Hess moderated the forum, and panelists included Chris Barbic, of the Tennessee Achievement School District; Deb Gist, of the Rhode Island Department of Education; Kaya Henderson, of DC Public Schools; Adrian Manuel, of Kingston High School; and Michelle Rhee, of StudentsFirst.

An article based on the book, “Combating the Culture of Can’t,” was recently published by Education Next in advance of the Spring 2013 issue.

—Education Next

So I watched the news last night with a worried eye after CNN told me that the exit polls in Wisconsin showed a tight race, with each candidate expected to get 50 percent of the vote.  Wow! I thought.  So all the polls leading up to election day were wrong.  Only the Democratic pollsters, Public Policy Polling, came close with their prediction that the race had tightened to within 3 points, indicating that either side could win.  Did our Education Next poll get it wrong?  Had the Wisconsin electorate shifted against the governor?  Had there been no shift against public sector unions after all?

In the days leading up to recall day, it seemed that Walker would win the race fairly easily, because Real Clear Politics (RCP), which calculates the average of all publicly reported polls, said that Walker had a 6.7 percent margin, and I had learned from earlier elections that the RCP average is better than any one poll at predicting the result.

So what was the final result?—a Walker win by 6.9 percent.  The RCP average was much, much better than the exit polls administered after the voters had cast their ballots!

Talk about a home run!  Congratulations to Real Clear Politics!

Never believe any particular poll (other than the Education Next poll, of course), but do believe the average of a bunch of polls.  Right now, the RCP average tells us Obama is leading Romney by 3 percentage points.  That number does not tell us what will happen on election day, but it does tell us that the incumbent president has a slight advantage today in a race that remains highly contested.

-Paul Peterson

Just to be eligible, districts by the 2014-15 school year will have to promise to implement evaluation systems that take student outcomes into account—not just for teacher and principal performance, but for district superintendents and school boards. That’s a big departure from the state-level Race to the Top competitions, which just looked at educators who actually work in schools, not district-level leaders.” [Emphasis added]

How very refreshing, even exhilarating, the inclusion of superintendents and boards in a results-based accountability system, rather than the customary focus only on schools and their principals and teachers (and sometimes the kids themselves). Will the NSBA and AASA react angrily to this goring of their own members’ oxen? Or will they—as they should—welcome this logical and potentially powerful widening of the theory and practice of accountability?

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog.

The Times called it a “coveted endorsement”—and indeed it is, no matter how much fun Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich had at poor Eric Fehrnstrom’s expense. (For the record, that same day Fehrnstrom, a longtime Romney advisor, gave a televised interview in which he said “I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign…. Everything changes [when he’s running against Obama]. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”)

Jeb Bush, who has been a tireless education reformer since the mid-nineties, is no Etch A Sketch. (Photo by Rex Sorgatz)

Jeb Bush, who has been a tireless education reformer since the mid-nineties, is no Etch A Sketch. And by coincidence I was lucky enough to spend some time with the popular two-term Florida governor (1999—2007) just last week as partEducation Next’s “Conversation” series with important education reformers (see my conversations with John White, Whitney Tilson, and Chris Cerf). You can read a summary of what he accomplished in Florida here; examples include instituting an A—F school grading system, ending social promotion, rewarding school success with both more funds and more flexibility, and creating a tax credit scholarship program. And it has worked. The state’s fourth graders—a majority of whom are minorities—went from ten points below the national average NAEP score on reading in 1998 to six points ahead of the national average by 2009. Florida’s Hispanic students are now reading as well or better than the statewide average of all students in thirty-one states and its African-American students are reading as well or better than the statewide average in eight states.

It is easy to see why The Economist ran a lengthy story on Bush just a couple of weeks ago, under the headline,

The Floridian school of thought: Inspired by Jeb Bush, more Republicans want to transform the classroom

Through his four-year-old nonprofit, Foundation for Excellence in Education, Bush remains an outsize presence in education reform circles. (Bush had also launched the Foundation for Florida’s Future after losing the 1994 race for Governor. It went dormant while he was Governor and then started up again in 2007 when he left office. It currently lobbies the Florida Legislature, the governor’s office, and the Florida Department of Education on education reforms to build on and protect the policies that were passed while he was in office.)

I watched Bush entertain a delegation of visiting legislators from North Carolina during an informal luncheon at his Coral Gables headquarters, an incisive and expert hour-long primer on building better school systems. What’s the secret, I asked Bush.  “Hard work,” he says. “And you have to be bold.”

Bush’s new foundation is a powerhouse in Florida education reform circles, thanks in large part to a veteran staff directed by Patricia Levesque, Bush’s deputy chief of staff for education while he was governor. And as The Economist suggested, the foundation’s reach is nationwide. (I recommend The Reformer Toolbox.)

As Alyson Klein reported on her Education Week blog,

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the godfather of the reformey-minded Chiefs for Change and an education force in statehouses around the country, has endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for president. That news may be the biggest unsurprise ever to education folks who have been following the campaign.

She notes that former Florida Board of Education Chairman F. Philip Handy is a Romney education advisor and on the board of Bush’s foundation. And Margaret Spellings, President George W. Bush’s former secretary of education, is also on Romney’s team. I guarantee you that if Mitt only half-listens to George W’s brother, the nation’s education prospects will be greatly improved.

- Peter Meyer

This post originally appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Board’s Eye View blog.

We are now entering the fourth and final year of the first term of the Obama administration. Enough time has elapsed to provide an opportunity for at least an interim assessment, even though anything more definitive must await the voters’ judgment as to whether a second term is warranted.

At first glance, it looks as if President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, have made surprisingly deft moves, both in terms of policy and politics. Even while Republicans are whacking the president “like a piñata,” as one pundit put it, they are treating his K–12 education record with kid gloves.

Senator Lamar Alexander has commented that he has “a lot of admiration” for Obama’s education secretary and “respect” for the president’s “positions on kindergarten through 12th-grade education.” Former House Speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich admitted that this is “the one area where I very much agree” with him. New Jersey governor Chris Christie exclaims that the president has been a “great ally” on education reform. Former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney acknowledges that “some of his education policies” have been “positive.”

Is that for good reason? Is President Obama as strong on education reform as these comments suggest? On the surface, at least, the president has a compelling record. His Race to the Top (RttT) initiative catalyzed a chain reaction of legislative action at the state level, securing key reforms on issues ranging from charter schools to teacher evaluations to rigorous standards. His stimulus and “edujobs” bills seemed to maintain a critical level of investment in the public schools during a time of difficult budget cuts and financial strain. His administrative action to provide flexibility on No Child Left Behind’s most onerous provisions bypassed a paralyzed Congress and partially fulfilled his campaign promise to lift the law’s yoke off the backs of decent but maligned schools. And in Arne Duncan he’s got a popular, attractive education secretary to boot, one of the leading stars of his cabinet.

Plenty of these accomplishments are more than skin-deep. For example, both the Common Core State Standards effort and the move toward rigorous teacher evaluations could lead to dramatic increases in student achievement, if implemented faithfully by states and school districts. Neither of these reforms would have been adopted so quickly, in so many places, were it not for the president’s leadership.

Beyond these success stories, however, lie some very real weaknesses—soft spots in Obama’s education record—that raise doubts about the long-term impact of the administration’s efforts.

Wasteful Spending

There’s little reason to doubt that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—the 2009 stimulus bill—will long be remembered, along with health-care reform, as Obama’s signature accomplishment. For Democrats, the law saved the nation from a profound depression. For Republicans, as they made clear in the 2010 midterm elections, it constitutes a massive spending program that contributes to a national debt of historic proportions, with few results to show for it.

Accounting for nearly $100 billion (or about double the typical annual federal appropriation for education), the education portion of the stimulus package was one of its central components. In fact, setting aside the bill’s tax cuts, education spending represented the largest piece of the stimulus pie. These dollars were split into a few large categories: supersized spending for the Title I and special-education formula programs, and a “state stabilization fund” that essentially amounted to revenue sharing. (It also included funds for the $4 billion Race to the Top program, discussed separately below.)

Ostensibly, the intent of the education stimulus was to keep teachers from losing their jobs. The macroeconomic argument was that the last thing a damaged economy needed after the 2008 shock was to have hundreds of thousands of public school teachers getting pink slips, going on unemployment, and defaulting on their mortgages. And the nation’s schoolchildren would benefit as well. Protecting education jobs would keep good teachers from getting laid off and class sizes from skyrocketing. In February 2009, Secretary Duncan warned U.S. News & World Report about the consequences if the stimulus bill were not enacted. “My concern is that hundreds of thousands of good teachers, not just bad teachers, are going to go, and that would be devastating. It is to no one’s advantage if class size skyrockets or librarians get eliminated or school counselors disappear.”

This line of reasoning has two problems, as Duncan himself later admitted. First, good teachers were laid off because union protections required districts to implement reductions in force via “last in, first out.” If schools could have used the recession and budget crisis as an opportunity to cut their least-effective teachers, student achievement would actually have risen. As Stanford economist Eric Hanushek has shown, there is no quicker way to lift student improvement than to encourage the lowest-performing teachers to pursue other lines of work. Duncan himself does not disagree. In March 2011 he said, “Layoffs based only on seniority don’t help kids. We have to minimize the negative impact on students.’’

Second, there is little, if any, evidence that a modest increase in class size would have devastating consequences. Class size has fallen markedly over the past few decades. The year Obama was elected, the average number of pupils per professional in the public schools was 15, down from 19 in 1980 and 26 in 1960. In fact, even major layoffs would only return schools to the staffing ratios of the late 1990s, not exactly the Dark Ages, and a time of great progress in raising student achievement nationally. And again, even Duncan admitted as much when he later said that “class size has been a sacred cow and we need to take it on.”

Even when we evaluate the stimulus package on its own terms, protecting teachers’ jobs and keeping classes small, the costs seem wildly in excess of any benefits obtained. According to the Obama administration’s calculations, the stimulus package and edujobs bill kept about 400,000 teachers on the payroll who would have otherwise been terminated. That works out to approximately $150,000 per job, an exceptionally bad deal for taxpayers considering that the average new teacher (who would have been first in line for a pink slip) makes considerably less than half that in salary and benefits. Even if we accept the estimate of teachers’ jobs saved, we have to ask, where did the rest of the money go?

There is evidence that a significant portion of the funds did not go to stemming layoffs. Media reports indicate that some districts used the money for teachers’ raises and bonuses. The Government Accountability Office cited one North Carolina district for using edujobs dollars to pay for movie tickets, fast food, and a water park visit for students. This was in the midst of the worst economic downturn in six decades, when most Americans were either losing their jobs or barely treading water.

The design of the laws may, in fact, have aggravated the funding crisis at the local level. Forced to spend the funds relatively quickly, districts added staff, made new investments, and otherwise increased their costs, which will make the coming “funding cliff” that much more painful. At a time when tough-minded superintendents should have been preparing for leaner times by negotiating concessions from their bargaining units on salaries and benefits, federal policy cut them off at the knees.

Lackluster Results

Race to the Top is President Obama’s most vaunted win. The name itself connotes progress, forward movement, even competition. And there’s plenty of substance for the president to brag about: more than 45 states signing onto rigorous common standards; dozens of states getting serious about teacher evaluations; key jurisdictions removing caps on charter school expansion. This is what New Yorker contributor Steven Brill called “a sweeping overhaul” of the system. Look closer, put the Race to the Top’s results into context, and the scorecard changes considerably.

Secretary Duncan likes to say that RttT is part of a “quiet revolution” in education, with states creating “bold blueprints for reform [that] bear the signatures of many key players at the state and local level who drive change in our schools.” He’s right that the program led to a flurry of reform-friendly legislation. But did the 2009–10 period, when states were competing for RttT funds, see the most reforms ever enacted? No. That distinction belongs to 2011, after the 2010 midterm elections swept historic Republican majorities into office in state after state. While a similar number of states (5) made sizable progress on charter school caps in 2011 as in the previous two years, the number of states that moved forward on teacher evaluations, layoff policies, and vouchers increased significantly (see Figure 1).

Race to the Top wasn’t meant just to catalyze legislative changes. Winning states made bold promises about implementing their proposed reforms, and Obama and Duncan issued stern statements about their intention to pull dollars away from jurisdictions that fell short. How has that effort fared?

In short: not so well. Eleven states and the District of Columbia won first-round grants of up to $700 million from the $4 billion RttT pot in 2010, promising to deliver a range of ambitious programs and results. A little more than a year later, every one of those grantees has amended its plans at least once, with the Department of Education approving a grand total of forty-seven amendments to date. Maryland asked for another year to finish its teacher evaluation system, while North Carolina opted for a more modest teacher-retention bonus program. Time and again goals have been lowered and timelines extended. When in late 2011, in response to Hawaii’s stalling Duncan finally threatened to cut off the Aloha State’s funding, it marked a sharp and belated shift from the dozens of accommodating letters of approval that states wavering on their commitments have received from Washington.

Scaled-back ambitions are only half the problem: many states seem to have barely started putting their plans in motion. As of May 2011, a year after the first RttT awards, just over $80 million of the $4 billion in funding had actually been spent. While it’s at least reassuring that states haven’t been burning through the money, the urgency of the “Race” petered out once the awards were made. With the latest round of RttT grants awarded with little fanfare, the Obama administration’s signature effort is losing steam.

Federal Micromanagement

Complaining about an overbearing federal role in education is a mainstay of Republican campaigns, particularly during primary season, when the battle cry of “local control” most resonates with likely voters. The current nomination contest is no exception, with all of the GOP candidates calling for a smaller federal footprint, if not the outright closure of the Department of Education.

This message is more problematic during general elections, when voters (especially all-important independents) can easily equate a conservative’s plea to “pull back” as an indication of disinterest.

But in skillful hands, painting Uncle Sam as school-yard bully could work.

“We’re going to let states, schools and teachers come up with innovative ways to give our children the skills they need to compete for the jobs of the future,” promised Obama when announcing his NCLB waiver plan. “Because what works in Rhode Island may not be the same thing that works in Tennessee—but every student should have the same opportunity to learn and grow, no matter what state they live in.” Duncan echoed, “instead of being tight on the goals and loose on the means of achieving them, [NCLB] is loose on the goals but tight on the means. We need to flip that and states are already leading the way.”

But for all the talk of state discretion, the Washington screws are actually being tightened. Take the Race to the Top, which one of us once characterized as “a carrot that feels like a stick.” Rather than invite states to present their own compelling reform plans, Obama and Duncan asked governors and state superintendents to develop plans that complied with federal guidelines set forth in excruciating detail. Or take their approach to NCLB waivers, in which they set constitutionally suspect conditions on the flexibility craved by the states (see “Obama’s NCLB Waivers,” forum, page 56). As Senator Alexander remarked, the Obama administration had states “over a barrel.”

And when it comes to federal control, nothing is more troubling than the declaration that a disproportionate percentage of white students in Advanced Placement (AP) classes constitutes evidence of racial discrimination. That’s the administration’s stance, thanks to the Department of Education’s civil rights branch, led by poverty warrior Russlynn Ali. At the very time Duncan was espousing the virtues of state and local flexibility, he and Ali were doubling down on 1960s-style top-down regulations. One stated objective was to address the “disparate impact” of policies that might lead to racial minorities taking fewer challenging classes than their peers, totally ignoring the obvious fact that African American and Hispanic students are, on average, much less prepared for AP courses by the time they reach 11th and 12th grade. Never mind that closing this preparation gap requires a long-term effort starting in elementary school, if not before. The federal government put districts on notice that if they had a disproportionate number of white students in AP classes, they could be immediately subject to civil rights enforcement. This is tight-loose?

Obama and Duncan have been good on education reform, certainly better than any of their Democratic predecessors. But to ignore the shortcomings of the president’s K–12 education-reform record entirely would be a mistake, we think. And it would also be bad for the country. The administration deserves to be pressed on the cost-effectiveness of its education system bailouts, on the results of its Race to the Top initiative, and on the wisdom of its approach to federalism and separation of powers. Education may not play a major role in the 2012 election, but that doesn’t mean that Obama’s education policies should be given a pass.

Michael J. Petrilli is research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and executive vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, where Tyson Eberhardt is a research fellow.

…Put another way, lopsided majorities voted to cut retirees’ pension benefits in a union-dominated state where Democrats have controlled the legislature since the eve of World War II.

The bill, which Governor Chafee is expected to sign next week, will face court challenges. Its enactment is a bitter, life-changing event for retirees and workers who spent their lives expecting a retirement benefit they now won’t get in full. And taxpayers are only avoiding far higher pension costs in the future, not saving huge sums.

Make no mistake, though: the bill is an extraordinary – and unlikely – achievement for the three leaders most responsible for shepherding it through: Chafee, House Speaker Gordon Fox and, most of all, Treasurer Gina Raimondo….

The lion’s share of the credit for the pension overhaul will go – justly – to the treasurer. The political newcomer and former financier is already winning glowing national media coverage, making her the darling of anti-pension warriors from coast to coast.

What that misses, though, is the nuance of her approach to the issue. Raimondo didn’t push to scrap defined-benefit pensions because like many experts, she thinks defined-contribution accounts alone don’t provide “retirement security.” She shined a bright spotlight on the funding shortfall and used her considerable speaking skills to push it to the top of the state’s agenda. She won over Chafee, lawmakers, the business community and many members of the public with her ideas for solving the problem. And she came up with a complicated plan that just may do the job.

As Nesi notes, the bill has real and painful consequences, especially for retirees who could see their annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLA) frozen for up to 19 years. Still, the the Rhode Island plan is thoughtful, comprehensive, and mostly succeeds in sharing the burden. Current teachers take on more risk. Taxpayers, although they pay less annually, pay over an extended term. Retirees bear the greatest load of all: as the years pass without a COLA, those with small pensions will see their buying power decrease.

Other states continue to ignore these issues or have tried to address pension shortfalls through gimmicks or delays. Some, like Illinois, slashed the pensions of new teachers and will use the contributions of these teachers to subsidize current teachers and retirees — in effect robbing the future by making it more difficult to recruit new teachers. And others want to use shortfalls as an excuse to try to gut public employee benefits altogether.

Rhode Island’s political courage offers an important example, not only to pension problem-solvers in statehouses, but also to those in our nation’s capital trying to solve another massive financial dilemma.

• school board members (four major roles: representative, leader, steward, advocate),
• school boards (“four macro responsibilities:  set the district’s direction…, ensure alignment of strategies, resources, policies, programs, and processes with district goals, assess and account for progress…, continuously improve the district,“),
• board president (“leader of leaders,” “presider,” “communicator”)
• superintendent (advisor, executive, leader, manager, advocate, communicator)

…. but in the nitty gritty world where we lived, as the governance discussion proceeded, the big issues were “chain of command,” “being part of the team,” “being negative,” and one of the major themes of that first hour and a half was, as our facilitator reminded us, the board’s role as “overseer, not micromanager.” The board “should not second-guess” the administration’s recommendations “except in extreme circumstances,” we were told. It should “trust the professionals.”

That was my opening. “That’s exactly what we’ve been doing for ten years,” I blurted, “trusting the professionals. We were 83^rd out of 86 districts in the region ten years ago and we are 83 out of 86 today – by letting the professionals do their work.”

There was a slight silence, but not a heavy one. In fact, our facilitator rather quickly replied, “That’s the board’s fault.”

It was a revelatory, if head-spinning, moment.  And very briefly a light shone on the heart of one of the major challenges of school governance: getting a school board to do its job, which, as the hand-out rightly said, was to improve the district.  Easier said than done. To do its job it has to be able to sift through acres of dust stirred up by federal and state mandates and piles of policies, politics, herds of wildebeest unions, experts, professionals, rivers of “model” policies from our school board associations, and a chain-link fence of interlocking economic interests defined by major corporations, rich lobbyists, and willing legislators.  Anyone who has ever tried skiing — even walking — in a whiteout can appreciate what it’s like walking into a school board meeting.  Take charge?   Continuously improve the district?  You gotta be kidding.  Improving requires changing, which disrupts.  The system is set up to encourage the opposite: to not rock the boat, to continue on whatever road you’re on — or, the safe path, to do nothing.  Every once in a while we glimpse the truth: After suffering through endless lectures about leaving it to the professionals, we are told it’s all our fault.  Ouch.  But it is.

I have argued before (here) that school boards’ irrelevance – defined as their failure to improve education outcomes, whether they try or not — is a symptom of a disease, not the disease itself.  Our nation’s 14,000 semi-impotent school boards are an indicator species, their malignancies caused by environmental toxicities not of their making.  New York State alone had 10,000 school districts in 1900 – we need ask ourselves if the disappearance of 9,250 districts over the ensuing 50 years (there are about 750 school districts in the Empire State today) has been good or bad for education.

The problem is that we — local school boards — can’t wait around for the folks who have caused our cancers to cure them.

Last year in Education Week I argued that “School boards still have enormous power…, especially on the local level”; and that “my own battle is to get my board to acknowledge that power, and to re-engage itself in the task of educating children, to revive a sense of the relevancy of democracy itself. It’s a win-win. Not only do we get a better education for our children, but we also get a community that begins to feel that it can deliver that education.”

This rosy view, of course, must be tempered by the fact that school systems (per the blizzard described above) don’t do right by the kids, as far education opportunity goes.  And on this question it is fortuitous that Mark Osgood has a new post at Education Next calling out those who believe that the education gap is “the civil rights issue of our time” to demand that the courts step up to the plate on these education issues as they did in the last civil rights era. I would go a step further and send in the National Guard – which is why I remain a steadfast defender of NCLB (minus the warts), the educational equivalent thereof.)  As long as we have a public school system, school boards, in my experience, remain the last – if  increasingly tenuous – link to the democratic ideal: the peoples’ schools. But it remains a federal responsibility to ensure that local majorities don’t block the school house door to racial, demographic or socio-economic minorities.

At the heart of my school board’s recent governance retreat – Webster’s definition number 1 is appropriate here:  “an act or process of withdrawing esp. from what is difficult, dangerous, or disagreeable” — was this mixed message: you’re responsible, but don’t get too involved.  In school districts that have all the gears running smoothly, that is the kind of creative tension that can work to keep the train on the tracks moving forward; in districts where the train has been off the tracks for years, it is a recipe for continued disaster.  I have seen the enemy and it is us.  Bring in the AYP!

Is that the answer?  What’s the question?  I recall walking with Tom Carroll,  founder of the successful charter school network in Albany (see my Education Next profile), after a couple of weeks of reporting on his Brighter Choice schools, which were knocking the socks off the traditional school competitors on test scores, and asking, “So, why are you able to do it and they aren’t?”

“Will,” said Carroll without hesitation. “Political will.”

If only, I thought. If only….  Whispering in my ear was the voice of the school board overlord, “Yeah, but….”

–Peter Meyer

This post also appears on Flypaper.

Since May, the leader of the Recovery School District, the state agency that now runs most New Orleans schools, has been John White, a 35-year-old Teach for America alum who had been serving as a deputy chancellor in New York City.

In a new article from the fall issue of Education Next, Peter Meyer profiles John White. Please read “The New Superintendent of Schools for New Orleans.”

You can hear an interview Peter did with White just before he started his new job here.

P.S. White is scheduled to release a strategic plan for the district on Tuesday.

The right school leader is essential for successful turnarounds, as Public Impact’s prior work indicates. But evidence suggests that the traditional principal pool is already stretched thin, and many of these leaders who are successful in schools that are already good wouldn’t fare well in the white-knuckled process of leading a turnaround. Meanwhile, potentially thousands of leaders capable of managing successful turnarounds work outside education, in nonprofit and health organizations, the military, and the private sector. If only a fraction of those leaders used their talents in education, we could increase the supply of school turnaround leaders significantly.

Fortunately, other sectors have experience importing talent. In fact, a large portion of turnaround leaders come from outside the organization or other sectors. Our paper explores lessons about when and how organizations in other sectors import leaders – including how they tempt people away, train them, and foster their success. The major takeaways are summarized below.

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–Emily Ayscue Hassel

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Yet not to confront the challenges of structure and governance in public education in our time is to accept the glum fact that the most earnest of our other “reform” efforts cannot gain enough traction to make a big dent in America’s educational deficit, to produce a decent supply of quality alternatives to the traditional monopoly, or to defeat the adult interests that typically rule and benefit from that monopoly.

The main structures of U.S. public education date to the 19th Century, when individual towns paid essentially all the costs of operating whatever schools they had, and to the progressive era, when it was deemed important to “keep education out of politics” so as to avoid the taint of patronage and partisanship. Better to entrust its supervision to expert professionals and to independent, nonpartisan school boards that would surely attract the community’s leaders to tend this crucial civic function. Don’t let the mayor or aldermen sink their grubby mitts into school affairs. Don’t entwine public education too closely with other governmental functions and agencies, either, lest it be contaminated.

Much the same thing happened at the state level, as states began to carve a role for themselves in the provision and regulation of public education. The New York Board of Regents launched back in 1784, though for decades its assignment dealt mainly with higher education. Massachusetts got its state board of education—focused on primary-secondary schooling—in 1837. It came in response to Governor Edward Everett’s admonishment of lawmakers. He told them that while locally-operated “common” schools were well and good:

The school houses might, in many cases, be rendered more commodious. Provision ought to be made for affording the advantages of education, throughout the whole year, to all of a proper age to receive it. Teachers well qualified to give elementary instruction in all the branches of useful knowledge, should be employed; and small school libraries, maps, globes, and requisite scientific apparatus should be furnished. I submit to the Legislature, whether the creation of a board of commissioners of schools, to serve without salary, with authority to appoint a secretary, on a reasonable compensation, to be paid from the school fund, would not be of great utility.

The very first secretary of that “board of commissioners” was, of course, Horace Mann, often termed the father of public education in the United State.

These early state boards, and almost all of those that followed (nearly every state now has one), were intended to be at least one step removed if not entirely divorced from messy electoral politics. Most are appointed—usually by the governor—for fixed terms. Most are separate from the rest of state government. Half of them appoint a state superintendent of schools (or “commissioner of education”) who is nearly always a career professional in the education field.

Although states bear formal responsibility for educating their citizens—the wording varies, but a typical example is Ohio’s constitutional charge to its legislature to “secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the state”—all but Hawaii have opted to deliver schooling through “local education agencies,” also known as school districts. These vary greatly in size and number—Illinois has 1100 of them, Maryland just 24. Most are coterminous with a county or municipal entity (town, village, etc.) though almost never are they directly governed by that entity.

The four major problems with this set-up should by now begin to reveal themselves.

First, as the decades have passed, “local” has gradually become a less accurate way to describe, much less to organize, public education in America. Most school funding now comes from state and federal sources. (The “local” share varies but on average is 43 percent.) So does an ever-larger amount of regulation. In a mobile society, few people live out their days in the town where they were born. Many cross municipal borders every day and plenty of families move to different cities or states. A growing number of children now attend charter schools operated by regional or national firms with non-local “brand names” (e.g. KIPP, National Heritage, Achievement First) and a growing number of pupils now absorb at least part of the curriculum from online providers at the state or national (and, in time, planetary) level.

These new realities raise some interesting questions: why is 6th grade math in Portland, Maine different from that in Portland, Oregon? And what does it mean for Cincinnati, say, to be responsible for educating a child who is enrolled in the Ohio Virtual Academy or in a charter school operated by a New York firm and supervised by a Toledo-based authorizer?

Second, the dream of keeping education out of politics has turned into a nightmare. There may still be corners of the countryside where community leaders with no agendas of their own or axes to grind or interest groups to enrich or political careers to advance get elected to the board of education. But in far too many places, today’s school boards consist of an unwholesome mix of aspiring politicians, teacher union puppets, individuals with some cause or scheme they yearn to inflict on everyone’s kids, and ex-employees of the system with scores to settle.

Much the same thing happens at the state level, often with an additional dose of partisan politics. And as for placing disinterested “professionals” in charge, many do indeed have formal credentials th

Third, keeping primary-secondary education separate from the rest of the public sector now does more harm than good. Splitting its operation and policy-making off from early-childhood and postsecondary education is obvious folly. For instance, individual academic records cannot be tracked from one level of education to the next. And it is even harder to ensure that those systems harmonize their expectations and minimize duplication.

It is also folly to wall education off from juvenile justice, health care, social services, employment services and the rest. Kids are not compartmentalized. It should be easy to coordinate what they need to grow up well—or at least to coordinate the portions for which government is responsible.

Fourth, our inherited structures presuppose a quasi-monopoly over K-12 education—”one best system” that delivers essentially the same instructional package to every child in every neighborhood and that takes little account of individual differences or preferences, much less the potential of competing providers. In short, the public education system takes for granted that one size does fit all. Wealthy families have always been able to buy their way out of that system via private schools. Some middle-class folks have opted to educate their kids at home. But for almost everyone else, the choices were limited—and the system was designed to keep them that way.

Today, however, school choice in a dozen forms has proliferated. Public and private (both for- and non-profit) providers are educating kids in a dizzying array of institutions. Charter schools, STEM schools, “governor’s schools,” regional vocational schools, “tech-prep,” and “early-college” programs are only the tip of the iceberg. Yet nothing in the traditional governance of public education is suited to this flowering of options and operators. All sorts of improvisations and work-arounds have been devised to compensate for the blunt fact that the system itself is hostile to educational diversity, competition, and choice. As the system continues to push back against these alternatives, it constrains, weakens, or defeats them. Nobody benefits except, maybe, the old system.

We endure all this because we’re used to it. Few can imagine anything different. Others despair of changing it. Perhaps they’re right.

Or maybe they’re not. We’ve seen a few experiments of late suggesting that structural change is not totally impossible: mayoral control of schools in New York, for example; a statewide authorizer of charters in Colorado; the consolidation of “county superintendents” in New Jersey; and more. True, there haven’t been many such innovations and nobody can “prove” that they work better than the status quo. But they do demonstrate one thing: education governance can change.

at attest to the graduate degrees they earned in education schools, but far too many of them are beholden to the status quo, to its adult interests, and to the conventional wisdom in an enterprise that urgently needs a fundamental makeover. (Unfortunately, those who upend apple carts often find themselves seeking new jobs. Just consider the case of Michelle Rhee.)

What would we want from a changed system? School-level autonomy is essential, else educators become compliance-minded rather than innovators who welcome responsibility. Diversity and choice among schools is crucial, because kids differ, competition is productive, and monopolies are not.

Voluntary school networks, not necessarily geographically based, will often prove more efficient and do better quality-control than thousands of isolated organizations. (Think “systems of schools” rather than “school systems.”) Nor should individual schools have to invent everything from scratch or buy it in small batches; they should be free to join with others in acquiring food services, transportation, health insurance, speech therapists, and such. They should also be free to individualize instruction (and boost curricular quality and diversity while saving money) by providing instruction via technology.

Transparency about results will prove vital for parents, taxpayers, and policy makers alike. And when things really go off the rails in a school, some external authority needs to be able to intervene.

What might this look like in reality?

With the governor squarely in charge of education, states would wield most of the authority and provide most of the money, but those dollars would follow kids to the schools of their choice, which would largely run themselves, selecting their staffs, managing their budgets, etc. Most would be brick and mortar structures but many classes would be online. Some schools would be entirely “virtual.” All sorts of schools would join together for various purposes and purchase services (if they choose to) from regional centers that take the place of today’s school districts. Academic standards in core subjects would be the same across the land, as would tests and other gauges of performance.

Every school’s performance would be open for public inspection, as would its financial records and its staff’s qualifications and track record. Individual schools might have their own governing boards or turn that job—and whatever “central” management functions are needed—over to their networks. Schools (and networks) might entrust their education programs to outside firms while their boards remain accountable to the state or state-designated “authorizers.” Failed schools would lose their license to operate. Uncle Sam, meanwhile, would concentrate on quality data and civil rights enforcement—and federal dollars (to help educate disabled kids, say) would accompany state dollars to the schools that families select.

If people are not satisfied with their schools or their results, they would have three main options: move their kids to different schools, move their families to a different state, or elect a different governor.

Dream or pipe-dream, that’s the short version of a better way to organize American education in the 21st century. You may think it could never happen and you might be right. But we could get closer by passing, changing, or repealing a handful of laws.

Over the last 20 years, England didn’t abolish its “local education authorities”—Blighty’s version of school districts—but it conferred so much autonomy on individual schools and their boards of governors that it essentially marginalized those authorities. American states could do the same. They could also repackage their money and make it portable anywhere within their borders and perhaps beyond. They could enact “open enrollment” laws and uncap charters. They could make school results transparent. The federal government could pull back from telling states and districts what to do and instead focus on gathering solid, comparable data about academics and finances.

Yes, that picture is messy and incomplete. More thorough change might require some states to amend their constitutions. But that’s not needed to get considerably closer to a governance arrangement for American education that is better suited to today’s realities. The first step down that path, however, is to recognize that our inherited arrangement is archaic and dysfunctional—and that continuing to take it for granted is to consign almost all of today’s other earnest education reforms to frustration and failure.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

(This essay also appears in Defining Ideas, published by the Hoover Institution.)

By running their own candidates for school board, through endorsements, by providing campaign cash, and by pressing for school-board elections to continue to occur on dates when voters have no other reason to come to the polls, they can ensure that their interests are represented on the “management” side of the table as well as the “labor” side. This is part of what has fostered reformers’ interest in alternative forms of governance—like appointed boards or mayoral control.

So it was fascinating, reassuring, and perhaps significant the other day when Anne Bryant, the long-time executive director of the National School Boards Association and America’s foremost defender of school boards as we know them, said that it is “wrong” for unions to “buy” school-board seats. This happened at a Fordham Institute panel, Are School Boards Vital in 21st Century America? Gene Maeroff, former New York Times education reporter and president of the Edison, New Jersey Board of Education, had just explained that the teachers were running a union activist to unseat him—in an election that was to take place the day after our panel. (Good news: Maeroff won.) Here’s what Bryant said.

I think it’s wrong. I think that unions buying the school board’s seat is just plain wrong. There should be the distinction between management and labor and governance, and management and labor. That is not to say that in our democracy unions don’t have the right to put campaign money into an election. But I have to admit that having the kind of situation that Gene described to me about the candidates being put up by the union doesn’t always get you the best school board members. And I think, in the past, we’ve seen that that bias has led to some decisions that now are fiscally unhealthy. We’ve got pension systems that are almost bankrupt. We’ve got healthcare delivery issues with teachers unions that are killing us, strangling us financially. Now, were those done for the right reasons? You know, twenty years ago it was oh so far away, instead of raising teachers’ salaries we’ll give them better retirement systems. Well, it sounded good twenty years away, but now we’re paying for it.

Similar words could well have been spoken by Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, Jeb Bush, or any other dyed-in-the-wool reformer. What’s not yet clear, however, is what Bryant might propose as a remedy. Panelists talked about greater “transparency” of board candidate’s funding, endorsements, and policy views. That might help. And certainly reformers can run their own candidates (as Maeroff did in Edison). But won’t many school boards continue to be influenced if not actually captured by the unions in lots of places much of the time? And if so, will Bryant acknowledge that there just might be a fatal flaw with elected local boards? And maybe set forth some promising alternatives?

Regardless, the defense of “the school board as we know it” just got dramatically weaker. And Anne Bryant’s place in the pantheon of impatient reformers just got more secure.

-Michael Petrilli

These arrangements, though they differ some from place to place, generally display four characteristics that make them obsolete at best and dysfunctional at their all-too-common worst:

First, while formal constitutional responsibility for educating kids belongs to the states, the actual delivery of that education falls squarely on local education agencies, typically called districts, which are geographically defined, most often by the boundaries of a city, town, county, or other municipality. Kids are generally educated in public schools operated by these districts.

Second, though states have shouldered some responsibility for financing public education, usually by decreeing a minimum or “foundation” level of per-pupil spending, sizable portions of education revenue are locally generated through property taxes, bond levies, and such. Those amounts differ enormously from place to place within the same state and are uncommonly vulnerable to interest group manipulation and local politics.

Third, at both the state and local levels, public education usually operates under governance arrangements that are separated from the rest of state and municipal governments, most commonly by being answerable to a separate board of education, most often elected, sometimes appointed, rather than directly to the governor, mayor, county commission, city council, or whatever. Historically, this was intended to buffer education from conventional politics and patronage.

Fourth, overall education governance has multiple layers, always at least three, often four and sometimes more. At minimum, these layers represent decisions made in, and funding arising from, Washington, the state level, and the local level. Besides all that, governance-type decisions may be made at the building level—and frequently at intermediate levels within a big district or region of a state.

I’ve come to believe that, whatever sense this set-up may have made fifty or a hundred years ago, it doesn’t make much today. Indeed, none of those four elements makes sense.

The multi-layer decision-making structure, while faithful in its way to American federalism, mainly serves nowadays to pull schools apart in response to funding and regulatory streams emanating from different levels of government, to foster bureaucracy, confusion, and tension and, maybe most importantly, to give every level a functional veto over reforms initiated at any other level. It doesn’t matter how much a state may want to participate in Race to the Top, for example, when each district in that state decides for itself whether to join in. Conversely, a district may yearn to bring Teach For America to town but the alternative certification rules for that district are set by the state. And these examples don’t even touch upon NCLB or the myriad other ways that Uncle Sam confounds and complicates how states and districts run their schools.

Separate governance for education doesn’t make much sense, either, not when we recognize that developing kids doesn’t just involve their cognition but also their physical health, social development, character, and much else. Why is education governance divorced from health, welfare, recreation, and the rest? Observe how often we burden the schools with obligations to prevent drug abuse, make kids fit, teach them character, get them inoculated, keep them off the streets, and on and on. How much more sensible it would be to place the same folks in charge of schools, juvenile justice, nutrition, public health, family services, etc.?

We now live in a highly mobile society and one that’s highly metropolitanized: over 80 percent of Americans live in urban locales and nearly 15 percent change residences in any given year. We’re no longer a land of small towns with geographically rooted, multi-generation families. There’s no reason for primary-secondary education to be different, or differently governed, or differently financed, from Anne Arundel County to Prince George’s County, MD, or from Arlington to Alexandria to Fairfax, VA. The same goes for Brookline to Newton in MA and Evanston to Winnetka in IL. In fact, these boundaries often impede student learning, restrict choice, and confound budgets. Think about kids attending schools across district lines, charter schools, or virtual schools that may operate statewide or in multiple states. Why are we jamming these educational realities and funding flows onto the traditional municipal system? If a kid who lives in Dayton attends the Ohio Virtual Academy, or Oakwood or Kettering High School (in nearby suburbs), or splits his time between the Ponitz Career Technology Center and Sinclair Community College, who exactly is responsible for that kid’s education? And who is paying for it? As the system is currently defined, that burden is mainly owned by the Dayton Public School district, just because that kid’s parents happen to live within the city limits of Dayton this month.

As for school boards, I’ll concede that in some suburbs, small towns, and rural communities, the elected board may still consist of selfless community leaders who want only the best for kids. In our cities, however, and in plenty of other places large and small, I challenge you to point me to more than a handful of examples of local districts that, over a prolonged period (e.g. a decade), have been able to devise, execute, and stick to a kid-focused, quality-driven reform agenda for their schools. Too often, imaginative, energized, and forward-looking superintendents are undermined, shackled, and distracted by seven or nine member boards, each consisting of seven or nine separate agendas.  And far too often for the good of the kids in their community, those seven or nine people fit into three types. There’s the aspiring politician for whom the school board is a step toward the legislature, county council, or wherever. Then there’s the single-issue zealot, bent on a particular curriculum, neighborhood, patronage arrangement, weird cause, or adult interest, often tugged and manipulated by outside constituencies, including teacher unions. And, third, there’s the vengeful former employee of that very district, bent on getting the superintendent or someone else fired and replaced.

This is no good way to run a railroad, much less our children’s educations. We need to find a better one. I’m not yet ready to spell out some possible solutions, but I’m sure ready to declare that we have an enormous problem in need of fresh alternatives, not more of the same.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This piece is an adaptation for remarks made at Fordham’s recent event: “Are School Boards Vital in the 21st Century.” View the video of the event and read a recap of the discussion.

Dozens of New York City journalists scrambled to get to City Hall, and educators all over the country twittered and tweeted about what had been predictable—and predicted (“Cathie Black will be gone by Easter,” wrote our own Mike Petrilli last December). Meanwhile, some 120 miles to the north, in the 3rd-floor press room of the state Capitol building, veteran radio broadcaster Susan Arbetter was a couple of minutes into her previously scheduled interview with State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. They were chatting about the “surprise” booting of Black, when Arbetter changed the subject.

“There is a rumor,” she said, “that David Steiner, the commissioner of education for New York State, could also be on his way out. I was wondering if you could illuminate us a bit on that?”

The normally unflappable Tisch, the first woman chancellor in New York history, seemed caught off guard. “You know, I have heard a lot about that,” she replied, as if stalling for time. But instead of saying, `just a rumor,’ as most practiced politicos would have, Tisch blurted, “I believe that the Commissioner is exploring his options—”

With all the klieg lights shining on the Bloomberg press conference, it took some time for the news from Albany to get out, but within the hour the Twitter world exploded again, with news that “outdid Mayor Bloomberg’s announcement,” as Philissa Cramer of Gotham Schools wrote, “at least in the department of rattling surprises.”

Rattling surprise, indeed. The sacking of Cathie Black, who had no education experience, surprised like an accident waiting to happen. David Steiner’s leaving rattled people. His elevation to head the state’s education system in October of 2009 had been hailed as a providential pick. With a philosophy degree from Oxford and a doctorate in political science from Harvard, and following stints at the National Endowment for the Arts and Boston University’s School of Education, he was most recently head of Hunter College’s School of Education. Steiner, then just 51, was the education reform world’s dream because he was an insider. And he charged out of the gate, instituting tougher benchmarks for the state’s 3–8 tests, initiating a major effort to write a statewide curriculum, and leading the charge to win a berth in the Race to the Top winner’s circle.

While rumors circulated—Steiner and Tisch didn’t get along, he was pushed out because he had stood up to Bloomberg over the Black appointment—Steiner himself played the resignation, which is to take effect in August of 2011, as if it were part of the plan. The timing of the announcement was not planned, he admits. He had started looking for other work, and it leaked and the leaks “became a flood.” That Tisch confirmed the rumors the same day as Black’s unceremonious sacking was, says Steiner, “bizarre coincidence.”

New York State department of education building, Albany NY. Inset: New York State’s commissioner of education David Steiner.

Chapter One Is Written

Saying that Tisch had “plucked” him out of academia to “plant a vision,” to find the funding for it, and to launch a radical reformation of the New York education system, Steiner is satisfied that “we’ve done that…. Chapter one is written. The key to chapter two is grinding implementation. And if you know me, you know that is not what I’m suited for.”

Indeed, Steiner’s chapter one is not a bad start. When I first interviewed him last December, he seemed fully engaged in the grinding implementation. Though he admitted that “the economic conditions on the ground are a huge, huge contextual challenge,” I was less interested in those challenges than in how, in a few short months, he had helped turn the Empire State from a poster child for education indolence, overregulation, overspending, and underperformance—an also-ran in Education Next’s poll of expected RttT winners (see educationnext.org/race-to-the-top-round-2-poll)—into an animated system with audacious academic strategies and goals, new (and higher) standards, aggressive timelines for meeting those goals, and, defying the odds, a silver medal and $700 million for finishing second in last summer’s RttT competition.

It is in that story that we can understand the bittersweet feeling of many New York educators that they have lost their leader before they got to the Promised Land.

Merryl Tisch was chosen to head the Board of Regents in 2009, the first woman to hold the post.

The Genius of Race to the Top

Perhaps it was all just a coincidence, but David Steiner was the right man, in the right place, at the right time. He was savvy enough to understand the importance of Race to the Top and able enough to turn the state’s education energies toward it.

The Washington Post said that the program “helped transform the national discussion on education.”

Education policy maven Rick Hess calls RttT “the centerpiece” of the Obama administration’s education strategy, and “arguably…the most visible and celebrated school reform effort in American history.”

Even David Brooks, conservative columnist for the New York Times, offered that the new federal program was helping prod a “quiet revolution” in American schooling.

Revolutionary, maybe. Quiet, no. A search of the Vocus Media Database, which includes hundreds of traditional media, blog, and social media outlets, found 1169 Race to the Top stories. The School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, initiated at the same time and distributing just about the same amount of money, turned up just 37 mentions.

All this hoopla and RttT was only $4.35 billion (SIG was $3.5 billion), a tiny fraction of the $100 billion in education funds passed out in 2009 as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), and less than 1 percent of the $600 billion spent on K–12 public education in the United States. Inside the Beltway, RttT was known as “Arne’s Slush Fund.”

Unlike NCLB, however, RttT proffered carrots instead of sticks: money for recession-strapped states that promised to implement education reform strategies, specifically, better teacher-evaluation practices, including using student performance as a metric; better teacher training; improved data gathering; and more school turnaround strategies, including more charter schools.

Despite a daunting array of rules for applying—there were 19 different categories that a panel of judges would score on a 500-point scale—states scrambled to join the race. Twenty-three of the applicants (including some strong union states like California, Michigan, and Ohio) passed laws or revised regulations before submitting their applications. Altogether, for round one (though no one knew if there would be a round two), 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted lengthy applications, in January of 2010, chasing millions.

New York State was one of them.

No Place More in Need

Once the shining star of the American public education system, New York has oflate come to represent all that is wrong with American education.

The new governor, Andrew Cuomo, in his first major postinaugural speech, complained, “We spend more money on education than any state in the nation, and we are number 34 in terms of results.” This is a big deal in a state with the third highest enrollment numbers in the country (2.7 million K–12 students, afterCalifornia, with 6 million, and Texas, with 4.6 million).

New York had other problems as well. At risk of bankruptcy and burdened by huge pension obligations, it was already the 4th “most taxed” state in the union (after Hawaii, Connecticut, and Vermont), according to Forbes; it faced a $10 billion deficit; and, as the New York Times put it, had “a divided and perennially dysfunctional Legislature.”

John King, an African American Brooklyn native, was tapped to be NYSED’s number two. He is rumored to be the Regents’ choice to succeed Steiner.

The Revolution Begins

Into the middle of this bog stepped Merryl H. Tisch, a former 1st-grade teacher with an EdD from Teachers College, Columbia University, and a spouse, James Tisch, who heads Loews Corporation and has sometimes appeared on the Forbes 400 list of the richest people in America. Tisch, one of 16 members of the Board of Regents since 1996, was chosen to head the Regents as chancellor in 2009. She had an agenda, the New York Times noted, that included “closing the achievement gap among demographic groups, bolstering career and technical education, and giving equal access to disabled students.” Tisch could, said the paper, be effective pushing that agenda because of “her ascent to chief regent” and “her rank in New York’s ruling class…”

“When my refrigerator is broken,” she once told a group of Catholic educators, “I don’t call the service department. I call the head of GE.”

In the Bloomberg mold, Tisch was a rich reformer at the helm of one of the most intransigent education systems in America.

And one of her first tasks was replacing the longtime commissioner of the New York State Education Department (NYSED), Richard Mills, who retired, on schedule, that June. In late July, education reformers throughout New York were pleasantly surprised to learn that the Regents had selected David Steiner to be the new co

mmissioner. (Truth in advertising: He has contributed to this journal.) Over the years, Steiner quietly built a reputation as a reformer’s reformer, willing to challenge the education system’s multiple vested interests—from the inside.

If there was any doubt that Tisch and Steiner weren’t serious about bringing change to New York’s hidebound public school system, that ended when they tapped John King to be NYSED’s number two. An African American Brooklyn native and product of the city’s public schools with his own Ivy League credentials, King cofounded Roxbury Prep, a successful Boston charter school, and was managing director of Uncommon Schools, which operated a network of 24 charter schools in New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey when Tisch called him. The two had met in 2000 when they were both in the doctoral program at Teachers College. And King knew Steiner through Teacher U, a teacher training program Steiner launched as a partnership with three high-performing charter management organizations while he was at Hunter.

By the time Steiner and King arrived in Albany, in the fall of 2009, the race for RttT funds was already on. There is some disagreement about how serious New York took the competition at that point. Joe Williams, head of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), says that “the general consensus from Merryl Tisch and Governor [David] Paterson on down the line was that Chuck Schumer is a powerful Senator—why does New York need to worry? We send our elected officials to Washington to bring home the bacon, so why was this going to be any different?”

Tisch scoffs at that view of things. “Oh, God forbid!” she says. “That is a wild accusation.” She notes that Steiner didn’t arrive until October 1 and King, November 1, with the RttT application due “just a few short weeks after that.”

Both Steiner and King avoid the question of whether New Yorkers assumed Schumer would bring home the bacon.

“When we arrived a lot of work had been done reaching out to stakeholder communities around the state,” King recalls. “What we didn’t have time to do was advance the legislative agenda.”

In fact, New York finished 15th out of 16 finalists in January of 2010. But both Steiner and King were impressed by the fact that that there were only two RttT winners (Delaware [$100 million] and Tennessee [$600 million]), which left $3 billion still in the pot. Says Steiner, “Arne Duncan made the shrewd assumption that putting out a small number of winners at the beginning would motivate and challenge others to raise their level.”

“That sent a very powerful message,” says King. “not just to the states, but to all the stakeholders, about how high the bar was, about ho

w much would be required, and about the stuff that it wasn’t going to be about.”

That stuff being politics. The message was clear: RttT was not a politics-as-usual program.

Richard Iannuzzi (seen here with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan), who heads the New York State United Teachers, agreed to participate in discussions about teacher evaluations.

Round Two: Change the laws

That didn’t mean New York couldn’t—and wouldn’t have to—play politics. The loss galvanized the state’s educators, reformers, and union bosses alike.

“It was very clear to us…that there would be no round two for New York State if we didn’t get legislative action,” says Tisch. John King recalls Tisch having some key conversations “that helped convince everyone that it was possible [to win in round two].”

Steiner called Richard Iannuzzi, head of the powerful New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), and invited NYSUT to begin discussions about “how we could get to an agreement on the teacher evaluations.” The union accepted.

Those discussions became known informally as the Sunday Morning Breakfasts. A team from NYSED, including St

einer and King, met in a conference room at NYSED headquarters, across the street from the capitol in Albany, with a team from NYSUT, led by the union’s number two, Maria Neira. “Lox and bagels,” laughs Steiner. Only it was more than breakfast.

“We had anywhere from 8 to 10 people at each of these sessions,” explains Steiner. “The meetings lasted four to five hours, sometimes longer.”

Most of the sessions, which went on for several months, focused on teacher evaluations, with the big concern being the “firewall” between the evaluations and student performance on state tests, a barrier that the union had always insisted was necessary. Steiner and King proved credible negotiators.

They were helped by a lobbying blitzkrieg led by Joe Williams and former Bloomberg campaign manager Bradley Tusk, who put together, with ample funds from Wall Street, Education Reform Now (ERN), a group with a single purpose: to bring the state legislature into the RttT reform fold.

Williams spread ERN money around on everything from brochures and mailings to door knocking in key legislative districts. “We ran $4 to $5 million worth of television ads,” Williams recalls, “blaming the teachers union for losing the chance to win $700 million in round one and urging the legislature to bring home the money for New York.”

The Williams team crafted a campaign not about teacher evaluations or firewalls or charter schools, but about “whether New York should get $700 million from Obama,” says Williams. “We wanted this to be an up or down vote on progress and the money.”

“The union, in my view, did not want to be blamed for not getting Race to the Top,” recalls Joel Klein, then chancellor of New York City’s public schools, which enrolled almost half the K–12 students in the state. “But I don’t think for a second that they were prepared to agree with lifting the [charter school] cap…. [Iannuzzi’s] big concern was what he called saturation. As long as we sprinkled charters and didn’t really create communities of choice, he was fine.”

As the union lost more charter fights over the years, it tried to draw lines in the sand on issues such as financial accountability, for-profit management of charters, and preventing a concentration of charters in particular neighborhoods or cities, dubbed “saturation.”

But the union didn’t want to talk about charters at the Sunday meetings at NYSED headquarters, preferring inste

ad to deal directly with the legislature, where it had long-standing friendly relations.

Iannuzzi reaffirmed the point when I discussed it with him at NYSUT headquarters last winter. “Our buy-in was built around the evaluation language not around the charter school piece.… The connection between the charter school piece and Race to the Top was just smoke as far as I was concerned.”

On this one, however, NYSUT faced stiff competition from the Williams-led ERN team, which, while telling the public that this was up or down on the money, was telling legislators it was up or down on the nitty-gritty issues of teacher evaluations and charter reform.

As the June 1 deadline for round-two applications approached, the efforts at the Sunday Morning Breakfast meetings and those of Williams intensified.

In the capitol, the union won some accountability and transparency fights—prohibiting for-profit organizations from running charters, making charters adhere to state comptroller audits, and demanding they serve more special education and ELL students—but lost the bigger issues of saturation and the cap, which legislators agreed to raise from 200 to 460.

When I asked Iannuzzi how NYSUT, which used to own the legislature, lost those key parts of the charter fight, he said, “The answer is hedge fund operators…who could write out a check for a million dollars a shot.”

But ERN had also found the key public relations nuance that made the money work: Walking away from $700 million in a recession was not smart. No one would get lost in the weeds on that message.

Which is ironic, as Joel Klein says, since “it is, literally, a drop in the ocean.” New York State spends more than $50 billion a year on K–12 public education; New York City’s school budget is some $22 billion. Seven hundred million, spread out over four years, represented less than one-half of 1 percent of the state’s education spending, and $350 million for Gotham, over four years, is the same droplet. “But if you can use it for the things you care about,” says Klein, “it’s important.”

It was important enough to New York’s legislature that, on Friday, May 28, just a few days shy of the June 1 deadline, the Senate and Assembly voted on Chapters 100, 101, 102, and 103 of the Laws of 2010, to remake the teacher evaluation process—40 percent of the “composite effectiveness score” would be based on student achievement—allow for 260 more charter schools, and appropriate $20.4 million for a new longitudinal data system.

“It was an extraordinary moment,” says Steiner, who had gone to the Assembly Hall at three in the morning with Tisch and King to watch the vote. “I had tears in my eyes.”

“What had been considered impossible months before was now a done deal,” recalls Williams.

Joe Williams and Democrats for Education Reform led a lobbying blitzkrieg to bring the state legislature into the RttT fold.

The Test: Oral Presentation

There were still two more hurdles: making the finals and defending the application at an oral presentation before the panel of judges.

For round two, a total of 35 states and Washington, D.C., had submitted applications, and in late July, at the end of a speech at the National Press Club, Duncan announced the names of 18 finalists, including New York. They had just over a week to prepare their oral presentations.

