The America Achieves study reveals in an alternate way an international achievement gap that my colleagues and I have been identifying over the past three years (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011; “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011; “Is the U.S. Catching Up?” features, Fall 2012). In those papers, we report that the most talented U.S. students dreadfully lag peers abroad in math, that the percentage of U.S. students who are proficient is seriously lagging, and that the rate of improvement in the United States is no better than average. We develop the implications in a book the Brookings Institution will release this summer under the title Endangering Prosperity: A Global View of the American School.

Both our studies and the one America Achieves has just released rely on the Program for International Assessment (PISA), a series of surveys of student achievement in math, science, and reading administered to 15-year-olds in most countries of the industrialized world. America Achieves’ contribution is to group students by social and educational “advantage” into four quarters, using an index based on such items as a poverty indicator, educational environment at home, and quality of peer group at school. The organization then focuses its analysis on students in the second and third quarter—those just above and below the median student. By this device, analysts can discover whether the education problem in the United States disappears if one ignores, statistically, the most disadvantaged students.

America Achieves has not chosen the perfect analytical strategy. For one thing, it assumes the distribution of social advantage is identical in all countries, when it can hardly be the case that the same percentage of Swiss and Dutch children are socially disadvantaged as children in Poland and Hungary. A direct measure of family social background would be better than one that mixes in such factors as books in the home and the quality of peers at school. These educational considerations cannot be called “social” without twisting words out of their ordinary meaning.

But the study is solid enough to embarrass the group of teachers union leaders and liberal academics that calls itself the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform (see “Neither Broad Nor Bold,” check the facts, Summer 2012). According to this influential group, the way to fix education in America is to eliminate poverty in America. If Broader, Bolder’s analysis were correct, then students who are not in the lowest quarter of the social spectrum should be doing just as well as similarly situated peers abroad.

That simply is not happening, as the America Achieves study demonstrates. Even if we ignore disadvantaged students both in the United States and abroad, U.S. performance ranks low in both math and science, and, to a lesser extent, in reading.

Also embarrassed by the America Achieves study is the lefty labor Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., which recently released a sophomoric study (see my January 16, 2013, post on the Education Next blog) that tried to use the PISA data to attribute educational deficiencies to the U.S. social structure, not its school system.

The America Achieves results show that there is only one way to alter the international achievement gap in education: fix how students are learning. That suggestion sounds like a truism. It would be, were it not for the organized forces that insist on disputing the obvious.

— Paul E. Peterson

Half those gains are probably an illusion, however. The latest results from the math and science tests administered by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the respected international testing agency, show gains of only 0.8 percent of a standard deviation yearly between 1995 and 2011. Further, another respected international assessment of student performance, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), found gains of only 0.5 percent of a standard deviation annually for U.S. students over roughly the same time period. (For specifics, see page 19 of our full report, Achievement Growth: International and U.S. State Trends in Student Performance [PEPG, 2012].)

In other words, NAEP has been identifying gains that are somewhere between two and three times as large as those recorded by two respected international testing agencies that do not have a political stake in showing rising levels of student achievement in any particular country.

For some time, analysts have been wondering whether NAEP tests have become easier. Those who construct the main tests that NAEP administers frankly admit that they have adapted questions over time to meet the changing curricula offered by contemporary schools. NAEP has also introduced special accommodations for those who say they are in some way disabled and need additional time or other modifications of the standard testing protocol. Have testing changes and administrative innovations softened tests so that they now indicate higher levels of student achievement than would be the case if older practices had been retained?

It is well known that when measuring economic change it is critical to adjust for inflation so that real growth is not confused with nominal growth in prices. An entire bureau within the U.S. Department of Labor is devoted to measuring the extent to which prices for the same commodities are rising or falling. With that information ready at hand, economists can ascertain whether the economy is actually moving forward or whether nominal growth in the GDP is simply the result of inflation.

Nothing similar exists in education. The U.S. Department of Education does not have an agency that inspects NAEP tests or state tests to ascertain whether questions on the tests have been eased with the passage of time.

It is remotely possible that TIMSS and PISA have revised their tests so that they have become more difficult over time, thereby underestimating U.S. student gains. But few believe that any testing organization in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has actually made its tests more challenging over time. All the social and political pressures operate in the opposite direction.

We do know one thing for certain: U.S. students are not closing the international achievement gap. Our study shows that even when measured by NAEP criteria, the United States stands at the 25th rank among 49 countries in achievement growth. Similarly, the recent TIMSS data show the United States to be the middle-ranked country among the 11 for which the organization could fully track student performance since 1995. U.S. students are making middling gains that are keeping them on par with students in other countries. In comparative terms, the United States is not making any progress at all.

— Paul E. Peterson

The teacher has long been an admired figure in American popular culture. The selfless public servant, Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford), subdued the Blackboard Jungle in 1955; years later, Jaime Escalante (Edward James Olmos) in Stand and Deliver inspired his East Los Angeles students to success in Advanced Placement Calculus; in 1989, John Keating (Robin Williams) created a Dead Poets Society to reach even the most cynical students at an elite private school.

We all remember at least one teacher who had a decisively positive impact on our lives. We see them as selfless members of a helping profession. The Phi Delta Kappan (PDK) poll has repeatedly asked the following question: “Do you have confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools?” Year after year, well over two-thirds of the public says “yes.” In 2012 the percentage was 71 percent. In this year’s Education Next poll, the favorable response was given by 72 percent of respondents who were asked this question.

But the Education Next poll varied the query for another (randomly selected) group of respondents, who were given the opportunity to choose among four answers, “How much trust and confidence do you have in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools?” They could select one of the following: 1) complete confidence, 2) a lot of confidence, 3) some confidence, or 4) little confidence.

Only 42 percent selected one of the two most favorable options: 4 percent had “complete” confidence, while 38 percent had “a lot of” confidence. A clear majority (58 percent) had either “some” (49 percent) or “little” (9 percent) confidence.

Only about one-third of African American (34 percent) and Hispanic (36 percent) respondents expressed complete or a lot of trust and confidence in teachers, with the remaining two-thirds saying they had little or some confidence.

Surprisingly, political independents had less trust and confidence in teachers than either Republicans or Democrats. Like African Americans and Hispanics, only about a third of independents (35 percent) said they had a lot of or complete confidence compared to nearly half of both Republicans (45 percent) and Democrats (49 percent). If political leaders pay particular attention to the opinions of swing voters, the teachers union may experience some tough sledding in the political arena in the years ahead.

Maybe the public has never quite trusted the teaching force as much as previous polls have led people to believe. We all know a teacher we admire, but are we watching too many of them yelling in state houses and on the picket line to continue to trust the teaching force as a whole?

Stay tuned for next year’s Education Next poll. Once again, we will ask the public how much trust and confidence they have in the men and women who are teaching the children in our public schools.

— Paul E. Peterson

Not true, says Yu Xie, a leading professor of sociology and statistics affiliated with the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. The press release summarizing the message of his book, Is American Science in Decline?, penned with Alexandra Killewald, declares that “American high school students are doing more coursework and performing better in mathematics and science than in the past.” “All current signs indicate that American science can remain a leader of world science for many years to come,” the authors declare.

So who is right? Are Klein and Rice scaremongers? Or is Xie whistling in the dark?

It is well documented that the math performance of even advanced students in the United States trails that of some 30 other countries (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011). And only 32 percent of U.S. students achieve proficiency by 8th grade, a percentage that places the United States at the 32nd level among countries whose performance has been surveyed (“Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011)

But is the United States now beginning to catch up, as Xie suggests?

In a paper I prepared with coauthors Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann (“Is the U.S. Catching Up?” features, Fall 2012), we answer this question by tracking gains in test performance between the early 1990s and 2011 in 49 countries. Noticeable gains in math, science, and reading have been achieved by U.S. students in 4th and 8th grade on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). But students in the other countries are, on average, making the same rate of gain. Indeed, the rate of improvement in the United States is no better than the median rate for 49 industrialized and developing countries.

Students in three countries—Latvia, Chile, and Brazil—are improving at an annual rate nearly three times that of the United States, and students in another eight countries—Portugal, Hong Kong, Germany, Poland, Liechtenstein, Slovenia, Colombia, and Lithuania—are making gains at twice the rate of students in the United States.

Furthermore, the upward shift in the United States is concentrated among 4th graders. Gains among 8th graders are only about two-thirds those of the younger kids, implying serious slippage in the middle years of schooling.

Even worse, trend data from international tests reveal only one-third as large a gain in the United States as that identified by NAEP.

It is not clear which tests—NAEP or the international exams—are providing the most accurate information on progress over time. But by any measure, U.S. performance is mediocre, not stellar.

Yet Xie and his colleague tell us not to worry. “American universities have been producing new graduates in science at the bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels in increasingly large quantities.” It is a minor matter that “the number of science degrees awarded to native born men has been stable” while that of U.S. visitors is climbing rapidly.

