accountability is coming down the pike,” says Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, a research and advocacy group.

Even Relay’s admirers concede that it’s too soon to tell whether the model works. It’s operating in just two cities: New York, where it’s offering a master’s degree to 206 students this year, and Newark, New Jersey, where so far it has state approval only to offer a one-year teaching certificate and has enrolled 64. Relay’s first class won’t graduate until 2013. Philanthropies are still footing much of the bill.

Relay has hired a research director, but Atkins says it may not open itself to independent researchers for another four years. Its students—with undergraduate degrees from the likes of the University of Virginia, Lafayette, and Georgetown—are atypical for an ed school, which could complicate comparisons with other teacher programs. Above all, trying to measure student achievement and a teacher’s role in improving it is hard to do.

Still, says Arthur Levine, former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College and a member of Relay’s board, Relay is helping to reinvent teacher education. “Relay is the model,” he told me. “It is the future.”

Nuts and Bolts

During their second year in Relay’s two-year masters-degree program, elementary-school teachers are asked to show that their own students averaged a full year’s reading growth during the school year. They must also set a reading goal for each child.

If there were ever a system in need of reinvention, it would be teacher education. Decades of studies, reports, and blue-ribbon commissions have criticized ed schools for low entrance requirements, mediocre standards, an emphasis on theory over practice, and outdated curricula. “It’s an accepted truth that the field is broken,” Walsh told me. The problem with fixing it, she added, is that “nobody has known what to do.”

What Relay is doing largely breaks the mold. Its students are full-time elementary- and middle-school teachers, almost all of them fresh out of college, almost none of them with a traditional teaching degree. The program is heavy on practice and nuts-and-bolts technique. It is competency-based: students can be waived out of Designing Assessments, for example, if they can show they are already adept at writing tests.

Relay’s method flips the classroom, with an online lesson at the start of every module or teaching unit (about 40 percent of instruction is online) and in-class discussions and exercises afterward. Twice-monthly night classes, once-monthly Saturday classes, and two summer terms are taught by master teachers and charter school heavyweights. Online instructors include Lee Canter, author of Assertive Discipline, charter school founders and principals, and Relay professors and deans.

Modules vary in duration and range from the nitty-gritty of classroom management—how to arrange furniture, how to grade papers, how to deal with families, how to open and close a lesson—to big-picture subjects, including literacy instruction, writing development, learning disabilities, unit planning, and character development. For a class called Benchmarking and Tracking Progress, scheduled to last 11¼ hours, the catalog says Relay students will create a spreadsheet to track their own students’ progress against year-end goals, and use the data to customize their teaching. In a class called Behavior Management Plans, Relay students will write a set of classroom rules and learn “how to engage in the very necessary practice of correcting students when they misbehave.”

Everybody Engaged

I logged onto an online lesson for a module titled Engaging Everybody, taught by Doug Lemov, managing director of Uncommon Schools. In the 3¾-hour lesson, Lemov lectured for three or four minutes on each of four techniques that he promotes to keep youngsters involved in class, techniques he labels “wait time,” “everybody writes,” “cold call,” and “call and response.” Each of Lemov’s minilectures was followed by a few pages of online reading from his book Teach Like a Champion, and an essay question or two that students answer online (see “Tools for Teachers,” book reviews, Spring 2011). Then came several short videos showing teachers using each technique in the classroom, with Lemov noting the teachers’ use of an apt pause or effective gesture.

Ed schools typically separate lectures from experience, Arthur Levine pointed out to me; by putting lessons online, Relay can blend them. Next came practice scenarios—what do you do if only three children raise their hands to a question about angles?—online group exercises, and instructions to prepare a lesson plan that incorporates the techniques.

Evening classes are on pedagogy—how to teach—and Saturday classes are on subject matter—what to teach. At the second Engaging Everybody evening class, Relay students are expected to present a 10-minute video of themselves using the techniques in their own classrooms. A complex “rubric” describes how students will be assessed on each: on the wait-time technique, students are evaluated on whether they wait at least three seconds between posing a question and calling on a child for an answer, and whether they “strategically narrate” the wait with encouraging comments.

The classroom lessons are heavily scripted. During the first three minutes of the Engaging Everybody class, for example, the Relay students are to report on how often they’re using the four techniques. The script then lists four paragraphs of narrative and questions for the Relay professor to pose over the next four minutes. For five minutes after that, there’s a review, with 10 questions for the professor to ask, and then a suggested transition: “All right, our minds are fresh on today’s content and we’re ready to move.” Then there’s a guided 7-minute “table discussion,” 5 minutes of class discussion, 11 minutes of partner feedback, and so on.

“It is the most self-consciously designed program I’ve ever seen at a university level. Everything was thought out,” said David Steiner, dean of the Hunter College School of Education, which hosted Relay’s predecessor, Teacher U, beginning in 2008. (Teacher U’s last class of about 147 students will graduate this summer.)

Relay students “model” the kind of behavior they hope to see in their own classrooms, so their hands fly up at questions, they rush to stack chairs and pass out papers, they snap their fingers or waggle their hands to show approval. Relay’s scripts do the same kind of modeling by showing students how to effectively use their limited class time, Steiner explained.

Feedback Loop

When asked a question about reworking a question from a teachers’ guide to fit the current lesson, Mayme Hostetter, Relay’s dean, says, “Sure. No need to totally invent the wheel. Just make the wheel amazing.”

Relay’s class of first-year students had moved to the 6¾-hour Designing Assessments module when I visited in the spring. At the first of the module’s two evening classes, they had practiced writing “exit tickets,” quick quizzes to measure kids’ understanding of that day’s lesson. At the second evening class, students were to write an end-of-the-week test. Again, the script divided the evening into increments, with 45 minutes for students to practice writing test questions and the final 10 minutes for “team building.”

The Newark class, held at North Star Academy Charter School, was looser than the script suggested—and heavier on inspiration. James Verrilli, director of the Newark program and founding principal of North Star, opened with a clip from a Hollywood film about an innocent man’s decades-in-the-making escape from prison, and asked how it related to urban teaching.

The communal answer was that the escape seemed doomed—“like some people look at our kids,” one young woman said—but that perseverance and vision will yield success. “Shout-outs” followed that, with Verrilli singling out students, and students singling out each other, for exemplary work in their classrooms that week. The evening closed with an animated call-and-response reading of Relay’s creed, which ends with the lines, “We touch lives daily. We are teachers.”

In between, the discussion ranged from how to align test questions with the state standards to the layout of a test paper. There was agreement that some questions on the New Jersey tests included extraneous information that obscured the lesson. But “if the state is doing it, we don’t want our kids walking in blind,” said another young woman, who suggested that everyone write a few wordy questions for their own students to practice.

A few days earlier, I attended a Saturday class at Baruch College Campus High School. It gathered most of the Relay students working in New York City schools (mostly in charters, but a few in district schools where Teach For America has assigned them), divided them into subject specialties, and then again by elementary- and middle-school levels. Relay says 61 percent of the New York class is working toward a master’s degree in childhood education, 9 percent in middle-school math education, 5 percent in middle-school science, 3 percent in social studies, 12 percent in English, and 10 percent in general middle-school education.

In a class called Geometry, Fractions, and Measurements, Nicole Chalfoun—a former Bronx 5th-grade teacher—asked Relay students to design a “remediation strategy” for a child whose answer to the equation 2/5 + 3/8 is 5/13. “Where would you start?” she asked, as her students discussed which manipulatives would best convey to the child why uncommon denominators can’t be combined.

In Teaching Middle School Social Studies III, Ali Brown—director of history achievement for the Achievement First schools—asked her class to write an “essential question” that would frame a unit they were soon to teach on the American Revolution. “What is best going to make your kids think hard?” she asked. In an Elementary School Literacy class—the last of 10 sessions in the module—students were critiquing videos they had made of themselves teaching a reading lesson. In Teaching Middle School Math III, the morning began with a game called Buzz and a discussion of ways to modify it to include higher-level math, including calculus.

Every class meeting ends with a survey—was the lesson helpful, how could it be improved?—with comments fed back to course designers, says Hostetter.

The students I talked with—almost all of them first-year teachers—told me that Relay’s lessons were helping them plan their classes, practice their presentations, keep their kids engaged. “Everything I learn here I can use the next day,” said Milan Reed, who graduated from the University of Virginia with a major in political and social thought and now is teaching at Newark’s Spark Academy charter school.

“I get ideas, I get practice, I get feedback,” added Adam Feiler, a 2008 Georgetown graduate and Teach For America volunteer who’s teaching 4th grade at North Star’s Vailsburg Campus elementary.

Many also told me that Relay’s lessons have changed their classroom culture. “The culture went from being compliant to being invested,” said Max Silverstein, a Penn State business major now teaching in an early-childhood classroom at Newark Legacy Charter School. I heard the same thing from Alonte Johnson, a Morehouse College English major who is teaching middle-school English at Kings Collegiate Charter School in Brooklyn. A few days earlier, his students designed a seating chart that paired the better and slower readers. “The environment is more interdependent instead of everyone working for me,” he said.

On a Mission

What Relay is doing largely breaks the mold. Its students are full-time elementary- and middleschool teachers, almost none of them with a traditional teaching degree.

Norman Atkins, who founded Uncommon Schools and its North Star Academy as well, said he, David Levin, cofounder of the KIPP charter schools, and Dacia Toll, founder of Achievement First schools, began talking about an education school when they found themselves competing for the same teachers. “Rather than fight over a shallow pool of talent, we were interested in what it would take to build a generation of teachers,” he told me in Relay’s spare Manhattan offices above a public library. (Levin and Toll are on the Relay board, but don’t hold executive positions in the nonprofit.)

They approached 10 college presidents looking for a partner institution, Atkins said, and Hunter’s David Steiner, himself a critic of teacher training, “was waiting for us with open arms.” Last year, seeking more autonomy, Atkins launched Relay and began phasing out Teacher U. The new school takes its name from research suggesting that a “relay” of three years of good teachers can erase the average educational disadvantage of low-income children.

The idea of holding Relay students—and before them, students at Teacher U—accountable for their students’ progress was “one of the very first things we talked about,” Atkins said. The school settled on the 70 percent average mastery floor after looking at the New York math and language tests, where proficiency generally is defined as a score of 70 percent correct answers. The 80 percent stretch goal (for the honors degree) was less data-based but is “at the nexus of ambition and feasibility,” said Brent Maddin, Relay’s provost.

Some 95 percent of Teacher U’s 2010 graduates and 98 percent of its 2011 graduates met the 70 percent targets, he said, although the graduation rate over the two-year master’s program is lower, between 70 percent and 80 percent because of attrition, Hostetter noted.

Reading progress can be assessed with any of six tests, including Fountas and Pinnell Benchmarks and Pearson’s DRA2. But subject tests don’t exist for all subjects and grades. Relay’s handbook says its students instead can use tests they acquire elsewhere or even write themselves, if the assessments show mastery of state or Common Core standards, or of standards set by charter networks or individual schools.

I asked Verrilli, head of the Newark program, how Relay could analyze achievement among youngsters taking so many different tests (a half dozen of his Newark students who are teachers in district schools are writing their own year-end assessments). It wasn’t an apples-and-oranges comparison, he said, but one between “McIntosh and Golden Delicious.” The comparison isn’t among tests, but about mastery levels, he said.

I put that to Scott Marion, associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, who told me that Relay was “dreaming” if it hoped to compare performance across schools, but he otherwise sounded supportive. “I care about the end determination: Is the teacher effective or not,” Marion said, “not ‘did these kids achieve a number’?”

Atkins is a serial social entrepreneur who also started the Robin Hood Foundation, which invests in schools and antipoverty programs in New York. His plans for Relay set a breakneck pace: Next year, he expects Relay to enroll 500 to 550 students in New York and New Jersey. It will add classes for high school teachers, including chemistry, biology, and physics. It has applied to New Jersey to begin a master’s program. And Relay expects to extend its reach further into district schools under an agreement to train up to 60 NYC Teaching Fellows in the Bronx.

Atkins said he expects Relay to be fully supported by tuition and client-school fees in three or four years. For now, philanthropies are footing about $13,000 of the $35,000 two-year tuition bill. Students pay about $4,500, with charter schools and federal grants and subsidies making up the rest. Arthur Levine, the board member, agrees with Atkins’s aim. “For innovation to survive, it has to be self-sustaining. If something’s not self-sustaining, it’s not serious,” he told me. And Relay is nothing if not serious.

“What calls us every day is the sad and tragic circumstance” of urban education, Atkins told me, and in one phrase or another, everyone at Relay says the same thing. The other thing they all told me turns on its head the notion of what makes a great teacher.

“We’re saying great teachers are made,” James Verrilli told me, “not born.”

June Kronholz is a contributing editor of Education Next and a former foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Not all relevant financial figures are available yet, but reasoned extrapolations from private- and public-sector employment data suggest that U.S. schooling may be on a historic glide path toward lower per-pupil resources and significant labor-force reductions. If not thoughtfully considered, budget-balancing decisions could damage learning opportunities for schoolchildren.

Education managers are typically inexperienced in and often reluctant to initiate cost-savings actions. Budget cuts may be poorly targeted, and students, particularly economically disadvantaged students, are swept up in the process as collateral damage.

In California and Washington, bad budget cutting has already begun. Governors in these two states have acquiesced to employee demands and have protected educator jobs at the expense of students’ time to learn.

The greatest risk of all is to the past quarter century of efforts to render America’s schools more effective. Unless means are identified for making schools more productive, that is, doing better with less, reform momentum is in serious jeopardy.

Evolving Context

Many members of the general public and the policy community believe that school districts are going bankrupt, teachers are underpaid, and educator layoffs are rampant (see “The Compensation Question,” forum, Fall 2012, forthcoming). Inaccurate media reporting, naive celebrity comments, education-advocate laments, social-media babble, and talk-show dialogue reinforce this view.

What are the facts? Total K–12 public-school spending approaches $700 billion annually. Inflation-adjusted per-pupil school spending has increased over the last century by, on average, 2.3 percent per year. There have been a few plateau years during recessions, but never a significant decline (see Figure 1).

As a consequence, the United States now spends more money on K–12 schooling than any other nation in the world. More is spent by the United States, in the aggregate, than by hugely populous nations such as China and India. Spending per pupil is higher in the U.S. than in every country except Switzerland.

Achievement levels in the U.S. are not commensurate with spending, however. Many nations exceed the United States in science and math test scores, for example.

Spending increases have been directed overwhelmingly toward adding school employees. Professional-to-pupil ratios have become ever more favorable. Whereas 30 years ago there was one professional educator employed for every 18.6 public school students, the equivalent figure today is one for every 15.4 students. When other personnel are added to the mix—cafeteria workers, custodians, clerks, and so forth—the ratio falls to one employee for every 7 students.

School productivity, measured as educational outcomes divided by labor or financial inputs, has declined dramatically. Indeed, relative to sectors such as communication, finance, manufacturing, and agriculture, the public schools are highly labor-intensive. The productivity picture is made worse by the resistance of schools to augment teachers’ efforts with new instructional technologies.

Why School Productivity Matters

A new normal of public-sector fiscal austerity is emerging.

Forty-two states and the District of Columbia face budget shortfalls. (Only a few fossil fuel–rich or agricultural states are able to sidestep the issue.) Although federal tax revenues are far short of anticipated spending, the federal government is not about to step in with still another stimulus package. Congress and the president are deadlocked over a path to economic recovery. Eurozone economies are in disarray and have had their credit ratings lowered, which jeopardizes U.S. exports.

Through deep and painful experience with cyclical growth and recession, U.S. private-sector firms have learned to deal with contraction. There have been nine recessions in the United States since 1955. During each of these, employment in the private sector declined. Employment subsequently turned up, but conventional private-sector response to recession has been workforce contraction. Private-sector managers know how to hone their labor force to balance cost cutting with the retention of scarce skilled talent and how to invest in labor-saving technology. These dynamics render the private sector ever more efficient, sustaining the production of goods and services with lower labor costs.

Here is an example of just how productive the private sector has become during the most recent recession: By the final quarter of 2011, gross domestic product (GDP) had returned to its 2008 prerecession level. It did so, however, with 5 million fewer private-sector employees.

School districts demonstrate the flip side of this dynamic. Cost-saving actions in public education, such as layoffs, school closures, salary freezes, benefit reductions, and decreasing school days, are possible but unusual. Taking such uncomfortable steps is legally cumbersome and politically treacherous. Cutbacks frequently fail to generate anticipated savings and can trigger hard-to-heal labor-management wounds. In recent recessions, when the private-sector workforce was contracting, school-district hiring continued apace.

It is important to note that much of the employment decline in the private sector during recessions is the result of firms going out of business. In difficult economic times, private firms must either become more efficient or fail. The public-school sector faces no such threat, which may be why schools have historically added jobs, regardless of economic conditions.

Figure 2 depicts growth in private-sector and public-school employment. Here one can see that from 1955 to the start of the most recent recession, the private sector experienced nine labor-market contractions—on average, one downturn per decade. Conversely, until the current recession, employment in public schools had only one downturn, in 1982–83.

The downturn in public-school employment in the early 1980s came on the heels of two recessions, one that stretched from January to July 1980 and the other from July 1981 to November 1982. The fact that teaching jobs were shed after these recessions were officially over should not be surprising, given that school budgets are set, teacher contracts are made, and federal and state funding are allocated ahead of time, causing the public-school sector to respond to tough economic times more slowly than the private sector.

The same condition prevailed in the wake of the most recent recession. Following 2009, when the private sector began adding wage earners, the public schools began to shed teachers. Figure 3 shows this in greater detail.

From June 2008 to March 2012, public schools shed more than 250,000 jobs, 3 percent of their total workforce. It is of particular note that this shrinkage in the public-education workforce took place in spite of the added revenues from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which were intended to prevent such a decline.

Nonetheless, as Figure 3 also indicates, a larger share of school employees who were working in 2008 were still on the job in 2012 than the share of workers still employed in the private sector in 2012.

Impact of Revenue Decline

There is no overstating the painful consequences of organizational downsizing, be it private or public. Closing a manufacturing plant, shutting down a large distribution center, and curtailing hours at a backroom financial operation trigger layoffs, and, depending on the context of the contraction, can imperil an entire community. Individuals, parents, children, and even a geographic region can be hurt.

Serious and sustained school revenue declines are at least as bad and in some ways worse. Layoffs almost always involve the least experienced or most recently employed teachers and other staff. If the financial situation necessitates the closure of one or more schools, then the pain spreads wider and may threaten the survival of a community.

School cutbacks may also disproportionately affect low-income students. As mentioned previously, California and Washington have reacted to budget shortfalls in ways that harm students: reducing the length of the school year and the number of days that schools operate. While this saves money and jobs, as teacher salaries are reduced and layoffs avoided, time in school is most important for disadvantaged students. Middle-class families can compensate for the loss of school hours with enrichment activities such as trips to museums and libraries. Low-income students are seldom so insulated from schooling adversity.

If the entire public-education system could be rendered more productive, that is, if higher levels of achievement could be coaxed from existing resource levels, some of the pain could be avoided or at least mitigated.

Improving Productivity

Several integrated strategies offer the prospect of protecting, possibly promoting, education reform in the face of a new fiscal austerity. These strategies involve 1) accurately informing the general public and the policy community regarding the condition of schools, that is, their financing, their achievement, and the relationship between the two; 2) conducting empirical research aimed at understanding issues of productivity in education; 3) informing policymakers and school managers regarding means by which budget cuts can be made without eviscerating instructional effectiveness; and 4) solving challenges to wider adoption of instructional technologies.

Federal and state governments have expended hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that local schools have Internet access and plentiful computing hardware. Grants have also been available for purchase of software and teacher training.

These efforts have seldom proved sufficient to transform America’s public schools. Instruction continues to rely almost exclusively on labor-intensive practices. Government policies have ignored the savings that private firms have shown can result from technological innovation. Put bluntly, why should a tenured classroom teacher go to the effort of altering her long-standing instructional protocols to adopt new technologies when her pay, professional status, and job security are only remotely related to improving her effectiveness or her clients’ satisfaction?

Strategies must be constructed that will attract classroom teachers to the use of technology to enhance their effectiveness. Whatever strategy emerges in this regard is likely to have to involve teacher and school performance evaluations linked to student achievement gains. If teachers, principals, and entire schools see that their professional status and remuneration are becoming more tightly linked to student achievement, then they will be more open to seeking technologies that will enhance instructional effectiveness.

There are those who contend that online learning will simply bypass schools, that conventional school classes will be disrupted by new digital models that operate outside the brick-and-mortar school. But there is only a modest chance of this happening. A state initiative in Florida, the Florida Virtual School, is promising in this regard. So is the spectrum of well-constructed subject-matter units that can be found at the Khan Academy web site. But the obstacles are almost too numerous to mention. Among them are the monopolistic nature of many public-school systems, the custodial function entrusted to schools by law, and the attractiveness to students of the social interactions that take place in school. If in fact conventional schools are to be disrupted by technology, it is unlikely to happen soon.

While waiting for technologies to augment the work of a teacher, what can be done by state and district officials to wring the maximum effect out of every dollar they have?

First, states and districts can discontinue costly practices that have not been shown to enhance student achievement, including paying educators for out-of-field master’s degrees and salary premiums for experience; following “last in, first out” personnel provisions; relying on regular classroom instructional aides; and adhering to mandated limits on class size. Regulations that mandate inefficiency, such as legislatively precluding outsourcing, requiring intergovernmental grants to “supplement not supplant” existing spending, and prohibiting end-of-budget year surplus carryover, can also be revised to encourage smarter spending.

In place of the practices above, states and districts can adopt strategies that foster efficiency at both the school and district level, such as adopting “activity-based cost” (ABC) accounting; empowering principals as school-level CEOs; adopting performance-based dollar distribution formulas and school-level financial budgeting; centralizing health insurance at the state level; and outsourcing operational services where proven to save money. By adopting these practices, districts and states may be able to ease the burden of the transition to the coming period of fiscal austerity and increase long-term efficiency in schooling.

James W. Guthrie, currently superintendent of public instruction in Nevada, is senior fellow and former director of education policy studies at the George W. Bush Institute, where Elizabeth Ettema is research associate in education policy.

Fourteen of the 4th graders at Washington, D.C.’s Hope Community Charter School had chosen the right answer—1/3 and 5/15—on a test written for the school by Boston-based Achievement Network (ANet). But 20 chose the wrong answer, and two didn’t answer at all.

So on a bright November afternoon three weeks after the test, Hope’s math specialist, Christine Madison, and two of the school’s 4th-grade teachers huddled over five pages of test-score data assembled for them by ANet. Hope’s Tolson campus serves 420 youngsters in grades PreK–8, almost all of them African American and two-thirds of them from low-income families. It is one of three D.C. charters that are operated by Virginia-based Imagine Schools and are working with ANet. The city’s charter board calls Hope “mid-performing”—about 40 percent of its elementary-school children and 60 percent of its middle schoolers are considered proficient in math and English.

ANet coach, Amrutha Nagarajan, coaches 14 schools for the organization.

The ANet data showed that the children generally understood fractions. But they also showed that many youngsters—including some with otherwise good scores—were unsteady at fractional models, or word problems, which are among the 15 math standards that Washington schools are expected to teach their 4th graders.

The fraction lesson, drawn from the class textbook, apparently didn’t work when the teachers first taught it. So at this half-day data-analysis exercise scripted by ANet and overseen by an ANet coach, Madison and the teachers debated why it failed and plotted how to reteach it. How about using an art project, fraction charts, flip-books, team competitions, they mused. How about reteaching the lesson to youngsters grouped by ability? How about reteaching boys and girls differently?

Think about how you taught the lesson the first time, and then do something different, urged Madison, who grew more exuberant with each new idea. “I think I may not have used enough visual aids,” one teacher finally conceded as Madison beamed.

Learning Curve

John Maycock is the founder of Achievement Network, a nonprofit organization that provides data-analysis training and coaching for school leaders and teachers.

Data-driven instruction began its spread across the country about a decade ago, in the footsteps of the No Child Left Behind requirement that schools administer yearly achievement tests. Those tests didn’t help teachers spot and backfill learning gaps, though. Scores came back after everyone had moved on to the next grade, and anyway, the tests were designed to hold schools accountable for the performance of groups: Did enough English-learners pass, enough African Americans? They were not intended to show which students didn’t understand decimals.

By most accounts, a few charter schools began testing their youngsters more frequently, with the idea that teachers could use those interim results to inform their teaching. “If you pay attention to what students learn and what they don’t, you learn how to teach more effectively,” says Paul Bambrick-Santoyo, whose book Driven by Data is a primer on data-driven instruction.

But on the ground, data-driven instruction has encountered problems. Schools complain that interim assessments produced by publishers aren’t always aligned with curricula, pacing guides, or year-end state tests. The assessments are often too easy, handing schools an unhappy surprise when state test results are posted.

Some districts have taken over the job of producing interim tests, but their data offices have the reputation of taking so long to return results that the information is too old to be of much use. (Ben Fenton of New Leaders for New Schools says he has encountered schools that sidestep their districts by photocopying their kids’ answer sheets and grading the assessments themselves.)

Schools that have tried to develop their own assessments have found the job overwhelming. Jermall Wright, principal of southeast Washington’s Leckie Elementary, told me that his leadership team tried it when they decided that the district’s assessments were inadequate. But writing, scoring, and analyzing the tests took so much time that they quickly abandoned the effort.

In any event, few teacher-education schools include data-analysis training, so many teachers don’t know how to read the data, or don’t have the time to use the information to rethink their lesson plans.

By the mid-2000s, “data was starting to become a hot topic,” says John Maycock, who at the time was completing a master’s degree in the school-leadership program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education. But “teachers were saying they wanted help” understanding and using it, he adds.

“We started to see that just having access to better data was not enough to drive improvement,” says Joe Siedlecki, a program officer at the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, which has given $1.7 million to ANet.

Maycock’s solution was to found a nonprofit organization that combines rigorous, standards-aligned assessments; data-analysis training and coaching for school leaders and teachers; guided peer review; and networking across schools. Schools join ANet, pay a fee for its services, and commit their teachers and principals to a four-times-a-year cycle of testing and data review. The model goes beyond traditional professional-development models by linking ANet’s work to each school’s data feedback loop: student achievement results inform the guidance ANet provides.

Coaching the Team

School leaders also agree to carve out time for teachers to look at the data together, and to take part in the cycle of meetings and reviews themselves.

Two days after Hope’s data-analysis meeting, I returned to the charter school to listen as its leadership team reviewed the session with ANet coach Amrutha Nagarajan, a 28-year-old Wellesley- and Harvard-educated former banker. Nagarajan came to Washington as a D.C. Teaching Fellow, resisting pressure from her Indian-immigrant parents to pursue a business career, she says, and now coaches 14 schools for ANet.

Hope had administered its second cycle of interim assessments in math and English-language arts on November 8 and 9 after downloading the tests from ANet’s web site. The untimed tests are given every six to eight weeks and typically take youngsters about an hour, Nagarajan told me. The 4th-grade math test asked 34 questions; the 3rd-grade language-arts test included three readings—a folk tale, a poem, and a nonfiction passage—and 20 questions.

The school’s leadership team had the option to view the year’s assessments well beforehand to be sure the school’s lesson plans and pacing would prepare kids for the district’s year-end tests. Hope doesn’t factor the ANet interim test scores into youngsters’ overall grades, and in their contract with ANet, network schools agree not to use the scores to rate their teachers, a move designed to dampen teacher resistance. School leaders also agree to carve out time for teachers to look at the data together, and to take part in the cycle of meetings and reviews themselves.

After the early-November tests, Hope shipped its completed answer sheets to ANet’s Boston office. Within 48 hours of receiving them, ANet posted the results online, and Hope printed out a set for every teacher. The data tell teachers how their students answered each question, of course, but also how each youngster, the class, and the grade scored on questions aligned to each standard, like dividing whole numbers or identifying details in a reading passage.

The data showed that among Hope’s 5th graders, for example, 88 percent appeared to understand how to find the area and perimeter of rectangles and triangles, but only 26 percent could do the same with circles. Among 8th graders, 65 percent could analyze details and draw conclusions from two reading passages—they did better at nonfiction than fiction—but just 52 percent could identify the author’s main purpose in writing the piece.

In their contract with ANet, network schools agree not to use the scores to rate their teachers, a move designed to dampen teacher resistance.

ANet’s coaching script next called for Nagarajan and the leadership team to go over the results—in ANet parlance, this is a pre-data meeting—and set priorities for a professional development day, or data meeting, two days later. They agreed that Hope’s 8th-grade language-arts teachers would concentrate on how better to teach “author’s purpose,” a D.C. learning standard. Its 6th-grade teachers would focus on “drawing conclusions,” its 3rd-grade teachers on “analyzing details,” and so on, through each grade and subject.

The idea, Nagarajan told me, is for teachers to “go deep on one or two standards” by dissecting four or five test questions each at the data meeting. The goal, she added, is for that kind of item analysis to become part of each teacher’s routine as she becomes more comfortable with data.

Nagarajan—whose teaching experience includes a year in Chennai, India, after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—remained in the background on data meeting day as Hope’s teachers worked on their reteaching plans. But she and ANet provided a clear structure to keep the school’s improvement plans on track.

During the data meeting, teachers pored over a form called an “item analysis template”—downloaded from the ANet web site—that forced them to think through the test questions that had given their kids the most grief. “What were the misconceptions” that led so many students to choose the wrong answer, the form asked them to consider. What groups of students missed the answer? What did students need to know to get it right?

Next, they worked through a “reteach action plan,” also downloaded from ANet. How was the lesson taught originally, the form asked. How and when would it be retaught, and to whom—the whole class, a small group, individual children?

Nagarajan, meanwhile, pressed Hope’s leadership team to meet deadlines and create what she called “follow-up structures.” When Dr. Chloé Marshall, Hope’s high-energy principal, said her teachers would file their reteaching plans that Friday, Nagarajan asked, “By the end of Friday or the beginning of Friday?” When would they do the reteaching, the next step on the ANet agenda, she asked. Those “reteaches” are supposed to be slipped into a compatible lesson so they don’t derail a teacher’s lesson plans and pacing, and target just those kids who need them.

Nagarajan continued: When would Hope retest—a quick two- or three-question quiz in each class—to make sure the new lesson was effective? When would teachers hold their “reflection meeting,” the last step in the assessment cycle, to look at the new results? “Does that make sense? What do you think?” she pressed the leadership team.

At the postdata-day debrief—more ANet parlance—Nagarajan and the school’s leadership team conceded that the English teachers were still learning how to use the ANet data to break down the broad standards into smaller skills, and to figure out which skills their students were lacking. But they also saw progress: teachers were talking more, sharing strategies, and acknowledging the need to teach differently.

“Some teachers were still challenging the test” by laying the blame on bad questions, Nagarajan said. But many more were “owning the data,” insisted Marshall, making the shift from the-kids-aren’t-learning-it to I’m-not-teaching-it. And with that, the discussion moved on to new teaching strategies, new delivery strategies, resources for new lesson plans, and the team’s goals for Hope’s students.

“The object isn’t to teach kids a process” that leads them to the right answer on a test, “but to visualize a problem and solve it,” Madison said to general agreement. “That’s what will help them in real life.”

Meeting a Need

Many teachers were "owning the data," making the shift from the-kids-aren't-learning-it to I'm-not-teaching-it.

John Maycock, who is now 37 and calls himself ANet’s “chief growth officer,” had managed afterschool centers in San Francisco, where he says he became “hooked forever” on education. But his real interest was “to be part of something entrepreneurial. I wanted to start something that was an expressed need from the schools,” he adds.

In 2004, Maycock and his mentor, Marci Cornell-Feist, assembled leaders from 10 Boston charter schools around the idea for Achievement Network. Cornell-Feist is the founder of the High Bar, which helps charter boards with management and governance issues.

The Boston charters had begun using interim assessments to prepare their kids for the year-end Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS. But the interim tests from outside vendors weren’t as rigorous as, or even aligned with, the MCAS. “They weren’t setting up the school leaders and teachers for success,” Maycock says.

The charters told him they needed better assessments, better data, and help understanding how to use the information, he says. They wanted a common assessment so they could compare results among themselves and use the data to identify best practices. And they wanted assessments that would serve as an instructional tool and not another gotcha mechanism to punish teachers.

Maycock raised $200,000 in seed money from a Massachusetts foundation, but also asked the schools each to pitch in $5,000 “to make it count,” he says. Schools now pay on a sliding scale: those like Hope that are in their first year and need intensive coaching pay $30,000. That declines to $14,000 a year once schools have been in the network for a few years and need less coaching.

Seven charter middle schools signed up with ANet in the 2005–06 school year, its first. Massachusetts had released the MCAS questions for the first time, and Maycock separated them by standard and skill, dissected them for rigor, and wrote his own interim assessments that mirrored the state exam.

James Peyser, a partner in NewSchools Venture Fund, which has invested $1.4 million in ANet and holds a seat on its board, says ANet’s assessments are remarkable for their rigor, which he adds are aimed at readying kids for college, not just for the state tests.

Three Boston district schools joined in ANet’s second year after catching wind of it. Maycock formed a second network of charter schools in Washington in 2008, and nine D.C. district schools joined the next year with help from the Dell grant. There are now 74 schools in the D.C. network.

New Orleans, Newark, Chicago, New York City, and Nashville-Memphis have since launched networks. There’s a network of three virtual schools, and a Baltimore network is planned for 2012. ANet says that 250 schools with some 70,000 kids were members of its networks in the 2011–12 school year. The organization has revenues of $9 million this school year, including $6 million in school fees.

Testing has expanded from the initial grades 6 and 7 to cover grades 3 through 8; ANet is piloting interim assessments for 2nd graders and a set of science tests. High school interims are more complicated because of wider course offerings, but they are “on our radar to consider—very much so,” Maycock says.

In 2010, ANet won a competitive $5 million Investing in Innovation (i3) grant from the U.S. Department of Education, which it is using, in part, to fund a large randomized study of its impact.

In its own analysis, ANet says the number of its youngsters who scored proficient or above on state tests last year increased by 7 percentage points in English and 4 percentage points in math in Chicago, and by 5 points in English and 3 points in math in New Orleans. Of the six cities for which it reported scores last year, ANet said four made twice the gains in English as the rest of their respective states, and three made double the state gains in math.

In D.C., about 6,600 youngsters in ANet’s charter and district schools took year-end tests in 2011. ANet says those scoring proficient in English increased by 4.5 percent and in math by 9 percent from the year earlier. That translates into 319 more kids passing the language exam and 662 more passing math, numbers Maycock calls “huge.” In just the D.C. district ANet schools, the increases were smaller—4 percent in English and 6.6 percent in math—but still better than the improvement of less than 2 percent posted by district schools that didn’t partner with ANet.

Network Strength

A learning walk explores peer-group feedback, or how to get teachers to help one another figure out how to reteach a troublesome lesson.

The schools in ANet’s original network were a lot alike: urban with high-need populations. Maycock has recently convinced stronger schools to join each network; in D.C., Janney and Horace Mann Elementary Schools, which are among the district’s highest-performing, white-majority schools, joined a network that is generally minority and struggling. The idea is to get charters and district schools, and stronger and weaker schools—schools that don’t generally cross paths—to share ideas and goad each other to improve.

Network schools have access to each other’s grade-level data, they share ANet coaches, and they’re invited to regular “learning walks,” where one network school models a practice for other network members.

A few days after the data-day review, I visited Powell Elementary, a district school in northeast D.C., for a learning walk on peer-group feedback, or how to get teachers to help one another figure out how to reteach a troublesome lesson. Teachers, data and instructional coaches, and a principal from eight widely different schools attended.

The practice Powell was showing off involved having its teachers present their reteaching plans—developed on data day—to a handful of teachers from other grades and specialties. These “critical friends” ask “clarifying questions” about the plan, and then talk it over among themselves. The presenting teachers can take or leave the suggestions without having to defend their lesson plans.

