New Orleans teenager Victoria McKnight bounced between three high schools before finding the right fit. One of the schools was too large and impersonal; the second closed long before McKnight had earned enough credits to graduate, so school officials encouraged her to transfer to the third school, NET Charter High School, which, as part of its curriculum, offers online classes to students who have fallen behind. Without the NET, McKnight, 18, doubts she would have ever earned a high school diploma; now she is on pace to do so in 2014.

McKnight says the computer-based courses allow her to work at her own speed and more easily avoid the distractions of classmates. But there are drawbacks, particularly when she is struggling to learn a new concept. “Some of the lessons I really don’t understand and some I do,” she says. “I would rather take it with a regular teacher because it would be more hands-on and you could ask questions.” The computer lab does have a full-time teacher, but students say it’s sometimes hard for him to respond to questions on a variety of subjects.

As online education grows in reach and sophistication, students like McKnight who are behind in credits are being pushed toward online credit-recovery programs. In communities including New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Chicago, educators are creating alternative schools for struggling students that employ online credit-recovery programs as a core portion, or all, of their curriculum. The most recent report from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) found that 55 percent of school districts reported using distance learning, most of it online, during the 2009–10 school year; more than 60 percent of those classes were taken for credit recovery. Meanwhile, about 80 percent of urban schools cite credit recovery as an issue of importance, according to the International Association for K–12 Online Learning.

NCES does not compile enrollment figures, but major online credit-recovery providers report surging enrollments. Arizona-based Edgenuity, for instance, serves about 1 million students annually, up 100 percent from two years ago. Although the company offers more than online credit recovery, a majority of its customers take its online courses for that purpose. Most companies selling online credit-recovery courses offer a host of online programs and classes, and few track what portion of their product is used for credit recovery. As a result, there are no concrete national data on how many students take online credit-recovery courses.

Even as online credit recovery hits the mainstream, for the most part it has remained free of any scrutiny beyond what individual school leaders and the consumer marketplace provide. Of course, the entire field of education, credit recovery or not, struggles with what makes a class or teacher good, great, or below par. In traditional education, however, there’s a nationwide war raging over accountability, with many states seeking ways to rate not only teachers and schools, but also teacher preparation and early childhood programs, based on quantifiable outcomes. With the exception of isolated pockets, like the Florida Virtual School (where funding of some online courses will soon be tied to passing an external exam), the conversation about accountability for online credit recovery has not been nearly as robust and far-reaching, in either a political or a pragmatic sense. Where there is nascent accountability for the quality of courses, it’s often a byproduct of the push for accountability in traditional education. Some states, for instance, are creating “end-of-course” exams aimed in part at assessing the efficacy of individual courses, whether traditional or online. But these are hardly universal and come nowhere close to covering the range and variety of courses offered by online providers. Edgenuity, for example, sells about 185 semester-length classes. “The field really struggles with the question of what makes a good or great online credit-recovery program,” explains Susan Patrick, president of the International Association for K–12 Online Learning.

Jessica Heppen, principal research analyst at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), is currently leading one of the only independent analyses of the effectiveness of online credit recovery courses. “There is a real dearth of research on credit recovery,” Heppen notes. “Even basic questions are unanswered, like the size of the business and the size of the need.” Because it’s limited to a single provider (Aventa/K12), a single course (Algebra I), and a single city (Chicago), the AIR study will not provide a broad sense of quality.

Counting Graduates

The growth in online learning generally, including blended learning, has fueled the proliferation of computer-based credit-recovery programs. The pressure on schools and educators to boost retention and graduation rates is a significant factor as well. Some argue that education leaders have their own reasons for not scrutinizing credit-recovery programs too closely. Such programs can be a lifeline, as schools can be punished or closed if they fail too many students and graduate too few. Schools and districts also stand to lose per-pupil funds when students drop out. If online courses can serve as an affordable means of keeping a student in school, there’s a financial incentive for embracing them. As a result, the push for greater accountability in K–12 education, including rating high schools based partly on graduation rates, might have the effect of suppressing the desire for accountability among online providers. “There’s a political motivation,” says David Bloomfield, professor of educational leadership, law, and policy at Brooklyn College. “It’s an end run around higher standards.”

Data about the credit-recovery industry are too incomplete, and change of all kinds too omnipresent in K–12 education, to posit a definite link between the spread of online courses and increased graduation rates nationally. But there’s evidence to suggest a connection in at least a few individual schools. The education news site GothamSchools (now Chalkbeat New York) reported on a guidance counselor at New York’s A. Philip Randolph High School, for example, who said she was instructed to enroll dozens of failing students in credit-recovery classes solely so they could earn their diplomas. Michael Bloomberg, who oversaw the schools as mayor from 2002 to 2013, has consistently denied that abuse of credit recovery led to rising graduation rates across the city during his tenure. Department of Education officials in New York City in January 2013 shored up the rules surrounding credit recovery in response to evidence that some schools were granting diplomas to students who had not met state or city graduation requirements. Students now have to take city-approved credit-recovery courses within a year of failing the traditional version and can only use that option to make up three core courses.

Patrick says there’s a “direct correlation” between the growth of online credit recovery and “the pressure school district administrators face in increasing graduation rates.” This pressure might not be a net negative if administrators use online credit recovery in creative and effective ways to meet the needs of students who have fallen through the cracks.

Larry Perondi, superintendent of the Oceanside Unified School District in California, reports that his district’s graduation rate has increased since the district opened three centers where struggling students can earn credits partly through online courses. But, more important, he believes the centers have improved the life prospects of students who would have dropped out otherwise, including young parents and teens battling drug addiction. To help keep the centers from becoming credit or diploma mills, Perondi encourages the district’s best teachers to work in them. Students can still participate in clubs and sports so they do not feel cut off from the rest of the school. And the district assigns extra counselors and social workers to the centers to ensure students have support when they need it.

While the district has not tracked how graduates of the centers perform compared to their peers on standardized tests and in college, Perondi feels confident that the district does enough to monitor quality. For the most part, the U.S. education system is relying solely on such vigilance and good intentions as online credit recovery grows.

Age-Old Questions

Credit recovery is not a new phenomenon: long before the advent of the Internet, many districts offered afterschool, summer school, or paper-and-pencil correspondence classes to students who needed to make up a failed course. These efforts have always had both proponents and detractors, whose long-standing debate speaks to a core tension and one that is mounting as credit-recovery opportunities expand: Is it better to graduate as many students as possible, even if many of their courses are subpar? Or is it better to ensure high standards for all, even if that prompts some of the marginal students to drop out?

The rapid rise of online education adds to the urgency of these questions, partly because it has fueled the spread of schools that specialize in helping dropouts to graduate. Some of the programs are fully online, while others employ a “blended” approach in which students spend part of their time in traditional classes or seminars. In the New Orleans area, three such schools, all of them charters, opened in the last five years. Each of them enrolls only students who have fallen behind in their academic coursework, and each uses online credit recovery for at least part of its curriculum. Not all of the students are “recovering credit” from a course they took and failed: some missed school because they were expelled, incarcerated, or temporarily gave up. The schools differ from the city’s other alternative programs because of their focus on online credit recovery and the fact that they do not exclusively enroll students who have gotten into trouble at other schools. Their supporters argue that the schools provide a much-needed safety valve for students who don’t work well in conventional settings and prefer to move through courses at their own pace; critics worry about the quality of the online courses and fear they take the onus off of traditional high schools to meet the needs of all students.

At the Jefferson Chamber Foundation Academy, most students are at least two years behind where they should be in academic credits; the average student is an 18-year-old sophomore. The two campuses are located in the New Orleans suburbs and enroll more than 200 teenagers. Some of the students failed the same classes multiple times; others dropped out for a period of months, or years. The school uses Edgenuity, formerly E2020, and spends about $50,000 per campus so that up to 200 users can take the company’s online courses at any given time. It supplements the online courses with in-person tutorials and small-group instruction. “Pretty much any course a student needs they can have access to,” says Millie Harris, the academy’s executive director. In a typical classroom, students sit wearing headphones in front of laptop computers, listening to videotaped lectures and presentations while one of their instructors circulates to make sure they are taking notes.

The NET, where McKnight enrolled two years ago, also uses Edgenuity credit-recovery classes, although its curriculum is only partially online; most students also take some traditional in-person classes and attend “advisory” courses where they research specific topics in depth. One fall morning, McKnight quietly progressed through an online environmental science class; she says it takes her about a semester to complete one of Edgenuity’s courses. A nearby student fumed after getting in trouble for trying to use her laptop to shop instead of study, but most of the students appeared occupied and content. McKnight watched an instructor give a videotaped lecture on “energy and resources” accompanied by PowerPoint-style notes. She said one of the course’s regular lecturers (all lectures are prerecorded) does not do a good job explaining what will be on the quiz that follows each lesson, so she was happy to see an instructor she liked on her computer screen that morning. After listening to the lecture through headphones, she dove into the quiz and answered multiple choice questions such as, “Which of the following is not considered an alternative form of energy?” McKnight scored 50 percent on her first attempt and notified the teacher in the room that she needed to retake the quiz. After glancing back through her notes, she netted a score of 70 percent (just barely passing) on a similar assessment. McKnight noted that sometimes the questions change, and other times she gets the same questions in a different order. She then moved on to the next lesson, on pollution and recycling.

Rigor Varies

Students and teachers say the online courses have some universal benefits: the teenagers can move at their own pace and get instant feedback on how they are doing. (A student sitting close to McKnight spent several minutes scrutinizing a pie chart showing, among other things, that he had completed 48 of 48 lessons on whole numbers and 20 of 46 on equations and fractions.) As a result, teachers can easily ascertain how much course material a student has mastered. Instead of trying to interpret a vacant expression on a student’s face, a teacher knows immediately to check in with a student who has been “idle” for more than a few minutes online. Students who spent their time joking and goofing off in traditional classes do not have an obvious “stage” in a room where most of their classmates are wearing headphones and focused on individual computers.

