But who’s counting? (No, apparently, Everett Dirksen did not say “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”)

What exactly an education dollar is worth is not an inconsequential topic and I started gathering string for a blog post about the newest federal bailout for teachers when I was hit by a stray thought:  James Tooley.

One of the more striking stories I have read on the subject of money and education is one I helped edit at Education Next called “Private Schools for the Poor,” written by Tooley, a one-time mathematics teacher in Zimbabwe and currently professor of education policy at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England.

I recall almost gasping at sections of the manuscript, as Tooley  took the reader on a tour of some of the poorest neighborhoods on earth.

“In the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, private schools are made from the same materials as every other building,” he wrote.  “[C]orrugated iron sheets or mud walls, with windows and doors cut out to allow light to enter. Floors are usually mud, roofs sometimes thatched. Children will not be in uniform and will usually be sitting on homemade wooden benches. In the dry season, the wind will blow dust through the cracks in the walls; in the rainy season, the playground will become a pond, and the classroom floors mud baths. Teaching continues, however, through most of these intemperate interruptions.”

Clive Crook of the Atlantic called Tooley’s work “something of an embarrassment to the official aid and development industry” because he had “demonstrated something that many development professionals would rather not know—and would prefer that you not know, either.” Tooley and his research team found that “private education is a principle lifeline for the abjectly poor” and that it worked. “On the whole,” says Crook, “dime-a-day for-profit schools are doing a better job of teaching the poorest children than the far more expensive state schools

Tooley turned the research into a book, The Beautiful Tree, which came out in 2009, and should be on every policymaker’s beach blanket – a reminder not only of our own good fortune to be living in America, but of the need to constantly reconsider education’s relationship to money.

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

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

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

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

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

Easy Money

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

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

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

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

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

Reality Check

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

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

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

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

Survival Instincts

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy Matters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Racing to the Top?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust but Verify

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch and Wait

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adapted from Chester E. Finn Jr., Terry Ryan, and Michael B. Lafferty, Ohio’s Education Reform Challenges: Lessons from the Front Lines, Palgrave McMillan Publishers (June 2010).

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation’s long and deep immersion in Ohio education policy, particularly in the charter-school realm, includes a half decade of direct experience as “authorizer” of several charters. To recount and draw lessons from that experience, Fordham president (and Education Next senior editor) Chester Finn, Fordham vice president for Ohio policy and programs Terry Ryan, and veteran journalist Michael Lafferty authored the new book from which this article is adapted.

Initially, the Ohio Department of Education (ODE) was chief authorizer of charter schools in the Buckeye State. After the state auditor released a scathing review of ODE’s handling of its role, the legislature “fired” the agency and in early 2003 invited a host of other entities to undertake the challenges of school sponsorship. Along with state universities, and district and county school systems, the list of potential authorizers included nonprofit organizations that met certain criteria. If too few new authorizers were willing to step up to the plate, however, the legislature’s move would orphan more than 100 extant charter schools, forcing them to close.

The Thomas B. Fordham Foundation had long been active on the Ohio charter scene as critic, policy analyst, facilitator of new schools, and source of assistance (both financial and technical) to promising charter operators. But we had never really rolled up our sleeves and plunged into the fray. After fruitlessly seeking new sponsors to take on the potential “orphans”—eligible organizations feared the political, financial, and legal-liability risks—and after much internal soul-searching and debate, Fordham decided in 2004 to apply to become a school authorizer and by June 2005 we found ourselves occupying that hot seat.

Our 10 schools were a varied bunch. Eight had previously been sponsored by the Ohio Department of Education. The other two were allowed to open by virtue of winning the state’s 2005 lottery for new charters; both were sister schools of Cincinnati’s acclaimed W. E. B. Du Bois Academy, a now-defunct charter school that was much acclaimed at the time. All 10 schools faced challenges that generally paralleled those of other charter schools across Ohio. Among the eight schools with track records, one was rated Excellent by the state in 2005 (Du Bois), and one was rated Continuous Improvement (Dayton Academy, an Edison-operated school), but the remaining six were in Academic Emergency. (At the time, 60 percent of Ohio’s charter schools were rated in Academic Emergency, 11 percent in Academic Watch, 18 percent in Continuous Improvement, and just 11 percent Effective or Excellent.)

Troubled Schools

The Moraine Community School had struggled since opening in 2002, but surely it was worth trying to rehabilitate. The charter represented this Dayton suburb’s only public school. Moraine was a General Motors industrial town, and many of its families were connected to the GM plant that had once made Frigidaires and later built SUVs. (The last vehicle rolled off its assembly line on December 23, 2008. The sprawling factory is now dark.)

Before the charter opened, all Moraine students were bused to schools in the nearby suburbs of Kettering and West Carrollton. Many felt like strangers there, and they and their parents longed for a neighborhood school of their own. For that reason, the Moraine charter originally enjoyed the support of community leaders and served about 200 children in grades K–12. Almost from the start, however, the school encountered serious governance, leadership, financial, and academic difficulties. Moraine Community School was in Academic Emergency for two years prior to Fordham sponsorship, and its board and principal had gone through a nasty split just before we took over. A serious leadership vacuum remained. Our sponsorship agreement made clear that we expected it to improve markedly—and fast. Its board assented. According to our contract, the school would show

•  adequate academic gains from autumn 2005 to spring 2006, as measured on a national norm-referenced test

•  market demand by enrolling at least 225 students by April 2006

•  compliance with all special-education requirements by October 2005

•  implementation of a viable curriculum by February 2006.

As the February deadline approached, we received a letter from the school’s board president stating, “Our one-year sponsorship agreement had renewal terms that we likely won’t meet. There was an opportunity to secure 2006/2007 sponsorship through the Cincinnati-based ERCO (Education Resource Consultants of Ohio).”

With those words, Fordham learned, the Moraine school was fleeing our tough-love embrace. We had thought its leaders were game to make the hard decisions needed to render their school effective. We were wrong, and they spurned us for a less-demanding sponsor. What’s more, under Ohio law the school was within its legal rights to “sponsor hop” when its leaders realized we were serious about holding them to account for improving their school. Two years later, the Moraine school and three others (with no Fordham sponsorship connections) would be sued by then Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, citing a failure to educate children.

In hindsight, we were naïve about the Moraine school and our ability to turn it around through tough love. No matter how much we wanted the school to succeed academically, those in charge—the school leadership and teachers—did not have the capacity to make it perform at a high level. Even more important, we gradually realized that the school’s leadership did not see their primary mission as delivering academic success to children.

For them, the goal was to provide a place that cared for the community’s children with love, respect, and understanding. If learning also occurred, well and good, but the school’s very existence was a sufficient end in itself for both the board and many parents. It was, quite simply, “their” school. Our efforts to inject a sense of urgency and focus on academic results just did not fly. That we didn’t share the same values should have been obvious from the start. But we failed to see it.

Technical Assistance

Moraine was not the only school in our new “portfolio” that opened our eyes to some realities of the charter world that we had not fully appreciated in our earlier think-tank role. As we were learning, threats and deadlines alone did not bring about better performance. Thus, within the bounds of state law and our budget, we also provided technical assistance to “our” sponsored schools to improve their performance. For example, we offered all those in Academic Emergency expert counsel on how to use achievement data to improve instruction, develop a strategy for maximizing performance on state assessments, and help students gain test-taking prowess.

Toward that end, we engaged Douglas Reeves and his team at the Denver-based Center for Performance Assessment (CPA). In November 2005, participating schools were provided with the tools to analyze their own test data to ascertain where their students needed the most help. In February 2006, CPA trainers conducted sessions at each participating school to assess staff needs and provide more-focused professional development based on school and student-specific data. This assistance cost Fordham about $70,000, but held out hope of helping the schools to boost student achievement relatively quickly.

We also offered the schools outside evaluations by a Massachusetts-based team of charter experts that provided school leaders and Fordham with thorough analyses of the strengths and weaknesses of individual schools and assisted in developing plans for bettering their performance. We asked team leader Joey Gustafson for a written report on each school akin to those produced by the acclaimed British school inspectorate. Four schools agreed to such evaluations—at Fordham’s expense.

After visiting the schools, Gustafson reported that all four—each an independent “mom-and-pop” operation with no links to national groups—faced a host of challenges, including strained budgets, low enrollments, curriculum problems, inexperienced staff, weak professional development for teachers, and board members ignorant of testing and other academic essentials. She also found a widespread belief that their academic setbacks were not the schools’ responsibility but, rather, the result of too many students from poor families with “home life” issues.

According to Gustafson, “These kids cannot” was the start of far too many conversations. She urged Fordham to take school leaders to visit high-performing charters in other states so they could see how such institutions worked. The result was a trip to Washington, D.C., where the heads of Fordham-sponsored schools spent time in a high-performing Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) school and the excellent charter boarding school called SEED Academy.

These repair efforts bore some fruit. The Phoenix Community Learning Center in Cincinnati, for example, made solid academic gains during 2004–5, when it was in Academic Emergency, to 2005–6, when it was rated Effective by the state. (The school sustained those gains in both 2006–7 and 2007–8, then faltered in 2008–9.) This school, led by a savvy, veteran educator, was committed to constant academic improvement and willing to change course in order to strengthen student results. It also built a strong instructional team and in time turned into a reasonably solid performer, a lamentably rare success within Ohio’s bumper crop of “mom-and-pop” schools.

It was evident, however, that some schools still needed far more help than we felt appropriate delivering as their sponsor, and more than we could afford financially. There was a real risk of veering from our role authorizing schools into school operations as we delved deeper into their problems and possible solutions. In 2004, before we even became a sponsor, one of the nation’s leading experts on charter schools and authorizing (and a Fordham board member), Bruno Manno, urged us to stop issuing grants to schools we would sponsor and to refrain from doing anything that could be seen as entangling us in their operations. Indeed, we agonized throughout the first year of sponsorship as to how much direct support to give schools for which we also served as monitor, evaluator, and judge. In the end, we offered financial help via modest grants and reduced sponsorship fees, plus substantial technical assistance in the form of advice from outside experts.

This support was manifest in our budgets. In 2005–6, Fordham collected $244,840 in school fees while our sponsorship expenses for the year totaled $715,512, of which more than one-third went toward outside consultants, school-specific grants, and foregone sponsorship fees. The following year, we collected $197,674 in school fees while our operating budget was $788,520, nearly half of it for consultants, grants to schools, and reduced fees. In fact, during the first four years of our sponsorship operation, we spent more on consultants and grants (targeted toward helping individual schools to tackle specific problems or needs) than we actually received in school fees. Under state law, we could charge schools sponsorship fees of up to 3 percent of their per-pupil funding, but our schools were paying closer to 1 percent, and several received free sponsorship. As a result, school fees covered just 30 percent of our costs from 2005 through 2009.

We continued to remind ourselves, the schools, and the state that we would not cross the line into providing direct services nor would we charge schools anything beyond their sponsorship fees. In June 2006, we shared a formal policy along those lines with every Fordham-sponsored school, building on what we had told the Ohio Department of Education in our sponsorship application two years earlier. In short, our provision of technical assistance was a good-faith effort to help schools improve but, at the end of the day, they were responsible for their results and we were responsible for holding them to account for those results.

Our refusal to sell services to sponsored schools proved prescient in the long run, as became obvious when another sponsor’s school, Harte Crossroads School in Columbus, blew up in 2007, revealing deep financial maladies. Its collapse resulted in much finger-pointing between sponsor and school as to who was responsible—and liable—for what. Even today, the state is still trying to sort out these tangles. In any case, this cautionary tale strengthened our conviction that sponsors ought not sell supplemental services to their schools. Unfortunately, many sponsors in Ohio made—and today still make—their own ends meet by doing precisely that. Legislation introduced in 2006 and 2007 to prohibit sponsors from selling supplemental services to their schools failed to become law. It would have unbalanced the books of too many sponsors. But neither did lawmakers solve the underlying problems of sponsor funding in Ohio: the chronic need to raise operating funds from the schools themselves, whether by charging fees or selling services, combined with the perverse incentives and inherent role conflicts that arise when saying no to a school is tantamount to reducing one’s own revenue.

Dollars and Cents

Sponsors weren’t the only ones on the Ohio charter scene that faced financial challenges. We also came to realize that independent charter schools faced almost insurmountable hurdles in delivering high-quality academic instruction while running these small businesses on tight margins. Consider the Omega School of Excellence, one of the ODE “orphans” that Fordham came to sponsor in Dayton and a school that in 2005 enrolled just 184 students. It received about $1.4 million a year from state and federal sources, which worked out to about $7,610 per pupil. In contrast, the Dayton Public Schools were at the time operating at about $13,000 a child. That difference was the result of some $5,500 per student in local tax dollars going to district schools that charters such as Omega did not receive—all this in addition to money for facilities and other outlays that were also denied to Ohio charters.

From its meager per-pupil allocation, Omega had to pay for all staffing, food services, special education, facilities, instructional materials (books, computers, etc.), and other expenses associated with running a school. Omega spent about $120,000 annually on facilities and utilities alone, and another $75,000 on food services, leaving about $1.2 million for instruction and operations. It was required to contribute to the state retirement system some 14 percent of salaries for every employee. Omega also offered basic health insurance and met the cost of federal Medicare payments. That meant the school paid about $645,000 in salaries and $175,000 in benefits. The result was that the average Omega administrator earned about $36,500 in 2005 while the average teacher made about $38,350. By contrast, Dayton’s district-school administrators earned about $68,500 and teachers about $50,550.

Starting in July 2005, charter schools also had to pay fees to their sponsors, which cut further into their operating margins and was seen by many in the charter community as a harsh tax. It certainly created animosity between new sponsors and schools. More than once we heard complaints that “under ODE we received free sponsorship, and now we’re paying you for sponsorship and you actually scrutinize our efforts far more than the state ever did.” This was another reason for us to keep our sponsorship fees as low as possible, but it made for an unsustainable situation over the long run.

Quality sponsorship costs money that somebody has to pay. Other states have realized this and fund their authorizers in more rational (and less tight-fisted) ways. For example, Florida provides sponsoring agencies 5 percent of revenue, as do Colorado and Oklahoma. These dollars come directly from the state to the sponsors, not out of the schools’ operating funds. In fact, the average payment structure for U.S. sponsors falls in the range of 3 percent to 5 percent of a school’s per-pupil allotment.

Besides keeping charter schools on short fiscal rations and “taxing” them for sponsorship, Ohio imposed onerous and disruptive reporting requirements. For example, charters had to report their student counts to the state every month while districts did so only twice a year. A charter school’s monthly revenue could suddenly drop by several thousand dollars if, for example, a mother lost her job and moved her five children to another school. Districts also feel the pain of losing students but they adjust their spending annually, not monthly. This becomes significant as teachers and other staff sign yearlong employment contracts, meaning that the charter school is on the hook for these costs whether pupils stay or leave.

Districts, of course, can also seek operating levies from local taxpayers to boost revenues beyond what the state affords them, while charters depend entirely on state and federal per-pupil allocations and whatever they can raise from philanthropy (see Figure 1 for current spending estimates). Some states—but not Ohio—provide charter schools with extra dollars in an effort to partially compensate for the absence of local dollars. Many now assist their charters with facility costs, too.

Strengthening the Support Network

The economic challenges facing charter schools, especially the mom-and-pop variety, were not just problems for Fordham-sponsored schools. In 2009, Ohio had 309 charters, of which almost 100 were independent operators. All but a handful served fewer than 300 students and many enrolled fewer than 200. In fact, fully 75 percent of the charter schools operating in Ohio in 2009 served fewer than 300 children apiece. Many ran on razor-thin margins.

In hindsight, many were financially doomed from the outset. In examining the causes of charter school closures in the United States, former National Charter Schools Institute CEO Brian Carpenter reported in 2008 that low enrollment was pivotal in the demise of almost three-fourths of the 100 cases he studied. He advised school boards and authorizers to “strive for 300 students as the minimum desired enrollment for each school.” Yet most Ohio charters were and are below that threshold.

In studying charter schools nationally, Paul Hill of the University of Washington observed in 2008 that, while money doesn’t assure educational success, it’s needed to innovate successfully. “Due to the way money flows,” Hill wrote, “new [charter] schools face major competitive disadvantages. Only entities that believe they can run effective schools with less money than district-run schools, or are able to gain some forms of subsidy, either philanthropic contributions or donated labor, can hope to compete.” The exception seemed to be schools associated with large, deep-pocketed national school-management organizations such as Edison and National Heritage Academies.

Worried about the appearance, the legitimacy, and the politics of a charter sector dominated by big out-of-state firms, many of them for-profit, we thought it was especially important for Ohio to develop and sustain a healthy crop of mom-and-pop schools with bona fide community roots. In 2001, we launched the Education Resource Center (ERC), originally housed at the Dayton Area Chamber of Commerce and later within a private-scholarship organization named PACE.

The concept was straightforward. We would help independent charter schools acquire benefits of scale by concentrating some of their needs and corresponding services in a single place, particularly their business management and other “back office” functions. This should, we thought, lead to lower-cost services for individual schools while improving the quality of those services for all. This, we expected, would reinforce their capacity to compete, stay viable economically and, ultimately, deliver stronger academic achievement.

In 2003, ERC became a standalone nonprofit organization named Keys to Improving Dayton Schools, Inc. (k.i.d.s.). At the outset, Fordham’s Terry Ryan (as volunteer executive director) and Dayton businessman Doug Mangen ran the day-to-day operations of k.i.d.s., with help from Dayton-area philanthropists and business leaders, including the former CEO of Copeland Industries, Matt Diggs, who also worked to raise money for the new venture.

About 20 charters were then operating in Dayton. Mangen surveyed their needs and found that their most pressing challenges were improving financial management while boosting academic performance. It wasn’t just record keeping and poor test scores. Several schools admitted that they were on the verge of financial collapse. The situation was captured in a memo from Ryan to the k.i.d.s. board in late 2003. “Early hopes for their transformative potential,” he wrote, “are yielding to the realities of meager academic results, financial woes, leadership and governance difficulties, and political challenges. Local charter schools are largely consumed by issues of survival. As a result, they’re not pointing the way toward educational excellence.”

