This problem is no more apparent than in the current debate about the Common Core State Standards. “Common Core: The Rorschach Test of Education Policy” writes one teacher blogger.  The psychological society meets the education policy world.

At the recent launch event for the CUNY Institute for Education Policy, David Coleman, now known as the “architect” of the English Language Arts Common Core State Standards, was asked by a member of the audience why a teacher, who cited the Common Core standards emphasis on “informational texts,” would claim that she was told to “put away her literature books and photocopy microwave instructions” for her eighth-grade students. (See here or here, at 1:35:25).  Coleman was polite in his reply.  “The ability to misread is widespread in our society,” he said.  “But in terms of what is in the Core Standards they could not be more rigorous or clear. The demand is to read high quality fiction and high quality literary nonfiction…. All the exemplars are listed and you can look at them.”

This is a scary start for what Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus described in last Sunday’s New York Times as perhaps “the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history.”

And though Hacker and Dreifus, a former Queens College political science professor (and frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books) and a veteran science reporter and editor, respectively, turn in what appears to be a useful essay about the challenges ahead for the CCSS, Peter Cunningham, a former assistant secretary of education, says that Hacker and Dreifus themselves “contribute greatly to the confusion and misinformation surrounding the issue of learning standards.”

Is it Rorschach or Picasso?

Cunningham lists a number of problems with the Hacker and Dreifus report – suggestions that most of the CCSS appeal is uniformity not “richness and rigor,” that the Tea Party objects to CC’s “radical curriculum,” that the standards will contribute to the dropout problem, that it confuses assessments and accountability, that the “state standards” are really federal standards in disguise, that the folks who concocted the standards are part of “an invisible empire,” a not-so-sly reference to the Ku Klux Klan.

It’s a long list.  But the most important of the Hacker and Dreifus misperceptions may very well be hidden in Cunningham’s “radical curriculum” complaint; not the first word of the phrase but the second. In fact, there is no Common Core curriculum, radical or otherwise. Words matter. The Times essay, Cunningham says, “conflates standards, which are agreed-upon expectations for what children should know in certain subjects by certain ages, with curricula, which are the materials and the approaches that teachers use to help kids learn.”  There is no such thing as a “radical curriculum” because there is no such thing as a common core curriculum.

This is not a minor point, in part because it is such an obvious mistake.  As Lisa Hansel of the Core Knowledge Foundation notes in the first sentence of her recent Education Week commentary, “The Common Core Needs a Common Curriculum,” the CCSS themselves clearly warn against this conflation (here): “[W]hile the standards make references to some particular forms of content, … they do not … enumerate all or even most of the content that students should learn. The standards must therefore be complemented by a well-developed, content-rich curriculum.” [Emphasis added.]

Indeed, the CCSS in English Language Arts do emphasize “informational texts,” do provide recommendations of the kinds of texts that should be read, and are a cut above most state standards on the rigor and content front. But they are not a curriculum.

It is not a small distinction, since standards provide goals and a curriculum provides the day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year road map for reaching those goals. As Cunningham says, “The standard is the bar that students must jump over to be competitive. The curriculum is the training program coaches use to help students get over the bar.” If we don’t understand that distinction, we encourage all kinds of mischief in what is so far a laudable effort to improve the chances of American students to succeed in the new world economy.  Without a curriculum we send students willy-nilly, untutored and unpracticed, toward the bar; it won’t matter how high it is.

Unfortunately, it’s not the first time that the Times has made the conflation mistake. In an editorial barely a week earlier, called “Caution and the Common Core,” the newspaper of record refers to curriculum four times, using the term as if it were the same as “standards.” In three of the four mentions it refers to “the new curriculum,” even though no such curriculum has been written and despite the fact that the CCSS explicitly state that the standards “must” be “complemented” by a curriculum. This is more than a quibble; it’s a serious factual error, with pedagogical and political implications.

Pedagogically, if states and districts don’t write a curriculum, as CCSS recommends, they fail to provide students the necessary “training program” to achieve the goals the standards set.

Politically, the failure to appreciate the difference between standards and curriculum is a ticking time bomb. As my colleague at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute Terry Ryan noted in an email he recently sent me, “This issue of conflating standards and curriculum is so prevalent it could kill the Common Core standards. We see it all the time here [in Ohio, where Terry is Vice President for TBFI Programs & Policy], in newspapers and among lawmakers and it matters big time because curricular decisions are statutorily the responsibility of districts and confusion around this raises all kinds of issues for local control Republicans.”

Thus, from both a pedagogical and political point of view, it is crucial to keep the distinction between standards and curriculum clean and clear. But, most importantly, we need to try as hard as we can to get the facts straight.

-Peter Meyer

This first appeared on IdeaLab, the blog of the CUNY Institute for Education Policy.

Dear Deborah,

Your last post was amazing—one of the most coherent, cogent articulations of a reform alternative that I’ve ever read.

I was particularly moved by this passage:

We need quiet places and noisy places, places full of books and computers and others full of paint and clay. We need adults with the freedom to make spontaneous decisions—shifting the conversation in response to one of those “wonderful moments” and deviating from any designed curriculum. Teachers need the time to mull over what they have learned from student work (written as well as observed) and collegial time to expand their repertoires. We need feedback from trusted and competent colleagues. We need time for families and teachers to engage in serious conversations. We need settings where it seems reasonable that kids might see the school’s adults as powerful and interesting people who are having a good time.

It reminded me why I loved your books when I was studying at the University of Michigan’s education school 20 years ago—and why you and your ideas are so beloved today. This is a joyous, lovely, and loving vision—one that educators and parents alike embrace.

But (you knew the “but” was coming!) … does it “work”?

I almost feel bad asking the question. Here you are, painting a beautiful picture of the kind of school community any teacher would want to join and in which any parent would want to enroll their children. Yet I can’t get past the utilitarian question: Does it work?

The reason I can’t get past it is that the stakes are so high, particularly for children living in poverty. As I wrote last week, the disadvantages such children face are tremendous, deep-seated, and overwhelming. Some sort of “transformational” intervention is needed if they are to overcome the strong forces that conspire to keep them poor into adulthood. Schools might not be the only candidates (others include mentors, religion, the military, and positive work experiences), but I would surely put them high on the list. And they are one of the few over which “we” (the public) have some purchase.

So, does it work? Does your vision of schooling work to help poor children gain the skills and knowledge and confidence and connections that will allow them to climb the ladder into the middle class? Does it help them do better than they otherwise would have, if they had gone to a “regular” (boring!) school?

Last week you wrote:

We need schools that define success in broader ways than test scores or college completion. I want ways that “allow” me to feel pride and pleasure about a former student who didn’t shine at either. It took all our staffs’ combined ingenuity (and patience) to get her a well-earned high school diploma—in five-and-a-half, not four years. She got a full-time stable job working in a nursery school and soon hopes to get an AA degree. She tells me proudly that she is also taking care of the grandmother who took care of her during a very tough childhood. She also volunteers once a week at a local center for the aged. I’m impressed and tell her so.

I agree—that’s success. And I’ve already agreed with you that test scores are imperfect measures for an enterprise as complicated as schooling.

But I can’t go as far as some—say, Diane Ravitch and Richard Rothstein—who argue that any measure, when linked with consequences, becomes hopelessly perverted. We’re talking about public schools, after all—and the public has a right to demand certain results from its investment. And we’re talking about children, who deserve not to be written off before they even turn 18. If not higher test scores and college completion rates, then what?

I’m quite willing to entertain other metrics. And, as I argued two weeks ago, states should entertain them, too—and allow schools to opt out of the whole testing-and-accountability caboodle if they can suggest better measurements. Yes, in the modern era, in most states, that would mean letting schools opt out of the common core.

So Deborah, let’s get specific. If you were seeking an “accountability waiver” for Mission Hill, or similar schools, what would you be willing to promise in terms of student outcomes? Higher graduation rates? Lower teenage pregnancy rates? Lower incarceration rates? Higher voting rates? Higher college matriculation and completion rates (including at the AA level)? Lower unemployment rates? Higher wages?

You name it, I’ll probably go for it. But the answer can’t be to ignore student outcomes. Otherwise, we’ve turned your beautiful educational vision—complete with books and computers, paint and clay—into a form of childhood hospice—a respite from life’s daily struggles, but also a surrender to the inevitable events to come.

Surely we can do better.

-Mike Petrilli

This article originally appeared on the Bridging Differences blog, where Mike Petrilli has been debating Deborah Meier for the last month.

This video looks at two New York City elementary schools participating in the pilot.

A review of the most recent book by E.D. Hirsch, the founder of the Core Knowledge foundation, appears in the Summer 2010 issue of Education Next: “Equal Knowledge: Common Curriculum Would Benefit the Poor — and Democracy,” by Nathan Glazer

— Education Next

Behind the Headline
Gifted Students Have ‘Special Needs’ Too
Ed Next blog | 1/4/13

In Slate, Sarah Garland writes about efforts to make gifted classes more inclusive. Chester E. Finn, Jr. has written extensively about the failure of our education system to offer gifted children the education they need, most recently in “Gifted Students Have ‘Special Needs’ Too”

See also “Young, Gifted and Neglected” by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and “Exam Schools from the Inside,” by Chester E. Finn, Jr. and Jessica Hockett.

-Education Next

Behind the Headline
The Lucy Calkins Project
Education Next | Summer 2007

In New York City, the Education Department is dropping its longtime literacy curriculum as part of a shift to the new Common Core standards. As Robert Pondiscio explains in the NY Daily News, the city will drop the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, a “balanced literacy” curriculum developed by Lucy Calkins.  Lucy Calkins’ approach to literacy was dissected by Barbara Feinberg in the Summer 2007 issue of Ed Next.

-Education Next

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

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

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

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

The Coming KIPP Bubble

You can’t play the ingenue forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All Hands on Deck”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Excuses 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Loco Helicopter Parentis

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe even more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Battling Barbarism

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

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

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

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

Generation Gap

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

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

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

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

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

Rules of Order

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today’s Torchbearers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Colloquial,” a few answer back.

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

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

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

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

There is strong evidence that the choice of instructional materials has large effects on student learning—effects that rival in size those that are associated with differences in teacher effectiveness.  For example, in a large-scale methodologically rigorous evaluation of the differential impact of four leading mathematics curricula, second-grade students taught using Saxon Math scored on average 0.17 standard deviations higher in mathematics than students taught using Scott Foresman-Addison Wesley Mathematics.  By way of comparison, the difference in the impact on student achievement of a teacher at the 75^th percentile of effectiveness compared to an average teacher is only 0.11 to 0.15 standard deviations.  But whereas improving teacher quality through changes in the preparation and professional development of teachers and the human resources policies surrounding their employment is challenging, expensive, and time-consuming; making better choices among available instructional materials should be relatively easy, inexpensive, and quick.

Administrators are prevented from making better choices of instructional materials by the lack of evidence on the effectiveness of the materials currently in use.  The vast majority of materials either have no studies of their effectiveness or have no studies that meet reasonable standards of evidence.  Not only is little information available on the effectiveness of most instructional materials, there is also very little systematic information on which materials are being used in which schools.  In every state except one, it is impossible to find out what materials districts are currently using without contacting the districts one at a time to ask.

This scandalous lack of information will only become more troubling as two major policy initiatives—the Common Core standards and efforts to improve teacher effectiveness—are implemented.  Publishers of instructional materials are lining up to declare the alignment of their materials with the Common Core standards using the most superficial of definitions.  The Common Core standards will only have a chance of raising student achievement if they are implemented with high-quality materials, but there is currently no basis to measure the quality of materials.  Efforts to improve teacher effectiveness will also fall short if they focus solely on the selection and retention of teachers and ignore the instructional tools that teachers are given to practice their craft.

In our Brookings Institution report, we show how this problem can be fixed by states with support from the federal government, non-profit organizations, and private philanthropy.  First, state education agencies should collect data from districts on the instructional materials in use in their schools.  The collection of comprehensive and accurate data will require states to survey districts, and in some cases districts may need to survey their schools.  In the near term, many states can quickly glean useful information by requesting purchasing reports from their districts’ finance offices.  Building on these initial efforts, states should look to initiate future efforts to survey teachers, albeit on a more limited basis.

The federal government’s National Center for Education Statistics should aid states in this effort by developing data collection templates for them to use through its Common Education Data Standards (CEDS), and providing guidance on how states can use and share data on instructional materials.  The most recent version of CEDS contains 679 data elements for K–12 education, none of which relate to instructional materials in use.

Organizations with an interest in education reform should support this effort.  For example, the National Governors Association (NGA) and Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) have put their reputations on the line by sponsoring the Common Core State Standards Initiative.  Research based on current and past state standards indicates that this initiative is unlikely to have much of an effect on student achievement in and of itself.  The NGA and CCSSO should put their considerable weight behind the effort to improve the collection of information on instructional materials in order to create an environment in which states, districts, and schools will be able to choose the materials most likely to help students master the content laid out in the Common Core standards.

States facing severe budgetary pressures may be reluctant to undertake new data collection efforts.  Philanthropic organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation for Education could have a major impact by providing the start-up funding needed to collect data on instructional materials and support the research that would put those data to use.

In 1955, educational psychologist Lee J. Cronbach wrote that “The sheer absence of trustworthy fact regarding the text-in-use is amazing.”  It is more than a half-century later and we still don’t know.  How can we tolerate ignorance on something that is as critical to student learning as instructional materials?

Matthew M. Chingos and Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, who are research director and director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, are the authors of Choosing Blindly: Instructional Materials, Teacher Effectiveness, and the Common Core.

Anyway, wanted to share one title that’s uber-relevant today. It’s Great Promise Thwarted: The Humbling History of the Common Core, 2008-2018. It’ll be written by my good friend, eminent NYU edu-historian Jonathan Zimmerman, and e-published by Harvard University Press, in 2022.

It’s worth quoting a long excerpt from the book’s conclusion:

For a brief time, during 2010-2012, the success of the Common Core seemed assured. Proponents had compelling arguments. Existing state standards were generally awful. The No Child Left Behind accountability system designed to accommodate variation in state standards and assessments was problematic. Conservative supporters argued that the Core would make it possible to do away with intrusive federal regulations governing accountability and easier to provide transparency and accountability with a light touch. Moreover, the Core would make it possible to credibly compare student and school performance across the nation, while allowing mobile students or those learning online to move across schools or programs with minimal disruption.
Proponents argued that the Core would reduce the barriers that hindered virtual schools, online instruction, and the emergence of “21st century” assessments and instructional tools. Observers generally characterized the standards as a substantial improvement on those in place in most states. And Core proponents enjoyed enormous political muscle. A push that would have been laughable in 2006 seemed a fait accompli by 2010, with forty-plus states on board. The effort enjoyed the enthusiastic backing of the Gates Foundation (what we today would call Gates-ECB; this was before the Foundation absorbed the European Central Bank following the third Greek default), the Obama administration, nearly the whole of the education “reform” community, and Republican leaders including both members of the 2016 GOP presidential ticket. Major publishers and test-developers were quiescent or supportive, while education technology entrepreneurs were enthusiastic.

So, what went wrong? Why is it that today just eleven states use a Common Core assessment, less than a third of the states are judged to have made any effort to adhere to the Core, and the phrase “Common Core” remains polarizing and generally unpopular with Republicans, parents, and teachers? How did such a promising effort run aground?

In hindsight, four factors were responsible. Notably, none turned on technical debates over the merits and rigor of the standards. All were the product, to varying degrees, of the “we’re-in-a-hurry” hubris that has so often humbled would-be social reformers. Indeed, as one of the Core’s great champions, Thomas B. Fordham Foundation president Chester E. Finn, Jr.,prophetically wrote in early 2012, “It will, of course, be ironic as well as unfortunate if the Common Core ends up in the dustbin of history as a result of actions and comments by its supporters.”

First, an effort that began as a bipartisan, state-driven enterprise, spearheaded by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, started to look to skeptics like a federally-inspired, politicized project. The Department of Education’s decision to link federal funding to the Core in its Race to the Top program, its NCLB waiver effort, and its “ESEA blueprint,” and the provision of $350 million in federal funds for Core-related tests, all alienated anti-Washington conservatives who would have remained neutral if the question had merely concerned states collaborating to set standards in math and English language arts. By the time nationally influential conservative pundit George Will questioned in 2012 whether the federal government had exceeded its legal authority, the challenge for proponents was clear. Indeed, “Tea Party” conservatives came to regard the Common Core as part and parcel of Obama administration efforts to extend the federal role in domestic policy, an extension of contemporaneous fights over health care, spending, clean energy, the auto industry, housing, and financial regulation. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan demonstrated an unfortunate knack for making it appear that the Core was a pet Obama project–initially, when he excoriated South Carolina in 2012 for expressing second thoughts, but most famously when he futilely blasted the dozen states that announced their “implementation hiatus” in 2014. All of this served to make the Core a partisan question viewed with suspicion by conservatives, undermining the bipartisan support needed to sustain implementation in many “red” and “purple” states.

Second, the Common Core advocates were tripped up by their own impatience. After nearly all states adopted the Common Core in an early rush, proponents exhibited little interest in making the case for its merits, responding to critics, or explaining what was in store. Outside of the occasional op-ed, little sustained attention was devoted to explaining the changes or building broad-based support. For instance, hardly anyone other than Core enthusiasts realized that the comfortable, familiar high school math curriculum of math, algebra and geometry was to be eliminated and replaced with the antiseptically titled Integrated Math I, II, and III. When the magnitude of the shift became clear in 2014, confused parents and irate math teachers bombarded legislators and state board members with calls to delay implementation or alter course. Enthusiasts concentrated on designing instructional materials, consulting with states and districts, and training leaders and teachers, seemingly presuming that the public knew what they were up to and supported their effort. In the event, this turned out to be a fatal miscalculation. The early success of the Common Core was remarkable, but proponents failed to recognize that this quick success meant few voters or legislators really understood what was involved or that real success would depend crucially on the breadth and depth of support.

Third, Core advocates never did a good job of explaining how their efforts intersected with other reform priorities. Observers asked about whether the math assessment would strangle the abilities of charter schools or specialty district schools to use nonstandard math curricula. Core proponents never really answered such questions in public, tending instead to favor quiet, technical fixes (in this case abandoning mandatory “through-course” assessment) that didn’t address broader concerns. Skeptics wondered whether the testing “windows” needed to assess all children with the new computer-assisted tests would be so wide as to undermine the viability of sophisticated value-added evaluation systems that states were eagerly building. TheWashington Post’s Jay Mathews pointed out, in 2012, that the new assessments would “delay, if not stop altogether, the national move toward rating teachers by student score improvements” and that radical change would force systems “to wait years to work out the kinks in the tests” before they could resume those efforts. In hindsight, the backlash produced by the chaos over teacher evaluation and school accountability systems during 2014 and 2015 was predictable and preventable.

Finally, insufficient public attention to practical questions of cost, technology, and practice ultimately proved crippling. Despite frenzied efforts to support new assessments, instructional materials, and implementation during 2011-2014, interviews from that era with state legislators, district officials, educators, and parents showed remarkably little awareness of the costs and practical difficulties that lay ahead. When the 2012 technology scan showed that most districts had the requisite technology platform, few realized that the minimum specs had been dumbed-down or that this meant the new tests would sacrifice most of the hoped-for features–turning them into little more than traditional paper-and-pencil tests taken on a computer. At the same time, lousy records and a desire to avoid embarrassment meant that many districts had overstated their capacity in the tech census; they were suddenly faced with millions or even hundreds of millions in unanticipated new expenses, even as they dealt with the practical headaches of inadequate technology. And when the price tag for the full cost of new technology, training, leadership, teacher preparation, and all the rest became clear in 2014 and 2015, just as states emerging from the Great Recession were restoring cuts to state agencies and hoping to trim taxes, it was no surprise that a slew of states decided they’d keep the Core standards but also their old assessments, instructional materials, training, and teacher preparation.

The Core is still with us, of course, but it remains a shadow of what its more optimistic proponents envisioned a decade ago.

As I perused Zimmerman’s account, I could only feel for my many friends working so hard to make the Common Core a success. But then I thought, “Wait a minute. The future hasn’t happened yet. It’s like Marty McFly using his knowledge of the future to change the future. They can still alter course.” Will they? I suppose that’s up to them.

(Oh, and by the way, my favorite paper from the 2022 AERA conference? “When All Your Hurtful Yesterdays Become All My Gendered Tomorrows”: Transgressive Ontologies Disrupting the Heteronormative Praxis Posed by a Post-Foulcauldian, Neo-Ravitchian Autoethnography of the Lived Lives of Three Indigenous Culture-walkers in a Neo-liberal Dystopia.)

-Frederick Hess

This post originally appeared on Rick Hess Straight Up.

More than 40 states have now signed onto the Common Core standards in English language arts and math, which have been both celebrated as a tremendous advance and criticized as misguided and for bearing the heavy thumbprint of the federal government. Assessing the merits of the Common Core math standards are Ze’ev Wurman and W. Stephen Wilson. Wurman, who was a U.S. Department of Education official under George W. Bush, is coauthor with Sandra Stotsky of “Common Core’s Standards Still Don’t Make the Grade” (Pioneer Institute, 2010). Wilson is a professor of mathematics at Johns Hopkins University, served on the National Governors Association-Council of Chief State School Officers “feedback group” for the Common Core standards, and was mathematics author of Stars by which to Navigate? Scanning National and International Education Standards in 2009: An Interim Report on Common Core, NAEP, TIMSS, and PISA.

Education Next: Are the Common Core math standards “fewer, higher, and clearer” than most state standards today? Can you provide some specific examples where you think the Common Core marks a step forward or backward?

Ze’ev Wurman: Common Core standards may in fact be clearer and more demanding than many, though not all, of the state standards they replaced. The Fordham Institute reviewed them last year and found them so. While I have no reason to doubt the technical quality of that review, there is good cause to note what it does not say.

Ze’ev Wurman

It does not say that Common Core standards are fewer. Indeed, if one compares them to the better state mathematics standards like those of Minnesota or California, they are more numerous. Minnesota’s standards fill 42 pages and California’s 59 pages, while the Common Core takes 73 pages even without the advanced statistics or calculus sections that are included in California’s standards. Counting the standards rather than pages, in grades 1 to 4 California has, on average, a few more standards than Common Core, but in grades 5‒8 the Common Core standards are more numerous than California’s.

Fordham’s review does not unequivocally say the standards are higher, either. They may be higher than some state standards but they are certainly lower than the best of them. For example, the 2008 report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, Foundations for Success, called for fluency in addition and subtraction of whole numbers by the end of grade 3, and fluency in multiplication and division by the end of grade 5. This is also what California calls for, along with high achievers like Singapore and Korea. (Japan and Hong Kong finish with multiplication and division of whole numbers even earlier, by grade 4.) Yet the Common Core defers fluency in division to grade 6. Fractions are touted as the Common Core’s greatest strength, yet the Common Core pushes teaching division of fractions to grade 6 without ever expecting students to master working with a mix of fractions and decimals. Students in Singapore, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong achieve fluency in fractions and decimals in grade 5.

Nor are the Common Core standards necessarily clearer. They may be clearer than many state mathematics standards, but they still tend to be wordy and hard to read. Table 1 compares a few grade 4 California standards with their Common Core counterparts.

Andrew Porter, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education, recently evaluated the Common Core standards with his colleagues, and their conclusion was stark:

Those who hope that the Common Core standards represent greater focus for U.S. education will be disappointed by our answers. Only one of our criteria for measuring focus found that the Common Core standards are more focused than current state standards…Some state standards are much more focused and some much less focused than is the Common Core, and this is true for both subjects.

We also used international benchmarking to judge the quality of the Common Core standards, and the results are surprising both for mathematics and for [ELA].… High-performing countries’ emphasis on “perform procedures” runs counter to the widespread call in the United States for a greater emphasis on higher-order cognitive demand.

Another recent analysis, by University of Southern California professor Morgan Polikoff, found the Common Core mathematics standards similarly repetitive, and hence as unfocused across elementary grades as the state content standards they attempt to replace, with only somewhat less redundancy in the middle grades.

In summary, analyses of the Common Core standards find them to be mediocre and not obviously better than many sets of state standards.

W. Stephen Wilson

W. Stephen Wilson: It turns out that nearly everyone was in favor of Common Core standards in mathematics if, and this is a big if, they got to write them. As it turns out, no one got to write the standards. A committee wrote them. Worse, the committee was hired by the very states whose standards would be replaced, so states got first crack at suggesting “corrections” to the standards. The pressures on the writing committee must have been enormous. The only reasonable expectation was that the result would resemble some sort of middle way between the states’ various standards. What is surprising is that the standards don’t rank in terms of quality in the middle 20 percent of state standards, but, instead, fall in the top 20 percent.

There is much to criticize about them, and there are several sets of standards, including those in California, the District of Columbia, Florida, Indiana, and Washington, that are clearly better. Yet Common Core is vastly superior—not just a little bit better, but vastly superior—to the standards in more than 30 states.

Where this gap is most obvious, and most important, is in laying the foundation for college readiness in mathematics early, by grade 6 or 7. Judging by state standards, few people see a connection between elementary school mathematics and college math, let alone really understand how the foundation is built.

Arithmetic is the foundation. Arithmetic has to be a priority, and it has to be done right. A number of things can and do go wrong with state standards for arithmetic in elementary school.

With the introduction of calculators, many states have downplayed the importance of arithmetic, apparently not realizing its true educational value. Instead, they spend time on statistics and probability, both of which Common Core has tossed out of early elementary school. Another thing that states love is geometric slides, turns, and flips, sometimes presented every year in grades K‒11, perhaps under the mistaken belief that they are really doing mathematics.

Fewer than 15 states are explicit about the need for students to know the single-digit number facts (think multiplication tables) to the point of instant recall. States love to have kids figure out many ways to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but often leave off the capstone standard of fluency with the standard algorithms (traditional step-by-step procedures for the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division of whole numbers). For example, only seven states expect students to know explicitly the standard algorithm for whole number multiplication. Fractions are even harder to find done well. Standards for fractions are generally so vague that nearly everything is left to the reader. Often states expect students to develop their own strategies or a variety of strategies for dealing with fractions. For example, only 15 states mention common denominators. Common Core does a pretty good job with arithmetic, even a very good job with fractions.

EN: Will the Common Core put an end to what has sometimes been termed the “math wars”? In your view, do the math standards resemble those recommended by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and what do you make of that similarity (or lack thereof)?

WSW: The end of the math wars! You must be joking.

There will always be people who think that calculators work just fine and there is no need to teach much arithmetic, thus making career decisions for 4th graders that the students should make for themselves in college. Downplaying the development of pencil and paper number sense might work for future shoppers, but doesn’t work for students headed for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields.

There will always be the anti-memorization crowd who think that learning the multiplication facts to the point of instant recall is bad for a student, perhaps believing that it means students can no longer understand them. Of course this permanently slows students down, plus it requires students to think about 3rd-grade mathematics when they are trying to solve a college-level problem.

There will always be the standard algorithm deniers, the first line of defense for those who are anti-standard algorithms being just deny they exist. Some seem to believe it is easier to teach “high-level critical thinking” than it is to teach the standard algorithms with understanding. The standard algorithms for adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers are the only rich, powerful, beautiful theorems you can teach elementary school kids, and to deny kids these theorems is to leave kids unprepared. Avoiding hard mathematics with young students does not prepare them for hard mathematics when they are older.

There will always be people who believe that you do not understand mathematics if you cannot write a coherent essay about how you solved a problem, thus driving future STEM students away from mathematics at an early age. A fairness doctrine would require English language arts (ELA) students to write essays about the standard algorithms, thus also driving students away from ELA at an early age. The ability to communicate is NOT essential to understanding mathematics.

There will always be people who think that you must be able to solve problems in multiple ways. This is probably similar to thinking that it is important to teach creativity in mathematics in elementary school, as if such a thing were possible. Forget creativity; the truly rare student is the one who can solve straightforward problems in a straightforward way.

There will always be people who think that statistics and probability are more important than arithmetic and algebra, despite the fact that you can’t do statistics and probability without arithmetic and algebra and that you will never see a question about statistics or probability on a college placement exam, thus making statistics and probability irrelevant for college preparation.

There will always be people who think that teaching kids to “think like a mathematician,” whether they have met a mathematician or not, can be done independently of content. At present, it seems that the majority of people in power think the three pages of Mathematical Practices in Common Core, which they sometimes think is the “real” mathematics, are more important than the 75 pages of content standards, which they sometimes refer to as the “rote” mathematics. They are wrong. You learn Mathematical Practices just like the name implies; you practice mathematics with content.

There will always be people who think that teaching kids about geometric slides, flips, and turns is just as important as teaching them arithmetic. It isn’t. Ask any college math teacher.

The end of the math wars! You must be joking.

ZW: Math wars erupted as a result of the unfocused and mostly math-less 1989 NCTM standards. NCTM rewrote those terrible standards in 2000, yet much of what mathematicians found objectionable remained in place. Only in 2005, with the publication in Notices of the AMS [American Mathematical Society] of “Reaching for Common Ground in K–12 Mathematics Education,” did the two sides make a serious attempt to bridge the chasm. NCTM followed shortly with its 2006 Curriculum Focal Points, a document that finally focused on what mathematics is all about: mathematics. Since then, NCTM seems to have regressed, as evidenced by its 2009 publication Focus in High School Mathematics, a document that is full of high-minded prose yet contains little rigor or specificity.

The Common Core mathematics standards are grade-by-grade‒specific and hence are more detailed than the NCTM 2000 standards, but they do resemble them in setting their sights lower than our international competitors, by, for example, locking algebra into the high school curriculum.

And they contain inexplicable holes even when compared to the much shorter NCTM Curriculum Focal Points, the major one being the absence of fraction conversion among their multiple representations (simple, decimal, percent). Other puzzling omissions include geometry basics such as derivation of area of general triangles or the concept of pi. One can argue those can be inferred, but the same can be said regarding all those state standards we acknowledge as “bad”—that all those missing pieces “can be inferred.”

What to make of such obvious deficiencies and omissions? Unfortunately, the main authors of the Common Core mathematics standards had minimal prior experience with writing standards, and it shows. While they may have had a long and distinguished list of advisers, they did not seem to have sufficient experience to select the wheat from the chaff. How, otherwise, can one explain their selecting an experimental approach to geometry, teaching it on the basis of rigid motions, that has not been successfully tried anywhere in the world? Simple prudence and an ounce of experience would tell them either to stick to what is known to work or to recommend a trial phase before foisting it sight-unseen on a nation of 300 million.

EN: How do the Common Core math standards compare to those in use in the world’s highest-performing nations? Crucially, on what do you base that assessment?

ZW: It is not difficult to show that the Common Core standards are not on par with those of the highest-performing nations.

Here is what Professor R. James Milgram of Stanford, the only professional mathematician on the Common Core Validation Committee, wrote when he declined to sign off on the Common Core standards:

This is where the problem with these standards is most marked. While the difference between these standards and those of the top states at the end of eighth grade is perhaps somewhat more than one year, the difference is more like two years when compared to the expectations of the high achieving countries—particularly most of the nations of East Asia.

And here is what a non-American member of the Validation Committee wrote to the Council of Chief State School Officers when declining to validate the standards:

I cannot in all conscience, endorse statements 2 and 3 [(2) Appropriate in terms of their level of clarity and specificity; (3) Comparable to the expectations of other leading nations] The standards are, in my view, much more detailed, and, as Jim Milgram has pointed out, are in important respects less demanding, than the standards of the leading nations.

We also have it straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Professor William McCallum, one of the three main writers of the Common Core mathematics standards, speaking at the annual conference of mathematics societies in 2010, said,

While acknowledging the concerns about front-loading demands in early grades, [McCallum] said that the overall standards would not be too high, certainly not in comparison [with] other nations, including East Asia, where math education excels.

Jonathan Goodman, a professor of mathematics at the Courant Institute at New York University, found exactly that: “The proposed Common Core standard is similar in earlier grades but has significantly lower expectations with respect to algebra and geometry than the published standards of other countries.”