As I listened, a Powell math teacher modeled the process while the visitors leaned in close and tossed out their own ideas. Consider a math competition, said the dean of an all-boys, entirely African American charter school that seemed to have little in common with Powell: “Kids respond well to that.” Identify the 10 words most commonly used in word problems, said a math specialist from a district school that seemed to mirror Powell’s English-learner enrollment.

“I hadn’t thought about using manipulatives” in the lesson, conceded the Powell teacher as the ideas rolled in—and his kids would benefit from a hands-on lesson that burned up some of their energy, he added. After two hours, with the learning walk long ended, a dozen teachers from around the network were still huddled together, still talking lesson plans.

Powell keeps an ANet data wall in its front lobby and records how many youngsters in each class score proficient or advanced in math and in language arts for each ANet assessment cycle. Powell’s parents attend a data meeting when the results come out each cycle, and “all but three or four” regularly attend, principal Janeece Docal told me.

Powell’s highly public use of the data contrasts with that of Hyde-Addison Elementary, a third-year ANet school in D.C.’s swank Georgetown neighborhood, which uses the ANet data only internally. “We see what you know and what you don’t know. We see what we’ve taught you,” principal Dana Nerenberg told me.

Powell links the data discussion to the kids’ future, Docal explained: good ANet scores translate into good scores on the year-end test, which will land the youngsters in the high school and then the college and then the job of their choice. “Education equals freedom,” she said a dozen times over the afternoon.

How schools use the data “depends on the school’s culture,” says Justin Jones, a former Teach For America corps member and recruiter who heads the D.C. network.

Peyser, at NewSchools Venture Fund, says the goal is to help “change and strengthen school culture toward data” until “it becomes the way they do business.”

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor.

Every few weeks, a group of education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) gathers in Washington, D.C., to compare notes and plot strategy in what is (half in jest) referred to as “fight club.” Like the subject of the 1999 David Fincher movie, this fight club sees itself as the underdog in an epic struggle for freedom and equality. While the target of the film’s ire is consumerism, these national ERAOs and their counterparts at the state level are focused on enacting sweeping education policy changes to increase accountability for student achievement, improve teacher quality, turn around failing schools, and expand school choice. As Terry Moe documents in his recent book, Special Interest, for decades the politics of school reform have been dominated by the education establishment, the collection of teachers unions and other school employee associations derisively called the “blob” by reformers. But the past two years have witnessed an unprecedented wave of state education reforms, much of it fiercely opposed by the unions. The ERAOs played an active role in pushing for these changes, and it is clear that they are reshaping the politics of school reform in the United States in important ways. But does the reform blob really stand a chance of defeating the education blob?

What Are the ERAOs?

Interviews with ERAO leaders reveal that the challenges of implementing No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—in particular, states’ efforts to game its accountability, choice, and school restructuring mandates—spawned the creation of policy advocacy organizations that could push for reform in state capitols. As Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) explained, “There was recognition over time that good ideas alone weren’t enough and weren’t going to get us across the finish line in terms of systemic reform. There needed to be a significant investment of time and resources in advocating for political changes that would enable and protect reform.” The largest of the ERAOs (in terms of staff, budget, and reach) are Stand for Children, StudentsFirst, the 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now (50CAN), DFER, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), but this remains a relatively decentralized and fragmented movement. Different groups embrace somewhat different policy agendas and tactics, from grassroots mobilization to lobbying policymakers and operating political action committees.

Another way that ERAOs differ is in their scope and where they operate. Groups such as Advance Illinois and the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education are independent operators that focus explicitly on a single state or city. Stand for Children, 50CAN, DFER, and FEE are national organizations that work in multiple states. Stand for Children currently has affiliates in 9 states, 50CAN operates in 4 states (originating from its flagship ConnCAN, which operates in Connecticut alone), and DFER has 11 state chapters (see sidebar). How do the ERAOs decide what states to operate in? Marc Porter Magee, president and founder of 50CAN, talks about a “vetting process” that centers on figuring out what the “advocacy value-add score” would be in a potential state. Collectively, the ERAO leaders I spoke with identified three critical factors: 1) Is there a void to fill (no existing organization already doing the work)? 2) Is there sufficient local support for reform, and are local champions in place to lead the effort? 3) Is state philanthropic support available to fund the effort and sustain it over time?

While the groups vary considerably in tactics and geographic base, several common elements are apparent. The first is a connection to school choice, and, in particular, to the charter school movement. Many of the ERAOs emerged from the frustration of charter school operators—and their supporters in the business and civil rights communities—at the restrictions placed on charter operations and growth. In addition, ERAOs generally embrace test-based accountability, reforms aimed at improving teacher quality, and aggressive interventions in chronically underperforming schools. One of the most important developments in recent years, in fact, has been the coming together of two previously separate strands of the education reform movement: “system refiners,” who embrace accountability, and “system disrupters,” who advocate choice. Many reform groups are funded by the same foundations, particularly the “big three”—Walton, Gates, and Broad. The support of conservative foundations and the embrace of market-based school reforms have led some observers—and many critics in the education establishment—to label the ERAOs “corporate school reformers.” StudentsFirst CEO Michelle Rhee called this description “bizarre” and noted that she, like many others in these organizations, is a lifelong Democrat with a deep concern for social justice. Suzanne Tacheny Kubach, executive director of the Policy Innovators in Education Network (PIE Network), emphasizes that a focus on partisan orientation or funding sources obscures that “almost all the advocacy groups working in the country were either founded by or are advised by civic boards made up of state leaders concerned about the direction of their public schools.”

The ERAO Playbook

Marc Porter Magee, president and founder of 50CAN

A critical first page in the playbook for reform groups is to increase the amount of information available about school system performance. Virtually all of them support reforms to improve the quality and transparency of state standards and assessments and the creation of state report cards that enable policymakers and parents to view school-level data on student achievement. The increased availability of this information—one of the most important legacies of NCLB—in turn helps the groups to highlight the need for school reform in state capitols and build support among parents and community groups. ERAOs use these data to create a sense of urgency and to craft detailed evidence-based policy recommendations. 50CAN, for example, releases a detailed “State of Public Education” report prior to launching a new state branch. The groups also build momentum for change—and help policymakers make tough political choices—by documenting community support for reform through public opinion polls. In Indiana, for example, Stand for Children hired an independent firm to survey teachers about proposed reforms and was able to report that many reforms had strong teacher support despite the opposition of their union.

There is both a public and private dimension to ERAO work. Behind the scenes the groups work to cultivate relationships and build credibility with governors and state legislators and their professional staff as well as with state education-agency folks. They hold regular briefings for these insiders—often bringing in nationally recognized experts—to make the case for reform and report on how other states have tackled similar challenges. They also wage a very public campaign for the hearts and minds of average citizens by organizing town hall meetings with parents and publishing op-eds in state and local media. They publicize the report cards developed by national research organizations—such as the National Council on Teacher Quality’s “State Teacher Policy Yearbook” and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s “State of State Standards,” which enable comparison of one state’s policies with those in the rest of the country. ERAOs organize phone banks, rallies in state capitols, and online petitions to build momentum behind reform.

While newer reform advocacy organizations often partner with older groups like the Education Trust, they differ in approach and tactics. Older groups have tended to confine their efforts to research and lobbying, while the newer groups are more explicitly political, creating public pressure for reform to make it easier for policymakers to embrace difficult changes and then rewarding those who advance their agenda. Robin Steans, executive director of Advance Illinois, observed that “in the past the SEA [state education agency] was often alone in pushing reform in the state but now we are able to help lead the charge, to bring media attention and change the stakes and get folks to the table.” Central to this effort, as Bruno Manno has noted, is the quest to mobilize parents (see “Not Your Mother’s PTA,” features, Winter 2012). The perception that older parent groups such as the Parent Teacher Association are closely aligned with teachers unions and wedded to the status quo has led to the formation of new reform-oriented parent groups (such as Parent Revolution) and parent advocacy campaigns by groups like Stand for Children. The ERAOs take advantage of data microtargeting capabilities to identify potential supporters and use social media like Twitter and Facebook to regularly inform and mobilize them for advocacy.

A Coordinated Movement?

Suzanne Tacheny Kubach, executive director of the Policy Innovators in Education Network

It is tempting to see the patchwork of state and national school reform organizations as a fully integrated and coordinated movement. Yet, as a January 2012 study from the PIE Network concluded, “The most common thread across these states that enacted reforms was actually a lack of tight coordination among the varied members of these coalitions.” While many ERAOs share goals and move on parallel paths, and coordinate where it makes sense, no one group dominates or is in charge. One reason is the significant variation in political context. The unique policy landscape of each state necessitates that reform coalitions and agendas be built state by state. In Colorado, for example, the coalition that successfully pushed for the “Great Teachers and Leaders Act” comprised 22 different stakeholder groups and 40 different community and business leaders. While many members of state reform coalitions are education-specific groups, others focus on civil rights or business issues. Coalition size and diversity ensure considerable variation in the groups’ education agendas, and often even greater variation in their noneducation agendas. Civil rights and business groups, for example, often find themselves on the same side of school choice debates but on opposite sides of collective bargaining and taxing-and-spending issues. As a result, a standing coalition of ERAOs is difficult to build or sustain across different policy proposals.

Many of the groups talk to one another frequently, through a regular conference call organized by the Education Trust, at meetings organized by funders such as the Walton Family Foundation, and at conferences convened by groups such as the NewSchools Venture Fund. To the degree that there is an organizational home for ERAOs, it seems to be the PIE Network, which held its first meeting in 2007. The PIE Network emerged, according to executive director Kubach, because of “the growing realization that the arena of state policymaking matters a lot for school reform and you can’t just do everything at the federal level. We needed to connect the conversation in Washington with a coalition of different kinds of groups at the state level—business leaders, civic leaders, and grassroots constituents.” The 34 organizations in the network operate in 23 states and Washington, D.C. Network members include affiliates of Stand for Children and 50CAN, business groups like the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, the Oklahoma Business and Education Coalition, and Colorado Succeeds, and civic groups like Advance Illinois and the League of Education Voters (Washington). The PIE Network is also supported by five “policy partners,” which span the ideological spectrum but agree on the network’s reform commitments: Center for American Progress, Center on Reinventing Public Education, Education Sector, National Council on Teacher Quality, and Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Like many ERAOs, PIE Network is funded by the big three (Walton, Gates, and Broad) along with the Joyce and Stuart foundations.

The PIE Network facilitates regular communication among its members: it distributes a bimonthly newsletter, hosts a monthly conference call for leaders of its member groups, and convenes two face-to-face meetings each year—one with about 40 participants for group leaders and another larger, invitation-only meeting designed to bring the advocacy group leaders together with policy experts and policymakers. The organization also uses Twitter to act as an information clearinghouse by retweeting/aggregating all of the posts from its member organizations. Kubach argues that it is extremely difficult for individual state reform organizations to do this work by themselves and that the PIE Network has worked to encourage cross-state collaboration and the “cross-pollination” of reform ideas, and enable the “acceleration of the school reform movement.” One tangible example is that PIE Network members share legislative language for school reform bills (such as to improve teacher evaluation and tenure) that are being pushed in state legislatures, obviating the need for groups to undertake this time-consuming and technical work on their own. Nonetheless, despite the increasing communication among ERAOs, it appears to be too early to speak of them as constituting a coordinated movement, and given some of the challenges and divisions identified below, they may never become one. Indeed, Kubach explained that, at least for the PIE Network, centralized coordination has never been the goal: “There’s a pretty clear understanding across the sector that states are where most of reform policy is made and that local actors concerned about their schools are the most credible voices to lead that change. Our goal is to strengthen those local voices—not to overshadow them with a single-minded, nationally orchestrated campaign.”

ERAO Victories

The ERAO leaders I spoke with praised the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) competitive grant program for creating momentum behind reform at the state level and providing political cover for reformers. Rhee observed that “RttT was a brilliant idea. It really helped us build bipartisan coalitions. Right now Republicans are being more aggressive on education reform than Democrats at the state level, but being able to say that a Democratic president and education secretary were supportive really helped to convince Democrats to do more courageous things.” As Steven Brill noted in Class Warfare (see “Great Teachers in the Classroom?” book reviews, Spring 2012), school reform advocates seized the momentum created by RttT to mobilize and collaborate in advancing their agenda in state legislatures. PIE Network director Kubach observed that it “created urgency, a moment of real comparability across states and pressure to change.” ERAOs helped to facilitate state-to-state comparisons and develop legislative agendas by assessing existing state policies against the RttT criteria. They then lobbied state policymakers and created grassroots campaigns to mobilize support.

It is difficult to precisely gauge their impact, but it is clear that ERAOs are having a large—and increasing—influence on education debates at the state and national levels and that their efforts have contributed significantly to the passage of important legislation. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels recently remarked that he has seen a “tectonic shift” on education in states and that “more legislators are free from the iron grip of the education establishment.” Hari Sevugen, communications director at StudentsFirst, noted that “what we’ve lacked and what those fighting for the status quo had was an organized effort that decision makers had in the back of their mind as they put together education policy. That equation was highly imbalanced, but is now changing.” StudentsFirst claims to have signed up a million members in its first year and to have helped change 50 different state education policies.

The recent wave of teacher quality reforms offers perhaps the best evidence of ERAO impact, as no area of education reform has been more strongly resisted by the unions. Nearly two-thirds of states have changed their teacher evaluation, tenure, and dismissal policies in the past two years: 23 states now require that standardized test results be factored into teacher evaluations, and 14 allow districts to use these data to dismiss ineffective teachers. While in 2009 no state required student performance to be central to the awarding of tenure, today 8 states do. ERAOs have been hailed for playing a pivotal role in the passage of these new laws, with Stand for Children leading the effort in Colorado and Illinois. Former Illinois board of education chairman Jesse Ruiz said that the group was “an instigator, a catalyst, you might say.” In fewer than 100 days, Stand raised about $3.5 million in the state and used $600,000 of that to make contributions to seven House and two Senate campaigns. This kind of hardball political organizing and lobbying has long been employed by the unions to defeat school reform legislation but increasingly is being utilized by the ERAOs to drive change.

Democratic Divides

Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform

While the ERAOs emphasize bipartisanship so that they can work effectively with policymakers on both sides of the aisle, the groups confront two very different challenges related to partisan politics. First, the Democratic Party is divided over school reform—particularly on school choice, test-based accountability, and teacher quality. One of the most important and unresolved issues is how the groups will navigate their complicated relationship with civil rights organizations and teachers unions. Teachers unions are a crucial part of the Democratic Party’s base and yet have long been resistant to the kinds of reforms the ERAOs are advocating. But the unions themselves are also in flux. Harvard’s Susan Moore Johnson has noted the rise of “reform unionism”: support for reform is increasing inside the unions, particularly in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and among younger teachers. This trend has spawned such pro-reform teacher organizations as Teach Plus and Educators 4 Excellence.

Collectively, civil rights groups have assumed an ambiguous and fluid position in the school reform debates, though with major groups at times supportive of elements of the ERAO agenda. As Jesse Rhodes observed in a 2011 article in Perspectives on Politics, a number of civil rights groups have “played a central role in developing and promoting standards, testing, accountability, and limited school choice policies in order to achieve what they view as fundamentally egalitarian purposes.” Yet these groups have historically been closely aligned politically with the teachers unions and continue to find common ground given the large number of minority teachers, particularly in urban areas. This helps to explain why the NAACP sided with the unions against school closures and charter school expansion in New York City and Newark, for example, even as the group supports the ERAOs’ call for closing achievement gaps. There is also a major generational and racial gap between the leaders of groups like the NAACP and ERAO leaders, who are an overwhelmingly young, elite-schooled, and “white” bunch and as such are often viewed skeptically by people of color. Figuring out how to create state-level alliances with civil rights groups and mobilize urban communities—which are disproportionately minority and poor—remains an ongoing challenge.

The Need for a “RFER”

The second challenge is preserving over time the fairly broad bipartisan consensus on the ERAO agenda. As DFER’s Williams observed, “There are times where we agree with Republicans, but also plenty of times where we disagree—especially at the federal level and about funding.” While ERAOs generally support an active role for the federal government in promoting school reform and accountability, the rise of the Tea Party has highlighted how many conservatives continue to oppose such activism. And while ERAOs have led the charge to reform teacher evaluation and tenure policies, they have generally opposed more fundamental changes to collective bargaining pushed by Republican governors in places like Wisconsin. Similarly, while many Democrats (as well as many of the ERAOs) support the expansion of charter schools and school choice, there is much greater ambivalence over the school voucher proposals that Republicans are pushing in many states.

The creation of DFER has shifted the politics of education inside of the Democratic Party and provided cover for reform-minded Democrats in Congress and state capitols from the more liberal, union-friendly base. But a Republican counterpart to DFER—which insiders jokingly refer to as ReeFER—has yet to emerge. The Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) serves that role to an extent, but it does not currently lobby or make political contributions. FEE was started by former governor Jeb Bush to help spread the accountability reforms he enacted during his time in office and has been very active in the South and West. The organization hosts an influential summit every year for state policymakers and also sponsors Chiefs for Change, current and former state education superintendents who advocate for school reform. FEE has concentrated its work on six states (Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arizona) but is active in more than 20.

Winning Battles or the War?

Over the past two years, ERAOs have shown that they can mobilize quickly and effectively on behalf of reform. But as FEE’s Patricia Levesque warns, education reform is a long-term endeavor where “success is incremental” and “progress can be torn down quickly if momentum is stopped.” The recent struggles of the winning Race to the Top states have demonstrated that ensuring that policy reforms are implemented effectively on the ground and sustained over time is crucial, though less “sexy” than winning legislative victories. Major policy victories can quickly be undone by a new governor or legislature or undermined during the rule-making process, what Levesque called “death by a thousand cuts.” Battles over implementation occur in different venues (state boards, task forces, and education agencies), are more technical and less visible, and demand different tactics than legislative fights. ERAOs’ roles must include technical assistance, reporting, and watchdog vis-à-vis state education agencies.

To date, ERAOs have focused on states they consider hospitable to their efforts. There are important limitations to this approach, as it leaves many states unserved; 27 states, for example, are not represented on PIE Network’s membership list. Indeed, this strategy may actually ensure that states most in need of reform advocacy (and perhaps with the worst-performing school systems) will be ignored. The hope among ERAOs is that laggard states will feel pressure to follow reform-oriented states, but there is no guarantee that this will happen. It is also important to keep in mind how new the ERAOs are and how small their staffs are, often just a handful of folks. Sevugen at StudentsFirst remarked that despite ambitious goals, the group is essentially a “start-up” and that “we are trying to fly the plane while we build it.” Clearly, to be successful over the long haul, ERAOs will need to better coordinate their efforts within and across states. Rhee is optimistic on this front, noting that “more critical masses of reform-oriented folks are being built up, and I’m seeing more leaders of education reform organizations saying ‘we need to figure out how we can align our efforts in a more effective and efficient way than in the past.’ It’s not going to happen overnight, but I’m very hopeful that it will happen in the next two to three years.”

Though the groups are still young, the “reform blob” is providing a counterweight to the teachers unions in school reform debates at the state level. The ability of the ERAOs to overcome the unions should not be overestimated, however. The unions’ extensive resources—and large staff—enable them to be present everywhere, and it is unclear whether the ERAOs will be able to match their efforts in every venue. Kubach commented that “in California, there are reform groups like EdVoice, California Business for Education Excellence, and the Education Trust West that among them have maybe 25 employees working in rented office suites. The number of employees working for the teachers unions and administrators associations is much, much larger, and they all own multi-story buildings near the capital. [Even with] StudentsFirst there, that doesn’t come close to tipping the scales. The suggestion that the reform movement is the ‘big money game’ in any state capital is simply laughable.”

Still, the unprecedented state school reform activity of recent years—and, in particular, the enactment of a large number of teacher quality and school choice bills—testifies to the role these groups are playing in mobilizing political support behind reforms that even five years ago faced long odds. Several ERAO leaders recalled how few reform organizations there were, and how few local or state politicians were willing to take up the mantle of reform. Today, it is clear that a new club of reform organizations is itching for a fight and that politicians in both parties are increasingly willing to join them in the ring.

Patrick McGuinn is associate professor of political science and education at Drew University.

School districts held an exclusive franchise on public education services until 1991, when Minnesota passed the first law permitting public charter schools. Charter schools are publicly funded, authorized by various agencies designated in public law, but independently managed. They operate outside district control, and most can draw students from all across town, not just those who live within neighborhood boundaries. Virtual charter schools can attract students from all around the state, without regard to any traditional school-district boundary. Parents have a choice, competition has arrived, and innovation can flourish.

But there’s a catch: traditional public-school districts still own the great majority of school buildings, and with rare exceptions, public charter schools have no legal claim to them. If charters want to build their own facilities, they face enormous obstacles. They have no taxing power, no access to state capital budgets, and, ordinarily, no bonding authority—they are shut off from the prevailing public sources of revenue for school construction. Distressingly often, they are denied access even to school buildings that the district no longer uses. Charter schools must take a wide detour around this enormous fiscal pothole. They have won credit enhancements to sweeten private lending and federal incentives to encourage states to create charter-specific facilities programs, and they must conduct ongoing campaigns to raise funds from private donors.

The lack of available facilities is a direct and pressing constraint on the growth of high-quality charter schools. According to a recent survey by the National Charter School Research Project, scarcity of facilities was listed first among all reported external barriers to growth of charter management organizations, mentioned in 89 percent of responses.

Let’s explore the sources and consequences of the iron grip school districts typically enjoy over the financing, development, ownership, and deployment of public school facilities—and some promising strategies for breaking it.

Financing Challenges

From the Minnesota statute on, access to dedicated revenues for facility construction was the gravest omission from state charter-school laws. The gap may have seemed reasonable at first. Charters were new and untried, and most were chartered for a term of five years, sometimes less. So even friendly policymakers resisted giving them the keys to funding instruments traditionally used by districts to build and maintain impressive, permanent structures. For a few years, as charters sprung up in storefronts and church basements, the policy almost seemed plausible (see sidebar).

Today, a mere nuisance has burgeoned into the foremost hurdle to the rapid expansion of high-quality charter schools. As the number of students entering charters has grown steadily year by year, comprising in 2012 approximately 4.2 percent of public school students nationwide, the case for rethinking the capital requirements of the charter sector has become overwhelming. Today’s charter community boasts large schools, extensive networks, and impressive market share. In six major school districts (New Orleans, Louisiana; the District of Columbia; Detroit, Michigan; Kansas City, Missouri; Flint, Michigan; and Gary, Indiana), at least 30 percent of public school students are enrolled in public charter schools. Another 18 school districts enroll more than 20 percent of public school students in charter schools (see Figure 1). Charter school students represent at least 10 percent of overall enrollment in nearly 100 school districts.

Yet among the 41 states (and the District of Columbia) with charter laws, only 17 provide some kind of direct facilities aid, either capital grants or per-pupil funding, and just three of those provide annual per-pupil capital funding of more than $1,000. And while states deliver straightforward capital support to traditional school districts, their support for charter facilities is often halfhearted and ineffective. Thirty-four states have conduit bond-issuing agencies, but only a few have made the state’s credit (either general obligation or moral obligation) available to charters. Only Colorado has done so at scale (see Table 1).

School Districts Drive the Facilities Bus

The denial of facilities funding would be less problematic if charter schools had routine access to existing buildings that had been built for public school use and already paid for with tax dollars. But the laws governing school facilities were written a century or more before charters existed, when there was only one kind of “public school” in this country. Under such legacy laws, traditional districts remain the sole proprietor, able to make fairly arbitrary decisions about who else might benefit from these public goods. The disparity in legal status between district-managed public schools and chartered public schools is more acute than that of landlord and tenant; it’s more akin to that of landowner and sharecropper, since the charters have no statutory or contractual right to the property.

Documented examples of misalignment between student needs and building availability are legion. Consider only a few of the most celebrated cases on record:

• In late 2010, the Journal Sentinel reported that Milwaukee Public Schools spent more than $1 million a year to maintain 27 surplus school buildings. Yet the district refused sales to charter schools—on the grounds that they would compete with the district for students. In May 2011, the state legislature finally approved a measure allowing the City of Milwaukee to sell the buildings, despite the district’s objections.

• In December 2007, the Special Administrative Board of the St. Louis Public Schools approved terms on the sale of the old Hodgen Elementary School building that included a 100-year deed restriction prohibiting leasing of the building to medical clinics, taverns, adult entertainment facilities, and…charter schools. The restriction was removed by the board in 2009 after the measure was held up to well-deserved ridicule.

• In rural Pennsylvania, the Penns Valley Area School Board is leasing property for construction of a privately funded, $5 million community center that will house a YMCA, the county office for the aging, and other agencies. However, included in the 30-year lease is the following clause: “No groups in direct competition with the District are authorized to use the facility. Those groups in competition are defined as entities that serve the same purpose of the District at the same age level, i.e., charter schools.”

Legal End Runs

Even when there is plain statutory language giving charter schools a share of district building stock, it is too often interpreted away or just ignored.

In Ohio, state law gives charter schools first dibs on shuttered school buildings. But when a prime Columbus property went up for charter school bids in 2010, the district’s general counsel averred that “the district is under no obligation to accept any of the bids…If it rejects all bids, the district can enter into a contract sale at a negotiated price with any buyer.”

When the District of Columbia School Reform Act was passed by Congress in 1996, it included language providing that charter schools should have access to surplus public-school buildings. A succession of D.C. superintendents and mayors (as well as the Financial Control Board that oversaw city government in the late 1990s) ignored or circumvented the law’s intent. The D.C. Council subsequently strengthened the guarantee, providing charters the right of first offer on sales and leases. But there remains a lack of transparency, and much of the surplus inventory is not made available to charter schools. As charter financing expert Maria Sazon succinctly states, “On paper, the Washington, D.C., statutory provision regarding surplus buildings is one of the strongest in the country. In practice, however, the Washington, D.C., government too often ignores it.”

California is the only state that requires, as a matter of law, provision of adequate school facilities for every charter school authorized. It became the law in California in 2000 when voters passed Proposition 39, which requires that the Golden State’s public-school facilities “be shared fairly among all public school pupils, including those in charter schools.”

Initially, charter school advocates were exuberant at voter support for the new law. But they soon discovered that district compliance could hardly be taken for granted. The result has been the longest running school building soap opera in the nation. The California Charter Schools Association (CCSA) had to take both the San Diego and Los Angeles school districts to court to enforce compliance. In July 2005, the California Court of Appeals affirmed that districts must consider the needs of charter students and district students equally. But L.A. Unified’s continued recalcitrance resulted in another CCSA lawsuit in 2010, this time contesting the district’s failures to comply with both Proposition 39 and a 2008 settlement agreement setting out conditions for the charter-district relationship. The association contended that in 2010, for example, the district issued just 45 final offers in response to 81 charter school requests for space. None of the offers were in compliance with the law, and fewer than half were accepted by the charter schools. Those numbers did improve in 2011, with 43 schools accepting offers. In response, CCSA agreed to stay its lawsuit in June 2011.

Positive Signs

Not every school district is hostile to charters, however. Those reporting to mayors may have added incentive to create more expansive facilities policies. Under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, for example, nearly three-quarters of New York City’s charter schools are located in district facilities. Some enlightened district superintendents, such as Denver’s Tom Boasberg, simply view charters and district schools as threads in the same net of support for their city’s children. Boasberg welcomed charter schools into district facilities and by 2011, “16 charter schools operated in district facilities, representing approximately 48 percent of charter schools operating in the district, with 11 of these schools operating in a shared campus partnership.” As more schools began to locate in district facilities, Boasberg requested that some of them prioritize enrollment for students living in the neighborhood. Three of the 16 charters located in Denver Public School facilities now share a boundary with adjacent DPS schools.

Cleveland has embraced the nascent Breakthrough Schools coalition, which united several high-performing charters within a common organizational structure. The district authorizes the schools, has agreed to help them expand, and recently sold them four vacant school buildings. The district’s chief operating officer, Patrick Zohn, clearly saw an opportunity for the district in the $1.5 million transaction: “There’s not really a robust aftermarket for pre-owned school buildings,” Zohn said. “Come on down. We’re dealing, dealing, dealing.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has brokered “compacts” between districts and charter schools in 14 cities. Each city’s agreement lists a series of steps the parties will take to ensure equity in resources, enrollment, and services; districts can apply for grants to fund implementation. Several of the compacts address facilities directly, and buildings will be provided at no or low cost for at least some charter schools in Denver; Hartford, Connecticut; Los Angeles; New Orleans; and other sites. The Nashville agreement, for example, promises to “include charter schools in the long-term strategic plans of the district including, but not limited to, student assignment planning and facility usage.”

State leadership can also change long-established attitudes and practices with respect to managing the facilities portfolio. In 2008, Louisiana used its massive post-Katrina settlement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as core funding for a $1.8 billion renovation program for public school facilities in New Orleans—and did so in a revolutionary way. In announcing the program, then state superintendent of education Paul Pastorek said, “The proposal considers all public schools in New Orleans, without regard to governance…. We’re not building schools for the OPSB [Orleans Parish School Board], we’re not building schools for the RSD [the state-run Recovery School District], nor are we building schools for charters. We are building schools for the city of New Orleans.”

Farther north, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels got it exactly right when asked whether Indianapolis Public Schools should sell 13 closed buildings to charter schools. “Sell them? They should give them away!” he said, noting that charter schools are public schools and taxpayers have already paid for the buildings. In May 2011, Daniels signed into law legislation that among other provisions, allows charters to lease or purchase for $1 any unused, closed, or unoccupied school building that is maintained by a school corporation.

Leveling the Playing Field

Whatever the original ownership or cost, surplus properties should rightly be considered a good held in trust for the future student population of the entire city. This calls for two kinds of actions:

•  State legislatures should transfer to municipal leaders authority to manage the disposition of any school space already declared “surplus” by a school district, giving right of first refusal to public charter schools for sale or lease at no cost.

• In cities with no officially declared surplus but pressing demand for charter school expansion, state governments should commission third-party building audits to determine whether there is excess space. If there is sufficient space to provide for non-district-managed schools, authority over that surplus should also transfer to the municipal authority.

State legislatures should put the full faith and credit of the state behind all kinds of public schools, as Colorado has done. Governors and state superintendents should use their own funding leverage in the way Louisiana is doing, sponsoring school projects that serve the entire public-school portfolio and deciding further down the road which kind of schools will occupy which facilities.

A few jurisdictions have modified the customary five-year charter term to make charter schools more attractive to lenders: Arizona and Washington, D.C., both have 15-year charter terms, with high-stakes reviews happening at least every five years, and Colorado charters can be granted 30-year terms. Other states are awarding 10-year charters after the first term, or experimenting with virtually automatic renewal for charters consistently meeting a high performance bar. All of these strategies make charter schools more appealing to lenders by aligning their legal life spans more closely with that of mortgages and bonds. Longer charter terms can bring wary investors to the table, provided that there is also a strong oversight and accountability system in place.

Three Management Models

With clear policy guidance from the state, and with local municipal authorities taking responsibility for implementation, there are many ways to manage the public school–facilities portfolio. Following are three possibilities, each a variation on some established or already-tried approach.

The Real Estate Trust. As with many notions that challenge the educational status quo, this one can be traced to Paul Hill, the protean researcher at the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE). He consulted for the Education Commission of the States (ECS) in its 1999 report, Governing America’s Schools: Changing the Rules, which described a “public schools real estate trust” as follows: “In any locality, one or more real-estate trusts assume ownership of a community’s public school buildings, sell the surplus buildings, and build or lease additional facilities in areas with insufficient space. Such trusts help schools find space, as well as tenants for space they no longer need.” Facilities funding would flow directly to schools, which would then use it to lease from the trust.

NewSchools Venture Fund endorsed the idea of nonprofit trusts, at least within the charter sector, in a 2006 paper: “By aggregating capital from multiple sources and consolidating expertise within the organization—rather than in the principal’s office or the central office of a charter management organization—the trust would lower the financial and human cost of real estate development and enable greater access to facilities funding.”

The idea has gotten one rather bumpy road test. Portland, Oregon, created a trust as one outcome of its 2002 long-range facilities plan, initially charging it with disposition or redevelopment of its surplus properties. According to the Portland school board, the real estate trust was “a nonprofit, independent entity created by [Portland Public Schools], which could, at the board’s discretion, be given title to property deemed ‘surplus’ to either market or redevelop it on behalf of the school district.” However, the City of Portland never insisted that the trust act as an independent municipal agency with real powers over property. The trust devolved into an advisory body, and the school board finally amended its policies in early 2009 to formalize the trust’s reduced status.

Retrofitting the Construction Authority. A second approach relies on existing or modified municipal authorities, with an eye toward New York City’s experience. Its School Construction Authority is the rare local entity that has soup-to-nuts responsibility for financing, building, and overseeing public schools, largely because it is now controlled directly by the mayor.

What if cities (rather than school districts) were to create corporations, authorize them to do financing, and assign them the task of managing the public-school facilities portfolio so that both district and charter schools could be housed? These would be local bodies with local accountability.

Or cities could simply expand the portfolio of existing municipal building authorities to include schools. It’s truly curious that such authorities exist in many jurisdictions, financing and putting up municipal and county hospitals and other complexes, while the school district operates in a totally separate bubble. Wouldn’t it be far more efficient to consolidate that work?

Expanding Charter-based Models. Using a third strategy, municipalities would contract with nonprofits to take over and manage the entire school-facilities process.

The District of Columbia tiptoed up to the edge of this idea in 2005, when then superintendent Clifford Janey called for public-private partnerships to support improved school performance. One resulting project was EdBuild, sponsored by the Federal City Council (a business-based civic group). With a mission of “high-performing public schools, inside and out,” EdBuild sought to provide both facilities renovations and academic support to a group of low-performing schools in the District of Columbia, with a vision of eventually taking on a large swath of D.C. schools and creating space that could be used flexibly by both traditional district and charter schools. The venture went under after critics raised questions about the political connections of its sponsors, and the D.C. Council refused to fund its contract with the school system.

A number of strong nonprofits currently serve the national charter community, including New York–based Civic Builders, Los Angeles–based Pacific Charter School Development, and the DC-based Charter School Development Corporation. These organizations differ from traditional district construction agencies by combining financing with a broader development role, serving, in effect, as both the “facilities office” and the chief financial officer in getting projects done.

These and other nonprofits could surely serve a wider public, although there could be some trade-off between their entrepreneurial culture and the demands of fully public administration. Perhaps the charter bargain could be struck in facilities as well as operations: strong accountability for outcomes, with public reporting to a mayor or city council, but far more latitude in matters of budgeting and labor.

Start Now

The school district monopoly over public education facilities is an accident of history. The policy and practice of public education facilities would look far different today if there had been more than one choice of provider when the laws were being written. There may be 100 ways of accomplishing the transformation away from monopoly, but the best path will involve policy and finance reform at the state level; municipal rather than district oversight; and a combination of entrepreneurial energy with appropriate public accountability.

While the exact way forward may vary from one district to another, there should be no further delay in creating state laws and regulations that level the playing field between charters and other public schools. Even with existing rules of ownership, there is no excuse for bolting the doors to unused school buildings. There is no excuse for ignoring the fact that charter schools must take dollars out of classrooms to pay the rent.

Nelson Smith is a consultant on education policy and former president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Critics of voucher programs often argue that private schools do exclude most disabled students, and the matter occasionally has been the subject of litigation. Yet accurate information on students with disabilities served by private schools is notable for its absence.

The main reason for the lack of accurate information is that private schools do not operate under the provisions of the federal law that furnishes aid to the states for students identified as needing special education. Public schools expend considerable resources identifying children eligible for special services, both because they are under an obligation to provide those services and because they receive additional funds from federal and state governments if a child is identified as having a disability that affects their learning. Those obligations, rights, and funding support do not apply if parents choose to place their children in private schools with the help of a voucher. By and large, private schools have not developed the capacity to identify children with disabilities, and many of them are reluctant to do so, as they believe it leads to stigmatization of the children.