Yes, U.S. universities can still attract and educate talent from abroad as long as this is a prosperous, stable democracy. But when a country’s elementary and high schools can no longer educate its own young people up to the highest international standards, then its security is endangered—just as Klein, Rice, and their task force have said.

The president said the study showed that we need new resources and policies to “keep good teachers on the job and reward the best ones.” But does the work of the Chetty team justify strong policy interventions? Do school board members need to peruse Education Next’s reader-friendly version of this econometric study, then take appropriate steps to replace weak teachers with high performers?

A number of commentators think not. “The differences produced by the high value-added teachers are relatively small,” Diane Ravitch tells her readers. Maria Bustillos objects to “firing ‘weaker’ teachers for the sake of a barely perceptible increase in students’ ‘lifetime income.’” Sherman Dorn says the effects are only “moderate.”

For these commentators, apparently, teachers are made of the same ticky-tacky that was used to build those identical “little boxes on the hillside” about which folksinger Malvina Reynolds crooned back in the 1960s. The people in those tickytacky houses were all made out of “ticky-tacky,” she warbled, and “they come out all the same.”

The Reynolds melody was as catchy as her words, and every adolescent was soon whistling it. But, fortunately, great teachers have always ignored such nonsense. They passionately care about the lives and education of each individual student—even when they know that the rewards come slowly.

Education is a long, measured process. Good parents start the education of their children the minute they are born, even though the payoff is years away. It is even more so with teachers, as they work with students for fewer hours a day.

Nonetheless, a top-notch teacher, as compared to a typical one, can over the course of a year raise student performance by as much as a third of a year’s worth of learning.

But despite those gains, salaries earned at age 28 are only $182 more, or 1 percent higher, for students who have experienced a year of great teaching. When the payoff is so low, why should we care whether schools keep their good teachers? Why should we bother asking bad teachers to find another job?

The answer is simple: One percent gains seem small, but they add up in the same way those saved Ben Franklin pennies do. Just 1 percent of additional income from one year in a room with a great teacher adds up to $25,000 over the typical wage earner’s lifetime. Extrapolating out to 10 years of excellent instruction, one can hazard the claim that the opportunity to enjoy consistently high-level instruction bolsters lifetime income by a quarter of a million dollars. That just about justifies the handsome tuitions charged by high-quality private schools and the large sums parents pay to buy homes in neighborhoods with outstanding schools.

And a great teacher works with not just one student but has a substantial average impact on all 28 of those in the typical class the Chetty team studied. Over the space of just 10 years, a teacher affects the lives of 280 students. On average, a great teacher has an impact that adds up to nothing short of $7 million. When the future is discounted at the standard rate, the annual value of the great teacher, relative to the typical one, drops to around a quarter of a million dollars, the number President Obama used.

Admittedly, some of these numbers are extrapolations and all are subject to error. But there is no justification for all teachers to be paid an identical salary as long as they have the same meaningless credentials and have spent the same number of years in the classroom. It’s time for school districts to stop treating teachers as if they were ticky-tacky—little boxes, sitting in the classroom, all teaching just the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Paul E. Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul E. Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul E. Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul E. Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Paul E. Peterson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul E. Peterson

Now we might say it a bit differently, “If restructuring is necessary for General Motors, it’s no less needed for the country—and its schools.”

For years, our public schools have paid as little attention to personnel costs as General Motors has. Instead, school districts have attempted to enhance student learning (and address many other problems along the way) by hiring more people—more teachers (for smaller classes) and more teacher aides, guidance counselors, bus drivers, lawyers, accountants, special educators, bilingual specialists, and others.

Back in 1950, school districts hired one teacher (or other instructional employee such as an administrator or guidance counselor) for every 19 pupils. The number of pupils per teacher dropped to 14 by 1970, and to just 8 pupils by 2005. If class-size reduction were the solution to America’s education crisis, that crisis would have passed long ago.

It’s not just the size of the instructional staff that has grown relentlessly, however. Clerks, maintenance workers, lunchroom employees, bus drivers, crossing guards, and others too numerous to mention are joining the district payroll. The number of pupils for each support staff member dropped from 58 in 1960 to 43 in 1970, to just 27 in 2005.

All of these folks cost money. Between 1960 and 1975, the amount (in inflation-adjusted dollars) spent nationwide on K–12 education per pupil nearly doubled, rising from $3,300 to just short of $6,100. Between 1975 and 2005, expenditures nearly doubled again, to reach $11,470.

Even those numbers don’t include costs hidden away in pension promises to “instructional personnel,” who are typically eligible to retire as early as the age of 55. In this issue, Michael Podgursky and Robert Costrell (see “Teacher Retirement Benefits,” research) show that pension benefits for teachers have risen rapidly even in the past four years, outpacing those provided by the private sector by 40 percent.

For years, accounting tricks have kept the long-term fiscal impact of pension promises hidden away, turning pension plans into Ponzi schemes by asking future generations to pay legacy costs that have long been accumulating. Today, however, new accounting rules—similar to those that brought banks and insurance companies to the bankruptcy brink—are forcing states and school districts to acknowledge a reality they have tried to ignore.

As that reality sinks in, education fiscal policy seems destined to change, perhaps dramatically. As more money must be put aside to pay pensions and other legacy costs, the amount available for current expenditures becomes curtailed, just at the time other fiscal challenges are mounting across the board. Any federal government bailout will probably turn out to be no more adequate for schools than for General Motors.

Will the emerging fiscal crisis accelerate the educational crisis that is leaving American students ever further behind the skill level it takes to function in the modern economy?

Or will it provoke a fundamental system restructuring? Will attention shift from satisfying the employee to educating the student? Will teachers be recruited, retained, and compensated in a more rational manner? Will more-focused institutions replace the comprehensive high school? Will technological innovation customize educational offerings? Will students become their own teachers? All such cost-cutting but potentially education-enhancing reforms may be more possible in a time of crisis and deficits than in an age of self-interested self-indulgence.

Home schooling is hardly foreign to the American experience. John Locke’s advice to parents in colonial America was to educate their children at home. He could not imagine “what qualities are ordinarily to be got from…a troop of playfellows [at school]…usually assembled together from parents of all kinds.” Even if the teacher’s industry and skill “be ever so great, it can[not]…be expected that he should instruct them successfully in anything but their books.”

But somewhere in the middle of the 19th century, John Locke’s advice was forgotten, schooling became compulsory, and home schooling had to be reinvented. The honor goes to the antibureaucratic, anticompetitive, “new Left” school of thought articulated by Ivan Illich and his articulate disciple, John Holt, who captured the imagination of the flower children of the sixties.

If the baby was born in hippieville, the toddler was soon kidnapped by Christian social conservatives. By 1990, 85 to 90 percent of all home schoolers came from the ranks of the Religious Right. Even Holt could not resist a Libertarian cry:

Some may feel that the schools teach a dog-eat-dog competitiveness; others that they teach a mealy-mouth Socialism…. What is important is not that all readers…should agree on these questions, but that we should…work for…the right of all people to take their children out of schools.

That right is to be found in the penumbra of the Constitution that guarantees the right of privacy, home schoolers say, but getting the Supreme Court to agree has not been easy. In a famous case, the Court was persuaded, on religious grounds, to exempt Amish adolescents age 14 and older from Pennsylvania’s compulsory education law. It said nothing about the right to home school younger children or the rights of those who have secular reasons for preferring education at home.

Then last July a California appeals court drew on the Amish decision to interpret an ambiguous California law as giving families the right to home school their children. Oddly enough, the same court had said—only a few months earlier—that no child could be taught at home except under the supervision of a certified teacher. The court changed its mind, however, after Governor Schwarzenegger, the state secretary of education, and leading newspapers, to say nothing of highly organized groups of home schoolers, condemned the court’s action. Reversing itself, the California court concluded that ambiguities in state law should be interpreted in a way that makes them consistent with the federal Constitution. If Amish adolescents had the right to home school for religious reasons, that same right had to be given to all Californians.

The California decision is only the latest in a string of legal and political victories for home schoolers, who have parlayed Internet connections into a political potency that charter and voucher proponents have never matched.

The Internet is also feeding home schoolers an ever broader range of curricular options, so that families and students of all types—leftist, social conservative, rock star, or skateboard enthusiast—have easy access to the kind of instruction they desire. With improved educational materials readily available, home schoolers are winning spelling and geography bees, scoring off the charts on statewide tests, and gaining access to elite colleges.

As virtual schools, distance learning, sophisticated educational software, and synchronous online communication continue to spread, the movement is poised for rapid growth. Home schooling will segue into hybrid education, historian Milton Gaither says (see “Home Schooling Goes Mainstream” features). Some courses will be taken in school, others online. Students could attend district or charter schools during the elementary years but decide to take most high school courses online.

State legislatures are likely to become increasingly accommodating toward a movement that saves them money. The day may come when we hear the phrase, “We are all home schoolers now.” John Locke would be pleased.