It is also worth mentioning that the standards, in addition to being “[c]omparable to the expectations of other leading nations,” were also supposed to be “[r]eflective of the core knowledge and skills in ELA and mathematics that students need to be college- and career-ready.” That is, at least, what the other Common Core Validation Committee members certified when they signed off on the standards in 2010.

College readiness is defined by what colleges require as prerequisites from their incoming freshmen. The enrollment requirements of four-year state colleges overwhelmingly consist of at least three years of high school mathematics including algebra 1, algebra 2, and geometry, or beyond. Yet Common Core’s “college readiness” definition omits content typically considered part of algebra 2 (and geometry), such as complex numbers, vectors, trigonometry, polynomial identities, the Binomial Theorem, logarithms, logarithmic and exponential functions, composite and inverse functions, matrices, ellipses and hyperbolae, and a few more.

What should we make, then, of a recent study purporting to “validate” that Common Core standards indeed reflect college readiness? The study, led by David Conley, was published more than a year after Common Core standards were already certified as college-ready by…David Conley as a member of the Common Core Validation Committee. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, he doth attest too much.

In summary, the Common Core mathematics standards fail on clarity and rigor compared to better state standards and to those of high-achieving countries. They do not expect algebra to be taught in grade 8 and instead defer it to high school, reversing the most significant change in mathematics education in America in the last decade, supported by the 2008 recommendations of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, and contrary to the practice of our international competitors. Moreover, their promise of college readiness rings hollow. Its college-readiness standards are below the admission requirement of most four-year state colleges.

WSW: When you are so far behind, comparing the United States with better-performing countries through the incredibly narrow lens of standards doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think Common Core is in the same ball park, certainly not up there with the best of countries, but Common Core isn’t up there with the best state standards either, and what does that mean? Look at California’s standards for example. They are great standards and have been unchanged for over a decade, but many in math education hate them. They think they are all about rote mathematics, but I think such people have little understanding of mathematics.

So, let’s just pretend for a moment that Common Core is just as good as the very best. Who, in education circles, will agree with that enough to put it all in practice? The standard algorithm deniers will teach multiple ways to multiply numbers and mention the standard algorithm one day in passing. Korea will say “no calculators” in K–12, a little extreme perhaps, but some in the U.S. will say “appropriate tools” means calculators in 4th grade. We, in this country, are still not on the same page about what content is most important, even if everyone says they’ll take Common Core. Without a unified, concerted effort to teach real mathematics, there isn’t much chance of catching up.

In other countries, if you say “learn to multiply whole numbers,” no one questions how this should be done; students should learn and understand the standard algorithm. In the U.S., even if you say “learn to multiply whole numbers with the standard algorithm,” some people will declare wiggle room and try to avoid the standard algorithm.

There is one big hope for our international competitiveness. Other countries see that their best STEM students come to the U.S. for graduate school—more than half of our STEM graduate students are foreign—and to start high-tech companies. Instead of thinking that this is possible because of their strong K–12 mathematics education, they erroneously conclude that they should adopt our version of K–12 mathematics education. We just might catch up with these countries without any effort on our part.

EN: What, then, are your main areas of disagreement?

WSW: Ze’ev refers to Andrew Porter’s work to support his argument that Common Core lacks focus. In the corrected version of Porter’s paper, he says that 39.55 percent of grades 3‒6 coarse-grained topics for the states are on Number Sense and Operations, but Common Core gets 55.47 percent. To me, that says that Common Core focuses on arithmetic in grades where arithmetic should be the focus, and that the states did not focus on arithmetic.

My only serious disagreement with Ze’ev is his summary that “analyses of Common Core standards find them to be mediocre and not obviously better than many sets of state standards.” If Common Core is mediocre, then mediocre is being set at a high standard. There are many states that set a very different, and much lower, standard for mediocre.

ZW: Steve sees the benefit of having Common Core standards that are better than those of “more than 30 states,” while I see the disadvantage of confining the whole nation to mediocre standards that are worse than those of highly rated states and high-achieving countries.

Taking this a step further, I believe the Common Core marks the cessation of educational standards improvement in the United States. No state has any reason left to aspire for first-rate standards, as all states will be judged by the same mediocre national benchmark enforced by the federal government. Moreover, there are organizations that have reasons to work for lower and less-demanding standards, specifically teachers unions and professional teacher organizations. While they may not admit it, they have a vested interest in lowering the accountability bar for their members. With Common Core, they have a single target to aim for, rather than 50 distributed ones. So give it some time and, as sunset follows sunrise, we will see even those mediocre standards being made less demanding. This will be done in the name of “critical thinking” and “21st-century” skills, and in faraway Washington D.C., well beyond the reach of parents and most states and employers.

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.

According to Stern,

On a battery of reading tests, the kindergartners in the Core Knowledge program had achieved gains five times greater than those of students in the control group. The second-year study showed that the Core Knowledge kids made reading gains twice as great as those of students in the control group.

This is no surprise to fans of E.D. Hirsch, whose research over the last 25 years (from Cultural Literacy (1987) to The Making of Americans (2010)), has shown that teaching children a wide-ranging but comprehensive content heavy curriculum actually improves reading more than teaching reading skills does.  As Robert Pondiscio of the Core Knowledge Foundation explains it,

Two large (and largely overlooked) problems remain at the root of the reading crisis:  a lack of a coherent elementary school curriculum, and a stubborn insistence on teaching and testing reading comprehension as a how-to “skill.”  Comprehension is highly correlated with general knowledge—the more you know, the greater your ability to read, write, speak and listen with fluency and comprehension.  Thus an essential component of reading comprehension instruction must be a focused commitment to build broad background knowledge in a coherent manner from the earliest days of schools–precisely what CKLA seeks to do.

Stern emphasizes,

Among Hirsch’s insights is that disadvantaged kids quickly fall behind in reading because of inadequate background knowledge; therefore, imparting such knowledge in the early grades is even more important than conveying basic reading skills.

Coincidentally, Stern’s Daily News op-ed was published at the same time as a front-page story in Education Week reported a new push to improve P-2 reading. Unfortunately, though, according to Catherine Gewertz’s account, the increased efforts in these lower grades seem to emphasize the same skill-oriented approaches that have proven so unsuccessful in the higher grades. Indeed, despite Herculean efforts and many millions of dollars spent to improve reading skills (drill-and-kill phonics, etc.), the National Assessment of Educational Progress 4^th- and 8^th-grade reading scores have been flat for 30 years – flat at very low levels. As Gewertz points out, the latest NAEP (2009) showed that “only one-third of 4^th graders scored at or above `proficient.’”

It is discouraging that our education system seems so blind to good ideas.  As Stern writes about the Gotham experiment, “Keeping this potential breakthrough alive would cost a mere $300,000 per year – which seems a far smarter investment than the $70 million paid in bonuses to teachers and principals who produced zero reading gains.”

Let’s hope that New York City will see the light.  More importantly, let’s hope that educators all over the country start to realize that planting healthy content seeds will a produce a bumper crop of good readers.

–Peter Meyer

Now he’s “applying to the Ivies” to complete his undergraduate degree, he says.

A century ago, often under pressure from labor unions, states passed seat-time and mandatory-attendance laws that compelled youngsters to stay in school, and out of the competition for jobs. The laws haven’t changed much today, but kids have, and by their midteens, many of them—bored with high school or academically beyond it—are ready for the next step.

The states’ almost uniform response has been dual-enrollment programs. Kids remain in high school but are able to take college courses at the same time. Almost every state has some sort of dual-enrollment policy, and 12 states require their school districts and public postsecondary schools to work out dual-enrollment partnerships, according to the Education Commission of the States (ECS). The U.S. Department of Education reported in 2005 that 98 percent of community colleges and 77 percent of public four-year colleges were taking part in dual-enrollment programs.

Universities and private colleges have long accepted gifted students and ambitious high schoolers under all sorts of arrangements. Among other reasons, colleges have viewed dual enrollment as a way to recruit and retain the brightest young students in the area. But in 1985, starting in Minnesota, states began looking at dual enrollment as a way to prepare even average students for college and to move nonacademic-minded kids into career and technical education. Some 5,300 high schoolers attended classes at 65 public, private, technical, community, and extension campuses under Minnesota’s Post-Secondary Enrollment Options Program in 2008–09, it reported on its web site.

Today, as legislators see it, dual enrollment offers something for everyone: academic enrichment for kids who have maxed out the honors and accelerated classes their schools offer; a glimpse of college rigor for high school laggards; and a leg up on a career for those who enroll in trade programs. Not incidentally, dual enrollment promises to speed youngsters through college and into the workforce, cutting college costs for parents and taxpayers alike.

But in their rush to get high schoolers into college, legislators are setting some up for disappointment. With state education budgets perpetually strapped, many states haven’t provided money to pay the college tuition. That leaves youngsters and their parents to pick up the bill, or high schools and colleges to swallow the cost.

Under federal law, youngsters who don’t have a high school diploma can’t apply for student loans, grants, and scholarships. Michael Jokl is paying his own tuition—$1,100 per calculus course—by mentoring fellow math students, grading papers for a math professor, and, on weekends, babysitting. He has a 25-mile one-way commute, is on campus daily from 9 AM to 3 PM, and then goes home to finish work on his home-school curriculum.

The Ivies, he says, may in some ways be easier than high school.

The Talented Tenth

Standardized test scores suggest that the country’s brightest youngsters are stuck in an academic rut: The 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress shows that reading and math scores for the brightest 10 percent of 12th graders have barely budged in the past five years. Still, there’s evidence that many kids are eager for a challenge, and more than up to it (see “Challenging the Gifted,” features, Spring 2011). Sixteen percent of last year’s SAT takers had crammed more than four years of math into high school and 10 percent took more than four years of natural science.

About 240,000 youngsters in grades 4 through 8 take part in university-sponsored talent searches each year. As early as 7th grade, students may take a college-entrance exam in hopes of gaining access to college-level enrichment programs. Of the 67,000 7th graders who took the exams at Duke University’s Talent Identification Program last year, 50 earned the highest possible score on one or more sections of the SAT or ACT. More than 4,200 kids who were in 8th grade or lower took the College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) exams in 2010; 22 percent of them scored a five, the highest possible score.

When academic challenges are available, “students are taking advantage of them,” says Martha Putallaz, executive director of Duke’s talent program, which has added new summer programs to meet the demand, and still has a waiting list of more than 1,000 kids.

There are probably several reasons for all of this, including the competition for college admission and scholarships. But Dr. Putallaz and others also blame federal and state policies that pressure schools to concentrate their resources on getting children to minimal math and reading competencies. That means high school is often a fairly dismal place for faster learners.

One day last December, I visited Mooresville High School, a half-hour’s drive west of Indianapolis and firmly in farm country, to meet Maggie Page, who has a 4.0 grade-point average and will be the school’s 2011 valedictorian. Debra Page, Maggie’s mother and Mooresville High’s guidance counselor, sat with us. Mooresville seemed to me to offer lots of options for ambitious learners, including AP courses in seven subjects. Teachers from Ivy Tech, the statewide community college, teach psychology, sociology, and math in the evening. Mooresville High faculty who have been certified by Indiana University at Bloomington to teach the IU curriculum offer four history and English courses. Ivy Tech has certified Mooresville teachers in two English classes.

Still, eager to get started on a nursing degree, Maggie took three courses through SPAN (IUPUI’s Special Programs for Academic Nurturing) beginning in 10th grade and earned a 4.0 on those, too. As we talked, Maggie, who is 18, rolled her eyes at the suffusive busy work and rules of high school, and at the minimal challenge of many classes. “I’m only learning in a few of my classes,” she said.

Debra Page agreed with her daughter about the lack of challenge for the school’s brightest students. “We do them a disservice,” she said.

A Special Program

IUPUI started its dual-enrollment program in 1984 when the director of the university’s honors programs opened liberal arts classes to gifted and talented kids. Since then, the university—which is a health-sciences partnership between Indiana and Purdue—has opened all of its undergraduate schools to the most able youngsters and claims to be the only Indiana university that does.

SPAN enrolls about 200 youngsters each semester and 300 in total each year. Most are high school seniors, but this year there also are two 13-year-olds and a 9-year-old who’s taking second-year physics. Most are boys: “Girls want to stay at high school with their friends,” says Dr. Johnny Russell, SPAN’s executive director. Half are home schoolers; the other half come from 61 area private and public schools, mostly in the suburbs. Kids typically take only a course or two per year, but three youngsters have earned more than 80 academic credits, or enough to make them second-semester juniors when they eventually enroll as undergraduates.

Growing up in central Indiana, Russell says he was “one of those kids they didn’t know what to do with,” too precocious for his tiny school district to accommodate, but kept in high school by state laws that typically require kids to sit through 40 or so courses to graduate. Accountability measures and stretched school budgets are only making things tougher for the brightest kids, he adds. School curricula “shoot for the middle,” and school resources increasingly are spent getting struggling students just to average. “The upper 2 percent, they’re falling by the wayside,” he says. They’re bored, they dread school, they’re often discipline problems, “their academics begin to stagnate and stall.”

Russell talks about “the glimmer of hope” that youngsters experience when they come to SPAN, and “the excitement, the zeal” they feel when they get to do college work. The youngsters I spoke with didn’t put it quite that colorfully, but they did speak of the satisfaction of knowing they were learning and were doing what they called “productive” work.

SPAN requires the youngest students to show some evidence of giftedness: IQ or SAT scores, participation in talent-search programs, recommendations from teachers or IUPUI professors. But even then, Russell turns down some who aren’t socially ready for college. “This is not a proving ground,” he told me. “If they fail here, it will haunt them.”

Entrance criteria are grades, not college-entrance exam scores, for older kids: Russell’s standard is “As, some Bs, no Cs.” Home schoolers take the ACT to qualify. And everyone must maintain a 3.3 IUPUI grade average to stay in SPAN.

Russell places no more than two SPAN youngsters in any IUPUI class: “If there are three of them, they huddle together,” he says. He gets concurrence from the professor before assigning a particularly young child to a class, but faculty otherwise aren’t told when they’re teaching, say, an 11th grader.

One afternoon, I visited Crispus Attucks Medical Magnet High School near downtown Indianapolis to meet Robert Hawthorne, who will graduate from the public school this spring with a 4.3 GPA and 45 IUPUI credits, including credits in engineering physics, Calculus I and II, multidimensional math, and guitar. Hawthorne, who is 17, had exchanged his khakis and polo shirt, the school uniform, for jeans and a T-shirt to attend his IUPUI class. “To blend in,” he explained. Now, back in high school, he had changed back to khakis. “This goes on all day long,” sighed Morris Weyand, who oversees the SPAN students at Crispus Attucks.

The Big Picture

Dual-enrollment policies and participation patterns vary widely across states, and programs designed explicitly for advanced students are a small fraction of the total. Most dual enrollment courses are taught in high school classrooms by high school teachers who have received some training and certification by their university or community-college partner and follow its curriculum. Others are online or are televised into high school classrooms.

Pennsylvania, which appropriated $10 million in 2008–09 for dual enrollment, lists modest goals for its program in an online description: giving high schoolers exposure to college-level work, helping minorities, and providing troubled students with “a fresh start on learning.” Pennsylvania counted 17,930 participants in 2008–09, a leap of 24 percent from the year before. Florida, in an online report, says that 37,000 of its high schoolers were in dual-enrollment classes last academic year. For the most part, these kids aren’t studying differential equations and congregating in ivy-covered halls. Florida requires only a B average for its students to enroll in college-credit courses and a C for career-certification classes.

Florida’s dual-enrollment legislation, passed in 2006, expansively assured high schoolers they could attend classes at career centers, community colleges, or state universities, but then added language instructing school boards to offer dual-enrollment courses on high school campuses “whenever possible.” Only Georgia and Wisconsin require that dual-enrollment courses be held on college campuses, and no state requires that college professors do the teaching, according to ECS.

Course credits aren’t always transferable. Only 15 states require their public universities to accept dual-enrollment transfer credits; even then, the requirement doesn’t carry across state lines. IUPUI’s Dr. Russell says that his SPAN students have been able to transfer all of the credits they earned at IUPUI to other colleges, although students told me that they don’t apply to some Ivy League schools that they know won’t accept their credits.

Credit transfer is less assured when credits come from dual-enrollment classes taught at high schools or community colleges, as the quality of these courses is not always easy to determine.

Who Pays?

The stickiest issue is who pays for the classes. A few states split their per-pupil funding between the high school and college. A Michigan college that enrolls a high schooler for two courses, for example, gets $2,279 of the youngster’s $6,875 foundation allowance; the high school keeps the rest, Michigan advises schools, using an online  calculator to do the math. Other states lay the cost on the school district, college, or state board of education. In 22 states, it’s up to kids or their parents to pay for college courses.

Washington State calculated that its Running Start dual-enrollment program—in which colleges are reimbursed for tuition by school districts—saved parents $17.4 million in tuition in 2001 and taxpayers $34.7 million, presumably because youngsters were able to cut the time they spent in college by a semester or two if they didn’t have to take Composition 101 and Introduction to American History twice.

Indiana allows colleges to waive dual-enrollment tuition, but otherwise is mute on funding. An IUPUI class averages $1,000 per semester, plus the costs of the commute. IUPUI pays $250,000 a year in tuition for SPAN students from Crispus Attucks, who account for 41 of the program’s 300 youngsters this year. A few other Indianapolis schools scrape together grant money for tuition and even books and transport for their SPAN students. But in inner-city schools, “principals tell me not to dangle SPAN in front of their kids if we can’t provide funding,” Russell said.

Courses taught at high schools cost far less than those taught on campus, but the expense is still considerable. At Mooresville High, a course taught by an Indiana University–certified high-school teacher costs students $248, says Debra Page, the guidance counselor. A class taught by an Ivy Tech–certified high-school teacher requires kids to buy about $200 in books. A night class taught by Ivy Tech faculty costs $300.

The dual-enrollment credits carry extra weight when it comes to calculating a student’s GPA, and that has set off a debate about equity in Mooresville, a town of 11,000 people with a median family income of $48,000. “People say you’re buying your class rank,” Page explains.

Room for Improvement

Even a targeted and successful program like SPAN has its challenges. For kids in their sociable teen years, attending classes on a college campus can be isolating. SPAN youngsters told me they never cross paths with one another. Dual-enrollment students often can’t join campus clubs, buy sports passes, or use the gyms.

Michael Jokl, whose four brothers and sisters also attended IUPUI through SPAN (they’re now  at Brown University, Purdue, Butler University, and the Florida Atlantic University Honors College), said he can’t apply even for math-department academic awards until he has a high school diploma. He also is disqualified from an overseas-study scholarship that’s available to other IUPUI students who, like him, mentor other students.

As a recruiting tool, SPAN has given IUPUI little to show for its investment, which Russell fears may be dampening the university’s enthusiasm: Only about 10 percent of SPAN students enroll as undergrads at IUPUI. Sharee Wilson, assistant dean of academic affairs, says the university can’t match the scholarship offers of private colleges that want such eager learners.

For their part, high schools aren’t always eager to see their brightest students opt out of AP classes for a dual-enrollment program. School ratings—and therefore, teacher bonuses—depend in part on how many AP classes they offer, how many kids enroll, and how well they score on the AP exam. Moreover, school district policies sometimes don’t allow youngsters to leave campus during the day.

Robert Faulkens, who until January was principal at Crispus Attucks, railed to me about institutional barriers that prevent youngsters from moving on when they’re academically ready. “We shouldn’t be putting up barriers,” he said. “We should be accelerating these kids to achieve their potential.”

It’s our goal for low achievers, after all. Why not high achievers, too?

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

Update: Michael Jokl received acceptance letters from Brown and Stanford, and will be attending Stanford this fall.

Education Next talks with Richard A. Epstein, Daniel Pianko, Jon Schnur, and Joshua Wyner

For a decade, at least since the passage of No Child Left Behind, the nation’s foremost education goal has been to erase achievement “gaps” in which African American, Latino, and low-income students dramatically lag behind their peers. This emphasis has enjoyed broad support through the Bush and Obama administrations, and from major funders, but it raises the question of whether high achievers and gifted students have been overlooked along the way. Has a focus on reading and math proficiency, and on boosting graduation rates, meant less attention and support for the “talented tenth”? Richard A. Epstein, professor of law at New York University School of Law and senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, and Daniel Pianko, a partner at University Ventures Fund, argue that high achievers have paid a high price for our attention to struggling students. Jon Schnur, chairman of the board of New Leaders for New Schools, and Joshua Wyner, of the Aspen Institute, see no tension, and argue that equity-focused efforts to improve teaching and learning benefit students across the board.

Education Next: Is the education of the most able students in the United States being shortchanged? What evidence would you cite to support your position?

Jon Schnur

Jon Schnur and Joshua Wyner: Too many of our students at every achievement level are being shortchanged. Based solely on their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, there are students at high, middle, and low levels of achievement who are not receiving the educational challenges they need to succeed and excel. While we have a growing and important number of small-scale breakthrough successes in American education, recently announced Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) results and other analyses show that we have performance gaps for our students at all levels of achievement relative to their peers internationally.

According to the 2009 PISA results, the U.S. ranked 14th in reading, 25th in math, and 17th in science among the 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic

Joshua Wyner

Co-operation and Development) countries. When we unpack these data, we see that U.S. students perform well below the standard of readiness for college and/or careers, regardless of where they fall on the achievement continuum.

Meanwhile, within the United States, modest advances in the number of students achieving proficiency have not been accompanied by similar increases in the number of students from all backgrounds achieving at advanced levels. In a 2008 study, Tom Loveless found that from 2000 to 2007 our nation’s highest-performing 10 percent of students made much smaller gains on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) than our lowest-achieving 10 percent. A similar trend existed in some grades and subjects during the prior decade (see Figure 1). We need to make dramatically greater progress to help more students reach and remain at the highest level of achievement.

While race- and income-based gaps are narrowing to some extent (especially in the earlier grades), four common but faulty assumptions could block progress toward closing these and other serious achievement gaps:

First, while most American schools will have to improve for our nation to reach internationally competitive education levels, many Americans assume that performance gaps exist only in someone else’s community or schools.  In a 2010 PDK/Gallup poll, only 18 percent of Americans surveyed graded our public schools nationally at an “A” or “B.”  By contrast, 77 percent of public school parents gave their oldest child’s school an A or B, a percentage that grew by eight points over the prior five years. To offset such misperceptions, we need to require that all schools in all districts report student performance—and calculate achievement gaps—using the same, internationally benchmarked standards.

Second, some mistakenly assume that a “talented tenth” strategy should focus on the schools and communities that already tend to achieve at the highest levels. The 2008 Achievement Trap study (Jack Kent Cooke Foundation) shows that low-income

students are less likely than other students to reach or remain at advanced levels of education at every grade. Access to rigorous coursework is unevenly distributed across American high schools, as shown by national audits of AP classes conducted by the College Board. And recent reports show that the fastest-growing gap between black and white students is at advanced levels of achievement. This is not surprising in some ways, given problems in current educational practice: we tend to provide less funding, have fewer outstanding teachers and principals, and require less rigorous coursework in schools that serve lower-income students. Not only is this grossly unfair, but our nation’s economic competitiveness, given both the larger populations of countries like China and India and our rapidly increasing diversity, will depend on our tapping students from all backgrounds in order to supply the innovators, engineers, and leaders we need to succeed.

The promising news is that we know the potential to achieve at the most advanced levels is distributed widely. The growin

g number of schools successfully serving low-income students provides hard evidence that when these students have access to an excellent education they can reach levels achieved by their affluent peers. When schools and systems aim to improve what matters most, the entire culture and practice in a school building can change. Such schools hold expectations high and ensure teacher and school-leader excellence and effectiveness.

A poorly conceived “talented tenth” initiative risks failing to capitalize on the potential of students of all backgrounds to achieve at the highest levels. To avoid that outcome, we need to dramatically increase the number of high-performing schools serving low-income students.

Third, some assume that students already achieving at the highest levels will be successful without additional educational interventions and progress. But studies show that many students at the most advanced levels don’t stay at that level without intensive work. Moreover, the stagnation of performance among America’s most-advanced students shows the consequences of failing to meet their educational needs.

Finally, some falsely assume that the question is how we split up the existing pie of educational focus. Changing entire systems of education is the best strategy for improving overall performance and increasing the performance of advanced students, while also closing achievement gaps. A 2010 study by Richard Freeman and colleagues shows that countries that perform best on TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) not only have a higher average score, but also have 1) less variation in performance and 2) smaller achievement gaps between different demographic groups. McKinsey & Co.’s most recent education report on how the best school systems improve cites evidence from Singapore, Finland, and elsewhere that improving overall performance can best be accomplished at the same time achievement gaps are closed.

Richard Epstein and Daniel Pianko: Enormous sums of money have been poured into grades K through 12 since 1970. Measured in constant 2007 dollars, the expenditure per pupil in the United States more than doubled, from $4,060 in 1970 to $9,266 in 2008. Over that same period, achievement levels for students at age nine showed a moderate increase. Achievement levels for those aged 17 have been dead-level since 1990 (see Figure 2). A stagnant educational record in the face of massive increases in expenditures means that the current system has the unique distinction of failing both its strongest and its weakest students.

As Hanushek, Peterson, and Woessmann have shown, our best and brightest have been treading water, while other countries have caught up with or passed the United States. The most recent PISA results place the United States 31st of 56 participating countries in the percentage of students achieving at an advanced level in mathematics (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011). These weak numbers complicate the challenge posed by Schnur and Wyner. Unfortunately, not every student can benefit from advanced education, and it could well be that the best way to increase performance is to reduce the number of students included in these programs while continuing to focus on bringing all students to international standards. It is most difficult to broaden a base and increase average quality at the same time.

Richard A. Epstein

Indeed, within the current milieu, one major drawback is that our most able students are not so much “shortchanged” as they are ignored. One telling sign is that the federal government does not impose minimum standards for gifted education, even though the No Child Left Behind law imposes all sorts of mandates to bring up the bottom. Nor does the federal government allocate dollars to gifted education. The one program of note, the Jacob Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Act, has a long title, but its total expenditures were $7.5 million for 2008 out of the roughly $40 billion of allocated federal funds, a drop in the proverbial bucket in a nation where 6 percent of all students, some 3 million, are classified as gifted.

The situation at the state level is so erratic as to be schizophrenic. Illinois, for example, has one statewide test to identify the top math and science students and bring them together in one school. But most states do not allocate any funds specifically for gifted and talented students. New York City runs an extensive system for gifted and talented students, but the special appropriations at the state level are exactly $0. States are hard-strapped for cash, so there is little reason to think that these policies will be reversed with time.

Daniel Pianko

State political leaders realize it is easier to ignore the needs of high-performing students. Tracking students into high-performing schools touches a third rail of racial politics. Unfortunately, it is likely that Caucasian and Asian students would disproportionately obtain places in these elite schools, which in the eyes of some would only widen the achievement gap. While the revolt against tracking students has had limited impact on those needing additional help, our nation has lost out on the long-term gains that gifted students could supply.

EN: In the past two decades, education policy has emphasized closing the achievement gap between low performers and high performers by raising the achievement of the low performers. Have the most-talented students paid a price for this focus?

Epstein & Pianko: Addressing the plight of students who are left behind is a noble, important goal. But the two goals of educating all Americans and providing the talented tenth with the specialized instruction they need do not have to be mutually exclusive. The Holy Grail of educators for the past 20-plus years has been to find ways for students of different abilities and aptitudes to learn at different paces in the same classroom. Educators have developed remarkably effective methods for achieving this goal for the early grades. However, this paradigm starts to break down by the time students reach middle school. The challenges become insuperable by the time students reach high school. The difference between those students capable of doing calculus and those who are barely ready for geometry, is too dramatic for even the ablest teachers to span in one classroom. Either there is separate education, with whatever perceived stigma it might have, or students at both ends of the spectrum will languish.

The real issue is a perception that a focus on gifted programs must automatically detract from children who are not achieving at grade level. To the contrary, the Loveless study cited above offers some support for the proposition that high performers suffer systematically from the focus on closing the achievement gap, while there is limited data that grouping all students together improves the quality of education for struggling students. No Child Left Behind only aggravates the problem because it is directed solely at keeping students and the schools that they attend above some failure line. A 10 percent improvement in the performance of gifted students counts for naught if a tiny fall in the performance of the weakest students puts the school out of compliance with federal standards. As elsewhere in life, you get what you measure and pay for. Policymakers expend virtually all dollars to cluster students above some pass-fail line, not for excellence at the top.

Schnur & Wyner: The answer to both parts of this question is no.

Policies over the past decade have neither substantially harmed nor significantly helped the achievement of our highest-performing students. While we haven’t seen substantial gains for students at advanced levels, there is no evidence to suggest that there have been overall declines, either. Still, we can’t afford stagnation of performance for any of our students.

EN: What policies would you support to ensure America’s future competitiveness and prosperity? Should we target our limited resources to boost literacy and numeracy in the general population or invest in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) and other programs aimed at the “talented tenth”?

Schnur & Wyner: As we argue above, the evidence shows this is a false choice. The data from countries around the world refute the fundamental assumption that we can only do one or the other. The highest-performing countries in the world not only have the highest raw achievement scores, but also the smallest achievement gaps between subgroups within their population. High-functioning education systems that pay attention to the needs of individual students serve all children well. Therefore, it is not a decision about how to target scarce resources to one specific subgroup at the expense of another.

Ultimately, America’s competitive advantage rests on a public education system that pushes beyond the limits of the “talented tenth” paradigm and fully develops the human capital of far more of our students. After all, if we can only rely on our top 10 percent to drive our economy, we’re on a losing path, since China and India are already fielding competitive teams of far greater size.

That’s why we need an education agenda that strategically recruits, retains, and rewards the most effective teachers and principals; that builds incredibly high standards; that develops rigorous and useful assessments to measure progress against those standards; that builds data systems that allow teachers, principals, students, and parents to quickly and conveniently access those data for everyday use; and that focuses on dramatic intervention within our country’s lowest-performing schools. We need an accountability system that holds schools and school systems accountable for all of their students, including the lowest- and highest-achieving.

This comprehensive approach offers the best chance to improve outcomes for every student, from our “talented tenth” to students languishing grade levels behind. It guarantees that we have a system that attracts the best talent to support success, sets clear goals, measures progress toward those goals, gives educators information they can use to improve student outcomes, and demands dramatic action in the face of persistent failure. A few specific policies can help foster this reality:

Raise K–12 standards to assess and drive readiness for success in college and careers. Improve the rigor of what students are taught and build better tools for assessing what they have learned. Tremendous recent progress has been made through adoption of the Common Core by 44 states and the nascent plans of multistate consortia to create better tests of student work that align with the Common Core.

Increase access to the most rigorous courses. Ensure that every high school offers high-quality AP classes in core subjects and that districts prepare students of every racial and socioeconomic group in earlier grades to succeed in AP.

Set targets for advanced learning and measure student growth toward them. Continue the state-by-state efforts to measure the growth of every student. Assiduously collect and report the numbers of advanced learners as well as gaps between subgroups, and hold educators accountable for ensuring that gaps are closed at every level of achievement, including advanced. At the same time, we can’t allow for definitions of academic growth and achievement to focus too narrowly on exams (the approach embodied by NCLB). Instead, we know that students learn, think, operationalize, and develop differently—they all have the potential to serve as our next generation of innovators, entrepreneurs, and scientists.

Adopting these policies can contribute to a culture in which we have high aspirations for every student, hold great expectations for every teacher, and no longer abide the notion that our nation must choose between excellence and equity. In the end, only if we reform our schools at scale to improve teaching practice will we succeed. By driving every education practice toward excellent outcomes for every child, intentionally moving each student from where they are to a much higher level, our nation will be able to realize its ideal of eliminating gaps in education and opportunity and, thereby, regain its place among the world’s education leaders.