The biggest drawback, however, is that many of the courses are either too easy or too hard. And while a good “live” teacher can adjust her instruction based on student need, that’s not so easy with a pre-scripted online course. Indeed, stronger schools and teachers are increasingly figuring out how to use the online courses as a jumping-off point to address individual students’ needs, supplementing easy courses with more challenging material, for instance, or harder courses with extra in-person tutorials. But the weaker programs do little to address these issues, relying solely on the online content. As online education spreads, this gap in implementation could become more meaningful than the gaps in course quality (particularly since well-run programs are also more likely to purchase higher-quality online courses from the start).

Vasy McCoy, head of ReNEW Accelerated High School in New Orleans, says he stopped using the online course provider Plato because the online courses weren’t engaging enough, and when students failed quizzes they sometimes retook ones that were too similar to the original version. Twenty-year-old Lawrencia McCarty, who lives in New Orleans, says one online credit-recovery course in world history required next-to-no critical thinking. McCarty failed the traditional version of world history when she took it at the city’s Sophie B. Wright Charter School. But when she took the online course, the lecturers usually told her verbatim what would be on the quizzes, and she could retake them as many times as she needed to earn a passing grade. Sometimes the questions changed, while other times they didn’t. “Online was much easier,” she says. “But you learn more in a regular class.”

Partly for this reason, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) started policing the online education industry. Annually, thousands of high school athletes submit applications for eligibility on college teams, and the NCAA duly reviews their transcripts to make sure enough of their courses measure up to the organization’s standards. Every day, NCAA staff review upward of 400 new courses: A school might shift the title of a class from British Literature to Shakespearean Literature, for instance, or add a series of International Baccalaureate classes to their list.

About six years ago, the NCAA noticed a surge in the number of online credit-recovery courses (although not all were labeled as such on student transcripts), says Nicholas Sproull, whose department oversees the course review efforts. Some took only days—or hours—for students to complete (in one particularly egregious case, a student received an algebra credit after being logged in to the course for less than two minutes, says Sproull). Others allowed students to retake the same multiple-choice test again and again until they passed. But few in the education community appeared to be paying attention.

So the NCAA devised its own system for guarding against abuses. In the case of online credit-recovery classes, Sproull’s staff attempts to gauge whether they entail a significant investment of time, require frequent and meaningful interaction with an instructor, and are part of a college preparatory curriculum. The “vast majority” of the online credit recovery courses the NCAA reviews fail to meet at least one of those standards and thus don’t count toward a student’s athletic eligibility, says Sproull. “When kids are just clicking their way through courses, that’s generally not a college prep experience,” he adds.

Aiming Too High

There’s also evidence that some online credit-recovery courses can be significantly harder than their face-to-face counterparts. The early results of Heppen’s study for AIR at 15 high schools in Chicago suggest that can be the case. A significantly higher percentage of students in the traditionally structured algebra credit-recovery classes earned a grade of C or higher (44 percent) than in the online classes (about 30 percent). Moreover, students in the online courses rated their classes as more difficult than students in the face-to-face ones.

By definition, students taking online credit-recovery classes are behind in school. At programs like the NET and ReNEW Accelerated, students typically read and do math a few grade levels below where they should be. One of the Jefferson Chamber Foundation Academy campuses admits only students at or above a 6th-grade reading level because teachers worry that otherwise they won’t be able to handle the online classes; at the other campus, students reading at the 2nd- or 3rd-grade level sometimes struggle with the coursework, says Harris. “The difficulty is that [the online courses] are at the high school level, but not all of the kids are at the high school level,” says Elizabeth Ostberg, principal at the NET. “There are very few kids that we can plug into the computer and have them take this class. There’s a reason they dropped out of school.”

As a result, the staff and teachers at schools like the NET and ReNEW Accelerated end up working extensively with the students on note-taking skills, supplementing the credit-recovery classes with more personalized instruction, and prepping the students for the content they will encounter online. “We preload information,” says McCoy. For instance, most of ReNEW’s students struggled to grasp the meaning of “tone” based solely on an online English course’s rote repetition of the definition. So one of the teachers gave a lesson on tone before students even started the online course to ease them into the concept more gradually and with better examples. Leaders of schools that rely heavily on online credit recovery say they try to purchase courses that can be easily broken apart, so teachers can reorder the lessons or pull out specific sections to meet individual students’ needs. ReNEW Accelerated switched to CompassLearning Odyssey courses because the quizzes were tougher, but also because teachers could make changes to the material more easily and the lessons are presented in a much more engaging way on the computer screen.

High-Tech Textbooks

Since there’s growing competition in the online course market, companies are under pressure to make quick changes and improvements to meet client demand. But as the experience at ReNEW underscores, even the most malleable, well-designed, and interactive online course can fail to compensate for the presence of a strong teacher who knows which students need an extra lesson or might need to repeat a unit in order to master the material. “The online curriculum doesn’t work in and of itself,” confirms McCoy. “You have to have small-group instruction.” Schools like ReNEW and the Jefferson Chamber Foundation Academy spend far more money on teachers and staff than they do on online software: software and licenses for 100 students cost about the same as one teacher’s salary.

With so little known about the efficacy of online credit-recovery courses, teachers and other onsite staff are in the best position to gauge quality and intervene when necessary. Eighteen-year-old Cedrecka Jones likes the mixture of online and face-to-face classes she gets as a student at the NET and doesn’t feel as if the difficulty between the two varies tremendously. But she gets frustrated in the computer lab at times since she can’t ask questions of the online lecturers. “I ask a lot of questions, especially when I don’t understand something,” she says. Online, “a company teaches you, and they don’t teach as fully as a real teacher would.”

Although Jones does have access to a teacher in the computer lab, her comment points to a broader truth when it comes to online learning: Schools and districts, particularly those hoping to use online credit recovery to help catch up students who have fallen behind, would be wise to see the new courses as elaborate, high-tech textbooks: highly variable in their quality, in need of substantial vetting, and—except for the rare student—utterly insufficient on their own.

Sarah Carr is senior editor at the Hechinger Report and author of Hope Against Hope, which tells the story of New Orleans schools after Hurricane Katrina.

As public budgets have grown tighter over the past decade, states and school districts have sought ways to control the growth of spending. One increasingly common strategy employed to rein in costs is to offer experienced teachers with high salaries financial incentives to retire early. Although early retirement incentive (ERI) programs have been around since the 1970s, their popularity has spiked in the past five years, as it has during previous recessions. In 2010 alone, several large states, including New York, Michigan, and Minnesota, enacted ERI legislation. Despite the popularity of ERI programs, little is known about how inducing experienced teachers to retire early affects student achievement.

The aging of the nation’s teacher workforce underscores the importance of examining how ERI programs influence student learning. Teachers typically become eligible for full retirement benefits based on their age and years of experience. In 2010, more than one-third of teachers were over the age of 50. Given that most teachers begin their careers in their 20s and that retirement rates tend to increase dramatically around 30 years of experience, in the coming decade we can expect a large number of teachers to be at a point in their careers when an ERI may be particularly attractive.

Research clearly shows that the incentives created by retirement plans affect teachers’ decisions about how long to work before retiring. It is not obvious, however, how large-scale teacher retirements, such as those resulting from an ERI, will affect student academic achievement. On the one hand, retiring teachers are highly experienced, and they typically are replaced with much less experienced or new teachers. If the experienced teachers who retire are more effective than the new hires, teacher retirements could reduce student achievement.

On the other hand, teachers who are near retirement may put forth less effort than younger teachers or may be less well trained in modern, potentially more effective, pedagogical practices. This may be particularly true for those teachers who desire to retire early. Teachers who choose to take up the ERI may be those who are least effective in the classroom. Addtionally, principals and administrators may respond to large losses of experienced teachers, such as by decreasing class sizes or changing the assignment of teachers to students. In these cases, teacher retirements may have no or even a positive effect on student learning.

The main difficulty in measuring the effect of teacher retirement on student achievement is that retirement decisions may both affect and be affected by student performance. For example, teachers may retire rather than face a lower-performing group of students. The opportunity for teachers to retire early exacerbates the measurement challenge, as early retirement programs give teachers greater flexibility in deciding when they leave teaching.

To overcome this challenge, we take advantage of a natural experiment brought about by a two-year ERI program offered by Illinois in the early 1990s. This short-term program led to the retirement of 10 percent of Illinois teachers in a two-year time span. We compare changes in student performance in schools that were more affected by the policy because they employed more experienced teachers to changes in schools that were less affected. We find the program did not reduce test scores; likely, it increased them, with positive effects most pronounced in schools that serve a more disadvantaged student population. We also find that, while this particular program produced a net cost to taxpayers, it is likely that a carefully designed program could produce similar results at a lower cost.

The Illinois Early Retirement Incentive

The Illinois Teachers Retirement System (TRS) is a defined benefit pension plan. Employee contributions are made over the course of employment, and benefits are paid out upon retirement. During the period studied, the employee contribution rate was 9 percent of earnings, and the benefits formula was based on employees’ years of service and salary at the time of retirement. The maximum annual benefit employees could receive was 75 percent of their end-of-career salaries.

In general, TRS teachers can claim retirement benefits when they end active service with Illinois Public Schools (IPS) and meet the following age and service requirements: age 55 with 35 years of service, age 60 with 10 years of service, or age 62 with 5 years of service. If a teacher is at least 55 years old and has at least 20 years of experience, she may start collecting pension benefits, but they will be discounted by 6 percent for each year she is below age 60. An early retirement option exists, whereby members who are at least 55 years old and who have at least 20 years of service can receive their full benefit if both the employee and the employer pay a one-time fee.

In 1992–93 and 1993–94, employees were offered an ERI as an alternative to the standard early-retirement option. This ERI, called the “5+5,” allowed employees to buy up to an additional five years of age and service credit. As long as the member was at least 50 years old and had accumulated five years of service credit, she and her employer could pay a one-time fee to increase her retirement benefit as long as the teacher retired immediately. The fee for employees was 4 percent of the highest annual salary for each of the additional years of age and service purchased; the fee for employers was 12 percent of the employee’s highest annual salary for each year purchased.