Tisch had already assembled her dream team: herself, Steiner, Klein, King, and Michael Mulgrew, head of New York City’s powerful teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers. “The important thing,” says Steiner, “was that you had there the chancellor of the Board of Regents, the chancellor of our biggest school district, the head of our biggest local [teachers union], and the two senior people from the department—that’s what you need.”

And they weren’t taking anything for granted. They practiced.

Most of the rehearsals were in a conference room at the Loews Corporation offices in Manhattan. Steiner brought in members of his staff to play the review panel. “They were very tough on us,” he laughs. “And we were tough enough to say, ‘Thank you, do it again next week.’ They got us to think hard about the application, about our narrative, about how we would respond. That was priceless.”

Such sessions were important not just for the substance of the arguments but for the chemistry among team members, so

me of whom—specifically, Klein and Mulgrew—were more accustomed to meeting each other from opposite sides of the table.

Team members all say they came out of the oral presentation feeling good about their chances. And three weeks later their feelings—and hard work—were rewarded with a second-place finish and a promised grant of $700 million. New York earned 464.8 points, just 6 points behind first-place finisher Massachusetts and more than 50 points better than its round-one score.

New York “had set forth a clear and comprehensive statement of its vision,” wrote one reviewer, who noted that the “ambitious agenda” would be helped by “the extensive authority over public education held by The Board of Regents” and “the large network of 37 District Superintendents who oversee Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES).” The state’s “aggressive agenda” would “strain the capacity of any state attempting to do so much for so many students in so many districts,” the reviewer continued, “but the applicant appears to have both the existing capacity and the political and bureaucratic will to re-organize and re-focus.”

The RttT money was important enough to New York’s legislature that just a few days shy of the June 1 deadline, they voted to remake the teacher evaluation process, to allow for more charter schools, and to appropriate $20.4 million for a new longitudinal data system.

The Beginning of the End

When I interviewed Steiner in his Manhattan office in December of 2010, he was perhaps foreshadowing his departure: “I have to say that what we face now, to me, is much more difficult,” he said. Under his direction New York had set some bold goals for 2013:

• Increase National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) grade 4 reading proficient scores by 10 points

• Increase NAEP grade 8 reading proficient scores by 8 points

• Close achievement gap for blacks, Hispanics, ELL, and students with disabilities by 20 percent on the NAEP exams

• Increase the Regents exam pass rate by 13 points

• Increase the graduation rate by 5 points.

It bothered Steiner that the state might not make these goals. And perhaps, he had, by then, sensed the deep difficulty in bringing the ship into port. “Ultimately, of course,” he said at the time, “you need to look at outcomes. There is no hiding from that.” In other words, the race is not over: It has just begun.

This is what rattled New Yorkers when they heard Steiner was leaving. And his protests that “the press will try to make more of this than is there” seem more the gentleman educator talking than the education reformer that he proved to be. (For a full discussion of his tenure, see my interview with Steiner.)

Though he seems to have few enemies, as one New York education insider noted, “Steiner got Race to the Top done, which was good money and raised standards, which is necessary, but I don’t see what he did to help kids meet those standards.”

This is chapter one. And it is the fundamental gamble of RttT, a presumption, really, that all the standards and metrics and variables will lead to better education results. In this respect, RttT is old-fashioned federal funding, with money doled out for proper inputs rather than sure outcomes. Federal ED officials promise that if states don’t make their “process benchmarks, they will not get the money.”

John King says that “in the first couple of years there will be what I characterize as process wins. You’ll see an evaluation system for teachers and principals, with student achievement built in as a meaningful component.… You’ll see the rollout of a statewide data system that will give a lot more useful information to teachers and principals about student performance and a lot more useful data for policymakers.… Three and four years out you’ll see real change in the percentage of kids achieving college-ready standards. You’ll see more students enrolling in college, fewer students in remedial courses, more students staying in college all the way through to graduation.” Indeed, Steiner and King rolled out an ambitious timeline, easily accessed on the state’s web site, to measure their “process wins.”

Steiner could have stayed, but he may be a man who knows his gifts and his abilities as well as his limitations. One of those limitations, in the political world, is his unflinching ability to see past the politics. He’s a “wonderful man,” said one insider, “but he is an academic thrown into a knife fight—usually not a good thing.”

“I suspect the endless political battles wore on him,” says Whitney Tilson, the hedge-funder turned education reformer. “Given the vicious, and I use that word deliberately, tactics often employed by defenders of the status quo, reformers need to have absolutely extraordinary levels of stamina, patience, thick skin, and a willingness to do battle in dirty, muddy trenches every day. I know I couldn’t do it—it drives me nuts just watching it!”

“The part of David Steiner that will be missed,” says Joe Williams, “is the refreshing disrespect he paid to the education bureaucracy.” That may be true or not, but it is true that Steiner had a surprising success turning that bureaucracy around. Finding the person who can steer it through a radically changed landscape will be New York’s next challenge.

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

A footnoted version of this article is available here.

Recently, two separate studies—one by Alan Ginsburg, a former director of Policy and Program Studies in the U.S. Department of Education, the other by a committee constituted by the National Research Council (NRC)—have sought to discredit the work of Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of schools for the District of Columbia.

According to Ginsburg, Rhee was no more effective—probably even less effective—than her predecessors. Not surprisingly, his argument was quickly picked up by American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. In a Wall Street Journal interview, she asserts that Michelle Rhee “had a record that is actually no better than the previous two chancellors.” In a blog post dated March 29, 2011, Diane Ravitch makes the same point: “The gains under Rhee were no greater than the gains registered under her predecessor Clifford Janey, who did not use Rhee’s high-powered tactics, such as firing massive numbers of teachers.” Yet the evidence Ginsburg musters to support such claims falls well short of its mark.

In the second study, the NRC committee does not deny that student performance in the District of Columbia improved under Michelle Rhee’s chancellorship between 2007 and 2010, but it says there is no scientific evidence that proves the work of the chancellor is responsible for those gains. “The problem was the [test score] changes that seem to be going in the right direction can’t be attributed to the specific changes in the system,” the study committee’s co-chair Robert M. Hauser told an Education Week reporter. While it is certainly true that one cannot, in the absence of experimental evidence, establish a connection between policy changes and test-score outcomes, Hauser added a carefully worded slap at Rhee: “All districts should be cautious about generalizing from the kind of aggregate overview data that have been used to suggest successes of changes made in the district to date.” The reporter is then informed that “students’ NAEP scores started to improve before the overhaul law passed, as noted in a report last month by Alan Ginsburg.”

The NRC study bears the more prestigious imprimatur, but it is the Ginsburg study that is most likely to be cited in future discussions of merit pay, teacher tenure, and the like. So our fact-checking of the two studies begins with his contribution to the discussion.

The Ginsburg Report

Alan Ginsburg, though now retired, was until very recently the ultimate Washington insider. For more than a generation he was known as the Department of Education’s data-collection guru, the person inside the bureaucracy who understood best what information to collect and how to collect it. So it is of considerable interest that Ginsburg has now chosen to give aid and comfort to Weingarten and other union leaders by leveling a hard-core attack on “The Rhee DC Record.”

To an Education Week reporter, Ginsburg insisted that his critique of “The Rhee DC Record” is not “intended to be anti-Rhee.” He is reported as saying that he acted only because “he believes they [his findings] should serve as a check on a policy of mass dismissals of teachers as a way to improve districts. ‘For me, it’s the much larger question in this country of building a large teaching force.’” It is nonetheless quite disconcerting that he—and those who rely on his work—say that she was engaged in “large-scale firing” and “mass dismissals” when in fact she released in 2010 just 241 teachers for low performance.

Ginsburg excludes any and all information coming from the D.C. exams, known as the Comprehensive Assessment System (CAS), required by the federal law known as No Child Left Behind. He explains that decision on the grounds that “performance levels for 2006 and afterwards are not comparable with those from prior years.” But that does not preclude a comparison of Rhee’s record for the years beginning in 2007 with the situation in the year before she arrived. Had Ginsburg taken a look at that information, he would have found an acceleration of the gains in the percentage of students deemed proficient. Before Rhee’s tenure, or between 2006 and 2007, the percentage increase in proficiency was about 1 percentage point in reading and 4 percentage points in math. But between 2007 and 2010, the gains in percent proficient were 9 percentage points in reading and 15 percentage points in math.

District Performance on National Assessment of Educational Progress

Although these gains are impressive, a USA Today investigative team has expressed concerns that, at least in some schools, those test-score results might have been improperly inflated. No conclusive evidence of cheating has yet been established, but it may well be prudent to focus, as Ginsburg does, on the performance of D.C. students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the nation’s report card. That is a low-stakes test taken only by a representative sample of students, none of whom answer all the questions and for whom no results are reported by student, teacher, or school. As the NAEP is not part of any accountability system, incentives to cheat on the test are minimal, and no allegations of cheating have been made.

At first glance, Ginsburg does not seem to have much of a case against Rhee. D.C. scores on the NAEP shifted upward during the first two years Rhee was in office. In both 4th-grade math and reading they jumped by 6 points, and in 8th-grade math they leaped by 7 points, though they slipped a point in 8th-grade reading (see Figure 1).

But Ginsburg says those gains are actually no greater than the ones students had been making in prior years, when superintendents Paul Vance and Clifford Janey were in charge. He reports, “With respect to the distribution of DC’s total gains in NAEP scores over grades 4 and 8 between 2000-09, Vance accounted for a 46% share of the total gain, Janey 30% and Rhee 24%.”

Though headline-grabbing numbers, they are quite misleading. Between 2000 and 2009, Rhee was in office for only two years, while Vance was in office for three, and Janey for four. If gains were rising at the same rate over the nine-year period, then each superintendent should account for 11.1 percent of the gains for each year in office: Vance 33.3%, Janey 44.4%, and Rhee 22.2 %. So based on Ginsburg’s own calculations, Rhee outperformed her immediate predecessor.

More significantly, Ginsburg ignores the fact that the D.C. NAEP sample in 2009 did not include students attending charter schools not authorized by the district, while in 2007 all charter school students were included. Because charter schools outside district control were outperforming district schools, the latter appeared to be doing better in 2007 than they actually were. NAEP corrected its data-collection procedures in 2009, but, except for 8th-grade math, it failed to provide the data that allow for an apple-to-apple comparison between 2007 and 2009. For 8th-grade math, NAEP explains that had NAEP followed the same policy in 2007 that it adopted in 2009, 8th-grade math scores under Rhee would have increased by 7 points, a statistically significant gain, not just the 3 points that are officially reported.

Similar underreporting of gains may have occurred on the 4th- and 8th-grade reading exams and the 4th-grade math tests, but NAEP unfortunately does not tell us how large they were. Its report only says that giving us that information would not alter the findings as to the statistical significance of gains. So in the analysis below, I provide the corrected results for 8th-grade math, but I cannot provide corrected results for the other exams.

Closing the Gap between District and National Performance

Most importantly, Ginsburg did not adjust for national trends in student performance occurring between 2000 and 2009. Unless one adjusts for national trends, one does not know whether gains in the district are due to district-specific events or to some larger developments in the nation, such as changes in the economy, or the waning effectiveness of No Child Left Behind, or permutations in the design and administration of the NAEP examination, or some other large-scale factor.

The most straightforward way of adjusting for national trends is to look at the extent to which D.C. closed the gap between its students’ performances and those of students nationwide. Once that adjustment is made, it can be shown that Rhee did considerably better at that task than did her predecessors (see Figure 2). For example, during the Rhee years, 4th-grade students, in both reading and math, gained an average of 3 points each year relative to the scores earned by students nationwide, a gain twice that of Rhee’s predecessors.

These numbers seem small, but they add up. In 2000, the gap between D.C. and the nation in 4th-grade math was 34 points. Had students gained as much every year between 2000 and 2009 as they did during the Rhee era, that gap would in 2009 have been just 7 points. Three more years of Rhee-like progress and the gap is closed. In 8th-grade math, the gap in 2000 was 38 points. Had Rhee-like progress been made over the next nine years, the gap would in 2009 have been just 14 points, with near closure in 2012. In 4th-grade reading, the gap was 30 points in 2003 (scores are unavailable for 2000); if Rhee-like gains had taken place over the next six years, the gap in 2009 would have been cut in half.

None of this proves that Rhee could sustain the gains observed over a two-year period. That is too short a time to draw conclusions about a leader based on NAEP results alone. Also, no improvement in 8th-grade reading is detected. The overall results do, however, cast doubt on Ginsburg’s claim that Rhee did no better than her predecessors.

But perhaps the other report, the one issued by a committee of the prestigious National Research Council, makes a more persuasive case that Rhee’s performance is less than it seems.

The National Research Council Report

The National Academy of Sciences dates its lineage back to the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, who asked three scientists to help in the “war against the rebellion.” Operating under its aegis, the NRC has positioned itself as the only nonprofit organization that can sign contracts with federal agencies without submitting a competitive bid. In the hard sciences, NRC periodically issues major reports of public significance. But on too many occasions it exploits its reputation for objectivity by wandering into domains where scientific knowledge is thin.

NRC has expanded its operations beyond reports to federal agencies. In the case at hand, it acted on a 2007 request of the D.C. City Council “under the leadership of Vincent C. Gray” to carry out an independent evaluation of D.C. public schools. Despite the fact that Gray was already planning his run for mayor, NRC responded enthusiastically to his request by undertaking an energetic fundraising campaign that supplemented the council’s own $325,000 in funding with a like amount from a variety of foundations and agencies, including the Spencer Foundation, the National Science Foundation (which contributed $200,000), and the World Bank (which contributed $25,000).

With $650,000 in hand, NRC staff formed the 14-member, largely academic Committee on the Independent Evaluation of DC Public Schools, consisting of a variety of professors and researchers. Its co-chairs are Christopher Edley, the left-leaning dean of Berkeley law school and, as mentioned, Robert Hauser, former University of Wisconsin sociology of education professor, a liberal critic of accountability systems, who has recently assumed the leadership of NRC’s division responsible for education reports.

Guidance for a Future Evaluation

The committee’s official assignment was not to carry out an independent evaluation, as its title implies, but only to 1) “provide guidance on how to structure” that evaluation and 2) “provide feedback about implementation” of the Rhee reforms. As part of its “guidance,” the committee calls for “systematic yearly public reporting of key data as well as in-depth studies of high priority issues.” One needs to look at more than just “student test scores,” it says. One needs to establish “suitable indicators” that “track how well the city’s public schools are doing.” “In-depth studies should be designed to provide deeper analysis of specific questions about high priority issues,” such as “teacher recruitment and retention.”

If most of this guidance consists of harmless bromides, one recommendation has an edge to it: The evaluation “must be independent of school and city leaders and responsive to the needs of all stakeholders.” Read in the context of D.C. politics, this seems to say: Keep the mayor and chancellor out of any independent evaluation, but let the unions play a major role. Now that Vincent Gray is mayor, one wonders just how eager he will be to act on that recommendation!

The committee has not issued a final document, but it has put out a press release and a prepublication version of an unedited version of the report. The rush to print seems to have been necessary in order to carry out the committee’s second objective: providing “feedback” on the Rhee record, which it apparently wanted to accomplish before her successor officially assumed office. The first substantive information in the committee’s press release reads as follows: “Data suggest that a modest improvement in student test scores has continued…but the committee cautions that it is premature to draw general conclusions about the reforms’ effectiveness at this time.” Note that the press release talks about a “continuation,” not an “acceleration,” in “modest,” not “striking,” improvement in student achievement. An Education Week reporter explains that “the evaluators confirmed that students’ NAEP scores started to improve before the overhaul law passed, as noted in a report last month by Alan Ginsburg.” Clearly, the NRC committee leadership was willing to put an NRC stamp on Ginsburg’s claims.

Do Teachers Need to Be at School for Students to Learn?

How did the committee cast doubt on Rhee’s effectiveness? The general strategy is to admit the evidence on school improvement in D.C., but then insist that it is impossible to see any connection between that improvement and the work of the chancellor. Of course, it is, as we have said, quite impossible, without experimental evidence, to prove connections between Rhee policies and changes in student gains, but that is not the committee’s agenda. Not in its executive summary, in its press release, or anywhere in the report does the committee call for the conduct of experiments that could establish causal relationships between policies and outcomes. On the contrary, the committee recommends gathering still more trend data and conducting old-fashioned case studies that in the end will prove little more than what is already known. And in the pursuit of its second objective, giving feedback on the Rhee reforms, it does not carry out even minimal case-study research to see whether a probable relationship may exist between Rhee policies and classroom outcomes.

Take, for example, the decline in student and teacher truancy. According to 8th-grade student self-reports, the rate of absenteeism declined significantly between 2007 and 2009. Teacher absenteeism also dropped noticeably over these same two years. The days on which 98 percent or more of the teachers were at school climbed from about 68 percent to approximately 85 percent.

Instead of congratulating the district on this improvement, the committee cautions: “It is important to note…that the fact that teacher absenteeism is correlated with achievement does not mean that the absenteeism causes the low achievement. There are many other factors, such as school safety, that affect both teacher absenteeism and student achievement. This is just one example of the many limitations of these data.”

In this passage we see a certain bias at work. The incidence of student and teacher truancy declined, the committee admits. But that hardly proves Rhee was a success or that students, in order to learn, need the stability that comes with the presence of their regular teacher. Perhaps school safety also improved, but the committee makes no effort to gather statistics on this point or carry out a case study to see whether Rhee had worked to make schools safer. We are simply left with the caution that a drop in the rate of absenteeism might not prove anything.

Comparing D.C. to Other Big Cities

The committee also acknowledges a notable climb in test scores on the DC CAS test and says that “NAEP shows increases similar to those seen on the CAS.” But, it says, “in comparison with other urban districts, the District’s scores were similar; many others also showed consistently significant gains.”

Really? At the 4th-grade level, D.C. students in math and reading gained 6 scale score points between 2007 and 2009, while the average gain in the other 10 cities for which comparable data are available was only 1 point and 2.2 points, respectively. In 8th-grade math, the D.C. gains were 7 points, as compared to an average of 2.9 points for the other cities. Only in 8th-grade reading does the District of Columbia lag behind, dropping a point, while the others gained 1.7 points (see Figure 3).

Do Demographics Explain Gains?

The committee next worries over whether the gains may be due to a change in the composition of the student population in D.C. “The composition of students tested in DCPS…has changed markedly since 2007,” the report says. “These patterns could bias the…statistics.” Education Week’s reporter was told that “the numbers of students with disabilities or limited English proficiency fell during that time. The district also had fewer black students and more white and Hispanic students by 2010.”

But is there any reason to believe the gains on the NAEP between 2007 and 2009 were attributable to a shift in the D.C. demography? Did high-income whites and blacks bring their children into the district’s public schools, while low-income blacks and Hispanics moved out? According to the committee’s own report, signs point in the opposite direction. The percentage of students identified as economically disadvantaged grew from 63 percent in 2007 to 70 percent in 2009. The percentage African American slipped slightly from 85 percent to 83 percent of the total, but the percentage Hispanic increased from 9 percent to 10 percent, while the white population rose from 4 percent to 5 percent. Those needing instruction in the English language increased from 7 percent to 10 percent. It’s true that the percentage identified as in need of special education budged downward by 1 percentage point, but the participation rates of special education students on the NAEP increased by 1.5 percent over the two-year period. Nothing in these data indicates that the D.C. schools had fewer challenges in 2009 than they had in 2007.

Rhee’s Record

In all the numbers Rhee’s critics have assembled, the two facts that stand out have nothing to do with test scores, but rather with student and teacher absenteeism. One does not know how quickly leaders can have an impact on student learning, but strong educational leaders are known for their impact on school culture. If we take Rhee at her word, changing culture was what she was trying to do, and those falling absenteeism indicators suggest that she may have had an effect, even in a short period of time. It’s even possible that a change in the D.C. school climate accelerated learning gains. About that one cannot be certain when only two years of NAEP data are available. But one can be quite sure that a case against Rhee has yet to be established.

Paul E. Peterson directs Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance.

A footnoted version of this article is available here.

Just weeks after the storm, officials turned the city’s failing schools over to the state-run Recovery School District (RSD) and gave the RSD five years to turn them around. That deadline was reached last December, and a vote by the state school board has extended the RSD’s reform effort, albeit with modifications that promise greater autonomy to schools that meet performance targets and create a process for qualified operators to take over failing schools. The December vote was a victory for charter schools and the RSD, one that boldy advances a school reform model as innovative as it is controversial.

District in Recovery

For decades, the deterioration of the New Orleans public school system had been shocking and seemingly inexorable. Students graduating with honors were sometimes incapable of elementary mathematics and some were barely able to read. One high-school valedictorian failed the graduate exit exam and then failed it some more—five times all told—and this was the school’s top student. Deferred maintenance and contract fraud ensured that the system’s physical infrastructure was as degraded as its instructional capacity. The system was bankrupt and the payroll so padded with no-shows—some of them deceased—that the FBI had set up a satellite branch within the school board’s central office. The hurricane was the coup de grâce. Some 110 of 127 schoolhouses were completely destroyed.

But ruin so extreme bred opportunity.

The RSD had been established in 2003 to manage “recovery” from academic failure, not from Hurricane Katrina, as the name is sometimes taken to imply, but had seized only five New Orleans schools before Katrina. After the storm, the RSD took control of an additional 63 deemed in need of radical intervention. The elected Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) retained authority over the system’s 16 still-viable schools, an administrative domain that shrank further as several of the best schools fled central control for the greater autonomy that comes with charter status. Today, the majority of OPSB schools are charters (see Figure 1). Further erosion of the board’s legitimacy came with the jailing of its former president for bribery.

In a similarly pivotal blow to the old order, with teachers scattered to 50 states and schools shuttered for the 2005 fall term, the OPSB discharged the 7,000 employees who had answered to it prior to Katrina, effectively nullifying the system’s contract with United Teachers of New Orleans. When the collective bargaining agreement formally expired at the end of the 2005–06 school year, it was not renewed.

Freed from union rules and OPSB central-office control, the RSD was able to act on its conviction that improved performance lay in spinning off as many schools as possible and chartering them as independent institutions with open-enrollment admissions policies and citywide catchment areas. Critics on the left accused Louisiana of implementing a version of the “shock doctrine,” whereby disaster is exploited to rescind worker protections and other strands of the social safety net. Critics on the right lamented that the Bush administration and its allies within the parochial school establishment failed to go even further and make private school vouchers a bigger part of the new regime.

Five years later, the city’s bet on charter schools had begun to pay off. The average rate of improvement in the New Orleans public schools stood at three to four times the statewide rate, despite persistent poor performance by several schools. For a change, extraordinarily good things could be said about New Orleans’s traditionally atrocious public school system.

Wake-up Call

Forced to compete for students and rank, the New Orleans schools were jolted from a decades-long coma. The awakening coincided with efforts in reform-minded cities like New York, Long Beach, California, and Washington, D.C. But what  was  distinctive about New Orleans was that the dynamic tension among schools was built into the system’s new polycentric administrative structure. The old apparatus of central control had not, as in other cities, merely been tweaked in the name of reform; it had been scrapped. Under the old order, the all-powerful school board and central office had seemed to view the district more as an adult jobs program and dispenser of patronage-based contracts than as a source of education for young people. Now, by design, no single apparatus of power—not OPSB, RSD, or the charter schools and charter management organizations that answered to them and to the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE)—could assert hegemony and dominate the others.

That made New Orleans a test not just of cutting-edge instructional practices but of variant administrative models as well. The city became a laboratory for the reinvention of its school system and, as was attested to by the enthusiasm of major foundations and the Obama administration, a crucible for ideas that might well be replicable in other cities.

As reformers hoped, the opportunity attracted a raft of independent school service providers ranging from charter management organizations to firms that aligned curricula with state standards and then developed metrics for measuring individual student achievement on a monthly or even weekly basis. Teach For America and the New Teacher Project saw opportunity and beefed up their presence in New Orleans, as did a homegrown organization called Teach NOLA. The Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools gained prominence as a deft legislative advocate for what was being called the New Orleans reform model. The largest of the independent reform groups, the nonprofit New Schools for New Orleans (NSNO), developed an array of services, subsidies, and other forms of support. To plug the human capital deficit in a city still depopulated by Katrina, NSNO began training prospective school leaders and directors as well as teachers. It also sponsored a small nonprofit to engage and inform parents about student choices in the new landscape. By 2010, NSNO had incubated 10 citywide, open-admission charter schools, the basic integer of local reform, and provided key personnel and services for dozens more.

Katrina spawned a gamut of visionary ideas for the transformation of New Orleans. They ranged from land-use plans to flood protection to the development of neighborhood health-care clinics to economic development and governance proposals. Many died at inception, undone by the impulse to re-create the old order before attempting its improvement. School reform was the exception. A sense of moral obligation combined with hard work and sheer exasperation to make it the most far-reaching achievement of the post-Katrina era. The decent public education long denied New Orleans youth was framed as a civil right at least as fundamental as the access to jobs, public accommodations, and polling places that had been milestones in an earlier generation’s fight to overcome segregation. The numbers show that charter schools were the barricades from which a new struggle was being waged successfully (see Figure 2). Parents, initially skeptical about school reform efforts, or accustomed to thinking of them as concessions aimed largely at luring parochial and private school students back into a low-income, black-majority system, flocked to the new schools, even lining up in pre-dawn hours to assure a child’s admission. Alone among American cities, New Orleans was actually beginning to close the much-discussed “performance gap” among students of different racial, ethnic, and economic backgrounds. A poll in late autumn 2010 by Tulane University’s Cowen Institute for Public Education Initiatives found that 60 percent of New Orleans residents opposed returning the schools to OPSB. Small wonder then that many politicians had loosened their ties to teachers unions and school system contractors. Change was in the air and the implications were revolutionary.

Sustaining Momentum

Now, the question, as keenly studied by chartering’s foes as by its friends, is this: Can the early success be sustained? The challenges remain numerous and daunting. There is concern that school reform’s bountiful harvest in the half decade since Katrina has been low-hanging fruit and that further gains—even with sharp improvement, the system remains subpar—will be much more difficult. Looking ahead, Neerav Kingsland, a Yale Law graduate and strategist for NSNO, talks about “Charter Issues 2.0,” the problems that arise on the way from being 10 percent of the system to being 80 percent of the system, the next and far more demanding phase of work.

For the nation’s foremost experiment in charter schools to rest even briefly on its laurels would be to risk setbacks, Kingsland and like-minded reformers contend. Loss of momentum would be pounced on by now-disenfranchised partisans of the old regime eager to buttress their claim that the rising test scores are somehow bogus or, in any event, temporary, merely a blip. That argument has been made by Larry Carter, president of the United Teachers of New Orleans. Like other skeptics, Carter seized on a 2010 report from Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes that portrayed many charter schools as doing no better, and indeed sometimes worse, than traditional schools nationwide. Carter rushed into print in New Orleans’s daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune, with an editorial saluting the Stanford study as proof of failure, but without mentioning the parts of the report that identified charters in New Orleans as a sharp exception to the national numbers and particularly successful with low-income students. In light of rearguard attacks of this sort, the only way to ensure that the system remains performance-driven, many of reform’s proponents believe, is to push the New Orleans model—predicated on open-admission, citywide charter schools—all the way to scale. That means encouraging the RSD to complete the chartering of its entire portfolio of schools; it also means resisting return of a still-shaky school system to OPSB, with or without a collective bargaining agreement. Above all, sustaining charter-based school reform means taking very seriously the criticisms that have been lodged against it.

The Search for a Governance Model

The 2005 legislation that designated New Orleans a district in crisis and placed more of its failing schools under state control gave the RSD five years to achieve recovery. The timetable guaranteed that school governance would emerge as a focus of debate on Katrina’s fifth anniversary. Eli Broad, whose foundation has committed millions to the reform effort, put the governance question at the top of the agenda as schools reopened for the 2010–11 school year:

The most important areas in which we think the city should focus going forward are putting in place a sustainable governance structure, continuing to develop and support teachers and leaders to become long-term, high-performing employees and continuing to improve the lowest-performing schools.

Last December BESE decided to extend the RSD’s shelf life rather than return the schools to OPSB control. In the run-up to the December decision, public interest swelled and rhetoric heated up. Opponents of the state’s post-Katrina intervention rallied to the cry of “local control,” which usually meant restoring power to the school board or something like it. The argument carried a racial subtext, sometimes explicit, more often coded. The bureaucrats in a white-majority state were cast as having usurped administrative power over a district in which 9 out of 10 students were African American, as were many teachers, politicians, and contractors.

Another theme popular among advocates of local control was the contention that RSD’s school performance gains were somehow illusory or rigged: students with special needs were being turned away from schools and those with disciplinary problems were being expelled to keep performance scores high, critics insinuated. The argument lost some of its political punch when 2009–10 enrollment figures revealed that the schools overseen by the OPSB, not the RSD, have the lowest proportion of special needs and behaviorally challenged students.

State Superintendent of Education Paul Pastorek, shortly after Labor Day, pointed the way for BESE’s December decision. The gist of his recommendation was that RSD would retain control of its current portfolio of schools for at least another two school years. At that point, schools that had met or surpassed minimum standards could return to local governance, if—the big if—they chose to do so. Pastorek’s further proviso was that local capacity to administer the schools would be reviewed before such transfers were approved. Many, if not most, eligible schools are expected to resist a return to OPSB control. In a late amendment to his plan calculated to impose greater accountability on the RSD, Pastorek advocated giving OPSB and others a crack at taking over not just successful schools, but also those that are still failing after five years in the RSD portfolio.

The December vote was not a foregone conclusion. Some board members were inclined to override Pastorek’s recommendation and restore the entire city system to OPSB control. But former OPSB and BESE board member Leslie Jacobs, widely regarded as the founder of Louisiana’s school reform movement, correctly predicted that BESE did not have the votes to oppose Pastorek.

Darryl Kilbert, the superintendent hired by OPSB to manage its small portfolio of schools, portrays the current transitional arrangement as an erosion of democracy itself and espouses restoration of “community control.” He tactfully makes clear that community control need not necessarily mean OPSB control, but clearly assumes that it will.

The countervailing observation is that the locus of democratic control has merely shifted, from an elected school board to an elected governor and a partly elected, partly appointed BESE. The mantralike criticism that a diminished OPSB means control is less “local” ignores the fact that the once all-powerful seven-member school board has been augmented by a growing cohort of charter school board members numbering in the hundreds. (The Left counters by deploring the charter schools as “privatized,” notwithstanding that most of them observe an open-enrollment admissions policy and that they, like all public schools in Louisiana,  are publicly authorized, funded, and evaluated. By statute, their meetings must also be open to the public, though critics say access is sometimes grudging.)

While its argument for regaining control of the schools rested on the principle of local control, a chastened OPSB also pointed out that it had instituted financial reforms since the system’s bankruptcy prior to Katrina.

But the broader political context was aligned in ways that favored continuing the reform effort, at least for now. Under the New Orleans city charter, the school system is a separate entity that does not answer to the mayor, but the incumbent administration, like the state education bureaucracy in Baton Rouge, was and remains vehemently opposed to cutting it short.

“There will be no turning back,” New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu said to cheers in his inaugural address in May 2010. He was reiterating a slogan that had been embedded in his campaign platform. If reform were to fail, he asserted in a network TV appearance in late September, it would be precisely because politics, perhaps especially racial politics, had eclipsed the commitment to improve the education of children. Landrieu is white and a Democrat, the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father served in that capacity in the 1970s, but he was elected with overwhelming black support. Governor Bobby Jindal, a conservative Republican and a devout Catholic, is even less disposed to resurrect the old regime. Indeed, he is a proponent not only of charter autonomy but of vouchers, which though ardently desired by the parochial system, are so far only a token presence in the New Orleans schools landscape (see “In the Wake of the Storm,” features, Spring 2010).

Paul Vallas, who as superintendent of the RSD since 2007 has lengthened both the school day and the school year, sees technical as well as political reasons why charters are here to stay. “You can’t turn back. Charters are authorized by the state,” Vallas told PBS Newshour during a July 2010 appearance. “The state would have to not renew them. The great thing about this system is, it’s really going to be hard to dismantle what’s been created.”

The influential Jacobs agrees. OPSB couldn’t roll back the clock even if it wanted to, Jacobs contends; the charter school constituencies—the families who use them—won’t let it happen.

And yet Jacobs, like many others, including Eli Broad, sees eventual return to an upgraded form of local control as both inevitable and wise. In the interim, every governmental entity with a management role in local schools, and that would include BESE, must maintain a local presence to facilitate citizen access, she told an independent citizens forum on school governance that met throughout the summer. Longer term, she believes any resolution of the governance question must observe two categorical imperatives: One is that any and all decisions must be based on whether they measurably improve the quality of the education being provided to children. The other is that the management of schools must be cleanly separated from the business of authorizing and evaluating them.

Extrapolating from these core values, Jacobs envisions a school board–like body, perhaps the OPSB itself, eventually recovering the power to authorize charters, reorganize failing schools, set policy consistent with state mandates, and provide systemwide services. Actual management of schools would be left to autonomous charter boards, each of which comprises a school “district” under the current arrangement.

Building Anew

As the December vote was approaching, Jacobs was also grappling with the question of whether central administrative functions should include facilities management, or whether that responsibility should lie with the schools that occupy assigned campuses. The real estate is owned by OPSB and is subject to reconstruction or replacement now that the city has finally settled with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for a post-Katrina allocation of construction funds totaling $1.8 billion—big, big money in a relatively small city like New Orleans (see sidebar).

Up-to-date information and photos can be found at www.rebuildingnolaschools.com

NO’s Master Plan Under Way

It’s the biggest school construction project in Louisiana since the Civil War and one of the largest in the nation’s history: 85 campuses, some overhauled, most being built from the ground up, at a total cost of about $2 billion. Another 89 buildings on 38 campuses are being demolished. By 2016, New Orleans antic­ipates a student population of about 45,000, compared to about 65,000 before Katrina.

With the system in the throes of convulsive reform, the build­ings are master-planned for flexibility. Not only is the population in flux, so are school management styles at a time of increased autonomy and experimentation. A charter school operator may be around for three to five years, but these are buildings that must last for a century, notes Ramsey Green, who, as the Recovery School District’s chief operating officer, is in charge of creating campuses for both RSD and OPSB schools, charters and direct-run alike. (For project news, interactive map, and photographs, visit www.rebuildingnolaschools.com.)

As the work kicked in, Louisiana got its first public building that meets the LEED “silver” standard for “greenness”—as will all 85 schools. The buildings also reflect the city’s vulnerability to storms and flooding: Many are elevated above flood levels. Ground floors are terrazzo so they can be easily scrubbed down and bleached if flooding occurs. The electrical systems origi­nate on the roof and flow down through the buildings so that only the lower extremities need to be replaced in the event of catastrophic flooding.

Of particular interest to progressives in the urban planning world, the buildings embody the potential for multiple uses by the surrounding community. Libraries and gyms and health clin­ics have separate entrances, allowing community groups to gain access for appointments, meetings, or after-hours exercise without having to traipse through the school itself. Air-conditioning and heating sys­tems are zoned to contain costs when a building is only partially in use.

In a city famous for corruption, procurement and payment are audited exhaustively at sev­eral levels within the RSD and at the state and federal level before checks are actually cut by FEMA. Early bids have been running nicely below estimates, thanks to the national recession, Green says.

Momentum has been building rapidly since early 2010, when the city and FEMA ended five years of squab­bling and came to terms on the federal commitment. Autumn saw eight groundbreakings, one a week. The excitement is pal­pable. So is the urgency of the work. Says Green, “We’ve still got 6,000 kids in modular campuses.”

Where those schools should be placed and what they should look like has long stirred debate. Some factions have clamored for a return to “neighborhood schools.” To some, this is code for an antireform agenda, given that citywide open access is one of the hallmarks of the new generation of charter schools since Katrina. That open access is a deliberate and effective assault on racial inequity associated with the segregation era is an irony not lost on reform advocates. In debating the issue, they point out that charters with open-access admission policies are an option already available to neighborhood residents; for admission to most they need only show up on time and enroll. Moreover, reform advocates note, basing admissions on geographical boundaries is an exclusionary practice, all too redolent of the days when low-income students of minority background desperately sought to escape from “slum” or “ghetto” schools and gain access to the generally superior schools in “good” neighborhoods from which they had been barred.

The neighborhood schools movement has found friends among some of the city’s more progressive urban planners. The master plan for reconstruction of the school system after Katrina envisions schools as centers of the adjacent community. At a time when budgets are tight, obesity epidemic, and fuel costs likely to rise, schools at the center of walkable communities are seen as both healthful and thrifty. School-centered communities also further neighborhood cohesiveness, the argument goes. To that end, the Orleans schools master plan calls for bundling several community services within or adjacent to new and reconstructed schools—a library branch, a wellness clinic, a community garden, and a senior center, for example.

The Money Factor

No discussion of school reform in New Orleans is complete without acknowledging that notable gains have occurred at a time of unusually high levels of government financial support, chiefly drawn from special funds set up in the aftermath of the Katrina disaster. Those dollars nearly doubled per-student allocations in New Orleans, lifting the figure above $12,000, even without factoring in support from foundations and individual donors (see Figure 3). That tide of money has now begun to ebb. It was hoped that reversion to more normal funding levels would be mitigated by federal Race to the Top (RttT) money, but Louisiana was not selected in the program’s first two rounds, in part, it was assumed, because upstate districts and teachers unions were not wholehearted in their support for RttT goals.

New Orleans has, however, secured $28.5 million in federal “i3” funds for educational innovation. The award, announced over the summer of 2010, will go to the RSD and to NSNO primarily to lubricate reorganization of failing schools. To test the replicability of the New Orleans model, some of the money will be used to help launch charter schools in Memphis. On the home front, NSNO is committed to implementing i3’s goal of reorganizing the lowest-performing 5 percent of failing schools. The intended uses of the i3 money align with an evolving vision of philanthropy’s role. As Broad put it,

Foundations can continue to play an important role in enabling school districts and states around the country to understand how and why New Orleans has made better relative academic gains in such a short period of time, and to encourage them to adopt similar approaches. We’ve only begun to unlock the lessons this city holds for education reform nationwide.

In early December 2010, notwithstanding a lawsuit threatened by OPSB, BESE accepted Pastorek’s recommendation to extend the current reform paradigm. The vote was preceded by histrionics at times reminiscent of pre-Katrina meetings of the Orleans school board at its most chaotic and dysfunctional. From the speaker’s rostrum, one OPSB member warned that a vote for Pastorek’s plan would be an act of criminal malfeasance that would trigger “civil war,” an indication that regardless of the board’s decision, the political battle was far from over.

Where to Go from Here

Amid changes as exciting as they are fragile, this much seems clear to the reform community: Even briefly settling for today’s improved performance levels is to avail critics of the opportunity to say that school reform has stalled after early gains that were easy and perhaps unsustainable (see Figure 4). It would be to settle for schools that are, not excellent, but merely “good enough.”

Efforts by the old order to claw back power are portrayed as only the most obvious threat to the gains achieved in New Orleans. The more insidious threat, reformers contend, is for schools and the communities of students and parents they serve to get comfortable with a still-inadequate status quo. A stubborn loyalty to the school they know, and indeed may have helped build, can abort the wrenching changes that may be required for a school to become truly excellent.

Reform advocates call it “churn,” the business of aggressively and systematically zeroing in on the least successful schools, ousting failed managers, and reorganizing the schools as open-enrollment, citywide charter schools. Churn is “disruptive,” a term of approbation in the school reform lexicon. But disruption breeds resistance. Even badly failing school administrations sometimes secure the affection of parents and students uncertain that striving for a truly excellent school will necessarily lead to improvement of the mediocre institution with which they have grown comfortable. That psychology is what for a time bedeviled the process of replacing a popular principal at the International High School of New Orleans, a BESE charter, with a controversial but dynamic former superintendent of the New Orleans system. In other school settings the resistance is communitarian or racial. The delicate and sometimes unpleasant politics of churn are the reason many reformers question whether an elected body, such as a traditional school board, has the gumption to handle tasks as potentially unpopular as declaring schools to be failures and handing them over to more capable managers, or shuttering them altogether.

Resolving the issue of governance will be the biggest test ahead for cities engaged in Charter Issues 2.0. At stake is not just the credibility of the reform movement but the prospect, at last, of convincing America that an excellent education is a civil right worth the kind of struggle that so far is exhilarating New Orleans with the possibility of transformational change.

Jed Horne educated two sons in Orleans Parish public schools. He is the author of Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City.

As in her much-discussed book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, Diane has it half right. She pinpoints genuine shortcomings in NCLB and failings in a number of other federal education programs, and correctly observes that many of the school-reform efforts and innovations of recent years have not yielded the desired achievement gains.

But she’s wrong about the remedy for these failures and about the course that Republicans (and, for that matter, reform-minded Democrats) should follow in the days ahead.

The weak and generally stagnant academic performance of most American school kids, our scandalous achievement gaps, the country’s sagging performance vis-à-vis other countries, the skimpy preparation of many teachers and principals, the shoddy curricula, the fat and junky textbooks, the innovation-shackling union contracts, the large expenditures with meager returns—these are not the result of an overweening federal government. They are, in fact, almost entirely the product of state and local control of public education—as it has traditionally been defined and structured in the United States. They are the product of failed governance, bureaucratic mismanagement, and the capture of the K-12 system by powerful organizations of adults who assign lower priority to kids’ needs than to their own interests. They are maladies caused by, and worsened under, the aegis of the very system that Diane trusts to cure them.

It’s never smart to expect those who cause, or even those who tolerate, problems to be any good at solving them. Blithely consigning America’s education fate to the traditional structures of “state and local control” won’t work any better tomorrow than it did yesterday, and Republicans (and Democrats, too) should spurn such advice.

What they should do instead is re-imagine local control, clear out the dysfunctional bureaucratic underbrush, disentangle the responsibilities of different levels of government, make everyone accountable for their performance (as gauged primarily by student learning gains), quit throwing good money after bad, and unshackle education innovators and entrepreneurs so they can give their all to solving problems and creating alternatives.

Local control, properly re-imagined, is vested in individual schools—“mom and pop” charters are examples—that control their own personnel, budgets, schedules, and curricula, that are voluntarily attended by children whose families choose them, that are fully funded and freed from nearly all regulatory and collective-bargaining shackles, but that are absolutely transparent and accountable with regard to what they do, how they spend their money, what goods and services they buy from where, and, above all, how well their pupils do (or don’t) achieve.

Local control, properly re-imagined, is vested in parents free to choose among—and fully-informed about—a wide array of quality schools (and other education delivery systems, including virtual education), and in financing systems that vary the per-pupil amounts according to kids’ differing needs but then send every single dollar to the schools they actually attend, instead of allowing that money to get caught up in bloated central offices and unnecessary bureaucracy.

Local control, properly imagined, abolishes the quasi-monopolies of “school systems,” “central offices,” and system-wide collective-bargaining contracts. It treats every successful school as an independent, self-propelled entity, accountable for its governance to those who work in and attend it but accountable for its results to state-level performance-monitoring systems with authority and wherewithal to pull the plug on bad schools. Those state-level systems, in turn, are united—at least those that wish to be are—by voluntary national academic standards and high-quality tests, the results of which can be compared from school to school and state to state, and communicated to teachers and parents. Other unifying forces—and reasons to discard traditional districts—include well-run CMO’s and the burgeoning “virtual” options that leap across municipal and state borders.

Yes, Uncle Sam’s future role in all this is far less intrusive than today. Washington supplies additional funds to underwrite the education of disadvantaged and special-needs kids, it pays for innovation through competitive-grant programs, it conducts research and supplies a wealth of assessment and other data, and it safeguards individuals from violations of their civil rights. That’s about it.

What do such structural recommendations have to do with the successful teaching and learning that must be at the core of any well-functioning education system? First, they remove all sorts of obstacles and constraints. Second, they concentrate the resources and decision-making authority where they belong (as close as possible to the kids—Diane has that part right). Third, they clarify expectations and make everyone’s performance transparent. Admittedly, in the near term that doesn’t prevent a foolish teacher or ill-run school from selecting a bad reading program or substituting silly social studies for real history. It doesn’t ensure brilliant lesson planning or inspired instruction—but it does allow for tailored instruction and flexible teaching models. In the medium term, however, it frees principals to make changes and liberates parents to exit. And in the long run it makes the school’s very existence hinge on whether it delivers the goods.

That ought to be an approach for tomorrow that Republicans (and reform-minded Democrats) can embrace. But it’s a very, very different model than “restoring” the failed systems of yesterday.

—Chester E. Finn, Jr.

To many education reformers,  the passage of the federal government’s massive stimulus plan, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), appeared to be a final bright star falling into alignment.

For years, consensus had been building across the political spectrum that the nation’s schools, especially those in urban America, were in urgent need of fundamental change. The election of reform-friendly Democrat Barack Obama presented the opportunity for K–12’s Nixon-goes-to-China moment. The subsequent selection of Arne Duncan, the battle-tested former Chicago schools chief, as secretary of education provided a trusted, steady hand to lead the charge and take the flak.

The ARRA seemed to complete the constellation: an astounding $100 billion of new federal funds—nearly twice the annual budget of the U.S. Department of Education—to jump-start and sustain the improvement of America’s schools. When Duncan expressed his intention to make the very most of this once-in-a-lifetime “moon shot,” some advocates eagerly prophesied an epochal shift for reform.

The ARRA’s results to date, however, have been soberingly quotidian. So far, the vast majority of its funds have served to sustain the status quo, funding the most traditional line items and actually helping schools and districts go about their everyday business. With one notable exception (spurring long overdue changes in some state laws), the implementation of this mammoth statute has confirmed several humbling, hoary lessons of federal policymaking, including the limited ability of Uncle Sam to drive education reform.

Though deflating (not to mention terribly expensive), these bumps and bruises, if taken to heart, could help build a better understanding of the federal government’s inherent strengths and weaknesses in K–12 education policy, a particularly valuable exercise as NCLB reauthorization looms. As important, they could still have a critical influence on the ARRA itself—helping to salvage its crown jewel of reform, the vaunted Race to the Top (RTTT).

Easy Money

The ARRA was crafted during the darkest stage of the recession and signed into law in February 2009. To help revive the nation’s flagging economy, Congress and the administration were determined to have funds enter the financial bloodstreams of states and districts as quickly as possible. So about $75 billion of the $80 billion the law designated for K–12 schools was funneled through formula-based programs, including the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and Title I, two of the nation’s oldest and most familiar federal education funding streams. Simply by virtue of having students, states and districts would begin receiving funds. No grant competitions, no long, complicated applications, no review teams with complex scoring rubrics.

The lion’s share of these ARRA education dollars was appropriated through the new $50 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund (SFSF), a population-based program created to expeditiously replenish education budgets decimated by declining tax revenue.

Despite the priority placed on getting lots of money out on the double, some policymakers were determined to see that these funds were also well spent. So the legislation required that, in advance of receiving their SFSF allocations, governors sign “assurances,” statements promising that their states were taking action to improve teacher quality, develop better data systems, enhance standards and assessments, and address low-performing schools. Duncan went even further, repeatedly telling state leaders that these formula dollars had to be used to improve student learning and innovate, not merely fund more of the same.

States that spent the funds unwisely, the secretary warned in March 2009, would seriously compromise their ability to vie for the $5 billion of ARRA competitive grants. “States that are simply investing in the status quo will put themselves at a tremendous competitive disadvantage for getting those additional funds,” Duncan said. “I can’t emphasize strongly enough how important it is for states and districts to think very creatively and to think very differently about how they use this first set of money.” The department also took the unusual step of creating a document for state and district leaders that explained how these funds could be used in reform-oriented ways.

Had everything gone according to Hoyle, this massive infusion of federal funds would have protected state and district education budgets from major cuts while advancing invaluable reforms by supporting new, innovative, and promising programs. But as is often the case in education policy, the best laid plans of Uncle Sam went awry.

Reality Check

In a July 2009 report to Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that SFSF dollars were being used to protect the status quo. After studying a sample of 16 states and select jurisdictions within them, GAO reported that federal funds were in fact being used for “retaining staff and current education programs.” Instead of advancing important reforms, states and districts were addressing a “more pressing” matter—their fiscal needs. In discussions with district leaders, GAO found that “most did not indicate that they would use [SFSF] funds to pursue educational reforms”; instead, they wanted to fill their existing budget holes. For example, officials in Flint, Michigan, decided to use SFSF funds to “cope with budget deficits rather than to advance programs.” Miami-Dade planned to save 2,000 teaching jobs; Richmond County in Georgia funded teachers, paraprofessionals, media specialists, and other existing positions.

Then, in an August report that the Washington Post referred to as a “reality check,” the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) also found that funding was being used to protect jobs and programs. The survey of administrators reported that most of the funds were merely repairing budget holes and that little if any reform was being accomplished. “Everybody appreciated getting the money,” the association’s executive director told the Christian Science Monitor, “but primarily all the money did was help to backfill the budget deficits they were already facing.”

The single-minded focus on jobs and the status quo was confirmed by hard numbers. In September, the U.S. economy lost 190,000 jobs, but the education sector gained nearly 11,000 jobs. In October, the Obama administration announced that more than half of the 640,000 jobs created or saved across the entire economy by the ARRA were in education. In November, after studying states’ quarterly stimulus reports, Education Week found that 96 percent of the ARRA education funds spent to that point had been “focused on creating and saving jobs.”

How did one of the ARRA’s education goals (reform) get completely displaced by the other (job and program preservation)? The answer can be found in two sets of factors, one mostly economic and beyond the federal government’s control but the other legislative and fully within it. Combined, they offer an unmistakable overarching lesson: local dynamics, not the will of Washington, determine the pace and scope of education reform.

Survival Instincts

The greatest confounding factor was the severity and duration of the nation’s financial decline. Revised 2009 figures indicated that the U.S. economy had contracted twice as much as previously estimated, amounting to the largest downturn since the Great Depression. Nationwide, unemployment topped 10 percent in October, considerably higher than most experts had anticipated.

State budgets were drastically affected. California famously faced a $26 billion shortfall, but many other states, including Ohio and Illinois, confronted multibillion-dollar deficits as well. A University of Denver study declared that Colorado’s government had been hit by a “budgetary tsunami.” The chair of Alabama’s finance committee called the state’s financial crisis “worse by far than we’ve ever seen it.” One estimate predicted that, were the recession to end in 2009, the states would still have combined deficits of $230 billion, comparable to the entire gross domestic product of Singapore.

Regrettably, but predictably, education systems went into self-preservation mode. Part of the explanation can be found in districts’ DNA. Local education systems, particularly the largest urban districts, are infamously Byzantine, change-averse organizations. They are also generally among their communities’ largest employers. Notably, both the GAO and AASA studies reported that local school officials felt compelled to disregard the calls for reform given “the realities of strained federal, state, and local budgets,” and the resulting likelihood of layoffs and other cuts.

External forces exacerbated these internal tendencies. In some cases, unions pressured policymakers to direct funds toward job protection. The California Teachers Association organized a “Pink Friday” rally to protest pink slips and furloughs. In Michigan, a local union sued a district over layoffs. Some in Montana sought to use stimulus funds to shore up teacher pensions, and the Utah Education Association ran television ads urging legislators to dedicate ARRA dollars to restoring education programs.

As a number of commentators have noted, the economic downturn offered school systems the opportunity to alter expensive, outdated practices such as strict salary schedules, protective tenure rules, and bloated pension programs. Though sensible in theory, this was probably wishful thinking when applied to the often confounding realities of K–12 politics and policy. Indeed, Kevin Carey, of the Washington-based think tank Education Sector, has written that there is no evidence that districts “implement a whole suite of needed reforms” in response to recessions.

Carey’s argument is strongly supported by recent events. In instances where stimulus funds failed to fill budget holes completely, states and districts generally did not blaze a trail for reform, instead opting for temporary, shortsighted cuts designed to help them hunker down and ride out the current storm. A number of states instituted flat reductions in district aid, while others made across-the-board cuts to programs. California’s Saddleback Valley district cut athletic programs, while districts from Houston to Boston to Atlanta slashed bus service. Seattle-area schools eliminated groundskeeper positions, Prince George’s County in Maryland cut “parent liaisons,” and Illinois reduced spending on bilingual and early-childhood programs. There was a nationwide trend in summer-school reductions, and Hawaii cut school days. Lake Washington School District in Washington had teachers remove microwaves from their rooms to reduce energy bills. In total, it appears that when education budgets wane, schools’ survival instincts, not their reform inclinations, kick in.

Policy Matters

Though the course of the recession, local political dynamics, and district preferences were beyond the reach of federal policymakers; the contours and implementation of the ARRA were not. They could have factored in these considerations to craft and administer a plan more likely to bring about reform. Astonishingly, however, the legislative language and departmental pronouncements enabled—actually, all but guaranteed—this $75 billion investment in the status quo.

While the use of formula-based programs certainly facilitated the speedy distribution of funds, it also set the stage for conventional spending patterns. In the case of Title I and IDEA, states were provided grants under their existing program agreements, meaning the federal government provided billions without extracting new reform promises.

Guidelines made clear that these funds had to be used in ways consistent with long-established program requirements. But over decades, tens of billions of dollars have flowed through these programs, failing to generate the improvements needed. Instead of tying new dollars to specific reform-oriented strategies, the law required that they fund more of the same.

Even more trouble was embedded in the SFSF. The law stipulated that states first use their allotments to fill budget holes and, instead of giving states the opportunity to reconsider their allocation of resources, it mandated that they use their existing funding formulas. So, rather than requiring or even encouraging state leaders to use this $50 billion investment to pursue new projects and ways of thinking, the ARRA prioritized preservation of the current order.

If dollars remained after budget holes had been filled, states were not allowed to invest them in new reform initiatives; they had to distribute what was left to the districts by formula. Districts then had nearly unfettered control over how these funds were spent; activities merely had to comport with four major federal education statutes, including the Elementary and Secondary Education Act—laws that, despite many years and billions invested, hadn’t adequately improved our schools.

Congressional leaders could have empowered governors, often among the nation’s leading education reformers, to direct how portions of these funds were used. Instead, federal guidance made clear that governors and state superintendents were prohibited from doing so.

Finally, meaningful federal oversight was lacking. States were not required to provide advance details of how dollars would be spent. The applications approved by the department are staggeringly devoid of specifics. While governors had to sign a form committing their states to pursuing four general areas of reform, these assurances carried little weight. States could receive their first allotments without explaining how the funds would actually be spent, and, amazingly, states could receive their second allotments even if they hadn’t followed through on their promises. In an April 2009 letter to governors, Secretary Duncan wrote, “States are not required to demonstrate progress in order to get phase two Stabilization funds. We are only asking…that states have in place systems to report on final metrics that are developed through rulemaking so that parents, teachers, and policymakers have clear and consistent information about where our schools and students stand.”