In other words, a child who may be classified as in need of special education in a public school may not be classified as such if his or her family chooses a private school, using a voucher to defray the cost. As a result, any official statistics on the prevalence of students with disabilities in public and private schools can be highly misleading.

We have not been able to surmount all of the obstacles to identifying the percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education in public schools, but we believe we have fairly accurate information on this question for the country’s largest and longest-running school-voucher program. The Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP), first established in 1990 and steadily expanded to include more private schools and more students in subsequent years, now serves more than 23,000 students who attend 107 different private schools. The annual voucher a school receives for each MPCP student is approximately $6,000. MPCP thus provides an excellent context for detecting the admission policies of private schools when a modest-value voucher program for low-income students is operating at scale.

In 2006, the State of Wisconsin authorized our research team to conduct a five-year evaluation of MPCP. Through the course of that study, we collected a wealth of data about the students in the voucher program and in the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) that permit us to estimate what proportion of the voucher student population would qualify for special education if the students were enrolled in public schools instead.

Drawing on different sources of data and various analytic methods, we estimate that anywhere between 7.5 and 14.6 percent of voucher students have disabilities that would land reported by the Wisconsin State Department of Public Instruction (DPI), a figure that gave rise to a lawsuit alleging discrimination by the MPCP program.

Following is a discussion of the procedures we followed to obtain our estimates and an explanation for the disparity between our estimates and the ones DPI has provided.

Structure of Special Education

As mentioned previously, receiving a special education designation brings with it certain legal rights for services or accommodations in the public educational sphere, as provided by the federal law known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Once so designated, public school students are entitled to receive a free and appropriate public education (FAPE), to include special education services in the least restrictive environment possible and according to an individualized education program (IEP). A student’s IEP is drawn up by a committee that includes the student’s parents or guardians, local public-school officials, and relevant medical or psychological diagnosticians and care providers. The resulting special services and accommodations are funded through a combination of federal, state, and local monies based on formulas established in law. In Wisconsin, the federal government pays about 11 percent of the extra cost of educating each special-education student, with the state paying 26 percent and the local public-school district covering the remaining 63 percent.

The legal and funding structure surrounding students with disabilities in the private sector differs greatly from the situation in the public sector. Unless a public school district itself places a special education student in a private school, the IEP and additional funding associated with a student with a disability in the public sector does not transfer with the student if the child enrolls in a private school. The point is made in an August 2011 DPI memo on the subject:

Students with disabilities attending voucher schools as part of the MPCP are considered parentally placed private school students and as such, DPI treats them in the same fashion as students attending private non-voucher schools. Under [state law] parentally placed private school students are…not entitled to a Free and Appropriate Public Education.

If a parent enrolls a student with special needs in a private school, that student must surrender her legal rights to special educational services. Private schools are not required by federal law to enroll students with special needs, and they are not entitled to any additional resources from the state if they do so. Private schools can either accommodate the student themselves, using whatever resources they have, or negotiate with public school officials regarding the provision of special services to the student by the public school system with additional public funds (a process called “equitable services”).

Maintaining a count of those thought to be in need of special services also varies by sector. In the public sector, careful record keeping is stressed because disability status has major implications for the kinds of instructional and other services students will receive. In the private sector, special education tends to be handled much less formally, inasmuch as schools are ordinarily not required to follow formal procedures in diagnosing or serving students with special educational needs.

Given the contrasts between how special education is governed and managed in the public and private education sectors, we hypothesize the following:

1. The same student will have a higher likelihood of being identified as in need of special education if in a public school than if in a private school.

2. Given the funding available for extra services for disabled children attending public schools, a higher proportion of students with disabilities than those without disabilities will choose to remain in the public sector rather than use a voucher.

3. Any data that rely on official reports of disability will under-count the percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education had they attended public schools.

To test these hypotheses, we used two alternative methods to estimate the actual percentage of students in private schools who would have been identified as in need of special education in public school had they selected that sector.

Method I: Same Student, Different Sector

The better of our two methods relies on information from those students who attended schools in both the public and the private sectors during the course of our study. During the five years of our evaluation, 20.1 percent or 1,475 of the 7,338 students in our MPCP and MPS study panels switched from one school sector to the other, in some cases multiple times.

We received enrollment files from MPS each year that included information on the special education status of each MPS student. We also collected enrollment lists from every private school in MPCP and asked school officials to indicate if students had disabilities that qualified them for special education. For students who switched school sectors during the study period, we can determine whether those who were identified as needing special education in the public sector were similarly identified when they attended private schools, and vice versa. In other words, we can use each student in our study as his or her own control group to learn whether disability designations vary by sector.

Our analysis indicates that Milwaukee students who switched between the public and private school sectors were much more likely to be identified as in need of special education when they were in the public sector. On average, controlling for factors such as year and student grade, those who attended schools in both sectors were classified as in need of special education at the rate of 9.1 percent when attending private schools but at a rate of 14.6 percent when attending Milwaukee’s public schools. If we assume that a student’s need for special education did not change at the time the student switched sectors, this suggests that 5.5 percent of students attending private schools were not identified as in need of special education but would have been had they been attending public school. In other words, the identification rate in the public schools appears to be 60 percent higher (the 5.5 percent increment divided by 9.1 percent) than in the private schools. The identification rate was higher when students were in MPS both because many students who switched from MPCP to MPS received special education designations in MPS and because many students with special education designations in MPS shed them when they enrolled in MPCP schools.

The 14.6 percent MPCP disability rate is based only on students who switched sectors (35 percent of MPCP students). Those students appear to have higher rates of disability than those who did not switch. Based on principal surveys, for the 65 percent of MPCP students who did not switch, the disability rate was 3.75 percent. To get an overall rate for MPCP students, we compute a weighted average for the two groups of 7.5 percent. We suspect that this rate is conservative, since several voucher school principals told us they resist labeling students in such a way. Combining this conservative estimate with the estimate from our analysis of only students who switched sectors yields a range of 7.5 to 14.6 percent, which we think captures the likely student disability rate in MPCP.

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Method II: Parental Estimates of Disability Rates

Our second estimate of the student disability rate in MPCP comes from interviews with parents. In 2007 we interviewed a random sample of parents of MPCP students in grades 3–8, all the parents of MPCP 9th graders, and a sample of parents of MPS students who were matched to the sample of MPCP students based on their grade in school, neighborhood of residence, ethnicity, test-score performance, and other characteristics. We expanded this sample with additional parents of 3rd-grade students similarly chosen in 2007 and 2008. Altogether, we interviewed a majority of the parents of 3,669 students in MPCP and 3,669 students in MPS.

The survey included the following questions:

• Does [child’s name] have any physical disabilities?

• Does [child’s name] have any learning disabilities?

If a parent answered yes to the learning disabilities question, we further asked,

• How well do the facilities at [child’s name] school attend to his/her particular needs?

According to parental responses to the first two of these questions, 2.5 percent of students in MPCP have a physical disability and 9.8 percent have a learning disability (see Figure 1). The corresponding rates reported by parents of MPS students were 4.1 percent and 18.5 percent for physical and learning disabilities, respectively. Combining the categories and eliminating overlapping cases, it is estimated that the disability rate in the MPCP sector is 11.4 percent, as compared to 20.4 percent for the MPS sector.

There is every reason to believe that these parental responses are consistent and fairly accurate indicators of what the parents are told by school officials and what they themselves know about their children. The official MPS rate for this time period is between 18 and 19 percent, just slightly less than the 20.4 percent reported by our MPS parents. The 11.4 percent disability rate for MPCP students based on our survey is midway between the 7.5 percent rate for all students in MPCP based on school staff designations and the 14.6 percent rate based on observing some of the students in both school sectors.

It is interesting that within a scaled-up, long-standing voucher program, parental satisfaction with services for students with disabilities achieves a balance across sectors. Similar levels of satisfaction with special education services are reported, regardless of whether the student was in MPCP or MPS (see Figure 2). Presumably, the choice of sectors and schools allowed parents to obtain an educational setting they view as appropriate for their child.

Discussion

Our estimates of the prevalence of MPCP students who have a disability range from 7.5 to 14.6 percent. The 14.6 percent estimate is based on the identification by public schools of the need for special services for those students who attended school in both sectors, while parental reports peg the rate at 11 percent, and the combination of MPCP and MPS school personnel suggest it is 7.5 percent.

All of these estimates are higher than the one provided, on March 29, 2011, by DPI, which said that “the private schools [participating in MPCP] reported about 1.6 percent of choice students have a disability.” That statement provoked a lawsuit by disability rights groups against DPI, which administers MPCP, based on the charge that the program discriminates in admissions against students with disabilities.

The estimate provided by DPI was based on the percentage of MPCP students who were given test accommodations on the 2010 state accountability exams. Only a fraction of students with disabilities receive accommodations on exams, and accommodations are only permitted if an IEP committee of school personnel requests them. Since few students with disabilities in private schools have IEP committees, the student-testing accommodation rate for MPCP may bear little relationship to the actual student-disability rate in the program. In fact, using administrative data we collected from the MPCP schools, we were able to determine that only one-quarter of the MPCP students judged by their school to have a disability were actually given any accommodation for last year’s test.

Using multiple measures of student disability, each of which is more valid and reliable than testing accommodation statistics, the estimates we produced indicate a 7.5 to 14.6 percent participation rate for students with disabilities in the voucher schools in comparison to the 17 to 19 percent participation rate reported for students with disabilities by the public schools. The difference could be due to discrimination against disabled students, as has been alleged, but the evidence is not sufficient to draw any such conclusions. Where disabilities are severe, private schools may not have the necessary facilities, and even in less severe instances, parents may prefer the legal entitlements and the greater range of funded services in the public sector.

What we do know, with considerable certainty, is that while the percentage of students in the voucher schools with disabilities is substantially lower than the disability rate in the public schools, it is at least four times higher than public officials have claimed. These statistical findings reinforce our views that the sectors cannot be easily compared to one another on this particular metric, because they operate under different legal obligations, financial incentives, and cultural norms. Special education is special in very different ways in public schools and in voucher programs.

Patrick J. Wolf is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas. John F. Witte is professor of political science and public affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. David J. Fleming is assistant professor of political science at Furman University.

A key step in establishing a charter-school sector is identifying the institutions that can authorize would-be founders to create these new public schools and grant them charters. Authorizers are charged with evaluating charter applicants, awarding and overseeing charter contracts, assessing whether the school is improving student achievement and fulfilling the goals in its charter contract, renewing charter contracts for schools that perform, and closing schools that do not.

Engler figured that for the chartering strategy to work in Michigan, he could not “just put authorizing in the hands of traditional school districts.” He says, “The superintendents were far more defensive about and married to the status quo than anybody else we were dealing with…” Just as it would be an inherent conflict to put McDonald’s in charge of determining whether or not others should be allowed to open a new restaurant nearby, Engler reasoned that charter school authorizers should be outside the control of the traditional K–12 system. He designed Michigan’s charter-school law to allow community colleges and the state’s 15 public universities to authorize charter schools, along with school districts.

Engler signed Michigan’s charter-school law into effect on January 14, 1994, and in August of that year, Central Michigan University (CMU) became the first university in the nation to authorize a charter school. Ironically, the same day CMU’s board of trustees authorized its first three charter schools, a group spearheaded by the Michigan Education Association, called the Council of Organizations and Others for Education About Parochiaid, along with two members of the state board of education, filed a lawsuit challenging the law’s constitutionality.

Founded in 1892, CMU had a long history of preparing teachers and school administrators. Thus, its decision to authorize charter schools riled many of its alumni who were teaching in traditional public schools across the state. Some of them even notified the university that they would no longer donate to their alma mater because of the leadership role it was playing with charter schools. One now-infamous controversy arose when the superintendent of a school district in southeast Michigan wrote CMU’s president notifying him that his district would no longer accept student teachers from CMU, hire CMU graduates, or recommend their high-school graduates attend CMU.

W. Sidney Smith, who chaired CMU’s board of trustees at the time, recalls that the president was out of town when the letter arrived. Not wanting to let the situation get out of hand, Smith says he “called a ‘war room’ together to strategize a response. We had over 200 CMU alumni attend the district’s board meeting. They were wearing CMU colors and making it very clear that their children should be able to live, work, play and go to school wherever they choose and that the superintendent deserved to be reprimanded.” The strategy worked, and the district and the superintendent soon recanted and apologized for the letter.

This story illustrates the pressure that is brought to bear on those who disrupt the status quo and its existing arrangements, which is exactly what the chartering strategy is supposed to do. This is why alpha authorizers, chartering agencies that operate independently of school districts, are so desperately needed.

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The Key to Quality

Ten years after Engler’s departure, Michigan is home to more than 250 charter schools educating some 115,000 students or 8 percent of the state’s public-school students. At the start of 2012, CMU served as authorizer to 56 of the schools, which educate about 30,000 students (see Figure 1). The top-performing public school in Michigan for each of the past five years has been a charter school authorized by CMU, and three high schools authorized by CMU have been recognized by U.S. News & World Report as among America’s best. CMU schools have performed extremely well on state exams. Despite serving a substantially greater proportion of students from low-income families and minorities than district schools, a higher percentage of CMU schools (86 percent) made AYP in 2010-11 than did public schools statewide (79 percent). The consistent strength of the charter schools overseen by CMU testifies to the impact of high-quality authorizing.

Early on, the role of charter school authorizers seemed so straightforward that little focus was placed on them, while the politics of chartering and the action surrounding the schools themselves consumed most of the attention. But as the charter schools movement spread across the country, more and more observers began to grow concerned about the wide variances in how charter schools were being approved to open, what quality standards they were measured against, and whether or not those that failed to perform were being held accountable, as promised.

By nature, the chartering strategy is not a prescriptive policy for improving schools. Rather, it is a way for policymakers to challenge the “givens” of the existing system by harnessing the powerful dynamics created by choice, competition, standards, and accountability. But having a strategy and getting it properly implemented are two different things. As the University of Michigan’s David K. Cohen so aptly put it, “Once upon a time, students of American politics believed that policy turned out as intended. But they have recently concluded that intentions are an inconsistent guide to results.”

Since policymakers have empowered authorizers to actually do the chartering, how they perform their role will have a defining impact on how well the chartering strategy is implemented and refined over time.

In 2006, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute brought national attention to the idea that authorizing matters when it released a report called “Trends in Charter School Authorizing.” The report said,

Over the past decade or so, we and others have often claimed that charter schools are the most promising innovations in American education. We were wrong. Charter school authorizing and the act of chartering schools are the most promising contemporary educational innovation. After all, there’s little you can find in the nation’s charter schools that doesn’t also exist somewhere in the vast and varied world of public and private schools. But the process of authorizing new schools—allowing them to open, overseeing their progress, shutting them down if necessary, but not actually running them—is entirely new.

The Fordham Institute’s observation was right on: authorizing matters. In fact, charter school authorizers are now expected to play an even more assertive role in ensuring that charter schools offer parents high-quality choices and not simply more choices for their children’s education. Regrettably, though, too many authorizers lack either the will or the capacity to up their game.

The Case for Alpha Authorizers

If the chartering strategy depends on disrupting the existing arrangements for how public education functions, then most charter laws have a structural flaw that will dramatically limit the ability of charter schools to deliver real change for educators and students. The flaw is relying on school districts to be authorizers. This is happening in far too many parts of the country. For example, the annual report released by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA), “The State of Charter School Authorizing 2011,” shows that of the nation’s nearly 1,000 authorizers, more than 850 are school districts. These districts, or LEAs (Local Education Agencies), authorize just over half (52 percent) of all charter schools. With the frequent reports of school districts doing a poor job of fulfilling their authorizing duties and school districts’ authorizing over half of the nation’s charter schools, it is easy to see how the real power of the chartering strategy is being negated.

This structural flaw runs counter to the original idea of chartering, allowing an entity other than the local school district to establish new schools. Further, it is unlikely that district authorizers will move beyond the regulatory-driven, compliance-based accountability systems that are the hallmark of public education or the troubling hit-and-miss formation of new schools that is raising questions about the ability of charter schools to deliver improvement on the scale that our country needs.

Even more concerning is the fact that school-district authorizers may be hostile to the charter idea itself. To understand why, one must understand the strategy Ted Kolderie, an early advocate of charters schools, outlined to lawmakers in a 1990 article titled, “The States Will Have to Withdraw the Exclusive.” Kolderie’s premise was that it was futile for lawmakers to continue trying to “improve existing schools within existing arrangements.” He wrote,

The existing arrangement has been…a checkerboard pattern of districts financed by taxes and appropriations, each with an “exclusive franchise” to offer public education within its boundaries. With customers required by law to use the service and assigned to the organization serving their “district,” such an arrangement effectively guarantees the organizations and the people in them most everything important to their material success: their enrollments, their revenues, their jobs, their incomes—and their existence.

Kolderie argued that this regulated public-utility model had led states to demand improvements and districts to promise improvements, in an endless exchange of money for promises. For this to change, he argued, lawmakers would have to enact policies that would no longer allow districts to take “students for granted.” So he exhorted lawmakers to consider “chartering,” as a way to allow entities other than school districts to establish new public schools that would be open to students regardless of where they lived, thereby beginning to withdraw the monopoly school districts held over the provision of public education.

For the chartering strategy to improve the whole of public education, we need to think strategically about what institutions we want authorizing schools. We need to support the emergence of more alpha authorizers, those who are independent of the K–12 system and have the courage and tenacity to serve as change agents, market makers, and forces for quality, while reliably performing the core functions of authorizing mentioned above.

Build an Education Marketplace

At the start of 2012, CMU served as authorizer to 56 of the 250 Michigan charter schools; the CMU charters educate about 30,000 students.

Alpha authorizers can play a significant role in helping transition the education system into a diverse and dynamic marketplace that fosters academic excellence for all children. Governor Engler believed that he had to establish a critical mass of charter schools before he left office or run the risk of having all his work undone. Mary Kay Shields, who served as Engler’s point person for charter schools, confirms this sense of urgency: “We were relentless in pushing towards progress…. It was about one thing and that was getting this done for the kids, and not about making adults feel comfortable.”

Because political leaders come and go, a long-term strategy like chartering needs people and organizations that have the staying power required to faithfully implement and refine the strategy over a long period of time. This is where alpha authorizers step in. For example, Shields reports that before Engler left office, he convened a meeting of key players, which included officials from CMU, and offered both encouragement and a list of directives aimed at ensuring that the charter strategy would continue to be implemented with fidelity.

In December 2011, after a decade-long political battle, Michigan’s legislature removed the cap restricting the number of charter schools that could be authorized by universities. Functioning as a market maker, CMU played a key role. Over the years, CMU was involved in establishing numerous organizations that would provide the support necessary to expand Michigan’s chartering strategy. For example, in 1996 CMU saw the need for charter schools to have representation in the state capitol and with the media, which led to the founding of the Michigan Association of Public School Academies, which now serves as the unified voice for Michigan’s charter schools and was a major advocate for removing the cap.

Several years later, CMU played a founding role in the establishment of both the Michigan Council of Charter School Authorizers and the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. Each organization now publishes oversight and accountability standards that serve as a guide for quality authorizing. On another front, CMU founded the Michigan Resource Center for Charter Schools and in 2001 facilitated its transition to the National Charter Schools Institute so that it could support the development and performance of the entire charter-school sector.

Advance Performance-Based Accountability

Alpha authorizers can lead the way in transitioning the oversight and accountability of charter schools from a compliance- to a performance-based approach. This process begins by fostering a welcoming regulatory environment. It means protecting the integrity of the charter application process by making it competitive, transparent, and merit-based. Alpha authorizers can also develop innovative ways to make it easier for groups with a demonstrable track record of success to replicate and scale their operations by bypassing some of the selection procedures untested applicants must go through. For example, charter applicants that have been previously vetted and operate outstanding schools could be pre-qualified or fast-tracked so that they don’t have to resubmit the same paperwork or follow a pre-established process each time they seek to start a new school. At the same time, alpha authorizers need to conduct sound due diligence and avoid being mesmerized by applicants who have political, financial, or star power, but lack the competencies necessary to open and operate a high-quality school.

Finally, alpha authorizers must ensure the charter contracts they issue are arm’s-length, conflict-free performance agreements that contain clear, meaningful, and measurable academic, financial, and operational standards. For example, although the schools CMU chartered were required by law to administer the state testing system, the Michigan Educational Assessment Program or MEAP, the results were wholly inadequate for making high-stakes decisions like closing schools. To address this situation, CMU required schools to administer a computer adaptive test during a common testing window at the beginning and at the end of the school year. To minimize the burden on schools, CMU paid for the tests using a portion of the 3 percent school oversight fee that funds its authorizing operations.

Share Sustainable Systems

Alpha authorizers can enhance the value of the systems and processes they create by sharing them with school leaders and other authorizers.

Although the tests described above were created to measure the performance of schools, CMU shared with the schools ways in which they could use the data generated to improve teaching and learning. As the schools learned how to interpret this diagnostic information, many began using the system to individualize instruction, assess teachers, and pay for performance. Then, in conjunction with the National Charter Schools Institute, CMU developed a growth-to-standard assessment model, called Elevate360, using the ACT’s definition of college readiness as the standard: students have at least a 50 percent probability of earning a B or better, or a 75 percent probability of earning a C or better in their first-year English, algebra, biology, and social science classes. For students to meet this definition of college readiness, they need to earn the following subject-matter scores when taking the ACT exam: English 18; math 22; reading 21; and science 24.

Sadly, in 2010, of the 1.57 million high-school students who took the ACT, only 24 percent met the definition of college readiness. For African American students, the numbers are alarming. Only 4 percent met the standard in science, 7 percent in math, 14 percent in reading, and 25 percent in English. To begin tackling this problem, CMU backward-mapped from the ACT’s definition of college readiness to establish grade-level achievement targets for grades 2–8 that can be used with Northwest Evaluation Association’s Measures of Academic Progress (MAP) or the Performance Series by Global Scholar. This student growth and achievement system is now available for use by any authorizer or school in the country through the National Charter Schools Institute.

Finally, when CMU designed the Authorizers Oversight Information System (AOIS), the goal was to streamline and automate the regulatory reporting process so the schools could more easily fulfill their compliance obligations, thereby leaving them with more time to spend on their primary mission of serving students. Today, AOIS is being used by authorizers in 11 other states and the District of Columbia to oversee almost 500 schools.

Hard Work Ahead

If the integrity of the chartering strategy is to be upheld, authorizers need to do a better job of closing schools that fail to deliver results for students. Alpha authorizers can show the way by having the courage to tackle the politics associated with closing underperforming schools and knowing how to document the facts in order to prevail in the court of law and public opinion.

Of course, there is a risk that alpha authorizers could turn into overbearing, bureaucratic machines that stifle innovation and entrepreneurship. To guard against this, policymakers should encourage and enable multiple entities to serve as authorizers. Just as choice and competition are good for students and schools, choice and competition are good for authorizers.

James N. Goenner is the president and CEO of the National Charter Schools Institute and a former chairman of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers.

We are now entering the fourth and final year of the first term of the Obama administration. Enough time has elapsed to provide an opportunity for at least an interim assessment, even though anything more definitive must await the voters’ judgment as to whether a second term is warranted.

At first glance, it looks as if President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have made surprisingly deft moves, both in terms of policy and politics. Even while Republicans are whacking the president “like a piñata,” as one pundit put it, they are treating his K–12 education record with kid gloves.

Senator Lamar Alexander has commented that he has “a lot of admiration” for Obama’s education secretary and “respect” for the president’s “positions on kindergarten through 12th-grade education.” Former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich admitted that this is “the one area where I very much agree” with him. New Jersey governor Chris Christie exclaims that the president has been a “great ally” on education reform. Former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney acknowledges that “some of his education policies” have been “positive.”

Is that for good reason? Is President Obama as strong on education reform as these comments suggest? On the surface, at least, the president has a compelling record. His Race to the Top (RttT) initiative catalyzed a chain reaction of legislative action at the state level, securing key reforms on issues ranging from charter schools to teacher evaluations to rigorous standards. His stimulus and “edujobs” bills seemed to maintain a critical level of investment in the public schools during a time of difficult budget cuts and financial strain. His administrative action to provide flexibility on No Child Left Behind’s most onerous provisions bypassed a paralyzed Congress and partially fulfilled his campaign promise to lift the law’s yoke off the backs of decent but maligned schools. And in Arne Duncan he’s got a popular, attractive education secretary to boot, one of the leading stars of his cabinet.

Plenty of these accomplishments are more than skin-deep. For example, both the Common Core State Standards effort and the move toward rigorous teacher evaluations could lead to dramatic increases in student achievement, if implemented faithfully by states and school districts. Neither of these reforms would have been adopted so quickly, in so many places, were it not for the president’s leadership.

Beyond these success stories, however, lie some very real weaknesses—soft spots in Obama’s education record—that raise doubts about the long-term impact of the administration’s efforts.

Wasteful Spending

There’s little reason to doubt that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—the 2009 stimulus bill—will long be remembered, along with health-care reform, as Obama’s signature accomplishment. For Democrats, the law saved the nation from a profound depression. For Republicans, as they made clear in the 2010 midterm elections, it constitutes a massive spending program that contributes to a national debt of historic proportions, with few results to show for it.

Accounting for nearly $100 billion (or about double the typical annual federal appropriation for education), the education portion of the stimulus package was one of its central components. In fact, setting aside the bill’s tax cuts, education spending represented the largest piece of the stimulus pie. These dollars were split into a few large categories: supersized spending for the Title I and special-education formula programs, and a “state stabilization fund” that essentially amounted to revenue sharing. (It also included funds for the $4 billion Race to the Top program, discussed separately below.)

Ostensibly, the intent of the education stimulus was to keep teachers from losing their jobs. The macroeconomic argument was that the last thing a damaged economy needed after the 2008 shock was to have hundreds of thousands of public school teachers getting pink slips, going on unemployment, and defaulting on their mortgages. And the nation’s schoolchildren would benefit as well. Protecting education jobs would keep good teachers from getting laid off and class sizes from skyrocketing. In February 2009, Secretary Duncan warned U.S. News & World Report about the consequences if the stimulus bill were not enacted. “My concern is that hundreds of thousands of good teachers, not just bad teachers, are going to go, and that would be devastating. It is to no one’s advantage if class size skyrockets or librarians get eliminated or school counselors disappear.”

This line of reasoning has two problems, as Duncan himself later admitted. First, good teachers were laid off because union protections required districts to implement reductions in force via “last in, first out.” If schools could have used the recession and budget crisis as an opportunity to cut their least-effective teachers, student achievement would actually have risen. As Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has shown, there is no quicker way to lift student improvement than to encourage the lowest-performing teachers to pursue other lines of work. Duncan himself does not disagree. In March 2011 he said, “Layoffs based only on seniority don’t help kids. We have to minimize the negative impact on students.’’

Second, there is little, if any, evidence that a modest increase in class size would have devastating consequences. Class size has fallen markedly over the past few decades. The year Obama was elected, the average number of pupils per professional in the public schools was 15, down from 19 in 1980 and 26 in 1960. In fact, even major layoffs would only return schools to the staffing ratios of the late 1990s, not exactly the Dark Ages, and a time of great progress in raising student achievement nationally. And again, even Duncan admitted as much when he later said that “class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on.”

Even when we evaluate the stimulus package on its own terms, protecting teachers’ jobs and keeping classes small, the costs seem wildly in excess of any benefits obtained. According to the Obama administration’s calculations, the stimulus package and edujobs bill kept about 400,000 teachers on the payroll who would have otherwise been terminated. That works out to approximately $150,000 per job, an exceptionally bad deal for taxpayers considering that the average new teacher (who would have been first in line for a pink slip) makes considerably less than half that in salary and benefits. Even if we accept the estimate of teachers’ jobs saved, we have to ask, where did the rest of the money go?

There is evidence that a significant portion of the funds did not go to stemming layoffs. Media reports indicate that some districts used the money for teachers’ raises and bonuses. The Government Accountability Office cited one North Carolina district for using edujobs dollars to pay for movie tickets, fast food, and a water park visit for students. This was in the midst of the worst economic downturn in six decades, when most Americans were either losing their jobs or barely treading water.

The design of the laws may, in fact, have aggravated the funding crisis at the local level. Forced to spend the funds relatively quickly, districts added staff, made new investments, and otherwise increased their costs, which will make the coming “funding cliff” that much more painful. At a time when tough-minded superintendents should have been preparing for leaner times by negotiating concessions from their bargaining units on salaries and benefits, federal policy cut them off at the knees.

Lackluster Results

Race to the Top is President Obama’s most vaunted win. The name itself connotes progress, forward movement, even competition. And there’s plenty of substance for the president to brag about: more than 45 states signing onto rigorous common standards; dozens of states getting serious about teacher evaluations; key jurisdictions removing caps on charter school expansion. This is what New Yorker contributor Steven Brill called “a sweeping overhaul” of the system. Look closer, put the Race to the Top’s results into context, and the scorecard changes considerably.

Secretary Duncan likes to say that RttT is part of a “quiet revolution” in education, with states creating “bold blueprints for reform [that] bear the signatures of many key players at the state and local level who drive change in our schools.” He’s right that the program led to a flurry of reform-friendly legislation. But did the 2009–10 period, when states were competing for RttT funds, see the most reforms ever enacted? No. That distinction belongs to 2011, after the 2010 midterm elections swept historic Republican majorities into office in state after state. While a similar number of states (5) made sizable progress on charter school caps in 2011 as in the previous two years, the number of states that moved forward on teacher evaluations, layoff policies, and vouchers increased significantly (see Figure 1).

Race to the Top wasn’t meant just to catalyze legislative changes. Winning states made bold promises about implementing their proposed reforms, and Obama and Duncan issued stern statements about their intention to pull dollars away from jurisdictions that fell short. How has that effort fared?

In short: not so well. Eleven states and the District of Columbia won first-round grants of up to $700 million from the $4 billion RttT pot in 2010, promising to deliver a range of ambitious programs and results. A little more than a year later, every one of those grantees has amended its plans at least once, with the Department of Education approving a grand total of forty-seven amendments to date. Maryland asked for another year to finish its teacher evaluation system, while North Carolina opted for a more modest teacher-retention bonus program. Time and again goals have been lowered and timelines extended. When in late 2011, in response to Hawaii’s stalling Duncan finally threatened to cut off the Aloha State’s funding, it marked a sharp and belated shift from the dozens of accommodating letters of approval that states wavering on their commitments have received from Washington.

Scaled-back ambitions are only half the problem: many states seem to have barely started putting their plans in motion. As of May 2011, a year after the first RttT awards, just over $80 million of the $4 billion in funding had actually been spent. While it’s at least reassuring that states haven’t been burning through the money, the urgency of the “Race” petered out once the awards were made. With the latest round of RttT grants awarded with little fanfare, the Obama administration’s signature effort is losing steam.

Federal Micromanagement

Complaining about an overbearing federal role in education is a mainstay of Republican campaigns, particularly during primary season, when the battle cry of “local control” most resonates with likely voters. The current nomination contest is no exception, with all of the GOP candidates calling for a smaller federal footprint, if not the outright closure of the Department of Education.

This message is more problematic during general elections, when voters (especially all-important independents) can easily equate a conservative’s plea to “pull back” as an indication of disinterest.

But in skillful hands, painting Uncle Sam as school-yard bully could work.

“We’re going to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future,” promised Obama when announcing his NCLB waiver plan. “Because what works in Rhode Island may not be the same thing that works in Tennessee—but every student should have the same opportunity to learn and grow, no matter what state they live in.” Duncan echoed, “instead of being tight on the goals and loose on the means of achieving them, [NCLB] is loose on the goals but tight on the means. We need to flip that and states are already leading the way.”

But for all the talk of state discretion, the Washington screws are actually being tightened. Take the Race to the Top, which one of us once characterized as “a carrot that feels like a stick.” Rather than invite states to present their own compelling reform plans, Obama and Duncan asked governors and state superintendents to develop plans that complied with federal guidelines set forth in excruciating detail. Or take their approach to NCLB waivers, in which they set constitutionally suspect conditions on the flexibility craved by the states (see “Obama’s NCLB Waivers,” forum, page 56). As Senator Alexander remarked, the Obama administration had states “over a barrel.”

And when it comes to federal control, nothing is more troubling than the declaration that a disproportionate percentage of white students in Advanced Placement (AP) classes constitutes evidence of racial discrimination. That’s the administration’s stance, thanks to the Department of Education’s civil rights branch, led by poverty warrior Russlynn Ali. At the very time Duncan was espousing the virtues of state and local flexibility, he and Ali were doubling down on 1960s-style top-down regulations. One stated objective was to address the “disparate impact” of policies that might lead to racial minorities taking fewer challenging classes than their peers, totally ignoring the obvious fact that African American and Hispanic students are, on average, much less prepared for AP courses by the time they reach 11th and 12th grade. Never mind that closing this preparation gap requires a long-term effort starting in elementary school, if not before. The federal government put districts on notice that if they had a disproportionate number of white students in AP classes, they could be immediately subject to civil rights enforcement. This is tight-loose?

Obama and Duncan have been good on education reform, certainly better than any of their Democratic predecessors. But to ignore the shortcomings of the president’s K–12 education-reform record entirely would be a mistake, we think. And it would also be bad for the country. The administration deserves to be pressed on the cost-effectiveness of its education system bailouts, on the results of its Race to the Top initiative, and on the wisdom of its approach to federalism and separation of powers. Education may not play a major role in the 2012 election, but that doesn’t mean that Obama’s education policies should be given a pass.

Michael J. Petrilli is research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where Tyson Eberhardt is a research fellow.

Founders of charter schools sign contracts (or “charters”) with an authorizer, such as a school district or higher-education institution, that stipulate the rules and regulations from which charters are exempted in exchange for accountability for results. In other words, a charter school can be closed if it does not meet certain reporting requirements and student achievement goals.

For years, South Carolina charters struggled mightily after their launch. Far fewer charters are now in operation in South Carolina than in some of the other states that were early adopters (South Carolina has 44, while California, Arizona, and Florida each has hundreds of charters), and charter students make up only 2 percent of the state’s public-school enrollment. Undoubtedly, some of these differences can be attributed to geography and population, but a recurring set of obstacles has also plagued the movement in South Carolina since its inception.

In 1996, then governor David Beasley signed South Carolina’s charter law, but few schools had opened by the turn of the century. This is surprising, considering the state’s record of low student achievement. According to commonly accepted performance indicators, South Carolina’s public schools are among the nation’s worst. Persistently low graduation rates, dismal SAT results, and low NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) scores, especially in reading, have long been the norm. In a historically red state with low-performing schools, a free-market education reform such as charters should be in demand and find strong support from lawmakers. What happened?

Fits and Starts

While South Carolina did indeed pass a charter school law in 1996, a combination of public-school establishment resistance and legislative reticence delayed the law’s maturation. As originally enacted, the law only allowed local school districts to authorize charters. When the first decade of South Carolina’s charter history concluded in 2006, there was little to show. Twenty-nine charter schools were operating, and few of these had a track record of success. Some 14 others had opened and closed. The average life span of the closed schools was 2.7 years, with most not even completing a second year. As is the case nationally, many of the closures were the result of financial problems or poor planning at the outset. While the state board of education addressed the planning concerns through regulation, other policy issues emerged, as certain districts developed a reputation for stonewalling reform efforts. For example, Greenville and Charleston, home districts for two early charter success stories, Greenville Tech and James Island, respectively, are the two largest districts in South Carolina, and each developed an adversarial stance toward charters.