The 5+5 program was very generous to experienced teachers in that most teachers who were at least 50 years old and who had at least 15 years of experience could realize large potential gains in compensation. The generosity of the ERI program is probably the reason it generated a significant increase in teacher exit among experienced teachers (see Figure 1).

Data

We use three sources of data on Illinois teachers and students collected by the state. First, the Teacher Service Record (TSR) is an administrative data set that tracks where IPS employees work and their number of years of creditable experience in the retirement system. These data let us follow an employee across schools and as she enters and exits IPS. We include in our study only those staff members who serve as regular classroom or special education teachers.

Standardized testing in Illinois in the early 1990s focused on 3rd-, 6th-, and 8th-grade students, so we restrict most of our analysis to teachers in those grades. The TSR contains 253,463 observations of 54,550 unique teachers in 3rd, 6th, and 8th grades during our analysis period. For these teachers, we measure teacher experience using the reported total years of experience both in IPS and outside of Illinois. There is a great deal of variation in the average experience of teachers across schools. On average, Illinois elementary and middle schools have 9.4 teachers in these grades, 5.2 of whom have 15 or more years of experience prior to the ERI program.

We also use the teacher-level data to calculate exit rates of experienced teachers, average experience in all years, and the proportion of new teachers in each school and year. One drawback of this dataset is that it does not track teacher retirement or ERI program participation directly. Because the data cover the entire state, however, we can gauge the effect of the ERI program on retirement by observing the change in exit rates of experienced teachers when the program was implemented.

The second set of data includes school-level information on test scores for certain grades and subjects, collected since the early 1990s as part of Illinois’ ongoing accountability program. During the period covered by our study, the IPS administered exams in math and English in grades 3, 6, and 8. We observe the average score by school, year, and grade on each exam, which we scale to have a mean of 0 and standard deviation of 1 in each year, grade, and subject.

Finally, we make use of information on the demographics of students in schools as reported to the Illinois State Board of Education. These data include the percentage of students who are from low-income families; the percentage who are white, black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American; and the percentage who are Limited English proficient (LEP). The school districts also record attendance rates and grade-specific enrollment for each school and year.

We focus our analysis on the 1989–90 through 1996–97 school years, because the earliest available data are from the 1989–90 school year, and in 1998 the Illinois legislature changed the teacher benefit formula in ways that could influence teacher retirement decisions.

Methodology

To measure the effect on test scores of the retirements resulting from the ERI program, we exploit the fact that teachers with more years of experience were much more likely to be affected by the program. The earliest age at which retirement benefit collection could have taken place before the ERI is 55; with the ERI, teachers can retire at age 50 or older. Most teachers aged 50 years or older have at least 15 years of experience, so we expect the ERI to have influenced the retirement behavior of teachers with at least 15 years of experience disproportionately. And our data confirm that teachers in this group were substantially more likely to leave the Illinois school system once ERI went into effect. A similar change in behavior did not occur for less-experienced teachers, as shown in Figure 1. As a result, schools with many veteran teachers saw large declines in teacher experience when the ERI went into effect. In contrast, experience levels in schools with few veteran teachers increased slightly, as fewer of their teachers retired and those who remained gained experience (see Figure 2).

The number of teachers in each grade at a school who had at least 15 years of experience prior to ERI therefore serves as our measure of “treatment intensity,” by which we mean that schools that had more such teachers were more affected by the policy than schools with fewer experienced teachers. Differences across schools in treatment intensity enable us to measure the impact of ERI-induced retirements on test scores. Specifically, we measure whether test scores changed to a greater (or lesser) extent in schools that had, in the pre-ERI period, a greater number of experienced teachers relative to schools that had fewer experienced teachers. As we make this comparison, we also take into account any preexisting differences in student achievement across schools that may be related to the experience profile of teachers as well as any changes over the period of our study in the student demographic variables discussed above.

The main assumption underlying our analysis is that, in the absence of the ERI program, schools with different teacher-experience levels in the pre-ERI period would have had the same trends in student test scores. We find that, prior to the introduction of ERI, teacher-experience levels were not associated with changes in test scores, suggesting that this assumption is valid and that our results can be interpreted as the effect of ERI-induced retirements on test scores.

Results

Before examining how the ERI affected student academic achievement, it is important to understand how it affected schools through changes in retirement patterns, teacher-experience levels, and school resources. We use our methodology to measure the impact of ERI on the number of experienced teachers who exit the school system, average teacher-experience level, the proportion of new teachers, and student-teacher ratios. These results show how the ERI changed the characteristics of the teacher workforce.

First, we find that having one more teacher with 15 or more years of experience in a school before ERI increased the number of experienced teachers exiting each year during the ERI period by 33 percent. The increased exit among more-experienced teachers was accompanied by declines in average teacher experience of 0.41 years, or 2.6 percent, for every teacher with 15 or more years of experience before ERI. This drop in average experience was driven in part by an increase in the number of new teachers. Overall, for each teacher with 15 or more years of experience before ERI, the number of new teachers in a school increased by 0.073, or 20 percent. In other words, schools with more veteran teachers before the creation of the ERI program experienced much larger changes in teacher turnover and declines in teacher experience when the program was implemented than schools with fewer such teachers.

Although retirements under the ERI program occurred quickly and unexpectedly, the possibility remains that administrators made changes in areas other than their teaching staffs to compensate for the loss of experienced teachers. Such offsetting behavior would be of interest in its own right, and we stress that our test-score results below reflect the effects of any such changes. Unfortunately, detailed data on curriculum, resources, and expenditures are not reported in ways that would prove useful for measuring this type of behavior. The only potentially important resource measure we can observe is pupil-teacher ratios, and we find no consistent evidence that ERI altered the number of students per teacher in the schools it affected most.

Although ERI had a substantial impact on the experience level of teachers in Illinois schools with many teachers eligible for early retirement, those changes do not appear to have had a negative impact on student achievement. Our estimates indicate that, for each teacher who left under the ERI, test scores increased by 0.01 and 0.04 student-level standard deviations in math and reading, respectively. Both of these estimates are quite small, and only the estimate for reading is statistically significant. But they point in a positive direction, and are precise enough that we can rule out the possibility that teacher departures due to the ERI had even small negative effects.

Given that the median retiring teacher had 27 years of experience and was replaced by a teacher with less than 3 years of experience, the fact that these retirements had little effect on student achievement is puzzling. In a recent review of existing research on teacher experience, the University of Arizona’s Matthew Wiswall concludes that new teachers perform between 0.10 and 0.18 standard deviations worse than experienced teachers. Since we find no support for the notion that schools reduced pupil-teacher ratios in order to counteract the potential negative impact of teacher retirements, we suspect that the teachers who took up the ERI were less effective than the ones who replaced them or than the ones remaining in the school.

Our results suggest that the teacher retirements caused by the ERI program did not reduce student achievement on average, and they may even have increased it. However, there could have been different effects in different schools that were driven, at least in part, by the fact that wealthier or higher-achieving schools may find it easier to replace retiring teachers with experienced teachers from other schools. We address this question by calculating the ERI effect on student achievement for schools that are similar in the percentage of students from low-income families, the percentage of students who are white, and pretreatment average test scores. The results point to increases in student achievement from teacher retirement that are, if anything, larger for disadvantaged schools—the opposite of what we might have expected (see Figure 3).

In sum, although the Illinois ERI program led a large number of experienced teachers to retire, and thereby lowered teacher experience levels, the program did not reduce test scores and instead led to increased student achievement in most cases.

Why would test scores improve when large numbers of experienced teachers retire? As noted above, it could be that less-effective teachers are more likely to take advantage of ERI opportunities, causing test scores to rise as these teachers are replaced with newer ones. If that is the case, our results yield information on the effect of ERI programs on student achievement, but it could be misleading to use them to predict the effects of the impending spike in teacher retirements due to the aging of the teacher workforce. Given available data, it is not possible to examine the effectiveness of teachers who responded to the ERI. But the implication of our results is clear: offering expiring incentives for late-career teachers to retire does not harm student achievement on average.

Policy Implications

From a broader policy perspective, our estimates suggest that ERI programs could be beneficial for school districts, saving them money on teacher salaries without harming student achievement. Along these lines, it is important to consider the costs of this program to both school districts and the state, as well as the value of any increases in test scores that occurred because of the program.

Because of the ERI, the median teacher retired 5 years earlier than she would have otherwise, at age 55 with 27 years of service rather than at age 60 with 32 years of service. Since replacing a 27-year veteran teacher with a novice one saves $20,772 per year on average, this would result in savings per employee to the district with a net present value of $95,306. (This figure, and all those which follow, are discounted using a 3 percent real interest rate.) For each year of creditable service purchased through the ERI, however, the district has to pay 12 percent of the teacher’s salary in a lump-sum payment. Since the median teacher bought five years of service, the median lump-sum payment made by the district was 60 percent of a teacher’s salary, or $26,493. Taking into account both costs and savings across the approximately 8,000 teachers who took advantage of the Illinois program, ERI resulted in savings to IPS districts of $550.5 million.

Teachers who retired early because of the ERI, however, could expect to receive pension benefits for more years than if they had retired later. In Illinois, the state, rather than the districts, must make up the increased costs to the pension system of these ERI retirees. The median ERI retiree received $115,677 of increased benefits from retiring five years earlier. The teacher also had to pay a lump-sum amount equal to 4 percent of her salary per year purchased. Accounting for the district and teacher payments, the net cost to the pension system was $80,352 per ERI retiree, or $642.8 million to the pension fund. Therefore, the total cost to the state’s taxpayers—the sum of the net benefit to the districts and the net cost to the pension fund—was approximately $92.3 million. Since there were approximately 1.8 million students in IPS in 1993, this represented a cost per student of $51.

In other words, even when an ERI program creates substantial savings for school districts by reducing teacher salary costs, it still can cost the state money through higher pension payments. This was clearly the case in Illinois.