In retrospect, it’s easy to see why the new federal funds didn’t lead to reform. Though $75 billion now appears to be a lost cause, it did buy important lessons. If properly applied, these lessons could contribute mightily to the ARRA’s final major education initiative.

Racing to the Top?

As expectations for the formula-based stimulus funds have rightfully abated, hopes for the reform-driving Race to the Top fund have risen. At $4.35 billion, RTTT is petite compared to other ARRA programs, but as a competitive grant program, it represents by far the largest amount ever at the discretion of an education secretary (see Figure 1).

The administration has tried to make the most of this opportunity by identifying specific reform priorities and requiring interested states to craft proposals that respond to each (see Table 1). While some roundly criticized the department’s audacity—former assistant secretary of education Diane Ravitch called the strategy embedded in the department’s draft documents “coercive” and North Carolina governor Beverly Perdue described it as “prescriptive”—others believed this would ensure the wise investment and use of these funds. That is, if a state doesn’t agree with the department’s favorite reforms, it simply won’t apply; if a state does agree, it will devise the strongest possible plan that faithfully responds to all priorities.

Unfortunately, that’s unlikely to be the case. First, because states are still desperate for money, it’s doubtful they will take a pass on the opportunity to compete for several hundred million dollars. In fact, a month before the first filing deadline, no state had announced that it would forgo the entire competition. Moreover, states’ financial fortunes are expected to get worse.

State budgets typically suffer most in the year after a recession ends. The Rockefeller Institute has found that education spending remains depressed several years after economic growth returns. These effects could be even more pronounced this time. Nationally, property taxes still account for 30 percent of all school revenue. The recession and associated housing crisis have significantly depressed property values; according to one widely used index, home prices declined continuously for three years beginning in July 2006. As rolling assessments catch up with these reduced prices, property tax revenues are likely to be adversely affected. An August report from the National Conference of State Legislatures noted, “While Fiscal Year 2009 can be summed up in one word: dismal, FY 2010 can be characterized by two words: even worse.” The National Governors Association and National Association of State Budget Officers concur: governors’ 2010 budget submissions showed the largest general fund reductions since 1979.

Second, federal dictates don’t alter local preferences; they only force them into temporary hiding. Yes, governors signed the ARRA’s reform assurances but states didn’t use SFSF dollars for reform. Yes, states developed standards and assessments as No Child Left Behind (NCLB) required, but many adopted weak standards and set low cut scores. Yes, districts developed policies for NCLB public school choice and supplemental education services, but they cleverly thwarted the full implementation of these programs, evidenced by the shockingly low student participation rates. As others have noted, the federal government can make states and districts do what they don’t want to, but it can’t make them do it well.

We know that states and districts desperately need money, that they have a preference for preserving the status quo, and that when the federal government asks them to do things they’re not fond of, they may just go through the motions. So when the U.S. Department of Education places $4.35 billion on the table during a serious recession and tells states to respond to Washington’s favorite ideas, it would be wise to anticipate their responses with a stockpile of skepticism.

Trust but Verify

The ultimate challenge for the administration will be reducing the gulf between reforms promised and reforms delivered. Among actions deserving a raised eyebrow are the modifications made to state laws since the passage of the ARRA. Duncan ingeniously used Race to the Top to induce states to improve their policies. If you want a grant, said the secretary, your state had better be hospitable to reform. The swift and positive response from the states amounts to the greatest achievement of Secretary Duncan’s tenure: Illinois, Louisiana, and Tennessee lifted charter school caps. California and Wisconsin ended prohibitions on linking student performance data to individual teachers. Delaware passed legislation making the state more hospitable to Teach For America, and Rhode Island put a stop to all seniority-based teacher assignments. A number of states, including Massachusetts and Michigan, were hurrying to make legislative changes before the first submission deadline in January, and others, including Maine, Maryland, Nevada, and Washington, were planning to apply in the second round to give their legislatures time to pass reform laws.

But as discussed above, there’s considerable daylight between a reform-oriented policy and its faithful implementation. The department should remember that while many states permit linking teachers to student test scores, few districts actually do so, and that while Virginia and Mississippi have each had a charter law for more than a decade, combined they have only five charter schools. In November, Tennessee provided a perfect and alarming example of how this might play out with regard to RTTT: though the state lifted its charter cap as Duncan desired, in the span of two days Memphis and Nashville denied all 24 charter applications submitted to them.

A good leading indicator of whether a state’s heart will actually be in its reforms is whether it sees the RTTT as an engine for change or as bags of cash. Secretary Duncan has said that the program “is not about the money,” and that “If folks are doing this to chase money, it’s for the wrong reasons.” But there have been numerous indications that the potential for a titanic federal payday is a huge, if not the decisive, consideration for many. Maybe the starkest case came from Massachusetts, where Governor Deval Patrick, after years of consistent charter school antagonism, conducted a high-profile volte-face and announced his support for lifting his state’s restrictive charter cap. This occurred after a visit from Secretary Duncan and a reminder that the Bay State was on the brink of disqualifying itself from RTTT consideration.

There are plenty of other examples. Illinois governor Pat Quinn said, “We want to get Illinois in that race and make sure we get as much money as possible from Washington.” The spokesperson for Idaho’s department of education noted, “Race to the Top is the only opportunity for education to get additional funding over the next two to three years.” A lobbyist for the California School Boards Association said, “The money would be nice because of our budget situation.” Even Ohio’s reform-minded Senator John Husted said, “During these tough and uncertain financial times, I believe it is imperative that Ohio be in a strong position to take advantage of the Race to the Top dollars.” A Wisconsin legislator angry about the lack of teeth in an ostensibly reform-oriented piece of legislation may have spoken for many when he said, “This is basically a race for the money, not a race for the top.”

Also to be approached with suspicion are the promises that will appear in state applications. To satisfy the administration’s requirements, states will have to change policies affecting teachers, intervene in failing schools, support charters, and more. With so much money at stake, we should expect carefully assembled plans that convey earnest guarantees of reform. But the SFSF assurances taught us the hard way that reform commitments plus a governor’s signature do not necessarily equal real reform.

So when state proposals hit Arne Duncan’s desk, the secretary must become the toughest schoolmarm in America. The first step is to not reflexively reward the states that improved their policies in response to the RTTT carrot. The department should instead view such moves cynically. Had these states really believed in reform, they would have adopted these measures ages ago. Deathbed conversions are always suspect.

Lifting a legislated charter cap shouldn’t be enough. There should be proof that state and district officials are not inhibiting charter growth, that new schools are opening, and that they have the requisite flexibility and funding to thrive. Likewise, a new law that brings down a “data firewall” should be coupled with affirmative policies that link individual test scores to individual teachers in the state data system and watertight district policies that tie this new information to tenure and evaluation decisions.

When a state promises in its RTTT application to develop a new teacher-preparation system, the administration must pry: Is this really a new initiative or just a renaming of your existing certification process? When a state proposes to create a major new intervention for failing schools, the department must confirm that this isn’t just gussying up an old and meek school improvement strategy.

As important, the department must insist that all reform proposals be completely shovel-ready upon submission. A state’s promise to launch a performance pay system is meaningless unless all pieces of the supporting architecture are already in place. That means the state legislature has authorized the program, union contracts have been modified to allow it, data systems have been updated to support it, and a state disbursement process is prepared to allocate funds as soon as the federal grant arrives.

Watch and Wait

There is some reason to wonder just how tough the department will be. Though the final documents released in November are still laudable, they certainly represent a step back from the publicly released draft versions. States can score points for a charter law with a cap. A state without a charter law can score points with a pale facsimile of one. A performance-pay system plays a smaller role than many expected. The door was opened to weak interventions for failing schools. And, possibly most curiously, despite Duncan’s earlier warning that a state’s unwise use of early ARRA funds would cause it to be tremendously disadvantaged in the RTTT competition, this issue only comprises 1 percent—5 of 500—of the total points available (by comparison, not signing on to the common standards initiative would cost a state 8 times the number of points). These shifts were widely noticed. In an editorial titled “School Reform Retreat?” the Wall Street Journal noted that the administration had eased requirements, and the Washington Post editors wrote bluntly, “draft regulations have been weakened.” Equally instructive was the national teachers unions’ support for the changes.

Despite these shifts, hope remains that the department will stand firm for reform. Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, told the New York Times, “The administration clearly listened to the unions, but they haven’t backtracked.” As the first competition got underway in the fall, Secretary Duncan maintained that the bar will be “very, very high,” telling Education Week, “There will be a lot more losers than winners.”

In hindsight, perhaps Washington should have crafted a different education package for the ARRA. Under alternate circumstances, federal leaders might have recognized that stabilizing and reforming our schools are quite different goals and that the complications associated with driving education reform from the nation’s capital are at least equal to the opportunities. But in early 2009 the economy’s condition didn’t afford much time for deliberation, and in the wake of the historic 2008 elections, few ascendant federal policymakers were overflowing with modesty and prudence.

Much will be learned from these experiences in the years ahead, but for the time being one immediate takeaway merits repeating: Local policy prerogatives and dire financial conditions trumped federal pleas for reform and led to the spending of massive amounts of aid on preserving the status quo and protecting existing jobs and programs.

With similar factors coalescing around RTTT, the administration should be wise to the potentially regrettable outcomes absent additional protections. Moving forward, the administration might reconsider talk of “moon shots” and transformational change and instead adopt a more humble creed: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

Andy Smarick, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of education, is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Voucher programs and their supporters have had a tough last few years. The Florida Supreme Court declared vouchers in that state unconstitutional in 2006. Three years later, the Arizona Supreme Court did the same. In 2007, voters in Utah handed a resounding defeat to a voucher program there. In 2009, the U.S. Congress refused to continue funding the federal voucher program in Washington, D.C., effectively killing the program in the nation’s capital.

The Louisiana legislature stood apart from this trend and in the summer of 2008 passed Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence, the state’s first voucher program, specifically for New Orleans. In the fall, 870 students in kindergarten through 3rd grade whose families earned less than two and a half times the federal poverty level and who would otherwise attend some of the worst schools in the city received vouchers worth up to $6,000 to attend private schools of their choice. In the second year, 2009–10, the maximum voucher amount rose to more than $7,000. The number of students receiving vouchers increased to 1,324. Thirty-one private schools, most of them parochial, in Orleans Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish serve these students. As was the case before Hurricane Katrina (see “Hope after Katrina,” feature, Fall 2006), private schools educate about one-third of the students in Orleans Parish (see Figure 1).

How did the Louisiana legislature pass this proposal when so many other states were rejecting similar programs? At first glance the question may not seem particularly interesting. After all, Louisiana is seen as the perennial exception to the general rule of American political culture. The state’s most famous political personality and a uniquely Louisianan character, Huey P. Long, once described himself as sui generis, one of a kind. The moniker is as fitting to the land of Long as to the man himself. On top of that, Hurricane Katrina brought unprecedented physical destruction, demographic shifts, and economic impacts that reshaped state and local politics as well.

In fact, passage of House Bill 1347, which established  the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program, depended on many factors, only some of which can be traced to Hurricane Katrina. The legislative success of the program was more a political story than a fluke of geography or history.

“In a way we’ve never done before”

Policy innovation comes slowly along the muddy banks of the Mississippi River. Frequently, it seems only an external catalyst (federal civil-rights enforcement, international fluctuations in the price of oil, or floodwaters) can spur new approaches to the social and economic challenges that have long faced New Orleans. The city’s Old World persona has frustrated the reformer at least as much as it has intrigued the tourist.

School governance is no exception. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, the Orleans Parish School Board (OPSB) was the strongest board politically in the state. It oversaw the largest district, the most students, and the biggest budget. It employed more teachers and staff than any other district, a ready resource for phone calls and letters directed at state officials. Its boundaries overlapped with 15 seats in the Louisiana House of Representatives and another 7 in the Senate, representing about 15 percent of the legislature, far more than any other school district. New Orleans was also home to the state’s strongest teachers union, United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO). In the 1970s, it was the first teachers union in the Deep South (and the only one in Louisiana) to win collective bargaining rights.

But the political clout of the OPSB and UTNO was not matched with a will for reform. When the Louisiana legislature proposed to address the state’s troubled schools in the 1990s with a series of policy innovations—charter schools, school accountability, and high-stakes testing—the OPSB and UTNO (occasionally even the New Orleans City Council) opposed the changes at each turn. A decade later, when the state sought to tighten fiscal oversight over the district, the OPSB balked, despite having lost track of millions of federal dollars and facing bankruptcy.

Meanwhile, public school enrollment steadily declined, dropping by more than 30,000 students over 30 years. Those students who remained attended some of the nation’s worst schools. Nearly two-thirds of the district’s schools were identified as “academically unacceptable,” the state’s lowest performance category. Only 12.5 percent of schools statewide received that designation.

Reform would have to come from outside. As House Bill 1347 approached passage in 2008, a representative from New Orleans stood on the House floor desperately urging his colleagues to delay the final vote, “We are spending $10 million on 1,500 students in a way we’ve never done before!”

He was correct. The legislature had rejected some 20 voucher proposals in the 10 years leading up to the 2008 legislative session. In 2005, a voucher proposal survived a hearing in the House Education Committee and passed the entire House. The Senate Education Committee put a stop to its progress, defeating it by one vote.

Voucher proposals were defeated because a persistent legislative coalition opposed them. Urban legislators tend to be mostly black Democrats from within the cities of New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport. Legislators from the more affluent areas in and around the state’s cities tend to be white Republicans. Rural and small-town legislators are mostly conservative white Democrats and Republicans. How these groups pair off spells the fate of most any legislative proposal.

Almost without exception, suburban Republicans support urban vouchers, and urban Democrats oppose them. As a result, the stance of rural and small-town legislators has been decisive on the issue. They represent districts that are spread over large geographic areas and are typically not situated neatly within radio and television markets. Legislators from these areas build strong ties with local officials—sheriffs, parish (county) government officials, and school board members—who provide name recognition, organization, and personal contact with their constituents. Rural legislators pay particularly close attention to the interests of these officials and to groups that lobby on their behalf, such as the Louisiana School Boards Association.

Opposition to vouchers was particularly acute in rural northern Louisiana, which has relatively few private schools. Most of the state’s private schools are Catholic institutions in southern Louisiana. Critics would, therefore, cast vouchers as a handout to the majority Catholic south, an unappealing prospect in the majority Baptist north. With their constituents uneasy about vouchers and their political allies on local boards actively opposing all such programs, these legislators opposed the proposals and the bills died.

Hurricane Katrina

What made 2008 different? The easy answer is Hurricane Katrina. The storm wiped out the status quo. On the first day of the 2005–06 school year, more than 100 public schools served 65,000 students under the purview of the OPSB. Then the storm damaged or destroyed two-thirds of the district’s school buildings, an estimated loss of $800 million. It also dispersed tens of thousands of New Orleans residents throughout the country. When the school year ended, only a handful of public schools had reopened, serving fewer than one-fifth as many students as had begun the year. To recover from such devastation, the city of New Orleans needed help from the state to restore infrastructure, homes, places of business, and schools.

The need for rebuilding opened up the opportunity for reform. “We’re not going to simply re-create the schools of New Orleans,” then governor Kathleen Blanco announced in her first speech following the storm. “Tonight, I am calling on all Louisianans and all Americans to join an historic effort to build a world-class, quality system of public education in New Orleans. Our children who have weathered this storm deserve no less.” She called the legislature into special session and requested authorization for state takeover of schools in New Orleans. The legislation easily passed, and the Louisiana Department of Education took over all but the handful of top-performing schools in the city. Today, the OPSB runs only 5 schools and the state runs 30. A majority of public school students attend the 40 charter schools. Whether district-run, state-run, or charters, all of these schools operate under a system of public choice without attendance zones.

Damaged as much by revelations of its own misdeeds as by the hurricane and state takeover, the OPSB has become politically obsolete. Likewise, UTNO was decimated. In August 2005, before Hurricane Katrina, the union claimed more than 7,000 members among the district’s teachers and support personnel. Lacking schools to staff, the OPSB terminated all teachers and education personnel in January 2006. UTNO filed suit the next day to force the district to reopen more schools. More unsuccessful suits followed, for back pay, disaster pay, lost sick days, and employee-paid health care and pension contributions. When the collective bargaining agreement expired in June 2006, the OPSB declined to renew it.

So if the storm brought state takeover and dramatic expansion of charter schools to New Orleans, did it also bring vouchers? On its own, Hurricane Katrina cannot explain it. In the weeks after the storm, the superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of New Orleans appeared before the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) urging board members to consider using vouchers as a way for the state and Catholic schools to collaborate in serving the students who remained in the city. BESE declined. Later, when Governor Blanco called the legislature into special session (twice) to address the crisis, vouchers were not on her agenda. In the spring of 2006, when the legislature held its first regular session after the hurricane, it killed three voucher proposals.

“If Bobby Jindal gets elected”

Passage of a voucher bill required political change. That change came in the fall of 2007 when Bobby Jindal, a Republican and strong supporter of vouchers, was elected governor. Thirty-six at the time, Jindal is one of the state’s youngest governors. But he has a long résumé: Rhodes scholar, a stint at McKinsey & Company, secretary of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, president of the University of Louisiana System, assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Heath and Human Services, and member of the U.S. House of Representatives for the 1st District of Louisiana, a suburban district outside New Orleans and the geographic base of the state’s Republican Party.

Jindal casts himself as a “policy wonk” and reformer, and his agenda for education features several ideas unfathomable in previous administrations: teacher pay for performance, school vouchers, and tax credits for private school tuition. Proponents of these proposals saw promise in Jindal. Just days before the vote, Howard Fuller, founder of the Black Alliance for Educational Options (BAEO) and a strong supporter of vouchers, told national reporters, “If Bobby Jindal gets elected, I think we have a chance to do something in Louisiana.”

“A few green stamps to spend”

Jindal had help from a 12-year-old term-limits law that changed the face of the legislature in 2007. Sixty of the 105 districts in the House had open-seat elections. Eighteen of 39 Senate seats were also vacant. Although 15 seats were filled by incumbents from one chamber running for election in the other, the vast majority of open seats were filled by first-time legislators. This massive influx of new blood marked the largest turnover in the Louisiana legislature since Reconstruction. The turnover changed the prospects for voucher legislation.

Most important, Republicans increased their numbers. Louisiana has been trending Republican for decades as Republicans replaced retiring Democrats, but the process was slow. When term limits forced the retirement of 60 incumbents, most of whom were Democrats, Republicans saw the largest boost in their legislative ranks in over 100 years. This increased Jindal’s base of support. But Republicans still fell short of a majority: 48 percent in the House and 42 percent in the Senate. A party-line vote would defeat the bill. Governor Jindal needed Democrats as well.

The governor initially sought to build a biracial coalition between white Republicans and black Democrats. A similar coalition had passed vouchers in Wisconsin 20 years before. Jindal was not so fortunate. The Legislative Black Caucus consists almost entirely of Democrats, and its membership overlaps significantly with the Orleans delegation. Although a few members have been prominent supporters of charter school expansion, the group has tended to support traditional public-school interests like greater funding for struggling schools and pay raises for teachers rather than choice proposals. The 2008 session was no different. With the Black Caucus opposed, the few black legislators’ “Yea” votes Jindal secured were not enough to change the outcome. However, he managed to transform the image of the proposal’s supporters. For the first time, black legislators from New Orleans, Rep. Austin Badon and Sen. Ann Duplessis, sponsored the voucher bill. All of the previous attempts (even those specifically aimed at the majority black school system in New Orleans) had been sponsored by white Republicans.

Similarly, the most prominent organizations to lobby in support of these proposals, the Archdiocese of New Orleans and the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, were represented by whites. In 2008 these organizations took a backseat. Instead, most testimony in support of the bill came from BAEO. During one key committee hearing, national and state leaders of BAEO were accompanied by two teenagers from Desire Street Academy, a private school in the New Orleans Ninth Ward. The students spoke about how attending a private school changed their lives, reflecting on the cousins, friends, and neighbors who lacked this opportunity. Each closed his comments with the phrase, “We can’t wait.” For the first time, supporters represented the population to which the bill was directed.

Still short of votes, Jindal turned to conservative white Democrats from the state’s small towns and rural areas. Local school board members and superintendents had yet to establish alliances with their new legislators. For freshman legislators, the most powerful source of political power was not the local school board; it was the new governor. When he offered to work with them on legislation to help their constituents, they were willing to listen to his agenda.

Soon Jindal had lined up votes from even the most unlikely supporters. For example, Rep. Noble Ellington Jr., a Democrat from the small northern community of Winnsboro, had opposed vouchers for more than a decade. In 2008 he had a change of heart or at least a change of vote. Ellington told reporters that he would vote for the bill because he was “willing to work with the governor as long as he is willing to work with me on things in my district.” Another northern Louisiana representative captured the political situation during debate in the House Education Committee, “We have a governor who is very interested….The administration has a few green stamps to spend.”

“What has changed is the frame”

The administration still had to provide legislators with the necessary political cover to explain their votes back home and so crafted the legislation in the most amenable terms possible. The term voucher is conspicuously absent from the 11-page act. Its official title is the Student Scholarships for Education Excellence Program. The bill’s supporters took care to use the term “scholarship” in all their discussions of the bill. House Speaker Pro Tempore Karen Carter Peterson, a prominent opponent, first noticed a reference to the program during a routine review of the governor’s proposed budget several weeks before the legislative session began. “That wouldn’t be vouchers would it?” she asked Commissioner of Administration Angèle Davis. “No. It’s a scholarship program,” Davis replied.

Opponents tried to reclaim the lead on framing the issue. During the House Education debate two months after Peterson’s exchange with Davis, Steve Monaghan, president of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, declaring “what has changed is the frame,” described the program as camouflaged vouchers. But the bill’s language remained intact and allowed legislators to tell their constituents that they had voted for “scholarships.”

The administration also won the spin battle over the measure’s cost, paying careful attention to how the bill treated the state’s education funding formula, the Minimum Foundation Program (MFP), the main source of state support for districts and a sacred cow in the statehouse. No legislator wants to be charged with cutting funds for children.

Jindal set aside $10 million for the program from the state’s general fund, rather than from dollars reserved for the MFP. Opponents argued that the bill would still reduce MFP dollars for New Orleans indirectly, as the formula is based on enrollment in public schools. But since the official enrollment counts for the MFP are conducted at the end of the school year (to determine dollars for the following year), any indirect impact on MFP funding from the voucher program was delayed for a year after the bill’s passage. Legislators who supported the bill could tell their constituents that they did not cut the MFP.

Finally, in crafting a proposal that would affect only New Orleans, the administration gave legislators additional political cover. Those who might oppose vouchers in their own districts could support them for New Orleans. In the end, the language of the bill permitted the administration to tell legislators (who could then tell their constituents) that the scholarships would not harm the MFP and would not affect schools in their own districts.

A Low Profile

The administration’s strategy to keep the bill’s profile low also helped secure passage. Except for Rep. Peterson’s exchange with Commissioner Davis in February, there were only rumors about a $10 million scholarship program. Neither Jindal’s fall campaign nor his inaugural address made an issue of vouchers. The governor never mentioned the proposal until his speech to open the legislative session in late March. Even then, the 49 words devoted to the program (out of a 4,000-word speech mostly dedicated to education issues) offered no details. Voucher opponents remained in the dark until the bill was filed one week into the session. By then, much of the administration’s work to line up votes was complete.

The administration further avoided early grass-roots opposition in New Orleans by navigating around the rules for “local” bills, a tactic that had been employed previously in Cleveland and Milwaukee. In Louisiana, bills that affect only a single community must be filed before the session begins and must be advertised in the community they will affect. The administration avoided the “local” designation by singling out New Orleans only indirectly. The bill applied to school districts with a population greater than 475,000 as of the 2000 census. Only Orleans Parish meets this criterion.

The bill received only modest press attention. There was no barrage of advertisements urging citizens to contact their representatives. One exception was a radio spot aired in New Orleans criticizing Rep. Peterson for her opposition to the scholarship program. Interest groups did not mobilize supporters or opponents to gather on the capitol steps or in the streets of New Orleans. BAEO was an exception, but its efforts were aimed more at recruiting students and parents to testify at the committee hearing than at organizing public rallies.

“This bill is already on the books”

The only close vote came in the bill’s first test. The 17-member House Education Committee heard the bill in late April. All but five members had begun their first term only six months before and were hearing the debate for the first time. Rep. Peterson joined the committee for the hearing. As Speaker Pro Tempore, she has the right to participate in any committee hearing but cannot vote. After three and a half hours of testimony and debate, all six Republicans on the committee voted for the bill. The bill’s sponsor, Rep. Badon, who was also the committee’s vice chairman, voted for the bill, but the other five black representatives on the committee voted against, along with a white Democrat from New Orleans. The bill’s fate depended on the remaining five white Democrats who represented smaller towns throughout the state. Three of them voted against but two voted in support. The bill passed committee 9 to 8, with Rep. Peterson sitting on the sidelines unable to cast the vote that would have kept the bill from moving forward.

When the bill returned to the House floor in mid-May, Rep. Jean-Paul Morrell (D-New Orleans) opposed it but conceded, “At this point I think we can all agree that this bill is already on the books.” The only shot at defeat was to stall until the legislature was required to close the session in June. Rep. Peterson moved to send the bill to House Appropriations, ostensibly because it required a $10 million appropriation. The motion failed.

In the Senate Education Committee, the debate was limited to amendments dealing with implementation: how long private schools had to operate before participating, what tests students receiving vouchers would have to take, what agency would be responsible for the costs of auditing the program.

Opponents took on an air of resignation. The New Orleans Times-Picayune, one of the most prominent papers in the state, had run an editorial condemning the bill in May. By June, editors could read the writing on the wall and in their pages argued for “strengthening” the bill (i.e., amending the accountability provisions) rather than defeating it.

The amendments gave opponents their final chances at running down the clock. The bill was next heard in the Senate Finance Committee, where Sen. Edwin Murray (D-New Orleans) repeatedly asked the chairman, Sen. Mike Michot (R-Lafayette), to table the bill while the committee members took time to digest the amendments. Michot, noting the dwindling number of days left in the session, declined.

The bill returned to the House floor on June 18 for concurrence in the Senate amendments. Only five days remained in the legislative session. The House could concur in the amendments, effectively passing the bill, or reject them. Supporters voted to concur in the amendments and send the bill to the governor’s desk immediately.

The bill passed the House 62 to 34, with eight representatives recorded as absent. Almost every Republican voted for the bill and all but six members of the Legislative Black Caucus opposed it. White Democrats cast the deciding votes; urban and suburban white Democrats voted with their Republican peers. Rural Democrats split for and against the bill in almost even numbers, but this was far more support than any previous bill had found from these legislative districts. The bill passed in large part because the governor had won over more rural white Democrats than anyone had before (see Figure 2).

Beyond Sui Generis

So far, the program has survived legally and politically (see sidebar). But was passage of the Louisiana voucher program a fluke arising from situations just too unique to replicate elsewhere? Or does it offer more general lessons about the politics of school choice? The fact that the program came so close on the heels of Hurricane Katrina seems to suggest the former. The storm set the stage, raising the salience of education reform and crippling some traditional political opponents. Perhaps most important, it wiped out the political strength of the local teachers union, an occurrence unlikely to be repeated elsewhere.

But once the stage was set, the political dynamics were not so uniquely Louisianan. Passage of House Bill 1347 ultimately depended on the votes of rural legislators unaccustomed to supporting vouchers. Winning over those votes depended on a popular governor committed to expanding choice, his willingness to put his political capital to work for the proposal’s success, and adept navigation of the legislative process. This is where voucher supporters found their greatest asset: a popular governor committed to school choice. Supporters did not have to lobby the governor for support; he was a supporter already. Instead, they could simply assist him in lobbying the legislature. The critical lesson for proponents outside the Bayou State seems to be: Get strong voucher supporters elected.

The political story of every reform will have some unique features. In New Orleans, the critical factors in establishing vouchers were 1) the weakened union presence; 2) parent-based lobbying support; 3) new faces in the legislature; and 4) strong gubernatorial support. Except perhaps for the first of these, none is too uniquely Louisianan to be inimitable.

Michael Henderson, a native of Louisiana, is research fellow at Harvard University’s Program for Education Policy and Governance and graduate student in the Department of Government.

A major debate among education reformers over how best to reduce the achievement gap broke out during the 2008 presidential campaign. Most advocates on both sides backed Barack Obama, but they urged him to pursue different policies. The Education Equality Project (EEP) supported a continuation of accountability and other school-focused reforms. The coalition for A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education claimed that the greatest gains could be achieved by addressing health, housing, and other social ills (see “Straddling the Democratic Divide,” features, Spring 2009).

A close look at recent changes in education in the state of Florida sheds light on that debate. One finds in this southern state, a closing of the achievement gap that has eluded allegedly more progressive states. When it comes to education progress, Florida is a star performer. Moreover, its success has come in spite of a challenging student demographic profile and relatively modest resources.

Let us begin with a basic demographic fact often cited by those in the Broader, Bolder camp. Over the past 20 years, the schools of Florida, California, Texas, and New Mexico have all seen rapid growth in their Hispanic populations. Compared to other groups, Hispanic students underperform academically, drop out of school in higher numbers, and attend college in lower numbers. A straight projection of the recent past into the future looks bleak for these students and their educational outcomes.

But demography need not be destiny. Over the past decade, Florida has succeeded in improving student achievement despite its demographic profile. Low-income students (those eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) make up almost half of Florida’s K–12 student body. Florida has a “majority minority” mix of students, with non-Hispanic white students making up 48.3 percent of the total, African Americans about 24 percent, and Hispanics 25 percent. But the educational situation is not as bleak as those statistics might imply: both minority groups have recently made academic strides forward.

Florida has managed to realize such gains although the state’s per-student funding is below the national average. More than making up for its fiscal limitations, the state, led by former governor Jeb Bush, implemented a series of school reforms that together appear to have had dramatic consequences for student performance. Upon taking office in 1999, the governor pursued a multipronged strategy of education reform: an emphasis on reading, standards and accountability for public schools, and new choice options for students. The bulk of the reforms passed in his first year in office. Subsequently, those initial measures were buttressed by additional innovations, including the curtailing of social promotion for students who failed to learn to read in the early elementary grades.

Academic Achievement

Prior to the introduction of those innovations, Florida’s educational record was little short of abysmal. Among the 43 states that in 1998 were gathering information on their students’ performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), Florida had the fifth-lowest 4th-grade reading scores. But over the next decade those scores moved sharply upward so that by 2007, Florida’s scores were tied for 8th highest among all the states. As the state moved up the leader board, Florida students, on average, were making strikingly larger gains on NAEP exams than the average student nationwide (see Figures 1 and 2). Nor were gains occurring only in reading. Fourth-grade math scores were climbing at an even faster rate. In 8th grade, reading and math gains in Florida were less impressive but they still outpaced the nation.

Those statewide trends could have been masking a widening of the achievement gap between whites and minorities. But exactly the opposite was happening. Far from lagging behind, Florida’s minority students were doing much to drive the overall rise in test-score performance. In the decade after the education reforms began, the average NAEP reading score for Hispanic 4th graders in Florida rose steeply so that by 2007 scores were higher than the average NAEP reading scores of all students (regardless of ethnicity) in 15 states (see Figure 3).

One might think that rising scores among Hispanic students reflect their families’ movement up the income ladder into the middle class. But even Florida’s low-income Hispanic students scored, on average, equal to or higher than nine statewide averages for all students (regardless of income). Average scores of all Florida low-income students, regardless of ethnicity, tied or exceeded the statewide average for all students in seven states. Many of these differences are small and thus within the margin of NAEP sampling error, so should be thought of statistically as ties. The margin of error cuts both ways, however, as the 2007 statewide averages for all students in Georgia, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Texas all fell within two points of Florida’s average for Hispanics on the 4th-grade reading exam. Indeed, the national average for all students falls within this same narrow margin.

Comparison of trends in Florida with those in California is particularly intriguing. Both are large states with growing Hispanic populations. California’s median family income is 12 percent higher than Florida’s, meaning families have more resources to devote to their children’s education. But California has largely eschewed the kinds of accountability and choice reforms that Florida adopted.

The consequences for students range between noteworthy and startling, as shown in Figure 4. The chart displays the differences in the NAEP gains 4th- and 8th-grade students made in the two states. As they did in 4th-grade reading, Florida’s Hispanic students outperformed California students in 4th-grade math and 8th-grade reading; they tied the California average in 8th-grade mathematics.

Explaining Florida’s Success

Not everyone thinks that something remarkable has been happening in Florida. The state’s success is only an apparent one, says Boston College education professor Walter Haney. He discounts Florida’s progress on 4th-grade NAEP scores, on the grounds that Florida’s worst-performing readers repeat 3rd grade and thus are not included in the 4th-grade NAEP. Without the low-performing 4th graders who have been held back for a year, the average scores of the remainder jump upward.

Haney’s critique is worth considering. One of the pillars of the Florida accountability reforms has been the policy, introduced in 2003, of not promoting 3rd graders unless they perform at a minimally acceptable level on the reading portion of the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT).

But a more careful look at the data shows that Florida’s NAEP scores were rising before implementation of the retention policy. Between 1992 and 1998, Florida’s average NAEP score in 4th-grade reading dropped by two points. Between 1998 and 2002 (before the social promotion policy affected 4th grade), however, it increased by eight points. One of the reasons for lower retention rates was improved 3rd-grade performance on the state’s examination. In 2002, 27 percent of 3rd graders scored at the lowest level on the reading portion of FCAT, but by 2008 only 16 percent did so, a 40 percent reduction in the pool of students eligible for retention. This helps explain why actual retention rates declined by 40 percent between 2002 and 2007.

One would expect, if Haney’s interpretation is correct, to see an upward spike in 4th-grade test scores in 2003 followed by a steady decline in test performance in subsequent years. But in fact the trend line shows no such spike and decline, only a steady movement upward.

Perhaps Florida’s gains are only apparent for another reason: its low starting point in 1998. Is it possible that gains are realized most easily when scores are initially very low? On this question, opinion is quite divided. Some think gains are more easily realized if students are already accomplished, while others think those with high scores have neared a ceiling, making it difficult to raise their scores further. However that issue is settled in principle, it cannot account for the fact that Florida made striking gains while states with equally low scores did not. For example, on the 1998 4th-grade reading test Florida was near the bottom, with Arizona, California, Hawaii, Mississippi, Louisiana, and New Mexico. In 2007, all those states but Florida were still clustered near the bottom.

But if the Florida achievement gains are genuine, and not imaginary, they might still be attributed to factors over which schools have little or no control, for example, demographic changes in the state. Such is the claim of those who say that demography is destiny. Were demographic change the best explanation, however, student performance in Florida would be worse than ever. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), 45 percent of Florida children attending public schools in 1998 were of minority background. By 2005, that percentage had climbed to just over 50 percent. Similarly, the percentage from low-income backgrounds (eligible for free or reduced-price lunch) rose from 43 to 45 percent between 1998 and 2007.

Another plausible explanation for the Florida success story is the 2002 passage of an amendment to the state’s constitution mandating universal preschool education for all those who would like to participate. But however valuable the program may prove to be, it cannot explain the gains in achievement observed thus far. The amendment did not require implementation until 2005, and none of the students participating in the Florida early childhood program had reached the 4th grade by 2007, the most recent year for which NAEP data are available.

Much the same can be said for a second constitutional amendment—the class-size reduction amendment—approved by Florida voters in 2002. As in the case of preschool, there is some research evidence that suggests class-size reduction can yield significant gains in student achievement in the early grades. Florida state law now mandates no more than 18 students per classroom in grades K through 3, and no more than 22 students in grades 4 through 8. But the constitutional amendment is being implemented slowly. Through the 2008–09 school year, administrators have been considered in compliance if their schoolwide average class sizes were under the constitutional limits. According to the state department of education, from 2002 to 2008, average class sizes in the early grades were reduced from roughly 23 to 16 students in pre-K to grade 3 and from 24 to 18 students in grades 4 to 8. Still, if class-size reductions had any effect on achievement gains between 1998 and 2007, it could only have been toward the end of the period.

Nor can the gains in education be easily attributed to changes in public school funding. Florida’s average spending per pupil rose from $7,183 in 1998–99 to $7,683 in 2004–05, in constant dollars. This was less than half the increase in the national average over the same period.

One can pretty much rule out these possible explanations for the Florida success story. The gains are not an artifact of the elimination of social promotion in 3rd grade or of the ease with which low test scores can be lifted. Nor can they be attributed to demographic change, the introduction of preschool education or class-size reduction, or greater per pupil expenditure. One must look elsewhere for an explanation. The most likely remaining candidate is school-focused reforms, which have the vigorous support of the EEP side of the education reform debate.

The Florida Reforms

Over the past decade, Florida has introduced a comprehensive program of school reform that has five main points: school accountability, literacy enhancement, student accountability, teacher quality, and school choice. Together, the reforms created a system that appears to have focused teachers and students on the task of learning in a way that has yielded the dividends we have highlighted above.

School Accountability.  In 1999, the state legislature enacted a law that required students in grades 3 through 10 to take annual tests in reading and mathematics, known as the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test or FCAT. The assessment had two distinctive features lacking in most other accountability systems, including the one prescribed by the federal law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB). First, it gave each school in the state a very clear grade of A to F based on the results from the test and offered a specific fiscal incentive to schools to try to reach as high a grade as possible. Bonuses were given for obtaining an A or raising one’s grade from one year to the next. Conversely, schools receiving an F grade twice over a four-year period were asked to carry out a variety of reforms. The law offered students at “double F” schools the opportunity to attend private schools until a court decision disallowed the practice in 2006.

Beginning in 2002, the accountability system included measures of student progress from one year to the next, a feature not incorporated into NCLB. That gave schools with low-performing students an opportunity to raise their grades without imposing upon them the extremely difficult task of matching the performances of schools whose student body enjoyed a preferred demographic portfolio. Clear, realistic incentives to improve were made available to schools across the state.

Focus on Literacy.  Along with its accountability system, Florida in 2002 introduced a statewide program known as “Just Read, Florida!” The effort created new academies to train teachers in reading instruction and provided for the hiring of 2,000 additional reading coaches. Teachers in grades K–3 took mandatory reading training courses over a three-year period. Students in grades 6 through 12 who demonstrated insufficient reading skills were provided remedial instruction.

Student Accountability. Beginning in 2003, Florida students were asked to pass a more demanding examination if they were to be given a high school diploma. In addition, Florida lawmakers, as discussed above, curtailed the social promotion of 3rd-grade students who performed at very low levels in reading. According to a careful evaluation by Jay Greene and Marcus Winters at the University of Arkansas (see “Getting Ahead by Staying Behind,” research, Spring 2006), the program had a positive impact on the performance of all 3rd graders, including those who were retained in that grade. Apparently, they benefited more from an additional year of instruction than they would have had they been pushed on to 4th grade when they were not well prepared for the more challenging material.

Teacher Recruitment.  Florida enacted new policies for broadening the pool from which teachers were being selected. Previously, teachers were required to earn a certificate by attending one of the state’s schools of education. Florida supplemented that channel of recruitment with a variety of alternative paths. The state opened “Educator Preparation Institutes” to facilitate the transition into teaching. Districts were allowed to offer alternative certification. Today, more than one-third of all new teachers in Florida are coming to the profession through alternative certification programs. The state’s teaching workforce has become the nation’s third most ethnically representative (see “What Happens When States Have Genuine Alternative Certification?” check the facts, Winter 2009).

The alternative certification program may have had a particularly significant impact on Hispanic students. Florida enjoys a large immigrant population that fled from Cuba in the years following the establishment of Castro’s communist regime. Many of the immigrants were middle-class professionals and entrepreneurs, and they have established a strong economic, political, and cultural presence in southern Florida. That population provides a pool of potential educators of high talent who speak both English and Spanish. Just how important alternative certification was to the recruitment of highly qualified bilingual instructors is unknown, but it cannot be ruled out as a potential explanation for the particularly large gains Florida’s Hispanic students have made. On the other hand, it cannot be the whole story, as African American and non-Hispanic white students also made strong gains during this period. Moreover, the percentage of Hispanics of Cuban origin has declined during the past decade (though this may not have affected the size of the pool of qualified bilingual teachers).

School Choice. Florida is well known for the range of school choice legislation it has enacted over the past decade. Charter schools, vouchers, tax credits, and online education all provide students and families with greater choice in 2008 than they had in 1998. For example, 105,329 students were enrolled in the state’s 358 public charter schools in 2007–08. That same year 19,852 students eligible for special education took advantage of the opportunity to use a voucher to attend private schools, and 21,493 students received scholarships averaging $3,750 from a tax credit program that opened private schooling to students from low-income families. The state-funded Florida Virtual School currently offers students more than 90 online courses (ranging from GED to Advanced Placement courses). Middle and high school students anywhere in Florida can access these classes free of charge. The state projects that 168,000 courses will be taken and completed during the 2008–09 school year (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features). Multiple evaluations, by organizations ranging from the Manhattan Institute to the Urban League, have found the choice programs to have had a positive impact on Florida public schools.

Despite the numbers, the school choice programs are not large enough to have had more than a limited statewide impact on the millions of students attending Florida’s public schools. Yet they helped create a climate in which public schools may have wanted to demonstrate their effectiveness for fear that choice opportunities would continue to expand.

Identifying what has caused the rise in Florida student performance cannot be done with perfect certainty. It might have been the accountability system, or the state’s reading program, or its decision to expect more from students, or its alternative certification program, or its plethora of school choice innovations, or some combination of all of them. But the results from Florida do suggest that concerted efforts to improve the quality of an education system can pay dividends for students. It is probably not a coincidence that the one state that has outdone the others in its efforts to reform its schools has made outsize gains in student performance. Exactly which of the many reforms Florida undertook was the key to success may never be known, but the reform package offers other states—and the nation as a whole—a clear path on which they, too, can move forward.

Matthew Ladner is vice president for policy at the Goldwater Institute. Dan Lips is senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

The session in the second-floor seminar room at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany had already featured a detailed presentation of “charter facts” from the new executive director of New York’s Charter Schools Institute and a dozen friendly questions from the mostly pro-charter audience. Ward, the dignified and cerebral deputy director of the institute, seemed anxious to wrap things up. “So, thank you—”

He stopped in midsentence. A hand had shot up at the back of the crowded room. “Eva, did you want to ask a question?” he asked.

All eyes turned to the dark-haired woman sitting on a folding chair along the back wall of the room. Some eyes rolled, as most of the group knew Eva Joseph, the embattled superintendent of Albany Public Schools (APS). They had seen her at countless education forums, on the local nightly news, and in the daily paper at every turn of the school budget clock, determinedly defending her district and, increasingly, railing against charter schools. “I’ll make it quick,” said Dr. Joseph. “I do want to thank you for acknowledging the situation in Albany, but going to the heart of what’s real, we have 10 charter schools in Albany with a total public school population of 10,500 students. Compare that to 23 charter schools in the Big 5, with the exception of New York City. Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, Yonkers. Twenty-three total charter schools and you total up their enrollment. The proliferation here. The oversaturation, per pupil and per capita, is glaring. And it has serious implications for the district. It destabilizes it on many fronts….”

Standing a few feet away, as Joseph plunged on, a man leaned against the wall, smiling. It was not a smug or obvious smile, nor the smirk of a man who was mocking or scornful. Tom Carroll was smiling because he had heard the speech before and because he knew, as founder of the charter school foundation that had siphoned off nearly a quarter of Dr. Joseph’s 10,500 students, that he was at least an immediate cause of the vitriol. It was the smile of victory.

The Holy Grail of Charter Schooling
During much of the previous nine years, Carroll had overseen the launch of eight charter schools (see Table 1) in Albany, a small city (pop. 94,172), as Joseph suggested, for so many charters (to see additional images of the schools and their students please click here). Joseph, who began her Albany tenure as an assistant superintendent in 1997 and took the top job in September 2004, had been engaged in the charter battle for most of that time. “Fifth Albany Charter School Approved” was the headline just two months after she became superintendent. “SUNY adviser suggests city district cut staff, rent out extra space as students depart.”

What had been especially maddening for Dr. Joseph and her school board, which issued routine condemnations of the charters, was not just the presence of so many of the new schools—“the proliferation, the oversaturation”—but that they were so good. The destabilization was real and deep, creating not just viable, but quantifiably better, educational alternatives for children. And this is the singular accomplishment of Carroll’s charter organization: they had found the Holy Grail of charter schooling, quality and scale.

It is still an elusive goal for the charter school movement, which has grown to include more than 4,500 schools and 1.3 million students in 40 states and the District of Columbia. This remains a drop in the public school bucket (nationally there were more than 94,000 public K—12 schools and more than 49 million students in 2007), which is why “market share” is considered a crucial milestone, one of the few ways to pinch traditional schools in their pocketbooks. According to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, in 2007 New Orleans had reached 55 percent market share, Washington, D.C., 31 percent, and Southfield, Michigan, and Dayton, Ohio, 28 percent each.

Albany at that time came in at 17 percent, tied with Buffalo for 12th place nationally. But it had already distinguished itself as the only member of the market-share club with consistently high academic outcomes.

In fact, the failure of charters to offer a meaningful choice, i.e., a better education, has become a sore point among charter promoters. Education Next editor Chester E. Finn Jr., in a 2007 confessional in his Thomas B. Fordham Institute newsletter (the Education Gadfly), wrote, “Why are so many charter schools inadequate, even mediocre? What went wrong?” Finn noted that in his own “charter-saturated” Dayton, where Fordham was born, things had gone terribly awry. And though charters have taken to putting a good face on things by comparing themselves to their local district schools, which is fair, the truth about quality is uncomfortable. In the fall of 2008, for instance, the Dayton Daily News published a story headlined, “Most charter schools made gains; most Dayton district schools saw losses.” But an accompanying chart revealed that 12 of Dayton’s 19 K—8 charters did not make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP); 8 of the 10 charter high schools fell short of their AYP benchmark.

By contrast, all of Tom Carroll’s Albany charter schools made AYP. Not only that, they had become the best schools in the city. “Last year our students were number one in math in every single grade,” says Carroll, who now runs the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability (FERA), which furnishes research help to charters, and serves as chairman of the Brighter Choice Foundation (BCF), which provides start-up financing aid. “In English, we were number one in 4th and 7th grades. We’re expecting to do even better this year.” And they have. On the 2009 state test in English language arts, in four of the six grades tested, the top school in Albany was one of Carroll’s charters.

Albany public school parents, mostly black and mostly poor, not only have a choice; they have one that will make a significant difference in their children’s futures. The Brighter Choice network has turned largely forgotten students into serious achievers. These schools have not only closed the achievement gap; they have reversed it.

An Unlikely Road to School Reform
“You might say that our success is the revenge of the amateurs,” jokes Carroll, over a recent lunch at a downtown Albany bistro. “We didn’t really know anything about education when we started—and perhaps that’s why we have succeeded.”

A veteran of the sharp-elbowed politics of New York’s infamously dysfunctional state legislature (called the worst in the nation by the Brennan Center for Justice in 2004), Carroll assembled a team of equally determined and savvy colleagues, most of whom had honed their political skills in those same tough trenches. They sounded like a law firm: Carroll, Backstrom, Murphy, Bender, and Brooks. Eva Joseph called them, disparagingly, “the white guys.” In fact, they knew money and they knew politics, and when they stumbled on to the disastrous state of public education, they became determined to know schooling.

“We were all focused on budget and tax issues that would make New York a more job-friendly place,” recalls Peter Murphy, who had worked with Carroll in the state’s budget office. “But we did lots of work examining various parts of the government, including education.” Increasingly, more budget and tax roads led to education, which consumed more than a quarter of the state’s revenues.

While Murphy continued work with a think tank called the Empire Foundation for Policy Research, helping to produce a report on education choice in 1993, Carroll and Brian Backstrom, another veteran of the budget office, and Jason Brooks, a fresh-faced triple major (history, religion, and political science) from Syracuse University, started FERA in 1998. FERA would seal their fates as education reformers when Virginia Gilder, then the wife of one of their major political reform benefactors, Wall Street financier Richard Gilder, asked Carroll what she could do to help fix the schools. Since there was no charter law in New York at the time, the group launched a voucher program. And in an early test of their market-share strategy, Carroll and company decided to spend all of Gilder’s money at just one school, offering $2,000 to 153 students, a third of the student body, at Giffen Elementary, “one of the worst public schools in New York State,” according to Forbes magazine, which featured the program on its cover.

The focus on one school, the national attention, and Giffen being “within spitting distance of the State House,” as Forbes put it, ensured that FERA would be an education reform player and an immediate thorn in the local school district’s side. Even Fred LeBrun—an influential columnist for the Times Union who once called Carroll and his political friends “a blustery gathering of overstuffed three-piece suits with watch fobs”—sympathized, praising the group for “walking the walk, not just talking the talk.” (The message was lost on Albany Public Schools: to this day, Giffen remains hopelessly behind the academic eight ball, with just 46 percent of its 168 remaining students in grades 6—8 able to pass proficiency tests in English and 57 percent passing in math. Carroll still oversees the voucher program, which continues to provide options for 38 Albany public school students each year.)

The next opportunity to walk the walk came in 1998 when the group helped write the state’s charter school law, passed in December, making New York the 34th state to have one.

The Road to a Brighter Choice
Carroll and his colleagues, now fully engaged in their roles as school reformers, immediately established the Charter School Resource Center to offer technical assistance to anyone willing to set up a charter school.

They knew their market. Almost overnight 90 applications for charter schools (the law set a cap of 100) were submitted to the state education department’s Board of Regents and the newly formed Charter Schools Institute at the State University of New York (SUNY). “You know you’ve hit on something when there is that level of interest across the state for doing something different in public education,” says Backstrom.

Carroll, Backstrom, and Brooks traveled the country and spent months on the phone quizzing successful school leaders: what works in your school, what doesn’t work? “And time and time again we were struck with how similar the answers were,” says Backstrom. Longer school day. Longer school year. Content-rich curriculum. School uniforms. Even the single-sex school, they learned, which had been all but driven off the education landscape by Title IX, was being tried, if quietly, and was working.

In November 2000 the group submitted a 300-page application to the Board of Regents to open the Brighter Choice Charter School for Boys (BCCS-Boys) and Brighter Choice Charter School for Girls (BCCS-Girls), which, initially, would be housed in the same building.

“The City of Albany is an educational tale of two cities,” the applicants wrote. Some 30 percent of Albany students already attended private schools—almost double the state average—and only 2 of the city’s 15 public schools managed even “respectable test scores.” Failure rates in the rest of the schools ranged from 50 percent to 80 percent in 4th-grade reading tests; citywide, the failure rate was 64 percent.

This, said the charter applicants, was “not acceptable.” The Regents agreed and granted charters to the two schools. And the rest, as Eva Joseph and a city of doubters would soon learn, is history.

Political Savvy Meets Commitment to Excellence
Even though they would have fewer than 100 places when the two schools opened in September 2002 (with just two grades, K—1, and plans to expand through grade 5), the schools received a thousand applications. This for a place that promised longer days (an hour more than the regular public schools), an extra 25 days of school per academic year, tough discipline, uniforms, and rigorous academic standards.

Success, of course, was anything but guaranteed. “They fought us every step of the way,” recalls Carroll of the APS and the teachers union. The New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), which boasted 600,000 members and had a retirement fund of $70 billion, was considered the most powerful lobbying group in the state. “They bring the cash to the legislators in wheelbarrows,” says Peter Murphy, only half-joking, “and not a day goes by that they aren’t trying to kill charters.” On one occasion, NYSUT slipped an amendment on to an obscure law that would have limited the market share of charters in Albany to 5 percent. Thanks to their many legislative connections, Carroll and team heard about the move and sent a busload of parents and students to the legislative hearing room. “If we had not had a legislative political background,” says Carroll, “they would have taken us to the cleaners.”

And then came Chris Bender, who was 10 minutes into pitching his school insurance product to Carroll when Carroll said, “You should be on my board.”

It was not an impetuous offer. Carroll knew that Bender was a fifth-generation Albany native and heir to a local publishing fortune. “We had people who knew a lot about charter schools,” explained Carroll. “But Chris Bender’s family had been here for 400 years, since the Dutch arrived. Between the two of us there are very few people of any significance in Albany that one of us doesn’t know. If we needed advice on construction, for instance, we could get to the best people. Who knows historic preservation? Who knows environmental regulation? We could figure all that out. If you were just starting out, if you helicoptered in from another country and tried to do it, you would trip over yourself a million times. With a master’s degree in education from Teachers College at Columbia University, Bender was also the only member of the team with real education credentials.

Three months after joining the board Bender became executive director of the group’s new nonprofit, the Brighter Choice Foundation, a technical and financial resource organization for Albany charter schools that would become the key to scale.

Through BCF, Carroll expanded the “what works” operating principle to include not just re-creating specific proven policies and practices, but replicating whole schools. The Achievement Academy middle school, which opened in the fall of 2005, was modeled after the Amistad Academy in New Haven, Connecticut, a pioneer of charter success. Albany Prep, which also opened in 2005, was modeled on the International Baccalaureate program and offered extended instructional periods for core academic subjects. The BCF would not only scout out potential charter school operators; it would build them a building; arrange for financing; and provide operational start-up money and free technical assistance, including community relations, politics, media relations, vendor advice, and legal advice if needed. The BCF lobbied KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) founder David Levin to open a school in Albany, offering KIPP both financial and logistical support and the freedom to focus on academic excellence. KIPP Tech Valley, a middle school, opened in 2005.

The financing scheme is both ingenious and, Carroll argues, replicable (see sidebar, page 36). For instance, BCF turned a $15 million loan from the Walton Foundation into a “revolving loan fund,” explains Carroll, that “allows us to build a facility and then take out a mortgage on it.” Once the building is built and the kids are in the chairs, BCF secures a short-term mortgage, which it pays while the new school is starting. When the school reaches full enrollment, usually within four or five years, it can then issue tax-exempt bonds and buy the building from BCF.

Getting It Right
The financing strategy, which includes start-up grants to new schools of up to $500,000, “helps schools start smaller, so they can start good,” says Chris Bender, who also believes that the smart leveraging of small amounts of money is what makes the BCF model replicable.

With such a model in hand, “a paradigm shift for us,” says Carroll, Brighter Choice was able to go to scale with quality and begin to make deep changes in the city’s educational system. The strategy is working so far.

At BCF’s flagship schools, Brighter Choice for Girls and Brighter Choice for Boys, 3rd and 4th graders have been outperforming their district counterparts almost from the beginning on the statewide English language arts and mathematics exams (see Figure 1 for the 2009 test results).