Epstein & Pianko: It is a national economic imperative that the United States maintain its (fast-eroding) advantage in innovation, which comes from the talented tenth. There is a tremendous body of research that shows that innovation, which sparks new industries and job creation, originates from the minds of a few. Since we fail to focus attention on increasing the aggregate number of Americans capable of achieving radical innovation or starting new entrepreneurial endeavors, we have likely sacrificed any number of start-ups that could have led to a Fortune 500 company or the next Facebook.

Figuring out how to do this is of course the hardest problem. Schnur and Wyner point to the role of increased standards through the Common Core and the success of certain high-performing schools. The Common Core, even assuming the most robust application, sets a baseline that by definition our future Facebook founders must exceed by orders of magnitude. We agree wholeheartedly that the standards for all students must be raised dramatically, but the opportunities for our highest-achieving students must include coursework that is radically beyond the Common Core.

Fundamentally, we do not accept that this is an “either/or” debate about whether to prioritize low- or high-performing students. We believe that there is a “both/and” solution that drives achievement for all students. All students would benefit from allowing self-directed, advanced learners to take some portion of their coursework online and/or at their own pace. Technology has opened up a remarkably cheap and efficient methodology for providing individually tailored instruction. State and federal policymakers must move decisively to create online programs to expand learning options for all students, including the talented tenth (see “Virtual Schoolteacher,” school life). States and/or the federal government could identify best practices for online skill assessments that all students could take at key break points in their school careers (e.g., 6th grade or 9th grade). Students who score well on such an exam could 1) complete lower-level coursework by learning online at their own pace so they can advance more quickly to higher-level coursework and 2) take advantage of a national network of advanced coursework.

Ideally, students would proceed online at their own pace and have access to in-person teacher assistance as needed. New York City, through its School of One and iZone/iLearn programs, is piloting such a strategy right now. Policymakers should encourage (or push) districts to create similar options for their students by tying Title I and other federal aid programs to initiatives that promote online learning for the most talented students and that also provide physical locations for these students to do their advanced group work. For example, each intermediate unit or district of more than 50,000 students might be required to create math and science academies, which offer a portion of their instruction online, with in-person practical application or advanced work. Allowing students to continue in regular schools for some courses while doing advanced work in others (see “High Schoolers in College,” features) may well be the best solution.

The main finding from the 2008 Survey was a five percent decline in arts participation by Americans.  The percentage of American adults who participated in one way or another in one of the “benchmark” arts activities in the preceding 12 months fell from 39.4 percent in 2002 to 34.6 percent in 2008.

The new report on arts education takes the participation findings from the 2008 report and connects them to other findings regarding arts education.  The Arts Endowment asked researchers at, respectively, the University of Pennsylvania, WolfBrown, and the National Opinion Research Center to analyze the results and draw conclusions about the two areas.  Here is what they said, in the words of Sunil Iyengar, head of the research office at the Endowment:

In their analysis, NORC researchers Nick Rabkin and Eric Hedberg test and ultimately confirm the validity of an assumption made with prior SPPA data, that participation in arts lessons and classes is the most significant predictor of arts participation later in life, even after controlling for other variables.

Plus:

Working along quite different lines, Mark Stern similarly concludes that arts education is the most important known factor in influencing arts participation trends.

This is an important finding for every museum, symphony hall, gallery space, and theater that wishes to boost attendance and support.  It is also crucial for mayors and other local politicians who want to raise the cultural environment of their towns and cities.  If you do not bolster arts education classes in K-12 schools, your arts organizations will continue to lose audience.  Arts course work for Americans at age 10 promotes arts attendance at age 30.

Immediate financial problems demand faster solutions, of course.  It’s hard to think ahead when next year’s budget looks catastrophic.  But if arts organizations wish to survive in the long run, and if political leaders want to take pride in their communities, then they must speak out in support of music, dance, theater, and visual arts in schools nearby.   We remember ancient Athens not only for its democracy and its military.  We also remember it for its drama festivals, which gave the world Sophocles et al.

-Mark Bauerlein

Alex Wade’s field is linguistics. In his search for the perfect language—and “annoyed,” he says, with Esperanto—he has created 10 languages and 30 or 40 alphabets, including one language without verbs, just for the challenge. He’s taking courses at the University of Nevada, Reno, in Basque, linguistics, and microbiology (because he also has a talent for science). And there’s this: Alex is 13.

Taylor Wilson’s field is nuclear chemistry. He has developed a process to detect weapons-grade nuclear material and chemical-warfare agents in shipping containers, a project that has interested the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He spent part of the summer at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, and is now at work on a process to cut the production cost of radioactive isotopes. “I think it has promise,” he says. Taylor is 16.

What’s a school to do with youngsters like Alex Wade and Taylor Wilson, kids who are intellectually years ahead of their age group, their textbooks, the curriculum, and usually their teachers?

When the National Association for Gifted Children (NAGC) surveyed states in 2008 about what they provide in the way of gifted education, it found the answer to be “not much.” At least a dozen states don’t let children start kindergarten early, even if they’re already reading The Aeneid. Two states bar a middle schooler from taking high-school classes. At least 30 states allow only those in 11th and 12th grade to also enroll in college classes. And almost no one will waive mandatory-attendance laws for the 15-year-old who has gotten everything she can out of her high school and itches to move on.

“That’s a mistreatment of students,” says Bob Davidson who, with his wife, Jan, founded, developed, and then sold the company that marketed the hugely successful Math Blaster and Reading Blaster computer software. So, in 2006, the Davidsons started a public school—a public school like no other—on the University of Nevada campus.

The Davidson Academy accepts only youngsters with an IQ of 145 or higher. That puts the 123 kids enrolled here, including Alex Wade and Taylor Wilson, in the 99.9th percentile of their age group. Or as Bob Davidson says, “The likely people to make the big discoveries” in the next generation.

Child Left Ahead

Katie Daw, at age 14, resorts to exasperated sighs to describe her schooling before the Davidson Academy. By 2nd grade, her private-school curriculum wasn’t challenging her, but administrators wouldn’t let her join a math class with older kids. In 3rd grade, she tried home schooling, using 5th- and 6th- grade curricula, but she finished a day’s lessons in 90 minutes. She tried another private school that let her skip a grade, but then “the excluding began,” she says. Why? “I asked a lot of questions,” she replies.

None of that story is particularly unusual, experts in gifted education told me. “For a really bright kid, it would be pretty difficult” to find much challenge in a regular classroom, said Nicholas Colangelo, director of the Belin-Blank Center for Gifted Education and Talent Development at the University of Iowa.

Part of the reason is that even the best school districts struggle with youngsters at the outer edges of the learning continuum. Researchers generally divide truly bright kids into four categories: gifted learners score above 130 on IQ tests, the highly gifted score above 145, the exceptionally gifted above 160, and the profoundly gifted above 175.

By those definitions, Miraca Gross, a professor of gifted education at Australia’s University of New South Wales, calculates that a teacher may encounter a gifted child only every few years. The odds of encountering an exceptionally gifted child during an entire 40-year teaching career are about 1 in 80. Teachers aren’t trained to teach that once-in-a-blue-moon student; they’re taught to accommodate the two-thirds of us who have IQs that fall between 85 and 115, or one standard deviation on either side of 100, the norm.

The bigger issue is whether schools even try to accommodate gifted learners, and researchers in gifted education make it clear that they don’t. Americans are awed by geniuses, especially technology giants like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, whose youthful ideas created entire new industries.

But we’re uncomfortable with the idea of singling out a few kids for special treatment. Our discomfort rises if those kids are suburban whites who already have access to the best schools and widest opportunities. We assume they will learn by themselves (although research suggests that they don’t), or that they have parents who can afford tutors and private lessons to keep them engaged. We’re even more uncomfortable with the idea of grouping youngsters by ability, especially because research suggests that the bright kids in a classroom help pull up the slower learners. “We rub our hands about elitism. It’s the single most difficult nut to crack” in gifted education, Tracy Cross, director of William and Mary’s gifted-education center, told me.

Federal education policy plays into the egalitarian sentiment by prodding the states to narrow the achievement gap between their lowest and highest performers. Since 2000, the gap in reading scores between the highest- and lowest-performing 10 percent of 4th graders has narrowed to 90 points from 103 points on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The results are similar in 8th-grade math.

But that has happened largely because the scores for the brightest kids have barely moved. “Our gifted kids are stagnant,” said Ann Robinson, a professor of gifted education at the University of Arkansas. “When you’re trying to get everybody to proficient, [the ablest learners] are not going to be the policy focus.”

What little attention the brightest do receive may be diminished even more in these tough economic times. In the 2008 NAGC survey of state policies, 18 states reported they don’t provide any money for gifted education, and 7 others noted they fund it only if they have money to spare. The federal government funds just one $7 million program in gifted education, and appropriations panels in both the Senate and House voted  preliminarily this past summer to eliminate even that. Funding gifted education is thus left largely up to school districts, which are hard hit by falling property taxes and looking to cut budgets without reducing the number of kids who get over the minimum-proficiency bar.

Cross, Colangelo, and Robinson all argue that the U.S. should be fanning the learning gap by teaching every youngster to his potential, rather than narrowing it by ignoring youngsters who have reached state minimums. Not because slower learners shouldn’t be helped, they argue, but because faster learners shouldn’t be kept waiting.

Indeed, Cross told me that as part of a research project he once asked 13,000 kids in seven states to describe in one word their experience as gifted children. The most commonly used word, he says, was “waiting.” Waiting for teachers to move ahead, waiting for classmates to catch up, waiting to learn something new—always waiting.

Meet the Davidsons

Bob Davidson says he had his epiphany after reading a newspaper story about a Maryland child who was assigned to kindergarten, even though he had the reading skills of an 11th grader. “Think of that,” says Davidson, slipping into the voice of an imaginary principal lecturing an imaginary parent, “‘We have this rule and you’re not in a position’” to challenge it.

Davidson, at age 67, is tall, gray-haired, fast-talking, and faster moving (his hobby is driving race cars). He earned degrees in chemical engineering, business, and law, and was executive vice president of an engineering concern before becoming CEO of the software company his wife founded. Jan Davidson, who is 66, has a PhD in American studies and is small, blond, and motherly: On a visit to the academy, she busily hugged students in the few minutes between classes. She came up with the idea for the Blaster programs after realizing, in the 1970s, the potential for computers to individualize instruction, she says.

After selling their company in 1997, the Davidsons said they spent two and a half years reading education research and looking for a way to get involved in school reform. Retired to Lake Tahoe, just outside Reno, they decided that gifted education fit their bill: The gifted population was small enough that they could have an effect (people with an IQ above 145 account for 0.13 percent of the population).

It was a group undoubtedly underserved: The federal government requires schools to provide an appropriate education to children with cognitive, physical, and emotional handicaps, but is largely silent about the needs of kids at the upper end of the educational curve. “And importantly to us, this is a population that could give back to society in their adulthood,” Jan Davidson told me.

The Davidsons first launched a young scholars program to provide tutoring and advocacy help for gifted youngsters trying to fight their way through school bureaucracies (the program now is funding 1,700 scholars). They followed that with a summer program that invites youngsters to attend UNR classes for credit. They wrote a book on gifted education, funded research, and awarded college scholarships.

But parents kept asking for a school, and said they would move wherever the Davidsons built it. In 2005, the couple convinced the Nevada legislature to let them launch a public school for what the legislature called the “profoundly gifted” on the Reno campus. The legislation didn’t exempt the Davidson Academy from state reading and math tests or core-curriculum requirements; it didn’t provide any funding, either.

The Davidsons paid the full cost of the school—for 35 kids the first year, 44 the second—until the legislature met again, two years later, and included the academy in the state funding formula. That amounts to $6,439 per student this year, or about $2,000 less, on average, than at other Nevada public schools, which receive money from federal poverty and special-education programs.

The Davidsons pick up the rest of the $18,918 per-student tab. Among other costs, that includes UNR tuition (about one-quarter of Davidson students take UNR classes) and a stipend for chaperones to walk the younger children to and from their university classrooms. In return for an $11 million donation to a new math and science center that bears the Davidsons’ names, the university turned over part of its former student union to the Davidsons, who spent $4 million refitting it with classrooms.

A 145 IQ score gets you an invitation to apply to the academy, but a grueling all-day assessment gets you in. This year, the school took in 39 new students and turned away 50 others. Many of the youngsters are Nevadans, including those whose parents came looking for jobs in Nevada’s boom days or retired to the Silver State. But about 41 percent of students have moved with their families to Nevada, the epicenter of the nation’s housing and employment bust, just to attend the academy.

That’s one reason for a demographically skewed student body (there’s one African American and one Hispanic). The relocation is out of reach for low-income families, those stuck with unsellable houses, and those who can’t find a job in Reno. The academy plans to start a residential program next year, but out-of-state parents will have to pay tuition, room, and board.

The Academy

When I visited the Davidson Academy, three weeks into the fall semester, teacher Alanna Simmons’s critical-theory class already had tackled Henry Louis Gates, Harold Bloom, Edward Said, and now was cheerfully plowing though a printout of a dense Jean-Paul Sartre essay on literature.

There was general bemusement at Sartre’s reference—famous in philosophy circles—to “horses of butter,” and knowing nods when one student quoted Albert Camus insulting Sartre. At Simmons’s request, the nine students, aged 12 to 17, rushed to the white board to record their favorite Sartre quote, and then excitedly dissected each one. “It smells like didactic rhetoric,” someone piped up at one point.

I noticed Daniel Hickox-Young, who is 17 and the school jock, smiling broadly and later I asked him why. “It’s so cool,” he said of literature theory.

Carmen Garcia, the academy’s director of curriculum, teacher training, and admission, told me this is a fairly typical class. The school uses few textbooks because classes move too quickly—“No textbook is going to fit the bill for more than two weeks,” she said—and because students prefer the variety of perspectives that come from reading original sources. “A history textbook; it’s doomed here,” she added.

Classes are grouped by ability rather than age, and Garcia and the teachers devote the first weeks of the school year to assessing each student in each core subject, moving him or her up or down a subject level to assure the best classroom fit. When an American history and government class broke into groups to discuss Aztec leadership, I noticed that a 12-year-old girl in striped knee socks was grouped with a 16-year-old boy who needed a shave. The 12-year-old was more than holding her own.

Davidson classes are small, typically eight or nine students. But this year’s advanced physics class has just two pupils. When Katie Daw at age 10 proved herself too advanced for Algebra 1, but not quite ready for Algebra 2, Davidson gave her a math tutor for the year.

Teachers told me they seldom lecture. “If we try to lecture, these kids are going to get bored,” said Darren Ripley, who has a 10-year-old in one of his calculus classes, a girl he refers to as “a big mind.” Instead, teachers seem to ride the wave of classroom discussion, now and then dipping in a navigational oar. “Sometimes you have to let go and see what’s working at the moment, then try to reel it back,” said Jessica Juriaan, who teaches British and American literature.

Davidson teachers are paid on the same scale as other Reno teachers—from about $45,000 to $67,000 a year—but aren’t union members, don’t get tenure, and aren’t even public employees. Ripley, who is 40, and Juriaan, who is 29, previously taught in Reno public schools and at UNR. Both are working on PhDs, and bristle with energy. I asked them to describe the difference between the Davidson youngsters and their public-school peers.

Juriaan said she teaches the standard literature curriculum, but that her Davidson classes focus on analysis; in her public-school classes, she spent her time helping students comprehend the plot. When I visited her class, her 11 students, aged 12 to 15, were discussing scapegoating and hysteria (Was the Spanish Inquisition a witch hunt? what about the Crusades? the Trail of Tears?) in anticipation of reading The Crucible.

Ripley, who sports a goatee and treats calculus like wicked fun, talked about “the motivation and level of buy-in” among the Davidson kids. “They know why they’re here. They came for a reason,” he said.

No Easy Answer

What does this all mean for the thousands of other gifted students around the country? Tracy Cross and Nicolas Colangelo both told me they doubt that profoundly gifted students can be accommodated in the typical public-school classroom: Like profoundly challenged children, they may need special classes, teachers, and even schools that adapt to their differences.

Davidson’s communications director, Julie Dudley, said the academy receives so many e-mails asking how to start a gifted school that she has worked up a form-letter reply. Most promoters lose interest when they learn they’ll need legislative exemptions to many state education laws, she said. There’s no seat-time requirement at Davidson, for example: Students typically finish seven years of middle and high school in five years.

I asked Davidson teachers and staffers what lessons public schools could take away from the academy. Their answers struck me a lot like the idea of getting rid of seat-time laws: logical, good for kids, and political showstoppers.

• Allow youngsters to accelerate by subject. Colleen Harsin, the academy’s longtime director, proposed that a school group its core classes—hold all math classes during 2nd period, say; all English during 3rd—so students can move up or down according to their ability.

• Promote dual enrollment so youngsters can take classes in both elementary and middle school, middle and high school, high school and college. That may strain transportation budgets, but students will graduate sooner, offsetting the costs.

• Individualize learning. Davidson students each have a learning plan that’s refined during weekly meetings with their advisors, semester meetings with Garcia, and yearly what’s-next meetings with Harsin. That might strain a school of 2,000, but so do discipline problems caused by bored or out-of-their depth youngsters.

• Group students by ability, not age. “You can’t teach to the middle,” Ripley said. “To say we’re all at an Algebra 2 level just isn’t accurate.”

That’s Bob Davidson’s mantra: Ability grouping “may fly in the face of closing the achievement gap,” but neglecting the country’s brightest kids flies in the face of logic. “Don’t stop them,” he says.

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

Over the past eight years, I’ve been privileged to serve as chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, the nation’s largest school district. Working with a mayor who courageously took responsibility for our schools, our department has made significant changes and progress. Along the way, I’ve learned some important lessons about what works in public education, what doesn’t, and what (and who) are the biggest obstacles to the transformative changes we still need.

So what lessons did he learn “along the way”? One is that education is a “service delivery” business. Wow, that’s inspiring to the classroom teacher. But furthermore, Klein’s been saying that for at least seven years.

Second, he claims that “We know how to fix public education. The question is whether we have the political will to do it.” What, now he’s quoting Davis Guggenheim? I’ve already called a Hubris Alert on this one; I’m sorry, Mr. Chancellor, but when just 21 percent of your eighth-grade students are proficient in reading, I think a little more humility is needed.

And finally, and most depressingly, he says this: “Traditional proposals for improving education—more money, better curriculum, smaller classes, etc.—aren’t going to get the job done.” More money and smaller classes, sure, I’m with you, Joel. But better curriculum? Good grief. Klein’s Achilles’ heel has always been curriculum, about which he was proudly (and foolishly) agnostic. It appeared that, a few years ago, he had a conversion experience, when he embraced Core Knowledge and started talking about the need for young children to build their content knowledge. Mr. Klein, I hate to break it to you, but that means putting in place a strong curriculum! We might try that sometime; you never know, it might work.

In a few minutes the baton will be passed to Michelle Rhee, as she announces her new reform advocacy organization. It’s too bad that Klein didn’t make more of his last minutes in the sun.

-Mike Petrilli

The greatest challenge facing America’s schools today isn’t the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or “teacher quality.” It’s the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. How we  as a country handle this challenge says a lot about our values and priorities, for good and ill. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What’s needed instead is some honest, frank discussion about the trade-offs associated with any possible solution.

U.S. students are all over the map in terms of achievement (see Figure 1). By the 4th grade, public-school children who score among the top 10 percent of students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are reading at least six grade levels above those in the bottom 10 percent. For a teacher with both types of students in her classroom, that means trying to challenge kids ready for middle-school work while at the same time helping others to decode. Even differences between students at the 25th and at the 75th percentiles are huge—at least three grade levels. So if you’re a teacher, how the heck do you deal with that?

In the old days, “ability grouping” and tracking provided the answer: you’d break your students into reading groups, with the bluebirds in one corner, tackling advanced materials at warp speed, and the redbirds in another, slowly making their way through basic texts. Likewise for mathematics. And in middle and high school, you’d continue this approach with separate tracks: “challenge” or “honors” for the top kids, “regular” or “on-level” for the average ones, and “remedial” for the slowest. Teachers could target their instruction to the level of the group or the class, and since similar students were clustered together, few kids were bored or totally left behind.

Then came the attack on tracking. A flurry of books in the 1970s and 1980s argued that confining youngsters to lower tracks hurt their self-esteem and life chances, and was elitist and racist to boot. Jeanne Oakes’s 1985 opus, Keeping Track, was particularly effective in sparking an anti-tracking movement that swept through the nation’s schools.

According to Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, this advocacy led to fundamental changes at breakneck speed. In a report for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute last year, he wrote,

An eighth grader in the early 1990s attended middle schools offering at least two distinct tracks in [each of] English language arts, history, and science. Mathematics courses were organized into three or more tracks. The eighth grader of 2008, however, attended schools with much less tracking. English language arts, history, and science are essentially detracked, i.e., schools typically offer a single course that serves students at every level of achievement and ability. Mathematics usually features two tracks, often algebra and a course for students not yet ready for algebra.

One of the reasons that detracking advocates claimed so many victories is that they painted their pet reform as a strategy in which everybody wins. Oakes and others insisted that detracking would help the lowest-performing students (who would enjoy better teachers, a more challenging level of instruction, and exposure to their higher-achieving peers) while not hurting top students. But by the mid-1990s, researchers started to compile evidence that this happy outcome was just wishful thinking.

In 1995, scholars Dominic Brewer, Daniel Rees, and Laura Argys analyzed test-score results for high-school students in tracked and detracked classrooms, and found benefits of tracking for advanced students. They wrote in the Kappan magazine, “The conventional wisdom on which detracking policy is often based—that students in low-track classes (who are drawn disproportionately from poor families and from minority groups) are hurt by tracking while others are largely unaffected—is simply not supported by very strong evidence.”

And this was before the policy incentives shifted sharply to prioritize low-achieving students. In another study for the Fordham Institute, Loveless found a clear pattern in the late 1990s when states adopted accountability regimes: the performance of the lowest decile of students shot up, while the achievement of the top 10 percent of students stagnated. That’s not surprising; these accountability systems, like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, pushed schools to get more students over a low performance bar. They provided few incentives to accelerate the academic growth of students at the top.

This dynamic might have been most pernicious for minority students. Earlier this year, an Indiana University study found that the “Excellence Gap,” the racial achievement gap at NAEP’s advanced level, widened during the NCLB era. One possible explanation is that high-achieving minority students are likely to attend schools with lots of low-achieving students, and their teachers are focused on helping children who are far behind rather than those ready to accelerate ahead.

The Power of Peers

The attack on tracking also claimed an innocent bystander: ability grouping, which became suspect in many circles, too. Yet in recent years, the “peer effects” literature has shown the benefits of grouping students of similar abilities together. One clever study, by economists Scott Imberman, Adriana Kugler, and Bruce Sacerdote, looked at the fallout from Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. They wanted to know what happened when students who were evacuated from New Orleans ended up in schools in Houston. They found that the arrival of low-achieving evacuees dragged down the average performance of the Houston students and had a particularly negative impact on high-achieving Houston kids. Meanwhile, high-achieving evacuees had a positive effect on local students. As Bruce Sacerdote told me, “The high-achieving kids seemed to be the most sensitive. They do particularly well by having high-achieving peers. And they are particularly harmed by low-achieving peers.” He added, “I’ve become a believer in tracking.”

In 2006, Caroline Hoxby and Gretchen Weingarth examined the Wake County (North Carolina) Public School System. For the better part of two decades, the district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning numbers of students to new schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments in which the composition of classrooms changed dramatically, and randomly, and that, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the “boutique model” of peer effects, “a model in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type.” When school reassignments resulted in the arrival of students with either very low or very high achievement, this boosted the test scores of other students with very low or very high achievement, probably because it created a critical mass of students at the same achievement level, and schools could better focus attention on their particular needs.

Does that mean students should be sharply sequestered by ability? Not exactly. Here’s how Hoxby and Weingarth put it in their conclusion: “Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal. This is because (a) people do appear to benefit from interacting with peers of a higher type and (b) people who are themselves high types appear to receive sufficient benefit from interacting with peers a bit below them that there is little reason to isolate them completely. What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.”

In other words, a little bit of variation is okay. But when the gap is too wide—say, six grade levels in reading—nobody wins.

Enter Differentiated Instruction

So if grouping all students together leads to pernicious effects, but divvying kids up by ability is politically unacceptable, what’s the alternative? The ed-school world has an answer: “differentiated instruction.” The notion is that one teacher instructs a diverse group of kids, but manages to reach each one at precisely the appropriate level. The idea, according to Carol Tomlinson of the University of Virginia (UVA), is to “shake up what goes on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn.” Ideally, instruction is customized at the individual student level. Every child receives a unique curriculum that meets that individual’s exact needs. A teacher might even make specialized homework assignments, or provide the specific one-on-one help that a particular kid requires.

If you think that sounds hard to do, you’re not alone. I asked Holly Hertberg-Davis, who studied under Tomlinson and is now her colleague at UVA, if differentiated instruction was too good to be true. Can teachers actually pull it off? “My belief is that some teachers can but not all teachers can,” she answered.

Hertberg-Davis worked with Tomlinson on a large study of differentiated instruction. Teachers were provided with extensive professional development and ongoing coaching. Three years later the researchers wanted to know if the program had an impact on student learning. But they were stumped. “We couldn’t answer the question,” Hertberg-Davis told me, “because no one was actually differentiating.”

Teachers admit to being flummoxed by this approach. In a 2008 national survey commissioned by the Fordham Institute, more than 8 in 10 teachers said differentiated instruction was “very” or “somewhat” difficult to implement. Even ed-school professors are skeptical. A 2010 national random survey of teacher educators asked them the same question and got the same result: more than 8 in 10 said differentiated instruction was very or somewhat difficult to implement.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I was curious to see differentiated instruction in action, so I visited my local elementary school in Takoma Park, Maryland. Piney Branch Elementary serves an incredibly diverse group of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, from the children of übereducated white and black middle-class families, to poor immigrant children from Latin America, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, to low-income African American kids.

I sat down with the school’s principal, Bertram “Mr. G.” Generlette, who has the friendly, laid-back manner of his native Antigua. I cut right to the chase. I’m wondering if I’d be making a mistake to send my son to a school like Piney Branch. Is it going to slow him down if his classmates are several years behind or still learning the language? (Of course, not all poor or minority children are low-achieving, nor are all white students high-achieving. Still, achievement gaps being what they are, the range of academic diversity does tend to be larger at schools with lots of racial and social diversity.)

It was pretty obvious that Mr. G. had heard these questions before, particularly from white folks like me. I asked him if that was the case. “Parents come in, yes,” he told me. “They are new to the neighborhood. Or their child is in kindergarten, or they are moving from private school. After a few minutes, you get the idea.” However, he said with a sly grin, “they very rarely ask the question directly.”

But he wasn’t afraid to answer me directly. “We are committed to diversity,” he started. “It’s a lens through which we see everything. We look at test scores. How are students overall? And how are different groups doing? It’s easy to see. Our white students are performing high. What can we do to keep pushing that performance up? For African American and Hispanic students, what can we do to make gains?”

Since Mr. G.’s arrival five years ago, the percentage of African American 5th graders passing the state reading test is way up, from 55 to 91 percent. For Hispanic children, it’s up from 46 to 74 percent. It’s true that scores statewide have also risen, but not nearly to the same degree.

And there’s no evidence that white students have done any worse over this time. In fact, they are performing better than ever. Before Mr. G. arrived, 33 percent of white 5th graders reached the advanced level on the state math test; in 2009, twice as many did. In fact, Piney Branch white students outscore the white kids at virtually every other Montgomery County school.

What’s his secret? Was he grouping students “homogeneously,” so all the high-achieving kids learned together, and the slower kids got extra help?

“There’s no such thing as a homogenous group,” Mr. G. shot back. “One kid is a homogeneous group. As soon as you bring another student in, you have differences. The question is: how do you capitalize on the differences?”

Well, that sounds OK in theory. But come on, Mr. G., how are you going to make sure my kid doesn’t get slowed down?

“My job as a principal is to let my parents know that your child will get the services they need,” he answered patiently. “We are going to make sure that every child is getting pushed to a maximum level. That’s my commitment.”

And that’s when I was introduced to the incredibly nuanced and elaborate efforts that Piney Branch makes to differentiate instruction, challenge every child, and avoid any appearance of segregated classrooms.

So how do they do it? First, every homeroom has a mixed group of students: the kids are assigned to make sure that every class represents the diversity of the school in terms of achievement level, race, class, etc. Then, during the 90-minute reading block, students spend much of their time in small groups appropriate for their reading level. (Redbirds and bluebirds are back!) However, in the new lingo of differentiated instruction, the staff works hard to make sure these groups are fluid—a child in a slower reading group can get bumped up to a faster one once progress is made.

For math, on the other hand, students are split up into homogeneous classrooms. All the advanced math kids are in one classroom, the middle students in another, and the struggling kids in a third. This means shuffling the kids from one room to another (a process that can be quite time-consuming for elementary school kids). But it allows the highest-performing kids to sprint ahead; one of the school’s 3rd-grade math classes, for example, is tackling the district’s 5th-grade math curriculum. (Because of large achievement gaps at the school, these math classes are more racially and socioeconomically homogeneous than the student population as a whole.)

The rest of the time—when kids are learning science or social studies or taking “specials” like art and music—they are back in their heterogeneous classrooms. Even then, however, teachers work to “differentiate instruction,” which often means separating the kids back into homogeneous groups again, and offering more challenging, extended assignments to the higher-achieving students.

It sounds like some sort of elaborate Kabuki dance to me, but it appears to succeed on several counts. All kids spend most of the day getting challenged at their level, and no one ever sits in a classroom that’s entirely segregated by race or class.

Reading War

Test scores indicate that the strategy is working, too, but that doesn’t mean all parents have been thrilled. Three years ago, Mr. G. told me, a group of white parents pushed to get the school to move to homogeneous classrooms for reading as well as math. “Parents felt that the only way to get kids to read at a high level was to have other kids around them who read at a high level,” he explained. (That didn’t sound so unreasonable to me.) “We had a lot of meetings. The staff overwhelmingly supported the diverse approach, the heterogeneous approach. That was good for me as an administrator because the staff was behind me.”

I tracked down one of the “troublemaker” parents. Her name is Sue Katz Miller and she personifies much of what makes Takoma Park great: she’s smart, she’s an activist, and she’s committed to helping make the city a welcoming community for families of all incomes and backgrounds. (A neighbor of mine called her “a force of nature.”) A former Newsweek reporter and now a regular columnist for The Takoma Voice, she spent two years as PTA president at Piney Branch and is an enthusiastic booster of the school and its diversity. “My kids have both benefited enormously from being in a Piney Branch social milieu,” she told me.

But the reading decision still sticks in her craw. “Why is it OK,” she asked, “to have homogeneous grouping in math and not have it in reading? The answer you get is: well, we can’t do both, they would be switching classes all the time, it would be like middle school and they won’t be able to handle it…. It’s a huge disservice to the kids who are ready for rigor in the humanities and are not math kids. It’s bizarre. We’ve said we’re going to accommodate kids in math but not in reading. It’s completely insane as far as I’m concerned. It makes me angry.”

She lost that battle, but Mr. G. and his teachers didn’t ignore the parents’ concerns, either. He went out and found reading programs suitable for advanced students, like William and Mary, Junior Great Books, and Jacob’s Ladder. He trained his teachers on these programs, ensuring that the students in the top reading groups would be challenged with difficult material. (The teachers loved it.) He tried hard to live up to his promise to push all students as far as they could go.

Competing for Kids

Mr. G. and Piney Branch face some healthy competition. Montgomery County offers a half-dozen “Centers for the Highly Gifted,” magnet schools that are designed for supersmart kids and located in elementary buildings throughout the district. Pine Crest, just a few miles away from Piney Branch, hosts one such center, and an increasing number of Piney Branch 3rd graders were testing into it for 4th and 5th grades.

A year ago, 25 Piney Branch kids were accepted—more than any other elementary school in the district. If they all took up the offer, Mr. G. said, “That’s a teacher walking out of my building.”

So in 2009–10, in cooperation with the district, Piney Branch launched a pilot program to bring the “Highly Gifted Center” curriculum into its classrooms. This wasn’t easy; there wasn’t a curriculum, per se, at the centers. Teachers had the freedom to do what they wanted. So the district helped the teachers put down on paper everything they were doing in the classroom.