This likely unintended cost can be weighed against the unintended benefit of higher test scores. Our results suggest that the average effect of the ERI on test scores was between -0.002 and 0.029, with an average effect of 0.010 standard deviations. Taken together, the cost and benefit estimates suggest that taxpayers paid $51 per student in return for an increase in test scores of 1 percent of a standard deviation. At worst, the taxpayers of Illinois paid $51 per student and saw test scores decrease by 0.002 of a standard deviation, a negligible amount.

In short, early retirement incentives can provide a means for districts to save money without hurting student achievement. With better policy design, it may be possible for such a program to save taxpayers money as well.

Maria D. Fitzpatrick is visiting scholar at the National Bureau of Economic Research and assistant professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University, where Michael F. Lovenheim is associate professor of policy analysis and management.

Mayor Bill de Blasio pretty much lost the charter school fight in New York City. When the New York Times summarized Hizzoner’s “proud recitation of campaign promises kept” during his first 100 days, the list included “universal prekindergarten, an end to unconstitutional policing,” and “paid sick leave.” The paper criticized the mayor’s silly proposal to disband the Central Park carriage horses, but the charter school debacle is a better example of mayoral horse sense gone awry. Outmaneuvered by Governor Andrew Cuomo, the mayor conceded, at least for now, unfettered charter access to public school space.

Still, charter enthusiasts should not rest on their laurels. Although the movement has acquired a critical mass of about 6 percent of all public school children, school districts and teachers unions across the country are fighting charters with renewed energy. The counterattack has been especially fierce in Chicago ever since new union leadership in 2012 led a weeklong strike against Mayor Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s former chief of staff. In the aftermath, the reform-minded mayor has had to take one step back. Recently, his appointed school board approved only 7 of 22 proposed charters, and it decided not to sell 43 abandoned public-school buildings to charter operators. In Los Angeles, charters enjoyed a growth spurt during the mayoral tenure of Antonio Ramón Villaraigosa, but now that he has left office, the school board is putting the brakes on, closing two successful charters—on the grounds that they did not contract with the district for their special education services. In Ravenswood, California, the school district shuttered a Stanford-sponsored charter, allegedly for poor performance. Yet other factors seem more important. The school’s financial officer told the board, “If we could pull back 200 or 300 kids to our district, that could offset the [district’s] entire deficit.” As the superintendent explained to a reporter, “I know that it’s not the [charter’s] intent, but when you take [students] away it makes it more difficult to work through these challenges.”

For two decades, charters have quietly spread, and today about 2 million students are attending more than 6,000 charter schools. In some cities, including New Orleans and the District of Columbia, more than one in five pupils attend a charter school.

Charter growth has been facilitated by the ferocious, partisan debate over school vouchers. Charters are the middle way, as they are sponsored by governments and lack religious affiliation. Republicans can support them as alternatives to the traditional district-run school, while Democrats may view them as centers for educational innovation. They have been embraced by Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and they have gained strong support in African American and Hispanic communities, where students are benefiting the most from charters.

Yet charters have never had to make much of a case for themselves. In 2013, an Education Next poll found that even though half the public supported charters, and just a quarter opposed them, another quarter had no opinion at all. Half the public had no idea whether charters charge tuition, and another quarter incorrectly thought they do. More than 60 percent didn’t know whether charters can hold religious services.

With a potential breakout moment at hand, but with as much public indifference as public support, charters must guard their exposed flanks. The conventional wisdom on charter schools nationally is that their performance is “mixed.” More specifically, studies show outstanding successes in urban settings such as New York City and Boston, but plenty of mediocrity—and worse—in the nation’s heartland. Why is there so much unevenness? Partly it’s baked into their very design. Charters are granted significant autonomy over their operations, so they have the freedom to innovate, to move nimbly, and to take action. In the hands of smart educators who know how to run great schools, that can lead to success.

But the autonomy afforded to charters also means that they don’t have much of a safety net. Inexperienced or incompetent educators can drive a charter into the ground—fast. This past fall, in Columbus, Ohio, nine charters closed just months after launching. Like other small nonprofits, charters are at risk of falling into financial trouble. Wrong-headed ideas around curriculum and instruction also lead more than a few charter schools to falter.

Then there are the outright financial shenanigans. Charter history is rife with stories about small-time crooks taking advantage of lax public oversight to steal dollars meant for education to enrich friends and family. One case in point is Cincinnati’s W. E. B. Du Bois school, which was among the highest-performing urban schools in the state—before its founder and leader, Wilson Willard III, pleaded guilty to five counts of theft and records tampering, and was sent to prison for four years. (The school closed a few years later.)

Such problems aren’t new—they emerged in the early days of charter schooling—but some states have been more willing than others to address them. How have those states done it? First and foremost, they’ve paid attention to the regulators that oversee charter schools—the “authorizers” in charter-speak. To be effective, these authorizers must want to be in the charter schooling business, need to have the resources and staff to do the work, and must be committed to the idea of charter school autonomy.

It tends to be in the big, creative-class, coastal cities of blue-state America where authorizers are doing their job and quality charters are thriving. Smart entrepreneurs, a surfeit of young talent, and rigorous but open-minded authorizers have allowed for measured, well-designed expansion. In many red and purple states, charters have grown apace but with less direction.

Today, we read of Gotham charters bravely defying teachers unions and politicians. But tomorrow’s headlines could as easily be dominated by tales of charter irresponsibility. The one thing we know for sure is that sharpshooters have set their sights on the charter bulls-eye.

-Paul E. Peterson and Michael Petrilli

The Texas Ten Percent Plan (TTP) provides students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class with automatic admission to any public university in the state, including the two flagship schools, the University of Texas at Austin and Texas A&M. Texas created the policy in 1997 after a federal appellate court ruled, in Hopwood v. Texas, that the state’s previous affirmative-action system based on racial preferences was unconstitutional. Through the TTP Plan, the state sought to maintain diversity in its most-competitive public universities in a race-neutral way. The program soon became the model for similar policies in Florida and California.

Percent plans in Texas and elsewhere have sparked considerable controversy. Some critics allege that they force the most-selective public colleges to admit underprepared students from low-performing schools and to deny admission to better-prepared students; others complain that they don’t do enough to promote diversity. After the Supreme Court upheld some forms of race-conscious affirmative action in 2003, UT-Austin quickly reinstated racial preferences in admissions, triggering a challenge that led to the Supreme Court’s most recent affirmative-action case. In Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, the Supreme Court in 2013 directed a lower court to consider whether the school’s use of racial preferences is essential to yield sufficient diversity in its student body. The key question the court must address: whether race-neutral methods, such as TTP, could accomplish the same goal.

Often lost in the debate over these policies is a more basic question: do they benefit the students who receive automatic admissions? Given their academic accomplishments, many of the students who gain admission under a percent plan may have been admitted to selective universities in the absence of the plan. But the number of students admitted under such plans has increased over time in Texas, suggesting that the programs have in fact had a sizable effect on enrollments. Additionally, percent plans may not just affect whether students apply to and attend college, but where they apply and matriculate.

In this study, we examine the effect of being eligible for automatic admission under the Texas Ten Percent Plan. We compare students in a large urban school district who just made it into their high-school’s top 10 percent to students who just missed the cutoff. We find that eligibility for automatic admissions under the TTP Plan increases the likelihood that students enroll at a flagship Texas university by at least 60 percent. This increase in flagship enrollment displaces enrollment in private universities, however, and therefore has no effect on overall college enrollment or on the quality of college attended. The effects on flagship enrollment are only observed in high schools that send many of their graduates to college, suggesting that automatic admission may have little effect on the college choices of students in the state’s most-disadvantaged schools.

The Texas Plan

The TTP Plan requires that students who are ranked in the top 10 percent of their class be admitted to the Texas public college of their choice. The state grants flexibility to districts in how they choose to calculate grade-point average (GPA) and class rank. To receive automatic admission, students must provide a transcript, along with their application, that verifies that their class rank falls within the top 10 percent. They must also take either the SAT or the ACT, although for students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class, these tests are not used for admissions decisions.

For students not in the top 10 percent of their high-school class, admissions decisions are based on standard criteria, including GPA and class rank, admissions test scores, and nonacademic factors such as personal statements and extracurricular activities. Following the Supreme Court’s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision upholding limited affirmative-action policies in use at the University of Michigan law school, the UT-Austin (but not Texas A&M) reinstated race-conscious affirmative action. The aggressiveness of the new affirmative-action policy, however, is unclear. We are not aware of any research that examines the true extent to which racial preferences are used in the post-Grutter era.

Data

The data for our study come from an unnamed large urban school district in Texas. We focus our analysis on 17,057 graduates from the 2002 through 2008 graduating classes. For each of these students, we have information on demographics, high school attendance, courses taken and grades received each semester, exit-exam scores, and whether they graduated.

Our data do not include the students’ class ranks, so we construct them ourselves following the procedure used by the district. First, we compute cumulative GPA at a given point in time using grades received in courses taken up to that juncture. Second, we rank students within their schools based on cumulative GPA to determine absolute class rank. Finally, we calculate the percentile class rank by dividing absolute class rank by the number of students in a school with a valid cumulative GPA. Our main analysis uses the class rank at the end of 11th grade, which is the criterion most commonly used for automatic admission to UT-Austin and Texas A&M.

Our information on college enrollment comes from the National Student Clearinghouse (NSC), a nonprofit organization that is now the nation’s leading source for postsecondary degree and enrollment verification. The NSC data include, for each semester, observations for each NSC-reporting institution that a student attends, including date of enrollment and completion. We supplement the NSC data with additional information on the institutions students attend from the federal government’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), including whether the institution is public or private and where it is located.

The IPEDS data also enable us to construct measures of college “quality” and cost. Our first quality measure is the Barron’s ranking of how competitive admission is at a particular college, which is available from the National Center for Education Statistics. A second measure of quality is the fraction of applicants who are admitted. We measure cost using the tuition “sticker price” that students face at a particular institution. This is only a proxy for the actual tuition students will have to pay, since many of the students in our sample come from disadvantaged backgrounds and would qualify for substantial financial aid. Nonetheless, because selective institutions generally charge a higher price, tuition provides a general indication of relative school quality.