“The Brighter Choice and KIPP schools are even outscoring the white suburban districts surrounding Albany,” says Carroll. “KIPP beat Bethlehem Middle School and Shaker Junior High (both in Albany’s affluent white suburbs), which is North Colonie’s middle school, in 7th grade English and math last year. The point is that we are not just beating crappy mediocre Albany schools; we’re beating the top public school districts in the area.”

Things have not always gone perfectly for Carroll and company. There was early backsliding in performance indicators at the Brighter Choice charter schools, for instance. The Brighter Choice board, which Carroll chairs, immediately asked the state department of education for permission to postpone adding a 5th grade as had been planned. They then did what traditional public schools seem so reluctant to do: they immediately changed leadership personnel. Brighter Choice went through three principals in three years, “until we got it right,” says Carroll.

Carroll’s missteps highlight the secrets to Brighter Choice’s success: constant vigilance, constant adaptability. When the Achievement Academy scores tanked, coming in below the district average in 2006, its second year, the school’s board immediately fired the principal and several teachers (who work with one-year contracts), changed textbooks as well as some systems and routines, and saw, the following year, a marked increase in test scores.

Scale Counts
The second part of the Brighter Choice story has been taking that quality to scale, to provide the kind of pressure to change that will improve the educational landscape.

“In a country this size, creating 50 or 60 really good schools barely creates a ripple,” explains Carroll. “It has a profound impact, of course, on the children educated in them, but it doesn’t challenge any of the institutional structures.”

Scale also provides a certain element of political protection, as Carroll has learned. “If you’re a single school and they close it down, most political people are willing to take that hit. But they’re not willing to close down schools serving thousands of kids.”

Though no one on the Brighter Choice team ever imagined shepherding eight schools into existence (the ninth, a girls’ high school, Albany Leadership, will open in 2010, and applications for two new middle schools are in the pipeline), they were even less sanguine about their chances of moving Albany’s public school system to change.

“We learned early on,” says Brian Backstrom, “that you couldn’t get the schools you needed by changing the schools you had. So that’s why we decided to build new schools, from the bottom up.”

But there have been signs of change at Albany Public Schools, which suggests that scale can count. “They have done some things,” says Backstrom. “Uniforms in one school. They’ve renovated all their facilities, gotten small class sizes—of course, they’ve done that in part because we’ve taken 2,200 kids away from them, but they’ve done it.”

The district has also lengthened its school day, albeit by only 30 minutes, but it is the first change in the union-contracted school day since the district was created in the mid-1970s. And they’ve even closed a perennially underperforming school (the Livingston Middle School). “Admittedly,” says Carroll, “our decision to locate [KIPP Tech Valley] charter school across the street from their weakest school was not subtle.”

Jason Brooks went through the minutes of Albany’s board of education meetings and discovered that, in fact, they were indeed listening, watching—and talking about Brighter Choice. At a March 17, 2005, meeting, for instance, board member Bill Barnett exclaimed, “I think that it’s high time for this district and the Board to have an in-depth discussion around the implications and the associated cost of increasing the number of instruction days.”

Added board member Scott Wexler, “We cannot compete with charter schools with 200 days while our…calendar committee [has] not [had an] instructional discussion [but] an employee benefit discussion. Our employees apparently need to understand our desire to have more time on task so we can be more successful.”
It’s a hopeful start and Brooks created a memo called “The Positive ‘Ripple Effect’ of Charter Schools” to note it.

And, though the district won’t admit the connection, Carroll believes that the recent overall rise in district elementary- and middle-school test scores is the result of “competition from charter schools [which] has forced an increased district focus on measurable outcomes.”

Finally, on March 25, 2009, just two weeks after her Rockefeller Institute charter critique, Eva Joseph announced her resignation. “She said the job has consumed so much of her time, sometimes seemingly 24 hours a day, that she looks forward to relaxing mentally,” wrote Scott Waldman in the Albany Times Union. “Under Joseph, Albany also became ground zero for the charter school movement, with the city’s 11th school expected to open soon. Joseph and the city’s charter school leaders often were at odds.”

“The question remains,” says Carroll, “as charter schools continue to grow in the city—within a year of this September roughly a third of public school children in Albany will be in charter schools—will the district put its head in the sand or finally be forced to reform its schools in order to compete?”

Carroll and company are not waiting around to see what happens. “Our opponents would love to freeze us in our tracks through a moratorium or a market-share cap,” notes Carroll. “But, as long as Albany has a shortage of good schools, the demand from parents and students for more charter schools will not diminish. Why would we want to stop creating charter schools to meet this demand when we know the alternative is for these children to attend bad schools?” A good question.

Peter Meyer, former news editor of Life magazine, is a freelance writer and contributing editor of Education Next.

Researchers have recently begun to learn more about the effects of time spent on learning from natural experiments around the country. This new body of evidence, to which we have separately contributed, suggests that extending time in school would in fact likely raise student achievement. Below we review past research on this issue and then describe the new evidence and the additional insights it provides into the wisdom of increasing instructional time for American students.

We also discuss the importance of recognizing the role of instructional time, explicitly, in accountability systems. Whether or not policymakers change the length of the school year for the average American student, differences in instructional time can and do affect school performance as measured by No Child Left Behind. Ignoring this fact results in less-informative accountability systems and lost opportunities for improving learning outcomes.

Emerging Evidence

More than a century ago, William T. Harris in his 1894 Report of the Commissioner [of the U.S. Bureau of Education] lamented,

The boy of today must attend school 11.1 years in order to receive as much instruction, quantitatively, as the boy of fifty years ago received in 8 years…. It is scarcely necessary to look further than this for the explanation for the greater amount of work accomplished…in the German and French than in the American schools.

The National Education Commission on Time and Learning would echo his complaint one hundred years later. But the research summary issued by that same commission in 1994 included not one study on the impact of additional instruction on learning. Researchers at that time simply had little direct evidence to offer.

The general problem researchers confront here is that length of the school year is a choice variable. Because longer school years require greater resources, comparing a district with a long school year to one with a shorter year historically often amounted to comparing a rich school district to a poor one, thereby introducing many confounding factors. A further problem in the American context is that there is little recent variation in the length of school year. Nationwide, districts generally adhere to (and seldom exceed) a school calendar of 180 instructional days. And while there was some variation in the first half of the 20th century, other policies and practices changed simultaneously, making it difficult to uncover the separate effect of changes in instructional time.

Among the first researchers to try to identify the impact of variation in instructional time were economists studying the effect of schooling on labor market outcomes such as earnings. Robert Margo in 1994 found evidence suggesting that historical differences in school-year length accounted for a large fraction of differences in earnings between black workers and white workers.

Using differences in the length of the school year across countries, researchers Jong-Wha Lee and Robert Barro reported in 2001 that more time in school improves math and science test scores. Oddly, though, their results also suggested that it lowers reading scores. In 2007, Ozkan Eren and Daniel Millimet examined the limited variation that does exist across American states and found weak evidence that longer school years improve math and reading test scores.

Work we conducted separately in 2007 and 2008 provides much stronger evidence of effects on test scores from year-to-year changes in the length of the school year due to bad weather. In a nutshell, we compared how specific Maryland and Colorado schools fared on state assessments in years when there were frequent cancellations due to snowfall to the performance of the very same schools in relatively mild winters. Because the severity of winter weather is inarguably outside the control of schools, this research design addresses the concern that schools with longer school years differ from those with shorter years (see research design sidebar).

While our studies use data from different states and years, and employ somewhat different statistical methods, they yield very similar results on the value of additional instructional days for student performance. We estimate that an additional 10 days of instruction results in an increase in student performance on state math assessments of just under 0.2 standard deviations. To put that in perspective, the percentage of students passing math assessments falls by about one-third to one-half a percentage point for each day school is closed.

Other researchers have examined impacts of instructional time on learning outcomes in other states, with similar results. For example, University of Virginia researcher Sarah Hastedt has shown that closures that eliminated 10 school days reduced math and reading performance on the Virginia Standards of Learning exams by 0.2 standard deviations, the same magnitude we estimate for the neighboring state of Maryland. Economist David Sims of Brigham Young University in 2008 took advantage of a 2001 law change in Wisconsin that required all school districts in that state to start after September 1. Because some districts were affected while others were not, he was also able to provide unusually convincing evidence on the effect of changes in the number of instructional days. He found additional instruction days to be associated with increased scores in math for 4th-grade students, though not in reading.

Collectively, this emerging body of research suggests that expanding instructional time is as effective as other commonly discussed educational interventions intended to boost learning. Figure 1 compares the magnitude of the effect of instructional days on standardized math scores to estimates drawn from other high-quality studies of the impact of changing class size, teacher quality, and retaining students in grade. The effect of additional instructional days is quite similar to that of increasing teacher quality and reducing class size. The impact of grade retention is comparable, too, though that intervention is pertinent only for low-achieving students.

Although the evidence is mounting that expanding instructional time will result in real learning gains, evidence on the costs of extending the school year is much scarcer and involves a good deal of conjecture. Perhaps the best evidence comes from a recent study in Minnesota, which estimated that increasing the number of instructional days from 175 to 200 would cost close to $1,000 per student, in a state where the median per-pupil expenditure is about $9,000. The total annual cost was estimated at $750 million, an expense that proved politically and financially infeasible when the proposal was recently considered in that state. Comparing costs of expanding instructional days with the costs of other policy interventions will be an analytic and policy exercise of real importance if the call for expanded instructional time is to result in real change.

Complicating this analytic task are differences in costs that exist across schools and states. Utilities, transportation, and teacher summer-labor markets vary widely across geographic areas, and all affect the cost of extending the school year. So, while the benefits of extending the school year may exceed the costs in some states or school districts, they may not in others. A further complication is the possibility of diminishing returns to additional instructional time. Our research has studied the effect of additional instructional days prior to testing, typically after approximately 120 school days. The effect of extending instructional time into the summer is unknown. Also, our research has focused on the variation in instructional days prior to exams, or accountable days. The effect of adding days after exams could be quite different.

Costs of extending school years are as much political as economic. Teachers have come to expect time off in the summer and have been among the most vocal opponents of extending school years in several locations. Additional compensation could likely overcome this obstacle, but how much is an unresolved and difficult question.

Teachers are not the only ones who have grown accustomed to a summer lasting from June through August. Students and families have camps, vacations, and work schedules set up around summer vacation. “Save Our Summers” movements have for years decried the benefits of additional instructional days and proclaimed the benefits of summer vacation, and the movements have grown as states have considered extending the school year and individual school districts have moved up their start dates. Longer school years might reduce tourism and its accompanying tax revenue. These additional costs likely vary by state and district, but are clearly part of the analytic and political calculus.

Time and Accountability

As education policymakers consider lengthening the school year and face trade-offs and uncertainties, it is important to recognize that expanding instructional time offers both opportunities and hazards for another reform that is well established, the accountability movement. Educators, policymakers, parents, and economists are sure to agree that if students in one school learn content in half the time it takes comparable students at another school to learn the same content, the first school is doing a better job. How students would rank these schools is equally obvious. Yet state and federal accountability systems do not account for the time students actually spent in school when measuring gains, and so far have no way of determining how efficiently schools educate their students.

One implication of this oversight is that accountability systems are ignoring information relevant to understanding schools’ performance. Year-to-year improvements in the share of students performing well on state assessments can be accomplished by changes in school practices, or by increases in students’ exposure to school. Depending on the financial or political costs of extending school years, those with a stake in education might think differently about gains attributable to the quality of instruction provided and gains attributable to the quantity.

To see how the contributions of these inputs might be separated, consider data from Minnesota. Between 2002 and 2005, 3rd graders in that state exhibited substantial improvements in performance on math assessments, a fact clearly reflected by Minnesota’s accountability system. But during that period, there was substantial year-to-year variation in the number of instructional days students had prior to the test date. In Figure 2, we plot both the reported test scores for Minnesota 3rd graders (the solid line) and the number of days of instruction those students received (the bars). Useful, and readily calculated, is the time series of test scores, adjusting for differences in the number of instructional days (the dotted line).

Comparing the reported and adjusted scores is useful for at least two reasons. First, it illustrates the role of time as a component of test gains. Overall, scale scores increased by 0.4 standard deviations from 2001–02 to 2004–05. Of this increase, a large portion was attributable to expansion in instructional time prior to the test date. Adjusting for the effect of instructional days, we estimate that scores increased by roughly 0.25 standard deviations, nearly 40 percent less than the reported gains.

Second, the comparatively steady gain in adjusted scores over the period provides evidence of improvements in instructional quality, independent of changes in the amount of time students were in class. The fast year-to-year increases in the first and last periods result in large part from increases in the amount of time in school, while the negligible change in overall scores between 2003 and 2004 does not pick up real gains made despite a shortened school year. Adjusted scores pick up increases in learning gains attributable to how schools used instructional time, such as through changing personnel, curricula, or leadership. The point here is that time-adjusted scores provide information that is just as important as the overall reported scores for understanding school improvements. A robust accountability system would recognize that more instructional time can be used to meet goals, but that more time is neither a perfect substitute for, nor the same thing as, better use of time.

The Hazards of Ignoring Time

Failing to account for the role of time in student learning not only means missed opportunity, it also creates potential problems. First, it can allow districts to game accountability systems by rearranging school calendars so that students have more time in school prior to the exam, even as the overall length of the school year remains constant. Beginning in the 1990s, districts in a number of states began moving start dates earlier, with many starting just after the first of August. The question arose whether these changes might be linked to pressures on districts to improve performance on state assessments. David Sims showed that Wisconsin schools with low test scores in one year acted strategically by starting the next school year a bit earlier to raise scores. Evidence of gaming soon emerged in other states as well. Wisconsin passed its 2001 law requiring schools to begin after September 1 to prevent such gaming; similar laws were recently passed in Texas and Florida.

The motives driving earlier start dates could spill over into other instructional policies. Minnesota moved its testing regimen from February to April in the wake of accountability standards, while Colorado legislators have proposed moving their testing window from March into April, with advocates suggesting that the increased time for instruction would make meeting performance requirements under No Child Left Behind more feasible for struggling schools. While administering the test later in the year has potential benefits in measured performance, grading the tests over a shorter time frame costs more, estimated at some $3.9 million annually in Colorado. Schools thus sacrifice educational inputs (such as smaller classes or higher teacher salaries) to pay for the later test date.

A second hazard involves fairness to schools at risk of being sanctioned for poor performance: these schools can face longer odds if weather or other schedule disruptions limit school days. The impact of instructional time on learning means that one factor determining the ability of schools to meet performance goals is not under the control of administrators and teachers. We illustrate the effects of time on making adequate yearly progress (AYP) as defined by No Child Left Behind by comparing the performance of Maryland schools the law identified as underperforming to estimates of what the performance would have been had the schools been given a few more days for instruction.

We begin with data from all elementary schools in Maryland that did not make AYP in math and reading during the 2002–03 to 2004–05 school years. We adjust actual performance by the number of days lost in a given year multiplied by the marginal effect of an additional day on test performance as reported in Marcotte and Hemelt’s study of Maryland schools. This allows us to estimate what the proficiency rates in each subject would have been had those schools been open for all scheduled instructional days prior to the assessment. We then compare the predicted proficiency rate to the AYP threshold.

We summarize the results of this exercise in Figure 3. The light bars represent the number of schools failing to make AYP in math and reading in various years. The dark bars are the number of those schools that we predict would have failed to make AYP if the schools had been able to meet on all scheduled days. We make these estimates assuming that low-performing schools would have made average gains with each additional day of instruction.

The average number of days lost to unscheduled school closings varied substantially over the period, from more than 10 to fewer than four and a half. Many schools that did not make AYP likely would have had they not lost so many school days. For example, we estimate that 35 of the 56 elementary schools that did not make AYP in math in 2002–03 would have met the AYP criterion if they had been open during all scheduled school days. Even if these schools were only half as productive as the typical school, 24 of the 56 flagged schools would likely have made AYP if they had been open for all scheduled days.

There is, however, a way to reduce risks like these for schools and to limit incentives for administrators to move start or test dates at the same time: that is to recognize and report time as an input in education. A simple and transparent way to do this is for state report cards, which inform parents about school outcomes and summarize the information on AYP status, to include information about the number of instructional days at test date as well as the total number of instructional days for the year. This information is readily available and already monitored by schools, districts, and states. Local and state education authorities could use it when assessing performance, for example, in hearing an appeal from a school that failed to meet its AYP goals. Further, this information could be used to estimate test scores adjusted for instructional days, to be used alongside unadjusted changes in performance. Distinguishing between gains due to expanded instruction time and better use of that time can enrich accountability systems and provide more and better information to analysts and the public alike.

Looking Ahead

There can be no doubt that expanding the amount of time American students spend in school is an idea popular with many education policymakers and has long been so. What makes the present different is that we now have solid evidence that anticipated improvements in learning will materialize.

Practical obstacles to the extension of the school year include substantial expense and stakeholder attachment to the current school year and summer schedule. The benefits of additional instructional days could diminish as school years are lengthened. Further, it is unknown how teachers would use additional instructional days if they are provided after annual testing is already finished. Simply extending the year well after assessments are given might mean that students and teachers spend more days filling (or killing) time before the end of the year. This would make improvements in learning unlikely, and presumably make students unhappy for no good reason.

Though the issue has seen little movement in the past and faces real opposition going forward, the policy climate appears likely to be favorable once the fiscal challenges now facing public school systems recede. It is our hope that policymakers and administrators who try to take advantage of this window of opportunity don’t harm reforms that have succeeded in improving learning outcomes and don’t implement reforms in a manner that would fail to do the same. Advocates for extended school years have so far said virtually nothing about whether or how accountability systems should accommodate longer school years.

Across the country, a small number of schools and districts are modifying or extending the academic year. The Massachusetts 2020 initiative has provided resources for several dozen schools to increase the number of instructional days they offer from 180 to about 200. Other examples include low-performing schools that have lengthened their school day in an effort to improve, and the longer school days, weeks, and years in some charter schools. However, such initiatives remain rare, with no systemic change in the instructional time provided to American students. Our work confirms that increasing instructional time could have large positive effects on learning gains. Encouraging schools and districts to view the school calendar as a tool in the effort to improve learning outcomes should be encouraged in both word and policy.

Dave E. Marcotte is professor of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Benjamin Hansen is a research associate at IMPAQ International, LLC.

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.

An interview with Patrick Wolf about his evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and about its likely future is available here.

School choice supporters, including hundreds of private school students in crisp uniforms, filled Washington, D.C.’s Freedom Plaza last May to protest a congressional decision to eliminate the city’s federally funded school voucher program after the next school year (to see additional images of this event please click here). That afternoon, President Obama announced a compromise proposal to grandfather the more than 1,700 students currently in the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program, funding their vouchers through high school graduation, but denying entry to additional children. Both program supporters and opponents cite evidence from an ongoing congressionally mandated Institute of Education Sciences (IES) evaluation of the program, for which I am principal investigator, to buttress their positions, rendering the evaluation a Rorschach test for one’s ideological position on this fiercely debated issue.

School vouchers provide funds to parents to enable them to enroll their children in private schools and, as a result, are one of the most controversial education reforms in the United States (to see an interview with Patrick Wolf about his evaluation of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program and about its likely future please click here). Among the many points of contention is whether voucher programs in fact improve student achievement. Most evaluations of such programs have found at least some positive achievement effects, but not always for all types of participants and not always in both reading and math. This pattern of results has so far failed to generate a scholarly consensus regarding the beneficial effects of school vouchers on student achievement. The policy and academic communities seek more definitive guidance.

The IES released the third-year impact evaluation of the Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) in April 2009. The results showed that students who participated in the program performed at significantly higher levels in reading than the students in an experimental control group. Here are the study findings and my own interpretation of what they mean.

Opportunity Scholarships
Currently, 13 directly funded voucher programs operate in four U.S. cities and six states, serving approximately 65,000 students. Another seven programs indirectly fund private K—12 scholarship organizations through government tax credits to individuals or corporations. About 100,000 students receive school vouchers funded through tax credits. All of the directly funded voucher programs are targeted to students with some educational disadvantage, such as low family income, disability, or status as a foster child.

Nineteen of the 20 school voucher programs in the U.S. are funded by state and local governments. The OSP is the only federal voucher initiative. Established in 2004 as part of compromise legislation that also included new spending on charter and traditional public schools in the District of Columbia, the OSP is a means-tested program. Initial eligibility is limited to K—12 students in D.C. with family incomes at or below 185 percent of the poverty line. Congress has appropriated $14 million annually to the program, enough to support about 1,700 students at the maximum voucher amount of $7,500. The voucher covers most or all of the costs of tuition, transportation, and educational fees at any of the 66 D.C. private schools that have participated in the program. By the spring of 2008, a total of 5,331 eligible students had applied for the limited number of Opportunity Scholarships. Recipients are selected by lottery, with priority given to students applying to the program from public schools deemed in need of improvement (SINI) under No Child Left Behind. Scholars and policymakers have since questioned the extent to which SINI designations accurately signal school quality because they are based on levels of achievement instead of the more informative measure of achievement gains over time.

The third-year impact evaluation tracked the experiences of two cohorts of students. All of the students were attending public schools or were rising kindergartners at the time of application to the program. Cohort 1 consisted of 492 students entering grades 6—12 in 2004. Cohort 2 consisted of 1,816 students entering grades K—12 in 2005. The 2,308 students in the study make it the largest school voucher evaluation in the U.S. to employ the “gold standard” method of random assignment.

Voucher Effects
Researchers over the past decade have focused on evaluating voucher programs using experimental research designs called randomized control trials (RCTs). Such experimental designs are widely used to evaluate the efficacy of medical drugs prior to making such treatments available to the public. With an RCT design, a group of students who all qualify for a voucher program and whose parents are equally motivated to exercise private school choice, participate in a lottery. The students who win the lottery become the “treatment” group. The students who lose the lottery become the “control” group. Since only a voucher offer and mere chance distinguish the treatment students from their control group counterparts, any significant difference in student outcomes for the treatment students can be attributed to the program. Although not all students offered a voucher will use it to enroll in a private school, the data from an RCT can also be used to generate a separate estimate of the effect of voucher use (see sidebar, page 50).

Using an RCT research design, the ongoing IES evaluation found no impacts on student math performance but a statistically significant positive impact of the scholarship program on student reading performance, as measured by the Stanford Achievement Test (SAT 9). The estimated impact of using a scholarship to attend a private school for any length of time during the three-year evaluation period was a gain of 5.3 scale points in reading. That estimate provides the impact on all those who ever attended a private school, whether for one month, three years, or any length of time in between (see Figure 1). Consequently, the estimate should be interpreted as a lower-bound estimate of the three-year impact of attending a private school, because many students who used a scholarship during the three-year period did not remain in private school throughout the entire period. The data indicate that members of the treatment group who were attending private schools in the third year of the evaluation gained an average of 7.1 scale score points in reading from the program.

What do these gains mean for students? They mean that the students in the control group would need to remain in school an extra 3.7 months on average to catch up to the level of reading achievement attained by those who used the scholarship opportunity to attend a private school for any period of time. The catch-up time would have been around 5 months for those in the control group as compared to those who were attending a private school in the third year of the evaluation.

Over time, in my opinion, the effects of the program show a trend toward larger reading gains cumulating for students. Especially when one considers that students who used their scholarship in year 1 needed to adjust to a new and different school environment, the reading impacts of using a scholarship of 1.4 scale score points (not significant) in year 1, 4.0 scale score points (not significant) in year 2, and 5.3 scale score points (significant) in year 3 suggest that students are steadily gaining in reading performance relative to their peers in the control group the longer they make use of the scholarship. No trend in program impacts is evident in math.

What explains the fact that positive impacts have been observed as a result of the OSP in reading but not in math? Paul Peterson and Elena Llaudet of Harvard University, in a nonexperimental evaluation of the effects of school sector on student achievement, suggest that private schools may boost reading scores more than math scores for a number of reasons, including a greater content emphasis on reading, the use of phonics instead of whole-language instruction, and the greater availability of well-trained education content specialists in reading than in math. Any or all of these explanations for a voucher advantage in reading but not in math are plausible and could be behind the pattern of results observed for the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships. The experimental design of the D.C. evaluation, while a methodological strength in many ways, makes it difficult to connect the context of students’ educational experiences with specific outcomes in any reliable way. As a result, one can only speculate as to why voucher gains are clear in reading but not observed in math.

Student Characteristics
The OSP serves a highly disadvantaged group of D.C. students. Descriptive information from the first two annual reports indicates that more than 90 percent of students are African American and 9 percent are Hispanic. Their family incomes averaged less than $20,000 in the year in which they applied for the scholarship.

Overall, participating students were performing well below national norms in reading and math when they applied to the program. For example, the Cohort 1 students had initial reading scores on the SAT-9 that averaged below the 24th National Percentile Rank, meaning that 75 percent of students in their respective grades nationally were performing higher than Chart 1 in reading. In my view, these descriptive data show how means tests and other provisions to target school voucher programs to disadvantaged students serve to minimize the threat of cream-skimming. The OSP reached a population of highly disadvantaged students because it was designed by policymakers to do so.

Did Only Some Students Benefit?
Several commentators have sought to minimize the positive findings of the OSP evaluation by suggesting that only certain subgroups of participants benefited from the program. Martin Carnoy states that “the treated students in Cohort 1 were concentrated in middle schools and the effect on their reading score was significantly higher than for treated students in Cohort 2.” Henry Levin likewise asserts that “the evaluators found that receiving a voucher resulted in no advantage in math or reading test scores for either [low achievers or students from SINI schools].”

The actual results of the evaluation provide no scientific basis for claims that some subgroups of students benefited more in reading from the voucher program than other subgroups. The impact of the program on the reading achievement of Cohort 1 students did not differ by a statistically significant amount from the impact of the program on the reading achievement of Cohort 2 students, Carnoy’s claim notwithstanding. Nor did students with low initial levels of achievement and applicants from SINI schools experience significantly different reading gains from the program than high achievers and non-SINI applicants. The mere fact that statistically significant impacts were observed for a particular subgroup does not mean that impacts for that group are significantly different from those not in the subgroup. For example, Group A and Group B may have experienced roughly similar impacts, but the impact for Group A might have been just large enough for it to be significantly different from zero (or no impact at all), while Group B’s quite similar scores fell just below that threshold.

From a scientific standpoint, three conclusions are valid about the achievement results in reading from the year 3 impact evaluation of the OSP:

• The program improved the reading achievement of the treatment group students overall.
• Overall reading gains from the program were not significantly different across the various subgroups examined.
• Three distinct subgroups of students—those who were not from SINI schools, students scheduled to enter grades K-8 in the fall after application to the program, and students in the higher two-thirds of the performance distribution (whose average reading test scores at baseline were at the 37th percentile nationally)—experienced statistically significant reading impacts from the program when their performance was examined separately. Female students and students in Cohort 1 saw reading gains that were statistically significant with reservations due to the possibility of obtaining false positive results when making comparisons across numerous subgroups.
  Why examine and report achievement impacts at the subgroup level, if the evidence indicates only an overall reading gain for the entire sample? The reasons are that Congress mandated an analysis of subgroup impacts, at least for SINI and non-SINI students, and because analyses at the subgroup level might have yielded more conclusive information about disproportionate impacts for certain types of students.

Expanding Choice
The OSP facilitates the enrollment of low-income D.C. students in private schools of their parents’ choosing. It does not guarantee enrollment in a private school, but the $7,500 voucher should make such enrollments relatively common among the students who won the scholarship lottery. The eligible students who lost the scholarship lottery and were assigned to the control group still might attend a private school but they would have to do so by drawing on resources outside of the OSP. At the same time, students in both groups have access to a large number of public charter schools.

The implication is that, for this evaluation of the OSP, winning the lottery does not necessarily mean private schooling, and losing the lottery does not necessarily mean education in a traditional public school. Members of both groups attended all three types of schools—private, public charter, and traditional public—in year 3 of the voucher experiment, although the proportions that attended each type differed markedly based on whether or not they won the scholarship lottery (see Figure 2). In total, about 81 percent of parents placed their child in a private or public school of choice three years after winning the scholarship lottery, as did 46 percent of those who lost the lottery. The desire for an alternative to a neighborhood public school was strong for the families who applied to the OSP in 2004 and 2005.

These enrollment patterns highlight the fact that the effects of voucher use reported above do not amount to a comparison between “school choice” and “no school choice.” Rather, voucher users are exercising private school choice, while control group members are exercising a small amount of private school choice and a substantial amount of public school choice. The positive impacts on reading achievement observed for voucher users therefore reflect the incremental effect of adding private school choice through the OSP to the existing schooling options for low-income D.C. families.

Parent Satisfaction
Another key measure of school reform initiatives is the perception among parents, who see firsthand the effects of changes in their child’s educational environment. Whenever school choice researchers have asked parents about their satisfaction with schools, those who have been given the chance to select their child’s school have reported much higher levels of satisfaction. The OSP study findings fit this pattern. The proportion of parents who assigned a high grade of A or B to their child’s school was 11 percentile points higher if they were offered a voucher, 12 percentile points higher if their child actually used a scholarship, and 21 points higher if their child was attending a private school in year 3, regardless of whether they were in the treatment group. Parents whose children used an Opportunity Scholarship also expressed greater confidence in their children’s safety in school than parents in the control group.

Additional evidence of parental satisfaction with the OSP comes from the series of focus groups conducted independently of the congressionally mandated evaluation. One parent emphasized the expanded freedom inherent in school choice:

“[The OSP] gives me the choice to, freedom to attend other schools than D.C. public schools….I just didn’t feel that I wanted to put him in D.C. public school and I had the opportunity to take one of the scholarships, so, therefore, I can afford it and I’m glad that I did do that.” (Cohort 1 Elementary School Parent, Spring 2008)

Another parent with two children in the OSP may have hinted at a reason achievement impacts were observed specifically in reading:

“They really excel at this program, `cause I know for a fact they would never have received this kind of education at a public school….I listen to them when they talk, and what they are saying, and they articulate better than I do, and I know it’s because of the school, and I like that about them, and I’m proud of them.” (Cohort 1 Elementary School Parent, Spring 2008)

These parents of OSP students clearly see their families as having benefited from this program.

Previous Voucher Research
The IES evaluation of the DC OSP adds to a growing body of research on means-tested school voucher programs in urban districts across the nation. Experimental evaluations of the achievement impacts of publicly funded voucher and privately funded K—12 scholarship programs have been conducted in Milwaukee, New York City, the District of Columbia, Charlotte, North Carolina, and Dayton, Ohio. Different research teams analyzed the data from New York City (three different teams), Milwaukee (two teams), and Charlotte (two teams). The four studies of Milwaukee’s and Charlotte’s programs reported statistically significant achievement gains overall for the members of the treatment group. The individual studies of the privately funded K—12 scholarship programs in the District of Columbia and Dayton reported overall achievement gains only for the large subgroup of African American students in the program. The three different evaluators of the New York City privately funded scholarship program were split in their assessment of achievement impacts, as two research teams reported no overall test-score effects, but did report achievement gains for African Americans; the third team claimed there were no statistically significant test-score impacts overall or for any subgroup of participants.

The specific patterns of achievement impacts vary across these studies, with some gains emerging quickly, but others, like those in the OSP evaluation, taking at least three years to reach a standard level of statistical significance. Earlier experimental evaluations of voucher programs were somewhat more likely to report achievement gains from the programs in math than in reading—the opposite of what was observed for the OSP. Despite these differences, the bulk of the available, high-quality evidence on school voucher programs suggests that they do yield positive achievement effects for participating students.

Conclusions
School voucher initiatives such as the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program will remain politically controversial in spite of rigorous evaluations such as this one, showing that parents and students benefited in some ways from the program. Critics will continue to point to the fact that no impacts of the program have been observed in math, or that applicants from SINI schools, who were a service priority, have not demonstrated statistically significant achievement gains at the subgroup level, as reasons to characterize these findings as disappointing. Certainly the results would have been even more encouraging if the high-priority SINI students had shown significant reading gains as a distinct subgroup. Still, in my opinion, the bottom line is that the OSP lottery paid off for those students who won it. On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.

The achievement results from the D.C. voucher evaluation are also striking when compared to the results from other experimental evaluations of education policies. The National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance (NCEE) at the IES has sponsored and overseen 11 studies that are RCTs, including the OSP evaluation. Only 3 of the 11 education interventions tested, when subjected to such a rigorous evaluation, have demonstrated statistically significant achievement impacts overall in either reading or math. The reading impact of the D.C. voucher program is the largest achievement impact yet reported in an RCT evaluation overseen by the NCEE. A second program was found to increase reading outcomes by about 40 percent less than the reading gain from the DC OSP. The third intervention was reported to have boosted math achievement by less than half the amount of the reading gain from the D.C. voucher program. Of the remaining eight NCEE-sponsored RCTs, six of them found no statistically significant achievement impacts overall and the other two showed a mix of no impacts and actual achievement losses from their programs. Many of these studies are in their early stages and might report more impressive achievement results in the future. Still, the D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.

The experimental evaluation of the District of Columbia Opportunity Scholarship Program is continuing into its fourth and final year of studying the impacts on students and parents. The final evidence collected from the participants may confirm the accumulation of achievement gains in reading and higher levels of parental satisfaction from the program that were evident after three years, or show that those gains have faded. Uncertainty also surrounds the program itself, as the students who gathered on Freedom Plaza in May currently are only guaranteed one final year in their chosen private schools. What will policymakers see as they continue to consider the results of this evaluation? The educational futures of a group of low-income D.C. schoolchildren hinge on the answer.

Patrick J. Wolf is professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program Impact Evaluation. The opinions expressed in this article are his own.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

Indeed, the principal’s critical role in the No Child Left Behind era may just be taken for granted. There is growing evidence to suggest that the revolution in school organization, management, and curricular affairs may have left principals behind. In a 2003 report, the nonpartisan research organization, Public Agenda, reported that today’s school superintendents want their principals to display prowess in everything from accountability to instructional leadership and teacher quality, but principals themselves don’t think they are equipped for these duties. Just 36 percent of them, according to Public Agenda, believe that their tougher scrutiny of weak teachers is leading to tenure denials and only 30 percent report that student achievement is being factored into their teacher evaluations. Most worrisome, perhaps, some 96 percent of practicing principals say that colleagues were more helpful than graduate studies in preparing them for the job. In fact, two-thirds of the principals polled by Public Agenda report that “leadership programs in graduate schools of education are out of touch” with what principals need to know.

A recent four-year study by the president of Teachers College, Columbia University, Arthur Levine, raised the stakes in this debate by harshly assessing the quality of educational administration programs. Based on a survey of practicing principals and education school deans, chairs, faculty, and alumni, as well as case studies of 25 school leadership programs, Levine concluded that “the majority of [educational administration] programs range from inadequate to appalling, even at some of the country’s leading universities.” In particular, the study found that the typical course of studies required of principal candidates was largely disconnected from the realities of school management, though the content of these courses was not analyzed. Among Levine’s thoughtful solutions: to create an education management degree like the M.B.A., to eliminate the Ed.D., and to stop districts from offering pay raises for course credit. Such structural changes are certainly welcome, but Levine’s study raises a more fundamental question as to whether the content of preparation courses, in addition to their structure, must be reconceptualized.

Given that 48 states require principals to be certified in educational administration, the disappointing state of principal preparation is disturbing news. Why does there seem to be such a wide gulf between what principals say they need to know to do their job and what they are taught in education programs required by state departments of education? Given what practicing principals say, schools of education seem to be missing a golden opportunity to contribute to school improvement.

What the Syllabi Tell Us

What are preparation programs asking future principals to learn? Beyond the recent Teachers College study, which did not seek to systematically explore the content of instruction, that question has remained unaddressed since researchers last conducted reviews of what was taught in University Council for Educational Administration preparation programs, in 1987 and 1992. Much has changed in American education since then, with principals today being asked to do many more and varied things, including using information from sophisticated accountability systems to evaluate teachers and enhance school improvement. Have education schools responded to these new challenges?

To provide some preliminary answers to these questions, we examined the course syllabi used in a cross-section of principal-preparation programs from across the United States (see sidebar, page 37, for our methodology). We examined syllabi because there, in black and white, one can find exactly what students are expected to read, the topics they are supposed to study, and the work they are assigned.

Our sample includes both elite and mainstream schools, large programs and small ones. Altogether we reviewed more than 200 course syllabi from 31 different programs, covering almost 2,500 total course weeks. This sampling strategy was designed to avoid the criticisms that have been made of a similar study of teacher-preparation syllabi conducted by David Steiner (see “Skewed Perspective,” Education Next, Winter 2005). Steiner’s study looked primarily at the syllabi of elite preparation programs, said by critics to be atypical of standard practice. Our sampling strategy allowed us to see whether or not practice varied between elite and non-elite, or between large and small programs. In general, we find little evidence of systematic variation among programs in the kinds of topics they address.

The syllabi devote about 30 percent of class sessions to operational issues like school law, school finance, and facilities management. The following analysis focuses on the three other most frequently addressed topics of the seven we examined: managing for results (16 percent of total course weeks), managing personnel (15 percent), and norms and values (12 percent).

Managing for Results–16%

In light of widespread efforts to hold schools accountable for student learning, a push highlighted by the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001, we were interested in seeing how much emphasis programs placed on assessment and accountability within the core curriculum. To identify the amount of time spent on such subjects, we singled out all weeks spent on the general topic “managing for results.” We included in this category such topics as school-level program implementation, evaluation, quality control, improved performance, and rethinking or restructuring practices and routines. The specific focus of these weeks included issues like accountability, evaluation, assessments, data management, decisionmaking, strategy, organizational structure, and change. Overall, about 16 percent of all the class sessions in the sample–about one-sixth of the course time altogether–were classified under this general managing for results heading.

We expected to find that many of the lessons on managing for results would be spent teaching principals to leverage accountability systems to help improve instruction and drive student achievement. No less than 63 percent of superintendents report that raising student achievement is the biggest part of a principal’s evaluation, reports Public Agenda. Instead, only 13 percent of the course weeks spent on managing for results actually attempted to link school management to standards-based accountability systems, state assessments, or the demands of No Child Left Behind. Unless the topic was being smuggled in elsewhere in the course, only about 50 out of 2,424 course weeks–or 2 percent of all instruction–addressed accountability as a management issue.

Managing effectively also requires that principals be equipped to make use of data, research, and associated technology. How much attention are preparation programs devoting to these topics? We found that the “managing for results” course weeks address data, technology, or research about 29 percent of the time.

Combining the tallies in the two previous paragraphs reveals an estimate of the total amount of time devoted to using accountability, data, research, or technology as management tools. Unless courses are handling the topic elsewhere, only 6-7 percent of all class sessions are linking these topics to effective school management. In contrast, many class sessions that ostensibly address managing for results focus on the more philosophical aspects of leadership, such as the one whose title asked, “How do we engage the moral and aesthetic imagination in the educational change process?”

Contemporary education leadership requires that principals have a familiarity with data and research. Expanding on the previous finding, we asked the broader question: What percentage of all course weeks included a description, reading, or assignment that mentioned or referred to statistics, data, or empirical research in any context? Just 11 percent of weeks did so, meaning that even the most generous estimate implies that consideration of data and research was absent in nearly 90 percent of the course weeks.

Managing Personnel–15%

A critical role for any leader is hiring, evaluating, developing, and firing personnel. We coded as “managing personnel” any course weeks that addressed relations with school employees–primarily teachers but also assistant principals, specialists, and staff members. These weeks discussed issues like recruitment, selection, induction, teacher evaluation, clinical supervision, motivation, conflict management, professional development, and termination or dismissal. About 15 percent of all course weeks were devoted to the topics placed under the managing personnel rubric.

While principals have always been limited in their ability to hire, remove, or reward personnel, they are now pressed both by expectations and by statute to play an increasingly aggressive role in ensuring teacher quality. In fact, Education Week reports that 80 percent of principals say they enjoy a great deal of influence in evaluating teachers and 74 percent say the same about hiring new personnel. The importance of good hires was highlighted by a 1999 study of 54 U.S. companies that concluded that the cost of the average managerial “mis-hire” was 24 times the failed employee’s starting salary.

There is little evidence that training programs are doing much to prepare principals for these new challenges. Just 11 percent of the managing-personnel course weeks addressed the hiring process. We also discovered that just 3 percent of the managing-personnel course weeks mentioned teacher dismissal, and less than 3 percent mentioned compensation. In all, just 21 of 360 class sessions on managing personnel addressed employee compensation or termination. Many programs did not discuss termination or compensation at all: the syllabi for 20 of 31 programs included not one class session that mentioned termination, and 23 of the 31 never mentioned compensation.

One topic that received more attention was teacher evaluation, which was covered in 24 percent of managing-personnel course weeks. However, these units generally focused on the more agreeable, supportive elements of evaluation: topics like observation, clinical supervision, coaching, or mentoring. Receiving far less attention were tough-minded areas of concern, like linking evaluation to student achievement, using systematic evaluation to identify effective and ineffective personnel, or dismissing low performers. Supportive evaluation accounted for 74 percent of the class sessions devoted to personnel evaluation, while tough-minded evaluation constituted just 26 percent. When they did occasionally touch on using evaluation to ensure instructional quality, lessons routinely focused on procedural questions (such as “Cycles of supervision: What’s due when?”) or finding ways to support problematic staff (for instance, “Supervising the marginal teacher”).

In short, there is little evidence that this attention to evaluation is well suited to help principals make difficult personnel decisions. The principal-preparation programs examined devoted barely 3 percent of total instructional weeks in core courses to the central management responsibilities of hiring, identifying, and rewarding good employees or identifying and removing ineffective ones.

Norms and Values–12%

Education school critics frequently assert that too many courses are characterized by an ideological tilt that influences content. Does the evidence suggest such a bias in principal preparation? We coded a course week as devoted to addressing “norms and values” if it exposed principal candidates to different philosophies of education and pedagogy, discussed debates about the nature and purpose of public schooling, or examined the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic context of education (the sociology of education). In fact, only about 12 percent of course weeks had an explicit emphasis on norms or values.

When instruction does address norms and values, is there evidence that instructors are failing to expose students to diverse points of view? Obviously, such inquiry requires the researcher to make judgment calls. Coded as “left-leaning” were course weeks that advocated concepts like social justice and multiculturalism, focused on inequality and race-based discrimination, emphasized notions of silenced voices and child-centered instruction, or were critical of testing and choice-based reform. For example, course weeks coded left-leaning included “The role of the curriculum in legitimating social inequality” and “Other silenced voices? (females, gay, impaired, over/underweight, bullied, biracial, [learning disabled], religion, homeless, transient, etc.).” Class sessions that critiqued notions of social justice and multiculturalism, raised concerns about affirmative action or a culture of “victimhood,” advocated phonics and back-to-basics instruction, or were generally positive with regard to testing or choice-based reform were coded as “right leaning.” The single unit in this category is entitled, “The state and local politics of education reform” and was coded as right leaning because the author of the week’s primary reading is regarded as conservative. Those weeks that did not display clear normative direction or that included a variety of normative views were coded “neutral.” Weeks that were coded neutral included such lessons as “Are unions good or bad for public education? What does the evidence say?” and “What should schools teach? Phonics vs. whole language; multicultural education/teaching for diversity.”

The results suggest that there is a distinct left-leaning normative tilt in those weeks that address norms and values. (See Figure 1.) Overall, 65 percent of the norms and values weeks were coded as left leaning, 35 percent as neutral, and less than 1 percent as right leaning. Contrary to earlier suggestions that the left-leaning tendencies of elite education schools are not representative of other programs, we found that the majority of norms and values course weeks were left leaning even in non-elite programs. Interestingly, many of the traditional bogeymen flagged by education school critics were not much in evidence. For instance, the words diversity and diverse, multiculturalism and multicultural, appear only about 3 percent of the time across all course weeks.

In the end, however, the imbalance of ideological perspectives does raise cautionary flags about instructor interest in entertaining competing schools of thought on leadership. Course weeks labeled “Suturing together a conservative public agenda: markets, religion, standards, and inequality” raise doubts about whether the aim is to educate or to promote a particular agenda.

Most Frequently Read Authors

Perhaps as important as what topics are examined in a class is what reading material students are exposed to in the course of their studies. Consequently, we searched among the author names of the 1,851 assigned books, book chapters, and articles in the 210 syllabi studied by future principals. A reading was attributed to an individual if that person was first or second author of the book, article, or book chapter. Edited volumes themselves are not attributed to the volume editor, although chapters assigned within edited collections–including introductions or conclusions–are attributed in the manner explained above.

There is little evidence that principal-preparation programs are designed in ways to introduce students to a broad range of management, organizational, or administrative theory and practice. On the contrary, they rely heavily on texts and other works written by professors of education administration, such as Terence Deal (University of Southern California), Allan Odden (University of Wisconsin), Kent Peterson (University of Wisconsin), Michael Fullan (University of Toronto), Lee Bolman (University of Missouri-Kansas City), and Thomas Sergiovanni (Trinity University, Texas). With a few exceptions, the authors assigned in the courses we analyzed tend to focus on the unique challenges and cultural distinctiveness of education systems. Sergiovanni, for instance, has argued that preparation for school leadership is unlike that for other leadership or management roles, declaring that “corporate” models of leadership cannot work in education and, “We [must] accept the reality that leadership for the schoolhouse should be different, and…we [need to] begin to invent our own practice.”

In both substance and point of view, this list raises questions about whether aspiring principals may be encountering only a limited body of thought. Notably missing are star thinkers in the world of business management. In 2003, Bloomsbury Publishing and Suntop Media surveyed business leaders, business school professors, and M.B.A. students to assemble a list of the 50 most important living management thinkers. Of the individuals identified, only nine were ever assigned in any of the course syllabi examined. Influential thinkers like Jim Collins, author of Good to Great; Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter; Harvard Business School professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clay Christensen; and In Search of Excellence author Tom Peters, who are often asked to address national education conferences and are prominently cited by education reformers, were not assigned in any courses in the sample. Such omissions raise concerns about whether principals are adequately steeped in important thinking on management.

While education leadership lies at the intersection of two vibrant and powerful bodies of learning and thought–education and leadership/management–instruction in these programs draws narrowly from a pool of education administration specialists. This is particularly problematic because, as economics Nobel Prize-winner Robert Lucas has suggested, growth and advancement come not merely from new inventions or unearthing new resources, but from entrepreneurial decisionmakers’ configuring personnel, practices, operations, and resources in new and more effective ways.

Conclusion

Because preparation of principals has not kept pace with changes in the larger world of schooling, graduates of principal-preparation programs have been left ill equipped for the challenges and opportunities posed by an era of accountability. In addition to changes related to program structure, such as those raised by the recent high-profile Teachers College study, the question of content is pivotal; principals receive limited training in the use of data, research, technology, the hiring or termination of personnel, or using data to evaluate personnel in a systematic way. The reading lists suggest that aspiring principals receive little exposure to important management scholarship or sophisticated inquiry on education productivity and governance. In short, there is reason to doubt whether they are mastering the skills requisite for success as school leaders in the 21st century.

The primary concern is not ideological bias but the apparent narrow-mindedness of today’s instructional focus. The lack of attention to serious thinking on management or to topics like research, accountability, or termination, suggests an emphasis on preparing candidates for the traditional, pinched world of leadership–and a failure to teach the array of skills needed to lead effective schools. While there are certainly times when a gentle hand on the wheel is desirable, there is a concern that programs are ignoring proven tools of tough-minded management or deeming them culturally unacceptable.

Preparation programs seem particularly unprepared to help principals tackle the challenges of leading new schools, running charter schools, or operating in a changing policy environment. Programs are training principals to do the things they have traditionally been empowered to do–monitor curricula, support and encourage faculty, manage facilities, and so on–but do little to equip them to take advantage of tools newly available to school leaders. Almost 30 percent of total instruction focuses on technical law or finance questions, 11 percent addresses curriculum and pedagogy, while the discussion of staffing focuses more on traditional faculty oversight than on exploiting new managerial tools. Principal-preparation programs that pay little attention to data, productivity, accountability, or working with parents leave their graduates unprepared for new responsibilities and likely to resist or mishandle new freedoms–resulting in micromanagement, poor decisions, or the misuse of accountability instruments.

Currently, a number of preparation programs are considering or undergoing ambitious redesign efforts. However, the Southern Regional Education Board, whose Leadership Initiative is driving preparation reform in its 16 member states, has cautioned: “Redesigning leadership preparation programs does not mean simply rearranging old courses–as staff at some universities and leadership academies are inclined to do.” Whether preparation programs will answer that challenge remains to be seen. Meaningful reform of principal-preparation programs must retool the content so that it matches the challenges confronting principals in 21st-century schooling.

-Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Andrew P. Kelly is an education policy researcher at AEI.

The Education Equality Project champions accountability, pay reform, and school choice, while the Broader, Bolder coalition insists we must attend to health care, preschool, and parenting skills if students are to succeed in school. The Obama administration must negotiate this split in pursuing education reform; indeed, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the only individual to serve as a founding member of both groups.

In this forum, president of Democrats for Education Reform Joe Williams speaks for the Education Equality Project and Pedro Noguera offers the Broader, Bolder perspective on improving K–12 schooling, the early record of the Obama administration, and the challenges that lie ahead.

Education Next: What principles unify the signers of the coalition [Education Equality Project or A Broader, Bolder Approach to Education]? Can you explain the key reforms the coalition is calling for?

Pedro Noguera: The basic principle underlying the Broader, Bolder Approach to school reform is that efforts to raise student achievement cannot ignore the unmet social needs of children, particularly those related to concentrated poverty—inadequate health, housing, and nutrition. These conditions have a tremendous impact upon child development and learning.

Poverty does not cause academic failure, but it is a factor that profoundly influences the character of schools and student performance, in at least three broad and interrelated ways: 1) in most cases, considerably less money is spent on the education of poor children. Per-pupil spending has bearing on the quality of facilities, the availability of learning materials, and the ability of schools to attract and retain highly qualified personnel. While high levels of funding do not guarantee that children will receive a quality education, money matters, and many of the most acclaimed charter schools spend more per pupil than public schools, even though they generally serve fewer high-need students (i.e., special education or English language learners); 2) the unmet, nonacademic needs of children (social, emotional, and psychological) often have an impact on learning; 3) schools serving large numbers of poor children typically lack the resources and expertise to respond to their academic and social needs.

This does not mean that poor children cannot learn or that until we eliminate poverty and related social issues we will not be able to educate all children in this country. There are schools across the country—some are charter, some are private, and many are traditional public—that have shown us that it is possible for poor children to achieve at high levels when we respond to their needs and create conditions that are conducive to learning. However, the fact that a small number of schools have experienced a degree of success does not mean that we can simply blame other schools for their failures or ignore what is happening to children outside of school. Many, though not all, schools that succeed with poor children devise strategies to mitigate the effects of poverty with site-based social services and extended learning opportunities.

BBA advocates providing universal access to health care for children, quality early-childhood education, and expanded access to extended learning opportunities, after school and during the summer. While these measures alone will not guarantee higher student achievement or large-scale school improvement, they are essential for creating a context in which other education reforms can be effective.

Joe Williams: The Education Equality Project is a coalition of leaders (from education, civil rights, government, public policy, and business) who believe that what happens inside schools (and in the politics surrounding schooling) plays a tremendous role in shaping the achievement gap that exists in this country between the haves and the have-nots. The focus for reform, therefore, should be on what happens between teachers and students. That isn’t meant to be glib; we keep finding ourselves debating that key distinction with people who argue that the external forces in a child’s life represent obstacles too large for even great schools to overcome. While we are very sympathetic to the obstacles that impoverished children face to their physical, emotional, and educational development, and support policies to address these deficiencies, we believe that when conditions outside of the classroom are less than stellar, it is even more important that we get the schooling piece right.

One of the beliefs that has tied together the signatories of EEP thus far is a commitment to eliminating the racial and ethnic achievement gap in this country. This is not just an education issue, but a civil rights issue. If we neglect the education needs of our children, we are depriving them of the kinds of opportunities that the American dream can offer.

The EEP has called for an effective teacher for every child (paying teachers as professionals, giving them the tools and training to do their work effectively, and making tough decisions about ineffective teachers); empowering parents by allowing them to choose the best schools for their children; holding grown-ups at all levels accountable for the education of our children; and, very important, having enough strength in our convictions to stand up to anyone who seeks to preserve a failed system.

EN: Is it fair to expect all students to meet a uniform performance baseline? Is it reasonable to hold schools and educators responsible for ensuring that students meet that bar?

JW: Yes, these expectations are fair and reasonable. The key is making sure that schools and educators have the tools to provide students with the kind of education they need to clear the bar, including resources, the ability to build teams of excellent educators, and enough flexibility at the school level to adjust the length of the school day and year (among other things). This will likely require both additional resources and smarter use of education budgets around the country. Newark mayor Cory Booker often talks about the fact that we allow time spent on education to be the constant, while achievement is the variable. We need the flexibility to flip that notion so that time is the variable and achievement is the constant.

PN: Setting high academic standards for schools and students to meet is important but relatively easy to do. The harder and more important task is to adopt and implement standards that create optimal conditions for learning. This means ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live, have access to high-quality schools. This is what government policy must strive to achieve. We have quality standards for airports, highways, food, drugs, and water, but no state has adopted standards for learning environments, and many poor children attend under-resourced, inferior schools.

In fact, the most troubled schools typically serve students with the greatest needs. These schools cannot solve problems related to inequality and poverty without additional support. Yet this is essentially what No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and most education reforms that preceded it have expected. Almost eight years after the enactment of NCLB, high dropout rates and low achievement are still pervasive throughout this country, particularly in schools where poor children are concentrated.

EN: Do you think the administration’s actions thus far on school choice and charter schooling have been too aggressive or not aggressive enough?

PN: School choice is an idea that should be supported in principle. It is good for parents to have a variety of schools from which to choose because not all children have the same needs or interests. The greater challenge is ensuring that there are many high-quality schools to choose from and ensuring that choice does not contribute to further segregation in schools. Unfortunately, in many communities that have enacted choice plans, well-organized and informed parents do their best to gain access to the better schools, and invariably, others are left out. Racial segregation in schools has increased in the last 20 years, and poor children have become concentrated in the worst schools. Furthermore, in most choice systems it’s not parents but schools that really do the choosing. The better schools are often able to screen out needy students and limit enrollment. Because of high demand, they can be selective about whom they choose. This often occurs even in charter schools that use lotteries to determine admission but set criteria that are difficult for low-income parents to meet. Those who are not chosen by the superior schools invariably end up in lower-quality public schools with fewer resources.

