Go to Barack Obama’s campaign website, click on the education link, and there you will read many ideas like this: “Obama’s plan will expand mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new recruits. He will also provide incentives to give teachers paid common planning time so they can collaborate to share best practices.” On Hillary Clinton’s website, you will see she wants to create “Green Schools in order to reduce energy costs and eliminate environmental hazards that can hinder children’s development.”
Is there another policy area where jargon, claptrap, and political correctness have such free rein as education? Perhaps that is why it is both astonishing and refreshing to find in the pages of the most recent City Journal a vibrant and bracing exchange about the future of the school reform movement. It is a must-read for anyone who has any interest in the future of education policy.
What gives the City Journal debate an edge is that it begins with apostasy. Sol Stern is a long-time warrior for school choice and vouchers, having written a book on the subject and numerous well-researched and persuasive articles. Now, to the dismay of his erstwhile intellectual allies, he has changed his mind. His article “School Choice Isn’t Enough” makes the case that after more than a decade of conservative and libertarian agitating, the school choice and voucher movements have been a colossal failure. He points out that today there are only three tiny voucher programs supported by public funds, one in Cleveland, one in Milwaukee, and another in Washington, D.C., while most other “parental choice” proposals have been resoundingly defeated in elections. In Utah–Utah!–a school choice proposal was defeated almost two-to-one.
But Stern’s more devastating critique is that, where they have existed, school choice programs have failed to deliver the improvements promised by advocates:
Stern’s reluctant discovery that school choice is not working came as he listened more closely to education scholars Diane Ravitch and E.D. Hirsch Jr., two of the most influential writers about education reform who have long battled the education professionals and the graduate Ed School establishment. Although Ravitch and Hirsch have been allies of the conservative education reform movement, they have never been cheerleaders for school choice in particular. Instead they are “instructionists,” believing that the curriculum and the way it is taught are far more consequential to improving failed schools.
Stern is now convinced that they are right and that the “incentivists”–those who believe that bringing market structure and competition to school systems–are wrong. He points to recent success in Massachusetts, where there is no school choice, few charter schools, and very little in the way of competition to improve teaching. Yet under the strong leadership of smart, content-focused reformers who make the liberal education establishment bristle, Massachusetts instituted a more rigorous curriculum, a focus on phonics and early reading, and real tests for its teachers. Over the last 15 years, school performance has improved far more than in most other states. In 2007, Massachusetts placed first in the nation in the fourth and eighth grade National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) reading and math tests, universally regarded as the best measure of student performance.
Stern admonishes his friends in the school reform movement who have ignored the Massachusetts story but applauded the “competition” agenda embraced by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, which is full of cash incentives for principals and teachers who improve students’ test scores. “One wonders why so many in the school reform movement and in the business community celebrate New York City’s recent record on education,” writes Stern. “Is it merely because they hear the words ‘choice,’ ‘markets,’ and ‘competition’ and think that all is well? If so, they’re mistaken.”
The critical responses to Stern that City Journal has collected are, individually, less interesting and less persuasive. The true believers in school choice–Andrew J. Coulson and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute, and Robert Enlow of the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice–give a doctrinaire defense of markets over government, undisturbed by evidence that voters (most of whom don’t have school-age children) aren’t swayed by these arguments. But a few of the respondents do poke some holes in the reasoning Stern gives for his conversion.
Thomas Carroll, an education reformer, argues that market-oriented school reform means much more than vouchers. He points to the spread of incentive pay for teachers and, of course, charter schools, which in places like Houston now command 20 percent of the market. Jay Greene of the Manhattan Institute warns that whatever salutary changes have occurred in Massachusetts can be quickly dismantled by a political administration in the grip of the faddish education school mafia. And in fact, under Governor Deval Patrick, this is already happening. Stern notes only in passing that the state’s assistant education commissioner whom he praises has already left town for an academic job.
But the real shortcoming in Stern’s argument is that, while he criticizes the political failures of school choice, he doesn’t offer an alternative political program for bringing about the changes he wants in a broad and sustainable way. Massachusetts, for all we know, was just the beneficiary of a fortuitous set of circumstances that won’t soon be replicated anywhere else.
If the school-choice movement has failed, what’s needed is a new political strategy to advance a different kind of education system, one that would embrace (or at least accede to) the rigorous content that experts like Diane Ravitch advocate. The school choice movement correctly recognized that the quasi-monopoly powers that school boards and teachers’ unions exercise over public education is an anachronism in a society increasingly built around consumer power. Their mistake, however, was in thinking that you could be agnostic on what these schools ought to be teaching.
You can’t be indifferent to the curriculum, E.D. Hirsch argues in his response to Stern. Without making content an explicit part of your education agenda, you abdicate to some third party–bureaucrats, textbook writers, political activists–control over what is actually taught every day. That’s not only what parents really care about, it is the thing that matters most to educational achievement. “Grade-by-grade core substance of the curriculum is what schooling is,” Hirsch writes.
Hirsch has been nobly making these arguments for a long time (his Cultural Literacy was a bestseller in the summer of 1987), but they have largely been ignored by unions, school boards, schools of education, and the professional teaching organizations.
That’s why the next political agenda for school reform, if it ever emerges, will be one that figures out how to redefine the notion of the public school so that traditional school authorities lose their grip on local school systems. This might mean a thorough-going charterization program in which every school effectively becomes an “independent” school competing for teachers, funding, and students. But to make this a compelling proposition, conservative reformers will have to make a case based on the content of the curriculum. Invariably that means some form of national or state curriculum, along with the sort of national testing that has begun under No Child Left Behind.
In other words, school reform will have to be about not just the way we think public schools ought to be organized, but also what we want them to teach in the classroom at every grade level. Neither the incentivist nor the instructionist side of the debate has been willing to take on both sides of the argument. But Sol Stern’s second thoughts suggest that a successful political movement for better American schools will have to do just that.
Daniel Casse is a senior director at the White House Writers Group, a Washington consulting firm.