Our data indicate that students in the top 10 percent of their high-school class are more likely to be white and female and less likely to be low-income than their peers (see Figure 1). As expected, students in the top 10 percent are higher-performing across all measures of academic achievement. Students in the top 10 percent are more likely to graduate with a recommended or distinguished diploma, take a college entrance exam, and have much higher high school exit-exam scores than their peers. Fifty-eight percent of students in the top 10 percent enroll in college, compared to just 30 percent of students districtwide, but only 21 percent of the top 10 percent enroll in a Texas flagship (see Figure 2).

Methods

Our goal is to study the effect of being eligible for automatic admission to the Texas public universities via membership in the top 10 percent of one’s high-school class. The challenge we face is that TTP-eligible and -ineligible students are obviously quite different, most importantly in terms of academic performance. To measure the effect of being in the top 10 percent, we use an approach that mimics random assignment into the top 10 percent. Specifically, our regression discontinuity research design compares the outcomes of students whose class rank is just above or below the cutoff. As long as students cannot exert complete control over their exact class rank, students on either side of the threshold should be similar in all respects other than whether they are in the top 10 percent.

The primary threat to this research design would be if students eager to attend a flagship institution were able to manipulate their class rank in order to end up just above the 10 percent cutoff. Although students may alter the mix of courses they take and petition for better grades in order to increase their chances of being in the top 10 percent of their class, course performance is at least somewhat uncertain and students are unlikely to have precise information about the GPAs of their classmates. This makes it unlikely that students can manipulate their class rank with enough precision to bias our results.

Although eligibility for automatic admission to the Texas public universities is the most noteworthy consequence of being in the top 10 percent, the policy in place in Texas during this time included outreach efforts by the flagships that targeted students in or near the top 10 percent, especially at schools that serve large numbers of disadvantaged students. This outreach may have had independent effects on college enrollment by, for instance, increasing information about college. As such, our results should be interpreted as reflecting the combined effect of automatic admission and the outreach efforts that are part of the TTP Plan.

In addition, our results are specific to students near the eligibility cutoff. In other words, they may not tell us what effect automatic admission would have for students far below or above the 10 percent cutoff. Even so, the effect of the TTP Plan on college outcomes near the eligibility cutoff has considerable policy relevance. The controversy surrounding the plan largely stems from the perception that the law lets “underqualified” students gain admission to the state’s most-selective public universities. Our estimates shed light on the plan’s impact on students for whom this claim is most likely to be relevant: students admitted under the plan in a relatively low-performing urban district. Moreover, our results are informative about the likely consequences of any changes in the TTP cutoff, such as UT-Austin’s fall 2011 decision to limit automatic admissions to 75 percent of the entering class.

Results

We first examine the effect of TTP on college enrollment and college choice in the fall following graduation from high school. Only about 9 percent of students who just miss being in the top 10 percent enroll in a flagship. We find that barely securing membership in the top 10 percent increases flagship enrollment by at least 5 percentage points, with positive effects at both UT-Austin and Texas A&M (see Figure 3). This result implies that program eligibility increases the likelihood of flagship enrollment by almost 60 percent, a very large effect.

But does this effect on flagship enrollment translate into an overall increase in the likelihood of enrolling in college? We find no evidence that this is the case, suggesting that increased flagship enrollment must be displacing enrollment at some other type of institution. One possibility is that students who enrolled in a flagship because they were eligible for automatic admission would have gone to another university had they missed it. And, indeed, we find that program eligibility sharply reduces enrollment at private or out-of-state colleges.

Next, we examine whether TTP status affects the quality of the colleges students attend. This is important, because the plan is designed to improve access to elite universities by guaranteeing access to the state’s flagship institutions. Also, much of the opposition to the TTP Plan centers on the claim that students admitted via the TTP Plan’s automatic-admission guarantee will take spots from better-qualified students who are not admitted under the TTP Plan because they attend more-competitive high schools.

To examine this issue, we first calculate the effect of eligibility for automatic admission on the probability of enrolling in a college ranked by Barron’s as a “most” or “highly” competitive institution. We also use a measure of selectivity defined as the fraction of applicants to a college who were admitted. For both measures, we find no clear evidence that program eligibility increases the quality of institutions students attend. We do find some evidence that TTP eligibility leads to attending colleges with lower tuitions, however, as would be expected if students are attending a public flagship instead of a private college.

An important question is whether students who are admitted under the TTP Plan drop out of these highly selective schools at a higher rate than other students. For instance, it may be that students admitted because of TTP are not able to do well in the rigorous academic environment of the flagship universities. However, we found no evidence that being in the top 10 percent affected the likelihood of transferring to a less-selective institution (as measured by the Barron’s competitive admissions ratings) or the probability of dropping out of college.

Finally, we examine whether our results vary for students from different racial and socioeconomic backgrounds and from high schools that send more and less of their graduates to college. We find no consistent evidence that TTP effects are different for underrepresented minority students than for other students. The effects of program eligibility are the same for black and white students. We do, however, find stronger evidence of TTP effects for students who are not economically disadvantaged than for their low-income peers.

When we compare TTP effects at high schools with different college-going rates, we find that the positive effects on flagship enrollment are largest in the schools with relatively high college-going rates (where at least 25 percent of graduates enroll in college in the fall following graduation). At these high schools, being in the top 10 percent increases the flagship enrollment rate by at least 9 percentage points. In contrast, we do not find any evidence of impacts on flagship enrollment for students from high schools with low college-sending rates. When interpreting these results, it is important to remember that even the higher college-sending high schools in the district have relatively low college-sending rates relative to the state as a whole. Nonetheless, eligibility for automatic admission appears to have little effect on college enrollment and choice for the most-disadvantaged urban high schools.

Conclusions

The difference in earnings between college graduates and nongraduates has risen in recent decades, and research indicates that attending selective colleges yields a larger economic return than attending less-selective institutions. The benefits of attending a selective college appear to be especially large for lower-income black and Hispanic students. Yet disadvantaged and underrepresented minority students attend selective colleges at far lower rates than do higher-income and white students. Devising strategies to close these gaps has considerable significance for social and economic policy.

Yet we find little evidence that the automatic admissions guarantee leads to increases in the quality of the colleges students attend. Instead, the increases in flagship enrollment appear to decrease enrollment at comparably ranked private institutions. Thus, offering eligibility for automatic admission does not appear to increase access to selective colleges in general, even though it increases access to the best public universities in Texas.

Our results demonstrate that eligibility for automatic admission does appear to increase enrollment at flagship universities for students in an urban school district that sends relatively few students to college. In particular, we also find these effects for underrepresented minority students. These findings are noteworthy because a key goal of the TTP Plan, and percent plans in general, is to increase access to top public universities for traditionally underserved populations.

But the effects on flagship enrollment are concentrated in the district’s most-advantaged schools. Indeed, when we calculate effects by the percentage of students at a high school who attend college, we find no evidence of effects on college choice in the schools with the lowest college-sending rates. Although the college-sending rates of the highest-performing high schools in the sample are low relative to Texas as a whole, our findings suggest that offering eligibility for automatic admission may not be effective at accomplishing even the narrow goal of increasing access to the top public universities for students in the most-disadvantaged settings.

There are important questions that our paper does not address. Because we use data from an urban school district, our findings may not reflect how automatic admission guarantees affect students in rural or suburban schools. The effects in rural areas are important because the TTP Plan aims to increase geographic diversity at the state’s public universities. Likewise, the effects in suburban areas have significance because many of the criticisms about the policy’s fairness stem from concerns that it places students in suburban districts at a disadvantage because it is harder for them to get into the top 10 percent. It is nonetheless plausible that the lack of effects on college selectivity that we find may hold in higher-income districts as well, since students in these districts who fall just shy of the top 10 percent likely face fewer informational and financial barriers to enrolling in high-quality colleges absent an automatic admissions guarantee than do students in our sample.

Finally, our results cannot speak to the overall effects of instituting the TTP Plan. These effects might include strategic behavior such as choosing less-competitive high schools to make it easier to get the admission guarantee as well as changes in student effort and course-taking behavior. Determining whether these and other unintended consequences of percent plans exist is an important area for future research. In the meantime, our evidence suggests that although the policy clearly increases the number of eligible students who attend Texas’s top two universities, the program appears to have simply shifted students from selective private or out-of-state colleges to the two flagship universities. That may have lowered educational costs for eligible students, but it did not enhance the quality of their higher education opportunities.

Lindsay Daugherty is associate policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Paco Martorell is economist at the RAND Corporation and research scholar with the Center for Research on Education Policy at the University of Texas at Dallas’s Texas Schools Project. Isaac McFarlin Jr. is assistant research scientist of public policy at the University of Michigan and research scholar with the Center for Research on Education Policy at the University of Texas at Dallas’s Texas Schools Project.

The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men
By Christina Hoff Sommers
Simon & Schuster, 2000, 2013, $25.00; 269 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

The War Against Boys was first published in 2000. At the time, the shortchanging of boys in school and in key areas of social development was less evident as a problem than it is today, and the proponents of policies to advance girls in school were much more prominent. This new edition of the book need take nothing back: the refusal or inability (often as a result of litigation) of schools to take into account or respond to the distinctive characteristics of boys is even more marked, the gap in school achievement between boys and girls even more substantial and troubling than in 2000.

“In this revised edition,” Sommers writes, “I describe the emergence of additional boy-averse trends: the decline of recess, punitive zero-tolerance policies, myths about juvenile ‘superpredators,’ and a misguided campaign against single-sex schooling. As our schools become more feelings centered, risk averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys.”

