What, you ask, is this all about?

Thirty years after a blue-ribbon panel declared the United States to be “a nation at risk” due to the weak performance and shoddy results of our public education system, one of the two great reforms to have enveloped that system is the setting of explicit academic standards in core subjects, standards that make clear what math youngsters should know by the end of fifth grade, what reading-and-writing skills they must acquire by tenth grade, and so on. (The other great reform: widespread acceptance of school choice.)

Up to now, individual states have set their own academic standards. Some did this well, but according to reviews undertaken by Fordham and others, most stumbled badly, putting forth vague expectations that lack content and rigor and often promote left-wing dogma. And even the good ones differ so much from state to state that school and student performance cannot be compared around the country, much less with other lands.

Public education is indisputably the responsibility of states—embedded deeply in their constitutions—but preparing young Americans to succeed in a mobile society on a shrinking and more competitive planet calls for some commonality of education expectations across the land, expectations that, if met, truly prepare young people for college and good jobs.

Many state leaders understand this and, beginning five years ago, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers (to which most state superintendents belong) launched a foundation-funded project called the Common Core State Standards Initiative, which gave birth to a set of commendably strong standards for English language arts and math from Kindergarten through high school. Our reviewers found them superior to the academic expectations set by three-quarters of states—and essentially on par with the rest.

But would states actually embrace them in place of their own? This was—and remains—totally voluntary, but decisions grew more complicated when the Obama administration started pushing states toward such adoptions by jawboning, hectoring, and luring them with dollars and regulatory waivers.

Whether it was the standards’ intrinsic merit, administration pressure, or the potential advantages of commonality—not just comparability but also cheaper textbooks and tests that need not be tailored to each state’s specifications—forty-five states plus D.C., several territories, and the Pentagon’s school network signed on. (Texas and Virginia are the big exceptions.) The top-priority education initiative in most of those places today is preparing teachers, parents, and others for these demanding standards—and for the likelihood that scores will plummet on the tougher tests now under development.

Then came the backlash. Some arose on the left from foes of testing and teacher groups wary of being evaluated against sterner criteria. Some arose from parents and educators fretful that heavier emphasis on English language arts and math will eclipse music, art, and the rest of a balanced curriculum.

The heavy artillery, however, came from the right. In true tea-party style, the Common Core was presented as a federal plot—worse, an Obama plot, in cahoots with the Gates Foundation, maybe even the United Nations—to take over American schools, end local control, undermine state sovereignty, and abolish school choice. Some decried the Common Core as a lowering of standards because, for example, it doesn’t mandate algebra in eighth grade. (Never mind that few eighth graders study real algebra today.) Others prophesied that Jane Austen and Mark Twain would be replaced by close study of auto-repair manuals. (The list of recommended readings that accompanies the Common Core is excellent—but bad choices by teachers or curriculum directors can subvert any standards.)

Many respected conservatives back the Common Core, including such scarred veterans of the education-reform wars as Jeb Bush, Bill Bennett, Chris Christie, Rod Paige, and Mitch Daniels. They understand that academic standards are just the beginning, describing a destination but not how to get there. They understand, too, that a destination worth reaching beats aimless wandering—and that a big modern country is better off if it knows how all its kids and schools are doing against a rigorous set of common expectations. As good conservatives, they realize that the Common Core in the long run should save dollars, enhance accountability, hasten development of powerful instructional technologies, strengthen American competitiveness, give a boost to the country’s shared civic culture, and (by supplying parents with better information about school performance) advance school choice.

They also recognize, however, that the Common Core is voluntary and that states unserious about implementing it are better off not pretending to embrace it.

Some day, we’ll know whether schools and students in the Common Core states do better than those in places that opt to go it alone. It’s hard to imagine that they’ll do worse.

Education reform is hard. Admiral Rickover once compared it to “moving a graveyard.” Standards-setting is just part of it—and common standards aren’t inherently better. (Newly released standards for science appear to have serious shortcomings.) But when a group of state leaders, many of them Republicans, can come together to set expectations for the curricular core that surpass what most of them set on their own, conservatives ought to applaud, not lash out.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

This blog entry first appeared in the Fordham Institute’s Education Gadfly Weekly.

In this installment of the Education Next book club, host Mike Petrilli talks with Michelle Rhee about becoming Michelle Rhee, what she’s learned over these last tumultuous years, and what she thinks the future holds for education reform in America.

Additional installments of the Ed Next Book Club podcast can be heard here.

—Education Next

Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change the World

As reviewed by Mark Bauerlein

The future of the United States depends on its innovators. That’s the first premise of Tony Wagner’s vision of 21st-century schooling. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels declares on the back cover of the book, “In the equation of world success, superior innovation is the only factor that can keep America #1,” and diverse experts are quoted to that effect several times, as well as starring in videos embedded in the text that readers can access by using their smartphones to scan the code on the page. (All the videos were created by documentary filmmaker Robert Compton and are available at creatinginnovators.com.) We can’t restore the manufacturing that sustained the U.S. through the 20th century, Wagner insists, and we can’t rely on consumer spending when un- and underemployment are so high, and we can’t keep polluting the planet, so “We must outinnovate our economic competitors.”

But how do we create more innovation when innovation is unsystematic and unpredictable? That’s the question motivating Creating Innovators, and Wagner answers it by conversing with savvy employers and inspiring mentors, and by profiling eight millennial innovators whose examples point the way. The portraits fill up half the book, including a product designer who improved Apple’s iPhone and now works for a start-up trying to alter the electric power system; the founder of a company that created a nifty platform for 3-D design (purchased by Autodesk in 2010); a youth who secured funding to distribute malaria nets in Africa; and a shoe designer working with three universities to develop organic shoes.

Goal-oriented but selfless, smart but quirky, these innovators combine dazzling imagination with earnest compassion and real-world know-how. They don’t always earn good grades and hefty paychecks, but they “Think Big” and devise goods and services that meet others’ needs and aspirations, not to mention the world’s betterment. When we read about these individuals, we note how special they are, but for Wagner this is precisely the problem: “we need to produce more than just a few entrepreneurs and innovators.” Indeed, “To maintain our standard of living and improve our world, every young person needs to become an innovator.”

In light of abundant data on low academic achievement and effort among high school students, Wagner’s goal sounds impossible, but years of experience plus 150 interviews he conducted for the book convince him otherwise. The reason we don’t have 50,000 innovators graduating from high school and college every year, he maintains, isn’t because of what we have failed to do. It’s because of what we actually do over and over again.

The pattern begins in the home with mothers and fathers who, high on achievement, become helicopter parents and “tiger moms.” Instead of letting their kids play and imagine, experiment and fail, they schedule and monitor. It gets worse when children enter school and undergo an accountability system filled with unimpressive teachers teaching narrow content in the same boring way and valuing every student by a uniform quantitative yardstick.

The home and school habitats squelch the very attributes and experiences of innovators. Parents of the remarkable youths in the book acted differently, caring about homework and extracurriculars but ensuring hours of free time and unstructured play each day. They didn’t push a particular discipline or career, but rather watched where their kids’ passions went and facilitated their pursuits. They let children take risks and make mistakes, and they asked them to think altruistically and “give back.”

Wagner’s innovators thank their parents for the freedom and encouragement, but they regret the schools they attended. In his interview, engineering whiz Kirk “said not one word about the many academic courses he’d taken at Stanford.” Another innovator treasures peers more than professors: “I’ve learned more from doing this work with my colleague…than I have from most of my teachers at Tulane.” When Jamien was in high school, his teachers tried to cure his “shoe addiction,” and he ended up taking his inspiration during an internship at AutoZone from his boss, a graphic designer.

Their frustrations make sense, Wagner observes, for innovators are curious, experimental “design thinkers,” not test takers and homework drones. Their talents escape conventional assessments, and they care less about mastering the content of a discipline than doing something with it. As Paul Bottino, director of Harvard’s Technology and Entrepreneurship Center, tells Wagner, “More and more students are saying that education which is merely content delivery doesn’t work, doesn’t stick. For students like David [one of the profiles], it’s about applying what they know, in order to connect the dots.” The more we should admire them, then, for their outlook tallies better than the prevailing curricula the 21st-century situation in which “what you know is far less important than what you can do with what you know.” The answer is clear: we should cultivate innovative minds by making homes more about play and passion and schools more about collaboration, interdisciplinary studies, and worldly projects.

That’s the argument of Creating Innovators. Traditionalists dislike the rationale for downplaying liberal arts knowledge, while accountability reformers consider its criticisms just one more rehearsal of antitesting points. But one can accept Wagner’s outlook and still identify a flaw that renders this book nothing more than a good idea to try out here and there in scattered high schools and colleges. It is that one cannot select a few unusual successes and build an entire institution upon them. Wagner regards his subjects as extraordinary persons; hence, their blossoming proves nothing about the fate of ordinary students. He believes that “every student starts school with unbounded imagination, curiosity, and creativity,” but without empirical backing, that assertion is sentimentality, not evidence. Besides, what about the kid who has a passion for basketball, devoting hours a day on the court but barely making the JV team? Should those hours be encouraged at the expense of math homework? And are there children who, perhaps because of their homes, desperately need the very discipline and structure of schools Wagner disparages?

To accept the advantages of innovation education, we need to know what happened to all of the students at schools and centers mentioned by Wagner, such as High Tech High—or to know what would happen to a broad range of students if they were admitted to them. Without those data, the insistence that every school and teacher be innovation-centered falls flat. Until we find out, such visions should be scaled back to more modest proportions, for instance, a district that devotes a few high-school classrooms to innovation education and monitors the outcomes for different types of students.

Mark Bauerlein is professor of English at Emory University.

Two weeks ago the Alabama House and Senate passed legislation, The Alabama Accountability Act, giving parents with children in failing schools a tax credit for tuition at a private school.  The bill passed by 2-1 margins in both houses of the Republican controlled legislature.  Naturally, organizations such as the Alabama Education Association (AEA), opposed as they are to letting students escape miserably failing schools, howled that the measure violated state law.  But this time, rather than at least having the decency to sue once the legislation was signed, the AEA decided to lawyer up before it even reached the Governor’s desk.

Initially the Act was called the School Flexibility Act and did not include tax credits. After the House and Senate passed different versions of the act, the conference committee added the tax credit provision and changed the name.  The restructured and renamed legislation then passed 51-26 in the House and 22-11 in the Senate on party-line votes.

Furious after realizing the horror that a program increasing options for children trapped in failing schools had passed, the AEA sued. It asked a state judge to enjoin the governor from signing the legislation—claiming that the conference committee violated the state’s Open Meetings Act when it inserted the tax credit with insufficient deliberation.  The judicial gods smiled on the AEA when the case went before Circuit Judge Charles Price.  Price had previously achieved momentary fame for declaring that a fellow circuit-court judge could not display the Ten Commandments in his courtroom or begin sessions with prayer. After a brief hearing, Price agreed with the AEA ruling that the state legislature could not send the bill to the governor and scheduled a hearing for mid-March over whether the legislature violated the Open Access Act.  The state attorney general has appealed to the state Supreme Court.

The litigation raises two basic questions about separation of powers.  The first is whether the courts have the authority to oversee the procedures that the legislature establishes for itself.  Typically courts have ruled that as a matter of separation of powers, they are not allowed to exercise this kind of oversight.  But even if the Alabama courts were to intrude into the internal workings of the state legislature, it should be a question raised only after a bill has actually become law.  After all, until a bill has been signed, no one can claim to have been harmed and, therefore, no one has standing.

The second, more significant question is whether the courts have the authority to actually stop a legislature from sending a bill to the governor to be signed.  Passing a bill and sending it to the governor to be signed (or vetoed) are obviously exercises of legislative power.  Legislative power is not granted to courts.  That’s why they are courts and not legislatures.  By definition, under a system of separation of powers, courts cannot have such power.

Of course, Price’s actions do raise some humorous possibilities, ones which hopefully will arise if only to salvage this absurd spectacle. What if the legislature were to send the legislation to the governor anyway?  Would Price dispatch marshals to block thoroughfares between the statehouse and governor’s office?  Would he send marshals to confiscate all the governor’s pens?

Regardless of these amusing possibilities, it is unlikely that the Alabama Supreme Court will side with Price’s brazenly unconstitutional power grab if party identification is as good a predictor of voting behavior there as it is in the legislature.  All eight members of the court are Republicans.  Oh, and the state’s Chief Justice is the infamous Roy Moore, the same judge Price said violated the Constitution by displaying the Ten Commandments. All of which means that the AEA and other Alabama choice opponents had better pray for a miracle, or prepare for the country’s newest tax credit program to become law.

-Joshua Dunn

This blog entry first appeared on the Fordham Institute’s Choice Words blog.

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

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

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

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

The Coming KIPP Bubble

You can’t play the ingenue forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“All Hands on Deck”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Excuses 2.0

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Loco Helicopter Parentis

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe even more.

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

• Nonie Lesaux: Focus on Higher-Order Literacy Skills

• Juan Rangel: Emphasize Civic Responsibility and Good Citizenship

In a recent New York Times column, I explained how America could benefit from more schools and classes geared toward motivated, high-potential students. Here, I want to look more deeply at why such initiatives are unfashionable, even taboo, among today’s education reformers.

We’d like to believe that every teacher can do right by every child in each classroom. But let’s be serious: How many of our 3 million–plus teachers are up to this challenge? The typical class is profoundly diverse in ability, motivation, and prior attainment. In most cases, instructors—under added pressure from state and federal accountability regimes—end up focusing on pupils below the “proficient” line, at the expense of their high achievers.

You don’t have to search hard for evidence that teachers and school systems are neglecting them. Take, for instance, our longstanding failure to get more than a few percent of U.S. students scoring at or above the National Assessment’s “advanced” level—in any subject or grade level. Study the data showing how far our students’ scores lag behind those of many competitor countries. Consider the ongoing need of high-tech employers to import highly educated personnel from abroad.

Then look at the unmet demand for “gifted and talented” schools and classrooms (and teachers suited to them). For many years, Washington’s only sign of interest in this portion of the K–12 universe was the Jacob K. Javits Gifted and Talented Students Education Program. Since 2004, however, Congress has steadily decreased funding for the program; last year, that contribution dropped to $0. And despite plenty of evidence that America is failing to nurture its gifted students, the problem fails to awaken much interest from education leaders and philanthropists. Why is this so?

Consider these possible explanations.

First, there’s nervousness about elitism. This is fed by the small percentages of low-income black and Hispanic youngsters in many gifted-and-talented classrooms and specialized schools. In reality, however, this underrepresentation reflects the education system’s own failure to identify such kids and counsel them into a sufficiency of classrooms, schools, and programs—a failure that inevitably advantages upper middle class youngsters with pushy, well-educated, well-connected parents.

Second, there’s the widespread belief—originating on the left but no longer confined there—that “equity” should be solely about income, minority status, handicapping conditions, and historical disenfranchisement. Most of American society does not seem to believe that giftedness constitutes a “special need” or that inattention to it violates some children’s equal rights.

Third, there is a mistaken belief that high-ability youngsters will do fine, even if the education system makes no special provision for them. This mindset is particularly convenient in a time of budget crunches, when districts feel pressured enough focusing on low-achieving kids at failing schools.

Fourth, the definition of “gifted” itself has been hazy. We have concrete numbers regarding kids who live in poverty or suffer from disabilities. We even know that 10 percent of the population is left-handed. But how many students are gifted? There’s little agreement on this key point. Some people talk about “the talented tenth,” others about the “top one percent.” The Templeton Foundation is bent on finding the one person in a million (its own estimate) who qualifies as a genius. Meanwhile, some prefer to advance the woolly claim that everybody is gifted in some way—a notion that doesn’t help matters, at least in policy circles.

Fifth, the field of gifted education lacks convincing research as to what works. My coauthor, education expert Jessica Hockett, and I became more aware of this problem when researching our recent book, Exam Schools. We found just two smallish studies focusing on the actual effectiveness of selective-admission public high schools. (Those two studies found scant advantage for the selective-admission schools.)

This means the burden of proof is now on such schools and their backers to generate data and analyses. In the past, these schools have been able to trade on reputations, friends in high places, and evidence of strong demand. Maybe that was sufficient yesterday, but not in today’s world of rigorous evaluations and comparisons.

Sixth, whether due to elitism angst or a shortage of resources, the gifted education world has been meek when it comes to lobbying and special pleading—not to mention heavier-handed political engagement, such as financial contributions and doorbell-ringing on behalf of friendly candidates.

Seventh, and finally, we return to bad ideas in Educatorland. I noted earlier the wishful proposition that “differentiated instruction” would magically enable every teacher to succeed with every kid in a mixed classroom. This is a close cousin of other false beliefs—for instance, that tracking, even ability grouping, is inherently pernicious; that competition is bad for kids; that selective admission should be forbidden in public schools; and that every opportunity should be open to every child regardless of actual preparedness, prior attainment, or other qualifications. Another culprit is the “multiple intelligences” claim that everyone learns differently and is surely gifted in some way, even if some forms of intelligence aren’t reflected in test scores. One could easily extend this list.

Some are convinced that such ideas have merit. Of this, however, I’m certain: They rule our education system, and they are bad for gifted children. And those likeliest to be short-changed are poor kids and those without savvy, obsessive (and generally upper-middle class) parents. There are too many bright students whose families don’t have the information or means to navigate the system, prep their children for admission into gifted programs, lean on the political system, or, if need be, move to another district or into the private sector.

I’m not worried about my three granddaughters, all of whom (I will posit) have immense potential. Their parents can navigate this system and, if they need backup, my wife and I and sundry others are available for additional pushiness, navigation help, or resources. But how many millions of high-potential young people lack such supports and are therefore falling by the wayside? Today’s education system is missing the motivation to find and counsel and push them, much less to do right by them in class, much less to provide them the additional help they may need outside school. If you stick with the “talented tenth” view of giftedness, we’re talking about roughly 5.5 million school-age kids. How many of them do you suppose are currently being educated to the max?

Whose responsibility is it to tackle this problem? It’s hard to picture many liberals getting worked up about the plight of smart kids—even those who are poor—for fear of being labeled elitists. For them, “lifting the floor” will continue to be the top education priority, along with micromanaging the system. Instead, conservatives should take up this cause, and Republicans should heed the advice of David Brooks:

What exactly happens to the ambitious kid in Akron at each stage of life in this new economy? What are the best ways to rouse ambition and open fields of opportunity? … Let Democrats be the party of security, defending the 20th-century welfare state. Be the party that celebrates work and inflames enterprise. Use any tool, public or private, to help people transform their lives.

That ambitious kid in Akron—and millions more like her—are ready, willing and able to transform their own lives, to benefit from America’s long (but now waning) promise of upward mobility, and to boost the country’s futures along the way. But they and their families can’t do it on their own. For better and worse, it’s our public education system that must serve as the primary engine of their advancement and opportunity—and it’s conservatives who should press it to take this responsibility as seriously as the education of children who can barely read.

It’s morally correct. It’s educationally sound. It’s economically beneficial. And to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, it has the additional advantage of being politically shrewd.

-Chester E. Finn, Jr.

A version of this article appeared on Atlantic.com.

In the 21st-century workplace, mathematical capability is a key determinant of productivity. College graduates who majored in subjects such as math, engineering, and the physical sciences earn an average of 19 percent more than those who specialized in other fields, according to the American Community Survey of 2009 and 2010. Precollegiate mathematical aptitude matters as well: math SAT scores predict higher earnings among adults, while verbal SAT scores do not.

These facts help explain our national focus on improving math performance. International comparisons made possible by standardized testing reveal just how American students lag behind their global peers (see “Are U.S. Students Ready to Compete?” features, Fall 2011). Judging the nation purely by its own historical performance yields the same conclusion. Between 1972 and 2011, real GDP per capita doubled in the U.S., but the average math SAT score of college-bound high-school seniors and the proportion of college graduates majoring in a mathematically intensive subject barely budged.

Concern about our students’ math achievement is nothing new, and debates about the mathematical training of our nation’s youth date back a century or more. In the early 20th century, American high-school students were starkly divided, with rigorous math courses restricted to a college-bound elite. At midcentury, the “new math” movement sought, unsuccessfully, to bring rigor to the masses, and subsequent egalitarian impulses led to new reforms that promised to improve the skills of lower-performing students. While reformers assumed that higher-performing students would not be harmed in the process, evidence suggests that the dramatic watering down of curricular standards since that time has made our top performers worse-off. Even promised improvements in the lower part of the distribution have at times proved elusive, a point illustrated below by the disappointing results of a recent initiative to accelerate algebra instruction in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district.

America’s lagging mathematics performance reflects a basic failure to understand the benefits of adapting the curriculum to meet the varying instructional needs of students. Recently published results from policies such as Chicago’s “double dose” of algebra, which groups students homogeneously and increases instructional time for lower-skilled math students (see “A Double Dose of Algebra,” research, Winter 2013), support differentiation as the best way to promote higher achievement among all students.

Decades of Hand Wringing

Figure 1 uses data from the American Community Survey of 2009 and 2010 to track a basic indicator of math proficiency over a 75-year span: the proportion of college graduates who majored in a math-intensive subject (math, statistics, engineering, or physical sciences) in each cohort. The sample is limited to male college graduates in order to address possible concerns about changing gender composition of the college-graduate population, although the figure looks similar if females are included.

Fluctuations in this indicator over time support a basic argument: American attempts to homogenize the math curriculum in secondary schools, although sometimes successful at improving the performance of the average student, have come at the cost of preparing the nation’s most promising students for mathematically intensive study.

At one point in time, 3 college graduates in 10 majored in a math-intensive subject. These cohorts grew up in an era when advanced math topics—algebra, geometry, and trigonometry—were considered “intellectual luxuries,” worthy of instruction to a select few, but of little to no relevance for the vast majority of the workforce. From the 1930s through the mid-1950s, educational practice codified these beliefs. Less than one-third of all high-school students enrolled in algebra, substantially fewer in geometry, and only 1 in 50 proceeded to trigonometry.

Among cohorts educated in the post–World War II era, there have been three distinct periods of decline in this measure of math performance. The first decline is modest and occurred very soon after World War II. Students graduating in the 1950s and early 1960s majored in math-intensive subjects less often than those graduating in the late 1940s. Trends in college completion, also shown in Figure 1, suggest that this early decline in math intensity corresponds with a run-up in college attendance and completion associated with the GI Bill. Given the restriction of advanced mathematical training to a select group of high school students in the first half of the century, it’s reasonable to think that the expansion of college access, presumably to less-prepared students, explains this first decline.

Expansion of access might explain a portion of the much larger decline occurring between 1962 and 1974. But the access and math-intensity trends don’t line up perfectly, and changes in enrollment and completion rates are not sufficiently large to explain the full decline in math intensity in these years.

If the admission of mathematically marginal students can’t explain this decline in math-intensive study, what can? One might hypothesize that math-intensive subjects are subject to “fads,” implying that college enrollment fluctuations have little to do with the underlying ability of students. The midcentury decline in math intensity, however, occurs at a time when math-intensive study should have enjoyed great popularity. The graduating class of 1974 commenced its formal education immediately following the Soviet launch of Sputnik in 1957, and graduated from high school shortly after the United States put a man on the moon. Nevertheless, this cohort chose math-intensive majors at roughly half the rate of classes from the 1940s.

The midcentury decline in math intensity coincides with the rise of the “new-math” movement. This movement to improve the math skills of average students was sparked in part by national security concerns. During World War II, many rank-and-file soldiers were unable to calculate the trajectory of artillery shells, among other things, in an era when hand computation in the field was still a necessity. The Cold War–era “arms race” and “space race” amplified calls to steer more American students toward math, science, and engineering. The new-math movement reflected a shift in curriculum design from professional educators to professional mathematicians. Where “old math” was pragmatic, focusing students’ efforts on tasks they were likely to perform in the course of their future careers, “new math” valued mastery of fundamental concepts, some of them quite abstract. It is during the new-math era, for example, that calculus was introduced as a high school subject, albeit only for a select group of students. Ironically, a curricular reform designed to introduce new rigor and bring higher-order subjects to more students in secondary school appears to have resulted in a strong movement away from math at the collegiate level.

Given that the substitution of rigor for practicality appears to have turned students off to math, it stands to reason that substitution in the reverse direction would undo the effect. And indeed, the wane of the new-math movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s might explain the resurgence of interest in math-intensive majors, the only such episode observed over a period of 75 years, among those graduating from college in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The resurgence was short-lived. From the 1984 class onward, the proportion of college graduates completing math-intensive majors dropped steadily. This second major decline in math intensity reflects a second nationwide effort to improve the math performance of average students. The alarm bells sounded by the influential A Nation At Risk report in 1983 pointed not to the performance of the elite but rather to the prevalence of remedial education in colleges and universities. It lamented the fact that a small fraction of high school students managed to complete calculus, in spite of the fact that most attended a school that offered the course.

Six years after A Nation At Risk, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics introduced new standards that favored calculators over pencil-and-paper computations, cooperative work over direct instruction, and intuition over solution algorithms. Educational rhetoric of the “No Child Left Behind” era has continued to prioritize the performance of average or even below-average students. The proficiency standards mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act impose sanctions on schools that fail to serve their worst-performing students, but enact no penalty on schools that accomplish this goal by shifting resources away from their top performers. Studies have verified the predictable consequence: gains to students just below the proficiency level have in some settings been offset by losses among more-advanced students.

No Improvement in High School

Evidence from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) provides further indication that curricular reforms have improved performance in basic subjects without providing a stronger foundation for more advanced study. Successive waves of testing show that students born in 1981, for example, outperformed the 1977 birth cohort at ages 9 and 13, but had lost their advantage by the time they reached 17. The performance of American 15-year-olds on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam in 2000 and 2009 confirms the lack of progress among secondary school students. The United States is among those countries whose math performance worsened over this time period. American students also fell behind those from several other countries: Luxembourg, Hungary, Poland, and Germany. International comparisons focused on younger students, such as the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), however, show more signs of progress in the United States relative to other nations.

This evidence of stagnation among secondary school students seems at odds with statistics on the math course–taking patterns of American students. In the mid-1980s, about one student in six took Algebra I in middle school. In more recent years, the national average has been closer to one-third, a doubling over the course of a generation. In some areas, including California and the District of Columbia, the majority of students take Algebra I as 8th graders.

How can students simultaneously proceed to advanced coursework earlier and perform no better on national and international assessments? Figure 2 yields some insight by listing the tables of contents for two introductory algebra textbooks: George Chrystal’s fifth edition, published in 1904, and Algebra 1, published by Prentice Hall exactly one century later. While there are similarities in the curricula outlined by these books—both, for example, cover quadratic equations late in the manuscript—the early book covered many more topics in greater detail. There is no mention of series in the later book, nor logarithms, interest and annuities, complex numbers, or exponential functions beyond the quadratic. Ironically, the only topic covered in greater detail in the 2004 textbook is inequality—of the mathematical variety.

A distaste for inequality has clearly motivated mathematics curricular reforms over the past quarter century. While the intent of equality-minded reforms is to boost low-performing students, in the case of American mathematics achievement, decline among higher-performing students has been part of the bargain. Furthermore, results from Charlotte’s algebra acceleration initiative indicate that an unthinking pursuit of equality can in fact harm all students, not just those at the top.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Algebra Initiative

This section summarizes research I undertook with Duke University colleagues Charles Clotfelter and Helen Ladd. The complete report, available as a working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, studies the impact of an algebra acceleration initiative in one of North Carolina’s largest school districts.

North Carolina’s Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS) district is generally regarded as a model education agency. It serves more than 100,000 students, ranking among the 30 largest in the United States. Among the 18 large school districts identified in 2009 NAEP assessment results, CMS ranked first in 4th-grade math performance, the only large district to post scores exceeding the national average. The district covers an entire county, incorporating both urban and suburban communities. While it is more affluent than most large districts in its NAEP peer group, it has a higher student poverty rate than North Carolina as a whole. A majority of students in the district are either black or Hispanic.

A decade ago, CMS superintendent Eric Smith instructed middle school principals to enroll a larger proportion of students in Algebra I, the first course in the state’s college-preparatory high-school sequence. He told PBS that middle school math is “the definition of what the rest of the child’s life is going to look like academically.” His goal was to “make sure that kids were given that kind of access to upper-level math in middle school.”

Figure 3 documents the impact of the policy initiative, using administrative data on CMS students from the North Carolina Education Research Data Center. It divides students into five groups of roughly equal size (quintiles), based on their performance on the state’s end-of-grade math assessment as 6th graders. Students are further divided into five age cohorts.

Students whose 6th-grade test scores place them in the top quintile of the distribution are consistently likely to take Algebra I by 8th grade. For students closer to the middle of the 6th-grade distribution, however, Algebra I enrollment rates varied considerably across cohorts. In the cohort entering 7th grade in 2000–01, about half of moderately performing students (those between the 40th and 60th percentile) took Algebra I as 8th graders; low-performing students in the same cohort had virtually no chance of taking algebra in middle school.

Over the next two years, the effect of Smith’s algebra policy can be readily observed. Moderately performing students in the 2002–03 7th-grade cohort had an 85 percent chance of taking Algebra I as 8th graders; even the lowest-performing students had a one-in-six chance.

Just as quickly as the policy was introduced, a return to the status quo appears in the data. The cohort of students entering 7th grade in 2004–05 took Algebra I in 8th grade at rates similar to or even lower than their counterparts in the first cohort. One might conclude from the rapid reversal that the policy did not lead to the anticipated effects. We’ll present the evidence on that score momentarily.

Smith’s initiative was inspired by basic observational evidence. In the United States, as elsewhere, students observed taking advanced courses at an early age tend to accomplish more later in life. In a later interview, Smith cited evidence documenting higher rates of AP course completion and better SAT scores among students who had taken Algebra I by 8th grade. But to infer from this that early entry benefits students, one must assume that the students in the advanced courses were no different from their counterparts, on average, before taking the course. This assumption is clearly misguided. As Figure 3 shows, those who in 2000 had the highest math scores in 6th grade (the top two quintiles) were much more likely than those with lower scores to take Algebra I by 8th grade. While it is theoretically possible that early progression to advanced coursework compounds this advantage, empirically it is very difficult to disentangle this benefit from the profound baseline differences between early and late algebra takers.

The CMS policy initiative provides a rare opportunity to perform this disentangling. Moderately performing students born just two years apart were subjected to radically different algebra placement policies. Were students in the accelerated cohort more likely to perform well in Algebra I? In the standard follow-up courses of Geometry and Algebra II? Figure 4 summarizes the evidence, which is based on student performance on North Carolina’s standardized end-of-course tests in the three subjects. The analysis on which the figure is based isolates the impact of Algebra I acceleration by comparing the performance of otherwise identical students who were subject to different placement policies by virtue of belonging to different age cohorts.

Students perform significantly worse on the state’s Algebra I end-of-course test when they take the course earlier in their career. The decline in performance is approximately one-third of a standard deviation, or 13 percentile points for an average student. The course material forgone in the acceleration process, plus the additional maturity that comes with a year of age, contribute positively to Algebra I performance.

The decline in end-of-course test performance implies that students’ risk of failing the course increase when they are accelerated. One could adopt a relatively sanguine view, arguing that accelerated students who have to retake the course ultimately aren’t any worse-off than those who weren’t accelerated in the first place. And the second effect shown in Figure 4 supports this view, showing that in spite of their worse performance, accelerated students actually become a bit more likely to pass the course on a college-preparatory schedule, that is, no later than their 10th-grade year. For most of these students, the acceleration provided three chances to pass the course rather than two.

It’s a different story when we consider the next outcome: whether students manage to pass the state’s end-of-course test in geometry by the end of their 11th-grade year. Accelerated students were 10 percentage points less likely to meet this threshold, in spite of the fact that acceleration gave them two chances, rather than one, to retake a course in the event they did not receive a passing grade.

By forgoing a year of prealgebraic math, students miss an opportunity to receive some instruction in fundamental topics underlying geometry. Although certain topics in geometry flow naturally from algebra—translating an equation with two unknowns into a line in a two-dimensional plane, for example—there are others that do not. In North Carolina’s standard curriculum, geometry incorporates emphasis on area and volume calculations, trigonometric functions, and proof writing, topic areas with zero coverage in the standard Algebra I curriculum.

To complete the college-preparatory curriculum in North Carolina, students must at a minimum pass the set of courses culminating in Algebra II. Accelerated students were neither more nor less likely to clear this hurdle by the time they would ordinarily complete 12th grade. The data show that many accelerated students who passed Algebra II did so without ever passing Geometry, implying that they had not completed the full college-preparatory math sequence. The struggles of accelerated students undoubtedly explain why CMS so rapidly reversed course, returning to its initial placement policy after only two years of acceleration.

Policy Implications

American public schools have made a clear trade-off over the past few decades. With the twin goals of improving the math performance of the average student and promoting equality, it has made the curriculum more accessible. The drawback to exclusive use of this more accessible curriculum can be observed among the nation’s top-performing students, who are either less willing or less able than their predecessors or their high-achieving global peers to follow the career paths in math, science, and engineering that are the key to innovation and job creation. In the name of preparing more of the workforce to take those jobs, we have harmed the skills of those who might have created them. Although there is some evidence of a payoff from this sacrifice, in the form of marginally better performance among average students, some of the strategies used to help these students have in fact backfired.

To some extent, the nation has reduced the costs of this movement through immigration. Foreign students account for more than half of all doctorate recipients in science and engineering, two-thirds of those in engineering. Many of these degree recipients leave the country when they finish, however, limiting their potential benefit to native-born Americans. Immigration policy reform that emphasizes skills over traditional family reunification criteria, much like the policies in place in Australia, Canada, and other developed nations, could change this pattern.

A second possible policy option would be to implement a curricular reform more radical than tinkering with the timing of already existing courses. Many schools have adopted the so-called “Singapore math” model, which emphasizes in-depth coverage of a limited set of topics. There are concerns, however, regarding whether a curriculum developed in a different cultural and educational context could produce similar results here. Singapore’s public schools, for example, use a year-round calendar, obviating the need to review basic subjects after a summer spent out of the classroom. Evidence also indicates that Singapore’s teachers have a firmer grasp of math than their American counterparts.

The United States need not import its science and engineering innovators, however. It need not borrow a faddish curriculum from a foreign context. And it need not sacrifice the math achievement of the average student in order to cater to superstars. It need only recognize that equalizing the curriculum for all students cannot be accomplished without imposing significant lifelong costs on some and perhaps all students.

Curricular differentiation might, for its part, exacerbate test-score gaps between moderate and high performers, if high performers move ahead more quickly. A narrow-minded focus on the magnitude of the gap, however, can lead to scenarios where the gap is closed primarily by worsening the performance of high-achieving students—bringing the top down—without raising the performance of low-achieving students. Society’s goal should be to improve the status of low-performing students in absolute terms, not just relative to that of their higher-performing peers. A growing body of evidence suggests that this type of improvement is best achieved by sorting students, even at a young age, into relatively homogenous groups, to better enable curricular specialization. Recent results from Chicago, cited above, provide evidence that differentiating the high school mathematics curriculum can have long-run benefits, even for students assigned to remedial coursework.

Not all children are equally prepared to embark on a rigorous math curriculum on the first day of kindergarten, and there are no realistic policy alternatives to change this simple fact. Rather than wish differences among students away, a rational policy for the 21st century will respond to those variations, tailoring lessons to children’s needs. This strategy promises to provide the next generation of prospective scientists and engineers with the training they need to create jobs, and the next generation of workers with the skills they need to qualify for them.

Jacob Vigdor is professor of public policy and economics at Duke University.

Many upper-middle-class parents are willing to have their children be “the first” white kids in a school and are comfortable with the idea of their child being a superminority. When the idea takes on an actual shape, however, diversity’s nonsuperficial elements often batter their sense of right and wrong, and they leave. After interviewing more than 50 of these gentrifiers about their school-choice process, I concluded that it is the substantive differences in parenting styles between the white, upper-middle-class parents and the nonwhite, less-affluent parents that are hindering school integration, as these parenting styles directly affect school culture and expectations. This article explores how the disparate cultures found in gentrifying neighborhoods clash in schools, and the pivotal role school leaders play in determining whether integration succeeds or fails, based on their ability and willingness to bridge the two worlds.

Culture Clash

The cultural differences between the newcomers and the old-timers in gentrifying neighborhoods can be easily, though inadequately, summarized: white, upper-middle-class families prefer a progressive and discursive style of interaction with their children, both at home and in school, and lower-income, nonwhite families prefer a traditional or authoritarian style of interaction with their children in these same venues. Annette Lareau’s book, Unequal Childhoods, delves deeply into these contrasting styles and how they play out over a lifetime. In my research on school choice, one cultural disparity came up repeatedly as a reason for why white parents leave the schools they are trying to integrate. They were put off by near-constant yelling—from principals, teachers, school aides, and nonwhite parents who come to drop off and pick up their kids. The white parents were surprised to discover that not only is the authoritarian end of the schooling spectrum alive, which would be tolerable if not ideal, but also that their gentrifying neighborhood schools exhibit what these parents perceive to be an extreme and outdated education environment, characterized by strict discipline with yelling adults.

Avery (pseudonyms are used for all of my interviewees), a white mom who was clearly resigned to the pervasiveness of this norm at her newly integrating school, explained that she was leaving “primarily because of the discipline issues. I figured the older, the higher up you got, the more effect there would be on him. I didn’t know enough about the upper-grade teachers to automatically be comfortable, because I know there were some yellers in the bunch. And I didn’t want him to get a yeller. It’s a crapshoot every year who you’re going to get.”

Amber was “appalled” by what she “saw in the hallways and in the cafeteria with the way some of the teachers would speak to students.” She remembers many teachers “screaming at the students,” and quickly concluded that “the pre-K was fine, but there was no way she was going to see the kindergarten year of that school.”

Erich used the word “insanity” to express his disdain for the yelling and strictness norm, which he attributed primarily to the administration: “There was just a lot of yelling in the halls, a lot of screaming at the kids. If the kids were acting up they would be punished by not allowing them to go to recess. You need to give them more recess time if they are acting up! Punishing the whole class if one kid is acting up is insanity to me.”

Cindy’s son “hated” school, and she attributed it to a classroom that “was kind of disorganized. There was a lot of yelling and there was no standard of discipline in place.” Clearly trained in diplomatic speak, Cindy expanded on how the yelling drove her out of the school: “I do think it is a little strange when you’re walking down the halls of the school and you hear teachers shouting and screaming ‘shut up’ at the kids. That is not a good thing. Our kids get yelled at enough at home, but to have to go to school and get yelled at too, it is not a good thing. So, I just wanted out of the school at that point.”

Meredith was not just concerned about “the policing of kids” and the impact this was having on her own children, she was especially aggrieved by the way the yelling seemed to target the young black boys in the school. She described a scene in which the black boys were “being treated like prisoners, lined up against the wall, like they’re being incarcerated already!” She was clearly pained recalling this story: “It was so tragic, so, so tragic. You know I was so aware of my own privilege in the situation, knowing I could pull my kids out at any time. And there are some parents for whom this is their chance!”

Lisbeth was equally horrified by the way the school aides’ yelling always seemed to hone in on the black boys, and she told her principal, “They would never dare speak that way to my children. They speak that way to the black boys. So not only is it horrible for everybody, but they’re reinforcing a stereotype that black boys can be spoken to in a way that white boys and white girls are not spoken to.”

In Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit explores the dissimilar styles of communication exhibited by people from different racial and class backgrounds, and how these differences might have a negative impact on learning. For example, Delpit sees a problem when a typical white, middle-class teacher uses a passive communication style with her low-income black students, such as asking them to take their seats instead of telling them to take their seats. She argues that this passive communication style is confusing because of low-income black children’s expectations of how authority figures should act, and this mismatch hinders their academic progress. She asserts that white, liberal educators who value student-centered pedagogy and soft, conversant, negotiated power end up alienating and confusing children who are used to explicit instructions and assertive, strong authority figures, a parenting style more common in the black community. My research suggests that this cultural mismatch also appears to work the other way. The teachers in predominantly poor, minority schools, who are reportedly mostly black and have adopted the more teacher-centered, authoritarian style of instruction that they view as appropriate for their students, are turning off white, upper-middle-class parents who want school climates similar to their own progressive homes, where problems are discussed. The “yelling” described by my interviewees could simply be a misperception of Delpit’s described assertiveness. What they think of as “yelling” might just be a firmness and directness that these parents are not used to, that is not part of their culture. Regardless, it hampers integration, because the white, upper-middle-class parents who send their children to schools in their gentrifying neighborhood do not want them spoken to in that way, whatever its label, and they often reconsider their schooling decision.

Different Sensibilities

The parents I interviewed who were taking their children out of their gentrifying neighborhood’s school shared stories of cultural dissonance that were minor affairs, but that crystallized for them the discomfort they felt as newcomers, and their inability to find a niche. In one example, the newcomers were trying to organize volunteers to come in to the cafeteria at lunchtime to help manage what they called “the chaos,” only to be kept out by fear of child molestation. As Meredith recounts with both humor and horror, some of the nonwhite families in the school responded to the lunchroom volunteer proposal with, “How do we know who is coming into the school? We need to protect our children! How do we know these people aren’t going to molest our children?” To which Meredith sarcastically replied (in her mind only, of course), “Yeah, right, that is something we really need to be afraid of!”

Avery explained to me how the lower-income parents in the school wanted these lunchroom parent volunteers to go through a Learning Leaders program before they could come in and open milk cartons. She was baffled by the resistance to something that seemed so innocent and helpful: “You know, it was basically bringing hands and ideas. It was not trying to change curriculum, nothing dramatic. It was simply, ‘Let’s ease the hardest part of the day, when you have no teachers and few adult hands in the lunchroom.’ We were literally going in and opening up milk cartons and handing out sewing cards. And yet somewhere along the line, there was an ego that got trip-wired. I don’t know what it was. But all of a sudden, ‘Oh, you have to go through the Learning Leaders program before you can even volunteer in the lunchroom! No, you cannot touch the students at all!’ I heard yelling at a meeting, from another parent, ‘I don’t want you in the lunchroom opening my kid’s milk unless you’ve gone through Learning Leaders! I don’t want you touching my kid!’ Like heaven forbid you put your arm around a kid’s shoulder!”

Since my study focused on the perceptions of the white, upper-middle-class families, I don’t know why there was such great concern about child molestation at this school. The parents I interviewed who were at the school at the time didn’t know either, and in the course of debating this parent lunchroom volunteer proposal, they never found out. It was as though they couldn’t have a conversation about it. Each side was so taken aback by the other’s sensibilities that there was no room for discussion.

Principals Matter

The reaction of the principal in a gentrifying neighborhood’s school to the arrival of more-demanding parents largely determined whether the white, upper-middle-class families stayed at the school in spite of the yelling and other incidents, or left. Those school leaders skilled at bridging gentrification’s cultural divide were able to retain the newcomers. They assured the white parents that they were welcomed and valued members of the school community, even as they continued to hold the respect of the families who had long been part of the school. This took political savvy, and perhaps a special talent for code switching. It was easier to do in schools with a diverse nonwhite population, and in neighborhoods that were further along in the gentrification process, where the battle over who it belongs to isn’t as raw. Interviewees described those school leaders who were unable to meet the needs and expectations of both groups of parents quite negatively and identified the principals as the ultimate reason for their departure.

At Timothy’s school, for example, all of the white families I interviewed rated the teachers “very good,” “great,” or “excellent,” so the principal, Dr. Fox, had a solid starting point for retaining the new families. But the parents described Dr. Fox as exacerbating the cultural tensions, tensions stemming mostly from different expectations about lunch and recess, with his “race baiting” and by “bad-mouthing some parents in the neighborhood to other parents.” He reportedly said things like, “Oh these nouveau riche parents want to come in and take over, remember how our neighborhood used to be before all these nouveau riche people showed up?’” One parent described him as “acting like Al Sharpton.” Another said he fostered an “us-against-them environment,” and he allegedly sent “horrible, stupid, hostile, mean, petty, threatening” e-mails to two of the white parents at the school, accusing them of “trying to bring down a strong black man.”

Parents complained that Dr. Fox tried to turn any criticism about the school into a racial issue. Shawn described him as “thwarting every attack by saying, ‘It’s these white people, they’re racist, they want private school, they want this, they want that, they want to make this school into a cooperative,’ things that make no sense at all.” But if his goal was to drive away the white families, his tactics were effective. As Shawn concludes, “If you say enough of it, and people want to believe you, they’ll believe you. So, eventually, we all just sort of left, in fear and in shame. Having to take my daughter out of the school, it hugely undermines what I’m trying to teach her about race relations. It’s really weird; it’s a weird situation.”

Power and Protocol

Weirdness is a common theme in parents’ recollections of school leaders who were both unwelcoming and unaccommodating. Cindy explained how her son got in trouble in his kindergarten class for raising his hand during a lesson, “because apparently you can’t do that.” He now lived in fear of getting in trouble and having to sit under the big T for Time Out. Cindy found this disciplining for hand raising so “bizarre” that she took her concerns to the principal. Dr. Caraway didn’t think it was strange at all and did nothing to help mediate the classroom culture disagreement between one of her teachers and one of her parents.

Kate was driven to tears within the first week of school by Dr. Caraway. She unknowingly violated protocol by inviting fellow pre-K families to a pizza party without first getting Dr. Caraway’s approval to distribute the invitation. It was Dr. Caraway’s peculiarity about the situation that Kate found so maddening, as she describes, “We were at a meeting with parents about procedures and things, and the principal was talking about how—I mean the way she was talking you would think that somebody had distributed some kind of communist propaganda—she is talking about how somebody had the audacity to distribute something without it going through her office! And I’m thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, how horrible, what did this person do?’ I had no idea that she was talking about my pizza party invitation. Then once it finally dawned on me, I don’t know how I made the connection that she was talking about me inviting my child’s classmates to pizza, on a Saturday in the park, but I went up to her and tried to talk to her calmly about it. She was just so defensive, trying to hold on so tight to whatever little power she had left. She just made me feel like I had done something awful. I invited the kids to pizza! I just don’t get it!”

Paula described an even stranger interaction with this same principal. She and a few other families in the school organized getting Barnes & Noble to give $4,000 worth of book cards so all the teachers would have a $100 gift card for books. According to Paula, Dr. Caraway thought they were “trying to bribe the teachers and turn them against her,” so she left a message on Paula’s answering machine telling her, “Oh you can’t do this, the DOE, it’s against the rules,” and then, thinking she had hung up, continued to say on the machine, “Just wait til Ms. —— and Ms. —— (referring to Paula and her friend) hear that! Ha ha ha ha ha (cackling like a witch).” Paula concludes, “It was so bad, it was straight out of the movies.”

Navigating Diversity

It isn’t clear what drove these principals to reject the white, upper-middle-class parents and their attempts to bring resources to the schools. Some interviewees thought these school leaders felt threatened and were trying to hold onto their power base; some simply thought the various principals were “not the brightest bulb in the box,” “insane,” “crazy,” “incompetent.” A few parents blamed themselves and thought that perhaps their tactics were insensitive to the existing school culture and off-putting to the nonwhite, lower-income families in the school. Despite their having the best intentions, given the cultural divide, they simply couldn’t find a way to enter the school and offer what they had without inciting tension.

Paula thought that successful integrators “showed the proper respect to teachers and parents,” whereas those who were not successful “felt like they were a little better than everybody, they didn’t mesh with the old parents, they didn’t know how the dynamics of the school really worked.” Among these dynamics were the “school is your job, home is my job” attitude common among lower-class parents. This was truly confusing to upper-middle-class parents, who had never really interacted with families with this attitude about school.

Avery offered a critique of herself and her peers for possibly failing to have the proper “cultural sensitivity” in their integration efforts. Her reflection on what happened is an attempt to take some of the blame off of the school leader: “There wasn’t enough, honestly, ego stroking or catering, there was not enough acknowledgment. It came across as, ‘You’re broken and you need fixing,’ rather than, ‘We’ve got extra hands, we’ve got extra energy, let’s build up what you already have.’ The perception, for whatever reason, was, ‘You’re judging what we have as inadequate.’ I think that there needed to be a bit more weaving of the parents together. Before saying, ‘We’re doing this,’ there needed to be more weaving.”

The weaving together of extremely different groups of people is not easy, especially when there is an undeniable hierarchy. Those at the economic top can exercise their privilege and exit a situation when it proves untenable. Despite believing in equality, they discover in their gentrifying neighborhoods that this concept isn’t pure, and diversity isn’t always a pleasant and stimulating panoply of interesting experiences. Non-superficial diversity can be extremely difficult to manage, especially in a school setting, where relationships are intimate. Overcoming the attendant challenges requires an adroit school leader who understands the value of racial and socioeconomic integration, who can infuse optimism into the integration skeptics within the school community, and who can skillfully shepherd such a motley flock. Without that kind of leadership, parents are too likely to reach the same conclusion as Peter, an urban dad who was bused for integration as a child, and who now struggles to navigate the parental responsibility of educating his own children: “I have my doubts about integration. It’s supposed to be about building understanding, but I find that it just makes people want to be even further apart.”

Jennifer Burns Stillman is a research analyst at the Office of Innovation in the New York City Department of Education and author of Gentrification and Schools: The Process of Integration When Whites Reverse Flight (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), from which this article is drawn.

Sometimes called “exam schools,” these academically selective institutions have long been a part of the American secondary-education landscape. The schools are diverse in origin and purpose. No single catalyst describes why or how they began as or morphed into academically selective institutions. Some arose from a desire (among parents, superintendents, school boards, governors, legislators) to provide a self-contained, high-powered college-prep education for able youngsters in a community, region, or state. Others started through philanthropic ventures or as university initiatives. A number of them were products of the country’s efforts to desegregate—and integrate—its public-education system, prompted by court orders, civil rights enforcers and activists, or federal “magnet school” dollars.

Exam schools are sometimes controversial because “selectivity” is hard to reconcile with the mission of “public” education. Even school-choice advocates typically assert that, while families should be free to choose their children’s schools, schools have no business selecting their pupils. Other people are troubled by reports of insufficient “diversity” among the youngsters admitted to such schools.

With such criticisms in mind, we set out to explore this unique and little-understood sector of the education landscape. Wanting first to determine how many there are and where they are located, we also wondered whether the “exam school” could be a worthy response to the dilemma of how best to develop the talents of our nation’s high-performing and high-potential youth in a climate consumed with gap closing and leaving no child behind. Could the selective public high school play a larger role in educating our country’s high-achieving pupils?

Nearly all schools we surveyed engaged in earnest, wide-ranging outreach to expand or diversify their applicant pools.

Who Goes There?