The Omega School of Excellence was first to sign on with k.i.d.s. Organized to serve 5th through 8th graders, Omega was modeled after the acclaimed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) schools. Its graduates won scholarships to top local private high schools and to several of the country’s elite prep schools. But, like other one-off charters, Omega faced severe challenges on the business side. Co-founder Vanessa Ward (with her husband) admitted that she lacked those skills. “This is a business. It’s a start-up business. I think most persons who are in education don’t necessarily come with those gifts managing budgets and forecasting, insuring that you’re making the best decisions fiscally to allow a start-up business to survive.” The Wards and their colleagues on the Omega board craved quality financial-management support, and k.i.d.s. was set up to help provide it to worthy but needy schools like this one.

By mid-2005, k.i.d.s. employed six staffers and three consultants who not only had the school-finance knowledge and appropriate state certifications, but also possessed real expertise in navigating Ohio’s byzantine data-reporting systems. At the start of the 2005–06 school year, k.i.d.s. was serving 11 schools in four cities with a combined enrollment of about 1,860 students. The services generated about $400,000 in fees for “back office” services. Fordham also subsidized k.i.d.s. to the tune of about $150,000 a year.

The board of k.i.d.s., which included Fordham’s Finn as well as Ryan, widened its mandate, adding academic and operating activities (e.g., food service support) and new schools in other cities. Too many Ohio charter schools were struggling academically as well as financially. K.i.d.s. wanted to see if it could build a full-fledged, high-quality, local charter-management effort, something almost absent from Ohio at that time. This service might even include running whole-school operations.

By this point, the Omega school was facing serious academic as well as financial challenges. Its initial success had been driven largely by Vanessa Ward’s vision, energy, and commitment. In 2005, however, she had to shoulder more church responsibilities when her husband became seriously ill. School heads came and went. Enrollment dropped and the school faltered. Such challenges, we were coming to discover, plagued many one-off charter schools that depended too much on the vision and leadership of a single dynamic individual.

Gradually, Omega’s future prospects became more and more entwined with those of k.i.d.s., both because the school came to consume more of the nascent CMO’s (charter management organization) time and attention and because k.i.d.s.’ other revenues were drying up. A support grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was spent. In 2006, Mangen spun off the one successful part of k.i.d.s.’ work—the financial services program—into his own new private business. Though Fordham and one or two other private donors did their best, the money just wasn’t there to keep k.i.d.s. afloat so long as its main client was the faltering, shrinking Omega School of Excellence.

When the Omega board authorized a formal resolution ceasing the school’s operations in June 2008, its demise dealt a mortal blow to k.i.d.s. and to our dream of creating a nonprofit school-management organization that could run successful schools across Dayton and southwestern Ohio.

Both organizations were also wounded by the national economic downturn that reduced Fordham’s endowment—and those of many others—by more than one-third. This fiscal misery made it far harder to raise money for a struggling school and a fledgling CMO that faced uncertain futures, even in flush times.

Human capital proved problematic, too. Finding and keeping great talent to work in Dayton’s charter sector was a nut that k.i.d.s. never cracked. And when it engaged the services of really capable individuals, they swiftly proved to be in great demand elsewhere.

Under these circumstances, we had to shelve our hopes for a Dayton-based CMO. There are, to be sure, several national charter outfits—e.g., Edison Learning, National Heritage Academies, Building Excellent Schools, KIPP—operating in Ohio and some of them do good work. But what this approach neglects, and what Ohio (and many other places) still needs, are mechanisms for strengthening the “mom-and-pop” schools like Omega that have deep roots in their communities yet lack the educational and management capacity necessary to sustain success.

Sobered and a bit battered, Fordham continues as an authorizer of Ohio charter schools—six of them today, with a seventh in the offing—and a vigorous participant in the state’s larger education-policy debates. We’re constantly exploring new options including, at this writing, possible merger with several other authorizers into a larger and, we hope, more stable and effective statewide sponsorship venture. Meanwhile, we’ve learned a lot about how much harder it is to walk the walk of education reform than simply to talk the talk, and about how the most robust of theories are apt to soften and melt in the furnace of actual experience. ◆

Something about those findings sounds like a bell striking thirteen. Not only is the clock wrong, but the mechanism seems out of whack.  How can more students graduate from private schools if they weren’t learning more? Are expectations so low in the private sector that any one can graduate?

Peering beneath the press release and the executive summary into the bowels of the study itself one can get some, if not all the answers, to these questions.

Let’s begin with the most important—and perfectly uncontested—result:  If one uses a voucher to go to school, the impact on the percentage of students with a high school diploma increases by 21 percentage points (Table 3-5), an effect size of no less than 0.46 standard deviations.  Seventy percent of those who were not offered a school voucher made it through high school. That is close to the national average in high school graduation rates among those entering 9^th grade four years earlier. As compared to that 70 percent rate among those who wanted a voucher but didn’t get one, 91 percent of those who used vouchers to go to private school eventually received a high school diploma.

Most people would be thrilled to learn about a new way to lift the graduation rates of students from low income families by 21 percentage points—especially if it costs the taxpayer nothing at all. Indeed, the school voucher program actually saved money, because vouchers cost only about half the cost per pupil per pupil of going to District of Columbia public schools.

The results are especially exciting because they come from a Randomized Field Trial, the gold standard in social scientific and medical research.  A lottery decided which applicants had the opportunity to use a voucher to go to private school, and so all the comparisons between voucher students and other students are strict ones that control for family background, parental motivation, child motivation and everything else.  That is the great thing about a randomized trial.  It does a better job of showing the effect of a program than any other research strategy, because it compares two groups that are essentially alike, apart from the luck that one group had on lottery day.

But how were such high graduation rates achieved, when voucher students learned no more than the other students?  The answer to that riddle is that the study shows exactly the opposite: Those who went to private school scored 4.75 points higher on the reading test, an effect size of 0.13 standard deviations.

Admittedly, that is not as big an effect as is the voucher impact on graduation rates, and it is only fair to point out that statistician purists insist that any finding, before it can be declared undeniably true, must have only 5 chances in 100 of being wrong. The chances that the reading impact is in fact phony are greater than 5—in fact they are 6 in 100–and so it must be declared—by the statistician purists who supervise reports by government agencies—that “there is no conclusive evidence that [the vouchers] affected student achievement (p. xv).”

But notice the wording—there is “no conclusive evidence.” That is quite  different language from saying there is “no evidence” that vouchers raised achievement.  Indeed, if you invested $1,000 every time you had 94 chances in 100 of picking the right stock—and only 6 chances of getting it wrong–as is the case here, then, with modern technology, you could become richer than Bill Gates by sundown.

So the evidence is only overwhelming, not “conclusive,” that the voucher program raised student reading scores.   Math results are noticeably weaker, however.  It is true that there is a considerably better than even chance that those in private school also learned more in math, but still the effects are small.  Private schools appear not to be teaching math as effectively as they teach reading.

One other fact to note is that the graduation data include many students who were not tested in the final stages of the study. By that time they were beyond 12^th grade, and no test was possible. For these students, we don’t know—we can only suspect—that they would have tested better than their non-voucher counterparts.

But all of these considerations still do not quite explain the very large impact the voucher program had on graduation rates.  For that we have to turn to the reports from parents on school safety, an orderly school climate, and overall satisfaction.  Here we find effect sizes of 0.14 and 0.17 and 0.22 standard deviations, not quite 0.46 standard deviations (the size of the impact on graduation rates) but sizeable enough to suggest that there was something about the private school that supported the development of the young person in ways that went beyond the mere acquisition of reading and math skills.

In short, the various pieces of the DC voucher study hang together more nicely than one might first conclude.  So the next time someone tells you there is no evidence that vouchers help kids, tell them, “I’m sorry, that just ain’t true. A darn good study by an agency of the federal government has yielded strong evidence that school vouchers can help the children of low income families who live in places like the District of Columbia.”

The data used to determine the grades in Figure 1 are available here.

Much ado has been made about setting high standards over the past year. In his first major address on education policy, given just two months after he took the oath of office, President Barack Obama put the issue on the national agenda. They ought “to stop lowballing expectations for our kids,” he said, adding that “the solution to low test scores is not lowering standards—it’s tougher, clearer standards.” In March 2010, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan accused educators of having “lowered the bar” so they could meet the requirements set by the federal education law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), which requires that all students be proficient in reading and math by the year 2014.

Current conversations about creating a common national standard largely focus on the substantive curriculum to be taught at various grade levels. Even more important, we submit, is each state’s expectations for student performance with respect to the curriculum, as expressed through its proficiency standard. Curricula can be perfectly designed, but if the proficiency bar is set very low, little is accomplished by setting the content standards in the first place.

To see whether states are setting proficiency bars in such a way that they are “lowballing expectations” and have “lowered the bar” for students in 4th- and 8th-grade reading and math, Education Next has used information from the recently released 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to evaluate empirically the proficiency standards each state has established. This report is the fourth in a series in which we periodically assess the rigor of these standards (see “Johnny Can Read…in Some States,” features, Summer 2005; “Keeping an Eye on State Standards,” features, Summer 2006; and “Few States Set World-Class Standards,” check the facts, Summer 2008).

The 2009 NAEP tests in reading and math were given to a representative sample of students in 4th- and 8th-grade in each state. NAEP, called “the nation’s report card,” is managed by the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics and is currently the “gold standard” of assessments. Its proficiency standard is roughly equivalent to the international standard established by those industrialized nations that are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). If a state identifies no higher a percentage of students as being proficient on its own tests than NAEP does, then the state can be said to have set its standards at a world-class level. To ascertain objectively whether state standards are high or low, and whether they are rising or falling, we compare the percentage of students deemed proficient by each state with the percentage proficient as measured by NAEP. The state assessment data used in this report consist of those compiled in 2009 by the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

States have strong incentives not to set world-class standards. If they do, more of their schools will be identified as failing under NCLB rules, and states will then be required to take corrective actions to bring students’ performance up to the higher standard. As a result, the temptation for states to “lowball expectations” is substantial. Perhaps for this reason, a sharp disparity between NAEP standards and the standards in most states has been identified in all of our previous reports. In 2009, the situation improved in reading, but deteriorated further in math.

Every state, for both reading and math (with the exception of Massachusetts for math), deems more students “proficient” on its own assessments than NAEP does. The average difference is a startling 37 percentage points. In Figure 1, we provide a uniform ranking of the rigor of state standards using the same A to F scale used to grade students (see sidebar for the specifics on the methodology we used).

Racing to the Top?

Ironically, Tennessee received an F and had the lowest standards of all states, despite the fact that it is one of the two winners in the first phase of the bitterly contested Race to the Top (RttT) competition sponsored by the Obama administration’s Department of Education. Indeed, Tennessee has had the lowest standards of all states since 2003. Based on its own tests and standards, the state claimed in 2009 that over 90 percent of its 4th-grade students were proficient in math, whereas NAEP tests revealed that only 28 percent were performing at a proficient level. Results in 4th-grade reading and at the 8th-grade level are much the same. With such divergence, the concept of “standard” has lost all meaning. It’s as if a yardstick can be 36 inches long in most of the world, but 3 inches long in Tennessee.

Delaware, the other RttT First Phase winner, also had below-average standards, for which we awarded a grade of C- and ranked it 36th of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Delaware claimed that 77 percent of its 4th-grade students were proficient in math, when NAEP shows that only 36 percent were. In 8th-grade reading, Delaware said 81 percent of its students were proficient, but NAEP put the figure at 31 percent.

From these findings one might conclude that the Obama administration is having a huge policy impact by getting states like Tennessee and Delaware to set standards they have been unwilling to establish in the past. But Tennessee earned almost full marks (98 percent) on the section of the competition (weighted a substantial 14 percent of all possible points) devoted to “adopting standards and assessments,” even though its standards have remained extremely low ever since the federal accountability law took hold. The proof will be in the pudding. If Tennessee and Delaware and other states now shift their standards dramatically upward, RttT will win over those who think it is performance, rather than promises, that should be rewarded.

Disparities in State Standards

Despite the incentive to lowball expectations, five states—Hawaii, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Mexico, and Washington—have set their standards at or close to the world-class level, earning them an A. Notice that we award grades purely for the expected standard for performance, not actual proficiency. New Mexico earned the same mark as Massachusetts, even though only about one-quarter of its students are proficient, while half of Massachusetts students score at that level. The two deserve equal grades, however, because both are rigorous in their expectations. Another eight states—Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Vermont—earned a B for their standards.

President Obama is undoubtedly correct, however, in suggesting that many states are “lowballing expectations.” Of the remaining 38 states, 27 earned a C, and 8—Arizona, Idaho, Illinois, Maryland, Michigan, New York, Texas, and Virginia—a D. Three states—Alabama, Nebraska, and Tennessee—had such low standards that we awarded them an F. All of the states that earned grades of F have been ranked D or below in all three of our previous reports. This suggests that once a standard, however low, has been set, it tends to persist—another reason to be concerned about promises from Delaware and Tennessee.

Changes in Standards

Secretary of Education Duncan is not altogether correct in suggesting that educators are lowering the bar, however. Figure 2 shows that in 2009 the differences between state and NAEP standards shrank by 0.08 standard deviations as compared to the average for the three prior surveys. This is a reversal of the trend of declining standards we observed between 2003 and 2007. Eight states improved the overall rigor of their assessments by a full letter grade or more since 2007: Georgia, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Utah, and West Virginia. By contrast, we gave just four states—Alaska, California, New York, and South Carolina—grades that were at least a full letter grade worse than they received in 2007.

The reversal in the overall trend is, however, driven wholly by an improvement in the rigor of reading assessments, which set expectations that are higher by 0.49 standard deviations in 4th grade and by 0.26 standard deviations in 8th grade. As a matter of fact, 17 states increased the rigor of their 4th-grade reading assessments by a whole letter grade since 2007, and 17 states did the same for 8th grade. But math standards have slipped by 0.12 standard deviations in 4th grade and by 0.31 in 8th grade. This means that at least some of the state-reported improvements in mathematics proficiency are misleading.

Converging on a De Facto National Standard?

Most changes to standards, as we noted, have been fairly small: only 12 states have made changes to their standards that alter their standing by a whole letter grade. But since our last report two states, Hawaii and South Carolina, have made major alterations to state assessments. The results of these moves have been at odds: while Hawaii’s increased alignment with NAEP raised its grade from a B+ in 2007 to an A, South Carolina dropped from an A to a C-.

States nonetheless seem to be continuing their trajectory of convergence toward standards of similar rigor in math (which, given the slipping standards noted above, constitutes a downward convergence), but are more divergent in reading since 2007, particularly in 4th grade. If the convergence of math standards were to continue, we could gradually attain something like a national standard. But it would take a great deal of national patience to achieve a national standard by convergence creep.

In this report, as in previous ones, we assess the rigor of standards that states set. This is an important task, as it reminds states that whether students have or have not learned cannot be a matter of how the test is designed and where the “proficiency line” is drawn. Rather, setting high standards for proficiency is the first step in the journey toward actually improving the learning of a high percentage of students. According to NAEP, less than one-third of students are proficient in reading and a similar proportion in math nationwide. For the sake of the children of this country, we should be doing much better than that.

Paul E. Peterson is professor of government at Harvard University, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and editor-in-chief at Education Next. Carlos Xabel Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University.

How has the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act affected student achievement? This is no idle question, as the landmark federal law is long overdue for reauthorization. The Obama administration has recently urged Congress to add the issue to its already crowded 2010 agenda, even going so far as to include an additional $1 billion for K–12 education in its budget proposal if the law is reauthorized this year (a wholly symbolic gesture, given that it is Congress that sets spending levels, but one that indicates the administration’s priorities).

Yet heightened attention to NCLB has not produced consensus over its consequences for students. No Child Left Behind was a reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the central federal legislation relevant to K–12 schooling. NCLB dramatically expanded the law’s scope by requiring that states introduce school-accountability systems that applied to all public schools and students in the state. NCLB requires annual testing of students in reading and mathematics in grades 3 through 8 (and at least once in grades 10 through 12) and that states rate schools, both as a whole and for key subgroups, with regard to whether they are making adequate yearly progress (AYP) toward their state’s proficiency goals. Supporters and critics, in their various approaches to discerning NCLB’s impact, share a significant problem: because NCLB applies to all public school students, researchers lack a suitable comparison group and so have been unable to distinguish the law’s effects from the myriad other factors at work over the past eight years.

The new research we present below takes on this challenge. Our basic insight is that the test-based accountability provisions that are the defining characteristic of NCLB did not come from nowhere, but rather were modeled quite closely on reforms adopted by many states in the 1990s. For states with such accountability systems in place before 2002, NCLB’s most important components may have created some logistical headaches but were largely irrelevant. In contrast, NCLB forced the remaining states to enact accountability systems for the first time. We can therefore estimate the impact of NCLB’s accountability mandates by comparing test-score changes in states that did not have NCLB-style accountability policies in place when the law was implemented to test-score changes in those that did.

We find that the accountability provisions of NCLB generated large and statistically significant increases in the math achievement of 4th graders and that these gains were concentrated among African American and Hispanic students and among students who were eligible for subsidized lunch. We find smaller positive effects on 8th-grade math achievement. These effects are concentrated at lower achievement levels and among students who were eligible for subsidized lunch. We do not, however, find evidence that NCLB accountability had any impact on reading achievement among either 4th or 8th graders.

Assessing NCLB

The broad interest in understanding whether NCLB has influenced student achievement, both overall and for key subgroups, has motivated careful scrutiny of trend data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and other sources. For example, the authors of a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES) note that achievement trends on both state assessments and NAEP were “positive overall and for key subgroups” through 2005. Using more recent data, a report by the Center on Education Policy concludes that reading and math achievement as measured by state assessments has increased in most states since 2002 and that there have been smaller but similar patterns in NAEP scores. Both reports were careful to stress that these national gains are not necessarily attributable to the effects of NCLB.

Other studies have taken a less sanguine view of these achievement gains, arguing that they are misleading because states have made their assessment systems less rigorous over time. University of California scholar Bruce Fuller and colleagues, for example, document a growing disparity between student performance on state assessments and NAEP since the introduction of NCLB and conclude that “it is important to focus on the historical patterns informed by the NAEP.” Using NAEP data on 4th graders, they conclude that the growth in student achievement has actually slowed since the introduction of NCLB.