— Paul E. Peterson

In this issue, we asked Julie Bennett, a business writer specializing in the study of franchises, to take a look at the rapid expansion of KIPP and other brand-name schools (“Brand-Name Charters,” features). Thinking of schools as franchises will no doubt raise a few hackles. As Diane Ravitch has written, “Schools are not like businesses or hamburger franchises. They are vital parts of their communities.” And compared with fast-food restaurants, the work done in schools requires a great deal more education, experience, skill, and smarts. But it’s hard to object to the basic idea behind the expansion of KIPP: once you’ve figured out how to create a school that can dramatically change the life prospects of poor kids, what better than to build more of them? And there’s some evidence that franchise-like connections between schools are beneficial in other countries.

In Chile, where a market-based approach to education has been in place for decades (and nearly all students attend private or public schools funded by vouchers), schools that are part of a network (which can resemble a franchise) are more effective than stand-alone schools (see “Scaling Up in Chile,” research). The authors suggest some reasons schools that are part of a network may outperform other schools: they can take advantage of economies of scale, and links between schools can facilitate the flow of information (to share best practices, for instance).

In “Brand-Name Charters,” Bennett contrasts two approaches to expanding the supply of effective schools (or hamburger joints or coffee shops). Most school management organizations in the United States (nonprofit and for-profit) embrace a corporate growth model, following the same detailed recipe again and again to develop additional sites. They identify what works and then assemble the components (for example, phonics-based reading, a content-rich curriculum, a longer school day) in highly recognizable schools with close ties to the central office. KIPP has more closely followed a franchise approach, hiring chefs with potential, training them well, and arming them with a thick cookbook of instructions. They identify great school leaders through a highly competitive screening process and teach them how effective schools work before sending them off to start their own schools (with relatively little meddling from the central office).

But while KIPP schools resemble franchises in some ways, the organization has gone beyond the franchise model in allowing school principals freedom to innovate. Perhaps in recognition of the fact that schools are not hamburger joints, KIPP principals are taught what has worked in other KIPP schools (and much more), but are encouraged to use whatever works in their own school. Only when it comes to replicating the culture of KIPP—that is, organizing new schools around KIPP’s founding principles of high achievement and no excuses—are school leaders expected to toe the KIPP line. While this loose franchise approach allows outstanding principals to exercise the kind of autonomy that is believed to be a key to effective schools, some fear that KIPP will eventually run out of school leaders equal to the task.

Bennett argues that replicating quality schools quickly is crucial to the success of the charter movement, and if done right these brand-name schools will be an important tool in the quest to reduce the achievement gap. Indeed, one advantage of the franchise approach is that it allows schools to scale up quickly. Growth is inevitably slower in a centrally managed organization because central office staff can only open so many new schools at a time. While there is always a tension between growing rapidly and maintaining quality, KIPP shows that good schools can be replicated, perhaps more rapidly than anyone expected. But it is too soon to know if such success is the exception or the rule.

— Marci Kanstoroom

Why aren’t schools an issue in the 2008 election? Results from the latest international tests arrived just as Education Next was going to press. In math and science, the United States again trailed the average international score achieved by students in the 57 test-taking nations that together comprise 87 percent of the world economy. Embarrassingly, the United States now lags behind Poland, which lifted its scores more than any other nation. Meanwhile, Finland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, South Korea, and our next-door neighbor, Canada, won high marks.

So why hasn’t the condition of the nation’s schools become a top issue in the 2008 election? Why is lagging student performance going unnoticed so far, undiscussed by candidates, questioners, and commentators alike?

In this issue, Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann (“Education and Economic Growth”) demonstrate the critical contribution to economic growth that good schools can make: If the United States were to join the world leaders in math and science this coming year, the country’s Gross Domestic Product, within a couple of decades, could be expected to rise by an extra 5 percentage points—enough to cover the full cost of its education system.

Ah, there’s the rub. Most of the economic payoff does not fall within the four- to eight-year horizon of our duly elected public officials. If a country fails to educate its young, the nation does not suffer until all those candidates are writing their memoirs or become subjects of posthumous biographies.

Candidates must worry about the present—and the present requires that one pay close attention to interest groups, especially to powerful teachers unions that pour vast sums into political campaigns. Between 1989 and 2006, the National Education Association (NEA) came in fourth among all entities contributing to national campaigns, right behind the National Association of Realtors. With the NEA opposed to meaningful accountability, genuine school choice, and anything resembling merit pay, politicians have little to gain from trumpeting reforms that might get schools back on track.

When the special interests get control of policy, the consequences can be disastrous, as the housing credit morass reveals. Realtors loved the free-flowing credit, so politicians had every reason to ignore the risks.

It was not always this way. The United States once led the world in its commitment to education. From the earliest days of the Republic, the United States invested heavily in its human capital, more so than any other nation. Those investments contributed to the extraordinary growth rate that propelled the nation to the world’s pinnacle by World War II.

Around 1970, the educational-industrial complex, long under construction, was finally hammered into place. Legislatures gave teachers collective bargaining rights, the courts began instructing the schools on disciplinary procedures, regulations multiplied, the United States gained a national department of education, and state and federal dollars poured into the system.

Despite the cash flow, education itself was put on pause. Grades inflated, learning faltered, graduation rates stagnated.

Forty years later, the impact on the well-being of the country is becoming increasingly obvious. As the world becomes “flatter,” the importance of human capital escalates, say Hanushek and his co-authors. The nations of South and East Asia are on the march. Corporations move operations offshore in order to find appropriately educated workers at the going price. Universities are finding it easier to recruit top-level scientists and sophisticated social scientists from abroad rather than try to grow them at home.

At least New Orleans’s new superintendent, Paul Vallas, and New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, are beginning to address the issues (see “The Vallas Effect” and “New York City’s Education Battles”). After jump-starting schools in Chicago and Philadelphia, Vallas is giving new hope to the hurricane-battered city on the Mississippi. Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s education boss, Joel Klein, is deconstructing New York City’s educational-industrial complex, while giving merit pay, charter schools, and student accountability a chance. If Vallas, Bloomberg, and Klein have made mistakes, at least they are trying. May their spirit catch on.

Though Secretary Spellings got the media attention she sought, the latest NAEP findings are hardly “news.” For more than a decade, progress in elementary school achievement has not translated into comparable gains in middle and high school.

The results must be disappointing for those who have marched fervently under the excellence banner for the past 35 years. Back in 1982, the Reagan administration jump-started that parade by releasing its attention-getting report on the state of American education, A Nation at Risk.

To its credit, the excellence movement halted the steady slide in American education then taking place. But reformers did better at identifying what they wanted to achieve than defining a strategy for getting there. Instead of working out a battle plan, they wandered back and forth between two contradictory goals—choice and accountability.

On the one side, reformers sought to introduce more competition into American K–12 education through charter schools, vouchers, and tax credits. Andy Smarick (see “Wave of the Future”) carries that idea to its logical conclusion by calling for the revamping of urban education through a comprehensive system of charter schools that go well beyond what even Paul Vallas is attempting in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Meanwhile, many embraced a not altogether compatible reform, school accountability, that has extended the regulatory control of the state and federal governments over public schools. By testing students, releasing the results to the public, and attaching rewards and sometimes a few weak sanctions to those results, accountability reformers have attempted to tighten the screws on local school boards, administrators, and classroom teachers. Once student performance was made known, those in charge would turn the school ship aright, reformers thought.

Until now, accountability has trumped choice. Well before the enactment of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, many states launched accountability systems and, urged by the federal legislation, the rest are beginning to catch up. Accountability’s edge is undoubtedly due not only to widespread public support for the idea (see “What Americans Think about Their Schools,” Fall 2007), but to the fact that, as practiced, it has posed only a minimal threat to the great vested interests of American education: local school boards, state departments of education, schools of education, and teacher unions. Even when headlines scream that students are doing badly, voters do not hold school board members to account, say William Howell and Christopher Berry (see “Accountability Lost”).

Meanwhile, one has to scour the countryside to find sizable choice interventions. Charter schools, the most popular of them, now enroll but 3 percent of all public school students. Even worse, NCLB, far from unleashing major new choice initiatives as was originally hoped, is instead threatening the future of many struggling urban charter schools. The law’s accountability standard expects schools serving the educationally disadvantaged to raise dismally low performance to full proficiency within an unreasonably short period of time. Charter schools, the one type of public school that is actually being held to account by authorizing bodies, are now threatened with closure if they don’t perform to standards other public schools can safely ignore.

Yes, choice schools need to be held accountable. But that is best accomplished not through tighter, one-size-fits-all regulation, but through sensible performance measures and a dynamic marketplace for education in which new schools challenge the dominance of decaying ones, much as Smarick suggests.

Not everyone will agree that accountability is the reform of the past. But as the reauthorization deadline for NCLB draws nigh, it is time for the excellence movement to reassess its reform strategy.

Still, schools will not be missing from the political agenda altogether. So long as the economy perks along and no one wants to cut Social Security or raise taxes on more than a few, then health care and education will be the top domestic issues. Clearly, no presidential issues kit can afford to be without an education page.