Mr. G. arranged to have a 4th-grade and a 5th-grade teacher trained on the Highly Gifted approach, and formed a “cluster group” of gifted students in their classrooms. This means that, in one classroom in each of these grades, there are 12 or so gifted students, along with another 12 or so “on-level” kids. While they are taught together some of the day, they are frequently broken into small groups, so the gifted kids can learn together at an accelerated pace.

Pulling this off takes an energetic and gifted educator; 4th-grade teacher Folakemi Mosadomi, who has the gifted group in her classroom, appears to fit the bill perfectly. Now in her 5th year of teaching (all of them at Piney Branch under Mr. G.), Ms. M. acknowledged that differentiating instruction in this way requires “extensive planning and training,” not to mention someone who is well-organized and creative. But even that’s not always enough.

In the first year of the pilot, she had four different reading groups in one classroom, from kids still learning English to the highly gifted students. “I went from sounding out the ‘A’ sound with one group, to talking to another group about how the Exxon Valdez oil spill was like the Battle of Normandy.” That range was simply too much for one teacher to handle—remember Caroline Hoxby’s finding about “continuity of types?”—so the next year she had just two groups: the gifted students, and the next level down. “Now it’s easier to do more with both groups of students together,” she told me.

And the strategy seems to be working in one important way: last year, about half of the gifted children chose to stay at Piney Branch.

Fragile Compromise

So with a well-trained and dedicated staff, and lots of support, “differentiated instruction” can be brought to life. But even at Piney Branch, which benefits from the vast resources of a huge, affluent school system in Montgomery County, Maryland, it sure seems rickety, held with lots of duct tape and chewing gum, and subject to collapse without just the right staff and parent support.

If the school community placed its highest value on pushing all kids to achieve their full potential, including its high-achieving students, it would probably organize its classrooms differently. It would embrace “ability grouping” and homogenous classrooms wholeheartedly, and would skip all the gymnastics required to keep classes academically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse throughout the day. But Piney Branch understandably seeks to balance its concerns for academic growth with its interest in maintaining an integrated environment, so this uneasy compromise is probably the best it can do.

Piney Branch and Ms. M. might be able to pull it off. But how many Piney Branches and Ms. M.’s are there?

Technology may someday alleviate the need for such compromises. With the advent of powerful online learning tools, such as those on display in New York City’s School of One, students might be able to receive instruction that’s truly individualized to their own needs—differentiation on steroids.

Perhaps. But until that time, our schools will have to wrestle with the age-old tension between “excellence” and “equity.” And that tension will be resolved one homogeneous or heterogeneous classroom at a time.

Michael J. Petrilli is executive editor of Education Next, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is working on a book for parents considering diverse public schools like Piney Branch.

At SUNY-Albany, for instance, in response to a huge budget shortfall, President George Philip announced in an email sent out to the university in late September, “As a first step in this more difficult phase of reallocation planning, I have issued a directive today to suspend all new admissions to five program areas – Classics, French, Italian, Russian, and Theatre.”

A few days later, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that LSU planned to lay off 14 foreign language instructors (that is, non-tenured teachers) at the end of Fall semester.   It’s another case of cutting costs in a difficult budget year.  Furthermore, LSU has decided to end its German and Latin majors.

And a few days ago, the University of Minnesota released a committee report on cuts and downsizing for the College of Liberal Arts.  The report doesn’t specify in much detail precisely what will happen to foreign language departments, but one paragraph is ominous:

The only major areas of funding left to consider are graduate teaching assistants and professional teaching staff; together these make up about $34 million in FY2011. Professional (P/A) teaching staff instruct roughly 1,000 courses each year in CLA at an average cost of a bit under $8,000 per course. These dedicated professionals teach in many departments, but they are concentrated in freshman writing, foreign languages, journalism, communication, and the fine arts. Willy Sutton said that he robbed banks because, ‘That’s where the money is.’ If CLA is forced to take another large cut, much of it will be coming from these two categories, because that’s where the money is.”

Finally, I’ve heard from people working in foreign languages at the Modern Language Association that anecdotal evidence of cuts continues to trickle in.  Full professors retire and are replaced by adjuncts.  Graduate student lines are reduced.  Administrators are planning to consolidate departments into super-departments.  And so on.

This is why the news this week from College Board is heartening.  Two years ago, the College Board stated that it would end AP Italian Language and Culture, claiming that it needed “external funders” to come forward if the program would survive.  The program did end, but on Nov 10 the College board announced that it would bring the AP Italian test back, with the next administration to take place in May 2012.

This is a crucial development for higher education.  Foreign language programs make for an easy target to cost-cutters for one reason: low undergraduate enrollments.  At SUNY-Albany, the president noted, the five programs being cut claimed only 300 majors in all.  Without undergraduate demand, administrators can’t keep those programs off the block.  The prestige that comes with having full-scale foreign language departments simply doesn’t off-set the cost of running them.  If you have six tenured professors in a department making $75,000 a year, but only 15 majors in that department, it looks like a boutique offering, and colleges just can’t afford it.

To boost enrollments, you need a pipeline, including appealing freshman courses and, precisely, an AP program that draws teenagers in before they even arrive in college.  People major in foreign languages usually because they had a great experience in a foreign language class before age 20.  Italian professors all across the country should salute the College Board and the advocates who pressed for reviving the course, including Dr. Margaret Cuomo, the Italian Language Foundation, and the Italian Government.

–Mark Bauerlein

Are traditional P.E. classes likely to be an effective tool in fighting obesity? In a 2006 article for Education Next, “Not Your Father’s PE,” economists John Cawley, Chad Meyerhoefer, and David Newhouse investigated the likely impact of mandating more time in P.E. class. They found that “relatively little research has systematically examined how much PE (as it is currently constituted) contributes to weight loss or lowers the risk of obesity, and what little research there is finds no association between PE and weight loss and obesity.”

One reason more P.E. has not led to weight loss might be that traditional P.E. classes do not always offer students a real workout, particularly in high school. As students and teachers explain in this new Ed Next video, students don’t like having to change into gym clothes and get sweaty in the middle of the day. So P.E. teachers may end up grading students in part based on whether they change into their P.E. clothes.

The 25^th Hour P.E. class at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia, featured in the new video, is different. Students enrolled in the class don’t break a sweat during the school day. Instead, they work out three times a week, before or after school. While the students are jogging, swimming, playing pickup basketball, going to soccer practice, or walking the dog, they wear monitors that track how long they exercise and whether their heart rates are in the target zone. Students meet with a P.E. teacher once a week to download the data from their monitor to her computer and discuss their workouts. Grades are based on how long students keep their heart rates in the target zone.

As students explain in the video, the grade is a powerful motivator. And the workouts that students can get outside of school may be longer and more intense than the workouts they can get during traditional P.E. classes, when valuable class time is spent changing in and out of gym clothes and showering.

Many high school students could benefit from alternative P.E. classes like 25^th Hour P.E., not just those attending brick and mortar high schools. As Paul Peterson has noted, one of the most popular courses at Florida Virtual School is physical education. It is not hard to see the benefits of offering physical education classes online when simple tools like heart rate monitors enable teachers to hold students accountable.

Every chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts must advocate for arts education. The arts need a voice in power, say people in the field, someone in the corridors of influence to argue the benefits of teaching the nation’s students about classical and jazz music, ballet, and sculpture. With No Child Left Behind (NCLB) emphasizing math and reading, business and manufacturing leaders calling for workplace readiness in our graduates, and politicians citing lagging international competitiveness in science and math, the Arts Endowment chairman must utilize the bully pulpit more than ever before. Dance, music, theater, and visual arts show up ever further down the priority ladder, and arts educators feel that they must fight to maintain even a toehold in the curriculum. The Arts Endowment chairman, they insist, must help.

It is no surprise, then, that in a November 2009 profile in the Wall Street Journal, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Rocco Landesman offers pointed remarks when arts education comes up. Examine closely what he singles out about the field:

When [Landesman] starts talking about his ideas for integrating the arts in education, his rhetoric becomes less bipartisan: “We’re going to try to move forward all the kids who were left behind by ‘No Child Left Behind’—the kids who have talent or a passion or an idiosyncratic perspective. Those kids are important too and they should have a place in society. It’s very often the arts that catches them.”

The emphasis falls on the unusual student, the difficult kid, not on the arts as a subject for study. Landesman doesn’t defend arts education as a rigorous discipline that builds concentration and requires practice, practice, practice. Nor does he say, We need arts education to keep alive the legacy of American art—Thomas Cole, Martha Graham, Duke Ellington… He doesn’t highlight the provocative stuff with something like, We need arts education to train young people to comprehend innovative, boundary-breaking art. Instead, the purpose is salvation. Some students don’t fit the NCLB regime and other subjects don’t inspire them. Talented but offbeat, they sulk through algebra, act up in the cafeteria, and drop out of school. The arts “catch” them and pull them back, turning a sinking ego on the margins into a creative citizen with “a place in society.”

Saving Kids with Art

To educators outside the arts field, it sounds like an odd approach to a school subject. If you want to advocate a field, you have to justify it as a discipline. It has to form a body of knowledge and skills that students study at least partly for its own sake. In the case of the arts, a graduated curriculum would incorporate technical skills and art history and theory, just as English language arts integrate literacy skills and the lineages of English, American, and world literatures. Yes, arts learning may have social and moral and professional benefits, but if people don’t value the materials of the fields themselves—if they can’t say that if High School X doesn’t acquaint students with Renaissance painting, classical music, and modern dance, its graduates will be undereducated—then arts educators lose in the competition for funds and hours in the day. Arts education remains an extracurricular, and school administrators focused on math and reading can push it aside: The arts are fine, so let kids who are interested in them study in an afterschool program like band practice.

The arts-saves-kids rationale crops up frequently near the centers of political power. I heard it repeated time and again while working on arts education policy at the Arts Endowment from 2003 to 2005. In gatherings such as the thrice-yearly meetings hosted by the Arts Education Partnership (AEP), a venture funded by the Arts Endowment and the U.S. Department of Education, arts education directors at state arts councils, officers at foundations, community arts school leaders, and various education-school professors outlined programs and research that related arts in classrooms directly to students in classrooms, especially to low-income, minority, at-risk, and underserved populations. Participants tended not to be classroom teachers, but to come from a network of public agencies, nonprofits, and academic centers, such as the Arts in Education Program at Harvard University. Their job was promotion, not instruction, their audience funders and politicians and school administrators, not students. They didn’t talk much about the arts canon (Shakespeare, Beethoven, etc.) or the interpretation of forms and contents (how to understand ancient tragedy, modern dance, etc.). Nor did they offer practical strategies for teachers and administrators who want to maintain the arts but face budget cuts and faceless bureaucracies. Instead, they talked about where to find money, how to build alliances, react to new policies, and firm up political support. And their preferred mode of vindication was to cast arts education as an agent of social change and individual transformation. As Dick Deasy, director of the Partnership (who retired in 2008), liked to say, “Teachers don’t teach a subject—they teach kids.”

In 2004, for instance, the Arts Endowment sponsored a summer institute organized by the Ohio Arts Council in Dayton. The stated aim was to bring educators from around the state together to hear about ways of strengthening arts curricula in schools. The headline speaker the first day was Harvard professor Jessica Hoffman Davis, who gave a rousing summary of what arts learning does for kids, stating at one point that the arts, among other things, allow schools to get away from letter grades. In the breakout sessions, participants had a common reply: “That was great, but we already believe in the arts. We need to find more classrooms, more resources, more money!”

In such discussions, the social dimension, the salvation purpose, overrode more mundane concerns. In a plenary session of the September 2003 AEP forum at Lincoln Center in New York, Kurt Wootton of Brown University offered a representative vignette in histrionic detail. After asking everybody in the room to say hello to people sitting nearby and to explain why they were there, he illustrated why the arts are “uniquely positioned to create social opportunities for learning.” (The address is reproduced on AEP’s web site in You Want to Be a Part of Everything: The Arts, Community, and Learning.) His proof came in the form of the story of Carlos, “a real gangster.” According to one of his teachers, Carlos was “the bad boy of the neighborhood,” a tough kid who “didn’t take s— from anyone.” He spent his first two years of high school on suspension, in detention, and now and then in class. Teachers dreaded his presence and administrators threw up their hands.

But in English class, something special happened. Carlos read at a 5th-grade level, but in discussions of Othello and Of Mice and Men, “he always had something interesting, and more often comical, to add to the class.” As the year progressed, his commitment did, too. With the help of a visiting theater artist, the students began to design and rehearse a pastiche of scenes from works they had read along with accounts from their own lives. The year would culminate in a schoolwide performance.

After three weeks of rehearsals, the teacher realized, Carlos had not missed a single session. Amazing, but even more so was what the teacher noticed later that day on the school’s daily attendance sheet. At the top of the “out of school suspension” list stood Carlos’s name! He had been kicked out of school for 10 days and had already served 7. And yet, his theater attendance was perfect. Carlos was sneaking back into school for theater.

When Wootten finished Carlos’s story, the room erupted in applause. It had all the ingredients of arts education advocacy and some enticing rebelliousness as well: a caring teacher who doesn’t give up on sliding students, a bad kid with a heart and a brain, a visiting artist in a tough school, and a minority group member defying administrative powers for love of theater.

One can appreciate the motivation that theater inspired in the young man, but the story had some dark undertones unrecognized in the speech. I asked one man who had to deal often with school administrators about what a principal would say. He shook his head and replied, “If a principal suspended a student, he did so for a pretty good reason, and if he knew that the kid was sneaking back onto the grounds, he’d be furious.”

One could hardly imagine the story stirring teachers in other fields, either, for it didn’t validate the arts as an academic discipline. A history teacher might respond, “You think the arts are more ‘motivational’ than history?” A math teacher might say, “Getting an ‘A’ on an algebra final raises self-esteem just as much as doing a self-portrait in art class.” If arts advocates instead emphasize the material—Shakespeare, major and minor chords, etc.—other teachers might show respect for their position, even if only to avoid appearing anti-art or anti-intellectual.

But such tactics don’t obtain at AEP or similar meetings. Turnaround tales and the like carry too much emotional freight to be displaced by talk of art history. Perhaps those engaged in arts ed lobbying believe that class- and race-based melodramas best sway elected officials and philanthropic organizations. Or perhaps they genuinely find the social and personal benefits of arts instruction more compelling than the arts themselves.

Arts as Discipline

When Dana Gioia took control of the Arts Endowment in January 2003, he didn’t share the arts-as-salvation outlook. One of the first things he told his education staff was of his preference for the Core Knowledge curriculum. While he believed that arts education enriches young people’s minds and transforms their lives, he felt that arts education had the strongest impact when students encountered lasting works of force and beauty. Students needed to experience great art—classic and contemporary—to acquire a solid foundation for their own general education and creativity. Otherwise, arts education would remain a sidelight in the curriculum, marginal and ineffective. How to impart the importance of artistic tradition without estranging arts ed advocates?

Gioia launched two reforms. First, he asked David Steiner, whom he hired to direct the Office of Arts Education, and me to review grant guidelines and suggest ways to strengthen their content requirements. We came up with a simple, but far-reaching stipulation: applicants for arts education grants had to align their programs with national or state standards and evaluate student learning by them. Awards to “Learning in the Arts for Children and Youth” must “apply national or state arts education standards,” we insisted, and “Students will be assessed according to national or state arts education standards.”

This created a challenge for arts organizations applying for Arts Endowment awards. Many of them had evaluation plans already in place, but those usually amounted to questionnaires issued to students at the end of the program that measured their attitudes and enjoyment. Or, they involved observations by evaluators who measured participation—for instance, how many kids talked in class. They did not focus on learning outcomes. From now on, they’d have to.

Arts advocates didn’t protest the change, in part because the field had already embraced outcome measures: the National Standards for Arts Education. The project was supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the U.S. Department of Education, and the National Endowment for the Humanities; a consortium of arts teacher organizations developed comprehensive standards for dance, theater, music, and the visual arts. Significantly, the designers weren’t primarily engaged in advocacy and fundraising. The final version appeared in 1994, and ever since it has garnered solid esteem, even though its premises run against the child-centered dramaturgy described above. Above all, arts educators wanted to establish strong disciplinary standards for their respective fields, both to regularize arts instruction across the country and to win higher recognition for the fields in the overall curriculum. Wisely, the designers insisted on the fundamental place of art history in the document. “In this document,” they wrote, “art means two things: (1) creative works and the process of producing them, and (2) the whole body of work in the art forms that make up the entire human intellectual and cultural heritage.” They define a “good education in the arts” as including “a thorough grounding in a basic body of knowledge.”

Furthermore, the standards “help ensure that the study of the arts is disciplined and well focused,” and that “arts instruction has a point of reference for assessing its results.” Assessments in the document follow not from social and personal impact, but from knowledge and skills. For instance, dance standards for grades 9–12 include this skill test: “Students choreograph a duet demonstrating an understanding of choreographic principles, processes, and structures”; and this content test: “Students create and answer twenty-five questions about dance and dancers prior to the twentieth century.” Music 9–12 includes this one: “Students classify by genre or style and by historical period or culture unfamiliar but representative aural examples of music and explain the reasoning behind their classifications.”

Gioia’s other reform was to develop separate arts education initiatives based squarely on art historical content. These programs were a primary instrument for building congressional consensus on Arts Endowment funding overall:

•  Shakespeare in American Communities—tours by theatrical companies to smaller towns and thousands of schools across the United States to give performances of Shakespeare plays and run workshops for students. The program included a toolkit for English and theater teachers that contained educational materials; by 2008, the toolkit had been delivered to teachers of more than 24 million students.

•  American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius—a multidimensional program providing, among other things, educational materials to schools on the high-culture heritage of American art.

•  Poetry Out Loud—modeled on the National Spelling Bee, a competition at the school, state, and national levels for high-school students, who memorize and recite a poem selected from a list of works both contemporary and classic, John Donne to Allen Ginsberg. Winners receive college scholarships and cash prizes for their schools’ libraries. In 2008, 250,000 students participated, and media coverage included a front-page story in USA Today and a segment on CBS News Sunday Morning.

The content of art and artistic tradition was at the center of each initiative. When Gioia first unveiled Poetry Out Loud, some state arts officers protested because it didn’t allow students to present their own compositions. Gioia’s reply was, in effect, “That isn’t what the competition is about.” With this particular effort, he wanted to encourage more reading of great poems, not more writing of adolescent verse.

Other figures in the arts education network considered Gioia’s programs tame and conservative, a Bush administration retreat from edgy and provocative art. On PBS NewsHour, for instance, after Gioia cited the Shakespeare initiative, interviewer Jeffrey Brown remarked, “Of course, for some people, though, this is the essence of ‘safe.’ Shakespeare? Who’s against Shakespeare?”

Gioia’s sage reply hinted at the social benefits of art while still honoring the art itself: “I could come up with 100 adjectives for Shakespeare before ‘safe’ would be the one I would offer [Regan and Goneril safe? The climax of Hamlet?]…. I was in a production in New York and we had all these New York insider theater people as half the audience and then in came 50 kids from the South Bronx. They were seeing Richard III. This production alarmed, excited. It was provocative. It wasn’t safe. It opened up possibilities in life and imagination to these kids that they weren’t getting otherwise.”

It helped, too, that the initiative gave 2,000 actors in 77 theater companies employment, and that Gioia was able to fund the Shakespeare project without taking any funds away from existing theater grant categories. Moreover, the Arts Endowment’s allocation from Congress grew steadily, jumping $20 million from 2007 to 2008 alone. Even if they bristled at the high-art, standards-based nature of Gioia’s approach, arts education advocates had to appreciate the resources he steered their way.

Beyond the Divide

For all the talk about why the arts are important and how they must be funded, the most successful support tactic I have encountered came from an actor/director in Los Angeles, Pierson Blaetz, co-director of Greenway Arts Alliance. The Greenway Arts Alliance runs a theater on the grounds of Fairfax High School, a large public school in the middle of West Hollywood. Living in the neighborhood during the’90s, Blaetz and co-founder Whitney Weston became interested in bringing more arts to students, but had to figure a way to provide the two necessities, space and money.

The project was an ingenious act of entrepreneurship. Blaetz and Weston surveyed the Fairfax High School campus and saw hidden value. First, they spotted an unused, roomy student social hall that lay separate from the main buildings and could serve as a venue for practice and performances. Second, they noted that the campus had an asset that was not in use on weekends: land. Fairfax High sits on expensive real estate right next to the L.A. Farmers Market. On Saturdays, while locals and tourists flooded the market, Blaetz noticed, acres of Fairfax High sat quiet and empty. What if, they proposed to school administrators, they leased and renovated the student hall and ran a weekend flea market at the school? They would charge a small admission fee, have merchants pay for spaces, let students work it, and pass the proceeds to the school. In return, Fairfax High would integrate Greenway into the curriculum and support its professional activities.

Administrators agreed, and now the Melrose Trading Post opens every Sunday in the Fairfax High parking lot with as many as 4,000 customers browsing some 200 stalls filled with antiques and collectibles. Meanwhile, students take courses at Greenway in drama, dance, and film, including theater classes for low-skilled 9th- and 10th-grade readers. Students also join Greenway in various productions after school, and their weekly Poetry Lounge is one of the most popular slam events in the country. While Greenway’s curriculum emphasizes its work with “at-risk high school students” and the power of the arts to “motivate youth” and impart “essential life skills,” it also aims at “skills, knowledge, and/or understanding of the arts consistent with national and state arts education standards.” In other words, while nodding to the social benefits of the program, Greenway recognizes the bottom line: demonstrated learning of the art, history, and practice of theater itself.

The Greenway Arts Alliance is an obvious model for arts education. Greenway has received support from public agencies, including the National Endowment for the Arts and the City of Los Angeles, but it has staked its continuance year-to-year on private enterprise. The program has thrived for years, and Fairfax High principal Ed Zubiate couldn’t be happier. Money comes in each week, affording the school needed resources, while the Fairfax curriculum expands nicely into the arts. In addition, 15 students have paid employment at the Melrose Trading Post each semester, and adults in the area with no connection to the school visit the grounds to attend performances (thus enhancing the school’s community profile). The relationship is symbiotic, not one of arts educators beseeching a few crumbs and class minutes.

Blaetz says that there are thousands of schools across the country ready for the same kind of creative economizing. A school might run a small farm that teaches students ecology and agriculture—and sells produce on weekends. The strategy transcends arts education and poses a logistical question about all schools. Why are they sitting on underused resources year after year, while scrambling to fund the arts and other programs?

When I shared Blaetz’s story with arts education advocates, not one of them followed up. I mentioned it to several attendees at AEP meetings and received blank glances in return. I’m not sure why, but I can guess. The people I encountered prosecute their mission by appealing directly to federal, state, and local governments and to nonprofit foundations for help. Blaetz went first to the free market. That approach is simply foreign to the network of arts ed folks hovering around public agencies and philanthropic groups.

That’s too bad, because what arts education needs in a time of fiscal crises are fewer advocates and more entrepreneurs.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

While the students may have lacked focus, Chura writes, “kids in jail share the same goals as their peers in the world outside: get a high school diploma, secure a decent job, go to college, make something of themselves.” He continues, “My job was to prepare them for the state’s comprehensive and demanding English exam.” His conclusion: “Curriculum would be the key.”

In the article, Chura describes the curriculum he taught. “Students read Greek, Norse, and Aztec mythology and such works as August Wilson’s play, Fences; the poetry of Luis J. Rodriguez and Pablo Neruda; and Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy.”

In an article that appeared in U.S. News last winter, Andy Rotherham wrote about the need for state and local policymakers to bring quality education to wherever students are, including prison. He noted, “Too often, however, alternative schools are educational backwaters. Students in these settings have more intense needs but frequently want for the cornerstones of quality education: High expectations, great teachers and curriculum, and adequate resources.”

But what we have seen is that as schools move away from promoting competition, those parents who think schools are not providing enough competitive outlets go outside of the traditional education system. Often these parents tend to be middle class or upper middle class, and they cre­ate or join extracurricular organiza­tions that charge participation fees. This development has led to increased inequality, as children who cannot pay to play are excluded.

Not only is there growing inequal­ity associated with afterschool com­petition, but increasingly younger and younger students are diving into com­petitive tournaments on sports fields, in dance and music studios, and in other venues, such as academic bees. Kronholz focused on middle school­ers (which is also a shift—it used to be only high school students who engaged in such competitive tourna­ments), but the reality is that elemen­tary school–age children now partici­pate in a variety of highly competitive and organized afterschool activities. Formal competition, tryouts, and practices are part of the everyday grind, as ever-increasing numbers of American children are being raised to play to win both inside and outside of the classroom. We simply do not know the long-term consequences of being engaged in competition from an early age, either psychologically or in terms of educational outcomes (i.e., Do competitive kids end up attend­ing “better” colleges and universities or pursuing more advanced degrees?). Education scholars should consider how to incorporate these types of extracurricular activities into existing theories, frameworks, and models.

Hilary Levey is a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy at Harvard University.

This blog entry was submitted as a letter to the editor.

If there’s anything in education that raises my eyebrows (and occasionally my ire) it’s the True and Only Solution.  I started paying attention, visiting their website and subscribing to their (recently shuttered) magazine.   I was surprised that I wasn’t more familiar with Edutopia.  It is, after all, the education philanthropy of the George Lucas Educational Foundation (GLEF).  Think Star Wars…Indiana Jones…that George Lucas.  His pockets are every bit as deep as guys named Gates, Broad and Walton.  But Lucas’ name never comes up in the same sentence with those better known billionaire ed philanthropists.  I was curious why no one ever talked about Lucas in ed reform conversations.

Lots of reasons.  For starters, the annual budget of the George Lucas Educational Foundation is $6 million.  That’s dog track money for Gates and Broad.  And Edutopia’s vision is a galaxy far, far away from the hardcore structures, incentives and accountability ideas promoted by the big boys.  Still, no one seems to have given much scrutiny to Edutopia.  The few articles that have been written tend to go weak in the knees over Lucas without paying much attention to his ideas about schooling.  And Lucas himself is an unlikely education philanthropist, having taken pains over the years to paint a picture of himself as a bored, indifferent student.  If Edutopia was going to start aggressively promoting its vision, it seemed worth taking a look at the efficacy of their ideas.  This piece (“Edutopian Vision,” in the Summer 2010 issue of Ed Next, now available online) is the result.

If the 21^st century skills movement put out a greatest hits album, it would sound a lot like Edutopia. Their vision revolves around six “core principles”:  project-based learning, technology integration, social and emotional learning, integrated studies, teacher development and comprehensive assessment.  Of these, the clear favorites are project learning and technology.  That’s no surprise, considering Lucas’s enthusiasm for technology and hands-on learning (he spent his teenage years goofing off in school and playing around with cars).   The head of GLEF boiled the Edutopia philosophy down to six words: “School life should resemble real life.”  I can boil that down to one: “Dewey.”

One curiosity about Edutopia:  it’s really a media outfit, staffed almost exclusive by writers, editors and TV people, not educators.  They make videos and post oodles of web content.  In essence they’re really good publicists for a certain brand of education, served up with a gee-whiz vibe.  They’re based in Marin County, California, a stone’s throw from San Francisco and Silicon Valley.   A decade ago during the dot-com boom, there was a brief, intense flowering in that part of the world of so-called “new economy” magazines–titles like Fast Company, Business 2.0, Red Herring, The Industry Standard, Upside and Wired.   Some wag once described these publications, nearly all now defunct, as reading like a cross between the Harvard Business Review and Highlights for Children.  Change HBR to Education Week and you’ve got Edutopia.

But it would be wrong to dismiss them. They’re an earnest bunch and they offer an attractive, teacher-friendly, alternative vision to the data-obsessed ed reform triumphalism that has the firm upper hand in education at present, yet too often defines well-educated as “reads on grade level and graduates on time.”  By contrast, Edutopia’s vision is large, generous, and all-encompassing.  It’s hard to find fault with that.  At least it’s hard for me.  Still any organization that purports to define “What Works in Public Education” is setting a mighty high bar for itself, and it’s not always clear that Edutopia can deliver the goods.  An attractive vision and an efficacious one are not always one and the same.

In February, the Core Knowledge Foundation announced that it would work to align its curriculum with the Common Core standards currently being developed by the NGA and CCSSO, and that it would give away its curriculum sequence for free instead of charging for it, all in an effort to ensure that the common standards are supported by a curriculum to help interpret and implement them.

In a blog entry appearing on the Washington Post’s blog “Answer Sheet,” Hirsch today makes the case that the Common Core standards have the potential to revolutionize reading instruction. He writes

There is a way we can sail out of the reading doldrums.

The recently released English Language Arts Standards drafted by the National Governors Association Center and the Council of Chief State School Officers may provide desperately needed wind we need to move forward… Note the unusual title it carries: “Common Core Standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History/Social Studies & Science.” The title shouts that language mastery requires knowledge of history, and science, (music and fine arts I hope will be included in due course) not just fiction and poetry. It states explicitly that these non-literary subjects should be generously represented in the long classroom hours devoted to literacy.

This emphasis on non-literary content is defended on the grounds that building “a foundation of knowledge in these fields will give [students] the background to be better readers in all content areas.”

That is an especially important consideration for the early grades, which now spend up to half the school day on literacy. Here is something new under the sun. It resists the infamous narrowing of the curriculum. And it is an important reform also for helping to overcome the test-score gap, which is essentially a knowledge gap, between racial and ethnic groups.

…

Transforming the elementary school “literacy block” into a rich, meaningful and sustained engagement with subject matter would be the single greatest transformation of instructional time in decades. If there is one Big Idea that can help arrest the decline of reading achievement in American schools, this is the one. To their credit, the authors of the Common Core standards have taken pains to get this right, and it is a master stroke.

In a new book, The Making of Americans, which Nathan Glazer reviews in the Summer 2010 issue of Ed Next, Hirsch more explicitly connects the idea of cultural literacy to the subject of civics—“the role of a common system of public schools in educating a citizenry to the level necessary to maintain a democracy.”  According to Glazer, the book looks back at the ideals guiding the development of American publication and how we have moved away from them in recent decades.

As Hirsch explains, “This book concerns itself…with overcoming low literacy rates and narrowing the achievement gaps between demographic groups but places those themes within the broader context of the founding ideals of the American experiment, which have been a beacon to the world and ourselves.”

Nathan Glazer and Paul Peterson discuss E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy and  The Making of Americans in a video  here.

Here, it was forecast, nothing less than the transformation of American secondary education would take place. This would be a neighborhood school, in the heart of impoverished urban America, committed to educating all students, not to weeding out the most challenging. Technology would bring the students to new heights, and serve as a prototype for reform and innovation elsewhere.

Each student—or “learner”—would have a laptop or tablet computer. The course of study would be dynamic, interdisciplinary, and driven by their interests. The teachers, called educators, and the community would collaboratively develop a “continuous, relevant, and adaptive” curriculum. Learning would spill out of the building into the surrounding neighborhood and, virtually, across the world.

The September 2006 opening of the school, thick with dignitaries, was featured on the national morning talk shows. Politicians jostled to get their faces in the picture during the ribbon cutting. Vallas declared the dawn of a new educational era. “This is how schools of today can and should be designed and developed to adequately prepare students for life and work,” he said.

Parents and students, who were chosen by lottery, exclaimed in wonder as they walked through the glass doors for the first time. Among them were Carmen Thomas and her son Sekou Thomas-Bamba. Thomas could barely contain her elation.

“This is just absolutely amazing,” she said, according to an account the next day in the Philadelphia Inquirer. “It’s like a fresh start, new dreams, new adventure, hope. For him to walk in and be a part of the first graduating class is exciting.”

Full of enthusiasm, Thomas said that she would volunteer at the school and learn the technology herself.

Fast-forward to the fall of 2009. On a Thursday evening in October, Thomas had kept her promise to volunteer: she and her son were among a handful of parents and students who came to the school to help evaluate the graduation project proposals of the first senior class.