The new material on the indifference or antagonism to acknowledging boys’ distinctive characteristics is seamlessly integrated with the old. Studies continue to show boys and men falling behind: young women caught up with young men in the percentage of those with four years of college in the early 1990s, and by 2009 far surpassed them, 36 percent to 27 percent. “Even the Harvard Graduate School of Education,” Sommers reports, “once the epicenter of the silenced- and shortchanged-girl movement, published a major study that acknowledged the plight of males.” (Note that Sommers has a tendency to attribute to an educational institution the work of those employed there.) The report points out that the high school education that once gave access to a job earning middle-class wages does so no longer, as unionized manufacturing has declined and been replaced by jobs demanding higher technical skills.

The movement to give special attention to girls and their needs was part of the grand drive to equality that has dominated American life and politics for decades. This is one of our glories. But the drive for equality for the sexes was accompanied by a litigious and bureaucratic fervor that often went beyond common sense: yes, girls and young women should be encouraged to engage in competitive sports, but why should a regime of strict equality in numbers be required so that some sports attractive to males had to be closed down to preserve a misguided notion of equal treatment?

Sommers gives a dispiriting account of recent governmental efforts to impose on vocational programs that have had success with boys expensive efforts to recruit girls into programs for which they show little interest. A report of the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education noted with alarm that in vocational programs girls comprise “only 4% of heating, A/C and refrigeration students, 5% of welding students, 6% of electrical and plumber/pipefitter students,” while girls make up 98 percent of students enrolled in cosmetology and 87 percent of those studying child care.

A curriculum specialist at the successful Blackstone Valley Tech high school in Upton, Massachusetts, explains that “we do everything we can to promote nontraditional fields. We bring in successful women welders and electricians; we counsel the girls and their parents about the benefits of traditional male fields. We force them to explore fields outside their interests. But we cannot force them into a career they don’t want.”

But that seems not to be enough for the current administration, which hopes to use the $1.1 billion it disburses under the Perkins Act to push more girls into “nontraditional” vocational and technical training. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has asserted that “it is time to transform” the program. The reauthorized Perkins Act in 2014, Duncan promises, “will ensure equity in access, participation, and outcomes.” Outcomes?

The president supports Duncan’s efforts. “The White House announced that the Department of Education would be adopting new and more vigorous application of Title IX to high school and college technical, engineering, and science programs….” Institutions receiving federal assistance will be “required to ensure equal access to STEM…fields.” President Obama wrote, “Title IX isn’t just about sports.” The example of how Title IX has been enforced in sports suggests a pointless punitiveness can be expected as women fall short in other fields.

Sommers points out that in 2010 women made up 64 percent of graduate students in social science, 75 percent in public administration, 78 percent in veterinary medicine, and 80 percent in health sciences. Will that attract the attention of politicians and of bureaucrats enforcing Title IX? Not very likely, according to Sommers: “There is no National Coalition for Boys in Education, no lobby promoting changes in the Perkins Act or Title IX to help them.”

And one wonders why not, in view of the serious efforts in England and Australia, also English-speaking democracies, to draw attention to the plight of boys in schooling and to adapt educational practice to their distinctive needs. Sommers reports on British headmasters and headmistresses who promote practices that work better with boys and on spreading experiments in single-sex classes, and they are not subject to the litigation that would face them in the U.S.

In Australia, a Standing Committee on Education and Training of the House of Representatives published “Boys: Getting it Right. Report on the Inquiry into the Education of Boys.” “The report notes that earlier governmental inquiries on gender equity focused only on the needs of girls,” says Sommers. Could we expect such an inquiry from a committee of our Congress, even when controlled by Republicans?

The whole thrust of education reform today ignores, even if some specific efforts (like KIPP and E. D. Hirsch-inspired programs) may subtly respond to, the needs of boys—for action, competitiveness, rough-and-tumble activity, whether inborn or whatever, and the need, too, for a stricter and more consistent discipline to socialize these characteristics. Sommers is not in politics and avoids the question of where these differences come from. The issue brought down Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he commented on the difference in achievement between men and women at the highest levels in math and science. Sommers notes that in intelligence tests, the normal distribution for boys spreads out wider at the tails than for girls—more scores at very high and very low levels, which is consistent with what President Summers was suggesting.

Sommers concludes with a fascinating discussion of a book, Between Mothers and Sons (Patricia Stevens, ed., Scribner, 1999), about “feminist mothers coping with an unforeseen and startling event—the birth of a son.” One mother describes what happened when she sent her son to a Montessori preschool “run by a goddess-worshiping multiracial women’s collective.”

Something about it did not honor his boy soul. I think it was the absence of physical competition. Boys who clashed or tussled with each other were separated and counseled by the peacemaker. Sticks were confiscated and turned into tomato stakes in the school garden.

The story is a common one. The memoir Brothers Emanuel, by Ezekiel Emanuel, describes the growing up of three remarkable brothers, among them Rahm, the mayor of Chicago, and Ari, a major Hollywood agent. Their mother was a convinced pacifist, but against all her efforts the boys fought and wrestled, took endangering risks, and suffered serious bruises and breaks. Ezekiel, a bioethicist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is arguing no thesis: he is merely describing how boys on the whole grow up, whatever the intentions of their mothers.

The War Against Boys is a solid book, wonderfully footnoted and indexed, telling an important story, and sorely needed now, possibly more so than in 2000.

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

All students should be prepared in accordance with a college-preparatory curriculum. But the key word is “a.” At early levels, all academics are mostly common, but choices should be allowed at later points in the continuum. High school students in particular need curricular options that fit their interests, skills, and plans for the future. A variety of rigorous pathways through high school can prepare students for postsecondary-learning programs. Regardless of their specific plans, however, all students need to be proficient in the range of fundamental skills and knowledge in math, English language arts, science, and history/social science if they are to go forward with postsecondary learning that prepares them for good jobs, healthy families, and contributing citizenship.

Our current system of public education has not aggressively stepped up to the challenge and the reality of today’s high-tech–based service and manufacturing economy, which demands increased educational attainment for workers who expect a middle-class lifestyle. While the U.S. holds its own internationally in baccalaureate attainment, ranking second, it ranks 16th in sub-baccalaureate attainment (associate’s degrees or formal credentials). Not all American students need to attend a four-year college, but most will need some postsecondary learning. Too many students, after years in low-performing elementary and middle schools, languish in dumb-downed high school courses that may be labeled college-prep or career-technical education, and graduate ill-prepared to take the next step.

In countries that have well-developed and integrated secondary and postsecondary career-preparation systems, graduates go into relatively high-paying jobs with skills that industries need. Many of these graduates have the equivalent of highly respected U.S. postsecondary training and credentials, and in some OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries, a secondary school diploma is equivalent to a U.S. associate’s degree. Large numbers of students in these advanced countries pursue the equivalent of the U.S. four-year bachelor’s degree as well. The end result of widespread low-quality high-school education in the U.S. compared to the secondary education in equally economically advanced countries is that a greater proportion of adults in the United States are woefully underprepared for today’s jobs. Skill development in other countries is accelerating, as it stagnates in this country.

An Academic Foundation

Among some outspoken leaders there is nostalgia for the vocational schools of yesteryear. Such programs are no longer appropriate or compatible with current skills expectations: automotive repair courses in high school where practice continued on components that had been replaced by sophisticated computers in current cars; cosmetology courses whose graduates didn’t have the math skills to pass licensing requirements for hairdressers and ended up as hair shampooers; distributive education courses that taught “selling” but not the computer, computation, and communication skills needed for any but the lowest-level sales jobs.

Successful career-pathway schools need constantly updated equipment and well-trained professionals who continually learn new techniques in their occupational field in a rapidly evolving technological world. The vocational high schools of the past, and still sometimes present, have never had the level of sustained investments that make this kind of constant updating possible. As numerous reports from the U.S. Department of Education documented in the 1980s and 1990s, these schools were too often dumping grounds for students whose math and reading skills were years below grade level, but who mistakenly believed they were on a path to a decent job.

Today, there is a great deal of thoughtful work being done to develop high-quality pathways through high school and onto a postsecondary degree or credential. The growth in career-themed high schools, career-technical schools, and early-college partnerships, all often connected to community colleges and local businesses, is setting students on stable paths to solid jobs. Many of these career-focused secondary school programs of study involve major projects of many weeks and hands-on learning experiences that combine strong content and skill development related to specific careers.

While too few in number, some of these programs involve work-based learning or apprenticeship programs in which students earn wages and study on the job, including in the lucrative trades. Now often called career and technical education or even STEM (with a focus of study on careers in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics), these are all two- and three-year courses of study, not simply career exploration. Students in these programs are not able to advance unless they have proficiency in reading and math, as well as in problem solving and so-called softer skills—the personal qualities, habits, attitudes and social skills that make someone a good employee and compatible in the workplace.

For today’s students who aim to be career-ready, appropriate curricula might include exposure to more electronics, with applied physics and computer science as the base; or health care, with a strong grounding in biology and chemistry; or travel/tourism, with a strong communications, management, accounting, and second-language skills curriculum. It’s up to educators to embed basic academics into the career-prep curriculum, just as they are embedded into the college-prep curriculum. Students must have the common foundational skills for success in postsecondary endeavors, be they four-year college programs, certification or credential programs, associate’s degrees, or apprenticeships.

Common Core and Testing

Nothing about these learning pathways is in conflict with the call for higher career- and college-ready standards, such as the Common Core State Standards adopted by 45 states and new science standards adopted so far by a smaller number. Indeed, the common core standards call for an emphasis on deep and thoughtful engagement with informational texts as well as literature; student-centered information gathering; and problem solving—all competencies that are well aligned to the materials skilled workers deal with on a daily basis.

There is no question that in most states the current high school testing regime is out of step with current needs. High school students should earn diplomas only when they pass rigorous exams indicating college and career readiness, especially in English language arts and math. End-of-course exams in other subjects may be fine if a student chooses a career-technical course of study.

Work on appropriate assessments of students’ learning in career-prep programs has lagged behind, but the move away from awarding course credit based on seat time is encouraging. As states and districts adopt measures of content and skill competency, new accountability systems must be developed. Education officials are already experimenting with new systems, and hopefully by the time Congress decides to move forward with a reauthorized ESEA (Elementary and Secondary Education Act), there will be strong competency-based accountability systems to incorporate, particularly at the high school level.