Many, but not all, charter schools have demonstrated considerable success in educating poor children. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has expressed his support for charter schools, even though in several states, such as Texas and Arizona, the charter schools are often no better, and in some cases are worse, than the public schools. As a trustee of the State University of New York, I am proud to say that the charter schools we authorize consistently outperform similar schools in the communities where they are located. If such quality-control measures can be adopted in other communities, charter schools should be supported as a means to increase the supply of good schools available to poor children.

JW: Choice, in and of itself, won’t bring about the kind of systemic change that we need. But it is difficult to imagine how we can drive that systemic change without choice playing a role. The administration’s actions to limit the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship (K–12 vouchers), for example, were perplexing, if only because the actions were accompanied by empty rhetoric about doing what is best for children. How do we look at low-income families with a straight face and tell them they can’t send their children to better schools because it isn’t the right policy to pursue for the broader system? We need to be doing everything we can to reform the larger system, but by all means, let’s help those families who need good schools now. All of that said, President Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have provided tremendous cover for the public charter-school movement and have helped shift the focus toward identifying those schools that are doing an outstanding job of educating students and giving them the green light to bring their models to scale.

I have never believed that a voucher or a charter can teach a child to read or do math at exceptionally high levels. That stuff happens in great schools, and vouchers and charter school lotteries offer access to those schools for families who can’t afford to live in affluent neighborhoods or send their children to effective private schools. The key is ensuring that they have an abundance of great schools from which to choose. The public charter-school movement, in addressing both the supply and demand sides of this equation, has emerged as the most promising development in the broader attempt to save public education. The question is whether the charter movement will provide the political spark needed to fundamentally transform our public schools.

EN: Is basing pay on teacher performance essential to school improvement? Is it possible to craft a merit-pay plan that the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) will endorse? Are teachers unions and existing collective-bargaining agreements an impediment to school quality?

JW: I think we have gotten way too far ahead in this discussion. We are talking about merit pay and performance pay in school systems that recognize neither merit nor performance. Teachers unions are understandably squeamish about this topic because today’s testing regimens were not created to serve this purpose. Until people feel confident in the tests that we are using, it will be difficult to build compensation systems on them.

This is an issue we can’t afford to ignore, however. The unions set out to create a standard of fairness for all teachers. The end result, in many cases, is a system that doesn’t allow itself to view great teachers any differently than it does mediocre teachers. Evaluations rate teachers as merely “satisfactory” or “unsatisfactory.” As long as excellence is irrelevant in our schools, we will continue to be stuck in this holding pattern. Wouldn’t it be something if we could strive for systems filled with “excellent” teachers, where excellence actually means something? We’re going to need a lot of help from the NEA and AFT in getting there, since they are holding the keys right now.

PN: Addressing the effectiveness of teachers must be an essential part of education reform in this country. However, judging teachers and awarding bonuses simply on the basis of test scores is problematic. We have already witnessed a large number of schools that have adopted scripted curricula and a narrow focus on test preparation as one way to raise test scores. This tendency will undoubtedly increase if teachers are evaluated exclusively on that basis. Such an approach is likely to discourage good teachers from working in high-need schools and to widen the gap between poor and affluent students. A narrow focus on raising test scores is also likely to deny poor students access to an enriched curriculum that encourages the development of higher-order thinking skills.

It makes more sense to devise incentives, including increased pay, to attract teachers with a track record of effectiveness, to high-need schools and classrooms. Such teachers can be identified through systematic evaluations carried out by principals and peers. If we could combine such a strategy with lower class sizes and extended learning opportunities after school, we could see major gains for struggling students.

In many cities, unions have resisted giving districts greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned, and in too many cases they have made it difficult to remove teachers who are ineffective and inept. Since it seems likely that teachers unions will be around for many years to come, it would be wise to find ways to collaborate with them to devise peer review programs like those that have shown promise in districts such as Toledo, Ohio, and Rochester, New York. In these districts, ineffective teachers are removed in greater numbers than in districts that rely on principal evaluation. Districts should also be encouraged to use the negotiation process to push for greater flexibility in how teachers are assigned to schools.

EN: The president has touted the $5 billion for preschool in the stimulus bill. How can we be confident that the money will fund difference-making programs?

PN: Most of the nations that outperform the United States in educational outcomes provide universal access to quality preschool. Research in child development has shown that the learning that occurs during infancy establishes a foundation for learning throughout life. It is cost effective and in our national interest to expand access to quality early-childhood education for all children.

We know two important things about early childhood education: 1) children who have access to quality programs generally outperform children who do not, and 2) the benefits of quality preschool can be further enhanced if quality of education is maintained in the K–12 system. The situation is similar for elementary schools. Throughout the country we have seen a growing number of successful primary schools and increases in test scores. However, these gains often are not sustained in middle school. This should not be used as a justification to question the value of elementary school nor should similar logic be used to limit expansion of early childhood education.

JW: If high-quality pre-K isn’t such a good idea, why are rich people in my neighborhood running around thinking that the Earth will implode (and their kid won’t get into Harvard someday) if they don’t get a slot in the most sought-after preschool programs? Providing access to high-quality preschool opportunities to the have-nots is an important part of the overall reform effort, as long as those programs successfully help students prepare for the world that awaits them in kindergarten and beyond.

Critics note that finding “high-quality” early-childhood programs, just like finding high-quality K–12 schools, is where the proposition gets iffy. My organization, Democrats for Education Reform, has been pushing to extend state charter-school laws so that charter schools can offer pre-K while being held accountable for their results. Connecting pre-K to early childhood programs that run through 3rd grade would close the gap that exists between what is taught in pre-K and what students need to be able to do in the later grades.

This is about making sure that all students are starting off on as close to a level playing field as possible, whether or not they can afford to make a $100,000 contribution to get a leg up on preschool enrollment.

EN: The Broader, Bolder Approach has made the case that school reform must attend to the “physical health, character, social development, and non-academic skills” of students. Should schools and educators be tasked with this? At what point can or should we start to hold educators responsible for student outcomes?

JW: Students clearly have needs that extend beyond merely learning to read and do math. In the most successful schools serving low-income students, we see a wide range of child development activities, including sports, dance, art, chess, and citizenship enrichment activities. The notion that these activities are distractions from academic instruction assumes this is an either/or proposition. The best schools out there today seem to nail both.

This is where issues like better use of time come into play. Many educators decided long ago (seemingly correctly) that it is not possible to meet the complex needs of their students with a school day that ends at 3 p.m. This is particularly true for students who are two and three years behind where they are supposed to be academically.

PN: It is impossible and undesirable to separate academic performance from physical health, character development, and a variety of nonacademic skills. Sick and unhealthy children generally don’t do as well in school as healthy ones, and children who have trouble getting along with others typically don’t do very well either. From their very beginning, public schools have been charged with preparing children for work and citizenship, and such preparation has never focused solely upon academic skills.

To educate the “whole child,” schools must provide students with an enriched education that includes art, music, physical education, and character development in addition to the core subjects. The fact that skills in these areas cannot be easily assessed should not trouble us since most middle-class and affluent children receive such an education already and typically no one asks for evidence that such an approach has an impact on their test scores.

The highest-performing schools never focus exclusively on student achievement. In fact, what typically distinguishes the best schools from the others is the culture—shared expectations, values, norms, and beliefs—that permeate the school environment.

EN: The president has suggested that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, especially the $5 billion in “innovation” education funds, provides an opportunity to “transform” schooling. What are a couple of developments that give you cause for optimism or pessimism? How will we know in a few years if these education funds were spent wisely?

PN: While many public schools, especially in urban areas, are in dire need of reform, I am concerned that there is a lack of clarity about why past reforms have failed and insufficient understanding about the direction change must take if we are to obtain better results. Why do we still have dropout rates of 50 percent and higher in several cities eight years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, and why are so many schools still foundering after substantial investments of public and private funds on reform? Several studies have shown that reforms have failed because we have ignored the nonacademic needs of children, because we have ignored school culture, because we have not evaluated reforms and insisted upon accountability, and because we have been too quick to pursue fads and gimmicks (small schools, technology, testing) while ignoring more substantive issues that support teaching and learning.

More funding is needed in many districts to address the lack of resources, but given the recession, we will need to rely upon better coordination between schools, nonprofits, and local government to respond to student needs. And money alone will not solve the problems facing America’s schools. We need a new vision and a new approach. A Broader, Bolder Approach offers part of the way forward. This must be combined with strategies that improve the quality of teaching and increase the accountability and responsiveness of schools to the communities they serve.

JW: The president and Secretary Duncan seem to have figured out that the leverage that comes from insisting that $5 billion be attached to innovation is tremendous. Even before a single dime was disbursed from the “Race to the Top” fund, we saw state legislatures take actions to support things like charter school expansion: Massachusetts, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, and Rhode Island were not exactly lining up to help charter schools until Duncan made clear that it would impact these states’ applications for federal funding. For a state like Tennessee, which risked losing $100 million in Duncan’s discretionary spending, the conversation quickly changed. A charter-school expansion bill that had been declared dead and tagged by the political coroners came back to life before our very eyes.

The challenge will come when it is time to convert the leverage Duncan has discovered into ongoing federal appropriations. This will launch a dramatic transformation of the role of the federal government in education. This is where we should be optimistic.

Politically, Duncan and Obama are going to need to tell good stories about what has been unleashed here through the stimulus package. If successful school operators like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), Uncommon Schools, and Achievement First can get help (financially and legislatively) in bringing their models to scale, and if successful education programs can be brought to more and more students, there will be a compelling story to tell. Public education will be on its way to saving itself.

EN: What does BBA’s proposed accountability system look like? How does it differ from NCLB?

PN: The BBA proposal for accountability emphasizes qualitative and quantitative evaluations of schools. That is, rather than relying exclusively on test scores to judge schools, BBA calls for the creation of an inspectorate, similar to that used in other countries with high-performing education systems, that is comprised of experienced educators, policymakers and scholars, to evaluate schools and make recommendations about how they might be improved. Such an approach could be used to provide schools with detailed feedback on how to make better use of resources and employ strategies that will enable them to become more successful in raising achievement and overcoming obstacles to learning.

Under NCLB, schools are judged largely on the basis of test scores, and many schools have figured out that the system can be gamed simply by targeting groups of students with intensive test preparation. Schools that are faced with greater challenges are simply labeled “failing” and targeted with threats and humiliation. The underlying assumption is that the educators are lazy and that pressure can be used to force them to improve. Accountability is essential if we are going to bring about school improvement on a larger scale, but it must be accompanied by real assistance and support.

In some cases, shutting down failing schools, as Secretary Duncan has suggested, may be necessary, but we must acknowledge ahead of time that the number of failing schools is simply too great for this to be the only strategy that we use. It is more constructive and effective to find out why a school has failed and to work with educators and local stakeholders to address the causes.

EN: In the context of EEP’s proposed reforms, how will an expanded federal role make a significant difference? How should new federal funds be distributed?

JW: An expanded federal role will allow our entire nation to cut through some of the political fog that has prevented good, sound ideas about how to change our schools from getting the go-ahead to proceed as part of a major systemic reform strategy. This is about using the tremendous leverage of the federal government to force some really blunt conversations at the state and district level, the kinds of conversations that make people uncomfortable and often lead to political paralysis. We have this tendency, if policy conversations make people feel uncomfortable, to sweep important issues under the rug. This is one of the reasons so little has actually changed despite waves and waves of reforms. We have an opportunity to change that dynamic, but only if President Obama holds firm on his commitment to bring change to public education.

For as long as there have been struggling schools in America’s cities, there have been efforts to turn them around. The lure of dramatic improvement runs through Morgan Freeman’s big-screen portrayal of bat-wielding principal Joe Clark, philanthropic initiatives like the Gates Foundation’s “small schools” project, and No Child Left Behind (NCLB)’s restructuring mandate. The Obama administration hopes to extend this thread even further, making school turnarounds a top priority.

But overall, school turnaround efforts have consistently fallen far short of hopes and expectations. Quite simply, turnarounds are not a scalable strategy for fixing America’s troubled urban school systems.

Fortunately, findings from two generations of school improvement efforts, lessons from similar work in other industries, and a budding practice among reform-minded superintendents are pointing to a promising alternative. When conscientiously applied strategies fail to drastically improve America’s lowest-performing schools, we need to close them.

Done right, not only will this strategy help the students assigned to these failing schools, it will also have a cascading effect on other policies and practices, ultimately helping to bring about healthy systems of urban public schools.

A Body at Rest Stays at Rest

Looking back on the history of school turnaround efforts, the first and most important lesson is the “Law of Incessant Inertia.” Once persistently low performing, the majority of schools will remain low performing despite being acted upon in innumerable ways.

Examples abound: In the first year of California’s Academic Performance Index, the state targeted its lowest-performing 20 percent of schools for intervention. After three years, only 11 percent of the elementary schools in this category (109 of 968) were able to make “exemplary progress.” Only 1 of the 394 middle and high schools in this category reached this mark. Just one-quarter of the schools were even able to accomplish a lesser goal: meeting schoolwide and subgroup growth targets each year.

In 2008, 52 Ohio schools were forced to restructure because of persistent failure. Even after several years of significant attention, fewer than one in three had been able to reach established academic goals, and less than half showed any student performance gains. The Columbus Dispatch concluded, “Few of them have improved significantly even after years of effort and millions in tax dollars.”

These state anecdotes align with national data on schools undergoing NCLB-mandated restructuring, the law’s most serious intervention, which follows five or more years of failing to meet minimum achievement targets. Of the schools required to restructure in 2004–05, only 19 percent were able to exit improvement status two years later.

A 2008 Center on Education Policy (CEP) study investigated the results of restructuring in five states. In California, Maryland, and Ohio, only 14, 12, and 9 percent of schools in restructuring, respectively, made adequate yearly progress (AYP) as defined by NCLB the following year. And we must consider carefully whether merely making AYP should constitute success at all: in California, for example, a school can meet its performance target if slightly more than one-third of its students reach proficiency in English language arts and math. Though the CEP study found that improvement rates in Michigan and Georgia were considerably higher, Michigan changed its accountability system during this period, and both states set their AYP bars especially low.

Though alarming, the poor record for school turnarounds in recent years should come as no surprise. A study published in 2005 by the Education Commission of the States (ECS) on state takeovers of schools and districts noted that the takeovers “have yet to produce dramatic consistent increases in student performance,” and that the impact on learning “falls short of expectations.”

Reflecting on the wide array of efforts to improve failing schools, one set of analysts concluded, “Turnaround efforts have for the most part resulted in only marginal improvements…. Promising practices have failed to work at scale when imported to troubled schools.”

Like Finding the Cure for Cancer

The second important lesson is the “Law of Ongoing Ignorance.” Despite years of experience and great expenditures of time, money, and energy, we still lack basic information about which tactics will make a struggling school excellent. A review published in January 2003 by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation of more than 100 books, articles, and briefs on turnaround efforts concluded, “There is, at present, no strong evidence that any particular intervention type works most of the time or in most places.”

An EdSource study that sought to compare California’s low-performing schools that failed to make progress to its low-performing schools that did improve came to a confounding conclusion: clear differences avoided detection. Comparing the two groups, the authors noted, “These were schools in the same cities and districts, often serving children from the same backgrounds. Some of them also adopted the same curriculum programs, had teachers with similar backgrounds, and had similar opportunities for professional development.”

Maryland’s veteran state superintendent of schools, Nancy Grasmick, agrees: “Very little research exists on how to bring about real sea change in schools…. Clearly, there’s no infallible strategy or even sequence of them.” Responding to the growing number of failing Baltimore schools requiring state-approved improvement plans, she said, “No one has the answer. It’s like finding the cure for cancer.”

Researchers have openly lamented the lack of reliable information pointing to or explaining successful improvement efforts, describing the literature as “sparse” and “scarce.” Those attempting to help others fix broken schools have typically resorted to identifying activities in improved schools, such as bolstering leadership and collecting data.

However, this case-study style of analysis is deeply flawed. As the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) has noted, studies “that look back at factors that may have contributed to [a] school’s success” are “particularly weak in determining causal validity for several reasons, including the fact that there is no way to be confident that the features common to successful turnaround schools are not also common to schools that fail.”

Researchers have noted that the Department of Education has signaled its own ignorance about what to do about the nation’s very worst schools. One study reported, “The NCLB law does not specify any additional actions for schools that remain in the implementation phase of restructuring for more than one year, and [the Department] has offered little guidance on what to do about persistently struggling schools.” Indeed, the IES publication, “Turning Around Chronically Low-Performing Schools” practice guide, purportedly a resource for states and districts, concedes, “All recommendations had to rely on low levels of evidence,” because it could not identify any rigorous studies finding that “specific turnaround practices produce significantly better academic outcomes.”

Still in Its Infancy?

The prevailing view is that we must keep looking for turnaround solutions. Observers have written, “Turnaround at scale is still in its infancy,” and “In education, turnarounds have been tried rarely” (see “The Big U-Turn,” features, Winter 2009). But, in fact, the number and scope of fix-it efforts have been extensive to say the least.

Long before NCLB required interventions in the lowest-performing schools, states had undertaken significant activity. In 1989 New Jersey took over Jersey City Public Schools; in 1995 it took over Newark Public Schools. In 1993 California took control of the Compton Unified School District. In 1995 Ohio took over the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. Between 1993 and 1997 states required the reconstitution of failing schools in Denver, Chicago, New York City, and Houston. In 2000 Alabama took over a number of schools across the state, and Maryland seized control of three schools in Baltimore.

Since NCLB, interventions in struggling schools have only grown in number and intensity. In the 2006–07 school year, more than 750 schools in “corrective action,” the NCLB phase preceding restructuring, implemented a new research-based curriculum, more than 700 used an outside expert to advise the school, nearly 400 restructured the internal organization of the school, and more than 200 extended the school day or year. Importantly, more than 300 replaced staff members or the principal, among the toughest traditional interventions possible.

Occasionally a program will report encouraging success rates. The University of Virginia School Turnaround Specialist Program asserts that about half of its targeted schools have either made AYP or reduced math and reading failure rates by at least 5 percent. Though this might be better than would otherwise be expected, the threshold for success is remarkably low. It is also unknown whether such progress can be sustained. This matter is particularly important, given that some point to charter management organizations Green Dot and Mastery as turnaround success stories even though each has a very short turnaround résumé, in both numbers of schools and years of experience.

Many schools that reach NCLB’s restructuring phase, rather than implementing one of the law’s stated interventions (close and reopen as a charter school, replace staff, turn the school over to the state, or contract with an outside entity), choose the “other” option, under which they have considerable flexibility to design an improvement strategy of their own (see “Easy Way Out,” forum, Winter 2007). Some call this a “loophole” for avoiding tough action.

Yet even under the maligned “other” option, states and districts have tried an astonishing array of improvement strategies, including different types of school-level needs assessments, surveys of school staff, conferences, professional development, turnaround specialists, school improvement committees, training sessions, principal mentors, teacher coaches, leadership facilitators, instructional trainers, subject-matter experts, audits, summer residential academies, student tutoring, research-based reform models, reconfigured grade spans, alternative governance models, new curricula, improved use of data, and turning over operation of some schools to outside organizations.

It’s simply impossible to make the case that turnaround efforts haven’t been tried or given a chance to work.

A Better Mousetrap?

Despite this evidence, some continue to advocate for improved turnaround efforts. Nancy Grasmick supports recognizing turnarounds as a unique discipline. Frederick Hess and Thomas Gift have argued for developing school restructuring leaders; Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel have recommended that states and districts “fuel the pipeline” of untraditional turnaround specialists. NewSchools Venture Fund, the Education Commission of the States, and the research firm Mass Insight have offered related turnaround strategies.

And the Obama administration too has bought into the notion that turnarounds are the key to improving urban districts. Education secretary Arne Duncan has said that if the nation could turn around 1,000 schools annually for five years, “We could really move the needle, lift the bottom and change the lives of tens of millions of underserved children.” In the administration’s 2009 stimulus legislation, $3 billion in new funds were appropriated for School Improvement Grants, which aid schools in NCLB improvement status. The administration requested an additional $1.5 billion for this program in the 2010 budget. This is all on top of the numerous streams of existing federal funds that can be—and have been—used to turn around failing schools.

The dissonance is deafening. The history of urban education tells us emphatically that turnarounds are not a reliable strategy for improving our very worst schools. So why does there remain a stubborn insistence on preserving fix-it efforts?

The most common, but also the most deeply flawed, justification is that there are high-performing schools in American cities. That is, some fix-it proponents point to unarguably successful urban schools and then infer that scalable turnaround strategies are within reach. In fact, it has become fashionable among turnaround advocates to repeat philosopher Immanuel Kant’s adage that “the actual proves the possible.”

But as a Thomas B. Fordham Foundation study noted, “Much is known about how effective schools work, but it is far less clear how to move an ineffective school from failure to success…. Being a high-performing school and becoming a high-performing school are very different challenges.”

In fact, America’s most-famous superior urban schools are virtually always new starts rather than schools that were previously underperforming. Probably the most convincing argument for the fundamental difference between start-ups and turnarounds comes from those actually running high-performing high-poverty urban schools (see sidebar). Groups like KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) and Achievement First open new schools; as a rule they don’t reform failing schools. KIPP’s lone foray into turnarounds closed after only two years, and the organization abandoned further turnaround initiatives. Said KIPP’s spokesman, “Our core competency is starting and running new schools.”

A 2006 NewSchools Venture Fund study confirmed a widespread aversion to takeover-and-turnaround strategies among successful school operators. Only 4 of 36 organizations interviewed expressed interest in restructuring existing schools. Remarkably, rather than trusting successful school operators’ track records and informed opinion that start-ups are the way to go, Secretary Duncan urged them to get into the turnaround business during a speech at the 2009 National Charter Schools Conference.

The findings above deserve repeating: Fix-it efforts at the worst schools have consistently failed to generate significant improvement. Our knowledge base about improving failing schools is still staggeringly small. And exceptional urban schools are nearly always start-ups or consistently excellent schools, not drastically improved once-failing schools.

So when considering turnaround efforts we should stop repeating, “The actual proves the possible” and bear in mind a different Kant adage: “Ought implies can.”

If we are going to tell states and districts that they must fix all of their failing schools, or if we are to consider it a moral obligation to radically improve such schools, we should be certain that this endeavor is possible. But there is no reason to believe it is.

Turnarounds Elsewhere

Education leaders seem to believe that, outside of the world of schools, persistent failures are easily fixed. Far from it. The limited success of turnarounds is a common theme in other fields. Writing in Public Money & Management, researchers familiar with the true private-sector track record offered a word of caution: “There is a risk that politicians, government officials, and others, newly enamored of the language of failure and turnaround and inadequately informed of the empirical evidence and practical experience in the for-profit sector…will have unrealistic expectations of the transformative power of the turnaround process.”

Hess and Gift reviewed the success rates of Total Quality Management (TQM) and Business Process Reengineering (BPR), the two most common approaches to organizational reform in the private sector. The literature suggests that both have failed to generate the desired results two-thirds of the time or more. They concluded, “The hope that we can systematically turn around all troubled schools—or even a majority of them—is at odds with much of what we know from similar efforts in the private sector.”

Many have noted that flexibility and dynamism are part of the genetic code of private business, so we should expect these organizations to be more receptive to the massive changes required by a turnaround process than institutions set in what Hess calls the “political, regulatory, and contractual morass of K–12 schooling.” Accordingly, school turnarounds should be more difficult to achieve. Indeed, a consultant with the Bridgespan Group reported, “Turnarounds in the public education space are far harder than any turnaround I’ve ever seen in the for-profit space.”

Building a Healthy Education Industry

We shouldn’t be surprised then that turnarounds in urban education have largely failed. The surprise and shame is that urban public education, unlike nearly every other industry, profession, and field, has never developed a sensible solution to its continuous failures. After undergoing improvement efforts, a struggling private firm that continues to lose money will close, get taken over, or go bankrupt. Unfit elected officials are voted out of office. The worst lawyers can be disbarred, and the most negligent doctors can lose their licenses. Urban school districts, at long last, need an equivalent.

The beginning of the solution is establishing a clear process for closing schools. The simplest and best way to put this into operation is the charter model. Each school, in conjunction with the state or district, would develop a five-year contract with performance measures. Consistent failure to meet goals in key areas would result in closure. Alternatively, the state could decide that districts only have one option—not five—for schools reaching NCLB-mandated restructuring: closure.

This would have three benefits. First, children would no longer be subjected to schools with long track records of failure and high probabilities of continued failure.

Second, the fear of closure might generate improvement in some low-performing schools. Failure in public education has had fewer consequences (for adults) than in other fields, a fact that might contribute to the persistent struggles of some schools. We should have limited expectations in this regard, however. Even in the private sector, where the consequences for poor performance are significant, some low-performing entities never become successful.

Third, and by far the most important and least appreciated factor, closures make room for replacements, which have a transformative positive impact on the health of a field. When a firm folds due to poor performance, the slack is taken up by the expansion of successful existing firms—meaning that those excelling have the opportunity to do more—or by new firms. New entrants not only fill gaps, they have a tendency to better reflect current market conditions. They are also far likelier to introduce innovations: Google, Facebook, and Twitter were not products of long-standing firms. Certainly not all new starts will excel, not in education, not in any field. But when provided the right characteristics and environment, their potential is vast.

The churn caused by closures isn’t something to be feared; on the contrary, it’s a familiar prerequisite for industry health. Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan’s brilliant 2001 book Creative Destruction catalogued the ubiquity of turnover in thriving industries, including the eventual loss of once-dominant players. Churn generates new ideas, ensures responsiveness, facilitates needed change, and empowers the best to do more.

These principles can be translated easily into urban public education via tools already at our fingertips thanks to chartering: start-ups, replications, and expansions. Chartering has enabled new school starts for nearly 20 years and school replications and expansions for a decade. Chartering has demonstrated clearly that the ingredients of healthy, orderly churn can be brought to bear on public education.

A small number of progressive leaders of major urban school systems are using school closure and replacement to transform their long-broken districts: Under Chancellor Joel Klein, New York City has closed nearly 100 traditional public schools and opened more than 300 new schools. In 2004, Chicago announced the Renaissance 2010 project, which is built around closing chronically failing schools and opening 100 new public schools by the end of the decade.

Numerous other big-city districts are in the process of closing troubled schools, including Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. In Baltimore, under schools CEO Andrés Alonso, reform’s guiding principles include “Closing schools that don’t work for our kids,” “Creating new options that have strong chances of success,” and “Expanding some programs that are already proving effective.”

Equally encouraging, there are indications that these ideas, which once would have been considered heretical, are being embraced by education’s cognoscenti. A group of leading reformers, the Coalition for Student Achievement, published a document in April 2009 that offered ideas for the best use of the federal government’s $100 billion in stimulus funding. They recommended that each state develop a mechanism to “close its lowest performing five percent of schools and replace them with higher-performing, new schools including public charter schools.”

A generation ago, few would have believed that such a fundamental overhaul of urban districts was on the horizon, much less that perennial underperformers New York City, Chicago, and Baltimore would be at the front of the pack with much of the education establishment and reform community in tow. But, consciously or not, these cities have begun internalizing the lessons of healthy industries and the chartering mechanism, which, if vigorously applied to urban schooling, have extraordinary potential. Best of all, these districts and outstanding charter leaders like KIPP Houston (with 15 schools already and dozens more planned) and Green Dot (which opened 5 new schools surrounding one of Los Angeles’s worst high schools) are showing that the formula boils down to four simple but eminently sensible steps: close failing schools, open new schools, replicate great schools, repeat.

Today’s fixation with fix-it efforts is misguided. Turnarounds have consistently shown themselves to be ineffective—truly an unscalable strategy for improving urban districts—and our relentless preoccupation with improving the worst schools actually inhibits the development of a healthy urban public-education industry.

Those hesitant about replacing turnarounds with closures should simply remember that a failed business doesn’t indict capitalism and an unseated incumbent doesn’t indict democracy. Though temporarily painful, both are essential mechanisms for maintaining long-term systemwide quality, responsiveness, and innovation. Closing America’s worst urban schools doesn’t indict public education nor does it suggest a lack of commitment to disadvantaged students. On the contrary, it reflects our insistence on finally taking the steps necessary to build city school systems that work for the boys and girls most in need.

Andy Smarick is a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Michelle Rhee’s senior staff meeting has all the ceremony of lunchtime in the teachers’ lounge. News is exchanged. Ideas tumble around. Rhee sits at the head of the table but doesn’t run the meeting or even take the conversational lead. Staffers talk over her as often as she talks over them. If consensus is the goal, the ball is far upfield.

But then, Rhee wades in with, “Here’s what I think,” or “What I don’t want,” or “This is crap,” or “I want someone to figure this out,” or “I’m gonna tell you what we’re gonna do; we can talk about how we’re gonna do it.” And that is that. Next order of business, please.

Rhee’s style—as steely as the sound of her peekaboo high heels on a linoleum-tile hallway—has angered much of Washington, D.C., and baffled the rest since she arrived as schools chancellor in June 2007. But it is also helping her gain control of a school system that has defied management for decades: that hasn’t kept records, patched windows, met budgets, delivered books, returned phone calls, followed court orders, checked teachers’ credentials, or, for years on end, opened school on schedule in the fall.

When I asked Rhee to name her most significant achievement in her two years in Washington, her answer suggested that any progress is, so far, only incremental. “We have begun—begun—begun—to establish a culture of accountability,” she said, with a long pause between each “begun.” A teacher had recently e-mailed her about a personnel matter, she went on, and was thrilled that Rhee had replied. “It’s sorta sad because the expectations are so low. The fact that you just get a response is celebrated,” she said.

Rhee tells parents and taxpayers that they should judge her on “student performance.” Are test scores rising? Are students graduating? So far, there’s some evidence that they are, although some teachers and parents say that even that evidence is suspect.

But not much learning gets done without institutional support, and for decades in Washington, not much has. When I asked Kenneth Wong, director of Brown University’s urban-education policy program, on what measures Rhee should be judged, he answered with a long list. It included how well the schools work with other city agencies (to get sidewalks plowed in the winter, for example), how many and which colleges new teachers come from (the wider the net, the better), how quickly managers return phone calls, and whether teacher absenteeism is down. Only at the end of the list did he get to student performance. “The other stuff are the necessary conditions to get to student achievement,” he said.

That’s not particularly glamorous for a national media darling who has been celebrated on magazine covers, on Capitol Hill, and by the president, but it is a start.

Rhee tells parents and taxpayers to judge her on “student performance.”

Rock Bottom?

It’s not news that Washington’s schools are among the most woeful in the country, but even a cynic has to gasp. The mismanagement is legendary: consider the 5 million personnel records Rhee says she found piled on a storeroom floor when she took office. Marc Borbely, a former teacher, filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2004 to find out how many work orders were outstanding at the central maintenance office. The answer: 25,000.

Teachers complained of out-of-control students: The city’s Ballou High School was closed for a 35-day cleanup after students stole chemistry-lab thermometers and scattered the mercury around hallways. In most school districts, mercury thermometers had been replaced years earlier.

The system churned through six superintendents in 10 years, usually after brutal head butting with the city council and community activists. That made Washington the La Brea Tar Pits of strategic plans: Each one sank into oblivion as its drafters moved on. The school funding formula changed four times under as many superintendents.

Academic measures were miserable. The 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), administered before Rhee’s arrival but announced five months after her term began, found that 61 percent of the city’s 4th graders had below-basic reading skills, which means they could barely read. Just 8 percent of its 8th graders were proficient—that is, at grade level—or above in math.

Scores on the district’s own tests for the 2006–07 school year, the last before Rhee’s arrival, were higher but still dismal. Just 38 percent of elementary-school children were at grade level or above in reading, and 27 percent of high schoolers were at grade level or above in math. Districtwide, fewer than 30 percent of African American students were reading at grade level, compared to 87 percent of whites, a 57-percentage-point gap.

Rhee arrived to find that all 10 of Washington’s comprehensive high schools had failed to meet federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) adequate yearly progress goals and that 48 of its 67 elementary schools were in some level of NCLB-mandated corrective action. The high-school dropout rate hovered at about 50 percent, and just 9 percent of entering 9th graders ever graduated from college.

On the SAT—a test presumably only the most ambitious students take—43 percent of district students who took the exam in 2009 scored 390 or below on the 800-point math test, which awards 200 points just for showing up. African Americans citywide averaged 773 on the 1600-point reading and math tests combined, or about 400 points less than they’d need for admission to the nearby University of Maryland.

Community pressure to “do something” about the schools’ performance had never materialized, though. Political leaders had seen no upside to taking on a school system that employs thousands of African Americans in a city where African Americans account for a majority of the population, the voter rolls, the city council, local-government posts, and union leadership. And in the weary way that people get used to dysfunction, no one else complained. Rhee says she marvels that her decision to shut down 23 failing schools in her first year drew howls of protest, while keeping failing schools open doesn’t excite anyone.

The Money Question

Washington’s business community has fussed for years about the schools because they turn out so few employable graduates and at a huge cost. The Chamber of Commerce says that only one in four jobs in the city is held by a D.C. resident now, and that 44 percent of Washingtonians don’t have even a high-school diploma.

Education expenditures can swing wildly depending on how students are counted and what spending is included in the calculation. But the U.S. Census Bureau, in a survey of education finances released in July 2009, says Washington spent $14,324 per public-school student in the 2006–07 school year, or about $6,300 more than the national average. The only states to spend more were New Jersey and New York, which have vastly larger corporate tax bases and far more upper-income taxpayers. The U.S. Department of Education reports that the federal government pays 12 percent of Washington’s education budget, a percentage largely determined by the city’s high poverty rate. That puts it well below Louisiana and Mississippi, but well above the 9 percent national average for federal support.

A simpler way of looking at it: Washington has budgeted $760 million for its traditional public schools in the fiscal year beginning October 2010. Using Rhee’s enrollment estimate of 45,000, that works out to $16,800 per student. Using the city council’s estimate of 41,500 students, it’s $18,300.

As costs have risen, enrollment has plummeted (see Figure 1). Affluent or activist parents enroll their youngsters in three or four largely autonomous elementary schools in white neighborhoods, or move to private schools, charter schools, or the suburbs. Between 2004 and 2008, Washington’s traditional public schools lost 13,500 students, while its charters gained 10,200.

What may be Washington’s last hope of stopping the slide from dismal to disastrous rests on the reform course chosen by its mayor, Adrian Fenty, an African American Democrat who has staked his political career and considerable ego on his pledge to improve the schools. After his January 2007 inauguration, Fenty courted and then summoned Rhee to Washington through her mentor, New York schools chancellor Joel Klein, even though Rhee says she initially “was not blown away” by the mayor or the job. Fenty quickly pushed through legislation that abolished the disputatious school board, won Rhee the authority to fire hundreds of central-office workers, and “has not flinched once through any of this, never,” she says.

Rhee’s Roots

Rhee speaks often about her Teach For America (TFA) tour in a Baltimore classroom between 1992 and 1995: how she struggled the first year until pairing with another teacher to team-teach a class of 2nd and 3rd graders. But Rhee’s experience a few years later with The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a better window on how she’s doing her job in Washington.

Political leaders have seen no upside to taking on a school system that employs thousands of African Americans in a city where they are a majority.

As Ariela Rozman, TNTP’s current CEO, tells it, superintendents had begun asking TFA founder Wendy Kopp for help attracting and training teachers like those Kopp was sending them. Rhee was finishing a graduate program at Harvard and had never had a management role at TFA, but Kopp tapped Rhee to head the teacher project as a spin-off in 1997. “The idea came from TFA clients, but Michelle brought the vision,” Rozman told me.

Rhee was a no-nonsense manager. She was so determined to fund The New Teacher Project out of the revenues it was generating through its training contracts with schools that she sorely underpaid her staff. For years, she resisted pressure even from Kopp to take foundation funding, said Kati Haycock, who is chair of the project’s board and president of the Education Trust. Even so, the project attracted a talented staff with high morale, little turnover, and fierce loyalty to Rhee. Richard Nyankori, who moved with Rhee to Washington from TNTP and now heads special education for the district, says Rhee teases him that he would throw himself under a bus for her, “and she’s right. I probably would.”

Rhee’s greatest success at The New Teacher Project may be how she left it. Start-ups frequently struggle when a strong-willed manager leaves: Staffers move on, backers temporize, and contracts slow as the new leader finds her footing. But Ariela Rozman says The New Teacher Project has grown since Rhee left, from 140 people and a $20 million budget to this year’s staff of 210 and budget of $32 million.

Kaya Henderson, who also moved to Washington with Rhee as her deputy chancellor, says The New Teacher Project’s management style moved with them. Policy differences are hashed out at the weekly senior staff meetings and at biweekly meetings of a strategy committee, which considers major initiatives. “We’re not going to leave the meeting until one group has convinced the other group. We all have to be good with the decision,” Henderson told me. Still, “part of being a good leader is knowing when to say ‘this is a good thing to do,’” a prerogative Rhee doesn’t shy from, Henderson added.

Rhee has pledged to stay to the end of a second Fenty term—January 2015, if he is reelected—and Henderson says “the rest of us are probably in it for the same.”

Bumpy Ride

Six weeks into the job, Rhee called her staff together with the message that “We are not here to do the bureaucracy better,” Nyankori says. Rhee told them that “that’s what all of our friends are doing in reform all around the country: They’re trying to make the trains stay on the track and go faster. We are here to derail those trains.”

If upheaval was the goal, Rhee has succeeded. Teachers say she has set black teachers against whites and young teachers against veterans with her controversial 2008 contract offer. Congressional Democrats worry that she has put them between a policy goal, school improvement, and their teachers-union allies. Education reformers are nervous that her outta-my-way approach will wound their movement if it backfires.

Almost everyone has a Rhee story. As when the chancellor closed those 23 schools and scheduled a community meeting at each one but on the same evening, so she couldn’t attend most of them. Or suggested the elected city council was irrelevant and resisted its invitations to testify. Or arrived for a meeting with the Chamber of Commerce board with—surprise!—a television news crew in tow. Chamber president Barbara Lang says Rhee never thanked the chamber for testifying in favor of Mayor Fenty’s takeover of the schools, legislation that will be pivotal to Rhee’s success.

Businesses, foundations, and civic groups that funded and ran after-school and enrichment programs were similarly dismissed. A Chamber of Commerce project that taught jobs skills to high schoolers was dropped. The World Bank had outfitted and staffed college-prep resource centers at some of the city’s toughest high schools. When Rhee put the outside groups on hold, the bank diverted its $1 million a year in youth programming to local nonprofits.

Parent groups that used to be solicited—even begged—to help make decisions about dress codes, building budgets and staffing, renovations and construction, and principal selection now find themselves shut out. “Parents feel pushed aside,” says Cathy Reilly, who started a parents’ group to exchange news about their kids’ high schools.

Rhee urges parents to e-mail her with questions, and she answers late into the night (she says she answered 99,000 e-mails her first year). But at the public meetings I attended last spring, Rhee sat alone at the front of the room, talked over parents, moved about with an ever-present photographer, and left immediately afterward in a chauffeured Chevy Tahoe.

Rhee and her loyalists say with jaw-dropping insouciance that none of that matters because, as she told me, she’s “doing what’s right for kids.”

“The conventional rules and the people who play by them don’t get much change,” says the Education Trust’s Haycock. “Hordes” of people come to their table when she and Rhee dine out together, Haycock adds, and “I have never heard anyone say anything except ‘keep on keeping on.’”

Rhee and her senior staff believe that the ed-reform stars are aligned as they never have been in Washington, and that they have the brains, focus, and work ethic to leap at the opportunity. In all of that, they’re probably right.

Rhee visits with first grader Sasha Simpson.

The Front Line

Rhee and her top aides don’t talk much about curriculum change; their focus is people. “Strong principals, strong teachers—that’s what turns schools around,” says Nyankori. “That’s why we feel so strongly about this union contract.”

The Washington Teachers Union and its parent American Federation of Teachers (AFT) feel just as strongly, of course, about a contract that undercuts such union cornerstones as tenure, seniority, and worker solidarity, and that would set a national precedent. Rhee’s proposal to pay six-figure salaries to teachers who agreed to link their paychecks to classroom outcomes: that’s the “green” option. Teachers who choose the “red” option (green, go; red, stop—get it?) would collect far-smaller pay increases, but would retain job security.

Rhee didn’t say how she would pay for the salary boosts, although she implied that foundations would pick up much of the tab. Meanwhile, foundation endowments have plunged and local tax revenues have shrunk since Rhee offered the plan in summer 2008.

AFT president Randi Weingarten, who has largely taken over the negotiations from the local union, insists that the teachers and Rhee “share the same goals, the issue in contract negotiations is how to get there.” She proposes rewarding teachers equally with school-based bonuses, a nonstarter with Rhee, who is zealous about getting rid of those she calls “bad teachers.” Stakes are so high for both sides that they appear to be working on a compromise that gives Rhee some, but by no means all of the staffing and firing flexibility she is after.

Still, Rhee has some tools that other school heads don’t have. Congress gave her the power to impose a teacher-evaluation system without negotiating its terms with the union. The new evaluations, set to begin in the 2009–10 school year, will include student test scores and five classroom observations of each teacher each year. Henderson, the deputy chancellor, has let the union know that the district will likely begin observing teachers by video, too.

And then there are some test-score gains, which Rhee is counting on to build public support for her plans and ease the doubts about her style. Two years after Rhee’s arrival, scores on district-administered tests are up: 49 percent of elementary school students were reading at grade level, a 21-percentage-point jump in two years, according to test results released in July 2009. Among secondary-school students, 40 percent were at grade level in math, up 13 points. Rising proficiency levels should win Rhee new clout in the city’s political circles, new respect among parents and civil groups, and more leverage to turn the troubled system around.

Rising proficiency levels should win Rhee new clout in the city’s political circles.

Taking Stock

Rhee’s other successes aren’t exactly the stuff of headlines. Erich Martel, who has taught social studies in the D.C. schools for 40 years, says teachers are doing more lesson prep and trying to make their classes more interesting. “There are teachers who need someone looking over their shoulder and they’re getting it,” he says.

Long-neglected school buildings are being renovated or rebuilt, which could make them more competitive with some better-housed charters. Spending on professional development has quadrupled. There are art and music classes in every school, the district says.

Rhee’s most important achievement might be in the management fixes most people can’t see. High-school transcripts, which the schools used to hold on to and sometimes alter to boost graduation rates, are being centralized and scrubbed (the audit found that one-third of students weren’t taking the classes they need to graduate). Nyankori says he has lured back 155 of the district’s 2,400 special-ed youngsters who are in private schools, at a yearly cost of $141 million, with more programs and better case management, and has set a target return date for each of the others. Quarterly diagnostic tests have been aligned with year-end assessments: Unbelievably, the two were designed by different consultants, and didn’t predict or reflect the outcome of the other.

That isn’t to say that Rhee is anywhere near achieving her often-stated goal of making Washington the best urban district in the country. Even she attributes much of the test-score gains in her two years to the district’s ability to pick what she calls “low-hanging fruit.” Saturday test-prep classes have helped borderline kids pass their year-end tests, even while thousands of other children remain far behind because of weak basic skills. Accounting changes helped boost results, too: Children who were absent on test day now are counted as no-shows; before, they were counted among those with failing scores.

The graduation rate—as opposed to the drop-out rate, which is calculated differently—was up a few percentage points in 2009 to 70 percent, the district says. But some teachers and parents attribute that to a new “credit recovery” program that lets failing students retake courses after school. Martel, the long-time social studies teacher, says credit-recovery classes ran 82 hours per quarter at his school compared to 125 hours for classes held during the school day, and that teachers were told not to give homework.

Despite the celebrity surrounding Rhee and Fenty, the traditional public schools are still bleeding students, which is perhaps the ultimate, market-driven judgment. Washington’s State Office of Education—yes, this nonstate has a state office—says enrollment in the traditional schools dropped to 45,200 in the 2008 school year from 49,500 just the year before. Charters grew to 25,700 from 22,000. Charter enrollment is even more impressive if you look at the fine print: In 2008, charters enrolled 48 percent of public-school 6th graders, up from 36 percent a year earlier.

Michael Herreld, who is president of PNC Bank’s Washington region and sits on several local school-reform committees, worries about what he calls the “disintegration” of the city’s traditional public schools if Rhee can’t stop the enrollment decline. Any urgency to fix things would wane, and so would the schools’ claim on public revenue. That would have practical consequences: Washington doesn’t have school buses, for example. If more schools are closed, youngsters could be miles from the nearest kindergarten and its free breakfast and lunch programs.

The only way to stop the attrition is to “grow good neighborhood schools,” says Nyankori. Rhee illustrated the obstacles to that when a woman asked her about her plans for math and science education during a meeting in the spring of 2009 in the city’s northwest quadrant, where most adults have at least one degree and, often, two or three. Rhee said she had ordered more computers to support math and science programs, but learned when they arrived that most schools didn’t have three-pronged electrical outlets for the computers’ three-pronged plugs. “This is the level where we are…subzero,” she said, as the audience stifled a collective eye roll.

High Stakes

Rhee seems irked that policymakers see Washington as the laboratory of the education-reform agenda. “That is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said, at the same spring meeting at which she bemoaned the lack of proper sockets. What matters is Washington’s kids, not a national agenda, she insisted.

In fact, both are at stake. Washington is a natural petri dish, whether Rhee disdains the idea or not. It’s small and deeply troubled, is a foundation darling, has creative new leadership, and is pursuing the popular academic ideas of the day. Its big charter sector almost begs researchers to compare the two systems, and it sits in the spotlight of the U.S. Capitol.

I asked Rhee to name her biggest mistake in two years and she offered this: She could have done a “better job of communicating with teachers” when she presented her contract proposal and averted some of the antagonism that dogs her relationship with them. Since then, she has met with teachers a few times a week, she said, and finds the exchanges “incredibly heartening.” There are other tiny signs that Rhee may be trying to calm the waters she has roiled. With contract talks going nowhere in the spring of 2009, she wrote a Washington Post op-ed in which she insisted that “[t]hose who categorically blame teachers for the failures of our system are simply wrong.”

Around the same time, at a banquet at the Federal City Council, a premier business and civic group, Rhee thanked a consulting group for undertaking, pro bono, the school-records audit. “It was the first time I’ve heard her thank anyone for anything,” said the head of a major nonprofit. Her staff now concedes that a Time magazine cover of Rhee—standing grim-faced in an empty classroom, holding a broom—was a mistake.

That may be about it. I asked The New Teacher Project’s Ariela Rozman if Rhee ever called to cry on her shoulder. “Michelle doesn’t cry,” Rozman said. That’s probably a good thing.

June Kronholz is a former foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and Washington-based education reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Determining the extent of program fraud and error is important, as the entitlement is associated with other streams of federal, state, and local taxpayer dollars. Eligibility data are widely used as proxies for poverty rates, thereby influencing funding for myriad government programs and informing both school district policies and policy research. For example, NSLP participation rates serve as the main criteria for the allocation of federal Title I funds to schools. Those schools with a higher percentage of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch also receive a larger discount on the federal government’s E-Rate program, which facilitates access to telecommunications services for schools and libraries.

State governments dole out benefits according to free and reduced-price lunch percentages, too. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, for instance, allocates $2,250 to schools for each low-income child enrolled in kindergarten through 3rd grade. The program gauges poverty using NSLP participation.

Because of the financial benefits, local school districts have a clear incentive to register as many students in NSLP as possible. Some districts encourage parents to fill out applications, even if they are not sure they qualify. One district in Chillicothe, Missouri, offered parents a $10 Wal-Mart gift card for turning in an application. “Even if you choose to pay for your child’s lunches and or breakfasts, each qualified application earns $1,025 per child of state money for our school district,” said Assistant Superintendent Wade Schroeder.

School districts often use free and reduced-price lunch percentages for student assignment and resource allocation as well. North Carolina’s largest school district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, gives schools 30 percent more funds for every student enrolled in the entitlement. Wake County Public School System, in central North Carolina, employs a costly busing strategy to foster socioeconomic diversity in the classroom, measured in part by NSLP participation. These districts and others could be basing policy on faulty numbers if the lunch program data are not a valid indicator of socioeconomic status.

In addition, the federal government’s evaluation programs routinely employ school lunch subsidies as a poverty indicator. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), commonly known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” uses the scores of students eligible for the lunch program to track the performance of states in educating low-income children over time. No Child Left Behind requires that schools meet performance benchmarks for program-eligible students in order to make adequate yearly progress. Academic researchers also make use of NSLP participation data, raising the question of whether researchers could be producing skewed results if program participation is not a reliable indicator of income.

How It Works

Parents who apply for school lunch benefits, or for the smaller school breakfast program, report their yearly income on the application. Children living in households at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level ($27,560 per year for a family of four) qualify for free meals at school; those in households between 131 percent and 185 percent (up to $39,220 per year for a family of four) qualify for reduced-price meals. Children can also qualify automatically based on residential status in areas of concentrated poverty or participation in other means-tested government programs, including food stamps and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). The USDA reimburses districts for each free or discounted meal served.

No proof of income, such as a pay stub or W-2 form, is required when parents apply. That’s in contrast to other federal nutrition entitlements, including the food stamp program, now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Normally, SNAP applicants must “file an application form, have a face-to-face interview, and provide proof (verification) of certain information, such as income and expenses.” Assuming a 180-day school year, students eligible for free lunch receive on average $462.60 per year in benefits, compared with an average of $1,152 per year in benefits for individuals receiving food stamps.

Each NSLP application contains a certification statement that parents or guardians are required to sign in which they promise that their reported income level is accurate. The statement warns that adults “may be prosecuted” if they “purposefully give false information,” but the threat doesn’t have teeth, as few, if any, applicants have been held accountable for cheating. It isn’t even clear which level of government—federal, state, or local—would be responsible for prosecuting fraud.

The only verification mechanism in place for the NSLP is outlined in the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act, as most recently amended by Congress in 2004. The act requires school districts to try each year to verify the incomes of 3 percent (or 3,000, whichever is less) of participants considered “error prone,” meaning households whose reported earnings are within $100 monthly or $1,200 yearly of the income eligibility limitation. School districts can also qualify for an alternate sample size of 1 percent if they meet certain requirements.

To verify eligibility, school officials request proof of income by mail from parents to justify the amount initially put on the application. If applicants fail to respond, it raises the possibility that they may not in fact be eligible, and officials terminate their benefits. If applicants respond with evidence that shows too high an income, officials reduce or terminate their benefits accordingly. In some cases, officials raise benefits if initial reports of income are too high.

Fraud or Error?

Verification summaries obtained from 10 of the nation’s largest school districts show a high proportion of those asked to provide proof of income could not or would not comply. The data are prompting some school officials to question the way the program is administered.

Of the 10 districts, all but 1 had a rate of reduced or repealed benefits above 70 percent for those in the verification sample for the 2007–08 school year (see sidebar). Most of those benefit reductions and repeals were due to participants’ failure to respond to the mailing, which automatically revoked their benefits. The average nonresponse rate among the 10 districts was 58 percent. Significantly, an average of only 1.5 percent of those who did respond had their benefits increased, suggesting that parents were more likely to understate than overstate their income on the forms.

Smaller school districts show a similarly high rate of reduced or repealed benefits. Wake County Public Schools had a nonresponse rate of 36 percent and a total reduced or repealed rate of 64 percent for its verification sample in 2007–08. Charlotte-Mecklenburg had a nonresponse rate of 31 percent and a reduced or repealed rate of 68 percent for the same school year.

Child nutrition officials say even the high percentages of reduced or revoked benefits do not suggest widespread fraud because the state samples are made up of “error-prone” applicants and are not random. They argue that disparities on the applications of those who do respond to the verification request are mostly due to honest mistakes, such as rounding errors or inserting weekly rather than monthly income, which could put applicants under the income threshold unintentionally.

Marilyn Moody, senior director of child nutrition services for the Wake County schools, pointed to intimidation as one reason her district’s nonresponse rate was so high. “Some people fail to respond because when we send a federal form that says you must send us proof of income, it’s intimidating,” she said. “They may not be educated to the point of realizing the significance of that.”

But others see a deliberate attempt to cheat the system. “I don’t think there is any doubt in anyone’s mind, even though we’re pussyfooting around, that there are thousands of students here that probably are not entitled to this government benefit,” said Larry Gauvreau, school board member in Charlotte-Mecklenburg.

“They know at the district and school level that it generates funding for a lot of other programs,” said Lisa Snell, director of education and child welfare at the Reason Foundation, a libertarian think tank. “It may not be intentional to be fraudulent in the program, but it is an unintended consequence of the program.”

Other research has found evidence of potential fraud in the NSLP. A study by Mathematica Policy Research published in February 2009 found that 15 percent of students enrolled in the breakfast and lunch programs receive more benefits than they are eligible for and 7.5 percent receive less. The most common source of error was parents or guardians misreporting income on applications. Mathematica estimated the total cost for the errors at around $1 billion annually.

The authors of the Mathematica study used a multistage-clustered sample design, selecting 7,800 applicants and students directly certified in 87 school districts across the country. The report stopped short of advocating an overhaul, instead suggesting that policymakers find a way to get more accurate income data from households. The authors did not offer specific recommendations on how to accomplish that goal.

Another study, commissioned by the USDA and published by Mathematica in 2005, argued that requiring applicants to submit proof of income would hurt needy children. The study compared districts pilot testing an approach that required families to document their income on the initial applications to a comparison group of districts using the current system. Study authors Philip Gleason and John Burghardt found that the same proportion of ineligible children were certified in both sets of districts but that in districts requiring up-front documentation, “the process reduced eligible students’ access to free and reduced-price meals.”

Food Fight

School board members in Charlotte-Mecklenburg upset the school-lunch apple cart last year by requesting more thorough verification of student eligibility for the lunch program, which, as noted above, partly determines the funding each school receives from the district. The move touched off a heated debate and led to weeks of uncertainty as school attorneys tried to obtain a written order from the USDA on the permissibility of a comprehensive audit. The controversy also aggravated old tensions over integration and racial busing, two sore spots in the district.

Like many cities in the South, Charlotte has a contentious history on the issue of school segregation. After the Warren Court in 1954 declared the separate but equal doctrine unconstitutional, the city adopted a neighborhood school policy that had the effect of sending most black students to inner-city schools and most white students to suburban schools in wealthier parts of the district. The U.S. Supreme Court attempted to remedy the situation in 1971 in its Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education ruling. The decision paved the way for school districts to adopt busing strategies aimed at creating greater diversity in the classroom.

In 1997, a white parent challenged the busing policy in court after a magnet school denied his daughter admission because of her race. Two years later, a federal judge ruled that the district’s 30-year busing policy had fulfilled its purpose of racial integration and was no longer necessary. The ruling stood after an appellate court upheld the decision and the Supreme Court declined to weigh an appeal.