Did the school turn out to be everything she expected?

Thomas thinks for a minute. An adventure, certainly. But not in the way she had anticipated. “There have been challenges,” Thomas said. “The transition from books to learning from laptops—I’m not sure all the students were ready.”

Sekou, who had spent his elementary years in a highly structured religious school, described his freshman year as “out of control. No one knew what to do exactly.” Sophomore year, he considered transferring. “I felt I wasn’t learning enough,” he said.

To be sure, the future has not yet arrived at School of the Future. Its early years have been plagued by a crisis in leadership, a revolving door of principals and wavering support for its mission from the Philadelphia district. The school’s downtown champions, Vallas and Nevels, were gone soon after SOF opened its doors. Some of the more exciting plans for technology use, including a Virtual Teaching Assistant that would allow teachers to track individual student progress online, never materialized. Solar panels were designed to transmit real-time data on energy use so students could study it, but the equipment has yet to be installed. Despite the awe that the school generated in the community, it has not filled to capacity. Built for 750, enrollment is below 500 in its fourth year. Walk through classrooms today and what you will see, pedagogically, is not terribly different from what happens in any high school.

Mary Cullinane, who has directed the project for Microsoft since the beginning, acknowledges the difficulties but has few regrets. Today’s children, she said, deserve learning communities that are inspirational, not just functional. And she says that, despite the problems, the experience at SOF has been invaluable.

“We’ve learned that we have to prepare for a very long journey,” she said. “If we want to be disruptive and allow for education to have a different experience in the United States, we need to recognize the long-term nature of this work and stop using short-term yardsticks to measure progress.”

Cullinane adds, “I’m not sure anybody has the stomach for this…innovation swims upstream in the river of status quo.”

Learning on the Fly

Developing SOF has been compared by more than one person to building an airplane while flying it. Those involved discovered that the default educational model—organized around bell schedules, teaching separate subjects in isolation, the assumption that most students learn the same material in the same way, the lockstep progression through grade levels, report cards with letter grades, and other conventions that most of America understands as “school”—does not give ground easily. Even the effort to start later in the morning, citing research that this is best for adolescents, ran up against bus schedules and the demand of after-school athletics.

The first two years of the school’s existence were marked by turmoil. The first principal, called “chief learner” at SOF, Shirley Grover, had a background in private schools, most recently in Italy, not in urban education. But her vision for change was bold and ambitious, her optimism boundless, and she was intensely recruited to help design the school and hire the first teachers. But she left, for personal reasons, in the summer after the first year.

After that, the school was run on an interim basis first by a retired principal who described himself as a seat warmer and then by an administrator who had no high school experience and didn’t quite get its mission.

Now in her second year as principal, Rosalind Chivis had a hand in the school’s start-up and spent several years in the district central office before being sent to rescue SOF. Always on the move, she presents a stern face to students and visitors alike. Students who arrive late or break the rules get little sympathy from her.

Shortly after taking over, Chivis cracked down on discipline and engineered the transfer of more than 60 problematic students, more than 10 percent of the student body, a move that some teachers equated to abandoning the mission of educating every child. “These were not all bad kids, they were kids who made bad choices,” lamented one.

Chivis doesn’t see it that way.

“When I came, I had to create a culture and climate conducive to effective teaching and learning,” she said. “I think we’re at a place now. I feel comfortable focusing attention on instruction.”

At the same time, Chivis wants SOF to blaze new trails and fulfill its original mission.

“We’re all in agreement we want an organization and a learning environment that is student-centered, we want instruction to be student-driven, we want it to be engaging, and we want there to be lots of opportunities for experiential learning, reflection, and inquiry,” she said.

Grand Challenge

Microsoft helped design and launch the school but, contrary to public perception, did not pay for it. The company deliberately tried to work within the resource and bureaucratic limits of the existing system, determined to create something that was scalable and replicable in other big school districts. So it declined to pull out all the stops in hiring staff, for instance, instead combining its intensive, competency-based hiring process with the rigid, centralized, and seniority-based system in Philadelphia. For the most part, school leaders, and later, committees led by teachers themselves, were able to choose the new staff members as the school added a grade a year.

But, with dual-subject certification required for all applicants to facilitate the interdisciplinary model, prospective teachers weren’t beating down the doors to work there. Especially after it began to gain a reputation as having problems, the school has had trouble filling all the teaching jobs.

Many of the mostly young educators who were lured by the promise that they could create something entirely new have felt stymied. They were drawn to SOF precisely because it was refusing to cream top students, but was instead ready to work with those who were dropping out in droves or would graduate with substandard knowledge and skills from traditional neighborhood schools.

“It was presented as a school, it still is a school, that is trying to ‘fix’ education,” said Aruna Arjunan, who came in the beginning and teaches social studies and math. “That sounds grandiose, but the whole point is to do things a different way.”

Yet this challenge proved greater than anyone had anticipated. The students, almost all African American, more than 80 percent of whom qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, came with skill levels all over the map; a majority read at a 5th-grade level or below. Used to worksheets, paper-and-pencil tests, and being asked to regurgitate information, many weren’t prepared to take control of their own learning. Some thrived on the project-based, interdisciplinary, and technology-rich model, and were finally able to connect to the purpose of school; others simply found it bewildering.

“I could only imagine what it was like for the learners when they first arrived in this building,” said Kathleen Lee, a veteran Philadelphia teacher whose longtime interest in project-based learning brought her to SOF. “Everything’s online for you. Your math’s online. Your writing’s online. Your foreign language is online. They were never taught like that. They needed gradually to be eased into this.”

The technology itself created problems for managing the classroom. “I would spend 30 or 60 minutes of a period deleting games from the computer,” lamented one teacher. Students would be instant messaging and checking emails during class. “When you’re exhausted because you’ve been telling kids to stop playing Halo all day, you’re not actually teaching them literature or skills or the content that they need to drive their own learning.”

Several people involved have gone so far as to say that there has been a culture clash between the design and expectations of the school and the learners’ readiness to take advantage of it.

“The leadership when we opened the building went into this with certain assumptions, and they were that the children…were coming already motivated to learn and were at a certain skill level. That was not the case,” said Chivis. “Had more thought been put into where these learners were coming from and what they were coming with, we may have realized a greater degree of success.”

Balancing Act

Any way you look at it, developing the curriculum for School of the Future has been a roller-coaster ride. Wrote one young SOF teacher, “Programs begun one year vanished the second; systems implemented one minute were overhauled the next. And thus, like the demoralized Biblical man who builds his home on a foundation of sand only to see it fall, any sense of agency our learners had [developed] disappeared as their expectations for the future collapsed.”

There was no set curriculum in the first year: “Educators wrote their own curriculum,” said one member of the original faculty. “It was project-based, mission- and vision-driven.” Working in teams, they devised projects with the help of a web exchange called Understanding by Design, which provides materials and helps educators develop interdisciplinary, project-based units that meet the subject-matter standards in a specific state. Teachers team taught, there was no defined bell schedule, and at the end of the day, it was hard to quantify what the students had learned, a mortal sin in today’s accountability climate.

Educators spent the second year designing an interdisciplinary project system with levels 100 through 400, similar to college courses. Students were assigned based on their skill levels and progressed at their own pace. Many educators were proud of this, but it had some of the same problems as the first year, primarily an inability to be “transparent” to the standardized test–based accountability system in use by the school district.

For starters, the school district’s computer couldn’t accept SOF’s narrative-style report cards, which evaluated students’ proficiency in the core competencies rather than giving them traditional numeric grades in individual subjects. District officials were concerned that students couldn’t easily transfer from a school with this sort of interdisciplinary structure and projects that spanned over years to a more traditional school.

By the middle of year three, the district had pressured the school to begin using its core curriculum and, like other neighborhood high schools, administer biweekly benchmark tests based on it. Two periods a week were set aside for mini-projects.

Today a core group of educators is hard at work, through a committee called Curriculum 2010, to meld the best aspects of project-based and interdisciplinary learning with the school district’s core curriculum and state standards. But the debate over how best to educate these students is likely to rage along. The first state standardized test scores are in, and the 11th graders did no better than those at other comprehensive, non-selective city high schools: about one-quarter of the students met proficiency standards in reading and a mere 7 percent in math.

English teacher Kate Reber is among those leading the curriculum effort. A graduate of Columbia University with a master’s degree in education from the University of Pennsylvania, this is Reber’s first teaching job. Scattered around her classroom are several dark red books that comprise the “planning and scheduling timeline” of Philadelphia’s core curriculum. It is no easy task to reconcile the core curriculum with her educational vision, or the vision of SOF. She points to a page inside the English book and quotes from it. It requires, for a particular week, that classes “study prefixes and suffixes using Jonathan Edwards’s sermons.” Reber shrugs. “I can study prefixes and suffixes. I can study Jonathan Edwards.”

She barrels on. “Where is the student voice, the project direction, the community engagement? If you would like me to develop a project that is learner-centered, community-focused, and academically rigorous, how also can it require that we ‘study prefixes and suffixes using Jonathan Edwards’s sermons’? Does this have problematic assumptions about teaching and learning? I think it does.”

Down the hall, math and technology teacher Thomas Gaffey is trying mightily to get a dozen or so 9th graders to understand scientific notation. He is using software rather than chalk and erasers, but the lesson would not have changed much if he had. This is not how Gaffey envisioned teaching at SOF when he was recruited right out of grad school at Temple University by the original chief learner.

Before the order to begin using the core curriculum, he was helping a team of girls understand math and physics by designing a complicated double-Dutch jump-rope game.

“As soon as we had to fit within the system, we lost everything innovative,” he said. “All over the country, urban districts are failing with the traditional curriculum. There’s a 45 percent dropout rate. These students don’t need that. They need something very different. Successful people learned by tinkering, by doing, they did not learn by sitting in a classroom in front of a board.

“At this point,” he added, “the School of the Future exists only in the minds of a few educators. We’re fighting against a leviathan.”

Control Central

The “leviathan” right now is embodied in the person of Arlene Ackerman, the superintendent of the Philadelphia schools, who previously led districts in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

Ackerman believes strongly that centralized leadership can bring schools into line. Experimenting and nurturing innovation and new ideas from the bottom up is not her thing. In interviews and meetings, she still talks about “what works” in terms of what worked for her in her St. Louis high school almost 50 years ago.

At the same time, Ackerman has a strategic plan called Imagine 2014 that lays out a vision of high school strikingly similar to what SOF has been laboring toward. It calls for flexible schedules, more project-based and interdisciplinary learning, a more engaging and real world–based course of study, increased opportunity for teachers to work in teams, and better integration of technology across subject areas. But she has shown little sign, so far, that she wants to explore the connection between what is needed to make that a reality and what has been happening, in fits and starts, at SOF.

Microsoft’s Cullinane said she is encouraged by “the language [of Imagine 2014] and some of the things they’ve been talking about at the district level. I feel they have an opportunity here to bring it to fruition and demonstrate what it looks like via work done at School of the Future.”

She is also heartened that the Obama administration is talking about looking differently at assessment and ways to promote inquiry-based learning. “There’s a natural tension between creating an innovative culture and doing it within a system that requires demonstrated accountability, metrics, quantitative results, etc.,” she said. “It will be interesting to see how that starts to look and sound different under the current administration.”

Glimmers of the future are apparent, if not institutionalized at SOF. Microsoft’s liaison to the school works to tailor technology training to teachers’ individual backgrounds and needs, and even the most traditional have learned to incorporate wikis and blogs into their classes. Most of the educators use Microsoft OneNote to organize work, create project guides and digital books. The portal allows for each class to have its own web site, and students manage their assignments online.

Despite the school’s rocky start, students at SOF have done remarkable things. One group of students created a College Resource Center. A math teacher devised a class called “Help Desk” in which students learn to solve technological issues. An indifferent student in middle school who blossomed at SOF was upset at her peers’ teasing and intolerance of autistic schoolmates. She took the lead in developing a mini-project she called All in Together, in which students learned to be mentors to their autistic peers. While the endeavor was not problem-free—it didn’t work out as a full-blown project—it succeeded in creating more awareness and acceptance of difference around the school and sparking an interest among students for more independent projects.

Success for Sekou

Sekou Thomas-Bamba is getting ready to graduate. He is not sorry that he has attended School of the Future. With ambitions to study business in college, he’s looking at colleges like Maryland, Pitt, Morehouse, and Villanova. He’ll get expert counseling and lots of personal attention as he applies and makes his choices.

While freshman and sophomore years were chaotic, he said, starting in his junior year, the year Chivis came, things got a lot better. While he still feels more comfortable in traditional classes, he started to enjoy the multidisciplinary projects—one led to a job as a tour guide at a historic house in Fairmount Park—and he feels that he is a step ahead of other students because he’s had so much practice making presentations and learning how to work with other people. Not to mention his ease with technology. “Technology is the future,” he said.

As he and his mother evaluated the graduation projects, they considered a wide variety of proposals, everything from investigating crocodiles and wetlands to researching Down syndrome to studying how society responds to infectious diseases. Some students wanted to probe gender roles in society, teen pregnancy, and gang violence.

Although the hoopla and euphoria of the first day in the shiny new building wore off quickly, Sekou’s mother is not sorry, either, even if the road has been rough. She understands what SOF is trying to do. “The ideal is good,” she said, “but you have to take it in stages.”

Dale Mezzacappa covered education for the Philadelphia Inquirer between 1986 and 2006 and is now a contributing editor at the independent Philadelphia Public School Notebook and a freelance writer. This article was adapted from a chapter in What Next? Educational Innovation and Philadelphia’s School of the Future (2010, Harvard Education Press).

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

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

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

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

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

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

First up, Richard Whitmire, author of Why Boys Fail, reads from the introduction of his book.

You can listen to the excerpt from the book through your computer’s speakers or download the excerpt to an iPod by right-clicking on the link (control-click on a Mac) and selecting “Save Link As…” The excerpt will download to your computer as an mp3.

You can read the entire introduction of the book Why Boys Fail here.

For more on this topic:

Richard Whitmire and Susan Bailey debate whether schools are shortchanging boys in “Gender Gap,” which will appear in the Spring 2010 issue of Ed Next.

Richard Whitmire talks with Education Next about boys and school.

Debates over tracking reached their high point in the United States in the 1990s. An influential report published in 1998 by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation argued that the available research did not support the contention that tracking doomed impoverished students to inferior schooling, nor did it support universal adoption of the practice. Over the last decade, patterns in grouping students have changed markedly in the U.S.; high school students are no longer placed in rigidly defined general-education or noncollege tracks but have the flexibility to move between course levels for different subjects. These changes may have assuaged some critics, but the broader debate over tracking remains unsettled.

The central challenge in measuring the effect of tracking on performance is that schools that track students may be different in many respects from schools that do not. For example, they may attract a different pool of students and possibly a different pool of teachers. The ideal situation to assess the impact of tracking on test scores of different groups of students would be one in which students were assigned to tracking or nontracking schools randomly, and the performance of students could be compared across school types.

We shed light on these issues using data from Kenya. In 2005, each of 140 primary schools in western Kenya received funds from the nongovernmental organization International Child Support (ICS) Africa to hire an extra teacher. One hundred twenty-one of these schools had a single 1st-grade class and used the new teacher to split the students into two classes. In 61 randomly selected schools, students were assigned to classes based on prior achievement as measured by test scores. In the remaining 60 schools, students were randomly assigned to one of the two classes, without regard to their prior academic performance.

The results showed that all students benefited from tracking, including those who started out with low, average, and high achievement. At the tracking schools, the test scores of students who started out in the middle of their class do not seem to be affected by which section (top or bottom) the students were later assigned to. In other words, any negative effects of being with lower-achieving peers were more than offset in tracked settings by the benefit of the teacher being able to better tailor instruction to students’ needs.

Primary Education in Kenya

The Kenyan education system includes eight years of primary school and four years of secondary school. Like many other developing countries, Kenya has recently made rapid progress toward the goal of universal primary education. After the elimination of school fees in 2003, primary school enrollment rose nearly 30 percent, from 5.9 million in 2002 to 7.6 million in 2005. This is typical of what is happening in sub-Saharan Africa overall, where the number of new entrants to primary school increased by more than 30 percent between 1999 and 2004.

This progress creates its own new challenges, however. Pupil-teacher ratios have grown dramatically, particularly in lower grades. In our sample of schools in western Kenya, the median 1st-grade class in 2005 (after the introduction of free primary education, but before the class-size-reduction program we study here) had 74 students and the average class size was 83. These classes are heterogeneous in a number of ways: Students differ vastly in age, school readiness, and support at home. Many of the new students are first-generation learners and have not attended preschools, which are neither free nor compulsory in Kenya. These challenges are not unique to Kenya; they confront many developing countries where school enrollment has risen sharply in recent years. Understanding the roles of tracking and peer effects in this type of environment is thus critically important.

Our results are most likely to be directly applicable to settings where classes are large, the student population is heterogeneous, and few additional resources are available to teachers. It is unclear whether similar results would be obtained in different contexts, such as developed countries, where smaller class sizes may allow more tailored instruction even without tracking, and extra resources, such as remedial education, computer-assisted learning, and special education programs, may already provide tools to help teachers deal with different types of students.

Design of the Experiment

This study takes advantage of a class-size-reduction program and evaluation that involved primary schools in Bungoma and Butere-Mumias in Western Province, Kenya. Of 210 primary schools in these districts, 140 schools were randomly selected to participate in the Extra-Teacher Program. With funding from the World Bank, ICS Africa provided each of the 140 selected schools with funds to hire an additional 1st-grade teacher on a contractual basis starting in May 2005, the beginning of the second term of that school year. Most of the schools (121) had only one 1st-grade class, which was split into two classes when the new teacher was hired. The 19 schools that already had two or more 1st-grade classes added another class.

It is important to note that the incentives facing the newly hired teachers differed from those facing civil-service teachers already working in program schools. The new teachers had clear incentives to work hard to increase their chances of having their short-term contracts renewed and of eventually being hired as civil-service teachers—a desirable outcome in a society where government jobs are highly valued. In contrast, the difficulty of firing civil-service teachers implies that they had weak extrinsic incentives and may be more sensitive to factors affecting their intrinsic motivation.

Average class size was reduced from 84 to 46 students in the 140 schools that received funds for a new teacher. The program continued for 18 months, which included the last two terms of 2005 and the entire 2006 school year, and the same cohort of students remained enrolled in the program.

From the 121 schools that had originally only one 1st-grade class, 60 schools were randomly selected to assign students to one of the two classes by chance. We call these schools the “nontracking schools.” In the remaining 61 schools (the “tracking schools”), the children were divided into two sections according to their scores on exams administered by the school during the first term of the 2005 school year. The 50 percent of the class with the lowest exam scores were assigned to one section (the “bottom class”) and the rest were assigned to the other (the “top class”).

After students were assigned to classes, the contract teacher and the civil-service teacher were also randomly assigned to classes. In the second year of the program, all children not repeating the grade remained assigned to the same group of peers and the same teacher.

Data

Our initial sample consists of approximately 10,000 students enrolled in 1st grade in March 2005 in one of the 121 primary schools participating in the study. The outcome of interest is student academic achievement, as measured by scores on a standardized math and language test first administered in all schools 18 months after the start of the program. Trained proctors administered the test, which was then graded blindly by data processors. In each school, 60 students (30 per class) were drawn from the initial sample to participate in the tests. If a class had more than 30 students, students were randomly sampled.

The test was designed by a cognitive psychologist to measure a range of skills students may master by the end of 2nd grade. One part of the test was written and the other part oral, administered one-on-one. Students answered math and literacy questions ranging from counting and identifying letters to subtracting three-digit numbers and reading and understanding sentences.

To limit attrition from the experiment, proctors were instructed to go to the homes of sampled students who had dropped out or were absent on the day of the test and to bring them to school for the test. It was not always possible to find the child, however, and the resulting attrition rate on the test was 18 percent. However, there was no difference between tracking and nontracking schools in overall attrition rates. In total, we have postintervention test-score data for 5,796 students.

In addition, each school received unannounced visits several times during the course of the study. During these visits enumerators checked, upon arrival, whether teachers were present in school and whether they were in class and teaching, and then took a roll call of the students.

To measure whether the effects of the program persisted, the children who had been sampled for the first postintervention test were tested again in November 2007, one year after the program ended. During the 2007 school year, these students were overwhelmingly enrolled in grades for which their school had a single class, so tracking was no longer an option. Most of these students had reached 3rd grade by that time, but those repeating an earlier grade were also tested. The attrition rate for this portion of the experiment was 22 percent. Neither the proportion nor the characteristics of children who could not be tested differed between the tracking and nontracking schools.

The Impact of Tracking

We estimate the impact of tracking on student achievement by comparing the postintervention (18 months after the experiment began) test scores of students in the tracking and nontracking schools. Taking the average of students’ scores on math and literacy exams, we find that students in tracking schools scored 0.14 standard deviations higher than students in nontracking schools overall. When we adjust the comparison to take into account minor differences in student characteristics across the two groups of schools, the effect increases to 0.18 standard deviations. There was no significant difference between the impact of the program on math and literacy scores when we examined the subjects separately.

How large were these effects? A typical student with a literacy score one standard deviation above that of the average student could correctly spell 5.5 of 10 words included on the exam, while the average student could spell only two. Similarly, students with a math score one standard deviation above the average were able to perform single-digit multiplications, whereas those at the mean could not. The average effect of tracking was roughly one-fifth the size of these performance differences.

These gains persisted beyond the duration of the program (see Figure 1). When the program ended, most students had reached 3rd grade, and all but five schools had only one 3rd-grade class. The remaining students had repeated and were in 2nd grade where, once again, most schools had only one large class, since after the program ended they did not have funds for additional teachers. Even so, the test scores of students in tracking schools remained 0.16 standard deviations higher than those of students in nontracking schools overall (and 0.18 standard deviations higher with control variables). The persistence of the benefits of tracking is striking, as many evaluations find that the test-score effects of successful interventions fade over time. It seems that tracking helped students master core skills in 1st and 2nd grade that in turn helped improve their learning later on.

We also examine whether the effect of tracking differs between initially high-scoring students (who are grouped with other strong students in tracking schools) and initially low-scoring students (who are grouped with other low-scoring students in tracking schools). We find that both groups of students benefited from tracking, and by approximately the same amount. A year after the intervention ended, the effect persisted for both the top and bottom classes.

Tracking increases test scores for students taught by contract teachers. In fact, students initially scoring low who were assigned to contract teachers benefited even more from tracking than students who initially scored high. But students who initially scored low showed only a small and statistically insignificant benefit if assigned to a civil-service teacher. In contrast, tracking substantially increased scores for students who initially scored high and were assigned to a civil-service teacher. Below we discuss other evidence that tracking led civil-service teachers to increase effort when they were assigned to high-scoring students but not when assigned to low-scoring students.

Changes in Peer Achievement

Data from the tracking schools allow us to estimate the effect of being taught with a higher-achieving vs. lower-achieving peer group by comparing students with baseline test scores in the middle of the distribution. Because of the way tracking was done (splitting the grade into two classes at the median baseline test score), the two students closest to the median within each school were assigned to classes where the average prior achievement of their classmates was very different.

By comparing pairs of students right around the cutoff, we can estimate the effect of being the lowest-achieving child in the class compared to being the highest-achieving student in the class. We find that, despite the large gap in average peer achievement (1.6 standard deviations in baseline test scores) between the top and bottom classes, the students just below the cutoff have postintervention test scores similar to students just above the cutoff. Moreover, when we compare students around the cutoff at the tracking schools with students of similar ability at the nontracking schools, we find that students at the tracking schools score higher at the end of the intervention than the comparable students in the nontracking schools. These results imply that being the best student in a class of relatively weak students and being the worst student in a class of relatively strong students are both better than being the middle student in a heterogeneous class. This evidence suggests that students benefit from homogeneity because the teacher does not need to spend time addressing the needs of students performing at widely varying levels.

Learning from Peers vs. Learning from Teachers

We took a separate look at students in schools where students were not tracked but instead assigned to classes randomly. The random assignment of students and teachers within these schools made it possible to see whether and how peer achievement affected the performance of individual students when education took place in an untracked setting. We found that it did. If peer achievement was higher—0.10 standard deviations higher, to be exact—students learned 0.04 standard deviations more than they would have otherwise.

These results, taken together with those reported earlier, indicate that peer influence depends on whether or not classes are tracked. In untracked classes, where there is considerable heterogeneity of performance, students learn less if their peers are lower performing. At least in this particular setting, however, the homogeneous classes that are created by tracking seem to allow the teacher to deliver instruction at a level that reaches all students, thus offsetting the effect of having lower-performing peers. Interestingly, combining the direct effect of peer achievement with the fact that the median children in each school did not suffer from being assigned to the bottom track suggests that teachers focus their attention not on the median student in the class, but at students considerably above the median.

Why Did Tracking Work?

Two additional pieces of evidence shed light on the question of why tracking had such clear benefits. First, we look at teacher presence and effort. Do they spend more time in class and teaching? Then, we examine whether the test-score gains in tracking schools were concentrated among simpler or more complex tasks and whether this varied by students’ initial achievement levels. Our results confirm that students in tracked classes seem to have benefited from more-focused teaching and perhaps also from greater teacher effort.

Teacher absence is a major problem in Kenya, as in many developing countries. Only 59 percent of teachers were in class and teaching during unannounced visits to a comparable sample of schools that did not receive an additional teacher. Overall, teachers in tracking schools were 9.6 percentage points more likely to be found in school and teaching during random spot checks than their counterparts in nontracking schools, who were present and teaching only about half of the time. There were, however, large differences across teachers. The contract teachers were much more likely to be found in school and teaching (74 percent versus 45 percent for the civil-service teachers), and their absence rate was unaffected by tracking (see Figure 2). The civil-service teachers were 10 percentage points more likely to be in schools and teaching in tracking schools than in nontracking schools when they were assigned to the top class. This difference is statistically significant and amounts to a 25 percent increase in teaching time. However, the difference between tracking and nontracking school types was smaller and statistically insignificant for civil-service teachers assigned to the bottom classes.

These results suggest that teachers may be more motivated to teach a group of students with high initial scores than a group with low initial scores or a heterogeneous group. Recall that students assigned to the top class with a civil-service teacher benefited more from tracking than those assigned to the bottom class with a civil-service teacher. Increased teacher effort may help explain this pattern.

Another hypothesis consistent with both the tracking results and the effects from random peer assignment is that tracking by initial achievement improves student learning because it allows teachers to focus instruction. Teaching a more homogeneous group of students might allow teachers to adjust the material covered and the pace of instruction to students’ needs. For example, a teacher might begin with more basic material and instruct at a slower pace, providing more repetition and reinforcement, when students are initially less prepared. With a group of initially higher-achieving students, the teacher can increase the complexity of the tasks and pupils can learn at a faster pace. With a heterogeneous group, they may be compelled to cover both simple and advanced material, spending less time on each, which would hurt all students.

One way to examine this is to see whether children with different initial achievement levels gained from tracking differentially in terms of the difficulty of the material that they learned. While the results for language are mixed, the estimates for math suggest that, although the total effect of tracking on children in the bottom class is significantly positive for all levels of difficulty, these children gained from tracking more than other students on the easier questions and less on the more-difficult questions. Conversely, students assigned to the top class benefited less on the easier questions, and more on the more-difficult questions. In fact, they did not significantly benefit from tracking for the easier questions, but they did significantly benefit from it for the more-difficult questions. These results suggest that tracking helped by giving teachers the opportunity to focus on the competencies that children were not mastering.

Conclusion

A central challenge of education systems in developing countries—the context for which our results are most relevant—is that students in the same grades and classrooms are extremely diverse. Our results show that grouping students by preparedness or prior achievement and focusing the teaching material at the most appropriate level could potentially have large positive effects with little or no additional resource cost. One could also target more resources to the weaker group, further helping them to catch up with their more-advanced counterparts. It is often suggested that there is a trade-off between the value of targeting resources to weaker students, and the costs imposed on them by separating them from stronger students. We find no evidence for such a trade-off in this context.

Our results may also have implications for debates over school choice and voucher systems. A common criticism of such programs is that they may hurt some students if they lead to increased sorting of students by initial achievement and if all students benefit from having peers with higher initial achievement. If tracking is indeed beneficial, this is less of a concern.

Esther Duflo is professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Pascaline Dupas is assistant professor of economics at University of California, Los Angeles. Michael Kremer is professor of economics at Harvard University.

Refusing to consent to the underlying ideology, Swan failed repeatedly. The college threatened to expel him from the teacher training program unless he signed a contract agreeing to undergo diversity training and accept extra scrutiny of his student teaching. After a national civil-liberties group intervened on his behalf, Swan was allowed to continue in the program, and WSU has since revised its evaluation form. The new version requires professors to evaluate students’ “willingness to consider multiple perspectives on social and institutional factors that can impede or enhance students’ learning.” Dean of Education Judy Mitchell explained, “We’ve changed the format and clarified the words, but we haven’t changed the standards.”

Advocates of dispositions assessments of the kind in place at WSU defend the screening of pre-service teachers, whether at program entry or later on in the certification process, as standard practice and argue that “dispositions” are merely those attitudes and behaviors necessary to successful teaching. Critics see the combination of program accreditation standards, revised by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) in 2000; a growing curricular emphasis on “social justice” issues; and a left-leaning education professoriate as yielding a one-sided approach to teacher education and the certification of teachers based on ideology, rather than teaching skills or mastery of content knowledge.

As a historian, I am most struck by the parallels between the dispositions assessments of today’s aspiring teachers and the evaluations of teachers’ mental hygiene and personality that began in the 1940s and continued for two decades. As is the case today, from 1940 to 1960 teacher educators sought to protect the interests of schoolchildren by socially engineering “desirable” characteristics in their teachers. What have changed are the personal qualities deemed most important for success in the classroom.

Assessing Teacher Dispositions

What is the purpose of dispositions assessment? What entity or body is in the best position to make this assessment? If the purpose is to ensure that access to children is denied to those who are truly deviant (sexual predators) or those who could harm children (drug dealers, felony offenders, child abusers), then it seems the assessment is best made by the government, which has the resources and responsibility to identify these people. If the purpose is to ensure that potential teachers have basic characteristics like honesty or fairness, existing standards such as university honor codes in higher education should suffice. If the purpose is to see how a teacher acts in a certain environment (be it an urban, suburban, or rural school, with a diverse or homogeneous student body), then perhaps those in that environment can best perform that assessment, taking into account the standards, mores, and preferences of the community. The ultimate employers of teachers, local school districts, can and do screen for the characteristics they want in their employees. Why, then, is it also necessary for teacher educators to assess the personal and political beliefs of aspiring teachers? Perhaps the policing of teacher personality and dispositions is just a way for teacher educators to extend their control even further into the public school classroom.

The harshest critics of dispositions assessment accuse education schools of acting as ideological gatekeepers to employment in public schools. Indeed, web site after web site shows schools of education that list among their teacher-education program goals the inculcation of political views alongside intellectual curiosity and such work habits as punctuality. The University of Alabama’s College of Education is “committed to preparing individuals to promote social justice, to be change agents, and to recognize individual and institutional racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism.…” In the teacher education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, students are asked to  “act as leaders and agents for organizational change in their classrooms, schools, and society…continually examine their own identities, biases, and social locations, seeking knowledge of students’ cultures and communities, and pursuing a complex understanding of societal inequities as mediated through classism, heterosexism, racism, and other systems of advantage.” Some program descriptions explain that requiring awareness of these issues and a commitment to addressing them ensures teachers will teach all children. In an October 2006 letter defending the conceptual framework of Teachers College, Columbia University, against accusations of political screening, President Susan H. Furhman wrote, “We believe that responsiveness to the diversity of students’ backgrounds and previous experiences are [sic] essential for effective teaching” (see Figure 1).