The prolonged period of fits and starts forced charter advocates and their allies in the statehouse to seek a separate peace with their opponents in well-entrenched teacher, superintendent, and school-board associations. In responding, legislators created an alternative authorizer, the South Carolina Public Charter School District (SCPCSD, here CSD), with a plan to commence operations in 2008 under the leadership of an appointed board representing the governor’s office, House and Senate leadership, and various state associations. The new authorizing district proposed to relieve pressure on local districts as the only avenue for a charter. This, plus the authorizing district’s spartan funding provision, helped quell opposition—for a time.

Allison Reaves, principal at South Carolina Connections Academy, a virtual school and one of the first the CSD authorized, was surprised that so little effort had been made to prepare the public system for the new district. “I realized [charters] were still such a novel idea in South Carolina. Local districts have had little to no education on the charter movement,” she says.

With the creation of the CSD, charters could be authorized to operate anywhere in the state, under the auspices of an agency that had no responsibility for traditional public schools. This new state agency/school district hybrid would be a logical alternative for charter hopefuls, especially those in local districts with an anticharter reputation.

The CSD opened in 2008 with five schools, including Connections Academy and two other virtual charter schools, the first of their kind in the state. By the end of the 2008–09 school year, though, one school’s charter had been revoked, two others had asked for loans to make payroll, the district office was operating with barely enough on the balance sheet to make it month to month, and the hybrid administrative concept had been abandoned in favor of a more traditional district model. Further complicating matters, leadership changed, as the inaugural superintendent, Tim Daniels, and board chair, Terrye Seckinger, were replaced at the end of the year. What began as a hopeful new charter authorizer for South Carolina teetered on the brink of oblivion after only one year.

Money Problems

CSD schools immediately found themselves forced to defend their very existence, a common position for charters. Nationally, charters embrace this challenge by vowing to do more with less, but there is a distinct difference between whether a school can stock an additional computer lab or barely pay the electric bill. From the beginning, the South Carolina Charter School Act provided CSD schools with little more than the Base Student Cost (BSE), which varies from year to year depending on the state budget. The most significant source of funds for South Carolina’s traditional public schools—as well as for charters authorized by a local district—is the municipality in which the school is located. CSD schools do not have a local tax base and thus must operate without these funds. “The funding part was totally misleading—there was no way. Anybody with any understanding of finance and schools would realize that the bill created a situation that was not going to be long term,” says current CSD superintendent Wayne Brazell. Principal Reaves says the charter management company behind her school knew the difficulties it would face in South Carolina, but pressed on. “Connections realized they were taking a risk,” she says, “but they also knew there was a need for us in the state.”

In 2008–09, the BSE was $2,476 per student, while the average per-pupil expenditure for traditional public schools in South Carolina totaled $9,162. Some other state funding was available to CSD schools, and they relied substantially on Title I dollars in the district’s first year. But even when federal Title I funding was added to the mix, the CSD per-pupil average was below $4,000, less than half the state average for traditional schools. And this figure varied according to grade level, as high school students and disabled students are weighted more heavily by the state finance office.

“It [the charter school allotment] was certainly inadequate,” says current CSD board chair Don McLaurin, an entrepreneur whose private-sector experience enabled him to recognize immediately the CSD’s precarious financial situation. McLaurin joined the board halfway through the 2008–09 school year and has already been voted chairman twice. “It just wasn’t enough money to run a school. I think we can do things at a more reasonable price than traditional public schools, but the mechanism that was in place in the beginning didn’t allow for the realities of the world.”

Understanding the policy shortcomings in CSD’s creation, legislators added a $700 per-student proviso to the 2009–10 state budget to aid the district. But the proviso, Title I funding, and federal IDEA (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act) funding failed to offset worsening financial conditions in 2009–10. The $700 proviso survived reauthorization in spring 2010 and was available to the district for the 2010–11 school year, but its benefit evaporated when BSE was cut to $1,757 per pupil. Statewide, general-fund revenue collections—for all state services, including education—dropped by nearly 25 percent between 2007 and 2010. The state faced a budget shortfall of $560.9 million in 2010–11, projected to reach $1.4 billion in 2012–13 unless spending was cut. In July 2010, midyear cuts slashed the BSE even further, to $1,630. Superintendent Brazell knew the proviso could only be considered a short-term solution. “My thoughts were that this was done just to get our foot in the door and other funding would become available later,” he says.

Having built annual budgets on significantly higher per-pupil allotments than they were receiving, CSD schools struggled to survive, and the threat of closure loomed. Compounding the problem, CSD schools experienced significant student turnover in their first two years, making enrollment unstable. “The funding level was so low and the opposition from so many traditional public-school groups was so fierce that many potential parents took a ‘wait and see’ stance. The growth in the district was mainly in the virtual schools and that student population was very transient,” says Brazell.

In an effort to save newly opened charter schools, the CSD extended loans to two of its five schools in 2008, but only one of the loans was repaid. This caused consternation among the authorizing district’s board members, especially as new requests for loans came in, and led to a swift reversal of district policy. “We violated what many of us thought we should have been doing as an authorizer, but we had to either help the schools or watch them all close,” says Brazell. With the damage done, the district and its schools were convinced that a funding scheme relying on BSE and Title I funding was untenable. For the next fiscal year (2009–10) the CSD aggressively cut costs, trimming office accounting fees and downgrading budget lines set aside for a legal retainer. As the district rebuilt its depleted reserves, schools again asked for short-term loans. Having learned a hard lesson, the district helped schools make payroll by advancing funds equal in amount to dollars due from the state. When the state funds arrived (typically at the end of the month), the district simply deducted monies already provided to the schools.

These actions were difficult for those board members with a background in education to come to grips with, says board chair McLaurin. But just as a start-up business has to be creative, he knew the new district had to be so as well. “The district either had to be flexible or not survive,” he says. “It was more difficult for educators than entrepreneurs to understand this—and that’s not a slight to educators, it’s just a different perspective.”

These unorthodox measures kept the district afloat while legislators moved to revise the funding scheme. Rep. Phil Owens of Pickens County, chair of the House Education and Public Works Committee, introduced a bill in 2010 aimed at establishing a more sustainable funding scheme for the district, but opposition from members of the education establishment stalled the legislation in committee. McLaurin says, “That we did become one of the largest districts in the state [after two years] was proof-of-concept to the legislature.” District enrollment more than doubled from 2,464 students in 2008–09 to 6,086 in 2009–10. “We proved that people want this; they signed up in droves, and that put a lot of pressure on the legislature to find more money for us,” he says.

Nevertheless, as the 2010 session ended, the CSD anticipated another year of uncertainty and prepared for more legislative battles in 2011.

The Schizophrenic District

From the outset, the CSD encountered another obstacle to progress, further exposing its policy-created vulnerability: it served as both authorizer and support office. Since charters struggled for more than a decade prior to the creation of the CSD, the district was not going to win public or legislative support by allowing new schools to evaporate into the ether due to lack of funds or ignorance of procedures, such as how to report accurate enrollment counts. CSD school officials labored to navigate the state reporting system, as the state shifted software providers between 2009 and 2011. At the same time, the CSD needed to uphold its mission of accountability to create, sustain, and retain high-quality charter schools.

“There is a lot of confusion, and there are a lot of roles and responsibilities [for the CSD],” says Reaves. “The district has to change personalities based on what it encounters in any given day or even any given hour.” Simple operational procedures, which existing traditional schools had mastered, were an enigma to CSD charters. How do they order textbooks? How can they order diplomas? “Student attendance and discipline questions were very common those first two years,” says Brazell, a 30-year veteran of public-school leadership in South Carolina. “I answered the same type of questions as when I was a superintendent in a traditional district.” The CSD desperately wanted to prove that charters could succeed under its auspices, so the district stretched beyond its authorizing role to help the new schools navigate the system.

In fall 2009, the CSD added three new schools, including a virtual high school that enrolled more than 1,000 students, and these schools needed the same guidance and services as the schools that had opened one year earlier. Two challenges faced the district office as it tried to distinguish itself as a charter authorizer and not just a traditional school district.

First, the CSD struggled to implement a comprehensive accountability scheme based on student performance on state assessments. The state department embargoes test scores for months after receipt, so the public does not have access to the results. District staff, parents, and teachers knew test scores, but schoolwide and districtwide averages could not be reported to the CSD board or its school boards because that would become public information. Without these data, school leaders did not have the current achievement information necessary to isolate areas of need and propose interventions. For charter schools, accountability for results is critical. By the time results were made public, the next school year had already begun.

Second, CSD staff continued to provide guidance to existing schools while simultaneously helping to launch new ones. With high staff turnover at existing schools (two of the five principals were replaced between the first and second year, not to mention numerous changes among assistant principals and teachers) and the addition of new schools, school officials needed training in critical procedures. Student information-system management and reports to the state, along with the means for implementing new curricula and distinguishing which state policies charters were exempt from and which they were not, were a mystery to many.

All of these issues converged as schools performed their primary purpose of educating students, frustrating progress on both fronts (operations and accountability). The financial circus kept school budgets in flux, making it difficult to prepare for additional student services, hire teachers, and develop strategic plans.

To make matters worse, the S. C. Charter School Act requires board elections at each charter school annually, resulting in the loss of institutional knowledge every year. “Folks operating charter schools were very naive for the most part, simply because they had never done it before,” says Brazell. Sometimes these new boards wanted to change course and replaced the principal, even after a school’s first year. In other cases, a principal was hired and then replaced before a new school ever opened its doors. At every turn, the CSD was forced to use hasty, temporary measures to help resolve problems that could be traced to the state policies in place. What resulted was a haphazard set of practices, inconsistently applied, with plenty of doubt to go around. “All of this put the district in a really compromising position,” says Connections Academy principal Reaves.

Hope for the Future

Fortunately, the story does not end there. Today, the CSD oversees 13 schools that serve more than 10,000 students. In 2010–11, Superintendent Brazell finished his second school year with the district and has filled key staff positions with knowledgeable personnel, many with a history at the South Carolina Department of Education. CSD staff experience has proved invaluable to the new charter operators. “Staff with experience in operations has helped to get a school’s questions answered quickly, and it’s allowed us to start talking about what a good district should be,” says Brazell. Only one charter has been revoked, so despite a roller coaster of financial adjustments and procedural changes, the schools are stabilizing. In addition, the 2011–12 state budget included a funding increase for CSD schools. Virtual schools received an additional $1,750 per student, while brick-and-mortar charters received an additional $3,250. Although the amount depends on a student’s category (grade level, special needs, etc.), the average CSD student is funded at approximately $5,000, still much lower than the average traditional school student but better than prior levels.

What took South Carolina’s charter movement so long? First, advocacy from key leadership positions had been missing. Brazell had no choice but to handle operational and administrative duties while also explaining the charter concept to legislators in the statehouse. The 2010 elections propelled a strong charter supporter into the state superintendent’s office. Dr. Mick Zais expressed support for charters in his campaign and made the 2011 charter legislation one of his first priorities. “That was a game changer,” acknowledged board chair McLaurin. “I’ve got to believe that we are creating a change in the culture, and he bought into that. He’s genuinely a believer in competition. Our whole relationship with the state department [of education] has changed.”

Second, authorizers with varied commitments to the reform effort slowed the growth of new schools. The statewide authorizer allowed a set of schools located in different areas around the state to coalesce as a group with a common outlook on education reform. All agreed that charters can succeed only if the initial political and administrative obstacles are overcome.

South Carolina’s statewide authorizer is less schizophrenic these days, though the concern coming to the fore is greater focus on support and administration than was intended. Brazell is looking to change that. With less uncertainty as to whether the schools will actually survive, the CSD can concentrate more on school quality and achievement. “The district board is freeing our office to concentrate on oversight and accountability instead of authorization,” says Brazell, which helps to narrow the focus for district staff. “I’ve told the schools that the expectations are higher now, and we are going to be focusing efforts on compliance. We’ve come a long way.”

“In any start-up that I’ve ever seen succeed, five years out from the start the business is never exactly like the business plan said it would be,” says McLaurin. “You’ve got this view of how the world is, but then you get out there and start interacting with the world and things change. I think that process was inevitable.”

Should these problems be solved, the fact remains that so long as the CSD continues to authorize schools, the district will have to train new school leadership and staff on compliance with state standards, while also holding all schools accountable for performance. In August 2011, the CSD approved seven charter-school applicants to open in the 2012–13 school year. Perhaps the strong leadership in the state and district superintendents’ offices, along with more experience among district and school staff, will result in more effective operations and better student outcomes in the future.

Jonathan Butcher is education director for the Goldwater Institute and served as the CSD’s director of accountability from 2009 to April 2011. Joel Medley is the director of the North Carolina Office of Charter Schools and was the director of the Charter School Office at the South Carolina Department of Education from 2008 to 2010.

It’s no surprise that, 28 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, school-reform efforts have generated so little effect. Our schools have proven, over the past century, quite adept at resisting change.

Recent attempts to inject accountability and innovation have brought us to an important opportunity. No Child Left Behind helped add transparency, and Race to the Top (RttT) motivated states to rethink teacher evaluation, charter limits, and more. The Investing in Innovation fund (i3) has seeded some promising innovations and helped attract more private investment to public education.

But none of these initiatives hits at the reasons that education has proven itself so innovation-resistant: governance and compensation. Further, there is good reason to believe a third impediment—the absence of useful data—will persist even through the Common Core State Standards initiatives.

Finland serves as a model for many reformers. There is a single curriculum; teachers are well educated and well respected. Their system reflects Finnish ideals and builds on Finnish strengths, and their students score at the top of international tests like PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).

But a top-down system will continue to be the wrong approach in this country, whether on a national or state level. It doesn’t reflect American values or culture, nor does it address the size, diversity, or income disparity of the United States. (Finland has half as many students as New York City, and only 13 percent live in poverty.) In a country of 300 million people, a top-down approach makes substantive change virtually impossible. To fix our schools, states have to stop trying to fix them; the quickest way to raise performance is command and control, but over the long run martial law does not even work well for generals.

States can create a more agile, more American, system of governance that eliminates impediments to improvement, empowers schools to innovate, and uses data to help families find the right schools for their children. The federal government should encourage them to do so.

None of the proposals below address the role of profitmaking companies in K‒12 education (though my bias might be clear, as I have run education companies for 30 years). It is important not to conflate marketplace with for-profit. It is also important to recognize that it takes time for deregulation and a newly formed marketplace to work. The breakup of AT&T and the telecommunications bill of 1986 did little to help consumers in the very short term, but they cleared the path for lower costs and technologies including the Internet and the cellphone. Occasionally efforts to create a marketplace don’t work at all, as happened with banking deregulation. As education is a public good and requires public funding, proposed structures should be measured by the incentives they will create for schools, districts, and teachers to produce great student outcomes at reasonable expense.

Empower Schools

Although our ultimate goal is a system of schooling that naturally evolves and improves, it’s important to keep in mind that the capacity for experimenting and innovating resides in individual schools, not in central offices. Under the current system of governance and funding, schools have too few resources and too little discretion for experimentation. Without the dollars to implement novel ideas and to discover what works and what doesn’t, most schools look for, at most, incremental improvement.

Right now, every state distributes state and federal funds to districts; in turn, the districts distribute funds to schools. Imagine that states instead channel funds directly to schools and require that the schools contract with a school support organization (SSO) for an array of services similar to what its district’s central office now provides (see Figure 1). There are many ways to implement such a plan, but the recent transition of New York City schools to its empowerment model might serve as a useful example, even though the city may be losing its resolve to change.

Ideally, existing school districts would be spun off as independent nonprofits and freed to compete with other districts, as well as with the new SSOs in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, for schools and dollars. University of Washington research professor Paul Hill and others have proposed variants of this concept.

Since most schools (especially those in small and wealthy districts) would probably keep their existing districts as their service providers at first, the initial shift would be subtle. But before long the roles and behavior of schools and districts would begin to change. Freed to choose a district or other SSO based on service, cost, and philosophy, schools would demand more for less, and SSOs would step up to pull schools away from their local districts and compete by differentiating themselves from their competitors. Perhaps they would charge less for similar services; perhaps they would deconstruct the services, providing only busing, technology, or financial/purchasing support. Eventually, districts and SSOs would also vie for schools based on their track records of learning outcomes.

Under this proposal, districts would become providers of services rather than owners of geographic zones. With their schools acting as clients rather than dependents, districts would be forced to compete for them, thereby becoming more innovative and cost-effective.

Concrete results would take a while to materialize, but they would come. The current system of big-district purchasing, for example, favors large textbook publishers, which play it safe. School-level purchasing—with proper financial controls—would allow smaller, more responsive companies to compete for business.

Charter schools are the one reform initiative of the past three decades that has addressed the issue of K–12 governance and gained some traction (some 5 percent of public schools are now charters). This proposal builds on some of the lessons learned from the charter school movement and would allow effective charter networks like Green Dot, KIPP, and North Star to operate as school support organizations on a level playing field with districts, with equal funding and authority. A great deal of innovation today is coming from charter networks; this change would encourage districts to match them.

Most states would need to implement significant initiatives to prepare school principals for their new role, and to recruit new principals with the right skills; education schools and programs like New Leaders for New Schools could participate in this effort. Further, states would need to balance power between districts and schools; for example, districts should have the power to reject association with a poorly performing school. Both schools and districts should be pushed to improve themselves and their products and services.

Accountability would become simple (and imperative) under this model. The newly empowered schools should live or die by their performance; similarly, SSOs would lose their customers if they proved unable to support high achievement (which is how the stock of K12, Inc., lost 40 percent of its value following a single critical article in the New York Times). Accountability goes hand in hand with empowerment; promoting one without the other will not succeed.

Empowering schools would also mean encouraging parental choice. After the district’s monopoly is broken up, it would be critical that states create intelligent, consumer-friendly systems to support parents in choosing their children’s schools. Any number of successful models exist, all of which would provide transparency and could be used to balance families’ desire for schools within reasonable distance with their desire for the right outcome.

This is not an easy change; further, many districts are already well run and don’t need change at all. But this proposal would remake the relationships between schools, districts, and states into a far more efficient and effective model, one that would increase agility and remove regulations that limit the autonomy of school leaders. (As Arizona congressman Jeff Flake once asked, “Who out there can sing their district fight song?”)

Offer Teachers a New Deal

Once we’ve empowered schools, we’re ready to address teacher compensation. Many people believe that teachers unions are a major cause of whatever they think is wrong with our schools. It’s not that simple; plenty of research suggests that districts without unions do not perform better than those that have unions, and are only slightly less expensive.

To be sure, pensions and tenure are huge impediments to organic change. But two parties signed the contracts putting them in place: the union, whose job is to get its members more pay for less work, and the district. It was the side representing kids—the districts and state legislatures—that failed. Demonizing unions and teachers is unfair and counterproductive.

The problem isn’t the total compensation; if anything, teachers are underpaid. It’s the structure of that compensation, a series of long-term obligations that severely limit agility while creating off–balance sheet debt that would make Wall Street blush. (According to district budget figures, New York City, for example, spends as much on teachers who no longer teach as on those who still do.)

Ending tenure without ending the current pension system would create some impossible pressures; teachers nearing certain vesting thresholds, for instance, would have a target on their backs. To create an agile system, states must end both tenure and pensions. We can take a big step down this road without reneging on commitments made to a generation of teachers who have accepted lower base salaries for long-term benefits. The starting point, in fact, is something many teachers would embrace.

States should give each teacher the right to choose an alternative contract that contains terms and benefits consistent with those in the private sector (e.g., an at-will contract with standard health-care benefits, 401k, etc.), and sits outside of the existing teacher pension system. Choosing this alternative contract would convert any existing pension to a lump-sum 401k contribution. In return, the new contract would have a far higher base salary; in fairness, states should require districts to hire an auditor to determine the savings that can be expected from each alternative contract teacher, and give that savings to the teacher as increased pay.

Under this plan, no current teachers would be forced to change their contracts. If a state chooses to implement this policy change on a school-by-school basis, teachers who choose the current traditional contract might be offered a transfer or be grandfathered, that is, allowed to continue under their current contract. But the alternative contract could be attractive: depending on the state or district, the expected pension-related savings over a standard contract could be as much as $25,000 per year per teacher. In New York City, for example, a teacher might choose her current contract and a $65,000 salary, or the alternative employment terms with a $90,000 salary but with no tenure guarantees. This change would not reduce costs overall, but it would begin to curb the practice of paying operating expenses with long-term, off–balance sheet debt.

Conversion specifics will vary by state; obviously, those with huge unfunded liabilities will have a tougher time finding an elegant solution to converting past pension obligations for teachers nearing vesting milestones. Some percentage of teachers will refuse to switch; every teacher who does switch, though, will reduce the scope of the long-term problem. Many teachers will prefer to have their retirement funds fully in their control, along with a higher base salary, over a pension subject to fierce political pressure.

So which teachers might choose the alternative contract? My hunch is that newer teachers, who would appreciate the extra cash, and high-performing teachers, who would be unconcerned about the decreased job security, would be likely converts. If that’s true, it’s probable that schools with the highest-need students (who traditionally have the least-experienced faculty) would be most likely to convert over to the new contract, and might thereby be able to attract higher-performing teachers.

Schools operating under the alternative contract would be free to evaluate teachers based on student performance and evaluation, as well as classroom observation and other evidence. These teachers could be empowered to shape their schools, by taking part in choosing the curricula they use in their classrooms and the formative assessments they use to measure student progress, for example. Giving teachers a voice in decisions that affect their work is a logical complement of recognizing and compensating them as professionals rather than as assembly-line workers.

Does this proposal solve the compensation problem? Not entirely, though it would take us halfway there. If we also clean up our accountability systems, we could compare the performance of teachers under each contract and adjust the compensation system to include performance metrics as appropriate.

Align Assessment to Curricula

For all their deficiencies, assessments of student learning are an indispensable component of an evolving school system. Without accurate assessments aligned with curricula and standards, education innovators would be flying blind.

The multistate Common Core State Standards project is an improvement over the patchwork of past state standards. But the standards are not the source of flaws in state accountability systems; the culprits are the state tests.

Tests used by international organizations, like TIMSS and PISA, and also our own NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), can measure performance because they’re both broad and deep; they use a reasonable number of items (many of which are constructed responses) against a large number of standards. But that design makes those tests too long to give to one student. Instead, they’re matrixed; 10 students might each take one-tenth of the test. A few thousand well-selected subjects might give us an accurate picture of 4th graders in a state, but these types of tests cannot be used to measure the performance of a student or school.

A state or national test, on the other hand, can only last an hour or two in each subject. Because such tests must contain several items per standard to be accurate, it will measure only a fraction of the standards. And since a test must be reliable from year to year, it will measure that same subset every year. This limitation encourages schools to narrow their curricula to only those standards likely to be measured and gives rise to illusory performance gains. At present, various groups of states are trying to work out this problem. In the end, they’ll trust that the testing companies will solve this problem, and once again, they’ll be disappointed. There’s a better path.

Imagine if states stopped commissioning their own tests and instead created a small set of requirements for each curriculum provider:

• Adopt or create a secure summative test for each grade level. This test should align closely to the curriculum, and every school using that curriculum would use that test to measure student performance.

• Work with client schools to administer NAEP (or some other matrix-based test aligned to the standards) to 2,000 students each year in key grade levels; use their performance to set the curve for the summative test (think of this as “Curriculum NAEP,” the equivalent of the current state NAEP testing).

• Set the curve for tests on a standard score range that facilitates value-added analysis.

This new way of thinking about summative testing would retain the advantages of the Common Core project and the best state tests while eliminating most of the disadvantages. States would retain the authority to determine the curricula they might subsidize or even allow; they might adopt only one for some subjects and grades (say, for K–6 math); in this case, the world would look a lot like it does now. States would be better off, however, allowing schools to adopt curricula, along with the corresponding summative tests, that best fit their students’ needs. Again, it makes sense to empower schools at the same time that we hold them accountable for student performance. Either way, states could continue to compare schools, since each curriculum would be scored on the same curve and the scores equated through Curriculum NAEP.

This proposal would eliminate most gaming around test scores. There would be no incentive for a provider to dumb down its test, since Curriculum NAEP scores (and therefore the curve) would leave scaled scores unchanged. Moreover, the proposal would create a true alignment between curricula and tests, by removing the state as intermediary. Rather than teach to the state test, schools would teach a curriculum, and then test students accordingly.

Best of all, this regimen would encourage differentiation and competition among curriculum providers. In the end, the curriculum generating the best results for a particular cohort (say, middle-school Latina students) would likely be adopted by schools with large groups of those students.

That competition would extend to the tests themselves. A test should be judged not only by its accuracy, precision, and reliability, but also by its ability to promote learning. Many educators believe that authentic assessment (asking students to perform complex tasks rather than answer multiple-choice questions) encourages better teaching and learning; if this proves true, then curriculum providers using authentic assessments would dominate the market, despite their higher costs.

Finally, this approach would save money. Curriculum providers will find much more agile ways to connect to assessment providers than any state consortium has found so far.

Let the Data Flow

If our schools are to continually improve, we need to gather data and make it available not just to schools, school districts, and parents, but also to independent researchers, who can comb the databases for correlations and any underlying causal connections. Our goal should be to create a veritable education genome project open to all appropriate parties, with proper security measures to address privacy concerns.

We currently gather data through a 1970s-era approach that is slow and expensive. As data move from classroom to school to district to state to the federal government, the details that would allow us to draw meaningful conclusions about things like the effectiveness of a textbook, a supplemental services provider, or an afterschool program are lost. Meanwhile, Google and others manage much more data with far less cost and difficulty. We need to adapt their processes to education data.

The testing companies already collect data from individual schools, as they send and collect test booklets either directly or through the district. These vendors are technically savvy and have the incentive to maintain participation in a lucrative assessment market. States should require their testing vendors to collect data from each school in a standard format, including at least the curricular materials used in each classroom, the calendar and schedule in use at that grade level, the background of the teachers, and any academic interventions used for particular students. The companies should be required to then forward these instructional data, along with test scores, subscores on specific components of the test, and student demographic information, to the state in a standardized format. The state, in turn, should publish a database with accounts allowing schools, districts, education consumers, and (in a privacy-ensured format) researchers to access at will.

There are obvious privacy concerns about publishing personal data in a state database. However, these data are far less sensitive than other data that are commonly secured and made widely available. (Just what would someone do with your son’s 5th-grade math grades?)

Thousands of researchers would surely exploit the resulting database. Curriculum providers would look for evidence of their (or their competitors’) effectiveness. Policymakers would examine the results of various interventions, including afterschool programs, changes in class and day length, or class-size reductions. Teacher preparation and in-service training programs would know whether and where they were having an impact. Parents would be able to make informed choices about where to send their children to school.

Most states would save money by making use of this more efficient way to collect data. At the same time, it would spawn a wave of innovation, as various players start using the data.

Innovation and the New ESEA

All four of these proposals would move us away from a command-and-control education system, and toward an agile education marketplace that encourages innovation and excellence. But even if these proposals sound reasonable to you, you’re probably still wondering how and when they might ever come to pass.

The answer is through the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA); by attaching the mind-set of RttT and i3 to the billions of dollars of annual education aid to states, we can use incentives to encourage the right behaviors quickly and inexpensively. Title I channels $14 billion per year to states, which pass it along to districts along with their own funding. Imagine if the new law leads states to channel that money, along with their own funds, directly to schools, and discourages them from holding to the status quo. With a small tweak (for example, an increase or decrease in funding of 10 percent), the feds would give states a $3 billion push in the right direction.

The language enabling schools to choose a district or SSO should be simple. Each state should find its own path to empowering schools. Perhaps some states would empower high-performing schools first, while others might put failing schools into governors’ districts like the one currently proposed in New Jersey. Perhaps states with higher population density would create statewide choice systems, while others would favor parents who sought short travel times. There are many mechanisms imaginable for allowing a school community to vote on its district or SSO affiliation and for states to license and monitor school support organizations.

Similarly, Title II provides roughly $3 billion per year for professional development. The federal government could limit those funds to states that give teachers the right to choose the alternative contract. Again, though, the new ESEA should allow states great latitude in structuring that right (for instance, they could give that choice to individual teachers, or allow a school-by-school vote); regardless, each state will have to figure out what to do with its pension obligations to teachers who switch to the new contract.

The process by which Common Core states are creating math and English tests is well under way; it may result in top-notch exams that lead to dramatic performance increases. The easiest place to implement an assessment marketplace, then, is in science, history, and language courses. ESEA should establish a group that registers curricula in those areas; if this marketplace proves effective and states struggle with the Common Core tests, this marketplace can easily expand to incorporate math and English.

The accountability provisions of ESEA should require testing companies to phase in collection of school-level instructional and background data. Initially, the testing companies could provide the data to client states for analysis; perhaps down the road, states or foundations will find it useful to run studies across multiple data sets.

None of these proposals is expensive; in fact, most will save money in the short and long term. And although some might be politically inexpedient, none would have the natural and well-funded opponents of other commonsense reforms. Further, this is not an exhaustive list. Every reader of this article could probably come up with additional reforms that would create a more responsive education system.

This plan places a great deal of faith in competition and innovation, though within the construct of a robust public school system. As I’ve noted, this faith could be misplaced: perhaps education truly is different, and there simply is one immutable right way to run schools. But there is something to be said for empowering our schools with transparency, choice, and agility. American ideals shouldn’t just be taught in the classroom; they should shape that classroom.

John Katzman is the executive chairman of 2tor, Inc.

To become proficient at dividing a one-place number into a three-place number, a girl with blue-painted fingernails wrote in her math journal.

To become proficient in multiplying decimals, wrote a dark-haired boy. To become proficient at subtracting one four-place number from another. To become proficient in arithmetic word problems. To complete an exercise in the properties of numbers, like (4 + 9) + 5 = ? + (9 + 5).

No two youngsters seemed to have quite the same math goals because, of course, no two youngsters are quite alike when it comes to learning. That’s why Los Altos is betting the future on an online math program from Khan Academy, and why scores of other schools and districts are clamoring to include Khan Academy in their math curriculum.

For the next 45 minutes, Julian met individually with his 5th graders to refine their goals. (In November, Julian left Los Altos to become assistant principal in the Milpitas Unified School District.) Everyone else logged onto the free Khan Academy web site and called up the “module,” or math concept, that fit their goals. Some watched short video lectures embedded in the module; others worked their way through sets of practice problems. I noticed that one youngster had completed 23 modules five weeks into the school year, one had finished 30, and another was working on his 45th.

As youngsters completed one lesson, an online “knowledge map” helped them plot their next step: finish the module on adding decimals, for example, and the map suggests moving next to place values, or to rounding whole numbers, or to any of four other options.

Julian, meanwhile, tracked everyone’s progress on a computer dashboard that offers him mounds of data and alerts him when someone needs his attention. He showed me, for example, the data for a child who had been working that day on multiplying decimals. The child had watched the Khan video before answering the 1st practice problem correctly, needed a “hint” from the program on the 3rd question, got the 7th wrong after struggling with it for 350 seconds—the problem was 69.0 x 0.524—and got the 18th correct in under a minute.

But just as powerful are the data kids have on themselves. The Covington youngsters regularly pulled up an array of charts that showed them which math concepts they had mastered and which they were working on, needed to review, or were stumbling over.

The classroom buzzed with activity, and amazingly, all the buzz was about math.

Salman Khan (on left) and the team at the Khan Academy.

Khan’s Rise

By now, more than 1 million people have watched the online video in which Salman Khan—a charming MIT math whiz, Harvard Business School graduate, and former Boston hedge-fund analyst—explains how he began tutoring his New Orleans cousins in math by posting short lessons for them on YouTube. Other people began watching the lessons and sending Khan adulatory notes (“First time I smiled doing a derivative,” wrote one) or thanking him for explaining fractions to an autistic son.

Khan quit the hedge fund, moved to Silicon Valley, and in 2009, with funding from a constellation of technology stars (Bill Gates’s children were using the videos), launched the nonprofit Khan Academy. A year later, Mark Goines, a member of the Los Altos school board and a legendary Silicon Valley investor, introduced Khan to the district’s new superintendent. Los Altos already ranked among the best-performing districts in the state, but it had set itself a goal of improving individual achievement, and “capturing data at a granular level” on each student was proving difficult, Goines told me.

A few weeks later, in November 2010, Los Altos agreed to pilot Khan Academy with two classes of 5th graders and two classes of 7th graders and provide Khan with feedback to refine the web site and tools. By summer 2011, some 250 school districts, charter schools, and independent schools were asking to be part of the pilot—Khan chose only a dozen—and have Khan staff work with them to integrate the videos, data dashboard, and other tools into their curriculum.

Salman Khan’s short videos remain the centerpiece of Khan Academy (there already are 2,576 of them and counting). In each one, Khan’s voice describes a discrete math concept, such as solving a quadratic by factoring or interpreting inequalities, while only his hand-scribbled formulas appear on-screen. Khan’s idea was that youngsters would watch the videos at home and work on problems in class, essentially “flipping” the classroom (see “The Flipped Classroom,” What Next, Winter 2012). But teachers told me that youngsters also are using the videos as a just-in-time solution when they’re stumped on a problem in class, or to move ahead when they feel ready.

The data that the web site churns out and the site’s gaming features seem to be the real learning motivators. Youngsters become “proficient” in a concept by answering a “streak” of 10 consecutive computer-generated questions: miss one and the computer sends you back to the start. Youngsters earn “energy points” for correct answers, and badges for accomplishments as diverse as working speedily (that’s a meteorite badge) or becoming proficient in the Pythagorean theorem (that’s a moon badge).

Ted Mitchell, president of the NewSchools Venture Fund and a Khan Academy board member, told me that Khan developers “were blown away by how important” the games and badges seem to be in giving kids a sense of accomplishment and progress. Even older kids, for whom badges are ho-hum, “are instantly motivated” when they complete a streak, and the program acknowledges their accomplishment, says Brian Greenberg, who until recently was chief academic officer of Envision Schools. “What’s brilliant about Khan Academy is the instant feedback,” Greenberg told me.

Envision runs four charters in Northern California, including one that piloted Khan Academy with a small program for remedial-algebra students last summer.

Los Altos has extended the Khan Academy program to all of its 5th and 6th grade classes, and to its 7th graders who were achieving at grade level and below.

The Teaching Curve

From Covington Elementary, I dropped in on Courtney Cadwell’s 7th-grade pre-algebra class at Egan Junior High. She, like Julian, piloted Khan Academy last year. Based on that first-year success, Los Altos extended the program to all of its 5th- and 6th-grade classes, and to its 7th graders who were achieving at grade level and below.

Cadwell, a 17-year teacher who was wearing University of Texas orange for her alma mater, calls Khan just “one resource we use.” The previous night, she had assigned worksheet homework; she began the class with a textbook lesson. Math projects ringed the classroom, a reminder that Khan Academy doesn’t include project-based lessons. That night’s homework included a reading on the origin of zero: Cadwell, among others I spoke with, said Khan’s weakness is that it “is not great at helping kids conceptualize math.”

Khan’s strength became clear a few minutes later when the students opened their laptops. Cadwell strolled the room with an iPad in hand, tracking the youngsters as they moved through problems and modules, and intervening with a quick one-on-one when the data identified a student who was stumped. “I’m getting data in real time about each student instead of assuming the entire class needs intervention,” she explained afterward. Khan “lets me use my class time more wisely.”

It also means that teachers have to figure out new ways to work. “Teachers have to be willing to escape from the role of standing in front of the class” and flexible enough to group kids based on need, said Julian, who was a math coach in New York for 20 years and retains his big-city bustle.

As I watched Julian, Cadwell, and later Ruth Negash at Oakland’s Envision Academy of Arts and Technology, they seemed to be always on the move—meeting individually with children, tutoring small groups, and occasionally addressing the whole class. “I actually work harder” with Khan Academy, Julian said. “I’m up and around more, meeting with kids more.” That gives time back to students and, as Cadwell said, makes them “take ownership of their learning” by setting their own goals.

