School Wars

SEASONS COME AND SEASONS GO, but the education mess endures. Of the nation’s fourth- and eighth-grade public-school students, only a third are “proficient” in reading or math, as defined by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. (Math scores have been on a slight but unmistakable upswing since 1990, but reading scores have remained stubbornly flat.)

And the achievement gap between poor and minority students on the one hand, and their white, wealthier fellows on the other, remains appallingly wide and seemingly impervious to efforts to narrow it. The average African-American twelfth-grade student, for example, reads at an eighth-grade level.

With the education mess come the education wars, which also have a life of their own. On one side are the vast majority of educators, administrators, and education specialists. They all come out of the progressive tradition of John Dewey, and they explain the present system’s shortcomings as largely the result of inadequate funding and a reflection of the larger society’s inequities. On the other side are education reformers of a traditionalist bent, who would remake the system with school-choice schemes, or reforms designed to wring efficiencies out of the vast bureaucratic wasteland that is public education. The battle has been going for two decades, with traditionalists making halting gains but no real victory in sight.

Two recent books, Frederick Hess’s Common Sense School Reform and Richard Rothstein’s Class and Schools, are new skirmishes in this war. Both books attempt to get at the root of our education problems. Rather than dealing with particular issues (Is teacher tenure good? What do we think about high-stakes testing?), Hess and Rothstein both present top-to-bottom reform packages–and the fact that they are in many ways diametrically opposed shows just how entrenched the two sides of the education wars are.

COMMON SENSE SCHOOL REFORM is uncompromising. Hess, an education-policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, takes direct aim at gauzy notions and sentiments that divert us from enacting needed reforms. Many will find shocking his direct attack on the idea that teachers are doing all they can to improve student achievement. Bunk, he says. In fact, while many teachers are working as hard as they can, many aren’t.

Many are themselves so poorly educated they aren’t up to the task of raising student achievement. And those who are up to the task still need external incentives–performance measures, bonuses for improved performance, and penalties for falling short–that Americans take for granted in other professions. “Educators, for better or worse, are a lot like everybody else,” Hess writes. “Some educators are passionately committed to their craft, highly skilled, and will be so regardless of rewards or guidance, but most–like most engineers and attorneys and journalists and doctors–will be more effective when held accountable for performance.”

Common Sense School Reform is shot through with hard-nosed realism. Unlike some proponents of high standards and increased accountability, Hess admits that such measures can have the unfortunate effect of narrowing the curriculum and limiting the additional touches–a focus on science or the arts, say–that can help distinguish schools and provide the personalizing touches that parents crave. (There is already some evidence that the No Child Left Behind Act, with its relentless focus on reading and math and, eventually, science, is crowding out art, history, and foreign-language classes.)

For Hess, the answer to this curricular narrowing is school choice, designed to allow parents to choose a tailored curriculum that operates in a larger framework of high standards and accountability. Choice will also help to spur school improvement by rewarding innovators who can deliver educational success–if choice rewards popular schools with additional resources and punishes persistently low-achieving schools with closure or reconstitution. (The second half of Hess’s formulation, closing down schools that lose students in a competitive marketplace, has not yet been tried in any of the voucher programs presently in operation.)

It’s a beguiling vision, and certainly one that would be a vast improvement over the present system, which actually punishes success by placing strains on popular, over-enrolled schools. As Hess points out, an innovative and dynamic principal who attracts a hundred extra students may be assigned two or three additional teaching slots and may get a little discretionary money to spend on new programs or additional teacher training. But most of the important decisions–who to hire; whether to put resources into physical plant, new personnel, or new books and teaching aids; the length of the school day; the hours teachers work–are dictated by collective bargaining agreements or are handed down from the district office. That offers little incentive to innovators, and a growing student body becomes a headache, not an indicator of success.

If Hess represents one side of the education debate, Richard Rothstein represents the other. Schools, he says in Class and Schools, cannot be viewed outside their larger social context. For Rothstein, social class is an irreducible reality; students come to school the products of cultures with different methods of child rearing, different opportunities for academic and social enrichment, and different attitudes toward schooling. “The influence of social class characteristics is probably so powerful that schools cannot overcome it, no matter how well trained are their teachers and no matter how well designed are their instructional programs and climates,” he writes.