Not all universities make the leap from classroom behavior to ideology: The “Teacher Education Professional Dispositions and Skills Criteria” at Winthrop University in South Carolina are only basic indicators of professional commitment, communication skills, interpersonal skills (among them, “Shows sensitivity to all students and is committed to teaching all students”), emotional maturity, and academic integrity; acknowledging social inequities is not mentioned. The difficulty, however, in assessing dispositions, whether they espouse social justice or are seemingly harmless as at Winthrop, arises when the assessors make value judgments rather than encourage academic freedom and respect freedom of conscience. As the Swan case at Washington State University shows, some teacher education programs clearly demand allegiance to a particular perspective on the politics of education.

If schools encourage students to respond honestly to teacher education assignments, and then use any responses that differ from accepted beliefs as grounds for dismissal, that is political screening and a clear denial of academic freedom. A student accused Le Moyne College, a private, Jesuit-run school, of doing just that. In 2004, administrators dismissed the politically conservative graduate student after he wrote a paper on classroom management that questioned the value of multicultural education and expressed limited support for the use of corporal punishment in the classroom. At the Brooklyn College School of Education, some students complained after a teacher showed the Michael Moore film Fahrenheit 9/11 on the day before the 2004 presidential election. The university asked one student to leave, accused two others of plagiarism, and then denied the two students the right to bring a witness or an attorney to their hearing. K. C. Johnson, a faculty member who questioned the accusation of plagiarism and defended the students in Inside Higher Ed, then faced possible investigation by the university. The hallmarks of a professional program of teacher preparation within a university should be the free exploration of ideas. Yet it seems some teacher preparation programs substitute professional socialization, and the political conformity it requires, for a commitment to academic freedom.

The controversy over political screening of prospective teachers by teacher educators came to a head at the June 2006 reauthorization hearing for the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) with the U.S. Department of Education. Within the list of dispositions aspiring teachers might be required to possess, the agency had included “social justice,” a phrase that, to many, signals a value-laden ideology. Under pressure from a number of groups, NCATE president Arthur Wise announced that the agency would drop “social justice” from its accreditation standards; he maintains that social justice was never a required disposition.

NCATE’s definition of “dispositions” and its inclusion of social justice as part of that definition had caused considerable consternation. Among the groups represented at the hearing were the National Association of Scholars, which had filed the complaint, and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), founded and headed by civil libertarians Alan Charles Kors, professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense attorney. FIRE, an organization dedicated to the preservation of free speech, has accused a number of universities, including Washington State University on behalf of Edward Swan, of evaluating students on the basis of their political views and thereby violating their First Amendment rights.

Arthur Wise has staked out NCATE’s position that dispositions are only “commonsense expectations” for teacher behavior and insists that the accrediting agency does not condone the evaluation of attitudes. Whether or not that is the case, most teacher education programs in this country receive accreditation from NCATE and follow its lead. Even though NCATE has now dropped “social justice” as a disposition, the agency stands behind dispositions assessment and institutions’ use of “social justice” as a curricular theme. The phrase appears in countless teacher-preparation program and course descriptions. Critics are not hopeful that NCATE’s action will curb abuses. In her testimony at the NCATE hearing, American Council of Trustees and Alumni president Anne D. Neal asked that the agency’s reauthorization be denied “until it affirmatively makes clear that teacher preparation programs are not expected to judge the values and political beliefs of teacher candidates and asks that its members review and revise their standards accordingly.”

Judging Fitness Is Nothing New

Society has long been concerned with the behavior, both inside and outside of the classroom, and the character of public school teachers. A century ago, local school boards carefully selected school teachers they deemed “fit to teach,” whose behavior comported with community values. They could not smoke or drink. Female teachers could not socialize with men while unchaperoned. They could not marry. They were not to display or engage in behaviors considered deviant, such as lesbianism. They were to dress conservatively and attend church. Violation could cost a teacher her job.

School officials and boards also scrutinized teachers’ political views. During World War I, the superintendent of the Cleveland public schools suggested firing those teachers sympathetic to Germany, and anti-war teachers did lose their jobs in New York City. In the 1920s and 1930s, more than a dozen states, typically those in which there were anti-communist crusades, required teachers to take loyalty oaths.

In public-school classrooms, as educational progressivism steadily gained influence during the first half of the 20th century, the focus in classrooms gradually shifted from rigorous academic study and discipline to children’s personality development and mental health. Education historian Sol Cohen describes the “medicalization” of education as the “infiltration of psychiatric norms, concepts and categories of discourse” into American education. Cohen reports that by 1950, there was “a national consensus on the role of personality development in American education” and that this included the view that “the school is basically an institution to develop children’s personality and that personality development of children should take priority over any other school objective.”

Attention turned as well toward the “mental hygiene” of the teacher, whose actions and attitudes would no doubt influence the children in her charge. As Douglas Spencer, instructor of psychological counseling at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote in 1938, the teacher was to “demonstrate in her own personality adjustment sound mental health and emotional maturity.” As the 1940s began, a growing chorus of educators called for teacher qualification and selection to be based on mental health, first and foremost, and many expected this to be achieved through the teacher education process. However, market pressures on teacher education institutions made this problematic. Government policies provided tax funds for training teachers through the publicly supported teachers colleges, which did not have selective admissions requirements. Meanwhile, the number of both school-age children and college attendees grew steadily, with more than one-quarter of college degrees being granted in the field of education.

The rapid expansion of the teaching workforce hindered efforts to select teachers on mental hygienic grounds, even before the teacher shortage that developed in the 1950s. Reports of teachers with mental disturbances and even mental illnesses made professional and public headlines throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Public concern grew about maladjusted or neurotic teachers and their inability to ensure the proper psychological development of the children under their tutelage. Some feared that, as with contagious disease, psychological disorders would spread from teacher to child. Various personality traits of the maladjusted teacher emerged in the literature of the time. Shy, nervous, timid, easily excitable, disorganized, irresponsible, introverted, sexually repressed, or hot-tempered teachers were considered unfit for the classroom. A 1961 text, The Mentally Disturbed Teacher, documented purportedly true incidents about such teachers, suggesting that teachers who used corporal punishment could be mentally ill or that irritability in a teacher may be a sign of alcoholism, to take two examples. One suggestion for improving the mental health of the teaching body was for schools to keep a record of the teacher’s “attainments and attitudes,” including her cultural background and her community leadership.

As early as the 1940s, teacher education institutions began to use rating scales, placement tests, and personal interviews as screening devices for measuring mental hygiene and teacher personality. For some assessments, candidates filled out questionnaires; for others, faculty, administrators, or psychologists observed the teacher and made judgments. The University of Utah required teacher candidates to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory and the Strong Vocational Interest Blank. The College of Education at the State College of Washington used the Minnesota Teacher Attitude Inventory. Still other institutions employed a variety of assessment measures, such as the Rorschach test, James Cattell’s 16 Factor Personality test, the Guilford-Zimmerman Temperament Survey, the Thurstone Temperament Schedule, and a host of other batteries designed to explore the teacher’s behavior, personality, and attitude.

In 1953, Ruth A. Stout, director of field programs at Kansas State Teachers Association and later professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, completed a comprehensive study of admission practices in teacher education institutions. Stout surveyed 785 of 865 accredited teacher-training schools and found that a majority identified emotional stability as being of primary importance and that approximately 45 percent actually assessed students’ emotional stability, identifying it as the second most important criterion for determining fitness for teaching, behind academic credentials. Assessment of emotional stability became more important, Stout reported, as students progressed through their teaching preparation, with more institutions using it to determine admission to student teaching than to the teacher education program.

Research on Teacher Personality

Experimental and statistical research on personality development exploded onto the 1940s education scene, replacing earlier anecdotal surveys. The Journal of Experimental Education and the Journal of Educational Research published much of this research, which used psychological or personality indexes to “scientifically” determine the relationship between personality and “good teaching.” The ultimate goal was to connect personal traits with teaching effectiveness, thus enabling better selection of teacher candidates. Sometimes, researchers measured teacher success based on the observation of classroom supervisors. At other times, they used data on students’ class rank, college grades, or other measures of student performance.

The results of the research were as diverse as the assessment instruments used. Some found good teachers were more gregarious, adventurous, frivolous, artistic, polished, cheerful, kind, and interested in the opposite sex than teachers rated poorer in performance. Others found good teachers to be those whose attitudes were positive toward children and administrators. A few studies that tried to correlate teacher factors (both intelligence and personality) with effectiveness found teaching too complex to be influenced by any one or two factors. Nonetheless, institutions pushed forward with the use of personality tests to select among teacher candidates, often using multiple indexes, even as critics warned that some instruments had low predictive validity, that there was inconsistency in results, or that the lack of replication warranted cautious use.

In a 1956 review of the research on “School Personnel and Mental Health,” J. T. Hunt, a professor at the University of North Carolina, noted that “efforts to identify personality differences between superior and inferior school personnel, to isolate a ‘teacher personality,’ or to predict either competence or effectiveness of student teachers by means of psychometric or projective instruments, led to limited results.” Unlike most of the research he reviewed, Hunt recognized that personality was not a monolithic attribute, as there were many kinds and types of teacher personalities and roles. More presciently, Hunt called for research that would consider the “varying value standards of judges.” “Very little attention seems to have been paid,” he concluded, “to the actual attitudes and expectations of persons” who assess teachers. He called for research that placed university administrators under the personality microscope.

University of Chicago professors Jacob Warren Getzels and P. W. Jackson in 1960 followed Berkeley professor Fred Tyler’s lead in arguing that no consensus existed among researchers, and presumably educators generally, as to what was considered good teaching. Getzels and Jackson pointed out that the authoritarian teaching style considered “good” at the end of the 19th century had given way to the personal style brought into vogue with progressive education, which would in time give way to another. Without definitive criteria for good teaching, the personality indexes used in teacher personality research had no validity. The tests, they claimed, were chosen for “irrelevant reason” or for “no apparent reason at all.” Thus, the entire design of research on teacher personality was flawed.

Mental Hygiene as Curriculum

The mental hygiene perspective nonetheless held sway throughout the 1950s, and the concept of personality became as important in teacher education as academic and technical preparation for the classroom—as important as content knowledge and skills. The separation of the teacher into “technician” and “personality,” a distinction noted by mental hygienist Harry Rivlin in 1955, required that teacher education prepare students along both lines. Teacher educators often prioritized personality over other aspects of a teacher’s abilities.

In 1955, Percival Symonds, professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, where he taught mental hygiene, headed a study publicized by the Council for Research in the Social Sciences of Columbia University. His study recommended “a change in emphasis in teacher-training from intellectual courses to experiences for the better personal adjustment of teachers.” For a decade, Symonds had promoted the inclusion of psychotherapeutic principles and methods in the mental hygienic treatment of teacher maladjustment. He used psychotherapy in his classes; his students wrote autobiographies and he analyzed them. As he noted in a Newsweek article, he “first gained the pupil’s confidence to a point where they would feel free enough to drag all the family skeletons out of the closet”; of course, he found maladjustment everywhere. According to a 1955 Education article by Leon Mones, then an assistant superintendent in Newark, New Jersey, and a former principal, Symonds and others were openly advocating that the emotional life of the teacher become the focus of teacher preparation, since “it is the teacher’s personality that is the tool with which he works rather than the content in which he gives instruction.”

Educational psychology courses aimed at understanding children were standard fare for teacher preparation in the 1920s. But even by the mid-1940s, the goal of psychology coursework had become the teacher’s own mental health. Bank Street College of Education in New York, San Francisco State College, the University of Texas, and the University of Wisconsin incorporated lectures on mental health with “psychiatrically supervised individual guidance” of pre-service teachers. The experimental use of psychoanalysis in teacher education even received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health.

At Bank Street College, teacher educator and director of research Barbara Biber extolled the virtues of a program that applied “the concept of the unified nature of cognitive and affective development…on the teacher-training level” and was based on “a process of integrating new knowledge with an old self.” Bank Street faculty members looked for certain dispositions in their candidates: relatedness to children, an orientation to the psychology of growth, their relation to authority, their emotional strength, and their motivation. The Institute for Child Study at the University of Maryland emphasized the ideal of the “self-actualized individual” in its graduate-level instruction. A human relations seminar at the Merrill-Palmer School aimed “to help the individual teacher express and explore the values, meanings, and dynamics of personal and professional experiences, to achieve self-awareness, and to develop sensitive, understanding, responsive attitudes.”

Still, psychiatrists reported that teachers, especially novices, did not know how to handle their negative feelings. I. N. Berlin, a professor of psychiatry and psychiatric consultant to school districts in San Francisco, San Joaquin County, and Stockton, California, argued that some mental pathologies that were causal factors in teacher maladjustment and ineffectiveness in the classroom were, unfortunately, exacerbated rather than alleviated by teacher education. Berlin’s criticism of teacher training reflected the belief of some psychiatrists that there were limits to teacher education’s ability to ensure mentally healthy teachers.

Learning from History

The screening of prospective teachers for maladjustment 50 years ago and the dispositions assessments going on today have remarkable similarities. As William Damon of Stanford has noted, dispositions assessment “opens virtually all of a candidate’s thoughts and actions to scrutiny…[and] brings under the examiner’s purview a key element of the candidate’s very personality.” The same underlying assumption—that scientific means of selection and training could guarantee good teachers—held sway at mid-century with respect to mental hygiene. Teacher educators who guarded entry to the profession used the techniques of science to study, measure, and evaluate the teacher candidate as do those who guard entry today. Only the specific values and attitudes they appraise have changed. Advocates of dispositions assessment claim that their methods are “standards-based” and provide “accountability” —scientific-sounding catchwords that hold considerable weight in the current political climate. Both sets of desirable characteristics—summed up in the terms mental hygiene and social justice—are tied to progressivism and appear as core components of the teacher preparation curriculum, with the effect of deemphasizing academic knowledge, or at least requiring subject-matter learning and even pedagogy to make room for them. And hard evidence was and still is lacking. Researchers could never link with any certainty particular personality traits with effective teaching. Nor, as Frederick Hess explains, is there any scientific evidence that requiring teachers to have certain views about “sexuality or social class” ensures that they teach all students: “Screening on ‘dispositions’ serves primarily to cloak academia’s biases in the garb of professional necessity.”

The history of teacher screening reveals how deeply rooted such practices are in American teacher education. Whether the standard is mental hygiene or possessing the proper political and ideological disposition, the elimination of candidates who do not pass muster gives teacher educators the power to determine who gains access to a classroom based on the values the teacher educators prefer. While the courts have permitted certifying agencies to require “good moral character” of teacher applicants, as legal scholars Martha McCarthy and Nelda Cambron-McCabe note, they “will intervene…if statutory or constitutional rights are abridged.” Thus, while pledging loyalty to federal and state constitutions is a permissible condition for obtaining a teacher license, swearing an oath to progressivism is not. Given the evidence and the history, there should be real concern, as teacher educator Gary Galluzzo has said, that “students’ views and personalities are being used against them” whenever dispositions are assessed. Those committed to academic freedom within higher education should be concerned when professional socialization trumps freedom of conscience in teacher education programs.

Laurie Moses Hines is assistant professor at Kent State University Trumbull campus, where she teaches in the Cultural Foundations of Education program and in the history department.

But state-run Florida Virtual School (FLVS), a decade-old public education experiment, departs from this conventional script. This most radical of choice based schools—where students and teachers never meet in physical classrooms and state funding flows on a performance-based, demand-driven model—has largely avoided the political and legal tangles that have stymied other reform efforts. And, free from the geographic constraints and facilities costs of traditional schools, FLVS has grown rapidly, scaling up to match the considerable demand for the school’s courses. In the 2008–09 school year, approximately 84,000 students will complete 168,000 half-credit courses, a 10-fold increase since 2002–03.

To accomplish this rare feat, the school has adroitly walked a fine line. It has built a distinct educational philosophy, approach, and culture. At the same time, it has maintained its identity as a public school and remains part of the system. This unique positioning, far enough outside to do business in a different way yet sufficiently inside the system to avoid political backlash, has been a key element in the school’s success. Mark Pudlow, spokesperson for the Florida Education Association, the teachers union that has fought pitched battles against many of Florida’s recent initiatives, acknowledges the result of Florida Virtual School’s approach: “[It] never developed the kind of mistrust that tends to be associated with other reform ideas.” Savvy leadership, strong political support, and a series of well-timed decisions around growth have helped FLVS become the country’s most successful virtual school, and perhaps one of its most important reform stories as well.

School on Demand

FLVS is a supplemental virtual school: most students attend brick-and-mortar schools and take FLVS courses in addition to their traditional classes. While the vast majority of FLVS students come from district schools (82 percent in 2007-08), the school is open to charter, private, and home-schooled students (see “Virtual Schools,” forum , Winter 2009).Much of the school’s recent growth has been driven by minority enrollments. Between June 2007 and July 2008, African-American enrollments grew by 49 percent, Hispanic enrollments by 42 percent, and Native American enrollments by 41 percent. Students enroll for a variety of reasons, but most come to fulfill graduation requirements, make up credits for missed or failed classes, or take Advanced Placement (AP) and other courses that are not available at their physical school (see Figure 1).

The FLVS motto, “any time, any place, any path, any pace,” emphasizes the school’s flexible and mastery-based approach to learning. Here, the content remains constant, but the time required—be it 16, 18, or 22 weeks—adjusts. Students at FLVS choose an accelerated, traditional, or extended pace for a particular course, taking extra time if needed to review and receive additional guidance on lessons or move through a course at a quicker pace than is typical. Moreover, FLVS students don’t have to wait for the semester to begin; they can choose the month in which they would like to start.

While its courses are virtual, FLVS strives for highly personalized instruction. The school employs more than 715 fulltime and 29 adjunct teachers—all Florida-certified and “highly qualified” under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Depending on the course, teachers use a variety of methods to engage students, including live one-to-one or small group virtual whiteboard sessions, asynchronous discussion, and even a new experimental, immersive online game for an American history course. Given the school’s flexible pacing, there isn’t a set class size, but full-time teachers are limited to 150 students each and individualized feedback is extensive. Instructors are expected to respond to student questions and provide comments on assignments within 24 hours. In addition, teachers phone students at least monthly, many times using oral assessments to ensure that students’ work is their own. Via the online course site, teachers post syllabi, readings, assignments, and other course materials.

Non-Adversarial Relationships

FLVS’s “inside the system” status originated in 1995 in efforts to develop Internet-based high-school programs in two Florida counties, Alachua (Gainesville) and Orange (Orlando). Both districts launched pilot programs and then formed an alliance to compete for state grant funding. In August 1997, FLVS began as Florida High School, with 77 course enrollments.

Nicholas Gledich, supervisor of Orange County’s initial program (he now serves as chief operating officer of Orange County Schools and is an FLVS trustee), recalls that from the beginning the school made a concerted effort to build relationships with a wide range of constituencies. While there was strong initial interest from home-schooling families, he says, it was important “to reach a diverse group of students” and establish “personal contact with districts and schools.”

Julie Young, who at the time worked for Gledich and is now CEO of FLVS, points to another important, early decision that helped set the precedent for a nonadversarial relationship with traditional district schools. Rather than become a diploma-granting institution and directly compete with traditional high schools, FLVS chose to supplement the brick-and-mortar high school. Instead of offering a full-time program that drew students away from traditional settings, the program focused on filling curricular gaps and expanding access to additional courses and learning opportunities. Young says the decision was “a huge deal.” We didn’t steal students from traditional schools; we “gave kids back to their schools in good shape.”

The grant-based funding mechanism provided early capacity-building funds, allowing FLVS to establish its courses, faculty, and credibility. Importantly, funds flowing to FLVS were over and above those received by traditional schools. Traditional high schools did not lose funds when students opted to take classes with FLVS. “If we went after FTE [regular school funding] we would be putting our head in the lion’s cage,” says Frank Brogan, Florida’s commissioner of education at the time of the school’s founding and later, in 2000, lieutenant governor under Jeb Bush. The fights begin “when you go after people’s money.”

Success Pays

From 1997 to 2003, FLVS enjoyed impressive growth, from the initial 77 course enrollments to more than 12,000. The school’s funding continued on a year-to-year appropriation, but strong political support in the governor’s office, the state department of education, and key legislative committees ensured that total funding rose from $1.3 to $6.9 million in the same time frame.

While FLVS’s political support was impressive, the annual appropriations funding mechanism not only was risky—it was subject to year-to-year budget decisions—but also essentially capped growth. And, despite the strong grant funding, the school could not keep up with student demand. In the summer of 2002, 8,000 students were on FLVS waiting lists after traditional summer school classes fell victim to budget cuts. The school decided it was time to seek a permanent funding mechanism through inclusion in the state’s school funding formula. Not only had the school proved highly effective and popular, but it had also grown large enough to develop its own political constituency, serving students from across Florida’s legislative districts.

In 2003, the Florida legislature voted to establish a performance-based funding model for the school. Under this model, the school’s funding is based on students’ successful completion of their courses, a step that places far more pressure on FLVS to ensure its students’ success than exists in traditional public school systems. Florida funds six credits per high-school student per year, so each time a student successfully completes a one-credit course, FLVS receives one-sixth of its per-pupil funding level ($1,054 per credit for 2008–09). Brogan calls this act an “absolute statement that the program had arrived.” This critical legislative action established the school as a permanent component of the state’s funding formula, providing stable and predictable funding outside of the yearly legislative allotment.

For the first time, this action also put FLVS in competition for funding with traditional school systems. “We would have preferred that it would have been funded outside the FEFP [Florida Education Finance Program],” said Ruth H. Melton, the director of legislative relations for the Florida School Boards Association, in a June 2003 EducationWeek article reporting on the legislation. Despite this opposition, FLVS was only a minor irritation among a number of controversial education reform programs. Melton concluded, “school boards are less concerned about losing funding to the virtual school than to the various voucher programs.” Former Florida governor Jeb Bush, reflecting on the legislative action, echoed Melton’s sentiment: “[At the time] we were doing so many different things that were provocative, this didn’t seem as radical.”

According to state rules, a student’s full-time school may not deny access to courses offered by FLVS. Taken together, the performance-based funding model and school choice provisions provide incentives for FLVS to be responsive to student, parent, and educational needs, an alignment not commonly found among district-run schools. Since there are no barriers to enrollment and funding is not capped at a preset amount, FLVS can increase its revenue by enrolling additional students and ensuring that those students successfully complete courses.

“Part of what Florida did is set it up in a way that gave direct access to parents and students, but structurally left kids enrolled in their district. [This has enabled] Florida to reach scale,” explains Barbara Dreyer, president and CEO of Connections Academy, a for-profit, full-time virtual school provider and partner of FLVS. “Many other states are caught in a catch-22: [Their programs] do not have enough scale so they are not cheap, but because they are not cheap they can’t get to scale.”

New Challenges

Despite FLVS’s success and national recognition—in December 2008 Florida governor Charlie Crist accepted a plaque from the Center for Digital Education recognizing Florida as the top provider of virtual education in the nation—the school still faces a number of operational and political challenges. The school is experiencing staggering growth; in the eight months from July 2008 to February 2009, it hired more than 300 new full-time teachers (see Figure 2). After a long period of extremely solid support in Tallahassee, the state’s executive and legislative leaders have begun to turn over.

The school was surprised at the end of 2007 when key state senate committee leaders convened a two-day workshop to hear from a variety of additional virtual school vendors, researchers, and district officials. While every legislator and speaker at the hearing expressed strong admiration and support for FLVS’s programs, it was clear that FLVS was no longer driving the agenda.

In 2008, spurred by a stated desire to increase school choice, but also partly motivated by fiscal concerns and vendor lobbying, the legislature voted to change the state’s other virtual school provisions that regulated full-time programs. In addition to FLVS’s supplemental programs, the state had contracted with two private providers, the similarly named Florida Virtual Academy, run by K12, Inc., and Florida Connections Academy, to offer fully online, fulltime, statewide virtual school programs for elementary- and middle-school students. The new law phased out the statewide programs, mandating that beginning in the 2009–10 school year, each Florida school district must develop its own offering or contract with a provider to offer a K–8 full-time online school option.

FLVS had to scramble quickly to respond. While the legislation did not directly impact FLVS’s supplemental programs or funding, it presented another, possibly more dangerous, issue. With 67 districts mandated to begin their own online programs and funding incentives for these districts to contract with low-cost providers and pocket the difference, FLVS feared that virtual education would be tainted by low-quality programs. Over the past five years, the school had watched as a number of other states, such as Colorado and Pennsylvania, conducted audits and investigations to root out mismanaged programs, casting doubt on quality programs in the process.

FLVS did not serve elementary-school students and operated on a supplementary basis. But the school already had “franchise” relationships with eight Florida counties, including Broward (Fort Lauderdale), Dade (Miami), and Hillsborough (Tampa). Under this agreement, the counties’ district schools use their own teachers in conjunction with FLVS’s courses and technology platform to offer online courses. For instance, in Broward County, the district offers a full-time alternative high-school program. These districts were mandated to begin K–8 full-time programs, but FLVS could only offer courses in 6th through 12th grade.

Faced with the possibility of being a nonplayer and not necessarily in a position to start its own program, FLVS decided to partner. The school issued an open solicitation for proposals and developed a partnership with private Connections Academy to jointly solicit and run K–8 programs for Florida school districts. Dreyer, when asked about the partnership, notes FLVS’s strong national reputation and the credibility it brings to her company.

Christopher McGuire, new principal at Broward Virtual School, an FLVS franchisee, continues the school’s philosophy of operating both within and outside of the system: “This is a healthy alternative to the conventional school model…we’re competing on a different plane: ‘Come to Broward Virtual School if the traditional model is not working for you.’”

A Winning Strategy

More than a decade after the school’s founding, Brogan recognizes the narrow path that FLVS has navigated between accommodation and confrontation. “Education has a unique ability to fend off and co-opt reform, drag it into a cul-de-sac and strangle it.” At the other extreme, “reformers can become such zealots. What is a great idea is lost in the translation of zealot status, lost in a wash of defensiveness.”

Bush, Brogan, and Gledich are all quick to point out that despite the school’s political support, it would not have succeeded without consistent leadership and a high-quality program. Former governor Bush says that a “poor quality product would have failed.” While much more research is needed to understand the effectiveness of virtual schooling for students in K–12, the small body of research available points to no significant differences in student performance in online courses versus face-to-face learning. At FLVS, the early evidence, including scores from its students’ AP exams, is positive (see Figure 3).

While it is still too early to determine the ultimate effect of FLVS on public schooling in Florida, the program’s growth is evidence that its political strategy has succeeded. Quietly, without the polarizing rhetoric or bruising battles of other reform efforts, the school has expanded options for students. For a virtual school, that’s a concrete achievement.

Bill Tucker is managing director at Education Sector

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.

It is true that Europeans confiscated land on which other people lived, sometimes intentionally killed those people through war or disease, and more often unintentionally killed those people with disease (this was, after all, before the development of the germ theory of disease or any practical means to control its spread).

While there is no doubt that Europeans confiscated land in the Americas from other people, we almost always fail to ask how those people came to possess that land.  We regularly refer to the people from whom Europeans confiscated lands as Indigenous Peoples or First Nations, but those terms are clearly inaccurate.

Indigenous means “having originated in and being produced, growing, living, or occurring naturally in a particular region or environment” and first is defined as “preceding all others in time, order, or importance.”  Neither term correctly describes the connection between the people whom the Europeans displaced and the land from which they were displaced.  Those peoples neither “originated” from nor preceded “all others in time” on that land.  Instead, those peoples confiscated that land from other groups of people who preceded them, often through war and disease.  And those displaced people confiscated the land from people before them, and so on.

It would be more accurate to describe the people from whom the Europeans confiscated land as the “T-1? Peoples because they were the people in possession of the land in the prior time period.  And those T-1 Peoples confiscated the land from T-2 Peoples, who in turn took it from T-3 Peoples, etc….

This all raises some very messy and complicated questions about how a People can have a legitimate claim to a land.  You can’t just declare that history starts whenever it suits you.  Being a T-1 People does not make them the “first” or “indigenous.”  There was a history before that with its own prior claims of ownership.

Just to illustrate this messiness — much of the land around the Dakotas was in the possession of a group of Sioux known as the Lakota when large numbers of European descendants arrived in the area.  The struggle between these European-Americans and Lakota culminated in the massacre of Lakota at Wounded Knee and their confinement to reservations.  This chain of events was filled with suffering and cruelty inflicted on the Lakota and has been cited by activists to justify claims of expanded control over land in that area by the Lakota descendants.

But how did the Lakota come into possession of that land before large numbers of Europeans arrived?  The Lakota can be traced to the Great Lakes area (and almost certainly came from somewhere else before that).  They were pushed west by the Ojibwe as the Ojibwe were pressured by the westward expansion of the fur trade.  The Mandan and Hidatsa blocked the Lakota from crossing the Missouri river, but eventually their resistance was weakened by disease and the Lakota were able to conquer the grassland in the Dakotas.  In doing so they also pushed west the Shoshone, who were struggling for that same valuable grassland.

So, who has the rightful claim to that land?  Is it the Lakota, because they were in possession of it before large-scale arrival of Europeans?  What if descendants of the Shoshone, Mandan, or Hidatsa showed up? Could they legitimately claim the land as their own?  What about the descendants of the various peoples who preceded all of these groups?

Only simple-minded college students and slogan-shouting activists could say that Europeans stole that land from the indigenous people, massacred its people, and ought to give it back.  The problem is that all land has been stolen countless times, with round after round of massacres, and an endless string of confusing claims to rightful ownership.  Being the T-1 People is hardly a sufficient justification for the legitimate possession of land.

If college students want to think seriously about these issues, they should discuss multiple, practical criteria for legitimate ownership of land, which might make them appreciate some of the messy compromises that explain status quo arrangements.

For the study (which was published in Science earlier this year), researchers administered tests to freshmen in college—not just any freshmen, but science and engineering majors enrolled in calculus-based physics. The study found that Chinese students outperformed American students on tests of content knowledge, but that the groups scored identically on a test of scientific reasoning.

Because the students in China had been exposed to much more intensive content learning than the students in the U.S., the authors of the study concluded that more study of content does not affect scientific reasoning ability.

Gross does not buy this interpretation of the results, and he offers some other possible explanations for the findings.

One possibility is that the authors of the study made a mistake when they determined that scientific reasoning is not explicitly taught in either country. How have these researchers missed the popularity of inquiry-based learning in American classrooms? Moreover, why do the researchers believe that Chinese classes that emphasize “conceptual physics understanding and problem-solving skills” do not explicitly teach scientific reasoning?

It could also be important that the test of scientific reasoning used by the researchers was designed to not require content knowledge. Students who know a lot of physics are likely to be better at reasoning about physics than students who do not know a lot of physics, but they may not be better at a test of scientific reasoning that is specifically designed to be general, not physics-specific.

A final possibility, Gross writes, is that the two groups of students–Chinese and American students majoring in science and engineering—have achieved about the same level of general reasoning ability or are of about equal intelligence. Their scores on a test of generic scientific reasoning may be about the same because what the test measures is something like intelligence; the test does not really measure the ability of students who know physics to reason scientifically about physics.

Gross makes a good case that this study does not demonstrate what the authors believe it demonstrates: that teaching more science content leads only to more content knowledge, not to higher-level science competence.  However, “whichever conclusion(s) may be correct,” Gross writes, “what we can say with confidence is that these Chinese students learned enough physics in school. The U.S. students—who, having opted already for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics majors in college, are among our best science students—have not learned enough.”

But a report issued recently by PayScale finds many fields doing much better than finance, accounting, and marketing.  PayScale provides a listing of undergraduate college degrees by salary, and it appears here.

What PayScale did was calculate the salaries of people who earned bachelor’s degrees (not professional degrees in medicine, law, etc.) and who were hired full-time and had compiled five years or less of experience. The median person was 25 years old and had two years of experience.

It calculated salaries for people later in their careers, too, and did the same correlation with majors.

If paycheck is first consideration, the course is clear. Seven of the top ten majors were in Engineering, aerospace topping them all, with starting people earning $59,600 and mid-career people earning $109,000. The other three fields in the top ten were Economics ($50,200 and $101,000), Physics ($51,100 and $98,800), and Computer Science ($56,400 and $97,400).