It also means a new level of classroom collaboration: youngsters can look at each other’s data and identify “coaches” among their classmates. Julian urged his 5th graders to ask the Khan program for a hint, watch a video, or ask a coach for help before coming to him. “Show him how to do it, don’t walk around the class giving answers,” he admonished would-be coaches. Pretty soon, a girl in a pink T-shirt turned to a girl in purple for coaching, and the two worked meticulously at solving 1.94 x 5.52.

The Khan Academy provides data in real time about each student, resulting in more efficient class time management for teachers.

Making It Work in Oakland

Los Altos is an affluent, tech-savvy community; I next wanted to see how Khan Academy could work in an inner-city classroom. So two days later, I visited Envision Academy, a downtown Oakland charter school, and Ruth Negash, an intense 4th-year teacher with wild, curly hair and two education degrees from San Francisco State University.

In 2011, Negash taught two summer-school classes of 9th, 10th, and 11th graders who had failed Algebra I. One randomly assigned class used Khan Academy; the other was a traditional math class. The results were promising enough that Negash now is using Khan in all of her 9th-grade algebra classes.

On the day I visited, Negash started both of her classes with a minilecture on linear equations, and then had her students solve for x in 7x + 4 = 18. The classes quickly became fidgety, first as Negash explained the problem, and then as youngsters finished at different speeds. Negash had to urge them to “respect the community of learning.”

But that changed a few minutes later when the youngsters opened their computers—I had noticed the same change in Cadwell’s class—and worked on Khan Academy for the next 75 minutes. I heard an occasional groan of exasperation. “They threw a trick question at me and sent me back to the beginning,” one boy moaned when his streak was broken. But the energy now was directed toward everyone’s screen.

Although everyone in Negash’s classes had taken, and presumably passed, algebra in 8th grade, their math competence ranged from marginal to impressive. In both periods, three or four youngsters claimed a table in the hallway, where they worked silently at lessons on quadrilaterals and complementary and supplementary angles, typical geometry exercises. But other students struggled with addition and subtraction, and one quarter don’t know their multiplication tables, Negash told me. (To keep those youngsters from falling even further behind, she gives them a reference sheet with the multiplication tables on it.) Negash told both classes to work on the Khan module on solving for a variable—a continuation of her minilecture—but Khan’s online prompts were urging most youngsters to first review lessons on lower-level skills.

Some of these youngsters simply “feel safer” doing arithmetic and will move on when they’ve experienced some math “success,” Negash predicted. Other educators had similar takes: Khan “takes away a lot of the fear about math” by letting kids backfill their gaps and then move ahead at their own pace, said Sandra McGonagle, the principal of Santa Rita Elementary in Los Altos, which also is using Khan Academy in its 5th and 6th grades.

“You don’t have to worry about getting something wrong in front of the whole class,” one of Julian’s 5th graders, the girl with blue nail polish, told me.

But in Negash’s classes, the wide range of math abilities is clearly a challenge. Negash sat with one low-performing student for much of the first-period class and with three others in the second period, hoping to encourage some of that “success.” Meanwhile, other students were calling for her help. Two boys were stumped by “adjacent” in a word problem; language issues crop up “every day,” Negash said.

When Negash finally had a moment to consult her Khan dashboard at the end of second-period class, she saw that one youngster had spent 62 minutes solidly working on math, but another had spent only 14 minutes. “It’s hard to figure out a different plan for 25 kids every day,” she sighed.

Gia Truong, superintendent of Envision Schools, said Khan Academy developers had urged her to let Negash’s students “start where they were” in math and move forward. But that’s creating a conflict when some kids are so far behind, she told me: “If you do that, you might never get to the algebra standards” that California students must pass in order to graduate.

“You’re in the new paradigm, but the grading standards are in the old paradigm,” she added.

Getting to Results

Test results at both Los Altos and Envision—the only two pilots to have any results so far—suggest that Khan Academy is working. Los Altos says that among the 7th graders who used the program in 2010–11—all remedial students—41 percent scored “proficient” or “advanced” on the California Standards Test compared to 23 percent the year before. Among 5th graders, 96 percent using Khan were proficient or advanced compared to 91 percent in the rest of the district.

At Envision’s summer-school program, the youngsters in the Khan Academy class spent only half their time on algebra—the rest of their time was on lower-level math skills—and yet still slightly outscored the traditional class, which spent all of its time on algebra.

Both districts are quick to say that it’s far too early to claim success: there were only 115 youngsters in the Los Altos pilot and just 20 at Envision. “It’s enough to say this is promising; it’s not enough to say this is the future,” former Envision Schools officer Brian Greenberg said.

Most observers of the Khan experiment agree that the measure of success must be student achievement. Otherwise, “I’m not very sympathetic,” said Michael Horn of Innosight Institute. As teaching is increasingly differentiated, however, schools may need a different kind of assessment. California’s year-end test can tell which 5th graders meet the state’s math standards; it can’t tell if some of those 5th graders have progressed to trigonometry or pre-calculus, as two Los Altos kids did last year.

But several experts also suggested measuring Khan’s impact by also looking at changes in the distribution of test scores. Khan Academy isn’t likely to close the learning gap because some kids, freed from the teach-to-the-middle plod of the usual classroom, gallop ahead. But Khan would be a success if low-performing kids move ahead too and “shift the bell curve to the right,” said the NewSchool Venture Fund’s Ted Mitchell.

Some other Khan watchers gave a surprisingly strong endorsement to such measures as student engagement and self-confidence, and to soft skills like goal setting and teamwork. “I don’t look at it as just based on the data,” said Mark Goines, the Los Altos school board member whose high-tech background (he helped develop and run TurboTax for Intuit, Inc.) suggests a fine reading of the data. “The kids seem to be happy about learning. That makes me excited,” he said.

What about increasing class size, I asked: Should Khan’s success be measured in part on its ability to increase teacher productivity? In elementary schools, where students generally spend the day with one teacher, increasing class size because of Khan would mean bigger classes in every other subject, too. And Goines, who said he has viewed “hundreds” of online programs, cautioned that there aren’t any comparable products in other subjects, especially in writing.

A fear among advocates of online learning is that slow learners will be abandoned in front of a computer, and a large classroom increases those chances. “It would then become a babysitting tool,” said McGonagle, Santa Rita’s principal.

At Envision Academy in Oakland, teachers say Khan takes away a lot of the fear about math by letting kids backfill their gaps and move forward at their own pace.

Blending Khan

Finally, I asked for “takeaways” from the Khan Academy experience. Greenberg told me that it’s more important that teachers be “nimble” and “entrepreneurial” than that they be tech wizards. All three teachers said they felt comfortable with technology, but that, more importantly, they were risk-takers. Even before she began piloting Khan Academy, Cadwell asked her PTA to buy classroom laptops for the youngsters in her remedial math class. “I figured if I could get them onto some practice sites, I’d figure things out from there,” she said.

Santa Rita’s McGonagle said it was “crucial” to have pilot teachers like Cadwell who can act as avatars for the rest of the district as it expands its blended learning. Cadwell is mentoring other Los Altos teachers this year. They “don’t need training as much as they need time” with the program, she told me (the data are fairly easy to use, but she and Julian asked Khan’s engineers for so much of it that both say they don’t always use it all).

The schools, meanwhile, are holding rollout meetings for parents and are urging parents to join the web site, where they can see the same data as the teachers, including whether little Bobby is really working on math up in his bedroom as he says he is. “It’s not just training the teachers; it’s training the community,” Goines said.

That training shouldn’t end with just learning to manipulate the data, though. It also means learning how teachers can use their time differently, how to work with youngsters who have different abilities, and how to blend Khan into the curriculum, not substitute for it, everyone told me. Cadwell and Negash said that they find gaps in the Khan curriculum, and that it isn’t completely aligned with either California or core-curriculum standards, although Khan is adding lessons to fill the holes.

“You can’t just put a kid down in front of a computer,” Goines said, although the kids I saw in Julian’s, Cadwell’s, and Negash’s classes sure seemed to enjoy it.

June Kronholz is an Education Next contributing editor.

We’ve already released the list of the most-read articles on the Education Next website in 2011. Today we bring you the 20 most-read blog entries from 2011. Happy reading!

20. Florida’s Class Size Amendment: Did It Help Students Learn?
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson summarizes a study of the impact of a class size reduction amendment in Florida.  The study found no detectable benefit from mandated class size reduction–either for students in general or for any student subgroup, racial, ethnic, or level of disadvantage.  Telling schools they must reduce class size—which is very expensive–yields no benefit, the study concludes.

19. The Case for Paying Most Teachers the Same
by Michael Petrilli

In professions like law and medicine, new hires get paid significantly less at the start, then pay rises rapidly–as soon as employees boost their effectiveness and productivity from on-the-job experience. In education, on the other hand, pay rises slowly, even though teachers’ effectiveness plateaus after as little as two (and no more than five) years on the job. So maybe we should pay young teachers more, and older teachers less, than we do now, argues Mike Petrilli. In other words, we should make their pay more alike.

18. Jeb Bush, Melinda Gates, Sal Khan and the Coming Digital Learning Battle
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson warns that we can expect a strenuous, highly politicized debate over the way in which digital learning should be provided:  “blended” learning that takes place within public school classrooms under the tutelage of a highly qualified teacher vs. “online” learning in which students are offered a choice of providers that include not only the blended classroom but also those who offer products exclusively online. “School districts and teacher unions can be expected to fight publicly funded online learning that offers students a choice of taking courses outside their local district school.”

17. The Education School Masters Degree Factory
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson describes a study finding that teachers in Florida with an M. A. degree were no more effective, on average, than teachers who lacked such a degree. He notes “One of the most straightforward ways school districts can obtain cost savings without harming students is to eliminate extra pay for teachers who earn a master’s degree.”

16. Is the Charter School Movement Stuck in a Rut?
by Chester E. Finn Jr.

“As the U.S. charter fleet sails past the 5,000-school and two-decade markers, there is reason to worry that it’s getting complacent, unimaginative, and self-interested,” wrote Chester Finn. “This wouldn’t be the first “reform movement” in the history of education to turn into an ideologically rigid, pull-up-the-gangplank-now-that-we’re-aboard sort of vested interest. But it would still be a great pity.”

15. Ed Next: Poll Top Books of the Decade
by Education Next

To mark Education Next’s 10^th anniversary, we asked readers to help us identify the best books of the past decade. We selected 41 books as contenders and asked readers to vote for the top three. In January 2011, we announced the results: Diane Ravitch’s Death and Life of the Great American School System came in first, E.D. Hirsch’s The Knowledge Deficit came in second, and Linda Darling-Hammond’s The Flat World and Education came in third.

14. The Enormous Economic Returns to a Good Teacher
by Eric Hanushek

Eric Hanushek explains a new report that calculates the value of a good (and a bad) teacher by tracing the economic ramifications of differences in student achievement.  “A teacher at the 85^th percentile … with a class of 20 students generates over $400,000 in economic benefits, compared to an average teacher, for each year that she gets such achievement gains.”

13. No Matter How Hard You Try, You Cannot Deny US Math Performance is Terrible
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson defends a study he authored with Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessman that found that the United States ranked 31st in the world at bringing 15 year olds up to an advanced level of math achievement.

12. Khan Academy Not Overhyped, Just Missing a Key Ingredient – Excellent Live Teachers
by Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel note that most of the hype about the Khan Academy is ignoring its potential to enable the best in-person teachers to reach more students with personalized instruction. “This dual power of technology –both to extend reach of super-instructors boundlessly (no more low-value homework and large-group time) AND to allow reorganization of great on-site teacher time – is worth hyping.”

11. Steve Jobs on Education
by Jay P. Greene

After Steve Jobs died in October, Jay Greene reviewed selected remarks from Jobs on education, including his criticism of teachers unions and his support for vouchers.

10. With a Math Proficiency Rate of 32 Percent, U.S. Ranks Number 32
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson reports on the results of a new study examining the performance of U.S. students in mathematics compared to students in other countries. That information is obtained by comparing student performance on NAEP math and reading tests with the performance of students from across the world on similar examinations.  Only thirty-two percent of U.S. students in the class of 2011 were proficient in mathematics when they were in 8^th grade, placing the United States in 32nd place among the 65 nations of the world that participated in PISA.

9. Nobody Deserves Tenure
by Checker E. Finn Jr.

Chester Finn traces the history of tenure and explains why it makes no sense for K-12 teachers to have it. “it didn’t come down from Mount Sinai—and there are plenty of other ways to safeguard public employees from wrongful dismissal besides guaranteeing them lifetime jobs.”

8. Teacher Accountability: The Next Front in the School Reform Wars
by Michael Petrilli

Mike Petrilli argues that school reformers should focus on teacher tenure reform rather than choice and accountability “After twenty years it’s become clear that choice and accountability are necessary but not sufficient to create the conditions for high-performing systems. They were too indirect; now it’s time to tackle teacher tenure and evaluations head-on. And that means fighting the unions in committee rooms in state capitals.”

7. The Best Books of the Past Decade According to Ed Next Readers
by Paul E. Peterson

In January 2011, after we announced the results of our “Best Books of the Decade” poll, Paul Peterson reflected on the results. Readers had been invited to vote for the three best education policy books of the past decade from a list of 41 books. Over 4000 votes were cast. Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System won the poll by a wide margin, pulling in 22 % of the total.

6. E.D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy and American Democracy
by Marci Kanstoroom

Marci Kanstoroom commented on the announcement that Core Knowledge would align its curriculum with the Common Core standards, and considered the claim by E.D. Hirsch that the standards have the potential to revolutionize reading instruction by embracing the idea that language mastery requires knowledge of history, science, music and fine arts. In a new book, Hirsch explicitly connected the idea of cultural literacy with the civic role of schools.

5. Why Digital Learning will Liberate Teachers
by Michael B. Horn

Michael Horn detailed the many different ways the growth of digital learning will benefit teachers. “The bottom line? Digital learning should liberate teachers’ lives by making the opportunities for success far more frequent, and the opportunities for teachers to pursue what they like and their passions about the teaching profession far more possible.”

4. Is Anybody Up for Defending the Common Core Math Standards?
by Frederick Hess

After trying without success to find an author for an Ed Next article defending the Common Core math standards, Rick Hess took his assignment to the blog, wondering why nobody involved with the standards was willing to make the case for their rigor and quality. “The notion that Common Core proponents needn’t make their case is an affront to democratic values,” he wrote.

3. Are Wisconsin Schools Better than Those in Texas?
by Paul E. Peterson

While debates raged last spring about the prospect of deep spending cuts (and limitations on collective bargaining rights) in Wisconsin, Paul Peterson took aim at a column by Paul Krugman in the New York Times that argued that low-spending Texas has rotten schools. Peterson responded to Krugman by pointing to data showing that if you look at the test scores of each ethnic group separately, Texas’ schools are doing better than Wisconsin’s.

2. Compared to Other Countries, Does the United States Really Do That Badly in Math?
by Eric Hanushek and Paul Peterson

Paul Peterson and Eric Hanushek investigated why U.S. students scored in the bottom half of countries in math on PISA but in the top 10 in math on TIMSS. They found that many industrialized countries that participated in PISA did not participate in TIMSS, which also includes many countries from the developing world.

1. Eighth-Grade Students Learn More Through Direct Instruction
by Paul E. Peterson

Paul Peterson described a study that found that students learned more math and science when their teachers spent more time on lecture-style instruction and less time working on problems.

Washington is at a crossroads on K–12 education policy. Policymakers can 1) continue down the path of top-down accountability; 2) devolve power to states and districts, thereby returning to the status quo of the mid-1990s; or 3) rethink the fundamentals, do something different, and empower parental choice.

The federal government’s involvement in K–12 education has accelerated through the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. The best evidence indicates that this substantially heightened federal role has had only modest impact on student achievement, far short of what had been hoped. It might be that further centralization would yield more benefits, but it is doubtful that more federal control is politically possible, and, in any case, any additional yield is uncertain.

The second option—devolving recently accumulated federal power to the states—underlies recent reauthorization proposals for the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) that allow each state to establish its own accountability system and that require teeth only for the very lowest-performing schools. It is unclear to us how releasing states and school districts from federal accountability and granting them maximum flexibility is anything more than a return to the status quo. It is the regrettable consequence of that approach that motivated increased federal involvement in the first place.

The Koret Task Force at the Hoover Institution (see sidebar, page 16), of which I am a member, believes that an evolved form of the ESEA that retains rigorous accountability is preferable to returning control of public schooling to local public-school monopolies and states, which will fall into old habits all too quickly. But we believe that the best interests of the nation require something other than either a return to the happy days of local school governance or evolutionary improvements to the type of top-down accountability found in No Child Left Behind.

We need a fundamentally new approach.

We propose to reform the nation’s schools on the basis of two principles that have served the nation exceedingly well throughout its history: federalism and choice. The federal structure of our government offers an opportunity to specify the role of Washington strategically, to leverage what it clearly can do best, while allocating to states and locales what they are best suited to do. Our particular view of federalism is disciplined by the laws of economics and empirical experience, a perspective known as fiscal federalism. The second organizing principle is choice. Much has been written and studied regarding choice in education—on charter schools, vouchers, choice among district schools, and much more—but the idea, so powerful in our economy and in other enterprises, including higher education, has rarely been examined in the context of federalism and the appropriate roles of Washington and lower levels of government.

A New Framework

What is fiscal federalism? Fiscal federalism argues that government services are most efficiently delivered if provided closest to the taxpayers or consumers receiving them, and that competition among local governments for residents and taxpayers will improve those services. In the context of public education, the challenge is to identify the areas of constraint for local providers of education services, determine which can be best addressed by state government, and assign the remainder to Washington.

But there is a fundamental flaw in fiscal federalism theory as it applies to education: the ability of taxpaying parents of school-age children to vote with their feet (leave school districts with which they are dissatisfied) is severely constrained for the low-income populations that are most likely to find themselves served by low-performing schools. This lack of geographical mobility for large segments of the population undermines the competitive pressure that low-performing schools and school districts would otherwise expect to face. This leaves those districts vulnerable to the interests of whoever is powerful at the local level, more often than not organizations that represent teachers who are employed by school districts, rather than to the influence of parents and taxpayers.

One way to correct the strong tendency of local school bureaucracies to cater more to adult than student interests is to intervene from above, the course of action taken by Washington over the last 15 years. We argue that this has been only weakly effective while imposing a heavy regulatory burden on schools. We propose instead to create real competition for students and the public funding that accompanies them among the providers of K–12 education services. Considerable research indicates that schools respond to competitive pressure. In a systematic review of 41 empirical studies on this topic through 2002, Columbia University researchers Clive Belfield and Henry Levin found that “a sizable majority report beneficial effects of competition.”

In our proposal, funding must follow students and be weighted to compensate for the extra costs associated with high-need students if schools are to compete for students and if parents are to have real choice. Parents must have the widest possible choice of schools for their children and be armed with good information on the performance of schools. Informed choice that is accompanied by financial consequences for schools will create a marketplace for schooling that will evolve toward greater responsiveness to what parents want, will be more innovative, and will become more productive.

A Role for Washington

The federal government currently funds a wide range of K–12 education initiatives (see Table 1). The task force has identified just four functions that are essential to its role in education: creating and disseminating information on school performance in each classroom and program effectiveness, including information on individual student performance; enforcing civil rights laws; providing financial support to high-need students; and enhancing competition among providers.

Information: The provision of information on the condition of education and on the results of education research is primarily a public service. In such situations, a serious free-rider problem exists: because it is impossible to prevent a class of consumers who have not paid for the information from consuming it, far too little evidence will be produced if it is not supported by an organization with the entire nation’s interests at heart. The free-rider problem is one reason that state and local authorities cannot be entrusted with the task of knowledge production. Furthermore, evidence does not merely need to be produced; it needs to be based on high-quality data. Gathering and auditing data are almost pure public services. Thus, it is easy to justify federal support for research, data gathering, and dissemination of information. Without valid information on the performance of students at each school relative to that of their peers across the country, the entire education enterprise flies blind, leaving parents, teachers, school managers, and policymakers with nothing more than intuition and consensus as the basis for making decisions.

Civil Rights: When state and local actions in education are discriminatory, the federal government should step in to enforce civil rights laws. Acts of unjust discrimination, such as those that would deny a student an educational experience for which the student is qualified based solely on race, gender, disability, or other protected status, are costly to society. Students who fail to be educated may need cash transfers as adults; they might take up crime or engage in other antisocial behaviors. Owing to mobility and society-wide redistribution, we all suffer in these cases. Thus, the federal government, and not merely state and local governments, has an obligation to curb discrimination.

Compensatory Funding: Regardless of whether the underlying cause is disability, lack of English proficiency, or poverty, high-need students are more expensive to educate than other students. Failure to provide additional resources can provide an incentive for other students to move to another school if they are able. The burden that the high-need student produces will thus be disproportionately borne by those who are too immobile to avoid it, most likely other high-need students. The federal government can counteract these inequities through cash transfers. The difficulty is figuring out the right financial supplement and the best mechanism for distributing it.

Title I of the ESEA and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) are designed to disburse funds to states and school districts for the education of high-need students. Rather than the complicated federal schemes under which funds are currently disbursed to districts, funds should be attached to the student. Individual schools would receive federal funds based on student counts, with a weighting formula to adjust for factors such as the increased burden of educating high-need students and for regional differences in costs. Sometimes called “backpack funding,” weighted funding that follows the student has been shown to direct proportionally more funds to schools that serve needy students than traditional distribution schemes.

Choice and Competition: The federal government can and should restrict education monopolies and support school choice for parents and students. The current system, which relies on residential mobility to drive school districts to improve education services, does not work well enough to improve education outcomes or to ensure equity. Such a system consigns the poor and immobile to inferior schools and leaves the control of schools in the hands of those who benefit most from the status quo. The simple feature of eliminating a default school assignment by the school district—thus requiring every parent to engage in school choice—eliminates socioeconomic differences in the likelihood that parents will shop for schools. Further, if parents could exercise school choice through web-based portals that highlight the important variables of school performance, socioeconomic differences in knowledge could be muted. Here, again, the federal government has a role to play, for example, by funding open competitions for designers and implementers of school-choice portals.

Market-based competition cannot prevail in public education unless the consumers of public education can choose where to be schooled. We propose that as a condition of the receipt of federal funds to support the education of individual students, schools be required to participate in an open enrollment process conducted by a state-sanctioned authority. Such a process would maximize the matches between school and student preferences. Unified open-enrollment systems that encompass as many choices as possible from the regular public, charter, private, and virtual school universes are essential to the expansion of choice and competition in K–12 education. These systems have to be designed so that all schools have the same time frame for applications and admission decisions, and so that they cannot be gamed by either schools or applying families.

The federal government has a legitimate role in overseeing the marketplace for schooling, including the architecture of parental choice systems. It is in the interest of society that the concentration of high-need students not increase in particular schools. Choice systems have to be carefully and explicitly designed to avoid students being sorted by race, economic background, and other conditions. Several options exist for ensuring that schools cannot discriminate against groups of students, including a lottery system (currently required in federal regulations for start-up charter schools), controlled choice (in which algorithms are used to maintain balanced enrollment), and a financial or fee supplement attached to students in protected classes.

Charter Schools

To ensure a supply of schools from which families may choose, states should establish a system for authorizing charter schools that enables the charter sector to expand to meet demand; that provides funding under the same weighted formula that applies to all other publicly supported schools; and that offers charter schools access to capital commensurate with district school funding. Where there are charter schools, they are frequently the only alternative to regular public schools for low- and moderate-income families. Relative to statewide averages, charter schools tend to attract a disproportionate number of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch as well as minority students, especially African Americans. Initial test scores of students at charter schools are usually well below those of the average public-school student in the state in which the charter school is located.

Research on the effectiveness of charter schools in raising student achievement presents a mixed picture. In general, charter schools that serve low-income and minority students in urban areas are doing a better job than their traditional public-school counterparts in raising student achievement, whereas that is not true of charter schools in suburban areas. Charter schools do require careful oversight through appropriately funded authorizing bodies, equitable funding via a backpack model, and the opportunity to grow based on their ability to attract students. Fulfilling the latter condition means that states that do not allow charter schools, or that arbitrarily cap their growth, or that turn their authorization over to the very school districts with which charters compete should reform their practices. The Obama administration included these conditions in Race to the Top. They should be incorporated into the reauthorization of ESEA.

Cybercharters and Other Choice Schools

Bringing the provision of K–12 education services into the 21st century by unfettering technology as a delivery mechanism will substantially enhance competition and productivity. Unfortunately, virtual courseware and distance learning providers often must make their sales to school districts rather than to individuals. School districts are likely to be reluctant customers because their operations are disrupted by distance learning. The result is that market demand is suppressed and investment in new technologies for K–12 education curtailed.

Much of the anticompetitive force of local school districts is exercised through requirements that link publicly supported education services to geographical constraints. A leading example is restrictions on cybercharter schools, i.e., schools that offer most or all of their instructional programs over the Internet and do not have brick-and-mortar physical locations where students assemble. To the extent that such schools are allowed to operate at all, they typically do so in the context of charter school laws. These laws include conditions such as a minimum number of hours of daily instruction that do not make sense for courses that are delivered over the Internet, can be taken at a student’s own pace, and frequently define completion in terms of mastery rather than seat time. Further, there is currently no provision in any state’s laws or at the federal level for students to attend cybercharter schools that are out of state in the sense of having no physical place of business within a state. States and school districts should be prohibited from establishing policies that unreasonably interfere with the provision of education services by out-of-state or out-of-district providers, including online charter schools and distance learning providers. They should, instead, make enrollment in such schools readily available.

The federal government has a long history of promoting interstate markets through its authority under the U.S. Constitution’s commerce clause. As the judicial interpretation of the commerce clause has evolved over time, it has come to include the federal authority to nullify state or municipal laws whose object is local economic protectionism (the so-called dormant or hidden commerce clause). The dormant commerce clause could be applied to the provision of education services through the Internet, that is, the federal government could take legal action or support legal claims against states and local school districts that restrict or prohibit access to Internet-based education services that are provided outside district or state borders.

In cybereducation, as in many areas of school administration and performance, it is useful to compare K–12 with postsecondary education. In 2006, the most recent year for which national data are available, postsecondary institutions reported more than 12 million separate distance-learning course enrollments. Two-thirds of all postsecondary institutions offered distance learning courses, and there were more than 11,000 individual programs of study that could be completed entirely online. The contrasts with K–12 education are stark; there were only about 1 million distance-learning enrollments in K–12 in 2007.

Cybereducation for postsecondary students is a national rather than a local marketplace. A student can take a distance learning course from the University of Arizona, and the course credit can apply to graduation requirements at a large number of colleges and universities, without geographical restrictions. Further, if the student has qualified for federal student grants or loans, those are attached to the student, i.e., backpacked. The federal government is indifferent to distance learning versus place-based learning and to geographical boundaries in the provision of financial aid to high-need postsecondary students, whereas in K–12, that aid is funneled through local public-service monopolies that hold captive the students in their geographical catchment area. The federal government also recognizes regional and national accrediting bodies for higher education institutions. By simply shifting its policies on K–12 education to match those it has adopted for postsecondary education, the federal government could provide to parents something nearly every parent wants—the right and opportunity to choose where their child is schooled—and create a powerful engine for innovation and productivity.

Although the promise and potential of parental choice is nowhere more evident than in the realm of technology, the arguments for allowing students ready access to cyberschools extend to interdistrict school choice, charter schools, private schools, and vouchers as well. When combined with the availability of good information on school performance to parents and backpack funding, these options could create a dramatically different landscape for schooling than is currently available in the United States.

Moving Forward

The approach we recommend places the federal government in a central role in providing information and compensatory funding and in promoting a competitive and information-rich marketplace for education services. Mechanisms we espouse, such as student-based funding, open enrollment systems, charter schools, and virtual education, are having some success in breaking open the current system, but they require very special circumstances at the state and local level. We understand that our proposals, if adopted, would represent a fundamental shift in the federal government’s role in K–12 education. An attempt to reauthorize ESEA, IDEA, and Head Start to conform to our recommendations may well fail, in part because what we propose will appeal more to some states than to others. There is nothing wrong with such differences. Indeed, the federalism we espouse is built on the advantage that is conferred to citizens by having government policies and services determined as close to home as possible. There is a legislative way forward consistent with our proposal and federalism, one with a rich legislative history and experience of success at the federal level:

Let states opt out of the statutory and regulatory requirements of ESEA, IDEA, Head Start, and other relevant federal laws in exchange for creating a marketplace of informed choice and competition. Some states will find throwing off the federal yoke in exchange for providing maximum education choice for their citizens politically attractive and viable. Those states can serve as the laboratory for the proposals we have put forward. If these initiatives fail to advance student achievement, social equity, and education productivity, and if they lose the support of a state’s electorate, they will be abandoned, and the state will return to the federal fold. If, instead, some states experience the success we think is likely, other states would find the risk of coming onboard manageable and, we think, face escalating demand from their citizens.

The education system clearly has vast consequences for this nation’s economy, society, and world leadership. The federal government has a crucial role to play in protecting and promoting precisely those national interests that lower levels of government cannot. We believe the most promising approach is to move decisionmaking closer to the consumers of K–12 public education by unleashing pent-up demand and empowering parents to choose schools for their children.

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst is a member of the Koret Task Force on K-12 Education and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution.

The full report of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education is available at www.choiceandfederalism.org.

Several of the articles take readers inside classrooms to see how some much-vaunted policies and innovations (e.g. differentiated instruction, blended learning) are working in practice. Several other top articles look at how the performance of U.S. students compares to that of students in other countries. Quite a few relate to teacher effectiveness and compensation. Only two of the top twenty articles focus on technology and learning.

Which Ed Next authors penned the most articles in our top 20 list? Eric Hanushek leads the pack with 4, followed closely by Ludger Woessman with 3 articles. Paul Peterson, Mike Petrilli, June Kronholz, and Michael Podgursky all wrote 2 articles in the top 20.

While most of the articles on our list were published in 2011, some are oldies that generated new interest this year (including two articles from our archives about teacher pensions and other benefits).

Here are the top 20 articles for 2011:

20. “Gender Gap: Are boys being shortchanged in K-12 schooling?”
by Richard Whitmire and Susan McGee Bailey
In this forum, two experts consider whether, after years of concern that girls were being shortchanged in male-dominated schools, boys are now the ones in peril.

19. “Merit Pay International: Countries with performance pay for teachers score higher on PISA tests,”
by Ludger Woessman
This study finds that student achievement is significantly higher in countries that make use of teacher performance pay than in countries that do not use it.

18. “The Turnaround Fallacy: Stop trying to fix failing schools. Close them and start fresh,”
by Andy Smarick
This article reviews the evidence on school turnaround efforts and concludes that they are not the solution for the nation’s failing schools.

17. “Academic Value of Non-Academics: The case for keeping extracurriculars,”
by June Kronholz
This article looks at links between student involvement in afterschool activities and academic achievement.

16. “An Effective Teacher in Every Classroom: A lofty goal, but how to do it?”
by Kati Haycock and Eric Hanushek
In this forum, two experts debate the best ways to identify effective teachers and to increase the number of effective teachers in high-poverty schools and communities.

15. “Teacher Retirement Benefits: Even in economically tough times, costs are higher than ever,”
by Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky
This study documents the growing gap between high employer pension costs for public school teachers and lower employer pension costs for private sector managers and professionals.

14. “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete? The latest on each state’s international standing,”
by Paul Peterson, Ludger Woessman, Eric Hanushek, and Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadon
This study found that U.S. students rank 32nd among industrialized nations in proficiency in math and 17th in reading.

13. “Fringe Benefits: There is more to teacher compensation than a teacher’s salary,”
by Michael Podgursky
This article examines the ways in which simple comparisons between teacher salaries and salaries of other kinds of workers can be misleading.

12. “Challenging the Gifted: Nuclear chemistry and Sartre draw the best and brightest to Reno,”
by June Kronholz
This feature story takes readers inside the Davidson Academy, a public school in Nevada for highly-gifted students.

11. “Sage on the Stage: Is lecturing really all that bad?”
by Guido Schwerdt and Amelie Wupperman
This study finds that students score higher on standardized tests in math and science when their teachers spend more class time on lecture-style presentations and less time on group problem-solving activities.

10. “When the Best is Mediocre: Developed countries far outperform our most affluent suburbs,”
by Jay Greene and Josh McGee
The first-ever comparison of math performance in virtually every school district in the United States finds that even the most elite suburban school districts produce results that are mediocre when compared to those of international peers.

9. “The Flipped Classroom: Online instruction at home frees class time for learning,”
by Bill Tucker
This article traces the development of “flipped instruction,” in which students view video-taped lessons or access online material at home and then use class time to work through problems and engage in collaborative learning with their teachers.

8. “Valuing Teachers: How much is a good teacher worth?”
by Eric Hanushek
This analysis considers the economic impact of replacing ineffective teachers with effective ones, and estimates the gains to U.S. gross domestic product that would result from boosting academic performance.

7. “Time for School? When the snow falls, test scores also drop,”
by Dave Marcotte and Benjamin Hansen
This article examines the evidence that expanding instructional time is as effective as other commonly discussed educational interventions intended to boost learning

6. “Creating a Corps of Change Agents: What explains the success of Teach for America?”
by Monica Higgins, Wendy Robison, Jennie Weiner, and Frederick Hess
This study examined the work histories of people leading entrepreneurial organizations in education and found that Teach for America alumni were heavily overrepresented.

5. “Teaching Math to the Talented: Which countries—and states—are producing high-achieving students?”
by Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessman
This study compares the percentage of U.S. students with advanced skills in math to percentages of similarly high achievers in other countries, and finds that 30 of the 56 other countries participating in PISA have more students scoring at an advanced level.

4. “All Together Now: Educating high and low achievers in the same classroom,”
by Mike Petrilli
This feature shows how one school is making differentiated instruction work–challenging every child while avoiding segregating classrooms.

3. “All A-Twitter about Education: Improving our schools in 140 characters or less,”
by Mike Petrilli
This article looked at the role Twitter was playing in education policy debates and ranked the top 25 education policy/media tweeters and the top 25 educator tweeters based on their Klout scores.

2. “Future Schools: Blending face-to-face and online learning,”
by Jonathan Schorr and Deborah McGriff
This feature, an early article on blended learning, profiled several charter schools using the hybrid approach.

1. “Evaluating Teacher Effectiveness: Can classroom observations identify practices that raise achievement?”
by Tom Kane, Amy Wooten, John Tyler, and Eric Taylor
This study of Cincinnati’s teacher evaluation system finds that the teachers who receive high ratings from trained evaluators who observe them are also more effective at promoting gains in student test scores.

Congratulations to all of our authors, and stay tuned — next Friday we’ll post the top 20 blog entries from 2011.

-Education Next

Many educators and elected officials, including more than a few members of Congress, regard “No Child Left Behind,” the well-known moniker of George W. Bush’s 2001 education act, as a discredited “brand.” Indeed, the very acronym NCLB is about to be tossed into the dustbin of history in favor of its progenitor, ESEA (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act), or perhaps some new title yet to be devised on Capitol Hill. There are many reasons why NCLB has been discredited, including, to quote Kevin Carey, the “apocalyptic language out there, that standards and tests have ruined American public education, driven the best teachers out of the classroom, etc., etc.”

Yet, as the data presented below demonstrate, NCLB—and the accountability movement it embodied, codified, and symbolized—contributed to a major change in the performance level of American students in math. The data also suggest, however, that the accountability movement has likely reached a point of diminishing (or perhaps even no) returns. While moving on from NCLB is probably essential to produce further growth in student performance, “consequential accountability” was an important and meaningful education reform and ought not be dismissed as a failed initiative.

Debates over the effects and effectiveness of NCLB almost always revolve around national and state scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Not surprisingly, the release in November 2011 of the newest NAEP Mathematics and Reading Report Cards set off a new round of discussion about the impact of NCLB and accountability more generally. Given the ongoing fights surrounding the overdue reauthorization of ESEA/NCLB, the debate over the effects of accountability is more important now than ever.