Almost all the schools have far more applicants than they can accommodate. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed accept fewer than half of their applicants. About one-quarter also reported rising numbers of applications in recent years, perhaps due to media attention, awards, school performance, population growth, and the closing of underperforming schools in the area. Respondents also noted changes in the composition of their applicant pools, mainly increases in the number who are female, Asian, or Hispanic. Several schools reported a decrease in the number of white applicants in recent years. Nearly all schools we surveyed engaged in earnest, wide-ranging outreach to expand or diversify their applicant pools. A few also engage in “affirmative action” within the selection process.

The schools’ actual admission criteria and procedures are interesting, variegated, and somewhat sensitive. Some school officials are uneasy about the practice of selectivity, given possible allegations of “elitism” and anxiety over pupil diversity. Still, most rely primarily on applicants’ prior school performance and scores on various tests.

Viewed as a whole, selective public high schools have a surprising demographic profile. Their overall student body is only slightly less poor than the universe of U.S. public school students. Some schools, we expected, would enroll many Asian American youngsters, but we were struck when they turned out to comprise 21 percent of the schools’ total enrollment, though they make up only 5 percent of students in all public high schools. More striking still: African Americans are also “overrepresented” in these schools, comprising 30 percent of enrollments versus 17 percent in the larger high-school population. Hispanic students are correspondingly underrepresented, but so are white youngsters. Individual exam schools often qualify as racially “imbalanced”: in nearly 70 percent of them, half or more of the students are of one race.

Inside the Schools

The schools we visited were serious, purposeful places: competitive but supportive, energized yet calm. Behavior problems (save for cheating and plagiarism) were minimal and students attended regularly, often even when ill. The kids wanted to be there, and were motivated to succeed. (Bear in mind that many of the schools seek such qualities in their applicants.)

In general, the schools structured their schedules in ways that facilitate in-depth learning and prepare students for the typical college schedule: staggered start times, eight-hour days, class periods of varying lengths, fewer class meeting days per week, and dedicated time for collaborative and independent research projects. Most classrooms we observed were alive, engaged places in which teachers appeared to have high expectations for their pupils and planned their instruction around the assumption that students can and want to learn.

Most schools offered Advanced Placement (AP) courses or the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. Several noted that they “only offer honors and AP courses.” A few schools noted that students do not take AP courses per se, either because they take actual college classes (at host colleges or through dual-enrollment arrangements) or because they earn college credit for advanced courses taught within the school itself.

We also came upon other kinds of specialized and advanced courses, in addition to or in lieu of AP and IB. Schools with a STEM focus or university affiliations, for example, reported an array of upper-level science and math courses that few ordinary high schools—even very large ones—could offer. Among them were Human Infectious Diseases, Chemical Pharmacology, Logic and Game Theory, and Vector Calculus.

There’s lots of homework but ample extracurricular opportunities, too. We encountered literary magazines, robotics competitions, sophisticated music and theater offerings, most of the usual clubs and organizations, plenty of field trips, and no dearth of sports—though champion football and basketball teams were rare!

Our site visits revealed faculties consisting mostly of intelligent, dedicated individuals, well grounded in their fields. Turnover was low. Most teachers belong to unions and are paid on the “contract scale,” but many receive additional compensation for longer days and extra duties. They tended to come early, stay late, and design complex assignments and lesson plans that may take as much time for them to formulate and grade as for their students to complete.

One assumption about selective public schools is that they have more and “better” teachers. It turns out, however, that their pupil-teacher ratio is actually a bit higher (17:1) than in all public high schools (15:1). (One likely reason: not much “special ed.”) The percentage with doctoral degrees is higher, too (11 vs. 1.5 percent), as is the percentage with master’s degrees (66 vs. 46 percent.) Nontrivial numbers of teachers also have experience in industry, science, and universities.

Nearly two-thirds of survey respondents indicated that teacher-hiring decisions are made at the school level. As for the criteria they employ in selecting faculty, of greatest importance are subject-matter knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and expertise, and the ability to engage adolescent learners. Many schools also seek proven classroom-management strategies, compatible teaching philosophies, technology prowess, and collegiality. Some require demonstration lessons and interviews by current teachers (and sometimes students). And some criteria are clearly aligned with the schools’ singular missions and student bodies (e.g., PhD in biology, training in AP instruction, ability to work with gifted pupils).

The schools’ principals hailed from various backgrounds. As a group, however, they exhibited traits that one would expect of leaders of successful high schools that in some cases are the pride of their communities and in every case are closely watched: extraordinarily dedicated and hard-working individuals who are also politically astute.

Schools with a STEM focus reported an array of upper-level science and math courses that few ordinary high schools could offer.

Governance and Finance

The schools are remarkably varied when it comes to history, mission, structure, and organizational arrangements. The oldest among them—New York’s Townsend Harris High School, Boston Latin School—have been around in one form or another for centuries, while half the schools for which we have such information are creations of the past two decades. With rare exceptions (mainly in Louisiana), however, the schools are not charters. Although they’re “schools of choice,” they are operated in more top-down fashion by districts, states, or sometimes universities rather than as freestanding and self-propelled institutions under their states’ charter laws.

We asked survey respondents about waivers and exemptions from the customary rules and regulations within which public schools operate. Because many of the schools on our list occupy distinctive niches within their local communities, districts, or states, we were also curious whether their teachers are fully subject to the provisions of collective-bargaining contracts. Most certainly are, but almost one in five is not (or not fully) subject to seniority-based staffing decisions.

A handful of responding schools said either that they are not required to hire teachers with state certification, or that other credentials (e.g., PhD in relevant field) preempt certification, at least for several years. In general, however, routine regulations and contract provisions prevail. We were struck by how few schools reported explicit freedom from them. Principals did say, however, that they could usually “work things out” as needed.

The schools vary widely in funding levels and other resources, from those that can barely make ends meet on per-pupil allotments that are lower than other high schools in the area to a few schools that amass large budgets from multiple sources and boast extraordinary technology and staffing. But all the schools we visited were worried about budget cuts associated with economic distress and pressure on state and local resources.

Leaders of these schools felt doubly vulnerable as attention—and resources—were concentrated on low-performing schools and students. (“Smart kids will do fine, regardless, and in any case are not today’s priority” was the undertone they picked up.) Many had become accustomed to having at least some extra resources, often for transportation or smaller classes. While some schools benefit from certain categorical funds (e.g., magnet dollars, STEM, or tech-voc dollars), many don’t qualify for other state and federal programs, such as Title I, bilingual education, and special education. Most engage in supplementary private fundraising to sustain resources for transportation, smaller classes, or other school features to which they and their students, parents, and teachers are accustomed.

Despite such challenges, the schools seem to enjoy levels of support that mitigate the budgetary distress and bolster their resilience. Most, for example, benefit—politically and in other ways, such as fundraising—from exceptionally devoted friends, sometimes in high places, including alums, local politicians, business and university leaders, even journalists. Many have ties with outside organizations, including universities, labs, and businesses, which bring expertise and some resources into the school, afford it some political protection, and supply it with venues for student internships and independent projects.

Some schools are also viewed as magnets for economic development and talent recruitment for their community or state. School-board members and district leaders believe that the presence of the school encourages middle- and upper-middle-class families to stay in town and stick with public education.

Perhaps most importantly, the schools are blessed with overwhelming advocacy from alumni and the parents of their students, many of whom feel that their children are receiving a private school–quality education at public expense. That parents strongly believe the schools provide safety (physical, emotional, intellectual), short- and long-term academic and career opportunities, and social benefits for their children will likely go a long way toward ensuring the survival of the schools, if not their expansion or replication.

The AP Quandary

Our site visits revealed faculties consisting mostly of intelligent, dedicated individuals, well grounded in their fields.

Nearly every school on our list offers a host of AP courses and has a huge number of students enrolling in them (either by requirement or by choice) and racking up solid scores on the AP exams. At northern Virginia’s celebrated Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, for example, students take an average of seven AP tests—four are all but universal—and do extremely well, earning scores of 3 or better on a mind-blowing 98 percent of the 3,357 AP exams that they sat for in 2010. Here and at many (though not all) schools on our list, students compete—and are pressed by parents—to rack up as many AP credits as possible.

Yet today’s scramble for entry into top-tier colleges plus the premium placed (by multiple players) on taking and passing AP exams plus standardized-test-based accountability pressures emanating from government do not add up to an optimal environment for these high schools. Here they don’t raise standards as much as they standardize. They press on students, parents, and teachers in ways that are plausibly said to discourage experimentation, risk-taking, unconventional thinking, unique courses, and individualized research, as well as pedagogical creativity and curricular innovation.

We spoke with frustrated teachers and exasperated administrators, well aware that they’re riding the back of an AP tiger from which it’s hard to dismount, especially for a public school that must weigh the priorities of parents, taxpayers, and voters. We talked with highly motivated students, too, who were (as one young man put it) “exhausted” from carrying course loads that included as many as six AP classes a semester in pursuit of a high school transcript that would wow the admissions committees of elite universities.

Some school leaders are pushing back, encouraging teachers to develop challenging courses that don’t fit the AP mold, or offering college-level courses shorn of the AP label. But only a few—such as the statewide, residential Illinois Math and Science Academy—have succeeded in putting their own stamp on the entire curriculum and withstanding the AP tsunami.

At northern Virginia's celebrated Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, students take an average of seven AP tests and do extremely well, earning scores of 3 or better on a mind-blowing 98 percent of the 3,357 AP exams that they sat for in 2010.

Are Exam Schools Effective?

The selection criteria employed by these schools all but guarantee students who are likely to do well academically, which raises the question of whether the schools’ generally impressive outcomes are caused by what happens inside them—their standards, curricula, teachers, homework—or are largely a function of what the kids bring with them. The schools’ peer culture likely has some influence on their pupils, too, as do high teacher expectations. Much like private schools, which are more apt to trade on their reputations and college-placement records than on hard evidence of what students learn in their classrooms, the schools on our list generally don’t know—in any rigorous, formal sense—how much their students learn or how much difference the school itself makes. As one puzzled principal put it, “Do the kids do well because of us or in spite of us? We’re not sure.”

The schools themselves are only partly culpable, however. They’ve seldom been asked to justify themselves in terms of learning gains. They’re flooded with eager applicants, media attention, and accolades. They can proudly demonstrate intricate research projects, cases full of academic prizes, science-fair and robotics-competition ribbons, National Merit lists, and messages from grateful alums. But they have access to little “value-added” data. Nearly all the tests their pupils take show “mastery”—like earning a 5 on an AP exam or racking up a lofty SAT score—rather than serving as before-and-after assessments. And insofar as their states impose graduation tests as prerequisites for receiving diplomas, the passing score is generally a cinch for these students.

The research community has mostly ignored these schools, too. One recent study by Duke economist Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Joshua D. Angrist and Parag A. Pathak of MIT—the first of its kind, say the authors—set out to explore this territory. Using a sophisticated methodology to look for value-added effects (gauged by scores on state tests and SAT and AP exams) in six prominent “exam schools” in Boston and New York City, they didn’t find much to applaud:

Our results offer little evidence of an achievement gain for those admitted to an exam school…. In spite of their exposure to much higher-achieving peers and a more challenging curriculum, marginal students admitted to exam schools generally do no better on a variety of standardized tests.

A similar study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie was confined to the three oldest and most famous of New York’s “exam schools” and used similar methods. It found that “attending an exam school increases the rigor of high school courses taken and the probability that a student graduates with an advanced high school degree” but “has little impact on Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, college enrollment, or college graduation.”

These pioneering studies are sobering, albeit limited both by their focus on “marginal” students (those barely over and just under the schools’ entry-score cutoffs) and by their reliance on short-term measures of effectiveness. The schools’ effects on other kinds of outcomes and over the longer haul are simply unknown, as are their effects on youngsters whose exam scores were well above the cutoff. This is obviously a ripe area for further investigation and analysis, but today it’s legitimate to observe, even on the basis of this limited research, that the burden is shifting to the schools and their supporters to measure and make public whatever academic benefit they do bestow on their students versus what similar young people learn in other settings. The marketplace signals, however, are undeniable: far more youngsters want to attend these schools than they can accommodate. Many applicants go to exceptional lengths to prepare for the admissions gauntlet, which may well lead to more learning in earlier grades than the same youngsters might have absorbed without this incentive. And we also know that most of those who are admitted stick with it through graduation; an average graduation rate of 91 percent was reported by the schools responding to our survey.

Would America Benefit from More Exam Schools?

Perhaps most importantly, the schools are blessed with overwhelming advocacy from alumni and parents.

At a time when American education is striving to customize its offerings to students’ interests and needs, and to afford families more choices among schools and education programs, the market is pointing to the skimpy supply of schools of this kind. Moreover, if the best of such schools are hothouses for incubating a disproportionate share of tomorrow’s leaders in science, technology, entrepreneurship, and other sectors that bear on society’s long-term prosperity and well-being, we’d be better off as a country if we had more of them.

This challenge, however, goes far beyond the specialized world of selective high schools. It’s evident from multiple studies that our K–12 education system overall is doing a mediocre job of serving its “gifted and talented” youngsters and is paying too little attention to creating appealing and viable opportunities for advanced learning. What policymakers have seen as more urgent needs (for basic literacy, adequate teachers, sufficient skills to earn a living, for example) have generally prevailed. The argument for across-the-board talent development has been trumped by “closing the achievement gap” and focusing on test scores at the low end.

American education could and should be doing much more to help every youngster achieve all that he or she is capable of. A major push to strengthen the cultivation of future leaders is overdue, and any such push should include careful attention to the “whole school” model. Such institutions can develop a critical mass of instructional tools and equipment, financial resources, reputations, alumni/ae, and outside supporters that is hard to assemble for a smallish program within a comprehensive school. And the critical-mass effect is visible in the curriculum, too. Instead of isolated honors and AP classes, single-purpose schools can amass entire sequences at that level. They can also develop courses that go beyond AP offerings, do more with individual student projects, concentrate their counseling efforts on college placement, and muster teams of eager students (and teachers) for science competitions and the like.

Insofar as students benefit from peer effects in classrooms, corridors, and clubs, and insofar as being surrounded by other smart kids challenges these students (and wards off allegations of “nerdiness”), schools with overall cultures of high academic attainment are apt to yield more such benefits.

Finally, viewed as a community asset, having an entire school of this sort to show parents, colleges, employers, firms looking to relocate, real estate agents, and others can bring a kind of élan or appeal to a place that may also help with economic development, the retention of middle-class families, and more. It’s also a fact, however, that in times when resources are tight, communities and states are unlikely to hasten to create many more selective high schools, even where the reasons for doing so may be compelling.

Whether we deploy many more “whole schools” of this kind or opt mainly for specialized courses and programs within ordinary schools, the kinds of rigorous and advanced education that selective-admission schools seek to provide, and the youngsters that they serve, need to rise higher in our national consciousness and our policy priorities.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Jessica Hockett is an educational consultant specializing in differentiated instruction, curriculum design, and teacher professional development. This article is based on the authors’ forthcoming book, Exam Schools: Inside America’s Most Selective Public High Schools (Princeton University Press), a joint undertaking of the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K‒12 Education and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

With so much activity, school choice moved from the margins of education reform debates and became the headline. In January 2012, Washington Post education reporter Michael Alison Chandler said school choice has become “a mantra of 21st-century education reform,” citing policies across the country that have traditional public schools competing for students alongside charter schools and private schools. “It took us 20 years to pass the first 20 private school–choice programs in America and in the 21st year we passed 7 new programs,” says Scott Jensen with the American Federation for Children (AFC), a school-choice advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “So we went from passing, on average, one each year, to seven in one fell swoop.” Programs enacted in 2011 include

• a tax-credit scholarship program in North Carolina

• Arizona’s education savings account system for K–12 students

• Maine’s new charter school law, which brings the total number of states, along with the District of Columbia, with charter schools to 42

• a voucher program in Indiana with broad eligibility rules.

School-choice laws also passed in Wisconsin, Washington, D.C, Oklahoma, and Ohio, some as new reforms and some that expanded existing options.

“Legal challenges to school-choice programs have become as inevitable and painful as death and taxes,” says Clint Bolick.

Now, in 2012, it is still not clear whether the legislative advance of school-choice bills in 2011 made more education options available or simply ushered in a bevy of new lawsuits. Maybe both. Many of the laws, including Indiana’s voucher program, Arizona’s savings accounts, and a new voucher program in Douglas County, Colorado, were challenged in court shortly after passage. These legal challenges stalled reform and kept the school choice movement fighting for a clear identity. Is school choice just for certain student groups, like low-income children, or can it actually change the public school system?

For some laws, such as Indiana’s, a legal challenge did not prevent thousands of students from participating in the program’s first year. In other cases, as with Colorado’s voucher initiative, courts shut down the program just as the school year began, leaving hundreds of students uncertain as to whether they could remain at their new schools.

“Legal challenges to school-choice programs have become as inevitable and painful as death and taxes,” says Clint Bolick, vice president for litigation at the Phoenix-based Goldwater Institute. Bolick has defended school-choice laws around the country, from Arizona to Ohio to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We should view legal challenges as a good sign that we are accomplishing something,” he says.

Perhaps 2011 was an unusual year for school reform only because of the number of school-choice programs enacted, which was significant by any measure, but not because students swarmed to the new programs (Indiana is a notable exception). We must wait to see which laws will survive legal challenges and whether students will enroll while judges consider the programs’ constitutionality. While school-choice laws arrived en masse in 2011, and the laws that passed are bolder than ever, lawsuits keep the systemic change reformers hope for just out of reach.

Vouchers

On May 5, 2011, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels signed into law the most inclusive voucher program in American history.

On May 5, 2011, Indiana governor Mitch Daniels signed into law the most inclusive voucher program in American history. Indiana’s “Choice Scholarships” were designed with broad eligibility rules that include middle-class and low-income students.

Voucher programs are often designed with “means testing” in mind, which specifies the income level for eligible students’ families. Typically, means-tested programs limit student eligibility to students from families with household income levels at or below a specified percentage of the poverty line.

The voucher amounts and household income levels for Indiana’s program are on a sliding scale. For example, a household of two parents with a combined income of $42,643 and two children would receive vouchers worth 90 percent of the state’s per-pupil funding figure (or approximately $4,500). As long as household income does not exceed $63,964, the two children in this household could still receive scholarships worth 50 percent of the state’s per-pupil amount.

“Indiana’s program is significant because it bridges the divide between advocates of means-tested choice and advocates of universal choice,” says Bolick.

Indiana education commissioner Tony Bennett said he “fully expected litigation.”

Indiana education commissioner Tony Bennett said he “fully expected litigation,” and the state teachers union filed a legal challenge in July 2011. Over the next several months, the lawsuit progressed through Indiana’s court system, and in March 2012, the Indiana State Supreme Court announced it would hear the case. As this article went to press, no date had been set.

Bennett’s expectations were likely shaped by the history of voucher programs in states such as Ohio, Florida, and Arizona. In those states, teachers unions and other education associations challenged and—in Florida and Arizona—overturned vouchers. In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris (concerning Ohio’s program) that vouchers do not violate the U.S. Constitution, but the decision hasn’t prevented courtroom battles from taking place from state to state over the past decade.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding Indiana’s legal challenge, 3,919 students from 185 Indiana school districts signed up in the program’s first year. This marks the largest inaugural enrollment in a voucher program in U.S. history. More than 250 private schools have been approved by the department to receive voucher students. Even with the inclusive eligibility rules, the Indiana Department of Education reports that 85 percent of new voucher students qualify for the federal free or reduced-priced lunch program. This indicates that these students are from families that would not otherwise be able to access private schools.

The school board in Douglas County, Colorado, located about 30 miles south of Denver, also created a voucher program in 2011. The American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for the Separation of Church and State immediately challenged the program in court, and Denver district court judge Michael A Martinez issued a permanent injunction in August. Douglas County’s program is unique because board members designed it as a district initiative, rather than working with state lawmakers to draft a bill. The system would have awarded up to 500 students vouchers worth $4,575.

Leslie Hiner, vice president at the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, says, “Those who oppose parental choice, they’ll always fight back, but that’s OK.” The foundation has monitored school-choice developments in the U.S. since 1996, and Hiner says Colorado’s program is evidence of a shift in opinion among education leaders.

“The realization was that the only thing that really matters is that every child has an opportunity to learn. If you keep that out in front of you at all times, then it’s easy for a public school board in Colorado to pass a voucher because they want all kids to learn,” she says.

Education Savings Accounts

In 2011, Arizona enacted a system of education savings accounts, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts (ESAs), for students with special needs (see sidebar). Families can use the money for private school tuition, or choose from a list of approved education expenses that includes textbooks and online classes. By September 2011, 75 students had completed their applications and enrolled in the program. Participation doubled in December when the department reopened the application window.

Bolick says ESAs are the future of school choice. “ESAs are a real game changer,” he says. “They have the potential to completely change the delivery of educational services while at the same time surviving legal challenges that have forestalled voucher programs.” Bolick and the Goldwater Institute, along with Arizona schools superintendent John Huppenthal and the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm, are defending the program from a lawsuit filed by the Arizona teachers union and state school boards association.

“Empowerment Scholarship Accounts are just another form of these vouchers trying to bypass the law,” Arizona Education Association president Andrew Morrill told the local ABC News affiliate. The Arizona Supreme Court ruled vouchers unconstitutional in 2009, citing state constitutional provisions prohibiting public funding for private or religious purposes.

“In a state rich in both public and private choice, parents overwhelmingly choose public schools,” he said.

Yet ESAs continue to push the envelope of education reform, consistent with the theme of 2011’s other school-choice programs. If Indiana’s vouchers are notable for how many students are eligible and Colorado’s program because district leaders designed it, ESAs are remarkable for the variety of allowable uses. ESAs are distinct from vouchers because parents can use the funds for different education services, while vouchers can only be used for private school tuition. The program adds a new element to debates over education reform: Can families use state funds to customize a child’s education?

Arizona has a charter school law, three tax-credit scholarship programs, and an open enrollment law that allows students to choose from schools across the state, so the question of whether parents should be able to choose a school for their child is settled. The question has become whether the system can successfully enable parents to shape a child’s entire schooling experience.

The Parent Trigger

“Things got so bad in L.A. that parents recognized no one is coming to their rescue,” says Ben Austin.

Among the school choice-based education reforms enacted in recent years, the Parent Trigger Act may be the most drastic. As passed in California, Texas, and Mississippi, the Trigger Act allows parents to petition to convert a school to a charter school, close the school, or replace school leadership. At least half of the parents with students in a school must sign the petition. Though three states have passed laws since 2010, most of the “trigger” activity occurred in California in 2011.

“The basic reason why it happened when it did was that things got so bad in Los Angeles that parents began looking around and recognized that no one is coming to their rescue,” says Ben Austin of Parent Revolution, the Los Angeles–based organization leading the movement (see “Not Your Mother’s PTA,” features, Winter 2012).

“If things are going to change, we are going to have to be ‘Superman,’” he says, referring to the title of the 2010 documentary film Waiting for Superman, which drew attention to the long waiting lists at many charter schools. Austin’s group is “unambiguously” opposed to vouchers, which means student- and parentcentric reforms are coming from both sides of the political spectrum. Austin, who worked in the White House for President Bill Clinton, says many on his staff are politically left of center.

“Parents became informed about a nuanced public policy. With that power comes real responsibility.”

The first parents to petition for reform did so at McKinley Elementary School in December 2010, and the process lasted well into 2011. Fewer than 20 miles south of Los Angeles, McKinley is located in the Compton Unified School District, one of the lowest-achieving school districts in the state. In February 2011, district officials rejected the parents’ petition, and parents responded by filing and ultimately losing a lawsuit against the district. While a new charter school was not allowed to move into McKinley, the Celerity Educational Group opened Celerity Sirius Charter School near McKinley in September 2011.

As many as 20 states considered trigger legislation in the 2011 and 2012 legislative sessions, but the new bills struggled to find support. In 2012, bills failed in Arizona and Florida, two states that, historically, have been receptive to school-choice programs (the two states have nearly a dozen choice laws between them). Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal signed a parent trigger law in April 2012 as part of a package of reforms that included a significant expansion of the state’s voucher program.

As state lawmakers continue their debate, some contend the program makes for exciting headlines but will not lead to effective school reform.

“The parent trigger reform is a dead end and makes no sense,” says Washington Post education columnist Jay Mathews. He suggests that parents, no matter how committed to the cause, don’t have the time or political savvy to lead effective school change. “It’s an interesting idea that sounds exciting on its face,” he says, “but it’s not going anywhere.”

Austin would disagree and points to California’s example. “Parents became informed about a nuanced public policy. With that power comes real responsibility,” he says. More than a dozen local Parent Revolution groups have formed in California, and in June 2011, Time magazine reported Parent Revolution advocates were at work as far away as Buffalo, New York.

Expansions

As new programs appeared in 2011, some existing programs saw expansion.

In Milwaukee, Governor Scott Walker removed the cap on the city’s voucher program. Students in the program receive vouchers worth up to $6,422 to attend a private school of choice.

In Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker removed the cap on the city’s voucher program. Students in the program receive vouchers worth up to $6,442 to attend a private school of choice. Milwaukee’s voucher program is the oldest in the United States.

The 2011 expansion also extended voucher eligibility to all low-income district students and those next door in Racine. The Racine school board considered legal action over the program, though none has been filed to date. The means test for Milwaukee and Racine students is also on a sliding scale, similar to Indiana’s Choice Scholarships. Students from families with household incomes up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line (slightly less than $70,000 for a family of four) are eligible, making these programs more examples of inclusive school-choice programs created last year. In Milwaukee, more than 23,000 students were participating as of September 2011, with more than 200 Racine students enrolled in the expansion.

Tax Credits

Like vouchers, tax-credit scholarships also allow students access to private schools, though these scholarships depend on private contributions and the state tax credits that follow. Individuals and/or corporations contribute to scholarship organizations, which then award private school scholarships to qualifying students. Donors receive a credit on their taxes for their contribution, with credit amounts usually capped at certain limits.

In 2011, Oklahoma and North Carolina enacted scholarship tax-credit programs, and Arizona expanded its existing law in 2012 after a veto in 2011. Oklahoma’s program is means-tested, and students from families with household incomes of up to 300 percent of the federal poverty line are eligible to participate. This program arrived one year after Oklahoma lawmakers passed a voucher program for students with special needs, and it should come as no surprise that districts filed suit to stop the vouchers (a little surprising, though, that districts sued the students and their parents, instead of the state).

North Carolina passed a “personal use” tax-credit program in 2011, which allows families to receive a credit for education expenses. Under the law, families of students with special needs can take a credit of up to $6,000 annually for expenses such as private school tuition and therapy services. The North Carolina Department of Public Instruction estimates that more than 120,000 students and their families may be eligible to make use of the credits.

“This is a large leap forward for a movement that a lot of people thought was dying on the vine,” says the AFC’s Jensen. “It’d been quite a few years since we’d had a tax credit pass for a family’s educational expenses, and $6,000 changes a family’s ability to choose a school.”

Governor Jan Brewer vetoed an expansion to Arizona’s 15-year-old scholarship tax-credit program in 2011, citing a negative impact on the state budget. Bill sponsors, including Republican state senator Rick Murphy and representative Debbie Lesko, revised the measure in 2012 to specify that any students receiving scholarships under the proposed expansion would be new scholarship recipients switching from public school to private school.

Under the new bill, individual (as opposed to corporate) donations to scholarships would be capped at $1,000 ($2,000 for married couples), double the previous limit. Brewer signed the expansion in 2012.

Does Passing Laws Equal Success?

Success implementing new school-choice laws in 2011 must be considered state by state. Students in Arizona and Indiana have more options but await rulings from the court system. In Colorado, many families are left wondering what to do next. Wisconsin parents in Racine must look over their shoulders for any sign of future litigation.

Legal issues aside, will enough students participate in choice-based reforms to change the status quo?

“My general view,” says the Post’s Mathews, “is that the voucher path is a dead end because we are never going to have nearly enough spaces in private schools for the kids who need it.

“No matter how much the laws change, I don’t see them ever leading to a place where there are enough spaces,” he says. Historically, voucher initiatives have struggled to gain support, says Mathews, because of persistent Democratic Party and educator opposition.

Voucher programs have long been considered a “Holy Grail” of sorts among school-choice advocates because they allow students to use state funds for a private school. But in 2011, reformers set ambitious goals for how many options could be afforded to parents, so even if participation is light, the range of choices that parents and children have in education should cause everyone to think twice about how public schools have been operating. Programs like Arizona’s provide parents with more options than vouchers. Likewise, California’s “trigger” law has radical implications, by giving parents the power to act without waiting for reform to happen to them.

“We are living in a revolutionary moment where the public as well as policymakers are open to thinking in new ways about issues in a way that hasn’t happened in a generation,” says Parent Revolution’s Austin.

Furman University professor Paul Thomas says that choice-based reforms became law in impressive numbers in 2011, but these reforms lack an agenda for comprehensive change.

“One thing that is telling to me about school-choice advocacy is that the claims and the goals are constantly shifting,” says Thomas, author of Parental Choice? A Critical Reconsideration of Choice and the Debate about Choice. “The school-choice movement has always been an ideology movement,” he says.

Others insist that, until recently, only a few choice programs had passed into law, so we should expect the results to be small and scattered.

“The reality is that we’ve had very small expansions in the use of market forces, so, not surprisingly, we’ve had modest effects from choice programs,” writes Jay P. Greene, head of the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas, in Why America Needs School Choice (a book that arrived in the midst of the 2011 activity).

“Programs tend to include relatively few students,” he said.

The Friedman Foundation’s Hiner says legislation and litigation are only the beginning. “Keep in mind that the goal is not to pass legislation. The goal is to enact a program that you can nurture and grow well into the future so that you can serve as many children as need a different type of education,” she says.

Tipping Point

School-choice laws took great strides in 2011, both in the number of programs that succeeded across states and also in the size and scope of the adopted programs. Yet education associations and teachers unions wasted no time in challenging the laws in court, as has been the case for school-choice reforms for the past 20 years. In almost every instance, school-choice advocates had little time to celebrate before looking for an attorney.

Some, like the teachers unions, contend that choice programs exist in isolation from mainstream public school reforms and point to limited participation rates. And others say choice advocates have not convinced people of the programs’ effectiveness.

“Since choice is not really very popular, I don’t think the public is for it,” says Furman’s Thomas.

Either because of public opposition, lawsuits, or the modest scope of voucher and tax-credit scholarship laws, only some 200,000 students nationwide attend private schools through choice systems, a paltry figure compared to the 50 million students in public schools across the United States.

Nevertheless, the school-choice laws that passed in 2011 were a departure from previous reforms in both size and scope. From Wisconsin to California, more students were included in the new laws, and the laws gave them more options.

Parent Revolution’s Austin says lawmakers are considering ideas today that in the not-so-distant past would have been considered outrageous.

“What normal people care about and what policymakers are beginning to care about is the very simple idea of giving parents real power over the educational destiny of their own children,” he says.

Jonathan Butcher is education director for the Goldwater Institute.

Not all relevant financial figures are available yet, but reasoned extrapolations from private- and public-sector employment data suggest that U.S. schooling may be on a historic glide path toward lower per-pupil resources and significant labor-force reductions. If not thoughtfully considered, budget-balancing decisions could damage learning opportunities for schoolchildren.

Education managers are typically inexperienced in and often reluctant to initiate cost-savings actions. Budget cuts may be poorly targeted, and students, particularly economically disadvantaged students, are swept up in the process as collateral damage.

In California and Washington, bad budget cutting has already begun. Governors in these two states have acquiesced to employee demands and have protected educator jobs at the expense of students’ time to learn.

The greatest risk of all is to the past quarter century of efforts to render America’s schools more effective. Unless means are identified for making schools more productive, that is, doing better with less, reform momentum is in serious jeopardy.

Evolving Context

Many members of the general public and the policy community believe that school districts are going bankrupt, teachers are underpaid, and educator layoffs are rampant (see “The Compensation Question,” forum, Fall 2012, forthcoming). Inaccurate media reporting, naive celebrity comments, education-advocate laments, social-media babble, and talk-show dialogue reinforce this view.

What are the facts? Total K–12 public-school spending approaches $700 billion annually. Inflation-adjusted per-pupil school spending has increased over the last century by, on average, 2.3 percent per year. There have been a few plateau years during recessions, but never a significant decline (see Figure 1).

As a consequence, the United States now spends more money on K–12 schooling than any other nation in the world. More is spent by the United States, in the aggregate, than by hugely populous nations such as China and India. Spending per pupil is higher in the U.S. than in every country except Switzerland.

Achievement levels in the U.S. are not commensurate with spending, however. Many nations exceed the United States in science and math test scores, for example.

Spending increases have been directed overwhelmingly toward adding school employees. Professional-to-pupil ratios have become ever more favorable. Whereas 30 years ago there was one professional educator employed for every 18.6 public school students, the equivalent figure today is one for every 15.4 students. When other personnel are added to the mix—cafeteria workers, custodians, clerks, and so forth—the ratio falls to one employee for every 7 students.

School productivity, measured as educational outcomes divided by labor or financial inputs, has declined dramatically. Indeed, relative to sectors such as communication, finance, manufacturing, and agriculture, the public schools are highly labor-intensive. The productivity picture is made worse by the resistance of schools to augment teachers’ efforts with new instructional technologies.

Why School Productivity Matters

A new normal of public-sector fiscal austerity is emerging.

Forty-two states and the District of Columbia face budget shortfalls. (Only a few fossil fuel–rich or agricultural states are able to sidestep the issue.) Although federal tax revenues are far short of anticipated spending, the federal government is not about to step in with still another stimulus package. Congress and the president are deadlocked over a path to economic recovery. Eurozone economies are in disarray and have had their credit ratings lowered, which jeopardizes U.S. exports.

Through deep and painful experience with cyclical growth and recession, U.S. private-sector firms have learned to deal with contraction. There have been nine recessions in the United States since 1955. During each of these, employment in the private sector declined. Employment subsequently turned up, but conventional private-sector response to recession has been workforce contraction. Private-sector managers know how to hone their labor force to balance cost cutting with the retention of scarce skilled talent and how to invest in labor-saving technology. These dynamics render the private sector ever more efficient, sustaining the production of goods and services with lower labor costs.

Here is an example of just how productive the private sector has become during the most recent recession: By the final quarter of 2011, gross domestic product (GDP) had returned to its 2008 prerecession level. It did so, however, with 5 million fewer private-sector employees.

School districts demonstrate the flip side of this dynamic. Cost-saving actions in public education, such as layoffs, school closures, salary freezes, benefit reductions, and decreasing school days, are possible but unusual. Taking such uncomfortable steps is legally cumbersome and politically treacherous. Cutbacks frequently fail to generate anticipated savings and can trigger hard-to-heal labor-management wounds. In recent recessions, when the private-sector workforce was contracting, school-district hiring continued apace.

It is important to note that much of the employment decline in the private sector during recessions is the result of firms going out of business. In difficult economic times, private firms must either become more efficient or fail. The public-school sector faces no such threat, which may be why schools have historically added jobs, regardless of economic conditions.

Figure 2 depicts growth in private-sector and public-school employment. Here one can see that from 1955 to the start of the most recent recession, the private sector experienced nine labor-market contractions—on average, one downturn per decade. Conversely, until the current recession, employment in public schools had only one downturn, in 1982–83.

The downturn in public-school employment in the early 1980s came on the heels of two recessions, one that stretched from January to July 1980 and the other from July 1981 to November 1982. The fact that teaching jobs were shed after these recessions were officially over should not be surprising, given that school budgets are set, teacher contracts are made, and federal and state funding are allocated ahead of time, causing the public-school sector to respond to tough economic times more slowly than the private sector.

The same condition prevailed in the wake of the most recent recession. Following 2009, when the private sector began adding wage earners, the public schools began to shed teachers. Figure 3 shows this in greater detail.

From June 2008 to March 2012, public schools shed more than 250,000 jobs, 3 percent of their total workforce. It is of particular note that this shrinkage in the public-education workforce took place in spite of the added revenues from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), which were intended to prevent such a decline.

Nonetheless, as Figure 3 also indicates, a larger share of school employees who were working in 2008 were still on the job in 2012 than the share of workers still employed in the private sector in 2012.

Impact of Revenue Decline

There is no overstating the painful consequences of organizational downsizing, be it private or public. Closing a manufacturing plant, shutting down a large distribution center, and curtailing hours at a backroom financial operation trigger layoffs, and, depending on the context of the contraction, can imperil an entire community. Individuals, parents, children, and even a geographic region can be hurt.

Serious and sustained school revenue declines are at least as bad and in some ways worse. Layoffs almost always involve the least experienced or most recently employed teachers and other staff. If the financial situation necessitates the closure of one or more schools, then the pain spreads wider and may threaten the survival of a community.

School cutbacks may also disproportionately affect low-income students. As mentioned previously, California and Washington have reacted to budget shortfalls in ways that harm students: reducing the length of the school year and the number of days that schools operate. While this saves money and jobs, as teacher salaries are reduced and layoffs avoided, time in school is most important for disadvantaged students. Middle-class families can compensate for the loss of school hours with enrichment activities such as trips to museums and libraries. Low-income students are seldom so insulated from schooling adversity.

If the entire public-education system could be rendered more productive, that is, if higher levels of achievement could be coaxed from existing resource levels, some of the pain could be avoided or at least mitigated.

Improving Productivity

Several integrated strategies offer the prospect of protecting, possibly promoting, education reform in the face of a new fiscal austerity. These strategies involve 1) accurately informing the general public and the policy community regarding the condition of schools, that is, their financing, their achievement, and the relationship between the two; 2) conducting empirical research aimed at understanding issues of productivity in education; 3) informing policymakers and school managers regarding means by which budget cuts can be made without eviscerating instructional effectiveness; and 4) solving challenges to wider adoption of instructional technologies.

Federal and state governments have expended hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure that local schools have Internet access and plentiful computing hardware. Grants have also been available for purchase of software and teacher training.

These efforts have seldom proved sufficient to transform America’s public schools. Instruction continues to rely almost exclusively on labor-intensive practices. Government policies have ignored the savings that private firms have shown can result from technological innovation. Put bluntly, why should a tenured classroom teacher go to the effort of altering her long-standing instructional protocols to adopt new technologies when her pay, professional status, and job security are only remotely related to improving her effectiveness or her clients’ satisfaction?

Strategies must be constructed that will attract classroom teachers to the use of technology to enhance their effectiveness. Whatever strategy emerges in this regard is likely to have to involve teacher and school performance evaluations linked to student achievement gains. If teachers, principals, and entire schools see that their professional status and remuneration are becoming more tightly linked to student achievement, then they will be more open to seeking technologies that will enhance instructional effectiveness.

There are those who contend that online learning will simply bypass schools, that conventional school classes will be disrupted by new digital models that operate outside the brick-and-mortar school. But there is only a modest chance of this happening. A state initiative in Florida, the Florida Virtual School, is promising in this regard. So is the spectrum of well-constructed subject-matter units that can be found at the Khan Academy web site. But the obstacles are almost too numerous to mention. Among them are the monopolistic nature of many public-school systems, the custodial function entrusted to schools by law, and the attractiveness to students of the social interactions that take place in school. If in fact conventional schools are to be disrupted by technology, it is unlikely to happen soon.

While waiting for technologies to augment the work of a teacher, what can be done by state and district officials to wring the maximum effect out of every dollar they have?

First, states and districts can discontinue costly practices that have not been shown to enhance student achievement, including paying educators for out-of-field master’s degrees and salary premiums for experience; following “last in, first out” personnel provisions; relying on regular classroom instructional aides; and adhering to mandated limits on class size. Regulations that mandate inefficiency, such as legislatively precluding outsourcing, requiring intergovernmental grants to “supplement not supplant” existing spending, and prohibiting end-of-budget year surplus carryover, can also be revised to encourage smarter spending.

In place of the practices above, states and districts can adopt strategies that foster efficiency at both the school and district level, such as adopting “activity-based cost” (ABC) accounting; empowering principals as school-level CEOs; adopting performance-based dollar distribution formulas and school-level financial budgeting; centralizing health insurance at the state level; and outsourcing operational services where proven to save money. By adopting these practices, districts and states may be able to ease the burden of the transition to the coming period of fiscal austerity and increase long-term efficiency in schooling.

James W. Guthrie, currently superintendent of public instruction in Nevada, is senior fellow and former director of education policy studies at the George W. Bush Institute, where Elizabeth Ettema is research associate in education policy.

This was my reaction last month when Murray visited the Fordham Institute to talk about his latest book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. Among his many interesting and provocative comments about the rise of a “new upper class”—one inhabited by the winners of America’s meritocracy—he made this rather disturbing statement: “The better the meritocracy, the faster social mobility will decline.” Checker Finn, our president and moderator, did a double-take. “Say it again?” So Murray did. “The better the meritocracy, the more efficiently you identify and reward talent, the faster that social mobility will decline over time.”

As it turns out, this wasn’t the first time Murray has made that argument. An earlier version can be found in his controversial book, The Bell Curve, written with Richard Hernnstein, and then restated in a 2010 Washington Post op-ed:

The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite—the “cognitive elite” that Herrnstein and I described—becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama’s example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent (“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.

Which is why, Murray argues, that the children of the New Elite dominate the campuses of top-tier universities.

The student bodies of the elite colleges are still drawn overwhelmingly from the upper middle class. According to sociologist Joseph Soares’s book “The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges,” about four out of five students in the top tier of colleges have parents whose income, education and occupations put them in the top quarter of American families, according to Soares’s measure of socioeconomic status. Only about one out of 20 such students come from the bottom half of families.

The discomfiting explanation is that despite need-blind admissions policies, the stellar applicants still hail overwhelmingly from the upper middle class and above. Students who have a parent with a college degree accounted for only 55 percent of SAT-takers this year but got 87 percent of all the verbal and math scores above 700, according to unpublished data provided to me by the College Board. This is not a function of SAT prep courses available to the affluent—such coaching buys only a few dozen points—but of the ability of these students to do well in a challenging academic setting.

Read that again. Just one in 20 students at top universities comes from the bottom half of the socio-economic strata. The number coming from the bottom quintile—children growing up in poverty—is even smaller—miniscule really. Are we reformers kidding ourselves when we think that better schools will catapult low-income children into the ranks of this New Elite?

Our argument, as it goes, is that we’ve never really tried. Because of low expectations, mediocre teachers, a lack of options, ill-designed curricula—name your poison—poor kids have never had a chance to see their talents flourish. Put them into the right educational environment, surround them with supportive adults, and (if you’re of the broader/bolder persuasion) provide them with all kinds of social supports too, and we’ll see our elite college campuses—gateways to the new Upper Class—democratize before our eyes.

But this assumes that academic ability—whether defined as intelligence, or non-cognitive skills and character traits, or whatever else—is randomly distributed across the population. Which, Murray argues, was probably once true but is no longer. Because of the ferocious sorting of the meritocratic machine, talented people have been finding and marrying one another, and giving birth to a super-class of highly gifted children. (Murray said at our event that it “doesn’t matter” whether these gifts are bequeathed by nature or nurture. What matters is the strong link between the talents of parents and the talents of their offspring.) And, as David Brooks pointed out today, after years of bedtime stories, trips to the zoo, vocabulary-packed conversations, and other “enrichment” activities, these children enter school miles ahead of the rest of their peers—including the poor kids that are the focus of so many education reforms.

Of course, as Murray says, this phenomenon plays out in terms of group averages. If we live in a meritocracy where intelligence and other talents lead to success,* then the children of the highly successful (the Elite) will, on average, be more talented than the children of the somewhat successful, who will, on average, be more talented that the children of the not successful (i.e., the children of the poor). On average.

Understandably, we don’t much like to discuss this possibility. It gives cover to educators who look at a classroom of low-income children and diminish their expectations—thinking that “these kids” aren’t capable of much, educators who don’t buy the mantra that “all children can learn.” But would we be shocked to find that the average intelligence level of such a classroom is lower than a classroom in an elite, affluent suburb?

Yes, intelligence is malleable, not innate. Yes, an exceptional school/teacher/curriculum may boost that average intelligence level. But can those factors boost it enough to overcome the disparities Murray describes? If not, what can educators do?

I see two possible strategies. The first is to be fanatical about identifying talented children from low-income (and middle-income) communities and then provide the challenge and support to launch them into the New Elite via top-tier universities. Murray, for one, thinks this is already happening. “If you are a really smart kid in a backwater town in Mississippi—I don’t care if you’re white or black—this has never been a better time for you,” he said at our event. “It’s never been easier for you, no matter how poor your family is, to get a full ride to a really good college if you’re really, if you’ve got a lot of talent. We’ve gotten really, really good at identifying talent wherever it is and I’m delighted about that.”

He may well be right. It’s true that many communities have various “talent search” initiatives, scholarship programs for poor kids to attend elite private schools and top colleges, science fairs, spelling bees, selective magnet schools, and other approaches for ferreting out these diamonds in the rough. (Some of the best charter schools might be playing this role too, though they don’t want to admit it.) Still, I worry that, in the current policy environment, most schools serving poor kids have little incentive to offer gifted-and-talented programs and other mechanisms whereby to boost the prospects of poor but brilliant kids. (Online learning could be a big help here.)

The second strategy is to be more realistic about the kind of social mobility we hope to spur. Getting a big chunk of America’s poor kids into the New Elite in one generation might be a fool’s errand—our meritocracy has put them at too great a disadvantage. But getting them into working -class or middle-class jobs isn’t so impossible. Here’s a question for the KIPPs and YES Preps of the world: Would you be happy if, ten years from now, your middle schoolers were working as cops, firefighters, teachers, plumbers, electricians, and nurses? This would be a huge accomplishment, it seems to me, as most poor kids will go on to work in low-paid service jobs a decade hence. It may not make for as inspiring a Hollywood story, but it’s a crucial version of social mobility all the same.

Maybe Murray’s wrong. I sort of hope that he is. But we should be talking about these issues all the same.

-Mike Petrilli

* The Left sees the same social sorting as Murray but concludes that our meritocracy isn’t efficient, it’s rigged. See, for example, Christopher Hayes’ The Twilight of the Elites, as excerpted in this Nation article.

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

Every few weeks, a group of education reform advocacy organizations (ERAOs) gathers in Washington, D.C., to compare notes and plot strategy in what is (half in jest) referred to as “fight club.” Like the subject of the 1999 David Fincher movie, this fight club sees itself as the underdog in an epic struggle for freedom and equality. While the target of the film’s ire is consumerism, these national ERAOs and their counterparts at the state level are focused on enacting sweeping education policy changes to increase accountability for student achievement, improve teacher quality, turn around failing schools, and expand school choice. As Terry Moe documents in his recent book, Special Interest, for decades the politics of school reform have been dominated by the education establishment, the collection of teachers unions and other school employee associations derisively called the “blob” by reformers. But the past two years have witnessed an unprecedented wave of state education reforms, much of it fiercely opposed by the unions. The ERAOs played an active role in pushing for these changes, and it is clear that they are reshaping the politics of school reform in the United States in important ways. But does the reform blob really stand a chance of defeating the education blob?

What Are the ERAOs?

Interviews with ERAO leaders reveal that the challenges of implementing No Child Left Behind (NCLB)—in particular, states’ efforts to game its accountability, choice, and school restructuring mandates—spawned the creation of policy advocacy organizations that could push for reform in state capitols. As Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) explained, “There was recognition over time that good ideas alone weren’t enough and weren’t going to get us across the finish line in terms of systemic reform. There needed to be a significant investment of time and resources in advocating for political changes that would enable and protect reform.” The largest of the ERAOs (in terms of staff, budget, and reach) are Stand for Children, StudentsFirst, the 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now (50CAN), DFER, and the Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE), but this remains a relatively decentralized and fragmented movement. Different groups embrace somewhat different policy agendas and tactics, from grassroots mobilization to lobbying policymakers and operating political action committees.

Another way that ERAOs differ is in their scope and where they operate. Groups such as Advance Illinois and the Tennessee State Collaborative on Reforming Education are independent operators that focus explicitly on a single state or city. Stand for Children, 50CAN, DFER, and FEE are national organizations that work in multiple states. Stand for Children currently has affiliates in 9 states, 50CAN operates in 4 states (originating from its flagship ConnCAN, which operates in Connecticut alone), and DFER has 11 state chapters (see sidebar). How do the ERAOs decide what states to operate in? Marc Porter Magee, president and founder of 50CAN, talks about a “vetting process” that centers on figuring out what the “advocacy value-add score” would be in a potential state. Collectively, the ERAO leaders I spoke with identified three critical factors: 1) Is there a void to fill (no existing organization already doing the work)? 2) Is there sufficient local support for reform, and are local champions in place to lead the effort? 3) Is state philanthropic support available to fund the effort and sustain it over time?

While the groups vary considerably in tactics and geographic base, several common elements are apparent. The first is a connection to school choice, and, in particular, to the charter school movement. Many of the ERAOs emerged from the frustration of charter school operators—and their supporters in the business and civil rights communities—at the restrictions placed on charter operations and growth. In addition, ERAOs generally embrace test-based accountability, reforms aimed at improving teacher quality, and aggressive interventions in chronically underperforming schools. One of the most important developments in recent years, in fact, has been the coming together of two previously separate strands of the education reform movement: “system refiners,” who embrace accountability, and “system disrupters,” who advocate choice. Many reform groups are funded by the same foundations, particularly the “big three”—Walton, Gates, and Broad. The support of conservative foundations and the embrace of market-based school reforms have led some observers—and many critics in the education establishment—to label the ERAOs “corporate school reformers.” StudentsFirst CEO Michelle Rhee called this description “bizarre” and noted that she, like many others in these organizations, is a lifelong Democrat with a deep concern for social justice. Suzanne Tacheny Kubach, executive director of the Policy Innovators in Education Network (PIE Network), emphasizes that a focus on partisan orientation or funding sources obscures that “almost all the advocacy groups working in the country were either founded by or are advised by civic boards made up of state leaders concerned about the direction of their public schools.”

The ERAO Playbook

Marc Porter Magee, president and founder of 50CAN

A critical first page in the playbook for reform groups is to increase the amount of information available about school system performance. Virtually all of them support reforms to improve the quality and transparency of state standards and assessments and the creation of state report cards that enable policymakers and parents to view school-level data on student achievement. The increased availability of this information—one of the most important legacies of NCLB—in turn helps the groups to highlight the need for school reform in state capitols and build support among parents and community groups. ERAOs use these data to create a sense of urgency and to craft detailed evidence-based policy recommendations. 50CAN, for example, releases a detailed “State of Public Education” report prior to launching a new state branch. The groups also build momentum for change—and help policymakers make tough political choices—by documenting community support for reform through public opinion polls. In Indiana, for example, Stand for Children hired an independent firm to survey teachers about proposed reforms and was able to report that many reforms had strong teacher support despite the opposition of their union.