Today, Charlotte-Mecklenburg has  a community-based assignment policy, but the issue remains divisive. And questions of cheating among free lunch recipients, the majority of whom are minorities, have poured more salt into the wound.

In August 2008, Ken Gjertsen became the first Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board member to raise questions about the program after learning of the potential fraud rate. The issue remained on the school board’s agenda for two months, as members went back and forth about the merits of a comprehensive audit. “Poor people don’t know how to steal from the federal government. They’re not smart enough,” said school board member Vilma Leake. She characterized a comprehensive audit as a “witch hunt” aimed at poor families.

Others claimed the school board had a responsibility to weed out cheating. “There are thousands of people who shouldn’t be in that program. We know that. Everybody up here knows that,” said Gauvreau, who twice proposed a motion, voted down both times, that would have directed the district superintendent to verify a larger percentage of applications.

Efforts to authorize an audit came crashing down in September when the USDA threatened to cut off the district’s $34 million lunch-program subsidy for the 2007–08 school year if it proceeded with a full verification. School-district attorneys subsequently received a written order from the USDA saying that an audit beyond the mandated 3 percent would be illegal under federal law.

The National School Lunch Act does not specifically address the legality of a school district going beyond the 3,000 or 3 percent benchmark. The USDA, however, interprets the law to disallow a comprehensive verification. The 2008 version of the “Eligibility Manual for School Meals,” published by the USDA, says that school districts “must not verify more than or less than the standard sample size … and must not verify all (100% of) applications” (emphasis in original).

The guidelines do provide one narrow window for school districts to cut down on fraud. Officials can pursue verification on a case-by-case basis if they see questionable content on an application, but it appears that districts rarely take advantage of this option. Charlotte-Mecklenburg conducted no verifications for cause during the 2006–07 and 2007–08 school years. Wake County verified 2 applicants for cause in 2007–08 and fewer than 10 in 2006–07. Due to the politically sensitive nature of the NSLP, it’s likely that school nutrition officials worry that verifying too many applicants would cause blowback.

To Verify or Not to Verify

With a recession hitting the family pocketbook hard, more parents are turning to free school lunches for relief. Rising food costs have put a strain on school districts, too, prompting President Obama to include $100 million in additional funding for the program in his economic stimulus bill, passed by Congress in February 2009. Obama has proposed another $1 billion for school nutrition programs in his 2010 budget.

Many government officials are quick to tout the benefits of the NSLP, arguing that some students would go hungry if the program did not exist. In a letter signed by a bipartisan group of 40 senators in January, Sen. Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat and chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, said that child nutrition programs “play a critical role in preventing hunger and promoting healthy diets among children from birth until the end of secondary school.”

The political climate in Washington makes it doubtful Congress will revise the verification structure of the NSLP in the near future. The entitlement has a long history of partisan strife and is generally recognized as a political hot potato. To make matters more complicated, the program is the product of a political alliance between agriculture Republicans and metropolitan-area liberals, which means that critics are few and far between. But the possibility of waste and fraud warrants a closer look from elected officials. Because the NSLP is the nation’s second-largest food entitlement, unqualified families could be costing taxpayers billions each year. The challenge is balancing program integrity with income verification policies that might have a chilling effect on eligible families. At the very least, Congress should establish clearer guidelines for school districts to investigate suspected fraud and explore alternative income-documentation methods that would provide greater reliability for program data. Given the amount of taxpayer dollars devoted to school lunch, and the range of policies and research based on the program, lawmakers can’t afford to do nothing.

David N. Bass is an investigative reporter and associate editor with the John Locke Foundation.

But we can only hope their similarities don’t extend to education policy. Patrick calls education his “singular pursuit.” Yet after winning election in a 2006 landslide fueled by strong support from the Bay State’s powerful teachers unions—including $3 million in contributions—he has pursued the systematic dismantling of reforms that have made Massachusetts the national leader in public education.

The Massachusetts Education Reform Act of 1993 dramatically increased school funding in return for high academic standards, accountability, and enhanced school choice. In the years following, the Commonwealth’s independent board of education, founded in 1837 with Horace Mann at the helm, implemented a set of reforms that have unquestionably been the nation’s most successful.

In 2005, Massachusetts became the first state ever to finish first in four categories of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP): 4th-grade reading and math and 8th-grade reading and math. The next time the test was administered, Bay State students did it again. Late last year, results from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) demonstrated that Massachusetts students are not only the best in the country, they are globally competitive as well. The Commonwealth’s 8th graders tied for first in the world in science and were sixth in math; 4th graders scored second in science and third in math.

Despite the clear success of more than a decade of education reform in Massachusetts, Governor Patrick’s administration has turned its back on the very forces behind that success: it is wavering on standards, choice is under continual fire, and the board of education has been stripped of the independence that for 170 years was Horace Mann’s legacy and had allowed the board to implement reform with a singular focus on improving student achievement.

In June 2008, Governor Patrick released the recommendations of his “Readiness Project,” an unwieldy 168-member, 13-subcommittee behemoth charged with developing a long-term “action agenda” for education. The plan calls for full-day kindergarten, universal pre-K, consolidation of school districts, and differentiated pay for teachers—all worthy goals. But the report maintains Patrick’s steadfast resistance to raising caps on charter schools. (Charter schools have the same effect on some of his supporters in the education establishment as Nancy Pelosi has on Rush Limbaugh.) Although the governor claimed during his campaign that he would open more charter schools once he “fixed” the formula by which they are funded, the Readiness Project is virtually silent on charters and their funding.

The Boston Globe, which enthusiastically endorsed the governor in both the Democratic primary and the general election, was not impressed. An editorial titled “Adrift in the edu-sphere” noted, “It’s nice to explore the educational cosmos. But taxpayers can’t be expected to pay for such a trip…when the likely cost of implementing Patrick’s full-blown plans could exceed $2 billion per year.”

Yet another commission, this one tasked with determining how to pay for Patrick’s action agenda, was appointed in June 2008. By the time its report was released, in the midst of a snowstorm on New Year’s Eve, the bottom had fallen out of the economy. Instead of identifying revenues to support new programs, the report focused mostly on cost-saving measures designed to preserve the current level of quality, although a majority of the commission’s 23 members did endorse raising the Commonwealth’s sales tax from 5 to 6 percent.

Success Story

All of this is particularly bizarre in light of the dramatic strides the state has made in improving its schools. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce published a state-by-state report card on educational effectiveness in 2007 that rated the Commonwealth’s public schools number one in the nation. The combination of funding, standards, accountability, and choice has brought real, measurable gains in student achievement (see Figure 1). A look at the condition of public education prior to reform shows just how far Massachusetts has come. During the 1980s, the Commonwealth’s verbal SAT scores were below the national average; math scores were below average as late as 1992. A funding system that was overly reliant on local property tax revenue created vast discrepancies from district to district in student achievement, class size, and the availability of resources like textbooks, libraries, and technology.

Since 1993 the Commonwealth has pumped more than $40 billion in new state money into public education, matched by $40 billion-plus in new local funding. Each district’s foundation budget, the minimum expenditure needed to provide an adequate education, is determined by formula, along with the amount each city and town can afford to contribute. The Commonwealth fills in the gap between the local contribution and the foundation budget. The result is a funding formula in which the vast majority of state education aid goes to the poorer school districts, making Massachusetts one of the national leaders in this respect as well (see Figure 2).

To ensure high academic standards and school-level accountability, state curriculum frameworks provide a subject-by-subject outline of the material that should form the basis of local curricula. To ensure implementation of the frameworks, students are tested each spring. Since 2003, passing the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) tests (based on the liberal arts-rich content of the frameworks) has been a high school graduation requirement. High-stakes testing also extends to new teachers, who must pass tests that measure communication and literacy skills as well as subject-area knowledge.

The state’s NAEP scores shot up after the curriculum frameworks were completed and the MCAS test was first administered in 1998. By 2007, the average Massachusetts 4th grader was performing at a higher level in math than the average 6th grader had been in 1996. Achieve, Inc., a national education organization established by governors and business leaders, found in 2001 that Massachusetts was the only state among the 10 it examined that had both strong standards and strong assessments. A 2007 study by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education confirmed the tests’ validity, finding a strong correlation between MCAS results and college performance.

Noted educator and developer of the Core Knowledge curriculum E. D. Hirsch lauded the Massachusetts approach in a February 2008 op-ed in the Washington Post. “Consider the eighth grade NAEP results from Massachusetts, which are a stunning exception to the nationwide pattern of stagnation and decline,” he wrote. “That is because Massachusetts decided…students (and teachers) should learn explicit, substantive things about history, science and literature, and that students should be tested on such knowledge.”

Choice and Charters

In Massachusetts, public charter schools are the principal vehicle for offering educational choice, and the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation has described the Commonwealth’s charter-school approval process as the nation’s most rigorous. Today, roughly 25,000 students (about 2.6 percent of the total public school population) attend Massachusetts charter schools, and another 21,000 are on wait-lists. Admission to an oversubscribed school is by lottery. When a student chooses to transfer to a charter school, funding follows from the district to the charter school. Despite the fact that districts are reimbursed for three years after a student leaves (100 percent the first year, 60 percent the second, and 40 percent in the third) and despite the 2004 adoption of district-friendly changes to the charter-funding formula, the flow of money has made charter schools controversial.

That controversy has fueled a one-step-forward, two-steps-back treatment of charters over the years. Caps on the number of schools have been raised just twice and now stand at 72 for the original type (known as Commonwealth charter schools) and at 48 for Horace Mann charters (a unionized, in-district model sanctioned after Commonwealth charters were established). Other limitations have been placed on both types of charter schools. The statewide share of public school students who can attend charters is capped at 4 percent. In any year in which a new charter school is approved, at least three of the newly approved charters must be located in low-performing districts. The law limits to 9 percent the portion of district spending that can be transferred to charter schools. More than 150 communities, mostly in poorer areas with low-performing schools, are bumping up against that cap, which places a de facto moratorium on charters.

Charter school results have been strong. A 2006 Massachusetts Department of Education study found that 90 percent of charter schools performed as well as or better than the districts from which their students came and 30 percent outperformed sending districts by a substantial margin. Their success has been particularly striking in urban areas, where most charters are located. Several urban charter schools, like Community Day in Lawrence, and MATCH, Boston Prep, and Excel Academy in Boston, serve overwhelmingly low-income and minority populations, yet outscore even the best suburban schools on MCAS tests.

SABIS International Charter School in Springfield is among the schools that have had remarkable success in narrowing achievement gaps based on race and economic status, a clear priority for the next phase of education reform. By 10th grade, Hispanic and African American students, who together make up 60 percent of the school’s student body, outperform white students statewide on the MCAS English exam and are virtually even with statewide averages for white students in math. More than 2,500 students sit on the school’s waiting list. Every member of all seven graduating classes has been accepted to college.

A study conducted by a team of Harvard and MIT researchers and published in January by the Boston Foundation showed that Boston charter schools dramatically outperform both district and pilot schools (semi-autonomous district schools created in response to charters). It found that the academic impact from a year spent in a Boston charter is comparable to that of a year spent in one of the city’s elite exam schools and, in middle school math, equivalent to one-half of the achievement gap between black and white students (see Figure 3).

One might expect the governor would support schools that the state’s own analysis and others have found to be successful. Indeed, prior to release of the Readiness Project recommendations, Governor Patrick said, “Everything is on the table because our future is at stake.” Everything, it seems, except expanding the kind of educational choice that transformed the governor’s own life.

Patrick earned a scholarship from A Better Chance, an organization that provides educational opportunities to young people of color. The scholarship transported him from the South Side of Chicago to Milton Academy, an elite Massachusetts preparatory school, and put him on a trajectory that led to Harvard, a top position in the U.S. Department of Justice, the corporate world, and ultimately the governor’s office.

But the Readiness Project includes precious little that would give others the opportunity to choose their school. The Readiness Project proposes “readiness schools,” which would have some of the autonomy of charter schools and some of the features of pilot schools. Teachers in a district school could come together and vote to convert to a readiness school, or districts could initiate the conversion. As an inducement to adopt the newly proposed schools, S. Paul Reville, whom Patrick appointed first to chair the state board of education and then as secretary of education, floated the possibility of a freeze on charter schools in districts that embrace readiness schools. When the trial balloon became public, he quickly backpedaled in the face of a torrent of opposition.

The administration’s current position on the charter freeze is unclear. When questioned, Patrick said the charter school debate had reached “stalemate” and his plan includes new ways to achieve the same goals.

Dismantling Success

In 2000, the Commonwealth created the Office of Educational Quality and Accountability (EQA) as an independent state agency to measure the effectiveness of school-district managers at implementing reform. Beginning in 2002, EQA conducted comprehensive audits of more than 175 school districts. The audits scrutinized MCAS performance, district leadership, curriculum and instruction, teacher and student assessment and evaluation, and business and financial operations. All findings were made public.

Soon after taking office, Patrick moved to eliminate the EQA. Opponents particularly disliked the agency because it did its job so well—auditing school districts and reporting when they came up short. Two studies by Boston-based think tank Pioneer Institute analyzed agency data and found that low-performing urban districts in particular were not aligning curricula with state frameworks and not using MCAS data effectively to improve achievement by tailoring lessons to student weaknesses.

More than a year after the EQA was scuttled, the co-chairs of the state legislature’s Joint Committee on Education filed a bill, later enacted, creating a new Advisory Council on District Accountability and Assistance. The new agency amounts to the fox guarding the accountability henhouse, replacing the EQA’s independent 5-person board with a 13-member panel that includes representatives of the very people it’s supposed to audit: the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents; American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts; Massachusetts Teachers Association; Massachusetts Association of School Committees; Massachusetts Secondary School Administrators Association; and the Massachusetts Elementary School Principals Association.

The administration’s proposal to overhaul the Commonwealth’s education governance structure gained legislative approval in February 2008. An education commissioner who reported to the board of education, not the governor, had long directed primary and secondary public education in Massachusetts. The Patrick proposal resurrected the state secretary of education post, which had been created and abolished twice since the 1970s.

Reville, who then chaired the board of education, claimed Governor Patrick’s plan kept appropriate distance between politics and education policy. But when a far weaker education secretariat had been proposed in 2003, Reville testified before the legislature in opposition to the plan, saying, “No matter how well constituted, an education secretariat creates a competing center of power that vies with and against the state’s chief school officer, the Commissioner of Education and the state education agency.”

Governor Patrick himself contradicted Reville’s claim that the new proposal was more respectful of independent education policymaking. At its unveiling, the governor said his plan “will be different in that (the secretary) will have real authority.”

But the administration’s main target was the state board of education. In a move reminiscent of FDR’s court-packing plan, the overhaul added two seats to the board, opened up two more slots by removing the commissioner of early childhood education and the chancellor of higher education, made the new secretary a voting member, and truncated the terms of members least likely to agree with the administration.

Even more importantly, it stripped the renamed Board of Elementary and Secondary Education of its independence, placing it firmly under the governor’s control by giving the new secretary final say over budget requests and veto power over its selection of future commissioners of education. The board had just selected Mitchell Chester, an Ohio education official, to be the next commissioner. Chester beat out Karla Baehr, who was superintendent of schools in the city of Lowell, had gained some prominence among urban superintendents (see sidebar), and was widely seen as the choice of the education establishment and the governor. Baehr was later hired as a deputy commissioner.

The usually affable Patrick also used the unveiling of his governance proposal to send a message to those concerned about charter schools, saying they should “grow up.” Later, after release of the Boston Foundation study, Patrick called the debate about raising charter caps “a red herring because we’re not at the cap,” despite the fact that Boston is among the urban communities bumping up against the 9 percent of school district spending limitation, with only 111 charter seats remaining and about 7,000 students languishing on wait lists.

In February 2008, the board, still chaired by Reville (he assumed the new secretary of education post on July 1), became the first to reject a charter school recommended for approval by the commissioner of education. The focus of the board’s discussion about the proposed SABIS regional charter school in the city of Brockton was a 2005 state department of education (DOE) report that identified problems at the Springfield SABIS charter school. Days after the new school’s application was rejected, a 2006 DOE letter surfaced that said the Springfield school had successfully addressed all the major issues raised in the earlier report. Company officials who attended the board meeting were not allowed to respond to Reville’s criticisms.

A Boston Globe editorial noted that the “rejection raises thorny questions about just how hard the Patrick administration is willing to push to achieve equity in education.” Like SABIS’s successful Springfield charter school, the proposed school would have served troubled communities. The most current data available prior to the proposed school’s rejection showed that 20 of Brockton’s 23 schools failed to make adequate yearly progress (AYP) under federal law, and all 6 failed to make AYP in nearby Randolph, where the schools are in such bad shape the district was required to submit a plan to stave off state receivership. During the board’s debate over the proposed charter school, Patrick appointee and board PTA representative Ruth Kaplan commented that charter schools are too focused on sending students to college, saying “families…don’t always know what’s best for their children.”

During the spring of 2008, Reville charged a “21st Century Skills Task Force” with rewriting curricula and ensuring that Massachusetts students are prepared to succeed in a fast-changing economy. The task force’s report, published in November, proposes revamping MCAS and using the U.S. History test to try out project-based assessments that require students to demonstrate skills like “global awareness,” a change likely to crowd out topics like the Constitution or causes of the Civil War. It calls on the teachers unions, school committees, and superintendents that have fought education reform for 15 years to determine how to integrate 21st-century skills in our schools.

In a sad irony, the task force report claims that “Massachusetts can learn from the experience of West Virginia” on ways to incorporate the needed skills. West Virginia students score below the national average on the NAEP tests, and the state was among the seven that saw the largest declines in reading scores between 1998 and 2005.

A month after release of the task force report, former state senate president Thomas Birmingham, one of the architects of education reform, delivered an address in which said he was “discomforted” by the direction of the Readiness Project and that the 21st Century Skills Task Force “may threaten to…drive us back in the direction of vague expectations and fuzzy standards.”

Teacher testing has also come under fire. In April 2008, the state senate voted to allow some teachers to be licensed even if they failed the required exam three times. The administration announced that it was looking at alternative criteria for aspiring teachers, even though most of the tests are at a high-school level of difficulty. Reville told the Globe the test “isn’t necessarily the best venue for everyone to demonstrate their competency.”

The move to back away from teacher testing sparked another firestorm of opposition. In a Boston Globe op-ed, Charles Glenn, then dean ad interim of Boston University’s School of Education, wrote, “It would be a gross disservice for our public school children to be taught by teachers who do not meet the standards set by our current teacher tests.” Reville later said the administration didn’t support the senate vote after all.

With the pillars of reform under attack, Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, wrote in the Globe, “You have to wonder why Massachusetts seems intent on retreating from its own nationally recognized success. The backward slide is already evident.”

The Wrong Path

The Commonwealth’s 15-year track record of successful education reform gave Governor Patrick a clear path ahead on education policy. Instead of undoing the reforms of his predecessors, the governor could have built on the state’s success by carrying on the commitment to high standards, fine-tuning a successful accountability system, and maintaining the governance structure that had successfully insulated critical education policy decisions from special-interest pressure. He could extend to others the educational opportunity that transformed his own life by raising from 9 to 20 percent the cap on the amount of money that can be transferred from school districts to charter schools in districts whose MCAS scores are in the bottom 10 percent statewide.

So far, he has chosen instead to dismantle reform and replace the singular focus on student achievement that was the key to education reform’s success with a wish list that would likely cost taxpayers an additional $2 billion per year. With the new Board of Elementary and Secondary Education stripped of independence, there is no entity left that can operate outside the political arena with the sole mission of improving academic performance.

Results released in September 2008 showed a sharp drop in MCAS pass rates and flat or declining scores in the elementary and middle school grades and in many urban districts. While 15 years of progress will not be undone overnight, as the Patrick administration’s efforts to dismantle reform continue, such drops are likely to become the rule. It is the price we will pay for Massachusetts policymakers snatching defeat from the jaws of the Commonwealth’s historic education-reform victory.

As for President Obama, during the primaries he played to the teachers unions that are a critical Democratic Party constituency by assailing the evils of forcing teachers to “teach to the test.” But once the nomination was secured, he moved to the center, unveiling proposals that included merit pay for teachers and doubling federal charter-school funding. His selection of Arne Duncan, Chicago’s charter-friendly school superintendent, as education secretary also bodes well. Let’s hope that as president he continues down that path rather than the one Governor Patrick has chosen, and that he applies the lessons from the successful reforms in Massachusetts to federal education policy.

Charles Chieppo is a senior fellow and James Gass is director of the Center for School Reform at Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts public-policy think tank.

CORRECTION: The printed version of this article contains two errors, which have been corrected here. The number of students on waiting lists for charter schools in Boston is about 7,000. The Readiness Finance Commission reportedly favored raising the state sales tax rather than the income tax from 5 to 6 percent.

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It’s hard to tell whether Washington D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee courts controversy or is merely dogged by it.  Either way, Rhee once again finds herself in the thick of it, just as her school-improvement efforts are starting to take hold and Washington had begun to exhale over her stick-it-in-your-eye style.  (See “D.C’s Braveheart,” for more on Rhee.  Her stormy tenure is being closely watched by school reformers, the teacher unions, urban educators and Congressional Democrats, who variously believe that the chancellor is either the troubled district’s last hope–or worst nightmare.)

On Oct. 2–with the speed and deadly accuracy of one of those laser-guided missiles–Rhee fired 229 teachers and another 122 office and building workers, with some of Washington’s most lamentable high schools suffering the deepest cuts. The Friday-night firings came one month into the new school year, and only weeks after Rhee hired 900 teachers to help open classes for the fall.

Rhee contended in a press release that she was forced to act because of a $43.9 million shortfall in her budget.  The local teachers union charged that Rhee was making an end run around negotiations over tenure and seniority rights, which Rhee wants to scrap. Those talks have been going on—and on and on—for two years.  (In an interview posted on the Education Next website today, Jason Kamras, Michelle Rhee’s deputy for human capital, explains the new teacher evaluation system that Rhee launched just before the firings (and which does not have to be negotiated with the union). All DCPS teachers will be evaluated this year according to the new system, and teachers who receive low scores on the new evaluation may be fired, whether or not they have tenure.)

The Washington city council, ever vigilant for opportunities to needle Rhee and her boss, Mayor Adrian Fenty, plans hearings.  The union says it has filed a lawsuit alleging age-discrimination.

However this latest set-to is resolved, Washington joins the swelling ranks of school districts forced to lay off teachers, cancel textbook orders, trim summer-school plans, raise school-lunch fees or take other measures to close budget gaps caused by falling state tax revenues.  The National Governors Association says 27 of its member governors plan to close state budget gaps by cutting education funding this year.  District superintendents predict worse to come in 2011, when federal stimulus dollars for education run out.

The dual problem for superintendents is that most of their costs are in personnel salaries and benefits, and that most personnel are teachers. Nationwide, personnel costs typically account for between 75% and 80% of school-district operating budgets, and that percentage is even higher in some Sun Belt states and inner cities.

You can’t close a hole as big as the one Rhee says Washington schools are facing by merely trimming the supplies budget and extending the life of the Xeroxes.  Eventually, staffers have to be cut.  Rhee hit on one way to do that; it will be up to the political process to determine whether it was the best way.  (For some opinions on this, you can listen to Ed Next’s Paul Peterson and Checker Finn discussing the teacher layoffs in their podcast, which was also posted this morning on the Ed Next website.)

Listen to the Podcast

For more on this topic, see “D.C.’s Braveheart,” by June Kronholz in the Winter 2010 issue of Education Next.

For Immediate Release: October 14, 2009

STANFORD — On the heels of protests this past week against D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s round of teacher firings, Education Next offers a behind-the-scenes look at the most dramatic education reform attempt in the history of the nation’s capital.

In “D.C.’s Braveheart,” available online and appearing in the forthcoming Winter 2010 issue of Education Next, former Wall Street Journal reporter June Kronholz digs into the substance and controversy of the Rhee-driven reforms.

In the excerpt below, Kronholz captures Rhee’s unyielding commitment to radically changing a broken school system–and the cost it is exacting.

Six weeks into the job Rhee called her staff together with the message that “we are not here to do the bureaucracy better.”

“That’s what all of our friends are doing in reform all around the country: They’re trying to make the trains stay on the track and go faster.” Rhee told her staff. “We are here to derail those trains.”

If upheaval is the goal, Rhee has succeeded. Teachers say she has set black teachers against whites and young teachers against veterans with her controversial 2008 contract offer.  Congressional Democrats worry that she has put them between a policy goal, school improvement, and their teachers-union allies. Education reformers are nervous that her outta-my-way approach will wound their movement if it backfires.

…Two years after Rhee’s arrival, [however], scores on district-administered tests are up: 49 percent of elementary school students were reading at grade level, a 21-percentage-point jump in two years, according to test results released in July 2009. Among secondary-school students, 40 percent were at grade level in math, up 13 points.

When asked to name her most significant achievement in her two years in Washington, Rhee tells Kronholz, “We have begun–begun–begun–to establish a culture of accountability,” with a long pause between each “begun.”

Read “D.C.’s Braveheart,” former Wall Street Journal reporter June Kronholz’s profile of D.C. Superintendent Michelle Rhee, now online at www.EducationNext.org.

**New Podcasts at Educationext.org**

• Listen to the new Education Next podcast featuring Education Next’s editor-in-chief Paul E. Peterson and Thomas B. Fordham Institute President Chester E. Finn, Jr. discussing Chancellor Rhee and the education politics in Washington, D.C.

• Listen to a special interview with Jason Kamras, deputy to Chancellor Rhee in charge of human capital. Kamras talks with Education Next about the new teacher evaluation system DCPS put in place this year.  Now all DCPS teachers will be evaluated based on student test scores (when available) and classroom observations (by principals and master educators), and poorly performing teachers may be fired, regardless of tenure.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
Caleb Offley (585) 319-4541
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6010
www.hoover.org

My list wasn’t so much a “to do” roster as much as it was a lot of “old business”; I keep track of these things.  The subjects ranged from updating the state-mandated “Professional Performance Review Plan” to encouraging carpooling and walking.  I had previously asked where last year’s graduating class ended up and what our current enrollment numbers were.  “Truancy and tardiness: how much?” was in an old email. Where was my copy of School Law, which I should have received in 2007, as required by Board Policy #2510?  Could we start an Alumni Association?  “Intermediate school Corrective Action: what does it mean? Why wasn’t the board informed at the 8/30 meeting when a letter went out to parents on August 27? (my email of 9/1)”

All together, there were thirty items on “the list,” just a tip, as I suggested, of the iceberg.

Micromanaging!  I could hear the cries already.  But in my school district, I gave up arguing only the BIG questions — How’s the district doing? — because it invited too much inconclusive argument.  (My sense of things was borne out by a study Christopher Berry and William Howell did for Education Next in 2008, “Accountability Lost: Student learning is seldom a factor in school board elections.”) The big questions didn’t seem to matter, even in a district, like mine, where graduation rates hovered around 60 percent and proficiency scores around 50 percent. “Nothing wrong with our schools,” was a common reply to these questions, “if you know how to take advantage of what’s there.”  Bad test scores?  “You have to study and do your homework.”  Parents and taxpayers had so internalized this mode of thought — that the only thing wrong with the district was the kids and their parents — that change was nearly impossible.

In any case, in my own business, which is journalism, I have found time and time again that when someone doesn’t get the little things right, he’s not going to get the big things right–and getting little things right does, indeed, seem to lead to greater truth–if not happiness. This is one reason why the good journalists, like good cops, don’t ask, “Did you do it?” but “Where were you last night?”

Besides, it’s hard to know where exactly to begin to tackle the challenge of low academic performance, as even the esteemed readers of Education Next know. The challenges seem even greater when working, below deck, in the hydra-wheeled ship that our current public education system has become. (See Beseiged: School Boards and the Future of Education Politics, the essential work on the subject, edited by William Howell.)

Absent a perfect, or even good, answer to the BIG question, I’ve adopted a strategy I call “the many and the mundane”: deal with the little things and only those things under our direct control–and deal with them often and in large numbers.  This is neither as cynical or as desperate as it sounds.  (And though we’re no Continental Airlines or New York Police Department, I did take to heart some of the lessons learned from those two “turnaround” miracles as detailed in Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel’s “The Big U-Turn,” Education Next, Winter 2009.)  We all need to feel a sense of accomplishment–and it’s easier to “fix” a drinking fountain than a curriculum. Let’s make the buses run on time.  Instead of asking why parents don’t come to meetings, I ask why there was no sign on the front door of the school telling visitors how to get in. Or how much did that parking lot cost? Did we apply for the Smart Scholars grant?  Why not?  May I see that teacher candidate resume?  Did the RFPs for a school architect go out? This form says we were supposed to an analysis of “roots and causes” of our failure  – did we do it? (The answer to that question was “Yes, of course.” My followup was, “May I see it?” The answer, “We didn’t write it down.”) You said that state law won’t allow us to question Special Ed placements – can you get me a copy of that section of the law?

These kinds of questions drove one of our superintendents to distraction, then to resignation–because, for the most part, she didn’t have the answers (or those answers were embarrassing).  The issue of micromanagement is not without merit.  But too often the debate about it takes place in a vacuum.  Context is everything in school management.  If you have a district that “works” (i.e. educates most of its children well), then the board can–and should–relax. If you have a district that doesn’t work, then I say, “Gimme an M!  Gimme an I!  Gimme a C!….  M-I-C-R-O-M-A-N-A-G-E.  Micromanage!

How has the list of follow-ups fared, after three weeks?  Not bad.  Eight questions answered satisfactorily; three, half-answered; 19, (so far) ignored.  We even acted on one of the proposals: the board agreed that we should investigate starting an Alumni Association.

That’s progress.

The news was that our school district had hired a new principal and assistant principal for our Intermediate school, which the board had approved the night before, but the reason for my colleague’s call was my comment to the reporter,  though I had voted for the hires, that the selection process had been flawed. The board, I had complained to the reporter in an email, “interviewed none of the candidates for these job.  Not one.  And that’s a mistake, especially when we have a brand new superintendent with barely six months of experience under his belt.”

Was it a mistake? And should I have talked about it?  To the press?

My blunder, said the colleague, was that that I had undermined the Superintendent by criticizing him, after the vote, in public.

We are a small district in a small town, but her concern raises a number of questions that go to the heart of public school governance: How involved should the school board be in hiring and firing decisions?  Should board members do their grousing in public – after the fact?   And, more metaphysically, what’s the difference between public and private anyway?

Big questions, which I can only touch on in this blog.

In my experience, a school board member criticizing the superintendent in public is one of the seven deadly sins of school board service.  I’m not yet sure what all of those sins are quite yet, but a close second on the Get Thee Behind Me, Satan! list is “micromanaging”: Thou shalt not second-guess the superintendent.  I had managed to sin twice at once.

Even at board meetings, which are public, there is an intricate dance of deferral to the superintendent.  The unspoken default behavior – which might owe to table arrangement, since the board, including the superintendent, is lined up together, facing the “public,” which consists mostly of members of the labor “units” – which makes it hard to dissent.  It has to do with “teamwork,” one of the major highways to heaven, if we stick to the religious theme here, according to school board association literature.

We had an interesting turn of events last year, in which the superintendent (a different one) was disliked by much of the staff and many parents — and the board, which still felt compelled to support her, was faced with some ugly meetings in which staff and public were mad at them.  Suddenly, as a critic of the super, I went from goat to hero for “speaking out” in public against the superintendent. (She had, at one point, ordered staff not to talk to school board members.)  In fact, her resignation was accompanied by a letter to the editor of the paper complaining about being driven from her post by nosey board members. I was happy to take the rap.  (My technique was that of the journalist: ask questions; she rarely had answers, an embarrassing predicament, especially in public.)

It was trickier now. We had a “local boy” as superintendent and his choices for principal and assistant principal were not controversial.   We were back to the question of what you do, as a board member, when just about everyone, for reasons of personality as much as policy, is “okay” with the way things are, even if those things are not “right.”  Is the “rogue” board member just a rogue?  Or a messenger of Truth?

Our board had had heated disagreements about the process for hiring the new principal and assistant principal – owing, I must admit, mostly to my dissent.  I didn’t like the process.

The superintendent had appointed two teams to vet the applicants for the two jobs and to interview the finalists. The teams included no board members and no community members who didn’t work for the district or have a child in the district school.  There were no parents on these teams who didn’t have a direct connection (e.g. by marriage) to a staffer.  The teams – eight on one and six on the other – were made up of district staff, including secretaries, aides, and teachers.  The leader of the assistant principal search team had just been appointed principal of our new Junior High (after serving several years as an assistant principal of the high school); he was assisted by an assistant principal (three years of experience) from another school.  It was, in short, an inside job.

I had voiced my objections, at a board meeting, to the lack of a board member on the teams, and eked out a reluctant assent from the Superintendent – my colleagues seemed mildly unconcerned about the issue – that board members could participate.  “But the rule for membership on these teams is that you have to be at every interview,” said the Superintendent.  I thought that a ridiculous rule for a member of the board, but I said nothing at the meeting.  (The rule in journalism, which I have practiced for some three decades, is to take on one hard question at a time; get in the door first.)

It didn’t take long for the proverbial mud to hit the fan. I attended four interviews on one day and two the next with the assistant principal team. But I had to excuse myself, I told the team leader on the second day, because of a previous commitment.  When I showed up the next morning, at 8am, for the final round of interviews, a nervous team leader met me at the conference room door and escorted me to an adjoining office.

“I’m very sorry,” he said. “But the superintendent told me that since you missed an interview, you couldn’t participate any longer.”

“But he’s on vacation,” I said. “Call him,” I ordered.  The poor fellow, now almost white with fear, called. No answer.

I left peacefully, but the next board meeting executive session was no walk in the park.  We did eke out a compromise, however: board members could attend the interviews for the principal position, but “as observers” only. We couldn’t ask questions.

My opinion?  The process was ridiculous.

A school board is charged with the responsibility of running a school district, and the hiring of school administrators is an important part of that function.  (Obviously, in larger districts, you can’t get so cozy, but there are ways of applying the principle of “informed board” to large districts as well.)  If the board – or any board member – wants to sit in on the process, it should.  And in the case of a district that has had a half dozen superintendents in a dozen years, and dismal academic outcomes all the way along, and on top of that has a new Superintendent in his first six months of superintendency, the board must intervene.  In fact, I had suggested that these teams should recommend to the board two or three finalists, and that the full board conduct the final interviews.  I didn’t even get a second on that motion.

This brings us, skipping a few intervening steps, to the other big question in this small drama: Is the superintendent always right?  Or, should the board pretend that the super is always right?

If the board is a cheerleader, should it wave pom-poms when the fullback is running toward the wrong goal post?  Some of my colleagues thought Yes.

The previous year I had a public debate – in the newspaper‘s letters column – with a fellow board member (who had been board president) on just this question. He was certain that it was the school board’s job – its only job, he said — to hire a superintendent and then sit back and let him/her run the district. His was a neat argument. The school board was not in a position to know right or wrong about any matter of policy – we were then arguing about whether the board should have a curriculum committee – because the board didn’t have the facts, which it didn’t have because it was the superintendent’s job to have them (and keep them).

There is a very strong Messiah Syndrome at work here, from what I’ve observed: the board’s primary responsibility (except, of course, for the long debates about facility fee waivers and the merits of whether to give the swimming pool lifeguards a 50-cent raise) is to find the savior, even if it means burning through anti-Christ after anti-Christ.  (This starts us down another interesting path in the woods of school board land: the never-look-back trail. For this, please see Craig D. Hochbein & Daniel L. Duke’s recent commentary in Education Week, “Failing to Learn from Failure.” Subscription, unfortunately, required.)

It’s easy to see where such superintendent worship comes from.  By coincidence, a few days after the front-page story with my public dissent, I participated in a “webinar” conducted by the New York State School Boards Association on the subject of – you guessed it – “recruiting and hiring.”

The board’s role, said NYSSBA’s webinar leader, “is to make policy and ensure accountability.”  And indeed, we had a policy on recruiting and hiring (#9240, written by NYSSBA), that read, “the Board will provide and maintain qualified and certified instructional and support personnel to carry out the educational programs of the district.”

Seemed pretty clear to me, but when the question of the board participating in job candidate interviews came up, the NYSSBA expert said this was “overstepping” the board’s responsibility.   Micromanaging.

Unfortunately, the webinar process does not lend itself to a hearty give-and-take, so we weren’t able to explore the problem of how the board could be responsible for getting qualified staff if it did not care to know anything about the candidates.  And, if the district had already burned through a half-dozen superintendents, wouldn’t – shouldn’t – someone wonder about the board’s hands-off policy?

In the end, my colleagues on the board did register some reservations about the two candidates selected, but only one board member voted against the superintendent’s  recommendations (on the grounds the salaries were too high).  Everyone else chose to defer to the Superintendent.

I shocked everyone, including the candidates, whom I advised beforehand of the reasons I would vote No, by voting with the majority.

“I changed my mind on the vote last night,” I emailed my colleagues, “because, in the end, I realized that it was not the candidates’ fault that they were there; it was the board’s `fault.’  The board fought for them, and that too was important to me — the board has committed itself to not letting them fail.”

That’s a board of education’s real job: not to let anyone fail. We’ll see soon enough if we’ve made any progress on that front.

But that optimism faded when Schwarzenegger, confronting a growing deficit in the state budget, shelved most of the far-reaching recommendations that his own commission sent his way. It would be neither fair nor practical, the governor said in January 2008, to ask the education community to accept a major dose of reform at the same time that he was proposing to cut state spending on the schools.

“We can’t do…all the things that we wanted to do,” Schwarzenegger said in an appearance before the California Newspaper Publishers Association. “It’s just simply because we won’t have the money available. And it is very hard to negotiate and to sit down with the education coalition and to say, ‘Here is what we want you to do; here are the 20 things we want you to do, but we’re going to take 3.5, 4 billion dollars away from you.’ So that doesn’t make any sense.”

Total Recall

Schwarzenegger’s caution undoubtedly grew out of his experience in 2005, when he did try to push education reform and budget cuts at the same time, and failed miserably. But his strategy also reflected the approach he has taken to education policy since he was elected: mostly hands-off. Despite a political persona and personal résumé that suggested the issue would be a perfect one for him, and despite the public’s seeming thirst for new ideas to improve the schools, Schwarzenegger has not made education policy a priority.

Bonnie Reiss, a longtime friend of the governor who served on his staff for two years, advised him on education issues, and was one of his appointees to the state Board of Education, said Schwarzenegger told her and others in his administration why he did not want to get involved in a long, politically difficult effort to overhaul the public schools.

“The recall election was not about public education,” Reiss said, referring to the historic 2003 election in which voters ousted a sitting governor, Gray Davis, and installed Schwarzenegger in his place. “The recall was about the budget, economic issues, energy, businesses fleeing the state. He used to say California was like a patient in triage. First we have to stop the bleeding. Then we have to heal the patient. Arnold felt very strongly that the anger of the voters that created the recall was not about public education. As critical as it was, it was not one of the first things he had to do in triage.”

Like a good physician, Schwarzenegger, at least for his first four years, followed the Hippocratic oath: do no harm. He proposed nothing that would undo the bipartisan momentum California has built on solid academic standards and a testing regimen that tells students, parents, and schools where they stand, in relation not only to the entire state but also schools with similar demographics. And he has vetoed bill after bill sent to him by a legislature that often does the bidding of the state’s powerful teachers unions, which have opposed much of California’s accountability system. The result has been a record best described as a kind of benign support for the status quo. That might not be an entirely bad thing. California’s schools, appear not to be worsening with respect to national trends (see Figure 1), and adding more reforms just for the sake of reform might not necessarily improve them.

Commando

Ironically, Schwarzenegger when he took office was probably more steeped in education policy than any California governor in a generation. He has four children, for one thing, and while they attended private schools, Schwarzenegger’s kids at least gave him a partial window into a world that was completely unknown, on a personal level, to three of the four governors who had preceded him in the office. He had also sponsored a successful ballot initiative, Proposition 49 in 2002, which set money aside in the state budget for an expansion of afterschool programs. That campaign led him to meet and seek the support of people from across the education community, from teachers to administrators and school board members.

As a candidate in 2003, he criticized the performance of the schools and pledged to restore more control to local districts. Schwarzenegger’s most vivid campaign promise on education policy was to cut through the red tape that bound local districts to the state’s multivolume Education Code. A series of stories in the Sacramento Bee detailed how the legislature and previous governors had created one special program after another, known as “categoricals,” that lived on without much if any assessment of whether they were accomplishing their goals. The programs tied up more than one-third of the education budget, limiting the ability of local trustees and administrators to spend money as they pleased.

A district that didn’t need new textbooks, for example, might still be forced to spend more money on instructional materials, or lose it, because the state had set aside a pot of money for the purchase of new books after it was disclosed that the massive Los Angeles Unified School District had many campuses where the students lacked basic texts. A school that didn’t need any more security measures might add them anyway because the legislature, after the Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, had appropriated another pot of money to be used only for more campus police, cameras, and metal detectors. The state funded at least 20 separate programs for teacher training alone, each with its own set of requirements, objectives, and paperwork—and with little thought put into whether they complemented or duplicated one another.

Soon after taking office, Schwarzenegger proposed a sweeping reform that sought to repeal the statutory mandates for 22 of the special programs and fold the money into general-purpose budgets for districts to spend as they chose. The new governor’s proposal might not have been sexy, but it was sensible, and it was consistent with what he had said during his campaign and with what many education reformers and analysts had been arguing for years. Of course, it also met with opposition from constituencies and legislators with ties to the programs that would no longer be guaranteed a steady stream of revenue, and the proposal soon bogged down in the legislature.

But Schwarzenegger’s aides pressed on. Working closely with then state senator Dede Alpert of San Diego, a veteran legislator who shared the governor’s goals, they eventually settled on a compromise that consolidated 26 programs and $2 billion in funding into block grants covering six broad subject areas. Districts were freed to spend the money within each grant on any of the programs in that subject area or on new priorities consistent with the goals of those programs.

The deal could have been a model for Schwarzenegger to build on. He could have celebrated his success and pushed for more the following year, perhaps exploring the concept of granting broad freedoms over spending, even total flexibility, to districts whose students were meeting state goals. But Schwarzenegger stopped there. According to Reiss, he did not push harder for local control because once he took office he learned how much power the teachers unions held over many local school boards. Cutting the strings from Sacramento, he concluded, would only give the unions more control at the local level.

“It would be nice to think that they make all the right decisions,” Reiss, a liberal Democrat, said, “but with the way the power structure works, that’s not the case.”

Raw Deal

As he began his second year as governor, Schwarzenegger struck a more confrontational pose with the Democrats who controlled the legislature. He proposed a series of policy reforms involving the state’s budget, public employee pensions, the drawing of political district lines, and education. The proposals were not built around any theme other than that they were all things that the majority Democrats in the legislature and their interest-group allies were sure to oppose.

Nowhere was that more true than on education. Schwarzenegger offered two ideas that were neither new nor terribly imaginative. One was to tie teacher pay to performance. The other was to extend the length of time a new teacher would have to work before qualifying for permanent status, or tenure. There was nothing wrong with either idea. But it was difficult to see how either would have transformed the schools. And they certainly didn’t seem to be worth the political risk Schwarzenegger was taking in proposing them.

Indeed, the proposals were the equivalent of a declaration of war on the teachers unions and their membership. The massive California Teachers Association (CTA) and the smaller California Federation of Teachers (CFA) reacted in kind, targeting Schwarzenegger with their invective and their advertising dollars. To make matters worse, the governor unveiled the proposals just as he was also revealing that, in his new budget, he was going to break a promise he had made to the education lobby a year before.

In his first weeks as governor, desperate to try to balance the budget without raising taxes as he had pledged during his campaign, the rookie chief executive met behind closed doors with teachers, administrators, and school board members in search of solutions. In the end, these groups shocked their friends in the legislature by agreeing to a plan that would shave $2 billion from the minimum the state constitution required the state to spend on the schools. In exchange, Schwarzenegger agreed to resume funding the schools at no less than the constitutional minimum one year later.

What he did not fully realize at the time was that his pact would commit him to giving the schools the lion’s share of any new revenue that flowed into the state. As it happened, tax receipts were projected to increase by about $5 billion in 2005–06, Schwarzenegger’s second year as governor. But the terms of his deal with the educators would have forced him to give $4.7 billion of that new money to the schools while cutting health care, social services, prisons, and other programs. It was either that or raise taxes, which Schwarzenegger had said he would not do.

So the governor broke his word and broke his deal. He did propose a $3 billion increase for the schools, enough to keep pace with enrollment growth and inflation. The school community, led by the California Teachers Association, launched a campaign to vilify him. The CTA alone spent more than $50 million to defeat his measures, and the teachers were joined by the other public employee unions. By the time the fight ended in a special election in November 2005, all of Schwarzenegger’s proposals would be defeated and a majority of voters would be saying that they were not inclined to reelect him to a second term the following year. Just 30 percent of Californians said they approved of the way Schwarzenegger was handling the education issue (see Figure 2).

The governor’s problems had a lot to do with substance: the voters did not share his view that bad teachers were at the root of whatever ailed the schools, and they didn’t like the fact that he had broken his word on funding (see Figures 3 and 4).

But Schwarzenegger also had a communications problem. Many of the education policies he would pursue as governor were designed to help close the achievement gap between students from low-income families and those from more affluent circumstances, a goal most voters shared. But he never really tried to pull those policies together into a coherent program that voters could understand and identify with him.

A similar problem had once plagued Schwarzenegger’s image on environmental issues. Although he was pursuing a number of policies that voters, when polled, said they supported, few associated those policies with the governor, and most rated him poorly on the issue. It was not until he embraced the movement to combat global warming with new controls on carbon emissions that voters began to identify him as an environmentalist Republican. But the governor never found a similarly dramatic education policy that could grab the attention of the public, who typically associate school policy with Democrats.

The Kid & I

Schwarzenegger’s signature issue could have been the achievement gap. His focus on poor kids began before he became governor, with his sponsorship of Proposition 49 on the 2002 ballot. Although the measure was more about politics than policy—it was designed to raise the Hollywood actor’s stature in advance of a future run for governor—the ballot initiative did reflect Schwarzenegger’s sincere interest in inner-city schools, dozens of which he had toured during work for his nonprofit foundation, the Inner-City Games. The foundation began as an effort to promote afterschool athletics in schools serving primarily underprivileged children. Schwarzenegger expanded the program to include an academic element as well, with tutoring and homework sessions. The measure proposed to set aside hundreds of millions of dollars a year to expand the programs, with first priority for the money going to schools serving disadvantaged pupils. In a national television interview during the campaign, Schwarzenegger spoke of the support he had from his parents as a child in Austria and how it made the difference in his development.

“When I look in those inner-city schools and I see those kids going out after school and not having this kind of supervision, not having this kind of help, not having this kind of love, anyone to help them with their homework, anyone that mentors them and tells them that they’re great, I say to myself those kids will never be ready and have the opportunity to use this land that that they have, the land of opportunity,” Schwarzenegger said. “They will never make it. And so what I promised myself at that point was—is that I’m going to go out and make sure that every child has the same opportunities that I had.”

Schwarzenegger’s measure won the support of educators, law enforcement, business groups, and lawmakers from both parties. It passed easily, with 57 percent of the vote, in the same election at which voters returned then governor Gray Davis to office for a second term.

But Proposition 49 was flawed. It was ballot-box budgeting at its worst, setting a narrow priority for state spending that would tie the hands of legislators, future governors, and educators, the very kind of “auto-pilot” spending Schwarzenegger would later decry. But it did reflect his desire to improve conditions for poor students. And as governor, Schwarzenegger would continue that same pattern: pursuing a variety of well-intended if imperfect policy approaches meant to help underprivileged children.

One of his first acts as chief executive was to settle a lawsuit filed against the state by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of students in 18 districts around California, most in poor communities. Students in those schools, the lawsuit alleged, were being denied equal opportunity because they lacked qualified teachers, modern textbooks, sanitary bathrooms, heat, and air-conditioning. The state, under Governor Davis, had fought the lawsuit, using an expensive private law firm to argue that the problems, if they existed at all, were the responsibility of local school districts.

Schwarzenegger held that those districts, even if they were responsible, were incompetent. So he told his staff to settle the lawsuit, and he was personally involved in the negotiations, some of which he convened in his famous “smoking tent” in the inner courtyard of his Capitol office suite. After months of talks, the governor agreed to a solution that would pump $1 billion into schools in poor neighborhoods. The settlement included standards for the schools to meet and empowered county superintendents to enforce the edict and monitor compliance. The ACLU, in a bit of hyperbole, compared the deal to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case that overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal.”

Schwarzenegger also stepped into a dispute over the future of the state’s largest school district, Los Angeles Unified, siding with Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa against the district’s board and the teachers union (see “Power Struggle in Los Angeles,” forum, Summer 2007). Arguing that the district’s poor and largely Latino student body was suffering from neglect, Villaraigosa wanted to take over the entire district, a move the governor supported. But the mayor could not win approval of that idea in the legislature, and he and Schwarzenegger settled for a compromise that rather than increasing accountability would have defused it further, dividing responsibility for the district among the board, the superintendent, and the mayors. Schwarzenegger announced early on that he would sign any bill Villaraigosa could get to his desk, and that’s exactly what he did, with great fanfare. But the courts struck down the new law as a violation of a state constitutional provision prohibiting anyone but a locally elected school board from running the schools.

Schwarzenegger also made a big rhetorical commitment to vocational education, now called career technical education, reflecting his belief that the schools were shortchanging students who either would not go on to college or would begin college but never finish. Schwarzenegger added $20 million to the program’s budget in 2006—once again making an exception to his call for more local control—and proposed a bigger increase in 2007. His school construction bond, which voters approved in 2006, included $500 million for new and expanded buildings for career technical education, an unprecedented level of funding.

Preschool was another issue where Schwarzenegger said he preferred to focus scarce resources on problems afflicting disadvantaged students. When Hollywood director Rob Reiner proposed a ballot initiative (Proposition 82 in 2006) calling for an income tax increase to make preschool universal and free for all of the state’s four-year-olds, the governor sided with opponents, who noted that the measure would use precious potential tax revenue to pay for a service that a majority of the state’s youngsters already received. The initiative would have given free preschool to the children of middle-income and wealthy parents and squeezed out a flourishing network of private preschools in favor of the new publicly financed system. During the campaign, Schwarzenegger pledged to increase the state’s commitment to preschool for poor children, and he later added $100 million to the budget over two years to open more slots for four-year-olds from low-income families. In the end, the ballot initiative was rejected by the voters.

Still, Schwarzenegger has not left much of a mark on education policy. His biggest impact might have come from playing defense. He has vetoed a number of bills that would have undercut California’s much-lauded system of standards, testing, and accountability. He rejected a measure that would have exempted the state’s growing Latino population from testing in English until they had been in California’s schools for three years, a proposal he said would give the schools less incentive to teach English quickly. And he sent back a proposed law that would have allowed schools to use “alternative assessments” for students who had failed the state’s high school exit exam.

State senator Darrell Steinberg, a Sacramento Democrat who has focused on reducing the number of high school dropouts in California, said he thinks Schwarzenegger sincerely wants to improve the lot of poor children. “I think he is driven by the reality that too many kids are falling through the cracks,” Steinberg said in an interview. “I think he recognizes that this issue of the forgotten kid is in many respects a civil rights issue, an equal opportunity issue, and an economic development issue. His heart is in the right place. The question is whether he will have the desire or the ability to make education reform on finances and policy a focus and a priority of his administration.”

The Running Man

As Schwarzenegger ran for reelection in 2006, he deflected questions about his education policies by commissioning, with the leaders of the state legislature, an independent research project to recommend funding levels and reforms needed to provide a quality education for every child in California. That project, overseen by Stanford University researchers, produced a series of studies concluding that the schools needed more money but that, without significant reforms, no amount of money would produce much change. Among the policy changes the researchers recommended: the state should eliminate categorical programs and devolve more authority to school districts and even school sites, giving principals the right to hire and fire their own staffs.

A separate panel the governor appointed to review the research recommended a series of far-reaching measures to put the Stanford group’s broad conclusions into practice:

• Make teaching a true profession—with training and pay to match—while also holding teachers more accountable for their results in the classroom.

• Invest more money in education, give districts and even individual schools more control over the money while directing funds to students who need the most help, and eliminate almost all categorical mandates.

• Empower county superintendents to enforce accountability rules, make the independently elected state superintendent of public instruction a sort of “inspector general” for school quality, place state education policy under the governor, and make the state board of education advisory to the governor.

• Create a comprehensive student-data system that tracks individual student progress from preschool to the workforce.

Instead of embracing those ideas and running with them, Schwarzenegger backed away in January 2008, citing the enormity of the state’s budget crisis. Instead, he recommended new state interventions in 98 districts that were failing to meet the standards of the federal No Child Left Behind law; waivers from state rules and regulations for high-performing districts; and an improved data system to guide state and local decisionmaking in the future. He also pledged to lead a series of public hearings on the issue around the state in 2008.

His proposals for 2008 were, then, a microcosm of his entire career as governor. They were driven by good instincts and informed by good advice, but they were piecemeal rather than comprehensive, and they were unlikely to engage the public in a way that could build widespread support. Anyone hoping to see him one day create the broad consensus necessary for fundamental education reform will have to wait at least another year.

Daniel Weintraub is the public affairs columnist for the opinion pages of the Sacramento Bee. He is the author of Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter.

On the first Monday of the 2003-04 school year, Pablo Sierra was not where he hoped to be. Instead of greeting students as the new principal of a Chicago public school, Sierra was driving downtown for another round of meetings with district officials, trying to keep his spirits up and hoping that a position would open soon.

As a newly minted graduate of the widely heralded New Leaders for New Schools training program for aspiring principals, Sierra (and the developers of New Leaders) had understandably expected to find a slew of opportunities awaiting him. He thought that his prestigious MBA, private-sector experience, and nine years as a classroom teacher would distinguish him from more traditional applicants for the principalship. The intense yearlong “residency” program developed by New Leaders would make up for his lack of traditional administrative experience.

As of September, however, Sierra had all but given up on his first choice: being tapped to run a neighborhood school. He had started looking for a start-up or charter school opportunity and was hoping to avoid taking a job as an assistant principal. The silver lining is that Sierra was eventually able to secure a job as the assistant principal of a charter school and is now set to head a new charter school opening next year.

Sierra’s situation was not unique among his New Leaders peers. Of his graduating class at the program’s Chicago location, less than half had found jobs by late June. Those without preexisting connections to the community or to the school bureaucracy were struggling even to get interviews. Surprisingly, Sierra’s private-sector training and experience were “not being perceived as positive,” he said. “All the positions are going to experienced [assistant principals].”