Too often candidates let vested interests and insistent advocates provide the content for that document. Many Democrats, for example, are currying favor with union interests by insisting on less student testing and more federal funding. “While the children are getting good at filling in all those little bubbles, what exactly are they really learning?” Senator Hillary Clinton asked delegates at a meeting of the New Hampshire chapter of the National Education Association late last May. “How much creativity are we losing? How much of our children’s passion is being killed?” Meanwhile, one is hearing in Republican circles a great deal about getting Washington off the states’ backs.

That may make political sense in the early days of a campaign when the opinions of the few count more than those of the many. Eventually, though, the next president must win support from a broad cross-section of voters across the country.

On education matters, a heap of valuable information can be found in the poll results presented in this issue. Shrewd candidates will scrutinize the hundreds of numbers set forth on pages 13 to 26 to extract the political truths buried within. To guide their search, I offer five basic themes that percolate through many of the answers potential voters have given:

1. Although the public supports its public schools, it finds them mediocre at best, deserving no more than a grade of C.

2. People want to remedy that situation but are not nearly so doctrinaire as powerful interests and political elites. Ordinary voters are pragmatists, willing to try many different things, whether it be accountability, school choice, smaller classes, more spending, or rewarding good teachers.

3. More people support accountability than any other single education reform. If they do not trust all of the utopian promises offered by NCLB, neither do they want the federal government to abandon its efforts to hold state and local school officials to account. On the contrary, the public would expand accountability systems in several directions:

a. Create national standards to replace state-specific ones.

b. Demand that students pass high school exams before graduating.

c. Evaluate and reward teachers according to how much their students are learning.

4. The public wants schools, students, and teachers to be treated fairly. Money should be spent equally on different types of schools, different types of students, and across the board on all teachers, unless there are convincing reasons to do otherwise. Even extra rewards to effective teachers win only a moderately positive endorsement.

5. The public does not oppose school choice, but doesn’t know much about charter schools. A charter platform will need a lot of explaining.

All this is good news for responsible aspiring leaders. From among the options available, the correct policies can be selected, and if persuasively described, perhaps even implemented post-election. May the best leader win.

Predictably, the Aspenites identify a major crisis: “America today faces a stark choice…. Do we take bold steps to accelerate progress in education? or risk…our competitiveness in the global economy?” But to resolve the crisis, the commission offers nothing but minimalist recommendations that (despite various protests) hardly offend a vested interest—not a school board, nor a teachers union, nor a state department of education, nor even the poor, maligned Bush administration.

The commission claims to have scoured the country for good ideas, but they are unable to find a single, exciting state or local intervention they can recommend for national adoption.

Perhaps one can expect nothing more from a commission composed mainly of academics and former members of the public school establishment—folks that once were school superintendents, state education officers, school board members, teachers union officials, or school teachers. After bragging (complaining?) about all the reading and listening they have done, how timid and tired they seem.

And how protective of the interests they still represent! One would have received a more penetrating analysis from British peers asked to reform the House of Lords.

Whenever a good idea comes to the fore, it is so qualified as to lose all punch. For example, the commission properly grapples with the need to revise NCLB’s flawed mechanism for holding schools accountable. It is even bold enough to recommend that the reshaped law take into account, in part, the “growth trajectory” of individual students. But if student growth is the only way to evaluate a school, as the commission properly seems to think, why does the report recommend only a partial change? And why not examine more closely the five-point grading scale that helped lift school performance in Florida under Jeb Bush’s watch (see “The Education Governor,” features).

The teachers unions do attack the Aspen commission for asking states to track teacher performance by checking to see how much their students are learning. Yet the report says nothing about removing a teacher identified as a repeated failure from the classroom. For this commission, reform means shifting bad teachers from one school to the next.

When the commissioners consider schools that fail five years running, they can only recommend “comprehensive reform,” leaving the reader to wonder just what they mean by that phrase. Why do they avoid mentioning charter schools? Why do they ignore such energetic innovations as the one led by Indianapolis mayor and Democrat Bart Peterson (see features).

The commission proposes tests for high school seniors, but decides against requiring adequate performance for high school graduation. It says nothing about the jump in Massachusetts scores once such a graduation requirement was introduced.

The Aspenites correctly urge that eligible students be given readier access to tutoring and the other privately provided services NCLB requires. But they do not call for an end to the multiple conflicts of interest that pervade the program: Currently, school districts have little (even negative) incentive to promote the tutoring, as they pocket the dollars when few students participate. And districts then compete directly with the private providers they regulate.

The commission properly asks schools to do more to facilitate choice for parents whose children attend a school that is failing. But it ignores the private school option—and even the option of attending public schools outside students’ districts of residence.

The aspen tree is well designed to bend with every wind that sweeps through the mountains of Colorado. The “Aspen report” well deserves that monicker.

— Paul E. Peterson

That our schools are impervious to fundamental change (fads-of-the-month notwithstanding) is well established. Joe Williams (“Games Charter Opponents Play”) recounts the imaginative means school districts find to strangle promising reforms, in this case charter schools. Couldn’t defeat them in the legislature? Then bleed them with a thousand little cuts. Can’t halt them with a state-mandated cap? File a frivolous lawsuit. Can’t persuade parents that they aren’t worth choosing? Ground their buses so students can’t get to the schools. Though twisted, many of these actions are inventive and energetic, some even entrepreneurial.

But push the education system to address its own widespread failures and suddenly it becomes limper than a lunchroom Tater Tot. Consider teacher quality. Virtually every school district in the nation possesses the authority to fire ineffective teachers within their first year or two on the job, without much difficulty. As Thomas Kane and his colleagues argue (“Photo Finish”), the effectiveness of a teacher can be predicted early on. Letting the weakest ones go makes perfect sense and requires no change in law or collective bargaining agreements. Why, then, don’t districts routinely dismiss those rookie teachers who don’t have the right stuff? Secure on the path of least resistance, administrators typically find it is just too much work to fire someone and find a replacement. Instead, they keep them all—good, bad, and indifferent. Later on, their hands are tied. They’re “stuck” with poor performers.

Consider the fate of failing schools under the No Child Left Behind Act. While the law’s rhetoric is John Wayne tough, its reality is Tiny Tim timid. Districts are expected to “restructure” their chronically low-performing schools by firing the entire staff, reopening as a charter school, or contracting with private managers. Most instead opt for soft reforms like sending in an instructional “coach” or tweaking the curriculum. As both Sara Mead and Nelson Smith lament, it’s a tragic lost opportunity. How to explain districts’ actions? They’re on the path of least resistance. It’s just too hard to close down a school and launch a “fresh start.”

To be sure, such bumbling behavior has long been associated with bureaucracies. Shielded from the free market’s incentives, public sector officials learn to “make nice” rather than make unpopular decisions. But in K–12 education, “accountability” was supposed to change all that. The new system of rewards for strong performance and tough sanctions for failure was meant to motivate officials to do the difficult work, make the hard choices, upset the applecart.

So why isn’t it working? Why don’t newly accountable principals, driven to raise student achievement, dismiss their ineffective rookie teachers? Why don’t newly accountable superintendents, committed to “leaving no child behind,” shut down their failing schools? Why hasn’t accountability closed off the path of least resistance?

There are two obvious explanations. First, accountability as we know it is still too weak-kneed. Sure, there’s plenty of sunlight and shame, with schools labeled “in need of improvement” and editorial writers wringing their hands. Yet very few public school employees—from the superintendent to the soup server—ever lose their jobs for poor performance. We need more head rolling, and less eye rolling.

Second, accountability is not enough. Competition via school choice is the other weapon in the “tough love” arsenal, and until it’s wielded at large scale, we are unlikely to see real results.

Which brings us back to charter schools. Through the eyes of change-resistant bureaucrats, they present a mortal threat to the very culture of the public education system. Were they to grab significant market share, they might “tip” K–12 education into an age of real accountability. And that’s a path the system can be expected to blockade with all the entrepreneurial zest it can muster. One only wishes all that energy could be put to a better purpose.

In this issue’s cover story, Veronique de Rugy and Kathryn Newmark say it’s too early to know whether a catastrophe has swept away one of the country’s most corrupt and ineffectual school systems, replacing it with a network of competing, privately managed charter schools. But after the wind, rain, and waters of Hurricane Katrina had subsided, only the city’s private and charter schools had the wherewithal to reopen in a timely fashion.

Most public schools were bogged down in mud and wreckage that was as much political as physical. By June 2006, only 12,000 of the 65,000 public school students had returned to school. And most of them were going to the five pre-existing charter schools—or to the 13 new ones formed in the wake of the disaster. Meanwhile, 20,000 of the 26,000 students in private schools were back in class.

Is New Orleans a metaphor for what could happen to the American public-school system nationally? Can a new birth be borne of catastrophe?

It does not take a confirmed curmudgeon to dismiss such notions. Political change in the United States occurs incrementally, a tiny step at a time. One should not expect much more than a haphazard accountability system, some boutique charter schools, a few scattered virtual schools, and perhaps a tiny voucher program.