Remember that NCLB’s system of consequential accountability (in which schools face cascading penalties for failure, e.g., replacement of the school’s principal, reconstitution, closure, etc.) was built upon the experience of many states that had already developed such systems before 2001. There is considerable agreement that states adopting consequential accountability before NCLB experienced more rapid growth in their test scores relative to non-adopting states. However, as Hanushek and Raymond note, as NCLB took hold, all states became “effectively consequential accountability states.” Perhaps not surprisingly, after NCLB, states that were new to the accountability regime experienced faster growth on NAEP assessments than states that had introduced their own accountability regimes before 2001.

The Case of Texas

Texas was one of the first states in the nation to adopt strict and consequential accountability. The Texas experience was fundamental to the framing of NCLB, as George W. Bush took the lessons and practices of Texas along with him when he moved from Austin to Washington. Thus, looking at the growth in NAEP scores in Texas relative to changes in the nation as a whole allows us to tease out some lessons about the effects of accountability on student performance and to speculate about the effectiveness of accountability past, present, and future.

As we look at these data, we should remember that, while NAEP is rightfully viewed as the “gold standard” of assessments, it is not the ideal instrument for detailed statements of cause and effect. We should further keep in mind one of the prime maxims of statistics: Correlation is not causation.

The Remarkable Growth in NAEP Math Scores

It is well known that, as measured by NAEP, American students have improved substantially in math (more in fourth grade than in eighth) and little in reading over the last two decades. Separate and apart from overall averages, there has been continuing concern for the level of skills among racial/ethnic minorities as well as concern for the effects of accountability on low- versus high-performing students (specifically, whether or not NCLB placed so much attention on low-performing students that high-performing students were neglected and suffered as a result). Looking at trends in Texas versus the nation presents some insights into these issues.

Fourth-Grade Mathematics

Consider Figure 1, which graphs the average scale scores on NAEP’s math assessment for fourth-grade students in Texas and in the United States as a whole. The growth in the performance of these students is nothing short of remarkable. Using the very rough rule of thumb that a 10-point change in NAEP scores equals about one year of learning, in 2011 our fourth graders are about two years ahead of where they were in 1992. But, as the figure shows, Texas and the nation marked their peaks of achievement at two distinct points in time.

In 1992, students in Texas were performing at the same level as the students in the nation. In the 1993-94 school year, Texas introduced its system of consequential accountability and, by the time of the next NAEP assessment in 1996, Texas fourth-graders had surpassed their peers nationwide. Between 1992 and 2000, math scores across the nation began to creep up; during the same period, a growing number of states began to adopt accountability systems.

By 2003, NCLB had turned every state into a consequential accountability state, and the rate of increase nationwide in math scores between 2000 and 2007 was remarkable. While Texas students continued to outperform the nation as a whole through 2007, the sharp uptick in national performance after 2000 narrowed the Texas lead substantially. Indeed, the last two assessments, in 2009 and 2011, show no significant difference between fourth graders in Texas and fourth graders nationwide.

We return to these overall patterns later, but first we turn to the performance of three groups of students who served as particular focal points of NCLB and the accountability movement more generally: blacks (Figure 2), Hispanics (Figure 3), and low-performing students (Figure 4), defined here by the cut score identifying those students performing at NAEP’s 10th percentile.

At the beginning of the series in 1992, black and Hispanic fourth-grade students in Texas scored slightly higher than their nationwide peers, while those low-performing students at the 10th percentile in Texas achieved at the same level as those at the 10th percentile nationally.

Between 1992 and 2000, the scores of Texas students in all three groups increased faster than those of their peers nationwide, with the size of the gap between student in Texas and the nation widening to well over 10 points for each group. Between 2000 and 2003, nationwide, the gains for students in each group increased dramatically but then slowed substantially. Gains among Texas fourth graders were sustained over a longer period of time, but also show evidence of little growth since 2005, with Hispanic and the lowest-performing students actually scoring lower in the latest assessments than in 2007.

The growth in fourth-grade math achievement represents one of the most significant success stories in contemporary American education. Again, the reader is reminded that, while correlation is not causation, the introduction of consequential accountability in Texas and then across the nation coincided with impressive spikes in the performance of students in fourth-grade math, and in particular among the students of most concern to NCLB and the accountability movement more generally.

Eighth-Grade Mathematics

NAEP test results for eighth-grade math represent a somewhat weaker reflection of this striking pattern (Figure 5). The first NAEP eighth-grade math assessment was in 1990, at which time Texas eighth graders lagged the nation by 5 points. That gap disappeared by 2000. By 2005, as the strong fourth-grade performers moved into the eighth grade and as the Texas system of consequential accountability continued to gain traction, Texas eighth graders moved past their national peers, producing a gap of 6 points. Whether eighth-grade test scores can continue to grow, given the flattening scores at the fourth grade, is something that remains to be seen.

Among black and Hispanic eighth graders, Texas students started at about the same place as their national peers in 1990. Over time, however, they experienced steady growth in performance, producing a widening gap with the nation. Indeed, the size of the gap for black students (in favor of Texas) has increased from 6 or 7 points before 2000 to 10 points in the last three assessments (Figure 6). The size of the gaps in favor of Hispanic students in Texas has been somewhat more variable, and was not statistically significant before 2000 (Figure 7). But this gap has grown to over 10 points in the last three assessments. Similarly, the cut score defining the lowest 10th percentile has risen more rapidly in Texas than in the nation as a whole (Figure 8), becoming statistically significant in 2000 and almost doubling in size from 2000 (7 points) to the latest assessment in 2011 (13 points).

High-Performing Students

A frequent criticism of the accountability movement and NCLB was that the focus on racial and ethnic minorities and on the lowest-performing students led to a neglect of the nation’s highest-performing youngsters.

Here we define high-performing students as those performing at NAEP’s 90th percentile. Fourth-grade math scores for these students both in Texas and in the nation display sharp increases since 1992 (Figure 9). The cut score for the top performers nationwide stood at 259 in 1992 and steadily rose to 276 in 2011, a gain of 17 points. The highest-performing fourth graders in Texas saw a correspondingly large jump in cut scores from 256 in 1992 to 273 in 2005. (Interestingly, half of that gain occurred between the assessments immediately preceding and following implementation of the state’s accountability system in 1993-94). Since 2005, however, there has been no statistically significant change in cut score for those Texas youngsters, although the national cut score for high performers has continued to rise—producing a statistically significant difference (to the disadvantage of Texas) in the two most recent administrations of NAEP.

Eighth-grade math scores among the highest performers also improved substantially over the period, gaining 14 points nationally and 17 points in Texas (Figure 10). The sharpest gains for these high-performing eighth graders in Texas were between 2000 and 2005, building on the improvement made in math by Texas fourth graders four years earlier. Gains continued thereafter at somewhat slower rates, likely reflecting the slower growth in fourth-grade math skills.

The growth in NAEP scores of the highest-performing students in Texas and the nation essentially mirrors the gains made by student groups that were focal to the policy goals of NCLB. Whatever changes more directly focused on specific target populations apparently spilled over to affect the performance of high performers as well. And just as we saw evidence of diminishing effectiveness in recent years for average, minority, and low-performing students, there is evidence that the spillover effects of accountability on high-performing students are also wearing thin. The recent absence of growth in Texas fourth-grade math skills among these high-performing students may portend the end of a remarkable period of growth among the highest performers in the second-largest state in the union.

The Disappointing Case of Reading Scores

The improvements in NAEP math scores were an unquestionable success for America’s fourth and eighth graders and even more so for students in Texas. However, neither the nation as a whole nor Texas has done nearly as well improving students’ reading skills. Figure 11 shows no significant difference between the reading scores of fourth-grade students in Texas and in the nation as a whole, except in 2003, and minimal improvement across the board. And Texas’s eighth graders have significantly lagged the nation since 2003: by 2 points in 2007 and by 4 to 5 points in every other assessment between 2003 and 2011 (Figure 12).

Accountability and NCLB Were a Success, But…

In 1972, Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldridge proposed a theory of evolutionary change that emphasized what they termed “punctuated equilibrium.” Their core insight was that complex systems will exist in long periods of stasis. Rather than coming in small incremental steps, change is often characterized by abrupt radical transformations caused by events external to the existing system. Perhaps the most dramatic example is the relatively sudden disappearance of dinosaurs associated with a meteor crashing into the Earth and changing the climate. As a result, the dinosaurs’ long reign was replaced by a new equilibrium dominated by mammals.

In 1993, political scientists Frank Baumgartner and Bryan Jones introduced this theory to the study of public policy, and it has since become a common lens through which to view change in social systems. Baumgartner and Jones argued that policy generally changes only incrementally, until some event, such as change in the party control of government or sizable shifts in public opinion, lead to large policy alterations. In their approach, large changes in external conditions (what Baumgartner and Jones term an “exogenous shock”) are often needed to produce change in complex social and political systems.

The pattern of test scores in Texas and the nation suggest that consequential accountability—adopted early by Texas, then by more states, and finally by the nation as a whole—was a shock to the U.S. school system that altered the ecosystem and led to a different outcome than had existed before. Over a relatively short period, math performance in fourth and eighth grade abruptly shifted to higher levels of performance. For example, between 2000 and 2005—the five years spanning the introduction of accountability via NCLB—the average math scale score nationwide at the fourth grade rose by 12 points, roughly a year of learning. In the same period, the average scale score for black fourth graders rose by 18 points, for Hispanic students by 17 points, and the cut score defining the 10th percentile of performance increased by 16 points. The corresponding changes among eighth-grade math scores are small only in comparison: 6 points nationwide, 11 points for black students, 10 points for Hispanic students, and 8 points for those students at the 10th percentile.

To be sure, an important lingering issue is the absence of growth in reading scores in Texas and in the nation as a whole. Many have argued that the foundation for reading, compared to math, is far more dependent on what happens early in children’s lives—before they enroll in school—and that improving reading skills is therefore much harder to accomplish. Whatever the explanation, clearly the absence of growth reflects a failure of the accountability “meteor” to affect reading levels in a fundamental way.

There is once final pattern to note: As would be expected when viewed through the punctuated- equilibrium lens, once the disruption of consequential accountability has wrung all changes out of the system, a new stasis should take hold. Indeed, Texas, an early adopter, led the nation to higher scores and seems to be ahead of the nation in reaching a new plateau where changes are minimal compared to what came in response to the introduction of an accountability system. The nation, which lagged Texas in adopting accountability, now seems to be entering a period of little change in test scores.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, accountability was an exogenous shock that produced radical gains in math if not in reading. But we now need a new shock to prevent a prolonged period of stasis and stagnation. Scanning the heavens for the next meteor, the most likely candidates to come crashing into the school ecosystem are the Common Core and the better measurement of teacher performance. If the United States is lucky, one or both of these shocks will produce yet another major uptick in math scores. If we are really lucky, these shocks will produce upticks in reading and other subject areas as well.

Mark Schneider, a former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, is a vice president at American Institutes for Research and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. This article was commissioned and also published by the Fordham Institute.

Faced with a $30 million shortfall in its $295 million budget for the 2011–12 school year, the Adams 12 school district in north Denver laid off custodians, furloughed teachers, trimmed programs, reduced benefits—and then took its budget scalpel to student activities.

The district dropped middle-school sports, cut back on travel for its high-school teams, and pared $500,000 from the $2 million budget that supports afterschool activities like the Math Olympiad and spelling bee at Centennial Elementary, the technology and drama clubs at Rocky Top Middle School, and the anime (Japanese animation) and Knowledge Bowl clubs at Mountain Range High.

Christopher Gdowski, superintendent of the 42,000-student district, talks hopefully of volunteers stepping in to fill some of the gaps. The YMCA has approached him about taking over some of the sports teams, even offering to buy the used school uniforms and the licensing rights to the school mascots. But some activities may have trouble finding sponsors, he concedes, and teachers union contracts may preclude others from turning to the community for advisors.

“We’re hoping for the best, but we’re fearing the worst,” Gdowski told me.

With school districts struggling to keep their noses above choppy budget waters and voters howling about taxes, should schools really be funding ping-pong and trading-card clubs? Swim teams, swing dancing, moot court, powder-puff football? Latino unions, gay-straight alliances, the Future Business Leaders of America, the French Honors Society, the jazz band, the knitting club? The barbell club at Adams 12’s Niver Creek Middle School?

As it turns out, maybe they should. There’s not a straight line between the crochet club and the Ivy League. But a growing body of research says there is a link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college, and becoming a responsible citizen.

“Honestly, the place that best prepared me for college was the hardwood court of men’s varsity basketball” in high school, Andrew Snow, a University of Michigan senior and pre-law major, e-mailed me recently. “That court taught me hard work, sacrifice, teamwork, humility…and leadership,” he added, plus, “how to deal with people in social situations” and “responsibility off the court [because] if you made a bad decision, someone would see it.”

Artists for Humanities serves 250 teens annually in an intensive arts micro-enterprise program.

Cause or Effect?

The U.S. Department of Education last compiled data on extracurricular activities a decade ago, when it reported that more than half the country’s high-school sophomores participated in sports, that one-fifth were in a school-sponsored music group, and that cheerleading and drill teams, hobby, academic, and vocational clubs each involved about 10 percent of kids.

At affluent suburban schools, the choice of activities can be dizzying. Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb, offered 89 clubs (equestrian, Persian, unicycle…), 26 sports, seven choral ensembles, seven bands or orchestras, a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a yearbook last year.

Whitman’s feeder school, Thomas W. Pyle Middle School, offered even more: 100 activities, including a stock market club, cooking, a math team, and a magic club.

Whitman says that 96 percent of its students go to college; its SAT scores in math and critical reading are 250 points above the national average. That isn’t because it has an equestrian team and a Shakespeare club, of course. The education department data show that kids from families in the top third by income and education are half again as likely to take part in sports and almost twice as likely to participate in music as kids from the bottom third. Almost 80 percent of the adults in Whitman’s zip code are college graduates, and the median household income is three times the U.S. average.

The data also show that kids with the highest test scores are the most active in afterschool activities. Two-thirds of kids in the top quarter of test takers played sports, for example, compared to less than half in the lowest quarter.

So, is there a link? Did kids who joined afterschool activities become good students, or did good students join afterschool activities?

As with a lot of social science research, the findings about extracurriculars aren’t always consistent or conclusive: You can’t randomly assign kids to soccer, after all. But some researchers insist there is a cause-effect relationship between activities and academic success, not just the other way around.

Margo Gardner, a research scientist at Columbia University’s National Center for Children and Families (NSCF), is among them—and certainly not alone. Using data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), and controlling for poverty, race, gender, test scores, and parental involvement, Gardner has calculated that the odds of attending college were 97 percent higher for youngsters who took part in school-sponsored activities for two years than for those who didn’t do any school activities.

The odds of completing college were 179 percent higher, and the odds of voting eight years after high school, a proxy for civic engagement, were 31 percent higher.

Gardner repeated the analysis using propensity-score matching, that is, comparing kids whose profiles suggested they had a similar propensity either to join or sit out afterschool activities. Even within those groups of similar kids, those who participated in activities had better school success rates than those who didn’t.

The National Center for Education Statistics, in its own analysis of the longitudinal or NELS data, found that high-school seniors who were involved in school activities were less likely to cut class and play hooky than kids who weren’t involved. Three times as many had a GPA of 3.0 or higher; twice as many scored in the top quarter on math and reading tests. And 68 percent expected to get a college degree, compared to 48 percent of kids who weren’t involved in school activities.

Other researchers have approached the question differently, but come up with complementary results. Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, looked at college activities as a predictor of success. She rated the résumés of recent graduates who were applying for their first teaching jobs. She gave the highest scores to those people who had been in a college activity for several years, any college activity, and who had attained a level of leadership or achievement (say, MVP on the softball team).

Those with the highest “grit” scores, as she calls them—with the most persistence—turned out to be the best teachers, based on the academic gains of their students. As an added bonus, the “grittiest” scorers also were more likely to stay in their jobs rather than quit midyear.

Duckworth attributes the difference to perseverance rather than talent: There wasn’t any significant difference in teacher effectiveness based on the SAT scores and college GPAs of the job applicants, she calculated. This isn’t just about whether teachers are new, Duckworth told me: People who are persistent and passionate about something, whether cross-country or baton twirling or spelling bees, will carry over that enthusiasm to other parts of their lives.

Similarly, Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business and currently the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, has found a link between high-school sports and girls’ success. Stevenson compared the college-going and labor-force rates between girls who attended high school before the 1972 passage of Title IX and those who attended after. Title IX, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, required high schools and colleges to offer girls and boys the same opportunities to play sports.

Again controlling for age, race, and their state of residence, Stevenson calculated that for every 10-percentage-point rise in the number of girls playing high-school sports in any state there was a 1-percentage-point increase in those going to college and a 1- to 2-point rise in those with jobs. Title IX led to a 30-percentage-point rise in girls’ sports participation, she adds.

The National Center for Education Statistics found that high-school seniors who were involved in school activities were less likely to cut class and play hooky than kids who weren't involved. Three times as many had a GPA of 3.0 or higher.

Engaging Students

Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg, whose book, You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10–25, discusses afterschool activities. He suggested two more reasons for what he believes is a causal link between activities and academic success.

Kids who are involved in clubs and sports spend an extra couple of hours a week with an adult, usually a role model like a drama director or a football coach. “They don’t want to disappoint the coach,” Whitman’s principal, Alan S. Goodman, told me. All he has to do to straighten out a misbehaving athlete is to threaten to talk to the coach, he said: “‘Oh no, don’t talk to the coach,’ they tell me.”

Extracurriculars also make school more palatable for a whole lot of kids who otherwise find it bleak or unsatisfying, Steinberg said. Grades improve not because of what kids are learning in the video club, but because the video club is making them enjoy school more, so they show up more often, find a circle of like-minded friends, and become more engaged in school.

Christopher Gdowski, Adams 12’s superintendent, echoed Steinberg when I asked him what he meant by “fearing the worst” if some afterschool activities are canceled. His district polled thousands of taxpayers as part of its budget process: A huge majority opposed eliminating all activities, but most agreed on trimming the number of activities each school could offer.

Gdowski said he worries that for “some meaningful number of kids,” those activities are what brings them to school. “That’s the hook,” he said, and budget cuts could leave that hook unbaited.

Penny-wise?

After years of steady increases in education spending, and with the expiry of federal stimulus funds, school districts are facing some unaccustomed belt-tightening this year. K–12 spending rose 39 percent between the 1989–90 and the 2007–2008 school years, according to the U.S. Census bureau, and hit $605 billion in 2009, the latest year for which it has reported numbers.

But the National Business Officers Association has calculated that spending is expected to be off $2.5 billion this year from a year earlier. Florida’s 2012 budget cut K–12 spending by 8 percent, or about $540 a student. Arizona cut $183 million from K–12; New York cut more than $1 billion, and Colorado cut $250 million, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The Center on Education Policy surveyed districts in the spring and found that 46 percent expect funding decreases of 5 percent or more in the 2011–12 school year (the poll asked districts about their “total funds available” for the year, excluding federal stimulus monies).

Staff salaries and benefits are taking much of the hit. But as bus routes, textbook purchases, and even cleaning supplies come under budget scrutiny, it’s no surprise that extracurriculars are in for some pain, too.

Diane M. Place, superintendent of the 1,700-student  Towanda, Pennsylvania, school district, told me she received hate mail and “horrendous calls” when she recommended a $30-a-household tax increase to close a $2.2 million gap in her $24 million budget. Instead, she cut the instruction budget by 9 percent and then went after extracurriculars. She eliminated the rifle and junior robotics clubs, JV soccer, majorettes and one cheerleading squad, and halved the funding for the forensics team and Future Business Leaders.

The 1,000-student Salida, Colorado, school district, facing at least a $500,000 budget gap, moved to a four-day week, and then announced plans to cut Key Club, Math Counts, jazz, and weight lifting. Coos Bay, Oregon, planned to let go a Knowledge Bowl coach in the middle school and a forensics coach in high school after the district chopped $44,000 from its activities fund. Cincinnati is thinking of shifting all of its extracurriculars onto a community group, a move it predicted will save $250,000 a year, largely in teacher coaching stipends.

Extracurriculars teach a lot of the skills you need as an adult: time management, leadership. self-discipline, and persistence.

Or Pound-Foolish?

There’s no ready estimate of how much districts spend for extracurriculars: Districts account differently for teachers’ afterschool pay (it can be lumped in with merit pay, says Stephen Frank of Education Resource Strategies), whether they include team buses in the extracurricular budget, how much they depend on parents and booster clubs for field maintenance and stage-set construction, if and how much they charge students to participate, whether they use federal Title I funds for afterschool enrichment, and so on.

Marguerite Roza, who studies school finance at the University of Washington, calculates that districts spend about the same to suit up a youngster to play a sport as to enroll her in a semester of, say, history. A difference is that there are three seasons for sports, but two semesters for history.

Districts increasingly are depending on kids and their parents to fund extracurriculars. State laws, not national policy, determine which school expenses must be taxpayer-funded and which can be charged to students as user fees. California recently settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against dozens of Golden State schools that levied fees for classroom materials, lab fees, and afterschool activities.

But elsewhere, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association counts 33 states where at least some school districts charge athletes anywhere from $25 to $1,500. The band fee at Medina Senior High in Ohio is $200. Arlington, Massachusetts, public schools charge youngsters $405 to join the cheerleading squad and $480 to wrestle. Lakeville, Minnesota, charges $190 to join the debate team and $110 for the chess club.

Many of the best student-athletes, musicians, actors—even cheerleaders and debaters—already are paying lots more than that for private lessons. And some of the most talented spurn their school’s programs in favor of club soccer teams and community orchestras, arguments that budget cutters sometimes cite for trimming extracurriculars.

But Steinberg counters that no one suggests eliminating math classes for mediocre students, or depending on private tutors for calculus. “You could extend that argument out to its illogical extreme,” he said.

At Whitman High, where kids pay a $40 district-wide activities fee, Goodman told me he would rather increase class size than eliminate activities. “You can cope with an extra kid in your class, but at 2:10” when school lets out and intramural basketball is canceled, “what do they do?”

Police statistics offer one answer: Juvenile crime peaks between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Education department data offer another: 31 percent of high-school seniors watched three or more hours of television every weekday in 2004, the last time the department ran the numbers, up from 9 percent in 1992.

Students write songs in an after-school program run by ZUMIX. The program offers young people the opportunity to travel thoughout New England, performing their original songs and engaging with other musicians.

Lessons That Last

Tony Wagner, codirector of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me he did a focus group a decade ago with college students who graduated from a leading public high school in New England. He asked them what “important things” they remembered about high school, three to five years after leaving.

“They described all their experiences in extracurricular activities and sports. This went on for an hour,” he said. But about what the remembered from their academics, “they said, ‘you basically start over.’”

The takeaway, Wagner said, is that extracurriculars “teach a lot of the skills you need as an adult: time management, leadership, self-discipline, and persistence for doing work that isn’t extrinsically motivated.” That dovetails with Wagner’s academic work, which defines the “skills of the future” as including adaptability, leading by influence, and initiative.

“Kids who have a significant involvement in an extracurricular activity have a capacity for focus, self-discipline, and time management that I see lacking in kids who just went through school focused on their GPA,” he told me. Like Gardner and Duckworth, he doesn’t single out football players over the engineering team, or vice versa. The kind of activities “seems not to matter; what matters is the level of engagement,” he said.

I tested Wagner’s conclusion using an updated version of the focus group: I posted a question on the Facebook pages of my college-going sons. I asked their friends what they learned in high school that best prepared them for college, and received answers that were carbon copies of Wagner’s.

No one dumped on high school—“It’s not that I didn’t have fine teachers,” Andrew Snow e-mailed me—but no one credited AP chemistry with preparing them for college, either. In fact, no one mentioned classes at all. Instead, they wrote that extracurriculars introduced them to new ideas and interests, taught them to study more efficiently, developed their social skills, and exposed them to caring adults. “Coach was a maker of honorable men,” wrote Snow.

Justine Mrosak, a first-year medical student at the University of Minnesota, wrote that high school taught her “how to balance my academics with other passions.” Basketball and choir took time, she wrote. “But I didn’t want to give up doing the things that I loved just to get good grades, so I really learned how to schedule my time, prioritize my activities, and make my studying [as] efficient as possible.”

Steven Zuckerman, a pre-law major at the University of Michigan, wrote that “the most valuable thing” he learned was “to challenge my inhibitions by trying new things.” That meant playing sports “I had never tried before,” joining clubs “about things that I never thought would interest me,” and, inevitably, meeting “people with whom I never saw myself connecting.” That curiosity has followed him into college, where he has worked on political campaigns, he says.

I’d rise to the defense of Algebra I any day, and I assume any social scientist would, too. But, leadership, adaptability, social skills? Try a couple years on the school newspaper to learn that.

June Kronholz, a contributing editor, spent four years on her high-school newspaper and 30 years at the Wall Street Journal.

American education has problems, almost everyone is willing to concede, but many think those problems are mostly concentrated in our large urban school districts. In the elite suburbs, where wealthy and politically influential people tend to live, the schools are assumed to be world-class.

Unfortunately, what everyone knows is wrong. Even the most elite suburban school districts often produce results that are mediocre when compared with those of our international peers. Our best school districts may look excellent alongside large urban districts, the comparison state accountability systems encourage, but that measure provides false comfort. America’s elite suburban students are increasingly competing with students outside the United States for economic opportunities, and a meaningful assessment of student achievement requires a global, not a local, comparison.

We developed the Global Report Card (GRC) to facilitate such a comparison. The GRC enables users to compare academic achievement in math and reading between 2004 and 2007 for virtually every public school district in the United States with the average achievement in a set of 25 other countries with developed economies that might be considered our economic peers and sometime competitors. The main results are reported as percentiles of a distribution, which indicates how the average student in a district performs relative to students throughout the advanced industrialized world. A percentile of 60 means that the average student in a district is achieving better than 59.9 percent of the students in our global comparison group. (Readers can find all of the results of the Global Report Card at http://globalreportcard.org. The web site contains a full description of the method by which we calculated the results. For a summary, see the methodology sidebar.)

For the purposes of this article, we focus on the 2007 math results, although the GRC contains information for both math and reading between 2004 and 2007. We focus on 2007 because it is the most recent data set, and we focus on math because it is the subject that provides the best comparison across countries and is most closely correlated with economic growth. Readers should feel free to consult the GRC web site to find reading results as well as results for other years.

The Example of Beverly Hills

It is critically important to compare exclusive suburban districts against the performance of students in other developed countries, as these districts are generally thought to be high-performing. The most wealthy and politically powerful families have often sought refuge from the ills of our education system by moving to suburban school districts. Problems exist in large urban districts and in low-income rural areas, elites often concede, but they have convinced themselves that at least their own children are receiving an excellent education in their affluent suburban districts.

Unfortunately, student achievement in many affluent suburban districts is worse than parents may think, especially when compared with student achievement in other developed countries. Take for example Beverly Hills, California. The city has a median family income of $102,611 as of 2000, which places it among the top 100 wealthiest places in the United States with at least 1,000 households. The Beverly Hills population is 85.1 percent white, 7.1 percent Asian, and only 1.8 percent black and 4.6 percent Hispanic. The city is virtually synonymous with luxury. A long-running television show featured the wealth and advantages of Beverly Hills high-school students (as well as their overly dramatic personal lives). If Beverly Hills is not the refuge from the ills of the education system that elite families are seeking, it’s not clear what would be.

But when we look at the Global Report Card results for the Beverly Hills Unified School District, we don’t see top-notch performance. The math achievement of the average student in Beverly Hills is at the 53rd percentile relative to our international comparison group. That is, one of our most elite districts produces students with math achievement that is no better than that of the typical student in the average developed country. If Beverly Hills were relocated to Canada, it would be at the 46th percentile in math achievement, a below-average district. If the city were in Singapore, the average student in Beverly Hills would only be at the 34th percentile in math performance.

Of course, people don’t think of Beverly Hills as a school district with mediocre student achievement. This is partly because people assume that affluent suburbs must be high achieving and partly because state accountability results inflate achievement by comparing affluent suburban school districts with large urban ones. According to California’s state accountability results, the average student in Beverly Hills is at the 76th percentile in math achievement relative to other students in the state. But outperforming students in Los Angeles, which is only at the 20th percentile in math relative to a global comparison group, should provide little comfort to Beverly Hills parents.

Los Angeles Unified is not the main source of competitors for Beverly Hills students, so the state accountability system encourages the wrong comparison. If Beverly Hills graduates are to have the kinds of jobs and lifestyles that their parents hope for them, they will have to compete with students from Canada, Singapore, and everywhere else. Beverly Hills students have to be toward the top of achievement globally if they expect to get top jobs and earn top incomes.

Results from Affluent Suburbs Nationwide

We can repeat the story of Beverly Hills all across the country. Affluent suburban districts may be outperforming their large urban neighbors, but they fail to achieve near the top of international comparisons (see Figure 1). White Plains, New York, in suburban Westchester County, is only at the 39th percentile in math relative to our global comparison group. Grosse Point, Michigan, outside of Detroit, is at the 56th percentile. Evanston, Illinois, the home of Northwestern University outside of Chicago, is at the 48th percentile in math. The average student in Montgomery County, Maryland, where many of the national government leaders send their children to school, is at the 50th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. The average student in Fairfax, Virginia, another suburban refuge for government leaders, is at the 49th percentile. Shaker Heights, Ohio, outside of Cleveland, is at the 50th percentile in math. The average student in Lower Merion, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, is at the 66th percentile. Ladue, Missouri, a wealthy suburb of St. Louis, is at the 62nd percentile. And the average student in Plano, Texas, near Dallas, is at the 64th percentile in math relative to our global comparison group.

All of these communities are among the wealthiest in the United States. All are overwhelmingly white in their population. All of them are thought of as refuges from the dysfunction of our public school system. But the sad reality is that in none of them is the average student in the upper third of math achievement relative to students in other developed countries. Most of them are barely keeping pace with the average student in other developed countries, despite the fact that the comparison is to all students in the other countries, some of which have a per-capita gross domestic product that is almost half that of the United States. In short, many of what we imagine as our best school districts are mediocre compared with the education systems serving students in other developed countries.

Pockets of Excellence

While many affluent suburban districts have lower achievement than we might expect, some districts are producing very high achievement even when compared with that of students in other developed countries. For example, the average student in the Pelham school district in Massachusetts is at the 95th percentile in math. That means that if we were to relocate Pelham to another developed country in our comparison group, the average student in Pelham would outperform 95 percent of the students in math. That’s very impressive.

Of course, Pelham is a small district that is home to Amherst College, among other institutions of higher learning, and serves a rather select group of students. But not all college-town school districts are equally high achieving. As we have already seen, Evanston, Illinois, is at the 48th percentile in math in a global comparison. Palo Alto, California, the home of Stanford University, is at the 64th percentile. And the average student in Ann Arbor, Michigan, home to the University of Michigan, is at the 58th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. So, the 95th percentile math achievement in Pelham is outstanding, even for college towns.

Spring Lake, New Jersey, has a similarly impressive record of having the average student at the 91st percentile in math. It is a very small and affluent community on the New Jersey shore that has somehow escaped the influence of Snooki and The Situation. Waconda, Kansas, a small rural community, also is at the 91st percentile. Highland Park, Texas, an affluent community near Dallas, is at the 88th percentile.

Interestingly, of the top 20 U.S. public-school districts in math achievement, 7 are charter schools (some states treat charter schools as separate public-school districts). And most of the 13 traditional districts remaining are in rural communities rather than in a large suburban “refuge” from urban education ills.

Pools of Failure

In total, only 820 of the 13,636 public-school districts for which we have 2007 math results had average student achievement that would be among the top third of student performance in other developed countries. That is, 94 percent of all U.S. school districts have average math achievement below the 67th percentile. There aren’t that many truly excellent districts out there.

Of the 13,636 districts, 9,339, or 68 percent, have average student math achievement that is below the 50th percentile compared with that of the average student in other developed countries. Most of our large school districts are well below the 50th percentile. This is especially alarming, because these lower-performing large districts comprise a much greater share of the total student population than do the relatively small higher-performing districts.

The average student in the Washington, D.C., school district is at the 11th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. In Detroit, the average student is at the 12th percentile. In Milwaukee, the average student is at the 16th percentile. Cleveland is at the 18th percentile. The average student in Baltimore is at the 19th percentile in math relative to students in other developed countries. In Los Angeles, the average student is at the 20th percentile. The average student in Chicago is at the 21st percentile in math. Atlanta is at the 23rd percentile. The average student in New York City is at the 32nd percentile in math. And in Miami-Dade County, the average student is at the 33rd percentile in math.

Not 1 of the largest 20 school districts is above the 50th percentile in math relative to other developed countries. Those districts contain almost 5.2 million students or more than 10 percent of the country’s schoolchildren. The rare and small pockets of excellence in charter schools and rural communities are overwhelmed by large pools of failure.

Previous Research

The Global Report Card is not the first analysis to compare the performance of U.S. students to international peers. Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011) used a very similar method to compare the performance of students in each state to students in other countries and arrived at similarly gloomy conclusions. Using state NAEP results for 8th-grade students and PISA results for 15-year-olds internationally, the researchers focused on the percentage of students performing at an advanced level in math. In almost every state, they found that we had far fewer advanced students than most of the countries taking PISA. They also narrowed the comparison to white students in the U.S. and to students whose parents had a college education to show that even advantaged students in the U.S. failed to achieve at an advanced level in math relative to their international peers. More recently, Hanushek et al. updated their analysis to examine the percentage of students in each state and across countries performing at the proficient level in math and reading.  The results were similarly disappointing.

The main difference between the GRC and the Hanushek et al. analyses is that in our study we push the comparison down to the district level. By focusing on white students and children of college-educated parents, Hanushek et al. clearly mean to convey that even students in elite suburban districts have mediocre achievement. Our contribution with the GRC is to name the districts so that people do not indulge the fantasy that their suburb’s record is somehow different from the disappointing performance of others with advantaged students in their state.

There are other important differences between the GRC and the Hanushek et al. analyses. We incorporate test results for U.S. students in all available grades (typically grades 3 through 8 and grade 10) rather than focusing on the grade closest to the 15-year-olds in the PISA sample. We could have focused only on 8th-grade results, as Hanushek et al. did, but in doing so we would have greatly reduced the number of test results on which we were doing the calculations for school districts. We preferred to gain precision in estimating the achievement in each district by increasing our sample size rather than restricting the sample to 8th graders in order to gain comparability in the age of the students under review.

The GRC analysis also differs from those of Hanushek et al. in that the latter focus on students performing at the advanced or proficient level, while we focused on the average student performance in both math and reading. Hanushek et al. concentrated on advanced or proficient performance because they were trying to compare our best students with the best abroad to show that even our best are mediocre. We did the same by highlighting the results for elite suburban school districts. Focusing on the average also avoids any dispute about how “advanced” or “proficient” are defined across different tests.

Gary Phillips at the American Institutes for Research has also conducted a series of analyses comparing state achievement on NAEP to international performance on a different international test, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Phillips arrives at somewhat less gloomy conclusions about U.S. performance, but that is because the countries included in TIMSS differ from those covered by PISA. Hanushek et al. rightly note that PISA provides a much more appropriate comparison for the U.S.: “Put starkly, if one drops from a survey countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, and New Zealand, and includes instead such countries as Botswana, Ghana, Iran, and Lebanon, the average international performance will drop, and the United States will look better relative to the countries with which it is being compared.”

