Uncle Sam is dreadful at micromanaging what actually happens in schools and classrooms. What he’s best at is setting agendas and driving priorities. Through a combination of jawboning, incentivizing, regulating, mandating, forbidding, spotlighting, and subsidizing, he can significantly influence the overall direction of the K-12 system and catalyze profound changes in it (though the system is so loosely coupled that these changes occur gradually and incompletely).

It’s just as well that such big directional shifts don’t happen very often, because the change, however gradual, can be wrenching. And it isn’t apt to happen much more often in the future, either, because the “federal government” is no single entity. It is, at minimum, three branches, two political parties, 535 members of Congress, innumerable judges, the White House, the Office of Management and Budget, and umpteen executive-branch agencies—a list that only starts with the U.S. Department of Education. Nearly all of these stars must come into rough alignment before anything important begins to change. And that only occurs once in a while, often under extraordinary political or historical circumstances, usually when the country faces a big challenge, crisis, or widespread injustice.

Let’s look at seven examples of federal “agenda setters” in K-12 education, one per decade.

1950s. One could legitimately cite Sputnik and the National Defense Education Act, but the decade’s real game-changer was the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision, striking down government-mandated racial segregation in Southern schools.

1960s. In the name of fostering opportunity, ending poverty, and giving needy kids a boost, President Lyndon B. Johnson launched the modern era of federal aid to K-12 education via the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, or ESEA, and the Economic Opportunity Act, which incorporated such high-profile programs as Head Start, the Job Corps, and the “domestic Peace Corps” known as VISTA.

1970s. Enacted in 1976, and signed (with some public misgivings) by President Gerald R. Ford, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act, now the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, righted another historic wrong by declaring that every youngster with disabilities is entitled to a “free, appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment.” Combined with the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the law meant public schools now had an obligation to educate such children in ways that responded to their needs.

1980s. Though nominally just a commission report, A Nation at Risk (1983) told Americans that we faced a crisis of educational achievement and began to nudge the country through a 90-degree change of course from the “equity” agenda of the previous quarter-century to the “excellence” obsession of recent decades, complete with academic standards, tests, and results-based accountability systems.

1990 ushered in the first-ever state-by-state results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress as well as the first-ever reporting of NAEP results according to newly established performance benchmarks. This dual development opened a new era of awareness of academic achievement in the United States and made possible the first bona fide comparisons of state performance at a time when state-based reform was in the ascendancy and governors craved such comparisons. It also launched what amounted to the first real set of standards by which to determine just “how good is good enough” when it comes to student achievement in various subjects.

2001 brought passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a momentous reauthorization of the ESEA, declaring not only that every single student should become “proficient” in math and reading, but also that every school in the land would have its performance reported, both school wide and for its student demographic subgroups, and that schools failing to make “adequate yearly progress” would face a cascade of sanctions and interventions. NCLB transformed the federal government from funder to would-be reformer of American public education. In the course of becoming a reformer, Uncle Sam also became a regulator as never before.

And the present decade opened with the Race to the Top, the brainchild of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, based on the bold hypothesis that sizable grants of federal dollars, disbursed via a competitive process, can induce states to jump through reform policy hoops that they likely would not otherwise have attempted.

Add them up: America desegregated its schools, with respect both to race and handicap. It inaugurated big-time federal aid to K-12 education, initially in the name of equitable opportunity, now more targeted on academic achievement and gap-closing. It devised new ways of assessing, judging, and comparing achievement across the states—and prodded those states to make politically difficult changes to reform a system that wasn’t producing satisfactory results. And in the process, unsurprisingly, Washington evolved from funder and equalizer into enforcer and regulator.

None of this worked as well as ardent advocates had hoped. All brought unintended consequences, pushback, and sizable financial burdens. But American education is a very different enterprise—and for the most part a better enterprise—as a result of these game-changing initiatives from Washington.

What causes some federal initiatives to function, at least for a while, as positive game-changers, while so many others almost immediately become duds? I see four conditions:

First, there needs to be a sizable, pent-up problem in need of a large solution—a lot of accumulated pressure seeking a release valve. That’s a very different thing from a notional seems-like-a-good-idea or scratch-a-minor-itch add-on to a pre-existing portfolio of programs.

Second, the problem needs to be one that affects the whole country (for example, economic competitiveness, social justice, national security), even if the solution focuses mostly on a region (the segregated South) or significant constituency (kids with disabilities).

Third, the solution needs to be something that can be crafted by implements in the federal toolkit, which is basically limited to financial incentives, regulation of state and district practices, research and data, and litigation or the threat thereof. (And, of course, the bully pulpit itself.)

Fourth, and finally, enough political stars must align—and stay aligned long enough to make a difference.

Not all of them need to be aligned, however. (If they were, the problem would likely have been tackled already.) Congress was not about to outlaw racial segregation in 1954, for example, and plenty of prominent educators declared A Nation at Risk wrong in 1983. Lots of states dragged their heels big-time on No Child Left Behind, and any number of psychometricians denounced the NAEP achievement levels.

But there has to be enough oomph of one kind or another—moral, economic, political, judicial, even occasionally (in the case of school segregation) military—behind these kinds of changes for them to overcome resistance and gain real traction. And when that oomph diminishes—whether because of fresh election returns, limited attention span, newfound prosperity, exhaustion, backlash, or whatever—what remains may be a country with its education direction lastingly changed for the better. Or it may be the husk of yet another federal initiative that was promising at the start but grew stale, obsolete, or oppressive. Or both.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry originally appeared as a commentary in Education Week and is adapted from an essay in the book Carrots, Sticks, and the Bully Pulpit (Harvard Education Press, 2011).

While Jerry Brown, Tom Torlakson, and Mike Kirst deserve plenty of criticism for their indifference to education reform—kicking charter supporters off the state board, cozying up to the teacher unions—on this one they deserve nothing but kudos.

In a nine-page request (still in draft form for another month), they ask Arne Duncan to allow California to use its own accountability system, the Academic Performance Index (API), and to scrap AYP. Mimicking language Duncan himself has used, they write:

Unrealistic and ever-increasing performance targets have forced us to label 63 percent of Title I schools and 47 percent of districts receiving Title I funds as needing improvement, and to apply sanctions that do not necessarily lead to improved learning for the students in those schools. This practice has confused the public, demoralized teachers, and tied up funds that could have been more precisely targeted on the schools and districts that are most in need of improvement.

But they refuse to meet one of Duncan’s conditions for such flexibility: Namely, the creation of a statewide teacher evaluation system. From Politics K-12:

Why? The cash-strapped state just doesn’t have the funds to help school districts cover the cost of a new evaluation plan, as state law requires, Kirst said.

“We’re saying we just can’t pay for it,” Kirst said. Other states that have applied for the flexibility “must be rich,” he joked.

And, in Kirst’s view, the waiver request is consistent with what’s actually in the NCLB law. “We do not see anything in the law about state mandates for teacher evaluation,” he said.

Amen, amen, amen! Finally, a state willing to call out the Administration on the illegality of its waiver policy. (And a true-blue state at that!)

Let me be clear: I’m not saying California’s request should automatically be approved. There are legitimate questions about API, and whether it’s demanding enough (and sensitive enough to subgroup performance). As with the other states, Duncan has a right to negotiate over the particulars.

But he doesn’t have a right to demand the creation of a teacher evaluation system not mentioned in the law in return. Part of me hopes he’ll turn down the request anyway so that California can sue—and win.

-Mike Petrilli

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

HT: Jay Greene

It’s vintage Jennings, perceptive about both what has happened and why and how it has (and hasn’t) worked, then incurably and relentlessly over-ambitious—in a classic, big-government, big-spending, liberal sort of way—about what federal policy should do tomorrow.

As to the past, and oversimplifying some points that he makes more subtly,

• Equity-based reform didn’t get very far because it amounted to add-on programs, suffered from limited funding, and failed to “generally improve the broader educational system.”
• School choice pleases parents but doesn’t raise achievement much, “an interesting case of convictions trumping evidence.”
• Standards-based reform has had more traction but has “gone astray”: too much testing, too much labeling, not enough real alteration in the quality of what’s taught and learned.

None of that is wrong. But his prescription for the future comes across as wishful thinking even if you’re disposed to agree with it. (I’m not.) Jennings favors a federal law declaring that “no child in the United States will be denied equal educational opportunity in elementary and secondary education through the lack of a challenging curriculum, well-prepared and effective teachers, and the funding to pay for that education.”

This would, of course, have the effect of transferring the responsibility for educating (and financing the education of) 55 million kids to Washington. I guess one might term this a “governance reform” but I don’t think it’s going to happen or that it would work well if it did. (Jack has done just about everything during the course of his long career EXCEPT work in the executive branch. If he had, he might harbor fewer illusions about its capacity in the realm of education.)

It’s notable, too, that he continues after all these years to put his faith in Uncle Sam to fix what ails American education. There’s no mention here of changes in the delivery system (e.g. technology), the system’s efficiency/productivity, or its structures and governance (except as noted above). He also downplays the value of “outsiders” (e.g. governors, mayors) as agents of change in K-12 education.

It is said that if your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Much as I respect and admire Jack Jennings, in spite of all his experience in this field, his main tool remains federal legislation, which I’ve come to believe is almost always wielded clumsily in pursuit of nails that either won’t budge at all or end up bent.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

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

It’s no surprise that, 28 years after the publication of A Nation at Risk, school-reform efforts have generated so little effect. Our schools have proven, over the past century, quite adept at resisting change.

Recent attempts to inject accountability and innovation have brought us to an important opportunity. No Child Left Behind helped add transparency, and Race to the Top (RttT) motivated states to rethink teacher evaluation, charter limits, and more. The Investing in Innovation fund (i3) has seeded some promising innovations and helped attract more private investment to public education.

But none of these initiatives hits at the reasons that education has proven itself so innovation-resistant: governance and compensation. Further, there is good reason to believe a third impediment—the absence of useful data—will persist even through the Common Core State Standards initiatives.

Finland serves as a model for many reformers. There is a single curriculum; teachers are well educated and well respected. Their system reflects Finnish ideals and builds on Finnish strengths, and their students score at the top of international tests like PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) and TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).

But a top-down system will continue to be the wrong approach in this country, whether on a national or state level. It doesn’t reflect American values or culture, nor does it address the size, diversity, or income disparity of the United States. (Finland has half as many students as New York City, and only 13 percent live in poverty.) In a country of 300 million people, a top-down approach makes substantive change virtually impossible. To fix our schools, states have to stop trying to fix them; the quickest way to raise performance is command and control, but over the long run martial law does not even work well for generals.

States can create a more agile, more American, system of governance that eliminates impediments to improvement, empowers schools to innovate, and uses data to help families find the right schools for their children. The federal government should encourage them to do so.

None of the proposals below address the role of profitmaking companies in K‒12 education (though my bias might be clear, as I have run education companies for 30 years). It is important not to conflate marketplace with for-profit. It is also important to recognize that it takes time for deregulation and a newly formed marketplace to work. The breakup of AT&T and the telecommunications bill of 1986 did little to help consumers in the very short term, but they cleared the path for lower costs and technologies including the Internet and the cellphone. Occasionally efforts to create a marketplace don’t work at all, as happened with banking deregulation. As education is a public good and requires public funding, proposed structures should be measured by the incentives they will create for schools, districts, and teachers to produce great student outcomes at reasonable expense.

Empower Schools

Although our ultimate goal is a system of schooling that naturally evolves and improves, it’s important to keep in mind that the capacity for experimenting and innovating resides in individual schools, not in central offices. Under the current system of governance and funding, schools have too few resources and too little discretion for experimentation. Without the dollars to implement novel ideas and to discover what works and what doesn’t, most schools look for, at most, incremental improvement.

Right now, every state distributes state and federal funds to districts; in turn, the districts distribute funds to schools. Imagine that states instead channel funds directly to schools and require that the schools contract with a school support organization (SSO) for an array of services similar to what its district’s central office now provides (see Figure 1). There are many ways to implement such a plan, but the recent transition of New York City schools to its empowerment model might serve as a useful example, even though the city may be losing its resolve to change.

Ideally, existing school districts would be spun off as independent nonprofits and freed to compete with other districts, as well as with the new SSOs in the nonprofit and for-profit sectors, for schools and dollars. University of Washington research professor Paul Hill and others have proposed variants of this concept.

Since most schools (especially those in small and wealthy districts) would probably keep their existing districts as their service providers at first, the initial shift would be subtle. But before long the roles and behavior of schools and districts would begin to change. Freed to choose a district or other SSO based on service, cost, and philosophy, schools would demand more for less, and SSOs would step up to pull schools away from their local districts and compete by differentiating themselves from their competitors. Perhaps they would charge less for similar services; perhaps they would deconstruct the services, providing only busing, technology, or financial/purchasing support. Eventually, districts and SSOs would also vie for schools based on their track records of learning outcomes.

Under this proposal, districts would become providers of services rather than owners of geographic zones. With their schools acting as clients rather than dependents, districts would be forced to compete for them, thereby becoming more innovative and cost-effective.

Concrete results would take a while to materialize, but they would come. The current system of big-district purchasing, for example, favors large textbook publishers, which play it safe. School-level purchasing—with proper financial controls—would allow smaller, more responsive companies to compete for business.

Charter schools are the one reform initiative of the past three decades that has addressed the issue of K–12 governance and gained some traction (some 5 percent of public schools are now charters). This proposal builds on some of the lessons learned from the charter school movement and would allow effective charter networks like Green Dot, KIPP, and North Star to operate as school support organizations on a level playing field with districts, with equal funding and authority. A great deal of innovation today is coming from charter networks; this change would encourage districts to match them.

Most states would need to implement significant initiatives to prepare school principals for their new role, and to recruit new principals with the right skills; education schools and programs like New Leaders for New Schools could participate in this effort. Further, states would need to balance power between districts and schools; for example, districts should have the power to reject association with a poorly performing school. Both schools and districts should be pushed to improve themselves and their products and services.

Accountability would become simple (and imperative) under this model. The newly empowered schools should live or die by their performance; similarly, SSOs would lose their customers if they proved unable to support high achievement (which is how the stock of K12, Inc., lost 40 percent of its value following a single critical article in the New York Times). Accountability goes hand in hand with empowerment; promoting one without the other will not succeed.

Empowering schools would also mean encouraging parental choice. After the district’s monopoly is broken up, it would be critical that states create intelligent, consumer-friendly systems to support parents in choosing their children’s schools. Any number of successful models exist, all of which would provide transparency and could be used to balance families’ desire for schools within reasonable distance with their desire for the right outcome.

This is not an easy change; further, many districts are already well run and don’t need change at all. But this proposal would remake the relationships between schools, districts, and states into a far more efficient and effective model, one that would increase agility and remove regulations that limit the autonomy of school leaders. (As Arizona congressman Jeff Flake once asked, “Who out there can sing their district fight song?”)

Offer Teachers a New Deal

Once we’ve empowered schools, we’re ready to address teacher compensation. Many people believe that teachers unions are a major cause of whatever they think is wrong with our schools. It’s not that simple; plenty of research suggests that districts without unions do not perform better than those that have unions, and are only slightly less expensive.

To be sure, pensions and tenure are huge impediments to organic change. But two parties signed the contracts putting them in place: the union, whose job is to get its members more pay for less work, and the district. It was the side representing kids—the districts and state legislatures—that failed. Demonizing unions and teachers is unfair and counterproductive.

The problem isn’t the total compensation; if anything, teachers are underpaid. It’s the structure of that compensation, a series of long-term obligations that severely limit agility while creating off–balance sheet debt that would make Wall Street blush. (According to district budget figures, New York City, for example, spends as much on teachers who no longer teach as on those who still do.)

Ending tenure without ending the current pension system would create some impossible pressures; teachers nearing certain vesting thresholds, for instance, would have a target on their backs. To create an agile system, states must end both tenure and pensions. We can take a big step down this road without reneging on commitments made to a generation of teachers who have accepted lower base salaries for long-term benefits. The starting point, in fact, is something many teachers would embrace.

States should give each teacher the right to choose an alternative contract that contains terms and benefits consistent with those in the private sector (e.g., an at-will contract with standard health-care benefits, 401k, etc.), and sits outside of the existing teacher pension system. Choosing this alternative contract would convert any existing pension to a lump-sum 401k contribution. In return, the new contract would have a far higher base salary; in fairness, states should require districts to hire an auditor to determine the savings that can be expected from each alternative contract teacher, and give that savings to the teacher as increased pay.

Under this plan, no current teachers would be forced to change their contracts. If a state chooses to implement this policy change on a school-by-school basis, teachers who choose the current traditional contract might be offered a transfer or be grandfathered, that is, allowed to continue under their current contract. But the alternative contract could be attractive: depending on the state or district, the expected pension-related savings over a standard contract could be as much as $25,000 per year per teacher. In New York City, for example, a teacher might choose her current contract and a $65,000 salary, or the alternative employment terms with a $90,000 salary but with no tenure guarantees. This change would not reduce costs overall, but it would begin to curb the practice of paying operating expenses with long-term, off–balance sheet debt.

Conversion specifics will vary by state; obviously, those with huge unfunded liabilities will have a tougher time finding an elegant solution to converting past pension obligations for teachers nearing vesting milestones. Some percentage of teachers will refuse to switch; every teacher who does switch, though, will reduce the scope of the long-term problem. Many teachers will prefer to have their retirement funds fully in their control, along with a higher base salary, over a pension subject to fierce political pressure.

So which teachers might choose the alternative contract? My hunch is that newer teachers, who would appreciate the extra cash, and high-performing teachers, who would be unconcerned about the decreased job security, would be likely converts. If that’s true, it’s probable that schools with the highest-need students (who traditionally have the least-experienced faculty) would be most likely to convert over to the new contract, and might thereby be able to attract higher-performing teachers.

Schools operating under the alternative contract would be free to evaluate teachers based on student performance and evaluation, as well as classroom observation and other evidence. These teachers could be empowered to shape their schools, by taking part in choosing the curricula they use in their classrooms and the formative assessments they use to measure student progress, for example. Giving teachers a voice in decisions that affect their work is a logical complement of recognizing and compensating them as professionals rather than as assembly-line workers.

Does this proposal solve the compensation problem? Not entirely, though it would take us halfway there. If we also clean up our accountability systems, we could compare the performance of teachers under each contract and adjust the compensation system to include performance metrics as appropriate.

Align Assessment to Curricula

For all their deficiencies, assessments of student learning are an indispensable component of an evolving school system. Without accurate assessments aligned with curricula and standards, education innovators would be flying blind.

The multistate Common Core State Standards project is an improvement over the patchwork of past state standards. But the standards are not the source of flaws in state accountability systems; the culprits are the state tests.

Tests used by international organizations, like TIMSS and PISA, and also our own NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress), can measure performance because they’re both broad and deep; they use a reasonable number of items (many of which are constructed responses) against a large number of standards. But that design makes those tests too long to give to one student. Instead, they’re matrixed; 10 students might each take one-tenth of the test. A few thousand well-selected subjects might give us an accurate picture of 4th graders in a state, but these types of tests cannot be used to measure the performance of a student or school.

A state or national test, on the other hand, can only last an hour or two in each subject. Because such tests must contain several items per standard to be accurate, it will measure only a fraction of the standards. And since a test must be reliable from year to year, it will measure that same subset every year. This limitation encourages schools to narrow their curricula to only those standards likely to be measured and gives rise to illusory performance gains. At present, various groups of states are trying to work out this problem. In the end, they’ll trust that the testing companies will solve this problem, and once again, they’ll be disappointed. There’s a better path.

Imagine if states stopped commissioning their own tests and instead created a small set of requirements for each curriculum provider:

• Adopt or create a secure summative test for each grade level. This test should align closely to the curriculum, and every school using that curriculum would use that test to measure student performance.

• Work with client schools to administer NAEP (or some other matrix-based test aligned to the standards) to 2,000 students each year in key grade levels; use their performance to set the curve for the summative test (think of this as “Curriculum NAEP,” the equivalent of the current state NAEP testing).

• Set the curve for tests on a standard score range that facilitates value-added analysis.

This new way of thinking about summative testing would retain the advantages of the Common Core project and the best state tests while eliminating most of the disadvantages. States would retain the authority to determine the curricula they might subsidize or even allow; they might adopt only one for some subjects and grades (say, for K–6 math); in this case, the world would look a lot like it does now. States would be better off, however, allowing schools to adopt curricula, along with the corresponding summative tests, that best fit their students’ needs. Again, it makes sense to empower schools at the same time that we hold them accountable for student performance. Either way, states could continue to compare schools, since each curriculum would be scored on the same curve and the scores equated through Curriculum NAEP.

This proposal would eliminate most gaming around test scores. There would be no incentive for a provider to dumb down its test, since Curriculum NAEP scores (and therefore the curve) would leave scaled scores unchanged. Moreover, the proposal would create a true alignment between curricula and tests, by removing the state as intermediary. Rather than teach to the state test, schools would teach a curriculum, and then test students accordingly.

Best of all, this regimen would encourage differentiation and competition among curriculum providers. In the end, the curriculum generating the best results for a particular cohort (say, middle-school Latina students) would likely be adopted by schools with large groups of those students.

That competition would extend to the tests themselves. A test should be judged not only by its accuracy, precision, and reliability, but also by its ability to promote learning. Many educators believe that authentic assessment (asking students to perform complex tasks rather than answer multiple-choice questions) encourages better teaching and learning; if this proves true, then curriculum providers using authentic assessments would dominate the market, despite their higher costs.

Finally, this approach would save money. Curriculum providers will find much more agile ways to connect to assessment providers than any state consortium has found so far.

Let the Data Flow

If our schools are to continually improve, we need to gather data and make it available not just to schools, school districts, and parents, but also to independent researchers, who can comb the databases for correlations and any underlying causal connections. Our goal should be to create a veritable education genome project open to all appropriate parties, with proper security measures to address privacy concerns.

We currently gather data through a 1970s-era approach that is slow and expensive. As data move from classroom to school to district to state to the federal government, the details that would allow us to draw meaningful conclusions about things like the effectiveness of a textbook, a supplemental services provider, or an afterschool program are lost. Meanwhile, Google and others manage much more data with far less cost and difficulty. We need to adapt their processes to education data.

The testing companies already collect data from individual schools, as they send and collect test booklets either directly or through the district. These vendors are technically savvy and have the incentive to maintain participation in a lucrative assessment market. States should require their testing vendors to collect data from each school in a standard format, including at least the curricular materials used in each classroom, the calendar and schedule in use at that grade level, the background of the teachers, and any academic interventions used for particular students. The companies should be required to then forward these instructional data, along with test scores, subscores on specific components of the test, and student demographic information, to the state in a standardized format. The state, in turn, should publish a database with accounts allowing schools, districts, education consumers, and (in a privacy-ensured format) researchers to access at will.

There are obvious privacy concerns about publishing personal data in a state database. However, these data are far less sensitive than other data that are commonly secured and made widely available. (Just what would someone do with your son’s 5th-grade math grades?)