The forces of the status quo are deeply entrenched. Teacher unions, school board associations, schools of education, state departments of education, and the halls of Congress all resist fundamental change. The American public, though uneasy about the current state of the country’s schools, is not yet aroused to the point where it is willing to sweep aside institutionalized barriers to reform.

Even when school reformers seem to gain a beachhead, the complexities of the American governmental system, with its endless veto points, slow reform’s expansion. Too often what is won in one legislative chamber dies in another, or is vetoed by the governor, or is found unconstitutional by politicized judges. And any reforms that survive the political gantlet can still end up choking on administrative dust.

With school systems stagnant, high-school students graduate without learning any more today than they did two generations ago. According to the “nation’s report card,” the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), high-school reading and math scores have hardly budged in 35 years. In science, student scores are actually falling, this despite the incredible rate of scientific discovery in our lifetime.

Yet in a world of rapid technological change, schools that cannot teach science may be no more in equilibrium than an upturned house balanced on its peak. Systems that appear to be impervious to external shock can nonetheless be quickly transmogrified. The Soviet Union, even more bureaucratized than American public schools, collapsed in a week.

Within the United States, a phoenix has more than once risen from the ashes. Out of the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake came new urban designs and architectural forms that brought forth the great cities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Out of the riots of the 1960s appeared an awakening that built the foundations for a multiracial society. Today, an oil spike, coupled with rising oceans and powerful storms, is creating a bipartisan, pro-conservation consensus on energy policy. In each case, advances came at the expense of vested interests that had long exercised with near monopoly power.

Will New Orleans finally get a viable school system? Is it a harbinger for what could happen nationwide? Reformers should take heart—but be wary nonetheless. Those beholden to powerful interests will try to eclipse the sun and forestall the dawn. They know what’s at stake—and they read catastrophe theory, too.

— Paul E. Peterson

Even more remarkable, both candidates offered evidence for their claims. They repeatedly cited scholarly studies that lent support to their policy proposals. Is it possible that we’re on the cusp of a new era of evidence-based education reform?

So we hope. In this spirit, we welcome you to the first issue of Education Matters: A Journal of Opinion and Research, available both in hard copy and on our website, www.educationnext.org. In the stormy seas of school reform, Education Matters will steer a steady course, presenting the facts as best they can be determined, giving voice (without fear or favor) to worthy research, sound ideas, and responsible arguments. Bold change is needed in American K–12 education, but Education Matters partakes of no program, campaign, or ideology. It goes where the evidence points.

Too often, in recent years, evidence and reform have been divorced from one another. Some assign responsibility for this disconnect to zealous reformers who are more interested in peddling their nostrums than in evaluating them, or to vested interests that aggressively protect the status quo instead of welcoming evidence about alternatives. Yet the scholarly community is no less culpable, due to its habit of reporting important education research in dense prose salted with tables, charts, and equations accessible only to other social scientists. The general reader—and the policy maker—is left confused as to what the research actually shows and whether it should be trusted.

Education Matters is committed equally to readability and scholarly integrity. The authors are committed to presenting their findings—as well as their conclusions and opinions—in crisp, readable language. More comprehensive versions of our authors’ research and essays, complete with notes and data, are available on-line in Education Next Unabridged Articles.

This journal has sections with distinctive missions. The Forum enables scholars and commentators to express differing views on major education issues and reform proposals—beginning, in this issue, with the pros and cons of for-profit schooling and merit pay for teachers in “Defining Merit.” The Features section provides notable authors with a place to reflect on important concerns. In this issue, we are pleased to have Nancy and Ted Sizer detailing the challenges of starting a charter school in “A School Built for Horace.” Then E. D. Hirsch Jr. shows how romanticism shapes our educational thinking—not always for the better. Next, Greg Cizek addresses “cheating to the test” and what can be done about it.

In Research, the journal shifts from interpretations and commentary to the presentation of new (peer-reviewed) studies. In this issue, Terry Moe in “Hidden Demand” uses survey data to estimate who would opt for private schooling if choice were publicly financed, and Caroline Hoxby in “Changing the Profession” shows what school choice could augur for teachers. Education Matters presents their key results in lively, readable prose; Education Next Unabridged Articles offers supporting documentation.

Check the Facts asks whether research that is already influencing policy actually withstands close scrutiny. In this issue, Eric Hanushek in “RAND versus RAND” reviews two RAND reports that were widely quoted during the recent presidential campaign. While partisans hailed these studies as supporting the claims of one or another candidate, Hanushek finds serious flaws in both reports.

As in this issue, our Book Review section will often supply more than one commentary on the same book. In this particular issue, Rogers Smith and Stephen Gilles review Diversity and Distrust: Civic Education in a Multicultural Democracy by Stephen Macedo in “Civics Lesson.” And on the journal’s last page, various authors speak in personal terms about how Education Matters to Me. Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona’s innovative superintendent of schools, inaugurates this feature in “Graduation Wish.”

In future issues—expect to see them four times a year—we will publish readers’ letters. We encourage you to send us your thoughts. The journal will benefit from your feedback. We also invite you to submit manuscripts for consideration and to contact us with your ideas.

-THE EDITORS

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush asked Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge to devote his energy to finding ways to strengthen the country’s domestic security. Before the tragedy, Ridge had worked equally hard at introducing competition into Pennsylvania’s education system. On the last page of this issue, Ridge explains why.

How will competition affect traditional public schools? Will they increase their productivity? Slide into passivity and bankruptcy? Turn into charity schools for the very poor and downcast? Shed responsibility for teaching challenging children? Or muddle along as usual?

No one can be certain, theorists have said, until a full-scale competitive system is tried in a serious fashion, on a large scale, over a lengthy period. This might be done as a huge experiment or simply as a forthright policy change. Cities might provide fully funded vouchers to everyone, for example. Or states might allow an unlimited number of charter schools to open, with enough funds to cover both operations and capital costs. This would facilitate the establishment of both individualized charter schools and multiple private companies with powerful education brand names.

So we won’t know for sure until we try competition on a large scale. In the meantime, however, should we not at least listen to the first whispers of information emanating from experiments currently under way? Undoubtedly the hints they provide will be subtle and ambiguous. Much as weak signals from the outer realms of the universe are both hard to detect and even more difficult to interpret, so, too, preliminary findings about the ways in which new forms of school choice will shape the public schools are hardly definitive. Yet few scientists would ignore well-researched results.

So it is that we bring together in this issue the best of the new evidence on how choice may be affecting public schools as well as a robust, informed conversation about its longer-term potential. The carefully conducted research by Caroline Hoxby and Jay Greene tells us that choice-even the threat of choice-provokes a detectable response from the public schools. Test scores rose when public schools were placed in more competitive contexts in Milwaukee, Michigan, Arizona, and Florida.

What policy changes actually produced these test-score gains? The participants in our forum take a close look at the competitive environments in Milwaukee, Michigan, and Arizona and find tangible changes hard to come by.

The most visible response to competition has been aggressive advertising campaigns. Perhaps more important changes are occurring at the grassroots. But turning a disheveled mountain of public education into a national schoolhouse on a hill will be a job as daunting as the marvelous, half-century-long, but ongoing rendering of a statue of Crazy Horse, the great Native American warrior, out of a Black Hills mountain by the Korzczak family.

The topic is a large one, and we invite you to tell us about any signs, positive or negative, that you have detected. Send your letters to Education Next, 226 Littauer North Yard, 1875 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138, or email to Editor_EM@latte.harvard.edu.

We hope you will also enjoy the remainder of this issue. Home schooling has received a lot of press recently; Christopher Hammons places much of the hysteria in the public media in thoughtful perspective. John Bishop makes the case for requiring high schoolers to pass curriculum-based exams in order to graduate, pointing out that students learn more and schools become more focused whenever these exit exams are in place. Maris Vinovskis calls attention to the misuse of the federal research dollar in education and the need for a basic restructuring of the federal research enterprise. And our forum on urban schools reveals that much of the governmental gyrating that is termed reform simply replaces one batch of ineffective institutions with another. If choice has yet to provide the definitive word on school reform, the governmental rearrangements conventionally attempted hardly seem more attractive.

-The Editors

After rising for more than 100 years, reports Duncan Chaplin in our lead feature “Tassels on the Cheap,” graduation rates started to slip during the 1970s. By the turn of the century, the graduation rate had dropped 7 percentage points from its high-water mark of 77 percent in 1969.

Surprisingly, the drop has gone practically unnoticed, mainly owing to the growing use of General Educational Development (GED) certificates. This certificate is awarded upon passage of an exam provided by the GED Testing Service of the American Council on Education. The most popular measure of graduation rates equates the GED with a high-school diploma, lulling observers into believing that graduation rates are higher than ever. Yet in the marketplace, the GED is not worth much more than the bubble sheet on which most of the answers are marked.