There is both a public and private dimension to ERAO work. Behind the scenes the groups work to cultivate relationships and build credibility with governors and state legislators and their professional staff as well as with state education-agency folks. They hold regular briefings for these insiders—often bringing in nationally recognized experts—to make the case for reform and report on how other states have tackled similar challenges. They also wage a very public campaign for the hearts and minds of average citizens by organizing town hall meetings with parents and publishing op-eds in state and local media. They publicize the report cards developed by national research organizations—such as the National Council on Teacher Quality’s “State Teacher Policy Yearbook” and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s “State of State Standards,” which enable comparison of one state’s policies with those in the rest of the country. ERAOs organize phone banks, rallies in state capitols, and online petitions to build momentum behind reform.

While newer reform advocacy organizations often partner with older groups like the Education Trust, they differ in approach and tactics. Older groups have tended to confine their efforts to research and lobbying, while the newer groups are more explicitly political, creating public pressure for reform to make it easier for policymakers to embrace difficult changes and then rewarding those who advance their agenda. Robin Steans, executive director of Advance Illinois, observed that “in the past the SEA [state education agency] was often alone in pushing reform in the state but now we are able to help lead the charge, to bring media attention and change the stakes and get folks to the table.” Central to this effort, as Bruno Manno has noted, is the quest to mobilize parents (see “Not Your Mother’s PTA,” features, Winter 2012). The perception that older parent groups such as the Parent Teacher Association are closely aligned with teachers unions and wedded to the status quo has led to the formation of new reform-oriented parent groups (such as Parent Revolution) and parent advocacy campaigns by groups like Stand for Children. The ERAOs take advantage of data microtargeting capabilities to identify potential supporters and use social media like Twitter and Facebook to regularly inform and mobilize them for advocacy.

A Coordinated Movement?

Suzanne Tacheny Kubach, executive director of the Policy Innovators in Education Network

It is tempting to see the patchwork of state and national school reform organizations as a fully integrated and coordinated movement. Yet, as a January 2012 study from the PIE Network concluded, “The most common thread across these states that enacted reforms was actually a lack of tight coordination among the varied members of these coalitions.” While many ERAOs share goals and move on parallel paths, and coordinate where it makes sense, no one group dominates or is in charge. One reason is the significant variation in political context. The unique policy landscape of each state necessitates that reform coalitions and agendas be built state by state. In Colorado, for example, the coalition that successfully pushed for the “Great Teachers and Leaders Act” comprised 22 different stakeholder groups and 40 different community and business leaders. While many members of state reform coalitions are education-specific groups, others focus on civil rights or business issues. Coalition size and diversity ensure considerable variation in the groups’ education agendas, and often even greater variation in their noneducation agendas. Civil rights and business groups, for example, often find themselves on the same side of school choice debates but on opposite sides of collective bargaining and taxing-and-spending issues. As a result, a standing coalition of ERAOs is difficult to build or sustain across different policy proposals.

Many of the groups talk to one another frequently, through a regular conference call organized by the Education Trust, at meetings organized by funders such as the Walton Family Foundation, and at conferences convened by groups such as the NewSchools Venture Fund. To the degree that there is an organizational home for ERAOs, it seems to be the PIE Network, which held its first meeting in 2007. The PIE Network emerged, according to executive director Kubach, because of “the growing realization that the arena of state policymaking matters a lot for school reform and you can’t just do everything at the federal level. We needed to connect the conversation in Washington with a coalition of different kinds of groups at the state level—business leaders, civic leaders, and grassroots constituents.” The 34 organizations in the network operate in 23 states and Washington, D.C. Network members include affiliates of Stand for Children and 50CAN, business groups like the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education, the Oklahoma Business and Education Coalition, and Colorado Succeeds, and civic groups like Advance Illinois and the League of Education Voters (Washington). The PIE Network is also supported by five “policy partners,” which span the ideological spectrum but agree on the network’s reform commitments: Center for American Progress, Center on Reinventing Public Education, Education Sector, National Council on Teacher Quality, and Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Like many ERAOs, PIE Network is funded by the big three (Walton, Gates, and Broad) along with the Joyce and Stuart foundations.

The PIE Network facilitates regular communication among its members: it distributes a bimonthly newsletter, hosts a monthly conference call for leaders of its member groups, and convenes two face-to-face meetings each year—one with about 40 participants for group leaders and another larger, invitation-only meeting designed to bring the advocacy group leaders together with policy experts and policymakers. The organization also uses Twitter to act as an information clearinghouse by retweeting/aggregating all of the posts from its member organizations. Kubach argues that it is extremely difficult for individual state reform organizations to do this work by themselves and that the PIE Network has worked to encourage cross-state collaboration and the “cross-pollination” of reform ideas, and enable the “acceleration of the school reform movement.” One tangible example is that PIE Network members share legislative language for school reform bills (such as to improve teacher evaluation and tenure) that are being pushed in state legislatures, obviating the need for groups to undertake this time-consuming and technical work on their own. Nonetheless, despite the increasing communication among ERAOs, it appears to be too early to speak of them as constituting a coordinated movement, and given some of the challenges and divisions identified below, they may never become one. Indeed, Kubach explained that, at least for the PIE Network, centralized coordination has never been the goal: “There’s a pretty clear understanding across the sector that states are where most of reform policy is made and that local actors concerned about their schools are the most credible voices to lead that change. Our goal is to strengthen those local voices—not to overshadow them with a single-minded, nationally orchestrated campaign.”

ERAO Victories

The ERAO leaders I spoke with praised the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RttT) competitive grant program for creating momentum behind reform at the state level and providing political cover for reformers. Rhee observed that “RttT was a brilliant idea. It really helped us build bipartisan coalitions. Right now Republicans are being more aggressive on education reform than Democrats at the state level, but being able to say that a Democratic president and education secretary were supportive really helped to convince Democrats to do more courageous things.” As Steven Brill noted in Class Warfare (see “Great Teachers in the Classroom?” book reviews, Spring 2012), school reform advocates seized the momentum created by RttT to mobilize and collaborate in advancing their agenda in state legislatures. PIE Network director Kubach observed that it “created urgency, a moment of real comparability across states and pressure to change.” ERAOs helped to facilitate state-to-state comparisons and develop legislative agendas by assessing existing state policies against the RttT criteria. They then lobbied state policymakers and created grassroots campaigns to mobilize support.

It is difficult to precisely gauge their impact, but it is clear that ERAOs are having a large—and increasing—influence on education debates at the state and national levels and that their efforts have contributed significantly to the passage of important legislation. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels recently remarked that he has seen a “tectonic shift” on education in states and that “more legislators are free from the iron grip of the education establishment.” Hari Sevugen, communications director at StudentsFirst, noted that “what we’ve lacked and what those fighting for the status quo had was an organized effort that decision makers had in the back of their mind as they put together education policy. That equation was highly imbalanced, but is now changing.” StudentsFirst claims to have signed up a million members in its first year and to have helped change 50 different state education policies.

The recent wave of teacher quality reforms offers perhaps the best evidence of ERAO impact, as no area of education reform has been more strongly resisted by the unions. Nearly two-thirds of states have changed their teacher evaluation, tenure, and dismissal policies in the past two years: 23 states now require that standardized test results be factored into teacher evaluations, and 14 allow districts to use these data to dismiss ineffective teachers. While in 2009 no state required student performance to be central to the awarding of tenure, today 8 states do. ERAOs have been hailed for playing a pivotal role in the passage of these new laws, with Stand for Children leading the effort in Colorado and Illinois. Former Illinois board of education chairman Jesse Ruiz said that the group was “an instigator, a catalyst, you might say.” In fewer than 100 days, Stand raised about $3.5 million in the state and used $600,000 of that to make contributions to seven House and two Senate campaigns. This kind of hardball political organizing and lobbying has long been employed by the unions to defeat school reform legislation but increasingly is being utilized by the ERAOs to drive change.

Democratic Divides

Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform

While the ERAOs emphasize bipartisanship so that they can work effectively with policymakers on both sides of the aisle, the groups confront two very different challenges related to partisan politics. First, the Democratic Party is divided over school reform—particularly on school choice, test-based accountability, and teacher quality. One of the most important and unresolved issues is how the groups will navigate their complicated relationship with civil rights organizations and teachers unions. Teachers unions are a crucial part of the Democratic Party’s base and yet have long been resistant to the kinds of reforms the ERAOs are advocating. But the unions themselves are also in flux. Harvard’s Susan Moore Johnson has noted the rise of “reform unionism”: support for reform is increasing inside the unions, particularly in the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and among younger teachers. This trend has spawned such pro-reform teacher organizations as Teach Plus and Educators 4 Excellence.

Collectively, civil rights groups have assumed an ambiguous and fluid position in the school reform debates, though with major groups at times supportive of elements of the ERAO agenda. As Jesse Rhodes observed in a 2011 article in Perspectives on Politics, a number of civil rights groups have “played a central role in developing and promoting standards, testing, accountability, and limited school choice policies in order to achieve what they view as fundamentally egalitarian purposes.” Yet these groups have historically been closely aligned politically with the teachers unions and continue to find common ground given the large number of minority teachers, particularly in urban areas. This helps to explain why the NAACP sided with the unions against school closures and charter school expansion in New York City and Newark, for example, even as the group supports the ERAOs’ call for closing achievement gaps. There is also a major generational and racial gap between the leaders of groups like the NAACP and ERAO leaders, who are an overwhelmingly young, elite-schooled, and “white” bunch and as such are often viewed skeptically by people of color. Figuring out how to create state-level alliances with civil rights groups and mobilize urban communities—which are disproportionately minority and poor—remains an ongoing challenge.

The Need for a “RFER”

The second challenge is preserving over time the fairly broad bipartisan consensus on the ERAO agenda. As DFER’s Williams observed, “There are times where we agree with Republicans, but also plenty of times where we disagree—especially at the federal level and about funding.” While ERAOs generally support an active role for the federal government in promoting school reform and accountability, the rise of the Tea Party has highlighted how many conservatives continue to oppose such activism. And while ERAOs have led the charge to reform teacher evaluation and tenure policies, they have generally opposed more fundamental changes to collective bargaining pushed by Republican governors in places like Wisconsin. Similarly, while many Democrats (as well as many of the ERAOs) support the expansion of charter schools and school choice, there is much greater ambivalence over the school voucher proposals that Republicans are pushing in many states.

The creation of DFER has shifted the politics of education inside of the Democratic Party and provided cover for reform-minded Democrats in Congress and state capitols from the more liberal, union-friendly base. But a Republican counterpart to DFER—which insiders jokingly refer to as ReeFER—has yet to emerge. The Foundation for Excellence in Education (FEE) serves that role to an extent, but it does not currently lobby or make political contributions. FEE was started by former governor Jeb Bush to help spread the accountability reforms he enacted during his time in office and has been very active in the South and West. The organization hosts an influential summit every year for state policymakers and also sponsors Chiefs for Change, current and former state education superintendents who advocate for school reform. FEE has concentrated its work on six states (Florida, Indiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Louisiana, and Arizona) but is active in more than 20.

Winning Battles or the War?

Over the past two years, ERAOs have shown that they can mobilize quickly and effectively on behalf of reform. But as FEE’s Patricia Levesque warns, education reform is a long-term endeavor where “success is incremental” and “progress can be torn down quickly if momentum is stopped.” The recent struggles of the winning Race to the Top states have demonstrated that ensuring that policy reforms are implemented effectively on the ground and sustained over time is crucial, though less “sexy” than winning legislative victories. Major policy victories can quickly be undone by a new governor or legislature or undermined during the rule-making process, what Levesque called “death by a thousand cuts.” Battles over implementation occur in different venues (state boards, task forces, and education agencies), are more technical and less visible, and demand different tactics than legislative fights. ERAOs’ roles must include technical assistance, reporting, and watchdog vis-à-vis state education agencies.

To date, ERAOs have focused on states they consider hospitable to their efforts. There are important limitations to this approach, as it leaves many states unserved; 27 states, for example, are not represented on PIE Network’s membership list. Indeed, this strategy may actually ensure that states most in need of reform advocacy (and perhaps with the worst-performing school systems) will be ignored. The hope among ERAOs is that laggard states will feel pressure to follow reform-oriented states, but there is no guarantee that this will happen. It is also important to keep in mind how new the ERAOs are and how small their staffs are, often just a handful of folks. Sevugen at StudentsFirst remarked that despite ambitious goals, the group is essentially a “start-up” and that “we are trying to fly the plane while we build it.” Clearly, to be successful over the long haul, ERAOs will need to better coordinate their efforts within and across states. Rhee is optimistic on this front, noting that “more critical masses of reform-oriented folks are being built up, and I’m seeing more leaders of education reform organizations saying ‘we need to figure out how we can align our efforts in a more effective and efficient way than in the past.’ It’s not going to happen overnight, but I’m very hopeful that it will happen in the next two to three years.”

Though the groups are still young, the “reform blob” is providing a counterweight to the teachers unions in school reform debates at the state level. The ability of the ERAOs to overcome the unions should not be overestimated, however. The unions’ extensive resources—and large staff—enable them to be present everywhere, and it is unclear whether the ERAOs will be able to match their efforts in every venue. Kubach commented that “in California, there are reform groups like EdVoice, California Business for Education Excellence, and the Education Trust West that among them have maybe 25 employees working in rented office suites. The number of employees working for the teachers unions and administrators associations is much, much larger, and they all own multi-story buildings near the capital. [Even with] StudentsFirst there, that doesn’t come close to tipping the scales. The suggestion that the reform movement is the ‘big money game’ in any state capital is simply laughable.”

Still, the unprecedented state school reform activity of recent years—and, in particular, the enactment of a large number of teacher quality and school choice bills—testifies to the role these groups are playing in mobilizing political support behind reforms that even five years ago faced long odds. Several ERAO leaders recalled how few reform organizations there were, and how few local or state politicians were willing to take up the mantle of reform. Today, it is clear that a new club of reform organizations is itching for a fight and that politicians in both parties are increasingly willing to join them in the ring.

Patrick McGuinn is associate professor of political science and education at Drew University.

Birdette Hughey is the 2011 Mississippi Teacher of the Year.

In February 2012, the New York Times took the unusual step of publishing performance ratings for nearly 18,000 New York City teachers based on their students’ test-score gains, commonly called value-added (VA) measures. This action, which followed a similar release of ratings in Los Angeles last year, drew new attention to the growing use of VA analysis as a tool for teacher evaluation. After decades of relying on often-perfunctory classroom observations to assess teacher performance, districts from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles now evaluate many of their teachers based in part on VA measures and, in some cases, use these measures as a basis for differences in compensation.

Newspapers that publish value added measures no doubt relish the attention they generate, but the bigger question in our view is whether VA should play any role in the evaluation of teachers. Advocates argue that the use of VA measures in decisions regarding teacher selection, retraining, and dismissal will boost student achievement, while critics contend that the measures are a poor indicator of teacher quality and should play little if any role in high-stakes decisions. The Obama administration has thrown its weight squarely behind the advocates, launching a series of programs that encourage states to develop evaluation systems based substantially on VA measures.

The debate over the merits of using value added to evaluate teachers stems primarily from two questions. First, do VA measures work? In other words, do they accurately capture the effects teachers have on their students’ test scores? One concern is that VA measures will incorrectly reward or penalize teachers for the mix of students they get if students are assigned to teachers based on characteristics that VA analysis typically ignores.

Second, do VA measures matter in the long run? For example, do teachers who raise test scores also improve their students’ outcomes in adulthood or are they simply better at teaching to the test? Recent research has shown that high-quality early-childhood education has large impacts on outcomes such as college completion and adult earnings, but no study has identified the long-term impacts of teacher quality as measured by value added.

We address these two questions by analyzing school-district data from grades 3–8 for 2.5 million children, linked to information on their outcomes as young adults and the characteristics of their parents. We find that teacher VA measures both work and matter. First, we find that VA measures accurately predict teachers’ impacts on test scores once we control for the student characteristics that are typically accounted for when creating VA measures. Second, we find that students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, attend higher-quality colleges, earn more, live in higher socioeconomic status (SES) neighborhoods, and save more for retirement. They are also less likely to have children during their teenage years.

Teachers in all grades from 4 to 8 have large impacts on their students’ adult lives. On average, a 1-standard-deviation improvement in teacher value added (equivalent to having a teacher in the 84th percentile rather than one at the median) in a single grade raises a student’s earnings at age 28 by about 1 percent. Replacing a teacher whose value added is in the bottom 5 percent with an average teacher would increase students’ total lifetime incomes by more than $1.4 million for a typical classroom (equivalent to $250,000 in present value). In short, good teachers create substantial economic value, and VA measures are useful in identifying them.

Our findings address the three main critiques of VA measures raised in a recent Phi Delta Kappan article by Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond and her colleagues. We show directly using quasi-experimental tests that standard VA measures are not biased by the students assigned to each teacher. Hence, value-added metrics successfully disentangle teachers’ impacts from the many other influences on student progress. We also show that although VA measures fluctuate across years, they are sufficiently stable that selecting teachers even based on a few years of data would have substantial impacts on student outcomes such as earnings.

Students assigned to high-VA teachers are more likely to attend college, earn more, live in higher socioeconomic status neighborhoods, and save more for retirement.

Data

We draw information from two sources: school-district records on students and teachers, and information on the same students and their parents from administrative data sources such as tax records. The school-district data contain student enrollment history, test scores, and teacher assignments from the administrative records of a large urban school district. These data span the school years 1988–89 through 2008–09 and cover roughly 2.5 million children in grades 3 through 8.

The school-district data include approximately 18 million test scores. Test scores are available for English language arts and math for students in grades 3–8 from the spring of 1989 to 2009. In the early part of the sample period, these tests were specific to the district, but by 2005–06 all tests were statewide, as required under the No Child Left Behind law. In order to calculate results that combine scores from different tests, we standardize test scores by subject, year, and grade. The district data also contain other information on students, such as race or ethnicity, gender, and eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch (a standard measure of poverty).

Our data on students’ adult outcomes include earnings, college attendance, college quality (measured by the earnings of previous graduates of the same college), neighborhood quality (measured by the percentage of college graduates in their zip code), teenage birth rates for females (measured by claiming a dependent born when the woman was still a teenager), and retirement savings (measured by contributions to 401[k] plans). Parent characteristics include household income, marital status, home ownership, 401(k) savings, and mother’s age at child’s birth.

Having spent a single year in the classroom of a teacher with value added that is 1 standard deviation higher increases earnings at age 28 by about 1 percent. If that 1 percent advantage were to remain stable throughout an individual's career, it would add up to about $25,000 in total earnings.

Do Value-Added Measures Work?

Value-added analysis aims to isolate the causal effects teachers have on student achievement by comparing how well their students perform on end-of-year tests relative to similar students taught by other teachers. These comparisons take into account students’ test scores in the prior year as well as their race or ethnicity, gender, age, suspensions and absences in the previous year, whether they repeated a grade, special education status, and limited English status. We also control for teacher experience as well as for class and school characteristics, including class size and the academic performance and demographic characteristics of all students in the relevant classroom and school.

Many other researchers use methods for measuring teacher value added that are similar to ours, so it is not surprising that we obtain similar results. For example, we find that a 1-standard-deviation increase in teacher value added corresponds to increases in student math and English scores of 12 and 8 percent of a standard deviation, respectively. In both subjects, this difference is equivalent to approximately three months of additional instruction.

Can we take this as evidence of teachers’ causal impact on student test scores? Recent studies by economists Thomas Kane, Doug Staiger, and Jesse Rothstein, among others, have reached divergent conclusions about whether VA measures should be interpreted in this way. In particular, critics contend that VA measures are likely to be biased as a result of the way that students are assigned to teachers. For example, some teachers might be consistently assigned students with higher-income parents (which typically cannot be accounted for by school districts when generating VA measures because they do not collect precise data on family income). We implement two new tests to determine whether VA estimates are biased.

Our first test examines whether in fact high-VA teachers tend to be assigned students from more-advantaged families. We calculate an overall measure of parents’ socioeconomic status, combining the parental characteristics listed above. Not surprisingly, parent socioeconomic status is strongly predictive of student test scores, and, looking at simple correlations, we find that less-advantaged students do tend to be assigned to teachers with lower VA measures. However, controlling for the limited set of student characteristics available in school-district databases, such as test scores in the previous grade, is sufficient to account for the assignment of students to teachers based on parent characteristics. That is, if we take two students who have the same 4th-grade test scores, demographics, classroom characteristics, and so forth, the student assigned to a teacher with higher VA in grade 5 does not systematically have different parental income or other characteristics.

This first test shows that any bias in VA estimates due to the omission of parent characteristics that we are able to observe is minimal. The possibility remains, however, that students are assigned to teachers based on unmeasured characteristics unrelated to parent socioeconomic status. For example, principals may consistently assign their most-disruptive students to teachers whom they believe are up to the challenge. Alternatively, principals might assign these same students to their least-effective teachers, whom they are not worried about losing. Our second test seeks to determine the amount of bias introduced by this kind of sorting.

To do so, we exploit the fact that adjacent grades of students within the same school are frequently assigned to teachers with very different levels of value added because of idiosyncrasies in teacher assignments and turnover. During our analysis period, roughly 15 percent of teachers in our data switched to a different grade within the same school from one year to the next, 6 percent of teachers moved to a different school within the same district, and another 6 percent left the district entirely. These year-to-year changes in the teaching staff at a given school generate differences in value added that are unlikely to be related to student characteristics.

To illustrate, suppose a high-VA 4th-grade teacher enters a school at the beginning of a school year. If VA estimates capture teachers’ true impact on their students, students entering grade 4 in that school should have higher year-end test scores than those of the previous cohort. And the size of the change in test scores across these consecutive cohorts should correspond to the change in the average value added across all teachers in the grade. For example, in a school with three equal-sized 4th-grade classrooms, the replacement of a teacher with a VA estimate of 0.05 standard deviations with one with a VA estimate of 0.35 standard deviations should increase average test scores among 4th-grade students by 0.1 standard deviations.

In fact, that is exactly what we find, as shown in Figure 1. To construct this figure, we first define the top 5 percent of teachers as “high VA” and the bottom 5 percent as “low VA.” Figure 1 displays average test scores for cohorts of students in the years before and after a high-VA teacher arrives. We see that end-of-year test scores in the subject and grade taught by that teacher rise immediately by about 4 percent of a standard deviation. This impact on average test scores is commensurate in magnitude with what we would have predicted given the increase in average teacher value added for the students in that grade.

We obtain parallel findings when we examine the departure of high-VA teachers and the entry and exit of low-VA teachers. When a high-VA teacher leaves a given subject-grade-school combination, test scores of subsequent students in that subject, grade, and school fall. Likewise, students benefit from the departure of a low-VA teacher and are harmed by the arrival of a low-VA teacher.

Together, these results provide direct evidence that removing low-VA teachers (bottom 5 percent) and retaining high-VA teachers (top 5 percent) improves the academic achievement of students. But what about the remaining 90 percent of teachers? When we perform a similar analysis for all teachers, we again find that changes in the quality of the teaching staff strongly predict changes in test scores across consecutive cohorts of students in the same school, grade, and subject. Moreover, in middle schools, where students usually learn math and English from different teachers, we confirm that the arrival or departure of math teachers affects math scores but not English scores (and vice versa).

Using these techniques, we can calculate the amount of bias in our VA estimates. We find that the degree of bias is, on average, less than 2 percent. We therefore conclude that standard VA estimates accurately capture the impact that teachers have on their students’ test scores. Although the results could differ in other settings, our method of using natural teacher turnover to evaluate bias in VA estimates can be easily implemented by school districts to evaluate the accuracy of their VA models.

Do Value-Added Measures Matter?

Even though value-added measures accurately gauge teachers’ impacts on test scores, it could still be the case that high-VA teachers simply “teach to the test,” either by narrowing the subject matter in the curriculum or by having students learn test-taking strategies that consistently increase test scores but do not benefit students later in their lives. To address this issue, we measure the relationship between teachers’ value added and their students’ outcomes in adulthood. We compare students who were assigned high-VA vs. low-VA teachers in grades 4–8 and study their outcomes in adulthood.

We find that high-VA teachers raise students’ chances of attending college at age 20 (see Figure 2a). A student assigned to a teacher with a VA 1 standard deviation higher is 0.5 percentage points more likely to attend college at age 20 (an increase of 1.3 percent). Students of higher-VA teachers also attend higher-quality colleges, as measured by the average earnings of previous graduates of those colleges.

A person’s income doesn’t begin to stabilize until their late twenties, so our analysis of earnings focuses on the year when students were 28, the oldest age at which we observe a sufficiently large number of students. We find that having spent a single year in the classroom of a teacher with value added that is 1 standard deviation higher increases earnings at age 28 by $182, or about 1 percent (see Figure 2b). If that 1 percent advantage were to remain stable throughout an individual’s career, it would add up to about $25,000 in total earnings.

In addition to improved earnings, we also find that improvements in teacher value added significantly reduce the likelihood that female students will have a child during their teenage years, increase the socioeconomic status of the neighborhoods in which students live in adulthood, and raise 401(k) retirement savings rates. Moreover, it is likely that improved education would yield benefits that we are not able to measure but have been shown by other studies, such as reduced crime and improved citizenship.

To sum up, our evidence confirms that the students of high-VA teachers benefit not just by scoring higher on math and reading tests at the end of the school year, but also through improved outcomes later in life. The size of these effects may seem small, but recall that they reflect the impact of a higher-VA teacher for a single year and could compound over time to the extent that students are exposed to multiple high-VA teachers. As important, a single high-VA teacher has this effect not only on a single student but rather on an entire classroom—and often on many classrooms of students over the course of a career.

Wanda Booth, Florida's 2011 Charter School Teacher of the Year, works with students. Teachers in all grades have large impacts on their students' adult lives.

Policy Implications

In a recent article (see “Valuing Teachers,” features, Summer 2011), Eric Hanushek argues in favor of dismissing the bottom 5 percent of teachers based on their VA scores. While such a policy would have many costs and benefits that are beyond the scope of our study, we can illustrate the magnitudes implied by our analysis by calculating its impacts on students’ earnings. Our estimates imply that replacing a teacher whose value added is in the bottom 5 percent with an average teacher would increase students’ cumulative lifetime income by a total of $1.4 million per classroom taught. This gain is equivalent to $267,000 in present value at age 12, discounting at a 5 percent interest rate. However, it is important to realize there is uncertainty in VA measures, which are estimates that may be based on only a few classrooms of students, so the gains from removing teachers identified as ineffective based on a limited number of years of data are smaller. We estimate the gains from “deselecting” the bottom 5 percent of teachers to be approximately $135,000 in present value based on one year of data and $190,000 based on three years of data. These benefits, while still large, would have to be weighed against any costs associated with the policy, such as teachers demanding higher pay to compensate them for the risk of dismissal.

We also measure the expected gains from policies that pay higher salaries or bonuses to high-VA teachers in order to increase retention rates. The gains from such policies appear to be only somewhat larger than their costs. Although the benefit from retaining a teacher whose value added is at the 95th percentile after three years is nearly $200,000 per year, most bonus payments end up going to high-VA teachers who would have stayed even without the additional payment. Replacing low-VA teachers is therefore likely to be a more cost-effective strategy to increase teacher quality in the short run than paying to retain high-VA teachers. In the long run, higher salaries could attract more high-VA teachers to the teaching profession, a potentially important benefit that we do not measure here.

While these calculations illustrate the magnitudes of teachers’ impacts on students, they do not by themselves offer a blueprint for the design of optimal teacher evaluations, salaries, or merit-pay policies. Teachers were not evaluated based on test scores in the school district and time period we study. VA measures may not be as useful for identifying teachers with positive long-term impacts on their students if teachers respond to their use in evaluation systems by engaging in practices such as teaching to the test or even outright cheating. In addition, our analysis does not compare value added with other measures of teacher quality, like evaluations based on classroom observation, which might be even better predictors of teachers’ long-term impacts than VA scores.

In summary, our research demonstrates that good teachers are of great value to their students, and that VA measures are a potentially valuable tool for measuring teacher performance. The most important lesson we draw is that finding policies to raise the quality of teaching is likely to yield substantial economic and social benefits.

Raj Chetty is professor of economics at Harvard University. John N. Friedman is assistant professor of public policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Jonah E. Rockoff is associate professor of business at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business. For further information on the study, see http://obs.rc.fas.harvard.edu/chetty/value_added.html.

Commentary

In light of the widespread attention given to the Chetty, Friedman, and Rockoff research, Education Next asked four experts to comment on the study’s implications for teacher policy.

Implications for Policy Are Not So Clear - By Douglas Harris
Profound Implications for State Policy - By Chris Cerf and Peter Shulman
More Evidence Would Be Welcome - By Dale Ballou
Low-Performing Teachers Have High Costs - By Eric A. Hanushek

Proponents of later start times, who have received considerable media attention in recent years, argue that many students who have to wake up early for school do not get enough sleep and that beginning the school day at a later time would boost their achievement. A number of school districts have responded by delaying the start of their school day, and a 2005 congressional resolution introduced by Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) recommended that secondary schools nationwide start at 9:00 or later. Despite this attention, there is little rigorous evidence directly linking school start times and academic performance.

In this study, I use data from Wake County, North Carolina, to examine how start times affect the performance of middle school students on standardized tests. I find that delaying school start times by one hour, from roughly 7:30 to 8:30, increases standardized test scores by at least 2 percentile points in math and 1 percentile point in reading. The effect is largest for students with below-average test scores, suggesting that later start times would narrow gaps in student achievement.

The primary rationale given for start times affecting academic performance is biological. Numerous studies, including those published by Elizabeth Baroni and her colleagues in 2004 and by Fred Danner and Barbara Phillips in 2008, have found that earlier start times may result in fewer hours of sleep, as students may not fully compensate for earlier rising times with earlier bedtimes. Activities such as sports and work, along with family and social schedules, may make it difficult for students to adjust the time they go to bed. In addition, the onset of puberty brings two factors that can make this adjustment particularly difficult for adolescents: an increase in the amount of sleep needed and a change in the natural timing of the sleep cycle. Hormonal changes, in particular, the secretion of melatonin, shift the natural circadian rhythm of adolescents, making it increasingly difficult for them to fall asleep early in the evening. Lack of sleep, in turn, can interfere with learning. A 1996 survey of research studies found substantial evidence that less sleep is associated with a decrease in cognitive performance, both in laboratory settings and through self-reported sleep habits. Researchers have likewise reported a negative correlation between self-reported hours of sleep and school grades among both middle- and high-school students.

I find evidence consistent with this explanation: among middle school students, the impact of start times is greater for older students (who are more likely to have entered adolescence). However, I also find evidence of other potential mechanisms; later start times are associated with reduced television viewing, increased time spent on homework, and fewer absences. Regardless of the precise mechanism at work, my results from Wake County suggest that later start times have the potential to be a more cost-effective method of increasing student achievement than other common educational interventions such as reducing class size.

Wake County

The Wake County Public School System (WCPSS) is the 16th-largest district in the United States, with 146,687 students in all grades for the 2011–12 school year. It encompasses all public schools in Wake County, a mostly urban and suburban county that includes the cities of Raleigh and Wake Forest. Start times for schools in the district are proposed by the transportation department (which also determines bus schedules) and approved by the school board.

Wake County is uniquely suited for this study because there are considerable differences in start times both across schools and for the same schools at different points in time. Since 1995, WCPSS has operated under a three-tiered system. While there are some minor differences in the exact start times, most Tier I schools begin at 7:30, Tier II schools at 8:15, and Tier III at 9:15. Tiers I and II are composed primarily of middle and high schools, and Tier III is composed entirely of elementary schools. Just over half of middle schools begin at 7:30, with substantial numbers of schools beginning at 8:00 and 8:15 as well. The school day at all schools is the same length. But as the student population has grown, the school district has changed the start times for many individual schools in order to maintain a balanced bus schedule, generating differences in start times for the same school in different years.

The only nationally representative dataset that records school start times indicates that, as of 2001, the median middle-school student in the U.S. began school at 8:00. More than one-quarter of students begin school at 8:30 or later, while more than 20 percent begin at 7:45 or earlier. In other words, middle school start times are somewhat earlier in Wake County than in most districts nationwide. The typical Wake County student begins school earlier than more than 90 percent of American middle-school students.

Data and Methods

The data used in this study come from two sources. First, administrative data for every student in North Carolina between 2000 and 2006 were provided by the North Carolina Education Research Data Center. The data contain detailed demographic variables for each student as well as end-of-grade test scores in reading and math. I standardize the raw test scores by assigning each student a percentile score, which indicates performance relative to all North Carolina students who took the test in the same grade and year. The second source of data is the start times for each Wake County public school, which are recorded annually and were provided by the WCPSS transportation department.

About 39 percent of WCPSS students attended magnet schools between 2000 and 2006. Since buses serving magnet schools must cover a larger geographic area, ride times tend to be longer for magnet school students. As a result, almost all magnet schools during the study period began at the earliest start time. Because magnet schools start earlier and enroll students who tend to have higher test scores, I exclude magnet schools from my main analysis. My results are very similar if magnet school students are included.

The data allow me to use several different methods to analyze the effect of start times on student achievement. First, I compare the reading and math scores of students in schools that start earlier to the scores of similar students at later-starting schools. Specifically, I control for the student’s race, limited English status, free or reduced-price lunch eligibility, years of parents’ education, and whether the student is academically gifted or has a learning disability. I also control for the characteristics of the school, including total enrollment, pupil-to-teacher ratio, racial composition, percentage of students eligible for free lunch, and percentage of returning students. This approach compares students with similar characteristics who attend schools that are similar, except for the fact that some schools start earlier and others start later.

The results produced by this first approach could be misleading, however, if middle schools with later start times differ from other schools in unmeasured ways. For example, it could be the case that more-motivated principals lobby the district to receive a later start time and also employ other strategies that boost student achievement. If that were the case, then I might find that schools with later start times have higher test scores, even if start times themselves had no causal effect.

To deal with this potential problem, my second approach focuses on schools that changed their start times during the study period. Fourteen of the district’s middle schools changed their start times, including seven schools that changed their start times by 30 minutes or more. This enables me to compare the test scores of students who attended a particular school to the test scores of students who attended the same school in a different year, when it had an earlier or later start time. For example, this method would compare the test scores of students at a middle school that had a 7:30 start time from 1999 to 2003 to the scores of students at the same school when it had an 8:00 start time from 2004 to 2006. I still control for all of the student and school characteristics mentioned earlier.

As a final check on the accuracy of my results, I perform analyses that compare the achievement of individual students to their own achievement in a different year in which the middle school they attended started at a different time. For example, this method would compare the scores of 7th graders at a school with a 7:30 start time in 2003 to the scores of the same students as 8th graders in 2004, when the school had a start time of 8:00. As this suggests, this method can only be used for the roughly 28 percent of students in my sample whose middle school changed its start time while they were enrolled.

Results

My first method compares students with similar characteristics who attend schools that are similar except for having different start times. The results indicate that a one-hour delay in start time increases standardized test scores on both math and reading tests by roughly 3 percentile points. As noted above, however, these results could be biased by unmeasured differences between early- and late-starting schools (or the students who attend them).

Using my second method, which mitigates this bias by following the same schools over time as they change their start times, I find a 2.2-percentile-point improvement in math scores and a 1.5-point improvement in reading scores associated with a one-hour change in start time.

My second method controls for all school-level characteristics that do not change over time. However, a remaining concern is that the student composition of schools may change. For example, high-achieving students in a school that changed to an earlier start time might transfer to private schools. To address this issue, I estimate the impact of later start times using only data from students who experience a change in start time while remaining in the same school. Among these students, the effect of a one-hour later start time is 1.8 percentile points in math and 1.0 point in reading (see Figure 1).

These estimated effects of changes in start times are large enough to be substantively important. For example, the effect of a one-hour later start time on math scores is roughly 14 percent of the black-white test-score gap, 40 percent of the gap between those eligible and those not eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, and 85 percent of the gain associated with an additional year of parents’ education.

The benefits of a later start time in middle school appear to persist through at least the 10th grade. All students in North Carolina are required to take the High School Comprehensive Test at the end of 10th grade. The comprehensive exam measures growth in reading and math since the end of grade 8 and is similar in format to the end-of-grade tests taken in grades 3–8. Controlling for the start time of their high school, I find that students whose middle school started one hour later when they were in 8th grade continue to score 2 percentile points higher in both math and reading when tested in grade 10.

I also looked separately at the effect of later start times for lower-scoring and higher-scoring students. The results indicate that the effect of a later start time in both math and reading is more than twice as large for students in the bottom third of the test-score distribution than for students in the top third. The larger effect of start times on low-scoring students suggests that delaying school start times may be an especially relevant policy change for school districts trying to meet minimum competency requirements (such as those mandated in the No Child Left Behind Act).

Why Do Start Times Matter?

The typical explanation for why later start times might increase academic achievement is that by starting school later, students will get more sleep. As students enter adolescence, hormonal changes make it difficult for them to compensate for early school start times by going to bed earlier. Because students enter adolescence during their middle-school years, examining the effect of start times as students age allows me to test this theory. If the adolescent hormone explanation is true, the effect of school start times should be larger for older students, who are more likely to have begun puberty.

I therefore separate the students in my sample by years of age and estimate the effect of start time on test scores separately for each group. In both math and reading, the start-time effect is roughly the same for students age 11 and 12, but increases for those age 13 and is largest for students age 14 (see Figure 2). This pattern is consistent with the adolescent hormone theory.

To further investigate how the effect of later start times varies with age, I estimate the effect of start times on upper elementary students (grades 3–5). If adolescent hormones are the mechanism through which start times affect academic performance, preadolescent elementary students should not be affected by early start times. I find that start times in fact had no effect on elementary students. However, elementary schools start much later than middle schools (more than half of elementary schools begin at 9:15, and almost all of the rest begin at 8:15). As a result, it is not clear if there is no effect because start times are not a factor in the academic performance of prepubescent students, or because the schools start much later and only very early start times affect performance.

Of course, increased sleep is not the only possible reason later-starting middle-school students have higher test scores. Students in early-starting schools could be more likely to skip breakfast. Because they also get out of school earlier, they could spend more (or less) time playing sports, watching television, or doing homework. They could be more likely to be absent, tardy, or have behavioral problems in school. Other explanations are possible as well. While my data do not allow me to explore all possible mechanisms, I am able to test several of them.

I find that students who start school one hour later watch 12 fewer minutes of television per day and spend 9 minutes more on homework per week, perhaps because students who start school later spend less time at home alone. Students who start school earlier come home from school earlier and may, as a result, spend more time at home alone and less time at home with their parents. If students watch television when they are home alone and do their homework when their parents are home, this behavior could explain why students who start school later have higher test scores. In other words, it may be that it is not so much early start times that matter but rather early end times.

Previous research tends to find that students in early-starting schools are more likely to be tardy to school and to be absent. In Wake County, students who start school one hour later have 1.3 fewer absences than the typical student—a reduction of about 25 percent. Fewer absences therefore may also explain why later-starting students have higher test scores: students who have an early start time miss more school and could perform worse on standardized tests as a result.

Conclusion

Later school start times have been touted as a way to increase student performance. There has not, however, been much empirical evidence supporting this claim or calculating how large an effect later start times might have. My results indicate that delaying the start times of middle schools that currently open at 7:30 by one hour would increase math and reading scores by 2 to 3 percentile points, an impact that persists into at least the 10th grade.

These results suggest that delaying start times may be a cost-effective method of increasing student performance. Since the effect of later start times is stronger for the lower end of the distribution of test scores, later start times may be particularly effective in meeting accountability standards that require a minimum level of competency.

If elementary students are not affected by later start times, as my data suggest (albeit not definitively), it may be possible to increase test scores for middle school students at no cost by having elementary schools start first. Alternatively, the entire schedule could be shifted later into the day. However, these changes may pose other difficulties due to child-care constraints for younger students and jobs and afterschool activities for older students.

Another option would be to eliminate tiered busing schedules and have all schools begin at the same time. A reasonable estimate of the cost of moving start times later is the additional cost of running a single-tier bus system. The WCPSS Transportation Department estimates that over the 10-year period from 1993 to 2003, using a three-tiered bus system saved roughly $100 million in transportation costs. With approximately 100,000 students per year divided into three tiers, it would cost roughly $150 per student each year to move each student in the two earliest start-time tiers to the latest start time. In comparison, an experimental study of class sizes in Tennessee finds that reducing class size by one-third increases test scores by 4 percentile points in the first year at a cost of $2,151 per student per year (in 1996 dollars). These calculations, while very rough, suggest that delaying the beginning of the school day may produce a comparable improvement in test scores at a fraction of the cost.

Finley Edwards is visiting assistant professor of economics at Colby College.

Let me now revisit a fifth potential asset, which is also the main reason that small-government conservatives should favor the Common Core or other high-quality “national standards”: This is the best path toward getting Uncle Sam and heavy-handed state governments to back off from micro-managing how schools are run and to return that authority to communities, individual schools, teachers, and parents.

It’s the path to getting “tight-loose” right in American K-12 education, unlike NCLB, which has it backward. (I refer to the well-known management doctrine that large organizations with many parts should be “tight about ends, loose about means.”) The proper work of conservatives going forward is to stop doing battle with the Common Core and instead do their utmost to ensure that the “loose” part gets done right. This could also be the path toward a viable political compromise on NCLB/ESEA reauthorization.

Common Core or other high-quality “national standards” are the best path toward getting Uncle Sam to back off from micro-managing how schools are run. Photo by DonkeyHotey.

Some on the Right don’t yet see any need for compromise because they expect to be in the driver’s seat in both houses of Congress and the Oval Office after November. Maybe that will happen. Maybe John Kline will have his way in the 113th Congress and at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., meaning that future federal K-12 dollars will be turned over to states with essentially no strings attached.

But I wouldn’t stake our kids’ future on the election working out that way. And even if it were to, there’s never yet been an ESEA reauthorization that wasn’t bipartisan to some extent. Which suggests to me that compromise is going to be needed and “tight-loose” is the right basis for it.

Here’s the core proposition: If all U.S. public schools embraced the same rigorous standards (for their curricular core), were assessed on the same tests, and had their results made public via a transparent system, then everybody would know how their own schools are doing and could decide for themselves whether to (a) leave things be, (b) demand a makeover, or (c) move their kids to other schools.

Communities would have grounds to rally in support of their schools, to fire the school board, to encourage charters and other innovators and entrepreneurs to arrive, etc. State-level voters would have grounds to fire the governor or legislature at the next election and to vote for higher or lower education taxes in the next referendum. Employers would know where to locate their education-intensive plants and offices and where to avoid. Philanthropists would know where to invest—or not. Reformers would know where to intervene with what. Above all, parents would know how content (or not) to be with the schools attended by their own kids.

Uncle Sam could then cease and desist from telling states and districts how to run their schools, how to “qualify” and evaluate their teachers, how and on what to spend their money, what to do about low-performing schools, to whom and how to provide choices among which sorts of schools and how many of them, etc.

But “loose” isn’t going to happen all by itself. Literally hundreds of federal programs (starting with but by no means limited to Title I and IDEA) will need to be reshaped by statute (or consolidated or abolished) for “loose” to work.

The brainpower and policy energy needed to prepare for that enormous undertaking isn’t going to be available if conservatives in the education space spend all their time battling against the “tight” part of the deal.

Remember, too, that “tight” is voluntary and should stay that way. No state needs to buy into the Common Core or the assessments now under development—as Education Secretary Arne Duncanunderscored in a letter this week to Utah’s state superintendent. (An important question for potential compromisers, however: If a state doesn’t accept “tight,” how much “loose” does it get and on what basis?)

Let me restate the essence of the compromise I’m suggesting: If everybody’s schools use the same academic targets and metrics to track their academic performance—duly reported by demographic subgroup, perhaps by individual classrooms, too—and if everybody has access to this information via a transparent reporting system, a powerful case can be made for getting “big government” to back away from managing schools. This case would be strengthened further if the education dollars—from every source—also accompany individual pupils to the schools they actually attend. Then those schools can and should be freed up to “run themselves” in the ways that matter most: budget, staffing, curriculum, schedule, and more. They can decide for themselves whether to pool resources for various external purchases and back-office operations (and where to obtain those). They can also decide for themselves what to teach on top of the “common” standards in the same or additional subjects. Schools will be freer than today to specialize in, say, art/music, STEM, technical-vocational education or history and literature.

This will lead to an overdue revolution in school governance at the state/local level, too, not just in Washington. The role of districts will change dramatically, at least in states that see this through to its logical conclusion. And the demand for outstanding building-level school leadership will soar.

Yes, this could all happen without the Common Core per se. It could be pegged to other widely agreed-upon academic standards and assessments—if such existed. Nor does any of this mean that the standards and assessments should come from the federal government. The tight-loose “compromise,” however, is mainly about the terms accompanying future federal K-12 funding and will need to be incorporated in some workable fashion into federal law.

This will, of course, be attacked from both sides. Some conservatives, as noted, will insist that the voters will soon vindicate their preference for restoring control and authority to states and districts with no expectation of common standards or tests. Some liberals will hate the “loose” part because they don’t trust states, communities, or schools to do right by kids and will therefore want continued heavy regulation from Washington. (How well has that worked, folks?)

But that’s the sort of “nobody’s pleased” situation that creates the possibility of compromise. Which would surely be better than today’s reauthorization gridlock cum waivers of dubious constitutionality (and continued heavy-handedness).

Compromise means everybody yields some of what’s important to them in return for getting (or keeping) another part that would be jeopardized if they didn’t also yield. It’s a term that’s fallen out of use in Washington of late. Can it return to favor in federal education policy in 2013?

- Chester E. Finn Jr.

This post originally appeared on Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog

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

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

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

Ze’ev Wurman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W. Stephen Wilson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wasteful Spending

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lackluster Results

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

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

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

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

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

Federal Micromanagement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the first round, the state supreme court in 2004 struck down a statewide voucher program enacted by the legislature for the benefit of students in low-performing districts. The plaintiffs alleged, and the court narrowly concurred, that the program violated a provision of the state constitution that school boards “shall have control of instruction in the public schools of their respective districts.” The court held that to require school districts to turn over some locally raised money to private schools, as the law did, offended that provision.

This seemed to suggest that a program adopted by a local school board might survive, and a test recently emerged. Suburban areas with high-performing school districts have shown little support for vouchers, so it was surprising to have the first locally enacted voucher program come from Douglas County, a Denver suburb with one of the highest median incomes in the country. School choice advocates, however, had targeted the district in school board elections. As a result, the normally nonpartisan elections turned partisan in 2009, when the Republican Party endorsed a slate of four candidates and handily defeated candidates endorsed by the teachers union.

Those efforts bore fruit in March 2011 when Douglas County’s school board unanimously approved the Pilot Choice Scholarship Program. Through this plan, any student who had been enrolled in district schools for at least one year could apply for a voucher of approximately $4,600, equal to 75 percent of state per-pupil funding, to attend a “partner” private school, with the school district keeping the other 25 percent. Religious schools would not have to waive admission requirements to participate, but would have to offer an exemption for voucher students who wished to be excused from religious services. Of the 19 initial partner schools, 14 were sectarian. The school board capped the program at 500 students but expected it to expand. As the third-largest district in the state, Douglas County serves more than 61,000 students.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, sued, citing a host of constitutional offenses, including violating the ban on support for private schools and churches (the state’s Blaine Amendment), the ban on religious tests, the guarantee of religious freedom, the uniformity requirement in the education clause, the prohibition on support for private institutions, and, for good measure, the guarantee of local control. After a three-day hearing in August, state district court judge Michael Martinez granted the ACLU’s request for a permanent injunction. Clearly alarmed by the religious instruction that would occur at religious schools—“not only is the risk of religion intruding into the secular educational function great, that risk is inevitable and unavoidable due to the very structure of the Scholarship Program”—Judge Martinez accepted nearly all of the ACLU’s claims.

Voucher supporters lined up to assist Douglas County in defending the program. The Daniels Fund, a well-regarded and influential foundation in the Rocky Mountain region, pledged $530,000 for legal expenses. In addition, the libertarian Institute for Justice filed an appeal on behalf of several families whose children were granted vouchers.

While the ACLU obviously has a grab bag of provisions at its disposal going forward, one risk is its reliance on the state Blaine Amendment. If state courts rule that the amendment requires that religious students and institutions be treated differently than secular ones, as Martinez’s ruling seems to imply, it could potentially raise a federal challenge under both the First and Fourteenth Amendments as a violation of free exercise and equal protection. The most promising outcome for Douglas County would be for Mickey Mouse to meet the U.S. Constitution.

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

This is a guy who has an astute appreciation for the challenges of education reform, and relishes them. In fact, the 57-year-old Cerf has been an avid wilderness camper since leading student canoeing expeditions near Hudson Bay in the 1970s. The tall, athletic, gray-suited father of three was appointed Chris Christie’s education czar for New Jersey in January 2011 and now oversees the Garden State’s 2,500 public schools, 1.4 million students, and 110,000 teachers in more than 600 school districts. New Jersey’s is a complex and troubled public school system: although the state ranks in the top 5 on most nationally normed tests (NAEP, SAT, ACT), it has one of the worst achievement gaps in the country—50th out of 51 in 8th-grade reading, for example. The mandate from Christie was to close it. And Cerf, fresh from a stint as a deputy chancellor for Joel Klein in New York City, has a rather straightforward plan. As he says, “Rather than working to change the organization, you shut the old organization down and transfer relevant parts into the new organization that you’re building and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

The Mission

The drive from Trenton to Newark was the third part of an interview that began in downtown Newark several days earlier, in a large, bare office that looks out over Jersey’s troubled largest city. Cerf uses it as a transit station, a temporary office while on his way to or from meetings in the state’s more populated eastern counties, his home in a northern suburb, or across the Hudson in New York City. I had caught up with him for part two of our interview in his official Trenton office, 50 miles to the south and west, where the state’s education department is headquartered and where he has lively paintings drawn by schoolchildren on the walls.

A lawyer who has argued two cases before the Supreme Court and served as a White House counsel in Bill Clinton’s first term, Cerf exhibits an appreciation of big ideas and broad trends as he explains the road forward. “I say straight out that there are many, many interests at work in public education,” he explains. “There are the interests of children, of course, which everyone talks about. There are the interests of employees, who have a perfectly legitimate set of interests to guard against arbitrariness and get as much economic benefit out of their work as is possible. There are commercial interests, like vendors and publishers…. The 600 districts in New Jersey have their interests as well: in expanding their power, their authority, their institutional permanence…. But the great myth of public education is that the Venn diagram of those interests is perfectly intersecting. There are areas of substantial overlap, but many areas do not. I represent the interests of the children of New Jersey, pure and simple. When there is a conflict between interests, and you would be amazed at how many issues come my way where you actually have to make a call between one interest and the other, I’m with the children. And I make that clear.”

