Back to bad schools

Like their parents and grandparents before them, they will bustle through hallways lined with lockers and backpacks laden with textbooks, and they will walk into classrooms with roughly 25 of their peers to sit and listen to a teacher work through a curriculum passed down by a central bureaucracy. If, in one of their physics classes, they invented a time machine and traveled back 100 years, the society they would see would be utterly different from that of their own epoch. Just about the only thing they would recognize would be their school.

But the world these children are being prepared for is fundamentally different from the one that awaited earlier generations after graduation. Automation and globalization are rapidly changing the nature of work. When kids reach the job market, they won’t compete only with students from their neighborhood, but with students from around the country and the rest of the world. Information culture is changing as well. As communication, travel and networking get easier, the sheer volume of knowledge and ability to gain access to new people and information threatens to drown students in tweeted factoids and Tumblr-ed listicles.

If that is the future they face upon graduation, children and their parents have a right to be concerned. For although schools have improved in the course of the past 100 years, they are far short of where they need to be. Improvement is a marginal term, but the standards necessary for success are absolute. American education is stuck. Where we’re stuck, why this is and what we can do about it are three questions for which any parent today needs answers.

Some data can be adduced to support the idea that American schools should be proud of what they have achieved. Economist Claudia Goldin referred to the 20th century as the “human capital century,” arguing that the increase in high school graduation from less than 10 percent of students in 1900 to almost 80 percent today was central to the growth of the economy for decades.

If we look at the longitudinal National Assessment for Educational Progress (NAEP), a standardized test given to a representative sample of students across the country since 1971, the amount that 9-year-olds and 13-year-olds know has grown significantly, to the level of about an entire year of learning in reading and more than two years in mathematics.

But that improvement is not carried through high school. The indicators level off among older students; 17-year-olds in the longitudinal NAEP study show no statistically significant improvement from students in 1971.

The truth is that while growth is admirable in some areas and age groups, American students still perform shockingly poorly in absolute terms. In the 2013 NAEP assessment, only 35 percent of 8th graders were deemed proficient in mathematics, and only 36 percent were proficient in reading. According to American College Testing, only one of every four students in the class of 2012 who took the ACT exam scored “college ready” in all four tested subjects.

The performance of American schoolchildren is even worse when compared to their peers abroad. On the 2012 international PISA exam, the United States came 27th in math, 20th in science and 17th in reading amongst developed countries.

This is not because of there is relatively more poverty in America than in other developed nations. Professors Eric Hanushek, Paul Peterson, and Ludger Woessmann disaggregated the scores by parental education levels and found that American students from privileged backgrounds still rank 28th when compared to foreign peers with similar advantages.

Such stark data demand an explanation. First, it is important to explode a couple of myths.

American schools are failing not because we have starved schools of money. In 1970, the United States spent $5,650 per student. By 2011, the most recent year for which comparable statistics are available, the U.S. spent $12,608 in inflation-adjusted dollars.

Worse still, and utterly at odds with the popular narrative, some of the highest education spending is in our poorest areas. Atlanta spends $13,146 per student per year, compared with $9,305 spent by neighboring suburban Fulton County. Baltimore City spends $15,287, compared with $12,940 spent by Baltimore County. Milwaukee spends $12,998. Detroit spends $13,330. And none of these figures counts capital expenses, which can tack on several thousand dollars more per year.

Nor is failure due to a shortage of people working on the problem. Ben Scafidi, an economist at Georgia State University, tracked statistics on the number of staff employed by public schools since 1950. He found that while the student population has increased by 96 percent, the total number of staff has jumped 386 percent. Troublingly, this overall number is driven primarily by administrative, non-teaching staff. While the number of teachers rose by 252 percent, the number of bureaucrats on school payrolls ballooned by a whopping 702 percent. In 2009, Scafidi found that the United States had one teacher for every 15.3 students, but one staff member for every 7.8 students.