Maybe we shouldn’t care. Maybe high school is not for everyone and the country does not need so many educated workers. The United States, moreover, has enjoyed robust economic growth despite our educational deficiencies. This issue’s forum dives into the debate over the link between education and economic growth. Eric Hanushek in “The Seeds of Growth“ argues that human capital is crucial to long-term gains in economic productivity and growth-and shows how poor the U.S. standing in the world actually is. Meanwhile, William Easterly, in a fascinating discussion of education policy in the developing world in “Barren Land,” cautions against building human capital simply by throwing money at schools. The massive expansion of education in poor countries during the past four decades has failed to produce the expected surges in economic growth.

Yet it is dollar tossing that is now being mandated by judges, says Michael Heise in “Educational Jujitsu.” In a number of states, lawsuits are filed-and decisions handed down-that require states to up their education spending in the mistaken presumption that more money equals better schools. All these lawsuits are riding high on the back of the standards and accountability movement-even though Michael Cohen in “Unruly Crew“ shows that states have been slow to implement their accountability systems.

Our research section contains a pair of striking articles. Joseph Guzman‘s findings in “Learning English” cast doubt on the value of bilingual instruction as practiced in America’s schools. His research indicates that Spanish-speaking students, if rapidly immersed in English-language instruction, are more likely to go to college than those placed in bilingual education programs.

Darius Lakdawalla‘s analysis of trends in class size in “Quantity over Quality” is no less penetrating, cutting across political and ideological cleavages. He argues that over the years policymakers have responded to the increasing cost of skilled workers by lowering the pay of teachers relative to other professions, thereby reducing their relative quality as well. To make up for the loss in quality, policymakers have chosen to reduce class sizes by hiring more teachers.

The teacher quality problem can’t be solved, according to Sandra Vergari and Frederick M. Hess in “The Accreditation Game,” simply by tightening the accreditation and regulation of teacher-training programs. Today that responsibility rests primarily with the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), a private accrediting agency that claims to distinguish good teacher-education programs from bad ones. In fact, NCATE is an ideologically infused, largely unaccountable organization that has done little to demonstrate its ability to effectively police the quality of America’s schools of education.

Education Next has still more. Robert Boruch in “The Virtues of Randomness” makes the case for randomized experiments in education. Then, Lowell C. Rose and Alec M. Gallup in “Responsible Polling” defend their polling techniques against criticisms first raised by Terry Moe in “Cooking the Questions?” They claim that Moe’s critiques are largely spurious, yet promise to conduct their own randomized polling experiment to see if Moe could be right after all. Terry Moe replies.

Also, check out the book reviews and the moving essay titled “Full Court Press” by Howard Fuller on the back page. Enjoy, or get angry, but in any case please send us your comments.

-THE EDITORS

Washington State relied partially on its own Blaine amendment to revoke the publicly funded scholarship of Joshua Davey, a student who had declared a major in theology at Northwest College. In its next term, the Supreme Court will again consider whether it is legitimate for a state to forbid individuals from choosing to use public dollars for religious instruction. The Court’s decision in Davey v. Locke, writes James E. Ryan in this issue’s cover story “The Neutrality Principle,” may neutralize the Blaine amendments altogether, thereby clearing the legal path for school vouchers.

If the principle of neutrality is the key to the voucher question, is it also the best way to think about civic education? James B. Murphy in “Tug of War” believes that efforts to teach civic values in public schools ultimately place students at the nexus of the country’s culture wars. In an essay that is sure to provoke both those who want schools to advance patriotic values and those who preach social change, Murphy argues that public schools should focus on teaching students the knowledge and skills necessary to be intellectually engaged citizens, while remaining neutral on questions of civic values.

The principle of neutrality lies at the core of an equally provocative feature by Miriam Kurtzig Freedman. In “Disabling the SAT,” Freedman examines the College Board’s controversial decision to end the “flagging” of students’ scores when they are granted extended time to take the SAT because of a disability. Beginning in October 2003, some students will take the test in three hours, others in four and a half hours, and college admissions officers will no longer know the difference. Either abolish the time limit for everyone, Freedman argues, or note whose time limits have been lifted.

In this issue’s forums “Lifting the Barrier” and “Out with the Old,” Frederick Hess and Marc Tucker, respectively, suggest that public schools should also remain neutral regarding where potential principals and superintendents gained their management skills and experience. Presently, most public schools are constrained by state rules to choose their leaders from the pool of candidates who have earned degrees in educational administration. Why aren’t graduates of business schools, experienced military officers, or business and nonprofit executives also eligible for a license? Do we need state licensure at all?

After all, many education schools focus less on enhancing student performance than on proposing unproven instructional approaches such as bilingual education and critical pedagogy. Christine H. Rossell in “The Near End of Bilingual Education” follows bilingual education’s gradual demise in California in the wake of Proposition 227-and finds that achievement is climbing slowly upward in schools that adhered to voters’ wishes by abolishing the purest forms of bilingual education. Separately, J. Martin Rochester in “Critical Demagogues” checks “critical pedagogy,” a body of education theory espoused by Henry Giroux, Peter McLaren and Michael Apple.

Elsewhere in this issue, Andrew Rudalevige in “The Politics of No Child Left Behind” explains just why the sweeping reforms of the federal No Child Left Behind Act were written in ways that created a host of implementation challenges. Gary W. Ritter and Christopher J. Lucas in “Puzzled States” tell us how the states are doing at addressing those challenges.

An earlier but still deeply influential set of educational theories, popularized by the likes of John Dewey and Herbert Spencer, are the targets of Lynne V. Cheney‘s review of Kieran Egan’s Getting It Wrong from the Beginning in “Progressively Worse.” In his review of Diane Ravitch’s The Language Police “Sensitivity Training,” Nathan Glazer wonders whether the efforts of both the Right and the Left to promote their values through the censoring of schoolbooks are presenting an unrealistic picture of America to students. Perhaps textbook authors and publishers should adhere to the neutrality principle as well.

-The Editors

The media continually parrot the claims of widespread fiscal crises in the nation’s school districts. Yet it’s hard to square these jeremiads with the simple fact that, after adjusting for inflation, per-pupil spending today is nearly three times what it was in 1960-and that spending jumps were higher in the 1990s than ever before.

Where did all this money go? How do schools seem to sponge up every last dollar? Why have the extensive investments in technology done nothing to forestall budgetary train wrecks or to produce significant achievement gains? Why does every slowdown in the economy seem to wreak so much havoc among school officials?

The authors of this issue’s cover stories, political scientist Jon Fullerton and management professor William Ouchi, address these questions from different angles.  Fullerton examines the politics of school budgeting and tells us that school managers are, in effect, rewarded for overspending. Moreover, they operate with primitive accounting systems that can serve to mask financial problems for years on end. Even the best financial officers are trapped by state, federal, and union mandates. Worse, the systems are so centralized, argues Ouchi, that they waste money on bureaucratic operations and lack the capacity to respond rapidly to changing circumstances.

In a few cases, school districts’ problems are the result not of poor management but of something more serious. Taking a look at the rising problem of teacher cheating on tests of achievement, Brian Jacob and Steven Levitt have come up with an estimate of the extent of the problem in Chicago and have designed a technique that will help to bring the problem under better control. Fortunately, they show that 95 percent or more of the teachers in Chicago administer tests honestly to their students, a welcome testimony to the decency of the teaching profession.

In professions like law and medicine, the occasional bad seeds are weeded out by committees of their peers. If teachers would like to enjoy similar self-policing, argues Denis Doyle, they will need to jettison the tactics of industrial-style unionism in favor of organizations more like the medieval guilds. And teachers could further enhance their sense of professionalism, says David Ferrero, if they were able to create schools reflecting their pedagogical commitments. They might also be less inclined to leave such schools, since path-breaking research by Eric Hanushek, Steven Rivkin, and John Kain reveals that teachers’ working conditions are more likely to determine whether they stay at a school-or even in the profession-than are their salaries. The essay is based on an extraordinary set of data collected in cooperation with the state of Texas under the leadership of John Kain, whose untimely death this past summer is mourned by his many friends in the educational research community.

This, the first issue of Education Next‘s fourth year, also features Ron Haskins‘s penetrating examination of Head Start’s history, explaining why a program with such great promise has had so little success. Federal programs are also the focus of Diane Ravitch‘s essay. Ravitch, the onetime head of the U.S. Department of Education’s research and development efforts, warns the department’s new Office of Innovation and Improvement not to be taken in by hucksters peddling the latest fad. Meanwhile, John Bishop highlights a promising innovation, Michigan’s college scholarship program for students who perform well on state tests. And in one of Education Next‘s most personal and moving essays, Ann Christy Dybvik traces an autistic boy’s steps through the school day and examines the impact of the federal inclusion mandate on children with disabilities.

In publishing circles they say that a journal’s third year is make-or-break. Thank you, readers, for joining us for a fourth.

-The Editors

In my high school, rumor had it that Richard Brockhaus was the toughest grader in the state. Others disagreed. They insisted it was the whole country.