Turning to the broader literature on school accountability, several researchers have evaluated the achievement consequences of the accountability systems states developed during the 1990s. One study by Martin Carnoy and Susanna Loeb of Stanford, which was based on state-level NAEP data, found that the within-state growth in math performance between 1996 and 2000 was larger in states with higher values on an accountability index, particularly for African American and Hispanic students in 8th grade. Another study, by Eric Hanushek and Margaret Raymond, both also at Stanford, evaluated the impact of school-accountability policies on state-level NAEP math and reading achievement measured by the difference between the performance of a state’s 8th graders and that of 4th graders in the same state four years earlier. They classified states as having either “report-card accountability” or “consequential accountability.” Report-card states provided a public report of school-level test performance. States with consequential accountability both publicized school-level performance and attached consequences to that performance. Hanushek and Raymond found that the introduction of consequential accountability within a state was associated with increases in NAEP scores.

Both of these studies suggest that NCLB-style accountability provisions may increase student achievement and also demonstrate how state-level NAEP data can be used to evaluate accountability systems. The analysis described below effectively extends this important work to cover the more recent state accountability reforms that were compelled by NCLB.

Research Design

Given the various social, economic, and educational factors at work before and after NCLB was implemented, it is difficult to draw strong conclusions about the policy’s impact from a simple comparison of achievement trends before and after enactment of the law. For example, the nation was suffering from a recession around the time NCLB was implemented, which one might expect would have reduced student achievement in the absence of other forces. At the same time, other national education policies and programs were in place that may also have influenced student achievement.

Perhaps the central challenge in evaluation research is to identify a plausible comparison group that was unaffected by the intervention under study. In the case of NCLB, this is particularly difficult, as the policy simultaneously applied to all public schools in the United States.

We address this issue by comparing trends in student achievement across states that had varying degrees of prior experience with state school-accountability policies similar to those brought about by NCLB. The intuition behind this approach is that NCLB represented less of a “treatment” in states that had already adopted NCLB-like school-accountability policies prior to 2002. To the extent that NCLB-like accountability had either positive or negative effects on measured student achievement, we would expect, once NCLB had been implemented, to observe those effects most distinctly in states that had not previously introduced similar policies.

This strategy relies on the assertion that pre-NCLB school-accountability policies were comparable to NCLB—that is, that the two types of accountability regimes are similar in the most relevant respects. The fact that many state officials criticized NCLB, arguing that it duplicated their prior accountability systems, suggests the functional equivalence of the two sets of policies. To ensure that this is the case and relying on a number of different sources, we evaluated the comparison states according to whether the features of their pre-NCLB accountability policies closely resembled the key aspects of NCLB. We found that they were in fact quite similar.

As an additional check on the validity of our treatment and comparison groups, we used our research design to estimate the impact of NCLB accountability on outcomes that we would not expect to be affected, such as the state-level average poverty rate and median household income. The fact that our method does not find any “effect” of NCLB on such outcomes suggests that these states can serve as a plausible comparison group for isolating the impact of NCLB accountability.

We implement our research design in a more fine-grained manner than simply comparing achievement trends in the treatment and comparison states. We define the treatment as the number of years without prior school accountability between the 1991–92 academic year and the onset of NCLB. Hence, states with no prior accountability have a value of 11. Illinois, which adopted its policy in the 1992–93 school year, would have a value of 2. Texas would have a value of 4 since its policy started in 1994–95, and Vermont would have a value of 9 since its program began in 1999–2000. This method implies that the larger the value of this treatment variable, the greater potential impact of NCLB. The total effect we report is the impact of NCLB accountability in 2007 for states with no prior accountability relative to states that adopted school accountability in 1997 (the mean adoption year among states that adopted accountability prior to NCLB).

It is important to note that this research design will capture the impact of the accountability provisions of NCLB, but not the impact of other NCLB components such as the Reading First program or its Highly Qualified Teacher provisions. Additionally, our estimates will identify the impact of NCLB-induced school-accountability provisions on states without prior accountability policies. To the extent that one believes that states that expected to gain the most from accountability policies adopted them prior to NCLB, one might view the results we present as an underestimate of the average effect of school accountability.

Data

This analysis uses data on math and reading achievement from the state NAEP, which offers a representative sample of student achievement in each state at regular intervals. Participation in the state NAEP was voluntary prior to NCLB, although roughly 40 states did participate. NCLB made participation mandatory. The main advantage to using NAEP data for our analysis is that it is a low-stakes exam that is not directly tied to any state’s standards or assessments. Instead, NAEP aims to assess a broad range of skills and knowledge within each subject area. Consequently, NAEP data should be relatively immune to concerns about accountability-driven test-score inflation, such as may result from “teaching to the test.”

Because our research design depends on measuring achievement trends prior to NCLB, we limit our sample to states that administered the state NAEP at least twice prior to the implementation of NCLB. We include 2002 as a pre-NCLB data point in our analysis because, given the timing of the passage and implementation of the law, it seems unlikely that spring 2002 scores could have been substantially influenced by NCLB (see sidebar). All states administered NAEP in 2003, 2005, and 2007.

Our sample includes 39 states for 4th-grade math, 38 states for 8th-grade math, 37 states for 4th-grade reading, and 34 states for 8th-grade reading (see Figure 1). With a few exceptions, our analysis sample closely resembles the nation in terms of student demographics (e.g., percentage African American and percentage Hispanic), observed socioeconomic traits (e.g., the poverty rate), and measures of the levels and pre-NCLB trends in NAEP test scores.

Results

We find that the accountability provisions of NCLB increased 4th-grade math achievement by roughly 7.2 scale points (0.23 standard deviations) by 2007 in states with no prior accountability policies relative to states that adopted accountability systems in 1997. How large is this effect? As one point of reference, consider that the difference between the average scores of 4th and 8th graders in our sample suggests that students gain roughly 12 scale points per year. By this measure, the NCLB impact is equivalent to roughly two-thirds of the average annual gain in scale points. Consider also that the achievement gap between black and white 4th graders on the NAEP math exam is roughly 30 scale points (1 standard deviation), which means that the impact of NCLB is equivalent to about one-quarter of this difference. The effect for 8th-grade math is smaller (0.10 standard deviations) and falls just shy of achieving conventional levels of statistical significance. We find no effects for 4th- and 8th-grade reading.

The design of NCLB necessarily focused the attention of schools on helping students attain proficiency. Figure 2 presents our estimates of the effects of NCLB accountability on the percentage of students achieving at or above the basic and proficient performance levels on NAEP. Although states’ definitions of proficient vary widely, very few set the proficiency bar as high as NAEP and most correspond more closely to NAEP’s basic performance level. We find that NCLB accountability increased the share of students performing at or above basic in math by 10 percentage points among 4th graders and 6 percentage points among 8th graders. Math proficiency rates among 4th graders also increased by 6 percentage points. Again, however, we do not find consistent evidence that NCLB increased reading performance at either grade level.

Given NCLB’s focus on proficiency, one would expect the law to disproportionately influence achievement among previously low-achieving students. Our results showing larger increases in the percentage of students reaching the performance level of basic on the NAEP are broadly consistent with this theory. However, in contrast with some previous research and commonly voiced concerns, we do not find that the introduction of NCLB harmed students at higher points on the achievement distribution. Indeed, NCLB accountability seemed to increase achievement among higher-achieving students, if by a smaller amount than it did among their low-achieving peers. For example, in 4th-grade math, we find that NCLB increased scores at the 10th percentile by roughly 0.29 standard deviations compared with an increase of only 0.17 standard deviations at the 90th percentile (see Figure 3).

One of the primary objectives of NCLB was to reduce inequities in student performance by race and socioeconomic status. Indeed, this concern drove the requirement that, under the statute, accountability ratings be determined by subgroup performance in addition to aggregate school performance. Hence, it is of particular interest to understand the effect of NCLB accountability on specific student subgroups.

In 4th-grade math, these estimated effects are somewhat larger for Hispanic students relative to white students. Similarly, the effects were substantially larger among students who were eligible for subsidized lunch (regardless of race) relative to students who were not eligible. We also found relatively large effects for black students but only when our analysis weighted the state-year NAEP data by the corresponding enrollments of black students. This pattern suggests that NCLB generated more meaningful improvements in the achievement of black students in states where public schools served larger numbers of black students. The effects were roughly comparable for boys and girls.

In 8th-grade math, we find extremely large positive effects for Hispanic students and small, only marginally significant effects for white students. Unfortunately, the results for black students are too imprecisely estimated to warrant interpretation. The effects for students eligible for subsidized lunch are large and statistically significant. Interestingly, for 8th graders the effects are substantially larger for girls, with boys experiencing little if any benefit of accountability.

Unintended Consequences?

One concern about NCLB and most other test-based school-accountability policies is that they may cause schools to neglect subjects other than math and reading. NAEP data offer some opportunity to test this hypothesis in the context of NCLB. A sizable number of states administered state-representative NAEP tests in science. Unfortunately, during our analysis period, the 4th-grade science exam was only administered in 2000 and 2005 and the 8th-grade science exam was administered in 1996, 2000 and 2005. The lack of multiple pre- and post-NCLB measures of student achievement limit the power of our research design. Nonetheless, when we apply our research design to these data, we find no statistically significant effects at either grade level at any point on the achievement distribution. Moreover, we are able to rule out effects larger than roughly 0.10 standard deviations. While these results should be taken with a grain of salt, they cast doubt on some claims that NCLB accountability has had an adverse impact on student performance in science.

Another major concern with test-based accountability, including NCLB, is that it provides teachers an incentive to direct energy toward the types of questions that appear most commonly on the high-stakes test and away from other topics within the tested domain. As noted above, one of the benefits of the analysis presented here is that it relies on student performance on NAEP, which should be relatively immune from such test-score “inflation” since it is not used as a high-stakes test under NCLB or any other accountability system. It is nonetheless interesting to examine whether NCLB accountability has improved student achievement in any particular topic within math or reading. The NAEP math exam measures student performance in five specific topic areas: algebra, geometry, measurement, number properties and operations, and data analysis, statistics, and probability. Our results suggest that NCLB had a positive impact in all math topic areas for the 4th-grade sample. Among 8th graders, NCLB had a moderately large and statistically significant impact in data analysis and marginally significant effects in number properties and geometry.

The NAEP reading exam measures student competency in several skills related to comprehension: reading for information (i.e., primarily nonfiction reading), reading for literary experience (i.e., primarily fiction reading), and (for 8th grade only) the ability to perform a task (e.g., students apply knowledge from reading bus schedules or directions for repairing something). We find no significant differences in student achievement effects by topic area in reading; that is, NCLB accountability did not appear to have significant effects on student achievement in any of the three reading competencies. Keep in mind, however, that our research design does not allow us to comment on the effects of other aspects of the law, such as the Reading First program, that were explicitly designed to boost reading performance.

Summing Up

So how has NCLB accountability affected student achievement? Our results suggest that its consequences have been mixed. Specifically, we find that the accountability provisions of NCLB generated large and broad gains in the math achievement of 4th graders and somewhat smaller gains for 8th graders. Our results suggest that NCLB accountability had no impact on reading achievement for either group.

The mixed results presented here pose difficult but important questions for policymakers considering whether to “end” or “mend” NCLB. The evidence of substantial and almost universal gains in math is undoubtedly good news for advocates of NCLB. But the lack of any effect in reading, and the fact that the policy appears to have generated only modestly larger impacts among disadvantaged subgroups in math (and thus made only minimal headway in closing achievement gaps), suggests that the impact of NCLB has fallen short of its extraordinarily ambitious goals. Some commentators have argued that the failure of NCLB and earlier accountability reforms to close achievement gaps reflects a flawed, implicit assumption that schools alone can overcome the achievement consequences of dramatic socioeconomic disparities.

An effective redesign of accountability policies like NCLB may need to pay more specific attention to the processes and practices operating within schools. Along those lines, it is interesting to note that our evidence of differential effects by grade and subject is broadly similar to the results from evaluations of earlier state-level school-accountability policies. Understanding the sources of these differences is likely to be particularly useful as policymakers discuss the future design and implementation of school-accountability systems. For example, the unique effectiveness of NCLB in improving the math skills of younger students could be related to the biological evidence that cognitive skills are more malleable at early ages. These outcomes may also result from the specific ways in which schools and teachers have adjusted their instructional practices, perhaps differently for mathematics and reading. Much evidence suggests that school decisions about curricula (e.g., textbooks, instructional software, and the corresponding pedagogy) can have comparatively large effects on student achievement. Further research that can credibly and specifically examine how school and teacher responses have contributed to the achievement effects documented here would be a useful next step in identifying effective policies and practices that can reliably improve student outcomes.

Thomas Dee is associate professor of economics at Swarthmore College. Brian Jacob is professor of education policy and economics at the University of Michigan.

In Education Unbound, Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute and Education Next editor, argues for new education service-delivery organizations that, free from the constricting norms and rules of traditional providers, focus single-mindedly on executing their model. The challenge for reformers is to recognize that enabling such providers is not just a matter of promoting “school choice,” but also of freeing up the sector to a wealth of different approaches and cultivating conditions in which problem solvers can succeed and grow. Hess argues in the selection below that funding is the fuel required for innovators to thrive.

Greenfield is a term of art typically used by investors, engineers, or builders to refer to an area where there are unobstructed, wide-open opportunities to invent or build.

— Chapter 1, Education Unbound

Teach For America’s Wendy Kopp also struggled to find funding when launching TFA. She has described [in Public Affairs] being schooled by Princeton faculty in just how hard it would be to raise the requisite funds, remembering, “What [Professor Bressler] really wanted to know, he said in his booming voice, was how in the world I planned to raise the $2.5 million…. He didn’t seem convinced. ‘Do you know how hard it is to raise twenty-five hundred dollars?’ he asked.”

Kopp has described sitting down with Texas billionaire and former presidential candidate Ross Perot, trying to get that $2.5 million:

All I remember is Mr. Perot talking. He talked a lot, and I had trouble following much of what he was saying. I was mostly just thinking ‘I need to stay here until I get $1 million from this man.’ When Mr. Perot suggested that I contact Sam Walton and other philanthropists instead, I insisted that he himself was the best possible prospect. Finally, after two hours of back and forth, Mr. Perot agreed to offer us a challenge grant of $500,000. We would have to match his money three to one. I’m not sure what ultimately led Mr. Perot to this idea. He must have realized that I wasn’t planning to go anywhere until he committed to something.

Kopp remembers that Perot’s grant was “the catalyst we needed,” with other donors following his lead and supplying the remaining funds “in relatively short order.”

Only the most hard-headed or selfless of entrepreneurs muscle through. Those with less stomach for frustration, as well as those interested in doing well in addition to doing good, will steer their energies elsewhere. It’s not just about dollars, though. The impact of venture capital  in entrepreneurial hotbeds like Silicon Valley is also a product of the personal networks, mentoring, and expertise that come with it. These networks help new enterprises get a foot in the door, and mentors provide assistance with mundane, but crucial, tasks like organizational bookkeeping, strategic planning, and governance.

Equally crucial is the quality control implicit in venture funding. Those who worry that greenfield efforts may not be publicly run, or who are hesitant to give funds to new ventures with unproven quality, often overlook the fact that competition for venture funding in the private sector comes with intensive screening. In a community like Silicon Valley, as a general rule only 10 percent of business plans that venture capitalists receive warrant any response at all, and only 1 percent are ever funded. To be sure, venture investment also has its share of blemishes. During the late-1990s dot-com bubble, for instance, investors frequently left their skepticism behind as they flocked to a slew of dubious ventures. So, it is not that this process is flawless, but only that it tends to exert a healthy discipline overall.

A particular challenge for schooling is that venture capital is not geographically dispersed. While schools operate in every corner of the country, venture capital is highly concentrated. In 2006, one-third of all venture capital investments were made in California’s Silicon Valley. That figure increases to about half of all investments if Los Angeles, Orange County, and San Diego are included, and to three-fourths of all U.S. venture investment if one adds the Route 128 corridor outside Boston, New York, and metropolitan Washington, DC. In other words, about three-fourths of all investment is made in a few California locales and in the Boston–New York–Washington nexus. Given this natural dynamic, we cannot expect 15,000 school districts to become hotbeds of educational entrepreneurship. Instead, the expectation should be that the requisite funding, infrastructure, and networks will likely emerge in some limited number of locales. Greenfielders need to invest in and build these hubs, and then take care to encourage and support the ventures that are able and willing to deliver their services more broadly.

The quality control and support that the investment process provides are driven by investors tending to their self-interest and happen naturally and invisibly in places like Silicon Valley. They impose a certain flexible but hardnosed quality control even while creating an entire ecosystem and equipping promising new ventures to take root. For too long, these quality assurances and development processes have been overlooked by both K–12 reformers who wonder why innovations fizzle and school choice enthusiasts who seemingly expect manicured flowers to spring from a barren, rubble-strewn plain.

The Three Phases of Investment

Though all education entrepreneurs need financing to get off the ground (venture capital) and to support expansion (growth capital), the capital market for for-profit organizations is markedly different from the one that nonprofit organizations can access (see Figure 2). While for-profit ventures can theoretically rely on their profits, nonprofits rely on a continuous funding stream (sustaining capital) even once they mature.

Startup Capital
Education entrepreneurs creating for-profit enterprises traditionally raise their initial capital from individuals (“angel investors”) or venture capital firms. As explained in the sidebar, these investors put up cash in exchange for an ownership stake (“equity”) in the new organization, and they expect that their investment will eventually yield a profit.

In 2004, just over $50 million was privately invested in businesses addressing the Pre-K–12 sector. With success stories like Amazon, Apple, and Google, one might think that early venture investors typically do quite well for themselves. But the reality is much more complex. In Fool’s Gold, Scott Shane, a professor of entrepreneurial studies at Case Western Reserve University, argues that observers focus on fabulously successful entrepreneurs, but what they do not realize is that these success stories are incredibly rare. Only a small number of entrepreneurs are really, really successful—and, by extension, only a small number of venture investors see large returns. The media contribute to this misperception because it is easy to tell the story of Google and of early Google investors, but it is much less interesting and more difficult to write stories about failure.

Nonprofit education entrepreneurs generally raise their startup capital from venture philanthropy firms like NewSchools Venture Fund and the Charter School Growth Fund, or from individual donors and foundations. Only a few foundations are comfortable with taking a risk on entrepreneurial education organizations. Those that do make these early funds available—usually multimillion-dollar grants over the course of several years—tend to be younger foundations, like the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation, the Milton Friedman Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that have embraced the modern school of venture philanthropy.