Thousands of researchers would surely exploit the resulting database. Curriculum providers would look for evidence of their (or their competitors’) effectiveness. Policymakers would examine the results of various interventions, including afterschool programs, changes in class and day length, or class-size reductions. Teacher preparation and in-service training programs would know whether and where they were having an impact. Parents would be able to make informed choices about where to send their children to school.

Most states would save money by making use of this more efficient way to collect data. At the same time, it would spawn a wave of innovation, as various players start using the data.

Innovation and the New ESEA

All four of these proposals would move us away from a command-and-control education system, and toward an agile education marketplace that encourages innovation and excellence. But even if these proposals sound reasonable to you, you’re probably still wondering how and when they might ever come to pass.

The answer is through the next iteration of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA); by attaching the mind-set of RttT and i3 to the billions of dollars of annual education aid to states, we can use incentives to encourage the right behaviors quickly and inexpensively. Title I channels $14 billion per year to states, which pass it along to districts along with their own funding. Imagine if the new law leads states to channel that money, along with their own funds, directly to schools, and discourages them from holding to the status quo. With a small tweak (for example, an increase or decrease in funding of 10 percent), the feds would give states a $3 billion push in the right direction.

The language enabling schools to choose a district or SSO should be simple. Each state should find its own path to empowering schools. Perhaps some states would empower high-performing schools first, while others might put failing schools into governors’ districts like the one currently proposed in New Jersey. Perhaps states with higher population density would create statewide choice systems, while others would favor parents who sought short travel times. There are many mechanisms imaginable for allowing a school community to vote on its district or SSO affiliation and for states to license and monitor school support organizations.

Similarly, Title II provides roughly $3 billion per year for professional development. The federal government could limit those funds to states that give teachers the right to choose the alternative contract. Again, though, the new ESEA should allow states great latitude in structuring that right (for instance, they could give that choice to individual teachers, or allow a school-by-school vote); regardless, each state will have to figure out what to do with its pension obligations to teachers who switch to the new contract.

The process by which Common Core states are creating math and English tests is well under way; it may result in top-notch exams that lead to dramatic performance increases. The easiest place to implement an assessment marketplace, then, is in science, history, and language courses. ESEA should establish a group that registers curricula in those areas; if this marketplace proves effective and states struggle with the Common Core tests, this marketplace can easily expand to incorporate math and English.

The accountability provisions of ESEA should require testing companies to phase in collection of school-level instructional and background data. Initially, the testing companies could provide the data to client states for analysis; perhaps down the road, states or foundations will find it useful to run studies across multiple data sets.

None of these proposals is expensive; in fact, most will save money in the short and long term. And although some might be politically inexpedient, none would have the natural and well-funded opponents of other commonsense reforms. Further, this is not an exhaustive list. Every reader of this article could probably come up with additional reforms that would create a more responsive education system.

This plan places a great deal of faith in competition and innovation, though within the construct of a robust public school system. As I’ve noted, this faith could be misplaced: perhaps education truly is different, and there simply is one immutable right way to run schools. But there is something to be said for empowering our schools with transparency, choice, and agility. American ideals shouldn’t just be taught in the classroom; they should shape that classroom.

John Katzman is the executive chairman of 2tor, Inc.

We at Fordham call this “Reform Realism”– a pro–school reform orientation leavened with realism about what the federal government can and cannot do well in K–12 education. But it also describes the spirit of the Obama Administration’s ESEA blueprint, released last year.

And now, thanks to a handful of moderately conservative GOP Senators, including former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, we have actual legislative language bringing this commonsense approach to life. In a package of five separate bills—a “step-by-step” approach rather than one mega-measure—the senators offer a proposal that would fix all of the onerous provisions of No Child Left Behind without abandoning its focus on reform.

Yes, the legislation can be fairly described as a rollback of NCLB—which is precisely what vast swaths of Americans have been demanding as the shortcomings of that mega-measure become more evident, its excesses become more painful, and its remedies prove themselves ineffectual. The reform package offered by Alexander et al would eliminate “adequate yearly progress,” hand “accountability” back to the states, and undo the law’s “highly qualified teachers” mandate. But it doesn’t abdicate Uncle Sam’s interest in reform, or in the country’s neediest students. States would still be required to take dramatic action to turn around their very worst schools. Title I funding would continue to flow to the highest-need schools and districts. Students would continue to be tested in grades 3-8 and once in high school, and the results would continue to be reported widely and by subgroup. The approach is tight-loose, incentives over mandates, transparency over accountability. It’s “reform realism” through and through.

What’s particularly impressive about this legislative package is its rare combination of thoughtfulness and humility. Take the issue of teacher evaluation. Senator Alexander, for one, believes fervently in the power of rigorous evaluations to drive educational improvement. His home state of Tennessee—one of the original Race to the Top victors—is putting one of the country’s most aggressive teacher evaluation systems in place. Yet Alexander stopped short of demanding that Uncle Sam mandate such a system for every state. He understands that he’s no longer a governor but a senator—and that to mandate a promising reform like teacher evaluation is to kill it—or render it toothless, just like “HQT” turned out. This kind of restraint is remarkable—and comes from the hard-earned experience of watching Washington smother promising reforms through its embrace.

The bills also find a clear route through the Common Core thicket. They strike the right balance—requiring states to adopt college-and-career standards but maintaining a position of neutrality on whether those states should develop standards together or alone. This is the best possible place for Common Core and those states that earnestly want to employ it—with no federal government entanglement at all.

In a sane world, leaders from both parties would welcome the Alexander approach and bring these bills to the floor of the House and Senate as soon as possible, and the Obama Administration would laud the package for its fidelity to its “blueprint.” (John Kline should certainly appreciate its respect for the 10th Amendment.) To be sure, the legislative language could be massaged this way or that. Debates should be held around the particulars. But the broad contours are right.

And, perhaps best of all, these bills could pass both chambers of Congress tomorrow. Rank and file members of both parties want to undo NCLB’s prescriptiveness around accountability—but don’t want to “cut and run” either. This points the way.

Perhaps that’s why Democrats for Education Reform reacted to the package with such swift viciousness yesterday. This generally admirable group—so effective at giving Democrats at the state level the political cover to break with the teachers unions—has an unfortunate tendency on federal policy to believe that Washington knows best. (Its policy director was a longtime staffer for Representative George Miller, one of the key architects of NCLB.) In a widely circulated press statement, the group described the plan as “a stunning retreat on two decades of reform” and wondered whose “bidding” the senators were doing.

If DFER staffers are implying that the Republican Party—the party of Scott Walker, John Kasich, Mitch Daniels, and Chris Christie—has decided to jump in bed with the teachers unions, then they’ve really lost their marbles. Sure, GOP principles on federalism and the unions’ disdain for accountability lead to a similar place on specific features of ESEA. But for reformers to believe that states will automatically back away from tough love for schools if given the chance is to admit weakness at the state policy level. Republican governors and legislators, the “Chiefs for Change,” and a growing number of DFER-type Democrats have proven themselves more than capable to carry the mantle of reform without help from Uncle Sam.

There’s a new slogan going around Washington this week: “Pass this bill.” When it comes to the GOP ESEA proposal, I say, “Yes we can.”

-Michael Petrilli

This post also appears on Flypaper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readers Poll: Vote for the presidential candidate you think would be best for K-12 education.

Two months before his 2008 election, Barack Obama addressed a roomful of Ohio public school teachers, praising their long hours and talking about his daughters’ starting 2nd and 5th grade. It was a typical Democratic education speech, with vows of support for early childhood education, for building up programs that help students from “the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college.”

Then Obama departed from the usual feel-good talking points. He touted competition, charter schools, and school choice. “I believe in public schools, but I also believe in fostering competition within the public schools,” he said. “And that’s why, as president, I’ll double the funding for responsible charter schools.”

That wasn’t an applause line, for sure, but it did serve another purpose: to position the candidate as a different kind of Democrat, one willing to embrace ideas from across the aisle and push back against his own teachers union base. It also put Republicans on notice: Obama wouldn’t be bashful about encroaching on their territory on education.

Two and a half years later, Republicans are still trying to figure out how to respond to Obama, a Democratic president with education reform bona fides. To date, the most prominent leaders of the GOP have either been mute on the topic of education or heaped praise on the president. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels lauded the Obama administration and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a speech he made in April 2011: “We need to prepare our young people with the highest possible preparation wherever they come from, wherever they are headed,” he said. “[Duncan] is the nation’s champion, along with the president he serves, of that ideal.”

As the winter primaries get closer, don’t expect much more of that.

The One That Got Away

Republicans began this election season in search of a candidate and a message. The May withdrawal of Mitch Daniels from the Republican primary race left the GOP without one of its most visible education leaders. The Midwestern governor had become a darling among education reformers for making school choice and quality teaching his top priorities.

In his final State of the State speech in Indianapolis, Daniels said that if he did nothing else in 2011, he wanted to “hitch his legacy” to education reform. Watching from the audience that day were students on waiting lists to get into various charter schools. He urged state lawmakers to create a voucher program that would allow kids to use public dollars for private school tuition. He talked for 30 minutes about improving teacher quality. And by the end of the legislative session, he got just about everything he wanted in a school reform plan: expansion of charter schools, private school vouchers, and college scholarships for students who graduate high school early.

But after flirting with a presidential run, Daniels bowed out, leaving to those still in the running the task of building a GOP education platform.

The Race Is On

After a slow start, the Republican field is finally starting to take shape. Former governors Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have announced their election bids, and former GOP house speaker Newt Gingrich is also running. As of June 2011, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum had entered the race. Republicans await announcements from Sarah Palin and Texas governor Rick Perry.

In staking out platforms in the coming months for what will likely be a feisty GOP primary, Republicans face two quandaries regarding education policy: They need to distinguish their positions from Obama’s centrist education reforms, and they need to win over the Republican base, fueled by some Tea Party energy, that will push for the U.S. Department of Education to be dismantled altogether.

Former education secretary Margaret Spellings says gaining ground may not be easy, but it has been done before: by George W. Bush, her former boss.

“I commend President Obama for adopting the GOP playbook and building on the groundwork that we’ve laid,” said Spellings, currently a consultant in Washington, D.C. “It’s time for us to develop some new material that pushes even further.”

If Republicans want an advantage, Spellings argues, they need to push choice and the hold-schools-accountable platform because “that’s safe territory for Republicans of all stripes,” she said. “Unite Republicans by talking about the kind of public policy that ties very closely to accountability.”

One likely Republican target is school spending. Days after entering office, President Obama signed into law the sweeping stimulus bill, which included a $100 billion bailout of the K–12 system. A year later, the smaller “edujobs” bill pumped another $10 billion into the schools. While this money was ostensibly linked to reform via the Race to the Top, there’s very little to show for this huge influx of federal funds. Most studies show that it merely saved teachers’ jobs, or kicked layoffs down the road a year or two. In lots of places where layoffs were not on the table, it allowed school districts to give teachers raises, at a time when America suffered through the worst unemployment crisis in a generation.

By pointing at the fat in the education system, GOP candidates could argue, as Governor Pawlenty did in 2007, that American schools are “costing us a lot of money and it’s costing them their future.”

Expect to see the candidates applaud governors in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Ohio, who took on collective bargaining rights and insisted that money is best used to reward good teaching for the children’s sake.

“We have built a system…that cares more about the feelings of adults than the future of children,” said New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie, widely expected to run for president in 2016, at the American Enterprise Institute earlier this year. “Tell me, where else is there a profession with no reward for excellence and no penalty for failure?”

In a 2011 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Romney berated Obama for failed economic policies, saying afterward that he’s “seen the failure of liberal answers before…liberal education policies fail our children today because they put pensions and privileges for the union bosses above our kids.”

Defining the Federal Role

A candidate like Romney or Pawlenty is still going to have to explain to the Republican base why they’re not going to shutter the U.S. Department of Education. During the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party Senate and House candidates across the country promised on the campaign trail that they would shut down the U.S. Department of Education and hand control over to state governments. Many of them are now members of Congress.

A related issue is where to land on the “Common Core” standards, a set of expectations in reading and math developed by the nation’s governors and state superintendents, but viewed by many conservatives as a federal plot to take over the schools.

“Post-Obamacare, post–Dodd-Frank, in the Tea Party world, Republicans aren’t interested anymore in a robust federal role in education,” said a senior GOP Capitol Hill staffer, who could not be named because he is not authorized to talk to the media. “Bush liked it and talked about it, fine. Now that he’s not there hitting us over the head with it, we’ll move to empower and trust state and local officials to make decisions.”

The Candidates

No matter who else enters the race, it is unlikely a newcomer will have a ready-made education platform. Romney, Bachmann, Pawlenty, Perry, and Gingrich have all, in their careers, been outspoken on key issues of education policy. It’s worth considering what each of these (potential) candidates might do, were he or she to become the nation’s 45th president.

MITT ROMNEY, like many Republican leaders in the 1990s, called for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.

Once he became governor of Massachusetts, Romney plotted out a more sophisticated education platform. He pushed school choice when a Democratic-controlled state legislature was moving away from it, and extolled the virtues of No Child Left Behind.

“I’ve taken a position where, once upon a time, I said I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education…. That’s very popular with the base,” Romney said at a 2007 Republican debate in South Carolina. “As I’ve been a governor and seen the impact that the federal government can have holding down the interest of the teachers unions and instead putting the interests of the kids and the parents and the teachers first, I see that the Department of Education can actually make a difference.”

As governor, Romney proposed education reform measures that lifted the state cap on charter schools and gave principals more power to get rid of ineffective teachers.

In his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, he darkly warns about American students’ low achievement in reading and writing. He writes that money does not play a pivotal role in education quality and achievement, perhaps a harbinger that Romney’s education-reform platform wouldn’t include new money, as Obama’s plan did.

“The average amount spent per pupil, adjusted for inflation, rose by 73 percent between 1980 and 2005, and the average class size was reduced by 18 percent,” he wrote. “But during that same period, the educational performance of our children has hardly budged. Why not?”

In Massachusetts, Romney defended statewide graduation requirement tests, which started during his first year as governor in 2003. When one mayor declared he would dole out diplomas even to students who didn’t pass the tests, Romney threatened to withhold state dollars.

He also defended English immersion after visiting a Boston school where many students enrolled in bilingual classes had actually been born in the United States.

If Romney talks education in the next year, he will blend the importance of accountability and of governing with a stick if needed. He is widely credited for raising test scores. In his third year as governor, 4th and 8th graders scored first in the country in math and English (see Figure 1).

It was in education that MICHELE BACHMANN got her political sea legs. Disappointed in the school work brought home by her foster kids attending public school, the now Minnesota congresswoman decided to get involved because the school system didn’t have an “academic foundation,” according to Bloomberg News.

She started a charter school in the early 1990s, but abruptly resigned from its board—along with other board members—after the school district accused the charter of teaching religion in its classrooms.

In 1999, Bachmann ran for Stillwater school board with a platform to dump Minnesota’s “Profile of Learning,” the state’s graduation standards. It is the only race the three-term congresswoman has ever lost.

Under a Bachmann presidency, expect the U.S. Department of Education to be all but shuttered. In 2004, she authored legislation that would remove Minnesota from the requirements of No Child Left Behind. (It didn’t pass.) In a 2009 letter to constituents posted on her website, Bachmann wrote, “I entered politics because I want to give my children the incredible educational experience I received from public schools as a student. No Child Left Behind must be repealed and control of our education returned to the local level.”

As his eight years as Minnesota’s governor wore on, TIM PAWLENTY’s push against the teachers union grew stronger and more publicly divisive.

Shortly after his election in 2002, in an impromptu speech to business leaders, Pawlenty called for tying teacher pay to performance and bringing up the state’s standards. He also urged state lawmakers to authorize the use of a transparent growth model to see how well schools are really doing to improve student achievement. Yet, maybe because teachers union officials were in the audience, Pawlenty carefully parsed tenure, saying, “Seniority can remain a big factor, maybe even the main factor, in setting pay scales,” according to news reports.

The speech underscored Pawlenty’s sometimes mixed message to unions throughout his tenure: I’ll try to work with you. That is until you don’t work with me.

In 2005, Pawlenty passed a Minnesota-wide teacher pay-for-performance plan called “Q Comp,” which rewards teachers based on evaluations. Though passed by the state legislature, the plan gave school districts and charter schools the choice of whether to participate and allows a district to collectively bargain a pay agreement that looks at professional development, teacher evaluation, and an alternative salary schedule.

When federal Race to the Top dollars became available, Pawlenty launched a statewide charter school initiative and moved to hone math and science instruction in schools. Still, Minnesota lost out, most notably because the application lacked support from the teachers union. Like all states, Minnesota had an opportunity to go for the second round of grants, but Pawlenty drew a line in the sand, saying he would only apply again if the union, and Democrats in the state legislature, agreed to more reforms.

At the time, Pawlenty also dialed up the rhetoric. The timing may have been personally fortuitous: He had declared he wasn’t seeking another gubernatorial term in Minnesota and was flirting with a presidential run. It was good press: He was out there staking pitch-perfect positions on education reform.

“If they [the teachers unions] don’t buy in and aren’t partners in change, it’s not going to work,” Pawlenty said at a United Negro College Fund event in February of 2010. “We have to constructively and gently, or maybe not so gently, nudge them toward change.”

Texas Governor RICK PERRY, if he runs,  is likely to use his own state’s successes to argue that the federal government should dramatically downsize in education.

While Perry has been outspoken against the Common Core, he and his education commissioner have pulled the quality of Texas tests up to a level respected among education reformers. Test scores among kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.

Though Perry will probably make this point on the campaign trail, he’s not likely to promise to take over the nation’s schools.  On the contrary, he’ll likely pick up on his recent call to repeal No Child Left Behind and let states take charge of their education systems. In his book released last year, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry argues that Washington has taken power away from states. At a speech in November in Washington, Perry took aim at two of former President Bush’s signature accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program, saying they were examples of areas in which Washington need not be.

“Those are both big government but more importantly, they were Washington-centric,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “One size does not fit all, unless you’re talking tube socks.”

Since the start of his career teaching college in Georgia, former GOP House Speaker NEWT GINGRICH has cast education among the nation’s most important domestic policy problems.

His views have developed through the years: In 1983, when the hallmark “A Nation at Risk” was released, Gingrich, a member of Congress at the time, traveled the country holding town hall meetings. He criticized American schools as “no more than holding pens for our children.” In the 1990s, he called for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education and opposed direct government loans to students.

In 2001, he authored a report that called the failure of math and science education among the greatest threats to national security, “greater than any conceivable war,” he said.

Then in 2008 and 2009, his political ambitions on hiatus, Gingrich joined some odd bedfellows, among them civil rights activist Al Sharpton and former Democratic Colorado governor and Los Angeles schools chancellor Roy Romer, in a yearlong initiative to push education reform nationwide.

“I’m prepared to work side by side with every American who is committing to putting children first,” he said in 2009 in a White House press conference, before praising President Obama for “showing courage” in pushing unions against charter school caps. “Not talking about it for 26 more years…. We could literally have the finest learning in the world if we were to systematically apply the things that work.”

He continued, “I think we need to move forward from No Child Left Behind towards getting every American ahead.”

But how we move toward providing each child with an appropriate education is the question.  The Republican candidates all stress accountability and favor school choice, though they prefer leaving the federal government out of education policy decisions.  Most of them emphasize reforms to enhance teacher quality, and they question the influence of teachers unions.  They support high standards, if delegated to the states to devise and enforce.  What they all have in common is a belief that education needs deep reform that goes beyond anything Democrats have proposed.

Allison Sherry is Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Denver Post.

-Paul E. Peterson

***

Folks, you know that our education system is tattered. Some of it is fine, but too much is mediocre or worse. Once the envy of the world, American schools are losing ground to those in Europe and Asia. Today, many countries are out-teaching, out-learning, and out-hustling our schools?—?and doing it for a fraction of the cost.

Meanwhile, failed education systems in our cities worsen the odds that the next generation will climb out of poverty into decent jobs and a shot at the American dream. And as much as many of us prefer not to notice, way too many of our suburban schools are just getting by. They may not be dropout factories, but they’re not preparing anywhere near enough of their pupils to revive our economy, strengthen our culture, and lead our future.

Turning this situation around has been the work of education reform for the past two decades. We’ve spent a lot of money on it. We’ve had any number of schemes and plans and laws and pilot programs. And we’ve seen some modest success. Graduation rates are starting to inch up again. The lowest-performing students have made gains. Many more families are taking advantage of many more forms of school choice. And our best public charter schools are demonstrating that tremendous success is possible even in the most challenging of circumstances.

Leaders from both parties deserve credit for these gains, including President Bush and, yes, President Obama. We need to appreciate his support for quality charter schools, rigorous teacher evaluations, and merit pay.

The RCP approval rating sums up all the polls out there, averaging out the idiosyncrasies and biases of each. It seldom changes by more than a point or two in any given day, and often it does not shift at all. With more than a year until election day, it’s the best forecasting number available, much better than the misleading mock races against hypothetical opponents that get so much press attention.  History shows that presidents cannot win re-election if their popularity rating falls well below the 50 percent mark.

Only a couple of months ago, Osama bin Laden’s demise had given the president a ten point jump in the approval ratings, but the public now seems to have totally forgotten that triumph, as the economy’s woes reassert themselves.

Until the latest economic dip, it seemed that the Republican leaders in Congress had settled for control of the House and maybe the Senate in November 2012.  If that’s all they really care about, the best way to hold their jobs was to simply work closely with the president, fashioning budgetary compromises, designing bipartisan education reform legislation, and getting other governmental business in hand.  Moderate majorities can be found in Congress for such actions, as long as the president is willing to abandon the left wing of the Democratic Party and embrace divided government, letting Republicans control one or even both of the congressional chambers.

But with the president’s popularity turning negative, legislative politics are giving way to presidential politics.  A key signal this weekend was the joint attack on the Obama-Boehner debt-increase compromise by all the major Republican presidential candidates.  Faced by such opposition, as well as a revolt by a good share of the Republicans in Congress, Boehner could do nothing other than go back to the drawing board, even if his new, tougher line places at risk a number of  Republican representatives in critical swing districts.  With the Republicans taking a tough line, that may leave the President with no option but to stand by the most partisan of his friends in the legislative branch, who are hoping to put congressional Republicans on that electrified Social Security rail.

So both sides are going “all in” in 2012. Republicans see a one-term presidency, while Democrats expect to win everything back, if not by the margin achieved in 2008.  That means a continuing tussle over the budget.  And it leaves No Child Left Behind on the books, even if the executive branch has put the law on ignore.

Of course, all this can change again. The economy can recover, or another foreign policy victory can be achieved, and President Obama may stand as tall as he did the day Osama’s number came up. If he regains his presidential stature, Republicans and the president will find a way to make up after all.

To guess whether that will happen, watch two numbers—the big unemployment one and the crucial, if little known, RCP job approval rating.