When as a senior I finally braved his Advanced Placement calculus course, Dr. B did nothing to dispel these rumors. For all my efforts, it seemed that I could not live up to his expectations. My grade for the fall semester remains the only C on my academic record.

Dr. B was not wholly devoid of sympathy. A relentless encourager, he constantly reminded us that the material we were trying to learn was “not rocket science.” Thus motivated, I managed to improve my grade modestly in the spring.

When we arrived in May to take the course’s final exam, to our surprise we found a TV perched awkwardly on Dr. B’s desk. In lieu of taking an exam, we would be watching Stand and Deliver, the film documenting Jaime Escalante’s success in teaching AP calculus to disadvantaged students in East Los Angeles. Apparently our work had met his expectations after all.

Still, those of us who had struggled through the course had little idea of what to expect as we headed into the official AP exam later that month. As it turned out, the College Board’s questions were among the easiest we had encountered all year. Dr. B had taught “to the test” and well beyond it; every member of our class passed with flying colors.

Contrast my experiences with those of 300 11th and 12th graders in Boston, Springfield, and Worcester surveyed in 2003 by the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute. In the 10th grade, these students had failed in their first attempt at the statewide Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) exam.

Yet more than 45 percent of them reported having a B average or better in the 2002-03 academic year; fewer than one in ten reported an average of D or F. This despite the state’s insistence that students who do not pass the MCAS demonstrate no more than “a minimal understanding of the subject matter and do not solve simple problems.” Their teachers, it would seem, had signaled success when in fact the students were floundering.

Today in Massachusetts, as in many states, students who fail to pass the statewide graduation test are prevented from receiving a diploma. Teachers who hand out misleading grades thereby allow some students, already let down by a school system that has failed to prepare them adequately, to be blindsided. Only because the state provides multiple opportunities to pass the MCAS do such students have some chance at redemption.

In this issue, David Figlio and Maurice Lucas take a systematic look at the effects of grading practices on elementary students in Florida (“The Gentleman’s-A‘,” p. 60). Their findings confirm what Dr. Brockhaus understood: Students learn far more from rigorous teachers than from those with lenient grading standards.

Regrettably, teachers with high standards appear to be as scarce in Florida as they are in Massachusetts. Only 50 percent of students awarded As and 11 percent of those with Bs performed at an A or B level on the corresponding section of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

Teachers clearly need some discretion in deciding how to distribute grades; situations will arise where they feel the need to award a higher grade than warranted in order to sustain a student’s morale or to reward exceptional effort. But grades that are consistently too high send the wrong message. They tend to discourage students from making a serious effort and increase the odds that serious problems will go unidentified until it is too late.

Is the era of unchecked grade inflation already behind us? Perhaps. As external assessments become a regular part of the American education system, parents may demand that report cards offer accurate information about their children’s progress. And principals responsible for ensuring that their schools make “adequate yearly progress” will need to ask teachers to keep standards high.

-Martin West

The funding question was put to rest by James Peyser and Robert Costrell in the Spring 2004 issue (“Exploring the Costs of Accountability,” Feature). They showed that it costs but $20 to test a student, the only new activity NCLB requires all schools to do. Meanwhile, federal dollars have risen steadily since the law’s passage; the average district now receives $300 more per pupil from Washington than it did in 2000.

Nor is NCLB, apart from its testing requirement, much of a mandate. To be sure, schools are expected to show adequate yearly progress toward state-determined goals, as measured by state-developed tests. If progress is not made, the school is said to be failing or, in the polite language of the federal Department of Education, “in need of improvement.”

But what are the consequences of failing? Not much. If a school fails for two years running, the only requirement is to let its students transfer to one of the district’s nonfailing schools.

Students are not given the option of transferring to a private school or to a charter school outside the district’s boundaries. Inner-city children are not given the choice of attending a suburban school. Students cannot move to a better school if it too is “in need of improvement.” If every school in a district is failing, or if the district has only one school, children have no choices whatsoever.

According to the Council of Great City Schools, roughly 20 percent of big-city schools have been deemed “failing” (see the article by Michael Casserly on p. 32). This percentage is almost certain to increase, because the “adequate yearly progress” rule becomes more demanding each year. Unless schools improve-or states ease their academic standards-most big-city schools will soon be defined as failing. If every school is so designated, the choice mandate vanishes.

William Howell reports that over a fifth of the parents in failing schools would like to consider an alternative (see the article on p. 26). Since his data are from Massachusetts, a relatively high-scoring state, the parental demand could well be greater elsewhere.

Yet less than 1 percent of all students in failing schools have sought a transfer. Some hurdles (transportation costs, timing, and so forth) are practical. But many school districts appear to be obstructing the process by restricting the number of available choices and discouraging parents when they apply. As one Worcester, Massachusetts, official put it, “The feds told us we had to offer a choice, not the parents’ choice, but a choice.”

After three years of making inadequate progress, schools face another so-called mandate: Students must then be given the option of receiving free tutoring or other supplemental educational services. For this, the federal government is providing more than enough funds to pay current costs-and still more money is on its way.

Local districts can contract with outside vendors or provide these tutoring services themselves. At present the system is designed so that districts can keep the motivated students with supportive families who initially apply for services, leaving the less motivated students to be served by outside providers.

Where, in all of this, is there a tough mandate? Admittedly, schools are to be “reconstituted” by their districts if they fail five years in a row. Will this mandate have a bite? Though it’s too soon to tell, the reconstitution concept remains ill defined, leaving plenty of wiggle room for local school officials-the very same people who let these schools “fail” in the first place.

So is NCLB too weak to succeed? Not as long as test results continue to be reported to the public. Because of NCLB, parents and taxpayers are being told, more clearly than ever, how much students are learning at school.
This, it seems, is the excruciating mandate that many school officials and union leaders detest most. The feds are making them squirm under a bright light of public information about the schools’ performance. What’s so bad about that?

-Paul E. Peterson

Yet today we see marked progress toward racial equality in public facilities, industry, and politics–but not in our schools.

In light of the Brown opinion, the irony is all the greater. The opinion accompanying the Supreme Court’s decision barred only school segregation–on the shaky grounds that such segregation harmed the “hearts and minds” of black children (see the essays in this issue by Warren Simmons and Howard Fuller).

Brown nonetheless changed the country’s most basic political and economic institutions. Segregated political rallies, legislative assemblies, and presidential cabinets all went by the boards. Not right away, but eventually.

The workplace, too, is now more often racially mixed than not. When the private sector was told not to discriminate, it complied. Not right away–and not completely–of course. But as younger generations scorned racism and money was to be made by becoming an equal-opportunity employer, private institutions opened their doors. Today, black and white adults with similar scores on standardized tests earn similar wages.

Meanwhile, Brown‘s consequences for education remain ambiguous at best. On the plus side, legalized school segregation disappeared and most school districts have become as integrated as their cities’ demographics will allow.

But the slow march toward further integration was accompanied by bitter conflicts that introduced new problems–involuntary busing that separated schools from families and communities; large, difficult-to-manage school campuses (built to broaden the social mix of the school); tensions between ethnic groups and within-school discrimination; and lowered expectations for students of all social backgrounds. Whites fled bad schools for racially distinctive suburbs.

Worse, African-American students’ learning has continued to trail that of whites. Though the achievement gap narrowed in the 1980s, it opened again in the 1990s, at a time when the principles of Brown should have been firmly entrenched.

Conventional liberals blame “politicians” for inadequate funding or “society” for its abiding, if now hidden, racism. But money has seldom bought progress in education, and it is difficult to claim that racism survives in schools when it is on the wane elsewhere.

Conventional conservatives are more apt to blame the family, suggesting that the child-rearing practices within black households are the root of the problem. Yet this overlooks growing evidence that disparities between the achievement of blacks and that of whites are smallest among preschoolers–the age at which family influences are pervasive and school influence nil (see the article by Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt).

Closer to the truth are those who blame Hollywood, television, and the fashion industry for fostering the drug-infested, anti-learning, “hip-hop” youth culture that burgeoned in the 1990s.

If street culture is the problem, then assigned neighborhood schools are not the solution. Only in rare instances do traditional neighborhood schools acquire the sense of mission that can wall off the seductions of their immediate environment.

Learning is best fostered when schools draw boundaries that separate classroom studies from the opiates of street life. Because good private schools have discovered this secret, African-American students who attend them are much more likely to complete college than are comparable students from public schools. There are signs that charter schools have discovered this secret as well. As schools of choice, not assignment, they have an institutional incentive to do so.

Unfortunately, some still argue for traditional public schools on the grounds that black families are too ill-informed to make wise choices. But over time, knowledge and commitment will come naturally to most parents, if choice is made available. To ignore this is racist in the extreme. School choice is, indeed, the civil-rights issue of today.