Since its founding four years ago, New Leaders has shown that there is no shortage of accomplished individuals like Sierra who want to be principals. The program continues to expand each year and has become a national voice for the reform of principal training. The remaining questions are whether school districts will let New Leaders run their own neighborhood schools–and are the New Leaders fellows really ready for the job?

New Blood

New Leaders for New Schools is the brainchild of a group of graduates from Harvard’s business and education schools including CEO Jonathan Schnur, a former Clinton administration official. The New Leaders idea is to recruit accomplished individuals from both the private and public sectors, including public education, and provide them with the leadership training necessary to take on significant school management roles. “We’re looking for the best people, wherever we can find them,” says Schnur.

The motivation behind New Leaders was to supply new blood to cities that were reportedly facing shortages of qualified principals ready to turn around dysfunctional schools. New Leaders fellows would also receive the kind of leadership and management training that principals hired through traditional routes seldom enjoy. Each cohort of “new leaders” is chosen through a highly competitive application process. Those selected take courses during the summer, then spend a year in full-time “residency” at a school under the guidance of a mentor principal.

While securing principalships for the program’s trainees has been challenging, finding accomplished aspirants has not. In 2003 the program received more than 1,000 completed applications for just 55 spots. Overall, roughly half the applications–and half of those accepted into the program–have come from nontraditional candidates, meaning that they were coming to the program from outside education or from another part of the country. Even those with traditional education backgrounds have flocked to New Leaders, seeking a program that is more hands-on and collegial than many of the principal-training programs based at schools of education.

As a result, the pool of New Leaders includes a concentration of individuals with backgrounds not often found among public school principals. For instance, Danny Kramer was a VISTA coordinator, a member of an Internet start-up, and a website designer for Oprah Winfrey. Drema Brown graduated from Yale Law School and ran a children’s program in New Haven, Connecticut. And Cindy Moeller, a member of the current cohort of fellows, entered the program after earning her MBA at Northwestern and serving as a vice president for human resources at Baldwin Pianos. New Leaders usually requires its applicants to have two years of classroom experience in order to meet guidelines for certification as a public schools administrator. The program also works in partnership with local universities to secure formal certification for its graduates.

The current fellows range in age from their late 20s to their mid-50s. Two-thirds are African-American, Hispanic, or Asian-American, and two-thirds are women. Most important, they are among the most confident, determined, and accomplished school leadership candidates you can imagine.

What Shortages?

Despite their accomplishments and passion, New Leaders fellows have had a hard time breaking into traditional public schools, especially those fellows who lack contacts or extensive experience in education. It’s not that New Leaders can’t get work; nearly all of the New Leaders have secured education-related jobs. But just 5 of the first 15 graduates and just over half of the 32 graduates in 2003 found positions running schools of any type.

Of course a 50 percent placement rate for aspiring principals is no small accomplishment, and there has been undeniable progress in getting fellows hired at neighborhood schools. Patrick Baccellieri, a graduate of the program’s first year in Chicago who had previously run a nonprofit, was hired to run a traditional school, as was second-year graduate Jarvis Sanford, a former diversity consultant for the Anti-Defamation League who holds an MBA and a Ph.D. Drema Brown is currently running a traditional public school in the Bronx, New York. Carleton Gordon, a longtime financial services executive, was named the principal at a tough school in Brooklyn in the fall of 2003. And after just a short time, some New Leaders have moved from assistant principal to the leadership spot in their schools.

However, these are the exceptions. Only 7 (out of 47) New Leaders have been hired to run traditional neighborhood schools. One problem is that, as it turns out, there isn’t really that much of a numerical shortage of principals in the four cities–Chicago, New York, Washington, and the Bay Area–where New Leaders currently operates training programs. Principalships don’t open up all that often. And when they do, these school districts receive tons of applications from insiders with more experience in education.

For instance, New York City may need to fill 150 open slots each year in a system with more than 1,200 schools. Program founder Schnur estimates that there are well over a thousand qualified candidates. Schnur says that there were only 60 to 70 genuine openings in Chicago this year, with about 65 applications for each position.

It is not just a numbers game though. The fact is that school district administrators and teachers have not wholly embraced the New Leaders concept. They tend to believe that the principal is also the instructional leader and should therefore have significant classroom experience. “Certainly, experience in other professions brings a perspective that could be a plus,” says Deborah Lynch, president of the Chicago teacher union. “But so little teaching experience really makes me wonder if that’s enough for a person to really get to know instructional improvement and school leadership.”

Even the New Leaders candidates agree that this is somewhat of a disadvantage. “I might have wanted a few more years in the classroom from the curriculum side,” says Kelly Wilson, a New Leaders graduate who holds an MBA and has a background in TV production. “We’re being developed as curriculum leaders, but I probably needed more exposure to that.”

The New Leaders training, while intense, will not make them curriculum experts. They get enough training and experience to talk the talk and are expected to learn along the way. And so, despite the widely acknowledged need for better-trained principals, reports of shortages, and waves of retirees, New Leaders candidates can end up seeming green. “Everybody just wants experience,” says one Chicago school administrator who has observed several of the principal searches where New Leaders fellows were interviewed. “The bottom line is that schools want someone to run the school, not just theories.”

There are also cultural and stylistic conflicts that can complicate the relationship between nontraditional principals and career educators. Winning trust at a new school–what New Leaders tend to call “gaining entry”–is a key challenge, especially for those who have spent most of their careers outside of schools.

Danny Kramer, for example, had a few run-ins with other teachers during his residency year that a more experienced administrator might have avoided. “Danny started with us before the school year started and stayed with us the whole year,” says Armstrong Elementary principal Arline Hersh. “He put his foot into it occasionally and learned that way,” she says. “But that’s part of the process, learning how to extricate yourself gracefully.”

There are also those who, threatened and offended by the notion of programs like New Leaders, question the fundamental legitimacy of bringing in outsiders. “Why should we think someone would be an effective principal just because they were once a student?” asked Jill Levy, president of the 5,500-member Council of School Supervisors and Administrators in New York, last year. Her organization has vociferously opposed Chancellor Joel Klein’s efforts to revamp principal training in New York City.

Conservative Hiring

New York is actually a bright spot in the New Leaders portfolio. Three quarters of the 2003 graduates of the New York program were selected to lead schools–a big increase from the previous year, when just two of eight became principals. Chicago has been more difficult to break into. In the program’s first year, just one New Leaders graduate was tapped to run a school; two more have moved up to the top job since then. The share remains below 50 percent for the 2003 crop of New Leaders.

The disparity at least partly reflects the sheer size of the New York school district and thus the greater number of openings it has to fill. But the actual mechanisms for hiring principals in each city may provide a more likely explanation.

In New York it is largely up to district administrators to hire and assign principals. By contrast, in Chicago each individual local school council makes its own hiring decision. These councils, made up of parents, teachers, and community members, can be advised by the district. But the decision is, in the main, the council’s to make.

Making the situation more difficult, roughly three out of four New Leaders in Chicago come from outside education–reflecting a priority expressed by the Chicago board of education, says Schnur.

The effects on the hiring process in Chicago are many. Local councils may not be familiar with the still-new New Leaders program, creating an enormous marketing challenge. With their strong ties to the community, local councils may also be more inclined to hire an inside person–an assistant principal, interim principal, or someone else from the community. And the principal contracts, set at terms of four years, make it very hard to remove someone if a decision goes awry.

“It is hard to get these people hired,” says John Ayers, executive director of Leadership for Quality Education, a Chicago education reform group that has worked with New Leaders and supports its efforts. “Local school councils tend to be surprisingly conservative.”

Bernard Lacour, a longtime school reformer who works with local school councils and consults with New Leaders on placement issues, believes that the obstacles thrown up by council dynamics and the predisposition for experience may be exacerbated by system politics, the advantages of incumbency, and fear among local councils that their candidates will be challenged by the board of education and their authority taken away from them.

Lacour notes that candidates who have not been administrators or who come from outside education frequently make it to the interview stage but rarely get hired or placed in the Chicago system. Only in rare cases is someone’s newness and lack of strong affiliation with the school system a real advantage. Sometimes council members don’t even know who has applied for the job, he says. “What we need is a process that is less daunting and procedural.”

Heading Charters

Not surprisingly, one result is that a substantial number of New Leaders end up running charter schools, small schools, start-ups, or education organizations rather than traditional schools, especially in Chicago.

Take Kelly Wilson. She was the second New Leader to do her residency at a small but well-known school, Ariel Community Academy, located on the south side of Chicago. Her predecessor had been hired as an assistant principal at Ariel, but before the year was even over, Wilson became executive director of a school-based teacher-training program in Chicago. She was the second New Leader to hold this position.

Opinions vary about whether this is a good outcome for graduates of New Leaders. Wilson and others say that having effective leadership in urban school systems is important, regardless of where that leadership is located. But sending too many New Leaders into alternative schools could easily create the impression that the program is not well suited for mainstream schools or that the school system is not ready and willing to hire even the most capable candidates if they enter through alternative routes. After all, imagine what would have happened if Teach for America, the storied program that places talented college graduates into low-income schools, had sent many of its members into charter schools.

In fact, many New Leaders would rather work in a traditional environment. “I’d love to work in a traditional school,” says Kramer, who is now serving as an assistant principal at Clinton Elementary School. “But that’s a hard nut to crack, to get the [school councils] to interview you.”

Despite these difficulties, New Leaders already seems to be making an impact, both directly and indirectly. Evidence from the 2002-03 school year, while minimal, suggests that schools with New Leaders fellows at the helm outperformed other schools with first-year principals in reading and math improvements and in reduced percentages of failing students.

At the same time, there has been an enormous increase in attention toward new ways of recruiting, training, and placing principals, at least some of which can fairly be attributed indirectly to New Leaders. New Leaders has 55 residents in training this year, has expanded to Washington, D.C., and will be expanding to Memphis, Tennessee, this summer. Moreover, the organization was recently named one of the top 20 organizations that are changing the world by Fast Company magazine. In the meantime, other efforts to set up fast-track principal training programs dot the nation, and in-depth residency components are increasingly common. The New York, Chicago, and Boston school systems have all initiated or adapted school leadership programs that have key elements in common with New Leaders.

Befriending the System

Nevertheless, New Leaders will need to find more success in placing its graduates if it is to remain a viable model for improving the management of regular public schools. This presents no small challenge. In the end, hiring a nontraditional principal may be considered more of a risk than hiring teachers or superintendents with nontraditional backgrounds–two related trends that have swept the nation over the past decade.

For starters, compared with the principal, a teacher has an important but relatively small role in the overall well-being of a school. Principals and administrators may be more willing to “take a chance” with a single 4th-grade class than risk the health of an entire school on a candidate with little experience in education. Furthermore, with the proliferation of alternative certification and programs like Teach for America, the practice of hiring teachers without formal degrees in education or classroom experience is fairly well established. Teaching, unlike the principalship, is also often an entry-level job that requires little previous experience aside from student teaching. The only real difference between a Teach for America teacher and a regular teacher is the nature of their training.

Similarly, the trend toward bringing in outsiders to run school districts is now at least a decade old. Superintendents with backgrounds in business, the military, or government are hired more for their forceful personalities and management skills than for their knowledge of instruction. They can arguably rely on the veteran educators within their systems to provide instructional leadership, while school principals need to be involved more directly in the process of upgrading the curriculum and monitoring the performance of teachers. By contrast, entering a role that involves directly managing professionals, like teachers, is tough to nearly impossible in any field where a candidate does not have significant experience. After all, how many newspaper editors did not do significant time in the reporting trenches? How many law firms’ managing partners were not once first-year associates?

The lessons from the Chicago experience are clear and are already being implemented, according to Schnur. “We need to become more aggressive earlier in the year about helping nontraditional candidates access networks that can help them and in helping them understand the climate of the school system,” he says. Last year, “We didn’t invest enough time and energy into this part of the process early enough.” This year the program has started networking earlier in the process and beefed up efforts to make sure that, when the time comes, New Leaders fellows are not just ready to take leadership positions, but are also welcomed by the school system.

-Alexander Russo is a freelance education writer. He is the editor of School Reform in Chicago: Lessons in Policy and Practice (Harvard Education Press, 2004).

Parr would like someone to haul the machines away so she can replace them with drafting tables configured for computer-aided design. In most high schools, this would be the principal’s problem, or something for facilities management. She’s a teacher, but it’s very much her responsibility to change this room full of curios into a place that graduates kids ready for a high-tech workforce.

Parr is one of six members of a teacher cooperative that contracts with Milwaukee Public Schools to run the School for Urban Planning and Architecture, or SUPAR. She thought up the idea for the charter school and negotiated its partnership with the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is directly accountable for the success of the 84 students, 93 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.

This is precisely the type of small, nimble program envisioned by charter schools’ creators. Twenty years ago, when the late Albert Shanker, then president of the American Federation of Teachers, endorsed the notion of innovative schools operating outside conventional district bureaucracies, his aim was to put teachers at the helm. “If you want to hold teachers accountable,” he posited, “then teachers have to be able to run the school.”

Parr’s school is also a lineal descendant of one of the early success stories profiled in Joe Nathan’s celebrated 1996 survey, Charter Schools. When Parr began to consider applying for a charter, her first stop was the teacher-owned cooperative Minnesota New Country School. Galvanized by its collaborative atmosphere, she and her father, lifelong teacher organizer John Parr, spent the drive home drafting union bylaws that would allow her to start a similar school chartered by a large urban district.

Fast-forward two decades from Shanker’s then-radical proposition and there are nearly 80 teacher-governed charter schools around the country. Although most are legally constituted as worker cooperatives, they better resemble the partnerships long enjoyed by doctors, lawyers, and other professionals used to viewing their practice as a collective good.

The hyperdemocratic programs are no more a panacea for what ails American education than any other single type of school. Test scores run the gamut from abysmal to odds-defying, and at least two schools closed before graduating a single cohort. Co-op schools can be challenging to work in and, because each arrives at a leadership structure via an often-painful organic process, tough to replicate, say policymakers and teachers who have taught in them.

Still, a review of the model can add to the current conversation about improving the quality of teaching, says Ted Kolderie, a senior associate with the St. Paul–based think tank Education|Evolving and the person who first proposed the concept.

“From what we know so far it does appear that, where teachers work in collegial groups, their attitudes and behaviors differ remarkably from those we see in conventional school settings,” he says. “Better teacher and student attitudes and behaviors are not in and of themselves better learning. But if you are looking to grow bananas it makes basic sense to plant where there is fertile soil and a lot of rain. Conditions matter.”

Fertile Soil

Located in a farm community an hour south of Minneapolis, New Country is widely known as the school whose observant students tipped off the adult scientific community to large numbers of deformed frogs in the area. Since New Country’s creation in 1994, three years after Minnesota passed the nation’s first charter-school law, thousands of educators have visited, curious about the school’s approach to learning: New Country has neither classrooms nor classes. Students (grades 6–12) design projects according to their interests; the teachers help them incorporate state-mandated learning goals.

As interest in school governance innovations has grown, more of the visitors come to learn about the nuts and bolts. New Country has no employees. The teachers are members of a state-recognized co-op, EdVisions, which provides the school with human resources support and administrative services as needed.

Producer and consumer cooperatives have long been a staple of life in heavily Scandinavian rural Minnesota. The organizations create economies of scale for family farmers and other co-op members, who realize better profits and bigger discounts by joining forces. For decades, Minnesota’s rural school districts have relied on cooperatives to supply school psychologists and instructors with highly specialized licenses.

Consistent with that tradition, EdVisions teacher-owners are responsible for every aspect of the learning program, from hiring and evaluating faculty to determining curriculum and setting salaries. For tasks the teachers can’t or won’t do themselves, such as catering lunch and transporting students, the school contracts with outside vendors. In a year when EdVisions spends less than it brings in, its members decide what to do with the surplus. Often they invest in continuing education, but occasionally shareholders have taken home dividends of $100 to $300.

After a visit to New Country made at Kolderie’s behest in 2000, representatives of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation were impressed enough to fund its replication. Using $9 million in Gates money and a federal charter schools technical assistance grant, EdVisions has helped to create more than 40 teacher-governed schools. Minnesota and Wisconsin are home to more than half, although the schools operate in 11 states. These days, EdVisions has 250 members teaching in 56 schools. Like New Country, some feature project-based learning, while others have traditional curricula. All share the partnership model, although the legal mechanisms by which teachers control the schools vary according to the laws of the different states.

In Minnesota, for example, teachers can organize as either a worker cooperative or a nonprofit. Each school responds to its respective chartering authority; most EdVisions member schools contract with the co-op for payroll services, benefits administration, and professional development assistance. A separate foundation, EdVisions, Inc., helps write grants.

Under Wisconsin’s more complicated laws, Milwaukee’s teacher-governed schools are chartered by the district. Unlike other charters, they remain a part of the district as “instrumentalities,” or instruments of the district. The schools employ the district’s unionized teachers, who operate as members of a cooperative according to terms spelled out in agreements between the union and the district.

Regardless of their location and legal status, all of the teacher-governed schools in the EdVisions network and those surveyed by Education|Evolving are small and serve disproportionate numbers of low-income and minority students. Several are virtually all African American or Latino. One is 100 percent Native American, and another serves gay and lesbian youth who were bullied at mainline schools.

Student achievement is mixed. For example, on recent Minnesota state tests, 43 percent of students at New Country read proficiently, and just 25 percent scored at the proficient level in math. Twenty-nine percent of the school’s 123 students are from low–income families, and 37 percent receive special education services. Avalon High School in St. Paul has fewer special education students but as many who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. Sixty percent of its 190 students scored proficient in reading in 2008 and 40 percent did so in math. At Minneapolis’s El Colegio, 86 percent of students are low income and 91 percent are minorities; just 11 percent scored proficient on either test.

In Milwaukee, test scores among the co-op schools also run the gamut. All students at the Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes (ALBA) elementary school are low-income Latinos; 60 percent of 3rd graders passed math exams, and 30 percent read proficiently. Third graders at the Individualized Developmental Educational Approaches to Learning (IDEAL) school had similar scores in math but significantly higher scores in reading. Of the seven co-op high schools with 2007 test scores available, just two had higher percentages of 10th graders demonstrating proficiency in math than the district, three in reading (see Figure 1).

Many Kinds of Accountability

Teachers in co-op schools are often less interested in test scores than in the model’s potential for creating cultures that hang onto kids who might otherwise get lost in the cracks. Because they are the administrators, they can adjust lessons to each student’s needs. If something isn’t working, they have their partners’ expertise to draw on.

Observes Raven, a student at Milwaukee’s Community High School, “If one’s down, all’s down. They need each other to stay strong. Each one is like a backbone.”

Once they realize they are dealing directly with decisionmakers, students are more likely to hold themselves accountable for their learning, says Carrie Bakken, a teacher at St. Paul’s Avalon. Avalon has a student-drafted constitution and a congress that produces legislation teachers either accept or veto. Several years ago, the school had a problem with tardiness. The students wrote a bill, debated stakeholders’ likely positions, and ultimately drafted a policy that was stricter and more enforceable than anything the adults had considered. Bakken’s explanation: Accountability trickles down.

“Adolescents—their life work is to sniff out the hypocrisy of adults; that’s their full time job,” observes Harvard education professor Richard Elmore. “So you’re setting yourself up when you put yourself in that situation. You really do have to act according to your beliefs or the structure you set up doesn’t have any authority for kids and it just becomes chaos.”

According to veterans, teachers often imagine the absence of a full-time administrator means no hovering boss, but few are prepared for the demands of a system that can’t afford free riders. “Small communities tend to be pretty vicious about driving people out who don’t do the work because there’s no one there to soak up the difference when the work doesn’t get done,” says Elmore. “They operate according to a pretty powerful normative structure.”

Selecting teachers who will fit in is crucial. “We really look at, what do you bring to the table? What’s your skill set? Not just licensure,” says SUPAR founder Parr. “We have to determine who gets what role: Who’s good at external relations? Who’s good at fundraising? Who’s going to keep things on track?”

Each co-op school establishes salaries according to the priorities of its members. It’s important to Avalon’s teachers to compete with wages in the St. Paul Public Schools and to recognize teachers’ experience with higher pay, for example.

Because Milwaukee’s 11 teacher-governed schools all belong to the district, faculty receive the same pay and benefits as other Milwaukee Public Schools employees. The only difference is that the terms of their assignments are spelled out under union side agreements. The cooperatives that run the schools decide whom to hire and when to return poor performers to the district’s hiring pool for reassignment.

All use some form of peer review. At Avalon, parents, students, and teachers—who are referred to as advisers—fill out anonymous evaluations via SurveyMonkey. “The key question is whether an adviser is meeting the job description,” says Bakken. “What does that adviser do well, not do well? It ends by asking whether this person should return next year.” Faculty who shouldn’t return usually realize as much before evaluation time.

“You have to work at maintaining this culture,” says Bakken. “There’s a huge learning curve for new people.”

Distributing Leadership

Not surprisingly, teacher-run schools can founder on the question of leadership. Because they are what Elmore calls “purpose-built,” the schools can appear to be tightly knit communities unified by a strong vision. But, Elmore says, “they tend to be very vulnerable when they confront a problem where they actually have to operate like an organization.” Teacher-owners have to figure out how to apportion the responsibility most schools vest in a principal or other authority or risk imploding in the face of external pressures like declining enrollment, poor test scores, or public controversy.

Distributing leadership takes both time and effort. Elmore cites research by the University of Michigan’s Roger Goddard that collective efficacy—in this instance, teachers who believe that by working together they are effective—has a powerful effect on student learning. It’s a level of functioning that can’t be grafted onto one school from another; systems can be copied, but the exact mix has to emerge organically.

Some schools adjust workload or pay for teachers who take on administrative or other extra responsibilities, but establishing a governance structure tied to compensation is less important than dividing duties according to aptitude or inclination, say teachers who work in the schools. Two of Avalon’s 14 teachers split their time between the classroom and administration. Bakken is one; she prefers to handle paperwork, while her counterpart enjoys external relations.

Ideally, Avalon’s team makes decisions by consensus at its twice-a-week meetings, but members vote when necessary. “When we know there’s a contentious issue coming up we talk a lot,” says Bakken. “In the meeting we use a ‘fist-of-five’ system: People hold up five, four, three fingers to indicate some degree of agreement. One or two is disagreement. A closed fist blocks action.”

SUPAR’s teachers also meet twice a week, but responsibility is vested differently. Because Wisconsin law says one person must sign a school’s charter, Milwaukee’s teacher-led schools have lead teachers. Originally the job was supposed to rotate every two years at the New School for Community Service, but it took founder Marty Horning so long to accumulate enough knowledge to be efficient he’s ended up the de facto go-to person.

Without a strong structure, teacher-run schools are vulnerable to collapse when core members retire or move on. EdVisions cofounder Doug Thomas worries that a minority of the co-op’s 250 members are truly invested as owners. “I’ll be brutally honest,” he says. “About a third of the people who belong really get it. A third like the idea but they’re really busy. A third look at their check every month and wonder, ‘Why does my paycheck come from EdVisions? What is that?’” If he had it to do over, Thomas would constitute the schools as nonprofits, chiefly to make it easier for teachers to write grants.

An associate at the policy incubator Education|Evolving, Kim Ferris-Berg, believes ownership matters. “Any given structure may get professionalism for teachers and higher-performing students,” she says. “The teacher professional-partnership arrangement maximizes the pressure to do it right because teachers are accountable for results, but results are not guaranteed.”

Whatever the details, Kolderie is convinced it’s time to hand both authority and responsibility to the same people. “The dominant notion in this country at the moment is that improving teaching is something the boss does,” he says. “We might at long last try approaching teachers as professionals; telling them what we want and leaving it to them, organized in collegial groups and made responsible for performance, to figure out how the job can best be done.”

Beth Hawkins is a Minneapolis-based writer and covers education, among other topics, for Minnpost.com.

Students will test the limits of acceptable behavior in myriad ways better known to school teachers than to judges; school officials need a degree of flexible authority to respond to disciplinary challenges; and the law has always considered the relationship between teachers and students special.
— Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer

In Morse v. Frederick, a 2007 First Amendment student free speech case, the Supreme Court held that a school official may restrict student speech at a school-supervised event when that speech is viewed as promoting illegal drug use. Filing a separate opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer echoed concerns expressed by his conservative colleagues that school authority was being undermined by legal challenges. Since the 1960s, courts have become increasingly involved in regulating U.S. schooling in general, but especially in the area of school discipline. Justice Breyer noted in his opinion, “Under these circumstances, the more detailed the Court’s supervision becomes, the more likely its law will engender further disputes among teachers and students.”

School discipline is a critical area for research, as student interaction with school institutional authority is one of the primary mechanisms whereby young people come into contact with and internalize societal norms, values, and rules. It is thus significant that the number of cases reaching state and federal appellate courts has surged back up to levels attained during the early 1970s when civil rights cases had a central place on the national political agenda (see Figure 1). Our research indicates that both educators and students understand the former’s authority to be more limited and the latter’s rights more expansive than has actually been established by case law.

School Discipline in Court
Until the late 1960s, parents and students rarely challenged the disciplinary actions of school authorities, viewing common schools as providing instruction, instilling virtue, and fostering the ideals of our nation. Then, as conceptions of youth rights began to shift, and as institutions that provided support for the expansion of these rights emerged, students and parents, with the support of public-interest lawyers, began to question and challenge school disciplinary practices in court.

Table 1 summarizes key school-related rulings from the Supreme Court over the last 40 years. From 1969 to 1975, amid increasing legal challenges to the regulation of student expression in school, the Court’s rulings largely confirmed students’ rights to various free expression and due process protections. The most important decision affecting how schools approach student discipline was Goss v. Lopez, decided by the Supreme Court in 1975. During a patriotic assembly at Central High School in Columbus, Ohio, in 1971, expressions of student unrest over the lack of African American curricula turned into a week of demonstrations and disturbances. Dozens of students were suspended for up to 10 days without formal hearings or notification of the specific charges against them. The Supreme Court case hinged on whether the disciplinary actions improperly denied students their rights to a public education. In ruling for the students, the Court granted “rudimentary” due process rights to those suspended from school for fewer than 10 days, as well as “more formal protections” for students facing longer exclusions.

In recent years, courts at all levels have dealt with cases challenging the enforcement of “zero-tolerance” policies that establish severe and nondiscretionary punishments for violations involving weapons, violence, drugs, or alcohol. At the same time, an increasing number of cases have appeared in lower courts that involve students and families suing schools for failing to provide adequate discipline within school facilities. These cases have alleged climates that permit bullying, sexual harassment, or other forms of school violence (including school shootings). Thus, in recent years, schools have been sued for both disciplining students and not disciplining them.

Since 1975, the Supreme Court has generally been less favorable toward students than it was during the early years of the civil rights movement.. This shift in orientation occurred for diverse reasons, including growing public concern about the level of violence and disorder in public schools, the changed political climate following the end of the Vietnam era, and a pattern of increasingly conservative judicial appointments during the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush administrations. The Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Morse v. Frederick continued the post-1975 pattern of sympathy with schools that are facing challenges to their disciplinary authority, but did not, as some of the media coverage implied, alter the general contours of student rights as previously established. Its June 2009 decision in Safford United School District v. Redding, in which eight justices agreed that a near strip-search of an 8th-grade girl suspected of concealing prescription-strength ibuprofen was unconstitutional, at first glance appears to be an exception—a sign that the courts will continue to watch over the shoulders of school officials to ensure that reasonableness and proportionality prevail. Yet a majority on the court ruled that the administrators who conducted the search could not be held personally liable because of the uncertainty of the law in this area.

Appellate Case Patterns
While Supreme Court decisions are important because every school in the nation must adhere in principle to its rulings, these few landmark cases do not encompass the universe of legal challenges regarding school discipline and related policies. To discern the larger contours of the legal climate facing schools, we analyzed all appellate-level federal and state court cases in which school efforts to discipline and control students have been challenged. As a whole, decisions in these cases are often complex and contradictory in providing practical guidance to schools regarding specific disciplinary matters. We included cases involving the use of state agents (such as the police) acting on behalf of school authorities to deal with students in the vicinity of school grounds. We excluded instances of conflicts between schools and teachers (such as teacher dismissal cases) and between schools and nonstudent outsiders (such as drug- and weapon-free-zone cases that did not involve students), as well as student rights cases focused exclusively on free speech issues (that is, those not combined with the school’s use of suspension, expulsion, corporal punishment, and transfer). We also excluded cases in which students allege that school authorities have breached their duty to maintain safety in the school and to protect students from harm.

Of course, we did not include the vast majority of litigation, which was either settled before hearing or never reached state and federal appellate courts. Still, our methods provide a way to gauge the general character and broad trends in legal challenges that contemporary educators face. Appellate-level court cases define case law, generate media coverage, influence public perceptions, and can be tracked over time as an empirical indicator of the broad parameters of court climate toward school discipline. We found that not only has the frequency of legal challenges greatly varied over time, but the content and direction of outcomes has shifted as well.
The newfound willingness to challenge school authority became evident in the surge of litigation during the late 1960s. In part because of increased institutional support from public-interest legal advocacy groups and the legal services program of the Office of Economic Opportunity, from 1968 to 1975 an average of 39.1 public school K—12 cases per year reached the appellate level. After important legal precedents were set and institutional support waned, the average number of cases declined but then took a sharp upturn from 1993 on, with a peak of 76 cases in 2000 and a total of 65 in 2007. We present here the overall number of cases rather than a relative measure accounting for public school enrollment, given that media coverage and individual understandings reflect the former indicator. Nevertheless, a measure of state and federal court cases calculated per enrolled student would demonstrate similar upward trends, more than doubling from the years 1976—1992 to the 2003—2007 period.

The substance of the cases brought before the courts has also varied over time, with protest and free expression cases decreasing markedly through 1992 (see Figure 2a). Recently, courts have witnessed a reemergence of these issues. Cases involving alcohol and drugs rose during the intermediate time periods that coincided with national attention to the “War on Drugs” and then diminished. Those involving weapons and violence have increased to nearly 40 percent of all K—12 public school discipline cases since 1993. In addition, school discipline court cases increasingly have involved student disability. From 2003 to 2007, 18 percent of cases included discussion of student disability status. Since the 1970s, legal entitlements and protections have grown for students classified as disabled because of learning, physical, or behavioral handicaps (including psychological disorders that are associated with the manifestation of student misbehavior). Special education students thus gained additional protections related to school discipline, particularly in cases in which infractions could be attributed to the individual’s disability.

Over time, we found that courts in general have become less favorable to student claims across these areas of litigation (see Figure 2b). However, since the number of court challenges has increased in recent decades, the likelihood of a school facing a legal environment in which a student has recently been successful in a court challenge over school discipline has not significantly diminished.

Socioeconomic Disparities
Many of the early school discipline cases were brought to ensure that the rights of less-advantaged students were protected. New evidence suggests, however, that litigation is increasingly used strategically and instrumentally by families from relatively privileged origins to promote the interests of their children. Research (by Irenee Beattie, Josipa Roksa, and Richard Arum) that examined appellate court cases from 2000 to 2002 found that, on average, those cases emerged from secondary schools with 29 percent nonwhite students compared to 37 percent nonwhite students in the national population of secondary schools (the latter weighted for enrollment size to be comparable to the court case data); appellate cases also emanated from schools with more educational resources per student (student/teacher ratios of 16.3 compared to 17.5 nationally).

National surveys of teachers and administrators reveal a similar middle-class bias in legal challenges. A reanalysis of a Harris survey of teachers and administrators conducted by Melissa Velez and Richard Arum for Common Good in 2003 examined the proportion of public school educators (a combined sample of teachers and administrators) who reported that either they or someone they knew personally had been sued by a student or parent. Educators in suburban schools with less than 70 percent nonwhite students had a 47 percent probability of having experienced contact with an adversarial legal challenge compared to a 40 percent chance for educators in all other schools. Although much of the development of student rights originally emerged from concern about nonwhite students in urban areas, educators in those settings had only a 41 percent probability of contact with a legal challenge.

In collaboration with colleagues working on the School Rights Project (Lauren Edelman, Calvin Morrill, and Karolyn Tyson), we conducted a national telephone survey of 600 high school teachers and administrators and site-based surveys of 5,490 students and 368 educators on perceptions and experiences of the law in schools. In our site-based work, which included in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, we examined 24 high schools with varying legal environments situated across three states (New York, North Carolina, and California), stratified by school type (traditional public, charter, and Catholic) as well as by student socioeconomic composition. We found that 15 percent of public school teachers and 55 percent of public school administrators have been threatened with a legal suit over school-related matters. For administrators with more than 15 years of experience in the position, the figure rose to 73 percent. Administrators’ actual experience with being sued for school-related matters occurs at a lower rate (14 percent), but is still the source of considerable professional anxiety, given that these cases—following Wood v. Strickland (1975)—include vulnerability to personal liability claims. We again found that legal challenges are concentrated in schools with more-privileged students. When we looked solely at administrators working in urban public schools with more than half of students eligible for free lunch, we found—albeit with a sample of only 16 cases—not a single report of administrators being sued for a school-related matter.

That legal mobilization is dependent on economic resources needed to pursue such challenges is in general not surprising. We documented evidence of this association, however, to illustrate that regardless of the institutional and political origins of student rights, today legal mobilization in schools largely reflects patterns of socioeconomic inequalities. In the School Rights Project, we found that white students were nearly twice as likely as nonwhite students to report having pursued a formal legal remedy for a perceived rights violation.

Legal Understandings and School Practices
Legal mobilization is a relatively rare occurrence, a small tip of a much larger legal-dispute pyramid. School discipline today is profoundly shaped by legal understandings that are only partially and indirectly related to formal regulation and case law. We highlight here the extent to which both students and educators have developed an expansive definition of legal rights of students, the relationship between this sense of legal entitlement and school disciplinary practices, and perceptions of the fairness and legitimacy of various school disciplinary practices.

The institutionalization of student due process protections goes well beyond appellate case law, having been enshrined in extensive state statutes and administrative regulations. The accompanying sidebar (page 65) provides a sense of the extent to which law has come to permeate school practices by highlighting codified disciplinary procedures in New York City. While discipline policies vary across schools, districts, and states—and as the nation’s largest school district the New York City public schools are likely more bureaucratized and formalized in matters of school discipline than smaller districts—the scale, scope, and level of complexity of the legal regulations affecting day-to-day school practices appear quite formidable.

Generally speaking, educators and students have developed a set of legal understandings that assumes a broad and expansive definition of student legal entitlements. Following the Goss decision, students have been granted rudimentary due process protections when facing minor discipline and more formal due process protections when facing more serious forms of discipline (such as long-term expulsion or suspension). The Goss decision delineated procedural safeguards, stating that “the student be given oral or written notice of the charges against him and, if he denies them, an explanation of the evidence the authorities have and an opportunity to present his side of the story.” More formal due process protections may include the right of students to “summon the accuser, permit cross-examination, and allow the student to present his own witnesses. In more difficult cases, he (the disciplinarian) may permit counsel.”

We are interested in individuals’ perceptions of such protections, since students’ and educators’ beliefs about rights likely have real consequences for school authority and disciplinary procedures. In the School Rights Project, we specifically asked students and teachers which due process protections were required when students faced various disciplinary sanctions. We found that while expectations of formal due process protections were broadly diffused for students when facing major disciplinary actions, many of them had also come to expect these legal entitlements when facing minor day-to-day discipline. For example, 62 percent of public school students in our sample believed that, if faced with long-term suspension or expulsion, they were legally entitled to at least one of the following: a formal disciplinary hearing, opportunity to be represented by legal counsel, opportunity to confront and cross-examine witnesses bringing the charges, or opportunity to call witnesses to provide alternative versions of the incident. Approximately one-third of students also believed that they were legally entitled to some form of formal due process protection when they had their grades lowered for disciplinary reasons (33 percent), were suspended from extracurricular activities (36 percent), or faced in-school suspension (35 percent).

We found that students’ sense of legal entitlement was expansive, and that teacher and administrator expectations of required student due process protections were even more so. For example, when asked about lowering student grades for disciplinary reasons, approximately half of public school teachers and administrators responded that this action was prohibited; among the educators who did think such disciplinary actions were permissible, 32 percent reported that students subject to such disciplinary sanctions were entitled to formal due process protections.

In the School Rights Project, we found that increased perceptions of student legal entitlements correlate with decreased reports of the fairness of school discipline. This conclusion mirrors James Coleman’s finding that Catholic school students in the 1980s were significantly more likely to perceive school discipline to be fair than public school students, who possessed far greater formal legal protections. Educators and students have developed a generalized sense of legal entitlements, while school practices have, in many settings, become increasingly authoritarian, with student misbehavior often subject to criminalization and formal legal sanction. These internal contradictions enhance students’ sense of the unfairness of school discipline. Longitudinal research has demonstrated that students who perceive school discipline as unfair are more likely to disobey teachers, disrupt classroom instruction, and in general fail to develop behaviors conducive to educational success and related positive outcomes.

Also, in recent decades schools have moved away from disciplinary practices that rely on the judgment, discretion, and action of professional educators and have turned instead to reliance on school security guards, uniformed police, technical surveillance, security apparatus, and zero-tolerance policies. The latter techniques are ill suited to the pedagogical task of enhancing the moral authority of educators to support the socialization of youth, that is, the internalization of norms, values, and rules.

Conclusion
Citizens, legislators, judges, and policymakers have begun to recognize and question legal interventions in situations involving school discipline and authority. We add to this discussion our findings that the legal understandings underlying school discipline policies depart in significant ways from the case law on which they are assumed to be based, according expansive rights and protections to students, even as the courts have tended to side with school authorities. We also document that although public-interest lawyers were initially motivated to expand student legal rights as part of a larger strategy to reduce social inequality, legal challenges to school disciplinary actions are disproportionately the province of white and higher-income students and their families.

The expansion of student legal entitlements has been accompanied by the increasing formalization and institutionalization of school discipline. As educators’ discretionary authority over school discipline has been challenged and undermined, counterproductive authoritarian measures such as zero-tolerance policies have been implemented in its place. But to be educationally effective, school discipline requires that educators have moral authority and students perceive their actions as legitimate and fair. Ironically, the expansion of student legal rights, rather than enhancing youth outcomes, has increased the extent to which schools have relied on authoritarian measures, decreased the moral authority of educators, and diminished the capacity of schools to socialize young people effectively.

As various social and political actors consider legal regulatory reforms, it is important to recognize that the expansion of students’ legal entitlements has also increased the potential for student dissent in U.S. schools, whether of a political, religious, or ideological character. At the same time, individual students and families with sufficient resources are able to contest what they perceive as unfair disciplinary sanctions or rights violations. These gains have come at a pedagogical and societal cost, as the resolution of school disciplinary matters has increasingly moved—as Justice Breyer feared—from the schoolhouse to the courthouse.

Richard Arum is professor of sociology and education at New York University, where Doreet Preiss is a research fellow and doctoral candidate. This essay is adapted from “Still Judging School Discipline,” in Joshua M. Dunn and Martin R. West, eds., From Schoolhouse to Courthouse: The Judiciary’s Role in American Education (Brookings, 2009).

John, the new board of education president, had just proposed that we move “Old Business” to the beginning of our meetings.

I had spent roughly a year-and-a-half arguing that it made no sense to put Old Business at the end of each school board meeting, which usually arrived about 10pm, the third hour of these star chambers of modern public education. By then, most people, including the lone reporter, had gone home.  That, of course, was the point: Old Business was dirty laundry, things not done. Why flaunt it?

I had gotten nowhere with my arguments because my colleagues on the school board thought I was the devil.  I was the infamous “rogue” board member, the person that school board associations give seminars about. Not a team player. The local paper wrote an editorial about me that prompted a friend, after church, to remark, “I’ve seen kinder things said about murderers.”

In fact, I had slipped on to the school board as a write-in candidate, after a stealth, two-day campaign waged only by email.

I had spent the last five years haranguing the board, at meetings and in letters to the editor, for its failure to do anything about low test scores (only about 50 percent of the kids passed the basic state reading and math tests), high dropout rates (over eight percent, more than double the state average), low graduation rates (under 60 percent), huge achievement gaps (from 15 to 40 points difference between whites and blacks), and phenomenally high rates of special ed referrals (almost 20 percent of all the kids). I had set records for Freedom of Information Act requests.

Needless to say, my new colleagues were not looking forward to the prospect of sharing executive sessions with me.  And, after being sworn in, they went out of their way to keep me in the dark.  If the superintendent recommended hiring a new teacher and I asked to see the candidate’s resume, a motion was quickly made that school board did not want to see said resume.  It passed, 6 to 1.  When a special board meeting was called to approve $25 million in construction contracts, I asked to see the contracts.  “I make a motion that the board does not look at the contracts,” said one of my colleagues. “I second that, said another.”  Another defeat, 6 to 1.

One of my favorites was Board Policy #2510.  It was titled NEW BOARD MEMBER-ELECT ORIENTATION and it said, in part, that “Each Board member-elect shall, as soon as possible, … be given selected materials of the previous year covering the function of the Board and the school district, including (a) policy manual, (b) copies of key reports prepared during the previous year by school Board committees and/or the administration, (c) the School Law handbook prepared by the New York State School Boards Association, (d) access to minutes of Board meetings of the previous year, (e) latest financial report of the district, and (f) copies of pertinent materials developed by the New York State School Boards Association….”

My orientation consisted of the board president and superintendent sitting me down and saying, “You’re not getting anything.”  And so it went.

I once read the board’s orientation policy, out loud, at a public meeting, to the regional superintendent, a lawyer.  “Aren’t school boards supposed to follow their own policies?” I asked.  “The board can do whatever it wants,” he said.  I was shocked, because board policies are, in fact, laws and have to be followed–or changed.

He might have said, “whatever it can get away with.”  But his comment reminded me of a fundamental truth about public school systems: the buck stops with the people.

There is much debate in policy chambers and think tanks across the country about the value of school boards.  I am here to say we need them. And we need more of them.  They remain a kind of last hope for democracy, where a rogue can actually be elevated to position of authority, bringing a flashlight –- and, sometimes, a pulpit — to the process.  (The pulpit comes and goes; my school board quickly removed “Board Comments,” traditionally the place for board members to give speeches praising their friends and family, from school board meeting agendas in order to muzzle me.)

I will write more on my school board experiences on this blog.  For now, let us celebrate democracy, three newly elected board members, and a vote, this one 4 to 3, to put Old Business up front, where it belongs.

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.

The first bill is already iconic: a Lexis-Nexis search covering NCLB since its passage quickly overloads and shuts itself down. No such difficulties, however, hamper a hunt for stories about IES. Half of the meager fourscore hits produced by the agency’s title turn out to be for a similarly named organization in Angola. Searching instead for IES director Grover “Russ” Whitehurst only confirms that many high school sports teams have a Whitehurst on the roster. It seems safe to say that IES is operating well under the radar of mainstream media attention.

But as the organization responsible for putting the “scientifically based” in the scientifically based research mandated by NCLB—not to mention the home of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—IES deserves attention in its own right. With Whitehurst moving to the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution after his term expires this month, and as drafts for IES reauthorization begin to make the Beltway rounds, it is time to assess the contribution of IES to the history of federal education research and look ahead to its future.

At best, education research is hard to do well: it studies a field in which all else is too rarely equal, one often driven not by facts but by values and aspiration. “Scientific” study of education at the federal level is thus a difficult mission. Achieving it has been made harder still by the inability of a succession of research agencies to withstand pressures to politicize or gain significant funding. Lawmakers constantly tout the virtues of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) when discussing what they want from education research, but they have just as constantly failed to endow that vision with either firewalls or cash.

IES, however, has a structure that heightens its autonomy from political interference. Whitehurst has used the opening provided to promote a new culture of favored research that, while sometimes narrow in methodological scope, has changed the conversation in the research community about rigor and relevance—and thus changed, at least at the margins, the research enterprise itself.

Still, has education research managed to move from tracing a vicious circle to a virtuous one? With new sets of policymakers—in the White House, Congress, and IES itself—taking office after the 2008 elections, the real tests may be yet to come.

Truth vs. Partisanship

President Hoover’s 1931 advisory committee on education grandly proclaimed the battle of “Truth vs. Partisanship.” Education policy “cannot hope to rise above partisanship,” it argued, “…unless mere differences of opinion, tenaciously held, are dissolved by revelations of pertinent facts established by scientific method and presented in understandable terms.” The Hoover committee thus summed up two truths about federal education research. First, rhetoric elevating the methodical quest for the scientific truths underlying education and its outcomes would echo repeatedly throughout the decades that followed. Second, its reality would fall far short. Even though a desire to collate and diffuse “statistics and facts” about education motivated the creation in 1867 of the earliest national department of education, research neither before Hoover nor since has ever achieved the status his advisors envisioned.

Indeed, at the turn of the 19th century, the first Office of Education (OE), by virtue of its placement in the Interior Department, spent more effort administering the breeding of Alaskan reindeer than driving or disseminating education research. (The reindeer would depart for greener bureaucratic pastures in 1907.) Periodic efforts to bolster OE’s clout did not take hold until after World War II. The faith in scientific research inspired by the war, afterward institutionalized in the likes of the NSF and the NIH, soon spread to education. In the 1960s, a series of research-and-development centers and then regional educational laboratories was rapidly established. But soon a grander proposal was in play—a plan, as Lee Sproull and her coauthors describe in Organizing an Anarchy, born “out of frustration with the failure of OE and belief in the power of scientific research.” The driving force was Nixon aide Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had realized (he wrote in 1969) that “almost nothing is known about education.” OE had inadequate resources or autonomy to do much about this, and Moynihan convinced the president to seek creation of a powerful independent research organization. Nixon’s subsequent message to Congress stressed the application of “science…to the techniques of teaching” and outlined an independent National Institute of Education (NIE) that would hire a “permanent staff of outstanding scholars” from across the sciences, contract with other researchers, and serve as “a focus for educational research and experimentation.” As such, the president anticipated a quarter-billion-dollar annual appropriation. The Budget Bureau’s Emerson Elliott, who became acting director of NIE, says it aimed even higher: “it was formulated by Moynihan as a billion dollar agency.”

Things didn’t work out that way. Michael Timpane, NIE director in the Carter administration, later said the agency “inherited at best a mixed bag of research projects, was slow to organize, inexpert at explaining itself, and soon fell from political grace.” As an indicator of the latter plunge, consider that Nixon’s $250 million agency netted $70 million in fiscal 1975 and barely $50 million 10 years later. Across 13 years NIE had six directors plus five acting directors, and was subject to constant reorganization and political intrusion. President Reagan fired its entire advisory board, despite its members’ statutory fixed terms, and his first director was most noted for decrying the “false” premise “that education is a science, whose progress depends on systematic research…”

In 1985, however, Secretary of Education William Bennett merged NIE and NCES into OERI. OERI head Chester Finn, as an aide to Moynihan, had helped create NIE; now he helped put it out of its misery.

Finn’s greatest success was in revamping NCES as an authoritative source for neutral data (see “Troublemaker,” features, Spring 2008). But the labs and centers, with which Finn waged war over earmarking, returned those attacks with political interest. And over time, the OERI suffered from some of the same problems as NIE. It had frequent changes of leadership; new monies it received were encumbered by new duties. The agency remained politically permeable and legislatively micromanaged.

On cue, the rhetorical cycle began again: OERI needed to be “depoliticized,” Rep. Major Owens (D-New York) argued in 1991, “so that… research activities can gain the kinds of credibility and support they merit.” Owens favored the restoration of a powerful independent policy board; others, gazing at the NSF/NIH grail, wanted to organize around distinct “institutes” within the agency, each focused on a different educational ill. Five of these were ultimately created, but not supported. Bush OERI director Christopher Cross argued that the institutes would need $50 million—each. But funding in fiscal year 1996 totaled just $43 million.

By the time reauthorization came due again, OERI was in trouble. The Clinton administration decision to use OERI to develop and oversee a system of voluntary national tests drew renewed accusations that the agency had been politicized for the president’s policy purposes, and the GOP-led Congress finally forced the issue out of the agency’s jurisdiction; Rep. Michael Castle (R-Delaware) would soon charge OERI with a long list of familiar sins, including “the creeping influence of short-lived partisan or political operatives, the funding and dissemination of questionable studies…and…no real sense of mission, mired by duplicative programs and competing interests.” In the fight between truth and partisanship, partisanship had won yet another round.

The Education Sciences Reform Act of 2002

Unexpectedly, though, as a new iteration of the research function took shape, what political scientist Terry Moe calls “the politics of bureaucratic structure” actually worked to promote agency insulation. There were various reasons for this, among them the fruitful foray into the study of reading by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the centrality of such “scientifically based research” in the concurrent debate over the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. President Bush praised ESRA as “an important complement” to NCLB that would “substantially strengthen the scientific basis” of classroom teaching. Likewise, the Democratic legislators so crucial to the passage of NCLB made ESRA bipartisan as well. As research became salient, so did “good” research, and as the congressional debate over education became inseparable from a broad endorsement of “accountability,” an autonomous IES became a marker of members’ commitment to that cause.

Accordingly, Castle’s first draft of ESRA in 2000 envisioned a National Academy for Education Research, Statistics, Evaluation, and Information independent of the Department of Education, run by a director serving a fixed term. Each of its three centers (for research, statistics, and evaluation) would be headed by a presidential appointee also serving a fixed term and under statutory stricture to guarantee that agency activities were “free from ideological agendas and undue political influence.” Intriguingly, what constituted valid research was to be mandated in law. Quantitative hypotheses, for instance, had to be “evaluated using experimental designs in which individuals, entities, programs, or activities are assigned to different conditions with appropriate controls to evaluate the effects of the condition of interest through random assignment experiments, or other designs to the extent such designs contain within-condition or across-condition controls.”

The end product retained key features of this first draft. But a series of changes was made over time. The academy was moved back into the department, becoming the Institute of Education Sciences, but retained its independent director, who gained appointment powers over the centers’ commissioners—except, notably, at NCES. The definition of “scientifically based research standards” for education wound up less proscriptive than in earlier drafts, but still limited causal claims to research designs that could bear their weight. A new advisory board (the National Board for Education Sciences, or NBES) was given formal approval powers over the institute’s long-term research priorities and its mandated strengthened peer-review process. And for the first time, a majority of the board was to be composed of researchers, rather than practitioners or other consumers of research (see Figure 1).

The first director of IES, moving over from OERI, was Russ Whitehurst. Whitehurst’s strong academic credentials broadcast his methodological predilections. He came to the Bush administration from the quantitatively minded psychology department at SUNY-Stony Brook with a long scholarly record that included stints editing research journals and serving as academic director of the Merrill-Palmer Institute. Per the mission statement of the latter, IES would be led by someone dedicated to “evidence-based programs and interventions” and the models that probed them.

The First Authorization Cycle

In the fall of 2006, IES received what an Education Week survey termed “mixed, but mostly positive, grades”; and the follow-up here likewise found widespread praise, leavened with caution. All sides agree that the six years since ESRA was passed have been consequential ones for education research.

Fans of IES tend to praise a new sense of agency independence and, not unrelated, a renewed emphasis on scientific rigor. IES has more structural autonomy than its predecessors; and below the surface the agency’s authority is also much improved, former OERI head Kent McGuire says, in ways that are “not sexy but critical.” In one telling shift, the director shot up the bureaucratic ranks to Level II on the executive schedule. That placed the position just one rung beneath the secretary and, by no coincidence, at the same rank as the director of NSF. (Assistant secretaries, by contrast, are normally at Level IV.) The ability to hire personnel outside civil service constraints and to roll funds over multiple fiscal years has been equally helpful. So too has language in ESRA that gives the director explicit authority to prepare and publish research and evaluation reports “without the approval of the Secretary or any other office of the Department.”

Thus if, as Finn argues, “three things matter in Washington, in terms of autonomy: the ability to manage your own money; to manage your own people; and to manage your own words,” IES has made important strides on all three fronts. One insider notes the dramatic contrast between the “most partisan Department of Education I have seen since 1988, and the most independent research and stats agency.”

IES has taken advantage of this independence to drive changes in expectations and values in the research community. The agency’s grant-review process was revamped to one Whitehurst says was “explicitly modeled on NIH,” emphasizing separation of the peer review and contracting processes and requiring agency reports to be peer reviewed before publication. The change in vocabulary has been striking: loud language touting the “rigorous scientific standards” set forth in statute emanates constantly from IES, relentlessly pressing the importance of randomized, controlled trials as the “gold standard” for judging whether and how a given intervention is effective. The online What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) judges “what works” with regard to curricular interventions on this basis alone. Blasted by high-volume endorsements of experimental design, researchers may be forgiven for feeling like Manuel Noriega in his 1989 Panama compound.

Some, of course, are clapping along to that beat; the quantitatively minded choir to which IES could preach has been a growing part of the education research community. But there are many others dubious of what they see as the myopic focus of IES. For them, the IES mantra of “transformation” via “evidence-based intervention” amounts (ironically enough) to a sort of faith-based program, an unrealistically dogmatic view of what should count as research. Instead, they argue, as former OERI head Sharon Robinson puts it, “you have to have a range of methods and rigor in all methodologies” and that an exclusive approach created mistrust in large segments of the education establishment, instead of “enlarging the political army.” Further, Knowledge Alliance’s Jim Kohlmoos argues that “the irony is that as you insulate [the agency]—which is a positive thing, in my opinion—you run the risk of becoming less relevant” to the world of practice. This connection, of course, is one of the things that WWC is designed to enhance; that it is not uniformly seen as doing so remains a concern. (Recently a parallel, and peppier, site titled Doing What Works has arisen in the department—not in IES, though it uses IES research.)

Suggesting these views had at least some traction on the Hill, early House drafts of NCLB reauthorization tinkered with the standard for scientifically based research, weakening its focus on experiments. A recent proposal for reauthorization approved by the IES advisory board, the National Board for Education Sciences, tweaks the language back again to reemphasize that causal claims can be made “only in well-designed and implemented random assignment experiments, when feasible.”

Even those who resent that focus must concede that IES practices what it preaches. The agency has rarely parroted the lines scripted by its political bosses or industrial heavyweights: Whitehurst was careful to cast caveats upon education secretary Margaret Spellings’s claims that rising student test scores in 2005 offered “proof” of NCLB’s effectiveness, adding in 2007 that widely divergent state standards for “proficiency” in fact made it hard to judge NCLB’s impact. While the administration has strongly pushed phonics-based reading curricula, IES gave positive marks to the rival Reading Recovery program and later reported ambivalent if still preliminary results for Reading First (a broader report on this topic is due in late 2008). And WWC found in 2007 that expensively touted math texts and test-preparation software had little effect on student outcomes: textbook superpower Houghton Mifflin’s elementary mathematics curriculum, for instance, was “found to have no discernible effects on…achievement.”