Anyone who has dipped his or her toe in the waters of school reform knows the hazards, the rocks, of siding with the children. And Cerf did not live through the Klein years without suffering the slings and arrows of unions and their friends. “Cerf devised a cockamamie plan to reorganize the NYC school system,” wrote Class Size Matters director Leonie Hamson in a lengthy Huffington Post attack not long after he took the reins in New Jersey. “Clearly, the man cannot be trusted; and Cerf’s persistent proclivity towards prevarication, political smear campaigns and the privatization of public schools shows that he is not fit to run New Jersey’s education system.”

Cerf is neither rattled by such attacks—he certainly doesn’t like them—nor defensive. “One thing you have to have in this business is a very thick skin. But you also must be willing to be almost righteous in your pursuit of your objective.” Cerf brings to the reform task a keen awareness of political necessities. “The second thing you need is a sense of what you are trying to accomplish. American public education has been extremely unclear about what success looks like, and I think that’s one of the sources of confusion and division.”

Cerf lists some of the prevailing notions about the purpose of an education: “to facilitate the melting pot, advance democratic values, educate the masters of the universe and their heirs to continue to run the world, and to have everybody else get enough of an education so they could go on to some kind of trade—and so on.” And to explain his own motivating principle, he cites the much-maligned No Child Left Behind Act. “One of the extraordinary powers of No Child Left Behind,” he says, “is that it attempted to articulate a vision that this is about every child getting a sufficient education.” That is his goal in the Garden State.

Up for the Challenge

If there is a model for the perfect modern education-reform leader, Christopher Cerf surely qualifies as that person. After a career that includes stints teaching high school history, vetting nominees for President Clinton’s first presidential administration, running a couple of businesses (Edison Schools and Sangari Global Education), and helping Joel Klein reinvent New York City’s education system, he is arguably one of the most seasoned education-reform leaders in the land. Smart, tough, tenacious, and impassioned, Cerf seems to be enjoying himself. “It’s a job I didn’t need,” he says. “It’s a job I can’t afford. I’m at a certain point in life where having the title is not particularly meaningful to me.”

Cerf spent his early years in Washington, D.C., where his father, with a Yale Ph.D. in political science, worked for a foreign policy organization used by Congress before joining the Kennedy administration as a deputy assistant secretary of commerce for international relations. His mother became a homemaker to raise Chris and his two brothers.

“My father, who has been gone now since 1974,” says Cerf, “was a child of the Depression, grew up in a very lower-middle-class environment in Chicago and Milwaukee, like so many people of that generation.” He was the first of his family to go to college, which was cut short by World War II, where he served as a Navy pilot. After the war, he worked as a secretary for the newly organized Central Intelligence Agency, in Germany, where he met his future wife, a translator for the agency. Both were 22. “This was right after the war,” says Cerf. “At the time, the late 1940s, the CIA was more like the Peace Corps. What do you do when you come out of college and need a job? You get an entry-level job with the government and you see foreign countries, which my father described as about as glamorous as counting freight cars.” Cerf’s mother had already had something of a glamorous life; at least she had “a really extraordinary father,” recalls Cerf of his grandfather. William McGovern was, by training, an anthropologist, by avocation an explorer and adventurer. “He was allegedly one of the very first non-Asians to go to Lhasa,” Cerf recounts. “He was lost in the Amazon for a year. He spoke seven languages. He ran naval intelligence for FDR during World War II. He was a Buddhist monk for part of his life. He was a very quirky guy, lived out of a suitcase growing up.”

After Kennedy was killed, Cerf’s dad took a job running a Boston foundation, and for middle and high school the young Cerf attended “a funky little private school called the Commonwealth School. It was extremely diverse, not only racially but also socially.” It was at Commonwealth that Cerf fell in love with history and the big ideas that have energized it, and decided to be a teacher. He sailed through Amherst, then headed to Cincinnati Day School, where he he taught AP U.S. history and government, modern European history, and one middle section (“to keep me humble,” he says). Nurturing his other passion, and taking a page from his grandfather’s playbook, Cerf led trips to remote regions of northern Canada. “Two of us would take a group of 10 or 14 kids and literally not see another human being for 40, 45 days. This is some of the most empty terrain left on the planet, with wolves and caribou and moose. It’s a very influential part of who I am today.” And Cerf certainly recognizes the similarities between white-water canoeing and education reform. “If it was a straight shoot, it wouldn’t be very interesting,” he says, “so the ability to advance a policy agenda in an environment that is entirely set up to thwart it is a real art form. It involves interpersonal engagements. It involves political judgments. It involves designing policies and selling policies and dealing with interest-group politics, dealing with people who are on your side but who may have a political focus that can get in the way of a policy objective.”

A Seasoned Leader

What got Cerf to the top of Christie’s education commissioner wish list was a remarkable record of top-drawer political, legal, and educational experience. He had given up his high school teaching career when his new wife decided to pursue a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Rutgers. “Well, I guess we’re married,” Cerf recalls telling his wife. “If you’re moving, I’m moving, too.” Cerf applied to a number of “Ivy” history programs and law schools and eventually chose Columbia’s law school. Several years later he had earned the prestigious job of editor in chief of the school’s law review. “That opened up lots of horizons for me,” says Cerf.

He spent his first summer in law school at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund doing civil rights litigation. He worked his second summer at a large Wall Street law firm, “and it took me about five minutes to realize that that was not a path that I had any interest in pursuing,” he says. But he didn’t have to make that choice right away because he was offered a clerkship with J. Skelly Wright, the judge who had overseen the post–Brown era school integration in New Orleans and Washington, D.C. The following year he was asked to be a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. He then took a job working for a very small D.C. law firm called Onek, Klein & Farr, a fortuitous choice since this was the firm of Joel Klein, an accomplished litigator and budding antitrust lawyer who, years later, would bring Cerf to New York City to help rebuild the nation’s largest school system.

In fact, Cerf found his own way to education reform. After arguing two cases before the Supreme Court (one win, one loss), he joined Bill Clinton’s campaign team, then went to work in the White House counsel’s office. “It is an extraordinary experience to drive your car into the West Wing parking lot every day, work in the White House, have meetings with the president and with all the people who are in the newspapers every day,” he says. He left just before the end of Clinton’s first term, wooed away by a brash former magazine publisher (he rescued Esquire magazine in the 1980s) and entrepreneur to help start an education company. Cerf ran Edison Schools for six years, shepherding Chris Whittle’s revolutionary idea into more than 150 schools in dozens of cities across the country.

“Not to rise up in defense of an organization which I haven’t been with in five years,” says Cerf, “but Edison absolutely succeeded. It was the point of the spear in the school reform movement. We had very, very high standards and we were on the leading edge of data-driven decision making…. And if you cut through the blather on the achievement record of Edison Schools, you’ll find that it was materially higher than other comparable schools in their districts, including in Philadelphia.” And it was with Edison that Cerf learned “the power of politics to thwart the effort. I’m not just talking about the unions, but there is a tremendous and deep resistance—here we are in the center of capitalism, right—there is a very deep resistance to the private sector that’s embedded in the culture of public schools.”

A Bold Vision

Cerf was to see that deep resistance up close and personal when he came to New York City as Joel Klein’s chief transformation officer. He and Klein had a similar view of the world, which Cerf explains this way: “We need to be brutally honest about the depth of the issues that are confronting us. That we live in a nation where equality of opportunity is what differentiates us from all that came before.” He sees education reform in broad nation-making, moral terms. “The great vision of the American experiment is that you could transcend your birth circumstances to become someone different from your parents, and public education is meant to be the catalytic agent of that central ideal.” But that ideal, says Cerf, “is a great big lie if you are born into economic disadvantage…. It is deeply distressing to me, as it is and was to Joel, that we tolerate this. At a fundamental moral level it’s just deeply wrong, and we need to shout from every mountaintop the wrongness of that.”

Translating that moral challenge to real reform, on the ground, is what has eluded so many education-reform efforts. “Government is organized to block change rather than advance it,” says Cerf. “At every level, someone can sweep into a meeting and put a wrench in the spokes.” Thus he is spending time establishing the process by which he will dismantle, then rebuild, New Jersey’s education system. He has been “incredibly explicit,” he says, about “the definition of success for us, [which] is that we dramatically increase the number of children, regardless of birth circumstances, who graduate from high school ready for college and career.” He has set out four pillars on which to build the new system: accountability, talent, high academic standards, and innovation. Cerf threw out the organizational chart at headquarters, which employs only about 800 staff, shut down some offices completely, and, in keeping with his new pillars, created jobs for a chief talent officer, a chief accountability officer, a chief academic officer, and a chief innovation officer. His team is poring over the 2,000 pages of education regulation that Cerf believes thwarts change. He is building regional achievement centers across the state and moving a lot of people out of a “central function” to work with schools and superintendents “to build out” the capacity of the four pillars at the school level.

It is a bold vision for New Jersey schools. But Cerf seems to be the right person to run the reform rapids and bring the state’s low-achieving schools to safer waters. Stay tuned.

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

In contrast, 75 percent of U.S. classrooms do not have an excellent teacher in charge. But in this country, limiting teaching to top grads would just produce a teacher shortage. Here, star students have so many career opportunities. Most want the psychic and financial rewards of having excellence recognized at work—hard to come by if they remain teachers. So, as we have posted on the Ed Next blog before, our nation needs a different strategy: extending the reach of excellent teachers. But how?

Public Impact has just posted brief descriptions of more than 20 school models for extending the reach of excellent teachers to more students, for more pay, within budget. We are seeking five major sites to tailor and implement these and similar school models that put excellent teachers in charge of more children’s learning.

The models describe how schools can adjust teaching roles and use technology to reach every child with excellent teachers—the 20 to 25 percent who make well over a year of progress each year, on average, with their students. In coming months, Public Impact will add examples and detail, including job descriptions, evaluation rubrics, and financial considerations. All will be available, free, on OpportunityCulture.org.

This work builds on Public Impact’s “Opportunity Culture” initiative, which aims both to reach every child with high-growth, enriched learning and to provide paid career advancement opportunities to excellent teachers, within budget. It is made possible by $1 million in funding from Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and builds on a two-year initiative funded primarily by The Joyce Foundation. The Colorado Legacy Foundation also contributed to early model development.

The new funding supports development and dissemination of the models, engagement of teachers and other stakeholders, tracking of efforts to extend the reach of top teachers, and recruitment of the five sites.

Excellent teachers from Teach Plus and other experts contributed to the models, alongside the initial Opportunity Culture Advisory Team, which includes leaders in teaching, technology, and philanthropic organizations.

From the five sites chosen to implement the models, Public Impact will expect a commitment to reach far more children with excellent teachers and to adhere to the Opportunity Culture reach extension principles:

1. Reach more children successfully with excellent teachers.

2. Pay excellent teachers more for reaching more children successfully.

3. Achieve permanent financial sustainability, keeping post-transition costs within the budgets available from regular per-pupil funding sources.

4. Include roles for other educators that enable solid performers both to learn from excellent peers and to contribute to excellent outcomes for children.

5. Identify the adult who is accountable for each student’s outcomes, and clarify what people, technology, and other resources (s)he is empowered to choose and manage.

Those interested in becoming an implementation site or in offering model feedback should contact Public Impact at opportunitycultureinput@publicimpact.com.

-Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

Martha Derthick: When the framers of the United States Constitution wrote that it is a duty of the chief executive to “take care” that the laws be faithfully executed, they can hardly have imagined a law so freighted with perverse and destructive consequences as No Child Left Behind. And if they had imagined any such thing, they would likely have assumed that the legislature would be quick to correct its work.

But that is not the case in our time, and the Obama administration, confronted with a train wreck, has responded with an offer to waive the most onerous provisions of the law. The offer is conditioned, however, on the state governments’ acceptance of a set of “principles” put forth in a document titled “ESEA Flexibility.” Flexibility is the new watchword at the Department of Education (ED), though the administration promises that it implies no sacrifice of “accountability,” which has been the watchword for roughly two decades.

Martha Derthick

It is hard to see what else the administration could have done, given the failure of Congress to make corrections itself, the manifest impossibility of carrying on with the law as written, and the protest that would have come from Democrats in Congress and the army of education reformers if the administration had simply settled for waivers. It enjoys broad waiver authority under the law, and waiver provisions in federal law have repeatedly been upheld in court. On the other hand, nothing in the law authorizes it to craft new conditions—in effect, to attempt making law itself—even if the new conditions are not called law or rules or conditions or standards, but merely “principles.”

Forty years ago, in regard to public assistance rather than education, I wrote as follows of intergovernmental relations in the United States:

Federal enforcement is a diplomatic process. It is as if the terms of a treaty, an agreement of mutual interest to the two governmental parties, were more or less continuously being negotiated…. The function of intergovernmental diplomacy in a federal system, like that of international diplomacy, is to facilitate communication and amicable relations between governments that are pretending to be equals by obscuring the question of whether one is more equal than the other…. That this be done is important primarily to the federal government, for it is the aggressive, the states the defensive, actor in intergovernmental relations. It has the greater interest in seeing that change is facilitated. But perhaps the principal advantage of a diplomatic style to federal administrators … is that this mode of behavior makes the best possible use of the technique of withholding funds. It enables federal officials to exploit, without actually using, this basic resource.

—from The influence of federal grants: public assistance in Massachusetts (Harvard University Press, 1970)

Much of what I wrote about federalism 40 years ago needs revision, but I think there is still truth in this passage. And what strikes me in reviewing intergovernmental relations in education is that the federal government has had a very hard time getting the hang of it. It has wavered (that is not meant to be a pun) between administrative passivity, as with the Clinton administration’s prolific granting of waivers following the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA, the 1994 version of the Elementary and Second Education Act), and the deeply intrusive, get-tough, and grant-no-waivers initial approach adopted by Congress and the Bush administration in 2001–02.

The Clinton-era approach perhaps made due recognition of the fact that the origins of the accountability movement lay in the states. Federal law, after all, typically builds, as the IASA did, on state precedents. But the successor regime of Bush, in an overcorrection, reacted sharply against the perceived fecklessness of federal education policy, was indifferent to what the states had in place, and demanded impossibilities. Just how this happened has always puzzled me. How could an elected legislature, traditionally thought to be locally oriented, err so grievously by attempting to improve the public schools by punishing their teachers and administrators? The short answer lies, I think, in the hubris typical of a freshly elected president, the passionate commitment of the liberal lions Kennedy and Miller to social justice (that is, closing the achievement gap), and the pride that John Boehner took in collaborating with these titans. Others who should have known better went along in ignorance of the consequences. Eugene Hickok’s account in Schoolhouse of Cards mentions Senator Judd Gregg, “who harbored serious misgivings about the whole enterprise, having for years argued for local control in education …” but who wanted to help a new Republican president and presumed that the new federal initiative would not have much of an impact in his state of New Hampshire, which he believed to have very good schools. Little did he know.

Now the Obama administration is on the rebound from its predecessor, attempting its own correction and searching for what I take to be a diplomatic middle ground. State intergovernmental cooperation is made the foundation for the promise of flexibility and better federal-state cooperation. But after one gets beyond the lofty principles, which begin with “college- and career-ready expectations for all students,” there is a lot of prescription woven in among the principles.

In announcing the new plan to chief state school officers (CSSOs), Secretary Arne Duncan points out that 44 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the Common Core standards prepared under the auspices of the National Governors Association with financial support from the Gates Foundation. Forty-six states and the District of Columbia are “developing high-quality assessments aligned with these standards.” According to Duncan, “Over 40 states are developing next-generation accountability and support systems,” guided by the CSSOs, and “many states are moving forward with reforms in teacher and principal evaluation and support, turning around low-performing schools, and expanding access to high-quality schools.” As happened early in the Progressive Era, the expansion of national government activity has prompted states to work more closely together, but that effort is not all embracing. Six states, including Virginia and Texas, have yet to adopt the Common Core standards.

Given the uncertain legal ground on which its new regime of not-quite-regulation rests, the department could face some unusual dilemmas if it attempts to bring federal power to bear against dissenters. Most states will undoubtedly apply for waivers, but what if some just stop complying with NCLB and drag their feet on the waivers? If some of the half dozen or so “outliers” apply but offer much less in the way of conforming principles than ED would like, what then? Withholding funds is never easy, and the legal ambiguities present in this new démarche will not make it any easier. Yet in the absence of a penalty against a state, withholding presumably, no court is likely to be engaged in a legal resolution. The Congressional Research Service (CRS), asked by a House committee for a legal analysis, replied that the secretary of education has broad authority to grant waivers, but hedged on the question of whether these waivers could be made conditional. “Given the novelty of the question,” it said, “it is unclear how a reviewing court would rule on such an issue.” Courts have been applying a “clear statement” rule for federal grant-in-aid conditions: a federal agency cannot withhold funds unless states have been told their obligations in plain language. If that were the test, the Department of Education would be heading into court with a weak hand.

The case raises a concern that extends well beyond the field of education. Just how far is the United States going to take government-by-waiver? Waivers began to make a significant appearance in public policymaking in the 1980s and 1990s, when they were the precursors of welfare reform and the instruments for major revisions of Medicaid. These waivers had a foundation in law, and after a great deal of experimentation and intergovernmental negotiation conducted by executive officials in the two levels of government, they resulted in new law. The CRS memo cites court cases involving waiver provisions in the Real ID Act of 2005 and the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. Undoubtedly, there are many others. Perhaps to its credit, Congress recognizes with waiver provisions the limitations of its own ability to tailor national laws to the needs of a huge, diverse, and constantly changing society. For it to include waiver authority in law is just a realistic acknowledgment that it is in over its head.

But waivers threaten to get out of hand, and to undermine the rule of law. What the Obama administration just did with education would be a mild case, in which waivers are combined with new requirements lacking a basis in law, but the more serious case is the Affordable Care Act, under which, without any warrant that I have been able to find in the law itself, the administration granted more than 1,400 waivers to labor unions and small businesses that were offering less insurance coverage than the law requires. If Mitt Romney is to be believed and is elected, he will abolish the whole law by waiver, as if a president has the right to do any such thing.

Andy Rotherham: It is impossible to discuss the Obama administration’s waiver plan without also discussing and understanding the general political and governmental dysfunction plaguing Washington. The administration is proposing to use waivers to give states, school districts, and schools flexibility under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, not because waivers are President Obama’s or Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s favored way to make policy, but rather because they are the policymaking tool of last resort.

Andy Rotherham

Even casual observers of government have probably noticed that little gets done in Washington these days. The budget process has become an ongoing game of political brinkmanship, with government shutdowns regularly threatened. Legislation moves in fits and starts and often only under special expedited rules. In education, the flurry of policymaking since 2009 has come exclusively under special circumstances and not through the regular legislative process. Race to the Top, i3 (Investing in Innovation fund), and School Improvement Grants, for example, were all folded into the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The administration’s victory on student loans came courtesy of special legislative rules related to the health-care bill. Its “gainful employment” rule for for-profit colleges and universities came through the regulatory process.

This dysfunction matters because when NCLB was passed in 2001, no one involved imagined the law would run for at least a decade without a congressional overhaul. On the contrary, longtime Washington hands were surprised that it took until 2001 to reauthorize the 1994 version of the law. And the 1994 law was not as complex or timetable-laden as the current version. Notwithstanding a few waiver programs and some clever waivers states managed to secure for themselves, the core of the law remains intact almost 10 years after President George W. Bush, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Congressmen George Miller and John Boehner barnstormed the country to celebrate its overwhelmingly bipartisan passage in the House and Senate.

That’s why hardly anyone argues with Secretary Duncan’s decision to grant waivers as a way of modifying the policies. Congress tried—and failed—to overhaul the law in 2007, and current efforts to do so still seem a long shot. Yet revisions are long overdue, and the secretary of education’s authority to grant waivers is clearly spelled out in the law. Previous secretaries have issued a variety of waivers. The criticism of the secretary’s plan, which he and the president rolled out September 23 at the White House, stems from two issues: 1) the secretary’s strategy of making receipt of the waivers conditional on states agreeing to maintain or adopt a series of reforms, and 2) the effect of the waivers on efforts to hold schools accountable for results.

Let’s take the two concerns in order.

Waivers are a common strategy for policymaking. After all, with 50 states and urban, suburban, and rural communities covered by the same laws, it is almost impossible to craft laws that fit every situation without some mechanism for modification. We see waivers on a variety of policy issues to accommodate implementation challenges, state-specific statutes or constitutional requirements, or to encourage innovation and new ideas.

Yet in September in its regular monthly survey, consulting firm Whiteboard Advisors asked a bipartisan group of policy and political insiders whether they thought Secretary Duncan’s waiver plan would be challenged in court, and 63 percent said yes. I am copublisher of that survey, and the figure reflects the substantial discontent on the political right and left with Secretary Duncan’s specific strategy in this case. On the left, groups like the United Farm Workers challenged the secretary’s authority to issue waivers that would curtail parental rights. Other special-interest groups felt the waivers should be unconditional and not predicated on any specific reforms or commitments. On the right, conservatives complained that the administration was not merely waiving aspects of the law but rewriting it unilaterally.

Actually, waivers with conditions attached are also a common practice. A cabinet agency can require that a state be in compliance with various laws and regulations to be eligible for a waiver. Or an agency can sponsor pilots and let states propose their own ideas and conditions. The Department of Education has issued waivers under both of these scenarios in recent years.

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, for instance, conditioned waivers in her “growth model” pilot on state plans to ensure student growth to proficiency on state tests within three years. Such a requirement did not exist in federal law, and many of the same individuals and organizations now apoplectic about Secretary Duncan’s waiver plan raised no objections to Spellings’s approach at the time.

Where Secretary Duncan’s waivers get complicated is the hodgepodge of laws, regulations, and initiatives that comprise federal education policy today, again because of congressional inaction. The federal goals of improving teacher evaluations, adopting college- and career-ready standards, and turning around low-performing schools trace their legislative provenance to congressional authorizations permitting the secretary of education to allocate federal funds based on priorities he determines rather than specific laws passed by Congress.

Politically, the secretary is on firm ground citing the precedent of his predecessors’ waivers, and his critics’ temporal concerns about executive power and federalism seem to owe more to which party controls the Oval Office than any underlying theory of government. But the courts will care less about political precedent than statutory precedent, and could read the law and the secretary’s authority more narrowly.

Unfortunately, all the attention to the legality of these waivers (as well as a lot of questionable rhetoric about NCLB itself) has obscured the second question: While the need for revisions to the law and its timetables is inarguable, are these specific waivers a good idea?

There are a number of sensible (and often broadly supported) provisions in the administration’s waiver package, but there are problems, too. Who could argue with getting rid of NCLB’s “highly qualified teacher” rules? States have gamed them to the point of meaninglessness. Flexibility for rural local education agencies is sensible policy as well. However, the lead-up to the announcement of the waivers was unsettling to supporters of a strong federal role in school accountability. In spring 2011, the president visited a suburban school (with notable achievement gaps) to argue that without substantial changes more than 80 percent of the nation’s schools would not meet NCLB performance targets this year. In fact, the actual figures are much lower. But more to the point, given our dismal educational outcomes, why should we be surprised that an accountability system would find a lot of schools underperforming?

Meanwhile, some states proposed, and in some cases were approved for, wholesale departures from efforts to hold schools accountable. Virginia, for instance, sought to retroactively set its accountability targets, and until the proposal became public the administration seemed to be onboard. Idaho and Montana demanded flexibility while announcing that they would not enforce the law, and the administration acquiesced to some changes.

The waiver proposal itself opens the door for suburban schools with achievement gaps to evade accountability. The plan commits states to concentrate on the poorest-performing 15 percent of schools in exchange for flexibility in setting school accountability targets. Yet data clearly show that some groups of students, poor and minority students in particular, do not fare appreciably better in schools that are higher performing overall. In those schools, such challenges are often lost in seemingly respectable averages. Whether the administration can maintain real accountability for all schools remains to be seen. In that same Whiteboard Advisors survey, 75 percent of policy insiders did not think that the administration could maintain a high degree of accountability throughout the process.

The No Child Left Behind law changed the unit of analysis for educational performance and accountability from schools to students. What happens to students within schools, not only differences between schools, became the focal point. This was a major policy shift and reflected the obvious truth that different students can have very different educational experiences in the same school. Laying that reality bare discomfited comfortable suburban communities and upset the traditional education establishment. Complaints about “labeling” schools drowned out hard conversations about the reality of educational performance today.

So while the law clearly needs fixes and updates to a variety of its policies, it does not need a rollback of this bright and often uncomfortable light. The 1994 predecessor to No Child Left Behind had a muted effect in most states precisely because of this issue. Data and transparency alone do not move public policy in a sector like education, which has powerful special interests and unclear outcome goals.

That’s why, assuming that Congress fails to act to reauthorize the law, in the end the same problem that has vexed the law since 2001 seems likely to plague the waiver process as it grinds on over time: how to give states flexibility yet ensure that they hold schools accountable for results. The federal government is not good at the former, and despite a few compelling state examples to the contrary, there is plenty of history to make one worry about the latter. Forget the first few states that have a solid commitment to reform, strong leadership, and will be approved while everyone is watching the peer review process. It’s the ones that come onboard later where a rollback is most likely.

Bottom line: As with No Child Left Behind (and most broad federal legislation), execution and implementation matter as much as the letter of law and regulations. The administration is betting that the education conversation and education politics have changed enough that rollback is politically untenable. Given the track record and the way the past decade unfolded in terms of the conversation about NCLB, that seems like a bad bet, whether a judge ultimately upholds or strikes down this waiver plan.

Richard D. Kahlenberg: Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s campaign earlier this year to significantly curtail the scope of bargaining for the state’s public employees, including teachers, set off a national debate over whether their long-established right to collectively bargain should be reined in, or even eliminated.

If you’re a Republican who wants to win elections, going after teachers unions makes parochial sense. According to Terry Moe, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gave 95 percent of contributions to Democrats in federal elections between 1989 and 2010. “Collective bargaining is the bedrock of union well-being,” Moe notes, so to constrain collective bargaining is to weaken union power. The partisan nature of Walker’s campaign was revealed when he exempted two public-employee unions that supported him politically: those representing police and firefighters.

But polls suggest that Americans don’t want to see teachers and other public employees stripped of collective bargaining rights. A USA Today/Gallup poll found that by a margin of 61 to 33 percent, Americans oppose ending collective bargaining for public employees. A Wall Street Journal/NBC poll discovered that while Americans want public employees to pay more for retirement benefits and health care, 77 percent said unionized state and municipal employees should have the same rights as union members who work in the private sector. Is the public wrong in supporting the rights of teachers and other public employees to collectively bargain? I don’t think so.

Richard D. Kahlenberg

The NEA has existed since 1857 and the AFT since 1916, but teachers didn’t have real influence until they began bargaining collectively in the 1960s. Before that, as Albert Shanker, one of the founding fathers of modern teachers unions, noted, teachers engaged in “collective begging.” Educators were very poorly compensated; in New York City, they were paid less than those washing cars for a living. Teachers were subject to the whims of often autocratic principals and could be fired for joining a union.

Some teachers objected to the idea of collective bargaining. They saw unions as organizations for blue-collar workers, not for college-educated professionals. But Shanker and others insisted that teachers needed collective bargaining in order to be compensated sufficiently and treated as professionals.

Democratic societies throughout the world recognize the basic right of employees to band together to pursue their interests and secure a decent standard of living. Article 23 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provides not only that workers should be shielded from discrimination, but also that “everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.”

Collective bargaining is important, not only to advance individual interests but to give unions the power to serve as a countervailing force against big business and big government. Citing the struggle of Polish workers against the Communist regime, Ronald Reagan declared in a Labor Day speech in 1980, “where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.”

The majority of Americans believe that citizens don’t give up the basic right to collective bargaining just because they work for the government. In free societies across the globe, from Finland to Japan, public school teachers have the right to form unions and engage in collective bargaining.

In the United States, only seven states outlaw collective bargaining for teachers. Thirty-four states and the District of Columbia authorize collective bargaining for such employees, and another nine permit it. It is no accident that the seven states that prohibit collective bargaining for teachers are mostly in the Deep South, the region of the country historically most hostile to extending democratic citizenship to all Americans.

Terry Moe finds that collective bargaining for teachers has strong support among candidates for school boards. He writes, “the vast majority of school board candidates, 66 percent, have positive overall attitudes toward collective bargaining. Even among Republicans—indeed, even among Republicans who are not endorsed by the unions—the majority take a positive approach to this most crucial of union concerns.”

Nonetheless, some (including Moe) would prefer that collective bargaining for teachers be severely curtailed, or even outlawed. Ironically, one argument advanced by critics is that collective bargaining is undemocratic. The other major argument is that teacher collective bargaining is bad for education. Both claims are without basis.

Those who argue that collective bargaining for teachers is stacked, even undemocratic, say that, unlike in the private sector, where management and labor go head-to-head with clearly distinct interests, in the case of teachers, powerful unions are actively involved in electing school board members, essentially helping to pick the management team. Moreover, when collective bargaining covers education policy areas, such as class size or discipline codes, the public is shut out of the negotiations, some assert. Along the way, they conclude, the interests of adults in the system are served but not the interests of children.

But these arguments fail to recognize that in a democracy, school boards are ultimately accountable to all voters, not just teachers, who often live and vote outside the district in which they teach, and in any event represent a small share of total voters. Union endorsements matter in school board elections, but so do the interests of general taxpayers and parents and everyone else who makes up the community. If school board members toe a teachers union line that is unpopular with voters, those officials can be thrown out in the next election.

Indeed, one could make a strong argument that any outsized influence that teachers unions exercise in school board elections provides a nice enhancement of democratic decisionmaking on education policy because teachers, as much as any other group in society, can serve as powerful advocates for those Americans who cannot vote: schoolchildren. The interests of teachers and their unions don’t always coincide with those of students, but on the really big issues, such as overall investment in education, the convergence of interests is strong. Certainly, the interests of teachers in ensuring adequate educational investment are far stronger than they are for most voters, who don’t have children in the school system and may be more concerned about holding down taxes than investing in the education of other people’s kids.

American society consistently underinvests in children compared with other leading democratic societies. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the child poverty rate in the United States is 21.6 percent, the fifth-highest among its 40 member nations. Only Turkey, Romania, Mexico, and Israel have higher child-poverty rates. Put differently, we’re in the bottom one-eighth in preventing child poverty. By contrast, when the interests of children are connected with the interests of teachers, as they are on the question of public education spending, the U.S. ranks close to the top one-third. Among 39 OECD nations, the U.S. ranks 14th in spending on primary and secondary education as a percentage of gross domestic product.

Some critics argue that strong teachers unions make for inefficient spending and bad education policies in the instances when teacher and student interests diverge. For example, it is frequently claimed that teachers unions, through collective-bargaining agreements, protect incompetent members and prevent good teachers from being paid more.

This sometimes occurs, and when it does, it is troublesome. But a number of reform union leaders, going back to Al Shanker, have embraced “peer review” plans, which weed out bad teachers in Toledo, Ohio; Montgomery County, Maryland; and elsewhere. These reform plans put the lie to the notion that the average teacher has an interest in her union protecting incompetent colleagues. To the contrary, dead wood on the faculty makes every other teacher’s job more difficult. Likewise, numerous local unions have adopted pay-for-performance plans, when the measurement of performance is valid and incentives are in place to encourage good teachers to share innovative teaching techniques rather than hoarding them.

Moreover, many of the things that teachers collectively bargain for are good for kids. The majority of students benefit when teachers can more easily discipline unruly students, for example. (Principals, by contrast, often want to take a softer line so the school’s suspension rates don’t look bad.) Higher compensation packages attract higher-quality teacher candidates and reduce disruptive teacher turnover.

If collective bargaining were really a terrible practice for education, we should see stellar results where it does not occur: in the American South and in the charter school arena, for example. Why, then, aren’t the seven states that forbid collective bargaining for teachers (Arizona, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia) at the top of the educational heap? Why do charter schools, 88 percent of which are nonunion, only outperform regular public schools 17 percent of the time, as a 2009 Stanford University study found? Why, instead, do we see states like Massachusetts, and countries like Finland, both with strong teachers unions, leading the pack?

Opponents of collective bargaining will immediately point out that poverty rates are high in the American South, and low in Finland, which is an entirely valid point. But doesn’t that suggest that the national obsession with weakening teachers unions may be less important than finding ways to reduce childhood poverty?

Moreover, scholarly studies that seek to control for poverty find that collective bargaining is associated with somewhat stronger, not weaker, student outcomes. Sociologist Robert Carini’s 2002 review of 17 studies found that “unionism leads to modestly higher standardized achievement test scores, and possibly enhanced prospects for graduation from high school.” Even Terry Moe, an outspoken opponent of collective bargaining for teachers (see “Seeing the Forest Instead of the Trees,” book reviews, page 77), suggests that research on the impact of collective bargaining on student outcomes “has generated mixed findings (so far) and doesn’t provide definitive answers.”

For a variety of reasons, collective bargaining for teachers should not be constrained, much less eliminated. Indeed, if teachers are to be partners in innovative education reform (see “A Different Role for Teachers Unions?” features, page 16), the scope of collective bargaining should be expanded. When the United Federation of Teachers first began to bargain collectively in the early 1960s, Albert Shanker was distressed that the New York City school board was willing to discuss only traditional issues like wages and benefits and rejected the idea of bargaining over broader policies that the union proposed, such as the creation of magnet schools.

Shanker saw that by reducing the scope of collective bargaining, critics created a political trap for unions. Union leaders were told they could only address bread-and-butter issues and then were criticized for caring only about their own selfish concerns rather than student achievement or larger policy issues. Moreover, Shanker believed that teachers had a lot of good ideas that could be incorporated into collective bargaining agreements, such as teacher peer review, suggestions for the types of curricula that work best in the classroom, and what sorts of programs would lure teachers into high-poverty schools. He also knew that reforms that draw on teacher wisdom are more likely to be effectively implemented when the classroom door closes.

In the end, Shanker’s frustration with the traditional constraints of collective bargaining spurred him to propose, in a 1988 speech at the National Press Club, the creation of “charter schools,” where teachers would draw upon a wealth of experience to try innovative ideas. Much to Shanker’s dismay, the charter school movement went in a very different direction, becoming a vehicle for avoiding unions and reducing teacher voice (and thereby increasing teacher turnover). And charters still educate a very small fraction of students.

Expanding collective bargaining for teachers to more states and to more education issues will give educators greater voice, and in so doing, indirectly strengthen the voice of students. Overall, the evidence suggests that Scott Walker has it exactly wrong, and the American public, which overwhelmingly supports the right to collective bargaining, has it right.

Jay P. Greene: Asking if teachers unions are a positive force in education is a bit like asking if the Tobacco Institute is a positive force in health policy or if the sugar lobby is helpful in assessing the merits of corn syrup. The problem is not that teachers unions are hostile to the interests of students and their families, but that teachers unions, like any organized interest group, are specifically designed to promote the interests of their own members and not to safeguard the interests of nonmembers. To the extent that teachers benefit from more generous pay and benefits, less-demanding work conditions, and higher job security, the unions will pursue those goals, even if achieving them comes at the expense of students. That is what interest groups do. Unfortunately, a public education system that guarantees ever-increasing pay and benefits while lowering work demands on teachers, who virtually hold their positions for life regardless of performance, harms students.

Collective bargaining is the primary vehicle through which the unions enact their preferred policies regarding pay, benefits, job security, and work conditions. It is also the mechanism by which unions collect fees from teachers that provide them with the resources to prevail politically. Until the ability of teachers unions to engage in collective bargaining is restrained, we should expect unions to continue to use it to advance the interests of their adult members over those of children, their families, and taxpayers.

Teachers unions only won the privilege of engaging in collective bargaining in the last 50 years, about when student achievement began to stagnate and costs to soar. A return to the pre–collective bargaining era may be the tonic our education system needs to return to growth in achievement and restraint in costs.

Jay P. Greene

The nature and function of organized interest groups is widely known and understood. Of course, there is nothing wrong with people organizing interest groups to advocate for themselves. That is an essential part of the freedom of assembly, protected by the U.S. Constitution. If people dislike what an interest group is advocating, they can organize other interest groups to compete in the marketplace of ideas and advocate for other concerns. The normal process of checks and balances among competing interest groups, however, has failed when it comes to education.

There are three factors that have contributed to the failure of other groups to check the power of teachers unions. First, there is an asymmetry in the ability of groups to organize in education, significantly favoring the teachers unions. Teachers unions have a huge advantage in organizing and advocating for their interests. Employees of the public school system are physically concentrated in school buildings, making it easier for them to organize. And because current employees are in a good position to know how they can benefit from the system, they can be mobilized relatively easily to advocate for those policies. Parents, taxpayers, and members of the general public are geographically dispersed, making it harder for them to organize. And because they are not immersed in education matters, they cannot easily envision how policy changes might help or hurt, making it harder to mobilize them on those issues. It is hardly unique to education that concentrated interests have an advantage over diffuse interests, but this is one factor contributing to teachers union dominance.

Second, teachers unions have fooled a large section of the general public and elites into thinking of them as something other than a regular interest group advocating for their own concerns.

The teachers unions have worked hard to convince people that they are a collection of educators who love our children almost as much as the parents do. They’re like the favorite aunt or uncle who dotes on our children. This image of the teachers unions as part of our family is facilitated by the fact that virtually every college-educated household (the households with the greatest political influence) has at least one current or former public school teacher sitting at the dining table when they gather for Thanksgiving. This impression is also fostered by ad campaigns featuring teachers buying school supplies out of their own pockets and movie portraits of heroic teachers believing in students, even as their parents have abandoned them.

Of course, some teachers really do buy school supplies with their own money (which should make people wonder what kind of education system would make that necessary after spending an average of more than $12,000 per student each year). And some teachers really are like the doting aunt or uncle who sticks with kids, even when the parents have given up. But loving children and being part of the family is certainly not what teachers unions are about. They are about accumulating the power necessary to advocate for the interests of their members. In a moment of candor, Bob Chanin, former general counsel of the National Education Association, explained the key to the union’s effectiveness: “Despite what some among us would like to believe, it is NOT because of our creative ideas. It is NOT because of the merit of our positions. It is NOT because we care about children, and it is NOT because we have a vision of a great public school for every child. NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.”

The disarming image of teachers unions as Mary Poppins has begun to morph into that of a burly autoworker, as teachers union advocacy has become more militant in recent years. As states attempt to trim very generous benefit packages for teachers, the unions have organized large demonstrations, occupied state capitols, and chanted angry slogans. The public image of teachers unions fighting like autoworkers for the benefit to retire at 55 with full medical coverage and 66 percent of their peak salary while the economy is in shambles and the quality of their industry stagnates has done much to undermine the doting aunt or uncle meme. The angry slogans emanating from Diane Ravitch’s and Valerie Strauss’s Twitter feeds may soothe disgruntled teachers, but they are eroding the public perception that teachers unions are somehow different from other interest groups. Media and policy elites are increasingly treating teachers union claims with the same skepticism that they used to apply only to other interest groups.

A third factor is that unions have significant influence over who is elected or appointed to negotiate with them over pay, benefits, and work conditions. In the private sector, the power of unions is constrained by the competing organized interests of management. When they sit down to negotiate pay, benefits, and work conditions, members of management are inclined to represent the interests of shareholders, not those of employees. But in education, as in other public-sector collective bargaining, the interests of employees are represented on both sides of the table. The employees, as citizens, can organize, finance, and vote for elected officials who favor the union’s interests. It is precisely for this reason that public employees historically did not have collective bargaining rights.

But didn’t the lack of collective bargaining rights sometimes leave teachers vulnerable to arbitrary and discriminatory treatment by school administrators? Yes, but unionization and collective bargaining were neither necessary nor efficient means of correcting those abuses. We can look to other public employees, such as members of the armed forces, who still do not have collective bargaining rights, to see how progress could have occurred without unionization. The military, like public schools, was once racially segregated. African American servicemen and servicewomen were treated horribly. And sometimes officers treated all soldiers in an arbitrary and unfair manner. These abuses were not corrected by unionization and collective bargaining in the military. They were corrected by executive orders and changing legislation governing those public employees. The same path could have been taken with public school employees without the political distortions that public employee unions introduce by virtue of having their interests represented on both sides of the bargaining table.

It may have taken longer than many would like to integrate the military, expand the roles of women in the armed forces, and end “don’t ask, don’t tell,” but we were able to achieve all of those through an open, public process of changing laws and regulations. Unionized collective bargaining might also have addressed those issues, but it would have been done mostly behind closed doors and would have been accompanied by provisions to protect the narrow interests of the unions at the expense of the public interest. Perhaps the use of drones would have been restricted because it displaces jobs for Air Force pilots; perhaps there would be caps on the hours soldiers could engage in combat. Who knows what else a unionized military might have produced? The point is we rightly restrict the ability of members of the armed forces from unionizing and engaging in collective bargaining, just as we once did and could again for teachers. The claim that public employees have a “right” to unionize and collectively bargain and that exercising this “right” necessarily advances the public interest is obviously false.

The proper mechanism for improving compensation and work conditions in the public sector is through changes in law and regulation. The salary, benefits, job security, and work conditions of public employees are just as much a matter of public policy as the work that those employees are supposed to do. We don’t allow smoky backroom deals arrived at in collective bargaining to dictate the goals, structure, or existence of the public education system, so neither should we use that process to determine compensation and work condition policies.

What evidence is there that teachers unions have actually had negative effects on students and the education system? The research literature generally finds that unionization is associated with higher per-pupil costs and lower student achievement, but those findings are not very large and are sometimes inconsistent. A 1996 article by Caroline Hoxby in the Quarterly Journal of Economics is widely considered the most methodologically rigorous analysis of the issue. Claremont Graduate University professor Charles Kerchner described Hoxby’s study in a literature review prepared for the National Education Association as “the most sophisticated of the econometric attempts to isolate a union impact on the student results and school operations …” Hoxby finds that unionization is associated with higher student dropout rates as well as higher spending.

But the reality is that it is very hard to produce rigorous research on the effects of teachers unions on education. For one thing, teachers unions are powerful and active almost everywhere. Even in states without collective bargaining, the unions push state legislatures to put into law what is normally put into collective bargaining agreements. This is less than ideal for the unions, because they don’t collect dues in exchange for pushing through legislation like they can for representing members to achieve the same ends through collective bargaining. Unions operate these money-losing operations in right-to-work states to make sure that there is no meaningful policy variation on their key issues. They’d rather that we not discover that the world does not end without a mandatory step-and-ladder pay scale, fair dismissal procedures, and favorable work rules. The lack of policy variation hinders researchers, because outcomes are not likely to be very different where the policies are not very different.

But we don’t need a wealth of evidence on teachers unions specifically as long as we know about the effects of interest groups and recognize that teachers unions are indeed interest groups. Seeking to produce evidence on the effects of each interest group separately, especially when there are empirical challenges to doing so, is a bit like trying to prove that gravity operates in every room of a house. We could drop a bowling ball in each room to see if it hits the floor, but sometimes there are tables, couches, or beds in the way. If we don’t get the result we expected, it doesn’t mean that gravity only applies in certain places; it just means that research constraints prevent us from seeing in a particular situation what we know to be true in general.

In general, we know that interest groups advocate for the benefits of their members, even if it comes at the expense of others. We know that teachers unions are interest groups. And we know that the interests of teachers unions are not entirely consistent with the needs of students and taxpayers. Thus, teachers unions are likely to be negative forces for the education system and certainly should not be seen as helpful. The most rigorous research that does exist bears this out, but we also know this from our more general knowledge of how interest groups affect policy.

It is not currently practical to forbid the unionization of teachers, as we forbid the unionization of members of the armed forces. But if we want to limit the ability of teachers unions to advance their own interests at the expense of children, their families, and taxpayers, we need to consider ways of restricting their ability to engage in collective bargaining. Restricting collective bargaining would force teachers unions to pursue their interests through the legislative process, where competing interests might have a better chance to check their power. And forcing unions to operate through legislation rather than backroom collective-bargaining negotiations would improve transparency, which could also place a check on the unions’ ability to satisfy their own interests at the expense of others.

RDK: Jay Greene’s opening line, comparing teachers unions to the Tobacco Institute, is very telling about his overall analysis. He’s right, of course, that both are “interest groups,” but does he not see a massive difference between an entity that is devoted to getting more kids addicted to deadly cigarettes so they’ll be lifelong clients and a group representing rank-and-file teachers whose life’s work is educating children?

Greene complains that teachers unions have become “more militant in recent years.” But teacher strikes, which were quite common in the 1960s and 1970s, dropped 90 percent by the mid-1980s and are now, as one education report noted, essentially “relics of the past.” To the extent that teachers have rallied, it’s in response to unprecedented attacks on them in places like Wisconsin, where a half century of labor law was radically rewritten. Astonishingly, Greene would go further than Wisconsin Republicans and “return to the pre–collective bargaining era.”

Greene says providing teachers with better pay and benefits is bad for kids, but where is his evidence? Don’t better compensation packages attract brighter talent, or are the laws of supply and demand suddenly suspended when it comes to teachers?

Finally, Greene is correct to suggest that teacher and student interests are not perfectly aligned, but who are the selfless adults who better represent the interests of kids? The hedge fund managers who support charter schools and also want their income taxed at lower rates than regular earned income, thereby squeezing education budgets? Superintendents who sometimes junk promising initiatives for which they cannot take credit? I’d rather place my faith in the democratically elected representatives of educators who work with kids day in and day out.

JPG: Richard Kahlenberg places his faith in “democratically elected representatives of educators,” that is, the teachers unions, to safeguard the interests of children. Note that he does not say the democratically elected representatives of the people, or the voters. Kahlenberg is perfectly comfortable with a school system whose policies and practices are dominated by its employees, not by the citizens who pay for it or by the families whose children are compelled to attend it. Rather than seeing a system controlled by its employees as one characterized by self-interested adults maximizing their benefits at the expense of children, Kahlenberg sees it as the ideal.

In my ideal vision, we would put our faith in parents, not teachers unions, to represent the interests of children. If we had a robust system of parental school choice, I would have no problem with teachers unions and collective bargaining. In the private sector, if unions ask for too much, at least they experience the natural consequences of destroying their own companies or industries (to wit, the auto industry). But in the public sector, unions are almost entirely insulated from the consequences of making unreasonable demands, since governments never go out of business. Public sector unions can drive total revenue for their industry higher without any improvements in productivity simply by getting public officials to increase taxes.

Unfortunately, we lack a robust system of school choice and instead have to rely on democratic institutions, like school boards and state legislatures, to determine most school policies and practices. But unless we also restrict the collective bargaining rights of school employees, teachers unions will dominate the decisions of those democratic institutions, given their advantages in funding and organization, to distort elections and policy decisions.

Teachers unions almost certainly raise salaries and benefits, as Kahlenberg suggests, but that doesn’t necessarily attract better teachers if the salary schedule does nothing to reward excellence. Similarly, union-imposed dismissal procedures make it virtually impossible to fire ineffective teachers. The alignment that Kahlenberg sees between teachers unions’ desire to increase education spending and the interests of students would only be a real concordance if the unions facilitated the use of those funds in ways that actually improved outcomes.

Stray Dogs, Saints, and Saviors: Fighting for the Soul of America’s Toughest High School

By Alexander Russo

Jossey-Bass, 2011, $24.95; 232 pages.

Reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Neither “stray dogs” nor “saints” play any role in Alexander Russo’s account of how Green Dot, a nonprofit organization that creates new charter high schools, managed to take over Locke High School in the Watts area of Los Angeles, and what it achieved in its first year managing it.

Stray dogs are occasionally found on Locke’s substantial campus, and the “Saints” are its athletic teams, which on occasion have had great success. Alain L. Locke High School was built after the Watts riots of 1965. It opened in 1967 and was part of a substantial effort to improve conditions in Watts. For some years it was the pride of the area. But it was an inner-city high school, initially primarily black, in later years increasingly Hispanic, with all the attributes common to such: poor scores on the various tests, district, state and national, that have come over the years to evaluate schools; poor attendance; low graduation rates; and serious student discipline problems.

But Locke has received much more attention than any other inner-city high school. It was the subject of an earlier book, Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach For America by Donna Foote, which tells us that President George H. W. Bush visited it in 1988, President Bill Clinton in 1999. Tipper Gore, wife of former vice president Al Gore, Senator John McCain, Ice Cube, Muhammed Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and James Olmos, the star of Stand and Deliver, have all been visitors. Green Dot’s takeover of Locke was covered in great detail in the Los Angeles Times and in an article in the New Yorker.

Margaret Spellings, then secretary of education, visited a Green Dot school in Los Angeles in 2007, and the principal of Locke at the time, Frank Wells, then in his third year (he had lasted longer than his recent predecessors), spoke up about his frustrations. He had effected some improvement in school discipline and in academic tests, “but the district kept on sending him ineffective tenured teachers who were  extremely difficult to remove.” (In Relentless Pursuit, we learn of the final successful removal of one teacher, after three years of effort and a great mass of documentation.)

Reporters covered Spellings’s visit, and Wells’s intervention. “It sounded as though Wells was calling out his employers in public, proposing a Green Dot takeover of the school—and committing professional suicide.” Green Dot had already established some small charter high schools, which were attracting the better students of the neighborhood, a source of frustration to Wells. Steve Barr, a progressive political activist who had founded Green Dot, had his eye on taking over and remaking a large urban high school. Some teachers at Locke were interested in Green Dot and had met with Barr. And California law makes it possible for a vote of teachers in a school to turn that school into a charter. One would like to know more on how that law works, and what the state provides to such charters, but Russo is skimpy on these details, as on so many others.

After initial skepticism, Wells came to support the teachers pressing for a Green Dot takeover. A majority of teachers voted for it, at which point Wells was summarily removed from the principalship. Coming out of a meeting at 6 p.m., he was met by the area director, who told him “he was being reassigned to the district office and asked for Wells’s keys…. There was no opportunity for [Wells] to tell his teachers or explain to the kids. He never went back into the building. It was less than a week after he’d publicly voiced support for Green Dot.” One would like to know more about how this happened to a rather successful principal, one who had been doing better than his predecessors.

Despite union and district efforts to overturn the vote, the Green Dot supporters succeeded, and after a year of transition, in which there was a good deal of disorder, Green Dot took over the school, with a new principal and new teachers. (One distinction of Green Dot among charter school organizations is that its teachers are unionized, but we are not told anything more about the union except that it is not the one that had represented the Locke teachers.)

One would like to know more about Green Dot’s philosophy, practices, model, if any, but all one manages to learn is that, as one teacher explained to the students, “at the new Locke, teachers cared about their students, wanted to help them pass their classes, and would not abandon that effort [implying the former teachers did not ‘care,’ etc.?]. ‘I’m going to shake your hand every day, no matter what [one teacher tells her new class]…. Don’t worry about germs—I’ve got lots of hand sanitizer.’” There are no details about Green Dot’s recruitment of teachers, training, etc. The new teachers, as one of the holdovers notes, were much more white than the old Locke staff, “despite all efforts to recruit minorities.”