Ready for Their Future

College- and career-prep curricula might look different, but the basic academics required for success in postsecondary life must be embedded in whatever curriculum a high school student pursues. Educators must not veer to the one-curriculum line. And they need to be more careful about their word choice in explaining programs of study to the public and parents. Any “college-prep curriculum” should be one of several options, all tied to “college- and career-ready standards.”

A so-called college- and career-ready curriculum must not imply that every graduate needs a four-year traditional college education ending in a bachelor’s degree. What are needed are courses of study that prepare each student well for quality postsecondary-learning opportunities that lead to good jobs. The nation’s public schools have an obligation to prepare students with the content and skills necessary for them to successfully go forward, and they should all be held accountable for doing so.

Cynthia G. Brown is senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and formerly served as the center’s vice president for education policy.

This article is part of a forum on college preparation. For another take, please see “Multiple Pathways Can Better Serve Students,” by Robert Schwartz.

Traditionally, we have thought of our high schools as having a three-part mission: to prepare students for further learning, work, and citizenship. While we still pay lip service to the work and citizenship parts of the mission, the reality is that our high schools have become increasingly focused on a single mission: college preparation. We have allowed a very important idea—that all students need a solid foundation of core academic knowledge and skills—to morph into a not-so-good idea: that all students need to be prepared to attend a four-year college.

So what’s wrong with the idea of making the four-year college-prep curriculum the default curriculum for all students, as some states have done, or making completion of the curriculum required for admission to a state’s four-year public university system a condition of high school graduation, as several large districts in California have done? Isn’t it true that virtually everyone will need a college degree in order to survive in the 21st-century economy?

Let’s begin with some basic facts. If we follow a cohort of 8th graders, roughly 2 in 10 will drop out before high school graduation, and another 3 will graduate high school but choose not to enroll in postsecondary education. Of those who do go on and enroll in four-year institutions, nearly 4 in 10 will drop out before attaining a degree. Of those who enroll in community colleges, roughly 7 in 10 will drop out. The bottom line: by age 25, only 33 percent of the cohort will have attained a four-year degree, and another 10 percent will have earned a two-year degree.

And what about the rising skill requirements of the 21st century? While it is absolutely true that two-thirds of jobs projected over the next decade will require education beyond high school, and that as a general proposition the more education you get the greater your lifetime earnings, it is also true that for the foreseeable future there will continue to be many good jobs that require some education beyond high school but not necessarily a four-year degree. A recent study from the Brookings Institution, for example, argues that half of the STEM jobs are in this “middle skills” category, requiring some education beyond high school but not necessarily a four-year degree. The average salary for these jobs is $53,000.

I certainly don’t mean to suggest that projected earnings should be the primary basis on which a young person should select a postsecondary pathway, or that career preparation is or should be the sole purpose of higher education. But given the rising costs of college and the uncertain return on that investment, it shouldn’t surprise us that there is increasing interest among policymakers in developing a much stronger set of career-focused pathways into two-year postsecondary programs to sit alongside the dominant pathway into the university sector.

What are the implications of this analysis for the organization of high schools and for their curricular requirements? First, we need to pay much more attention to providing all students with systematic information and advice about the broad spectrum of careers and the education and training requirements associated with them. This should begin no later than middle school and should include opportunities for exposure to a wide variety of workplaces and the adults who work in them. This is especially important for those most at risk of dropping out, for we know that one of the two main reasons dropouts tell us they leave school is that they can’t see any connection between what they are asked to study and any future life they can imagine for themselves.

Second, we need to build a strong set of career pathways in such high-growth, high-demand fields as information technology, health care, and advanced manufacturing that begin in high school, continue seamlessly into two-year postsecondary education, and culminate in a degree or certificate with value in the labor market. These pathways need to provide substantial, sequential opportunities for workplace learning culminating in paid internships or apprenticeships in order for students to see and test the application of academic concepts in a real-world setting and to demonstrate that they are “career-ready.” While these pathways need to combine rigorous academics with relevant career and technical preparation, it is not at all clear why the course sequences in these career pathways need to be the same as those for students in the four-year college pathway.

Adapting the European Model

While one should be mindful of the usual caveats about the relevance of European experience in the U.S. policy context, the typical European division between lower- and upper-secondary education is useful here. In most countries in northern Europe, all students pursue a common curriculum up through grade 9 or 10, and then choose between an academics-only pathway leading to university and a more applied-learning pathway leading to a vocational qualification. In the strongest of these systems (e.g., Switzerland), the vocational pathway opens postsecondary options leading to a degree from a university of applied sciences, as well as crossover options back to the classical university system.

So how would an adaptation of this division between lower secondary and upper secondary help in the U.S. context? First, it would enable us to concentrate our attention and resources in pre-K through Grade 10 primarily on preparing all students to meet the requirements of the Common Core State Standards. Ideally, this is the point at which the last common assessments in English language arts and math would be administered.

It’s in the upper-secondary years, grades 11 and 12, where the case for a differentiated curriculum is strongest. If we do the job right in the pre-K–10 years and supplement a thoughtful, untracked implementation of a common core–aligned curriculum with a systemic, sequential program of career information and exposure, young people and their families should be in a position to make an informed choice among a set of pathways, all of which lead to some form of postsecondary education or training, but only some of which lead directly to a four-year college or university. Progress in meeting the requirements of each upper-secondary pathway would be measured by end-of-course assessments. College readiness would be measured by the successful completion of at least one dual-enrollment college course, preferably taken on a college campus. Work readiness would be measured by the successful completion of an internship or other form of workplace learning, as certified by a workplace supervisor.

Implications for the Curriculum

For those who choose career pathways other than those leading to a four-year university, their curriculum choices should be guided by the requirements of their pathway. In mathematics especially, it is absurd that the views of university mathematicians should drive the curriculum requirements for all students. If only 11 percent of jobs even in STEM fields require advanced mathematical knowledge, why should we force march all students through a mathematical sequence leading to calculus?

In my view, the vast majority of students in two- and four-year institutions would be much better served by getting a solid grounding in data, statistics, and probability in high school. In recent years, promising courses in statistics and quantitative reasoning have been developed and field-tested by researchers at the Dana Center in Texas and the Carnegie Foundation in California to address the remediation problem in community colleges. If these courses could be offered to students in grades 11 and 12 as dual-enrollment courses, it would provide a more relevant, engaging math option for those not heading for math-intensive majors or careers, and in the bargain get more students launched on college-level work without the need for remediation.

Four-year colleges and universities for too long have exercised an undue influence over the high school curriculum. Why should a set of institutions that are effectively serving only one young person in three be setting the requirements for what all students are expected to know and be able to do in order to become productive participants in civic and economic life? If we continue to communicate to young people that the principal reason for completing high school is to sit in classrooms for another four years, we will continue to lose an unacceptably large percentage of them along the way. We need multiple pathways to get many more young people through high school and on to a two-year postsecondary credential with value in the workplace.

Robert Schwartz is professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and coleads the Pathways to Prosperity Network.

This article is part of a forum on college preparation. For another take, please see “All Students Need Common Foundational Skills,” by Cynthia G. Brown.

There’s broad commitment to ensuring that all high-school graduates are college- and career-ready, but heated debate about the best means of achieving that goal. The big question is, how can schools both respect the diversity of students’ interests and ambitions and set a high bar for all? In this forum, two longtime advocates of high school reform weigh in.

Cynthia G. Brown is senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and formerly served as the center’s vice president for education policy. Robert Schwartz is professor emeritus at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and coleads the Pathways to Prosperity Network.

• Cynthia Brown: All Students Need Common Foundational Skills

• Robert Schwartz: Multiple Pathways Can Better Serve Students

Just above the sofa in the comfortable office of Lily Eskelsen García, the 58-year-old president-in-waiting of the National Education Association (NEA), 10 class pictures of young children are on display. The faces of the 4th, 5th, and 6th graders she taught at Orchard Elementary School in suburban Salt Lake City in the 1980s are small and faded, and their smiles convey little about them or their lives.

But Eskelsen García knows their stories, and she’s happy to tell them. The student with a learning disability she awarded an “A” for drawing a picture and describing the three branches of government to his class. The boy who grew up to be a staffer on Capitol Hill. The girl and boy from different classes who later married and sent her a wedding picture.

Eskelsen García had the photographs put up when she became vice president of the union that claims 3 million members to show visitors that she sees herself, first and foremost, as a teacher.

“This is who I am, this is my expertise, this is what I bring to this job,” Eskelsen García explains.

It’s been 24 years since Eskelsen García left full-time teaching, one year after being recognized as Utah’s Teacher of the Year in 1989. The honor gave her a statewide audience, and, a natural entertainer, she used the turn in the spotlight to become an outspoken advocate for teachers. That year, the Utah legislature cut taxes rather than use a budget surplus to increase education spending that had been flat for three years. Utah governor Norman Bangerter dismissed teachers’ criticisms, telling them publicly they should take two aspirin and “go back to work.” The comment touched off a one-day statewide teachers’ strike, and at a rally Eskelsen García strapped on her guitar and sang a protest song she’d written for the occasion: “The Utah Teacher Blues.”

The song’s last verse seemed to foretell her future:

When we speak with one voice, no one can be confused / It’s time to show the world we can do more than sing the blues / I know what I can do to wipe those tears away / I’m gonna sign on the dotted line and join the NEA.

She was urged to run for a leadership position in the Utah Education Association (UEA), the NEA’s state affiliate, and was elected president as a write-in candidate, despite having held no previous union position. The next year, teachers received a 6 percent increase in compensation championed by Bangerter himself, although the UEA was pushing for an increase of double that. Over the next six years, Eskelsen García pushed unrelentingly for higher salaries, which were among the lowest in the nation, and for smaller classes, which were among the largest.

Utah ranked 50th among the states in average teacher’s salary in 2011, and its class sizes were among the largest. Nonetheless, Utah’s scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress have been at or above the national average in reading, mathematics, and science over the past two decades.