Before the relatively recent emergence of these new foundations, funders tended to provide these early grants in only small increments, forcing entrepreneurs to spend enormous amounts of time and energy on fundraising from multiple donors. In addition, foundation officials found it far more palatable to support a host of small, capacity-building grants than to make concentrated bets on greenfield ventures. Foundation officials rarely get in trouble for failing to have an impact, but can quickly get into hot water for supporting politically contentious measures. For this reason, traditional funders have historically preferred to support professional development, curricular reforms, mentoring programs, and similar efforts that are broadly popular and appear to be risk-free.

Growth Capital
For an education entrepreneur, finding startup capital is challenging, but fundraising for growth can be even tougher. For-profit companies that have a good track record may find that venture capital firms such as Quad Ventures are willing to invest in growth for later-stage education organizations with promising early results. Even venture capital firms that don’t focus on education are willing to entertain the notion if they see a successful business emerging.

Nonprofits, on the other hand, have a much more difficult time attracting growth funds. They struggle to raise the kind of large, multiyear investments needed to support expansion because even terrific nonprofit ventures cannot deliver a handsome return to investors. In addition, there is a perverse incentive for growing nonprofit organizations: The better the organization is doing, the more likely donors are to drop their support, believing they have done their part or are no longer needed. As such, many foundations seem willing to support strong nonprofit organizations and help them expand on a limited scale, but few are willing to sustain an organization as it grows over time.

It is especially difficult to raise large amounts of funding from foundations because, according to federal regulations, program officers need only spend 5 percent of the foundation’s total assets each year in the form of grants and other expenses. Except in unusual cases, the other 95 percent of a foundation’s assets are not used to fund grantees but instead are invested for the long term to preserve its endowment. If foundations are to seek a bigger impact, they may need to tap these endowments more aggressively.

One possible strategy for augmenting the available funding relies on program-related investments, which are loans that come from endowment funds. Several foundations, including the Walton Family Foundation and the Annie E. Casey Foundation, have made program-related investments to help charter school entrepreneurs secure facilities for their schools. There is room for more such investment: According to the Foundation Center, foundations nationwide hold nearly $500 billion in their endowments, but use just over $200 million of that for charitable loans or program-related investments—less than one-twentieth of 1 percent.

Nonprofits and philanthropies that have taken on the explicit mission of helping other nonprofits grow include the Growth Philanthropy Network, the Draper Richards Foundation, the Robin Hood Foundation, and the Tipping Point Community. The Draper Richards Foundation, for instance, was founded by famed venture capitalist Bill Draper and seeks to give nonprofits both management knowledge (a Draper Richards board member sits on participating nonprofits’ boards) and capital in their infant stages ($100,000 per year for three years).

Another foundation that is doing things differently is SeaChange Capital Partners, which makes multimillion-dollar infusions to help established nonprofits grow. SeaChange was founded by Chuck Harris, a retired Goldman Sachs partner. Harris had previously worked with nonprofit organizations and noted a serious problem. He explains [in Philanthropy News Daily]:

I was involved with a couple of non-profit organizations that had fantastic management, good results, a fair amount of financial discipline, and were ambitious. And if they had been for-profit businesses at a similar stage of development, they would have gone out and raised a multi-million-dollar, multi-year round of funding tied to their business plan. Instead, they were sending out scattershot proposals for relatively small amounts of money over short periods of time. In other words, there was no financial certainty…[and] the most senior people in the organization were spending a disproportionate amount of their time fundraising as opposed to driving the ship. It seemed to me to be a very ad hoc, inefficient, and restrictive way to grow.

SeaChange adopts Wall Street methods to support proven nonprofits with ambitious growth plans. Harris explains the key shift is “seek[ing] to fund the business plans of these nonprofits rather than [to] fund a piece of their program…. We plan to conduct the financing much like a private placement in the business sector, with the goal of raising $5 million, $10 million, $15 million for organizations on the threshold of a growth phase.”

Sustaining Capital
Entrepreneurial K–12 ventures launch and grow with private capital or philanthropic support. Once up and running, however, sustainable ventures seek to rely on earned income from fees or the sale of products or services. However, despite increasing acceptance of income-generating for-profit and nonprofit organizations, few education entrepreneurs have built models that sustain themselves on these revenues alone. And, as Dan Katzir and Wendy Hassett of the Eli & Edythe Broad Foundation have observed [in Hess, With the Best of Intentions], “Many foundations will not support a grantee for more than a specified number of years, regardless of where the organization is in terms of its growth cycle.” This means that nonprofits scramble to offset the loss of philanthropic support by finding ways to sell their services or by finding new funders, while for-profits seek to achieve a scale that makes them economically viable. One of the few successful school builders to have addressed this challenge is National Heritage Academies, a for-profit charter operator that enrolls 35,000 students in 57 schools across 6 states and has managed to attain profitability while generating impressive academic outcomes. Even academically successful ventures, however, have found it challenging to mimic NHA’s financial success.

Although some nonprofit education entrepreneurs can support their organization’s ongoing operations through public funding—such as by per-pupil dollars that flow to charter management organizations—most rely, at least in part, on fundraising from individuals and foundations. The limits to this approach are legion, however, as scholars estimate that total philanthropy to K–12 probably amounts to less than $3 billion a year—or less than 1 percent of all K–12 spending [as shown in Figure 1]. To date, entrepreneurial ventures have been disproportionately funded by this tiny sliver of funding—and especially by funds from younger foundations with roots in the 21st-century economy.

Some leading “new” philanthropies, like the Gates, Walton, and Broad Foundations, have attempted to adapt the venture investment mind-set to the social sector. Funders have begun to weigh criteria like scalability and financial sustainability more heavily, have taken seats on nonprofit boards, and have requested regular performance updates. This marks a shift in thinking—though it’s a development that has also encountered skepticism as to how willing these funders actually are to take bold chances and whether their efforts sometimes cross from smart oversight into micromanagement. Whatever one makes of such concerns, it is clear that support from philanthropic funders has proven instrumental in launching or expanding heralded greenfield ventures like KIPP, New Leaders for NewSchools, Aspire Public Schools, College Summit, Green Dot, and Achievement First.

In education circles, the two best-known venture philanthropies may be the decade-old NewSchools Venture Fund and the much younger Charter School Growth Fund. The San Francisco-based NewSchools Venture Fund secures investments from both for-profit and nonprofit sources and then seeks to provide startup capital to ventures—both nonprofit and for-profit organizations—that are sustainable and designed to achieve scale. The Colorado-based Charter School Growth Fund, with over $150 million in support, provides grants and loans to promote the growth of high-quality charter management and support organizations. These venture philanthropists accept that some investments will fail, so long as the failures are the product of efforts to address hard, important challenges. As the Broad Foundation’s Katzir and Hassett have explained, “We do not regard our grantmaking as charity…[but] think of our work as making investments in areas in which we expect a healthy return.”

But my concern here is just one part of the Ravitch book and it’s not just Ravitch:  it’s what to my provincial eyes looks like a proverbial cut ‘n run on the part of our reform leaders over No Child Left Behind.

Despite the bashing the ten-year-old federal law has been taking–much of it deserved–on the ground, in the provinces NCLB has succeeded in beginning a much-needed change in the culture of public education: from a system focused on adults to one looking behind all the curtains to see how kids are doing. It hasn’t been a pretty launch, of course, but the ship is only barely out of port.

I think there are statistics that give some credence to my beliefs, but my conclusions here come from close observation of my small piece of the public education world — a tiny district with 30% African-American enrollment, 55% of students eligible for free or reduced lunch, and a 59% graduation rate.  A district on whose board of education I now serve (and have written about).

Here, the NCLB rollout has gone like this: the first three to four years were spent with teachers (99% white), backed by their distant but powerful union leaders, kicking and screaming about how bad and nasty NCLB was. Nothing much got done in those years, but I knew there was hope when I listened to an envoy from the Education Trust (whom a bunch of us invited in) give a reading from the actual law to a group of mostly minority parents. They cheered – must be a first for any piece of federal legislation! – and sang their “Amen” chorus to the sections requiring transparency and full reporting from schools and schools districts.  They got it, this being the first time they felt they had a right to actually question THE MAN or get real information about why their kids never seemed to make it to graduation.  And much to the surprise of the local establishment, these folks could actually read a chart showing 80 percent failure rates for African American kids in 3^rd and 8^th grade math and English. These first years for our community were a long and very uncomfortable “shock of the new.”

During the next three to four years, thanks to the continued NCLB bite, teachers actually spent time looking at the law (which they began to notice nowhere told anyone to “teach to the test”) and began to think that maybe they should (COULD! There is in NCLB the much needed faith that schools and teachers CAN make a difference) be doing something to improve the kids’ academic performance. Having been labeled a “district in need of improvement,” they felt some shame and rose to the occasion; they began analyzing the curriculum (actually, they began to realize they really didn’t have one, a revelation that came only because of NCLB pressure) and their teaching methods. Parents and other community members – thanks to some local gadflies who began to get the message out – also began paying attention and, for the first time in memory, voted down a school budget in large part because of academic failures. The state education department was getting on board and actually issued a “core curriculum” to offer some guidance. This period was also difficult, but it was one of positive tension and argument and a barely discernable consensus beginning to emerge that academics counted.

So now, here we are, barely ten years into this huge reform, with our little platoon of teachers and administrators and parents fighting feverishly on the front, beginning to make some progress on test scores and feel some confidence about improving our kids’ academic opportunities – and I look up from my trench and, instead of seeing the school house door thrown open with garlands of WELCOME signs, I see teachers back to cheering from the windows as the reform generals scurry away, white flags in hand.

As I have urged Professor Ravitch, a historian, I hope our policymakers take the long view on this one. They need don their best Margaret Mead outfits and visit the places where the culture of failure and low expectations spans generations (the culture that Ravitch so wonderfully described in “Left Back.”) No, no. It is far too early to declare NCLB a failure, much less abandon the many parents and students who have already benefited immensely from it.

Back in 1989, one of those teachers, Joshua Pechthalt, joined Villaraigosa for a rally downtown in Exposition Park. Pechthalt remembers his charismatic young friend pumping up the crowd. “Antonio was the master of ceremonies who had parents and teachers on their feet,” recalled Pechthalt, now vice president of United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA). “When we see each other, to this day, we give each other a hug.”

By 1994, the popular Villaraigosa was departing for the state capitol, rocketed into a legislative seat by grateful teachers, not to mention the union’s campaign contributions. Fellow legislators chose Villaraigosa to become the first-ever Latino Speaker. Back home in East Los Angeles, the teachers associations would spend over $1 million during his six-year tenure in Sacramento to ensure that Villaraigosa would be reelected.

“As Speaker, I was without question the number one advocate for the unions,” Villaraigosa reminisced. Teacher pay hikes sailed through the legislature. He made sure that the push to hold educators accountable for results stopped short of challenging protection of dismal teachers and stymied efforts to send strong teachers into weak schools.

Fast-forward to 2010 and Villaraigosa finds himself in the vortex of a political torrent. “I’m Public Enemy Number One within the UTLA,” he told me. In his quest to turn around the schools, the mayor has united working-class Latino parents, civil rights leaders, and big-money Democrats to challenge union leaders. “It’s been a war,” he said. “It’s a war I’m willing to wage.” After a series of bloody battles against his old union friends, including a 2007 loss in the courts, the mayor gained the upper hand last fall when the L.A. school board passed a radical reform plan that he helped to craft. Over the next few years, the district intends to hand off one-third of its 800-plus campuses to managers of charter schools, other nonprofits, and inventive district educators.

Democratic leaders have enriched the unions over the past half century, creating millions of jobs for dues-paying teachers, feeding the building trades via school construction, and granting bargaining rights to teachers in the 1970s. But union leaders, of late, find themselves on the far edge of the national debate over how to lift students and their flagging schools. Test scores have largely stalled in recent years and gaps have widened slightly, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Labor chiefs are openly miffed over President Obama’s offer of moral support and billions of federal dollars to escalate the “war” being waged by Villaraigosa and his fellow mayors. “In a place like L.A. or Detroit, where the public schools are dysfunctional,” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told me, “I don’t think that the system can by itself go where it has to go. You have to rally all elements of the community. The person who can rally all those actors is the mayor.”

Villaraigosa is not the only city chief to take charge of urban schools. But his battle for mayoral control in Los Angeles offers a cautionary tale for all sides. It reveals new tensions between teachers union leaders and Democratic mayors. But charter school enthusiasts should not expect that close alliance, nurtured over many years, to be disrupted overnight. Politicians are highly skilled at finding a middle ground between demands for reform and protection of old connections. As much as Villaraigosa—and the school superintendent with whom he is allied—have appeared committed to rapid charter school expansion, when the L. A. school board took decisive action in February, charters were forced to settle for much less than they expected. Instead of getting the lion’s share of the schools they sought, charters were left with only four. Newly formed teacher groups won the vast majority of school contracts after they formed an alliance with UTLA. The charters were left with their tongues hanging out.

The Players

Villaraigosa returned to L.A. in 2000, eager to become the city’s first Latino mayor since 1872. His union friends contributed another $2 million in traceable dollars to his mayoral campaigns in 2001 and 2005. Leaders of the California Teachers Association even talked up Villaraigosa as California’s next photogenic governor, the Democratic heir apparent to Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger.

At first, the old polarities seemed to hold, pitting education groups like the UTLA against downtown developers and fiscal conservatives. Then the mayor began to echo the impatience expressed by blue-collar Latino parents, packed into graying apartments and tiny cottages spread across East Los Angeles. For decades these families saw no options other than sending their children to overcrowded, sometimes dangerous schools. Villaraigosa grew up in a broken barrio home. “My father left when I was young; we lived in abject poverty,” he recalled. His roots in Chicano politics taught him about L.A.’s racial dynamics in the 1950s, when “Mexicans” were simply kept out of predominantly white schools.

Running for mayor in 2005, after losing his first bid, Villaraigosa began talking with a variety of activists, including Maria Brenes, who runs Innercity Struggle, a group that fights for small, more rigorous high schools. She works from a modest office in the heart of East Los Angeles. A musty fragrance permeates two rooms, blending L.A.’s unrelenting heat with too many eager organizers stuffed into a small space. “Public education has been going downhill in East L.A. for some time,” Brenes said. “Schools built for 1,000 students are now at 5,000.”

Parents worry over these densely packed schools in which teachers simply lose track of kids. Alicia Ortiz, for example, made sure that her daughter escaped Garfield High School, once home to Jaime Escalante, the math teacher made famous in Stand and Deliver. “They have so many students it doesn’t matter if your student is in school or not,” Ortiz said. Her daughter now attends a charter school.

Candidate Villaraigosa also met with wealthy Democrats worried sick over the quality of the schools, like developer and philanthropist Eli Broad. “In L.A. there is no one responsible for the schools,” Broad said. “The board is made up of political wannabes. The only time we have seen dramatic change in urban education is when you have mayoral control.”

Initial evidence backs Broad’s claim. After tracking progress in a dozen cities where mayors have grabbed the tiller—including Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C.—Brown University professor Kenneth Wong concluded that students benefit significantly. Reading performance in these cities’ high schools climbed by one-third of a standard deviation when compared with urban districts serving similar kids, on par with the impact of providing quality preschools. City residents also reported feeling better about their local schools, a key win for municipal leaders eager to stem white flight and shrinking property values, as Wong detailed.

Broad’s collateral assault on the downtown school bureaucracy includes growing new charter schools and attracting strong principals who gain unfettered authority to hire and fire their own teachers. L.A.’s activists are further bolstered by a statewide charter lobby that’s picked up considerable clout in recent years, capitalized by Broad, Netflix founder Reed Hastings, and most recently Bill Gates. Villaraigosa soon came to see charters as a lever for organizational innovation, since “parents are hungry for change,” he said. And these well-heeled Democratic donors, for now, offset declining campaign support from the unions.

The Setting

Villaraigosa’s predecessor, James Hahn, did little to challenge the pace of change inside the L.A. Unified School District. Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor and head of the Democratic National Committee, came to L.A. as superintendent in 2001. He pushed to award principals more discretion over budgets and the power to assemble strong teams of teachers, reforms largely thwarted by the UTLA. Romer standardized the curriculum and required teachers to follow weekly timetables. Student scores inched upward on Romer’s watch. Still, less than one-sixth of L.A. 8th graders now read and write proficiently, according to federal assessments.

After winning the mayor’s race in 2005, Villaraigosa wasn’t about to accept this glacial pace of progress. Catching his union benefactors off guard, he soon announced his intention to take control of the far-flung L.A. school system, citing strides made by Mayor Richard M. Daley in Chicago and Michael Bloomberg in New York. “We have got to move away from a model where school boards are defenders of a failed status quo, where the unions just control the board,” Villaraigosa said.

But wresting control of the schools from Romer and loyal board members required that Villaraigosa return to Sacramento to win legislative approval. Unlike other states, California sets the powers of local school boards in the state constitution. Villaraigosa had to negotiate with statewide teacher groups since they continue to sway Democratic legislators through old alliances and rich campaign contributions.

UTLA president A. J. Duffy sensed an opening, negotiating with Villaraigosa to grant teachers greater control over curriculum and pedagogical practices. In return, the unions would endorse the mayor’s plan. The surreal and controversial power-sharing deal that emerged in Sacramento resembled governance of the Palestinian territories (see “Power Struggle in Los Angeles,” forum, Summer 2007). And the school board, which the UTLA could often dominate, would have lost most of its authority. The union’s conservative wing came unglued, forcing a vote on Duffy’s deal with the mayor, which the rank and file soundly rejected.

The Plot

The notion that anyone might take command of the sprawling L.A. Unified’s 885 schools, even a mayor with boundless energy, feels like a Disney movie, an ever-hopeful fiction. The district spreads across 710 square miles, half the size of Delaware, and serves more than 688,000 students. The system hosts the nation’s single largest public-works program, a $27 billion effort to build more than 130 new schools and renovate countless others. It employs over 36,700 classroom teachers and, curiously, an equal number of managers and support staff.