Wells was not selected by Green Dot for the principalship of the new Locke. He is African American, came out of San Francisco housing projects, and has been in military service. Veronica Coleman, his replacement, “is the product of a childhood on a Michigan farm and years playing sports.” Russo is rather sparse on details about race. One does not learn until well into his book that Wells is black.

What is clear about Green Dot is its commitment to small high schools, and so the reorganized Locke consisted of six schools. Efforts at creating smaller schools within Locke had already taken place, in response to No Child Left Behind prescriptions, but we are told little about these: their problems, successes, failures. In the new Locke there were to be a number of small baby Lockes, each beginning with one class of ninth graders, but scheduled to add an additional grade each year until they became full four-year high schools. The old Locke students were organized into two subschools, one called “white” and one “black,” with appropriate uniform dress requirements, and these were slated to disappear, losing a grade a year as the baby Lockes added new grades.

Russo, an experienced education journalist, received a Spencer Foundation Education Journalism Fellowship at Columbia to write this book, which covers the story of Green Dot, of its efforts to take over an inner-city high school, and of its first year managing Locke, with briefer coverage of its second year. Predictably, attendance, academic achievement, and the rate of graduation improved. Locke had a new teaching body, one likely more enthusiastic, harder working, and perhaps better qualified in some respects than the old, and a new administrative .team. It saw the effects of this new effort: the Hawthorne effect, it has been named, after famous experiments on productivity in the 1930s.

Donna Foote, in her book on Locke written a few years before the takeover, focuses on four teachers who came through Teach For America (TFA), which had sent a good number of young teachers to the school. They made up for years a large percentage of Locke’s teaching force. It is not clear whether they still do under Green Dot’s management; Russo does not mention the TFA influence at Locke. One learns a great deal in Foote’s book about the remarkable effort TFA puts into recruiting the best possible students for its enterprise, the energy and resources it devotes to evaluating its recruits, and the awesome effort these young people put into their teaching. They get good results—no wonder. Some of those who feature in Russo’s book, we learn from Foote, came to Locke through TFA. One wishes Russo had told half as much as Foote does about how Green Dot recruits, trains, and evaluates its teachers.

The first year of Green Dot management of Locke was 2008–09, the second 2009–10; we are now past the end of the third year, at which point the old Locke fully disappeared, absorbed into the new smaller Lockes. One wonders how things are going. It is the unfortunate fact about school reform stories that by the third or fourth year many of the reformers are off doing other things: they have gone on to graduate school, become administrators and consultants, and the like. This is true of the TFA recruits, too, whose contract is only for two years. One wonders how well Green Dot holds its teachers. Perhaps a book on the third or fourth year of a successful reform would teach us something about how initial gains can be maintained.

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

Faced with a $30 million shortfall in its $295 million budget for the 2011–12 school year, the Adams 12 school district in north Denver laid off custodians, furloughed teachers, trimmed programs, reduced benefits—and then took its budget scalpel to student activities.

The district dropped middle-school sports, cut back on travel for its high-school teams, and pared $500,000 from the $2 million budget that supports afterschool activities like the Math Olympiad and spelling bee at Centennial Elementary, the technology and drama clubs at Rocky Top Middle School, and the anime (Japanese animation) and Knowledge Bowl clubs at Mountain Range High.

Christopher Gdowski, superintendent of the 42,000-student district, talks hopefully of volunteers stepping in to fill some of the gaps. The YMCA has approached him about taking over some of the sports teams, even offering to buy the used school uniforms and the licensing rights to the school mascots. But some activities may have trouble finding sponsors, he concedes, and teachers union contracts may preclude others from turning to the community for advisors.

“We’re hoping for the best, but we’re fearing the worst,” Gdowski told me.

With school districts struggling to keep their noses above choppy budget waters and voters howling about taxes, should schools really be funding ping-pong and trading-card clubs? Swim teams, swing dancing, moot court, powder-puff football? Latino unions, gay-straight alliances, the Future Business Leaders of America, the French Honors Society, the jazz band, the knitting club? The barbell club at Adams 12’s Niver Creek Middle School?

As it turns out, maybe they should. There’s not a straight line between the crochet club and the Ivy League. But a growing body of research says there is a link between afterschool activities and graduating from high school, going to college, and becoming a responsible citizen.

“Honestly, the place that best prepared me for college was the hardwood court of men’s varsity basketball” in high school, Andrew Snow, a University of Michigan senior and pre-law major, e-mailed me recently. “That court taught me hard work, sacrifice, teamwork, humility…and leadership,” he added, plus, “how to deal with people in social situations” and “responsibility off the court [because] if you made a bad decision, someone would see it.”

Artists for Humanities serves 250 teens annually in an intensive arts micro-enterprise program.

Cause or Effect?

The U.S. Department of Education last compiled data on extracurricular activities a decade ago, when it reported that more than half the country’s high-school sophomores participated in sports, that one-fifth were in a school-sponsored music group, and that cheerleading and drill teams, hobby, academic, and vocational clubs each involved about 10 percent of kids.

At affluent suburban schools, the choice of activities can be dizzying. Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, a Washington, D.C., suburb, offered 89 clubs (equestrian, Persian, unicycle…), 26 sports, seven choral ensembles, seven bands or orchestras, a newspaper, a literary magazine, and a yearbook last year.

Whitman’s feeder school, Thomas W. Pyle Middle School, offered even more: 100 activities, including a stock market club, cooking, a math team, and a magic club.

Whitman says that 96 percent of its students go to college; its SAT scores in math and critical reading are 250 points above the national average. That isn’t because it has an equestrian team and a Shakespeare club, of course. The education department data show that kids from families in the top third by income and education are half again as likely to take part in sports and almost twice as likely to participate in music as kids from the bottom third. Almost 80 percent of the adults in Whitman’s zip code are college graduates, and the median household income is three times the U.S. average.

The data also show that kids with the highest test scores are the most active in afterschool activities. Two-thirds of kids in the top quarter of test takers played sports, for example, compared to less than half in the lowest quarter.

So, is there a link? Did kids who joined afterschool activities become good students, or did good students join afterschool activities?

As with a lot of social science research, the findings about extracurriculars aren’t always consistent or conclusive: You can’t randomly assign kids to soccer, after all. But some researchers insist there is a cause-effect relationship between activities and academic success, not just the other way around.

Margo Gardner, a research scientist at Columbia University’s National Center for Children and Families (NSCF), is among them—and certainly not alone. Using data from the 1988 National Education Longitudinal Study (NELS), and controlling for poverty, race, gender, test scores, and parental involvement, Gardner has calculated that the odds of attending college were 97 percent higher for youngsters who took part in school-sponsored activities for two years than for those who didn’t do any school activities.

The odds of completing college were 179 percent higher, and the odds of voting eight years after high school, a proxy for civic engagement, were 31 percent higher.

Gardner repeated the analysis using propensity-score matching, that is, comparing kids whose profiles suggested they had a similar propensity either to join or sit out afterschool activities. Even within those groups of similar kids, those who participated in activities had better school success rates than those who didn’t.

The National Center for Education Statistics, in its own analysis of the longitudinal or NELS data, found that high-school seniors who were involved in school activities were less likely to cut class and play hooky than kids who weren’t involved. Three times as many had a GPA of 3.0 or higher; twice as many scored in the top quarter on math and reading tests. And 68 percent expected to get a college degree, compared to 48 percent of kids who weren’t involved in school activities.

Other researchers have approached the question differently, but come up with complementary results. Angela Duckworth, a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, looked at college activities as a predictor of success. She rated the résumés of recent graduates who were applying for their first teaching jobs. She gave the highest scores to those people who had been in a college activity for several years, any college activity, and who had attained a level of leadership or achievement (say, MVP on the softball team).

Those with the highest “grit” scores, as she calls them—with the most persistence—turned out to be the best teachers, based on the academic gains of their students. As an added bonus, the “grittiest” scorers also were more likely to stay in their jobs rather than quit midyear.

Duckworth attributes the difference to perseverance rather than talent: There wasn’t any significant difference in teacher effectiveness based on the SAT scores and college GPAs of the job applicants, she calculated. This isn’t just about whether teachers are new, Duckworth told me: People who are persistent and passionate about something, whether cross-country or baton twirling or spelling bees, will carry over that enthusiasm to other parts of their lives.

Similarly, Betsey Stevenson, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of business and currently the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, has found a link between high-school sports and girls’ success. Stevenson compared the college-going and labor-force rates between girls who attended high school before the 1972 passage of Title IX and those who attended after. Title IX, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, required high schools and colleges to offer girls and boys the same opportunities to play sports.

Again controlling for age, race, and their state of residence, Stevenson calculated that for every 10-percentage-point rise in the number of girls playing high-school sports in any state there was a 1-percentage-point increase in those going to college and a 1- to 2-point rise in those with jobs. Title IX led to a 30-percentage-point rise in girls’ sports participation, she adds.

The National Center for Education Statistics found that high-school seniors who were involved in school activities were less likely to cut class and play hooky than kids who weren't involved. Three times as many had a GPA of 3.0 or higher.

Engaging Students

Temple University psychologist Laurence Steinberg, whose book, You and Your Adolescent: The Essential Guide for Ages 10–25, discusses afterschool activities. He suggested two more reasons for what he believes is a causal link between activities and academic success.

Kids who are involved in clubs and sports spend an extra couple of hours a week with an adult, usually a role model like a drama director or a football coach. “They don’t want to disappoint the coach,” Whitman’s principal, Alan S. Goodman, told me. All he has to do to straighten out a misbehaving athlete is to threaten to talk to the coach, he said: “‘Oh no, don’t talk to the coach,’ they tell me.”

Extracurriculars also make school more palatable for a whole lot of kids who otherwise find it bleak or unsatisfying, Steinberg said. Grades improve not because of what kids are learning in the video club, but because the video club is making them enjoy school more, so they show up more often, find a circle of like-minded friends, and become more engaged in school.

Christopher Gdowski, Adams 12’s superintendent, echoed Steinberg when I asked him what he meant by “fearing the worst” if some afterschool activities are canceled. His district polled thousands of taxpayers as part of its budget process: A huge majority opposed eliminating all activities, but most agreed on trimming the number of activities each school could offer.

Gdowski said he worries that for “some meaningful number of kids,” those activities are what brings them to school. “That’s the hook,” he said, and budget cuts could leave that hook unbaited.

Penny-wise?

After years of steady increases in education spending, and with the expiry of federal stimulus funds, school districts are facing some unaccustomed belt-tightening this year. K–12 spending rose 39 percent between the 1989–90 and the 2007–2008 school years, according to the U.S. Census bureau, and hit $605 billion in 2009, the latest year for which it has reported numbers.

But the National Business Officers Association has calculated that spending is expected to be off $2.5 billion this year from a year earlier. Florida’s 2012 budget cut K–12 spending by 8 percent, or about $540 a student. Arizona cut $183 million from K–12; New York cut more than $1 billion, and Colorado cut $250 million, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The Center on Education Policy surveyed districts in the spring and found that 46 percent expect funding decreases of 5 percent or more in the 2011–12 school year (the poll asked districts about their “total funds available” for the year, excluding federal stimulus monies).

Staff salaries and benefits are taking much of the hit. But as bus routes, textbook purchases, and even cleaning supplies come under budget scrutiny, it’s no surprise that extracurriculars are in for some pain, too.

Diane M. Place, superintendent of the 1,700-student  Towanda, Pennsylvania, school district, told me she received hate mail and “horrendous calls” when she recommended a $30-a-household tax increase to close a $2.2 million gap in her $24 million budget. Instead, she cut the instruction budget by 9 percent and then went after extracurriculars. She eliminated the rifle and junior robotics clubs, JV soccer, majorettes and one cheerleading squad, and halved the funding for the forensics team and Future Business Leaders.

The 1,000-student Salida, Colorado, school district, facing at least a $500,000 budget gap, moved to a four-day week, and then announced plans to cut Key Club, Math Counts, jazz, and weight lifting. Coos Bay, Oregon, planned to let go a Knowledge Bowl coach in the middle school and a forensics coach in high school after the district chopped $44,000 from its activities fund. Cincinnati is thinking of shifting all of its extracurriculars onto a community group, a move it predicted will save $250,000 a year, largely in teacher coaching stipends.

Extracurriculars teach a lot of the skills you need as an adult: time management, leadership. self-discipline, and persistence.

Or Pound-Foolish?

There’s no ready estimate of how much districts spend for extracurriculars: Districts account differently for teachers’ afterschool pay (it can be lumped in with merit pay, says Stephen Frank of Education Resource Strategies), whether they include team buses in the extracurricular budget, how much they depend on parents and booster clubs for field maintenance and stage-set construction, if and how much they charge students to participate, whether they use federal Title I funds for afterschool enrichment, and so on.

Marguerite Roza, who studies school finance at the University of Washington, calculates that districts spend about the same to suit up a youngster to play a sport as to enroll her in a semester of, say, history. A difference is that there are three seasons for sports, but two semesters for history.

Districts increasingly are depending on kids and their parents to fund extracurriculars. State laws, not national policy, determine which school expenses must be taxpayer-funded and which can be charged to students as user fees. California recently settled a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against dozens of Golden State schools that levied fees for classroom materials, lab fees, and afterschool activities.

But elsewhere, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association counts 33 states where at least some school districts charge athletes anywhere from $25 to $1,500. The band fee at Medina Senior High in Ohio is $200. Arlington, Massachusetts, public schools charge youngsters $405 to join the cheerleading squad and $480 to wrestle. Lakeville, Minnesota, charges $190 to join the debate team and $110 for the chess club.

Many of the best student-athletes, musicians, actors—even cheerleaders and debaters—already are paying lots more than that for private lessons. And some of the most talented spurn their school’s programs in favor of club soccer teams and community orchestras, arguments that budget cutters sometimes cite for trimming extracurriculars.

But Steinberg counters that no one suggests eliminating math classes for mediocre students, or depending on private tutors for calculus. “You could extend that argument out to its illogical extreme,” he said.

At Whitman High, where kids pay a $40 district-wide activities fee, Goodman told me he would rather increase class size than eliminate activities. “You can cope with an extra kid in your class, but at 2:10” when school lets out and intramural basketball is canceled, “what do they do?”

Police statistics offer one answer: Juvenile crime peaks between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. Education department data offer another: 31 percent of high-school seniors watched three or more hours of television every weekday in 2004, the last time the department ran the numbers, up from 9 percent in 1992.

Students write songs in an after-school program run by ZUMIX. The program offers young people the opportunity to travel thoughout New England, performing their original songs and engaging with other musicians.

Lessons That Last

Tony Wagner, codirector of the Change Leadership Group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, told me he did a focus group a decade ago with college students who graduated from a leading public high school in New England. He asked them what “important things” they remembered about high school, three to five years after leaving.

“They described all their experiences in extracurricular activities and sports. This went on for an hour,” he said. But about what the remembered from their academics, “they said, ‘you basically start over.’”

The takeaway, Wagner said, is that extracurriculars “teach a lot of the skills you need as an adult: time management, leadership, self-discipline, and persistence for doing work that isn’t extrinsically motivated.” That dovetails with Wagner’s academic work, which defines the “skills of the future” as including adaptability, leading by influence, and initiative.

“Kids who have a significant involvement in an extracurricular activity have a capacity for focus, self-discipline, and time management that I see lacking in kids who just went through school focused on their GPA,” he told me. Like Gardner and Duckworth, he doesn’t single out football players over the engineering team, or vice versa. The kind of activities “seems not to matter; what matters is the level of engagement,” he said.

I tested Wagner’s conclusion using an updated version of the focus group: I posted a question on the Facebook pages of my college-going sons. I asked their friends what they learned in high school that best prepared them for college, and received answers that were carbon copies of Wagner’s.

No one dumped on high school—“It’s not that I didn’t have fine teachers,” Andrew Snow e-mailed me—but no one credited AP chemistry with preparing them for college, either. In fact, no one mentioned classes at all. Instead, they wrote that extracurriculars introduced them to new ideas and interests, taught them to study more efficiently, developed their social skills, and exposed them to caring adults. “Coach was a maker of honorable men,” wrote Snow.

Justine Mrosak, a first-year medical student at the University of Minnesota, wrote that high school taught her “how to balance my academics with other passions.” Basketball and choir took time, she wrote. “But I didn’t want to give up doing the things that I loved just to get good grades, so I really learned how to schedule my time, prioritize my activities, and make my studying [as] efficient as possible.”

Steven Zuckerman, a pre-law major at the University of Michigan, wrote that “the most valuable thing” he learned was “to challenge my inhibitions by trying new things.” That meant playing sports “I had never tried before,” joining clubs “about things that I never thought would interest me,” and, inevitably, meeting “people with whom I never saw myself connecting.” That curiosity has followed him into college, where he has worked on political campaigns, he says.

I’d rise to the defense of Algebra I any day, and I assume any social scientist would, too. But, leadership, adaptability, social skills? Try a couple years on the school newspaper to learn that.

June Kronholz, a contributing editor, spent four years on her high-school newspaper and 30 years at the Wall Street Journal.

For over forty years the unions have been the stewards of the teaching profession. I recently attended an event sponsored by the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce that included Michelle Rhee, former chancellor of Washington D.C. schools. When the issue of teachers unions was brought up, Rhee said something to the effect of, “We have to remember that the union’s job is to create better policies for teachers, and they do a great job of that.” I hear some form of this statement quite often; and it bothers me every time. I respectfully disagree with Rhee and others who believe unions are doing a good job for teachers. As a former teacher and former National Education Association (NEA) member, I believe the unions support policies that are good for the unions, not for teachers or for the profession.

Let’s take a quick look at what union stewardship has done for the teaching profession:

Recruitment

While a recent PDK/Gallup poll indicated that 3 out 4 American’s believe that the brightest Americans should be recruited to the teaching profession, this belief has not led to such recruitment. According to a McKinsey report, only 23% of teachers are graduates from the top third of their college class; in high-poverty schools that number sinks to 14%. As stewards of the profession, have the unions used their political power to make teaching an attractive profession for the nation’s brightest college students, or do they just to try and get more money to hire more teachers, no matter the quality?

Retention

A report released recently by the U.S. Department of Education found that ten percent of teachers leave the profession in the first year. A recent article in Forbes magazine cites studies finding that 46% of teachers leave the profession in the first five years. Not only does this turnover rate cost the nation over $7 billion in hiring and training costs, it also leads one to wonder why these teachers are leaving and what union policies have done to keep young talent in the classroom?

The Union’s solution is more money and more hiring

U.S. Department of Education statistics show that the student-teacher ratio has dropped from 18:1 in 1960 to 8:1 today, causing union membership to increase six-fold. The unions clamor for more money to hire more teachers, while nary a word is said about using this money to promote teacher quality. Doesn’t it make more sense to use money to create innovative reforms that will improve the teaching profession, even if it doesn’t result in more dues-paying members?

Instead of embracing multi-faceted evaluations (which consider more than just test scores) or 21^st century pay structures, the unions have embraced inflexible policies that force districts to spend money on unproductive teachers they don’t want. This inflexibility depletes the resources available to pay higher salaries to those productive teachers the districts do want. This drags the profession down. Education funding has doubled in real dollars over the last thirty years, yet according to the NEA’s own figures, teacher salaries have not even grown at the rate of inflation. While quantity over quality policies have been good for the union’s bottom line, have they been good for the profession?

Something has to change

Because of the urgency of this issue, I have chosen to leave the classroom to encourage teachers to push for a new way forward for the profession. As a leader for the non-union Association of American Educators (AAE) in Colorado I am finding that many teachers already understand the need for a new strategy to elevate the teaching profession in a way that the unions have failed to do. We are proving that teachers do support innovations that will promote teacher quality, and not just quantity.

While the unions are busy passing resolutions to oppose Teach for America (the organization that recruited me to the world of education), AAE wants to help find new ways to attract talent to classrooms. While the unions blame education failures on parents, in Colorado, AAE is developing a program to connect teachers to parents to ensure they have the tools they need to help their children succeed. While the unions are busy opposing innovative pay structures that will give teachers the salaries they deserve, AAE wants to help spread excellent programs that benefit great teachers.

Teaching is in need of dramatic reform to become a competitive profession that will attract America’s best and brightest, yet the union is clinging to the past and supporting the same old, tired policies that only benefit unions and their political allies. For this reason I think it is time that teachers choose to view themselves as academic professionals like doctors and lawyers, not laborers, and choose to shed the unions and embrace professional associations. The unions don’t want change, and if nothing ever changes, then the underpaid and under-respected teaching profession will never change.

AAE is a non-union professional association committed to building a better profession. Because AAE does not make political contributions, it is able to give teachers membership in a great organization that provides $2,000,000 in liability insurance, as well as legal insurance for a host of other issues a teach might encounter, for $15 a month, which is about ¼ of what unions usually charge in dues. AAE realizes that innovation is the key to creating a better profession, and that improving the profession will ensure the best teachers are in every classroom across the country, impacting the lives of our nation’s students.

I encourage you to learn more at www.aaeteachers.org

Tim Farmer is a Teach for America alumnus and current membership director for the AAE-affiliated Professional Association of Colorado Educators (PACE).

It’s called “the flipped classroom.” While there is no one model, the core idea is to flip the common instructional approach: With teacher-created videos and interactive lessons, instruction that used to occur in class is now accessed at home, in advance of class. Class becomes the place to work through problems, advance concepts, and engage in collaborative learning. Most importantly, all aspects of instruction can be rethought to best maximize the scarcest learning resource—time.

Flipped classroom teachers almost universally agree that it’s not the instructional videos on their own, but how they are integrated into an overall approach, that makes the difference. In his classes, Bergmann says, students can’t just “watch the video and be done with it.” He checks their notes and requires each student to come to class with a question. And, while he says it takes a little while for students to get used to the system, as the year progresses he sees them asking better questions and thinking more deeply about the content. After flipping his classroom, Bergmann says he can more easily query individual students, probe for misconceptions around scientific concepts, and clear up incorrect notions.

Counterintuitively, Bergmann says the most important benefits of the video lessons are profoundly human: “I now have time to work individually with students. I talk to every student in every classroom every day.” Traditional classroom interactions are also flipped. Typically, the most outgoing and engaged students ask questions, while struggling students may act out. Bergmann notes that he now spends more time with struggling students, who no longer give up on homework, but work through challenging problems in class. Advanced students have more freedom to learn independently. And, while high-school students still occasionally lapse on homework assignments, Bergmann credits the new arrangement with fostering better relationships, greater student engagement, and higher levels of motivation.

Once Bergmann’s and Sams’s lessons were posted online, it wasn’t long before other students and teachers across the country were using the lessons, and making their own. Across the country in Washington, D.C., Andrea Smith, a 6th-grade math teacher at E. L. Haynes, a high-performing public charter school, shares Bergmann’s enthusiasm, but focuses on a different aspect of the flipped classroom. Smith, who has taught for more than a decade in both D.C.’s public charter and traditional district schools, immediately saw the benefit for students, but says she was most captivated by the opportunity to elevate teaching practice and the profession as a whole. As Smith explains, crafting a great four- to six-minute video lesson poses a tremendous instructional challenge: how to explain a concept in a clear, concise, bite-sized chunk. Creating her own videos forces her to pay attention to the details and nuances of instruction—the pace, the examples used, the visual representation, and the development of aligned assessment practices. In a video lesson on dividing fractions, for example, Smith is careful not to just teach the procedure—multiply by the inverse—but also to represent the important underlying conceptual ideas. Like Bergmann, she makes it clear that the videos are just one component of instruction. She’s keen on the equivalent of a motion picture’s “director’s cut,” where a video creator might explain the reasoning behind the examples chosen and how she would extend those activities into class time.

“Flipping” is rapidly moving into the mainstream. Bergmann and Sams have completed a book, are in high demand across the country at educator conferences, and even host their own “Flipped Class Conference” to train teachers. The chief academic officer at Smith’s school, Eric Westendorf, is taking the tools he has piloted at the school and building them into a platform for teachers everywhere to create and share videos. Most notable, though, is the emergence of the Khan Academy, an online repository of thousands of instructional videos that has been touted by Bill Gates and featured prominently in the national media.

Given education’s long history of fascination with new instructional approaches that are later abandoned, there’s a real danger that flipping, a seemingly simple idea that is profound in practice, may be reduced into the latest educational fad. And, in today’s highly polarized political environment, it also runs the risk of being falsely pigeonholed into one of education’s many false dichotomies, such as the age-old pedagogical debate between content knowledge and skills acquisition.

But the ideas behind flipping are not brand new. For over a decade, led by the National Center for Academic Transformation (NCAT), dozens of colleges have successfully experimented with similar ideas across math, science, English, and many other disciplines. NCAT’s increasingly impressive body of practice shows that thoughtful course redesigns lead to improved learning. Carol Twigg, NCAT’s president and CEO, says there is no magic: course redesign is “a hard job.” She’s not assuming students love homework. But redesign offers an opportunity to reengage students and improve their motivation, while setting proper expectations and monitoring to “push school to the top of the list.” And while many course redesigns focus on incorporating more project-based learning opportunities, Twigg’s experience leads her to quickly dismiss pedagogical extremes: “If you don’t have basic math skills, you can’t do an interesting physics project.”

There is also some danger that the flipped classroom could be seen as another front in a false battle between teachers and technology. Yet Bergmann and Sams emphasize that the “only magic bullet is the recruiting, training, and supporting of quality teachers.” And while Khan Academy’s prominence engenders fear of standardization and deprofessionalization among some critics, Bergmann, Sams, and Smith see instructional videos as powerful tools for teachers to create content, share resources, and improve practice. Smith admits that if such tools were available when she first started out, she “would have run to this every week when planning.”

It seems almost certain that instructional videos, interactive simulations, and yet-to-be-dreamed-up online tools will continue to multiply. But who will control these tools and whether they will fulfill their potential remains to be seen. As Scott McLeod, one of the nation’s leading thinkers on educational technology and the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education, observes, the “reason Sal Khan is so visible right now is that nobody did this instead. It would have been great if the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics had been doing this, but someone from the outside had to fill the vacuum.” His guidance to educators: “Start making!”

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

A 35-year-old former teacher, John White headed to New Orleans in late April to become superintendent of the Big Easy’s Recovery School District (RSD), quite an accomplishment for such a young man. But, with his bags barely unpacked, he found himself nominated by Governor Bobby Jindal to be interim chief of all of Louisiana’s public schools (thanks to the sudden resignation of Paul Pastorek, who had recruited White), in addition to running RSD. Newspapers claimed that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was calling members of the state’s school board, praising White as “an extraordinary leader [who is] committed to reform and is a great asset to the state.” Is your head spinning?

John White’s wasn’t. He told the press that he was flattered by Jindal’s offer, that he had come to the Bayou State to run the New Orleans schools, but if they wanted him in Baton Rouge, he’d be glad to help out. Cool. Calm. Collected.

“I’ve got more gray hair than I should at my age,” he says, smiling, during our interview in a first-floor chancellor’s conference room at New York City’s education department headquarters just a few days before he left for New Orleans. Tall, boyish, soft-spoken, White is cordial, even gracious, but never flip. When I ask if we should wave to the mayor, whose “bull pen” office windows were visible from where we sat, he responds that such proximity to the mayor is “a beacon for accountability and the priority that this mayor has placed on public education.” Accountability is a word White frequently used during our talk.

Where did this rising education star come from? The short answer is Teach For America (TFA). He is one of a growing list of wunderkind school leaders produced by this moon shot idea of Princeton University student Wendy Kopp (20 years ago) to put smart college grads in the nation’s worst schools. White, son of a lawyer and “private wealth advisor” father and television journalist mother, grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended the prestigious private St. Albans School, where he learned, he says, “that education starts with relationships between adults and students and among students, who then reinforce the high expectations that are held for them.” But he never thought of being a teacher. In fact, there was a time in high school when he wanted to be a naval officer. As he looks back, he says he was attracted to the military’s “faith to mission, the commitment to excellence because of the deep understanding that they cannot fail.”

Instead of the military (his younger brother and only sibling did become a naval officer), White entered the University of Virginia (UVA), where he majored in English and was aiming at journalism for a career until he discovered an interview of William Faulkner, who had taught at the school, describing Ike McCaslin, protagonist in Go Down, Moses. “There are three kinds of people in the world,” he recalls Faulkner saying. “And I’m paraphrasing. There are people who don’t know there’s a problem. There are people who know there’s a problem and choose not to do anything about it. And then there are people who know there’s a problem and say, I’m going to do something about it. And the power of reading that one night on my couch in my apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, knowing that it had been spoken only half a mile from where I was living, and amidst this incredibly complex book and this incredibly complex writer and man, but the simplicity of that call literally was a life-changing moment for me. The next day I applied to Teach For America.” And he never looked back.

Into the Crucible

TFA sent White to Jersey City, to 3,000-student Dickinson High School, overlooking the Holland Tunnel, where he taught English for three years and learned that “there are a lot of challenges and we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The school itself was not organized to serve every child. It’s a huge school. Kids come and go. They oftentimes come and go without ever having formed a strong relationship with the adults who are supposed to serve them.” White met “heroic educators who were saving lives,” and he saw quickly “what an impact one teacher could make, and I thought, what an extraordinary thing it would be if we started creating groups of teachers and even schools and school systems that were doing this kind of thing.”

He gives TFA credit for “keeping me in the mission…. We all know each other,” he says of fellow alums like Michelle Rhee (Washington, D.C.’s superintendent at age 38) and Cami Anderson (who took over Newark’s troubled district at age 39), and “those are people who have fueled my commitment just as I hope that I fuel theirs.” After his teaching stint, White went to work for TFA in its New Jersey region coaching and mentoring the new recruits. He was then sent to Chicago to do the same thing. While there he met Arne Duncan. “I count Arne as a friend and advisor and mentor,” he says. “And he once told me, ‘If you want to lead and you want to lead change, just go find a place where it’s happening. Go find a school system where it’s happening and go do it.’”

“Part of the problem with the current system,” says White, is that “the schedule and the curriculum are organized around a time-based, space-based model.” Technology will help teachers meet children at their level and “move them to mastery.”

From the Big Apple to the Big Easy

That was 2006 and the happening place was New York City, where Joel Klein was four years into remaking the nation’s largest public school system. Klein immediately offered White a job on his portfolio planning team, which meant leading the process of closing bad schools and creating new ones, one of the bull’s-eye issues in the massive system’s turnaround efforts. “I was part of the team that was catalyzing change at a very rapid pace,” says White.

Several years later, when Pastorek called and invited him to audition to take over for veteran reform educator Paul Vallas, who was bound for the private sector, White was running the district’s Division of Talent, Labor and Innovation. One of the most important parts of the job was overseeing the Innovation Zone, a network of nearly 100 New York City schools focused on using technology as a catalyst to personalize education. “We wanted to organize schools around the needs of individual kids,” he says. “And I want to emphasize that last point. I think that it’s a question of providing an individual education for each child, which doesn’t mean education isolation, but one where literally every child is having a program daily that is tailored to his or her specific needs.”

As a UVA graduate, White is keenly aware of the groundbreaking work of E. D. Hirsch, who taught at UVA for several decades and is the intellectual godfather of the modern standards-based curricular movement. “Part of the challenge,” says White, “has been a standards-based education that has for too long meant that we don’t differentiate, whereas a child-centered education has meant that we, for too long, don’t hold children to standards.” White believes that “we can marry those two things…. You don’t water down the common core standards; in fact, you adopt them and you implement them.” He knows that technology is no silver bullet, but White believes it will help bring school systems “to where student progress is not being determined by whether he or she sits in a seat for 54 hours or 108 hours, but is instead seeing what each child is capable of achieving in the common core.”

His three years in the classroom at Dickinson High gives White a firm grasp of these fundamental teaching challenges, including trying to teach the same content to a room of children where the proficiency spread may be two to three grade levels. “It is, of course, every teacher’s goal to bring every child to a place of proficiency. On the other hand, we also need to make sure that we’re not holding children back from achieving something beyond proficiency…. Similarly, if a child is just really behind, limiting their education in that subject to 50 minutes makes absolutely no sense.” Part of the problem with the current system, says White, is that “the schedule and the curriculum are organized around a time-based, space-based model.” Technology will help teachers meet children at their level and “move them to mastery.”

White knows that the challenges of running New Orleans’s 70 Recovery District schools are great, despite Paul Vallas’s amazing progress in rebuilding a system that most educators agreed was among the worst in the nation before Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 80 percent of its 127 schoolhouses (see “New Schools in New Orleans,” features, Spring 2011).

“I think there are three critical challenges in New Orleans,” says White. “One, a system that has moved from tremendous problems to providing an adequate education for many kids still needs to provide a great education for all kids. Two, serving all children, including our hardest-to-serve kids: kids who are over-age, kids with severe learning needs, kids who have been out of school, kids who are moving back. Three, doing it in a way that understands the needs of family, of community, and of parents—that’s critical to being successful.”

A Leader and a Partner

New York—if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere—is certainly a great training ground for meeting and overcoming challenges. And White has the energy and intelligence and grit of a reformer. But as he sees it, the keys to success in the New Orleans RSD, where 37 of the 70 schools are charters, will be “communicating with parents” his “deep belief that parents need to be a partner in education,” that “they need to understand the options for their kids, and the need to make the best choice possible for their kids, knowing what the likely outcome is going to be.”

His responsibility “as a leader,” he says, is “to share information about the opportunities and the constraints that you’re facing. You need to be honest with people about what you can do and what you can’t do. You need to give them a rationale for why you’re doing what you are doing. You need to hear their opinion of the proposal. You need to consider it and you need to be honest with them when you come to a decision…. It’s when we either make promises that we can’t or don’t intend to keep, when we hide from people, when we don’t face the brutal facts, that’s when you know you’re not qualified to be a leader.”

And the one brutal fact that drives this young education reformer is that “without a great education system for all our children, we simply will not be the nation that we imagine ourselves to be.”

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

On August 17, 2011 Paul Peterson discussed the findings of this study in a free online webinar. An archived recording of this webinar can be found here.

The challenge is particularly great in math, science, and engineering. According to Internet entrepreneur Vinton Cerf, “America simply is not producing enough of our own innovators, and the cause is twofold—a deteriorating K–12 education system and a national culture that does not emphasize the importance of education and the value of engineering and science.” To address the issue, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education Coalition was formed in 2006 to “raise awareness in Congress, the Administration, and other organizations about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leader of the global marketplace.” Tales of shortages of educated talent appear regularly in the media. According to a CBS News report, 22 percent of American businesses say they are ready to hire if they can find people with the right skills. As one factory owner put it, “It’s hard to fill these jobs because they require people who are good at math, good with their hands, and willing to work on a factory floor.” According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, of the 30 occupations projected to grow the most rapidly over the next decade, nearly half are professional jobs that require at least a college degree. On the basis of these projections, McKinsey’s Global Institute estimates that over the next few years there will be a gap of nearly 2 million workers with the necessary analytical and technical skills.

In this paper we view the proficiency of U.S. students from a global perspective. Although we provide information on performances in both reading and mathematics, our emphasis is on student proficiency in mathematics, the subject many feel to be of greatest concern.

Student Proficiency on NAEP

At one time it was left to teachers and administrators to decide exactly what level of math proficiency should be expected of students. But, increasingly, states, and the federal government itself, have established proficiency levels that students are asked to reach. A national proficiency standard was set by the board that governs the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and generally known as the nation’s report card.

In 2007, just 32 percent of 8th graders in public and private schools in the United States performed at or above the NAEP proficiency standard in mathematics, and 31 percent performed at or above that level in reading. When more than two-thirds of students fail to reach a proficiency bar, it raises serious questions. Are U.S. schools failing to teach their students adequately? Or has NAEP set its proficiency bar at a level beyond the normal reach of a student in 8th grade?

One way of tackling such questions is to take an international perspective. Are other countries able to lift a higher percentage—or even a majority—of their students to or above the NAEP proficiency bar? Another approach is to look at differences among states. What percentage of students in each state is performing at a proficient level? How does each state compare to students in other countries?

In this article, we report results from our second study of student achievement in global perspective conducted for Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In our 2010 PEPG report, we compared the percentage of U.S. public and private school students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 who were performing at the advanced level in mathematics with rates of similar performance among their peers around the world (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011). The current study continues this work by reporting proficiency rates in both mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.

Comparing U.S. Students with Peers in Other Countries

If the NAEP exams are the nation’s report card, the world’s report card is assembled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which administers the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to representative samples of 15-year-old students in 65 of the world’s school systems (which, to simplify the presentation, we shall refer to as countries; Hong Kong, Macao, and Shanghai are not independent nations but are nonetheless included in PISA reports). Since its launch in 2000, the PISA test has emerged as the yardstick by which countries measure changes in their performance over time and the level of their performance relative to that of other countries.

Since the United States participates in the PISA examinations, it is possible to make direct comparisons between the average performance of U.S. students and that of their peers elsewhere. But to compare the percentages of students deemed proficient in math or reading, one must ascertain the PISA equivalent of the NAEP standard of proficiency. To obtain that information, we perform a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA. The crosswalk is made possible by the fact that representative (but separate) samples of the high-school graduating Class of 2011 took the NAEP and PISA math and reading examinations. NAEP tests were taken in 2007 when the Class of 2011 was in 8th grade and PISA tested 15-year-olds in 2009, most of whom are members of the Class of 2011. Given that NAEP identified 32 percent of U.S. 8th-grade students as proficient in math, the PISA equivalent is estimated by calculating the minimum score reached by the top-performing 32 percent of U.S. students participating in the 2009 PISA test. (See methodological sidebar for further details.)

What It Means to Be Proficient

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP, the determination of proficiency in any given subject at a particular grade level “was the result of a comprehensive national process [which took into account]…what hundreds of educators, curriculum experts, policymakers, and members of the general public thought the assessment should test. After the completion of the framework, the NAEP [subject] Committee worked with measurement specialists to create the assessment questions and scoring criteria.” In other words, NAEP’s concept of proficiency is not based on any objective criterion, but reflects a consensus on what should be known by students who have reached a certain educational stage. NAEP says that 8th graders, if proficient, “understand the connections between fractions, percents, decimals, and other mathematical topics such as algebra and functions.”

PISA does not set a proficiency standard. Instead, it sets different levels of performance, ranging from one (the lowest) to six (the highest). A student who is at the proficiency level in math set by NAEP performs moderately above proficiency  level three on the PISA. (See sidebar for a statement of the 8th-grade proficiency standard and sample questions from PISA and NAEP that proficient students are expected to pass.)

Crossing the Proficiency Bar

Given that definition of math proficiency, U.S. students in the Class of 2011, with a 32 percent proficiency rate, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA. Performance levels among the countries ranked 23rd to 31st are not significantly different from that of the U.S. in a statistical sense, yet 22 countries do significantly outperform the United States in the share of students reaching the proficiency level in math. Six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong had majorities of students performing at least at the proficiency level, while the United States had less than one-third. For example, 58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students performed at or above a proficient level. Other countries in which a majority—or near majority—of students performed at or above the proficiency level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands. Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent). Figure 1 presents a detailed listing of the scores of all participating countries as well as the performance of the individual states within the United States.

Shanghai topped the list with a 75 percent math proficiency rate, well over twice the 32 percent rate of the United States. However, Shanghai students are from a prosperous metropolitan area within China, so their performance is more appropriately compared to Massachusetts and Minnesota, which are similarly favored and are the top performers among the U.S. states. When this comparison is made, Shanghai still performs at a distinctly higher level. Only a little more than half (51 percent) of Massachusetts students are proficient in math, while Minnesota, the runner-up state, has a math proficiency rate of just 43 percent.

Only four additional states—Vermont, North Dakota, New Jersey, and Kansas—have a math proficiency rate above 40 percent. Some of the country’s largest and richest states score below the average for the United States as a whole, including New York (30 percent), Missouri (30 percent), Michigan (29 percent), Florida (27 percent), and California (24 percent).

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Proficiency in Reading

According to NAEP, students proficient in reading “should be able to make and support inferences about a text, connect parts of a text, and analyze text features.” According to PISA, students at level four, a level of performance set very close to the NAEP proficiency level, should be “capable of difficult reading tasks, such as locating embedded information, construing meaning from nuances of languages critically evaluating a text.” (See sidebar for more specific definitions and sample questions.)

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The U.S. proficiency rate in reading, at 31 percent, compares reasonably well to those of most European countries other than Finland. It takes 17th place among the nations of the world, and only the top 10 countries on PISA outperform the United States by a statistically significant amount. In Korea, 47 percent of the students are proficient in reading. Other countries that outrank the United States include Finland (46 percent), Singapore,  New Zealand, and Japan (42 percent), Canada (41 percent), Australia (38 percent), and Belgium (37 percent).

Within the United States, Massachusetts is again the leader, with 43 percent of 8th-grade students performing at the NAEP proficiency level in reading. Shanghai students perform at a higher level, however, with 56 percent of its young people proficient in reading. Within the United States, Vermont is a close second to its neighbor to the south, with 42 percent proficiency. New Jersey and Montana come next, both with 39 percent of the students identified as proficient in reading. The District of Columbia, the nation’s worst, are at the level achieved in Turkey and Bulgaria, while the one-eighth of our students living in California are similar to those in Slovakia and Spain. (See Figure 2 for the international ranking of all states.)

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Ethnic Groups

The percentage proficient in the United States varies considerably among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. While 42 percent of white students were identified as proficient in math, only 11 percent of African American students, 15 percent of Hispanic students, and 16 percent of Native Americans were so identified. Fifty percent of students with an ethnic background from Asia and the Pacific Islands, however, were proficient in math, placing them at a level comparable to students in Belgium, Canada, and Japan.

In reading, 40 percent of white students and 41 percent of those from Asia and the Pacific Islands were identified as proficient. Only 13 percent of African American students, 5 percent of Hispanic students, and 18 percent of Native American students were so identified.

Given the disparate performances among students from various cultural backgrounds, it may be worth inquiring as to whether differences between the United States and other countries are due to the presence of a substantial minority population within the United States. To examine that question, we compare U.S. white students to all students in other countries. We do this not because we think this is the right comparison, but simply to consider the oft-expressed claim that education problems in the United States are confined to certain segments within the minority community.

While the 42 percent math efficiency rate for U.S. white students is considerably higher than that of African American and Hispanic students, they are still surpassed by all students in 16 other countries. White students in the United States trail well behind all students in Korea, Japan, Finland, Germany, Belgium, and Canada.

White students in Massachusetts outperform their peers in other states; 58 percent are at or above the math proficiency level. Maryland, New Jersey, and Texas are the other states in which a majority of white students is proficient in math. Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state’s white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the nation as a whole.  (Results for all states are presented in the unabridged version of the paper.)

In reading, the picture looks better. As we mentioned above, only 40 percent of white students are proficient, but that proficiency rate would place the United States at 9th in the world. Its proficiency rate does not differ significantly (in a statistical sense) from that for all students in Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, but white students trail in reading by a significant margin all students in Shanghai, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In no state is a majority of white students proficient, although Massachusetts comes close with a 49 percent rate. The four states with the next highest levels of reading proficiency among white students are New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, and Colorado.

Are the Proficiency Standards the Same for Math as for Reading?

Has NAEP set a lower proficiency standard in math than in reading? If so, is the math standard too low or the reading bar too high?

At first glance it would seem that the standard is set at pretty much the same level. After all, 32 percent of U.S. students are deemed proficient in math and 31 percent are deemed proficient in reading.

But that coincidence is quite misleading. When compared to peers abroad, the U.S. Class of 2011 performed respectably in reading, trailing only 10 other nations by a statistically significant amount. Admittedly, the U.S. trails Korea by 16 percentage points, but it’s only 10 percentage points behind Canada. Meanwhile, U.S. performance in math significantly trails that of 22 countries. Korean performance is 26 percentage points higher than that of the United States, while Canadian performance is 18 percentage points higher. Judged by international standards, U.S. 8th graders are clearly doing worse in math than in reading, despite the fact that NAEP reports similar percentages proficient in the two subjects.

A direct comparison of NAEP’s proficiency standard with PISA’s proficiency levels three and four also indicates that a lower NAEP bar has been set in math than in reading. To meet NAEP’s standards currently, one needs to perform near the fourth level on PISA’s reading exam, but only modestly above the third level on its math exam.

Clearly, the experts set an 8th-grade math proficiency standard at a level lower than the one set in reading. Perhaps this is an indication that American society as a whole, including the experts who design NAEP standards, set lower expectations for students in math than in reading. If so, it is a sign that low performance in mathematics within the United States may be deeply rooted in the nation’s culture. Those who are setting the common core standards under discussion might well take note of this.

Of course, it could be argued that the math proficiency standard is correct but the reading standard has been set too high. In no country in the world does a majority of the students reach the NAEP proficiency bar set in 8th-grade reading.

What Does It Mean?

Many have concluded that the productivity of the U.S. economy could be greatly enhanced if a higher percentage of U.S. students were proficient in mathematics. As Michael Brown, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, has declared, “If America is to maintain our high standard of living, we must continue to innovate…. Math and science are the engines of innovation. With these engines we can lead the world.”

But others have argued that the overall past success of the U.S. economy suggests that high-school math performance is not that critical for sustained growth in economic productivity. After all, U.S. students trailed their peers in the very first international survey undertaken nearly 50 years ago. That is the wrong message to take away however. Other factors contributed to the relatively high rate of growth in economic productivity during the last half of the 20th century, including the openness of the country’s markets, respect for property rights, low levels of political corruption, and limited intrusion of government into the operations of the marketplace. The United States, moreover, has always benefited from the in-migration of talent from abroad.

Furthermore, the United States has historically had far higher levels of educational attainment than other countries, with many more students graduating from high school, continuing on to college, and earning an advanced degree. It appears that in the past the country made up for low quality in elementary and high school by educating students for longer periods of time.

As we proceed into the 21st century, none of these factors remains as favorable to the United States. While other countries are lifting restrictions on market operations, the opposite has been occurring within the United States. The U.S. has also placed sharp limits on the numbers of talented workers that can be legally admitted into the country. Our higher education system, though still perceived to be the best in the world, is recruiting an ever-increasing proportion of its faculty and students from outside the country. Meanwhile, educational attainment rates among U.S. citizens now trail the industrial-world average.

Even if some of these trends can be reversed, that hardly gainsays the desirability of enhancing the mathematical skills of the U.S. student population, especially at a time when the nation’s growth in productivity is badly trailing growth rates in China, India, Brazil, and many smaller Asian countries. Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann have shown elsewhere that student performance on international tests such as those we consider here is closely related to long-term economic growth (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008). Assuming past economic patterns continue, the country could enjoy a remarkable increment in its annual GDP growth per capita by enhancing the math proficiency of U.S. students. Increasing the percentage of proficient students to the levels attained in Canada and Korea would increase the annual U.S. growth rate by 0.9 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points, respectively. Since current average annual growth rates hover between 2 and 3 percentage points, that increment would lift growth rates by between 30 and 50 percent.

When translated into dollar terms, these magnitudes become staggering. If one calculates these percentage increases as national income projections over an 80-year period (providing for a 20-year delay before any school reform is completed and the newly proficient students begin their working careers), a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests gains of nothing less than $75 trillion over the period. That averages out to around a trillion dollars a year. Even if you tweak these numbers a bit in one direction or another to account for various uncertainties, you reach the same bottom line: Those who say that student math performance does not matter are clearly wrong.

Given the integration of the world economy, a global perspective is needed for assessing the performance of U.S. schools, districts, and states. High-school graduates in each and every state compete for jobs with graduates from all over the world. Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has warned, “America faces many challenges…but the enemy I fear most is complacency. We are about to be hit by the full force of global competition. If we continue to ignore the obvious task at hand while others beat us at our own game, our children and grandchildren will pay the price. We must now establish a sense of urgency.”

Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich. Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. An unabridged version of this paper is available here.

Eighteen-year-old Tyriq Jones was fairly blunt about the mess he had gotten himself into before transferring to the Hampton, Virginia, online school where I approached him one chilly day this spring. “I got in trouble. I was playing around. I got backed up” in high school, he said. He had failed three classes in his junior year and, faced with the prospect of repeating a year, probably would have dropped out instead, he told me. “I didn’t want that kind of pressure.”

People who deal with at-risk teenagers say dropping out is not an event; it’s a process. Youngsters miss school and get “backed up” in class, so they miss more school because they’re bewildered or embarrassed, and fall further behind. Seeing few ways to recover, “they just silently drop out,” said Richard Firth, who showed me around the Hampton school and two others in Richmond that are using online learning to derail the cycle.

In the three years the 75-seat Hampton Performance Learning Center has been open, it claims to have graduated 91 students. There’s a waiting list for admission, so the school opened a second shift, which also is near capacity. Sherri Pritchard, the school’s social-studies “learning facilitator”—there are no teachers and no principal here—said 95 percent of her online students pass Virginia’s end-of-course history test, which would put them well ahead of both the Hampton school district’s and state’s pass rates.

And Tyriq: He has only a C average after a year at the Hampton PLC, he said, but he graduated in June—on time—and plans to enlist in the Army, his goal all along.

The New Alternative

Online K–12 education made its appearance in the mid-1990s, largely as a resource for bright students who had no access to accelerated classes. It moved next into core high-school courses where districts found themselves with teacher shortages—math, science, foreign languages—and has been growing bumptiously, and in a dozen directions, ever since.

The International Association for K–12 Online Learning, which goes by the acronym iNACOL, estimates that 82 percent of school districts now offer at least one online course. Thirty-two states have virtual schools where online offerings range from one class to an entire high-school curriculum, according to an annual report on online learning published by the Evergreen Education Group, a Colorado consultancy. At the Florida Virtual School alone, students collectively took 220,000 classes online in 2009–10 (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features, Summer 2009). Twenty-six states have at least one full-time online school, and perhaps 225,000 youngsters were full-time online students this year, says John Watson, editor of the Evergreen report.

During a recent visit to the Richmond PLCs, Congressman Eric Cantor chats with Dr. Donna Scott.

Two of the fastest-growing trends in online education converge in the Performance Learning Center project, which is why I called Communities in Schools, a nonprofit dropout-prevention program that devised the model in Georgia in 2002.

The PLCs call themselves an alternative to traditional schools and distance themselves from the credit-recovery factories that many districts have opened to boost their graduation rates ahead of state and federal sanctions. (Indeed, a few PLC students enroll for the chance to accelerate.) But the schools do offer struggling kids like Tyriq a chance to make up courses they failed in traditional teacher-student classrooms, which puts them at the nexus of a national debate. States are raising their graduation standards, but returning kids to the classroom for a second attempt at algebra often is counterproductive—Why should we suppose they’ll understand equations any better the second time around?—and gobbles up teacher time.