-Paul E. Peterson

The WRONG way to think about federal policy in education is to identify the myriad problems plaguing our schools, and then dream up federal solutions, as if Congress could pass a law and magically things would change in the real world (and without any unintended consequences).

The RIGHT way to think about federal policy is to figure out what Uncle Sam is capable of doing, and then doing that well.

Now, I disagree with some friends on the right, like Jennifer and her colleagues at Heritage, that there is basically NOTHING Uncle Sam is capable of doing right in education. For instance, thoughtfully crafted competitive grant programs, like the Teacher Incentive Fund, CAN move the reform ball down the field.

But I strongly disagree with my friends on the left, like Cindy and her colleagues at CAP, who seem to think that Uncle Sam’s capacity to do good is practically unlimited.

Here are Fordham, we embrace the notion of Reform Realism. Washington absolutely should promote reform. But we have to be realistic about the limits of its power and influence. Because while Washington CAN force states and districts to do things they don’t want to do, it can’t force them to do those things well. And almost everything in school reform is only worth doing if done right.

So what does this mean for federal policy around accountability? There are two questions. First, should Washington prescribe a particular school ratings system for all the states (like the rating system we call AYP)? And second, should Washington prescribe particular interventions for failing schools in all of the states? Let’s ask: Can Washington do these things well and without lots of perverse consequences?

To my eye, the answer is clearly no. Nobody will come right out and defend AYP, with its byzantine rules and dichotomous ratings. Yet, if you read the policy papers coming out of CAP, Ed Trust, the Chamber of Commerce, and other left of center organizations, they don’t want to scrap its most onerous parts: a deadline for getting all kids to “proficiency,” Soviet-style annual goals, dozens of boxes to check in order to be considered a good school, etc. They might agree to a tweak here or there, but their Son of AYP would look a whole lot like the AYP we know and hate today.

And what about federally-mandated interventions? This has been a total flop. Not because federal law wasn’t prescriptive enough, but because NCLB’s architects never had a realistic theory of action for how the feds were going to compel recalcitrant states and districts to implement these sweeping reforms. Setting up a public school choice program, or free tutoring program, or intervening in failing schools—all of this is hard under the best of circumstances. Expecting states and districts to do these things under duress and do them well is nuts.

So what would I propose instead? Three words: Transparency, transparency, transparency. What the federal government can do and do well is ensure that schools results—AND finances—are transparent to the public.

It starts by encouraging rigorous standards and tests, so that the test scores that are at the base of any transparency system can be trusted and might mean something in the real world. The Common Core initiative is a huge step forward here.

The feds can also reasonably ask the states to develop ratings systems so that parents and educators have an easy to understand signal about whether their schools are on the right track. But rather than prescribe a rating system from Washington, Congress should simply list the elements that states must include. I would include: Student growth, subgroup performance, graduation rates, and more.

Not everybody is going to be happy with the system every state develops. They might not focus enough on achievement gaps for someone’s taste, or value-added, or science scores, or whatever. So the feds should also ask the states to make public all of the data behind the school ratings so that any independent organization can build their own ratings system. Education Trust, for example, could develop an achievement gap index that would allow viewers to compare all schools in Common Core states, in an apples to apples way. GreatSchools would build its own.

As for intervening in schools that aren’t measuring up, here’s where we’re in need of a big wallop of humility. Let’s face it: nobody really knows how to turn around failing schools; a recent Fordham study found that just 1 percent of low performing schools reach turnaround status five years later. So it doesn’t make any sense to me to pretend that the federal government can waive a wand and make these interventions happen and happen well.

If Congress can’t help itself, and wants to intervene in the very worst schools, I would propose a competitive grant program for states and/or districts that really want to do the work.

So there you have it.

Will my plan fix all that ails America’s schools? Nope, but neither will anyone else’s federal program. I like to think that I should get points for being honest about it.

-Mike Petrilli

Note: These were my opening comments during last week’s Fordham Institute panel, “Is it Time to Turn the Page on Federal Accountability in Education?” Video of the event is available here.

Here’s my take. First, Arne Duncan deserves credit for doing something on ESEA beyond issuing statements and press releases that amount to “please, please, pretty please, with sugar on top!” Congress is dithering and no amount of pressure—Presidential or otherwise—has made a difference to date. The Republicans in the House at least have some reasonable excuses—with all those new members still getting up to speed, and the tricky politics of the Tea Party. But Senator Harkin should be ashamed (though he doesn’t appear to be); Easter is long past and still we have no bill from his committee. Maybe this threat will finally be the kick in the pants he needs to get his act together.

Second, my friend Rick Hess is right that Duncan’s plans to tie regulatory relief to new requirements indicates an incredible amount of tone-deafness, not to mention Constitutional ignorance. Yes, under NCLB’s waiver authority, the Secretary has a lot of room to maneuver in terms of letting states and districts escape from onerous parts of the law. But what provision gives the Department of Education the power to make its supplicants agree to Race to the Top-like mandates in return? As a spokeswoman for the top Republican on the House education committee told Education Week: “Chairman Kline remains concerned about any initiative that would allow the secretary to pick winners and losers in the nation’s education system.” Bingo.

So what was Team Duncan thinking? Here’s a hint; consider this quote (again from Ed Week) from NCLB-uber-advocate Kati Haycock:

While we believe targeted waivers in exchange for real movement on those issues is a good thing, regulatory relief would fit squarely in the ‘cop-out’ category.

That’s right, if all you do is try to fix the most onerous parts of NCLB, but don’t “move the ball down the field” in terms of reform, you are copping out.

I prefer another line of reasoning: If we reformers want to save the larger project of school reform, we need to fix NCLB now before the backlash gets even worse.

Here’s my advice to Duncan et al: Go ahead with a package of regulations that would provide blanket waivers of the worst parts of the law. Of course there will be parameters—states would still have to have accountability systems, for example. The only question is how different they could be from NCLB’s vision. But don’t try to tie this stuff to new, made-up mandates. That will only get NCLB implementation embroiled in a lawsuit (which you’ll lose) and acrimonious charges of imperialism (which will be well-founded). And of course, keep your eyes on the Senate.

—Mike Petrilli

Our criticism of the nationalization of standards, curriculum, and assessments elicited the following statement from Peter Cunningham, spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education: “Just for the record: we are for high standards, not national standards and we are for a well-rounded curriculum, not a national curriculum. There is a big difference between funding development of curriculum—which is something we have always done—and mandating a national curriculum—which is something we have never done. And yes—we believe in using incentives to advance our agenda.”

Let’s leave aside the double-speak of how incentivizing is somehow different from mandating.  Instead, let’s focus on his admission that the Department is “funding development of curriculum” and is “using incentives to advance our agenda.”

The 1979 law by which the U.S. Department of Education is authorized in its current form clearly prohibits these activities.  It states (in section 103b): “No provision of a program administered by the Secretary or by any other officer of the Department shall be construed to authorize the Secretary or any such officer to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction, administration, or personnel of any educational institution, school, or school system, over any accrediting agency or association, or over the selection or content of library resources, textbooks, or other instructional materials by any educational institution or school system, except to the extent authorized by law.” (emphasis added)

So, the spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education says that they are funding development of curriculum, but the Department is expressly not authorized to direct, supervise, or control curriculum.  They are are also prohibited from directing, supervising, or controlling textbooks or other instructional materials.

The Department seems to think that it is on solid footing as long as it does not mandate or control curriculum.  But the 1979 law restricts the Department more broadly.  It may not even direct or supervise curriculum.  I have no idea how the Department could fund the development of curriculum without also exercising some direction and supervision over that curriculum.

Nor can the Department justify its current activities by claiming that they are only funding the development of curricular frameworks and instructional materials.  The Department is also explicitly prohibited from directing, supervising, or controlling the content of instructional materials.

As far as I know, no law has specifically authorized the Department to engage in these activities from which they are otherwise prohibited.

I think they have been caught red-handed.

-Jay P. Greene

The announcement rattled me, since I was just finishing up a feature story for Ed Next on Steiner’s brilliant leadership in taking the moribund Empire State to the RTTT winner’s circle in nine short months – the equivalent of turning on a dime in the education reform world.  Much of the credit, of course, goes to RTTT itself, which set broad but rigorous reform goals, then dangled a nice prize in front of cash-strapped states ($700 million in New York’s case) that proved they were serious about attaining them.  States rushed to join in the competition. But no one gave New York much of a chance – and in fact it finished far out of the money in Round 1.  Steiner arrived in October of 2009 and by the end of May the following year, at three in the morning, stood with Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and his deputy John King, in the State Assembly and watched the vote that raised the state’s charter cap by 260 and dismantled the “firewall” between teacher evaluations and student performance. Said Joe Williams of Democrats of Education Reform, “What had been considered impossible months before was now a done deal.” My story takes you through the story of how Steiner and his team were able to accomplish this minor miracle.

You can also read excerpts from my April 11 interview with Steiner, just four days after his resignation announcement, and hear him describe what he tried to accomplish and what comes next. In some ways, however, my interview with Steiner last December (excerpted here) is more revealing, as he speaks candidly about the “huge challenge” of implementing the ambitious program that he had helped design. By April 8, the day after the resignation announcement, in a brief phone conversation, he told me that he had decided that the “grinding implementation” was not his cup of tea.  Still diplomatically tight-lipped about the exact reasons for leaving – “an academic thrown into a knife fight,” one insider explained – Steiner will be missed in New York.

–Peter Meyer

Education Next [EN]:  How did you get involved in New York’s Race to the Top business?

Joe Williams [JW]: It goes back to the spring of 2009, when the stimulus package was approved and Race to the Top is bubbling around and nobody in New York State knew what anybody was talking about.  In fact, [at the time] the general consensus from Merryl Tisch and Governor 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?

…

EN: Were you worried?

JW: We were worried. We were worried that it was rigged.  We were worried that no one in New York was taking it seriously.  They were asking, Why are you rocking the boat? That kind of thing. It was in September or October [of 2009] – wait, it was November because there was a Yankees playoff game that night.  I was on a panel and Merryl Tisch was on it and she declared that she thought New York had a great package and would win [Round 1 of RttT]. I disagreed with her, and we sort of went at it for a little bit. I said that if there was a race, you had to at least tie your shoes and show up at the starting line.  New York was flabby, and eating donuts and not ready to compete for anything.

EN: Did they ever get the message?

JW:  Later that month, when Gov. Paterson was on a conference call with other governors and either Obama or Duncan, they made it clear that states that had things like a firewall in place between [student achievement] data and teacher evaluation and had charter school caps in place – those states would have a tough time winning [RttT] and getting any money out of this stuff. It was about the same time that David Steiner was sworn in and started his work. He and the governor and Merryl Tisch began to understand that they had a little bit of a problem.

EN:  Did that solve the problem?

JW:  The [state Senate] staffers were being told that [U.S.] Senators [Chuck] Schumer and [Kristen] Gillibrand had said, in some sort of conference call, that we didn’t really need to worry about it. That everything was going to be okay for New York. The message they also got was don’t rock the boat. Don’t push any of this Race to the Top stuff.  The quieter the better.

At the time Obama was trying to peel away votes for the health care bill. And the theory we were hearing from Albany staffers was that Chuck Schumer and company would get the votes Obama needed on health care and New York would be rewarded with Race to the Top funding.  I never talked to Schumer about it, but we were hearing this from state Senate staffers who stopped work on the legislation we were working on with them.  So I called Arne Duncan’s office and said, “You need to know how this is playing out in a state like ours and we’re probably going to have to go to the New York Times with this, to let them know that the Obama education plan is a total sham

A couple days later I get a call from Merryl Tisch and some of the state Senate leaders asking me to come to a meeting.  They couldn’t decide whether to do it in Albany or New York City, so we did it by teleconference. A bunch of state Senators, staffers, me, and charter leaders Tom Carroll, James Merriman, Bill Phillips… And the beginning of the meeting was, basically, “Who called Arne Duncan and is badmouthing New York State?”

EN: Did you fess up?

JW: I did. I said, I called Arne Duncan and I needed to let him know what we were hearing.  And the staffers who had told us this about the call with Schumer were in the room at this meeting. And I said there are people in this room who know what I’m talking about.  And Senator Malcolm Smith said, “C’mon, name names.”  I said, “I’m not going to do that, but everyone here knows what I’m talking about.”

At that point, David Steiner stood up and said, “Look, I was on this call with the state chiefs and it’s clear we’re going to have a lot of difficulty with both the firewall and the charter cap. We’re going to have trouble competing in the Race to the Top.” At that point people started to take it seriously.

So, for six months we had been trying to get people to talk about this. But it really wasn’t until Steiner–in the context of us getting taken to the woodshed about why we were throwing New York under the bus with the feds–it was clearly understood at that point that we were going to be publicly embarrassed.

EN: So what did you do after the failure of Round 1?

JW: We decided to put together a pretty sophisticated political campaign, in the winter of 2010, to make it so that the legislature couldn’t just punt again.  We started with some polling statewide and we found that, as you would expect, most people could care less about charter schools, don’t know what they are, don’t really care. But we found out, by like 90/10, that if there were a federal contest, with seven hundred million dollars at stake, at a time when we’re talking about laying off teachers in districts all over the place, New York State should be doing everything they can to win it. The idea of New York being competitive in a national race to the top in education reform was a no-brainer to people around the state.

So we crafted the campaign in such a way as to make this an up or down vote about whether New York should get $700 million from Obama. We didn’t want it to be an up or down vote on charter schools or an up or down vote on teacher evaluations. We wanted it to be an up or down vote on progress and the money. We ran it like a political campaign.  We had canvassers going door to door in the key districts of the Senate and Assembly, knocking on their doors, knocking on their parents’ doors. We were doing patch-through phone calls. At one point we had the mother of a New York City assemblyman patch through to his office to demand that he support the Race to the Top package. We generated thousands of phone calls and thousands of faxes and knocked on thousands of doors. And we had an air-war component as well. We ran $4 to $5 million worth of television ads 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.

EN:  How did you know if it was working?

JW:  I’m jumping ahead a little bit, but a couple of state senators who were not traditionally charter school supporters, when they voted Yes to lift the cap, mentioned that they had been contacted by so many parents that they couldn’t ignore it.  They couldn’t say No to them.

EN:  Where did your best support come from?

JW:  We had a solid block of Republican votes. This was all about picking up Democratic votes to whatever extent we could. One of our television ads had Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Andrew Cuomo, David Paterson all supporting the legislation [on teacher evaluations and charter caps], to imply that if you didn’t support it, you weren’t a good Democrat.  There was some edge to the ad. We were very critical of the unions. We wanted to blame them for gunking up the process in round one and urge the legislators to listen to their communities instead of to the unions.

…

EN: Then what?

JW: At that point we basically had legislation that had been drafted months before that we just needed to get support for. And we ended up getting a lot more support in the state Senate [than we anticipated].  John Sampson ended up being very helpful, surprising the Assembly. There was a point when the Senate passed the Race to the Top legislation – both the charter cap lift and the teacher evaluation legislation – at a time and in a way that completely took the Assembly by surprise.  I think they thought they could wait until the last day and throw something in that was cosmetic.  And what the Senate ended up passing was a pretty good piece of reform legislation.  And it immediately put all the spotlight on to the Assembly and [Speaker] Shelly Silver.

Andrew Cuomo weighed in behind the scenes and basically said “Please take care of this before I’m governor.”  And Shelly Silver at that point told the union to negotiate this out – because there was going to be legislation, so come back with a deal that we can bring up for a vote.

….

EN: Looking down the road, two questions come to mind. Is RttT going to change education, and how are we going to know if it’s working?

JW: Our view at DFER is that programs like this are not necessarily changing education but creating new points of leverage for people who are trying to create conditions where reform can happen. We viewed this as a big success. This gave tremendous leverage to reform activists all over the country who were trying to get legislation passed that probably would not have passed otherwise. That’s what we thought the goal was and we thought it was a smashing success. Now it’s up to the states to turn this into changing education. On the teacher quality issue we’re going to see in the next year that they unleash something even more powerful than we realize now. The discussions about the future of teacher evaluation and teacher tenure are going to pick up speed all over the country and the origins are going to turn out to be in Race to the Top….

EN: Thank you.

-Peter Meyer

NB:  The Ed Next article for which this interview was conducted appears here. You can read my interview with David Steiner about how New York won the Race to the Top here. And a later interview I did with Steiner (just a few days after he announced his resignation) appears here. Finally, you can view New York’s Race to the Top presentation here.

Let’s start with Jay. In a witty and amusing blog post yesterday, he proposed a drinking game for readers of Fordham’s new ESEA proposal, due out next week. (Clearly Jay has seen it—or at least heard about it—or else simply knows us very well.)

Tight-Loose — The Fordham folks will say that they favor being tight on the ends of education, but loose on the means.  Never mind that dictating the ends with a national set of standards, curriculum, and assessments will necessarily dictate much of the means.  My instruction for the drinking game is that every time you see the phrase “tight-loose” you can take a shot of your choice.  We are loose about the means but tight on the requirement that you numb yourself to this edu-babble.

Let me give you a little hint: if you play this game, you will get very, very drunk indeed.

But I’m at a loss for why the concept of “tight-loose” strikes Jay as so preposterous. Try this: Start by looking at the list of potential mandates that Congress could attach to federal Title I funding in the next ESEA:

1.  States must adopt rigorous academic standards (and cut scores) in English and math that imply readiness for college and career.

2.  States must test students annually in English and math.

3.  States must build assessments and data systems to allow for individual student growth to be tracked over time.

4.  States must develop standards and assessments in science and history, too.

5.  States must rate schools according to a prescriptive formula (i.e., AYP)

6.  States must intervene in schools that fail to make AYP for several years in a row, or in schools that are among the lowest-performing in the state.

7.  States must develop rigorous teacher evaluation systems and ensure a more equitable distribution of effective teachers.

8.  States must ensure that Title I schools receive comparable resources—including good teachers and real per-pupil dollars—as non-Title I schools.

The way Jay argues it, Congress has to either choose “none of the above” or “all of the above.” But of course it doesn’t. We at Fordham would select items 1-4 off this a la carte menu, and leave the rest alone. That, to us, would be “tight-loose” in action. Does Jay not want to require any of these? And if so, isn’t he arguing for federal taxpayers to just leave the money on the stump? Why not make the principled conservative case and say that Title I and other federal funding streams should simply be eliminated?

And then there’s Kevin Carey’s much more earnest—yet equally problematic–essay in the much more earnest New Republic. He takes the opposite view, and seems to argue that if Republicans don’t opt for “all of the above” they are showing themselves to be “radicalized” and in fear of awesome powers of the Tea Party.

The about-face among key Hill Republicans on education has been striking. Consider Senator Lamar Alexander, who pioneered the use of annual school testing when he was governor of Tennessee in the 1980s and continued pushing the standards-based reform agenda as President George H. W. Bush’s Secretary of Education from 1991 to 1993. Today, he is working with Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi to lead Republican negotiations on the new version of NCLB. Yet all indications now are that Alexander has largely abandoned his lifetime of education reform work in the face of the new anti-federal mood.

Never mind that this brief account of Senator Alexander’s career is incredibly misleading; Alexander joined other Republicans in calling for the elimination of the Department of Education in the mid-1990s, and has long pushed for a smaller federal footprint in education. Now he’s “abandoning” his lifetime of work because he wants to let states take the lead on the next phase of reform? All that’s happening is that the GOP is returning to its federalist roots after a wayward journey with No Child Left Behind.

Note, in particular, Kevin’s concerns that “states might no longer be required to test students annually or intervene when schools persistently fail to help students learn. Progress on using federal dollars to change the way teachers are evaluated, hired, and paid would grind to halt.”

Say what? First, nobody is seriously talking about moving away from the annual testing requirement. Second, what evidence can Carey point to that federally-mandated interventions in persistently failing schools have amounted to anything? And third, as Kevin knows, Republicans remain the biggest supporters of the Teacher Incentive Fund, which is the program that attempts to “change the way teachers are evaluated, hired, and paid.”

So let’s quit with all the over-the-top rhetoric. Give the list of eight mandates above a good look. My best guess is that Congress will move ahead with the first few, will definitely reject the last few, and that the real debate is about the ones in the middle. In other words, we’ll be arguing over the precise definition of “tight-loose,” regardless of what the anti-tight Right or the anti-loose Left have to say about it.

-Mike Petrilli

Less than two years later, in his first major education address as president, delivered to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March 2009, Obama explicitly backed paying teachers for performance, a reform the unions vehemently oppose. “Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay.”

Behind this seeming contradiction on performance pay is a complex set of political and policy strategies. Obama and his team are caught in the narrow channel between two important Democratic constituencies: establishment organizations that are opposed to performance pay and the increasingly prominent education-reform crowd that generally supports it. And while the administration appreciates the merits of differentiated teacher pay, this is but one of many teacher-quality policies it hopes to change.

The public record reveals how the administration has navigated these shoals, setting a new course for the federal government’s role in the reform of teacher pay. As senator and president, Obama has made known his education-reform commitments and hesitations in speeches to both unions and business groups. The inclinations of his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, are evident from actions he took while serving as head of the Chicago public school system. Finally, the administration’s handling of two prominent federal programs, the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) and the Race to the Top (RTT), offers important clues to the strategic thinking at work.

My analysis of this history has led me to two conclusions. First, though the administration’s apparent tentativeness on performance pay can be partially explained by its deference to organized labor, a larger factor is its interest in creating a new and comprehensive framework for advancing teacher quality. Second, the administration’s strategy for generating change through a combination of incentives, collaboration, and optional reforms did not initially bear much fruit for performance pay, but it may reap benefits over the long term, both for performance pay and for other teacher-quality issues.

Developing a Position

In Senator Obama’s 2007 speech to the NEA, he gave an establishment-friendly interpretation of recent education-reform events. He called No Child Left Behind “one of the emptiest slogans in politics” that amounted to “fill[ing] in a few bubbles on a standardized test.” He vigorously supported an active role for unions in education and said that teacher salaries should be raised across the board.

But he also said that schools should be open to paying more to teachers in tough-to-staff subjects, to those who take on additional work, and to those helping students excel academically.

Politically, this equivocation was savvy: he buttressed his liberal bona fides while nodding toward reform. But it also foreshadowed the challenges his administration would face in trying to run the performance-pay gauntlet by staying in the middle of the road.

In the speech, he attempted to reconcile his support for both sides by arguing that differentiated-pay programs should move forward but that they should be created in collaboration with teachers, not imposed on them, and that such programs should never be based on “some arbitrary test score.”

This raised difficult questions: How do you fairly implement a differentiated-pay plan without empirical measures of student performance, and what if organized labor refuses to accept performance pay at all? The first question would eventually be addressed diplomatically by his education secretary; the second lingers on to this day.

One year later, with the election drawing near, Obama again spoke at the annual meeting of the NEA. He was in no position at this time to reveal how the circle was to be squared. In fact, passages specifically related to compensation were either unusually clumsy or cleverly delusive. He said superb teachers should be rewarded through “better pay across the board.” One spectacularly oblique sentence left muddled whether a teacher should be rewarded for learning new professional skills or raising student achievement and whether that reward should be praise or compensation. He was, however, firm that pay systems should be developed with, not imposed on, teachers.