Finance came in at $48,500 and $89,400, Marketing at $41,500 and $81,500, International Business at $41,900 and $77,800, and Business Administration at $42,900 and $73,000.

(Second to last was Elementary Education at $33,000 and $42,500. Education came a bit higher at $36,200 and $54,100.)

Now, this chart doesn’t tell you how hard those jobs were to get. If each engineering job had 500 applicants, and if each marketing job only had 20, then to a canny undergraduate, we might say, the lower marketing salary might have been worth the better odds.

Still, the skew toward engineering and physics and math (statistics came in at #11, math at #13) should lead more kids toward those majors. But on the 2008 American Freshman Survey, when entering students were asked about what they intended to major in, the standard preferences held steady.

Business stood at the top with 16,7% of the respondents. Next came “Professional,” then “Arts and humanities,” then “Social Sciences” (on the PayScale list, social work, sociology, psychology, and anthropology all came up under $40,000).

And Engineering? All the fields from aeronautical to chemical to civil to electrical took in 9.3% of the freshmen, and the entirety of the Physical Sciences garnered only 3.2% (!). That puts only one in eight students headed toward the most prosperous fields. And let’s note, too, that of the percentage of kids who aim for physics et al., a good portion of them likely won’t make the cut after a year of differential equations . . .

The first paper, released in July 2009 by Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt, found that while there are no mean differences between boys and girls in math when they start school, girls gradually lose ground, so that the gap between boys and girls after six years of schooling is half as large as the black-white test score gap.  The researchers attempted to find an explanation for the gender gap. They write “We explore a wide range of possible explanations in the U.S. data, including less investment by girls in math, low parental expectations, and biased tests, but find little support for any of these theories.” One interesting thing they did find was that girls do not lag behind boys in countries with same-sex schooling at the secondary school level, such as Bahrain, though they did not investigate whether the relationship is causal. (Over at one of the New Republic’s blogs, Zubin Jelveh asked “Is Islam Good for Girls’ Math Scores?”)

The second study, released by Glenn Ellison and Ashley Swanson (also in July 2009), examined the results of high school mathematics competitions and found that the gender gap widens dramatically at the highest levels of math performance. They also found that the top female math students are concentrated in a very small set of super-elite schools (e.g. Phillips Exeter Academy). As Kevin Lewis wrote in the Boston Globe, “Unless the parents of all the gifted girls in the country are enrolling their kids in the same schools, the evidence suggests that a lot of female talent is just not being tapped.” Ellison and Swanson note in their paper that their focus is on reporting the facts rather than on attempting to explain the factors that may contribute to the gender gap. However, they write,

If asked to speculate, our first remark would be that several elements in our results seem consistent with the view that girls suffer because they are more compliant with authority figures and/or are more sensitive to peer pressure. Most high schools offer math courses to suit students at several different levels. But, even in the highest-level “honors” courses, it is probably unusual to teach material at the level needed to bring students to the 99^th percentile. If girls are less likely to complain and get schools to make special accomodations, then we would expect them to be more underrepresented among students with skill levels that are farther beyond those developed in the classroom. Peer pressure would also presumably be more limiting when we look at achievement levels that are only likely to be reached if students join a math team or take online courses.

—–Almost always                     8.6%
—–Often                                22.4%
—–Sometimes                        39.1%
—–Seldom                             22.9%
—–Never                                 6.9%

Those numbers are disappointing, but most educators probably aren’t surprised that more than two-thirds of high school seniors don’t recognize the value of what they have to learn.  Maybe the low rating is just an expression of their feelings toward having to do the work rather than their genuine assessment of its meaningfulness.

Here is where the significance of longitudinal comparisons come in.  Just a few years earlier, things weren’t so bad.  Here are the numbers for 2001.

—–Almost always                10.2%
—–Often                             26.0%
—–Sometimes                    41.5%
—–Seldom                         19.0%
—–Never                             3.3%

Note how much the top and bottom figures have changed.  From 2001 to 2008, the combined “Almost always” or “Often” rate went down five percentage points, 36.2 percent to 31 percent.  At the same time, the combined “Seldom” or “Never” rate went up 7.5 points, 22.3 percent to 29.8 percent.
Go back to 1983 and the trend lengthens.  Back then, “Almost always” and “Often” took in 40.2 percent, “Seldom” and “Never” 18.3 percent.
More and more, then, the “meaningful” factor is dropping.  Why?
In this article in Educational Horizons, entitled “Toward a Connected Core Curriculum,” William G. Wraga blames it on a core curriculum that breaks subjects up into discrete pieces that students can’t put together into a coherent vision of education.  I attribute it to changes in the out-of-school lives that kids lead, specifically, the extension of social life to all hours of the day and night enabled by digital tools, which draws an ever-sharper division between in-class and out-of-class activity.

But whatever the cause, the declining meaningfulness-factor adds yet another burden to teachers.  Not only do they have to teach a subject matter, but they have to plant the conviction that their subject matter really matters.  They can’t rely on students entering their classrooms believing, “Yeah, this stuff is important, even if I don’t wanna learn it.”  Less and less do teens make the connection between a 19th-century short story and their daily lives, between World War II and career ambitions, Black Holes and the upcoming party . . .

This is more than just the old burden of “relevance.”  It may signal a new estrangement from more parts of the curriculum, and I don’t know if laptops in classrooms, more lessons in contemporary culture and youth issues, letting students pick their own books to read, and more collaborative learning are going to do one thing to stop it.

The participants focused on primary and secondary school, but if students pass through those years as out-of-class, evening worker-bees, the habit doesn’t stick at the next level.  Data from large surveys of college students shows that college for all too many of them is just a part-time job.

One of the questions on the National Survey of Student Engagement asked about ”Hours per 7-day week spent preparing for class (studying, reading, writing, doing homework or lab work, analyzing data, rehearsing, and other academic activities).”  Professors estimate that strong performance in college requires about 25 hours of homework to go along with a full load of courses.  In 2008, the number of students who reached that mark was miniscule.  Fully 43 percent of first-year students and seniors came in at 10 hours or less each week.  Only 17 percent of first-years and 20 percent of seniors passed 20 hours on homework.  Eight percent of first-years and 11 percent of seniors passed 25 hours.

The lax results echoed in other surveys.  On the 2008 College Senior Survey, the breakdown for seniors doing homework was:

—–10 hours or less              58.7 percent

—–11 to 15 hours                18.1 percent

—–16 to 20 hours                12.2 percent

—–More than 20 hours        11.1 percent

And the 2007 Your First College Year survey came up with these numbers for first-year students doing homework.

—–Less than 6 hours per week          37.5 percent

—–6 to 10 hours per week                33.2 percent

—–11 or more hours per week          29.2 percent

So, those who fret about homework in high school creating lifelong anti-leisure laborers needn’t worry.  The students don’t carry the homework disposition beyond high school, at least not the vast majority of them.  And they don’t have to get up early and catch the bus five days a week, either.

Even before the Texas Board of Education and Texas legislature made this change, courses related to participation in high school sports could count for as many as 2 of the 26 courses required for graduation.  Now they can count for as many as 4 of the 26 required courses.

Advocates of the change “have been complaining for years that students weren’t getting credit for all their athletics courses. They argued that there was no comparable limit on marching band or ROTC military-training classes, which can earn students four years of credit.”

Detractors of the change complained: “There are only so many hours in a school day… This really equates to two less academic credits a student will then be taking.”

Of course students should be required to take a rigorous set of core academic classes, but the question is what they should be allowed to do to satisfy elective requirements.  Is football less academically beneficial than band or ROTC?

Many education pundits have a decidedly anti-athletics bias.  Perhaps it was those years of wedgies and romantic failure with the cheer-leading team, but whatever the cause, high school sports rarely receive a kind word from education reformers of all stripes (except maybe referee stripes).

To be sure, high school sports can detract time, energy, and money from core academic pursuits, but rigorous research suggests that athletics tend to be associated with academic and lifelong success.  For example, Eric Eide and Nick Ronan report in the Economics of Education Review that: “Using height as an instrument for participation, we find evidence that sports participation has a negative effect on the educational attainment of white male student athletes, a positive effect on the educational attainment and earnings of black male student athletes, and a positive effect on the educational attainment of white female student athletes. We find no effect of participation on the educational attainment or earnings of Hispanic males or black and Hispanic females.”

In the Review of Economics and Statistics, John Barron, Bradley Ewing, and Glen Waddell find, “There is a clear direct link for men between athletic participation and both additional formal education and wages.”  They use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth and the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, and employ multiple models to estimate the relationship between participating in high school sports and educational attainment and earnings later in people’s lives.

For the most part, the Barron, et al analysis supports the conclusion that high schools sports select people who are likely to be successful later in life, rather than causing them to be successful later in life: “Higher-ability individuals or individuals with a reduced preference for leisure are more likely to choose to participate in athletic events. In such cases, athletic participation can be viewed as a signal of individuals with higher ability or greater ‘work ethic’ or industriousness. The resulting higher educational attainment and improved labor market outcomes that are linked to athletic participation then simply become a reflection of the inherent capabilities of more able or industrious individuals.”

But Barron, et al are not completely convinced that the link between high school sports and later success is purely a selection effect for industriousness since they do not detect a similar relationship for other extra-curricular activities: “However, we do find across both data sets that athletic participation is distinct from participation in other extracurricular activities in terms of its link to wages. This one finding does suggest that athletic participation may in fact serve as a training activity.”

If sports are associated with later success in life while band is not, it’s not clear why we would want to give more academic credit for band than sports.  And if sports particularly help black male students stay in school, there’s even more reason to allow athletics to count as an elective course.

This provocative new book by E.D. Hirsch (dedicated to the late Al Shanker) poses fundamental challenges to both of the dominant reform movements in American education–challenges that their leaders would do well to ponder. On the one hand, Hirsch defies the skill-centric view of academic standards, contending that the nation’s founders and Horace Mann had it right, but that for the past seventy years America’s leading educators have misconceived K-8 education as being about the 3 R’s rather than fundamental knowledge and civic values. On the other hand, he defies proponents of charters, vouchers, and other forms of school choice as wishful thinkers disposed to let marketplace theories trump evidence of student achievement while also undervaluing education’s civic and cultural roles. Both sets of reformers, Hirsch suggests, have a narrow, utilitarian, and private view of schooling that ill-serves our democracy. He calls instead for an “American core curriculum” in grades K-8–for all kids, all schools, all communities, all states–and outlines what that would entail, as well as why it’s important. What he does not do–this book is more exhortation than manual–is to suggest a path through the organizational, political, ideological, and intellectual foes of his appealing and well-argued conception of what a proper public-education system would accomplish for the United States in the 21st century. You can obtain the book here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Paul E. Peterson

Though parents and tutors have been teaching children in the home for centuries, in the late 1960s and 1970s there emerged for the first time in the United States a political movement that adopted this practice as a radical, countercultural critique of the public education system. Conservatives who felt the public schools had sold out to secularism and progressivism joined with progressives who felt the public schools were bastions of conservative conformity to challenge the notion that all children should attend them. By the early 1990s they had won the right to home school in every state. Some home-school advocacy groups have attempted to secure a federal law or Supreme Court ruling that would establish uniform national guidelines grounded in First or Fourteenth Amendment rights, but to date such efforts have failed (to the great relief of home-school advocacy groups that oppose this strategy). Home schooling thus falls under state law, and these laws vary widely. A complex matrix of specific statutory language and judicial interpretations emerged out of the maelstrom of political activism over the issue that started in the late 1970s. In Indiana and Michigan, for example, there are virtually no restrictions on home schoolers and very little accountability to government. Home-schooling parents are not even required to register. In Pennsylvania and New York, state agencies oversee and regulate home schooling in a number of ways, from curricular requirements to parental qualifications to mandatory home visits by certified personnel to obligatory standardized testing.

By the 21st century, state laws were well established and uncontested, though nearly every year state legislators or judges, especially in the most permissive states, seek to increase regulations on home-schooling families in the name of accountability. Such initiatives nearly always fail due to the astonishing grass-roots organization and political mobilization of home schoolers. The most recent challenge to home schooling arose when a California court cited a 1929 state law that ostensibly requires home tutors to be state-certified. After several months of protests and concomitant uncertainty for the 160,000 home-schooled children in the state, the court reversed the ruling to permit home schooling as a “species of private school education” and came surprisingly close to finding in the federal Constitution a right to home school.

Reliable nationwide numbers are difficult to obtain, but the National Center for Education Statistics estimates that from 1999 to 2003 the number of home-schooled children increased from around 850,000 to roughly 1.1 million, a 29 percent jump in four years. Movement leaders suggest even higher estimates of around 2 to 2.5 million children currently being home schooled. Some states keep their own figures. Virginia had 3,816 registered home schoolers in 1990. By 2007 the number had grown to 20,694. Maryland saw similar growth, from 2,296 in 1990 to 24,227 in 2006.

After three decades of explosive growth, the rate of increase in home schooling has begun to slow somewhat, and home-schooling rates are even declining a bit in some states. In Pennsylvania, there were 24,415 reported home schoolers in 2002, the largest figure the state had ever seen. But in 2003 the number of registered home schoolers dropped to 24,076. In 2004 it declined again to 23,287, a decrease of 3.3 percent from the previous year.

Among the possible explanations for declines in home schooling is the increased use of home-based public charter schools, often called “cybercharters” because of their extensive use of online curricula, by families that had previously been home schooling independently. Home schooling is blending with other education movements to lead the way toward a 21st-century education matrix that is far more dynamic and adaptive than the schooling patterns of the past.

The New Home Schoolers

Survey research has revealed a heterogeneous population of home schoolers and higher rates of minority home schooling than expected. Economist Guillermo Montes’s analysis of data from the massive 2001 National Household Education Survey found that 70 percent of respondents cited a nonreligious reason as the top motivator in their decision to home school. Home schoolers whose motivations are primarily religious have certainly not gone away, but they are now joined by those whose reasons range from concerns about special education to bad experiences with teachers or school bullies to time-consuming outside activities to worries over peanut allergies (see Figure 1).

Increasing participation in home schooling among African Americans has drawn media attention in recent years. The U.S. Department of Education estimated that by 2003 there were 103,000 black home schoolers (see Figure 2). Nonprofits, including the Children’s Scholarship Fund, founded in 1998, have provided vouchers to help low-income families afford private schools, and some are using the money to home school. Several nationwide support groups have been formed by African Americans to build momentum; the newest and largest is the National African-American Homeschoolers Alliance, cofounded in 2003 by Jennifer James. By 2006 the organization had 3,000 members. James learned of home schooling by watching the success of home schoolers at the Scripps National Spelling Bee and embraced it for her family. “Families are running out of options,” James told the St. Petersburg Times in 2005. “There’s this persistent achievement gap, and a lot of black children are doing so poorly in traditional schools that parents are looking for alternatives.” Home schooling is becoming the method of choice for many, and as such “the Black homeschool movement is growing at a faster rate than the general homeschool population,” according to J. Michael Smith, president and cofounder of the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), the nation’s most powerful home-school advocacy organization.

Growth in home schooling can be spotted among other ethnic and religious groups as well. Native Americans in Virginia and North Carolina have founded home-school organizations in an effort to escape assimilationist public schools and preserve their traditional values. Hawaiian natives have found home schooling to be the solution to the gulf between tribal ways and public education. Jews, especially those who follow the Orthodox tradition, have been home schooling in much greater numbers in recent years. While Roman Catholic families have long had a presence in the home-schooling world with such institutions as the Virginia-based Seton Home Study School (founded in 1980), recent years have seen an explosion in Catholic home schooling and resources. Islamic home schooling has also grown rapidly, especially since 9/11, largely because “the public school system is not accommodating to Muslims,” in the words of Fatima Saleem, founder of the Palmetto Muslim Homeschool Resource Network.

Large numbers of parents whose children have diagnosed learning disabilities have pulled them from local schools, believing they can do a better job teaching them at home. Increasing numbers of wealthy Americans are hiring private tutors for their children. The U.S. Department of Education estimated that in 2003, 21 percent of home schoolers were being taught this way. Business Week editor Michelle Conlin explained the appeal of home education to “creative-class parents” as an outgrowth of the “spread of the post-geographic workstyle” and “flex-time economy.”

A final group of home schoolers that should be mentioned is children involved in sports requiring rigorous training, acting and modeling, demanding arts or music programs, and other time-intensive activities. In motocross, where an elite-level 13-year-old can earn over $100,000 a year, 90 percent of minors are either home schooled or dropouts. Circe Wallace, a retired snowboarder turned action-sport agent, remarked in 2006, “I’ve been in this business 15 years, and it’s always been those with parents that understand the freedom and flexibility of home schooling that go the furthest.” Orange County gymnast Katy Nogaki was 11 years old when she told a reporter, “my coaches…said if I home schooled, I could come to the gym early and I could get really far in gymnastics …. When I was in regular school, I wasn’t as good, but when I was home schooled, I got state champion.”

Many of the new breed of home-schooling parents, even if they do not become dues-paying members of home-schooling political organizations, still need help with pedagogical or curricular decisions, playmates for their children and companionship for themselves, and opportunities to get out of the house for a while. Home-school support groups can serve as remarkably diverse social networks. In a National Home Education Network online forum, Pam Sorooshian described her Southern California group:

My homeschooling group includes Moslem, Jewish, Quaker, Baptist, Messianic Jews, Pagan, Baha’i, atheist, agnostic, Catholic, unity, evangelicals, other Protestant denominations, and probably more. We have African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners, and other minorities. We have stay-at-home dads and single mothers. We are FAR more diverse than the neighborhood school I pulled my oldest child out of 10 years ago.

In short, home education is now being done by so many different kinds of people for so many different reasons that it no longer makes much sense to speak of it as a political movement or even a set of movements. Make no mistake: the veteran political movement is still going strong, as legislatures that attempt to increase regulations quickly discover. For a growing number of Americans, however, home schooling is just one option among many to consider, for a few months or for the entirety of a child’s schooling.

New Home Schooling in Practice

Home-schooling families of the 1980s and 1990s fell somewhere along a continuum of pedagogical practice bounded on the left with “unschooling,” a word coined by educator John Holt to describe the liberation of children from adult-imposed constraints on their learning. Unschoolers had no formal curriculum, no tests, grades, schedules, or benchmarks. Instead, children were free to do as they please with the parent serving largely as a facilitator of the child’s individual growth and development. On the righthand side of the continuum was the formal “school in a box” approach whereby a parent purchased a full year’s worth of textbooks, worksheets, tests, and assignments and attempted to reproduce in the home the same basic pedagogical strategies practiced in most schools. Not surprisingly, progressive types leaned toward unschooling and conservative Protestants trended toward formal curricula, usually provided by fundamentalist private schools, the most popular being A Beka Book, Bob Jones Complete, and Christian Liberty Academy Satellite Schools.

While some families began on one side of the continuum and stayed there, most gradually incorporated something from both approaches. The most typical progression according to a 1999 study by Karen Rogers Holinga was from complete dependence on a prefabricated curriculum in the first year of home schooling to a more flexible, eclectic orientation by the third. Nevertheless, since the great majority of home schoolers in the 1980s and 1990s were conservative Protestants, Christian presses did a brisk business selling textbooks and other material to them, at huge annual conventions attended by thousands, at local Christian bookstores, and, increasingly, over the Internet.

Home schoolers have for some time been creating hybrids that blend elements of formal schooling into the usual pattern of a mother teaching her own children at home (see Figure 3). One of the simplest hybrids is the “Mom School.” Pioneer Utah home schooler Joyce Kinmont explains, “a Mom School happens when a mother is home schooling a child who wants to do something that can be done best in a group, so she invites other home-schooling families to join her. The mom is the teacher.” Related but slightly different is the home-school cooperative, wherein a group of mothers (and sometimes fathers) pool their expertise, each teaching a subject she knows well to all the children in the group. Sometimes such co-ops are held in the homes of respective group members, but often they meet in area churches or other buildings.

The most successful and developed cooperatives begin to look quite a bit like schools, with an adult teacher in the front lecturing to rows of students sitting quietly at desks, sometimes hiring experts to teach advanced subjects like calculus, foreign languages, or physics. Others carry a more free-flowing pedagogy into the new setting. North Star, a Massachusetts cooperative billing itself as “self directed learning for teens,” was formed in 1996 by two disgruntled public school teachers. At North Star, no attendance is taken, no grades or evaluations offered. Students learn about whatever they want. In 2006, students asked for and got tutoring in Greek mythology, historical interpretation, Shakespeare, prime numbers, martial arts, culture and belief, electronic music, dance, historical fiction, and much more. Most students engage in apprenticeships and internships in the local community. Though the graduates receive no transcript or degree, a 2006 Teacher Magazine article reported that 49 percent of alumni had been accepted to college and 49 percent had secured full- or part-time jobs.

While large numbers of home-schooled kids transition to traditional schools in their teen years, home schooling for older children is a high-growth market, and there has been an explosion in innovative programs for them. Home schoolers have challenged and are increasingly overturning laws barring them from participation in high school sports and other extracurricular activities offered by public schools. Journalist Peter Beinart found that Wichita’s 1,500 home-schooling families had created “three bands, a choir, a bowling group, a math club, a 4-H Club, boy- and girl-scout troops, a debate team, a yearly musical, two libraries and a cap-and-gown graduation.” “Home-schooled” children were meeting in warehouses or business centers for classes “in algebra, English, science, swimming, accounting, sewing, public speaking, and Tae Kwan Do.”

Many with roots in conservative Protestantism have had trouble adjusting to the more worldly culture that often accompanies cooperatives, especially ambitious endeavors like sports leagues and orchestras. Disagreements over “what kinds of uniforms are appropriate for home-school cheerleaders and whether rock music may be played at home-school events” are not uncommon, says Beinart, as lifelong home schoolers rub shoulders with families fresh from the public schools.

Blurred Boundaries

None of the small-scale culture skirmishes begin to match the controversy generated by the growing popularity of government-sponsored initiatives for home schoolers, however. Many public school districts, having lost the fight to criminalize home schooling, now openly court home schoolers. School districts around the country are experimenting with programs that allow students to home school for part of the day but take certain classes at the local public school.

School districts with high rates of home schooling have seen significant drops in funding, tied as it is to per-pupil enrollment. The Maricopa County school district in Arizona, for example, had by the year 2000 lost $34 million due to the exodus of 7,526 home schoolers. In an effort to win some of them back, the district began offering à la carte services through satellite campuses at strip malls and other locations. Home schoolers there have attended weekly enrichment classes in such subjects as sign language, art, karate, and modern dance. The district receives one-quarter of each pupil’s government allocation for every student it enrolls in one of the classes. The state of Washington has been a national leader in establishing such partnerships. At the Homeschool Resource Center operated by the Seattle Public School District, home-schooled children can choose from a rotating menu of classes or just stop by to use the computer center or library.

The College Board has seen a dramatic rise in home schoolers who take Advanced Placement tests. Some 410 home-schooled students took them in 2000, while 1,282 did so in 2005. Home-schooling diploma services have multiplied across the country, as have honor societies like the Houston-based Eta Sigma Alpha. Many states have begun to extend to home schoolers the popular dual-enrollment programs (sometimes called “Running Start”) that allow high-school students to enroll for free in classes at local colleges. Florida and Washington are perhaps the national leaders in establishing such programs, but other states are warming to the possibility.

Not surprisingly, all of this innovation and experimentation at the secondary level has led to a dramatic rise in applications to institutions of higher education by students without a traditional high-school background. In 1986, 90 percent of the nation’s colleges and universities had no explicit home-schooling admissions policy. A 2004 study by Paul Jones and Gene Gloeckner found that by that year, over 75 percent of the institutions did, and that the majority of admissions officers surveyed had very positive feelings about home-schooled applicants. Another 2004 study by Sean Callaway of Pace University, of the home-school admissions policies of 72 colleges and universities and the performance of home-schooled students who were enrolled, found that home schoolers were generally happy with the way they were evaluated and universities were happy with the performance and graduation rates of the home schoolers they admitted.

Virtual Schools

Among the most innovative and successful of the public-private hybrids is the Florida Virtual School (FLVS), founded in 1997 and operated by the Florida Department of Education. It partners with all 67 Florida school districts to bring a complete high-school curriculum moderated by certified teachers to the homes of residents across the state, many of whom live on isolated produce farms or ranches. In the 2006–07 school year, more than 52,000 students were enrolled in FLVS. By 2006, 21 other states and several local districts had begun similar programs, both to service homebound or other special-needs students and as an effort to lure home schoolers (and the tax dollars they represent) back into the public education system.

More provocative have been online schools founded by private companies that have taken advantage of charter school laws in various states to make their services available for free to home schoolers. California was an early innovator, with virtual charter schools opening shortly after the Charter Schools Act was passed in 1992. By 2001 the state had 93 cybercharters serving more than 30,000 students, which meant that over $200 million of California’s public school budget was being paid to private firms offering home-school curricula and technology. After it became clear that some of these outfits were making scandalous profits by offering minimal services, California legislators passed SB 740, which imposed strict financial guidelines on cybercharters, including a requirement that they spend at least 50 percent of public revenues on salaries and benefits to state-certified teachers. The law also set limits on pupil-teacher ratios, required more expansive record keeping, and imposed strict penalties for failing to meet these and other standards.

By 2006, 18 states had a combined total of 147 virtual charter schools educating over 65,000 students. Many cybercharters have faced growing pains similar to those seen in California. The Western Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School (WPCCS) opened its virtual doors in the fall of 2000 as Pennsylvania’s second cybercharter and the first to offer its services across district lines. After nine months enrollment topped 1,100. Many school districts, frustrated that they now had to pay an outside organization to educate students in their own districts, many of whom had not even attended public schools before, simply stopped making payments, causing WPCCS to lose nearly $1 million in 2001. The Pennsylvania Department of Education responded by withholding $850,000 in state aid from 60 districts, sending the money directly to WPCCS. Lawsuits were filed by 23 districts, and in May of 2001 senior judge Warren Morgan ruled against the school districts. That did not stop complaints about WPCCS and several other cybercharters. In 2002 the state legislature passed Act 88, shifting authorization of cybercharters from local districts to the state department of education and setting more rigorous requirements and accountability measures. Despite increased scrutiny, virtual charters have continued to grow. By 2008 WPCCS, now called PA Cyber, was employing 500 people to educate 8,500 students on a $60 million budget.

For-profit cybercharters have many enemies. Many politicians and public school advocates agree with Democratic Rep. Patrick Rose of the Texas state legislature that “we ought not be in the business of supporting for-profit education. Any program that takes money out of our public schools would be against our better judgment.” Profits have indeed been sweet for many cybercharters, operating as they do without extensive facilities and support staff, though advocates always stress the cost of developing curriculum, advertising, and computer networks, as well as of high turnover rates. Cybercharter advocates and entrepreneurs are not surprised at the criticism (and lawsuits, nearly all of which have been unsuccessful) they have been handed from public school districts, Democratic legislators resistant to educational choice initiatives, and teachers unions. What has taken them off-guard, however, is the vocal and bitter opposition among many leaders in the home-schooling community. Right- and left-wing home-schooling leaders have set aside long-standing grudges to unite in protest of virtual schools. In 2003, dozens of home-school leaders from a wide range of ideological positions signed a resolution condemning virtual charter schools called “We Stand for Homeschooling.” The Home School Legal Defense Association did not sign the statement but has heaped condemnation on cybercharters. Elizabeth Smith, wife of HSLDA’s president, in a 2007 address urged her audience of Protestant home-school leaders to pray against the “assault of the Enemy” that cybercharters represented: “if we will band together…through prayer…our groups will win.”

Cybercharter backers have had difficulty understanding and responding to such criticism. Ron Packard, founder and CEO of K12, a curriculum provider whose services in 2007 reached over 25,000 students through virtual schools in 16 states and the District of Columbia, has been “shocked” by opposition coming from HSLDA. He told CNSNews.com, “It’s really amazing to me that a group that has fought so hard for its right to home school would oppose someone else’s parents who are fighting for their right to be doing at home a great public school education.” Home-school movement leaders’ reactions do make sense, however. Animus toward government was what bound leftist and conservative Christian home schoolers together in the 1970s and 1980s, and it is what has brought them back together to oppose virtual charters.

For veteran Christian leaders especially, the cybercharter movement has cut in on their business. HSLDA senior counsel Chris Klicka explains how “even in independent-minded states like Idaho and Alaska” Christian home schoolers are enrolling in cybercharters “by the thousands. They are attending government home-school conferences (where Christ or God cannot be mentioned) and receiving the secular, government home-school newsletters. They no longer go to the Christian home-school conventions.” Christian curriculum providers have lost market share as well. Christian home schoolers who would otherwise be purchasing Christian curricula as independent home schoolers now receive nonreligious, government-sanctioned curriculua for free through cybercharters. It is only natural that Christian companies would resent such a move and interpret it as a clandestine effort by the secularist state to destroy them. Despite the united front of opposition, with studies like Carol Klein’s 2006 Virtual Charter Schools and Home Schooling finding high levels of parent satisfaction and student achievement at virtual schools, it is highly unlikely that independent home schoolers and advocates for traditional public schools will be able to stop them.

The increasing diversity of home schoolers and institutional configurations should not obscure the fact that many who home school still choose this option out of frustration with or protest against formal, institution-based schooling and seek to impart an alternative, usually conservative Christian, worldview to their children by teaching them at home. Yet it is also the case that increasing numbers who opt to home school do so as an accessory, hybrid, or temporary stopgap, or out of necessity given their circumstances. It is this newer group of home schoolers who are challenging the historical dichotomies between public and private, school and home, formal and informal that have played such an important role in the movement’s self-definition and in American education policy. Trends toward accommodation, adaptation, and hybridization will likely increase as U.S. education policy seeks to catch up to the sweeping demographic, technological, and economic changes taking place. A movement born in opposition to public schools ironically might offer public education its most promising reform paradigm for the 21st century.

Milton Gaither is associate professor of education at Messiah College and author of Homeschool: An American History, from which this article was adapted. His blog reviewing recent research on home schooling can be found at gaither.wordpress.com.

Few were aware that the legality of home schooling was even under judicial consideration. Home schooling was initially an ancillary consideration in a child welfare case involving Phillip and Mary Long, parents of eight home-schooled children. An investigation into claims of mistreatment by one of their daughters revealed that they were providing at best a poor education. A juvenile court judge ruled nonetheless that the Longs had a constitutional right to home school. At the request of a court-appointed attorney for two of the children, the appellate court both overturned the juvenile court and took the broader step of ruling that home-schooling parents must have state teaching certification, leaving the vast majority in violation of the law. To no one’s surprise, the state’s teachers unions praised the decision.

Prior to the ruling, the California Department of Education had interpreted the state’s education code to allow four ways for children to be taught at home: 1) qualify as a private school, 2) use a certified tutor, 3) officially enroll in a private school satellite program, or 4) enroll in a public school’s independent study program. The Longs had been home schooling under option 3, having enrolled their children in the Sunland Christian School’s satellite program.

The appellate court ruled that there were only two permissible exceptions to the state’s compulsory public education laws: enrollment in a private school or private tutoring by a certified teacher. A strict reading of the state’s education code and judicial precedents on home schooling from the 1950s and ’60s clearly supported the ruling. But the code and the precedents originated long before the rise of today’s large home-schooling movement, with more than 1 million students nationwide as of 2003, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. This made the political circumstances surrounding the case far different from those of past judicial decisions.

If the court was unaware of the size and zeal of the home-school movement, that ignorance was short-lived. Within days the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA), a national organization with more than 14,000 member families in California, had collected over 250,000 signatures calling on the California Supreme Court to “depublish” the appellate court’s ruling, which would strip it of precedential value. As well, a resolution supporting home schooling was quickly introduced in the state legislature. Sensing the groundswell of opposition, the state superintendent of public instruction, Jack O’Connell, announced his disagreement with the decision and promised that the state’s policies would not change. Most strikingly, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger called the ruling “outrageous” and declared that it “must be overturned by the courts and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then, as elected officials, we will.”