The second trend is the “blended” approach, combining online learning with a teacher-led classroom (see “Future Schools,” features, Summer 2011). Most instruction is online in the PLC model, but a teacher-coach is there to answer questions, direct projects, and keep kids on track.

Communities in Schools linked those two trends with the small-school idea and has expanded the project to seven states and 33 schools. PLCs have only four or five classrooms, four or five teachers, and fewer than 100 students. Teachers are district employees who are paid the district scale and apply for their jobs. Kids remain part of their home schools, which has raised graduation statistics for those schools and generated buy-in from their administrators.

PLCs generally receive the same per-pupil funding as  traditional schools. Their biggest expense, after salaries, goes to licensing fees for the online curriculum, which Richard Firth, the Virginia PLC director, put at about $35,000 a year per school. Start-up costs for computers, teacher training, and to carve new schools out of old facilities can be a showstopper for financially pressed school districts. Richmond, which is building its first new high school in 40 years, plans to include some multipurpose rooms that could be used for a future PLC.

Richard Firth, director of the Virginia PLCs, says dropping out of school for at-risk teenagers is not an “event” but a “process.”

The only outside funding comes from Communities in Schools, which pays the salary of a services coordinator, who links youngsters with housing, day-care, medical, and other service providers and helps them plan what they do after graduation. The services coordinator at the Richmond career-center PLC keeps a closet of baby clothes in her office for students whose own children can attend Head Start or day care downstairs.

Almost disarmingly, the PLCs reach out to youngsters that schools typically find the most troublesome. Sherman Curl, the academic coordinator—i.e., principal—at the Adult Career Development Center PLC in Richmond, handed me a brochure describing the students for whom the PLC is a good fit. Kids with “poor attendance,” “excessive tardiness,” “academic failure,” “apathy,” “social issues,” low motivation, and such “challenges to success” as pregnancy and poverty, it read.

In a summary of its 2009–10 academic year, Virginia’s Communities in Schools reported that one-third of the students at its four PLCs were at least two years behind in academic credits when they arrived. They were a year or two older than their conventional-school peers and, in the previous year, averaged six suspensions and 24 absences each at their former schools. Several youngsters told me they’d fallen in with the wrong crowd at their old schools, or they felt bullied and isolated. “I started messing up,” a chatty 18-year-old named Chelsie Saunders told me at the Hampton PLC, which is housed in a modern teen center, complete with pool tables, a basketball court, a coffee bar, and an airy television lounge with leather sofas.

“These are kids who never made it in a comprehensive school,” said Wes Hamner, the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC, which occupies one floor of a sprawling trades-training campus in Richmond’s industrial district.

For all that, the three PLCs I visited were remarkably quiet and orderly: There wasn’t much chatter about what kids were learning, but there wasn’t any catcalling, hallway scuffling, or acting out in class, either. Hamner pointed out that there’s no security at his school and that the lockers don’t even have locks. Teachers sat in the back or in a corner of the classrooms, while students sat at computers, wearing headsets.

Teacher Pat Sessions monitors student work via a “dashboard” on her computer.

Teaching to the Student

At Hampton, I asked Pritchard, the social-studies facilitator, how she knew what her students were doing, so she opened a dashboard on her computer. It showed that on computer 3, a student was working on a U.S. history unit, or “module,” on civil rights. The teenager on computer 6 was working on a module on imperialism for the same course, and the student on computer 7 was doing a review and practice test on the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Most PLCs, including those in Virginia, use NovaNET, an online curriculum that is marketed by Pearson Education Inc. The program tests a student at the end of each lesson, module, and course, and lets those who pass their tests with at least an 80 percent move on. For those who don’t pass, the computer singles out the content they seemed not to understand, reteaches it, and retests.

Administrators and teachers at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC: Sherman Curl (front right), Rani Gharseese (front left), Elizabeth Muse (center), Pat Sessions (back left), Ingrid Thomas (back center), Stephania Muterspaugh (back right)

Kids like the immediate feedback, Katherine Fox, the academic coordinator at Hampton, told me: “It’s difficult for them to wait for success. Kids want to move on.” A mop-haired boy named Michael told me that he used to obsess over test questions at his conventional school and couldn’t force himself to move ahead. The NovaNET practice tests and make-up tests relieved him of that anxiety, he said, as he pulled certificates from his backpack to show that he had completed two business classes, oceanography, and biology. “No one gets left behind here,” he said.

Back on Pritchard’s dashboard, meanwhile, I could see that the student on computer 1 was using an open-source educational website called SAS Curriculum Pathways to research voting rights for the government class, while the student on computer 2 was researching Appomattox on SAS for history class. Most Hampton PLC computers can access only NovaNET; the few that can access SAS can’t go any further than research sites to which SAS provides a link.

At the career center PLC in Richmond, which is housed on the top floor of a 1920s-era school built for the city’s elite black students, science facilitator Patricia Sessions showed me more. A “pacing sheet,” a sort of minimum speed limit set by the state education department, suggested that teachers should expect to devote three weeks to a unit on biochemical processes, part of the biology curriculum. But when Sessions opened the computer file of a student named Trish, it showed that Trish had finished the unit in a week. She’d spent 26 minutes on an online lesson about atoms and molecules, and got a 90 on the test. She’d spent an hour on the properties-of-water lesson and another hour on acids and bases, and got 80 on both.

Teachers told me that most NovaNET courses are comparable to textbook-based courses in length and content—a comeback to critics who talk of watered-down curricula at alternative schools—but that many students move through them more quickly, and often finish high school a semester early. “I’m constantly working rather than waiting,” explained a tattooed girl named Shaina at the Richmond Tech school.

Pritchard told me that she started the school year with students grouped largely by subject—say, geography in one period, government in another. But as the year went on, and students progressed at different speeds, classes became more diverse. In any class period now, she could have youngsters working on either semester of any of four subjects.

Wes Hamner is the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC.

As students finish courses, they can move to another classroom to work on courses they may find slower going. If they earn enough credits to graduate before the school year is over, the services coordinator steers them to mentorships, trade training, or jobs. Sessions, who was playing Mendelssohn in her otherwise-silent classroom as her students worked, said she started the year with 20 kids in her afternoon class and was down to 8 by late March.

All that movement precludes lectures or class discussions. Teachers told me that anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the work in their classrooms is done online, with work sheets, projects, one-on-one meetings, and, for seniors, a research report and presentation accounting for the rest. The walls of Pritchard’s classroom were ringed with poster-board projects on the Zhou Dynasty, the Battle of Fort Fisher, and the roles of the secretary of defense and the U.S. Department of Education, among others. It wasn’t AP material, perhaps, but it showed persistence and attention to detail that are not always common in city schools. Last year, the whole school read the same book, Facing the Lion, and used it as a springboard for cross-disciplinary studies.

The students I talked with said they didn’t miss discussions or were self-aware enough to know that lectures didn’t fit their learning style. “I wouldn’t be listening anyway,” Tyriq told me; “I’m not a person to talk,” said another 18-year-old named Dashawn. Instead, kids said they liked the anonymity and independence of working online. “I like being in my own bubble,” Chelsie Saunders told me in Hampton: “I don’t like waiting on people” on some lessons and “I don’t worry about people getting frustrated with me” for working slowly on others.

Teacher Stephenia Muterspaugh prepares Shakeva Seward, Thomas Griffis, and Brittany Goodman for their Standards of Learning tests at the Richmond Adult Career Development Center PLC .

A Promising Start

The PLCs take youngsters who have at least attempted 9th grade, plus a few overage 8th graders. But most kids arrive in 10th or 11th grade when they realize they’re not on track to graduate. For admission, they must score at an 8th-grade level on standardized reading and math tests (the Richmond Tech PLC raised that to 9th grade because it had so many applicants), pass an interview, and sign an achievement contract that also commits them to attend a daily meeting called Morning Motivation. Each gets a learning plan that plots an individual path to graduation and then to a trade program, a job, or college.

Yvonne Brandon, superintendent of Richmond City Schools, expressed enthusiasm for online learning when we spoke. “We have to transform our ideas of what learning looks like,” she said. But PLC staffers told me that the districts sometimes struggle to understand them. Grade levels, quarterly grades, GPAs, and the academic calendar are fuzzy at a move-at-your-own-pace school: Youngsters told me how many credits they had, not whether they were juniors or seniors.

Sherri Pritchard is Hampton PLC’s social studies “learning facilitator.”

Students graduate when they earn the state-mandated 22 credits, but they can’t receive diplomas until spring. Firth, the Virginia PLC director, said he recently learned that some of those graduates-without-diplomas were being counted as absent by the district because, well, they weren’t in school. “We’re so outside the box and education is so inside the box,” Hamner sighed.

The data on online education are still pretty equivocal. There are no data on what kind of student performs best in an online class, although everyone I talked with assumed it probably was the independent achiever, because that kind of student performs well in any setting. There are few quality measures, although Michael Horn, executive director for education at the Innosight Institute, a Mountain View, California, think tank, points out that we don’t know how to measure quality in face-to-face classes, either.

Barbara Means of SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, California, told me that much of the ambiguity is because state data systems aren’t set up to compare online learners to in-class learners. They don’t record which students taking the state’s standardized math tests completed them at the end of an online course, for example, and which took them after a face-to-face class. Most states don’t keep student-level data, so researchers also can’t compare similar students at a full-time virtual school and those in a full-time conventional one.

Means reviewed 12 years of literature on online learning and said that from the limited data they presented she concluded that “there wasn’t much difference” in the educational outcomes of kids who studied online and those who studied in a classroom. That suggests that schools should consider some other reason if they’re thinking of shifting curriculum or students online, she said: Perhaps it’s cheaper or there are social benefits, like making school more flexible for working students or for those with infants.

Means also surveyed the literature comparing outcomes at traditional schools to outcomes at schools that blended face-to-face and online teaching. Youngsters in the blended environments, with a teacher and technology, did “significantly better,” she said. But that may be because blended schools offered youngsters more learning time, more content, or perhaps both, rather than because of the different approach to teaching.

Katherine Fox, academic coordinator at the Hampton PLC, hands Tyriq Jones his diploma.

Credit-recovery and online programs have been accused of low standards and a weak-tea curriculum, anything to get kids into the graduation statistics, critics contend. But the PLCs insist on the rigor of their program because it’s based on a general-education curriculum, not a credit-recovery curriculum. PLC students take the same state tests as their traditional-school peers. And computer testing on NovaNET and other online curricula prevents social promotion or the intervention of soft-hearted administrators. “We legally graduate kids; I don’t do them any favors,” said Wes Hamner at Richmond Tech PLC.

In a report on the 2009–10 school year, the project says that, nationally, its students improved their scores in all four core subjects compared to their performance in their home school the year before—by from 6 to 11 percentage points—and that 96 percent of the students classified as seniors at the beginning of the school year graduated. For a project that works with potential dropouts, that’s hugely impressive, but there has been little outside research on the PLCs that would confirm that.

The results at the Virginia PLCs are equally ambiguous. In 2009–10, the 432 youngsters who attended the four schools arrived with D averages in math, English, science, and social studies, and, except for math—which was still stuck in the basement—raised them to a C. But the averages include the 30 percent of kids who dropped out, switched to a GED program, or left for some other reason, probably lowering the grades.

After experiencing little success in a traditional high school, Tyriq Hasan Jones graduated in June 2011 from the Hampton PLC.

The PLCs also reported that 96 percent of their students passed Virginia’s end-of-course algebra exams, 97 percent passed reading, 90 percent passed biology, and 100 percent passed writing. That would put the PLCs ahead of state averages in all four subjects. (The results say a lot about Virginia’s learning standards: Is it really possible that only 6 percent of the state’s 400,000 high schoolers failed reading and 6 percent failed Algebra I last year?) The scores of PLC students are included in the results of their home schools, which makes them difficult to verify. The PLCs also don’t accept English-language learners, kids with discipline problems or most disabilities, or those with elementary-level reading and math abilities, as other public schools must, which muddies the comparison.

Still, more than one-third of the youngsters who started at the Virginia PLCs in fall 2009 graduated in 2010, including 68 students who headed to two- or four-year colleges, the Virginia project reported.

When I spoke with Chelsie Saunders in Hampton in early spring, she laid out a career path that included community college, university, and then a career in teaching or nursing. “Honestly, if it wasn’t for here, I wouldn’t graduate,” she told me. When I checked back in June, she had.

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

Who’s right?

Each has a slice of the truth. This display from the Colorado Department of Education, included in Kevin Carey and Rob Manwaring’s excellent report on growth models, helps to illustrate the dilemma:

Bruce Randolph is a high growth / low achievement school

Looking at the y-axis, very few Bruce Randolph students scored as proficient on state tests. Yet, at the same time, 65 percent of students at Bruce Randolph had growth, or year-to-year gains in scores, above the median for similar students. Only one other high school in the city, the Denver School of Science and Technology, had better growth scores. And, in May 2010, 97% of Randolph students graduated.

Diane Ravitch is partially right: There are no miracles — this is the story of a school with students that are very, very far behind. But, so is Barack Obama. If you factor in where students start, Bruce Randolph is doing an exceptional job. And, while Tough is right that students deserve better, Bruce Randolph appears to be part of the solution, not the problem.

- Bill Tucker

[If you explore the data yourself on the Colorado Growth Model site, you'll see that it's even more complicated -- Bruce Randolph's high school outperforms the middle school. FYI, Bruce Randolph is located in Denver.]

UPDATED on July 11: I’ve updated my characterization of what Bruce Randolph’s growth percentile means in the chart above. I originally said, “65 percent of students at Bruce Randolph had growth above the median for similar students.” The correct interpretation is that there was a median student growth rate at the 65th percentile. In other words, half the students grew above the 65th percentile. The 50th percentile is Colorado’s median growth rate percentile. Thanks to Richard Wenning, former Associate Commissioner at the Colorado Department of Education and one of the persons behind the Colorado growth model, who called to offer the clarification.

Schoolhouse of Cards: An Inside Story of No Child Left Behind and Why America Needs a Real Education Revolution

Collision Course: Federal Education Policy Meets State and Local Realities
By Paul Manna
CQ Press, 2010, $32.95; 206 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

Whatever Possessed the President? was the unlikely title of Robert C. Wood’s memoir of urban policy during the 1960s. The same thought springs to mind in reading these two books on the shaping and progress of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation, the great expansion of federal education policy effected during George W. Bush’s first year in office. One wonders not only what he and his advisers could have been thinking, but what the lawmakers who implemented NCLB could have been thinking. Its aims were unbelievably ambitious—every child to be proficient in reading, mathematics, and science for the appropriate grade level by 2014; an array of required tests in every state for grades 3 through 8 and in high school; the elimination of persistent achievement gaps for minorities, those with limited English, children from low-income families, and perhaps even students with disabilities; graduated requirements to be imposed on schools and school districts that did not make “adequate yearly progress” (AYP) toward these goals; and much else.

Eugene Hickok reminds us that education was a major theme in the campaign of the Republican candidate for president in 2000, despite Republican skepticism about any major federal role in education. Elimination of the Department of Education had been a frequent note in the party’s rhetoric for decades. But under Governor Bush, Texas education had made great progress, according to the state’s own tests, although this achievement was disputed during the campaign. Bush cited this improvement as one of his major accomplishments, and he hoped to take the measures that had led to it national. Bush further had managed all this while Democrats controlled the Texas legislature. Indeed, NCLB, formally an expansion of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, moved through Congress in 2001 with surprising bipartisan support. It radically implemented at the federal level a call for “accountability” in education, which had already led to substantial changes in many states.

Hickok, who served as undersecretary of education during the first George W. Bush administration, gives a detailed account of how the legislation and the key decisions were shaped. The president’s White House advisers played the dominant role; the secretary of education, Roderick Paige, former superintendent of the Houston schools, is not much in evidence, and neither is Hickok himself, despite his high office. He informs us that it was decided early on that accountability should be imposed on the individual school. To make the teachers accountable would not only have involved a statistical burden that states were not prepared to accept, but would have led to strong union resistance, which would have influenced the Democrats.

The administrative burdens at the federal and state levels, it can be imagined, were enormous. AYP was to be measured not only at the school level but for defined subgroups in each school. As a consequence for failure to make AYP, schools and school districts were required to undertake measures for improvement: To begin with, students would be allowed to move to any other school in the district or would get supplementary tutoring, and beyond that, in further years in failure, “corrective action” and “restructuring” would be required, by schools and school districts.

All this was spelled out in mind-boggling detail in the legislation: One can find a helpful summary in Collision Course. Paul Manna, a professor at William and Mary, is particularly oriented to the administrative problems the legislation created at the federal and state levels. Many states already required their own testing, which had to be conformed to federal requirements, and the federal government now required a huge amount of reporting by states of plans for implementation and, in time, test results. Inevitable “collisions” could be expected to occur, among federal and state, state and school district, school district and schools, with Department of Education officials enforcing the law, and elected officials responding to the local inability to fulfill federal requirements and trying to get relief from them. There were also conflicts among top officials in the Department of Education, though Hickok is curiously silent about his role.

One wonders how anyone informed about education could have expected the measures imposed on schools and school districts to have had great effect. The freedom to choose alternative public schools? In heavily minority urban areas, not to mention rural areas, there would have been few or no superior alternative public schools with available seats from which to choose, and few of those who became eligible to make this choice did so. In any case, freedom to choose among public schools was already widespread and one could see how minimal its influence was.

Manna meticulously and soberly reports on the statistics showing how few students who could did choose different schools, how many received tutoring—a good many more—and with what results, if any, for achievement. The “corrective action” required after the fourth year of missing AYP, and the “restructuring” required in the fifth and sixth year after missing AYP, have not for the most part occurred. But the current secretary of education says that 82 percent of schools may be expected not to reach AYP in 2010-11. Presumably many requirements in the law for schools in need of improvement for a number of years will simply not be upheld. Many school districts, on their own, such as New York City’s, undertake the kinds of “corrective action” and “restructuring” that the law calls for after a number of years of failing AYP, but without any great outcomes on achievement.

The most serious effects of NCLB I believe may be seen at the teaching level in the classroom. For the weaker inner-city schools, in particular, the required tests have come to dominate the curriculum (see “Inside the Testing Factory,” book reviews, Winter 2008). Reading and math instruction plays a dominant role in these schools and classrooms, with some positive results; social science and arts education have had to be shunted aside.

As many have pointed out, it is a good thing that NCLB has made student academic achievement a central concern nationally (see “Will NCLB Hit the Wall?” forum, Fall 2007). But many state tests set the “proficiency” bar low, the decision to mark schools as “proficient” or not is too crude, the AYP measure means that many good schools with less need to do better are pointlessly marked “in need of improvement,” and the remedial measures are insufficient. Should they be prescribed by the federal level in any case? The law needs a radical overhaul.

What is possible in the present Congress, so sharply divided and in which a good part of both parties might be happier to see NCLB dispensed with entirely? While Manna gives many suggestions for improvement, Hickok surprisingly calls for a radical and revolutionary overhaul of the whole education system to adapt to contemporary realities. Neither the lesser nor the larger suggestions will find many buyers in the current Congress.

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

We’ve written here and here about the importance figuring out as a nation how to “extend the reach” of great teachers to more students, since great teachers accountable for student learning are the one “intervention” we know can close achievement gaps and raise the bar for all students.  Khan Academy represents a potential “double-dose” of reach extension.  The hype emphasizes one of the two “doses” – the potential of videos of a super-instructor like Khan to reach millions of kids, what we call “boundless” reach extension (smart instructional software is another version).

The second potential dose is less hyped, but probably more important for learning outcomes:  the potential to enable the best in-person teachers to reach more students with personalized instruction. Large amounts of top teachers’ time could be freed up if kids were soaking up more knowledge and basic skills via Khan, smart software, or other vehicles. Excellent teachers could use that time to reach more kids. But homework flipping is not required (a good thing – see the end of our post). Kids can learn online at school, replacing teachers’ rote lectures and one-size-fits-few whole group learning.

Picture this: let’s say one class out of four in a school’s 4^th grade has an excellent math teacher, and she spends half her instructional time on whole-group instruction and half on more dynamic/personalized learning. If Kahn takes over the former whole-group time, two 4^th grade classes could have that teacher just for personalized/dynamic learning. The effect is a 100% increase in the number of kids who get a top-tier in-person teacher — without reducing personalized instruction time with kids. She’d need a learning lab monitor for Khan time at school and time-saving digital tools to monitor kids’ progress (a la Wireless Generation or others; Khan’s experimenting with this, too).  The change would be at least budget-neutral, and the great teacher could earn more within budget, since lab monitors are not paid as much. While one teaching position disappears – and that should be the weakest teacher who goes – other jobs emerge, such as the monitor or combined monitor/tutor. Possibly some of today’s struggling teachers would shine in those more focused roles, a topic Hess has thought about a lot.

This dual power of technology –both to extend reach of super-instructors boundlessly (no more low-value homework and large-group time) AND to allow reorganization of great on-site teacher time – is worth hyping.  Khan and Hess are somewhat onto this, but seem to be thinking of it more as just enabling in-person teachers of any quality to engage in more interaction with the kids they have – rather than specifically to give dramatically more kids access to the best available in-person teachers.

As technology advances, students will still need accountable adults taking responsibility for their learning.  The excellence of the teacher-in-charge will have the same enhancing and mitigating effect on digital learning as it has on every other reform tried to date.  Let’s focus on how Khan Academy and other less-hyped innovations can give nearly all student access to great teachers, nearly every year.

And as we do that, let’s face facts: according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 39% of high school students do no homework. Zip. In a homework flipping model like Khan’s promoters are pressing, these kids have nothing to flip. Khan and his kindred may be able to overcome that, but it reinforces the importance of reaching more students with excellent instruction – live and online – during the 35 hours per week they are already in school.

– Bryan Hassel and Emily Ayscue Hassel

In every school in America, in three-ring binders and file folders, sit lesson plans—the recipes that guide everyday teaching in the classroom. Like the secrets of talented cooks, the instructional plans of the best teachers have much to offer their creators’ colleagues. But while the plans are increasingly digital, they are still not easily shared across classrooms, nor, especially, across districts or states. Even when these plans are accessible, they are often not organized in a way that makes them easy to use, understand, or customize.

Now, a host of new web sites, from A to Z Teacher Stuff to Lesson Planet to Lessonopoly, are trying to solve that problem and make it easier for teachers to share, find, and make better use of lesson plans and accompanying materials. One, TeachersPayTeachers, a sort of Craigslist for educators, says it has paid more than $1 million in commissions to teachers, who have sold everything from classroom hand puppets to lesson plans on the Civil War. The site even hosts a “lesson plan on demand” auction, in which teachers advertise for, say, 4th-grade materials on Texas history and other teachers bid to fulfill the request.

But context matters. Teachers want to know whether something will work with their instructional style, in their classroom, and for their kids. Trust matters, too. While the sites offer ratings by users and rankings of the most popular items, these may not identify the highest-quality offerings. So how do novice teachers, who lack experience developing lessons and stand to benefit the most, know that a lesson plan will actually be effective? The answer may not lie in cyberspace, but in real communities.

One of the most promising new entrants to the growing online market of lesson plans is BetterLesson, a small Cambridge, Massachusetts, company started by former educators that has been called the “Facebook for teachers.” Any teacher can join for free, manage her lesson plans, organize teaching materials, and share (or not) with her school, a wider professional learning community, or the entire world. As with Facebook, the site’s technology and user interface are sharp, and users can easily register a positive reaction, in this case by clicking “Helpful.” But more important, BetterLesson shares Facebook’s initial focus on social networks and trusting relationships that already exist. While the site is currently open to any teacher, the company wants to leverage existing communities—school networks, alumni groups, and grade or subject affinity groups—that already share an identity and language around teaching.

BetterLesson’s Intranet package targets existing school networks. One early adopter, Achievement First, the highly regarded network of public charter schools in Connecticut and New York, is tailoring BetterLesson to extend the work of its instructional coaches and teacher learning communities. A coach working with a teacher can share concrete examples from the lesson plans and videos of effective teachers. “Remember what we were talking about at our last professional development session?” she can say. “Well, this is what it looks like.”

Since the examples are drawn from schools with similar cultures, expectations, and records of achievement, they are more likely to be trusted and used. As of February 2011, Achievement First had logged 15,000 downloads. KIPP and Rocketship Education (see “Future Schools”) have also signed on. In the first semester of use, KIPP teachers downloaded more than 20,000 lessons and related materials. But in the wider teaching community, BetterLesson has plenty of competition (see Figure 1).

Dan Cogan-Drew, Achievement First’s director of digital learning, emphasizes that the BetterLesson tools build on school cultures that are already collaborative. They are “an extension of the relationships that coaches are building with teachers,” he says, adding, “If it works for us, it’s because of the people and structure we have.”

Andrew Mandel, a vice president in charge of Teach For America’s Resource Exchange, a similar set of tools for TFA members, agrees with the importance of extending existing relationships. He says that TFA’s successful site is “not so much about the technology. [We’re] much more concerned with the user side.” This past fall, 75 percent of TFA’s 8,131 members downloaded materials from its site. And more than half of Achievement First’s 19 schools were active on BetterLesson in its first full year of use.

It is these real-world ties, along with recognition from their peers, that motivate successful teachers to spend the time and energy to organize and upload their materials. The site’s ease of use, as well as the tools to organize a teacher’s own lessons, is also critical. But sharing lesson plans is not just a one-way exchange. Teachers can also get feedback to ensure that their lessons are always improving.

There are other rewards, including one not normally associated with teaching but always possible on the Internet: fame. While teachers can keep their lessons within their trusted networks, they can also share them in such a way that they end up “going viral.” Alex Grodd, BetterLesson’s founder, former 6th-grade English teacher, and Teach For America alum, says it’s important for these networks to live on the same platform so that teachers can share beyond their individual networks, between districts and charters, and even across countries. The site can also offer outsiders a glimpse inside the classroom, notes Cogan-Drew; he says it lets prospective Achievement First teachers “step into our world.”

Just as Mastering the Art of French Cooking can’t magically transform a kitchen rookie into Julia Child, great lesson plans won’t turn novice teachers into experts. But the plans can help those novices lighten their load, allowing them to focus on other areas like classroom management and student engagement. As for the great teachers, they now have a way to capture tangible artifacts of what’s working and to spread them across hundreds of classrooms. And even the best chefs borrow recipes from each other. Highly effective veterans are constantly looking for ways to improve specific components of their instruction, such as opening up an explanation of quadratic equations. Perhaps sometime soon, we’ll see great lesson plans join the Star Wars kid, piano-playing kittens, and sneezing pandas as Internet sensations.

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Talented Tenth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Special Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Picture

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

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

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

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

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

Who Pays?

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

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

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

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

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

Room for Improvement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opinion: In an Ed Week commentary, Eric Hanushek discusses some policy implications of his findings about the impact of good and bad teachers.

For some time, we have recognized that the academic achievement of schoolchildren in this country threatens, to borrow President Barack Obama’s words, “the U.S.’s role as an engine of scientific discovery” and ultimately its success in the global economy. The low achievement of American students, as reflected in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011), will prevent them from accessing good, high-paying jobs. And, as demonstrated in another article in Education Next (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008), lower achievement means slower growth in the economy. From studying the historical relationship, we can estimate that closing just half of the performance gap with Finland, one of the top international performers in terms of student achievement, could add more than $50 trillion to our gross domestic product between 2010 and 2090. By way of comparison, the drop in economic output over the course of the last recession is believed to be less than $3 trillion. Thus the achievement gap between the U.S. and the world’s top-performing countries can be said to be causing the equivalent of a permanent recession.

According to the president in this year’s State of the Union address, this is “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” the time when we realize the urgent need to step up the performance of our education system. Only today, unlike in the 1950s, we have a clear idea of what it takes to improve achievement. The quality of the teachers in our schools is paramount: no other measured aspect of schools is nearly as important in determining student achievement. The initiatives we have emphasized in policy discussions—class-size reduction, curriculum revamping, reorganization of school schedule, investment in technology—all fall far short of the impact that good teachers can have in the classroom. Moreover, many of these interventions can be very costly.

Indeed, the magnitude of variation in the quality of teachers, even within each school, is startling. Teachers who work in a given school, and therefore teach students with similar demographic characteristics, can be responsible for increases in math and reading levels that range from a low of one-half year to a high of one and a half years of learning each academic year.

But while most parents are able to distinguish a good teacher from a bad one, few have any idea what difference it makes in the lives of their children. And researchers do not help, tending to talk in terms of standard deviations of achievement and effect sizes, phrases that simply have no meaning outside of the rarefied world of research. Here, I translate the researchers’ shorthand into concepts that might be more readily understood: the impact of teachers on the earnings of individuals and on the future of the economy as a whole.

Measuring Teachers’ Impact

Many of us have had at some point in our lives a wonderful teacher, one whose value, in retrospect, seems inestimable. We do not pretend here to know how to calculate the life-transforming effects that such teachers can have with particular students. But we can calculate more prosaic economic values related to effective teaching, by drawing on a research literature that provides surprisingly precise estimates of the impact of student achievement levels on their lifetime earnings and by combining this with estimated impacts of more-effective teachers on student achievement.

Let’s start with the researcher’s point of view. With a normal distribution of performance (the classic bell curve), a standard deviation is simply a more precise measure of how spread out the distribution is. Somebody who is one standard deviation above average would be at the 84th percentile of the distribution. If we then turn to the labor market, a student with achievement (as measured by test performance in high school) that is one standard deviation above average can later in life expect to take in 10 to 15 percent higher earnings per year.

That estimate may be deemed conservative for two reasons. First, it does not account for increases in years of education that may result from having a higher level of performance early on. Also, the estimate is based on information from people’s wages and salaries early in their careers, before they have reached their full earnings potential. Other calculations that take into account earnings throughout entire careers estimate 20 percent increases over the course of a lifetime.

Does 10 to 15 percent amount to much? For the average American entering the labor force, the value of lifetime earnings for full-time work is currently $1.16 million. Thus, an increase in the level of achievement in high school of a standard deviation yields an average increase of between $110,000 and $230,000 in lifetime earnings.

How do increases in teacher effectiveness relate to this? Obviously, teacher quality is not the only factor that affects student achievement. The student’s own motivations and support from family and peers play crucial roles as well. But researchers have worked hard to isolate the impact of teachers from these other influences. Rigorous studies consistently show that the impact of a more-effective teacher is substantial A high-performing teacher, one at the 84th percentile of all teachers, when compared with just an average teacher, produces students whose level of achievement is at least 0.2 standard deviations higher by the end of the school year. In fact, the impact of having such a teacher could plausibly be as large as 0.3 standard deviations.

Those impacts attenuate somewhat over time, however. The literature, though less than definitive, suggests that perhaps 70 percent of the gains achieved that year are retained in the long run by the student. The persistence of achievement gains is important, because the more sustained that these increases are, the greater the positive impact teachers will have on the lifetime skills and therefore the earnings of students. Put together, this evidence suggests that a teacher in the top 16 percent of effectiveness will have a positive impact (as compared to an average teacher) on longer-term student achievement that is 70 percent of the immediate gain, which as noted is at least 0.2 standard deviations.  That lower bound of the estimated effect is what we will use as we calculate the economic worth of a teacher by combining a teacher’s impact on achievement with the associated labor market returns.

Let’s start with some conservative estimates of the impact on an individual student. Take a good but not great teacher, one at the 69th percentile of all teachers rather than at the 50th percentile (that is, a teacher who is half a standard deviation above the average). She produces an increase of $10,600 on each student’s lifetime earnings. Even a modestly better than average teacher (60th percentile) raises individual earnings by $5,300, compared to what would otherwise be expected.

While those numbers are not trivial, they burgeon dramatically once we recognize that every student in the class can expect such increases in earnings. Consider, for example, a teacher with a class of 20 students. Under such circumstances, the teacher at the 60th percentile will—each year—raise students’ aggregate earnings by a total of $106,000. The impact of one at the 69th percentile (as compared to the average) is $212,000, and one at the 84th percentile will shift earnings up by more than $400,000.

But there is also symmetry to these calculations. A very low performing teacher (at the 16th percentile of effectiveness) will have a negative impact of $400,000 compared to an average teacher.

Moreover, the economic value of an effective teacher grows with larger classes, as do the economic losses of an ineffective teacher. Figure 1 illustrates the aggregate impact on students’ lifetime earnings for higher- and lower-performing teachers. As we will discuss below, these results are all very large compared with, for instance, the $52,000 annual salary U.S. teachers were paid on average in 2008.

An Alternate Thought Experiment

We can also approach this valuation calculation from the perspective of the impact of teacher effectiveness on the U.S. economy as a whole, rather than just on the future earnings of students. As noted above, student achievement, which provides a direct measure of later quality of the labor force, is strongly related to economic growth. Improving achievement leads to a better prepared workforce and to greater growth, and this growth translates into higher levels of national income.

Starting again with the estimates of the difference in effectiveness of teachers, it is possible to calculate the long-term economic impact of policies that would focus attention on the lowest-quality teachers from U.S. classrooms. Let us propose the following thought experiment: What would happen if the very lowest performing teachers could be replaced by just average teachers? Based on the estimates of variation in teacher quality identified above, Figure 2 shows the overall achievement impact through a cycle of K–12 instruction. Assuming the upper-bound estimate of teachers’ impact, U.S achievement could reach that in Canada and Finland if we replaced with average teachers the least effective 5 to 7 percent of teachers, respectively. Assuming the lower-bound estimate of teachers’ impact, U.S achievement could reach that in Canada and Finland if we replaced with average teachers the least effective 8 to 12 percent of teachers, respectively.

Here the estimated value almost loses any meaning. Closing the achievement gap with Finland would, according to historical experience, have astounding benefits, increasing the annual growth rate of the United States by 1 percent of GDP. Accumulated over the lifetime of somebody born today, this improvement in achievement would amount to nothing less than an increase in total U.S. economic output of $112 trillion in present value. (That was not a typo—$112 trillion, not billion.)

Admittedly, these estimates are subject to some uncertainty. So if you think those that are given here are too high, even though they are based on the best of contemporary research, then just cut them in half. You will still have effects on growth of one-half of 1 percent per year, which produces impacts of $56 trillion over the lifetime of today’s child. In other words, to make the very large effects disappear, you have to make either the very strong assumption that student learning has little effect on the U.S. economy or the equally strong assumption that teachers have little impact on students.

What Would It Take?

The majority of our teachers are hardworking and effective. The previous estimates point clearly to the key imperative of eliminating the drag of the bottom teachers. Here we can offer several alternatives.

One approach might be better recruitment so that ineffective or poor teachers do not make it into our schools. Or, relatedly, we could improve the training in schools of education so that the average teaching recruit is better than the typical recruit of today. Unfortunately, we have relatively few successful experiences with either approach as compared to considerable wishful thinking, particularly among school personnel.

An alternative might be to change a poor teacher into an average teacher. This approach is in fact today’s dominant strategy. Schools hope that through mentoring of incoming teachers, professional development, or completion of further graduate schooling, ineffective teachers can be transformed into acceptable (average) teachers. Again, however, the existing evidence is not very reassuring. While such efforts undoubtedly help some teachers, there is no substantial evidence that certification, in-service training, master’s degrees, or mentoring programs systematically make a difference in whether teachers are in fact effective at driving student achievement.

The final option is a clearer evaluation and retention strategy for teachers. Today, obtaining an entry job into teaching is virtually tantamount to an indefinite contract that stays in force regardless of actual effectiveness in the classroom. Yet the calculations above show the enormous value to individuals and society of “deselecting” the least effective teachers.

Is such a policy change feasible? If we contemplate asking 5 to 10 percent of teachers to find a job at which they are more effective so they can be replaced by teachers of average productivity, states and school districts would have to change their employment practices. They would need recruitment, pay, and retention policies that allow for the identification and compensation of teachers on the basis of their effectiveness with students. At a minimum, the current dysfunctional teacher-evaluation systems would need to be overhauled so that effectiveness in the classroom is clearly identified. This is not an impossible task. The teachers who are excellent would have to be paid much more, both to compensate for the new riskiness of the profession and to increase the chances of retaining these individuals in teaching. Those who are ineffective would have to be identified and replaced. Both steps would be politically challenging in a heavily unionized environment such as the one in place today.

Salary Politics

The above discussion also highlights the difficulties in recruiting high-quality teachers, due in part to the difficulties of paying them well. Collective bargaining mechanisms do not provide incentives for the best people to enter or remain in the profession and likely hold the average pay down: given the uniform salary structure, increases in salary are bound to be unrelated to increases in effectiveness, making large pay raises raises politically problematic. This is likely one of the main reasons that teacher salaries now lag those in other professions. In the 1940s, the salaries of male teachers were slightly above the average pay for all male college graduates, and female teachers had higher salaries than 70 percent of other female college graduates. Today, despite the collective bargaining process, the salaries of male teachers are at the 30th percentile of the distribution of all college graduates, and women who teach are at the 40th percentile of their college-educated peers.

Teachers’ salaries today are based on credentials and years of experience, factors that are at best weakly related to productivity. In a competitive marketplace, a firm must compensate employees according to their productivity or risk bankruptcy. Yet no school district goes out of business if it retains ineffective teachers and pays them as much as effective ones. Salaries become political footballs, and it is often awkward for politicians to explain why a large pay increase goes equally to ineffective and effective teachers.

The challenge of implementing reform of the teaching profession remains considerable. Most of the benefits of implementing the “thought experiment” explored here would be fully realized only many decades later, while the costs of economic, and especially political, reform must be paid at the beginning. These costs would be steep, as they would likely negatively affect some of the most vocal constituents in education policy: current teachers.

The magnitude of the above valuations of teacher effectiveness, however, suggest that we should be willing to consider more radical reforms than have been commonplace in recent decades. Salaries several times higher than those paid teachers today would be economically justified if teachers were compensated according to their effectiveness. But unless we can replace the current system with one that better links teacher recruitment, compensation, and retention to effectiveness, we should expect both our schools and our economy to underperform relative to their potential. The cost to the nation at a time of intensifying international competition is high indeed.

Eric A. Hanushek is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter One Is Written

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

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

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

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

The Genius of Race to the Top

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New York State was one of them.

No Place More in Need

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

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

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

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

The Revolution Begins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Round Two: Change the laws

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Test: Oral Presentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Beginning of the End

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

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

• Increase NAEP grade 8 reading proficient scores by 8 points

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

• Increase the Regents exam pass rate by 13 points

• Increase the graduation rate by 5 points.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A footnoted version of this article is available here.

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

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

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

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

The Ginsburg Report

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

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

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

District Performance on National Assessment of Educational Progress

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

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

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

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

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

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

Closing the Gap between District and National Performance

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

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

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

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

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

The National Research Council Report

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

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

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

Guidance for a Future Evaluation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comparing D.C. to Other Big Cities

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

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

Do Demographics Explain Gains?

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

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

Rhee’s Record

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

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

A footnoted version of this article is available here.

Additional photographs of the Catalyst Schools are available here.

It wasn’t exactly a marriage made in heaven. In fact, the idea that one of the Catholic Church’s most respected religious orders might run a public school sounded odd, maybe even, as Francis Cardinal George, head of the Archdiocese of Chicago, conjectured, illegal.

But a decade ago several trends in American education, and in the Catholic Church, made a Catholic-operated public school seem increasingly possible: 1) the traditional, parish-based Catholic school system, especially in the inner cities, was crumbling; 2) equally troubled urban public-school systems were failing to educate most of their students; and 3) a burgeoning charter school movement, born in the early 1990s, was beginning to turn heads among educators in both the private and public sectors.

The various currents merged in the Windy City in 2006 and 2007 when the Christian Brothers helped open two charter schools in impoverished neighborhoods on Chicago’s west side, embarking on a unique experiment in public education. Could Catholics run a school without mentioning Jesus, Mary, or Joseph? Without prayer, Mass, the rosary, the sacraments? Without God? And could the high wall between church and state be kept intact?

Back to Their Roots

The Christian Brothers—known in France, where the Catholic order was founded in 1680, as Frères des écoles chrétiennes or Brothers of the Christian Schools—have had some experience in education. The order’s founder, Jean-Baptist de La Salle, is the church’s patron saint of teachers and today the order serves nearly 1 million students in more than 80 countries, including some 20,000, mostly middle-class, students in 90 Catholic middle and high schools and education centers in the United States.

But what caught the eye of Arne Duncan, while he directed Chicago Public Schools (CPS), was the success the brothers were having with an initiative the order had launched in the early 1990s. They had opened San Miguel schools, named after a Christian Brother saint from Ecuador, in American pockets of poverty, including an Indian reservation in Montana, the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and inner-city Camden, New Jersey. (In 2006 San Miguel merged with the Jesuits’ Nativity Schools; today the NativityMiguel Network operates over 70 schools for the poor in 26 states and the District of Columbia.)

The first Chicago San Miguel school opened in 1995, behind the infamous (now gone) stockyards. The goal was simple enough: bring to poor children, tuition-free, what the brothers were delivering to middle- and upper-class students in their other American schools, including small class sizes and a college-prep academic program.

It worked. Within a few years of opening, San Miguel Back of the Yards School’s low-income students were outperforming their Chicago Public Schools counterparts. The school’s success prompted Lands’ End company founder Gary Comer to donate $1.2 million to open a second school, now known as the Gary Comer Campus, in the blighted Austin neighborhood.

The schools employ a year-round academic calendar, have a 9:1 student-to-teacher ratio, and a core academic curriculum. They put heavy emphasis on reading—80 minutes a day, an average of 165 books read per year—and individualized instruction.

“Our model is not rocket science,” says Mike Anderer-McClelland, a former brother who is now president of the San Miguel organization in Chicago. “It is a lot of reading, writing, and arithmetic.”

The schools also have a Family and Graduate Support Program that not only tracks students through high school but helps them and their parents with tutoring and counseling, long after they leave left San Miguel at the end of 8th grade.

“We graduate 85 percent of our kids from high school in a neighborhood that traditionally graduates less than 40 percent,” says Anderer-McClelland. “Sixteen percent of our kids graduate from four-year colleges, compared to less than 5 percent of public school kids in our neighborhoods; and it’s only 3 percent of CPS Latinos and 4 percent of CPS blacks who graduate from college.”

Brother Ed Siderewicz and former Brother Gordon Hannon discuss the future of the Catalyst Schools.

Getting from No to Yes

A faith-based or church-sponsored charter school had been the subject of some discussion among Catholics in Chicago almost from the moment that Illinois passed a charter school law in 1996. Though the law initially allowed just 20 charters statewide, 15 of the slots were assigned to Chicago.

Coincidentally, the Archdiocese of Chicago, which ran the nation’s largest parochial school system with more than 130,000 students, was in the midst of a demographic and financial crisis. The archdiocese had closed 55 of its schools in the previous 10 years. (See my story, “Can Catholic Schools Be Saved?” features, Spring 2007.) At the time, CPS CEO Paul Vallas and others encouraged the church to consider converting their closed and closing schools to charters. But in 1999 Cardinal George said “No.” It was “a square circle,” he remarked, “not because of archdiocesan protocols but because of the nature of the beast.”

That view was shared by others, including the National Catholic Educational Association (NCEA). “Are charter schools another way to keep Catholic schools alive, as some proponents suggest?” the NCEA asked in a 2009 press release. “Absolutely not.”

Catholic leaders could not support schools that were not grounded in religious instruction.

However, in what was perhaps an unintended consequence of the church’s crisis, a former priest became one of the first to open a public charter school in Chicago. John Horan, director of the Archdiocese’s Catholic Youth Organization when he was a priest, opened the public North Lawndale College Prep charter in 1998 as a layperson. “Catholic schools were terrific,” says Horan today, “but there just wasn’t enough financial support to send all of our poor kids to Catholic schools. So we thought, we…have to make public schools work.”

This is what Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan were thinking, too. Vallas had floated the idea of the Christian Brothers running a public school as early as 1997, recalls Ed Siderewicz, a young Christian Brother who helped start the San Miguel Back of the Yards School, “but we shrugged it off as compromising our mission.”

The question would keep coming up.

“The [San Miguel] board really wrestled with this,” recalls Sister Margaret Farley, director of personnel for the archdiocesan schools of Chicago and a founding board member of San Miguel. “We thought we could do a values-based school, but many members of the board were superparanoid about anyone thinking it would be a Catholic school.”

Early on in the discussions, Brother Gordon Hannon, a Chicago native and cofounder of San Miguel Back of the Yards School, researched the question in a paper for a graduate course at DePaul University. He concluded that though the San Miguel model “meets a clear and urgent secular need,” it was an open question whether “a faith-based group of competent, licensed educators” could run a publicly funded school without crossing the church/state line.

Brother Mike Fehrenbach, head of the Christian Brothers’ Midwest District, saw an opening in the “values-based” charter idea (instead of faith- or religious-based) and convinced the San Miguel board that the question was worth exploring. And in July of 2004 they formed a special charter-school planning committee.

Money was a significant consideration.

“We are probably near the limit of our ability to raise the dollars necessary to expand effectively,” wrote Fehrenbach in a one-page memo to the group, referring to the cost of running the two private San Miguel schools. He suggested that a charter school, which was publicly financed, might be a way of bringing education to the poor without having to spend so much time fundraising.

“This sounded like a growth company,” smiled Terry Toth, recalling his initial reaction to the idea. Toth, a lifelong Catholic, was a member of the San Miguel board as well as head of the world’s 12th largest investment bank, Northern Trust. “We would get 85 percent of our costs paid for—versus the need to fundraise 100 percent,” he laughs. “Win-win.” Toth also recognized that it was an opportunity to have an impact on more people. “Obviously, there was a church/state issue. But it was worth trying.”

“We Can Do This”

That is what Arne Duncan said, Ed Siderewicz recalls, when Gary Comer brought him to visit the San Miguel Austin campus in 2004. “You get your team behind it and I’ll make it work.”

“We asked a few questions,” recalls Siderewicz, “but I remember thinking that if our starting point is how to make it work rather than what we have to give up, then we should continue talking.”

And they did continue talking, with more and more detailed attention given to the question of San Miguel’s core mission. God or no God? For his part, Mike Fehrenbach didn’t see the charter undertaking as a challenge to the brothers’ mission, which he believed was “about offering people an opportunity for a future worth living.” They could do this by exemplifying Christian and Catholic values; they didn’t have to preach them. (This was not unknown territory for the Christian Brothers. In many countries they ran secular schools; in Indonesia, in fact, they operated a Muslim school.)

At the end of January 2005, the order’s district council voted to launch the charter school. And a month later, Brother John Johnston, then the order’s Superior General in Rome, weighed in: he saw “no important reasons for saying no” and “important reasons why we should say yes.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach suggested that a publicly financed charter school might be a better way of bringing education to the poor.

Too Good to Be True

But the Christian Brothers were suddenly given another challenge. In the middle of writing the application for the charter school they wanted to open, Arne Duncan asked them to take over a public school he was closing in the North Lawndale neighborhood. This was part of the “turnaround” strategy that Duncan initiated in Chicago and would bring to his job as secretary of education in the Obama administration: improve some schools by closing them, then reopening under new management.

This was fine except that the brothers had already found the neighborhood for their new charter school: Austin, near the Gary Comer Campus San Miguel School. Austin was clearly needy; it had the highest number of homicides in Chicago in 2003 and nearly 30 percent of families with children under 18 lived in poverty. The neighborhood high school had the second-highest dropout rate in the state of Illinois. And the brothers had good connections in Austin, including with Circle Urban Ministries and the Rock of Our Salvation Church, an active evangelical Baptist congregation that owned a former Catholic school there.

“It was like manna from heaven,” recalls Rev. Abraham Lincoln Washington, pastor of the congregation, remembering Brother Ed Siderewicz’s request to open a charter school in his facility. Circle Rock had been struggling to keep open its 185-student religious school for the poor. “We had a vacant building and they had 300 years of experience educating kids.”

Reverend Washington’s congregation was also a strong one, providing a rich mix of social services, including a food pantry, legal and medical services, transitional housing, and education. “Education is like preventive medicine,” he says. “It’s so important.”

But the perfect union between Christian Brothers and Baptists would have to wait.

“At the last moment, Duncan asked us to take over the Howland School in North Lawndale,” recalls Siderewicz, “before we opened Austin Circle Rock. Naively, we said ‘Okay.’”

Although the neighborhoods are, technically, adjacent, Austin and North Lawndale are among Chicago’s largest neighborhoods and so the Howland School was more than five miles south of Austin Circle Rock—a world away. Especially for the Christian Brothers, who had no presence there.

Worse, North Lawndale was even needier than Austin. At the time of the 2000 U.S. Census, approximately 10,000 adult males from the neighborhood were in prison. Says Father Lawrence Dowling, pastor of St. Agatha Parish, which is just four blocks from the Howland School, “We have the highest incidence of HIV in the state, the highest rate of asthma for kids in the state, and the highest percentage of grandparents raising grandchildren in the nation.”

“As poor a census tract as you can find,” says John Horan, who had established his North Lawndale charter high school in one part of the sprawling Howland building. “Do I know the neighborhood?” he chuckles. “I am completely grey because of it.”

But the Christian Brothers didn’t know the neighborhood, and the neighborhood didn’t know them. Recalls Fehrenbach, “The community was in an uproar over the closing of their school—and then we came in.”

At an initial public meeting, a group calling itself “The Voice of the ExCon” sent dozens of people, who shouted and screamed. “It was a bit scary,” recalled Siderewicz. “But we made it through.”

The Christian Brothers eventually won the group over by giving them a tour of their San Miguel schools, but the initial animosity was a sign of things to come.

At the time of the 2000 census, approximately 10,000 adult males from the North Lawndale neighborhood were in prison.

A Tale of Two Schools

The brothers opened Howland Catalyst Charter School, on schedule, in the fall of 2006 and Austin’s Circle Rock Catalyst in 2007. The Howland plan called for starting with 4th and 5th grades, with two classes of 15 students in each grade; it would add 3rd and 6th grades in year two, 2nd and 7th grades in year three, 1st and 8th grades in year four, and kindergarten in year five, growing to 540 students in grades K through 8 by 2010. The Austin plan was to start with 5th and 6th grades beginning in 2007, add 7th and 8th grades in the second year, then build up from kindergarten to 4th grade in the next two years.

Both plans reflected the brothers’ belief in the importance of middle school, which was the focus of their San Miguel initiative. And true to the San Miguel model, they brought to the Catalyst charters their 9:1 student-to-teacher ratio, a belief in academic excellence, graduate and family support, and the goal of having every child reading at or above grade level before graduation (8th grade). They also brought modern assessment tools, including standardized testing several times a year, teacher-designed testing on a weekly basis, nightly homework that was checked each day by the teacher, and daily testing/assessment in core subject areas.