FOR ROTHSTEIN, a former New York Times education columnist now at Columbia Teachers College, school reforms are destined to fail if they are not accompanied by full-scale social reforms that seek to equalize differences in social class. For example, lower-class parents, he notes, use far fewer words in conversation with their young children; they read fewer and easier books to their children; and when they do read, they often ask factual questions about the reading–“What happened? What is that picture?”–rather than open-ended questions that spark creative answers and higher-order thinking. And Rothstein shows how not just income but wealth, usually in the form of longtime home ownership, provides middle- and upper-class parents with resources to enrich a child’s learning, such as music, the arts, and foreign languages.

Individual pieces of Rothstein’s analysis make sense. He reports on studies that show that providing optometric exams and glasses to low-income students has more immediate effect on reading and math scores than instructional or curricular reforms. And there is no doubt that income and wealth affect student achievement, by allowing some students opportunities that others don’t have–opportunities deeply ingrained and built up over generations.

That said, what are we to do about it? Massive federal interventions with the intent of redistributing income, the sorts of programs that would be required to correct the wealth imbalance Rothstein identifies, have a poor track record, to say the least. The idea of an efficient, carefully targeted program of redistribution that avoids the unintended consequences and bureaucratic sclerosis of the past remains a dream. Rothstein’s argument is more complicated than the old saw that school reform must wait until social reform has been achieved; he is willing to concede that school reforms can have some effect on student achievement at the margin. But his argument isn’t much more complicated than that. In the end, Rothstein would have us wait to reform our schools until a promised land of egalitarianism and class leveling has arrived. For kids in failing schools, that will be a long wait.

WHAT MAKES ROTHSTEIN’S ARGUMENT unsatisfying is that the school reforms he dismisses as merely tinkering at the edges of the achievement problem aren’t failures. In fact, they haven’t really been tried, at least in any systematic way. The standards-and-testing approach of the No Child Left Behind Act, which Rothstein abhors, is barely two years old. And while standards have been in place in many states for a decade and a half, it has taken time and multiple fits and starts to improve their rigor. It has taken even more time to develop full packages of standards, well-aligned tests that are true assessments of learning, and accountability systems that are serious spurs to improved performance. In fact, even in the age of NCLB, few states have a decent system of standards, testing, and accountability measures in place.

Meanwhile, educational choice through charter schools, vouchers, and tuition tax credits is growing fitfully, but nowhere does it yet represent a true competitive force whose success can spur improvements in traditional public schools by threatening funding. (A case in point: the much-ballyhooed D.C. vouchers program actually rewards schools that lose students through choice with additional resources, free of strings–a perverse incentive if ever there was one.) And a number of important personnel and management reforms loathed by administrators and teachers’ unions, such as ending tenure, reforming teacher education, and opening up accreditation processes, have never even gotten off the ground. So, it’s a bit much for Rothstein to knock school reform as a failure if it largely remains an aspiration.

The federal government, in its lumbering but decisive way, has developed a response to persistent school failure with the 2001 No Child Left Behind system. Many of the act’s goals, such as the dictate that every student be proficient in reading and math by 2014, are laudable. But the demands for rigorous testing, higher standards, and increased expectations have also raised an important question: Can we expect inefficient schools to make gains without systematic reforms to the way they do business? The No Child Left Behind Act has put new incentives for schools, states, and districts in place–but the force of those incentives (and concomitant punitive measures) remains blunted by collective bargaining agreements, tenure systems, and teacher education programs that strictly limit what we can expect from teachers and school administrators. In the end, the greatest accomplishment of No Child Left Behind may turn out to be a new awareness of just how far we have to go in remaking our schools.

THAT’S NOT TO SAY we need to go as far as Richard Rothstein would have us go–in his Class and Schools, there’s little hope of good schooling short of the apocalyptic remaking of the whole society. But reform is also not quite the simple, easy thing envisioned by Frederick Hess in Common Sense School Reform. And so the education wars roil on.

Justin Torres is a research director at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a K-12 education reform organization, and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.