These twin phenomena of rising costs and a boated corps of non-teaching staff lead to a clear diagnosis of what ails American education. It is a sclerotic bureaucracy that serves itself rather than the students for whom they supposedly work. This intransigent army of administrators lacks the ability to adapt to changing times, and it stifles the creative capacity of educators.

It is hard to overemphasize the massive scale of the American education system. This year, almost 50 million school children are enrolled at more than 100,000 schools across the country. They are taught by some 3.7 million teachers. In comparison, there are some 800,000 physicians in the United States and 1.3 million total active-duty servicemen and women in all branches of the military combined.

To manage these schools, the United States has 14,000 school districts, each enjoying a near-monopoly of public education provision in a given geographic area. In whatever district you live, your children go to that district’s schools. People with enough money move to a district with good schools. People without must take what their district offers — good, bad or flat-out appalling.

This system is the endpoint in a long march of centralization that has made schools and school districts fewer but much larger.

In 1940, there were 119,000 school districts and a quarter of a million public schools, serving far fewer students than there are today. But as student enrollment increased, the number of schools and school districts dwindled. By 1960, there were only 40,000 school districts and 115,000 schools. Two decades later, in 1980, the number of school districts had dropped to only 16,000 school districts and these were overseeing only 80,000 schools.

The disappearance of one-room schoolhouses, of which there were still 150,000 in 1930, explains much of the decline. But when it comes to school districts, more is at play.

The schools we know today are the product of the progressive movement of the turn of the last century. Taylorism, the management theory created by efficiency guru Frederick Taylor, was the rage, with “scientific management” determining “best” practices and then standardizing and disseminating them across the industrial and manufacturing sectors. The idea that successful practices could be identified, employees could be trained on them and then progress could be tracked bled into education, as schools consolidated and teachers “professionalized.” Much of this was to prepare students for success in Taylorized industries, but it also stemmed from a progressive ideology that science could tell us what the best way to teach a child was, and with enough study and determination on the part of elite managers, everyone could reap the benefits.

It turns out, sadly, that the education elite had the determination but did not actually have the answers.

They moved schools away from local, democratic control into the hands of regulators and bureaucrats who instituted pay scales based on longevity in the job rather than performance, last-in-first-out quality-blind hiring and firing practices and a low-bar tenure system that gives a job for life to teachers who make it through the first two or three years without getting fired.

Many of these policies were originally intended to thwart machine politics that handed out teaching and administration jobs as patronage posts and manifestly discriminatory firing practices that allowed schools to throw out female teachers who got pregnant or, in some cases, married. But over time, the these rigid operational rules took on on a life of their own, protecting incompetent teachers and making them more expensive at the same time.

They have certainly outlived their usefulness, not least because an array of laws now protect staff from unfair-dismissal laws and age and gender discrimination. Today, rigid policies serve primarily to thwart improvement rather than to protect vulnerable employees. Other industries have learned to take advantage of new technology to promote efficiency, have adapted to the needs of a changing workforce and have rethought pay and evaluation. But schools are mostly plodding along in the same tired ways.

Many of these outmoded policies are being challenged. In June, the California Supreme Court ruled for nine public school students who argued that tenure and last-in-first-out policies systematically denied them the chance to receive a good education. In late July, former CNN anchor Campbell Brown announced that a nonprofit group she leads would help a group of New York City parents try to overturn the Empire State’s tenure laws.

The loudest and most fervent opponents of change and improvement are, not surprisingly, teacher unions. Unionization played a large role in professionalizing the teaching workforce. Though it had existed as a professional organization since the 1850s, the National Education Association began to function as a labor union in the 1960s. To date, it is the largest teacher union in the United States, with more than 3 million members. The American Federation of Teachers, the second largest at 1.5 million members, was founded in 1916.

Ironically, unions have historically fought against bureaucrats and for local control of schooling. They used to want teachers to have autonomy and schools to be democratically controlled. Albert Shanker, the longtime head of the United Federation of Teachers and later the American Federation of Teachers, is credited with inventing the idea of charter schools. He saw them as offering an opportunity to free teachers to run schools the way they, not bureaucrats, wanted to run them.