After entering the White House, President Obama felt less need to dissemble on the subject. In his March 2009 speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he intimated that his administration would not only support retention bonuses and additional compensation for teaching in hard-to-staff schools and subjects, but also pay increments for those able to measurably influence academic growth. “Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement.”

Left undecided, however, were the role of the standardized “bubble” tests and the implications of union opposition.

Secretary Duncan refined the administration’s position before the NEA in July 2009. Billed as a “challenge” to the union to “think differently” about job security, evaluations, and more, the speech also revealed that the administration was beginning to think holistically about the policies affecting the teaching profession.

Duncan began by acknowledging the wide distribution of teacher effectiveness. Current practices, the secretary argued, unfortunately treat “all teachers lik e interchangeable widgets.”

To gain a better understanding of variations in teacher quality and then make use of this information, we need improved teacher evaluation systems, Duncan argued. Those currently in place are “deeply flawed.”

Then Duncan opened the door to the use of empirical measures of student achievement in teacher evaluations and therefore, presumably, in teacher pay and other personnel decisions. While acknowledging that today’s “tests are far from perfect” and that “the complex, nuanced work of teaching” can’t be fairly measured by “a simple multiple choice exam,” the secretary defended the use of test scores.

Though they “alone should never drive evaluation, compensation, or tenure decisions…to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.” Duncan was beginning to sketch a new framework for teacher policies, one that integrated student performance data, teacher evaluations, and a range of personnel decisions, including compensation. In time, this shift would prove to be consequential.

But Duncan also echoed his boss’s deference to labor. “The president and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works.” This hedge would also prove consequential.

A good deal can be learned about both the roots and implications of the Obama administration’s evolving position on performance pay from Arne Duncan’s experience with the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) in Chicago (see sidebar) and the administration’s efforts to fund and reform the program since 2009.

The Teacher Incentive Fund

Since 2006, the federal government has funded a small program to support differentiated compensation, the Teacher Incentive Fund. Developed by the Bush administration, TIF provides funding on a competitive basis to states and districts that implement performance-pay programs for teachers and/or principals in high-need schools.

In its first years, TIF had several strikes against it. It was a new program during a period of domestic budget austerity. It sought to advance what was still a politically contentious policy. And it was advocated by an unpopular administration facing a Congress controlled by the opposition party. Accordingly, Congress never fully embraced TIF during the Bush years, and that administration’s annual budget requests (ranging from $100 to $500 million) were never fully funded. Appropriations were generally just under $100 million each year, a relatively small amount for a federal education program.

The Obama administration could have taken the knife to this Bush-era initiative as it has with the school voucher program in Washington, D.C. Instead, it sought to expand TIF by both seeking increased funding and embedding it in a newly proposed, larger program tentatively called the “Teacher and Leader Innovation Fund” (TLIF).

The 2009 federal stimulus package, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), provided TIF with an additional $200 million (on top of its $100 million regular appropriation for that year).

Coming on the heels of the ARRA was the administration’s 2010 budget request, in which the Obama team proposed nearly $487 million for TIF, more than the Bush administration had requested since the program’s inaugural year in 2006. Congress proved receptive, providing $400 million, by far the program’s largest regular annual appropriation.

In its FY2011 request, the first real opportunity for the administration to put its full mark on the federal budget (since the 2010 proposal went to Congress shortly after Obama was sworn into office), the U.S. Department of Education sought to significantly change TIF by including its priorities in the new, broader TLIF program. The $950 million request was approximately double the previous year’s.

According to administration documents, if created, TLIF would support the expansive category of state and district efforts to develop “innovative approaches to human capital systems.” Though differentiated pay would be a core component of the program, TLIF would also support efforts to increase the number of effective teachers, more fairly distribute high-quality teachers among differently resourced schools, improve educator-preparation programs, develop additional professional opportunities for effective teachers, strengthen evaluation systems, remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, improve professional development, and support school turnaround efforts.

So what is to be made of the Obama administration’s initial embrace of TIF and subsequent inclusion of many of its objectives into the TLIF proposal? What does this tell us more broadly about the administration’s views on and intentions for performance pay?

Two different interpretations seem plausible. The first is a political explanation. By supporting TIF, both the Bush-era version and even more so the amended TLIF version, the administration can keep one foot in the reform camp and another in the establishment camp.

Even the original TIF program allows for a wide array of approaches to differentiated pay, some of which opponents find easier to swallow than others, like those that reward all adults in a school rather than just the teachers who measurably increase student performance. TIF also permits grantees to apply program funds to a range of more traditional activities, such as professional development and data collection. This list of less controversial activities would grow under the proposed TLIF initiative. Both programs are optional, so no district or state is required to differentiate pay. Finally, since the program is directed toward high-need districts and schools, most of which have collective bargaining agreements, a state’s or district’s participation in the program ordinarily means that organized labor was involved in crafting the new arrangements. The administration can claim the mantle of reform while standing by its pledge that reform will not be forced on teachers and their unions.

A second interpretation is that the administration is attempting to develop a new, comprehensive federal approach to improving teaching, one that combines student performance data, teacher evaluations, and a host of personnel decisions. The roots of this approach can be seen in Secretary Duncan’s TIF experience in Chicago and in his 2009 NEA speech.

This interpretation is supported by TIF draft regulations released by the education department in early 2010. Among other things, the agency sought to require grantees to measure student growth and use these data in robust teacher evaluations, which would then be aligned with professional development. Language in the administration’s 2011 budget description of the new TLIF implied that TIF was too myopic, treating performance pay as a discrete activity when, instead, policy should reflect the “interconnectedness” of compensation reform and other teacher issues. TLIF, according to the budget document, recognized that it is “important to think of [these issues] in a coherent, integrated way.”

So which interpretation better explains the Obama administration’s approach? Support for both can be found in the administration’s signature program, the Race to the Top.

Race to the Top

Included within the ARRA’s nearly $800 billion in spending was the largest competitive grant program in U.S. Department of Education history, the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT).

The official RTT application was a blend of reform and deference to the establishment. The four major ARRA reform categories—data use; standards and assessments; failing schools; and teacher quality—served as its backbone. But the administration added a good bit of muscle. States would earn points for having in place each of the 12 data elements required by the federal America COMPETES Act. They’d be rewarded for having policies authorizing aggressive interventions for failing schools. They’d be significantly penalized for lacking a charter school law. And they’d be barred from even applying if they had “data firewalls” preventing student performance information from being tied to individual teachers.

But states also earned significant points for crafting plans that earned the blessing of their school districts and unions. In a number of cases, those who scored state applications gave extra weight to stakeholder “buy-in” by subtracting points from proposals that lacked the support of these groups.

Though Duncan would later downplay the importance of consensus, when Delaware and Tennessee were announced as the only first-round winners the secretary emphasized that these two states stood apart in their ability to develop strong proposals that also had broad support. In fact, the most hotly debated RTT question in the spring of 2010 was how states would address the tension between reform and union buy-in in their second-round applications.

RTT and Performance Pay

At first glance it is striking, even startling, how small a role performance pay played in round one of Race to the Top. The application has six main sections: one for each of the four ARRA reforms; an introductory section largely dedicated to buy-in issues and previous reform successes; and a final catchall section.

The fourth section (D), “Great Teachers and Leaders,” contains the most points of the six (138 out of 500, or 28 percent). It is broken into five subsections, one of which is titled “Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance.” This comprises four sub-subsections, including “Using evaluations to inform key decisions.” That is broken into four sub-sub-subsections, one of which includes performance pay. Performance pay is one of three elements in this area, along with promotion and retention.

In other words, in the Race to the Top, performance pay is a sub-sub-sub-subsection.

Were a peer reviewer to score by the book, a state without a performance-pay plan would lose just over 2 points out of 500. By comparison, a state without a charter law would lose 32 points.

The most straightforward interpretation is that the administration capitulated to performance-pay opponents. But this analysis seems incomplete, even unfair. Had pleasing the establishment been the administration’s priority, it might simply have kept performance pay out of the application altogether.

In fact, subsection (D)(2) offers compelling evidence for the alternative interpretation. It asks states to measure student growth and to tie these results to individual teachers. It also asks states to develop annual teacher evaluations and include student growth as a component of each teacher’s official assessment. Finally, it asks them to use these evaluations to inform a number of personnel decisions, such as tenure, removal, and compensation.

The Obama administration appears to be offering a new—not to mention tight and rational—framework for improving the teaching profession. However, consistent with the administration’s nonconfrontational method for advancing reform, the new framework is optional. Since RTT is a competitive grant program, no state is forced to participate; states uncomfortable with the framework are free to disregard it.

It is too soon to tell whether this new framework will lead to better student outcomes. But it is not too soon to test the administration’s theory of action for bringing about change. Did the Race to the Top’s use of financial incentives, rewards for collaboration, and optional reforms lead to progress in performance pay and other policies that affect the teaching profession?

State Race to the Top Applications

In the first round, 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted Race to the Top applications. To test the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s approach, I reviewed each application’s (D)(2) section. Figure 1 illustrates how many proposals include an affirmative response to the nine questions embedded in the RTT framework. Will the state…

1.  measure student academic growth?

2.  conduct annual teacher evaluations?

3.  include student growth in teacher evaluations?

4.  use teacher evaluations to inform professional development decisions?

5.  use teacher evaluations to offer additional professional opportunities?

6.  use teacher evaluations to inform compensation decisions (performance pay)?

7.  use teacher evaluations to inform tenure decisions?

8.  use teacher evaluations when considering promotions?

9.  use teacher evaluations to inform termination decisions?

Of the 41 entrants, 39 have systems in place to measure student growth, are building such systems, or have committed to building them. Most states (32) also agreed to conduct annual teacher evaluations. In some cases, this represents a major shift in policy; for example, under current practices, tenured teachers in Hawaii are evaluated only once every five years.

Only about half of the states (21) agreed to include measures of student growth in teacher evaluations. Several committed to having 50 percent or more of each teacher’s evaluation composed of such data. A number of states, however, simply ignored this matter in their applications or only committed to forming a stakeholder committee to discuss it.

Almost all states (34) committed to using evaluations to determine which teachers need which types of professional development. But states were far less likely to commit to using evaluations to make tougher personnel decisions. Only nine were willing to link teacher evaluations to processes for terminating the lowest-performing teachers.

Sixteen states committed to performance-pay plans. But only five states proposed what could be considered strong plans (Arizona, Delaware, Florida, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C.). Notably, Florida required all LEAs (local educational agencies) participating in the state’s application to make student achievement growth the most significant component of compensation, ahead of years of experience and academic degrees.

Two plans could be considered of moderate strength. Minnesota planned to expand its “Q Comp” program, but nearly all details were to be negotiated at the local level between unions and districts, raising questions about the ultimate impact of the plan. In Georgia, participating districts agreed to adopt ill-defined step increases for high-performing teachers.

The remaining nine performance-pay plans were of dubious seriousness. In several applications, including Oklahoma’s and West Virginia’s, the state promised to create a bonus pool but made district participation optional, so it is possible that no teacher would receive extra pay based on merit. In Massachusetts, 1 percent of the state’s districts would pilot a locally determined, yet-to be-defined, differentiated compensation plan. In Idaho, all employees of schools in the top three quartiles of statewide student growth would receive small bonuses, meaning half of the state’s below-average schools would get schoolwide bonuses.

Before choosing Delaware and Tennessee as the first round winners, the education department identified 16 finalists. Figure 2 shows how committed the group was to key components of the new teacher-effectiveness framework.

So far, RTT has not had a revolutionary impact on performance pay. This seems to raise questions about the administration’s belief that large federal financial incentives will lead states to embrace controversial reforms. The limited use of student-performance data in teacher evaluations offers further evidence for this point. Although states, in order to apply, had to remove data firewalls, only half of applying states took the critically important but optional next step: actually making student growth a part of evaluations.

An additional data point calls into question another component of the administration’s theory of action—that major reform can be brought about through collaboration with unions. As noted above, five applicants proposed strong performance-pay plans. South Carolina has no teachers unions. Washington, D.C.’s proposal received no union support. In Florida and Arizona, 8 and 21 percent of local teachers unions, respectively, supported the state’s plan. Only Delaware was able to both craft a strong performance-pay plan and earn broad union support (100 percent).

A Solid Footing

Several factors have diluted the administration’s work on performance pay. First, Duncan, as a general rule, prefers to make reform optional, using incentives to alter behavior. Second, the secretary appears to be more interested in changing the teaching profession broadly than in advancing the narrower issue of performance pay. Third, and most important, the president and secretary remain committed to securing union support for change, reform “with” labor not “to” labor. RTT winner Tennessee made alternative compensation systems completely optional for districts and required that, before a local performance-pay plan is implemented, it receive the blessing of the local union.

But it may still be the case that, in the long term, the administration’s efforts will have a profound positive impact on performance pay. A few states were willing to consider performance pay to an extent that they hadn’t before. And while giving unions a great deal of power in negotiations about differentiated pay will severely limit the number and strength of plans adopted, it might help ensure the strength and sustainability of the few plans that do emerge. Finally, by encouraging states to measure student growth, embed student learning in annual teacher evaluations, and use evaluations to inform a range of personnel decisions, the administration has laid the foundation for performance-pay plans in the future.

The Obama administration, if nothing else, has changed the politics of performance pay. No longer can it be assumed that leading Democrats will oppose efforts to financially compensate high-performing teachers.

On January 19, 2013, in other words, we’ll be able to ask of a Democratic administration a once inconceivable set of questions. How many billions did it spend on performance pay? How many new state-level performance-pay plans did it bring about? Did its activities cause unions to drop their reflexive opposition? Is performance pay now widely viewed as one part of an integrated teacher policy framework?

Depending on the answers to these questions, performance pay and the new teacher framework—not turnarounds, a reauthorized ESEA, or another higher profile issue—may be the Obama administration’s most important education legacy.

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

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

Programs that enable students to attend private schools, including both vouchers and scholarships funded with tax credits, have become increasingly common in recent years. This study examines the impact of the nation’s largest private school scholarship program on the performance of students who remain in the public schools. The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) was signed into law in 2001 and opened to students from low-income families in the 2002–03 school year. FTC provides corporations with tax credits for donations they make to scholarship funding organizations, the nonprofits that determine student eligibility for the program and issue scholarships. Corporations can receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits for up to 75 percent of their total state tax obligation each year.

Although little noticed, tax credit scholarship programs now send many more low-income students to private schools than do traditional school voucher programs. More than 104,000 students nationwide attended private schools through tax credit programs in the 2008–09 school year, while only 60,000 students used private school vouchers. Scholarship programs similar to Florida’s now operate in several states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Indiana, and are being considered in Maryland and New Jersey. The Florida program is set to expand dramatically in the coming years (see sidebar), making evidence of its consequences all the more timely.

One popular argument for expanding private school choice is that public schools will improve their own performance when faced with competition for students. Because state school funding is tied to student enrollment, losing students to private schools means losing revenue. The threat of losing students to private schools may give schools greater incentive to cultivate parental satisfaction by operating more efficiently and improving the outcomes valued by students and parents. Alternatively, private school vouchers and scholarships may have unintended negative effects on public schools: they may draw away the most involved families from public schools, community monitoring of those schools may diminish, and schools may reduce the effort they put into educating students.

It is notoriously difficult to gauge the competitive effects of private schools on public school performance. Private schools may be disproportionately located in communities with low-quality public schools, causing the relationship between private school competition and public school performance to appear weaker than it actually is. If, however, private schools are located in areas where citizens care a lot about educational quality, the relationship will appear stronger than it truly is.

This study takes advantage of the introduction of the FTC to provide new evidence on the effects of increased competition on student achievement in public schools. Before the program began in 2002, roughly 11 percent of students in Florida were enrolled in private schools. FTC targeted students from low-income families, only 5 percent of whom had been attending private schools.

We examine whether students in schools that face a greater threat of losing students to private schools as a result of the introduction of tax-credit funded scholarships improve their test scores more than do students in schools that face less-pronounced threats. We find that they do, and that this improvement occurs before any students have actually used a scholarship to switch schools. In other words, it occurs from the threat of competition alone.

Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program

In order to be eligible for an FTC scholarship, students must meet the income guidelines (until recently, family incomes below 185 percent of the federal poverty line for new applicants) and either must have attended a Florida public school for the full school year before program entry or be entering kindergarten or first grade. With the exception of these early-grade private school students, students already attending private schools in Florida are not eligible for first-time scholarships. Students who enter a private school on a scholarship are eligible to retain their scholarships in future years, so long as their family income remains within the stated limits (until recent changes, below 200 percent of the federal poverty line).

Scholarships need not cover all of the costs of attending private schools, and parents are free to send their children to any private school regardless of the share of tuition and fees the scholarship covers. The scholarship is quite generous; it covers approximately 90 percent of tuition and fees at a typical religious elementary school in Florida and two-thirds of tuition and fees at a typical religious high school. As a result, the program greatly increased the accessibility of private schools to low-income families. In the first year, some 15,585 scholarships were awarded, increasing the number of low-income students attending private schools by more than 50 percent. For the 2009–10 school year, the FTC program awarded scholarships to 28,927 students (see Figure 1).

Data

Our analysis draws on several data sources. The Florida Department of Education’s Education Data Warehouse provides test scores from the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT) and demographic characteristics for all students in the public schools. We use test-score data from the 1999–2000 school year through 2006–07. Students classified as learning disabled were excluded from the analysis, as they are eligible for a more generous voucher through the McKay Scholarship Program, and the FTC program should therefore have had no effect on schools’ efforts to retain these students (see “The Case for Special Education Vouchers,” features, Winter 2010).

The Florida Department of Education publishes public and private school addresses, including latitude and longitude information for the public schools. The address information was geocoded to generate measures of the pressure that public schools face from private competitors. We first limited our attention to the 92 percent of public school students in the state attending schools with a private competitor within a five-mile radius. Because it is not obvious how best to gauge the amount of competition faced by the remaining schools, we constructed four different measures:

• Distance: the crow’s-flight distance between the physical addresses of each public school and the nearest private competitor. A private school qualifies as a competitor to a public school if it serves any of the grades taught in that public school.

• Density: the number of private competitors within a five-mile radius of the public school.

• Diversity: the number of different types of private schools within a five-mile radius of the public school. To generate this measure, we first identified 10 distinct types of private schools, defined by their stated religious (or secular) affiliation.

• Concentration: an index of how varied the private school competitors are for a given public school, based on the counts of different types of schools within a five-mile radius.

The distance and density measures gauge whether easier access to a private school of any type increased the competitive pressure on public schools when the new policy lowered the effective cost of attending private school for eligible students. The diversity and concentration measures capture the variety of options available to students; public schools in areas with more varied options should feel more competitive pressure in the wake of the policy change.

Methods

In order to determine the effect of scholarship-induced private school competition on public school performance, we examine whether students in schools that face a greater threat of losing students to private schools as a result of the introduction of tax-credit funded scholarships improve their test scores more than do students in schools that face a less-pronounced threat. Specifically, we look to see whether test scores showed greater improvement in the wake of the new policy for students attending public schools with more (or more varied) nearby private options that suddenly became more affordable for low-income students than did scores for students attending schools with fewer (or less varied) potential competitors.

This analysis is possible because of the considerable variation in potential competition faced by schools across the state of Florida. Prior to the introduction of the program, some communities in Florida had a much richer and more diverse set of private school options than did other communities. The overall share of low-income students attending private schools ranged from 1.4 percent in Punta Gorda to 7.9 percent in the Melbourne-Titusville-Cocoa-Palm Bay area. More importantly, by our measures, the amount of competition that specific public schools faced on the eve of the program also varied widely. Our density measure, for example, ranges from one private school within five miles to 60. The average Florida public school had roughly 14 private schools nearby, but more than 30 percent of schools had fewer than 2 or more than 30.

We isolate the effect of competition introduced by the program by comparing the performance of each school’s students to the performance of its students the year before the program was enacted. When making these comparisons, we take into account student characteristics that are associated with test scores, including gender and race/ethnicity, English-language-learner status, and eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch.

We also control for some characteristics of schools that could affect the degree of competitive pressure. Most importantly, we control for the letter grades that schools received from the state’s accountability system; schools with lower grades may feel particular pressure to increase their scores to avoid accountability sanctions, independent of the effects of the FTC program. We also control for the percentage of the school’s student body that was eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, as only these students were eligible for FTC scholarships.

There are three main ways in which a program that expands access to private schools could affect public school performance. Public schools could react to private school competition by altering their policies, practices, or effort; this is the direct competitive effect. Such a program could also affect public schools by changing the mix of students who attend them. A third possibility is that, so long as only a few students leave a public school with scholarships, the program could have effects on resources. Resource effects could be either negative (as total state aid decreases with the loss of students), or positive (as per-pupil resources might actually increase following small losses of students, due to the indivisibility of classroom teachers). We can eliminate the possibility of student-body composition and resource effects by concentrating solely on the FTC program’s effects during the 2001–02 school year, after the program’s announcement but before students could actually leave the public schools with a scholarship. During this academic year, students in the public schools were applying for private school scholarships for the following year.

Results

We find that all four measures of competition (distance, density, diversity, and concentration) are positively related to student performance on state math and reading tests. (Because we obtained similar results looking at performance in each subject separately, we focus our discussion on the average score across both subjects.) Each of our competition measures uses different units. We therefore report the estimated effects of a one standard deviation increase in the amount of competition faced by a given public school by each measure.

For every 1.1 miles closer to the nearest private school, public school math and reading performance increases by 1.5 percent of a standard deviation in the first year following the announcement of the scholarship program. Likewise, having 12 additional private schools nearby boosts public school test scores by almost 3 percent of a standard deviation. The presence of two additional types of private schools nearby raises test scores by about 2 percent of a standard deviation. Finally, an increase of one standard deviation in the concentration of private schools nearby is associated with an increase of about 1 percent of a standard deviation in test scores.

Although these effects are relatively small, they consistently indicate a positive relationship between private school competition and student performance in the public schools, even before any students leave for the private sector. That is, these results provide evidence that public schools responded to the increased threat of losing students to the private schools. The fact that we obtain quite similar results regardless of the specific measure used makes us confident that the findings are not driven by other factors that might distinguish public schools facing more or less competition based on a given measure. Indeed, in ongoing work we have also considered measures of competition based on the number of available slots in nearby private schools and on the number of nearby churches, and again find very similar results.

Moreover, it is important to recognize that the results reported above represent lower-bound estimates of the effects of competition on public school performance. They are based only on comparisons of schools with different levels of competition. If all public schools improved their performance in response to the scholarship program, this improvement would not be detected by our analysis.