Back in Sacramento, Villaraigosa emerged victorious. The legislature passed the mayoral-control plan, and Governor Schwarzenegger signed the deal in the summer of 2006. But Romer fought back in the courts, winning on appeal in spring 2007. So, the unstoppable mayor simply pivoted and went with Plan B. “We also had a Plan C,” Villaraigosa joked, reviewing his battles against the union. “We would go to the end of the alphabet if necessary.”

Villaraigosa outflanked Romer, rallying support for three challengers to incumbent members of the school board who had sided with the schools chief during the prolonged legal battle. “I raised millions, defeated the union candidates, and we won a majority of the board,” the mayor recalled. Three million to be exact, coming mostly from wealthy Democratic donors. Among the mayor’s allies, newly elected to the school board, was another rising L.A. star, Yolie Flores.

Petite in stature, soft-spoken in style, Flores seemed an unlikely dragon slayer. Yet she had already proven to be a Latina Saul Alinsky of sorts, organizing parents around the issues of scarce child care and unsafe schools. She arrived on the board impatient and eager to ramp up reform efforts. “The community has reached a level of exasperation, of ongoing failure (in the schools),” she told me. Little love was lost between Flores and the UTLA. During her campaign, she opposed a moratorium on opening new charter schools. In turn, the union refused to endorse her candidacy. Still, no one predicted that she would lead a palace revolt.

Flores’s idea to push charter expansion and parental choice took shape by early 2009. Sessions with advocates included well-connected operators like Ben Austin, first a deputy to Republican mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordon, then a political aide to film director Rob Reiner. Austin is a hard-driving politico from the affluent west side of L.A., and now the unlikely head of Parent Revolution, a mostly Latina advocacy group led by the Los Angeles Parents Union and bankrolled by Broad and charter proponents. He argued that newly built campuses would provide the affordable facilities that charter firms required to expand. Flores also found on her desk a UCLA study of dropout rates, revealing that fully two-thirds of students entering the high schools in her area, including Garfield High, never graduate. Flores felt like the only sane person in an asylum, “walking around not knowing whether to cry or scream. In the district office there was a very casual sense of the crisis,” she said.

By early summer, Villaraigosa felt that he could swing his school board to support Flores’s dramatic proposal. He also received an unexpected dose of capital to advance the plan from Hollywood mogul Casey Wasserman, who donated $4.5 million to the district’s own reform office. For Villaraigosa, charters were just one piece of the puzzle. Along with the new schools chief, Ray Cortines, the mayor sought to integrate Flores’s charter plan with his own “partnership schools” and Cortines’s commitment to “pilot schools” and thin labor contracts. Together, these experiments were to extend decentralized management and dollars to hundreds of L.A. schools (see sidebar).

One Democratic donor told me, not for attribution, “This is an all-out war that needs to be attacked from every angle. Charters are a piece of the puzzle, but not the only, nor the largest, piece.” With about 55,000 kids enrolled in L.A. charter schools, “you don’t solve the problem through 10 percent of the kids.”

Tensions were intensifying between Latino leaders and the UTLA by early in the summer of 2009. As Flores walked into the cramped auditorium at Annendale Elementary School for a meeting, she suddenly deciphered the shrill chanting of neatly dressed 2nd graders. “Shame on you, shame on you,” they cried out with quizzical faces, miffed by their own angry words. “I was shocked, I couldn’t believe it,” Flores recalled. She had voted for necessary budget cuts as the recession deepened, and her reform ideas had surfaced. Now union activists had wound up these children to deliver their barbed message. Villaraigosa parried back, calling Duffy and company “the most backward labor union in the nation. We’re not going to be held hostage by a small group of people,” a thinly veiled reference to UTLA leaders.

By mid-summer, Flores and Villaraigosa were ready to hatch their charter-and-choice initiative, at first urging the school board to hand off 50 recently opened campuses to charter firms and nonprofit reform groups. Then, a second board ally pushed the mayor to include a total of 251 low-performing schools within the proposal. If the mayor could deliver his new majority on the board—the vote was set for late August—more than one-third of L.A.’s schools would eventually compete in a marketplace unprecedented in scope. UTLA leaders, not surprisingly, went ballistic.

The Mayor Wins a Round

To bolster their stance, union leaders highlighted their recent support of certain innovations, including expanding Cortines’s experiment with decentralized pilot schools, operating under flexible labor contracts and granting principals greater authority. But the union reluctantly endorsed this model, “because teachers are demanding them,” said Brian Fritch, a Garfield High history teacher and union insurgent. Fritch’s generation of teachers has few historical roots with the labor movement, yet they speak of social justice and daily serve kids from working-class families. He has spoken out publicly against the UTLA’s habits of protecting lousy teachers and resisting greater power for reform-minded principals.

UTLA leaders, including the mayor’s old friend, Joshua Pechthalt, worry that new Democrats, like Flores, Villaraigosa, and even President Obama, are “looking to have one teacher competing against another, one school against another.” Market values and monetary incentives are displacing a cooperative spirit, Pechthalt argued. “Our satisfaction (as teachers) comes when you look around and say, ‘the students got it,’ and you have connected with the kids.”

But Villaraigosa is not one to mull over competing political theories. The week before the crucial board vote on the charters-and-choice proposal, he convened a press conference, surrounded by six civil-rights leaders who endorsed Flores’s radical plan. Tom Saenz, national head of the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund, talked of “parents whose kids are victims of poor schools. There’s a level of impatience because of repeated reforms that have not provided the dramatic change on the quick timeline that the community expects.” Or, as one East L.A. parent, Maria Leon, told me, “We need more options.” Each charter school “takes only 400 students, and there’s a very long waiting list.”

The new school year was just getting under way as the board convened to vote on Flores’s proposal. At sunup that morning last August, a line of buses snaked around the 28-floor tower that houses the city schools office. Out came 3,000 mostly Latino parents sporting bright yellow and powder blue T-shirts that read, “My Child, My Choice.” Villaraigosa arrived to stir the already animated crowd. “We are here to stand up for our children,” the mayor shouted, beneath a banner that proclaimed, “Parent Revolution.”

Inside, UTLA’s Duffy, appearing before the board, was berating Flores. “When all is said and done, you will have sold this district down the road for political gain and for a mayor whose own program has been a dismal failure,” he said. But once again, Duffy had overplayed his hand. The board voted 6–1 to approve the reform plan. Los Angeles would now host “the most important charter-school reform market in the country,” said Jed Wallace, head of California’s charter lobby.

The Twist

It didn’t turn out quite that way. For the school year beginning in the fall of 2010, 36 schools on 30 campuses were eligible for takeover, including 12 so-called focus schools with lifeless achievement trends, along with 24 newly opened schools. When the takeover plans were tallied in January, far more had arrived from local district managers and teachers than from charter operators (see Figure 1). The schools attracted more than 80 bids in total, about half coming from within the district, including area superintendents, teacher confederations only sometimes involving union activists, and the mayor’s own partnership school organization. Charter firms, including Aspire, Green Dot, Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, and smaller charter operators, put forward one-quarter of the takeover plans, but only one plan was aimed at turning around a chronically low-performing focus school. The Los Angeles Times editorial board blasted the charter firms, questioning their commitment to equity. Independent nonprofits submitted the remainder of the proposals.

Few predicted that renegade teachers and grassroots activists would out-bid the established charter firms. The L.A. school board’s decision to hand off potentially hundreds of schools had been powered largely by charter school advocates who had won over Flores and Villaraigosa. But now upstart teachers had joined in common cause with neighborhood activists, arguing that even popular charter firms were “outsiders.”

Cortines formed an independent panel to review the bids. By February, Villaraigosa’s majority on the school board began to unravel. The neutral panel recommended a balanced mix of charter firms, nonprofits, and district educators to take over the 36 schools. But after joining forces with charter comrades to pass the public school choice legislation, neighborhood activists and teachers now split off to fight the charter awards, alleging that charter firms were too imperial and noting fresh statistics that special education students were underrepresented in the charter sector. Over  the mayor’s and Flores’s vocal objections, the board awarded just four schools to charter organizations.

Devil’s in the Details

Despite the charter lobby’s reversal of fortune, L.A. Unified has become “a network of schools,” as Claremont Graduate University professor Charles Kerchner points out. Even before Villaraigosa pushed through public school choice, the district watched over 15 magnet schools with long waiting lists, and Cortines’s pilot campuses were showing promising results, at least in terms of decentralizing school management. The 161 charter schools operating within the district’s boundaries ranged from fragile mom-and-pop organizations to those run by franchise firms like the Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools and the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP). The Gates Foundation has begun funneling $60 million to these big charter players, hoping to boost teacher effectiveness through incentives and training efforts. L.A. may yet become the poster child for Secretary Duncan’s $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative.

New questions continue to surface from the twists and turns of the L.A. story. How rapidly and responsibly can L.A. Unified hand off as many as 251 schools to charter firms, nonprofits, and breakaway teachers? Will a robust count of charismatic innovators surface in Los Angeles to take over complicated urban schools? “No. 251 schools, no,” says charter advocate Wallace. “Most of our organizations are going to be up for taking on one or two schools every other year.” This capacity constraint allowed local nonprofits and teacher confederations to compete against charter firms.

The nerve-wracking work of handing off schools began on cue. Matt Hill is Cortines’s top aide for crafting the emerging confederation. A total of 219 letters of intent were initially submitted. “It’s more than I anticipated in the first year,” Hill said. “As far as a jolt to the system, it has been a great process.” Yet the major charter firms moved prudently, each bidding on just one or two schools, and favoring the spanking-new campuses rather than attempting to turn around chronically ailing schools.

Teacher groups went after and won most of the schools, with some opting for the pilot model, embracing the idea of autonomy with all the trappings, “except a thin labor contract,” Hill said. This model, in which principals are no longer hog-tied by elaborate bureaucratic or confining union rules, proved attractive to teachers eager to take over campuses, but who equate charters with privatization of school management. And the UTLA much prefers flexible labor contracts under the pilot model to charter agreements that freeze out the union.

Parents are confused over their options. “It was so rushed (in this first year) parents didn’t really understand what was going on,” Hill said. “Empowerment is a relationship,” as UCLA law professor Joel F. Handler remarked.

And the story is far from over. The UTLA filed suit in December to block the mayor’s entire charter-and-choice program, even as the union helped some teachers to develop school bids. Soon Villaraigosa will be back in court, once again battling his old friends.

The Roots of Reform

Back in 1989, Bill Clinton and his fellow governors first pushed labor to swallow more demanding learning standards and stiff accountability measures, betting this would renew voters’ confidence in the schools. The patient responded with strong vital signs for a time, as test scores climbed in the 1990s and achievement gaps narrowed. Now President Obama is upping the ante, spurring local activists to shake up, even break up, downtown school bureaucracies. “Charters…force the kind of experimentation and innovation that helps to drive excellence in every other aspect of life,” the president told the Washington Post. His Race to the Top fund sends dollars to states that have lifted caps on charters, offering aid and comfort to urban agitators like Villaraigosa. “The president is demanding innovation, and there are funds out there,” as L.A.’s Brenes put it.

Still, Washington’s feeding of new charters may fail to lift students until quality climbs. Warm results arrived this past winter in New York City from Stanford University economist Caroline Hoxby, who detailed how students winning slots via lotteries in over-subscribed charters out-performed applicants who remained in regular public schools. Secretary Duncan, up to speed on the national evidence, told me, “I am not for charters. I’m a fan of good charters. Second- and third-rate charters should be closed down.” But will Washington nudge states to prune lifeless charter schools after pushing for a major expansion?

Still, the political realignment seen in L.A. narrows the choices available to union leaders: either navigate these treacherous waters more mindfully, or get swept away downstream. “My style is never about being in your face,” Duncan said. “[But] do the unions have to move? Absolutely. We all have to get outside our comfort zones.”

One unforeseen lesson for Duncan from L.A. is that high-quality charter firms can expand only so quickly. And once the neighborhood-control genie is out of the lamp, managing democratic impulses is difficult, no matter how disciplined the charter lobby. After pushing the school board to cut out several charter bids and go for pilot schools instead, Brenes explained, “Some of our best teachers rolled-up their sleeves and developed quality plans.” As for the charter schools? “A lot of folks out there were just not grounded in the community, [they] underestimated our organizing capacity in East L.A.”

When the school board finally turned 36 schools over to new management, only four were awarded to charter school operators. Most of the remaining schools were allocated to the newly formed teacher groups who had greatly strengthened their political position by siding with UTLA against the charters. “We knew from the beginning there was a lot of push back from the unions,” said Yolie Flores, one of the two board members who opposed the decision. But Steve Zimmer, one of the members who voted with the majority, said the board had found an appropriate compromise. “There was a lot of pressure from UTLA not to vote for a single charter,” he explained.

Of course, the mayor was furious over losing his earlier majority on the board. “We have accountability in our schools, and high-quality charter schools hold themselves to these standards,” Villaraigosa said in a statement. “Choosing more of the same reinforces the status quo.”

The lesson for Villaraigosa, and fellow mayors committed to charter schools that have shown results, is to remain steadily engaged and forceful politically. When Villaraigosa lost focus, then assumed his board majority would hold tight, reputable charter organizations lost out.

All sides will be back next year for another round of takeover bids. And union leaders may warm up to decentralizing management, even with more flexible labor contracts, especially if they can win control of pilot and autonomous schools by uniting with Latino neighborhood activists.

The UTLA’s sudden enthusiasm for innovative school management is breathtaking, and largely the work of a young generation of impatient members. Fritch, after helping to win a pilot school with Brenes, put it simply, “We need to become a more progressive union, or we’re going to be a done union.”

Bruce Fuller is professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. His recent book is Standardized Childhood (Stanford University Press).

Claire Anderson provided invaluable research assistance.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“CRTC scandal stuns the state”

“Cheating details revealed”

“Atlanta board calls for cheating probe”

“CRTC” stands for “criterion-referenced competency tests,” and they are administered to students in grades 3-8 to gauge learning.  The problem is signaled in the first few paragraphs of one of the stories:

“One a late June day two years ago, two DeKalb County school administrators panicked.  A few dozen of their elementary school students had just finished high-stakes summer retests–exams first taken in spring but not passed.  With just a glance at the answer sheets, Atherton Elementary Principal James Berry and Assistant Principal Doretha Alexander saw they were in trouble.

“We cannot not make AYP,’ Alexander said. Not making AYP, or adequate yearly progress, meant not meeting a required federal benchmark.  These students, all fifth-graders, also faced being held back if they did not pass.

“‘Okay,’ Barry answered.  He pulled a pencil from a cup on Alexander’s desk.  ’I want you to call the answers to me.’  With that, he began to erase the students’ answers.”

That’s one scene, and it occurred a while ago.  But official investigations have enlarged the problem, and the general picture is this: fully 191 schools in the state of Georgia, 10 percent of the total number of elementary and middle schools, are up for investigation for altering test answer sheets, the story reported.

The next day’s story put the count at one in five Georgia public schools.  More than half of those schools had at least one classroom that displayed abnormal numbers of wrong answers changed to right answers.  In one elementary school classroom, 4th-grade math tests showed an average of 27 answers changed from wrong to right (out of 70 total answers).  In one middle school in Atlanta, nearly 90 percent of classrooms came up suspicious.

The extent of the scandal remains to be seen, and its impact is long-term.  What happens to kids whose tests were flagged, but who might have done much of the answer-changing themselves in the course of taking them?  What about the fate of the governor’s proposal to tie teacher pay to student performance (in other words, is this too strong an incentive to cheating)?  Who is going to investigate all the individual cases and measure out relative culpability and punishments?

This is going to take awhile.

Charter schools have become a popular alternative to traditional public schools, with some 5,000 schools now serving more than 1.5 million students, and they have received considerable attention among researchers as a result.

Most studies focus on the effects of charter attendance on short-term student achievement (test scores), using either data sets that follow students over time (see “Results from the Tar Heel State,” research, Fall 2005) or random assignment via school admission lotteries (see “New York City Charter Schools,” research, Summer 2008) to control for differences between students in charter and traditional public schools. Beyond measuring achievement effects, however, there has been only limited analysis of the impacts of charters on the students who attend them. Even less research has been conducted on the effects of charter high schools specifically, though a large portion of all charter schools in the U.S. serve some or all of the high school grades.

Developing a high school model suited to the 21st-century student has been the Holy Grail of education reform in recent years, absorbing governors, task forces, and vast sums spent on small schools, university-based schools, and concept schools (see “High School 2.0,” features). With roughly 30 percent of American students dropping out before receiving a diploma—a rate that has been stable for several decades—assessing existing alternatives to the traditional high school is an urgent task.

In this study we use data from Chicago and Florida to estimate the effects of attending a charter high school on the likelihood that a student will complete high school and attend college. Given the impact of educational attainment on a variety of economic and social outcomes, a positive result could have significant implications for the value of school-choice programs that include charter high schools. We find evidence that charter high schools in both locations have substantial positive effects on both high school completion and college attendance. Controlling for key student characteristics (including demographics, prior test scores, and the prior choice to enroll in a charter middle school), students who attend a charter high school are 7 to 15 percentage points more likely to earn a standard diploma than students who attend a traditional public high school. Similarly, those attending a charter high school are 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college (see Figure 1). Results using an alternative method designed to address concerns about unmeasured differences between students attending charter and traditional public high schools suggest even larger positive effects. Our main results are comparable to those of some studies which find that attending a Catholic high school boosts the likelihood of high school graduation and college attendance by 10 to 18 percentage points.

Methods

Determining the influence of charter school attendance on educational attainment is difficult because students who choose to attend charter high schools may be different from students who choose to attend traditional public high schools in ways that are not readily observable. The fact that the charter students and their parents actively sought out an alternative to traditional public schools suggests the students may be more motivated or their parents more involved in their child’s education than is the case for students attending traditional public schools. Since these traits are not easily measured, the estimated impact of charter high schools on educational attainment could be biased.

Our main analysis uses two methods to address students’ self selection into charter schools. First, we control for any observable differences between charter and non-charter high school students prior to high school entry. These include factors such as race/ethnicity, gender, disability status, and family income. The most important characteristic included among our statistical controls is 8th-grade test score, which aims to capture differences in student ability and students’ educational experiences prior to high school.