Much of that resistance has gone out the window. Rather than agree to greater autonomy in exchange for accountability, much of the teachers unions’ agenda can be boiled down to asking for more money, more staff and less oversight.

Centralized teacher evaluations came into vogue because the teaching profession has not adequately policed itself. Documents supporting the California case challenging the constitutionality of tenure and last-in-first-out showed that, on average, only two or three of the state’s 275,000 teachers were dismissed each year for poor performance. This despite the fact that the 2013 NAEP test found that 71 percent of California 8th graders were not proficient in reading and 72 percent were not proficient in math. It is safe to assume that a very bad job was being done by than the 0.000008 percent of teachers who were fired for incompetence.

New centralizing tendencies

While unions stand in the way of reform, continued standardization and centralization is perhaps even more pernicious.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Republican governors, including Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and George W. Bush of Texas, put in place centralized accountability systems requiring schools to test children and be held accountable for their results. Bush took this idea nationwide as president with No Child Left Behind, which for the first time required states that received federal dollars to establish performance benchmarks and punish schools that failed to meet them.

The conservative, good-government impulse that produced this system is admirable. If we are to have 14,000 bureaucracies paid for by taxpayer dollars, and if we are going to compel families to send their children to those districts’ schools, we should make sure they provide a minimum level of education. But the goal of providing a minimum quality education has metastasized into the Obama administration’s lengthening list of requirements of states, from school accountability to teacher evaluation. The Department of Education is going so far as to require states to submit “teacher equity” plans to ensure that they are spreading their good teachers appropriately.

There is no better example of these centralizing tendencies than the Common Core standards, a set of uniform expectations for K-12 students across the country.

The Common Core began as a collaborative effort by some of the nation’s governors. When No Child Left Behind demanded that states develop their own standards and tests, many chose low standards or poor quality tests. So some governors decided that if their states could create a set of common standards and share the costs of developing better assessments, they could hold each other accountable and help each other improve.

Their heart was in the right place, but the progressive wing of the movement demanded more federal involvement. They succeeded in making adoption of the Common Core a key element in the Race to the Top competitive grant program that the Department of Education created as part of the 2009 economic stimulus package.

States that had no desire or capacity to switch to new standards joined the effort in a mad rush for federal dollars, and their mile-wide but inch-deep support for those standards is now crumbling as they actually have to implement them.

What do we make of this? Accountability, teacher evaluation and high standards are prima facie good ideas. But how they are implemented makes all the difference. Teacher evaluations at the state or district level have a better chance of measuring what we want to measure, rewarding what we want to reward, and penalizing what we want to deter than policies handed down from Washington. Standards will engender less real and lasting support from teachers, families, and voters if they are conceived by faceless bureaucrats than if they are based on real local needs and knowledge.

Another promising improvement is the growth of charter schools — independent and autonomous public schools — such as the KIPP Academies, which use longer school days and school years, stricter discipline and more direct instructional methods to produce wonderful results, particularly among low-income and minority students. Other charter school networks, such as the Rocketship Education program in San Jose, Calif., use technology to provide personalized support for students during computer lab time, alternating with in-person instruction. Still others, including Touchstone Education in Newark, N.J., have chosen to staff schools using teams rather than the standard model of one teacher per 25 students, encouraging better collaboration and specialization among teachers.

Rather than centralize and standardize, policymakers can foster these nascent entrepreneurial ventures by scrubbing away onerous regulations that restrict school leaders. They can make school funding far more flexible, allowing money to follow children to the school of their parents’ choice. They can encourage schools to use technology to extend the reach of effective teachers, or work to change the way they manage their school day or year to get the most out of their best educators. Most of all, they can realize that in an education system as vast as America’s, the best solutions will not come from the mountaintop — or the musty corners of a stale and unresponsive bureaucracy — but from trial and error and the hard work of teachers working in classrooms every day.

Michael McShane is a research fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.