One might expect that some public schools have a greater incentive to respond to potential competition associated with the availability of private school scholarships for low-income students than others. We consider two major reasons schools may face different incentives to react to competitive pressure. First, elementary and middle schools may have more of an incentive to respond to competitive pressure than high schools because the scholarships cover a greater share of private school tuition and fees in the early grades than they do in the high school years. Although the differences in the share covered might not matter for higher-income families, for many low-income families the difference in out-of-pocket expenses between an elementary or middle school and a high school is likely to be significant. Knowing this, public high schools might not react as strongly to competition from a private school scholarship program as would public elementary and middle schools. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that the effect of competition is more than twice as large for elementary and middle schools as it is for high schools (see Figure 2).

Second, public schools that stand to lose the largest amounts of revenue if many of their scholarship-eligible students leave may be more responsive than those schools less likely to lose large amounts of revenue. All public schools may experience resource effects as a consequence of losing students to private schools through a scholarship program. However, those that are on the margin of receiving federal Title I aid have the largest incentive to retain students from low-income families. These federal resources, which average more than $500 per pupil, are directed to school districts, which then allocate them to the elementary and middle schools that low-income students attend. We find that public schools that are likely to receive Title I aid in the next year if they retain their low-income students, but not if they don’t, tend to improve disproportionately in the year following the program announcement, whereas schools whose Title I aid is unlikely to change respond much less noticeably or not at all.

We also investigate whether the estimated effects of the scholarship program persist in later years. After the first year of the analysis, resource and composition effects may occur as students who receive scholarships leave the public schools for private schools. We find that the effects of the voucher program grow stronger over time (see Figure 3), resulting perhaps from increased knowledge of the program, which might contribute to greater competitive pressure, or from the advent of composition and resource effects. While it is difficult to disentangle the reasons for this strengthening over time of the program’s estimated effects, these findings nonetheless suggest that our first-year results may understate the positive effect of the FTC program on public school performance

Conclusion

Our results indicate that the increased competitive pressure public schools faced following the introduction of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program led to general improvements in their performance. Both expanded access to private school options and greater variety of options that students have in terms of the religious (or secular) affiliations of private schools are positively associated with public-school students’ test scores following the introduction of the FTC program. The gains occur immediately, before any students leave the public schools with a scholarship, implying that competitive threats are responsible for at least some of the estimated effects. And the gains appear to be much more pronounced in the schools most at risk to lose students (elementary and middle schools, where the cost of private school attendance with a scholarship is much lower) and in the schools that are on the margin of Title I funding.

To be sure, our study has several limitations. First, our measures of competition reflect the state of the private school market in 2001, before private schools had a chance to respond to the FTC scholarship program. Although that ensures that the competition measure is not itself affected by postpolicy test scores, it does give a less accurate view of the competitive pressures faced by schools in subsequent years.

Second, our study is based on data from a single state. It is possible that the dynamics between competitive pressures and public-school students’ test scores are systematically different in Florida than they are in the rest of the nation. In particular, more than 90 percent of Florida’s students live in the state’s top 20 most populous metropolitan areas. In states with a greater share of the population in rural areas, the effects of a scholarship program may not exert the same degree of competitive pressure on public schools. It may also be the case that Florida’s diverse range of private school options and accompanying greater competition among the private schools limit the study’s generalizability. Nonetheless, our results indicate that private school competition, brought about by the creation of scholarships for students from low-income families, is likely to have positive effects on the performance of traditional public schools.

David Figlio is professor of education, social policy and economics at Northwestern University and research
associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Cassandra M.D. Hart is a doctoral student in the
Department of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University.

Remember that initiative from the 1990s? (If not, read this excellent Jeffrey Mirel history, published by Fordham in 2001.) Here’s what Checker wrote in its foreword:

[Mirel] finds that [New American Schools] showed signs from the outset that it was headed for the education mainstream.  Observers noted that the initial request for proposals (RFP) process itself attracted and rewarded established educators and familiar ideas, indeed, that nearly all the winning proposals shared similar ideas and practices rooted in the progressive education movement that has long been the dominant paradigm of American primary/secondary education. “Can you have a revolution via an RFP process?” critics wondered.

Consider that as you ponder the $46 million award granted to Reading Recovery–a “progressive” (and questionable) approach to reading instruction if there ever was one. Or the $50 million soon to flow to Robert Slavin’s “Success for All”–which also received, almost two decades ago, funding from New American Schools! As one friend ruefully commented to me, “Innovation???  I bet there isn’t a chronically low performing elementary school in the country that already hasn’t been around the block at least once with one of these two.” (And it’s hard not to notice that both of these outfits were among the loudest critics of Reading First, which largely shut them out of the winner’s circle.)

To be sure, there are victors on the list that are more to my liking (TFA, TNTP, KIPP, etc.) and a few that can claim to be breaking new ground (like School of One). Maybe funding these worthy outfits is a reasonable use of federal funding. But i3 as a “game changer”? If history is any guide, that seems unlikely.

* About once a year it happens!

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 recent discussions in Congress, however, shed some light on this.  The discussions of teacher layoffs have led Congressman Obey to try to find money to avert any dismissals of teachers.  In order to be revenue neutral, however, he must come up with budgetary savings.  Where does he look?  Why, to reducing funds for Race to the Top, teacher incentives, and charter schools.  In other words, a simple trade is proposed:  sacrifice innovation and reform when there is a threat to maintaining the status quo of current hiring.

When push comes to shove, it is appears that it is not about the kids–it is about the adults.  More charitably, we might conclude that just slowing down the pace of innovation is appropriate in the face of the potential job losses.  But that brings us back to history.  There never appears to be a time for real reform.

Any president with approval ratings under 50 percent is at risk of becoming a one-term president. Already, we know that the overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress will nearly vanish in November. Indications that liberal Supreme Court Justice John Stevens will retire in June is just the latest sign that the political tide has reversed.  Stevens most certainly wants a successor confirmed before the president’s nominee has to navigate the shoals of a closely divided Senate. So the long-shot political betting now shifts to 2012.  Can the President recover?

Very probably, he will. The best predictor of the economic future—the stock market–is acting as if recovery is at hand. Passage of a health care bill could also help the president’s political fortunes.  After enacted, legislation is usually accepted by the voters as a fait accompli. But employment gains may come slowly and one never knows how the public will react to the new health legislation.

Even if everything goes the President’s way, Obama still needs to move beyond divisive partisanship if he is to re-cement his relationship with the American public.  To do that, the White House needs to move legislation that wins greater enthusiasm among Republicans than among Nancy Pelosi’s left-wing, interest-group-dependent Democrats.

The President’s education bill gives him the opportunity to rediscover the middle ground.  Keeping NCLB’s testing system, creating a new and better yardstick to measure school performance, finding new ways to hold schools accountable by combining carrots with sticks, encouraging merit pay, and tracking of teacher performance—all that and more has been included in Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s agenda. To capture the high ground, he needs only to make clear his strong support for charter schools and offer bold, innovative ideas in virtual education. (I make the case for the latter in Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Education.)

Thinking Republicans are already prepared to support the President’s bill. In Congress, Republican leaders should take notice—after all, the popularity rating of Republicans on Capital Hill is even lower than that of the president—and make education a bipartisan issue.

It’s not the first time a president has wasted his political capital—take Bill Clinton, for example–in the first year of office, but then learned how to make the system work. Obama now appears to have found the middle of the political spectrum. Some Republicans may carp and criticize the proposed bill but unified partisan opposition is unlikely. Special interests will get their hands on pieces of the legislation, but I am willing to bet that before the year is out the proposed legislation will give the President a chance to claim a clear domestic policy victory.

Obama’s call for mending—not ending–No Child Left Behind (NCLB), strikes the right balance. Of course, the name has to be abandoned. The 2009 Education Next poll (full results available here) showed that the mere mention of NCLB lowered support for the law by 11 percentage points. That same poll has shown that a heavy majority favor testing, accountability, and national standards. Nearly two thirds of public school teachers say they favor one national standard, instead of different standards in each state. The public also supports the merit pay concept the president has proposed.

The Administration’s decision to judge schools by the amount individual students improve from one year to the next can only be applauded as a great improvement over current law. But we should remind ourselves that when NCLB was first passed, data were not available to allow for this kind of accountability system. It is to the credit of the Bush Administration that they initiated a testing regime upon which the Obama team can improve.

That the proposed law focuses more on incentives than on negative consequences has political appeal—even though the pressure on local schools to do well does not really change. No wonder the unions are opposed.

The President needs to take one step further, however, if he wants to find a way to lift four-year high school graduation rates from 70 percent to 100 percent. He must ask Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to launch a major campaign (as part of the I-3 initiative, perhaps) to give schools incentives to take advantage of new technologies that are rapidly coming on line–broadband, powerful computers, 3-dimensional presentation of material (ala Avatar), and open-source curricular development (ala Wikipedia).  For more detail, see my Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning.

Indeed, the Administration has the opportunity to use Title I to act on a recent Brookings proposal. That group (full disclosure—I am a member) has proposed giving incentives to states if they enact legislation that encourage community colleges, universities, charter schools, and other providers to offer virtual courses to high school and middle school students over the internet.  Specifically, students should have the opportunity to decide whether they want to take a course in the classroom or online as part of their pursuit of a high school diploma. If they take the course online, the state money goes to the virtual provider; otherwise, it goes to the local district.

As long as good accountability provisions are in place, a new hybrid form of education can evolve, where students decide whether to take a particular course online or in the classroom. Teachers would be forced to compete for students. A bad classroom biology teacher would lose students to an excellent one teaching online, and vice versa. Imagine a student avatar dissecting a frog avatar online seventeen times over without killing a single amphibian!

Each student could access curricular materials at his or her specific level of accomplishment. Students could learn at their own pace, in their own way. All of a sudden the 100 percent graduation rate in the next decade that the White House imagines would not seem so far fetched.

But some of the truly bold new ideas in education today are escaping the attention of RttT policymakers. Why not ask states to set up virtual high school courses that students could use to help get their high school diplomas?  Why not create a competition between virtual courses and brick-and-mortar courses?  Why not ask for regional consortia to accredit virtual courses for national distribution?

Life sciences can be transformed by making use of virtual curricula that can be easily accessed at any time and in any place.  In today’s brick-and-mortar biology classes,  students are looking at a 2-dimensional textbook diagram of a frog’s digestive system, and then they are asked to dissect a frog in a laboratory. Often the student can see little connection between the text and the reality.   In the future, student avatars will be dissecting frog avatars in 3-dimensional space. Dissections can be repeated ten times over–without killing any amphibians.

Similarly, the mathematics of cubic space can be taught in three dimensions. Students can cooperate in the design of communities  In government classes, they can create virtual political campaigns.  Students themselves can be given credit for developing their own contributions to open source curricula. The possibilities are endless.

Let’s hope the next round of RttT expectations raises the bar to an entirely new level.

[Please see the blog entries here and  here and here and here and here and here for more discussion of the Race to the Top finalists.]

If the exercise were just tedious, I’d let it go.  But the whole game, and the mindset it reflects, is actually far more harmful than that.  It turns school reform into an Us Weekly-TMZ-In Touch echo chamber, ratcheting the pressure to sound wise by regurgitating the conventional wisdom of the moment (as if insufficient enthusiasm for hot fads was a problem in education).  Most of the predictions are based on anecdotes, enthusiasm for this or that program, vague impressions, which state chiefs someone knows and respects, and new stories.  Few who play this parlor game have deep knowledge of more than a few of the 41 applicants, and I don’t know anyone who’s read even a majority of the applications—much less done so carefully.

So, how is this problematic?  In several ways.

First, the echo chamber feeds on itself, creating a sense of legitimacy apart from the substance of the competition.  This means that credibility will rest on whether the results validate the conventional wisdom (did the expected states win?) rather than on a careful look at whether states delivered on the criteria. In other words, if Florida isn’t a finalist, many insiders will presume something was amiss—even though most of those same insiders have never read Florida’s application, much less scrutinized it alongside its competition.  This is like judging the fairness of football polls based on whether the teams thought to be the best at the start of the season wind up in the national championship game.

Second, the echo chamber is distorting reform efforts in the states.  States outside the buzz have been pressed to mimic the Kardashian states, whether or not the strategies make sense or the imitators know what they’re doing.  Meanwhile, the Kardashian sister states have been goosed to go “faster, faster” by our earnest Secretary of Education and enthusiastic would-be reformers, without a lot of attention to potential missteps.  For instance, I’m a huge critic of teacher tenure and the step-and-lane salary schedule, but I’m immensely bothered by how eager states are to lay the weight of reform on systems that will be primarily driven by value-added reading and math scores.

Third, the echo chamber conflates strong personalities with smart programs.  The presence of a terrific state chief or prominent superintendent is often taken as a proxy for a state’s “reform-mindedness,” but this kind of personality-driven judgment can leave observers blind to the problems with overhyped reforms.  Simply trying to do what this or that popular chief does is a lot like what those Hollywood studios do when they try to imitate the latest blockbuster.  “Avatar made $700 million domestically!  So let’s get a slate of 3-D science fiction flicks into production,” says the studio head.  Somehow, it never quite works as intended.

Fourth, because nobody has read the apps or really understands how to score them, the media horse-race stories have kept quoting pundits recycling the conventional wisdom.  Nobody has really read or examined the apps, but everyone knows who is expected to win—because they know who everyone else has said is going to win.  And an interesting wrinkle is that those impartial reviewers who are trying to make sense of these massively uneven phonebook compendiums are simultaneously reading the same recycled “hot” lists as the rest of us.   Hard to know how much impact it will have, but it’s not the ideal situation.

Let me be clear. I don’t think this was inevitable.  I believe it’s largely a product of the way RTT was hyped and designed. If the Department of Education had been more disciplined about establishing clear and comprehensible criteria for the apps, had opted to embrace fewer than 19 (!) criteria, had not insisted that states punch every box on the app, had enforced limits on application length and structure, had done more to make the apps transparent to and searchable by third parties, or had constructed the reviewing process with less haste and more thought, this could be more about the steak and less about the sizzle.

For most of this, it’s too late.  But, especially as we start looking forward to round two of RTT, the Department could devise a far more robust and reassuring process.   What would it take?  To start, here are three suggested steps.

One, buffer the process from ED’s political leadership.  Today, there’s no formal separation of the process from the Department’s political appointees.  While Joanne Weiss has asserted that the political appointees played no role in selecting reviewers, the formal documents both give them a major role in selecting reviewers and almost unfettered freedom to name winners and allocate dollars.

Two, make clear to observers what constitutes expertise in judging.  We know what kind of expertise is sought by IES reviewers or Olympic judges; given the newness and ambiguity of this competition, we need more (not less) clarity on this score.

Finally, in building a novel competitive grant program it is essential to be clear as to what the dimensions of the playing field are, how high the goal posts should be, or what constitutes a stellar double-axle.  What the Department is trying to do is different and harder than launching a new research agency, where the criteria for judging are framed by long traditions of rules and professional norms.  Observers don’t know how reviewers are to weigh buy-in versus boldness, ambitious promises versus realistic goals, or taut applications (that respected the ED guidelines) versus sprawling apps (that heeded ED’s warning that only materials in the apps themselves will be read).  By failing to be explicit on this score, the Department has ensured that the buzz has defaulted to the latest word on whether Rhode Island is hot and what kind of hemline Delaware is sporting this spring.

[Please see the blog entries  here and here and here and here and here and here for more discussion of the Race to the Top finalists.]

It is unclear whether and how public funds should be mobilized to close those gaps. Some advocate expanding existing programs that target disadvantaged children on the grounds that limited public resources should be directed toward the families and children most in need. Others consider the perennial underfunding of targeted programs like Head Start as evidence of a lack of political support for this approach, and argue that providing universal access is needed to ensure adequate public funding over the long run. In other words, any new funding for preschool education must benefit middle-class children if it is to gain their parents’ political backing. Or so it is argued.

Existing research provides little insight into the relative merits of universal programs and those targeted to specific groups. While there have been several recent studies of the short-term effects of universal preschool programs in the U.S., there is no evidence to date on long-term consequences. Some studies suggest that Head Start has lasting effects in reducing criminal behavior and increasing educational attainment, but this program is much more intensive than any universal program is likely to be and serves a very disadvantaged population.

In the absence of direct evidence on the types of preschool programs now under consideration, this study attempts to shed light on the likely consequences of a new universal program by estimating the impact of earlier state interventions to introduce kindergarten into public schools. In the 1960s and 1970s, many states, particularly in the southern and western parts of the country, for the first time began offering grants to school districts operating kindergarten programs. Districts were quick to respond. The average state experienced a 30 percentage point increase in its kindergarten enrollment rate within two years after an initiative, contributing to dramatic increases in kindergarten enrollment (see Figure 1). These interventions present an unusual opportunity to study the long-term effects of large state investments in universal preschool education.

My results indicate that state funding of universal kindergarten had no discernible impact on many of the long-term outcomes desired by policymakers, including grade retention, public assistance receipt, employment, and earnings. White children were 2.5 percent less likely to be high school dropouts and 22 percent less likely to be incarcerated or otherwise institutionalized as adults following state funding initiatives, but no other effects could be discerned. Also, I find no positive effects for African Americans, despite comparable increases in their enrollment in public kindergartens after implementation of the initiatives. These findings suggest that even large investments in universal early-childhood education programs do not necessarily yield clear benefits, especially for more disadvantaged students.

Kindergarten in the U.S.

Many state governments have only recently introduced state grants for school districts that operate kindergarten programs. Kindergartens began outside of the public school system, funded largely through philanthropic organizations or private tuition. Over the first half of the 20th century, kindergartens slowly became incorporated into urban schools, at the same time gaining partial funding through local taxes. As late as the mid-1960s, however, such programs continued to rely heavily on local resources, as only 26 states and the District of Columbia helped fund kindergarten costs. There were remarkable changes over the next decade, however: Between 1966 and 1975, 19 states began funding kindergarten for the first time. The majority of these states were in the South, but the West was also well represented. By the late 1970s, only two states—Mississippi and North Dakota—did not fund kindergarten programs (see Figure 2).

Initially, states channeled their funding to districts in one of two ways. Some states revised existing funding formulas to include financial support for kindergartens on a basis equivalent to support for all other grades in a state’s public school system. Other states appropriated separate monies for kindergarten, an approach that made kindergarten funding more vulnerable to budget cuts. Eventually, however, all states made kindergarten a part of the basic state school program.

The initiatives were introduced during a period of rising labor-force participation among women with young children, so kindergarten’s popularity may have been due to the fact that it provided families with subsidized child care. The stated purpose, however, was to improve children’s educational outcomes. In particular, it was claimed that kindergarten would provide the preparation children need to succeed in the elementary school years. Greater success in school would, in turn, reduce state spending not only on special education and “re-education” of children who failed, but also on public assistance and incarceration over the long term.

Whether state funding of kindergarten was capable of achieving these goals is open to question. Kindergartens have historically maintained a curriculum focused more on children’s social development and less on academic training. While a focus on socialization does not preclude long-term effects, kindergarten programs lacked features of some targeted interventions—such as parental involvement and health services—that may be critical to their success. State-funded kindergartens for five-year-olds may also have reduced enrollment in private kindergartens and in education programs funded through Head Start and Title I. My study seeks to shed light on these important policy questions of relevance to the current conversations concerning early childhood education.

Method and Data

To find out the long-term impacts of the introduction of universal kindergarten, I take advantage of the staggered introduction of state funding for kindergarten from the 1960s forward, combined with the fact that children generally attend kindergarten at age five. More specifically, I calculate the average difference in outcomes between individuals who were age five before the introduction of kindergarten funding and children born in the same state who were five years old after the initiative was introduced. I further adjust these comparisons to take into account the fact that kindergarten enrollment was increasing gradually in many states prior to the adoption of state funding. The remaining differences should reflect the long-run effects of the typical state-funded kindergarten program.

I restrict my analysis to the 24 states that introduced state funding for universal kindergarten after 1960 because the data needed for the analysis are not available for earlier years. I also limit attention to the 1954 to 1978 birth cohorts because they span the period over which most of these funding initiatives were passed, and doing so provides me with data both before and after the introduction of these initiatives necessary to estimate the effects of kindergarten funding on long-term outcomes.

I combine data from several sources. I measure the kindergarten enrollment rate with the state kindergarten-to-first-grade enrollment ratio, calculated from the federal Common Core of Data and earlier published data. Data for the analysis of the initiatives’ long-term effects were drawn from Public Use Microdata Samples (PUMS) of the Decennial Census. In particular, I examine 1) whether a child was below grade for age while still of school age (a proxy for grade retention); 2) three indicators of adult educational attainment (high school dropout, high school degree only, and some college); 3) adult wage and salary earnings and indicators of employment and receipt of public assistance income; and 4) an indicator for residence in institutionalized group quarters, a widely used proxy for incarceration.

Limited Impact

I begin the empirical analysis by examining how the funding initiatives affected kindergarten enrollment. The results confirm that funding had a large, immediate impact on kindergarten participation. In the first year in which funding was available, the kindergarten enrollment rate in the typical state was about 15 percentage points higher than would have been the case in the absence of state funding. Two years out, it was 33 percentage points higher, and the lion’s share of gains in kindergarten enrollment from the funding initiative had been achieved. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the take-up of kindergarten was not completely immediate because of shortages of classrooms and teachers rather than because of a gradual increase in local demand. On net, the public school kindergarten enrollment rate of children turning five after an initiative was about 30 percentage points higher than it would otherwise have been.

I next investigate whether these developments were matched by changes in child well-being. Because grade retention and educational attainment were arguably the prime targets of policymakers, I first consider the effects of kindergarten funding on those indicators. Whites had more education as adults as a result of the initiatives, but the effect was quite small: only a 2.5 percent reduction in the dropout rate (see Figure 3). Because the dropout rate among whites prior to kindergarten funding was roughly 15 percent, this reduction amounts to less than half of 1 percentage point, which is a small effect even if we take into account that kindergarten enrollment rose 30 percentage points (not a full 100 percentage points) as a result of the initiatives. College attendance also increased among whites, but by an even smaller amount. The analogous estimates for African Americans suggest that affected children attained lower levels of education. While not statistically significant, the estimates are sufficiently precise to rule out the possibility that African Americans experienced even the small positive gains in educational attainment evident among whites. The apparent gains in educational attainment for whites occurred without significant reductions in grade repetition, either in absolute terms or relative to African Americans.

I then turn to an investigation of the impacts on earnings, employment, public assistance receipt, and the proxy for incarceration described earlier. I again find little evidence that kindergarten funding affected these outcomes. The most notable exception is that whites of kindergarten age after passage of a funding initiative were less likely to reside in prisons or institutionalized group quarters as adults. The effect is relatively large, at 22 percent. Once again, however, no such effects were observed for African Americans. Moreover, I find no evidence of an impact of state kindergarten funding on earnings for individuals of either race. The estimated effects on earnings are imprecise, however, and leave open the possibility that kindergarten attendance had effects on earnings comparable to any other year of education for African Americans and whites alike. In general, the earnings estimates should be viewed with caution, as they could be distorted by the fact that the sample includes some individuals who are young and could still be enrolled in school.