Second, we limit our analysis to students who attended a charter school in 8th grade, just prior to beginning high school. That is, we compare high school and postsecondary outcomes for 8th-grade charter students who entered charter high schools (the treatment group) with outcomes for 8th-grade charter students who entered conventional public high schools (the comparison group). If there are unmeasured student or family characteristics that lead to the selection of charter schools in general, these unmeasured characteristics should be relatively constant among students and families who choose charter middle schools. Unlike other nonexperimental studies of charter school impacts, our study therefore addresses student self-selection into charter schools directly by ensuring that the comparison students as well as the treatment students were once charter choosers.

Charter school 8th graders who went on to attend a charter high school differed from their peers who subsequently attended a traditional public high school in several respects, particularly in Florida, which suggests the importance of taking such differences into account when assessing the effects of charter attendance (see Figure 2). However, there may still be unmeasured differences that explain why one charter 8th grader attends a charter high school while another charter 8th grader attends a traditional public high school. For this reason, we estimate charter school effects by comparing students who are more likely to attend a charter school because they live closer to one to those less likely to attend a charter school because it is less convenient. For many charter middle-school students, attending a charter high school may be infeasible due to the lack of a charter high school within a reasonable distance. Such students make different choices not because of unmeasured characteristics, but because of a factor out of their control: the distance from home to the nearest charter school.

Data

The data required to analyze the impact of charter high schools on educational attainment are substantial. One must have data on school type (charter or public) and test scores of individual students prior to high school, individual-level high school attendance records and exit information, and college attendance after high school. Finally, the jurisdiction studied must have a sufficient enrollment of students in charter high schools to provide reliable results. The areas we analyze, the state of Florida and the city of Chicago, are two of just a handful of places where all of the necessary data elements are currently in place.

The Florida data, which cover the four cohorts of 8th-grade students from the school years 1997–98 to 2000–01, come from a variety of sources. The primary source for student-level information is the Florida Department of Education’s K-20 Education Data Warehouse (K-20 EDW), an integrated longitudinal database covering all public school students in the state of Florida. The K-20 EDW includes detailed enrollment, demographic, and program participation information for each student, as well as reading and math achievement test scores.

As the name implies, the K-20 EDW includes student records for both K–12 public school students and students enrolled in community colleges or four-year public universities in Florida. The K-20 EDW also contains information that allows us to follow students who attend private institutions of higher education within Florida. Data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a national database that includes enrollment data on 3,300 colleges from throughout the United States, is used to track college attendance outside the state of Florida. Any individual who does not show up as enrolled in a two- or four-year college or university is classified as a non-attendee.

High school graduation is measured using withdrawal information and student award data from the K-20 EDW. Only students who receive a standard high school diploma are considered to be high school graduates. Students earning a GED or special education diploma are counted as not graduating. Similarly, students who withdrew with no intention of returning or left for other reasons, such as nonattendance, court action, joining the military, marriage, pregnancy, and medical problems, but did not later graduate, are counted as not graduating.

The Chicago data, which cover the five cohorts of students who were in 8th grade during the school years 1997–98 to 2001–02, were obtained from the Chicago Public Schools. The data include 8th-grade math and reading test scores and information on student gender, race/ethnicity, bilingual status, free or reduced-price lunch status, and special education status. This data set is also linked to the National Student Clearinghouse. High school graduation is determined by withdrawal information from the Chicago Public Schools data. As in Florida, only students who receive a standard high school diploma are considered to be high school graduates.

Results

The raw data on our study population of students who were in charter schools in 8th grade reveal substantial differences in educational attainment between attendees of charter high schools and those of traditional public high schools. In Florida, 57 percent of students who went from a charter school in 8th grade to a traditional public school in 9th grade received a standard high school diploma within four years, compared to 77 percent of charter 8th graders who attended a charter high school. In Chicago, the corresponding high school graduation rates were 68 and 75 percent. Similar differences are found for college attendance. In Florida, among the study population of charter 8th graders, 57 percent of students attending a charter school in 9th grade went to either a two- or four-year college within five years of starting high school, whereas among students who started high school in a traditional public school the college attendance rate was only 40 percent. In Chicago, the gap in college attendance is smaller but still sizable: among the study population of charter 8th graders, 49 percent of students at charter high schools attended college, compared to 38 percent of students at traditional public high schools.

Controlling for student demographics, 8th-grade test scores, English language skills, special education program participation, free or reduced-price lunch status (a measure of family income), and mobility during middle school does not alter the basic patterns of graduation and college attendance seen in the descriptive comparisons. The estimated impact of attending a charter high school on the probability of obtaining a high school diploma is positive in both Florida and Chicago. In Chicago, students who attended a charter high school were 7 percentage points more likely to earn a regular high school diploma than their counterparts with similar characteristics who attended a traditional public high school. The graduation differential for Florida charter schools was even larger, at 15 percentage points. The findings for college attendance are remarkably similar in Florida and Chicago. Among the study population of charter 8th graders, students who attended a charter high school in 9th grade are 8 to 10 percentage points more likely to attend college than similar students who attended a traditional public high school (see Figure 1).

As discussed above, there remains the possibility that unobserved changes occur between 8th and 9th grade that influence both high school choice and subsequent educational attainment. For example, dissatisfaction with performance in a charter middle school that is not captured by test scores (such as discipline issues or a poor fit between the student’s interests or ability and the curriculum being offered) could lead parents to choose to send their child to a traditional public high school. When we correct for this potential bias by examining students who attended charter or traditional public school based on proximity, we continue to find highly significant positive effects of attending a charter high school on both receipt of a high school diploma and college enrollment. The magnitude of the effects is large, roughly double the size of our main results.

This pattern suggests that, among students enrolled in charter schools as 8th graders, it is those who are less likely to graduate who are choosing to attend charter high schools. We can only speculate as to why this is so. It is possible that parents whose children are at risk of dropping out are more likely to choose charter high schools in a belief that the traditional public school environment would make it more likely that their child leaves school early. Alternatively, although we control for free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, it may be the case that low-income families have a stronger preference for charter schools. If so, families with children in charter high schools would be less likely to be able to afford to send their children to college.

Possible Mechanisms

The analyses reported above cannot explain how or why charter high schools appear to produce positive effects on their students’ educational attainment. Our study lacks data on operations and instruction in the charter schools, so we have little opportunity to explore the mechanisms contributing to their success. Nonetheless, we have a few pieces of information that permit exploratory analyses of factors that might play a role.

First, it is worth considering that charter high schools may raise rates of high school graduation and college enrollment directly, or indirectly through improved academic achievement. We attempt to distinguish between these explanations by controlling in the analysis for math and reading achievement as measured in the 10th grade. Controlling for 10th-grade test scores explains about half the graduation differential for charter high schools in Florida but less than 20 percent of the difference in Chicago. And it has an even smaller effect on the results for college enrollment, reducing the estimated effect of charter school attendance by only about 10 percent in both locations. These patterns suggest that the positive effects of charter school attendance on educational attainment are not due solely to measured differences in the achievement of students in charter and traditional public high schools. This result is similar to those found in some studies of Catholic high schools, which suggest larger benefits for attainment than for test scores.

Second, given that charter high schools tend to be much smaller than traditional public high schools, charter school effects might simply be attributable to their smaller size. In order to assess this possibility, we ran the analyses for high school graduation and college attendance again with an additional control for the total number of students attending the school. The results are comparable to those reported above, indicating that the estimated effects of charter high schools are not due to differences in school size.

Third, we consider the possibility that the charters’ success might be related to grade configurations that often differ from those of traditional public schools. In the traditional public school sector in both Chicago and Florida, high schools are almost always separate from middle schools. This is not the case for charter schools. In 2001–02, about 22 percent of charter schools in Florida offering middle-school grades also offered some or all high-school grades. As a result, about 30 percent of Florida charter 8th-grade students attended schools that also offered at least some high-school grades. In Chicago, 40 percent of charter middle schools offered both middle- and high-school grades, and nearly half of the 8th-grade charter students could attend at least some high-school grades without changing schools. This raises the possibility that the measured effects of attending a charter high school on educational attainment could simply reflect advantages of grouping middle and high school grades together, thereby creating greater continuity for students and eliminating the disruption often associated with changing schools.

In order to examine whether charter-school effects might be attributable to eliminating the transition between middle and high school, we restricted the Florida analysis to those students whose 8th-grade charter school did not offer 9th grade and ran our analyses again. For high school graduation, restricting the sample produces estimates that are nearly identical to the original estimates from our main method. Using the restricted sample and our alternative method, the estimates are about 30 percent smaller than when the full sample is employed, but still large. Meanwhile, estimates of the effect of attending a charter high school on college enrollment are even larger using the restricted sample than with the original sample that includes schools offering both 8th and 9th grade. In Florida, grade configuration is not a primary driver of the estimated positive effects of charter high schools on attainment. In Chicago, however, we could not run similar analyses because grade configuration is too strongly correlated with charter status; we therefore cannot rule out the possibility that positive results in Chicago could be partly attributable to eliminating the transition from middle school to high school.

Finally, we examined an interpretive concern arising from the fact that some charter schools in Florida are former traditional public schools that converted to charter status. If conversion schools were better-than-average traditional public schools to begin with, they may be distorting the estimated impact of charters on educational attainment. We calculated separate effects for Florida conversion and non-conversion (“de novo”) charters in Florida. (In Chicago, virtually all of the charter high schools in our sample were de novo charters). We found that although Florida’s conversion charters have significantly greater effects on high school graduation than do de novo charters, the impact of non-conversion charters is still sizable (nearly equal to the estimate in Chicago). For college attendance, the estimated positive impacts of Florida’s de novo charters are statistically indistinguishable from the estimated positive impacts of Florida’s conversion charters.

Conclusions

Although a number of recent studies analyze the relationship between charter school attendance and student achievement, this is the first analysis of the impacts of charter school attendance on educational attainment. We find that charter schools are associated with an increased likelihood of successful high-school completion and an increased likelihood of enrollment at a two- or four-year college in two disparate jurisdictions, Florida and Chicago. The reasons for these large charter-school effects are not clear. There is certainly room for future work to explore how differences in curricula, expectations, peer characteristics, and other factors may cause charter schools to diminish the high-school dropout rate and ease the transition to postsecondary schooling.

Our findings are consistent with some research on the efficacy of Catholic schools, which finds substantial positive effects of attending a Catholic high school on educational attainment. While just a first step, the results presented here and in the Catholic-school literature suggest that school-choice programs that include alternatives to traditional public high schools may reduce high-school dropout rates and promote college attendance.

Kevin Booker is researcher at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Tim R. Sass is professor of economics at Florida State University. Brian Gill is senior social scientist at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Ron Zimmer is associate professor at Michigan State University. This article is adapted from research reported in Charter Schools in Eight States (RAND Corporation, 2009).

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.

Podcast: Paul Peterson talks with Mike Petrilli

In Saving Schools: From Horace Mann to Virtual Learning, scheduled for release by Harvard University Press this spring, Paul E. Peterson tells how five individuals—Horace Mann, John Dewey, Martin Luther King Jr., Al Shanker, and William Bennett—shaped American education in ways they never expected. Peterson chronicles how education became ever more centralized and bureaucratized, creating the monolithic system in place in the early 21st century. The story nonetheless ends on a hopeful note, as Peterson characterizes Julie Young’s innovative work at Florida Virtual School as a harbinger of an educational future in which learning finally becomes customized to each student’s circumstances.

In Peterson’s account, sociologist James Coleman plays a pivotal role. In the following excerpts from the book, Peterson recalls the bitterness of the controversy provoked by Coleman’s writings and reveals, for the first time, how Coleman’s insights were rooted in his own high-school experiences.

Excellence was seldom to be found in 2006, when David Ferrero, an officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reviewed five firsthand, book-length accounts of teaching and learning at individual high schools. In one account, a rookie teacher, telling her own story, “struggles to establish authority in her classes and generally fails;…her students ritually defy her, going so far as to openly declare their intention to get her fired for the sheer sport of it.” At another school, “numerous attempts” by well-meaning, hardworking teachers fail “to coax students out of their shells, engage them in important issues, and motivate them to perform on tests.” On and on such tales go. A powerful but hostile peer group seemed in charge of the learning process.

According to Cornell economist John Bishop, the problem begins in middle school, where “nerds” are harassed. “Studiousness is denigrated…in part because it shifts up the grading curve and forces others to work harder to get good grades…. Victims of nerd harassment hardly ever tell their parents, their siblings, or their friends. Most accept the proposition that…acting like a dork is bad…. Complaining to a teacher is self-defeating. Squealing on classmates only exacerbates [the situation].”

The problem did not appear suddenly at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Fifty years earlier James Coleman, reflecting on his own adolescence, had detected something quite similar and then provided a sociological explanation for the phenomenon.

James S. Coleman

Born in 1926, Coleman began his graduate studies in sociology at Columbia University in 1951, one year before [John] Dewey died at the age of ninety-two. The two intellectuals had much in common. Both came from ordinary, small-town families, but they both had entrepreneurial spirit, tremendous energy, and personal fortitude that belied their surface modesty. Neither was a brilliant lecturer, but both were kind, gentle, supportive mentors, surrounded by devoted graduate students. Like most Americans, both were pragmatists—concerned less about systematic theory than about learning what worked in practice. Neither saw his work on education as the centerpiece of his life’s work. Dewey was a philosopher, Coleman a social theorist and mathematical model-builder. Yet neither man would have made as lasting a contribution were it not for his work on schools.

Despite the similarities, Dewey and Coleman walked in contrasting intellectual worlds. If Dewey’s thinking was shaped by Rousseau, Hegel, and the Romantic tradition more generally, Coleman’s owed more to two Scottish empiricists: David Hume and Adam Smith. The “Emile” of significance to Coleman was not Rousseau’s mythical child but Emile Durkheim, a sociologist whose point of departure was not the state of nature but a well-defined community context. Coleman’s work was more disciplined than was Dewey’s. Trained in survey research and modern analytic techniques—random sampling, systematic data collection, rigorous comparisons—taking hold at Columbia, Coleman was able to test his ideas in ways unavailable to Dewey. Most important, Dewey and Coleman had separate agendas: Dewey’s ideas shaped the public schools of the twentieth century; Coleman deconstructed what Dewey had built.

Unlike Dewey, Coleman never became a household name, yet his impact on American education has been immense. At his memorial service in 1995, New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed that the man they were remembering was among “a very small number of people who end up defining a major part of the intellectual agenda for their times. Their work is both so powerful and so well argued…that others are inspired to focus on these same issues.” Coleman’s impact was not without its ironies, however. His research served the civil rights movement King had begun but also the reaction that was to follow. His studies first accelerated and then helped put the brakes on school desegregation. A part of his work has been taken to mean that schools are insignificant, while another part suggests they are decisive. Coleman himself saw no contradictions.

We know few details about Coleman’s early educational experiences, in part because Coleman himself wanted us to believe that at age twenty-five he had sprung directly from the head of—well, not Zeus, but Robert Merton and Paul Lazarsfeld, two men in Columbia’s sociology department whom many students thought had godlike qualities. Reflecting back on what seems to have been something like a conversion experience, Coleman said: “I left a job as a chemist…and took on a new life…. The transformation was nearly complete. Except for my wife (and other kin who lived far away in the Midwest and South), I shed all prior associations…. [After] the resocialization I underwent at Columbia from 1951 to 1955… I was a different person.” It was Merton’s social-theory course that did the trick, “a conversion experience for those of us eager for conversion.”

The grandson of an evangelical preacher, Coleman certainly knew the religious meaning of the concept he was invoking. But his first twenty-five years left more of a mark on him than he was willing to acknowledge. Born in Bedford, Indiana, he began high school in Greenhills, Ohio, a place he wrote about almost wistfully: “School life had, for a few of us, a more academic focus, in retrospect surprisingly so.” Shortly thereafter his father took a job as a factory foreman in Louisville, Kentucky, a city that had two public high schools for boys: “Male (with a college preparatory curriculum) and Manual (with vocational and pre-engineering curricula).”

Coleman adjusted to his new school [Manual High] by becoming a member of the school’s football team. The “boys who counted in the school,” he writes, “were the first-string varsity football players,” because “Male and Manual were locked in a fierce football rivalry that culminated every Thanksgiving Day but flavored the whole school year.” He was quickly drawn in. “[The] environment had shaped [his] own investment of time and effort, intensely focused on football, although arguably [his] comparative advantage lay elsewhere.” Otherwise, high school “failed” him. Apart from an eleventh-grade algebra class, he could not find anything “to excite my interest and capture my full attention.” One day, while hitchhiking to football practice, he thought longingly: “If only they would not destroy in us the interest with which we came to school, I would ask for nothing more.” Only when Coleman arrived at Columbia did he find faculty members with a “personal (that is, selfish) interest in some of their students. They seemed to be interested in those students in a way I had never felt since the ninth grade,” perhaps because “graduate students help bring professors closer to immortality.”

He nonetheless attended a small college before joining the Navy in the middle of World War II. After his discharge, he used his benefits under the voucher-like GI Bill to earn a B.S. degree in chemical engineering from Purdue University. Though he was then hired by Eastman Kodak in Rochester, New York, Coleman was still a frustrated product of Manual High, a technician who wanted a more intellectual challenge. Despite his limited resources, he made a dramatic career decision to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology. Rejected by Harvard and Michigan, he won admission to the overcrowded program at Columbia.

He could not have been more fortunate. In 1951, Paul F. Lazarsfeld was using newly developed quantitative techniques to look at practical topics: mass media, advertising and political campaigns. At the same time, Robert K. Merton was systematizing his sense of the ironic—unexpected things happen for reasons no one anticipates—to which he gave the rather pompous label “latent-function theory.” Coleman drank from both professorial wellsprings, but it was Merton who “provided the inspiration for it all.” In his italicized words: “I worked with Lipset, worked for Lazarsfeld, and worked to be like Merton.” Like Merton, Coleman viewed the world with an outsider’s irony: things are not as they seem, and consequences differ from what is expected. At a personal level, Merton endeared himself to Coleman the day he asked the young man about his dissertation plans. Told that none had been devised, Merton suggested that Coleman simply use the chapters he had drafted for a study of trade unions he was writing in collaboration with Seymour Martin Lipset, the department’s up-and-coming assistant professor. Acting on this advice, Coleman had his thesis completed just three years after matriculation. Shortly thereafter, he submitted a research proposal to the U.S. Office of Education’s new Cooperative Research Program.