This has sparked a debate among researchers about whether TIMSS or PISA provides a better set of countries against which we should compare the U.S. The Global Report Card circumvents this dispute by developing its own set of countries against which we compare U.S. students. The comparisons provided by TIMSS and PISA depend on which countries decide to take each test each time it is administered. And PISA scales its scores against the results for members of the OECD, which excludes countries like Singapore while including countries like Mexico. Our comparison group depends on PISA results, but it is also based on objective criteria, like per-capita GDP, to identify a set of developed economies that can be reasonably compared with that of the U.S. Our comparison group is a significant improvement on the self-selection of countries that choose to take a test as well as an improvement upon arbitrary membership in an organization like the OECD.

No Refuge

The elites, the wealthy families that have a disproportionate influence on politics, clearly recognize the dysfunction of large urban school districts and have sought refuge in affluent suburban districts for their own children. But the reality is that there are relatively few pockets of excellence to which these families can flee.

In four states, there is not a single traditional district with average student achievement above the 50th percentile in math. In 17 states, there is not a single traditional district with average achievement in the upper third relative to our global comparison group. And apart from charter school districts,  in over half of the states, there are no more than three traditional districts in which the average achievement would be in the upper third.

The elites in those states have almost nowhere to find an excellent public education for their children. But state accountability systems and the desire to rationalize the lack of quality options have encouraged the elites to compare their affluent suburban districts to the large urban ones in their state. These inappropriate comparisons have falsely reassured them that their own school districts are doing well.

This false reassurance has also perhaps undermined the desire among the elites to engage in dramatic education reform. As long as the elites hold onto the belief that their own school districts are excellent, they have little desire to push for the kind of significant systemic reforms that might improve their districts as well as the large urban districts. They may wish the urban districts well and hope matters improve, but their taste for bold reform is limited by a false contentment with their own situation.

But the elites should not take comfort from the stronger performance of affluent suburban districts relative to large urban districts. As the Global Report Card reveals, even our best public-school districts are mediocre when compared with the achievement of students in a set of countries with developed economies.

Of course, the Global Report Card does not isolate the extent to which schools add or detract from student performance. Factors from student backgrounds, including their parents, communities, and individual characteristics, have a strong influence on achievement. But the GRC does tell us about the end result for student achievement of all of these factors, schools included. And that end result, even in our best districts, is generally disappointing.

Jay P. Greene is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush Institute. Josh B. McGee is vice president for public accountability initiatives at the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

PHOTO: Ms Marianne Heikkikä teaches physics in Tikkurila High School in Vantaa, Finland

American teachers unions are increasingly the target of measures, authored by friends and foes alike, intended to limit their power, or even eviscerate them. Looking at this scene, one would never guess that the countries that are among the top 10 in student performance have some of the strongest teachers unions in the world. Are those unions in some way different from American teachers unions? Do unions elsewhere behave differently from American teachers unions when challenged to do what is necessary to improve student performance? To explore these questions, I compare teachers and their unions in Ontario, Canada and Finland with their U.S. counterparts.

In the United States, the modern labor union grew out of bitter strife between workers and owners in the early years of the 20th century. The Wagner Act, passed in 1935, guaranteed workers the right to organize and strike. Modern labor relations date from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which modified the Wagner Act mainly by defining the rights of employers in the framework it had provided. These laws applied only to workers in the private sector.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts reflected the mass-production systems that the United States embraced more fully than any other industrial nation. In this arrangement, management figured out how the work was going to get done; workers were regarded as interchangeable; and skilled craftsmanship was minimized. The “skill” was in the machine, not the person operating it. And because the work was largely unskilled, pay was low.

The Wagner and Taft-Hartley Acts gave workers the right to organize to bargain for wages and working conditions. They also obligated the unions to defend their members against management when conflicts arose. The assumption was that the relationship between the union and management would be adversarial; the laws provided the rules under which that adversarial relationship would be conducted. Courts later ruled that the unions and management could not collaborate.

In northern Europe at that time, the mass-production system was not so widely embraced, the era of the craftsman did not abate, and work was less routinized and rule-bound than in the United States.

After World War II, management and owners in many Western European countries wanted to deny communism any opportunity to gain ground among workers, and so they gave labor a seat at the table. Thus three “social partners”—government, labor, and management—would frame social policy together, as equals. In many countries, the law also provided for work councils made up of workers elected by their peers at the firm level to adjust the national agreement to local conditions.

Indeed, in countries with labor parties in Europe today, it is not unusual for the labor party, when in power, to put a brake on wage growth in order to forestall inflation, or to resist calls for more benefits when productivity growth does not justify increased benefits.

In many European countries, by law, workers sit on the boards of directors of major firms. When that happens, workers sometimes offer to hold wages steady or even reduce them if management agrees to invest the savings in capital or in research and development. Workers understand that if the firm cannot make the investments required to be more competitive, it may resort to layoffs.

Senior European executives are often puzzled when their American counterparts talk about a desire to greatly weaken or even eliminate trade unions. The Europeans, while often eager to acquire more power vis-à-vis their unions, do not generally talk about eliminating them. They view the unions as an instrument for giving a voice to a key sector of the society. They generally believe that if labor were not provided a voice through the union, it might eventually become a direct threat to democratic capitalism.

The Case of American Teachers

Prior to the 1960s, the National Education Association (NEA) was an alliance of educators, not a teachers union. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT), founded in 1916, had always been a union, but it was much smaller, and not particularly militant. But, during the ’60s, teachers’ compensation declined significantly relative to that of other occupations requiring a similar level of education. In the racial battles of the era, teachers were sometimes made the target of public anger in a way that was unprecedented and seemed quite threatening. As a result, the AFT became appealing to many teachers to whom it had not been before. The NEA shed those members who were not classroom teachers and traded its identity as a professional organization for a new one as a trade union.

The newly energized teachers unions appealed to the AFL-CIO for help in getting state legislatures to pass laws that put teachers on much the same footing as those in unions representing workers in the private sector. The AFL-CIO was stronger then than it is now, and the teachers could put more feet on the ground in legislative political campaigns than any other single constituency. This was particularly true in the northern part of the country, where organized labor was strongest at the state level.

In the beginning, the lawyers that management hired were happy to negotiate contracts that closely followed common practice in the industrial sector. Some of these provisions simply made a teacher’s life a little easier, like lunchtime free of student responsibilities. But others had major consequences for the quality of teachers and for instruction. Among the most important of these provisions were those defining the hours of work, using seniority to determine who could transfer to jobs within the system as they opened up, and the order in which people would be laid off when staff size was reduced.

Many now think of these seniority-based rules as the result of collective bargaining. But such practices began in other industries in the 1920s—before there was any national legislation mandating collective bargaining—and were part and parcel of the mass-production workplace. Management wanted rules that were easy to administer, and, in a world in which all workers were treated as interchangeable, such a system worked well for managers in most industries.

In the case of the schools, management’s attorneys, like management’s attorneys everywhere, saw these demands as reasonable, because they were easy to administer and cost the district no money. But the organizational costs were substantial. Although the unions knew this, the school boards’ attorneys apparently did not. Thus, school boards and management gave away control over who could be hired in a school, who could fill leadership positions, how much time was available for professional development, and much, much more.

Few citizens were aware of the significance of the concessions that school boards made to unions over the years. Both school boards and the unions greatly feared teacher strikes, knowing that there were few things that could anger parents as much as not being able to put their children in school when they had to go off to work in the morning. While the teachers unions could seek higher compensation at the negotiating table, they quickly discovered that they would lose public support if the school board sought the authority to pay for raises by floating new bonds, for example. So the unions and the boards often settled their differences by negotiating changes in “working conditions,” thereby avoiding teacher strikes.

When times were tough, it was often easier for both management and labor to negotiate increased benefits, particularly retirement benefits, than increased cash compensation, because, again, the public focused on current costs rather than on obligations that would not have to be paid for many years. The unions typically negotiated benefits that would be most attractive to their longest-serving members. Over time, the compensation package got more and more expensive but less and less attractive to talented young people making decisions about which occupation to pursue.

Over the course of several decades, teachers unions in the United States progressively constrained management’s ability to select staff, promote staff, deploy staff, discipline staff, train staff, and let staff go when they were not doing the job. In the context of American-style labor relations, and the politics of American schooling, this was probably inevitable. The adversarial model of labor relations embodied in the national labor laws initially applied only to the private sector, but when President Kennedy, in an executive order, allowed members of the federal workforce to organize, state legislators adopted the private-sector model for public employees. Public-sector unions were told by their attorneys that their members could sue if they did not defend the teachers in court against school district management seeking to deprive them of their jobs. So the union lawyers routinely made it as difficult as possible to fire teachers, even those widely regarded as incompetent. Given the adversarial nature of the relationship, there was never any real possibility of teachers accepting joint responsibility for student performance outcomes, as was the case with unions in northern Europe, where the relationship has never been hostile. In the United States, student performance was the responsibility of management, not labor.

Today, American teachers want to be viewed as professionals, but their experience tells them they need their membership in the union and the clout that they have in the state legislature, even in states that do not allow them to organize. Without the unions, they might lose ground economically and be at the mercy of management that often does not treat them as professionals.

The Collaborative Model

These dynamics set the stage for the current confrontation in the United States between the unions and the teachers on one side and, increasingly, school district management, legislatures, governors, and the public on the other.

The unions are perceived to be standing in the way of badly needed reforms, protecting incompetent teachers, and putting up barricades to prevent the erosion of pension benefits the public can no longer afford. But as the unions come under increasing assault, teachers see themselves being blamed for system failures that should be attributed to others, including school boards, parents who are not supporting their children’s learning, and politicians who preside over a society in which an ever-greater number of students come to school unprepared to learn. It is hardly surprising that teachers and their unions are circling the wagons to salvage as much as possible of what they have gained since the 1960s.

It does not have to be this way.

Finland is famously a world leader in student performance. It also has some of the strongest unions in the world, and that includes its teachers unions. More than any other advanced industrial nation, Finland’s education strategy is to give teaching the highest status and make it the most desirable job in the country. The winning combination is top-quality recruits, first-rate training, and teachers with the kind of autonomy—read trust—typically accorded to other professionals but rarely to teachers. There are no top-down accountability systems in Finland, with their implied distrust of teachers, of the sort that dominate the discussion in the United States. It is hard to say which came first, the trust in the teachers or their quality, but they clearly go hand in hand. Finland’s teachers and their unions have not engaged in confrontational politics; the unions have been at the reform table for years as essential social partners.

In Ontario, Canada, one of the great PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) success stories, the current provincial administration took over from one that had instituted a province-wide curriculum and matching assessments, along with a tough accountability system. But the Conservative government that put these policies in place had gone to war with the teachers and their unions, cutting funding, reducing professional development by half, and taking out television ads demonizing teachers. The result was a highly polarized environment, with teachers resorting to strikes and lockouts to defend what they could of their prerogatives, and no improvement in student performance.

The administration that took office in 2003 reversed course. Premier Dalton McGuinty took the view that he was not going to get the kind of student performance he was looking for if he did not have the trust and confidence of the teachers, and he would never gain their trust by continuing the war that the previous administration had begun. He and his top aides spent a lot of time to talking with teachers in classrooms and school lunchrooms. They brought teachers and their unions to the table for discussions of education reform strategy and won their trust by listening hard to what the teachers had to say and then providing the needed support. The reform strategy that they adopted assumed that teachers wanted to do the right thing but lacked the capacity to do it. So the McGuinty government focused on building that capacity. By trading trust for manifest distrust, the McGuinty government laid the base for the collaborative relationship with teachers and their unions that it saw as the prerequisite for improving student performance.

American Translation

What can one reasonably conclude from this comparative description of the development of unions in the United States and northern Europe and the approaches taken to reform in Canada and Finland?

My conclusion is that the current impulse to curtail the influence of the teachers unions may return some powers to management that over the years have gravitated to the unions. But that victory is likely to come at the price of deeply alienating many teachers from the larger cause of education reform.

Teachers know that if they lose their unions during a fiscal crisis, they will have no protection at all as long as state and local officials face enormous pressure to cut teaching jobs, compensation, and benefits. A determined, widespread effort to weaken or destroy the institution teachers are counting on to protect them economically will force them into retirement or to hunker down and wait in brooding resentment for a change in the political weather.

As we have seen, this is precisely what happened when they came under a similar attack in Ontario, Canada. That is hardly a formula for successful education reform.

The alternative is the one taken by Ontario’s premier McGuinty: convince the teachers that they have the trust of government and enlist their unions in seeking to improve student performance. As the Ontario case shows, this does not mean that government has to give the unions whatever they want. McGuinty certainly did not do that: He made it clear where his bottom lines were. He insisted on a strong curriculum, competitive standards, and new assessments that matched them. And he was not about to break the bank.

But he invited the teachers and their unions to the table. He listened to them with respect. Where they told him that they needed support to improve outcomes for students, he supplied it wherever he could. The mutual trust that grew out of this relationship persuaded the teachers and unions to make concessions that they would never have willingly made under savage attack.

Reforming the Contract

Management will have to revisit the provisions of the contracts that school boards have negotiated over the years. Concessions will be necessary on unfunded retirement plans and on the use of seniority to govern many aspects of school-district operations. The more-or-less-unexamined move to apply the structures of the Wagner Act and the Taft-Hartley Act to the public sector needs to be reassessed. State labor legislation that mimics national labor law in its insistence on a confrontational stance between management and labor should be rewritten.

Getting to where these issues can be productively addressed requires first a relationship of trust between government and labor. Each side says that experience has taught them not to trust the other party, and so each states that trust depends on the other side making the first concessions. Someone has to go first.

Some will argue that the possibilities represented by the European model are simply not available in the United States. But our politics are not so different from those of Canada. The idea of American exceptionalism—the notion that the United States is so different from the rest of the world that lessons learned elsewhere do not apply here—had a certain allure when we were far ahead of our competitors. But it is very dangerous for a country that is falling further and further behind.

Marc Tucker is president of the National Center on Education and the Economy and editor of Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems (Harvard Education Press, November 2011).

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

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

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

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

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

Need to Take Action

Anthony Miller and Susan Patrick

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

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

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

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

Teachers and Teaching

Mona Mourshed

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

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

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

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

Gwang-Jo Kim

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

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

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

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

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

Choice and Autonomy

Shengchang Tang

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

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

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

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

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

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

State Standards and Accountability

Avis Glaze

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Learning

Paul Pastorek and Tony Bennett

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

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

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

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

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

Tea Leaves or Tea?

Jari Lavonen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As a “practitioner” of sorts, I’ve wondered the same thing for 15 years. The K–12 school sector generates little empirical research of any sort. And of this small amount, most is targeted to policymakers and superintendents, and concerns such matters as the effects of class size reduction, charter school attendance, or a merit-pay program for teachers. Why is there virtually no empirical education research meant to be consumed by the nation’s 3 million teachers, answering their questions?

Those 3 million teachers generate about 2 billion hour-long classes per year. We do not know empirically which “teacher moves,” actions that are decided by individual teachers in their classrooms, are most effective at getting students to learn. Why doesn’t this kind of research get done?

Mr. Gates has part of the answer. Money. For 2011, the Microsoft R&D budget is $9.6 billion, out of total revenue in the $60 billion range. The U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) represents only a fraction of total education research, but its budget gives some perspective: IES spends about $200 million on research compared to more than $600 billion of total K–12 spending. So, 15 percent to upgrade Microsoft, 0.03 percent to upgrade our nation’s schools. And while Microsoft’s research is targeted to the bottom line ($8.6 billion is on cloud computing, the profit center of the future), IES spends almost nothing examining the most important aspect of schools: the decisions and actions that individual teachers control or make.

One IES project is the What Works Clearinghouse (WWC), established in 2002 to provide “a central and trusted source of scientific evidence for what works in education.” The WWC web site lists topic areas like beginning reading, adolescent literacy, high school math, and the like. For each topic, WWC researchers summarize and evaluate the rigor of published studies of products and interventions. One might find on the WWC site evidence on the relative effectiveness of middle-school math curricula or of strategies to encourage girls in science, for example.

But there is almost nothing examining the thousands of moves teachers must decide on and execute every school day. Should I ask for raised hands, or cold-call? Should I give a warning or a detention? Do I require this student to attend my afterschool help session, or make it optional? Should I spend 10 minutes grading each five-paragraph essay, 20 minutes, or just not pay attention to time and work on each until it “feels” done?

And the WWC’s few reviews of research on teacher moves aren’t particularly helpful. A 63-page brief on the best teaching techniques identifies precisely two with “strong evidence”: giving lots of quizzes and asking deep questions. An 87-page guide on reducing misbehavior has five areas of general advice that “research supports,” but no concrete moves for teachers to implement. It reads, “[Teachers should] consider parents, school personnel, and behavioral experts as allies who can provide new insights, strategies, and support.” What does not exist are experiments with results like this: “A randomized trial found that a home visit prior to the beginning of a school year, combined with phone calls to parents within 5 hours of an infraction, results in a 15 percent drop in the same misbehavior on the next day.” If that existed, perhaps teachers would be more amenable to proposals like home visits.

By contrast, a fair number of medical journals get delivered to my house. They’re for my wife, an oncologist. They’re practical. In each issue, she learns something along these lines: “When a patient has this type of breast cancer, I currently do X. This study suggests I should do Y.” There is a bit on medical policy, but most of the information is meant for individual doctors in their day-to-day work.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t conduct research on education policy. My own work has certainly benefited from it. For example, the quasi-experimental study by economists Tom Kane and Josh Angrist on Boston charter schools, which compared the winners and losers of charter admission lotteries, helped change the Massachusetts law that had blocked the creation of new charters. The change enabled me to help launch a new charter school, MATCH Community Day. My point is simply that relative to education policy research, there is very, very little rigorous research on teacher moves. Why? Gates knows it’s more than a lack of raw cash; it’s also about someone taking responsibility for this work. “Who thinks of it [empirical research on teachers] as their business?” he asked. “The 50 states don’t think of it that way, and schools of education are not about [this type of] research.”

I agree, but I contend there are a number of other barriers. The first is a lack of demand.

The Demand Side

Why aren’t teachers clamoring for published research? One reason is that researchers generally examine the wrong dependent variable. Researchers care about next August (when test scores come in, because they can show achievement gains). Teachers care about that, too, but they care more about solving today’s problems (see sidebar, page 26).

A second issue is that researchers don’t worry about teacher time. Education researchers often put forward strategies that make teachers’ lives harder, not easier. Have you ever tried to “differentiate instruction”? When policy experts give a lecture or speak publicly, do they create five different iterations for their varied audience? Probably not.

The return on investment for teacher time and the opportunity cost of spending it one way rather than another is rarely taken into account. In what other, valuable ways could teachers be spending the time taken up with building “differentiation” into a lesson plan? They could phone parents, tutor kids after school, grade papers, or analyze data. Much research implies that teachers should spend more time doing X while not indicating where they should spend less time.

Teachers don’t trust research, and understandably so. There’s a lot of shoddy research that supports fads. Experienced teachers remember that “this year’s method” directly contradicts the approach from three years ago. So they’d rather go it alone. Newer teachers pick up on the skepticism about research from the veterans.

Unlike medical research, teacher research rarely examines possible side effects, and whether they are short-term aggravations or can be expected to persist. Imagine that a teacher reads an article arguing that students benefit from being asked “higher-order questions.” She begins doing that. Some students, surprised at this new rigor, are frustrated. Some students throw up their hands and give up. Misbehavior ensues.

Student frustration is probably a fairly predictable short-term side effect of asking higher-order questions. If she isn’t being properly warned, a teacher might quickly abandon this technique.

For all these reasons, the 3 million teachers aren’t forming picket lines to demand research.

Do We Know What Works?

Neither policy camp, reformers nor traditionalists, care much about research into teacher moves, either. Some traditionalists see teaching as an art, one that cannot be subjugated to quantitative analysis (“every teacher is different”). Others aren’t averse to research; they simply don’t see it as a priority. They’d prefer that limited resources be used to fight poverty, not to improve students’ day-to-day classroom experiences.

Meanwhile, some reformers argue “we already know what works,” and we just need to scale it.

As part of the “reformer” community, I find this troubling. From charter opponents like Diane Ravitch to supporters like education secretary Arne Duncan, there’s agreement that “some charter schools work.” Furthermore, there’s strong evidence that the charters that succeed tend to be “No Excuses” schools. So do we know what works?

I’m the founder of one of those charter schools; our high-school students have the highest value-added gains of all 340 public high schools in Massachusetts. I’m also the founder of a small teacher residency program that supplies teachers to schools like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program). Many of us would agree to a very different proposition: We know teacher moves “that work” to some extent, enough to create very large achievement gains, but we don’t know teacher moves well enough to get our college graduation rate near where we’d like it to be. Nor do we know how to help teachers do these moves more efficiently, so that their jobs are sustainable.

Without a massive uptick in our knowledge of teacher moves, we’ll continue on the current reform path. That path is a limited replication of No Excuses schools that rely on a very unusual labor pool (young, often work 60+ hours per week, often from top universities); the creation of many more charters that, on average, aren’t different in performance from district schools; districts adopting “lite” versions of No Excuses models while pruning small numbers of very low performing teachers; and some amount of shift to online learning. Peering into that future, I don’t see how we’ll generate a breakthrough.

Bridging the Divide

The final barrier to research on teacher moves is the divide between practitioners and researchers. My analogy is a 5th-grade dance. Boys stand on one side. Girls stand on the other. There is very little actual dancing. In this case, teachers are off to one side, and quantitatively oriented researchers are on the other.

After a while, the boys go into the hallway and talk about video games. Similarly, quantitative researchers find the transaction costs of setting up experiments are too high and give up on doing research about teacher actions. They take their problem-solving marbles and find other data sets to crunch.

Girls see that the boys aren’t around anymore. So they dance with each other. Teachers and school leaders, if they like to learn, do so through observation of and conversation regarding perceived “best practices.” There aren’t many practitioners who care about rigorous empirical research.

With all these barriers, is there much hope? There’s not going to be a pot of gold in this funding environment. If research on teacher moves matters, we need to be more creative about catalyzing the low-hanging fruit. That would mean identifying practitioners who are unusually interested in randomized research, and connecting them with doctoral students who are unusually interested in teachers and teaching.

What does it look like when practitioners and researchers dance together? Here is one example.

In July 2010, I asked Harvard economist Roland Fryer for some help. My research question was fairly simple: Do teacher phone calls to parents “work”?

In our school, teachers proactively phone parents. Typically, the parents have not been heavily involved in their children’s previous schools. We believe that phone calls to parents help teachers generate improved decorum, effort, and ultimately learning from students. (Sometimes the calls to parents are supplemented with teacher calls to students) These parent relationships seem to be linked to very high parent-satisfaction ratings, and in turn we have thought those were related to our high test-score growth. Truth be told, however, we just don’t know whether this is a productive use of teachers’ time.

Fryer enlisted two doctoral students, Shaun Dougherty and Matt Kraft, from the Quantitative Policy Analysis in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. These two did an amazing job, operating skillfully within our school to do the randomized study. From their findings:

“On average, teacher-family communication increased homework completion rates by 6 percentage points and decreased instances in which teachers had to redirect students’ attention to the task at hand by 32%.”

This collaboration worked for several reasons. First, we have a teacher residency embedded in our charter school, so I had 24 student teachers who could be fairly easily randomized during the summer school session. Second, a professor I trusted chose the graduate students who would conduct the research. These guys were, in my view, dispassionate. I’ve tried to work before with grad students who have strong preexisting beliefs about what they’ll find (typically with a “progressive” lens), and it was difficult to gain real knowledge. (Researchers often feel the same way about practitioners, that we’re searching for marketing, not truth). Also, Fryer paid them a stipend; in my experience, graduate students working for free, and only for credit of some sort, don’t always follow through.

The cost of the two graduate students was not the only expense. In our experiment, at any given time, there were 16 classrooms in action. The researchers needed to hire 16 observers to carefully code student behavior for a few weeks. The total bill was around $10,000. Kraft and Dougherty found a Harvard grant of $1,000. The rest I needed to pay.

Once we’d designed the experiment, I needed to explain it to my team: the principals of our high school and middle school, and the student teachers who were involved. These are people I know well, and they generally trust me. Still, this buy-in phase required expending both time and “relationship capital,” a resource that gets spent down and must be built back up over time. Using student teachers was also of benefit. It would have been tough to randomize our regular teachers. Their belief in the efficacy of parent communication is so strong I suspect many would have doubted the value of changing their normal routines.

There were other costs to the experiment. The head of our teacher-prep program spent many hours handling the experiment’s complex logistics, including a permission slip for parent consent. He could have spent those hours coaching these student teachers, which is the main task I was paying him to do.

All of these issues reflect transaction costs: finding the right people and then doing the right study well takes time, effort, and money.

Researching Teacher Moves

Think of the Human Genome Project. When the project started, scientists didn’t know how many genes there were; now they believe the number is 20,000 to 25,000.

We don’t know how many teacher moves there are. The number is certainly high but not infinite, maybe 200, 2,000, nobody knows. Presumably, there are some unusually high-yield teacher moves across all contexts, some moves that are high yield but only in specific situations or contexts, and other less powerful moves. There is undoubtedly lots of interaction effect among many moves. Mapping all of this might be called the Teaching Move Genome Project, and at the beginning it would be a scary undertaking.

Absent this work, what do we have? Perceived best practices, often buttressed by observation or nonrandomized studies. In his best-selling book Teach Like a Champion, Doug Lemov describes 49 teaching moves he has observed in the nation’s top charter schools. At the University of Michigan, Deborah Ball and her colleagues are close to unveiling a list of 88 math teacher moves. Lee Canter’s Assertive Discipline and Jon Saphier’s Skillful Teacher discuss scores of moves, like the “10-2” rule (have kids summarize for 2 minutes in small groups after 10 minutes of teacher-led instruction), much of it supported by nonrandomized research. On the basis of its observations of effective teachers, Teach For America (TFA) promotes 6 teacher behaviors and 28 component parts, like “plan purposefully” or “set big goals”; none are specific moves.

What would a series of randomized trials look like? Let’s apply it to Lemov’s 49. Imagine a group of trials that would ask the questions, Do all of the moves work? Are any particularly successful? How does the degree of teacher buy-in interact with effectiveness? What are the “costs” of these moves?

An example from Lemov is “Right Is Right.” The idea is that when a kid gives an answer that is mostly right, the teacher should hold out until it’s 100 percent correct. Lemov describes various tactics the teacher can use to elicit the 100 percent right answer from the student (or first from another student, before having the original student repeat or extend the correct answer).

The obvious cost of implementing this move is time. These back-and-forths add up to lost minutes each period when other topics are not being discussed. A less skillful teacher might be drawn into a protracted discussion, when her next best alternative (simply announce the 100 percent right answer, and move on) might work better. We just don’t know.

Back in 2003, education researchers David Cohen, Stephen Raudenbush, and Deborah Ball argued that “one could make accurate causal inference about instructional effects only by reconceiving and then redesigning instruction as a regime, or system, and comparing it with different systems.” That suggests “a narrower role for survey research than has recently been the case in education, and a larger role for experimental and quasi-experimental research. But if such studies offer a better grip on causality, they are more difficult to design, instrument, and carry out, and more costly.”

Still, we need a better grip on causality. So who would undertake this cost?

A Proposal

Once again borrowing some terminology from medicine, I propose a typology of trials, delineating phases in a continuum.

Phase 1 trials would be small, nongeneralizable empirical studies of teacher moves. These could be randomized, single-subject, or regression discontinuity, but the dependent variable would not be year-end test scores. Instead, we’d look for next-day or next-week outcomes: measurable effects on student behavior, effort, or short-term learning.

Who would decide what moves to test? Some would be proposed by established authors and thinkers in the teaching field. Some would come from the nation’s 3 million schoolteachers, possibly with crowd sourcing to identify the most-promising ideas. Some would come from academic researchers, particularly those from other fields, like psychology, who may offer unusual insights. But for the next level, testing competing ideas, I’d suggest we draw heavily on teacher opinion, particularly a group of teachers selected for their stated willingness to try new methods (if they are supported by research).

Phase 2 trials would test promising teacher practice from Phase 1 on a larger, more varied teacher pool to see if the next-day outcomes held up, probably across different types of schools. Again, the dependent variable is short-term student response.

Phase 3 trials would be randomized trials in which teachers combine multiple moves that emerge from Phase 2. In the end, our bottom line is student learning, and Phase 3 trials are combinations of moves that are measured to see if they bolster year-end student learning gains.

Medical researchers have found that treating some illnesses requires a drug “cocktail,” that is, no one medicine by itself works as well as the combination of several. The same approach might work in education: it could be that individual teacher moves by themselves cannot create measurable year-end achievement gains in students, but combining many together can.

My proposal is that each of the nation’s 1,200-plus schools of education and teacher prep programs conduct one randomized trial on a teacher move each year: Phase 1, Phase 2, or Phase 3. They’d do that by recruiting alumni into a network of experienced teachers willing to participate. The advantage is that once you pay the one-time transaction costs of finding these teachers, the ongoing expenditures related to persuading them to participate, and securing permission from families and principals, decline.

Once that network existed, it would function like a laboratory. Various Phase 1 experiments could be run through it, with small numbers of teachers at first, so that many experiments could be run concurrently. Larger numbers of teachers would be included in more promising Phase 2 validation experiments. Of course, there would be selection bias in terms of which teachers are willing to be participate in this sort of work, and other imperfections. But in the end, experiments could build on proven results from previous ones. Multiple ed schools would combine their networks for Phase 3 trials.

By itself, no single experiment would be that important. Instead, it would be like cancer research: thousands of people each trying to answer small questions in a very rigorous way…which would add up to promising treatments.

The goal is an affordable system for conducting teacher research that teachers would actually consume, that would address both the implementation challenges and the high transaction costs for researchers and practitioners in creating such research. Until that exists, I’ll see you at the 5th-grade dance.

Michael Goldstein is the founder of MATCH Charter School and MATCH Teacher Residency, in Boston.

The PTA has worked to advance social changes that improved the lives of young people, including championing the creation of child labor laws, reorganizing the juvenile justice system, and improving a variety of children’s services. But today, its orientation to K–12 issues is most aptly described by education analyst Charlene Haar as an “echo…of the teachers unions.”

Moreover, it has fallen on hard times. For example, many PTAs have withdrawn from the national organization, forming local Parent Teacher Organizations that no longer send dues to the national PTA. Membership in the national organization declined from more than 12 million in 1965 to around 5 million in 2010.

Truth be told, few in today’s K–12 education reform movement look to the PTA to fight for dramatic change or engage in direct conflict with the public education establishment. Education historian William Cutler explains in Parents and Schools that “educators and most school board members prefer to think of the parent-teacher association as an extension of the educational establishment, ‘an auxiliary to the public school,’ as the Los Angeles County Board of Education put it in 1908.”

Among today’s advocates for young people are nonprofit insurgent groups that challenge the education establishment by organizing, educating, and mobilizing parents in a variety of roles and in different ways, empowering them to engage in K–12 reform efforts. This organizing generates collective, durable power that advances the interests of K–12 education consumers—especially parents—rather than education producers.

Some organizations direct their activities only to district and/or charter school issues, such as improving teacher quality and effectiveness, developing new public charter schools, or closing and transforming failing district schools to create new high-quality schools of choice. Other organizations focus on the private school sector and issues such as using taxpayer-funded scholarships, or vouchers, or tuition tax credits to enable children to attend private schools. Still other organizations undertake cross-sector approaches like educating and mobilizing parents so that they are empowered to choose a quality school for their child, whether it be district, charter, or private.

In short, these advocacy groups empower parents to make their voices and choices a primary catalyst of school reform.

This piece limits its focus to three organizations that use parent mobilization and advocacy to catalyze district sector and charter sector reform: Parent Revolution, Education Reform Now, and Stand for Children. I do not consider others engaged in private school parent mobilization and empowerment or those using other approaches to educate or mobilize parents, e.g., GreatSchools.org, which provides information to parents on school quality and rankings.

These three organizations are similar in many ways, but differences in their legal structures affect the scope of their parent mobilization and advocacy strategies, activities, and tactics. The piece closes by presenting a framework for thinking more generally—one might say strategically—about different operating models for parent advocacy and organizing and by raising some key questions about the future of these efforts.

Parent Revolution

When the California Parent Empowerment Act—known for its parent trigger provision—became law in 2010, the Los Angeles–based nonprofit Parent Revolution had achieved one of its key legislative goals. The act allows at least 51 percent of all parents whose children attend a failing California school to petition the local school board to undertake one of several reform options. Among the options are closing a school and reopening it as a charter school; bringing in new staff and then exercising some control over staffing and budgeting; keeping school staff but firing the principal; and closing the school and sending students to a better school. The president of the California Federation of Teachers, according to the Wall Street Journal, called the parent trigger a “lynch mob provision.”

Parent Revolution supports parents in transforming their children's schools through community organizing.

Parent Revolution’s executive director is Ben Austin, former Los Angeles deputy mayor to Richard Riordan, senior advisor to Rob Reiner and First 5 California (the state’s comprehensive early-childhood initiative), aide to President Bill Clinton, and member of the California State Board of Education. Austin believes the parent trigger law “creates an entirely… new way of thinking about education reform. [It gives] parents the power to advocate for children.” These “new tools” no longer doom “parents to accept[ing] systemic failures for generations.” Parent Revolution is incorporated as a 501(c)(3). It has a small staff of around a dozen individuals, a mix of grassroots organizers and political activists.

Founded in January 2009, its mission is to “transform public education rooted in what’s good for kids—not grownups—by empowering parents to transform their own children’s low performing schools through community organizing.” Parent Revolution’s motivating belief is that power must be in the hands of the only people who do not have an inherent conflict of interest in education: parents. Other stakeholders have a natural and primary self-interest to pursue.

Parent Revolution organized the first campaign to “pull” the parent trigger in a Los Angeles–area district, using its staff to work with a field team of parents under the banner of McKinley Parents for Change. These parents knocked on the doors of other parents living in the Compton school district, inviting them to sign a petition to convert McKinley Elementary School to a charter school.

McKinley is a K–5 school serving nearly 500 students, 60 percent Hispanic and 40 percent African American. It is in the bottom 10 percent of schools statewide, having made adequate yearly progress only once since 2003 under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. It scored 1 out of 10 on the California “similar schools” ranking, meaning that the school is worse than almost all similar California schools.

Although the group had signatures from 275 of 442 parents, 62 percent of those with children in the school, the Compton school board voted 5–1 against the McKinley charter proposal, citing a variety of technicalities. The matter sparked a lawsuit and precipitated the involvement of the California State Board of Education, which wrestled for months with the law’s implementation. Eventually, the board reached a consensus on many issues, including how to draw up petitions and verify signatures, satisfying groups as diverse as Parent Revolution and the California Teachers Association. As of July 2011, McKinley remains a low-performing district-run school.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles County education officials gave its approval for Celerity Educational Group (the nonprofit charter-management organization whose petition to reopen McKinley as a charter school the Compton board denied) to open a new K–12 charter-school campus for 220 children. The new school is housed at Compton’s Church of the Redeemer, whose pastor, Kerry Allison, sees education reform as the civil rights movement of this century. One of Pastor Allison’s colleagues—Pastor K. W. Tulloss of Weller Street Baptist Church in Los Angeles—is the board chair of Parent Revolution.

Despite widespread community support, especially from African American and Latino parents, Parent Revolution has harsh detractors. Journalist Robert Skeels called it “a poverty pimp and privatization pusher collecting a check from plutocrat foundations.” But Los Angeles schools superintendent John Deasy described the trigger to a group of young people as a sad commentary on the state of K–12 schools: “It is a big shame on us [school administrators]. If we’re not going to do it [improve schools], they [parents] have to do it.”

Mississippi, Connecticut, and Ohio now have some form of a parent trigger law. Officials in at least a dozen states are interested in a version of a parent trigger, including Chicago’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel.