These results remain essentially unchanged when estimated using to a series of alternative approaches, including adding controls for state demographic and labor market conditions. I also perform the analysis separately by gender, which reveals that the effect of kindergarten funding on institutionalization for whites is primarily due to its effect on men, for whom the institutionalization rate is much higher. The magnitude of the effect for white men is similar to that observed for whites overall (a reduction of 23 percent). Among African Americans, there are no effects on institutionalization rates for men or women. The gender-specific results also reveal that kindergarten funding was associated with significantly lower earnings for African American women. To the extent that kindergarten funding displaced African American enrollment in more intensive early education, a possibility that I explore below, these findings would be consistent with recent findings that girls are more responsive to intensive preschool interventions.

Why Did African Americans Not Benefit?

My main results imply that there were some positive impacts of state subsidization of kindergarten, particularly on incarceration rates. What is potentially unexpected, however, is that the funding initiatives appear to have had positive effects only for whites. What might explain these findings? I explore three broad hypotheses for why African Americans might not have benefited as much as whites from the funding initiatives: 1) kindergarten funding disproportionately drew African Americans out of higher-quality education settings; 2) instead of raising additional revenue to fund local kindergarten programs fully, school districts offered lower-quality kindergarten programs to African Americans or moved funds from existing school programs from which African Americans may have disproportionately benefited; and 3) African Americans were more adversely affected by any subsequent “upgrading” of school curricula as more students entered elementary grades having attended kindergarten. The first of these hypotheses receives the most support in the available data.

Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics suggest that the introduction of state funding for kindergarten prompted a reduction in Head Start participation among African Americans. The existence of kindergarten funding among all states in a region (relative to none) was associated with a statistically significant 25-percentage-point-reduction in the likelihood that an African American child attended Head Start at age five. Given an enrollment rate of 26 percentage points across the observed cohorts, this estimate implies that state funding for kindergartens essentially eliminated enrollment of African American five-year-olds in Head Start (see Figure 4). By comparison, enrollment of whites in Head Start at age five was much lower (2 percent), and the change in enrollment after the average funding initiative close to zero.

Together with historical accounts of the importance of Head Start in providing education for five-year-olds in the absence of state-funded kindergartens, these estimates strengthen support for the hypothesis that state funding for kindergartens decreased enrollment of African American five-year-olds in federally funded early education for the poor. It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the movement of African American five-year-olds from Head Start to kindergarten might have offset positive impacts of kindergarten attendance elsewhere in the African American population. However, a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the reduction in Head Start attendance among African Americans may account for at least 16 percent of the 1-percentage-point increase in the African American-white gap in high school dropout rates after the initiatives were passed. Head Start has also been found to reduce criminal behavior among African-American males.

I uncover no support for the hypothesis that school districts failing to supplement the state grants placed African American students in lower-quality programs, either in kindergarten or in later grades. I also detect no evidence that the establishment of kindergarten programs as a result of the funding initiatives prompted an increase in academic expectations of students in the early grades, which would have adversely affected children with low levels of achievement. Because the data available to test these alternative hypotheses are not ideal, however, these conclusions must be viewed with caution.

Back to the Future

Although there is great interest among policymakers in extending free early education to disadvantaged children, evidence to date on long-run effects of preschool has been limited to experimental evaluations of model preschools and nonexperimental studies of Head Start. This study has attempted to expand this literature by measuring the long-term effects of a historical episode of public investment in universal early education—the introduction of state funding for public school kindergarten in the 1960s and 1970s. I find evidence that state funding of universal kindergarten lowered high-school dropout and institutionalization rates among whites, but not among African Americans, and detect no impact of state funding for children of either race on grade retention, public assistance receipt, employment or earnings. Why the positive effects for whites occur for dropout and incarceration only is not entirely clear and should be grounds for future research.

These findings complement those of existing research on the long-term effects of targeted programs. First, they suggest that, in the absence of higher-quality alternatives, participation in a low-intensity preschool program may have some limited positive long-term effects. In other words, even a weak program may be better than no program at all, as can be seen in the results for whites. Second, when alternatives already exist for many disadvantaged children, universal programs may not yield additional benefits for that group.

Though there are clear limits to the generalizability of these findings, they do provide some tentative lessons for policymakers. On one hand, the higher rates of preschool participation among children today suggest that any positive long-term effects of extending universal public schooling to four-year-olds may be even smaller than those estimated here for kindergarten. On the other hand, the universal preschool programs being proposed today have a more academic orientation than kindergarten has had, and may therefore have larger impacts on long-term well-being despite significantly “crowding-out” enrollment in other programs. The truth will only be discovered in the years to come.

Elizabeth U. Cascio is assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College.

Everyone knows the early drafts have been the object of much discord. How confident can we be that what will emerge from these tussles and dust-ups will be coherent, complete and sufficiently demanding without being overwrought? If this national standards endeavor were a new drug for fighting swine flu or breast cancer, the FDA would subject it to rigorous long-term “field trials” to determine both its safety and its efficacy before releasing it for widespread use. Yet the Education Department, the White House, the Gates Foundation, the National Center on Education and the Economy and plenty of other parties are sounding and acting as if these standards and assessments had already proven themselves. The high command at Gates seems to assume that all of American K-12 education is going to be reconfigured around them. Secretary Duncan asserts that only states pledging their troth to the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI) should be eligible for Race to the Top funding. Yesterday, the President declared that future Title I funding for a state should hinge on whether it has embraced the new standards and assessments. And more.

A little humility would seem to us to be in order. If these standards and assessments end up representing a huge improvement over those in use in most states today, then much that’s good may reasonably follow from their installation and use. But what if they don’t? And even if they do, what about those (few) states that have done a creditable job on their own and for which CCSSI may represent either a lateral move or a step backward? In any case, would it not be prudent to appraise their safety and efficacy before demanding that they become the center of America’s new education universe?

Showing the chops he must have picked up during his tenure in the Clinton White House, Rotherham explains why Duncan’s penchant for secrecy doesn’t necessarily violate his pledge (and the President’s) to ensure an “unprecedented level of openness” when it comes to stimulus spending.  Rotherham suggests that Duncan try a variation of the “it depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is” defense, explaining, “‘Transparent’ is not synonymous with contemporaneous.  In other words, a process can be transparent while it is going on or it can be transparent after the fact.” It’ll be amusing to see whether Duncan tries that defense; somehow, I don’t think it’ll play that well.

The larger issue here, of course, is not merely whether Duncan should have announced the identity of the judges (though the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli offers a terrific explanation of why he should, from the perspective of a Department of Education veteran).  The larger question is how the Department is proceeding on RTT.  Let’s remember to keep that question in context. The administration has unprecedented discretion due to the $787 billion stimulus package, more than $100 billion of which is directed to education.  Given the control over this kind of money, as well as the terrific intuitions that undergird Race to the Top, it’s essential that the administration does everything possible to reassure observers that it is operating in a credible, non-political fashion.  Part of having unprecedented sums of money is the need to embrace unprecedented levels of transparency.  That includes reaching out to skeptics and moving with particular thoughtfulness when it comes to the process.  In fact, for all the criticism that the Bush Department of Education justly received for insularity and a lack of transparency, the names and affiliations of the growth model pilot peer reviewers and the differentiated accountability pilot peer reviewers were disclosed prior to the reviews taking place.

Yet, after Obama’s assurances that “politics won’t come into play” in the RTT process, after Duncan’s claims about how he’d recruit “disinterested superstars” to judge RTT, and after comments from RTT chief Joanne Weiss on the “unprecedented level of transparency” of the process, the reality has been otherwise.  Last summer, the 19 (!) RTT priorities appeared pretty much out of nowhere—with the dictate that states would not be rewarded for successes in data systems or teacher quality alone, but would be required to punch off all 19 boxes in sprawling applications if they were to seek funds. The advisers for the RTT evaluation were named and secretly convened last fall. The 58 reviewers were selected from 1500 applicants in a process that was never made clear. The Department has never explained what constitutes a “conflict of interest” for potential reviewers.  The Department never announced that reviewers had been named or when or how they’d be trained.  Indeed, it took Education Week’s intrepid Michele McNeil to finally leak that story, before Duncan responded (and not in an official Department announcement, but in a blog post!).

In yesterday’s post, Rotherham alludes to the controversy over Obama’s back-to-school speech from September, and he’s right to make the point.  As Andy notes, that was a needless and ridiculous controversy, but it was one that the administration invited by issuing a raft of curricular materials that reflected Obama-mania and were tone-deaf to skeptics.  When doing big, visible things, and especially when spending billions in borrowed public funds, openness and working to engage potential skeptics is the wisest course.  The problem here is not just the secret judges—it’s the administration’s seeming belief that transparency means whatever it wants it to.

More than seven years ago, President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind (NCLB) into law. Sweeping calls for testing, intervening in persistently low-performing schools, and policing teacher quality made it the most ambitious legislation on K–12 schooling in American history. The law, due for congressional reauthorization in 2007, still awaits legislative action. This spring, the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force issued 10 recommendations to guide reauthorization. In this forum, lead author of Learning from No Child Left Behind, EdisonLearning’s John Chubb, and education historian and task force member Diane Ravitch, who declined to sign the recommendations, weigh in on the future of the law.

EDUCATION NEXT: Is NCLB working? Should it be reauthorized?

Diane Ravitch: It is time to pull the plug on No Child Left Behind. It has had adequate time to prove itself. It has failed. After seven years of trying, there is no reason to believe that the results of NCLB will get dramatically better. Now is the time for fundamental rethinking of the federal role in education.

NCLB has produced meager gains in achievement. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) assesses student achievement in reading and mathematics every other year. Despite the intense concentration on reading and mathematics required by the law, the gains registered on NAEP since the enactment of NCLB have been unimpressive.

In 4th-grade reading, the gains after implementation of NCLB, from 2003 to 2007, were small (three points) and exactly the same as the gains from1998 to 2003. Fourth graders in the bottom10th percentile of performance had a five-point gain after NCLB, but this did not compare to the 10-point jump in their scores from 2000 to 2002 pre-NCLB (see Figure 1).

In 8th-grade reading, there were essentially no gains from 1998 to 2007. Student performance was a flat line both before and after NCLB.

Mathematics was tested in 1996, 2000, 2003, 2005, and 2007. The gains preceding the adoption of NCLB were larger than those posted after NCLB. From 2000 to 2003, 4 th grade students recorded a nine-point gain in mathematics, compared to a gain of only five points from2003 to 2007. Among 4th-grade students in the lowest decile, there was an astonishing 13-point gain from 2000 to 2003 pre-NCLB; the same group saw a gain of only five points from 2003 to 2007. The same deceleration of student improvement was seen at all performance levels, from top to bottom.

In 8th-grade mathematics, gains also slowed after the passage of NCLB. Eighth graders saw a five-point gain from 2000 to 2003, but only a three-point gain from 2003 to 2007.

John Chubb: NCLB will and should be reauthorized. Absolutely, student achievement has grown much more rapidly in the last decade—the NCLB era—than during the 1990s, especially for the lowest achieving and most-disadvantaged students in the nation. Achievement is what NCLB is all about, so the law has met its most basic test. This is recognized by even the law’s critics which is why the only discussion in Washington is how to mend the law. The Obama administration recognizes that No Child Left Behind aims to help the federal government perform its most important education function: improving the education of students in greatest need. The new president is supported in this view by a bipartisan majority in Congress, which has worked for many years to ensure that poor kids get the help they require. The education needs that NCLB addresses are not going away, nor is the need for funding. Indeed, the economic stimulus bill passed in February increased funding for NCLB by 80 percent, and these provisions of the massive and controversial bill met no objections.

Over half of poor and minority students have reading and math skills far below grade level, whether measured by the tough performance standards of the NAEP or by the standards of the various states. Dropout rates, measured accurately only since NCLB made them part of Title I accountability, hover around 50 percent in many major cities.

NCLB is based on sound principles and should with time improve the achievement of all American children, especially economically disadvantaged and racial minorities. There is empirical evidence these principles are working. The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation recently completed an analysis of the top and bottom 10 percent of all students tested by NAEP. It found that the bottom 10 percent had gained far more than the national average since 2000 in math and reading, more than a full grade level in math. The top 10 percent had gained as well, providing no evidence that schools were ignoring the best students while focusing on the kids below proficient and subject to NCLB sanctions. Both groups of students had also gained more since 2000 than they had during the 1990s. The federal government’s own comprehensive analysis of Title I, mandated by Congress, conducted by RAND among others, and published in 2007 after several years of NCLB experience, found the largest academic gains since 2000 and 2003 among students in high-poverty schools. To be clear, the evidence in total is early, and the research is incomplete. But there is no question that American kids, especially the most disadvantaged, are making progress. It is absolutely mistaken to suggest, that NAEP changes pre- and post-2003 are evidence that NCLB has been counterproductive. Disadvantaged kids are achieving far more today than ever before, and those gains are attributable to higher standards and tougher accountability that began in the states in the 1990s and accelerated with NCLB.

EN: What are the strengths and weaknesses of the NCLB approach to assessment?

DR: Educators and the public are getting wise to the uselessness of the testing regime that has been foisted upon them. A year ago, North Carolina’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Testing and Accountability issued a report recommending a sharp reduction in the number of tests that the state required. The chairman of the commission, Sam Houston, said, “We’re testing more but we’re not seeing the results. We’re not seeing graduation rates increasing. We’re not seeing remediation rates decreasing. Somewhere along the way testing isn’t aligning with excellence.”

NCLB may in reality be dumbing down our children by focusing the attention of teachers and administrators solely on basic skills. Our students are not being prepared to compete with students from high-performing nations in the world. Many are not getting an education based on a coherent, content-rich curriculum in history, geography, the arts, science, foreign languages, and literature. They are not getting a good education. They are getting thin gruel. If we want a future workforce that is smart, creative, independent, and resourceful, we are not educating to get what we want.

JC: Perhaps the single greatest virtue of NCLB’s approach to assessment and accountability is that it shines a bright light on student performance, as measured against explicit standards of proficiency. The nation finally knows which schools are raising proficiency in reading and math and which are not. Before NCLB, such information was spotty at best. A weakness, however, is that the bright light does not shine on all subjects that matter for kids and their future.

The education the nation values is one that is rich in content. NCLB has unwittingly and unfortunately encouraged schools to focus instruction inordinately on reading and math, the subjects that NCLB requires be tested annually and to which it has attached the tough accountability regime. Students, however, need also to understand science, history, geography, civics, and more if they are to succeed in a 21st-century world of intense international competition and technological sophistication.

NCLB already requires science testing once each in grades 3–5, 6–9, and 10–12. This requirement should be extended to include three tests of social science, defined as U.S. history, world history, geography, and civics. The law should further specify that the science and social science assessments be cumulative and comprehensive, and not focused just on the content taught during the tested grade level. NCLB should require that scores be posted on state and district web sites and included in school report cards. State scores should be benchmarked against NAEP, to encourage high standards. But science and social science should not be part of Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP); the process of assessing and exposing performance should be ample to promote attention to these fields.

EN: How should proficiency be defined and measured?

DR: The federal demand that all students will be proficient by 2014 has led states to embrace a very loose definition of proficiency. Most states are now using NAEP’s “basic” achievement level as their definition of proficiency because NAEP’s “proficient” level is far beyond their reach. But many states go even lower than NAEP basic for their definition of proficiency. Tennessee, for example, says that 90 percent of its 4th-grade students are proficient in reading, while NAEP says that only 26 percent are. Only 61 percent of students in Tennessee are at basic or above, according to NAEP. Similarly, North Carolina tells the public that 86 percent of its 4th graders are reading proficiently, but NAEP says only 28 percent are (and 36 percent score “below basic”). These states and many others make inflated claims to satisfy NCLB’s ridiculous requirements.

JC: There is much room for improvement in how proficiency is defined and measured by NCLB—and we have practical suggestions for improving both. But the fundamental principles that NCLB advances represent a huge step forward for the nation. NCLB asks the nation to define what all students should know and be able to do in reading and math, and then measures progress toward these performance standards. This is a boldly democratic and egalitarian expectation and the very first time that the nation has asked its schools to perform at an explicit level. We should proudly defend these principles.

On a practical level, “proficiency” should describe the knowledge and skills necessary to be “college and career ready” in the 21 st century. Proficiency should capture the “common core” of competencies deemed necessary for all students to have a chance at success after high school.

NCLB should authorize the U.S. Department of Education to fund—after a competitive bidding process—up to three multistate consortia to develop standards, tests, and performance levels that support the overarching goal of college and career readiness. With federal funding, states will buy into one of the systems of national standards and tests, saving the huge expense of developing new standards alone. NCLB could, through these recommendations, give the nation standards both achievable and worth achieving, while preserving the rights of the states to determine what “national” standards should be.

EN: Are the law’s “remedy” provisions—including public school choice and supplemental educational services—working?

DR: The remedies the law prescribes—choice and tutoring—have proven to be ineffective. Less than 5 percent (and by some estimates, as low as 1 percent) of eligible students choose to leave their “failing” school to transfer to a school that made AYP. Some say it is because the students and families did not get adequate notice, but more likely students are not choosing to leave for other reasons. In many suburban and rural school districts, there may be no other school to transfer to. But perhaps more important, most students will not leave their school even if there is another school that is presumably better, by NCLB’s definition, and that is accessible. That is because most students are not in the group that is failing to make progress, and if they like their school, they don’t want to be separated from their friends.

The law assumes that the schools are bubbling over with discontented kids who are eager to escape, but that assumption is probably wrong. Or at least there is no evidence for it based on the lack of response to the choice provisions of NCLB. We have long known from polling data that the public is concerned about the quality of American education, but most parents are satisfied with their own children’s school. The failure of choice in NCLB reminds us of that consistent finding.

The other remedy in NCLB for failure to make AYP is tutoring, and that too has proved to be ineffective, though it has turned into a half-billion-dollar bonanza for tutoring companies. Evaluations in several states, including Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, and Kentucky, have reported that students who received tutoring did no better on state tests than their peers who did not receive tutoring. Only about 15 percent of eligible students have signed up for tutoring. Even when tutoring is free, conducted after school, and provided in a convenient location (sometimes in their own school building), most students don’t want it. Maybe it conflicts with their afterschool jobs or their sports or other commitments. Maybe they just don’t want to study for an additional hour or two when the school day is done. We need to know more about why 85 percent of eligible students avoid tutoring. We need to know why most eligible students are not showing up to be tutored, and why those who do show up are gaining so little from it.

JC: We know from ample research that choice can boost the achievement of students who avail themselves of it. We also know that tutoring is an effective means of remediating achievement deficits. RAND recently affirmed the effectiveness of SES tutoring in a well-controlled study. But choice and tutoring are not working nearly as well as they could in NCLB. This has nothing to do with the ideas of choice and tutoring but rather with the way NCLB provides for them.

Students in failing schools simply do not have enough choices. The law currently limits choice to schools not in improvement status, which often eliminates all nearby options. NCLB should increase the choices available by permitting families to judge school shortcomings for themselves. A school failing a single subgroup or barely missing AYP, for example, might be a better choice for a student in a school that is failing badly. Yet today those choices are not available.

NCLB should offer additional charter school start-up grants in any school district where failure is rampant, such as a district not making AYP. Students should be able to choose schools in neighboring school districts, subject to district approval. And private schools should be eligible to receive choice students, provided those schools charge no extra tuition and participate in the state testing program.

Students in failing schools should also have greater access to tutoring, sooner. There is no more effective way to help students who are struggling than to get them extra, focused, individualized attention. Yet only 20 percent of students eligible for tutoring under NCLB are receiving services, and the services often fall short of the quality offered in the private marketplace. This should be remedied.

First, make Supplemental Educational Services (SES) available as soon as schools are declared in need of improvement, the same time as school choice is offered. Second, ensure that students have access to the best possible tutors. Grant districts the right to provide SES, even if the district is failing to make AYP, but also require districts to provide a fair and competitive marketplace for all providers. Whatever access the district itself has to families, students, and facilities, it must also provide to private tutors—or the district loses the right to be a provider. To reinforce these measures, NCLB should require states to provide information on eligible students to approved providers. The states should be required to collect and post comparative information on the effectiveness of all tutors.

EN: Are NCLB’s sanctions for persistently failing schools effective? Are they fair?

DR: The law’s punitive sanctions are ineffective. By year six of failing, the schools may be turned into charter schools, taken over by the state or private management, closed, or restructured (e.g., replacing the entire staff). None of these sanctions had a research basis to justify its inclusion in the law. They were hopes or hunches, based on ideology, not evidence. Most states and districts choose the least onerous of the sanctions, which is restructuring. According to a 2008 report from the Center on Education Policy, restructuring itself needs to be restructured because there is no sure-fire way to turn around a chronically low-performing school. The federal Institute of Education Sciences recently published a research summary on how to achieve this admirable goal, but not one of its four recommended strategies was supported by evidence.

JC: Currently, NCLB’s escalating sanctions apply identically to schools that have failed massively and to schools that barely miss. This is a big mistake—but one that is easily fixed. NCLB should differentiate school improvement needs. Over time we expect more and more schools to succeed with the majority of their students, but to struggle with certain extra-needy subgroups. It is vital, as the nation expects increasing percentages of students to achieve proficiency, that we identify schools accurately for their performance. The Department of Education has approved nine states’ requests to implement “differentiated accountability” plans. NCLB should build on this good work and institutionalize a simpler system for all states.

Schools should be placed into one of two categories of “needs improvement.” “Limited” improvement is for schools whose shortcomings involve less than one-third of the student body. Limited improvement would offer students in year one of their school’s acquiring improvement status (two years of missing AYP) choice of another school and SES. If schools remain in limited improvement status, NCLB would require, in year four of improvement, that states develop with schools “limited corrective action plans.” Schools with limited improvement status should not face restructuring; states should have the flexibility to work with schools with limited problems as they see fit.

“Schoolwide” improvement is for schools that miss new AYP growth targets for all students or for subgroups that total more than one-third of school enrollment. Schoolwide improvement would require schools to proceed through restructuring, but NLCB should be revised to include only three means to restructure: First, a school may be reorganized as a charter school, giving it new governance. Second, the school’s management can be contracted out to an independent school management company, changing day-to-day control of the school. Finally, a school may be closed and reopened with 100 percent of the teaching staff and administration replaced. Each of these measures ensures a new day for the school and its students.

EN: Is NCLB’s goal of universal proficiency by 2014 one that should remain in a reauthorization of the law?

DR: The demand that all students be proficient by 2014 is absurd. This laudable goal has never been reached by any other nation or by any state. The only way it can be met is by defining “proficiency” to mean minimal literacy and numeracy. Meanwhile, the expectation that all schools will achieve this goal has created a trajectory of failure that guarantees a steady increase in the number of schools that are stigmatized for not making adequate yearly progress. In the 2007–08 school year, nearly 30,000 schools—or 35 percent of all public schools—joined that abysmal list; this was a 28 percent increase in the number of “failing” schools over the previous year. In Massachusetts, which has the highest-scoring students on NAEP in the United States, nearly half the public schools in the state were rated as being “in need of improvement.”