Despite the model, the polished floors, new banners, and students outfitted in spiffy olive and khaki uniforms, the staff at Howland was quickly overwhelmed by the outsized needs of its student population, which was 100 percent African American and 98 percent eligible for free or reduced-price lunch.

“These children live in a world where you can’t appear weak—it can be deadly,” says assistant principal Igbazenda Moses, a Nigerian native and former Christian Brother who came to Chicago in 2002 and joined the Catalyst staff in 2006. “All of this makes the kids very uptight and creates a huge barrier to learning.”

Howland’s was a student population suffering from enormous environmental, economic, and social trauma—a kind of permanent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

“Three weeks ago we had a child whose dad was shot and killed,” Moses says. “We have two kids like that here now. There is so much violence in their daily lives. They hit you—and they’re used to getting hit back. Self-control is a big issue for these kids.”

Howland’s leaders were caught off guard by the severity of the social and environmental ills, and the effort it would take to address them. As Brother Ed Siderewicz recalls, “We had every problem in the book and more. I had forgotten how hard it was to start a school.”

In 2009, Austin Circle Rock outperformed the other Austin neighborhood schools on the composite Illinois Standards Assessment Test.

God Help Us!

Assistant Principal Moses believes that the inability to teach religion was a significant part of the problem. “Talking about how to be respectful and trustworthy is not the same as talking about a person’s life being grounded in the knowledge of God,” he says. “And that’s what these children and their families need. ‘Character Counts’ just doesn’t do the trick.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach smiles at this in-house dissent. “We’re doing fine.”

Both Catalyst schools use the popular youth ethics program developed in the early 1990s by the Josephson Institute of Ethics. Character Counts includes “six pillars”: Trustworthiness, Respect, Responsibility, Fairness, Caring, and Citizenship. Banners with those words are hanging throughout the school.

“Yes, we’re doing character education,” says Gordon Hannon, no longer a Christian Brother, but who was brought back in as Catalyst CEO at the end of the 2009 school year to help right the Howland ship. “But we have to go beyond that. To capture the essence of Catholic education, one of our core values is reverence. We must instill a sense of reverence for each other and show how that is different than respect.”

“You can get lost in debates about whether you should have a crucifix on the wall or not,” says John Horan. “It’s more about violence and drugs and poverty than the decorations.”

And leadership.

“I had a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach,” says Megan Dougherty, who arrived in August 2007, at the beginning of Howland’s second year, and was assigned a 5th-grade classroom. “There was no new teacher training,” she recalls. “And there was a new principal and a brand-new administrative team. The kids were being bad and teachers didn’t feel they had any support.”

Five teachers quit that year; another five didn’t return the next year. Dougherty would have been gone early except that when she came back from Christmas holiday, she realized that “my kids really missed me. I had to stay for them.” But she did eventually leave. “No one was happy with their job,” says Dougherty. “I loved the school. I loved the kids. But I couldn’t stay another year.”

Fourth-grade teacher Tina Corsby calls herself “the last of the Mohicans.” A veteran of CPS, she started at Howland Catalyst when it opened in 2006 and is still there in 2010. “It’s better than a regular public school,” she says. “Here, they really do care about the kids.”

But Corsby and her teacher colleagues were caught in the classic bind: trying to do a good job, they seemed to get no help from the top. “Job one in a school like this is to establish a culture of peace and high academic expectations and do rigorous social supports,” says John Horan. “Stable leadership makes all the difference in the world. You can’t end-run this one. The principal makes it all happen.” Howland has had three principals in three years.

“We’ve struggled from the get-go,” says Catalyst CEO Hannon. “We had everything we had at San Miguel, but we weren’t clear enough or deliberate enough about who we are. We were hesitant. We were not tough enough about the teaching, about embracing reading as the number one priority…. The bottom line is that the leadership wasn’t there.”

“It’s better than a regular public school,” says 4th-grade teacher Tina Corsby. “Here, they really do care about the kids.”

While these lessons were being learned, the San Miguel team opened its second Catalyst charter school, at Austin Circle Rock, in 2007. Perhaps it was just luck that Sala Sims, a seven-year veteran of CPS classrooms, applied for the job of principal. “I knew I wanted to start a school,” she recalls. The Chicago native met Brothers Mike and Ed in early 2007 “and never looked back.”

“She gets it,” says Brother Mike Fehrenbach.

And it showed. After just two years, Austin Circle Rock had an air of order that eluded Howland after three. From the front desk to the back offices and faculty lunchrooms, students and adults at Austin Circle Rock were both more relaxed and more disciplined. And the test scores proved it.

In 2009, Austin Circle Rock students outperformed the other Austin neighborhood schools on the composite (reading, math, and science combined) Illinois Standards Assessment Test (ISAT), with from 68 to 76 percent of students in grades 4 through 8 meeting or exceeding the state standard.

“It’s part of the Resurrection before our very eyes,” says Brother Ed Siderewicz.

Perhaps it was just luck that Sala Sims applied for the job of principal. “I knew I wanted to start a school,” she recalls.

How was Howland doing on its test scores?

“Flat would be generous,” says Hannon. In fact, Howland ISAT scores in 2009, with just 49.8 percent of its students meeting or exceeding the state standard, tied for last place among five public schools in North Lawndale.

How could the “formula for success” have gone so far wrong in Howland?

In many respects, it is as simple as what Donnell Harrison, the safety manager at Austin Circle Rock, calls, “following the model.” Donnell has manned the front desk at Austin since it opened. “At Howland they’re conforming to the community instead of to the model.”

This point has not been lost on Catalyst leaders, especially as they work on turning Howland around.

With Hannon as the new Catalyst CEO came a new principal, Chaun Johnson, and the two have become a veritable tag team. Johnson grew up in the Austin neighborhood, where Circle Rock is located and where his wife Natalie now teaches, and he attended Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School (now closed) in Lawndale. Johnson is articulate, self-assured, and, at over six feet tall, a commanding presence in a room full of teachers and students. (The photograph on page 40 shows him leading the “principal’s choir.”)

“This is a community of potential,” Johnson says. “It would appear that nothing can grow here. I’m here to change that.”

And it would appear, at the beginning of his second year, that he has done that.

Fehrenbach noticed the change “just after Christmas,” he says. “The tone shifted radically. Kids in the classrooms were actually smiling; there was less shouting.”

There is an air of discipline—in the old sense of the word, order—in the school that had not been there the previous two years. All children are now wearing uniforms with shirts tucked in. Test scores have improved markedly. Among Chicago’s 91 charters, Howland showed the fourth-best improvement on ISAT composite test scores in 2010, jumping from a 49.8 percent to a 60.8 percent passing rate.

With Hannon’s help, Johnson began conducting weekly teacher and staff training sessions. They brought in a curriculum instructor, and he brought in trainers for grade-level teacher meetings. The eventual goal, says Hannon, is to send teachers to a Lasallian Leadership Institute. Run by the Christian Brothers and named for the founder of the order, these three-year programs, including a one-week intensive training session during the summer and several weekend sessions, are meant to introduce teachers and administrators to the Lasallian mission and show them how to implement it in their classrooms and schools.

“This is a community of potential,” says Principal Chaun Johnson. “It would appear that nothing can grow here. I’m here to change that.”

Though the church/state question will no doubt live on, for now the leaders of the Catalyst charter experiment are convinced that the essence of their San Miguel schools can work in a public school setting. “We will live the values and virtues of the Christian Brothers without speaking the words,” says Chaun Johnson. “And that will open the doors so that our education plan can work.”

Johnson represents what it is that the Catalyst backers believe is the point of their charter: they bring a Catholic ethos, not the catechism, to children. And they educate them in reading, writing, and ’rithmetic.

While admitting that Howland still has challenges, Catalyst leaders believe they have turned the corner. And they have learned some hard lessons.

First, they did inadequate relationship building in the community. As many of those involved in the early discussions with the city have said, the Christian Brothers were “naive” or “stupid” to have taken on the Howland project before getting to know the neighborhood.

“A second mistake was starting Howland with grades 4 and 5,” says Ed Siderewicz. Taking on older kids, the brothers now know, requires the kind of knowledge of and relationships with a community that they did not have in North Lawndale.

Third, leadership and staff must understand the model. “Reforming the academic leadership team was our biggest challenge,” says Hannon.

And finally, “we worried too much about the church/state issue,” says Terry Toth. “We run a public school. We don’t have crucifixes on the wall. We don’t teach religion. We teach truth and honesty.”

Is there any one ingredient of success in these matters?

Says North Lawndale College Prep charter school’s John Horan, “You have to have a community of full-grown adults who understand the culture piece and the academic expectation piece. The kids will come around.”

“Hard work,” adds Hannon, who has all but lived at Howland for the last year and shows no signs of slowing down.

And Terry Toth remains bullish on Catalyst’s future. “We’re working on a strategic plan,” he says. “We’re trying to button down the academics and get more consistency there. We’ve taken faith-based and made it values-based. We’re even exploring opportunities to add more schools. The Circle Rock campus got more traction because of Rock of Our Salvation Baptist church and there was community support. So, we’ll be looking for similar things as we expand: a pastor, a supportive community, etc. We’ve learned that you can’t just plop a school down in a neighborhood and expect it to work.”

Brother Mike Fehrenbach would agree. “Be good citizens,” he told a Circle Rock graduation class. “We pledge to stand by you. Failure is not an option.”

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

Additional photographs of the Catalyst Schools are available here.

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

District in Recovery

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

But ruin so extreme bred opportunity.

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

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

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

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

Wake-up Call

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

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

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

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

Sustaining Momentum

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

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

The Search for a Governance Model

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building Anew

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

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

NO’s Master Plan Under Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Money Factor

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

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

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

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

Where to Go from Here

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

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

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

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

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

Merit pay proponents argue that monetary incentives for better teaching can improve the quality of instruction in our nation’s classrooms. Yet only a handful of studies have evaluated the impact of teacher merit pay on student achievement. These studies offer no conclusive recommendations regarding the optimal role of merit pay in U.S. school systems, leaving policymakers largely dependent on studies on other countries for information about how best to implement merit pay programs.

Recently, the New York City Department of Education (DOE) conducted a policy experiment to test whether merit pay given to all teachers at an effective school could increase student achievement. The city’s School-Wide Performance Bonus Program, launched in 2007 and endorsed by both the DOE and the teachers union, was implemented in a randomly selected subset of the city’s most disadvantaged schools. The randomized design of school selection makes it possible to separate out the causal effect of this form of merit pay from myriad other influences on student learning.

Our analysis is based on data from the first two years of the bonus program. In interpreting our findings, it is important to appreciate the key features of the program’s structure. Teachers received bonuses based on the overall performance of all tested students in their school, rather than just on the performance of students in their own classrooms. According to proponents of group incentives, this design can minimize conflicts and foster a spirit of cooperation among teachers at participating schools. However, under group incentive schemes, individual teachers may not have sufficient motivation to improve their own performance if they know that their success in attaining a bonus depends heavily on the efforts made by other teachers. Especially in schools with a large number of teachers, it may be difficult to sustain a school-wide push to mobilize the efforts of most teachers. The New York City bonus program thus provides valuable information on the effects of a school-wide bonus plan.

Other specific characteristics of the bonus plan and the New York City context may also have influenced its effectiveness. If a school won a bonus, money was distributed among teachers and other school personnel by a committee consisting of two administrators and two teachers union representatives at the school. The bonus program was implemented alongside a new citywide accountability system that provided strong incentives to improve student achievement, regardless of whether a school was participating in the bonus program. Also, over the period we examine, all schools experienced increases in student achievement on the New York state test, leading some to suggest that the exam had grown easier (or at least easier to teach to). Roughly 90 percent of participating schools received a bonus in the second year of the program.

Did the group bonus program operating in this policy environment have an impact on student achievement? We find very little effect overall, positive or negative. There is some evidence, however, that the program had a positive impact in schools where teachers were few in number, an environment in which it may be easier for teachers to cooperate in pursuit of a common reward. This study leaves open the question of whether a bonus program that rewards teachers for their own specific effectiveness would be more successful.

The Program

In November 2007, the New York City DOE launched the School-Wide Performance Bonus Program, randomly selecting 181 schools serving kindergarten through 8th grade to participate from a group of 309 high-need schools. (Disadvantaged high schools were also randomly selected into the program; we focus only on elementary and middle schools since these are the grades for which we can measure math and reading achievement.) The remaining 128 schools that were not selected serve as the control group for the purposes of our evaluation. The 309 schools included in the study differed from other city schools in the following ways: They had a higher proportion of English Language Learners (ELL), special education, minority students, and students eligible for the Title I free or reduced-price lunch program, as well as lower average math and reading scores. Teachers in these schools had slightly less experience and slightly more absences than teachers in other schools. The schools were smaller and had fewer teaching staff than other New York City schools.

The bonus program was the product of lengthy negotiations between district administrators and the teachers union. As a result of these negotiations, schools had to gain the support of 55 percent of their full-time United Federation of Teachers (UFT) staff each year in order to participate. Out of the 181 schools selected for the program, 25 schools voted not to participate in the first year of implementation or withdrew from the program following an initial vote of approval, and three more schools pulled out before the second year. Additionally, at the discretion of the DOE, two schools initially assigned to the treatment group were moved to the control group, and four schools initially designated as control schools were moved to the treatment group and subsequently voted to participate in the program. Of course, the schools that elected not to take part in the program and those moved by the DOE may differ in important ways from schools that chose to participate. We therefore consider the treatment group to include all 181 schools originally deemed eligible for bonus payments and take into account the fact that not all of them were actually participating in the program when interpreting our results.

Schools that implemented the program could earn a lump-sum bonus for meeting school-wide goals. These goals were tied to the New York City accountability system and were mainly determined by student performance on state math and reading exams. Under this accountability system, schools receive scores and grades that summarize their overall performance on three sets of measures: school environment, student performance, and student progress. The school environment measure incorporates student attendance and the results from surveys of parents, teachers, and students. Student performance measures include average student achievement on reading and math exams, along with median proficiency and the percentage of students achieving proficiency. The student progress measure considers the average change in test scores from year to year and the percentage of students who made progress from one year to the next. The accountability system also gives “extra credit” for exemplary progress among high-need students. Schools received target scores based on their accountability grades, and schools with lower accountability grades needed to make larger improvements to reach their targets.

Schools participating in the bonus program received awards based on their progress toward meeting target scores. Schools that achieved their goals received bonuses equal to $3,000 per union teacher. Schools that fell short but manage to meet 75 percent of their goal received $1,500 per union teacher. Schools that did not achieve their target faced no consequences from the bonus program beyond the absence of incentive pay. For a sense of the strength of the incentive provided by the bonuses, the full $3,000 award represents a 7 percent increase in the salary of teachers at the bottom of the pay scale and a 3 percent increase for the most experienced teachers. In other words, these bonuses provided a substantial monetary benefit to most recipients.

Each participating school was required to develop a plan for distributing any lump-sum bonus awarded to the school. In the first year of the program, plans had to be submitted to the DOE after students took the state math and reading exams but before exam results were released and, thus, before schools knew whether they would receive a bonus. In every school, a four-member compensation committee, consisting of the principal, a second administrator, and two teachers elected by the school’s UFT members, determined how bonuses would be distributed. The DOE program guidelines placed only two restrictions on the schools’ bonus distribution plans: all union teachers had to receive a portion of the bonus payment and bonuses could not be distributed based on seniority. Otherwise, the committees had full discretion over bonus amounts and over whether other school employees would also receive funds. About half of the school committees chose to divide the award roughly equally among all recipients. In these schools, the difference between the highest and lowest bonus payment was less than $100. In the rest of the schools, the difference between the highest and the lowest bonus ranged from a low of $200 to a high of $5,000.

Of the 158 schools that voted to participate in the first year of the program, 87 (55 percent) received bonus payments. The bonus pool totaled $14.0 million in the first year and averaged $160,500 per school. In the second year of the program, the 2008–09 school year, 139 participating schools (91 percent) earned bonus awards, averaging $195,100 per school and totaling $27.1 million.

Little Difference for Students

Before we get to the detailed findings of our study, it is important to make clear the nature of the incentives NYC teachers and administrators faced over the period we examine. First, the 2007–08 school year was the first year of both the bonus program and a new citywide accountability system. The accountability system provided strong incentives to improve student achievement, regardless of whether a school was participating in the bonus program. For example, schools that earned A or B accountability grades were eligible for principal bonuses and additional funds when students transferred from schools receiving a poor grade. Schools that received D and F grades faced potential consequences, including principal removal and school closure. With this in mind, we see the results of our study as representing the effect of group-based teacher merit pay for schools that are already under accountability pressure. However, given that all school districts in the United States are subject to No Child Left Behind and many states have implemented their own accountability systems, this may be the most appropriate context in which to study the consequences of merit pay.

The second thing to keep in mind is that the power of the bonus program incentives was likely muted in the first year because of the timing of the program announcement. Eligible schools were notified in November of 2007, leaving relatively little time for teachers and administrators to alter their educational plans before accountability exams were administered in January for reading and March for math. As noted above, the percentage of schools that hit their achievement targets increased between the first, truncated year of the program and the second, when schools had more time to respond to the program incentives. But we caution readers to remember that this leap in bonus payouts is not, by itself, evidence that merit pay worked. It may instead reflect citywide performance improvements or, more pessimistically, that the New York state tests decreased in difficulty over this period. The most important comparison to make is between the treatment group schools eligible for the bonus program (most of which actually participated in the program) and the schools in the control group. Treatment-group schools need to at least outpace their counterparts in the control group over these two years for us to say that merit pay made a real difference for student achievement. It is this comparison that is at the heart of our analysis.

How did bonus program schools fare compared to schools in the control group? Both groups of schools saw an increase in the average math and reading scores during the first two years of the bonus program; treatment-group schools, however, did not experience a statistically significant improvement in average test scores relative to the schools in the control group. Nor did these results change notably when we 1) made adjustments for the small differences in treatment and control school characteristics that existed despite randomization between treatment-group and control-group schools, or 2) took into account whether treatment-group schools elected to participate in the bonus program. It is possible, of course, that looking at average student achievement could divert our attention from changes for particular groups of students. Were teachers, we wanted to know, focusing their attention on either high-achieving or low-achieving students in an effort to meet target scores? We used statistical techniques similar to the one we employed to examine changes in average scores to assess the effect of the bonus program on the percentage of students achieving proficiency on math and reading exams. Once again, we found no evidence that the bonus program led to changes in this measure of student achievement. Participation in the bonus program did not, for example, boost the percentage of students who scored at or above the level designated as “proficient” under New York state accountability standards. Bonus-program schools fared no better than schools in the control group, and in the second year of the program, treatment schools experienced a statistically significant, although quite small, decrease in math proficiency.

On a related note, the New York City accountability system and, as a byproduct, the bonus program, contain incentives to focus on particular groups of students, since improvements for some student groups matter more in the calculations of a school’s accountability grade. In addition to calculating overall achievement for all students in a school, components of the New York City accountability system take into account changes in the achievement of students who were in the lowest third of their grade in the prior year, those on the cusp of proficiency, and those close to the school’s median score, along with students who are designated as ELL and students who are enrolled in special education programs. Again, we found no evidence to suggest that the bonus program led to achievement gains for any of these groups of students. On average, students in these groups fared just as well whether they attended a school that was participating in the bonus program or one in the control group.

Limitations of Group Bonuses

Does evidence that the New York City bonus program did not lead to marked gains in student achievement, at least in the program’s first two years, mean that merit pay for teachers in general does not work? That is certainly one possible conclusion to be drawn from our findings. Another possibility is that this particular type of merit pay program, where bonuses are based on school-wide performance and teachers expect to receive bonus payments regardless of their effort, does not work in all schools. Group bonuses may weaken the incentives for individual teachers to increase effort devoted to raising student achievement to the point that the programs become ineffective. And perhaps this problem would be mitigated in programs in which rewards are more tightly coupled to the effort an individual makes in the classroom.

Think about two schools, one with many more teachers than the other, both participating in a school-wide merit pay program. In each school, the impact of an individual teacher’s effort on the expected bonus is determined by the number of other teachers with tested students, since bonus receipt is primarily based on student performance on math and reading exams. Because of this, a very good teacher with a large number of teaching colleagues can do less to raise school-wide student performance than a teacher of the same quality in a school with fewer teachers. In the school with more teachers, the diffusion of responsibility for test-score gains across many teachers may erode the incentive that any individual teacher has to increase effort in the classroom. Some teachers may conclude that exerting additional effort will produce little difference in the overall performance of the school. The central idea here is that teachers could face relatively strong or weak incentives under the same merit pay program as a result of the number of teachers at their school. With this logic in mind, we examined the effect of the New York City school-wide merit pay program at schools with different numbers of teachers with test-taking students. Did schools with fewer teachers show signs that teachers were responding to merit pay incentives?

We conducted a statistical analysis similar to our method for estimating the average effect of the bonus program across all New York City schools in the experiment. But this time, we looked for different effects on math scores in schools with more and fewer math teachers and different effects on reading scores on schools with larger and smaller cohorts of reading teachers.

It turns out that the effectiveness of school-wide bonus programs may, in fact, depend on the number of teachers with tested students in a school (see Figure 1). For schools in the bottom quartile of the number of teachers with tested students, that is, schools with approximately 10 or fewer such teachers in elementary and K–8 schools and five or fewer in middle schools, school-wide merit pay did lead to improved student achievement. We estimate that the New York City bonus program had a positive effect on student math achievement in these schools in both program years, although the estimated effect in the second year fell just short of conventional levels of statistical significance. Conversely, this analysis also indicates that the program may have slightly lowered student achievement in schools with larger teaching staffs. Math achievement gains attributable to the bonus program in schools with smaller teaching staffs were modest in size but meaningful. In the first year of the program, the bonus program boost to math scores was, by our estimates, 3.2 points on the New York state test, or 0.08 student-level standard deviations. To benchmark this effect against the magnitude of other familiar results, it is slightly smaller than the estimated 0.1 standard deviation gain in achievement that results from being assigned to a teacher at the 85th percentile of the effectiveness distribution rather than a teacher at the median.

The Devil in the Details

The New York City bonus-pay program provides us with a valuable opportunity to study the effect of merit pay for teachers in an experimental setting. We are a long way from amassing a convincing body of research on either side of the debate over merit pay in education, but what this experiment makes frustratingly clear for merit pay proponents is that the structure of the payment scheme can make a large difference. For merit pay to improve student outcomes, teachers must face strong incentives to improve their performance. Our study indicates that school-wide bonus programs may be able to provide those incentives in schools with relatively small teaching staffs. They may also be appropriate for schools characterized by a high degree of staff cohesion, in which teachers work collaboratively to improve student learning and it is difficult to isolate the performance of a single teacher. The early experience with the New York City School-Wide Performance Bonus Program suggests, however, that a heavy reliance on school-wide rewards may hamper the effectiveness of merit pay programs in schools with large teaching staffs that are not highly collaborative.

Sarena Goodman and Lesley Turner are PhD candidates in Columbia University’s Department of Economics. The randomization of schools participating in the School-Wide Performance Bonus Program was designed and conducted by Harvard University economist Roland Fryer.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

On a range of issues, education “reformers” have made great progress in the last decade, certainly among policy elites, but also among the general public. Interviewed in October on the Today Show, President Obama seemed to be channeling a generation of conservative education analysts in stating bluntly that more money absent reform won’t do much to improve public schools. Waiting for “Superman,” a documentary chronicling the travails of five students seeking spots in heavily oversubscribed charter schools, drew rave reviews, star-studded premieres, and breathless talk of a new era of reform. While the American Federation of Teachers and a handful of liberal publications tut-tutted the film’s sharply critical portrayal of teachers unions, its clarion call for change has been embraced by opinion leaders across the political spectrum. Even zeitgeist queen Oprah Winfrey.

Poll numbers show the broader public, too, increasingly supports efforts to create new schooling options, overhaul teacher pay and evaluation systems, and provide strong incentives for improvement. Ideas such as charter schools, performance pay, and consequential accountability are much more widely accepted—and acceptable—today than they were a decade ago. Furthermore, advocates are no longer considered right-wing kooks for casting the teachers unions as a big part of the problem. Even a Democratic president or secretary of education can say so. Indeed, the influential Democrats for Education Reform expends much of its efforts spreading that very message.

Though support for these notions may be a mile wide, it appears to be little more than an inch deep—and to rest as much on pleasing sentiments and newfound conventional wisdom as on informed conviction. The 2010 Education Next poll reported that charter school supporters outnumber opponents by a 44-to-19 margin, but the vast majority of respondents don’t really know what charter schools are. Fewer than one in five know that charter schools cannot charge tuition, can’t hold religious services, and can’t selectively admit students. Charters sport a well-regarded brand, but their popularity rests on a shaky foundation.

And while virtually all Americans embrace accountability in the abstract, most remain reluctant to impose tough sanctions on schools, and especially on individuals, whose performance is found wanting. The 2010 PDK/Gallup poll reported that, when asked whether they preferred to keep a low-performing school in their community open with the existing teachers and principal and provide comprehensive support, to temporarily close the school and reopen it with a new principal or as a charter school, or to shutter the school, 54 percent chose to leave the school open. The EdNext survey asked respondents, “If a teacher has been performing poorly for several years, what action should be taken by those in charge?” Among the general public, just 45 percent thought the teacher should be removed.

Still, reformers have won some major battles over the past decade. The center of gravity in public debates has moved in important ways. But these successes have come with two big caveats. First, reform “support” resides with a mostly uninformed, unengaged public—one that isn’t especially sold on their ideas and that, in any event, is often outmatched by well-organized, well-funded, and motivated special interests. And second, and more unfortunately, many reformers are eagerly overreaching the evidence and touting simplistic, slipshod proposals that are likely to end in spectacular failures. In short, some forces of reform are busy marching into the sea and turning notable victories into Pyrrhic ones. To quote that wizened observer of politics and policy, Pogo: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.

The Icarus Problem

Advocates drive good ideas to extremes when they oversell their promise and undermine their integrity. Unfortunately, this pattern is all too common.

Problem One: Measures that are overly ambitious or poorly designed risk undermining popular support for sound and necessary reforms. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) took near-universal backing for tenets of accountability and deployed them in an overwritten federal statute that poisoned the NCLB brand. Indeed, EdNext polling in 2007 showed that describing the key precepts of NCLB without using its name drew 71 percent support, but the addition of the phrase “No Child Left Behind” reduced that figure by 14 points.

To be sure, reliable evidence (see “Evaluating NCLB,” research, Summer 2010) shows that NCLB has improved math achievement in states that did not previously have accountability systems in place. The data generated as a by-product of the law’s testing requirements have been a boon to the research community—and may ultimately yield a new body of evidence to inform education policy and practice. Yet the law’s “my way or the highway” approach in areas where best practices were (and remain) far from certain has arguably slowed the development of accountability systems that would provide a more refined view of school performance. In fact, the most convincing criticism of NCLB has come not from accountability skeptics but from states like Florida that were in a position to go beyond what the law requires but were forced to simplify their approach to comply with the law’s mandates. More than nine years after the law’s enactment, and four years after its scheduled reauthorization, the shortcomings of an accountability system organized around the utopian goal of universal student proficiency rather than continuous improvement are all too apparent.

We’re in danger of repeating this same mistake with the Race to the Top agenda. By demanding that states embrace a very prescriptive set of policy reforms in order to win federal funding, policymakers locked in the “best thinking” circa 2010. Just as definitions of Adequate Yearly Progress, Highly Qualified Teachers, and other core elements of NCLB, circa 2001, soon grew obsolete and problematic, so too will today’s conventional wisdom around teacher evaluations, charter caps, and all the rest. Rather than encouraging problem solving and policy tinkering, these “shoot the moon” initiatives freeze reform in one moment in time. And they run the risk of backlash if and when early results prove disappointing. A better means of driving reform would be to reward states and districts based not on unenforceable promises but on specific, concrete steps to overhaul anachronistic policies like teacher tenure, now granted in most states as a matter of course after just a couple of years in the classroom.

Problem Two: Overpromising. When they insist that ideas like school choice, performance pay, and teacher evaluations based on value-added measures will themselves boost student achievement, would-be reformers stifle creativity, encourage their allies to lock elbows and march forward rather than engage in useful debate and reflection, turn every reform proposal into an us-against-them steel-cage match, and push researchers into the awkward position of studying whether reforms “work” rather than when, why, and how they make it easier to improve schooling.

Consider performance pay. Just recently a three-year randomized evaluation of a Tennessee merit-pay experiment funded by the federal government’s Teacher Incentive Fund found that bonuses tied to test scores didn’t lead to higher performance in middle-school math. “Study Casts Cold Water on Bonus Pay,” read Education Week’s headline, and the news was widely interpreted as a setback for attempts to link teacher compensation to classroom performance. Yet the most compelling rationale for merit pay is not any short-term bump in test scores, but rather its potential for making the profession more attractive to talented candidates, more amenable to specialization, more rewarding for accomplished professionals, and a better fit for the 21st-century labor market. Whether or not bonuses linked to test scores had any effect on measured achievement in the short run says absolutely nothing on this score. Yet, the lust for simple answers and for research that “proves” those answers right has led many would-be reformers to adopt and defend half-baked versions of pay reform.

The primary goal of reform efforts should be to make it easier for problem solvers to gain access to and traction in the system, coupled with thoughtful public oversight of results. The impatient rush to “fix” teacher quality in one furious burst of legislating may instead lead to a situation in which promising efforts to uproot outdated and stifling arrangements become enveloped in crudely drawn and potentially destructive mandates. Rushing forward with statewide mandates to incorporate value-added assessments into teacher evaluation systems, for example, may wind up stifling innovation. Systems built around individual value-added calculations can stymie the smart use of personnel that reformers should encourage. Principals who rotate their faculty by strength during the year, or augment classroom teachers with online lessons, will find their staffing models a poor fit for evaluation systems predicated on linking each student’s annual test scores to a single teacher.

Uprooting the old, intrusive superstructure, not imposing a new one, must be the first order of business. And unwinding a century’s worth of accumulated detritus and replacing it with a functioning system will take time. Only after a few years of stripped-down tenure and evaluations focused on performance, and after a few locales craft some promising approaches, will it make sense for state legislatures to wade in more aggressively.

Problem Three: Obsession with “gap closing.” For the past decade, school reform has been primarily about “closing achievement gaps” by boosting math and reading proficiency and graduation rates, among black, Latino, and poor students. “Conservative” notions of accountability have been linked to old-school liberal conceptions of “social justice.” This is all admirable. At the same time, this emphasis signals to the vast majority of American parents that school reform isn’t about helping their kids. And, given that only about one household in five even contains school-age children, 80 percent of households are being told that extra dollars and energy should be redirected into urban centers simply because it’s the right thing to do.

Well, perhaps. But those policies that most often succeed in the U.S. are those that recall the Tocquevillian adage that Americans embrace the precept of “self-interest properly understood.” Policies that work are those that work for all families. Efforts to squeeze inefficiencies out of schooling or enrich instruction and improve services for all kids can command widespread support.

Like the architects of the Great Society nearly half a century ago, however, too many school reformers have an unfortunate habit of deriding apathy or opposition from middle-class families. They have blithely ignored lessons learned when the Great Society’s social engineers sought to sustain ambitious social programs on the backs of guilt-ridden white suburbanites, only to fail spectacularly. They dismiss concerns that their reforms do nothing for suburban schools or may adversely affect them. Until we enable suburban legislators to regard a vote for reform as a political winner, and not merely a vote they’re allowed as a display of political guilt, the underpinnings of reform will remain thin.

Looking Ahead

The latest silver bullet appears to be the lure of Hollywood. Since Teach For America and the KIPP Academies haven’t yet saved the world, 5,000 charter schools have not prompted the remaking of urban school systems, and we’re saddled with the disappointing legacy of NCLB, maybe what we’ve been missing all along is a sufficiently sentimental, gut-wrenching presence in the nation’s cinemas. Perhaps with the arrival of documentaries like The Lottery, The Cartel, and, of course, Waiting for “Superman,” this is the moment when the public will finally awaken and make its voice heard, and resistance will come crumbling down.

Rather than taking a hard look at why NCLB proved to be such a gross distortion of accountability, why so many merit-pay schemes eschew sensible principles of professional compensation, or why the public has so little understanding of charter schooling, some reformers may decide after seeing these films that they’ve paid too little attention to marketing. The problem isn’t overreach, bad politics, or bad proposals; it’s the need to fuel a greater sense of urgency. As Davis Guggenheim, the director of “Superman,” put it: “we’ve cracked the code” on how to make high-poverty schools work. All that’s needed now is the political will to make change happen.

This is a story we’ve seen before. We saw it with A Nation at Risk. We saw it when the nation’s governors gathered in Charlottesville two decades ago. We saw it with the Annenberg Challenge. We saw it with No Child Left Behind. We saw it with “ED in ’08,” the expensive and ultimately futile foundation-backed effort to boost education’s salience among voters in an election dominated by other pressing issues. We know how it ends.

Instead of more cheerleading, what’s desperately needed is more humility. Our current education system is the product of multiple generations of previous reforms, also promoted by well-meaning activists and educators. Building on the best of what remains of their architecture—and sweeping the rest out of the way—will take time and patience. But that’s what’s called for. We’re not urging delay or half-measures, but merely a willingness to see ourselves as problem-solvers, solution-finders, and tool-builders rather than warriors going to battle with intransigent educators. Let us proudly declare: we don’t yet know what works, but we’re committed to figuring it out, the best we can, along the way.

Frederick M. Hess, Michael J. Petrilli, and Martin R. West are all executive editors of Education Next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Power of Peers

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

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

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

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

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

Enter Differentiated Instruction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading War

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

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

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

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

Competing for Kids

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fragile Compromise

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Caught in the hurricane of hormones,” the Toronto Star began a 2008 story about students in the Canadian capital’s middle schools. Suspended “between childhood and the adult world, pre-teens have been called the toughest to teach.”

“The Bermuda triangle of education,” former Louisiana superintendent Cecil Picard once termed middle schools. “Hormones are flying all over the place.”

Indeed, you can’t touch middle school without hearing about “raging hormones.”

Says Diane Ross, a middle-school teacher for 17 years and for 13 more a teacher of education courses for licensure in Ohio, “If you are the warm, nurturing, motherly, grandmotherly type, you are made for early childhood education. If you love math or science or English, then you are the high school type. If you love bungee jumping, then you are the middle school type.”

Even in professional journals you catch the drift of “middle-school madness.” Mayhem in the Middle was a particularly provocative study by Cheri Pierson Yecke published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2005. American middle schools have become the places “where academic achievement goes to die,” wrote Yecke.

Hyperbole? Or sad reality? Sometime last year, while walking the hallway of my school district’s middle school, I was pulled aside by one of our veteran teachers, who seemed agitated. I was more than happy to chat. I had known this teacher for years. Let’s call her Miss Devoted: she is dedicated and hardworking, respected by her peers, liked by parents and teachers, one of those “good” teachers that parents lobby to have their children assigned to.

I mentioned that I was coming from a meeting with the literacy consultant, who had shown me her improvement strategy on a fold-out sheet with red arrows and circles that, I said, “looked like battle plans for the invasion of Normandy.”

Miss Devoted rolled her eyes. “I understand,” she said. “The progressives keep doing the same thing over and over, just calling it by different names.

“All I’m doing is going to meetings, filling out forms, getting training. My kids are struggling with substitute teachers.”

Here was a bright and talented teacher in a school that had failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the infamous benchmark of the equally infamous 2002 No Child Left Behind law, for four consecutive years. That meant that nearly half of the school’s 600 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders were failing to make grade-level in English and in math. Further, only 10 percent of the school’s African American 8th graders (who made up 30 percent of the total) could pass the state’s rudimentary math exams.

Thus, a swarm of state education department consultants had descended on the school.

“Why won’t they just let me teach?” Miss Devoted asked, clearly frustrated.

By all accounts, middle schools are a weak link in the chain of public education. Is it the churn of ill-conceived attempts at reform that’s causing all the problems? Is it just hormones? Or is it the way in which we configure our grades? For most of the last 30 years, districts have opted to put “tweens” in a separate place, away from little tots and apart from the big kids. Middle schools typically serve grades 5–8 or 6–8. But do our quasi-mad preadolescents belong on an island—think Lord of the Flies—or in a big family, where even raging hormones can be mitigated by elders and self-esteem bolstered by little ones?

Parents and educators have begun abandoning the middle school for K–8 configurations, and new research suggests that grade configuration does matter: when this age group is gathered by the hundreds and educated separately, both behavior and learning suffer.

How Middle Schools Came to Be

Notwithstanding all the despairing headlines middle schools seem to provoke, the more interesting story may be how they became, in relatively few years and with hardly any solid research evidence to support the idea, “one of the largest and most comprehensive efforts at educational reorganization in the history of American public schooling,” as middle-school researchers Paul George and Lynn Oldaker put it in 1985.

The core idea is generally traced to a speech given by William Alexander at a conference for school administrators at Cornell University in 1963. At that time, the dominant organizational structure of American schools was K–8 or K–6 and junior high, a two-year “bridge” to high school conceived in the early 20th century. In fact, the conference topic was “The Dynamic Junior High School,” which was then at its peak, with more than 7,000 such schools in the U.S.

Alexander, then chairman of the department of education at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, was assigned the keynote address but he could find no “dynamism.” He struggled over his speech, according to Jessica Hodge in a 1978 profile in Kappa Delta Pi. Thanks to a delayed flight on his way to Cornell, the professor got “the time he needed to outline a new focus and organization for the school ‘between’ the elementary and high school.” That was, as history notes, the middle school. Too many junior highs had merely appended high-school practices on to the 7th and 8th grades, said Alexander, and so the bridge had become simply “a vestibule added at the front door of the high school.” The schools, he suggested, had lost touch with the developmental needs of the preadolescent student.

Alexander told the gathered educators that these young students had their own needs, which were not being met in the junior high, including “more of the freedom of movement,” “more appropriate health and physical education, more chances to participate in planning and managing their own activities, more resources for help on their problems of growing up, and more opportunities to explore new interests and to develop new aspirations.” And he then set out what, given the subsequent battles, was his most dubious claim, that these students needed “exploratory experiences” rather than “greater emphasis [on] the academic subjects.”

Alexander was reacting to that era’s academic scare—Sputnik and its gremlins—and bemoaning the fact that greater emphasis on math, science, and “more homework” meant for many students “less time and energy for the fine arts, for homemaking and industrial arts, and for such special interests as dramatics, journalism, musical performance, scouting, camping, outside jobs, and general reading.”

The Me Generation Meets the Psychological Society

Alexander struck a nerve. “The content of his Cornell address would forever alter the nature of education at the middle level,” concluded Hodge. “Educators and citizens were receptive to creating schools that respond to the needs of young people.”

In a few short years, middle schoolers would go from Growing Up Forgotten, the title of a 1977 report by the Ford Foundation, to being what David Hough, then director of the Institute for School Improvement at Missouri State University and managing editor of the Middle Grades Research Journal, described as “studied, researched, and analyzed with a greater degree of exuberance and sophistication than ever before.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, many social and political institutions began to be viewed through the prism of psychiatry and sociology and so, in schools, through the personal psyches of individual students. Middle schools, brand new, were the blank slates for the child-centered, social-environment pedagogues. And what better population of student to study and nurture than, as education journalist Linda Perlstein puts it, youngsters whose “bodies and psyches morph through the most radical changes since infancy, leaving them torn between anxiety and ardor, dependence and autonomy, conformity and rebellion.”

It was a perfect storm for creating psychosocial-enrichment holding pens for preadolescent children: middle schools.

March of the Mediocracy

“Holding pen” is a harsh phrase, but it is not surprising that it slipped into the middle-school lexicon as the focus on preadolescent emotional development seemed to overwhelm the academics. By 1989, when President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors met in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the heralded education summit, that worm was beginning to turn. Academic mediocrity was not a hard case to make, since middle-school proponents had given, at best, lip service to academics almost from the inception of the model.

“I don’t know if it was deliberate or not,” recalls Trish Williams, executive director of EdSource, a California nonprofit, “but I know that when my kids were in middle school, one of the best in California, one of the teachers told me that her job was to just hold them and keep them safe until they get through puberty. So there has been a philosophy in middle school which deemphasized academic outcomes….”

As Hough noted in 1991, their popularity was “linked to programmatic characteristics…not to student outcome measures.”

The editors of Phi Delta Kappan recognized early signs of trouble when they devoted a special issue to middle schools in 1997 and noted an abundance of “observational studies,” but “little quantitative information to satisfy the demands of thoughtful practitioners and policymakers for assessment of those efforts.” They pointed out that what quantitative work there was attested to “the intellectual underdevelopment of too many young adolescents,” noting that only 28 percent of 8th graders nationally scored at or above the “proficient” level in reading in 1994. Indeed, it was beginning to be apparent that middle schools were doing little to help educate children academically.

In the 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), students who had yet to enter middle school fared better than those who had nearly completed those grades. U.S. 4th graders scored 12th among 26 countries in math while 8th graders ranked 18th. “These statistics about young adolescents’ poor academic performance suggest that many middle-grades schools are failing to enable the majority of their students to achieve at anywhere near adequate levels,” noted the Phi Delta Kappan editors.

Nothing much has changed since then. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show the middle-school lacunae. While U.S. 4th graders increased their NAEP math scale scores by 24 points between 1978 and 2008, 8th graders improved by 17 points during the same period. And while 4th-grade readers improved by 10 points during a similar period, the nation’s 8th graders improved by just 4 points. Middle schools seem to be dampening the modest improvements being made by our primary schools.

Lightning struck when Yecke published her middle-school broadsides, The War Against Excellence (2003) and, two years later, Mayhem in the Middle. Those reports caught the No Child Left Behind wave perfectly, presenting a searing condemnation of middle schools’ failures to educate a large swath of children. “The middle school movement advances the notion that academic achievement should take a back seat to such ends as self-exploration, socialization, and group learning,” says Yecke in Mayhem.

Sure, Some Middle Schools Work

There is no doubt that some middle schools are working. Unfortunately, the answer to the “what works” question is an elusive one. Veteran middle-school educators John Lounsbury and Gordon Vars, for instance, claim that “when the tenets of the [middle school] concept are implemented fully over time, student achievement and development increase markedly.” In a 2003 story for the Middle School Journal, they argue that there is “hard evidence that the middle school does in fact work,” but they don’t supply that evidence. Instead, we are treated to empathetic descriptions of “legions of genuinely good teachers both touching lives and successfully teaching skills and content in hundreds of middle schools” and hear the complaint that “most of the mandated assessments being used to determine students’ attainment of the standards focus heavily on recall of facts, one of the lowest forms of thinking.” Or, “Is it too extreme an exaggeration to suggest that high-stakes testing may be lobotomizing an entire generation of young people?”

Ironically, the middle schools that we know “work” are those that eschew the tenets of middle schoolism. Charter schools like the Young Women’s Leadership School and those operated by the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), and private networks like the NativityMiguel schools—several dozen of which serve low-income, inner-city students—have proven that proper pedagogy and academic focus can overcome the developmental challenges of preadolescence. A recent study of 22 KIPP middle schools found “significant” gap-closing results in math and reading achievement at about half of the schools. The Mathematica Policy Research report found that, after three years in the schools, students showed gains in math equal to 1.2 years of extra instruction and in reading almost a full extra year of improvement compared to outcomes for students in schools with similar demographics. The “effects are pretty striking and impressive,” Brian Gill of Mathematica told Education Week.

The latest evidence of middle-school potential is a study from EdSource released in February 2010. “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better” is, says Trish Williams, “the largest study of middle grades education ever conducted.”

Under the guidance of Williams and Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, a group of researchers from EdSource and Stanford looked into the “black box” of middle-school performance to analyze how district and school policies and practices are linked to higher student performance. Controlling for student background, they studied 303 middle schools and compared 200,000 student scores on California’s standardized tests in mathematics and English to responses to school practices surveys provided by 303 principals, 3,752 English and math teachers, and 157 superintendents.

“Our findings were surprising in their consistency,” the report concludes. The 44 higher-performing schools (those with average school-wide math and English test scores a full standard deviation above the mean) “create a shared, school-wide intense focus on the improvement of student outcomes,” it says. Those high-performing schools did things like “set measurable goals on standards based tests and benchmark tests across all proficiency levels, grades, and subjects”; create school missions that were “future oriented,” with curricula and instruction designed to prepare students to succeed in a rigorous high-school curriculum; include improvement of student outcomes “as part of the evaluation of the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers”; and communicate to parents and students “their responsibility as well for student learning, including parent contracts, turning in homework, attending class, and asking for help when needed.”

The EdSource study findings echo many of the principles espoused by successful “no excuses” charter schools like KIPP. But do we really want more middle schools, when only a very small portion of them will have what it takes to succeed?

Grade Configuration May Matter

The trends suggest that grade configuration matters to at least some parents and educators, who decided some time ago that separately configured schools for preadolescents are not the best way to go. Even KIPP, which has primarily served grades 5–8, began in 2006 a strategy of siting its schools in pre-K–12 “clusters.” Of KIPP’s current roster of 99 schools, 60 are stand-alone middle schools; the rest are Pre-K–4 elementary (24) and 9–12 high schools (15). “When we start in fifth grade, we’re starting in the fourth quarter, down by a touchdown, and the two-minute warning has been given,” KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg was fond of saying about running middle schools. “Every second counts, and there’s no margin for error.” With the new emphasis on clustering, he says, “we’re still down by a touchdown,” but it’s the first quarter.

Though the 6–8 middle school remains the dominant school configuration for the age group (roughly, ages 11 to 14), a countertrend has been building for much of the last decade. How many separate middle schools remain today? The numbers are not easy to pin down. Hough, now dean of the education school at Missouri State, has been tracking middle schools for 20 years and says their numbers peaked in 2005 with just over 9,000 across the United States. And he cites data from the National Center for Education Statistics that puts the number for the 2007–08 school year at 8,500. Hough says that “the trend is definitely away from stand-alone middle schools” and estimates there will be fewer than 7,950 when the 2010 data are in. The number of “elemiddle” schools, the new term for K–8 schools, has jumped from 4,000 nationwide to just under 7,000 in the last 10 years, says Hough. Cleveland has closed all 16 of its middle schools, re-opening most as K–8 schools. Philadelphia has closed 21 of its 46 middle schools since 2002. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Maryland are all rethinking the 5–8 and 6–8 school configurations, says Hough, and cities such as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Portland (Oregon), and Baltimore have already moved away from 6–8 middle schools.

Veteran New York educator Kathleen Cashin, a regional superintendent in the city’s sprawling system, explained the trend away from middle schools six years ago, before it was a trend, when she told the New York Times that parents “were clamoring” for a return to K–8 schools. “It’s an elementary-like nurturing environment,” she said. “Because children are older doesn’t mean they don’t need that nurturing care of a loving, caring adult. I have found the attendance is better, almost always. The violence is less, the younger kids defuse the older and the academics are at least as good if not better.”

This sums up much of what I heard from parents I spoke with about middle schools, even as some educators remained reluctant to acknowledge the possible importance of grade configuration. Meanwhile, parents are voting with their feet, and reformers can draw on recent research that offers little support for the stand-alone middle-school model.

Researchers Confirm What Parents Know

First, from North Carolina comes evidence that separating middle-school children from the other grades may exacerbate behavioral problems. “Is there a ‘best’ grade configuration for schools that serve early adolescents?” ask researchers Philip Cook, Robert MacCoun, Clara Muschkin, and Jacob Vigdor in a 2008 study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

The “conventional wisdom” on grade configuration, Cook and colleagues say, “has changed several times over the past century,” as we have seen. To see what impact configuration may be having today, they studied public schools in North Carolina, which has “led the national trend of incorporating sixth grade” into their middle-school program. In 1999–2000, more than 90 percent of the Tar Heel State’s 379 middle schools served grades 6–8. By comparing the grade 6 cohorts that were not in a separate middle school to those that were, the researchers found some remarkable results: “students who attend middle school in sixth grade are twice as likely to be disciplined relative to their counterparts in elementary school.” They found that the behavioral problems of these middle-school 6th graders “persist beyond the sixth grade year” and that “exposing sixth graders to older peers has persistent negative consequences on their academic trajectories.”

The results of the Cook et al. research complement those of Kelly Bedard and Chau Do, whose 2005 study of national data  found that moving 6th graders to middle school resulted in a 1 to 3 percent decline in on-time high-school graduation rates. Bedard and Do conclude that the decrease in graduation rates of middle schoolers is “a surprising result for a program with the stated aim of aiding less able students.” Given the oft-studied economic impacts associated with graduation rates, e.g., lifetime earnings, unemployment, and incarceration rates, “the negative economic implications of less on-time high school completion may be far reaching and multifaceted.”

Perhaps the most telling research about the impact of middle-school grade configuration is a recent study of New York City middle schools by Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood (see “Stuck in the Middle,” research, Fall 2010). The Columbia Business School researchers studied the impacts of grade configuration on learning and concluded that “middle schools are not the best way to educate students” in districts like New York City. In fact, they argue that “students who enter public middle schools in New York City fall behind their peers in K–8 schools.” The effects are large, present for both math and English, and evident for girls as well as boys. And perhaps most troubling, “students with lower initial levels of academic achievement fare especially poorly in middle school.”

Like the Cook research on behavior, the Rockoff and Lockwood study finds that the negative achievement effect on children who moved into middle school “persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.”

The one caveat Rockoff made about this research is the effect of school size. “In New York City all the buildings are roughly the same size, which means that a 6–8 school and K–8 school have the same number of students,” says Rockoff. It may make “a very big difference” if you have 250 kids in a 6th grade (which is what you typically have in a 6–8 school) rather than 80 (which is what you might have in a K–8 school). “Imagine if you’re in a K–8 school, you have 900 kids across nine grades, and one out of every ten 6th to 8th graders is making trouble. So you have 30 troublemakers in the school. Now, imagine a middle school with 900 kids but only three grades, 300 per grade. They have 90 troublemakers in the school instead of 30.”

Needless to say, that makes teaching—and learning—far more difficult.

Peter Meyer is a former news editor at Life magazine and senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

In Vancouver last winter, the United States proved its competitive spirit by winning more medals—gold, silver, and bronze—at the Winter Olympic Games than any other country, although the German member of our research team insists on pointing out that Canada and Germany both won more gold medals than the United States. But if there is some dispute about which Olympic medals to count, there is no question about American math performance: the United States does not deserve even a paper medal.

Maintaining our productivity as a nation depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals. To realize that objective requires a system of schooling that produces students with advanced math and science skills. To see how well schools in the United States do at producing high-achieving math students, we compared the percentage of U.S. students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 with advanced skills in mathematics to percentages of similarly high achievers in other countries.

Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Moreover, while the percentage of students scoring at the advanced level on NAEP varies considerably among the 50 states, not even the best state does well in international comparison. A 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, succinctly put the issue into perspective: “Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world.”

The Demand for High Achievers

The gap between the burgeoning business demand for a highly accomplished workforce and a lagging education system has steadily widened. Even as the United States was struggling with a near 10 percent unemployment rate in the summer of 2010, businesses complained that they could not find workers with needed skills. New York Times writer Motoko Rich explained, “The problem…is a mismatch between the kind of skilled workers needed and the ranks of the unemployed.”

Skill shortages have severe consequences for a nation’s overall productivity. Two of the authors of this report have shown elsewhere that countries with students who perform at higher levels in math and science show larger rates of increase in economic productivity than do otherwise similar countries with lower-performing students (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008).

Public discourse has tended to focus on the need to address low achievement, particularly among disadvantaged students. Both federal funding and the accountability elements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have stressed the importance of bringing every student up to a minimum level of proficiency. As great as this need may be, there is no less need to lift more students, no matter their socioeconomic background, to high levels of educational accomplishment. In 2006, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Coalition was formed to “raise awareness in Congress, the Administration, and other organizations about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leader of the global marketplace for the 21st Century.” In the words of a National Academy of Sciences report that jump-started the coalition’s formation, the nation needs to “increase” its “talent pool by improving K–12 science and mathematics education.”

A Focus on Math

We give special attention to math performance because math appears to be the subject in which accomplishment in secondary school is particularly significant for both an individual’s and a country’s economic well-being. Existing research, though not conclusive, indicates that math skills better predict future earnings and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school. The American Diploma Project estimates that “in 62 percent of American jobs over the next 10 years, entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra, geometry, data interpretation, probability and statistics.”

There is also a technical reason for focusing our analysis on math. This subject is particularly well suited to rigorous comparisons across countries and cultures. There is a fairly clear international consensus on the math concepts and techniques that need to be mastered and on the order in which those concepts should be introduced into the curriculum. The knowledge to be learned remains the same regardless of the dominant language spoken in a culture.

Data and Methodology

Our analysis relies on test-score information from NAEP and PISA. NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is often called the nation’s report card. It is a large, nationally representative assessment of student performance in public and private schools in mathematics, reading, and science that has been administered periodically since the early 1970s to U.S. students in 4th grade and 8th grade, and at the age of 17. PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, is an internationally standardized assessment of student performance in mathematics, science, and reading established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It was administered in 2000, 2003, and 2006 to representative samples of 15-year-olds in all 30 OECD countries (which include the most developed countries of the world) as well as in many others.

We focus on performance of the international equivalent of the U.S. high-school graduating Class of 2009 at the time when this population was in the equivalent of U.S. grades 8 and 9. NAEP was administered to U.S. 8th graders in 2005, while PISA 2006 was given one year later to students at the age of 15, the year at which most American students are in 9th grade.

In 2005, NAEP tested representative samples of 8th-grade public and private school students in each of the 50 states in math, science, and reading. For each state, NAEP 2005 calculates the percentage of students who meet a set of achievement standards: a “basic” level, a “proficient” level, and an “advanced” level of achievement. The focus of this report is the top performers, the percentage of students NAEP found at the advanced level of achievement (subsequently referred to as “advanced”).

Only 6.04 percent of the students in the United States in 8th grade in 2005 scored at the advanced level in math on the NAEP. Some critics feel that the standard set by the NAEP governing board is excessively stringent. However, the 2007 Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS 2007), another international test that has been administered to students throughout the world, appears to have set a standard very similar to NAEP 2005, as only 6 percent of U.S. 8th graders scored at the advanced level on that test as well.

We use the NAEP 2005 advanced standard to compare U.S. performance with that in other countries. Because U.S. students took both NAEP 2005 and PISA 2006, it is possible to find the score on PISA that is tantamount to scoring at the advanced level on NAEP, i.e., the score that will yield the same percentage of students as the percentage of U. S. students who scored at the advanced level on the NAEP.

A score on PISA 2006 of 617.1 points is equivalent to the lowest score attained by anyone in the top 6.04 percent of U.S. students in the Class of 2009. (The PISA assessment has an average score of 500 among OECD students and a standard deviation of 100.) It is assumed that both NAEP and PISA tests randomly select questions from a common universe of mathematics knowledge. Given that assumption, it may be further assumed that students who scored similarly on the two exams will have similar math knowledge, i.e., students who scored 617.1 points or better on the PISA test would have been identified at the advanced level had they taken the NAEP math test. Inasmuch as a score of 617.1 points is more than one standard deviation above the average student score on the PISA, it is clear that a group of highly accomplished students has been isolated. (For more methodological details, see sidebar.)

We start with the national share of 8th-grade U.S. public and private school students (most of whom are 14 years of age) who reach the advanced level in math on NAEP 2005: 6.04 percent. These students are assumed to be part of the cohort of 15-year-olds who participated in PISA 2006 one year later. Thus, using the PISA 2006 microdata, we can calculate the PISA math test score at which the 93.96th percentile (100.00 – 6.04) of the U.S. student population performs. All PISA calculations use the PISA sampling weights to yield nationally representative estimates. The PISA scaling methodology returns student performance estimates through a range of five plausible values, which are random draws from the estimated probability distribution for a student’s underlying performance. We perform our analysis separately for each of the five plausible values provided by PISA 2006. We then average these results. Based on these calculations, we estimate the PISA score at which the 93.96th percentile of the U.S. student population performs to be 617.1 PISA points.

Next, we calculate from the PISA microdata the share of students reaching this cutoff point for each country participating in the PISA 2006 test. This provides an estimate of the share of students in each PISA country who reach the equivalent of the advanced level in 8th-grade math on NAEP 2005. The share of students who reach the advanced level in 8th-grade math in each U.S. state is taken from NAEP 2005. For information on the statistical significance of differences among jurisdictions, see the unabridged version of this study, available here.

Because representative samples of student performance on NAEP 2005 are available for each state, it is possible to compare the percentages of students in the Class of 2009 who were at the advanced level for each state to the percentage of equally skilled students in countries from around the globe.

In short, linking the scores of the Class of 2009 on NAEP 2005 and PISA 2006 provides us with the opportunity to assess from an international vantage point how well the country as well as individual states in the United States are doing at lifting students to high levels of accomplishment.

U. S. Math Performance in World Perspective

We begin with an overall assessment of the relative percentages of young adults in the United States and other countries who have reached a very high level of mathematics achievement. It is frequently noted that the United States has a very heterogeneous population, with large numbers of immigrants. Such a diverse population, with students coming to school with varying preparation, may handicap U.S. performance relative to that of other countries. For this reason, we also examine two U.S. subgroups conventionally thought to have better preparation for school—white students and students from families where at least one parent is reported to have received a college degree—and compare the percentages of high-achieving students among them to the (total) populations abroad.

Overall results. The percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. While just 6 percent of U.S. students earned at least 617.1 points on the PISA 2006 exam, 28 percent of Taiwanese students did. (See Figure 1 for these results as well as for the international rank of each U.S. state.)

Click to enlarge

It is not only Taiwan that did much, much better than the United States. At least 20 percent of students in Hong Kong, Korea, and Finland were similarly highly accomplished. Twelve other countries had more than twice the percentage of advanced students as the United States: in order of math excellence, they are Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, Macao-China, Australia, Germany, and Austria.

The remaining countries that educate a greater proportion of their students to a high level are Slovenia, Denmark, Iceland, France, Estonia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Slovak Republic, Luxembourg, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Ireland and Lithuania.

The 30-country list includes virtually all the advanced industrialized nations of the world. The only OECD countries producing a smaller percentage of advanced math students than the United States are Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and Mexico. The performance levels of students in Spain and Italy are statistically indistinguishable from those of students in the United States, as are those of students in Latvia, which has subsequently joined the OECD.

State-level performance. The percentage of students scoring at the advanced level varies among the 50 states. Massachusetts, with over 11 percent of its students at the advanced level, does better than any other state, but its performance trails that of 14 countries. Its students’ achievement level is similar to that of Germany and France. Minnesota, with more than 10 percent of its students at the advanced level, ranks second among the 50 states, but it trails 16 countries and performs at the level attained by Slovenia and Denmark. New York and Texas each have a percentage of students scoring at the advanced level that is roughly comparable to the United States as a whole, Lithuania, and the Russian Federation.

Just 4.5 percent of the students in the Silicon Valley state of California are performing at a high level, a percentage roughly comparable to that of Portugal. The lowest-ranking states—West Virginia, New Mexico, and Mississippi—have a smaller percentage of the highest-performing students than Serbia or Uruguay, although they do edge out Romania, Brazil, and Kyrgyzstan.

In short, the percentages of high-achieving students in the United States—and in most of its individual states—are shockingly below those of many of the world’s leading industrialized nations. Results for many states are at a level equal to those of third-world countries. (Click the image below for an interactive map providing specific information for each state.)

Click to find specific information for each state

White students. The overall news is sobering. Some might try to comfort themselves by saying the problem is limited to large numbers of students from immigrant families, or to African American students and others who have suffered from discrimination. For example, the statement by the STEM Coalition that we “encourage more of our best and brightest students, especially those from underrepresented or disadvantaged groups, to study in STEM fields” suggests that the challenges are concentrated in nonwhite segments of the U.S. population.

Without denying that the paucity of high-achieving students within minority populations is a serious issue, let us consider the performance of white students for whom the case of discrimination cannot easily be made. Twenty-four countries have a larger percentage of highly accomplished students than the 8 percent achieving at that level among the U.S. white student population in the Class of 2009. Looking at just white students places the U.S. at a level equivalent to what all students are achieving in the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Poland. Seven percent of California’s white students are advanced, roughly the percentage for all Lithuanian students.

Children of parents with college degrees. Another possibility is that schools help students reach levels of high accomplishment if parents are providing the necessary support. To explore this possibility, we assumed that students who reported that at least one parent had graduated from college were likely to be given the kind of support that is needed for many to reach high levels of achievement. Approximately 45 percent of all U.S. students reported that at least one parent had a college degree.

The portion of students in the Class of 2009 with a college-graduate parent who are performing at the advanced level is 10.3 percent. When compared to all students in the other PISA countries, this advantaged segment of the U.S. population was outranked by students in 16 other countries. Nine percent of Illinois students with a college-educated parent scored at the advanced level, a percentage comparable to all students in France and the United Kingdom. The percentage of highly accomplished students from college-educated families in Rhode Island is just short of 6 percent, the same percentage for all students in Spain, Italy, and Latvia.

The Previous Rosy Gloss

Many casual observers may be surprised by our findings, as two previous, highly publicized studies have suggested that—even though improvement was possible—the U.S. was doing all right. This was the picture from two reports issued by Gary Phillips of the American Institutes for Research, who compared the average performance in math of 8th-grade students in each of the 50 states with the average scores of 8th-grade students in other countries. These comparisons used methods that are similar to ours to relate 2007 NAEP performance for U.S. students to both TIMSS 2003 and TIMSS 2007. His findings are more favorable to the United States than those shown by our analyses. While our study using the PISA data shows U.S. student performance in math to be below 30 other countries, Phillips found the average U.S. student to be performing better than all but 14 other countries in his 2007 report and all but 8 countries in his 2009 report. (Oddly, the 2007 report takes a much more buoyant perspective than the 2009 report, though the data suggest otherwise.) Phillips also finds that individual states do much better vis-à-vis other countries than we report.

Why do two studies that seem to be employing generally similar methodologies produce such strikingly different results?

The answer to that puzzle is actually quite simple and has little to do with the fact that Phillips compares average student performance while our study focuses on advanced students: many OECD countries, including those that had a high percentage of high-achieving students, participated in PISA 2006 (upon which our analysis is based) but did not participate in either TIMSS 2003 or TIMSS 2007, the two surveys included in the Phillips studies. In fact, 19 countries that outscored the U.S. on the PISA 2006 test did not participate in TIMSS 2003, and 22 higher-scoring countries did not participate in TIMSS 2007. As a report by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics has explained, “Differences in the set of countries that participate in an assessment can affect how well the United States appears to do internationally when results are released.”

Put starkly, if one drops from a survey countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, and New Zealand, and includes instead such countries as Botswana, Ghana, Iran, and Lebanon, the average international performance will drop, and the United States will look better relative to the countries with which it is being compared.

Did NCLB shift the focus away from the best and the brightest?

Some attribute the comparatively small percentages of students performing at the advanced level to the focus of the 2002 federal accountability statute, No Child Left Behind, on the educational needs of very low performing students. That law mandates that every student be brought up to the level a state deems proficient, a standard that most states set well below NAEP’s proficient standard, to say nothing of the advanced level that is the focus of this report.

In order to comply with the federal law, some assert, schools are concentrating all available resources on the educationally deprived, leaving advanced students to fend for themselves. If so, then we should see a decline in the percentage of students performing at NAEP’s advanced level subsequent to the passage of the 2002 federal law. In mathematics, however, the opposite has happened. The percentage performing at the advanced level was only 3.7 percent in 1996 and 4.7 percent in the year 2000. But the percentage performing at an advanced level climbed steadily to the 7.9 percent attained in 2009.

Perhaps NCLB’s passage in 2002 dampened the prior rate of growth in the achievement of high-performing students. To ascertain whether that was the case, we compared the rate of change in the NAEP math scores of the top 10 percent of all 8th graders between 1990 and 2003 (before NCLB was fully implemented) with the rate of change after NCLB had become effective law. Between 1990 and 2003, the scores of students at the 90th percentile rose from 307 to 321, an increment of 14 points, or a growth rate of 1.0 points a year. Between 2003 and 2009, the shift upward for the 90th percentile was another 8 points, or a change of 1.3 points a year. Our results are confirmed by a more detailed study of NCLB’s impact on high-performing students conducted by economists Brian Jacob and Thomas Dee.

In short, the incapacity of American schools to bring students up to the highest level of accomplishment in mathematics is much more deepseated than anything induced by recent federal legislation.

Conclusions

The economic and technological demand for a talented, well-educated, highly skilled population has never been greater. Not only must everyday workers have a set of technical skills surpassing those needed in the past, but a cadre of highly talented professionals trained to the highest level of accomplishment is needed to foster innovation and growth. In the words of President Barack Obama, “Whether it’s improving our health or harnessing clean energy, protecting our security or succeeding in the global economy, our future depends on reaffirming America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation. And that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today, especially in math, science, technology, and engineering.”

Unfortunately, the United States trails other industrialized countries in bringing a large proportion of its students up to the highest levels of accomplishment. This is not a story of some states doing well but being dragged down by states that perform poorly. Nor is it a story of immigrant or disadvantaged or minority students hiding the strong performance of better-prepared students. Comparatively small percentages of white students are high achievers. Only a small proportion of the children of our college-educated population is equipped to compete with students in a majority of OECD countries.

Major policy initiatives within the United States have in recent years focused on the educational needs of low-performing students. Such efforts deserve commendation, but they can leave the impression that there is no similar need to enhance the education of those students the STEM coalition has called “the best and brightest.” Yet, with rapidly advancing technologies in an increasingly integrated world economy, no one doubts the extraordinary importance of highly accomplished professionals.

Admittedly, the United States could simply ignore the needs of its own young people and continue to import highly skilled scientists and engineers who were prepared by better-performing schools abroad. But even such a heartless, irresponsible strategy relies on both the nature of immigration policies and the absence of better opportunities abroad, two things on which we might not want the future to depend. It seems much more prudent to encourage the most capable of our own people to reach high levels of academic accomplishment.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich.

The patio of my local coffee bar in Washington, D.C., is as good a place to think about truancy as any other. A high school with 1,500 students is two blocks away; a middle school with 900 students is a block beyond that.

Between 9:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. every school day, two police officers in a white Ford van sweep the neighborhood. Armed with a gun and dressed in blue fatigues, a curly-haired officer hops out of the van, marches through the coffee shop, glances into a shoe store next door, peers down the subway escalator, hikes to a bus stop, and then retraces her steps to take in a drugstore and a Best Buy.

Typically, the two-officer patrol, one of seven full-time truancy patrols in D.C., picks up four or five youngsters at lunchtime and returns them to their schools. Another four or five “runners” take off, knowing that the officers aren’t allowed to give chase into the neighborhood’s busy streets.

As the officer makes her way through my Starbucks, some youngsters produce cell phones with parents on the other end to corroborate excuses. Others hand over school-issued passes. A few flash identity cards from Maryland schools. The D.C. officers haven’t any authority over youngsters from across the state line, a mile away; as it turns out, Maryland police haven’t much authority, either. By the end of the school year, D.C.’s truancy officers are on familiar terms with a circle of regulars. “You got your hair cut,” one officer remarked to a girl named Ashley, who produced a pass that gave no explanation for her absence from school.

Next, she checked the ID of a Maryland 9th grader named Clyde, who explained that he had missed so much school already it wasn’t worth attending for finals. How do you get away with skipping school, I asked the boy, who wore a Metallica ski cap despite the warm weather. “I just do,” Clyde said. And what do your parents say, I persisted. “They can’t force me to go to school,” he said.

School is the center of social life for most youngsters. It’s the necessary step to a good job and income, a message these kids have been hearing since kindergarten. Taxpayers spend almost $600 billion a year on public education, an average of more than $10,000 per student.

So, why are so many kids willing to dodge traffic, hide out in shoe stores, and risk apprehension by an armed officer to skip school?

Counting Kids

States and school districts vary in how they define truancy, which means that nationwide truancy statistics don’t exist. In Maryland, a truant is someone who has 18 unexcused absences per semester. In Texas, it’s 10 unexcused absences within six months. In Florida, it’s 15 in 90 calendar days.

Complicating any attempt to compare statistics are divergent state compulsory-education laws. In D.C., youngsters must attend school until age 18, in Maryland until age 16, and in Pennsylvania until 17.

No Child Left Behind lets states use attendance as an additional indicator of adequate yearly progress, and 37 states do that. But attendance is measured differently from truancy: Attendance is a daily average, and a few youngsters with perfect attendance can hide the absences of those who stay away for days at a time. Attendance tends to hover at about 95 percent in most state reports.

Where states do report truancy, the numbers are staggering. California reported that 24 percent of its 6.2 million public school children, some 1.5 million kids, were truant (missing more than 30 minutes of instruction without an excuse at least three times) in 2008–09. Wisconsin disclosed that 15.4 percent of its high-school students were truant (absent without an acceptable excuse for part or all of five or more days during a semester) in 2008–09, including 62 percent of its African American students.

The New School calculated that 24 percent of New York City’s 350,000 high schoolers had 38 or more absences in 2007–08 (the report didn’t distinguish between excused and unexcused absences). Washington, D.C., reported that in 2008–09, 20 percent of its students were truant, that is, absent 15 days without an excuse. But the district also said that it missed counting about 10 percent of its youngsters, so the true number could be higher.

Even a simple calculation suggests that adds up to a bad deal for taxpayers. If 20 percent of D.C.’s 46,000 students miss 15 days each, that’s the equivalent of 766 full school years. The U.S. Census Bureau calculates that the D.C. schools spent an average of $14,594 per pupil in 2007–08. That adds up to $11 million spent by the district on no-shows.

California, like six other states, funds its schools based on average daily attendance rather than on the once-a-year or once-a-semester headcount that many states and Washington, D.C., use. Some 16 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 272,000 students were truant in 2008–09. That means the district lost at least 130,000 student days of funding.

State and federal data indicate that truants tend overwhelmingly to be African American and Hispanic. About as many girls as boys are truant. Almost half live in single-parent households, and about one-third live in poverty. Truancy spikes at about age 15, when most youngsters enter 9th grade and the less-supportive atmosphere of high school.

Diane Groomes, an assistant Washington, D.C., chief of police, whose responsibilities include the truancy patrol, said she is noticing that truants are getting younger. This year, her officers picked up more 12-year-olds than in the past, and even a growing number of 10- and 11-year-olds. Why? “Unfortunately, they’re growing up fast,” she ventured.

What’s the Problem?

Back at my coffee shop, I fell into conversation with a 10th grader who said her name was Devora. She had a school pass to keep a medical appointment, although she seemed to be settling into her patio chair for the day. Devora had big plans to study political science or philosophy in college, but she admitted she was absent “a lot,” and she put the blame on—how’s that?—her high school.

“If classes showed more relevance to life—not equations and stuff,” she might attend, she said. A chemistry teacher “yells a lot,” she added. A math teacher has “missed more school than I have. We don’t learn anything.” An English teacher is assigning “3rd-grade work.” Kids “feel trapped in school. The only thing on their mind is they want to get out.”

I read Devora’s indictment to Edward Deci and AnneMarie Conley, who study achievement motivation—Deci at the University of Rochester and Conley at the University of California, Irvine—and they knew all about it.

Deci, a psychologist, co-authored self-determination theory, which holds that we’re motivated to complete a task when we feel we’re competent to do the work, have autonomy in how we go about it, and feel some “relatedness” to the situation; we have friendly teammates or a supportive boss, for example. For lots of kids, school offers none of that, Deci says, and waves of school reforms are only making things worse, he adds.

“Kids know if they can’t do the work. They’re attuned to ‘these people are pushing me around.’ They know if teachers are relating to them in a warm kind of way or a demeaning kind of way,” Deci told me.

Middle schools, desperate to keep order in a hothouse of surging hormones, slap on tighter rules at the very time that kids crave more independence. They also tend to be larger and have many more students per grade than elementary school (see “The Middle School Mess,” features). Kids can have a tough time finding a caring adult or a circle of friends in a big school, and the pressure on teachers to boost achievement may add to that lack of relatedness. “When teachers get pressured on accountability, they get more authoritarian with kids. What kids need is autonomy and support, not control,” Deci said.

Conley, an education professor, studies expectancy-value theory, which doesn’t contradict Deci but says that we’re also motivated by what we expect to get out of a task: what do I gain vs. what do I give up by going to class, for example? Most kids see a social cost in playing hooky: They’d miss being with friends, their peers would think less of them, or they’d suffer a wound to their self-image.

But the calculation comes out differently for other kids. Going to school may mean they can’t hang out at the mall or use drugs. They might miss some serendipitous fun with truant friends or could lose some of their cool, if being truant is cool among their peers.

One morning near the end of the school year, I sat in on a string of meetings between students at Francis Scott Key middle school in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a group of adults—a family-court judge, a district attorney, a school social worker—who are part of a truancy project sponsored by the University of Baltimore School of Law.

At one point, the mentors congratulated a chubby 7th grader for his improved attendance and asked him to explain his success. The boy said his family couldn’t afford to pay for cable television any more. “I get bored so I do my homework and go to bed” instead of staying up late and missing school the next day, he added. What would he do if the family got cable again, Montgomery County judge Joan Ryon asked, hoping for lightning to strike. “I’d probably do the same thing again,” he said.

“Costs really matter,” Conley said when I told her the story. School and homework cost TV time, and that’s a price some kids won’t pay.

Who’s to Blame?

While the kids were telling me that truancy is a result of dysfunction in the schools, adults were telling me that it’s the result of dysfunction in the home. Both are probably right.

In late June, I sat in a Montgomery County courtroom, just outside Washington, D.C., as two criminal misdemeanor cases were called against three parents for failing to send their children to school. The first case was against 30-year-old Stephanie Terrell and Alexander Norris, who spoke up only to correct the court’s misimpression that he had fathered all eight of Terrell’s children or that he lived with the family. He did neither.

Attendance records showed that Terrell and Norris’s oldest child, a middle schooler, missed 14 percent of his school days in September 2009, 45 percent in October, 50 percent in November, and 71 percent in December. Four siblings did no better: two missed half of November, when the family was homeless; a third missed 44 percent; and a fourth missed 94 percent because he lacked immunizations.

Montgomery County had clearly tried to help. The schools scheduled parent-teacher conferences, home visits and, finally, three Truancy Review Board hearings, where a panel of school and social workers hoped to get Terrell and Norris to sign an attendance contract (the couple skipped two of the hearings). Social services found the family a seven-bedroom house, and produced a grant to send the children to summer camps so Terrell could attend a job-training program. “She really does want these children to go to school. She’s just overwhelmed,” Terrell’s lawyer told the judge.

Minutes later, the court called the case of Mayra Yesenia Argueta, a worried-looking woman, dressed for work, who explained that she awoke her 14-year-old daughter for school before hurrying off to her job. The state’s attorney said the girl didn’t show up.

Judge Stephen Johnson, visibly saddened by the Terrell-Norris case, admonished all three parents on the importance of education for their kids. “They need it as much as food and clothing,” he told Terrell and Norris, who—oh, the irony—works in an elementary school. But Johnson has few tools to deal with these parents, and he seemed to admit it.

He put Terrell and Norris on probation so the court can monitor their children’s school attenda nce. Court supervision is “a big stick…that’s all it is,” he told them. “Do the best you can,” he told Argueta, as he put her case on hold for six months while ordering her to see that her daughter attends summer school, the same girl who had failed to attend so much of the regular school year.

Truancy laws generally target parents because, the reasoning goes, they have violated the state’s attendance laws by not getting their kids to school. Educational neglect, the legal term in many jurisdictions, is a misdemeanor that generally carries the threat of jail time and a fine. But enforcement is typically lax: Washington, D.C., is one of only three or four cities with dedicated truancy patrols. Other jurisdictions depend on beat patrols or the occasional citywide sweep. Prosecutions are rare because schools see truancy as an issue for social services rather than the courts.

Under Maryland law, police can’t pick up truants, even to return them to school, because it is the parents who are committing the offense. Montgomery County counted 5,000 “habitual truants” between 2005 and 2010, but prosecuted the parents of just 55 of them. Sentences are minimal—10 days in jail and a $50 fine in Montgomery County—and penalties are seldom imposed. What judge is going to risk sending children into foster care while their mother cools her heels in jail?

The courts generally deal with the truants themselves only when children who already are under its jurisdiction fail to go to school: Attendance is usually a condition of probation for young offenders. The courts also can declare a child to be “in need of supervision” for missing school. But in inner cities, truancy takes a backseat to serious offenses. Some 3,752 juvenile cases were filed in D.C.’s family court in 2009, including four rapes and three armed robberies by children aged 10 to 12. The 135 child-in-need-of-supervision petitions seem almost trivial by comparison.

A few states that have aggressively enforced truancy laws have come to regret it. In 1995, Washington State passed a law that, among other things, required schools to file court actions when youngsters have seven unexcused absences in a month or 10 in a year. Students face up to seven days in juvenile hall and parents are subject to fines. The law overwhelmed the courts: 15,000 truants went to court in 2005. Lawmakers now are trying to amend the law to make truancy reporting discretionary.

School districts often have elaborate protocols for dealing with truancy. An automated call system in Fairfax County, Virginia, made 625,014 calls to parents about attendance issues between July and May, or almost four per Fairfax student. In D.C., an automated call notifies parents whose kids were absent that day and, for high schoolers, which class periods they missed. A teacher calls or sends a letter after a third unexcused absence. After the fifth absence, the school dispatches a certified letter asking for a parent conference.

After the 10th absence, the school attendance committee is convened to devise an intervention. After 20 absences, the city’s social-service agency is called in and, after 25 absences, the case is referred to family court. If the truancy patrol picks up a youngster, the process fast-forwards to the 5th day, the certified letter and parent conference.

But that all supposes that youngsters don’t erase telephone messages or destroy letters, and that they don’t slip out the back door of the school after attendance is taken. “It’s one thing to say we’re getting kids back in school; it’s another thing to know they’re back in class,” said Curtis Watkins, the director of LifeSTARTS, which works with youngsters in two Washington, D.C., middle schools. His counselors check classrooms three times a day to be sure that students who are targeted by the program are still in class.

It also supposes that parents want to and can get their children to school. Hedy Chang, who heads a research project called Attendance Counts, has calculated that children living in homes without enough food missed two days more than better-fed kids, children whose mothers are unemployed missed two more days than those whose moms had jobs, children whose mothers had less than a high-school education missed 1.5 more days, and those whose mothers are in poor health missed two days more.

Chang’s research was on kindergartners, but it would also seem to apply to older children. At the Francis Scott Key middle school meeting, the mentors told a 7th grader who had been tardy 58 times in three months that her attendance hadn’t improved enough for her to graduate from the program and receive the promised reward, an MP3 player. The girl shrank sullenly into her hooded sweatshirt and said she’d been “too tired” to come to school one day the previous week because she had had to watch a three-year-old niece who “screamed all night long.”

On other weeks, the girl had explained that another family had moved into the house and disrupted things, that she was tired because boys came around to visit her at night, and that her mother takes medication for a chronic illness and can’t awaken herself to get the girl off to school.

Truancy is never the problem, school staffers, social workers, prosecutors, and police officers told me over and over. Truancy is the symptom.

Promising Efforts

When Mel Riddile took over as principal of Fairfax County’s J. E. B. Stuart High School in 1997, he said, average daily attendance for the year was 89 percent, which means there were 19 absences per student. Within three years, Riddile says, average daily attendance was up to 96 percent. There were some easy victories: early on, Riddile linked a computer to Stuart’s phone system, which made autodial wake-up calls to youngsters with the worst attendance records. One youngster thanked him, Riddile said: No one had ever cared whether he came to school.

But mostly, cutting truancy was a hard slog. Some Stuart parents from Central America and the Middle East weren’t interested in having their daughters complete school. Teacher absenteeism was high, Riddile said, which seemed to some kids to validate their own absences (the daily absentee rate for teachers nationwide is about 5 percent, according to some studies, compared to about 1.7 percent for private-sector workers).

Riddile, now associate director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, held parent conferences aimed at forging “partnerships” with families. He referred 70 youngsters to court for child-in-need-of-supervision hearings: That was enough to jolt all but 12 into coming to school. And to avoid diffusing staff energy, he kept his focus on just two or three outcomes. They’re reflected in the name Riddile chose for his reform efforts: RAGS, for Reading Plus Attendance Means Better Grades and a Safer School.

The challenge is even harder in tumultuous inner-city schools, although no-excuses charters seem to be making headway. KIPP DC says that from 3 to 8 percent of the students in the five grade schools that it operated last year had 15 or more unexcused absences, the D.C. definition of truancy. KIPP operated just one high school, and it enrolled only 9th graders, which likely skewed the truancy rate downward compared to the city’s district schools. But KIPP also takes a tough stand. Parents and students sign an attendance contract during a lengthy home visit. Kids can be dropped from the rolls after 20 unexcused absences, and a handful have been, says Irene Holtzman, the director of accountability, although the school is “still willing to have a conversation” with youngsters who pile up more absences.

Sick days require a doctor’s note at KIPP. Social workers provide wake-up calls, go-to-bed calls, and bus passes, if necessary, as well as the occasional McDonald’s lunch as a reward for good attendance. “It’s helpful to frame expectations up front,” Holtzman adds.

What to Do?

A generation of school reforms has aimed at making school a place that youngsters should want to be. Districts are slowly breaking up megaschools and weeding out teachers—hopefully the yellers and those missing in action that Devora complains about. They’re adding dual-enrollment programs that allow high-school youngsters to take some college classes. A few are setting graduation requirements that are based on learning rather than “seat time,” and that could move youngsters through high school more quickly. Fairfax County, like many districts, no longer flunks a youngster for missing class if he otherwise earns a passing grade.

But critics also say that the No Child Left Behind focus on testing has narrowed and standardized curricula, and discouraged teachers from experimenting with lesson plans that do more than get kids past a test. Deci proposes a vast reform of all this reform in an effort to motivate kids. Abandon standardized testing and curricula to give teachers and students more autonomy, he says. Create more small schools where youngsters can develop relationships with teachers and peers. Individualize instruction so it accommodates youngsters who are behind and challenges those who want to race ahead.

Conley proposes finding out what kids feel they give up by being in school. “We can’t just tell them to go to school; we have to increase the costs of not going to school,” she says.

Those costs already seem extraordinarily high to taxpayers, employers, the police, the schools, social workers, college admissions officers, and most parents. Truancy seems a dumb choice and a lousy bargain to us. Still, on a spring afternoon at Starbucks, teenaged customers were sitting with me in the sun.

June Kronholz is a former foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Washington, D.C.

Given those challenges, pollsters/analysts Steve Farkas and Ann Duffett have delivered an invaluable service in their new study “High Schools, Civics, and Citizenship: What Social Studies Teachers Think and Do,” released today (Full disclosure: The study was commissioned and published by my shop at AEI). Steve and Ann explore what our schools are teaching today about citizenship by interviewing and surveying those teachers most directly charged with educating and shaping America’s new citizens–high school teachers of history and social studies in both public and private schools.

The findings struck me as both surprising and predictable, at times reassuring but also unsettling. While teachers’ priorities and values largely reflect those of the general public, their efforts to convey that knowledge to students are falling short of their own expectations.

In marked contrast to their private counterparts, public school teachers believe that social studies is losing ground to other subject areas and that civics in particular is being neglected by their schools. Teachers appear mixed, with some notable exceptions, about what the precise content of a proper civic education should be. They emphasize notions of tolerance and rights, but are inclined to give less attention to history, facts, and key constitutional concepts such as the separation of powers.

First, the good news: I found the results quite promising when it comes to public values and how teachers view America. Teachers share what most Americans would likely regard as a vision of responsible citizenship–with 83% of the teachers surveyed seeing the U.S. as a unique country that stands for something special in the world. At the same time, 82% of survey respondents say students should be taught to “respect and appreciate their country but know its shortcomings.” For all of the concerns about anti-American sentiment in schools of education, just 1% of teachers want students to learn “that the U.S. is a fundamentally flawed country.” This sounds, to our ears, pretty much like a pitch-perfect rendition of what parents, voters, and taxpayers would hope for–schools where students learn that America is exceptional even as they learn about its failures.

Teachers working with immigrants and English Language Learners (ELL) voice a particular need to teach their students to appreciate America and its culture. Fully 82% of teachers believe it is especially important to teach foreign-born students to value the U.S. and the meaning of citizenship, and 89% of teachers working with ELL students say the same.

Second, when asked what content, skills, or knowledge are most important, teachers rank the guarantees of the Bill of Rights at the top, whereas concepts like federalism and the separation of powers and key periods like the American Founding fare less well. It appears that students are taught about those things that embody a certain spirit of America, but not about how that spirit is translated into actual governance. Similarly, only 50% of teachers thought it essential for students to know “economic principles like supply and demand” and just 36% thought it essential that they know facts and dates (like the location of the 50 states or the date of Pearl Harbor). This strikes us as a case of teachers setting a remarkably low bar for what they expect their students to be able to learn.

Third, these teachers are uniquely well-positioned to report on what students are and are not learning when it comes to citizenship. On that score, things are disconcerting. When asked whether they are “very confident” that students have mastered important content and skills, only 24% of teachers indicate that their students can identify the protections in the Bill of Rights when they graduate high school, 15% think that their students understand concepts such as federalism and the separation of powers, and 11% believe their pupils understand the basic precepts of the free market.

Fourth, private schools may actually be better at fostering citizenship and civic virtues. For all the popular assertions that private schooling cannot serve public purposes, the data suggest that public and private educators value similar things and seek to accomplish similar aims. At the same time, the nature of the private school environment appears to be more conducive to achieving these civic ends. Take this striking finding: 43% of private school teachers say that most students in their high school graduate having learned “to be tolerant of people and groups who are different from themselves” compared with just 19% of their public school counterparts. Indeed, private school teachers appear to be much more confident that their graduates are learning the things that both groups of teachers say they want students to learn.

Finally, teachers feel marginalized in the testing era. Farkas and Duffett note that 70% of social studies teachers say their subject is a lower priority because of pressure to show progress on math and language arts. More than four in ten blame No Child Left Behind for deemphasizing their subject. Of course, the reality is that No Child Left Behind has had far more of an impact on elementary and middle schools than on high schools, so it may be that teachers are merely finding the law to be a visible, convenient villain. Nonetheless, 93% of teachers express a strong preference for social studies to become a regularly assessed subject.

-Frederick Hess

(This post also appears on Rick Hess Straight Up.)

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

Middle school. The very words are enough to make many Americans shudder with memories of social anxiety, peer pressure, bad haircuts, and acne. But could middle schools also be bad for student learning? Could something as simple as changing the grade configuration of schools improve academic outcomes? That’s what some educators have come to believe.

States and school districts across the country are reevaluating the practice of educating young adolescents in stand-alone middle schools, which typically span grades 6 through 8 or 5 through 8, rather than keeping them in K–8 schools. The middle-school model began to be widely adopted almost 40 years ago. Now, reformers in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Maryland, and New York, and the large urban districts of Cincinnati, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, are challenging the notion that grouping students in the middle grades in their own school buildings is the right approach.

Why the turn against middle schools? For more than three decades, American public education embraced this organizational model. Between 1970 and 2000, the number of public middle schools in the U.S. grew more than sevenfold, from just over 1,500 to 11,500. These new middle schools displaced both traditional K–8 primary schools and junior high schools (which first appeared a century  ago and served grades 7–8 or 7–9). From 1987 to 2007, the percentage of public-school 6th graders in K–6 schools fell from roughly 45 percent to 20 percent.

Neither the middle school nor the junior high has ever been popular among private schools, which educated only 2 percent of their 6th and 7th graders in these types of schools in 2007. And maybe the private schools have had it right all along. For the last two decades, education researchers and developmental psychologists have been documenting changes in attitudes and motivation as children enter adolescence, changes that some hypothesize are exacerbated by middle-school curricula and practices.

These findings are cause for concern, but there is reason to doubt their conclusions. Because the studies use data from a single school year to contrast students in middle schools and K–8 schools, most of the available research cannot reject the possibility that differences between the groups of students, rather than in the grade configuration of their schools, are actually responsible for the differences in behavior and achievement.

To provide more rigorous evidence on the effect of middle schools on student achievement, we turned to a richly detailed administrative dataset from New York City that allowed us to follow students from grade 3 through grade 8. Some of these children attended middle schools and some did not. Because we could follow the same children over a period of time, we could do a better job of ruling out the role of influences other than middle-school attendance on educational outcomes.

What we found bolsters the case for middle-school reform: in the specific year when students move to a middle school (or to a junior high), their academic achievement, as measured by standardized tests, falls substantially in both math and English relative to that of their counterparts who continue to attend a K–8 elementary school. What’s more, their achievement continues to decline throughout middle school. This negative effect persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.

We found that the middle-school achievement gap cannot be explained by a scarcity of financial resources for the schools. Instead, the cause is more likely to be related to other school characteristics, especially the fact that middle schools in New York City educate far more students in each grade. Although our conclusions about the reasons for the middle-school gap are tentative, we are quite confident that the evidence shows that middle schools are not the best way to educate students—at least in places like New York City.

Data and Methods

Our study was based on data for New York City school children who were in grades 3 though 8 during the 1998–99 through 2007–08 school years. We were able to follow students who entered 3rd grade between the fall of 1998 and the fall of 2002 for six years, until most had completed the 8th grade. We have data about the grade configuration and other characteristics of their schools, individual academic achievement as measured by annual standardized test scores in math and English, and a variety of personal characteristics. In particular, we know each student’s gender, ethnicity, whether they received free or reduced-price lunch through the federal lunch program, whether they were English language learners or received special education services, and their record of suspensions and absences from school.

Elementary schools in New York City typically serve students until grade 5 or grade 6, while a smaller portion of elementary schools run through grade 8. This means that most students move to a middle school in either grade 6 or grade 7, while some never move to a middle school. Of the 3rd graders in our initial sample of students, 62 percent were in a K–5 school, 24 percent were in a K–6 school, and 7 percent were enrolled in a K–8 school. The small fraction of remaining students attended K–3, K–4, or K–7 schools and are excluded from our analysis.

To isolate the impact of attending a middle school from the many other factors that influence student achievement, we combined two basic strategies. Most importantly, we tracked the performance of individual students over time to see how their performance evolved relative to that of their peers as they progressed from grades 3 to 8, in essence, using each student as his or her own control group. This step alone provides much stronger grounds for conclusions about the effects of attending a middle school than previous research.

A lingering concern, however, is the possibility that different types of students choose to attend middle schools than choose to continue in a K–8 school. If students do sort themselves into middle schools because of some unobserved characteristic that causes changes in academic achievement over time, we would incorrectly attribute differences in achievement to the middle schools instead of to characteristics of the students themselves. We reduced the likelihood of making this mistake by using a statistical technique that effectively takes the choice to switch schools out of the students’ (or parents’) hands. Specifically, we ran a statistical model that used the last grade served by the school that a student attended in grade 3 to predict whether the student attended a middle school. We then used that prediction to place each student into one of the two groups we are comparing, that is, students who attend middle schools and those who do not. Our key assumption in taking this approach is that there are no unobservable factors that cause a drop in student achievement at precisely the same time as students must leave the elementary schools they attended in grade 3. While we cannot definitively rule out the existence of such factors, we do not know of any plausible alternatives that would explain our findings.

The Middle-School Disadvantage

What determines a student’s level of academic achievement is complex. But the simple fact is that students who enter public middle schools in New York City fall behind their peers in K–8 schools.  This is true both for math and English achievement. Even more troubling, the middle-school disadvantage grows larger over the course of the middle-school years. With the transition into a middle school, students set out on a trajectory of lower achievement gains.

The achievement gap between middle-school students and K–8 students is put in stark relief in Figure 1, which displays our estimates of the impact of attending a middle school on student achievement as measured by standardized tests in math and English Language Arts. The graphs show how well students who attend a middle school perform relative to how we would expect them to perform if they attended a K–8 school. We report those differences, in standard deviations of student achievement in math and reading, for the 3rd through 8th grades. We separate students who enter a middle school in grade 6 from those students who enter a year later, in grade 7.

No matter whether students enter a middle school in the 6th or the 7th grade, middle-school students experience, on average, a large initial drop in their test scores. Even after accounting for a host of other factors that influence student achievement, students who eventually attend middle schools go from scoring better than their counterparts in K–8 schools in the year prior to transitioning to middle school to scoring below where we would expect if they were not attending a middle school. Math achievement for 6th graders transitioning to middle school falls by 0.18 standard deviations, and English achievement falls by 0.16 standard deviations. Contrast that decline with the 6th-grade test scores for students who will enter middle school the following year, in the 7th grade. Their test scores in both subjects continue to improve relative to their peers in K–8 schools. When these 6th graders move to a middle school in the 7th grade, however, we see the same dramatic fall in academic achievement: math scores decline by 0.17 standard deviations and English achievement falls by 0.14 standard deviations. Just how large are these effects? Consider that decrease in achievement associated with middle school entry—between 0.14 and 0.18 standard deviations—is roughly 20 to 25 percent of the achievement gap between poor and non-poor students (as measured by free lunch receipt) in New York City (about 0.7 standard deviations).

Moreover, these are not temporary dips followed by rebounds in learning. Throughout the middle-school years, students fall further behind. After two years in a middle school, on average a student who entered in the 7th grade will score 0.10 standard deviations in math and 0.09 standard deviations in English below what we would expect if he had gone to a K–8 school. After three years in a middle school, a student who entered in the 6th grade will underperform on 8th-grade assessments by 0.17 standard deviations in math and by 0.14 standard deviations in English.

A particularly distressing finding from our study is that students with lower initial levels of academic achievement fare especially poorly in middle school. To investigate the possibility of different effects on students with higher and lower initial achievement levels, we separated students into two groups: one group had grade 3 test scores above the citywide median, the other group scored below the median. Although we found substantial drops in achievement during middle school for both groups of students, the first-year drop and cumulative deficit were, respectively, 50 percent and more than 200 percent greater for students who start at the lower end of the achievement distribution.

We also found evidence that student absence rates increased when students entered middle schools and were significantly higher in grade 8 than for students who never entered a middle school (see Figure 2). More specifically, our estimates indicate that students were missing almost two additional days of school per year than would have been the case had they attended a K–8 school. Thus, increased absences may be one mechanism through which middle schools lower student achievement. There is little chance, however, that absences could explain a large share of the overall effect of attending a middle school.

To be sure, the population of public school children in New York City is different from that of many other school districts around the country. These differences might mean that middle-school attendance would have smaller or larger effects on other students than we estimate it to have on New York City’s public school children. For example, students with fewer educational resources at home may be more strongly affected by changes in their school environment. If that is the case, studying New York City students, who arguably come from less advantaged backgrounds than, say, the students in New York City suburbs, may have led us to find a larger middle-school effect than had we followed a more-affluent student population. While we encourage readers to be cautious about applying our findings without qualification to all public schools, we also encourage school districts to support research that can identify middle-school effects in other settings, especially since we find the consequences of attending a middle school for student achievement to be substantial and troubling.

Explaining the Trouble with Middle Schools

Why might New York City’s middle schools be detrimental to academic achievement? We find little support for the notion that differences in resources, such as per-pupil expenditures and class size, could explain the middle-school achievement gap. In middle schools serving grades 6–8 and grades 7–8, average per-pupil expenditures were $10,094 and $11,082, respectively, while per-pupil expenditures in K–8 schools were roughly equivalent, at $10,950. Nor do students experience a large decline in per-pupil spending when they move to a middle school. Average per-pupil expenditure in K–5 schools was $10,144 (compared to the $10,094 for grade 6–8 middle schools) and $9,680 in K–6 schools (compared to $11,082 in grade 7–8 middle schools).

Nor can we attribute the disparity we see to differences in class size. The average class size is slightly smaller for 5th graders in K–5 schools than for 6th graders in 6–8 schools (24 vs. 25 students); students in K–8 schools see similar growth in class size between grades 5 and 6. Class size is actually larger for grade 6 students in K–6 schools than for grade 7 students in 7–8 schools (24 vs. 23 students).

What about the possibility that the relative age of students in a school, especially during adolescence, can influence how students learn? In other words, does being the youngest students in a school have negative effects on the educational experience of those students? We could not find evidence in our data to support this explanation for the initial drop in test scores upon transitioning to a middle school. In our study sample, about one-third of new 7th graders moved out of a school serving grades K–6 and entered a middle school for 7th and 8th graders, becoming the youngest cohort in the school, while roughly half of new 7th graders entered a grade 6–8 middle school as part of the school’s middle cohort of students. We find that the effect of entering a middle school was essentially the same for both of these groups.

At least part of the problem with middle schools may be that they usually combine students from multiple elementary schools. In the New York City schools we studied, the average cohort size was 75 students in K–8 schools, 100 students in K–5 and K–6 schools, and over 200 students in middle schools for grades 6–8 and 7–8 (see Figure 3). We went back to our data and analyzed the effect of these cohort size differences on test scores. What we found was that cohort size has a pronounced influence on student achievement during these school years. We estimate that an 8th grader who attends school with 200 other 8th-grade students will score 0.04 standard deviations lower in both math and English than he would if he attended a school with 75 other 8th graders, the average cohort size for a K–8 school. This 0.04 standard deviation deficit represents roughly one-quarter of the largest test-score declines we attribute to middle-school attendance.

Given the data we have, we can only speculate about why it is harder to educate middle school–aged students in large groups. Developmental psychologists have shown that adolescent children commonly exhibit traits such as negativity, low self-esteem, and an inability to judge the risks and consequences of their actions, which may make them especially difficult to educate in large groups. The combining of multiple elementary schools and their students also disrupts a student’s immediate peer group. And middle schools often serve a more diverse student population than many students encountered in elementary school. Yet while it seems plausible that these changes in environment would matter, we could not find any evidence in our data that any one hypothesis can explain the drop in learning among students moving to middle schools.

Even though a full explanation of the middle-school achievement gap eludes us, there does seem to be a consensus among New York City students and their parents that educational quality in the city’s public middle schools is lower than in the boroughs’ K–8 schools. We reached this conclusion after examining responses to a citywide survey of parents of children in grades K–8 and students in grades 6 and higher, which was conducted at the end of the 2006–07 and 2007–08 school years as a part of the city’s new school accountability system.

On average, New York City parents of students in middle schools gave their schools lower marks on measures related to education quality than parents whose children attend K–8 schools. Figure 4 shows that parent evaluations of school safety, academic rigor, and overall educational quality was much lower among those whose children attended middle schools than among parents with children in K–5, K–6, and K–8 schools. It is important to note that this is not simply a product of the challenges of educating adolescents. There is little perceptible decline in satisfaction among parents in K–8 schools as their children age, a consistency we would not expect if educational quality simply cannot withstand the onslaught of puberty.

The students’ opinions are consistent with their parents’ assessments, although the lack of data on students below grade 6 prohibits us from more direct measurement of the degradation of education quality in middle schools. The clearest pattern that emerges from student reports is that 6th and 7th graders in middle schools think their schools have less academic rigor, less mature social behavior among the students, are less safe, and provide lower-quality education than do 6th graders in K–6 or K–8 schools.

The Longer View

We don’t yet know whether the troubling slide in test scores for middle-school students persists through the end of high school, a question that is certainly worth studying. Unfortunately, our data do not allow us to follow the students in our study further than grade 8. If the decline does continue, middle schools not only hurt student achievement in the short term but set students up for unnecessary longer-term disadvantages.

Of course, it is possible that transitioning to high school could be more difficult for students who come from K–8 schools than for middle school students. If K–8 students experience a larger drop in achievement upon entering high school, that could bring the two groups of adolescents back into parity. But it is hard to recommend closing the middle-school achievement gap by bringing everybody down. The better option is to address the trouble with middle schools—or do away with them altogether.

Jonah E. Rockoff is associate professor of business at the Columbia Graduate School of Business. Benjamin B. Lockwood is research coordinator at the Paul Milstein Center for Real Estate at the Columbia Graduate School of Business.

In February, First Lady Michelle Obama launched her “Let’s Move” initiative, which aims to fight childhood obesity by, among other things, increasing physical education. And this spring, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill called the FIT Kids Act that aims to enlist schools in the war against obesity by requiring districts to report what is taking place in P.E. classes.

Are traditional P.E. classes likely to be effective in fighting obesity? In a 2006 article for Education Next , “Not Your Father’s PE,” economists John Cawley, Chad Meyerhoefer, and David Newhouse wrote “requiring more PE seems like a logical response to the childhood obesity epidemic, but will mandating more time in gym classes actually result in more exercise for kids?” They found that “relatively little research has systematically examined how much PE (as it is currently constituted) contributes to weight loss or lowers the risk of obesity, and what little research there is finds no association between PE and weight loss and obesity.” In “Don’t Sweat It,” an article in the same issue that looked at efforts to ramp up physical education classes, Bob Cullen concluded that “simply passing legislation mandating a little more of the same PE just isn’t going to do.”

As students and teachers explain in this video, traditional P.E. classes may not offer students a real workout, particularly when those students are in high school. Students don’t like having to change into gym clothes and get sweaty in the middle of the day. So P.E. teachers may end up grading students based on whether they change into their P.E. clothes.

A report released this spring by the American Heart Association and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education found that, while most states require some kind of physical education, few require students to exercise for a specific amount of time.

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