Less than a month after the initial ruling the appellate court appeared to back down. The Longs, with the support of California’s four home-schooling associations and the HSLDA, petitioned it to rehear the case. The court agreed, vacated the decision, and scheduled a rehearing for June. At the rehearing, the main defender of the court’s previous ruling was the California Teachers Association. But dozens of attorneys for the governor, attorney general, state superintendent of schools, home-school associations, and religious liberty organizations urged the court to protect home schooling. Attorney General Jerry Brown explicitly called for the judges to rule that state law already authorizes home schooling, a position that would avoid legislative intervention.

Given the support offered by the political establishment, it seems likely that home schooling will continue in California regardless of what the court decides in its reconsidered opinion. Much like banks that become “too big to fail,” home schooling appears to have become too widespread and embedded in educational practice, as well as too well organized and politically effective, to be undone by a judicial opinion.

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

Illustration by James Steinberg.

Risk charged the larger society with the sin of burdening schools with so many nonacademic responsibilities. Yet it appears at least as likely that the schools eagerly took on these burdens.

Bureaucracies like to grow, to widen their mission, to take on more duties and thereby expand their budgets and influence. That’s as true of public schools as of any other agency. The “comprehensive” high school, for example, could grow ever more comprehensive by offering more courses, many of them nonacademic.

This was not just a bureaucratic imperative; it also followed the thinking of progressive educators, who viewed the 19th-century high school as elitist, dominated by the wishes of college officials. Progressive educators believed that in order to make high schools more “democratic” they needed to provide most students a different curriculum, one that included a multitude of practical, problem-solving courses that were supposedly “relevant.”

Once progressive educators gave up academic content as the basis for the curriculum, they were prey to all sorts of crackpot fads. They made pseudoscientific predictions about children’s futures. They decided schools had to help students adjust to adulthood. They tried to reshape the curriculum to advance utopian political ideas. Under the influence of progressive educators, the curriculum was filled with watered-down and nonacademic courses.

The New Basics

The commission’s antidote to the curricular smorgasbord was to recommend that all high-school students be required to take a set of courses called the “New Basics.” The New Basics required every prospective graduate to take a minimum of four years of English, three years of mathematics, three years of science, three years of social studies, and half a year of computer science. College-bound students were also advised to study a foreign language for at least two years.

High schools responded favorably to this admonition, at least superficially. The share of students completing the New Basics rose from 2 percent in 1982 to 29 percent in 1998 (see Figure 1). If you put aside the computer-science requirement, the increase was from 10 percent to 44 percent.

Completion rates for specific mathematics and science courses increased dramatically as well. The percentage of high-school graduates who took Geometry increased from 47 percent to 70 percent; the rate for Algebra II rose from 40 percent to 62 percent; and for Precalculus, it went from 6 percent to 23 percent. Less substantial increases were seen in Chemistry, Physics, and Biology (see Figures 2 & 3 in Caroline Hoxby, “Reforms for Whom?” p. 47).

Such notable gains in academic course taking should have resulted in impressive gains in achievement. However, as Paul Peterson shows (see “Ticket to Nowhere,” p. 39), long-term trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reveal only small increases in mathematics and science scores after 1982, when scores for 17-year-olds reached their nadir.
Even more worrisome is the fact that these achievement levels on NAEP are considerably lower than would be expected from students who are taking rigorous academic classes. Consider the performance description for students scoring 350 on the NAEP mathematics scale-a score well above the average achievement level:

Students at this level can apply a range of reasoning skills to solve multi-step problems. They can solve routine problems involving fractions and percents, recognize properties of basic geometric figures, and work with exponents and square roots. They can solve a variety of two-step problems using variables, identify equivalent algebraic expressions, and solve linear equations and inequalities. They are developing an understanding of functions and coordinate systems.

This definition does not describe work at the Precalculus level or even the Algebra II level; it more closely resembles the less difficult content from Algebra I and Geometry. Yet even the average among top-quartile students in the United States has never reached this level.

The relative weakness of even our most advanced students is confirmed by scores on the advanced physics and mathematics components of the 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), which is administered only to students who have taken these courses. In physics the United States scored significantly lower than 14 of the 15 participating countries; in advanced math U.S. scores were significantly lower than those of 11 of 15 participating countries. On neither exam was the U.S. score significantly higher than that of any other nation. Nor did we register any improvement from the Second International Mathematics Study, conducted in the early 1980s.

Diluting the Solution

These divergent trends-simultaneous increased enrollment in academic courses and stagnant achievement-suggest an hypothesis: in order to accommodate a wider range of student abilities and previous attainments in academic courses, the content of those courses has been diluted. This may be the inevitable consequence of policies that stress uniform academic treatments for all students.

First consider evidence from studies of curriculum and textbooks. The serious deterioration of textbook content appears to have begun in the 1960s. The late Jeanne Chall and Sue S. Conard studied widely used textbooks covering the period from 1945 to 1975 and noted, “On the whole, the later the copyright dates of the textbooks for the same grade, the easier they were, as measured by indices of readability level, maturity level, difficulty of questions, and extent of illustration.”

There is reason to believe that curriculum materials have continued to weaken since the publication of Risk. The so-called “math wars” were prompted by the release of newer texts seen as grossly inadequate because of their deemphasis of rich content. The unchallenging curriculum stimulated the growth of parent-led protest organizations such as HOLD and Mathematically Correct. Many of the offending new mathematics programs were sponsored by, of all institutions, the National Science Foundation.

For instance, one of these programs, the Core-Plus Mathematics Project, was found by a reviewer to have “generated massive resentment among the students who were the experimental subjects during early implementation. Many students found themselves ill prepared for college, even though they came from highly educated homes and had a high likelihood of success.” Just one example of the sheer vacuity of Core-Plus is that it had no section at all on factoring polynomials.

Another measure of the degree to which high-school academic courses have been watered down is provided by achievement scores in districts and schools where more children are taking academic courses. Consider data on algebra enrollments and achievement from California. There is a negative partial correlation of .67 between enrollment and achievement among individual schools in 8th-grade algebra, meaning that high enrollment percentages in algebra were correlated with lower scores. This was after controlling for students’ mean achievement in 7th-grade math the previous year, which establishes that the correlation is not simply the result of diluting the test-taking pool with more students.

This suggests that the more students a school enrolls in algebra, the more school officials feel the need to use curriculum materials with less challenging content. Flooding academic courses with underprepared students may have had the net effect of driving the rigor out of these courses.

The best course of action is for high schools to reinstate truly rigorous academic courses, but to differentiate among students with respect to the extent and rate of progress through the sequence of courses. For example, multiple levels of diplomas could be offered based on courses completed, although this progress should still be verified by external exams, as in the International Baccalaureate program. This would be a major improvement over the other form of differentiated curriculum (rigorous content for the college-bound, nonacademic content for the rest) that A Nation at Risk warned against, while also respecting the fact that not all students can handle the same lockstep schedule of rigorous courses.

-Williamson M. Evers is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. Paul Clopton is a biomedical research statistician with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Multiple Intelligences: The Theory into Practice
(Basic Books, 1993)

Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21st Century
(Basic Books, 1999)

By Howard Gardner

Checked by Daniel T. Willingham

What would you think if your child came home from school and reported that the language-arts lesson of the day included using twigs and leaves to spell words? The typical parent might react with curiosity tinged with suspicion: Is working with twigs and leaves supposed to help my child learn to spell? Yes, according to Thomas Armstrong, author of Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom, especially if your child is high in “naturalist” intelligence–one of eight distinct intelligences that Harvard University scholar Howard Gardner claims to have identified. However, if your child possesses a high degree of what Gardner terms “bodily-kinesthetic” intelligence, Armstrong suggests associating movement with spelling. For example, a teacher might try to connect sitting with consonants and standing with vowels.

Armstrong is far from alone in placing faith in Gardner’s theory of “multiple intelligences.” Gardner’s ideas have been a significant force in education for the past 20 years–significant enough that they bear close study. How does the scientific community regard the theory of multiple intelligences, and what impact should the theory have on education?

Central Claims

Gardner first proposed his theory in 1983. Since then, it has undergone incremental but not fundamental change, including the addition of one intelligence (bringing the total to eight), the rejection of others, and consideration of the theory’s applications. The theory rests on three core claims:

• Gardner says that most psychometricians, those who devise and interpret tests as a way of probing the nature of intelligence, conceive of intelligence as unitary. In Intelligence Reframed, Gardner’s most recent restatement of his general theory, he writes, “In the ongoing debate among psychologists about this issue, the psychometric majority favors a general intelligence perspective.”

This is not an accurate characterization of the position taken by most psychometricians. As will be shown, the vast majority regard intelligence not as a single unified entity, but as a multifaceted phenomenon with a hierarchical structure.

• There are multiple, independent intelligences. There are three parts to this claim, and it is important to appreciate all three. First, Gardner offers a new definition of intelligence, describing it as “a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture.” Previous definitions were limited to cognition or thought; one was intelligent to the extent that one could solve problems and adapt effectively to one’s environment using thinking skills. Gardner self-consciously broadens the definition to include effective use of the body and thinking skills relevant to the social world. He also extends the functionality of intelligence to include the crafting of useful products, not just the solving of problems. Second, Gardner claims to have identified some (but not all) of the several types of intelligence, which I describe below. Third, he claims that these multiple intelligences operate independently of one another.

• The multiple intelligences theory has applications to education. Gardner has been careful to say that he has proposed a scientific theory that should not be mistaken for a prescription for schooling. He makes clear that the educational implications of children’s possessing multiple intelligences can and should be drawn, but he believes that many possible curricula and methods could be consistent with the theory. The sole general implication he supports is that children’s minds are different, and an education system should take account of those differences, a point developed in diverse ways by his many followers.

One Intelligence or Many?

Let’s evaluate each of Gardner’s claims in turn, beginning with how psychometricians view intelligence. In the early 20th century, many psychometricians did in fact think of intelligence as a unitary trait, just as Gardner now claims. The thinking at that time was articulated by Charles Spearman, who suggested that a single factor (he called it g, for general) underlay all intelligent behavior. If you had a lot of g, you were smart; if you didn’t, you weren’t. However, by the 1930s some researchers (notably Louis L. Thurstone) were already arguing for a multifaceted view of intelligence. One might be intelligent in the use of words, for example, but unintelligent mathematically. From the 1950s on, many psychometricians proposed hierarchical models, which may be thought of as a mixture of the single-factor and multiple-factor models. Except for a few holdouts, most psychologists now favor the hierarchical model.

How can one use data from tests of cognitive ability to evaluate the number of intelligences? A straightforward approach entails administering a number of separate tests thought to rely on different hypothesized intelligences. Suppose tests 1 and 2 are different tests of verbal ability (for example, vocabulary and spelling), and tests 3 and 4 are different tests of mathematical ability. If there is one intelligence, g, then g should support performance on all four tests, as shown in diagram A of Figure 1 (this page). A high score on test 1 would indicate that the test-taker is high in g, and he or she should perform well on all of the other tests.

Suppose, however, that there are two intelligences–one verbal and one mathematical, as shown in diagram B of Figure 1. In that case, a high score on test 1 would predict a high score on test 2, but would tell us nothing about the individual’s performance on the math tests, 3 and 4. Performance on those tests would depend on mathematical intelligence, which is separate and independent of verbal intelligence.

The data support neither of these views. To continue with our hypothetical example, the data show that all of the test scores, 1 through 4, are somewhat related to one another, which is consistent with the existence of g. But scores from tests of math ability are more related to one another than they are to verbal scores; the same goes for verbal scores. A hierarchical model, shown in diagram C of Figure 1, fits this pattern. In this model, g influences both mathematical and verbal cognitive processes, so performance on math and verbal tests will be somewhat related. But mathematical competence is supported not just by g, but by the efficacy of a mathematical intelligence that is separate and independent of a verbal intelligence. That’s why math scores are more related to each other than they are to verbal scores. It also explains how it is possible for someone to be quite good in math, but just mediocre verbally. This logic applies not only to the restricted example used here (math and verbal) but also to a broad spectrum of tests of intellectual ability.

The hierarchical view of intelligence received a strong boost from a landmark review of the published data collected over the course of 60 years from some 130,000 people around the world. That massive review, performed by the late University of North Carolina scholar John Carroll, concluded that the hierarchical view best fits the data. Researchers still debate the exact organization of the hierarchy, but there is a general consensus around the hierarchical view of intelligence. Thus Gardner’s first claim–that most psychometricians believe that intelligence is unitary–is inaccurate.

What Are the Intelligences?

Gardner’s second claim is that individuals possess at least eight independent types of intelligence. The following list includes a definition of each along with examples Gardner has provided of professions that draw heavily on that particular intelligence.

• Linguistic: facility with verbal materials (writer, attorney).

• Logico-mathematical: the ability to use logical methods and to solve mathematical problems (mathematician, scientist).

• Spatial: the ability to use and manipulate space (sculptor,

architect).

• Musical: the ability to create, perform, and appreciate music (performer, composer).

• Bodily-kinesthetic: the ability to use one’s body (athlete, dancer).

• Interpersonal: the ability to understand others’ needs, intentions, and motivations (salesperson, politician).

• Intrapersonal: the ability to understand one’s own motivations and emotions (novelist, therapist with self-insight).

• Naturalist: the ability to recognize, identify, and classify flora and fauna or other classes of objects (naturalist, cook).

Gardner claims that everyone has all eight intelligences to some degree, but each individual has his or her own pattern of stronger and weaker intelligences. Gardner also argues that most tasks require more than one intelligence working together. For example, the conductor of a symphony obviously uses musical intelligence, but also must use interpersonal intelligence as a group leader and bodily-kinesthetic intelligence to move in a way that is informative to the orchestra. The claim of separate and independent intelligences is, of course, central to Gardner’s theory. How do we know that these intelligences are independent?

It is important to bear in mind that the hierarchical model described in the previous section is not a theory, but a pattern of data. It is a description of how test scores are correlated. A theory of intelligence must be consistent with these data; the pattern of data is not itself a theory. For example, the data do not tell us what g is or how it works. The data tell us only that there is some factor that contributes to many intellectual tasks, and if your theory does not include such a factor, it is inconsistent with existing data. Gardner’s theory has that problem.

Setting g aside, the claim of independence among the eight intelligences is also a problem. Data collected over the past 100 years consistently show that performances on intellectual tasks are correlated. Even if Gardner’s theory did not include some general factor, it should at least provide a way to account for this correlation. The theory did not, and it was widely criticized for this failure. In some later writings, Gardner has said that he questions the explanatory power of g, not whether it exists–in other words, he doubts whether g makes much of a contribution to abilities Gardner deems important. He has also deemphasized the importance in his theory of whether the intelligences are truly independent.

Let’s allow, then, that the intelligences Gardner has identified are not independent, but that there are a number of distinguishable (but correlated) intellectual capabilities in addition to g. Has Gardner done a good job of cataloguing them? It is instructive to examine the criteria by which Gardner determines whether an ability is an intelligence. The criteria are shown in the table on page 22.

Gardner’s eight criteria appear to be quite rigorous: the psychometric criterion described in the previous section and seven others that span different domains of investigation. But Gardner weakens them by demanding that only a majority be satisfied, and some are rather easy to satisfy. The psychometric criterion is the most rigorous of the eight, but Gardner has largely ignored it. The remaining criteria are so weak that they cannot restrain a researcher with a zest for discovering new intelligences.

For instance, a humor intelligence and a memory intelligence certainly meet a majority of the criteria. Humor and memory can be used to solve problems and create valued products in many cultures and so meet Gardner’s definition of intelligence. Both can be isolated by brain damage, each has a distinct developmental history, and there is evidence for the psychological separability of each. Some individuals show exceptional memory or sense of humor but no other remarkable mental abilities. The evolutionary plausibility of each intelligence is easy to defend as well. Humor would certainly be adaptive in a social species such as ours, and the adaptive nature of memory should be self-evident.

By these criteria I am also prepared to defend an olfactory intelligence and a spelling intelligence and to subdivide Gardner’s spatial intelligence into near-space intelligence and far-space intelligence, thus bringing the total number of intelligences to 13. (Gardner, for reasons that are not clear to me, excludes sensory systems as potential intelligences, but not action systems such as bodily-kinesthetic.)

The issue of criteria by which new intelligences are posited is crucial, and it is in the selection of criteria that Gardner has made a fundamental mistake. Gardner’s criteria make sense if one assumes extreme modularity in the mind, meaning that the mind is a confederation of largely independent, self-sufficient processes. Gardner argues that neuroscience bears out this assumption, but that is an oversimplification.

For example, suppose that mathematical and spatial intelligence have the structure depicted in Figure 2, where each letter represents a cognitive process. Mathematical reasoning requires the cognitive processes A through E. Spatial reasoning requires the processes B through F. Are math and spatial reasoning separate?

Most people would agree that they are not identical, but they are largely overlapping and don’t merit being called separate. By Gardner’s criteria, however, they likely would be. If we assume that each process (A through F) is localized in a different part of the brain, then if the part of the brain supporting process A were damaged, math ability would be compromised, but spatial ability would not, so the brain criterion would be met. If process A or process F had a different developmental progression than the others, the developmental criterion would be met. If A and F differ in their need for attentional resources, the experimental psychological criterion would be met. The criteria that Gardner mentions can be useful, but they do not signal necessarily separate systems. In fact, the one criterion that Gardner has routinely ignored–the psychometric–is the one best suited to the question posed: Are cognitive processes underlying a putative intelligence independent of other cognitive processes?

Gardner’s second claim–that he has described multiple, independent varieties of intelligence–is not true. Intellectual abilities are correlated, not independent. Distinguishable abilities do exist, but Gardner’s description of them is not well supported.

Should Theory Become Practice?

For the educator this debate may be, as Shakespeare wrote, sound and fury, signifying nothing. What matters is whether and how the theory inspires changes in teaching methods or curriculum. The extent to which multiple intelligence ideas are applied is difficult to determine because few hard data exist to describe what teachers actually do in the classroom. Even statements of schools’ missions are of limited usefulness, although dozens of schools claim to center their curriculum on the theory. An administrator might insert multiple intelligences language in an effort to seem progressive. Or an administrator’s enthusiasm may be sincere, but if the teachers are not supportive, the classroom impact will be minimal.

We are left with indirect measures. Textbooks for teachers in training generally offer extensive coverage of the theory, with little or no criticism. Furthermore, the ready availability of multiple intelligences classroom materials (books, lesson plans, and activities) leaves the impression that there is a market for such materials. The applications they suggest generally fall into two broad categories: curricular expansion and pedagogical stratagem.

Curriculum expansion suggests that schools should appeal to all of the intelligences. Some educators have called for a more inclusive approach that does not glorify any one of the intelligences at the expense of the others. The theory has also been viewed as providing a pedagogical stratagem–namely, to teach content by tapping all of the intelligences. For example, to help students learn punctuation, a teacher might have them form punctuation marks with their bodies (bodily-kinesthetic intelligence), assign an animal sound to each punctuation mark (naturalist intelligence), and sort sentences according to the required punctuation (logical-mathematical intelligence). The motive may be that students will most enjoy or appreciate the material when it is embedded in an intelligence that is their strength. In this sense, intelligences may be translatable. The student who is linguistically weak but musically strong may improve his spelling through a musical presentation.

Gardner has criticized both ideas. Regarding curriculum, Gardner argues that the goals of education should be set independently of the multiple intelligences theory, and the theory should be used to help reach those goals. In other words, he does not believe that status as an “intelligence” necessarily means that that intelligence should be schooled. This objection is doubly true if you doubt that Gardner has categorized the intelligences correctly.

On the subject of pedagogy, Gardner sees no benefit in attempting to teach all subjects using all of the intelligences. He also expresses concern that some educators have a shallow understanding of what it takes to really engage an intelligence. Gardner writes, “It may well be easier to remember a list if one sings it (or dances to it). However, these uses of the ‘materials’ of an intelligence are essentially trivial. What is not trivial is the capacity to think musically.” It is therefore surprising that Gardner wrote the preface for Thomas Armstrong’s book, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom, which includes many such trivial ideas, such as singing spellings and spelling with leaves and twigs, as mentioned earlier. In the preface Gardner says that Armstrong provides “a reliable and readable account of my work.” The inconsistency in Gardner’s views is difficult to understand, but I believe he is right in calling some applications trivial.

Gardner also writes that intelligences are not fungible; the individual low in logico-mathematical intelligence but high in musical intelligence cannot somehow substitute the latter for the former and understand math through music. An alternative presentation may serve as a helpful metaphor, but the musically minded student must eventually use the appropriate representation to understand math. Gardner is on solid ground here. There is no evidence that subject-matter substitution is possible.

Gardner offers his own ideas of how multiple intelligences theory might be applied to education. Teachers should introduce a topic with different entry points, each of which taps primarily one intelligence. For example, the narrational entry point uses a story (and taps linguistic intelligence), whereas the logical entry point encourages the use of deductive logic in first thinking about a topic. Entry points are designed to intrigue the student via a presentation in an intelligence that is a particular strength for him or her. Gardner also believes that a thorough understanding of a topic is achieved only through multiple representations using different intelligences. Hence significant time must be invested to approach a topic from many different perspectives, and topics should be important enough to merit close study.

How effective are Gardner’s suggested applications? Again, hard data are scarce. The most comprehensive study was a three-year examination of 41 schools that claim to use multiple intelligences. It was conducted by Mindy Kornhaber, a long-time Gardner collaborator. The results, unfortunately, are difficult to interpret. They reported that standardized test scores increased in 78 percent of the schools, but they failed to indicate whether the increase in each school was statistically significant. If not, then we would expect scores to increase in half the schools by chance. Moreover, there was no control group, and thus no basis for comparison with other schools in their districts. Furthermore, there is no way of knowing to what extent changes in the school are due to the implementation of ideas of multiple intelligences rather than, for example, the energizing thrill of adopting a new schoolwide program, new statewide standards, or some other unknown factor.

What is perhaps most surprising about Gardner’s view of education is that it is not more surprising. Many experienced educators probably suspected that different materials (songs, stories) engage different students and that sustained study using different materials engenders deep knowledge.

Multiple Talents

One may wonder how educators got so confused by Gardner’s theory. Why do they believe that intelligences are interchangeable or that all intelligences should be taught? The answer is traceable to the same thing that made the theory so successful: the naming of various abilities as intelligences.

Why, indeed, are we referring to musical, athletic, and interpersonal skills as intelligences? Gardner was certainly not the first psychologist to point out that humans have these abilities. Great intelligence researchers–Cyril Burt, Raymond Cattell, Louis Thurstone–discussed many human abilities, including aesthetic, athletic, musical, and so on. The difference was that they called them talents or abilities, whereas Gardner has renamed them intelligences. Gardner has pointed out on several occasions that the success of his book turned, in part, on this new label: “I am quite confident that if I had written a book called ‘Seven Talents’ it would not have received the attention that Frames of Mind received.” Educators who embraced the theory might well have been indifferent to a theory outlining different talents–who didn’t know that some kids are good musicians, some are good athletes, and they may not be the same kids?

Gardner protests that there is no reason to differentiate–he would say aggrandize–linguistic and logico-mathematical intelligences by giving them a different label; either label will do, but they should be the same. He has written, “Call them all ‘talents’ if you wish; or call them all ‘intelligences.’” By this Gardner means that the mind has many processing capabilities, of which those enabling linguistic, logical, and mathematical thought are just three examples. There is no compelling reason to “honor” them with a special name, in his view.

Gardner has ignored, however, the connotation of the term intelligence, which has led to confusion among his readers. The term intelligence has always connoted the kind of thinking skills that make one successful in school, perhaps because the first intelligence test was devised to predict likely success in school; if it was important in school, it was on the intelligence test. Readers made the natural assumption that Gardner’s new intelligences had roughly the same meaning and so drew the conclusion that if humans have a type of intelligence, then schools should teach it.

It is also understandable that readers believed that some of the intelligences must be at least partially interchangeable. No one would think that the musically talented child would necessarily be good at math. But refer to the child as possessing “high musical intelligence,” and it’s a short step to the upbeat idea that the mathematics deficit can be circumvented by the intelligence in another area–after all, both are intelligences.

In the end, Gardner’s theory is simply not all that helpful. For scientists, the theory of the mind is almost certainly incorrect. For educators, the daring applications forwarded by others in Gardner’s name (and of which he apparently disapproves) are unlikely to help students. Gardner’s applications are relatively uncontroversial, although hard data on their effects are lacking. The fact that the theory is an inaccurate description of the mind makes it likely that the more closely an application draws on the theory, the less likely the application is to be effective. All in all, educators would likely do well to turn their time and attention elsewhere.

-Daniel T. Willingham is a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia.

The practice that has come to be known as “tracking” began as a response to the influx of immigrant children into America’s schools during the early 20th century. To educate this newly diverse student population, school officials thought it necessary to sort children into different “tracks” based on their ability or past performance. As school reformer Ellwood P. Cubberley stated in 1909, “Our city schools will soon be forced to give up the exceedingly democratic idea that all are equal, and our society devoid of classes . . . and to begin a specialization of educational effort along many lines.” The advent of the IQ test and standardized achievement tests accelerated this trend by making the sorting process more apparently scientific.

In the early days of tracking, junior-high and high-school students were assigned to academic, general, or vocational tracks. At one extreme students were being groomed for college, while at the other they prepared to enter trades such as plumbing or secretarial work. By midcentury, a majority of secondary schools used some form of tracking. The practice was especially prevalent in large comprehensive high schools.

Today this extreme form of tracking is relatively rare. In the early 1970s, policymakers and educators, fearing that America was in danger of losing its competitive edge, began insisting that all students have access to a rigorous academic curriculum. States passed minimum graduation standards that required students to take a certain number of courses in the core subjects of English, mathematics, social studies, and science. And the 1983 A Nation at Risk report recommended even tougher standards. In the ensuing two decades, the percentage of students taking four years of each core academic subject increased dramatically.

With the new emphasis on preparing every student for college, tracking in its modern form has come to mean grouping students by ability within subjects. In each subject, students are assigned to advanced, regular, or basic courses depending on their past performance. For instance, students in the advanced track might take pre-calculus as juniors in high school and calculus as seniors, while students in the basic track might go only as far as algebra II or geometry. The creation and growth of Advanced Placement courses is perhaps the best example of how tracking has become an institutionalized practice (see Figure 1).

AP Testing on the Rise (Figure 1) Advanced Placement (AP) courses represent an increasingly popular form of ability tracking. Since 1980, the number of students sitting for AP exams has increased more than sevenfold. The College Board estimates that just one-third of all students enrolled in AP courses actually sit for the exam.

NOTE: The number of exams given exceeds the number of individual test-takers because test-takers may take exams in more than one subject. Totals include a small percentage of non-U.S. students. SOURCES: College Board; U.S. Department of Education

The Backlash

Educators broadly support the practice of tracking in its modern form. Teachers find that tracking facilitates instruction by making it easier to gear lessons to the ability level of the whole class. Parents of high-performing students also favor tracking because research shows that students assigned to high-ability groups make greater gains in achievement. However, in studies published in 1986 and 1999, my colleagues and I found that students assigned to low-ability groups score lower on standardized tests than if they had been placed in mixed-ability or high-ability groups.

That finding lies at the core of a backlash against tracking that began in the 1980s. Critics argued that tracking, especially in practice, created greater learning opportunities for high-performing students at the expense of their lower-performing peers. Tracking’s opponents alleged that students in lower tracks often had the weakest teachers in a school, an unchallenging curriculum, few academic role models, and low social status. Moreover, they argued, tracking enabled educators to claim that courses were academic or college preparatory in nature when, in fact, the content lacked even the semblance of rigor.

The movement picked up considerable momentum with the 1985 publication of Jeannie Oakes’s deeply influential Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality. Oakes provided empirical evidence of the disadvantages endured by students placed in lower tracks. In a similar vein, she revealed that some schools, under orders to desegregate, were promoting internal segregation by disproportionately assigning minority students to lower tracks. Overall, Oakes characterized tracking as an elitist practice that perpetuated the status quo by giving students from privileged families greater access to elite colleges and high-income careers. “Tracking is not in the best interests of most students,” Oakes concluded. “It does not appear to be related to either increasing academic achievement or promoting positive attitudes and behaviors. Poor and minority students seem to have suffered most from tracking—and these are the very students on whom so many educational hopes are pinned.”

At the height of the detracking movement, organizations including the National Governors Association, the National Education Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the California Department of Education came down in favor of detracking. Courts even mandated detracking reforms in some districts as part of efforts to desegregate the schools. For instance, in 1994 the San Jose Unified School District agreed to a consent decree that mandated detracking in grades K–9 and limited tracking in grades 10–12. But the response of school personnel was mixed. While many teachers favored detracking, a large number of parents, politicians, and other teachers resisted. As a result, while the schools became more integrated over time, and remedial classes were eliminated, detracking was never institutionalized as school practice.

Perhaps the most notorious episode in the detracking movement occurred in Massachusetts and California in the early 1990s. Officials in both states mandated that middle schools eliminate or reduce tracking. However, in The Tracking Wars: State Reform Meets School Policy, Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless demonstrated how schools, possessing a considerable degree of autonomy, were able to implement the new policy in ways that were consistent with local preferences. While neither state withdrew the mandate, the detracking movement could hardly claim victory.

Minor Inroads

To what extent has the detracking movement influenced the practices of schools and teachers? To date, no national longitudinal survey has provided solid information on the extensiveness of detracking and the manner in which it has been carried out. However, the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 asked a representative sample of teachers whether students were assigned to classes comprising students who were above average, average, below average, or ranging widely in achievement. Their responses suggested that, nationwide, 15 percent of 8th-grade students were heterogeneously grouped for English classes, 14 percent for mathematics, 12 percent for science, and 18 percent for social studies. The remaining large majority of students were in classes with students of roughly the same ability level.

A second study, the Survey of High School Curricular Options, sampled 912 secondary schools in 1993 to obtain information about curriculum differentiation. It reported that 86 percent of high schools offered courses in which students were tracked. The data revealed that 14 percent of 10th graders took math courses in groups in which students’ abilities differed widely; the same was true for 28 percent of 10th graders in English.

A 2000 survey of all 174 public high schools in Maryland reported that two-thirds of the high schools used tracking in the four core subject areas, while 13 percent didn’t track students in any of the core subjects (the survey’s response rate was 79 percent). The remaining schools tracked in some but not all of the core areas. Interestingly, all of the 31 low-poverty, low-minority schools in the study used tracking, compared with only 36 percent of the 25 high-poverty, high-minority schools. In Maryland, at least, detracking is more likely in schools with a greater proportion of disadvantaged students. On the whole, however, the evidence suggests that the detracking movement has not transformed the way students are organized for instruction in America’s schools.

What explains the resilience of tracking? For one thing, teaching in a detracked school is far more difficult than in a tracked school. Teachers who have been assigned to detracked classes often report that they must “teach to the middle” or omit some of the curriculum because they don’t have time to instruct students at every different level within a class period. Moreover, detracking necessitates reallocating teachers and administrators, modifying the curriculum, and providing professional training. Schools may find these changes prohibitive for budgetary or logistical reasons. Finally, parents of high-ability students tend to prefer rigorous, homogeneous classes, while other parents are unconvinced that heterogeneous classes will benefit their children.

Subtle Influence

Despite widespread opposition to detracking and the failure of many efforts to institutionalize the policy, the detracking movement has had a major impact on school reform. While most schools still assign students to classes based on ability, the movement has heightened public awareness of the often inadequate resources and underwhelming curriculum provided to students in low-track classes.

Furthermore, the detracking movement has challenged widely held beliefs regarding the notion of “ability” and the role it plays in determining the kind of curriculum to which students will be exposed. More educators are now convinced that nearly all students are capable of mastering a challenging curriculum. New academic standards, state tests, and accountability requirements represent an effort to ensure that all students are given access to a rigorous curriculum. Detracking may never become widespread, but changes such as these are expected to improve the achievement of all students, particularly those who are ill served by the negative aspects of tracking as it is currently practiced.

Maureen T. Hallinan is a professor of sociology and director of the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity at the University of Notre Dame.