- PAUL E. PETERSON

Just about everyone with experience in public schooling knows what a teachers’ salary schedule looks like. (You can see a specimen in our Forum section, accompanying Brad Jupp’s story, “The Uniform Salary Schedule,” page 10.) Along one axis are 15 or so “steps,” usually based on years of experience in that school system. Across the other are categories of teacher “qualifications,” with higher pay depending on how many university courses and degrees the teacher has acquired. In the specimen from Denver, for example, a “step 1″ teacher (in this case, that’s a step above “new hire”) with a bachelor’s degree is paid $32,971, while a “step 10″ teacher with a master’s degree earns $46,860.

Such schedules have three profound failings. First, they pay no attention to the labor market for people possessing a specialty. Thus the gym teacher earns exactly the same as the AP physics teacher, who earns the same as a middle-school social studies teacher, though all know that their job options outside of teaching are entirely different.

Second, they pay no attention to the relative challenge of teaching in particular schools within a district. Thus an instructor in the toughest downtown high school gets paid the same as one teaching in the most serene of suburban-like elementary schools. Especially for poor districts, such schedules-usually devised and agreed to via collective bargaining-make it brutally hard to manage the educationally productive distribution of limited dollars and human resources.

Third, they ignore teacher effectiveness. Despite all we have learned about huge differences in teaching skills and the profound impact such differences have on children’s learning, the mediocre (or worse) teacher earns exactly the same as the classroom superstar.

Insane, no? It’s impossible to picture how the United States will radically upgrade the quality of its three-million-member K-12 teacher cadre, attract more able people to enter and stick with this field, ensure needy kids’ access to the best instructors, or span the curriculum with people who really know their subjects as long as this archaic, civil-service pay system persists.

This issue’s Forum section illustrates the emerging consensus, bringing together three people who might otherwise have very different perspectives on public education. On this they agree: It’s time to replace the uniform salary schedule with something that takes account of (at minimum) subject specialty, school environment, and classroom effectiveness. The Forum also illustrates some of the tantalizing innovations now visible on this front, from Denver’s pioneering teachers’ pay system to the Milken Family Foundation’s Teacher Advancement Plan.

The innovations, however, remain tiny and tentative alongside the massive challenges.

Timorousness in the face of obdurate teacher unions (Denver being a happy exception) is perhaps the greatest cause of our halting progress in this domain. But reformers must also face the reality that getting an alternative system properly calibrated, making it work, and holding onto it are exceptionally challenging.

This we can see in Thomas Dee’s account of Tennessee’s 13-year attempt to install a workable “career ladder” for the Volunteer State’s public-school teachers (see “Dollars and Sense,” page 60). Despite the fact that it seems to have enhanced teacher effectiveness, issues arose from day one. Whether to “ration” the upper rungs of the ladder or let all teachers ascend it. Whether to judge teachers’ readiness to climb according to their students’ achievement, supervisors’ (or peers’) appraisal of their classroom prowess. What’s fair to teachers? What’s administratively workable? What can the state afford? What will the union tolerate?

In the end, just about every Tennessee teacher clambered onto the career ladder. Salary differentials shrank; grounds for ascending became ever more diverse and less exacting; and never did the program deal with such variables as subject specialty or working conditions.

A failed experiment? No, a cautionary tale: Everyone knows we must erase the uniform salary schedule. But close attention must be paid to what will replace it.

-CHESTER E. FINN JR.

But new evidence confirms what was known when the law was passed: Fixing the American education system is an even more monumental task. Just as this issue was going to press, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released the results of its latest triennial international math and reading survey, this one undertaken in 2003, the year NCLB was being fully implemented. American 15-year-olds, according to the report, ranked 24th in math among the students from 29 industrialized countries who were given the tests.

Given these results, President Bush is absolutely correct to focus on the American high school as the next target for reform. Students in the best-performing European and Asian countries must take well-defined examinations to achieve graduation. But most American high school students, to get a diploma, only have to earn barely passing grades until they finish their 12th year.

Externally set graduation examinations need to be the first order of business for Margaret Spellings, the new secretary of education. This will require a clear change in NCLB policy.

Up until now, NCLB has held schools accountable but has expected nothing directly from students. Instead, it treats pupils as widgets, objects to be manipulated by teachers, parents, and school administrators. Yet in the end adults can only guide and encourage youngsters, who must learn to take responsibility for their own education.

For that to happen, students should be told what material they need to learn, what examinations they need to pass, and what level they need to achieve on the exam if they are to earn the recognition that will give them access to decent jobs and good colleges.

Nor can the Bush administration push high school reform without at the same time repairing other defects in NCLB. Although the law does shine an intense light on school performance, that light is filtered by lenses that distort what is happening inside schoolrooms.

For one thing, the law requires only that schools make progress toward the proficiency standard established by each state. Once a student crosses the proficiency bar, the school has no incentive to encourage further improvement. The school can ignore the high-flying student and still win NCLB approval.

Yet the OECD study shows that the top students are flying low. Only 5 percent of Americans performed at the highest math level—compared with nearly a quarter of Finns, Koreans, Japanese, and Dutch. (For some of the reasons why, see in this issue the feature essay on the new “new math” by Barry Garelick, page 28.) Such a scandalously low performance leaves the country’s future at the mercy of the ever better educated competition beyond our borders (see review essay by Martin West).

Other changes in NCLB are needed as well. For one thing, definitions of proficiency vary widely from one state to another-and in most states fall well below the standards established by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (For details, see the figures and discussion in this issue’s Forum, page 8).

Also, schools should be held accountable for the gains of individual students. To do this effectively, states must create an information system that allows them to track individual student progress, then hold students, teachers, schools, and districts to account.

NCLB is a monumental first step. But it is only the first step. Much more needs to be done if the promise of accountability is to be fulfilled.

At the edge of a fault line between two tectonic plates, the Grand Teton towers some five thousand feet over Jackson Hole below. There, near his beloved family home, John Walton, a risk-taker of the kind seldom witnessed within the world of large-scale philanthropy, died tragically on June 27, 2005, while flying a small, experimental plane. His memory will be held dear not only by his family and friends but also by thousands of low-income families, for whose children he helped find better schools. For more than two decades, he devoted much of his heart, time, intellect and charitable resources to finding a way to put children first so that genuine equality of education opportunity could be secured for all Americans.

John Walton’s father, Sam, discovered that placing the consumer first was the key to creating a worldwide retailing system that gave working people access to quality products previously beyond their means. John committed himself to doing much the same thing for the education system, seeking to redesign its very framework so that parents, regardless of means, would be in command. Motivated by a faith that gave deep roots to his simple, strong values and tenacity to his vision, he believed that his country’s renewal depended on the reform of its schools.

Sam’s accomplishment, while one of the great commercial triumphs, was in some ways less impressive than his son’s intrepid struggle, if only because the marketplace for retailers was already woven into American practice. John’s daring drive to transform the country’s schools challenged both conventional wisdom and a thicket of entrenched interests.

From the beginning, however, John Walton understood the magnitude of the task. He realized that withoutmarkets systems do not change. He knew that putting families and children ahead of vested interests would provoke relentless resistance that even might have endangered the company on which the family fortune rested.

But Walton, who had worn the Green Beret, felt no goal worth pursuing if risk were not attached. Not for him the safe philanthropy expected to enhance a corporate image. No, his concern was always focused on the consumer: in this case, the poor children who needed better schools if they were to experience the American dream.

Focused on the goal, Walton was flexible as to means. He gave great sums to privately funded voucher programs, hoping that those funds would spur public action. When this seemed insufficient, he came up with more direct political strategies, especially the mobilization of poor, inner-city, minority families whose plight, if articulated clearly, might win over public opinion. When charter schools appeared on the reform horizon, he was quick to explore ways to increase their numbers and make them more effective. Always, he understood that gains could be achieved only by maintaining a strategic vision, forming broad alliances, ignoring the temptation to micromanage, and allowing others, with less at stake, to take most of the credit.

To Walton, commitment, not ceremony, was what counted. Just as he avoided formalities and fashion in favor of shirtsleeves and jeans, so he avoided press releases, public pronouncements, and platitudes in favor of quiet discussions about what really mattered.

True, he wanted to move quickly and decisively, entering the fray with the impact for which Sam Walton had been well known. But as he discovered that the framers of the American Constitution had created a system that could change only slowly, he acquired a more patient strategic vision.

The full range of his accomplishments is yet to be tallied. Yet even a preliminary assessment is remarkable, beginning with John Walton’s major contribution to the nationwide Children’s Scholarship Fund, which revealed to a broad public the desire for school choice among low-income families. That was only the most visible of the Walton contributions. In addition, he provided support and guidance to the successful efforts to secure publicly funded voucher trials in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in Florida, and in the District of Columbia; aided the litigation that resulted in the constitutional validation of school vouchers by the U. S. Supreme Court; helped extend the charter school movement; and became a key founder and trustee for the newly formed Alliance for School Choice.

Tectonic change builds mountains, but it does so an inch at a time. John’s mortal remains now rest in a mountain’s shadow, but his spirit continues to guide us toward the distant summit.

— The Editors