Until this point, nothing in Coleman’s early career indicated he would become the premier education sociologist of the twentieth century. No one at Columbia specialized in educational sociology, a field Coleman disparaged as languishing in the cellar of the discipline. But as he was ruminating over possible topics for a federal grant proposal, Manual High came up one night at a dinner party the Colemans were hosting for Martin Trow (coauthor, with Coleman and Lipset, of the trade union study) and his wife. The Trows had attended elite schools where sports were subservient to academics, not only in the schools’ official focus but also in the students’ interests and social relationships. How different from Manual High!

Turning the conversation into a research proposal, Coleman laid out a plan to study several schools in Illinois, near the University of Chicago, where Coleman had been hired as an assistant professor. The book that emerged, The Adolescent Society [1961], which is as much a theoretical commentary on Manual High as an analysis of ten schools in Illinois, remains Coleman’s masterpiece. According to Coleman, the focus at these schools was on sports stars, cheerleaders, and other members of the leading crowd, known more for smart dressing than for smarts per se. Those who studied hard and got good grades were edged to the social sidelines. For those who excelled scholastically, success must appear to have been “gained without special efforts, without doing anything beyond the required work.” Otherwise, one is socially isolated by “the crowd.” Ostensibly, schools are educational institutions, but their latent function is social and quite inimical to educational purposes. It is the way in which U.S. schools are organized that is the problem, Coleman says. They resemble jails, the military, and factories: all of these institutions are run by an “administrative corps” that makes demands upon a larger group (students, prisoners, soldiers, workers). In response, the larger group develops a set of norms that govern the choices individuals make. “The same process which occurs among prisoners in a jail and among workers in a factory is found among students in a school. The institution is different, but the demands are there, and the students develop a collective response to these demands. This response takes a similar form to that of workers in industry—holding down effort to a level which can be maintained by all. The students’ name for the rate-buster is the ‘curveraiser,’…and their methods of enforcing the work-restricting norms are similar to those of workers—ridicule, kidding, exclusion from the group.” With his typical irony, Coleman dedicated the book “To my own high school, du Pont Manual Training High School, Louisville, Kentucky.”

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The occasion for his contribution was provided by a little-noticed clause buried in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which called for a “survey concerning the lack…of equal opportunities…by reason of race, color, religion or national origin in public education.” Though not a prominent public figure, James S. Coleman was the logical choice for directing the survey. He had been trained in survey research, was an acknowledged expert on high schools, and was sympathetic to the civil rights movement—he and his son had been arrested at a demonstration in Baltimore. Coleman…agreed to take on the assignment only after “some hesitation” and “extensive discussion” that transformed what at first seemed to be nothing more than a collection of racial-segregation statistics into the first nationwide study of the factors that affect student achievement. Students at 4,000 randomly selected schools across the country were tested in various subjects. The study also collected information on characteristics of the schools the students attended: racial composition, per-pupil expenditures, the college degrees teachers had earned, teacher ability (as measured by performance on a test), the number of books in the school library, and much more. Family background information was collected as well.

The study was to go forward with more-than-deliberate speed, as results were expected to reveal a need for federal action to equalize educational opportunity, the keystone of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.” Imagine, then, the shock inside the White House when a draft of the report began circulating inside the administration. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of Johnson’s top domestic advisers, gave a sense of the reaction when he recalled being greeted in the spring of 1966 by Harvard professor Martin Lipset with the query: “You know what Coleman is finding, don’t you?” “I said, ‘What?’ He said: ‘All family.’ I said, ‘Oh, Lord.’” The next day Moynihan informed the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) to get ready, as the research project was about to produce findings the administration “was not going to like.” The project report [Equality of Educational Opportunity, 1966], later known as “Coleman I” after two additional reports appeared, was released on Independence Day weekend, 1966. That was thought to be a good time to announce negative news, since much of the press was on holiday. The strategy worked: few but academics paid attention, and only gradually did its message sink in.

To everyone’s surprise, Coleman I found that within regions and types of communities (urban, suburban, and rural), expenditures per pupil were about the same in black and white schools. Even more remarkable, students did not learn more just because more was spent on their education. Nor did any other material resource of a school have much of an effect on how well Johnny and Suzy read—not the number of students in the class, nor the teacher’s credentials, nor the newness of the textbooks, nor the number of books in the library, nor anything physical or material that schools had for years considered important. What did count were a host of family-background characteristics: mother’s education, father’s education, family income, having fewer siblings, the number of books in the home, and other factors—all of which together explained more of the variation among students in their reading achievement than any school-related factor.

One finding in Coleman I saved the day for the Johnson administration. The authors found that student achievement was affected by the social composition of the pupils at a school. If a low-income African American child had fellow students who were white or from a higher socioeconomic status, the child did better at reading. The converse was not true, however: a white child did not suffer educationally from having black classmates. In other words, the influence of peers was asymmetrical. Desegregation helped blacks without hurting whites. Many years later, the Nobel Prize–winning econometrician James Heckman and his colleague Derek Neal called that asymmetrical result Coleman’s “least robust” finding. But Coleman never doubted it. Testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity, he said black students at segregated schools were “deprived of the most effective educational resources contained in the schools: those brought by other children as a result of their home environment.” Whatever regrets the Johnson administration might have had about some parts of Coleman I, it was pleased by the ammunition the report provided for the ongoing desegregation campaign.

So it was truly ironic that Coleman, the very academic whose work provided the clearest educational justification for school desegregation, would in his next major study [Trends in School Segregation, 1968–73, 1975], the “white flight” study (known as Coleman II), produce findings that called into question many of the policies being used to desegregate the schools. Using data collected by the newly established Civil Rights Commission, Coleman II tracked trends in black and white school enrollments in cities across the United States. He and his colleagues found that white families were moving outward more rapidly from those central cities where racial desegregation plans were being implemented.

Coleman expressed concern that, as a practical matter, busing of students within districts was self-defeating. Within school districts, to be sure, the segregation index fell from 0.63 to 0.37 in the years 1968–1972. But that only intensified segregation between districts. Said Coleman, “The emerging problem with regard to school desegregation is the problem of segregation between central city and suburbs.” Schools were at risk of being as segregated as they had ever been, exactly as Justice [Thurgood] Marshall had predicted.

Not since Cleopatra heard about Antony’s dalliances has a messenger come so close to being poisoned. Scholars turned on Coleman with an unexpected vengeance that introduced a more virulent tone into the world of education policy research. Well-known Harvard psychology professor Thomas F. Pettigrew claimed that Coleman II “should not be taken seriously.” The NAACP general counsel called the Chicago sociologist “without a doubt, a first-class fraud…. He is not entitled to any credence or any reliability or any belief with respect to the things he says he has found.” A Washington Post columnist questioned whether Coleman was mixing research with advocacy, quoting then deputy director of the National Science Foundation (and future president of the University of California) Richard Atkinson as saying, “A lot of what goes under the name of social science is just junk…. Too often [when] speaking on issues of education [scholars use] research evidence as a disguise for advocating a particular policy.” Atkinson was careful not to mention Coleman by name, but such innuendo by distinguished leaders fed the anti-Coleman fire. It flamed into an effort, led by the sociologist Alfred McClung Lee, then the president of the American Sociological Association (ASA), to censure or expel Coleman from the organization’s membership for having spread “flammable propaganda.” Though that blaze was contained, “few sociologists ever had to endure the high profile public controversy which swirled around him.” Years later, Coleman recalled the ASA plenary session held to debate the report: “The passions generated at that session are hard to reconstruct now, but I still have the posters that were plastered at the entrance to the ballroom and behind the podium, covered with Nazi swastikas, epithets, and my name.”

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In 1981, Coleman wrote his third major report, identified here as Coleman III. Two years previously, Coleman and his colleagues at the University of Chicago had been asked by the National Center for Educational Statistics to extend the work begun in Coleman I. The study was to be more than a single-shot survey along the lines of Coleman’s earlier work. Instead, several rounds of data were to be collected. A nationally representative sample of high schoolers was to be tested as sophomores and then again as seniors, after which they would be followed into college and the labor force. In this way, Coleman expected to find out how much students learned between their sophomore and senior years, as well as the impact of schooling on college attendance and labor force participation. Coleman also convinced the U.S. Department of Education, which was funding the study, to look at private schools as well as public ones. He now got his chance to see if private and public schools across the country were as different from one another as Manual High differed from those elite schools his friends at Columbia had attended.

The survey of some 70,000 students at more than 1,000 high schools was conducted in the spring of 1980. Working at his usual extraordinary pace, Coleman reported his team’s findings back to the government that same September, even as a presidential election campaign was in full swing. After the election was over and the Reagan administration had assumed office, the results from the first round of data collection were released. Coleman reported that sophomores in Catholic schools performed at higher levels than those in public schools, apparently showing in practice what [Milton] Friedman had argued in theory. In education circles, it was about as dramatic as the first proof of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Coleman explained his findings by claiming that students at Catholic schools benefited from the “social capital” surrounding the religious school: parents knew and supported one another as they attended Mass and participated together in other religious activities. As another group of sociologists put it, “Catholic schools benefit from a network of social relations, characterized by trust, that constitute a form of ‘social capital.’… Trust accrues because school participants, both students and faculty, choose to be there.”

The attacks on Coleman III were no more polite and detached than the attacks on Coleman II. The day it was released, “people entering the auditorium were handed leaflets attacking the study.” The executive director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals insisted that the study used “incomplete data inappropriately applied.” The New York Times chided Coleman for publicizing his results, saying that “sociologists invite trouble” when they seek “the stardom of advocacy based on their fallible predictions.” Its news reports quoted Coleman out of context in order to give the impression that he himself thought “the study was deeply flawed and that [he] was retreating from his conclusions,” though Coleman had said nothing of the sort. A number of professors and education experts denounced the report. One called it a “premature” report of “an ax-grinding nature.” Fumed one Harvard faculty member, “While the findings are wrapped in a mantle of social science research, the report is inconsistent with the notion of disciplined inquiry,” curiously objecting to the fact that “the findings are presented quite plainly.” Another set of critics opened their essay with: “The methods and interpretations used by [Coleman and his colleagues] fall below the minimum standards for social-scientific research.”

A good deal of the rhetoric can safely be ignored, but two criticisms were valid. (1) Students at fee-charging private schools cannot easily be compared to those attending free public schools, because they come from families who are willing to pay for their children’s education. Although Coleman III adjusted for parental education and many other family background characteristics, that adjustment did not necessarily take into account the greater educational commitment of parents who were willing to pay for their children’s education. (2) The study showed that sophomores in private school performed at a higher level, but it did not prove that they had learned more there. It was possible that the children who were being sent to private school were, to begin with, more capable students.

Coleman and his colleagues replied to these criticisms two years later when the second round of “High School and Beyond” data became available. This time, they were able to show that students in private schools had learned more between their sophomore and senior years than their counterparts in public school had. The findings calmed the skepticism of the more reasonable of their critics.

Coleman and his colleagues made some errors. They might have decided to withhold their results until they’d gathered information on student gains in achievement in high school, not just the initial sophomore scores. And they made various methodological errors, as frequently happens when one is undertaking an innovative project. But the biggest tactical errors were made by Coleman’s opponents. By relentlessly attacking Coleman III, they helped to place school choice on the national political agenda. What had been an academic debating point during the 1970s became, in the 1980s, a part of the national conversation.

The preview of the event says that the report “argues that parents should be afforded the maximum degree of choice.”  So far, so good.  More intriguing, however, is news that the report will discuss “how to expand school choice to increase equity and create a market within the public sector for school quality.”  The emphasis is mine, highlighting three phrases that will tell much about how meaningful this report will be.  

“Increase equity.” What education reform proposal worth its rhetorical salt does not envision more “equity”?  How the authors define that term will tell all.  As I see it, in the school choice arena equity is about eliminating disparities in the access that parents have to educational options.  As we all know, “equity” is often merely a cover for proposals that serve entrenched educational interests.

A “market within the public sector.” If public sector means public schools, the scope of the report will be limited, perhaps fatally so.  On the other hand, parental choice of schools supported with public dollars would provide a more promising framework.  

“School quality.” I have observed in the last year the beginning steps, in the name of school quality, to dismantle the 20-year old Milwaukee Parental Choice Program.  Many of those involved in this process want to “increase equity” and believe the focus of K-12 reform efforts should be confined to the “public sector.”

Given the expertise and background of the panelists who will present next week, how they define equity, the public sector, and school quality will be quite significant.

The warm greetings given by both Republicans and Democrats on the committee reflect Duncan’s reputation as a centrist in the ideologically fraught battles over education reform. He has received national attention for moves favored by reformers, such as opening 75 new schools operated by outside groups and staffed by non-union teachers; introducing a pay-for-performance plan that will eventually be in 40 Chicago schools; and working with organizations, including The New Teacher Project, Teach For America, and New Leaders for New Schools, that recruit talented educators through alternatives to the traditional education-school route.

At the same time, Duncan maintained at least a cordial working relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union, and both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) backed his nomination. He supported the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), but also called for dramatic increases in spending to help schools meet the law’s targets, and additional flexibility for districts like his own. In nominating Duncan, Obama said, “We share a deep pragmatism about how to go about this. If pay-for-performance works and we can work with teachers so it doesn’t feel like it’s being imposed upon them…then that’s something that we should explore. If charter schools work, try that. You know, let’s not be clouded by ideology when it comes to figuring out what helps our kids.”

Given the strong union support for the Obama presidency, there was great speculation within education circles throughout the fall as to whether the new president would turn out to be a reformer—willing to challenge existing practices and the teachers unions in order to achieve dramatic changes in schools—or play it politically safe by backing programs that brought only marginal changes. A sharp divide among Democrats was in full view at the party’s national convention in Denver, where urban mayors and educators, gathered at a forum sponsored by Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), challenged the dominant role of teachers unions in shaping policy. Newark mayor Cory Booker told those assembled, “We have to understand that as Democrats we have been wrong on education, and it’s time to get it right.”

Even before the national convention, conflicts between the unions and Democratic reformers were intensifying. At a New York fundraiser in 2007, Obama reportedly made a similar point. According to Joe Williams, DFER’s executive director, Obama incriminated the teachers unions when the director of a Harlem charter school asked the then candidate why Democrats threw up so many obstacles.

Williams explained, “We’re at this point where the nation wants to change education more than the unions and the unions are going to have to decide if they’re going to be part of the change or be left out of it entirely.”

Two manifestoes issued during the Democratic primaries laid out competing philosophies on improving student achievement that were intended to influence the eventual Democratic nominee. A “Broader, Bolder Approach to Education,” a letter issued by the liberal Economic Policy Institute, signed by national leaders across much of the political spectrum, and endorsed by the AFT, argued that improving schools alone would not close achievement gaps between disadvantaged and advantaged students. It called on policymakers to provide preschool, afterschool programs, and summer school, and take steps to improve students’ health and social development. Another letter, issued by a coalition called the Education Equality Project, advocated addressing school system failures through greater accountability, school choice, and changes in compensation that would promote teacher quality. Those who signed on to the project, a diverse group of leaders in education, philanthropy, and public service, vowed to “challenge politicians, public officials, educators, union leaders and anybody else who stands in the way of necessary change.”

Obama has allies in both camps. Arne Duncan was one of only a handful who signed both statements. Yet in his confirmation hearing, Duncan left little doubt that the administration wants to make systemic changes.

“We must do dramatically better,” Duncan told the Senate committee. “We must continue to innovate. We must build upon what works. We must stop doing what doesn’t work. And we have to continue to challenge the status quo.”

Advisors to Obama say the rhetorical distinction was overdrawn and that the thrust of the president’s strategy is to make progress without causing further polarization. His education platform reflected that approach. Like many Democrats, he wants to spend more money: on helping students attend college; early childhood care and education; and improving teaching through mentoring and professional development for both principals and teachers. He has criticized NCLB for encouraging teaching solely focused on preparing students to pass tests. But in line with many Republicans and more conservative Democrats, Obama, like Duncan, supports school choice, charter schools, performance-based pay, and alternatives to education schools for teacher preparation (see sidebar). He and his opponent, Senator John McCain, both praised the work of Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who has fought the local union as well as the AFT over tenure and teacher pay.

Economic Stimulus

Widespread agreement that only a massive stimulus package could rescue the U.S. economy presented the new administration with the opportunity to placate both sides of the Democratic divide. The unions and their allies would get a massive infusion of federal funds into the schools that would help offset state and local budget cuts. And this would give Obama cover to push for tougher reforms down the road.

House Democrats, after negotiations with Obama’s team, in mid-January proposed a stimulus package of $825 billion that included between $120 billion and $140 billion for public schools and colleges. Most of the money would have few strings attached.

The spending package would boost federal spending on Title I programs for low-income students and for special education, distributing the money according to current formulas. It would also provide at least $39 billion to offset state cuts in education budgets and $20 billion for capital improvements at schools and colleges. About $15 billion would be available to states as bonuses for efforts such as ensuring that low-performing schools and districts have effective teachers and that the performance of English-language learners and special education students is properly assessed (see Figure 1). One Obama aide said similar incentives would be incorporated into education programs to be introduced later in the spring.

The stimulus package also proposed to boost funding for the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF), a Bush-era program that provides financial incentives to teachers and principals who raise overall student achievement and close achievement gaps. After Democrats took control of Congress in 2006, they zeroed out funding for TIF but restored $100 million for the following year. In his last budget, Bush requested $200 million for the program, the same amount Obama’s team has proposed.

Thirty-six states plus the District of Columbia already have local or statewide teacher compensation systems that add some sort of financial incentive to the standard step-and-column pay plan, according to the NEA. Former NEA president Reg Weaver cautioned that “while we can be open to alternatives, we should always oppose politically motivated, quick fixes designed to weaken the voice of teachers and the effectiveness of education employees. If they want to talk about changing the way we’re paid, they need to do that with us, not to us.”

In Obama’s platform, he agreed that such plans should be developed in consultation with teachers. Among the promising models is a voluntary pay-for-performance program in place in districts in a dozen states, funded in part by TIF, and implemented by Duncan in Chicago. The Teacher Advancement Program (TAP) provides teachers with professional support, helps them to use data in instruction, holds them accountable for results, and provides bonuses. Teachers in 10 Chicago schools voted to participate in TAP starting in the fall of 2007, and bonuses totaling $340,000 were given out the following year for improved test scores at 9 of the schools. “This is a landmark event for Chicago’s schools—recognizing and rewarding educators for exemplary work and compensating them accordingly,” Duncan said at the time.