The controversy surrounding enactment of the Connecticut law may prefigure the battle ahead for trigger advocates. An internal document prepared off the record for American Federation of Teachers union activists and accidentally posted online explains how union lobbying in Connecticut worked to undermine a full version of the trigger. Plan A was “Kill Mode” and Plan B was “Engage the Opposition.” Since the union could not kill the bill, they worked to dilute it. The new law eliminates parent petition drives, creating instead school governance councils with parent, teacher, and community representation that provide advice only and have no governing authority to trigger a takeover. In the words of the Wall Street Journal, “Engagement meant pressuring legislators vulnerable to union muscle. That’s most of them—and the AFT’s muscle worked.”

When the California Parent Empowerment Act—known for its parent trigger provision—became law in 2010, the Los Angeles-based nonprofit Parent Revolution had achieved one of its key legislative goals.

Education Reform Now

In January 2010, the New York State legislature rejected legislation that would have lifted the cap of 200 charter schools allowed in the state. The action was part of several being considered by the legislature as it tried to improve the state’s chances of receiving $700 million in federal funds under the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition (RttT). Opposed to lifting the cap was the United Federation of Teachers, the New York City union affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers. In a blunt assessment of the union’s role in dooming New York’s initial RttT application, the New York Daily News headlined, “They damned the kids: Teachers’ union and its lackeys sank bid for federal funds.”

A second round of RttT competition with a June 1, 2010, deadline provided an opportunity to target the legislature with a campaign to lift the cap. The strategy was straightforward but would be difficult to execute. One individual involved with the campaign explained, “Until the charter movement began to develop its own political operation and build a counterweight to the teachers’ union, it could never be successful in Albany, regardless of the results the schools produced.”

While many charter support and advocacy organizations in New York City and state had diverse agendas and perspectives, one campaign would need to unite them all, with one organization leading and executing the campaign. After much discussion, all the parties agreed that Education Reform Now (ERN) would be that lead organization, working with the New York Charter School Association, the New York City Charter School Center, and several charter management organizations.

In New York, many charter supporters and advocacy organizations with diverse agendas united under the banner of Education Reform Now, headed by school reformer, Joe Williams.

ERN is a national organization founded in 2006, with state affiliates in California, Colorado, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin. It has a national board overseeing state affiliates, a strong donor base, both 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) structures, and a political action committee (PAC) called Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), with a separate board but shared staff with its related organizations. ERN’s mission is to orchestrate “a powerful chorus of voices within the education policy debate advancing a true agenda of reform [that includes]…every child having…a quality public education.”

The individual coordinating the overall effort was Joe Williams, executive director of DFER. The New York Times recounts an incident involving Williams when Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew M. Cuomo was seeking donors from “certain members of the hedge fund crowd…what he heard was this: Talk to Joe. That would be Joe Williams, executive director of a political action committee that advances…a favorite cause of many of the wealthy founders of New York hedge funds: charter schools.”

The plan to raise the cap had four components: paid media, free media, field and grassroots organizing, and a strong lobbying effort in Albany. Joe Williams hired as campaign director Bradley Tusk, who managed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2009 reelection campaign.

A key aspect of the grassroots campaign involved organizing the parents of the 40,000 children in charter schools as well as the 40,000 on charter school waiting lists. ERN built a field operation similar to a political campaign. It hired a staff that developed a canvassing and phone system and set up e-mail and fax capabilities along with an issue visibility program. The field plan included daily targets for parent visits, parent recruitment, parent activities, education events, lobbying, and an advertising and social media campaign.

Charter-school financial supporters were willing to fund the campaign and ask friends for additional support. An article in the New York Times reported, “Hedge fund executives are thus emerging as perhaps the first significant political counterweight to the powerful teachers unions…. They have been contributing generously to…a multimillion dollar war chest to lobby…for a bill to raise [the cap].”

Boykin Curry, a partner in Eagle Capital Management and founder of two New York charter schools, commented on the change in mind-set among his colleagues, “A lot of hedge fund and finance people in New York had decided that politics was too dirty and focused on their philanthropy. I think there’s an awakening now that we can be a force in Albany, but we’ve got to play a tougher game than before.”

Passing the bill entailed working first in the state senate with Senate Democratic conference leader John Sampson. After the bill to raise the cap to 460 schools from 200 passed by a margin of 45–15, attention focused on the state assembly. Speaker Sheldon Silver, an ally of the teachers union, vehemently opposed the bill. The ERN strategy was to frame the issue as an effort by teachers unions to keep New York from winning RttT rather than targeting specific members in a negative way.

ERN hired a staff that developed a canvassing and phone system and set up e-mail and fax capabilities along with an issue visibility program.

Over the course of the campaign, the phone and canvass program reached legislators in multiple ways: nearly 9,000 postcards were sent, more than 16,000 voice mails were left, and 23 face-to-face visits were logged. A concerted editorial-board campaign targeted major newspapers along with media buys to educate the public and state legislators, focusing almost exclusively on New York City and Albany. High-profile supporters were recruited, including former president Bill Clinton, candidate and now governor Andrew Cuomo, the Reverend Al Sharpton, and U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan.

The bill finally passed the assembly 91–43 and was signed by Governor David Paterson on May 28, in time for the RttT application deadline of June 1. On August 24, U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan announced that New York was among the 10 finalists to win the competition, receiving $700 million in funding. Secretary Duncan credited the legislature’s lifting the cap with helping to secure the award.

In 2010, ERN reported spending $6.6 million in lobbying expenses in New York State, split almost evenly between its (c)(3) and (c)(4), with another $41 million in (c)(3) expenditures directed to organizing and polling expenses, which the state does not consider lobbying. During that same time period, the New York State United Teachers reported $4.9 million in lobbying expenses. For the first time, ERN outspent the teachers union in lobbying expenses, which along with other activities helped win the fight to raise the New York charter cap.

Stand for Children

June 1, 1996—Stand for Children Day—marked what its organizers claim is the largest rally for children in U.S. history, in Washington, D.C., at the Lincoln Memorial, with around 300,000 participants. Stand for Children now has national offices in Portland, Oregon, and Waltham, Massachusetts, and state affiliates in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, and Washington.

Stand’s CEO is Jonah Edelman, who along with Eliza Leighton cofounded the organization after Edelman studied different community-organizing and -advocacy organizations, moving to Oregon to test and further develop the Stand approach. (Leighton eventually left Stand to complete a law degree at Yale and works as director of strategic initiatives for Casa de Maryland, a Latino advocacy and assistance organization.)

Stand for Children organized a blue umbrella rally for a rainy day fund in 2010. The organization trains "everyday people" to become leaders who unite to improve programming for children, especially in the K-12 arena.

Edelman considers himself a second-generation civil rights leader “who grew up with these incredible parents who had been public servants all their lives.” Marian Wright Edelman, his mother, was the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar and is president and founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. His father, Peter Edelman, clerked for former Supreme Court justice Arthur Goldberg, was a close aide to Robert F. Kennedy, and served as a senior official in the Clinton administration until resigning over differences with the administration on the 1996 welfare reforms.

Stand is legally incorporated nationally as a 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4), with each organization having its own board and each state affiliate also having its own PAC. Affiliates are under the legal umbrella of the national organization and its respective boards, though each has advisory and other groups that provide counsel on specific issues.

Its (c)(3) is called Stand for Children Leadership Center and trains “everyday people” to become leaders who unite to win improvements in children’s programs, especially in the K–12 arena. The center’s web site contains resources on how to turn out individuals for meetings, plan effective community forums, choose a winning issue, educate decisionmakers, engage in lobbying to elicit a commitment from a legislator, and so forth. Its (c)(4) is a membership organization called Stand for Children, which uses grassroots action to convince elected officials (and voters) of the merits of specific legislation or policy.

Stand’s 2010 and 2011 work in Illinois on teacher effectiveness illustrates how the three distinct legal entities inform, educate, and advocate for specific legislative proposals. The (c)(3) organized and trained community members, educating them, policymakers, and the general public on school reform and teacher effectiveness issues. The (c)(4) targeted mainly legislators, although efforts were also made to convince voters to get their representatives to support the legislation. The PAC raised $3.5 million in 2010 and judiciously spent about $600,000 in support of state lawmakers running for office who would help forge the bipartisan consensus that led to the passage of the legislation. Stand leveraged its resources and activities through a partnership with Advance Illinois, a statewide 501(c)(3) K–12 education-reform advocacy organization. Other state and local organizations also joined the partnership.

Edelman characterizes Stand’s strategy by saying, “We go in…for the long term.” In Illinois, Chicago teachers union president Karen Lewis called the work of Stand—especially its PAC funds—as “pretty much union busting.” Chicago Democratic state senator Kwame Raoul commented that Stand’s cadre of lobbyists and cash “were making a clear statement that ‘If you were not willing to stand with the children, they would find somebody who would.’”

In 2011, Time magazine named Edelman one of the nation’s 11 most influential education activists, “poised to shake things up,” commenting further that with “formidable political fundraising prowess, Stand for Children is delivering results and changing how politicians think about grass roots education reform.”

Dimensions of K–12 Advocacy

Unlike the PTA, Parent Revolution, Education Reform Now, and Stand for Children are insurgent organizations that exist to challenge the conventional power arrangements of the K–12 public education system, organizing parents at the grassroots level to advance a school reform agenda. Thus far, all three organizations have been successful in raising funds to support their efforts. As 501(c)(3) entities, these organizations derive a significant portion of their revenue from foundations and individual donors. In addition, Stand has a fee-for-service arrangement for training state affiliates, which are responsible for raising their own operating funds. Both Stand and ERN raise their (c)(4) and PAC money from individual donors, who do not receive a tax deduction for contributions. Stand projects its 2011 budget will be around $22 million, nearly double its 2010 budget. Though the long-term financial outlook for the three organizations is difficult to predict, there are no immediate threats to their revenue sources.

While differences in the organizations’ legal structures have implications for their strategies, activities, and programs, three key elements create a framework for understanding their diverse operating models: a value proposition; civic mobilization; and coordinated action.

Value proposition: This includes a mission statement and core beliefs, as these inform the organization’s desired impact. It also describes the sector focus of the organization’s work, what types of parents it will mobilize, and a geographic focus. Finally, it provides a way to measure progress over time so the organization and its stakeholders can determine whether the intended results are being achieved.

An important issue in developing the value proposition is who defines it. Does a strong board of directors or advisors drive the process, with an executive focused on execution? Is it created from the bottom up, with a board affirming the consensus of the group? Or is there some combined approach?

Civic mobilization: This effort is a “call to action” whereby the organization seeks to build a cohesive group of parents who support the value proposition and fight to achieve and defend it. The objective is a tightly knit and inclusive network of like-minded activists who challenge the K–12 status quo.

Mobilization includes building relationships with other allies and partner organizations that broaden support for the coalition’s civic base. The advocacy organization engages in many outreach, education, and training activities to prepare its members and civic partners for coordinated action.

Coordinated action: The organization undertakes on-the-ground activity that pushes against resistance to change. It thereby alters present power relationships and changes existing policies and practices.

At the tactical level, activities include demonstrations, letter and e-mail campaigns, testifying at hearings convened by policymakers, public awareness campaigns, and other forms of public education and lobbying. These tactics are limited by the legal structure of the organization, for example, whether it is a 501(c)(3), 501(c)(4), or PAC.

Integrating these three elements creates each organization’s unique operating model: its programs, activities, capabilities, relationships, finances, goals, and metrics. Those who run these organizations must align, manage, and execute within this context.

Insurgent organizations like the ones described here seem to hold significant promise for mobilizing parents to advance an agenda that goes far beyond today’s PTA, whose critics, in the words of William Cutler, describe it “as a company union—part of the problem, not the solution. [It gives]…the illusion of parental influence, while discouraging the formation of community groups that might be more aggressive about the need for change.”

Ironically, the advocacy and organizing approach of these organizations mirrors the early work of the PTA, which was part of a nascent progressive political reform movement that changed the world of child welfare and children’s education programs. Are these groups heirs to that tradition?

Stand for Children exists to challenge the conventional power arrangements of the K-12 public education system, organizing parents at the grassroots level to advance a school reform agenda.

And there are other questions to be answered.

• How will opponents reorient their organizing prowess and financial resources to strike back against reform-oriented parent mobilization efforts?

• Will K–12 education philanthropy continue to support  reform-oriented advocacy organizations or move to support some new reform du jour?

• Will the national organizations with state affiliates begin to step on each other’s toes or work directly at cross-purposes, and will competition for philanthropic resources constrain their effectiveness and impact?

• Will tensions and conflicts emerge between those groups focused more on micro issues, like cultivating savvy consumers of choice, and those focused on macro issues, like legislation and electoral politics?

• Will organizations working in the charter and district sectors become openly hostile to those working in the private school sector, with its emphasis on vouchers and tax credits?

• Or will a “grand agreement” unite them under a banner of parent empowerment that places family educational choice at the core of K–12 reform, regardless of what educational option a parent chooses for a child—district, charter, or private?

Only time will tell.

Bruno V. Manno is senior advisor for K–12 education reform at the Walton Family Foundation and former U.S. assistant secretary of education for policy.

Parent Revolution, Education Reform Now, and Stand for Children Leadership Center are 501(c)(3) grantees of the Walton Family Foundation; the opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.

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

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

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

Student Proficiency on NAEP

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

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

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

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

Comparing U.S. Students with Peers in Other Countries

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

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

What It Means to Be Proficient

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

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

Crossing the Proficiency Bar

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

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

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

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Proficiency in Reading

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

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

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

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Ethnic Groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Does It Mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eighteen-year-old Tyriq Jones was fairly blunt about the mess he had gotten himself into before transferring to the Hampton, Virginia, online school where I approached him one chilly day this spring. “I got in trouble. I was playing around. I got backed up” in high school, he said. He had failed three classes in his junior year and, faced with the prospect of repeating a year, probably would have dropped out instead, he told me. “I didn’t want that kind of pressure.”

People who deal with at-risk teenagers say dropping out is not an event; it’s a process. Youngsters miss school and get “backed up” in class, so they miss more school because they’re bewildered or embarrassed, and fall further behind. Seeing few ways to recover, “they just silently drop out,” said Richard Firth, who showed me around the Hampton school and two others in Richmond that are using online learning to derail the cycle.

In the three years the 75-seat Hampton Performance Learning Center has been open, it claims to have graduated 91 students. There’s a waiting list for admission, so the school opened a second shift, which also is near capacity. Sherri Pritchard, the school’s social-studies “learning facilitator”—there are no teachers and no principal here—said 95 percent of her online students pass Virginia’s end-of-course history test, which would put them well ahead of both the Hampton school district’s and state’s pass rates.

And Tyriq: He has only a C average after a year at the Hampton PLC, he said, but he graduated in June—on time—and plans to enlist in the Army, his goal all along.

The New Alternative

Online K–12 education made its appearance in the mid-1990s, largely as a resource for bright students who had no access to accelerated classes. It moved next into core high-school courses where districts found themselves with teacher shortages—math, science, foreign languages—and has been growing bumptiously, and in a dozen directions, ever since.

The International Association for K–12 Online Learning, which goes by the acronym iNACOL, estimates that 82 percent of school districts now offer at least one online course. Thirty-two states have virtual schools where online offerings range from one class to an entire high-school curriculum, according to an annual report on online learning published by the Evergreen Education Group, a Colorado consultancy. At the Florida Virtual School alone, students collectively took 220,000 classes online in 2009–10 (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features, Summer 2009). Twenty-six states have at least one full-time online school, and perhaps 225,000 youngsters were full-time online students this year, says John Watson, editor of the Evergreen report.

During a recent visit to the Richmond PLCs, Congressman Eric Cantor chats with Dr. Donna Scott.

Two of the fastest-growing trends in online education converge in the Performance Learning Center project, which is why I called Communities in Schools, a nonprofit dropout-prevention program that devised the model in Georgia in 2002.

The PLCs call themselves an alternative to traditional schools and distance themselves from the credit-recovery factories that many districts have opened to boost their graduation rates ahead of state and federal sanctions. (Indeed, a few PLC students enroll for the chance to accelerate.) But the schools do offer struggling kids like Tyriq a chance to make up courses they failed in traditional teacher-student classrooms, which puts them at the nexus of a national debate. States are raising their graduation standards, but returning kids to the classroom for a second attempt at algebra often is counterproductive—Why should we suppose they’ll understand equations any better the second time around?—and gobbles up teacher time.

The second trend is the “blended” approach, combining online learning with a teacher-led classroom (see “Future Schools,” features, Summer 2011). Most instruction is online in the PLC model, but a teacher-coach is there to answer questions, direct projects, and keep kids on track.

Communities in Schools linked those two trends with the small-school idea and has expanded the project to seven states and 33 schools. PLCs have only four or five classrooms, four or five teachers, and fewer than 100 students. Teachers are district employees who are paid the district scale and apply for their jobs. Kids remain part of their home schools, which has raised graduation statistics for those schools and generated buy-in from their administrators.

PLCs generally receive the same per-pupil funding as  traditional schools. Their biggest expense, after salaries, goes to licensing fees for the online curriculum, which Richard Firth, the Virginia PLC director, put at about $35,000 a year per school. Start-up costs for computers, teacher training, and to carve new schools out of old facilities can be a showstopper for financially pressed school districts. Richmond, which is building its first new high school in 40 years, plans to include some multipurpose rooms that could be used for a future PLC.

Richard Firth, director of the Virginia PLCs, says dropping out of school for at-risk teenagers is not an “event” but a “process.”

The only outside funding comes from Communities in Schools, which pays the salary of a services coordinator, who links youngsters with housing, day-care, medical, and other service providers and helps them plan what they do after graduation. The services coordinator at the Richmond career-center PLC keeps a closet of baby clothes in her office for students whose own children can attend Head Start or day care downstairs.

Almost disarmingly, the PLCs reach out to youngsters that schools typically find the most troublesome. Sherman Curl, the academic coordinator—i.e., principal—at the Adult Career Development Center PLC in Richmond, handed me a brochure describing the students for whom the PLC is a good fit. Kids with “poor attendance,” “excessive tardiness,” “academic failure,” “apathy,” “social issues,” low motivation, and such “challenges to success” as pregnancy and poverty, it read.

In a summary of its 2009–10 academic year, Virginia’s Communities in Schools reported that one-third of the students at its four PLCs were at least two years behind in academic credits when they arrived. They were a year or two older than their conventional-school peers and, in the previous year, averaged six suspensions and 24 absences each at their former schools. Several youngsters told me they’d fallen in with the wrong crowd at their old schools, or they felt bullied and isolated. “I started messing up,” a chatty 18-year-old named Chelsie Saunders told me at the Hampton PLC, which is housed in a modern teen center, complete with pool tables, a basketball court, a coffee bar, and an airy television lounge with leather sofas.

“These are kids who never made it in a comprehensive school,” said Wes Hamner, the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC, which occupies one floor of a sprawling trades-training campus in Richmond’s industrial district.

For all that, the three PLCs I visited were remarkably quiet and orderly: There wasn’t much chatter about what kids were learning, but there wasn’t any catcalling, hallway scuffling, or acting out in class, either. Hamner pointed out that there’s no security at his school and that the lockers don’t even have locks. Teachers sat in the back or in a corner of the classrooms, while students sat at computers, wearing headsets.

Teacher Pat Sessions monitors student work via a “dashboard” on her computer.

Teaching to the Student

At Hampton, I asked Pritchard, the social-studies facilitator, how she knew what her students were doing, so she opened a dashboard on her computer. It showed that on computer 3, a student was working on a U.S. history unit, or “module,” on civil rights. The teenager on computer 6 was working on a module on imperialism for the same course, and the student on computer 7 was doing a review and practice test on the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Most PLCs, including those in Virginia, use NovaNET, an online curriculum that is marketed by Pearson Education Inc. The program tests a student at the end of each lesson, module, and course, and lets those who pass their tests with at least an 80 percent move on. For those who don’t pass, the computer singles out the content they seemed not to understand, reteaches it, and retests.

Administrators and teachers at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC: Sherman Curl (front right), Rani Gharseese (front left), Elizabeth Muse (center), Pat Sessions (back left), Ingrid Thomas (back center), Stephania Muterspaugh (back right)

Kids like the immediate feedback, Katherine Fox, the academic coordinator at Hampton, told me: “It’s difficult for them to wait for success. Kids want to move on.” A mop-haired boy named Michael told me that he used to obsess over test questions at his conventional school and couldn’t force himself to move ahead. The NovaNET practice tests and make-up tests relieved him of that anxiety, he said, as he pulled certificates from his backpack to show that he had completed two business classes, oceanography, and biology. “No one gets left behind here,” he said.

Back on Pritchard’s dashboard, meanwhile, I could see that the student on computer 1 was using an open-source educational website called SAS Curriculum Pathways to research voting rights for the government class, while the student on computer 2 was researching Appomattox on SAS for history class. Most Hampton PLC computers can access only NovaNET; the few that can access SAS can’t go any further than research sites to which SAS provides a link.

At the career center PLC in Richmond, which is housed on the top floor of a 1920s-era school built for the city’s elite black students, science facilitator Patricia Sessions showed me more. A “pacing sheet,” a sort of minimum speed limit set by the state education department, suggested that teachers should expect to devote three weeks to a unit on biochemical processes, part of the biology curriculum. But when Sessions opened the computer file of a student named Trish, it showed that Trish had finished the unit in a week. She’d spent 26 minutes on an online lesson about atoms and molecules, and got a 90 on the test. She’d spent an hour on the properties-of-water lesson and another hour on acids and bases, and got 80 on both.

Teachers told me that most NovaNET courses are comparable to textbook-based courses in length and content—a comeback to critics who talk of watered-down curricula at alternative schools—but that many students move through them more quickly, and often finish high school a semester early. “I’m constantly working rather than waiting,” explained a tattooed girl named Shaina at the Richmond Tech school.

Pritchard told me that she started the school year with students grouped largely by subject—say, geography in one period, government in another. But as the year went on, and students progressed at different speeds, classes became more diverse. In any class period now, she could have youngsters working on either semester of any of four subjects.

Wes Hamner is the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC.

As students finish courses, they can move to another classroom to work on courses they may find slower going. If they earn enough credits to graduate before the school year is over, the services coordinator steers them to mentorships, trade training, or jobs. Sessions, who was playing Mendelssohn in her otherwise-silent classroom as her students worked, said she started the year with 20 kids in her afternoon class and was down to 8 by late March.

All that movement precludes lectures or class discussions. Teachers told me that anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the work in their classrooms is done online, with work sheets, projects, one-on-one meetings, and, for seniors, a research report and presentation accounting for the rest. The walls of Pritchard’s classroom were ringed with poster-board projects on the Zhou Dynasty, the Battle of Fort Fisher, and the roles of the secretary of defense and the U.S. Department of Education, among others. It wasn’t AP material, perhaps, but it showed persistence and attention to detail that are not always common in city schools. Last year, the whole school read the same book, Facing the Lion, and used it as a springboard for cross-disciplinary studies.

The students I talked with said they didn’t miss discussions or were self-aware enough to know that lectures didn’t fit their learning style. “I wouldn’t be listening anyway,” Tyriq told me; “I’m not a person to talk,” said another 18-year-old named Dashawn. Instead, kids said they liked the anonymity and independence of working online. “I like being in my own bubble,” Chelsie Saunders told me in Hampton: “I don’t like waiting on people” on some lessons and “I don’t worry about people getting frustrated with me” for working slowly on others.

Teacher Stephenia Muterspaugh prepares Shakeva Seward, Thomas Griffis, and Brittany Goodman for their Standards of Learning tests at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC .

A Promising Start

The PLCs take youngsters who have at least attempted 9th grade, plus a few overage 8th graders. But most kids arrive in 10th or 11th grade when they realize they’re not on track to graduate. For admission, they must score at an 8th-grade level on standardized reading and math tests (the Richmond Tech PLC raised that to 9th grade because it had so many applicants), pass an interview, and sign an achievement contract that also commits them to attend a daily meeting called Morning Motivation. Each gets a learning plan that plots an individual path to graduation and then to a trade program, a job, or college.

Yvonne Brandon, superintendent of Richmond City Schools, expressed enthusiasm for online learning when we spoke. “We have to transform our ideas of what learning looks like,” she said. But PLC staffers told me that the districts sometimes struggle to understand them. Grade levels, quarterly grades, GPAs, and the academic calendar are fuzzy at a move-at-your-own-pace school: Youngsters told me how many credits they had, not whether they were juniors or seniors.

Sherri Pritchard is Hampton PLC’s social studies “learning facilitator.”

Students graduate when they earn the state-mandated 22 credits, but they can’t receive diplomas until spring. Firth, the Virginia PLC director, said he recently learned that some of those graduates-without-diplomas were being counted as absent by the district because, well, they weren’t in school. “We’re so outside the box and education is so inside the box,” Hamner sighed.

The data on online education are still pretty equivocal. There are no data on what kind of student performs best in an online class, although everyone I talked with assumed it probably was the independent achiever, because that kind of student performs well in any setting. There are few quality measures, although Michael Horn, executive director for education at the Innosight Institute, a Mountain View, California, think tank, points out that we don’t know how to measure quality in face-to-face classes, either.

Barbara Means of SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, California, told me that much of the ambiguity is because state data systems aren’t set up to compare online learners to in-class learners. They don’t record which students taking the state’s standardized math tests completed them at the end of an online course, for example, and which took them after a face-to-face class. Most states don’t keep student-level data, so researchers also can’t compare similar students at a full-time virtual school and those in a full-time conventional one.

Means reviewed 12 years of literature on online learning and said that from the limited data they presented she concluded that “there wasn’t much difference” in the educational outcomes of kids who studied online and those who studied in a classroom. That suggests that schools should consider some other reason if they’re thinking of shifting curriculum or students online, she said: Perhaps it’s cheaper or there are social benefits, like making school more flexible for working students or for those with infants.

Means also surveyed the literature comparing outcomes at traditional schools to outcomes at schools that blended face-to-face and online teaching. Youngsters in the blended environments, with a teacher and technology, did “significantly better,” she said. But that may be because blended schools offered youngsters more learning time, more content, or perhaps both, rather than because of the different approach to teaching.

Katherine Fox, academic coordinator at the Hampton PLC, hands Tyriq Jones his diploma.

Credit-recovery and online programs have been accused of low standards and a weak-tea curriculum, anything to get kids into the graduation statistics, critics contend. But the PLCs insist on the rigor of their program because it’s based on a general-education curriculum, not a credit-recovery curriculum. PLC students take the same state tests as their traditional-school peers. And computer testing on NovaNET and other online curricula prevents social promotion or the intervention of soft-hearted administrators. “We legally graduate kids; I don’t do them any favors,” said Wes Hamner at Richmond Tech PLC.

In a report on the 2009–10 school year, the project says that, nationally, its students improved their scores in all four core subjects compared to their performance in their home school the year before—by from 6 to 11 percentage points—and that 96 percent of the students classified as seniors at the beginning of the school year graduated. For a project that works with potential dropouts, that’s hugely impressive, but there has been little outside research on the PLCs that would confirm that.

The results at the Virginia PLCs are equally ambiguous. In 2009–10, the 432 youngsters who attended the four schools arrived with D averages in math, English, science, and social studies, and, except for math—which was still stuck in the basement—raised them to a C. But the averages include the 30 percent of kids who dropped out, switched to a GED program, or left for some other reason, probably lowering the grades.

After experiencing little success in a traditional high school, Tyriq Hasan Jones graduated in June 2011 from the Hampton PLC.

The PLCs also reported that 96 percent of their students passed Virginia’s end-of-course algebra exams, 97 percent passed reading, 90 percent passed biology, and 100 percent passed writing. That would put the PLCs ahead of state averages in all four subjects. (The results say a lot about Virginia’s learning standards: Is it really possible that only 6 percent of the state’s 400,000 high schoolers failed reading and 6 percent failed Algebra I last year?) The scores of PLC students are included in the results of their home schools, which makes them difficult to verify. The PLCs also don’t accept English-language learners, kids with discipline problems or most disabilities, or those with elementary-level reading and math abilities, as other public schools must, which muddies the comparison.

Still, more than one-third of the youngsters who started at the Virginia PLCs in fall 2009 graduated in 2010, including 68 students who headed to two- or four-year colleges, the Virginia project reported.

When I spoke with Chelsie Saunders in Hampton in early spring, she laid out a career path that included community college, university, and then a career in teaching or nursing. “Honestly, if it wasn’t for here, I wouldn’t graduate,” she told me. When I checked back in June, she had.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Teacher Rights and Policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

School Choice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grading Public Schools

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

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

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

Spending on Public Schools

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

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

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

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

Digital Learning

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

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

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

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

School and Student Accountability

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

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

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

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

Conflicts with Teachers Likely to Persist

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

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

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

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

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

Readers Poll: Vote for the presidential candidate you think would be best for K-12 education.

Two months before his 2008 election, Barack Obama addressed a roomful of Ohio public school teachers, praising their long hours and talking about his daughters’ starting 2nd and 5th grade. It was a typical Democratic education speech, with vows of support for early childhood education, for building up programs that help students from “the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college.”

Then Obama departed from the usual feel-good talking points. He touted competition, charter schools, and school choice. “I believe in public schools, but I also believe in fostering competition within the public schools,” he said. “And that’s why, as president, I’ll double the funding for responsible charter schools.”

That wasn’t an applause line, for sure, but it did serve another purpose: to position the candidate as a different kind of Democrat, one willing to embrace ideas from across the aisle and push back against his own teachers union base. It also put Republicans on notice: Obama wouldn’t be bashful about encroaching on their territory on education.

Two and a half years later, Republicans are still trying to figure out how to respond to Obama, a Democratic president with education reform bona fides. To date, the most prominent leaders of the GOP have either been mute on the topic of education or heaped praise on the president. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels lauded the Obama administration and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a speech he made in April 2011: “We need to prepare our young people with the highest possible preparation wherever they come from, wherever they are headed,” he said. “[Duncan] is the nation’s champion, along with the president he serves, of that ideal.”

As the winter primaries get closer, don’t expect much more of that.

The One That Got Away

Republicans began this election season in search of a candidate and a message. The May withdrawal of Mitch Daniels from the Republican primary race left the GOP without one of its most visible education leaders. The Midwestern governor had become a darling among education reformers for making school choice and quality teaching his top priorities.

In his final State of the State speech in Indianapolis, Daniels said that if he did nothing else in 2011, he wanted to “hitch his legacy” to education reform. Watching from the audience that day were students on waiting lists to get into various charter schools. He urged state lawmakers to create a voucher program that would allow kids to use public dollars for private school tuition. He talked for 30 minutes about improving teacher quality. And by the end of the legislative session, he got just about everything he wanted in a school reform plan: expansion of charter schools, private school vouchers, and college scholarships for students who graduate high school early.

But after flirting with a presidential run, Daniels bowed out, leaving to those still in the running the task of building a GOP education platform.

The Race Is On

After a slow start, the Republican field is finally starting to take shape. Former governors Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have announced their election bids, and former GOP house speaker Newt Gingrich is also running. As of June 2011, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum had entered the race. Republicans await announcements from Sarah Palin and Texas governor Rick Perry.

In staking out platforms in the coming months for what will likely be a feisty GOP primary, Republicans face two quandaries regarding education policy: They need to distinguish their positions from Obama’s centrist education reforms, and they need to win over the Republican base, fueled by some Tea Party energy, that will push for the U.S. Department of Education to be dismantled altogether.

Former education secretary Margaret Spellings says gaining ground may not be easy, but it has been done before: by George W. Bush, her former boss.

“I commend President Obama for adopting the GOP playbook and building on the groundwork that we’ve laid,” said Spellings, currently a consultant in Washington, D.C. “It’s time for us to develop some new material that pushes even further.”

If Republicans want an advantage, Spellings argues, they need to push choice and the hold-schools-accountable platform because “that’s safe territory for Republicans of all stripes,” she said. “Unite Republicans by talking about the kind of public policy that ties very closely to accountability.”

One likely Republican target is school spending. Days after entering office, President Obama signed into law the sweeping stimulus bill, which included a $100 billion bailout of the K–12 system. A year later, the smaller “edujobs” bill pumped another $10 billion into the schools. While this money was ostensibly linked to reform via the Race to the Top, there’s very little to show for this huge influx of federal funds. Most studies show that it merely saved teachers’ jobs, or kicked layoffs down the road a year or two. In lots of places where layoffs were not on the table, it allowed school districts to give teachers raises, at a time when America suffered through the worst unemployment crisis in a generation.

By pointing at the fat in the education system, GOP candidates could argue, as Governor Pawlenty did in 2007, that American schools are “costing us a lot of money and it’s costing them their future.”

Expect to see the candidates applaud governors in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Ohio, who took on collective bargaining rights and insisted that money is best used to reward good teaching for the children’s sake.

“We have built a system…that cares more about the feelings of adults than the future of children,” said New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie, widely expected to run for president in 2016, at the American Enterprise Institute earlier this year. “Tell me, where else is there a profession with no reward for excellence and no penalty for failure?”

In a 2011 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Romney berated Obama for failed economic policies, saying afterward that he’s “seen the failure of liberal answers before…liberal education policies fail our children today because they put pensions and privileges for the union bosses above our kids.”

Defining the Federal Role

A candidate like Romney or Pawlenty is still going to have to explain to the Republican base why they’re not going to shutter the U.S. Department of Education. During the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party Senate and House candidates across the country promised on the campaign trail that they would shut down the U.S. Department of Education and hand control over to state governments. Many of them are now members of Congress.

A related issue is where to land on the “Common Core” standards, a set of expectations in reading and math developed by the nation’s governors and state superintendents, but viewed by many conservatives as a federal plot to take over the schools.

“Post-Obamacare, post–Dodd-Frank, in the Tea Party world, Republicans aren’t interested anymore in a robust federal role in education,” said a senior GOP Capitol Hill staffer, who could not be named because he is not authorized to talk to the media. “Bush liked it and talked about it, fine. Now that he’s not there hitting us over the head with it, we’ll move to empower and trust state and local officials to make decisions.”

The Candidates

No matter who else enters the race, it is unlikely a newcomer will have a ready-made education platform. Romney, Bachmann, Pawlenty, Perry, and Gingrich have all, in their careers, been outspoken on key issues of education policy. It’s worth considering what each of these (potential) candidates might do, were he or she to become the nation’s 45th president.

MITT ROMNEY, like many Republican leaders in the 1990s, called for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.

Once he became governor of Massachusetts, Romney plotted out a more sophisticated education platform. He pushed school choice when a Democratic-controlled state legislature was moving away from it, and extolled the virtues of No Child Left Behind.

“I’ve taken a position where, once upon a time, I said I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education…. That’s very popular with the base,” Romney said at a 2007 Republican debate in South Carolina. “As I’ve been a governor and seen the impact that the federal government can have holding down the interest of the teachers unions and instead putting the interests of the kids and the parents and the teachers first, I see that the Department of Education can actually make a difference.”

As governor, Romney proposed education reform measures that lifted the state cap on charter schools and gave principals more power to get rid of ineffective teachers.

In his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, he darkly warns about American students’ low achievement in reading and writing. He writes that money does not play a pivotal role in education quality and achievement, perhaps a harbinger that Romney’s education-reform platform wouldn’t include new money, as Obama’s plan did.

“The average amount spent per pupil, adjusted for inflation, rose by 73 percent between 1980 and 2005, and the average class size was reduced by 18 percent,” he wrote. “But during that same period, the educational performance of our children has hardly budged. Why not?”

In Massachusetts, Romney defended statewide graduation requirement tests, which started during his first year as governor in 2003. When one mayor declared he would dole out diplomas even to students who didn’t pass the tests, Romney threatened to withhold state dollars.

He also defended English immersion after visiting a Boston school where many students enrolled in bilingual classes had actually been born in the United States.

If Romney talks education in the next year, he will blend the importance of accountability and of governing with a stick if needed. He is widely credited for raising test scores. In his third year as governor, 4th and 8th graders scored first in the country in math and English (see Figure 1).

It was in education that MICHELE BACHMANN got her political sea legs. Disappointed