It does not take a statistician to figure out that NCLB is a recipe for disaster for American public education. An article in Science magazine last fall predicted that nearly 100 percent of all elementary schools in California would be failing schools by 2014.

JC: Universal proficiency is perhaps the most important principle of NCLB—certainly the most audaciously democratic one. It should and will be preserved. Who, after all, will be willing to say whose children should be proficient and whose should not? And, this is not just a matter of principle—the goal is doable.

But the states need to come together around standards that are worth accomplishing, that represent the common core of knowledge and skills that every child needs to be prepared in the 21st century for college or a productive career. Students with special needs or just beginning to learn English need to be provided alternative means to demonstrate proficiency. Universal proficiency in practice may mean 90 to 95 percent proficient, a high number but not an unattainable one. Finally, schools must be given time to realize goals worth achieving.

NCLB should extend the 2014 deadline for universal proficiency by six years—half the original NCLB timeline—to 2020, but only for states willing to adopt new high national standards.

EN: Has the federal leadership embodied in NCLB been a help or a hindrance to school improvement?

DR: Washington does not have the institutional knowledge or capacity to reform our nation’s schools. Congress is not the right institution to reform the nation’s schools. The U.S. Department of Education lacks the capacity to tell the nation’s schools what they should do to improve. Washington is too remote from schools to take responsibility for improving them. In their edited volume, No Remedy Left Behind, Chester E. Finn Jr. and Frederick Hess wrote that NCLB “amounts to a civil rights manifesto dressed up as an accountability system. This provides an untenable basis for serious reform, rather as if Congress declared that every last molecule of water or air pollution would vanish by 2014, or that all American cities would be crime-free by that date…. NCLB’s dogmatic aspirations and fractured design are producing a compliance-driven regimen that recreates the very pathologies it was intended to solve. It’s time to relearn the lessons of the Great Society, when ambitious programs designed to promote justice and opportunity were undone by utopian formulations, unworkable implementation structures, and a stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge the limits of federal action in the American system. In the end, Washington is not well-positioned to effect change to a program that depends on state and local action, or successfully to require states and districts to adopt measures whose efficacy hinges on gusto and creativity rather than compliance.”

A few tweaks here and a little tinkering there cannot fix this fundamentally flawed legislation. The time has come to discard it altogether and begin to think afresh about how the federal government can provide useful assistance to states, districts, and schools that are trying to improve. What we need is a clear recognition of the appropriate federal role in education and a deeper understanding of the meaning of a good education. Perhaps with a sense of the limits of federalism and of the limitless potential of education, we might be able to free ourselves from the sterility, rigidity, dogmatism, and narrow anti-intellectualism of NCLB.

JC: NCLB embodies a delicate balance between federal leadership and state execution. Despite the hue and cry from critics about federal over-reaching, NCLB provides ample discretion to the states. The role that NCLB sets out for the federal government—setting national goals while leaving states and districts to decide how to reach them—is sound, and surely superior to the hodge-podge of state accountability systems that preceded it. The challenge now is to improve how our federal-state partnership works. Experience can be a powerful guide.

Let’s face facts. The nation needs to boost its achievement even more now than when the law was passed. Our economic welfare depends more and more on education. We should learn from the law—as it is beginning to help our children learn—and not expect 50 uncoordinated states to get the nation where it needs to be in the demanding world of the 21st century.

What, in addition to what we have already suggested, would improve the federal-state partnership? A practical remedy on which all sides now agree: change how the law measures academic progress. NCLB currently recognizes achievement only when it lands a student above a state’s proficiency bar. The act does not recognize student progress by the lowest achievers, growing from, say, below basic to basic. The act also fails to recognize the growth of the nation’s top students: a school gets zero credit toward AYP for upper-end success. The Department of Education has approved 15 states’ requests to use “growth models” to measure achievement. NCLB should be revised to make growth the only measure of achievement. The act should require that each student’s achievement be judged, for purposes of determining AYP, against one simple standard: is the student on track to be proficient or better by the time of her last reading and math tests in high school? Those tests must be passed for high-school diplomas to be awarded.

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.

The department softened a proposal to use results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to measure states’ progress over the past several years in boosting achieve­ment scores and closing achievement gaps be­tween subgroups.

The department had wanted to use NAEP data because it is a national assessment. But in the end, it bowed to complaints that the test, among other things, “may not provide accurate achievement information for students with dis­abilities and other subgroups.”

Thus, the department will now use results from state assessments in addition to NAEP to evaluate states’ efforts on this front.

Oh, that’s rich! After all, the whole “Race to the Top” lingo is in reference to the “Race to the Bottom” whereby states have rushed to set passing scores on their own tests at laughably low levels. (Though, truth be told, it turns out that it’s been more of a walk to the middle.)

Now states will be able to claim that they have “narrowed achievement gaps” when all they’ve done is make their tests so easy to pass that virtually all kids—black and white, rich and poor—do so, magically erasing any group differences.

Remember all the talk of “Moral Hazard” from a year ago? Here we go again, letting irresponsible states off the hook for, in Arne Duncan’s words, “lying” to the public about how well their students are doing. When will we ever learn?

UPDATE: Checker Finn noted to me in an email that it’s “also more than a little ironic that the Race to the Top places such heavy emphasis on states adopting COMMON standards and tests—precisely because of the failings of their own standards and tests—yet now gives them credit for “gains” on their own tests.”

Listen to the Podcast

Election Postmortem (11/19/09)
Will Congress Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut? (11/4/09)
Voters Choose Neighborhood Schools over Socioeconomic Diversity (10/29/09)
The Nobel Committee Isn’t the Only One Giving Speculative Prizes (10/22/09)
Will Michelle Rhee Triumph? (10/14/09)
Will the Federal Role in Education Double? (10/8/09)
Charter Schools Narrow Achievement Gaps in New York City (10/1/09)
What Congress Is Not Working On (9/24/09)
Charter Schools, Unions, and Linking Teachers with Student Achievement Data (9/17/09)

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.

A substantial academic achievement gap exists between well-defined groups of American students.  In addition, international comparisons show that there is a notable gap between the academic achievement of American students and students in many other countries.  From an overall fund of $4.5 billion, the Department of Education will award grants to individuals, organizations, schools (public or private) and colleges and universities who demonstrate they can do something to close those gaps.  Depending on the quality of applications, the Department might award less than $4.5 billion.

There would be forms to fill out.  Successful applicants would be subject to audit requirements.  Evaluations would be needed to assess results.  Most importantly, the Secretary of Education would need great discretion in making awards.  He should not be constrained by a scheme that personifies the stifling bureaucratic process for which American education is noteworthy.  Unfortunately, an argument can be made that Arne Duncan has fallen prey to just such a system.

Consider the voluminous RTTT information posted here.  On reviewing it, one could be excused for thinking that the editors of The Onion have hacked into the Education Department’s website.

What most stands out is the palpable disconnect between the RTTT process and what actually occurs in the many charter schools and private schools that have made real progress.   If a random selection of administrators at such schools were asked to review the process, the response likely would be a collective laugh.

For example, describing a change to the original RTTT application, the department explains, “The term persistently lowest performing schools has been changed to persistently lowest-achieving schools.” Thankfully, that’s been clarified.  Elsewhere, the department explains that the definitions of “rapid-time” and “student achievement” have been modified. Whew.

While that might seem like nit-picking, arcane bureaucratic definitions are central to the RTTT process.  Among the 100+ pages of instructions and guidelines — part of the RTTT application states must submit — nearly five pages are devoted to definitions.

Meaningless nuance rules.  There are “effective” teachers and principals and then there are “highly effective” teachers and principals.  There are “high-need” LEAs, not to be confused with “involved” LEAs or “participating” LEAs.  And on and on.

Then there are “assurances” required of applicants.

One of several:

The State will comply with all applicable assurances in OMB Standard Forms 424B (Assurances for Non-Construction Programs) and to the extent consistent with the State’s application, OMB Standard Form 424D (Assurances for Construction Programs), including the assurances relating to the legal authority to apply for assistance; access to records; conflict of interest; merit systems; nondiscrimination; Hatch Act provisions; labor standards; flood hazards; historic preservation; protection of human subjects; animal welfare; lead-based paint; Single Audit Act; and the general agreement to comply with all applicable Federal laws, executive orders and regulations.

And this:

The State will comply with all of the operational and administrative provisions in Title XV and XIV of the ARRA, including Buy American Requirements (ARRA Division A, Section 1605), Wage Rate Requirements (section 1606), and any applicable environmental impact requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA), as amended, (42 U.S.C. 4371 et seq.) (ARRA Division A, Section 1609).  In using ARRA funds for infrastructure investment, recipients will comply with the requirement regarding Preferences for Quick Start Activities (ARRA Division A, Section 1602).

Or how about this?

The State and other entities will comply with the Education Department General Administrative Regulations (EDGAR), including the following provisions as applicable:  34 CFR Part 74–Administration of Grants and Agreements with Institutions of Higher Education, Hospitals, and Other Non-Profit Organizations; 34 CFR Part 75–Direct Grant Programs; 34 CFR Part 77– Definitions that Apply to Department Regulations; 34 CFR Part 80– Uniform Administrative Requirements for Grants and Cooperative Agreements to State and Local Governments, including the procurement provisions; 34 CFR Part 81– General Education Provisions Act­–Enforcement; 34 CFR Part 82– New Restrictions on Lobbying; 34 CFR Part 84–Government-wide Requirements for Drug-Free Workplace (Financial Assistance); 34 CFR Part 85–Government-wide Debarment and Suspension (Non-procurement).

“[N]o honeymoon lasts forever,” opined the New York Times recently.  Its editorial, headlined “The ‘Highly Qualified Teacher Dodge’,” suggested that recently issued RTTT guidelines amounted to a cave-in by Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

The Times did not go far enough.  It’s simply not possible to sort through the RTTT morass and conclude that anything positive will result, except by chance.

Download the Podcast

Will Congress Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut? (11/4/09)
Voters Choose Neighborhood Schools over Socioeconomic Diversity (10/29/09)
The Nobel Committee Isn’t the Only One Giving Speculative Prizes (10/22/09)
Will Michelle Rhee Triumph? (10/14/09)
Will the Federal Role in Education Double? (10/8/09)
Charter Schools Narrow Achievement Gaps in New York City (10/1/09)
What Congress Is Not Working On (9/24/09)
Charter Schools, Unions, and Linking Teachers with Student Achievement Data (9/17/09)

One way the federal government attempts to ameliorate hunger is the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which spends $8 billion annually to provide free- or reduced-price lunches to over 30 million children. (A graph in USA Today shows the percentage of kids in each state who are eligible for free- or reduced-priced meals.)

However, a new article published today on the Education Next website, “Fraud in the Lunchroom,” by David Bass, warns that the federal school lunch program does not do a very good job of verifying that students whose families sign up for the program actually meet the eligibility requirements. The result is that a lot of ineligible kids are receiving free lunches.

While many people might not object to a policy that errs in the direction of generosity to hungry children, the article notes that having ineligible students on the free lunch list has a lot of other consequences.

For instance, Bass explains that the percentage of students eligible for free- and reduced-price lunches is the main criteria for the allocation of federal Title I funds to schools. State governments and school districts also distribute funds to schools according to the count of students eligible for free- and reduced-price lunches.

Also, when NAEP tracks the performance of low-income children over time, and when schools report on whether low-income students in a school make AYP, both are looking at students who are eligible for free- and reduced-price lunches, says Bass.  Many outside researchers also rely on free- and reduced-price lunch eligibility as a proxy for poverty. In all of these cases, the results of analyses may be skewed if many students whose families are not truly poor are listed as eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches.

(NB: An earlier article in Ed Next, “The School Lunch Lobby,” looked at the history of the school lunch program.)

For more on this topic by Andy Smarick, please see his article The Turnaround Fallacy.

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.

To receive a standard state certification in most states, prospective teachers not only must be college graduates but also must have taken a specific set of education-related courses that comprise approximately 30 credit hours of coursework. Prospective teachers are well advised to pursue studies at a college or university within the state where they expect to teach, because it is often only within that state that students can get the courses required for state certification in the subject area and for the grade levels that they will be teaching.

Such certification requirements limit the supply of certified teachers, and as a result, serious teaching shortages are regularly observed. For example, in California, one-third of the entire teacher work force, about 100,000 teachers, will retire over the next decade and need to be replaced, compounding what the governor’s office calls a “severe” current teacher shortage. Other states are facing a similar situation. The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics projects a shortfall of 280,000 qualified math and science teachers by 2015. As former National Education Association president Reg Weaver put it, “At the start of every school year, we read in the newspaper…stories about schools scrambling to hire teachers.”

Teachers of minority background are in especially short supply. In 2004, only 14.1 percent of the nation’s teachers were African American or Hispanic, even though these ethnic groups comprised 26.5 percent of the adult population. That shortage has led to calls for remedial action. In the words of Weaver, “An impressive body of research confirms that recruiting and retaining more minority teachers can be crucial to” raising the achievement of minority students. “States and school districts need to develop programs…[that] reach out to minorities still in school, offering encouragement and incentives to enter the teaching profession. We need more minority teachers. School districts need to aggressively recruit them.”

The Certification Debate

Both colleges of education and teachers unions oppose any relaxation of certification requirements. In Weaver’s view, “The solution is not to develop alternative routes of entry into the profession or to increase the supply of recruits by allowing prospective teachers to skip ‘burdensome’ education courses or student teaching. The solution is to show a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T, and show us the money.”

According to this point of view, certification is necessary to ensure teacher quality, because teaching, like other professions (law, medicine, the sciences, and so forth), requires mastery of an esoteric body of substantive and pedagogical knowledge that cannot be obtained without undergoing a rigorous training program. Arthur Wise, former head of the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, told the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, “Rigorous teacher preparation is key to ensuring that no child is left behind…. Content knowledge is only one indicator of readiness to teach…. [Schools of education] must prepare new teachers to teach the great diversity of students who are in America’s classrooms today.”

But Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, says that the “certification process” has only a “crude capacity for ensuring” quality teachers, because pedagogical “knowledge can be acquired by means other than coursework.” Teachers learn to teach by practicing the craft, not by taking coursework in its history or psychology. If that is so, then both the teaching shortage and the paucity of minority teachers can be alleviated by opening the classroom door to all college graduates, not just to those who have taken the required courses associated with state certification.

Although no state has abandoned its traditional certification programs in response to calls for broader recruitment paths into education, all but three states have set up some kind of alternative certification pathway, and the number of alternatively certified teachers has steadily grown. In 2001, just 20,000 alternative teaching certificates were issued. By 2006, nearly 60,000 alternatively certified teachers were entering the teaching force each year, roughly one-fifth of new entrants (see Figure 1).

In many states, however, the alternative certification requirements closely resemble traditional ones. As Chester Finn, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute (and Education Next senior editor), explains, “Typical alternative certification programs have come to mimic standard-issue pre-service college of education programs…. Alternative certification has been co-opted, compromised, and diluted. Education schools—brilliantly turning a threat into an opportunity—have themselves come to dominate this enterprise, blurring the distinctions that once made it ‘alternative.’”

Symbolic vs. Genuine Alternatives

To see which states have established genuine alternative certification programs and which have only symbolic ones of the kind described by Finn, we compared alternative certification rules to requirements for traditional certification in each state. We obtained information from state web sites as well as from publications available for prospective teachers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When necessary, we contacted relevant officials in state departments of education (see sidebar).

Our research revealed that the design of alternative certification programs varies considerably from one state to the next. In 26 of the 47 states that allow alternative certification, the situation is as Finn describes, similar to standard-issue education school programs. But in the other 21 states, alternative teacher certification can be obtained without completion of most of the coursework associated with traditional certification (though the states may require additional coursework after a teacher secures a classroom position).

The variation in state practice allows us to provide some preliminary answers to questions frequently raised about alternative certification: Do states that provide a genuine alternative, not simply a symbolic one, recruit more teachers who take the alternative certification route? Do they open the classroom door to more minority teachers? What is the impact on student learning?

The answer to the first question is very clear: it makes a good deal of difference whether alternative certification is meaningful or symbolic. In the 30 states that do not have genuine alternative certification, only 5 percent of the newly certified teachers chose the alternative route in 2004–05 (the most recent year for which information is available). Hardly anyone bothers with an alternative certificate if the requirements are essentially the same as for the traditional one. In the 21 states that offer genuine alternative certification, however, 28 percent of newly certified teachers utilize the option (see Figure 2). Altogether, 92 percent of those with an alternative teaching certificate received it in one of the 21 states that have such certification in reality as well as in name.

Minority Representation

To the second question, there is also a fairly clear answer: minorities are represented in the teaching force to a greater extent in states with genuine alternative certification than in other states. Information on the number of minority teachers in each state is available from the Office for Civil Rights and the U.S. Department of Education. Together with census data, that information allows for the calculation of the ratio of minority teachers to minority adults for each state, which serves as an index of minority representation. If the index for a given state has a value of 1.0, then the percentage of minority teachers equals the percentage of minority adults in that state. If the index exceeds 1.0, then minorities are overrepresented in the teaching population; if the index is below 1.0, minorities areunderrepresented.

In 2004 (the most recent year for which data are available) minority teachers were seriously underrepresented in the nation’s public school classrooms. The nationwide ratio in 2004 was 0.53, which means that only a little more than half as many minority adults were teachers as one would expect, given the minority composition of the adult population.

The index of minority representation was nonetheless considerably higher in the 21 states with genuine alternative certification than in the 30 states with a symbolic substitute or no alternative certification (see Table 1). In the states with genuine alternative certification, the weighted average index of representation was 0.6, while in the states with a symbolic substitute or no alternative certification, the index was 0.2. In the three genuine alternative certification states with the largest total populations (California, Texas, and Florida), the index of representation was 0.56, 0.68, and 0.72, respectively, while in the three largest states with a merely symbolic or no alternative certification option (New York, Illinois, and Ohio), the index of representation was 0.38, 0.33, and 0.51, respectively. In other words, genuine alternative certification seems to give minority adults interested in a career in education greater opportunity to become a teacher.

Of course, minority teachers may be recruited by avenues other than alternative certification. Sixteen states report the ethnic background of alternatively certified teachers to the U.S. Department of Education. In 14 of them, the percentage minority for those alternatively certified exceeds by a wide margin the percentage minority of the state’s teaching force as a whole. In Mississippi, for example, the disparities are massive: 60 percent of the more than 800 teachers who were alternatively certified in 2004–05 were of minority background, while the overall Mississippi teaching force is just 26 percent minority. Other states where percentage differences between the two groups exceed at least 10 percentage points include California, Delaware, and Texas. In other words, there is every reason to believe that alternative certification is key to recruiting more minorities into the teaching profession.

Impact on Student Learning

But is alternative certification, however desirable a device for recruiting minorities into the teaching profession, impairing student learning? That is ultimately the justification for traditional teacher certification, regardless of its consequences for teacher shortages or for the recruitment of minority teachers. And that apparently is the rationale for those who interpret the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act as requiring a certified teacher in every classroom, the basis for the complaint in the California case Renee v. Spellings. That suit objects to the presence in classrooms of teachers who have not received traditional certification.

Most studies show very little, if any, connection with a teacher’s classroom effectiveness and certification status. Harvard economist Thomas Kane and his colleagues (see “Photo Finish,” research, Winter 2007) found no difference between the amount of learning taking place in New York City classrooms under the direction of non-certified teachers and in those under the direction of regularly certified ones.

Nor is there convincing evidence that minority teachers are less effective at teaching minority students. On the contrary, the results from an experiment conducted in Tennessee (see “The Race Connection,” research, Spring 2004) indicate that minority students learn more from teachers of their own ethnicity than from other teachers.

Our results are consistent with that research and other studies that have found little reason to equate certification with “highly qualified.” Students attending schools in states with genuine alternative certification gained more on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) between 2003 and 2007 than did students in the other states. The finding holds, even when one adjusts for changes in the ethnic composition, free-lunch eligibility,class size, and education expenditures for each state (see Figure 3).

In states that had genuine alternative certification, test-score gains on the NAEP exceeded those in the other states by 4.8 points and 7.6 points in 4th- and 8th-grade math, respectively. In reading, the additional gains in the states with genuine alternative certification were 10.6 points and 3.9 points for the two grade levels, respectively. Among African Americans, test-score gains were also larger in the states with genuine alternative certification.

It is possible that the disproportionately large gains in test-score performance in the states with genuine alternative certification were due to some other factor, possibly other education reforms those states were introducing at the same time they were widening the door to the teaching profession. We cannot dismiss this possibility, inasmuch as we were able to control only for changes in certain demographic and policy variables, not for changes in other state policies that might explain the difference in test-score gains among states.

But the burden of proof would now seem to shift to the plaintiffs in the Renee v. Spellings case, who argue that traditional state certification is necessary to ensure teacher quality. Genuine alternative certification opens the door to more minority teachers, and student learning is more rapid in states where the reform has been introduced. Meanwhile, scientific evidence that alternative certification harms students remains somewhere between scant and nonexistent.

-Paul E. Peterson, director of the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG), is editor-in-chief of Education Next. Daniel Nadler is a PEPG research associate.

WEAC, an affiliate of the National Education Association, is the state’s largest teachers’ union.

A Milwaukee Journal Sentinel story notes the WEAC role.  The article highlights the division of opinion on a bill that purports to allow student test scores to be used in evaluating teachers.  As I described in an earlier post this week, the actual language of the bill gives meaning to the old standby:  the devil’s in the details.  As one legislator quoted in the article explains, “This is a joke.”

Mainly reflecting WEAC’s opposition, the Legislature did not consider a measure that would transfer control of the Milwaukee Public Schools to the city’s mayor.

The legislative action followed President Obama’s visit to a Madison school earlier in the week.  The White House said the visit was intended to highlight positive steps being considered by the Legislature.  It remains to be seen whether Education Secretary Arne Duncan regards Wisconsin as worthy of receiving RTTT funds.

During a visit to Madison [November 4], President Barack Obama will highlight Wisconsin’s movement toward education reform and talk about how the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition is spurring other states to do the same, a spokeswoman for the White House said this afternoon.

Melody Barnes, the director of the White House Domestic Policy Council, said in a conference call that the president on Wednesday will ‘applaud positive steps forward’ on education reform in Wisconsin, such as the bills pending in the state Legislature that would remove the ban on using student achievement data to evaluate teachers, and another that would share student data between K-12 institutions and higher education.

What “positive steps forward” does one find in these pending Wisconsin bills?  Here, for example, is the nonpartisan Legislative Reference Bureau analysis of Assembly Bill 533:

Current law directs school districts to administer certain standardized examinations to pupils enrolled in the 4th, 8th, and 10th grades. Current law prohibits a school board from using the results of the examinations to evaluate teacher performance; to discharge, suspend, or formally discipline a teacher; or as the reason for the non-renewal of a teacher’s contract.