Such insulation is good for the perceived integrity of the institute. Even congressional Democrats, angered by what they see as the gross politicization of science agencies under the Bush administration, make an exception for IES. But being apolitical takes special political skill. Otherwise—as with the initial Reading First report—it runs the risk of antagonizing potential allies, and of cooling ardor for institute initiatives and departmental appropriations (see Figure 2). (Reading First funds have been cut from $1 billion to $393 million to, possibly, zero in 2009, and IES’s own funding has been flat since fiscal 2004.) It can mean, too, that the institute does not participate in shaping legislation with important ramifications for research, such as the NCLB reauthorization.

Over time, however, as Whitehurst’s tenure lengthened vis-à-vis latecomers to the administration, his role of honest if prickly broker has garnered more deference. Time, too, has helped soften the edges between Whitehurst’s focus on quantitative experimental methodology and those pushing more immediate “relevance” over his brand of “rigor.” Sharon Robinson concedes, “They’ve come a long way toward lowering the guard and righting the rhetoric,” and Whitehurst himself seemed to be channeling his inner Robinson in February, when he told an American Enterprise Institute conference that education is “richly contextual and multivariate” and that research should encompass a “panoply of existing techniques.”

Still, moving toward reauthorization, IES must deal with concerns from at least two corners of the education research constituency. On one side are partisans of the regional centers and labs first created in the 1960s. Under IES the centers have seen their funding cut and the scope of their research tightened; the labs have been pushed to supplement with experimental research their traditional role of local dissemination and “rapid response” technical assistance. Whitehurst argues that while Congress should determine what it wants to know, IES should determine how to find that out. But the labs, especially, originally set up to maximize local political support, have always done so; and their customers, officials used to receiving quick customized help, have not always been pleased with the changes at IES. Indeed, the Democratic addendum to ESRA notes that protecting the regional system was “a critical priority.” Those members are now in the majority.

Coming from another angle are those who fear for the independence of the National Center for Education Statistics. Recall that the head of NCES differs from other IES commissioners in being a Senate-confirmed presidential appointee with a fixed term. The idea is to give the job additional status and independence, even from IES, placing yet one more barrier between politics and data. As a guardian of statistical information, NCES holds its main aim to be the integrity and credibility of that data; it should have little to say about its analysis.

But the managerial messiness of this has never pleased Whitehurst, and IES has sat rather heavily astride both NCES inputs (especially hiring) and outputs (its publications). NBES’s proposed reauthorization language goes further, making the NCES commissioner an appointee of the IES director, though dismissible only for cause. Advisory board chair Robert Granger argues that this is “a more rational model,” creating efficient lines of accountability and ensuring that the director and commissioner will be compatible. Whitehurst suggests that having a presidential appointee at NCES could prove more problematic, not less, in terms of partisan influence, without the director to buffer the commissioner from political winds.

One could foresee circumstances in which this would be true. But in general the proposal runs counter to the long-standing recommendations of the National Research Council and its guide to Principles and Practices for a Federal Statistical Agency. Certainly the heft of a presidential appointment is useful to the NCES commissioner in bureaucratic dealings. More broadly, statistical agencies, in this view, are qualitatively different, not to be treated, as Elliott puts it, as “just another government agency.” Even such a fan of managerial efficiency as the Office of Management and Budget, whose program evaluation gives both IES and NCES coveted (and rare) grades of “effective,” feels that “real and perceived independence” is best served by the current system.

The drive by IES for managerial (and budgetary?) control also seeks to alter the complicated relationship between NCES and the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB), which oversees the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). NAGB has autonomy regarding the conduct and presentation of NAEP, but proposed changes would give most of that power to NCES, which would itself be under the thumb of IES. NCES would be happy to get the envisioned authority in the proposed language, if limits on its own autonomy were not part of the deal, but the current system is intentionally uncomfortable, dividing authority in a way that is itself insulating.

Looking Ahead

It seems unlikely, given current sentiment on the Hill, that these changes will receive legislative sanction. But there will be plenty of time for the debate to play out. Few expect much progress on ESRA reauthorization even in 2009, pending movement of the equally late NCLB reauthorization. As that approaches, it is worth remembering Whitehurst’s hopeful testimony in 2002 that “we are close to a point where the right investment in the right structure could get us close to a tipping point, where education becomes an evidence-based field.” Has that occurred?

The quick descent to technical minutiae in the discussions already occurring on reauthorization actually bodes well on this point. Early murmurings suggested the new ESRA could be passed, as a noncontroversial measure, in order to clear the congressional decks for NCLB. This didn’t happen, of course, but even informal designation as “noncontroversial” suggests IES has come a long way. There are few questions about its basic structure. Legislators seem serious about avoiding confirmation of a partisan hack to the IES directorship, when that job opens up. So far, insulation remains good politics.

But politics lurk close. In a months-long tussle between IES and Congress over the evaluation of Upward Bound, IES insisted that a robust test of whether the program made a difference to students required a control group—students eligible for but not served by it. This meant some students would be recruited for Upward Bound but denied participation. And lawmakers decried that as unethical and “discriminatory,” even comparing it, ominously (if inaccurately), to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments. In early 2008 the evaluation was canceled.

Whitehurst called the legislative intervention “a terrific mistake.” On scientific grounds, he was right. But as he conceded, “We produced some of these problems for ourselves,” in part by centering on a single kind of evaluative procedure and by failing to consult with the advocacy community and Congress in advance before grappling with a popular program.

Will “the Upward Bound problem…be contained to Upward Bound,” as Whitehurst later insisted? Probably so, but it nonetheless showed how easily breached is agency autonomy when its exercise roils partisan waters. Further, if a director as experienced as Whitehurst could stumble into this sort of controversy, how will his greener successor fare? Some of Whitehurst’s effectiveness, and leeway, is a matter of longevity and related learning (on all sides) that will have to be repeated after the transition. Given ESRA’s tight association with NCLB, the crumbling consensus around the latter will bring new pitfalls to navigate.

Whatever November’s outcome, January 2009 will bring major changes to Washington. It is not clear that it is worth betting the structural house on things having changed for good. Indeed, in purely practical terms, the IES budget is not big enough to tip the field of education research on its own. Structure matters, but so do resources; and the politics of knowledge is no different from politics as a whole—defined, as Harold Laswell put it long ago, by who gets what, when, and how. By this standard, IES is distinctly undercapitalized (see Figure 3). The institute’s funding (for research and dissemination) is up by a third compared to the final days of OERI, to $160 million or so; that said, that level was achieved in fiscal 2004 and has hardly budged since. The bipartisan NCLB commission proposed doubling that amount. And in its draft reauthorization bill, NBES proposes that IES become a $1 billion agency as of fiscal 2009, finally meeting Pat Moynihan’s 1970 vision. Of course, a billion 1970 dollars equates to some $5.3 billion today. Some advocates argue that to parallel corporate research-and-development budgets the figure should really be 2 percent of overall investment, or something like $10 billion.

That those numbers sound utopian speaks to the need for new political dexterity at IES that also maintains its scientific integrity. Still, Whitehurst and IES can take pride in having made a solid start. If the randomized-controlled-trials approach was oversold, this has served to move the field by force, further and faster, toward recognizing the need for rigorous research standards generally. The unstinting focus on promoting scientific rigor, even through a single lens, must thus be viewed as broadly positive. And if these changes are, ultimately, at the margins, in American politics that is where most change occurs. The institution is in place: the next administration, next Congress, and next director will have the chance to institutionalize it.

Andrew Rudalevige is associate professor of political science at Dickinson College. This article is adapted from “Structure and Science in Education Research,” in Frederick Hess, ed., When Research Matters (Harvard Education Press, 2008).

What about newspaper editorial boards, the original “opinion leaders”? Their writers have the luxury of time to follow important public-policy debates (as well as their own paper’s daily coverage), to interview key players, and to form well-honed views. How do they come out on these issues?

To find out, I asked three of my colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute to review all of the editorials written about or touching on charter schools or No Child Left Behind from 2006 and 2007 for the nation’s 25 largest-circulation papers. They had no shortage of reading material. Editorial boards commented on each subject extensively, with 201 editorials written about NCLB (an average of 8 per paper) and 183 about charters (an average of 7).

For both issues, the reviewers rated each newspaper on a Likert Scale, from negative 10 for “strongly opposed,” to positive 10 for “strongly supportive.” In every instance, at least two of the three reviewers agreed on the assessment and this was the value assigned to the paper. (In a majority of the cases, all three agreed.)

What did we find? As a group, the editorial boards share the general public’s views. The newspapers are much more supportive of charter schools than of No Child Left Behind, with charters receiving an average score of 4.1 (meaning the papers are “somewhat supportive” on average), compared to 1.2 for NCLB (meaning the papers are slightly better than neutral on average). Weighting the results by circulation gives the average ratings a small bump (to 4.3 and 1.3 respectively), but doesn’t change the story line.

Figure 1 shows how the individual papers scored. The charter school advantage is clear: 19 papers are somewhat or strongly supportive, versus only 3 that are somewhat opposed. (One is neutral and 2 did not write any editorials about the subject.) Meanwhile, the papers are split on NCLB, with 15 somewhat or strongly supportive, 9 somewhat or strongly opposed, and 1 neutral.

Taking into account the national papers’ political bent, the results are hardly surprising. USA Today and the Washington Post support both No Child Left Behind and charter schools, in line with their reputations as centrist or center-left papers. The New York Times supports the federal law but not charter schools, again not shocking for a liberal paper. (The Times titled one of its five editorials on the latter, “Exploding the Charter School Myth.”) And the conservative Wall Street Journal supports charters, but has misgivings about NCLB. Local context clearly has an impact. The Los Angeles Times is one of three papers to be “strongly supportive” of charter schools, which makes sense considering the frustrating pace of reform within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) and the exciting development of L.A.-based charter management organizations such as Green Dot. Hence the paper’s stern admonition to LAUSD that it “learn from charters.”

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is one of three papers to oppose charter schools, and their implementation in the “Gateway to the West” has been far from stellar. One editorial was titled “Charters Flunk.”

So are the “opinion leaders” driving the public’s views in a certain direction, or is it the other way around? It’s hard to know, but one thing’s for sure: the future of charter schools sure looks brighter than the future of No Child Left Behind.

“We need to challenge the soft bigotry of low expectations. We must not tolerate a system that gives up on people.”
—George W. Bush, 2006

Two presidents speaking 224 years apart declared the importance of challenging every American child to achieve the potential that lies within each of them. Education and the responsibility of our government to provide it have been part of the political debate since our nation’s earliest days. At our founding, Jefferson argued that an educated citizenry would serve as the ultimate guardian against the threat of an oppressive government.

That remains true today. But the twenty-first-century global marketplace demands more of our education system. When President George W. Bush called upon our schools to “leave no child behind,” he did so because he understands, like most people in this country, that a well-educated America is also an economically competitive America. In his sobering book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman warns against assuming that “because America’s economy has dominated the world for more than a century, it will and must always be” in the forefront. In fact, he calls the notion that America will forever be the economic powerhouse it is today a “dangerous illusion.”

In today’s Information Age, the ability to process knowledge and out-innovate the competition separates economic winners from losers. Education is the new capital and gives us that competitive edge. But by most measurements today, our schools, at best, get mediocre grades. In 2005, Achieve, Inc., a nonprofit, nonpartisan group concerned with preparing young people for work and college, released “Rising to the Challenge: Are High School Graduates Prepared for College and Work?” College professors polled said that approximately half of all incoming students at their schools were not prepared to handle college-level math and writing. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently gave this critical assessment of our education system: “Education spending has steadily increased and rafts of well-intentioned school reforms have come and gone. But student achievement has remained stagnant, and our K–12 schools have stayed remarkably unchanged—preserving, as if in amber, the routines, culture, and operations of an obsolete 1930s manufacturing plant.”

More and more Americans agree. A joint survey done by Peter Hart Research Associates and The Winston Group last year for the Educational Testing Service (ETS) found that Americans are worried our education system will be unable to meet the needs of the future and sustain the quality of life we enjoy today. People instinctively sense that our schools are not adequately preparing our children for the competitive world of the twenty-first century.

The Politics of Education

It is important, when looking at education through a political lens, to understand that it is far more than an issue. Education has morphed into something personal. For most Americans, it has become a basic value that defines, in part, who we are. For the poor it is the path out of poverty, for immigrants the chance to find freedom and opportunity. Education gives the middle class a shot at the brass ring, and for every parent, it fuels the hope that their children’s lives will be better than their own.

Because education has become such an intrinsic part of American life it may well have a decisive impact on the outcome of the 2008 presidential race, just as it did in 2000, the closest presidential election in recent history. That year, voters said in exit polls that education was the second most important factor in making their presidential choice, just slightly trailing the economy and jobs. This was a significant shift from 1996, when education tied for third place with the issue of the deficit, coming behind the economy and jobs and Medicare and Social Security. Among voters who said education was their top issue in 1996, Clinton beat Dole by a remarkable 62 points, 78 vs. 16 percent.

In 2000, however, George W. Bush and congressional Republicans structurally changed the education debate, as decades of Democratic education policies ran up against reality. Voters recognized that the education status quo was failing too many children. Bush and congressional Republicans called for an end to the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and a focus on achievement outcomes. Together, they pushed an education reform agenda, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that emphasized higher standards and more accountability, a results-based approach that parents liked.

A majority of voters who cited education as their number-one concern in 2000 still pulled the lever for Democrat Al Gore. But in making education a focus of his campaign, Bush kept Gore’s advantage on this important issue to only eight points, 52 vs. 44 percent. A number of issues and factors affected the outcome of that election, but the very closeness of the race made swing voters, for whom education is a top priority, particularly crucial. While Bush didn’t win the “education vote,” he closed the margin dramatically on this traditionally Democratic issue, especially with swing voters.

Since 9/11, education has taken a political back seat to national security and the economy. In 2004, education came in seventh on the list of voters’ top issues in exit polls. In the 2006 congressional elections, exit polls didn’t address the question of education at all. Still, private surveys showed that education was an important issue for many swing voter groups then and has remained remarkably steady over the past seven years. In a New Models survey conducted by the Winston Group in May 2007, married women with children, a key swing voter group, ranked education second in importance, only a single point behind defense and terrorism. In 2008, the same swing voter groups that played such a decisive role eight years before could again provide the margin of victory for the winning presidential candidate.

A Republican Education Agenda

Republicans have a significant opportunity in next year’s election to win on the education issue by continuing their push for a reform-based education agenda and arguing against the idea that more money without real structural reform can fix the ills of our education system. For decades, Democrats have embraced the status quo, calling for increased federal spending as the solution to declining test scores and increasing numbers of students ill prepared for the future. Between 1980 and 2000, Department of Education (DOE) spending rose by a staggering 174 percent, from $14 billion to $38.4 billion, with little to show for it. The Democrats got what they wished for, but the bleak record of education achievement in the 1980s and 1990s shows their funding-based approach simply doesn’t work. The central premise of the Democratic Party’s education policy—that a lack of money is the problem with America’s schools—has been debunked by years of negative student outcomes.

All of which explains why George W. Bush was able in the 2000 election to connect with voters on the education issue. When he spoke of “leaving no child behind,” it resonated with parents who wanted a new approach to the challenges facing their children’s schools. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act emphasized accountability, higher standards, parental involvement, and increased resources to help students and schools most in need. It took effect in January 2002 and put American education on a new course.

Stick With No Child Left Behind

Republicans can make a persuasive case that they have been the agents of real change in our schools. They should stick with the principles of the No Child Left Behind Act. The NCLB reauthorization debate will give Republicans an opportunity to contrast their approach of accountability, parental involvement, and targeted spending with the Democrats’ traditional “show us the money” education policy.

Although in effect for a relatively short period of time, the programs mandated by NCLB are beginning to show results. The 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Nation’s Report Card, showed that nine-year-olds made “more progress in reading over the past five years than in the previous 28 years combined…and posted the best scores in math in the history of the report.” The same tests showed that 13-year-olds had the “highest math scores ever recorded,” which included all-time high scores for African American and Hispanic students. Other scores showed improvement in urban districts and in narrowing the gap between whites and minority children.

The vast majority of Americans, 76 percent, support reauthorization of NCLB, according to the ETS survey; parents of school-age children (K–12) favor reauthorization at an even higher rate. Even school teachers and administrators, some of the act’s biggest critics, favor reauthorization by 75 percent and 78 percent, respectively, although with modifications.

Yet it would be a mistake for Republicans to rest on NCLB’s early gains. If all students are going to be achieving at grade level or better in reading and mathematics by 2014, progress must come faster. That will take some changes to the provisions. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings recognizes that fact. Talking about the NCLB reauthorization, she said, “we can use the knowledge we’ve gained to strengthen and improve the law…continuing the workable, common sense approach that we’ve developed together with states.”

Demand Tougher Standards and Higher Expectations

Republicans should also argue that dramatically improving our schools may require a tougher attitude toward failure on the part of parents, teachers, and taxpayers. With countries like China and India focusing their education systems on preparing workers to compete against our children, the excuses that have kept our schools mediocre for years are no longer acceptable. Moving from 6 percent of Washington, D.C., 4th graders scoring proficient or advanced on the 2000 NAEP math test to 11 percent in 2005 is progress. But real achievement means no child scores below proficient. With America’s economic future riding on our schools’ ability to produce a competitive twenty-first-century workforce, “failure isn’t an option.”

That means setting world-class standards. But today we have a mishmash of state standards that often leave parents unable to assess the quality of their children’s schools. What one state deems a high standard may appear low in another. If a standard is deficient and state tests are geared to it, schools will not see real achievement. Only when external tests such as NAEP expose failing students and schools will parents realize their state standards simply don’t make the grade. But by then it may be too late for their children.

Implementing tougher standards has always been a Republican idea and will be again in 2008. At the heart of Republican education policy is a core belief: if we ask more of American students, they will produce more. The Republican agenda calls for higher expectations for students themselves. School systems must look critically at what is working and what is not working in their schools. That means putting money into initiatives that will bring achievement for all students: historically low performers, who must be able to compete in a world that demands higher skills; average students, who need to care more about their studies if they are going to succeed; and top students, who will drive the country’s future innovations.

School choice, school vouchers, merit pay, teacher standards, and a raft of other education reforms are key elements of the Republican education agenda and in 2008 will once again offer voters innovative ideas to address our education challenges.

Reject the Traditional Funding Debate

Democrats reject most of these reforms out of hand, fearing the loss of political support from education special interests. Instead, as they have done in election after election, they will likely embrace an attack strategy decrying Republicans’ “failure” to fund education.

The facts tell a different story. At the end of his second term, Bill Clinton signed a $42 billion DOE budget. All told, Clinton increased education spending by 6 percent ($2.7 billion using constant 2007 dollars) over his Republican predecessor, which earned him the praise and political support of the education establishment.

Under President George W. Bush, the 2007 DOE budget hit $67.4 billion. Bush increased education funding over Clinton by 38 percent (nearly $19 billion), yet Democrats tell the American people that education is underfunded (see Figure 1). This election, Republicans should dispel the Democratic myth because the education debate ought to focus on what’s really important—the need for dramatic education reform based on student outcomes.

A Tough Question for ’08

All of which brings us back to the core education question of the 2008 campaign, a question that deserves an answer from the men and women, Republican and Democratic, who aspire to lead this country:

As political leaders, how will you transform our schools from a model that tolerates failure and gauges success by the size of the school budget to an Information Age model that measures success by student achievement and ensures that every child can succeed in the global economy?

The full impact of an ineffective system of public education may not be evident for many years. But one day America will pay a heavy price for accepting and excusing mediocrity in our schools: generations of American children unprepared for the modern workplace.

In 2000, “education” voters said, “Stop processing students, stop looking at them as profit centers, and start preparing them for a tough, competitive world out there.” Republicans listened, promised change, and put the country on a path of education reform. The 2008 election will determine whether the country continues down that path and is ready to compete in the future.

-David Winston is the president and founder of The Winston Group, a Washington, D.C., survey research and strategic communications firm, and former director of planning for the Speaker of the House and senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Today, America’s public education system gets a “gentleman’s C.” Our public school students consistently rank average or below average in international comparisons of student achievement. A study by University of Pennsylvania researchers, which has been used to counter arguments that America’s public education system is not working as well as it should, found that the U.S. was generally a bit above average when compared with other industrialized nations and in the middle in the important subjects of math and science. Imagine the public outcry if a study concluded that the U.S. was in the middle of the pack or just slightly better than average when it came to our per-capita income or our nation’s military strength?

Given the enormous changes taking place in the world, the current education achievement gap between low-income and affluent students, and the logical nexus between a nation’s economic strength and the quality of its public education system, it is incumbent on our country to put in place a national education strategy. Leaders in the Democratic Party have the opportunity to step up to the plate and provide leadership and public policy solutions.

First, a national education plan would animate the Democratic Party’s ideological commitment to providing equal opportunity for all. It is imperative that minority children receive the same level of educational opportunity as white children. If we want high-tech businesses and high-quality jobs being developed in the United States rather than in China, all of our children need to be prepared to earn a good living. We simply cannot afford to allow segments of our population to lack the skills needed to compete in the global economy.

Second, whenever the U.S. has moved from one era to another, the public has historically looked to the government to take the lead in addressing the attendant challenges. This pattern holds true today, whether the challenge is global warming, terrorism, immigration, disaster relief, or education. For the Democrats, a party that philosophically believes that government should and can play an important role in providing for both the national and economic security of our country, the public’s desire for government action is an enormous opportunity to demonstrate leadership (see Figure 1).

Third, a national education strategy offers Democrats the chance to best the Republican Party politically by standing as protector of the American Dream. Communicating a clear economic philosophy will help the party beat the standard Republican play that raises the specter of higher taxes in every discussion about investing in the country’s future. Linking a high-performing public education system with a strong economy and our country’s national security at a time when voters, especially middle-class voters, are connecting these dots themselves will give Democrats a winning public policy agenda.

So far in the 2008 presidential campaign, public education has not been a breakthrough issue for the Democratic candidates. To be sure, a number of the candidates have strong public education credentials, and virtually all consistently touch on the subject. But none of the Democratic presidential candidates have discussed thematically the central role public education will play in addressing the challenges of globalization.

Three principles should guide the candidates as they seize the opportunity to get out in front on the critical issue of transforming our public schools to be the best in the world.

A Democratic Education AgendaPrinciple I: Support Teachers

Everyone knows what a tremendous impact a great teacher can make on a child’s life. Studies consistently show that the single most important factor in improving student achievement is a quality teacher. If America is going to improve its schools, we must do a better job of attracting our most passionate and high-achieving individuals to the classroom. With the baby-boom generation retiring in large numbers, we are facing a historic shortage of teachers. In California, the state teaching shortage could be as high as 100,000 within 10 years.

The U.S. also needs to make it easier for those who want to become teachers to join the ranks, including creating an alternative credentialing route that recognizes nonteaching professional backgrounds and supports high achievers looking to transition into the classroom. There are many nonprofit programs making a difference that could be expanded. Teach For America, an organization that recruits high-achieving college students to make a two-year commitment to teaching in the inner city, was ranked by college graduates as one of the 10 most wanted employers. In addition, many professionals have the passion to teach, and they will pursue teaching if we make it a more viable option. We might be talking about an attorney who has practiced law for 15 years and wants to give something back, or an engineer who has 20 years of military service. It is critical to acknowledge the value in those backgrounds and create a streamlined credentialing process.

Finally, plain and simple, we need to pay our teachers more, especially those teaching in underserved communities and high-need subject areas. In response to the teaching shortage, school officials in Los Angeles have offered teachers a $5,000 stipend to work in low-performing schools, and New York City officials provide $5,000 for a down payment on a house to educators teaching in mathematics, science, and special education.

Principle II: Think Pre-K–16

Our children begin their required schooling too late and graduate too early. If we are serious about educating our children, we need to start them at the same age they begin playing organized sports—the pre-K years—and see them through college, the level of education needed to succeed in an Information Age economy.

Pre-K programs provide a critical education foundation. Studies have demonstrated that children with access to high-quality pre-K education graduate from high school in higher rates, perform better on standardized tests, are less likely to go to jail, and are more likely to have greater employment and wage-earning opportunities. Economist Robert Lynch recently released a study, Enriching Children, Enriching the Nation, which found that providing pre-K education produces large, measurable economic benefits for children and the nation. The Lynch study estimated that the total annual budgetary, crime, and earnings benefits from a universal program in place nationwide would be $779 billion by 2050.

We also need to extend public education through four years of college. Virtually all the research shows that a college degree affords better pay, more options, and a brighter economic future. According to the 2006 Graduation Project report, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, a college grad earned 50 percent more than someone with only a high school degree in 1980. By 2004, a college graduate earned nearly double.

Maine, a state with a low college attendance rate that is losing its blue-collar jobs as the forestry, fishing, boat-building, and paper-making industries contract, is considering requiring students to apply to college or postsecondary vocational schooling before receiving a high school diploma. The thinking is that making applying to higher education mandatory will encourage college attendance, which in turn will help create a generation of children who will be able to compete as well as attract the jobs of the future to the state. Other states, such as Georgia, have made college accessible by providing free tuition for high school graduates who are able to maintain a specified grade-point average. It is time to take what is going on in these states to the next level by transforming our K–12 system of free public schools to pre-K through 16 nationwide.

Principle III: Instill a Public School Culture of High Expectations

One of the challenges facing schools, especially those serving disadvantaged populations, is the expectations ceiling. Simply put, it is too widely accepted that some students cannot succeed. Where low expectations persist, schools face safety and discipline challenges and practice social promotion, moving kids along regardless of whether they have the skill set needed to succeed in the next grade.

America’s public schools must be committed to shattering the “expectations ceiling.” It was thought early on that public charter schools would serve as “laboratories of education,” where independence, flexibility, and innovation would produce high-quality learning environments that could be replicated across the country. While charter school performance has been mixed to date, a growing number of brand-name charter schools are having tremendous success in communities where high student achievement was thought impossible. Amistad Academy in New Haven, KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program) Academy in Houston, Texas, and Green Dot Ánimo High School, located in the barrio in East Los Angeles, are well-documented examples. These schools hold students accountable for achievement; extend the school day, week, and year; and give principals the autonomy to hire the most skilled teachers. The students at Amistad Academy, who are 97 percent minority and 84 percent poor, are told again and again that they will go to college. Amistad’s philosophy is that low-income, minority children can succeed as well as white middle-class students if only they are exposed to quality teachers, a culture of high expectations, and an extended school day. In recent years, 86 percent of the school’s 8th graders passed the state’s writing test, above the statewide average of 62 percent and better than the public schools of wealthy Greenwich. These schools are beginning to replicate nationwide. In just over a decade, KIPP has grown from 2 schools to 57 schools in 17 states.

The success of these brand-name schools is having an impact on the traditional public school system. In Massachusetts, a pilot extended-day program in which 10 elementary schools have eight-hour days has led to higher attendance and achievement. Governor Deval Patrick has allocated $6.5 million to expand the program to more Massachusetts schools. We need to support laws and policies that allow proven education models, in both charters and traditional schools, to flourish in our education landscape.

During the recent immigration reform debate, high-tech companies, trade groups representing high-tech companies, and elected officials contended that it was in America’s economic interest to allow skilled workers to enter the country on H-1B visas. They argued that these workers are essential to the ability of America’s high-tech companies to compete against their foreign-based competitors. The fact that the very high-tech companies that represent America’s economic future have to look abroad for workers with the needed skills is a chilling sign that we have to get our act together when it comes to public education. America’s future depends on hitting the books and turning a grade C public education system to an A+ public education system. And to make this grade, we will need a president who is capable of being both a commander in chief and superintendent in chief.

Christopher S. Lehane, a California-based Democratic political consultant, served as press secretary for former vice president Al Gore and was special assistant counsel to President Bill Clinton.

Nevertheless, Risk said, all was not lost. Its authors made a number of policy recommendations that they believed would improve American education before another generation fell victim to its empty promises. Now that everyone knew what the problem was, someone would surely get around to fixing it.

No one did.

To be sure, some progress has been made over the past two decades. For example, we have determined definitively-meaning with scientific research, not simply because someone said it in print-that there are some basic ingredients that are necessary for a good education. We know, for example, that teacher quality counts more than almost any other external factor, including class size or neighborhood attributes, in determining academic success. We know that phonics instruction produces the kind of real results that gimmicky “whole language” approaches can’t replicate. We know that competition-through vouchers, charter schools, and even simply a diverse array of school districts and private schools in a geographic area-creates an environment in which successful schools thrive.

Yet we risk another damning and depressing report 20 years from now if we simply assume that our advanced knowledge of what works can make it real for all of the nation’s children. Vast repositories of best practices and sage advice do no more to educate a child than a blueprint does to get a house built. Ideas need to be put into action, not just onto paper. Doing so is easier said than done, and, unfortunately, we don’t always make it easy on ourselves.

School Leadership

First of all, the nation suffers from a distinct confusion over who is in charge of what. We may know that learning depends on teachers’ solid understanding of their subjects, their clear appreciation of and enthusiasm for those subjects, and their willingness to tailor their instruction to the needs of each student. But that means little unless we also understand that the only people capable of ensuring quality instruction in a school are that school’s leaders. Governors, legislators, and even local school boards may all say they know “what works” in instruction, but they simply cannot create that quality with the stroke of a legislative pen, such as when they mandate phonics instruction.

They are also often unaware that the rules, policies, and laws that they have written or simply enforced may be direct impediments to creating an ideal classroom setting. Funding students based on where they reside, rather than where they attend school, for example, is a practice as old as the system itself, and just as outdated. That same finance system also mandates that districts receive their appropriation based on their enrollment at a single date during the year, funding schools for an entire year for a child who may have left his school the next day. Archaic funding policies like these do little to encourage innovation within the system.

Proactive teachers, principals, and administrators are both the gatekeepers and the keymasters of education reform. Any changes in the system must be carried out by educators working at the school level. Without great school and classroom leaders to make sure reforms are implemented, even the most ambitious and sweeping policy changes can sputter out by the time they hit your children’s classrooms.

In the world of schooling, the majority of highly successful turnaround cases seem to be those where an individual educator had not only the right idea about instruction, but also the tenacity to bend or break those rules that would have prevented meaningful changes at the school level. But it should no longer be the case that only the lucky students get to learn in schools where teachers have decided to work against standard expectations.

It is critical, then, that education reformers begin recruiting, grooming, and mentoring potential leaders not just for key policymaking positions in the hierarchy of education, but for positions in which they would lead, innovate, teach, and inspire. Those who matter most in the reform movement are those in the school. It’s time to start putting leaders in place in the classroom and at the school level first.

It won’t be easy. As the Koret Task Force’s report continually observes, the resistance to change within the system is not only intense, but also, in the majority of cases, overwhelming. Any effort to improve or change education is usually met with a backlash from unions and other organizations that sense that changes in the way the system works can often cut into their power base.

In 2000, for example, Arizona voters approved Proposition 301, an initiative meant to inject funding directly into classrooms, implement performance pay for teachers, encourage school-based management, and complete a statewide system for collecting and reporting data. Voters understood that passage of this proposition would mean more money in their classrooms, better pay for the teachers in their schools, more control at the local level, and more information for parents.

That didn’t sit well with the unions, however. After the proposition passed, state union representatives immediately lobbied the state attorney general to issue a “clarification” explaining that performance pay actually meant an across-the-board bonus for every teacher in a school or district, regardless of performance, and that funding classrooms directly actually meant passing the funding through the district first so the district, rather than the school, can make the major funding decisions. That was the end of direct classroom funding, and school-based management went with it-and that was essentially the end of the reforms of Proposition 301. Where the voters had seen an opportunity, the unions saw a threat. It’s likely to continue that way for quite some time.

It is reasonable to assume that the next generation of potential leaders will come from pipelines other than colleges of education-a virtual breeding ground for educational stagnation-such as alternative certification programs for teachers. The Koret report rightly endorses choice, but choice must apply to the adults, as well as the children, in the education system. Alternative certification programs like the American Board for the Certification of Teacher Excellence-which provides teachers with a certification based on their mastery of subject area and excellence in classroom management-need to be endorsed by states as a viable route to ensuring excellence in the classroom. Teachers need to be recognized for their ability to teach, not for their ability to toe the party line in a teaching college. Only in this way can we hope to truly professionalize the teaching profession and pave the way for needed changes in tenure, performance-based pay, and other policies that contribute to the transparency in the system that Koret envisions.

Unintended Consequences

Shaming the education establishment into doing the right thing-as Risk attempted to do-only motivated educators to defend their turf and the status quo more creatively. As a result, reformers have let the establishment define the terms of the debate. Advocates for school choice suddenly become “anti-public school.” Those who want to professionalize teaching are labeled as unsympathetic to the “plight” of teachers. Those who push high academic standards for all students are scolded for supposedly forcing poor children to drop out of school.

Reform is presently being resisted in an act of self-preservation, which the unions have cleverly labeled “looking out for the best interests of children.” Don’t believe it. Only the interests of structures and systems are being safeguarded, not those of children. And reformers need to stop apologizing for advocating reforms that are good for children, but might cause some adults somewhere a bit of discomfort. Again, leadership matters.

Another unintended effect of Risk was the proliferation of federal education programs shortly after its publication, as policymakers struggled mightily to respond to the report and its recommendations. Gimmicks and fads-such as efforts to reduce class size or to create parent education programs-suddenly became federal policies as legislators scrambled to find the Next Big Thing to improve education. When the nation’s governors lent their voices to the demand for change in education in the late 1980s, President Bush put together the America 2000 proposal, which eventually became President Clinton’s Goals 2000 program, which was mothballed when it became apparent that it, too, wasn’t doing much to increase education achievement. Meanwhile, federal funding on programs mushroomed, without any noticeable gains in student achievement.

As a result of the legislative activity of the past 20 years, school systems have grown in size and power, under the mistaken assumption that more funding and more authority would give educators the clout and resources they needed to improve achievement. It didn’t happen-and in the meantime, as the system grew, very little was done at the federal level to empower families or any others served by the system.

All that is starting to change, and change for the better. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 swept away much of the legislative clutter that had littered the education landscape for more than a decade, in favor of programs based in good science and research. High academic standards and quality teaching-two of the cornerstone recommendations of the Risk report-were finally embraced formally and built into the law. A number of state-based initiatives that favored parents and parental choice were reflected, albeit sometimes only partially, in the final legislation, including new requirements for school choice and supplemental services for children trapped in chronically failing schools.

While No Child Left Behind represents the most comprehensive and substantive change to education policy in more than 30 years, there has been some concern that the act overreaches, both in scope and in structure. Some have argued that not only are its objectives too lofty and ambitious, but in its haste to effect change immediately, the bill also arbitrarily makes some decisions that should be left to state and local decisionmakers.

For example, provisions in the law that require supplemental services, such as tutoring, and school choice for schools that have failed to improve have led some critics to bemoan these actions as a federal power grab. “This law moves against the tradition of local control in a fundamental way,” said one midwestern school board member in the autumn of 2001. “We all seek nationally defined excellence, but we must be free to adapt to local conditions.” What needs to be pointed out is that these same local decisionmakers have always had the authority to put such programs in place, but have simply refused to do so out of a need to protect their power base. Choosing not to act must no longer be considered “adapting to local conditions.”

The requirements of No Child Left Behind-which include, for the first time, real consequences for schools that do not show academic progress for all students-are beginning to break the stranglehold that entrenched interests have had on our schools for far too long. If local autonomy has been somewhat impeded by the new law-a debatable conclusion-then it could also be argued that this is a self-inflicted wound. Because the system could not be shamed into moving 20 years ago, the federal government has finally tried to move the system itself.

It is clear that Risk underestimated the influence of the education establishment in framing education policy and overestimated its interest in doing the right thing for children. While teacher unions and other organizations representing administrators, policymakers, and school chiefs all claim to be acting on behalf of children, they are all by their very nature really only looking out for their own best interests-that’s what they’re there for. Self-preservation is a strong motivator, and breaking the stronghold on the system of these interests-what Teddy Roosevelt would have called “trust busting”-will likely continue to be a major challenge for educators and policymakers.

Such trust busting will require a new generation of educators who not only know what works in education, but also know how to do it. Ensuring that these innovators have the authority to make the necessary changes to the system will take time. Until then, we need to hold those who presently have the authority to create successful schools accountable for doing so. The price for inaction is another 20 years of unrealized promises and another generation of unrealized student potential.

-Lisa Graham Keegan is chief executive officer of the Education Leaders Council and the former superintendent of public instruction in Arizona.

In a December 2003 decision, a Colorado trial court judge invalidated the state’s new school voucher program. The decision was unusual in that the court relied not on traditional separation-of-church-and-state concerns, but instead on a provision of the Colorado state constitution that vests control over public education in local school boards. The court held that by failing to give local school boards any “input whatsoever into the instruction to be offered by the private schools” that accepted voucher students, the state had violated the constitutional provision that grants local boards “control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.”

The ruling in Colorado Congress of Parents v. Owens, which has already been appealed, illustrates the longstanding tension in American education law between two competing models of the relationship between states and local school boards. The dominant approach has treated school boards as legally subordinate to their states, recognizing that most state constitutions explicitly assign responsibility for and authority over public education to the state government. While the states’ nearly unlimited authority has been repeatedly affirmed by the courts, there has been intermittent legal recognition of the de facto autonomy enjoyed by local school boards in the day-to-day operation and management of their schools. Moreover, as the Colorado decision indicates, courts have occasionally recognized-and even celebrated-the powerful tradition of local control in American education.

However, the Colorado case is the rare example of local control’s successfully trumping state action. Overall, the tradition of local control has not constrained the states’ role in education. On the contrary, local-control arguments have been most successful in court when the states themselves have wielded them as a means of resisting new obligations, such as equalizing spending between wealthy and poor districts. In other words, local control is primarily a matter of state policy rather than a constraint imposed by federal or state constitutional law on the states’ role in education. States assert the principle of local control when it is convenient for them to do so, without yielding much authority to local school boards.

“Arms of the State”

The roughly 15,000 local school districts in the United States account for more than one-sixth of all American local governments. Of these districts, more than 90 percent are legally and politically independent of their surrounding counties or municipalities; the vast majority are governed by elected boards. (However, a number of states have recently authorized the mayors of big cities, such as Cleveland and Detroit, to appoint some or all of the members of their school boards, while New York gave the mayor of New York City the power to appoint a commissioner of education to run the city’s schools.) In some states, local school boards also enjoy fiscal independence, including the power to levy taxes. In most states, however, school boards are fiscally dependent on other local governments.

The legal status of school boards flows from two key factors. First, school districts are local governments and thus, like all other local governments, are subordinate to their states. Second, unlike counties and municipalities, school districts have a single function-the provision of public education-that is considered a state responsibility. Virtually every state constitution requires the state legislature to provide for a system of free public education. The existence of such a mandate is an unusual departure in American constitutionalism-which has traditionally been focused on limiting government power, not creating obligations to provide a public service-and is a tribute to the central role of public education in American culture. Thus, as units specializing in public education, school districts are often seen as agencies of the state-sometimes, rhetorically, “arms of the state”-for the implementation of the state’s education mandate.

The state interest in education affects the powers of local school boards significantly. First, there is far greater state oversight of school boards than of other local governments. State boards of education and state education agencies promulgate extensive regulations governing school board behavior and school district operations. There is no comparable state administrative officer or body-other than the legislature itself-with similar powers over counties, cities, or other localities. State legislatures also heavily regulate the school system, through laws dealing with school district organization, elections, and governance; education programs, instructional materials, and proficiency testing; attendance rules; the length of the school day and school year; teacher credentialing, tenure, and pensions; the construction and maintenance of school buildings; school district finances and budgets; school safety; parents’ and students’ rights and responsibilities; and virtually every other aspect of school operations and policy. By my count, 14 volumes of the California legislative code concern education.

Finally, the strong state interest in education means that local school boards tend to have relatively limited powers to initiate policies on their own. One recent study in Kansas found that school districts had to obtain express statutory authority to hire lobbyists; operate alternative schools; share guidance programs; enter into interdistrict agreements to share personnel or computer systems; pay dues to the Kansas Association of School Boards; educate military dependents; or obtain boiler, fire, auto, health, or student insurance. To be sure, other studies have found that courts have construed the implied powers of school districts broadly, particularly in recent years, permitting greater “freedom and experimentation” than the formal limitations of school board powers would suggest, including the ability to add to the state-prescribed curriculum and to supplement state-mandated materials. Yet while school boards’ capacity to innovate may be greater in practice than it is in theory, they enjoy less autonomy than other local governments.

Hostile Takeovers

One of the clearest illustrations of states’ power relative to school districts is the freedom they enjoy to restructure or displace locally elected school boards. For instance, the judiciary treated New York State’s 1961 reorganization of the New York City Board of Education as akin to an internal restructuring of a branch of state government rather than an infringement on local autonomy. The legislature, at the request of the city’s mayor, eliminated the board of education and authorized the mayor to appoint a new board from a list of nominees prepared by the legislature. When the ousted board members filed suit, claiming that the state’s action violated the principle of home rule, the New York Court of Appeals-the state’s highest court-sided with the state. The court argued that board of education members were “officers of an independent corporation separate and distinct from the city, created by the State for the purpose of carrying out a purely State function and are not city officers within the compass of the constitution’s home rule provision.” More recently, courts have upheld state laws ousting the independently elected school boards in Cleveland, Detroit, and Harrisburg, giving each city’s mayor the power to appoint all or most of the new board’s members.

These high-profile restructurings were initiated by local officials or resulted in the transfer of power to those local officials. To that extent, they may bolster local control even if they involve a loss of school board autonomy. But state courts have been just as deferential to state laws allowing the takeover of local districts by state appointees. As of 2002, a total of 24 states had adopted laws authorizing a state education agency to displace a school board and take over the operation of a school district in cases of protracted problems with academic performance, fiscal mismanagement, or corruption. In 15 states, state law permits a state agency to take over an individual school. The Education Commission of the States found that since the late 1980s there have been nearly 50 school district takeovers (some involving multiple state interventions in the same district) in 19 states. Courts have found these measures to be well within the state’s prerogatives.

Diluted Local Authority

The rise of charter schools also reflects the subordinate position of local school districts and to some extent further weakens their position. In most states the creation of a charter school challenges a school district’s control over the public schools within its borders. Just 12 states vest the authority to grant charter school applications solely in school districts. By contrast, in 23 states, many institutions can approve charter schools, such as the state board of education, universities, a specially designated state board for charter schools, or local school districts. In 26 states (including 10 of the 12 states above), the initial decision by a local school board to deny a charter school application may be appealed to the state board of education or another institution, thus curbing school districts’ control over the approval of charters even where school districts are given a role.

State courts have uniformly rejected challenges to charter school-enabling legislation, relying on the plenary state power over public schools. In California an appellate court found that charter schools easily fell within the legislature’s “sweeping and comprehensive powers in relation to our public schools.” The charter schools were, like the school districts and county boards of education challenging their charters, creatures of the state “authorized to maintain” public schools. Similarly, the Utah Supreme Court rejected the claim brought by the state school boards association that the statute authorizing the state board of education to approve and supervise charter schools represented an unconstitutional expansion of the state board’s authority into the area of local schools.

Courts have also been reluctant to entertain suits by school boards challenging decisions to grant particular charter school applications. A Pennsylvania court held that a school district lacked standing to contest the grant of a charter application, even though the school district had alleged that the new school would draw students (and thus state funds) away from the district.

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Sometimes school boards can benefit from being subordinate to their states in the sense that states can be held responsible for the fiscal health of school districts. For instance, in the 1992 Butt v. State of California decision, the California Supreme Court held that the state was constitutionally required to bail out a local school district that decided to end the school year six weeks earlier than planned because of acute financial difficulties.

The state had resisted the bailout, claiming the district had received enough state support under California’s equalized school funding system. The state contended that requiring additional state financial support would enable a local district to “indulge in fiscal irresponsibility without penalty.” Moreover, the state argued that the bailout would be inconsistent with the principle of local control.

The California Supreme Court disagreed sharply. It found that the state had long departed from local control by taking an enormous role in school governance and decisionmaking, including setting standards for and overseeing local school district budgets. Nor would a bailout make fiscal mismanagement more likely since the state has authority to “further tighten budgetary oversight, impose prudent, nondiscriminatory conditions on emergency State aid, and authorize intervention by State education officials to stabilize the management of local districts whose imprudent policies have threatened their fiscal integrity.” In any event, the state’s “ultimate responsibility for equal operation of the common school system” meant that the “State is obliged to intervene when a local district’s fiscal problems would otherwise deny its students basic educational equality.”

The education clauses of state constitutions have also provided the legal foundation for the wave of court-ordered school funding equalization reforms over the past three decades. State courts have repeatedly held states responsible for ensuring that all students receive at least an adequate, though not necessarily equal, education. Such decisions have forced many states to take a stronger role in the funding and regulation of local schools. The legal theory underlying school finance reform is predicated to a significant degree on the principle that local school districts are essentially agencies of the states, charged with providing the education mandated by the state’s constitution.

The Value of “Local Control”

While demonstrating the states’ legal responsibility for public education, the school finance cases also illustrate the resonance of the local control principle. First, eight state supreme courts have cited the value of local control in upholding the states’ reliance on local property taxes to fund the schools, notwithstanding the resulting inequalities in spending among districts. Second, even in the many cases where courts have sided with the plaintiffs and demanded financing reforms, the courts have typically ruled that individual local districts are free to raise and spend above the level they deem “adequate.” As the Arizona Supreme Court observed, in the course of striking down the state’s school financing system:

Local control in these matters is an important part of our culture. Thus, school houses, school districts, and counties will not always be the same because some districts may either attach greater importance to education or have more wherewithal to fund it. Nothing in our constitution prohibits this. . . . Indeed, if citizens were not free to go above and beyond the state financed system to produce a school system that meets their needs, public education statewide would suffer.

The principle of local control has also played a pivotal role in the U.S. Supreme Court’s jurisprudence regarding school finance reform. In the 1972 decision in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the Court accepted to a considerable degree the argument that the funding of schools primarily through local property taxes resulted in significant differences in school spending and quality from district to district. Nevertheless, the Court upheld Texas’s school financing system because it grew out of and supported a system of local control.

Local control is valuable, said the Court, because it facilitates “the greatest participation by those most directly concerned” with school decisionmaking. It also, the Court wrote, builds support for public schools, enables those communities that wish “to devote more money to the education” of their children to do so, and provides “opportunity for experimentation, innovation, and a healthy competition for educational excellence.” The Court determined that local-based financing was constitutionally justified, notwithstanding the resulting inequalities, because the state could reasonably decide to promote local control in public education. Indeed, the state was not challenging local control but instead relied on it to deflect a constitutional claim.

The Supreme Court made an even more powerful departure from the “school-district-as-arm-of-the-state” model in Milliken v. Bradley. In that case, the Court rejected a lower court’s order requiring interdistrict busing as a remedy for segregation in Detroit. The lower court had found that segregation in the Detroit schools could not be remedied without including suburban school districts in the busing program. In the lower court’s view, Detroit and the suburban districts were merely different components of a single Michigan school system, so district boundaries could be ignored in developing a remedy.

The Supreme Court rejected the district court’s assertion that the school district boundaries “are no more than arbitrary lines on a map.” Instead, the Court argued, “the notion that school district lines may be casually ignored or treated as a mere administrative convenience is contrary to the history of public education in our country.” The Court found that extending the busing remedy beyond the Detroit system would undermine the autonomy of the suburban school districts.

The four dissenting justices pointed to the considerable authority the state enjoyed over school districts, including the “wide-ranging powers to consolidate and merge school districts, even without the consent of the districts themselves or of the local citizenry.” Indeed, as the dissenters noted, between 1964 and 1972 Michigan had winnowed the number of school districts statewide from 1,438 to 608. The prevailing view of the majority, however, was that the state’s formal authority to consolidate school districts was irrelevant. Unless the state itself ordered a consolidation, the suburban school districts could rely on their independent existence to insulate themselves from Detroit’s problems. The federal courts had to respect the existing school district boundary lines, even if that made impossible an effective remedy for segregation in the metropolitan area.

State Intervention, Local Opposition

State governments are typically successful in exercising the authority their state constitutions give them over public education. However, as the school finance cases demonstrate, states are perfectly willing to raise the principle of local control when it suits their interests. In these cases, local control has been asserted by the state defensively to relieve it from having to increase its school spending or take on unsought oversight responsibilities. In short, the local control argument functioned as a shield to sustain state policy, not as a sword to alter policy in the direction of more local control.

Only in a handful of cases have local school districts successfully used the idea of local control to resist state actions. Not coincidentally, these cases arose in Colorado and Wisconsin, two of the relative handful of states where the state constitution directly grants power over local schools to local school boards. The overwhelming majority of state constitutions make no mention whatsoever of school districts or local school boards.

For instance, in Board of Education No. 1 in the City and County of Denver v. Booth, the Denver school board challenged Colorado’s Charter Schools Act, which grants local school boards the authority to approve or disapprove a charter application. The board asserted that the statute gives the state board of education more powers than the Colorado state constitution permits and infringes on the state constitution’s provision that the local school board “shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.”

The Colorado charter statute enables aspirants whose applications are denied by local school boards to appeal to the state board of education. The state board can then force the district board to reconsider. If the district board again denies the application, the charter applicant may again appeal to the state board. If on the second appeal the state board finds that granting the charter is in the public interest, it may reverse and remand to the district board “with instructions to approve the charter applicant.”

In the 1999 Booth decision, the Colorado Supreme Court rejected the Denver board’s position, finding that the constitution’s grant of “general supervision” over public education to the state board was broad enough to encompass the power to approve local charter schools. However, the local board’s authority could not be entirely displaced. Rather, “as long as a school district exists, the local school board has undeniable constitutional authority,” including “substantial discretion regarding the character of instruction that students will receive at the district’s expense.”

The Colorado court struck a compromise that would affirm the state board’s authority as well as the local board’s interest “in controlling instruction.” The state board could order the local board to approve a charter application, but it could not require the local board to actually open a school or agree to all the terms of the charter applicant’s proposal. Rather, the state board’s order was treated merely as a directive to the local board to negotiate with the applicant concerning the “issues necessary to permit the applicant to open a charter school,” including, in the Denver case, questions of the site of the school and per-pupil funding.

In the recent Colorado Congress of Parents decision, a Colorado district court took the legal protection of local school autonomy even further. The Colorado Opportunity Contract Pilot Program, enacted in 2003, established a voucher program for a limited number of low-income, low-achieving students who had attended schools in any of 11 poorly performing school districts. During the 2003-04 school year, enrollment in the voucher program was capped at 1 percent of the students in those school districts, rising to 6 percent in 2006-07. The program allowed parents to place their children in private schools at the district’s expense.

Here the Colorado district court relied on the local control provision of the state constitution to strike down the voucher program altogether. The court emphasized the unusual nature of this provision and the role of local control in Colorado jurisprudence, noting that the Colorado Supreme Court’s 1982 Lujan decision, rejecting a challenge to the state’s school finance system, had relied on the value of local control. Unlike the Charter Schools Act upheld in Booth, which provided for a mix of state and local powers, the voucher program gave the local school board, in the court’s words, “no substantial discretion over the educational program embodied in the voucher program,” thus violating the state constitution.

It remains to be seen how this ruling will fare on appeal. One could reasonably argue that requiring school districts to provide some financial support to students attending private school does not directly interfere with the state constitution’s mandate that local school boards have control over “instruction in the public schools” (emphasis added). But however the case is resolved, it serves as an important reminder of the importance of state-specific constitutional language and precedents, the considerable degree of variation in legal rules in our 50-state federal system, and the continuing power of the local control idea in education law.

Conclusion

Several recent developments have raised new questions about both the status of local school boards and the legal significance of the local control principle. For instance, court-ordered school finance reforms-as well as financing reforms undertaken to forestall litigation-have increased the state’s share of education funding in many states. Such reforms have often been accompanied by greater state control over the distribution of financial resources and the use of state dollars. Moreover, courts in some states-such as those in New Jersey, West Virginia, and Kentucky-have required those states not only to increase aid to poorer school districts, but also to spell out the content of the education required by the state’s constitution, to better monitor local school district performance, and to intervene when local school districts have failed to attain state education goals.

States have also become more involved in shaping the curriculum and in setting standards for graduation and teacher certification through the standards and accountability movement. Some have extended the school day or the school year or even set minimum homework requirements. The federal No Child Left Behind Act accelerates these trends by exerting a strong degree of federal authority over public education. The act burdens the states as well as local districts, imposing obligations to develop academic standards, test all students annually in grades 3 through 8, hire “highly qualified” teachers in core subjects, and reconstitute persistently failing schools in order to remain eligible for federal aid.

Indeed, other changes have involved shifts in power at the local level or even decentralization below the school district level, rather than greater control by the state (or the federal government). As noted, in a number of large cities, the mayor has effectively displaced the independent school board. Some states, like Kentucky, have adopted site-based management programs that transfer power from school districts to individual school councils. In addition, many states have provided for charter schools, which operate with considerable independence from-and often in conflict with-local school districts. These developments reflect the continuing power of the local control idea even as they undermine the position of independent school boards. Indeed, these decentralizing moves may be as great a challenge to school boards as centralization. Not only do they create competing local school authorities, but they also open alternative opportunities for the participation in school governance that the courts have proclaimed to be the normative value at the core of local autonomy.

Taken together, these recent developments confirm that public education is an area of virtually complete state power (although now subject to greater federal intervention) that can be reshaped by state legislatures in either a centralizing or decentralizing direction or in both directions at once. But without changing the theory of state-local relations in education, these developments may be altering the practice. If so, this could resolve some of the tension between the formal law of state control and the de facto autonomy of local school districts by aligning practice with the formal legal theory of state power.

Yet it is unlikely that the political and legal debate over local control will end any time soon. The call for local control reflects many deep-seated concerns-the public’s desire to participate in and influence decisions on a vital public matter; the role of local tax dollars in financing public education; the impact of local schools on local communities; the interest in taking diverse local preferences and circumstances into account in educational programs; and the possibilities for experimentation and innovation, to name a few. Even as the state- and federal-led accountability movement presents new challenges to local control, the political, economic, and educational arguments for local control are also likely to continue to enjoy support. As a result, the legal significance of the local control idea, much like the legal status of school boards themselves, is likely to be contested for some time to come.

-Richard Briffault is vice dean and professor of legislation at the Columbia University School of Law.