The scale of the proposed spending on education is stunning, more than doubling the federal contribution. Of course, even an increase of that magnitude would leave the feds as the junior investors in public education, their contribution dwarfed by current state and local spending. But the funds proposed to offset cuts in state funding would mean that, for the first time, the federal government would be directly covering the cost of basic school operations. That kind of money could buy a lot of goodwill, especially if it helps states avoid laying off thousands of teachers. By December 2008, 19 states had cut K–12 education spending, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal research group. Even with the infusion of federal support proposed so far, states may have to make further cuts in their education budgets if the economy does not improve quickly. States spend between one-third and one-half of their budgets on elementary and secondary education, and the revenue available to state and local governments is shrinking fast. By January 2008, states had reported deficits of $350 billion. “If the economy doesn’t get better, schools are in trouble,” said Jack Jennings, founder and CEO of the Center on Education Policy. “For the sake of the schools it’s important that Obama pay attention to the economy.”

Even if the economy recovers and the stimulus package goes through intact, some observers question whether the proposed spending will do enough to address persistent disparities in achievement. Despite past federal support directed toward the needs of low-income students, African American 4th and 8th graders did not make measurable progress on the National Assessment of Educational Progress between 2005 and 2007. “Is the stimulus going to benefit kids in ways that are palpable and real and that improve achievement?” asked Dianne Piche of the Citizens Commission on Civil Rights. As the House was passing its version of the stimulus package (see Figure 1), Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute noted that most of the money simply gave states dollars to keep intact the programs of the past: “It’s like an alcoholic at the end of the night when the bars close and the solution is to open the bar for another hour,” he told a New York Times reporter.

No Child Left Behind

The pressing economic issues, as well as difficult politics, will likely push reauthorization of NCLB into 2010 or even 2011. California Democrat Representative George Miller, who was one of four members of Congress who worked with the first Bush administration on the original NCLB, wants to see it revised and reauthorized. Yet Miller acknowledged to the Washington Post that “at the end of the day, it may be the most tainted brand in America.”

NCLB has been a great success in the sense that no one disagrees with its goals: accountability for results, addressing issues of teacher quality, putting a spotlight on the learning of all students, and better targeting of funds to districts serving the most disadvantaged students. Still, its detractors argue that the law has had unfortunate side effects: too much time spent teaching to narrow tests, schools focused on boosting the scores of students who are just below the proficiency threshold, and some states lowering their standards to reduce the number of schools missing their achievement targets.

“We’ve learned over the past five to 10 years that we have to align curriculum, align standards, and align tests with professional development,” Jennings said. “We’ve also learned that it is very, very hard to do. We’ve also learned that if we really set certain goals…teachers will pay attention to those students who are just below the goal and not pay attention to those who are further down or further up.”

Obama spoke during his campaign at length about the ins and outs of testing and decried teaching to the test. Rather than abandon the testing in NCLB, he has said he wants to invest in improving assessments, so that they measure a broader range of skills than just the basics.

The battle fought over reauthorization of NCLB in 2007 offers a preview of the challenges the Obama team will face. In a speech at the National Press Club outlining his priorities for reauthorizing the law, Representative Miller said, “Throughout our schools and communities, the American people have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair, not flexible, and is not funded. And they are not wrong.”

Hope for Reform
Despite the challenges, many in Washington are hopeful that public schools may in fact improve under an Obama administration. Although he cannot ignore the unions that form a key part of the party’s constituency, Obama owes less to them than did past Democratic presidents. The unions did not support him in the primaries and, because he raised so much money on his own, Obama was not as dependent on their money as others have been. Of course, he is hugely popular with teachers, and the staggering amount of money he appears to be willing to spend on education will only make him more so.

In addition, the leaders of the two unions at least appear more willing to be flexible on some long-standing issues. AFT president Randi Weingarten has said several times that “nothing is off the table” except vouchers. Not that much is known about Dennis Van Roekel, the Arizona math teacher who became president of the NEA last summer (see “Same Old, Same Old,” features, Winter 2009). But he was among those who supported Bob Chase, an earlier NEA president, when he tried to get the union to endorse what he called the “new unionism.” Chase wanted the union to experiment with new forms of performance pay and peer review of teacher performance, but the rank-and-file members nationally were reluctant to go along. It remains unclear how far Weingarten and Van Roekel will be able to push their members now to accept changes in compensation, evaluation, tenure, and so on.

Weingarten finds it “very sad” and frustrating that unions are always blamed for opposing reforms. “There’s a lot of demonizing and blame-mongering going on in education and it’s ridiculous…because it just creates excuses,” she said. “It says to me that they don’t think anything can be done because they are looking for the fall guy rather than helping all kids achieve.”

Weingarten expressed hope that Obama would push for more rigorous standards, better curricula, more valid assessments, and investments in helping teachers improve. “You can’t buy it by putting money out there and saying to teachers, ‘if you don’t do it, you’re fired,’” she said, referring to her opposition to Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C. “We have the responsibility…to recruit and support and retain teachers if they’re doing a good job, and if not, to counsel them out of the profession.”

But Kate Walsh, president of the National Council on Teacher Quality, counters that the unions have resisted that course of action. “I think the unions are up against the wall,” she said. “The whole movement toward the notion that teachers don’t have a basic right to be in the classroom unless they are effective is proving so powerful as an idea that they’re weakened because they’ve run away from it rather than embrace it.”

It is well known that one of the strongest threads in the narrative of Obama’s journey from his childhood to the White House is educational opportunity (see “The Early Education of Our Next President,” features, Fall 2008). Schooled first in Indonesia, he returned to Hawaii because his mother wanted him to get a better education. There, his maternal grandmother and grandfather enrolled him in the private Punahou School, where he studied with the island’s elite. Then, it was on to Occidental College, Columbia University, and Harvard Law School.

“I wasn’t born with a lot of advantages, but I was given love and support, and an education that put me on a pathway to success,” Obama said during a major campaign speech on education last September in Dayton, Ohio. “The reason Michelle and I are where we are today is because this country we love gave us the chance at an education. And the reason that I’m running for president is to give every single American that same chance.”

Joe Williams believes that all of those factors, as well as Obama’s personal commitment to improving education, create a real opportunity to bring about systemic, long-lasting changes. “Everyone says they support the goals of NCLB and if that’s real, then he can use his bully pulpit to say that we’ll do in education the equivalent of saying we’ll put a man on the moon in 10 years.

“He can say that we will make sure that every kid who starts the race will cross the finish line and it will give everyone goose bumps and start a new type of discussion about what the game is. But it only has the potential to change the game if he treats it as an opportunity to wipe the slate clean and inspire people to think very big about what is possible,” adds Williams. “Obama is the only person I’ve seen in the last 20 years who may be up to that job.”

“His vision of education is as a foundation not just of the economy but of a society in which people take care of each other,” explained Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, who advised Obama during the campaign and handled education policy for the president-elect’s transition team, in remarks delivered in November 2007 at a National Academy of Education event. “I think we can make great strides in a very short time.”

Although some may worry about the cost of all of the new programs, Darling-Hammond views the amount Obama wants to spend on education as a relatively small part of the overall bailout and recovery package, which could exceed $1.5 trillion.

In his speech last September in Dayton, Obama assured his audience, “We can do it all.”

Richard Lee Colvin is a longtime education journalist and director of the Hechinger Institute on Education and the Media, Teachers College, Columbia University.

During a decade when voucher programs were handed defeats in Florida, Arizona, Utah, and Washington, DC, the state of Louisiana established a scholarship program that now provides vouchers worth up to $7,000 so that 1,324 poor youngsters in New Orleans can attend private schools.

How did vouchers come to the Big Easy? Michael Henderson tells the story in an article just published on the Ed Next website, “In the Wake of the Storm.” (The article will appear in the Spring 2010 issue of Ed Next.)

You can also hear Michael Henderson discuss how the voucher program came about in a video just posted on the Ed Next website, “How Vouchers Came to New Orleans.”

And here’s a press release that summarizes the main points of the story: Voucher Supporters Achieve Political Success in Louisiana.

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

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

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

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

“In a way we’ve never done before”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hurricane Katrina

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

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

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

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

“If Bobby Jindal gets elected”

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

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

“A few green stamps to spend”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What has changed is the frame”

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

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

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

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

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

A Low Profile

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

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

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

“This bill is already on the books”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Sui Generis

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

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

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

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

The quality of our public schools has been measured in innumerable ways, and stakeholders may draw on any number of sources for rankings to support a particular agenda. Each winter, Education Week issues Quality Counts as a magazine supplement to its weekly newspaper. Report cards track and compare state education policies and outcomes in six areas: chance-for-success; K–12 achievement; standards, assessments, and accountability; transitions and alignment; the teaching profession; and school finance. For example, the grade for transitions and alignment is based on 14 indicators related to “early-childhood education, college readiness, and economy and workforce,”  while the school finance indicators measure spending patterns and resource distribution. Through these report cards, Education Week purports to “offer a comprehensive state-by-state analysis of key indicators of student success.”

The Quality Counts rankings are eagerly anticipated, thoroughly perused, and widely quoted. After the 2009 rankings were released, the Maryland State Department of Education issued a press release touting the state’s place at “the top of the list in Education Week’s tally, just ahead of Massachusetts.” Florida governor Charlie Crist celebrated the news that Education Week’s Quality Counts rated Florida’s schools 10th in the nation, based on its average rating across the six categories that comprise the analysis. Are Florida’s schools among the nation’s best? It depends on what you measure. By November of 2009, two lawsuits had been filed in Florida claiming the state was failing to provide high-quality education to its students. The plaintiffs claimed the state has low graduation rates, frequent school violence, and low levels of education spending and teacher pay compared to other states.

The rankings are also frequently misunderstood. Among the most widely cited of the Quality Counts ranking schemes is the Chance-for-Success Index (CFSI), which attempts to measure a state’s capacity for helping young people succeed. Here’s what Education Week’s Editorial Projects in Education (EPE) Research Center has to say about the index:

The Chance-for-Success Index captures the critical role that education plays at all stages of an individual’s life, with a particular focus on state-to-state differences in opportunities. While early foundations and the returns in the labor market from a quality education are important elements of success, we find that the school years consistently trump those factors. In every state, indicators associated with participation and performance in formal schooling constitute the largest source of points awarded in this category, and help explain much of the disparity between the highest- and lowest-ranked states.

The CFSI’s stated aim is to show the role that education plays as a student moves from childhood through the formal K–12 system and into the workforce, but then the rest of the description is fairly ambiguous. Many states nonetheless interpret the index as a simple measure of school quality. Maryland came in fifth in 2009, with a B+. The Maryland schools’ press release cited above reported that the state “ranked among the nation’s leaders in ‘Chance for Success,’ which looks at how well graduates achieve beyond high school.” Of course, some states choose not to emphasize their CFSI score. For example, the New Mexico education department’s January 2009 press release led with its number-two rank and A grade for transition and alignment policies and buried in the middle its 51st-place CFSI grade of D+.

Does CFSI measure the school system’s contributions to achievement beyond high school? It’s hard to say. Most of its components, described as “key facets of education spanning stages from childhood to adulthood,” are a grab bag of demographic characteristics. The index combines indicators related to family background, wealth, education levels, and employment with schooling measures, including kindergarten enrollment and selected National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores. The 13 components of success are identified in the sidebar. Not all of these have a clear relationship to postsecondary success, and several are beyond the control of state policymakers.

Consider the parental employment indicator and its role in an index that is updated annually or even every other year. Short-run trends in parental employment may not have any impact on the overall quality of a state’s education system; even the direction of possible influence is unclear. Parents who see how difficult it is to get and retain employment without education may stress the value of school completion, but it is also conceivable that underemployed parents may seek to accelerate their children’s entry into the labor force, even at the expense of their education. A similar problem exists with annual income: many factors outside of education quality influence the vitality of a state economy. Even if strong gains in public education are realized, it will be years before the effects are reflected in adults’ annual income. Income trends over the next few years will have little or nothing to do with current levels of education quality.

A Different Approach

Absent a sound theory of action, it is easy to go on a data spree. As seen in the CFSI, the more the merrier. As an experiment, we reconstructed the Chance-for-Success Index. First, we selected a clear standard for our index: we defined “success” as the percentage of young adults, aged 18 to 24, who are productively engaged in postsecondary endeavors (pursuing a college degree, active military service, or full-time employment). We limited the indicators to only those factors for which a reasonable empirical base of evidence shows an association between the indicator and our definition of success and that are plausibly under the control of education policymakers. Five indicators have a clear bearing on education outcomes: preschool enrollment, kindergarten enrollment, 4th-grade reading, 8th-grade mathematics, and high school graduation. Using the same source data as the 2009 CFSI and giving each factor equal weight, we computed new averages for each state and compared the new rankings to the originals.

Our results show marked divergence from the CFSI rankings (see Table 1). Only Maryland (5th) and Arizona (43rd) retained their rankings, although four of the top five stayed within that band. Looking down the list, however, 34 states moved 3 or more places, 21 shifted by 5 or more places, and 13 states moved by 8 or more places. Does our revised index precisely rank states’ public education systems? Probably not. The ideal index would be one that measured how well states and schools did, given their demography. Still, this exercise shows how sensitive the CFSI is to the choice of indicators.

Removing family background characteristics from the index changes states’ rankings substantially. The states that drop the most in the revised rankings are Hawaii, Rhode Island, Indiana, Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota. The states that gain the most are Florida, Texas, Maine, Idaho, Arkansas, and Mississippi, mostly poor, rural states.

Is the CFSI largely a measure of parental education? We looked at where the states would fall if we ranked them by individual family background variables. The variable that by itself provides a ranking with the closest fit to the CFSI is percentage of children with at least one parent with a postsecondary degree (parent education). Ranked by that measure alone, only 8 states would move by 8 or more places from their positions in the CFSI. Indicators of family income and adult education levels also produce rankings similar to the CFSI. Ranking states by either the percentage of children in families with incomes at least 200 percent of poverty level (the family income indicator) or the percentage of adults (25–64) with a 2- or 4-year postsecondary degree (adult educational attainment), only 15 states would move 8 or more places.

Measuring the Measure

Report cards must meet a number of conditions if they are to be reliable. First, they need to clearly define the condition or result being examined. None of the descriptions provided by the CFSI editors accomplish this—they never reveal exactly what they take the “chance for success” to be, asserting only that some states provide better opportunities than others. Explained the EPE Research Center’s director, “a child’s life prospects depend greatly on where he or she lives.”

Second, the indicators that are employed should have direct and proven association with the outcome being measured. The CFSI’s current approach mixes inputs such as demographics with outcomes like academic results to arrive at a single score. The result is a tautology: success is the sum of the parts; the parts are by default the components of success.

The editors of Quality Counts gather and report a variety of measures that reflect current education and policy performance across all 50 states and the District of Columbia and, through comparison, encourage states to take actions that would lead to improvements in their ratings. Nowhere do the Quality Counts editors show how or why the Chance-for-Success Index is a good predictor of success. Instead, they provide statistics that divert attention away from the things that actually do matter, such as high-quality teaching, a good range of school options, and success in early elementary schools. There is risk in including variables that have no real impact on the result being studied. States may view the results as motivators to improvement, and ineffective indicators may lead to ineffective attention and investment. Narrowing the scope of the Chance-for-Success Index to factors both causally related to school achievement and under the control of state education officials or school districts would improve its value and deliver the right signals to states.

CREDO at Stanford University supports education organizations and policymakers in using research and program evaluation to assess the performance of education initiatives. The team is led by Margaret Raymond and includes Kenneth Surratt, Devora Davis, Edward Cremata, Emily Peltason, Meghan Cotter Mazzola, Kathleen Dickey, and Rosemary Brock.

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

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

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

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

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

Academic Achievement

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

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

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

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

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

Explaining Florida’s Success

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Florida Reforms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Various people began lining up with one study or the other – largely it seems on the basis of which results they liked.  Those supporting expanded charters emphasized the New York results, while those generally disliking charters emphasized the other.

There were two major differences among the studies:  they used different evaluation methodologies, and they analyzed different sets of charter schools.  The CREDO study employed a matching approach that compared students in charter schools to a virtual student who had similar prior achievement, race, income, and so forth along with being in one of the feeder schools from which a given charter drew its students.  The New York study compared students who won a lottery for entry into each (oversubscribed) charter to students who lost the lottery.  The CREDO study looked across 15 states (which did not include New York), while the NBER study was confined to New York City schools.  Either or both of those differences could be responsible for the different results.

A new study by CREDO clears up the uncertainty.  They took their matching approach to evaluation to New York City charters, thus holding constant location.

The new CREDO results were virtually the same as the prior NBER results:  Charter schools in New York City do significantly better than the traditional public schools that feed them.  Thus, it is not methodology that drives the prior differences in results, but instead it is the fact that New York City simply is doing something different.

These results change the focus of debate.  They bring us back to considering what is it that makes some charters fly high and others fall flat.  Is it the authorizing environment?  The state of existing public schools in an area?  The role of state regulations and oversight?

It is really important to dig deeper into the underlying causes of effectiveness across the charter sector.  They will not only give us insights about how to organize charter schools but also how to manage and improve the traditional public schools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EN: How should proficiency be defined and measured?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listen to the Podcast

Focus of School Reform Shifting to Teachers (12/17/09)
Are Middle Schools or Middle Schoolers the Problem? (12/10/09)
Biggest Spender in Politics: The NEA (12/4/09)
Saving Jobs or Stimulating Reform? (11/24/09)
Election Postmortem (11/19/09)
Will Congress Reroute the Preschool Juggernaut? (11/4/09)
Voters Choose Neighborhood Schools over Socioeconomic Diversity (10/29/09)
The Nobel Committee Isn’t the Only One Giving Speculative Prizes (10/22/09)
Will Michelle Rhee Triumph? (10/14/09)
Will the Federal Role in Education Double? (10/8/09)
Charter Schools Narrow Achievement Gaps in New York City (10/1/09)
What Congress Is Not Working On (9/24/09)
Charter Schools, Unions, and Linking Teachers with Student Achievement Data (9/17/09)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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