This bill allows the results of the state-required standardized examinations and the standardized examinations required under the federal No Child Left Behind Act to be used for the evaluation of teacher performance if certain conditions are met. The school board must develop a teacher evaluation plan that includes a description of the evaluation process, multiple criteria in addition to examination results, the rationale for using examination results for evaluating teachers, and an explanation of how the school board intends to use the evaluations to improve pupil academic achievement. This bill also requires a school district to bargain collectively over the development of the teacher evaluation plan.

Bold, cutting edge stuff, huh?

And then there is Assembly Bill 534.  The analysis of this bill states:

This bill provides that if the state superintendent of public instruction determines that a school or school district is in need of improvement, the state superintendent may direct the school board to do one or more of the following in the school or school district:

1. Implement a new curriculum. 2. Implement a new instructional design, including expanded school hours, additional pupil supports and services, and individual learning plans for pupils. 3. Implement professional development programs focused on improving pupil academic achievement.  4. Make personnel changes that are consistent with applicable collective bargaining agreements. 5. Adopt accountability measures to monitor the school district’s finances or to monitor other interventions directed by the state superintendent. The bill directs the state superintendent to promulgate rules establishing

criteria and a procedure for determining whether a school or school district is in need

of improvement for the purpose of exercising this authority. The school board must

seek input from school district staff on implementing any of the above directives.

The bill also authorizes the state superintendent to withhold state aid from any school district that fails to comply to the state superintendent’s satisfaction with any of the above directives.

Wow.  Talk about a game-changer.

OK, so I am cynical.  One wonders: has Arne Duncan vetted these and other pending bills to determine if they represent the kind of change that will meet RTTT criteria? Presumably the answer is yes, or why would President Obama travel to Wisconsin for the purpose reported by the Journal Sentinel?

Keep in mind that throughout the NCLB era Wisconsin distinguished itself mainly as having some of the country’s least demanding proficiency criteria on state tests.  As I noted in an earlier post on this topic:

There is scant evidence that Wisconsin is poised to make the kind of decisions that represent real reform.  As education reporter Alan Borsuk wrote recently, “There it was again last week: A chart from a reputable national education organization that put Wisconsin at the top of the list, provided you were standing on your head.”

Borsuk continued, “The New Teacher Project…created a scorecard of the chances of each state to win some of the $4.35 billion to be given out by the U.S. Department of Education to places where there are bold, well structured plans to improve low-performing schools.  Wisconsin had the worst scorecard of all 51 candidates (including the District of Columbia).

Further, he noted, “A couple of years ago, Education Sector…rated the states on how they were dealing with the No Child Left Behind education law. Wisconsin was rated as doing the best job in the country of evading the consequences of the law. The organization called it the Pangloss index, after a fictional character who believed everything was in its best possible condition even when it wasn’t. We were the most Panglossian state, so to speak.”

Had that money really been spent in ways to promote educational productivity, it would have been faithful to the investment goals of the stimulus package.

But the money has in fact been spent to keep school employees on the payroll, while ensuring that teachers’ salaries climb upward with each year of experience, and giving those with a master’s degree a bonus.

In Marlborough, Massachusetts, the mayor was courageous enough to say the district could not afford the annual increment this year.  Since millions of other Americans have lost their jobs and almost everyone in the private sector is being asked to accept a salary freeze, that seems not too much to ask of school teachers.  But “no,” said the local union, and the teachers are now “working to rule,” which means, of course, putting student needs last.

At last report, the Marlborough mayor is facing a strong challenge in the election on Tuesday. She is learning the hard way that if one fights a teachers union, it can be expected to fight back on election day (even while claiming neutrality).  The Marlborough story helps explain why virtually every other district in the country is hoisting teacher salaries as if the economy were forging ahead at a hundred miles an hour.

So we have a nearly $800 billion stimulus package focused mainly on rewarding an outmoded, self-indulgent school system, where employees control the election chances of those on the other side of the bargaining table.

All of this might be justified if we had the faintest hope that the additional monies were lifting student performance and preparing them for a workplace that expects higher levels of skill than ever before. But the most recent results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress reveal that schools are as much in the doldrums as ever.

If the Obama Administration is really going to stimulate the economy, they need to find some tools other than one that simply bails out the educational status quo.

Today, Education Next is releasing my article “The Turnaround Fallacy,” which strongly argues that the education reform world needs to abandon its current fixation on “school turnarounds.”

Though the inclination to fix our worst schools is understandable and is often the result of the best intentions, it is misguided.  The article explains why.  Turnarounds have not only consistently failed in education; they fail in the vast majority of instances in other industries and sectors.  Moreover, and most importantly, continuing to pursue turnarounds actually inhibits our ability to build healthy urban school systems.

This is more than a philosophical debate.  Unless we apply the brakes post haste, we’re going to head down the wrong (and costly) tracks at a breakneck pace.  Secretary Duncan has been strongly advocating for turnarounds since his first days in the administration.  His U.S. Department of Education received $3 billion in “school improvement funds” through the stimulus legislation that might be applied to these activities.  One of the four focus areas for other stimulus programs, including the $50 billion State Fiscal Stabilization Fund and the much-ballyhooed $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund, is intervening in persistently struggling schools.  Duncan is also encouraging the nation’s best education reform organizations to get into this business.  In short billions of dollars, scarce human resources, and lots of young lives are at stake.

I’m as fierce a proponent as there is for addressing the nation’s worst schools and giving hope to the millions of currently disadvantaged students assigned to them.  Turnarounds aren’t the only option; we have a much, much more promising alternative.

Quite simply, we need to do what every other industry, field, and sector does to address its lowest performers.  This is the first step toward building healthy urban school systems—systems that are dynamic, responsive, and self-improving.

So what is it??!?

Give “The Turnaround Fallacy” a read and find out…

(or click below to check out an interview I did with Education Next.)

Listen to the Podcast

According to the Boston Globe, Paul Reville, the secretary of education and chairman of the commission, urges action because  “we can ill afford the waste, loss and tragedy these persistent [drop-out] rates represent.”

It is true that nearly a third of the nation’s 9^th graders—and about half those attending dangerous big city schools—have voted with their feet against the disastrous state of the modern public high school.  They have concluded that they don’t want to stick around for four more years just to get a diploma from their local school.

Schools are like jails, the great sociologist James Coleman once wrote. The inmates hate the authorities and sabotage the mission of the place. The teachers reach a compromise with the students, explains Theodore Sizer, Harvard’s former dean of the school of education. As long as the inmates sit quietly, the teachers will let them get by.   In this kind of environment, the peer group takes charge. And when the peer group is organized into gangs, as in many inner city high schools, life in the school jail can get pretty tough.

In most parts of the country, students have the option of getting out of the school jail at age 16, sometimes even younger. They can get a diploma by taking the equivalency exam, or they can take high school courses at community colleges, or, in Florida and a few other states, they can take courses on line over the internet.

But when students drop out, it means less money for public schools from the enrollment-based state aid formula.  Less money means fewer employees and fewer union members.

So if students don’t want to go to school at age 16 and 17, they should be incarcerated, Reville insists. Dragged off by the truant police and stuck in a classroom. Surely, they will learn, if only they can be badgered into getting to school on time.

Paul Reville, appointee of Massachusetts’ hapless governor Deval Patrick, is the same guy who has shut down the formation of any new charters in Massachusetts (with a possible exception or two if necessary to placate the Boston Globe or get “race to the top” money from the Obama Administration.)

According to Reville’s incarceration theory, it is wrong to give students a choice of school.   If that should happen, high school students would abandon the neighborhood high school in droves. That would be a true disaster.  Don’t create charters: Incarcerate instead.

EDUCATION NEXT: Should the United States have a national curriculum?

Chester Finn: Absolutely, positively yes, provided that we properly define “curriculum,” and ensure that the states’ participation remains voluntary. In the core subjects of English, math, science, and history (including geography and civics, never say “social studies”), there is absolutely no reason why we ought not ask all young Americans to learn most of the same things while in the elementary and secondary grades. That doesn’t mean all teachers should follow identical lesson plans, that everybody needs to read the same poems and plays, or that a rigid “scope and sequence” should be clamped onto all schools and school systems. But the basic content of, say, 4th-grade English or 6th-grade math or 8th-grade science should be the same from Portland, Maine, to Portland, Oregon. And that content should be married to national standards of “proficiency” in these subjects at these grade levels, and joined to national exams by which we determine how well and by whom this is being accomplished.

The curriculum should cover grades K–12 and leave plenty of room for state, local, and building- and classroom-level variation and augmentation. Particularly in grades 11 and 12, it would make sense to offer (as high schools do today) some choice among courses in science, history, and English; one English class might focus on drama, another on creative writing. A charter or magnet school might specialize in art and music, while another concentrates on science and math, in addition to the academic core.

One way to picture the core is the “1,000 question” approach, which blends standards, curriculum, and assessment. Here’s a simple version: The testing body (perhaps a consortium of states, possibly a spin-off from the National Assessment of Educational Progress [NAEP]) would publish—this is all totally transparent—maybe 1,000 possible exam questions dealing with, say, 7th-grade science. A generous portion would be open-response and deep-thought queries that probe a student’s ability to make sense of what he or she is learning, not just parrot it back or fill in bubbles. The national end-of-course exam in 7th-grade science would consist of a subset of those questions. Any student able to answer all 1,000 would likely get a perfect score on the exam.

But 1,000 is obviously too many to drill students on, so effective teaching of 7th-grade science would cover most if not all of the subject matter spanned by those questions. The teacher would be free to cover it however she likes—any sequence, any course structure, any instructional materials. If the state or school system or charter school wants to systematize this (and assist its teachers) by setting forth a scope and sequence, textbooks, units, midcourse assessments, and such, that’s fine, too.

Obviously, the testing body needs to ensure that there’s a logical, sequential relationship between the 7th-grade science questions and the 8th-grade questions and so forth. Indeed, the questions would surely overlap in part—and would cumulate, over the 13 grades, to a solid science education.

That’s pretty much the way the best extant national curriculum works, at least through grade 8. Of course I’m thinking of the Core Knowledge Curriculum developed by University of Virginia professor and Cultural Literacy author E. D. Hirsch. (Alas, it doesn’t yet include the high school grades.) Hirsch says it’s supposed to occupy roughly half of the school day. That feels about right to me. Maybe even two-thirds.

The national curriculum would cover only content, not pedagogy or instruction. For that we depend on professionals, and we assume and expect that they will differ from one another in their skills, enthusiasms, preferences, and values. One school might rely heavily on “virtual” instruction, for example, making extensive use of Internet offerings and opportunities. Others may team teach several subjects via two or three teachers who like working together and whose subjects lend themselves to blending. Still others will resemble the traditional self-contained-classroom schools of yesteryear. This is as it should be. The United States has some 54 million schoolkids, 3 million teachers, and 100,000 schools. They differ in many ways and ought to. But today the absence of a common core is a critical handicap, particularly for the neediest kids, weakest teachers, and least advantaged schools. Equity demands that we rectify this.

Most successful modern nations have something akin to a national curriculum, whether explicitly or through their exam systems. Japan has “national curriculum standards” and insists that individual schools use them as the basis for planning what they will actually teach and how they teach it. Singapore publishes syllabi for each major course or subject, usually divided between primary and secondary. England spells it all out in considerable detail, and France famously standardizes even its lesson plans. To my knowledge, no two nations do this in quite the same way—and some of the other “federal” countries, such as Australia and Canada, are still working on how to do it at all. In Canada, for example, several provincial education ministries have voluntarily joined together to develop “pan-Canadian” curricula, starting with science.

Rather than starting with a federal mandate, a consortium of states and private organizations (such as some combination of Achieve, the state school “chiefs,” and the governors) could develop the curricula and tests, ideally with initial support from major national foundations. States would then be free to join if they like. Possibly we’ll wind up with more than one consortium, and states would have choices among them. Picture the Southern Regional Education Board spearheading the second of these. Maybe the four small New England states that have already joined forces on testing will become the starting point for a third. (The Brits do something like this with their multiple testing bodies.) Uncle Sam’s role is to encourage movement in this direction, probably by giving states that join such consortia some breaks on No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and its successors, perhaps a bit more money, perhaps automatic approval of their standards and tests without further inspection or negotiation.

I don’t expect every state will join, at least not soon, so the federal government’s additional responsibility is to maintain NAEP as the external auditor of all states. We’ll find out over time whether kids in schools and states that join in the common curricula and exams do better (or worse) than in those that maintain their curricular independence.

Deborah Meier: I have five concerns with Chester Finn’s proposal for a national curriculum.

First, what’s (positively) special about the U.S.A. is that it doesn’t have an official line, above all, on ideological and intellectual matters. This is part of our unusual history and reflects tolerance for diverse origins and beliefs. It has always been a struggle, never quite won, but it is a strength that is always tempting for us to abandon. Doing so would be at a cost we would someday rue.

Second, there is no way in which a federally approved curriculum can avoid the trap of selection bias—no matter who might design it. Even if I were to design my ideal history curriculum, whatever I decided to spend more time on or (God forbid) omit altogether will be influenced by my biases. The sources I require my students to be familiar with; the differences of opinion I tolerate versus those I feel compelled to correct; how I “simplify” without losing the most important truths—all these are fraught with inevitable biases. What I believe everyone must know may be different from what you believe. Do we vote on “the truth” and then put a camera in each classroom to ensure it’s carried out?

I truly cannot imagine how supporters of a federally approved curriculum solve these issues. It’s not merely political bias, mind you, but academic and intellectual views that may or may not have political implications. Historians at my graduate school differed on whether history was a science or a field of humanities, for example. So they offered both! Not an insignificant difference of opinion. Biologists and physicists may have different views about which science is more critical, and within each field there are controversies about the nature of science and which scientific ideas are more important.

A panel of righteous and well-educated people is not an answer. So, you might ask, are multiple bodies of righteous and well-educated people any better? Yes, because it leaves the door open for more controversy; offers escape hatches for unexpected views; and leaves contenders, alternatives, and authority in many hands.

Third, attempting to avoid bias by including everyone’s biases only generates more problems. Precisely in order to avoid charges of bias, the tendency of textbooks (and curricula and tests) is already to include snippets of all viewpoints, thus becoming long-winded and boring. The effort of the national science community a decade or so ago to outline what every 18-year-old should know about science was so extensive that it invited either rote memorization (in defiance of the heart of science instruction being recommended) or studying nothing but science in order to cover it all. The science teachers at my old high school admitted that they were only secure in their knowledge of one or at most two of the fields covered. What part of the fascinating study of mathematics is a “must” for 18-year-olds? What knowledge of music or art?

The focus on testing also has an interesting side effect: it makes it hard for wise educators to take advantage of the teachable moment in their concern to stick with the stuff that will appear on the test. For example, teachers should be able to use the recent election as a moment for understanding our political system or the financial crisis to examine how money and finance works.

My fourth problem is that any curriculum leads—as Finn acknowledges—to assessment issues. My colleague Diane Ravitch suggests we decouple the two ideas. I think, as Finn does, that the one inevitably follows the other. At that point the best intentions of a good curriculum come screeching to a halt. In reality, the test becomes the curriculum, and the scoring guide for the test becomes the bible.

Of course, we can do our best to develop tests that are more nuanced, that require strong written and oral exposition, opportunities to defend one’s ideas, to think critically and persuasively, etc. But it’s highly unlikely, almost utopian, to imagine we could do it on a national scale, and far more likely are precisely the kinds of assessment tools that undermine a strong education.

But my greatest concern is none of the above!

I’m concerned that all of this is a way to avoid a real conversation about the purposes of public education and then to acknowledge our ignorance about “ensuring” success. Our own children are worth more than money can buy, but no parent can offer a guarantee.

Whether the first discussion might ever lead to a substantial consensus I don’t know. What math must we “all” know, and why? Like music, mathematics is a subject of beauty, as well as a practical study of import. But which aspects of math must we all—as citizens—have at our fingertips regardless of our vocational goals? In this debate not only experts in math must have a voice.

So, too, with debating what literature is indispensable. How tempting it is to add a little bit of everything to please all camps rather than engaging with a few works in great depth. The development of a “taste” for literature—fiction and nonfiction alike—is hardly something we’re good at teaching, Not to mention the dilemma about how to teach literacy of the new media that will constitute the bulk of the next generation’s “reading.”

Perhaps we can reach agreement that one purpose stands apart from the rest—that the indispensable core purpose of a public education system is that it prepares people for public life in a democracy, with all that this implies. But even that would be far from settling matters. How we define democracy, and what constitutes the intellectual underpinnings of a democracy are open to endless discourse. But it’s the “litmus” test.

I also know that the second question—how to make it work—is equally knotty and that no one has a monopoly on the right answers.

EN: What should be taught, in your view, and how will educators figure out effective ways to do this?

CF: If I were king, I’d probably install Core Knowledge in the primary and middle grades and the International Baccalaureate (IB) in high schools. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the most highly respected high school courses in America today are Advanced Placement (AP) and IB courses, which have quite a lot of nationwide prescription as to their content. (It’s true that AP shuns a prescribed “syllabus,” but veteran AP teachers are clear as to what they must cover in order to prepare their pupils for those exams—and the College Board isn’t shy about clueing in new teachers.)

With these standards and assessments in place, the question reasonably arises, where do educators find the curricular materials that best help them tackle the standards? Some will develop their own or pull them off the Internet. I think we can be confident that major publishing companies will develop and market commercial versions. I’d favor staging a competition among prospective curriculum suppliers, maybe have a jury evaluate and grade their products. Perhaps then we could make all their products available to states, districts, and schools, and let the market select among them. Wikipedia-style (or Zagat-style) open-source rating systems will enable product users to rate and comment on what works best in what circumstances. Having a national curriculum doesn’t mean we need confine ourselves to just one option.

Textbook publishers (and their modern-day successors, such as virtual-curriculum developers) will align their products with the national standards rather than with the whims of California and Texas. (That assumes California and Texas join the multistate ventures, of course.) The total amount of testing should diminish and, if it doesn’t, it will have to be better aligned to the end-of-course expectations and exams that states will administer. Commercial tests such as the Stanford and Iowa may evolve into something more like formative assessments meant to assist teachers rather than be used for external accountability.

Teacher preparers and professional developers, and those who try to set standards for them (e.g., National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education, National Board for Professional Teaching Standards), will need to take seriously the obligation to align their expectations for instructors with the common expectations for students. All this is mostly good—and, yes, a little bit risky, if the national standards go squishy or the national curriculum falls into the hands of zealots. That’s why it needs to stay voluntary, so any jurisdiction that can’t abide it need not stick with it.

A big grown-up country in the 21st century needs common (and ambitious!) curricular standards for all its children, at least in core subjects, and it needs common assessments, too. If we’ve learned anything from the NCLB experience (and its antecedent “Goals 2000” and “Improving America’s Schools” legislation), it’s that having these things vary from state to state produces mediocrity, cacophony, waste, duplication, and confusion (see Figure 1). Survey after survey makes clear that (if the question is asked correctly) parents favor national standards and tests. Instead of letting “That’s the first step toward a national curriculum” serve as a conversation stopper, let’s deploy it as a conversation starter. Let’s acknowledge that “curriculum,” loosely defined, is supposed to be aligned with standards and appraised by assessments.

Let me note, finally, that I’m unimpressed by Meier’s “habits of mind” alternative to content (see below). It’s wonderfully seductive, but the serious psychologists with whose work I’m acquainted (see, for example, “Reframing the Mind,” check the facts, Summer 2004) don’t put much stock in this Howard Gardner–originated proposition that youngsters can learn skills devoid of content. It’s the absence of essential core content from her view of schooling that lies at the heart of our curricular disagreement.

EN: What other options are there for bringing our nation’s public education system to a higher level?

DM: At the schools I led for nearly 40 years, as part of the work of the Coalition of Essential Schools, we spent a lot of time exploring the “why” questions and developing an approach that was aimed at answering them. This discussion was at the heart of the school’s existence and included all parties to it. Like Coalition founder Ted Sizer, we figured if we could grab hold of that, we’d see how much else we could teach and, more importantly, how everything we taught and did helped to reinforce “the essentials,” influencing not only our students’ hours in school (or doing homework), but every waking hour of their lives. We even saw misbehavior as an opening, an opportunity to teach such habits and not an obstacle to it.

We boiled it down to five “habits of mind” that we claimed (somewhat pompously) underlay all the academic disciplines as well as the mental and social disciplines needed for living in a complex modern society: (1) How do you know what you know? What’s the nature of your evidence? How credible is it? Compared to what? (2) Are there other perspectives? What affects our points of view? How otherwise might this be seen? (3) Are there patterns there? A sequence? A theory of cause and effect? (4) Could it be otherwise? What would happen if? Supposing that x had not happened? and (5) Who cares? Why does it matter? As you can see, they blend into each other and, in a way, just define a mind state of skepticism and informed empathy. It suggests having to take seriously the idea that one might be wrong, and so could others. We added “habits of work” like meeting deadlines and being on time and “habits of the heart” like caring about one’s impact on others.

We developed rubrics that spelled out specific formats in which students could demonstrate their proficiency in each discipline. The diploma from our high school rested on convincing an internal and external evaluation committee that the student met the standards set by the faculty. Students’ oral presentations and defenses were based on written essays and other performances in each of the major disciplines as well as subjects of the student’s and faculty’s choice.

Could the five habits of mind become a national curriculum? Democratic habits of the sort we laid out at Central Park East can be taught in the process of learning math with its powerful logical habits, its attentiveness to patterns, as well as its multiple approaches to getting “right answers.” They can be taught in science, with its scrupulous attention to detail, specificity, and evidence, not to mention its humility in the face of the unknown. They can be taught in literature through our capacity to empathize with otherwise unacceptable protagonists, connecting us to people and worlds we otherwise would or could never choose. They can be taught in the way one handles discipline!

Isn’t democratic culture best served if all citizens are accustomed to such habitual ways of thinking, not just knowing how to do various things? I know how to do a lot of things—like putting my keys in the right compartment in my purse—that I don’t practice, especially in times of stress. What would it mean to teach so well that we’d hang on to such “habits of mind” in times of stress? Are our five a fair representation of what democratic intellectual habits amount to? Fair questions.

A school community that holds itself to high standards must risk such everlasting debate among, at the very least, the adults in charge and ideally all members of the community. But nothing I’ve said works if it’s simply adopted to try to “cover” the likely contents of a test with which ordinary teachers, families, and students cannot argue or differ. The habit of mind of “supposing that” is best learned from adults who are in a position to choose, revise, and rethink their own viewpoints in the presence of the young.

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Peterson and Finn’s previous podcasts:
Charter Schools, Unions, and Linking Teachers with Student Achievement Data
What Congress Is Not Working On
Charter Schools Narrow Achievement Gaps in New York City

For more on this topic by Patrick Wolf, please see his article Lost Opportunities.