Having experienced the exhilaration that comes with influence, Eskelsen García ran for Congress in 1998 as a Democrat in a district that included Salt Lake City. Her campaign was criticized for its negativity, and she lost badly.

Beginning in 1996, she served on the NEA’s nine-person executive committee, a half-time union position, and then in 2002, defeated two other candidates to become the union’s secretary-treasurer. After moving to the NEA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., she assumed the vice presidency in 2008 when Dennis Van Roekel, a high school math teacher in Arizona for 23 years, became president. Union rules limit presidents to two three-year terms, and Eskelsen García is running unopposed to replace him. So, this July 4 in Denver, during the annual meeting of the NEA’s 9,000-delegate representative assembly, she will almost assuredly become the union’s first woman president since Mary Hatwood Futrell was elected in 1983.

In her new role, she says, she will use stories from her teaching days to connect with NEA members as well as with the union’s critics.

“I know what got me elected state president,” Eskelsen García confides. “Members would tell me, ‘You said it just the way I felt it. You expressed my frustration, my heartbreak, my joy, and what got me into this.’ They encouraged me to just keep talking like I was talking, because that’s how they felt.” She was unscripted then and vows that, as NEA president, she will continue to speak her mind without the help of speechwriters.

She also says she will continue to use her Teacher of the Year recognition, as she did in Utah, to disarm critics. “I did it shamelessly because people really do respect teachers, and it didn’t fit their mental model of a union activist,” she says.

She will be the first Hispanic head of the nation’s largest union, and a powerful labor and political leader. Even so, she sees her organization as facing an existential threat.

“We feel embattled,” Eskelsen García says. “People have decided to take us out in a metaphorical war.”

Challenges from the Right, Left, and Center

The NEA was founded in 1857 by teachers and administrators as an advocate for public education, not a union. It wasn’t until 1969 that the NEA endorsed the concept of collective bargaining, nearly a decade after the American Federation of Teachers had done so. Ever since, the organization’s leaders have had to manage a tension among members regarding its identity. Is it a union? Or is it a professional organization? In 1997, NEA president Bob Chase declared that school quality was a union issue. In a speech at the National Press Club, he said that the NEA could no longer focus only on improving wages and benefits. “While this narrow, traditional agenda remains important, it is utterly inadequate to the needs of the future. It will not serve our members’ interest in greater professionalism. It will not serve the interests of America’s children, the children we teach, the children who motivated us to go into teaching in the first place.”

Chase’s speech and stance were controversial, and the NEA retreated from those positions, despite accusations from anti-union conservatives and some civil rights leaders that it was sublimating the needs of children to the welfare of its members. Teachers unions could ignore such critiques because they could field tens of thousands of volunteers and spend millions of dollars on pro-union political candidates and lobbying to block most legislation they deemed injurious.

Now, however, the unions are being challenged from the political right, left, and center, as well as by a growing insurgency from members who want them to help improve their teaching, not just protect their perceived employee rights.

Eskelsen García says it’s not just unions that are at risk, but the entire public education system. As a leader, she knows the motivating value of identifying and vilifying an enemy to build unity among her members. Among those she counts as enemies of public education are proponents of charter schools and vouchers. She said their goal is to “show that public schools have failed and can’t be trusted and they are going to swoop in with their answer,” which is privatization of public education.

The election of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker in 2010, who has fought to weaken public sector unions, was a wake-up call. The NEA and other unions invested heavily in a campaign to recall Walker and several of his allies in the legislature, but lost. Governors in Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Indiana, and other states also have moved, with varying success, to undercut the power and influence of unions.

Eskelsen García and other union leaders also see themselves as under attack by “self-described” education reformers and centrist Democrats who favor charter schools, performance evaluations that factor in student achievement, and changes to long-standing practices that mean teachers hired last lose their jobs first in the event of budget cuts or declines in enrollment. A small but loud and angry faction of teachers and advocates on the political left want the NEA and the AFT to be more aggressive in resisting those efforts, which they associate with the Obama administration.

In addition, the proportion of younger teachers, who are less likely to see teaching as a lifelong career, is increasing rapidly. The sensibilities and interests of these teachers are not always aligned with established union positions, and membership in alternative groups is growing (see “Taking Back Teaching,” features, Spring 2013).

Membership Declines

In a report to the union’s representative assembly in the summer of 2013, the NEA claimed that these dynamics, as well as the rapid spread of online learning, were depressing membership. In 2011, the NEA had stated that it expected a membership loss of more than 300,000 teachers and support personnel between 2010 and 2014, which would result in $65 million less in revenue. That prediction turned out to be overly pessimistic; in 2013–14 NEA has 65,000 more full-time teacher-members than had been expected and revenues are $6.1 million higher.

But, the 2013 report warned, the union’s membership will continue to decline.

Ruben Murillo, president of the Nevada State Education Association, has described the situation this way: “With all the defeats, if we keep doing the same thing over and over again, we’re going to cease to exist as an organization.”

Although the union’s leaders agree, they also believe that the organization’s current problems represent an opportunity to reposition the NEA to lead efforts to improve public education rather than block them, just as Bob Chase had recommended.

“Future members and education historians will talk about this pivotal moment in the education union movement,” says James P. Testerman, senior director of the NEA’s Center for Organizing. “We will have either successfully pivoted to being a union that advocates not only for its members but truly advocates for professional practice that makes a difference for kids…or else the role and influence of public education–sector unions will be significantly diminished.”

Key to which of those two outcomes occurs is Eskelsen García, known within the NEA simply as “Lily.”

“Teachers love Lily,” says Maddie Fennell, an Omaha, Nebraska, teacher who led an NEA commission on professionalizing the workforce. “She can go into a crowd of a thousand people and come out with all of them wanting to chat with her because she is so personable. Even in a large crowd, she makes you feel like she’s talking straight to you, and they feel like she’s reflecting them and their concerns.”

Eskelsen García can be blunt, as when last summer she told a group of liberal bloggers that supporters of gun rights “are going to hell.” Urging the audience to take action, she said, “We have to make the senators as frightened of us as they are of the gun lobby…. Shame on us if we give one inch.”

Eskelsen García is equally adamant that current policies that stress testing, accountability, and school choice are wrong for kids as well as for teachers. “You know, when something’s stupid you have to call it stupid,” she said in an interview.

Such unambiguous assertions appeal to her members emotionally. Her counterpart, AFT president Randi Weingarten, tends instead to make sophisticated, politically astute policy arguments—such as her declaration that teachers should not be evaluated using students’ scores on tests that are outdated and not aligned with what teachers are trying to teach. After she made that position public, some state and local leaders fell in line and began raising the question of whether new assessments and new teachers’ evaluations were on a collision course. Only in February, many months after Weingarten spoke out, did Van Roekel take the same position.

John Wilson, former executive director of the NEA, says teachers today “are ready to revolt” over the same policies Eskelsen Garcia calls “stupid.” “Her challenge will be to manage that anger and position the NEA to push some substantive redirections around education in this country,” he said.

Eskelsen Garcia agrees and says frequently that it’s not enough for the union to just block bad ideas.

“We’re really good at being able to explain why something is a stupid idea,” she told a panel sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute in 2010. “But it begs the question of what is a better idea, and my organization now, I think, is much more open than we’ve ever been on the local, state, and national level about taking on that challenge of designing something better.”

A Better Education

Born Lilia Laura Pace in Texas in 1955, Eskelsen García did not think about going to college or becoming a teacher when she was growing up. Her father worked on missile guidance systems for the U.S. Army, and her mother, who was from Panama, dropped out of school after the 8th grade. Her mother spoke Spanish but wanted her daughter to speak English so she wouldn’t face discrimination.

She moved frequently as a child, living in Texas, Georgia, Alaska, Washington, and Colorado, before graduating from high school in Utah in 1973. She married Ruel Eskelsen as soon as she graduated. Her husband enlisted in the Army, and during one of his postings, she got a job in a school cafeteria. A kindergarten teacher at the school noticed how well she connected with the students and urged her to go to college to become a teacher.

Several years later, after her husband got out of the Army, they both enrolled at the University of Utah, supporting themselves with help from the GI Bill, loans, financial aid, and money they earned singing, accompanied by Eskelsen García on the guitar. She graduated magna cum laude with a degree in elementary education and later earned a master’s degree in instructional technology. She began teaching at Orchard Elementary School outside of Salt Lake City in 1980 and recalls the experience fondly. Teachers worked as a team, sharing ideas and taking on additional duties to allow a colleague to spend more time with a group of kids producing a play or exploring a topic such as the civil rights movement in greater depth. Her love of music found its way into many of her lessons— she taught her students to memorize the Preamble to the Constitution by singing it, for example. She learned quickly from more experienced teachers, who shared their “incredible wealth of knowledge” informally.

When she toured Utah after being named Teacher of the Year, she was surprised to find that Orchard’s creative, collaborative, professional culture was noticeably absent in other schools. As NEA president, Eskelsen García wants to encourage more schools to operate the way Orchard did.

“Everyone’s Worst Nightmare”

But, she says, the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), in effect since 2002, is making it impossible for teachers to teach creatively and provide students with a well-rounded education. NCLB, she says, was “everyone’s worst nightmare” because of the importance it placed on test scores. It redefined education as whether “you hit your cut score on a standardized test and, if you have, then you have been educated.”

To Eskelsen García, standardized testing is just one particularly noxious element of what she calls “GERM,” which she says stands for “global education reform movement.” Speaking to a large gathering of union leaders in Austin, Texas, in December 2013, she decried “corporate model competition” among schools, the privatization of public education via charters and vouchers to be used for private schools, and the deskilling of teaching. “You make everybody read the script; you have to be on page 33 at the same time and the same day in every class,” she said.

Yet Eskelsen García is a big fan of another prominent “reform,” the common core academic standards now being instituted in schools across the country (see “The Common Core Takes Hold” and “Navigating the Common Core,” features, Summer 2014). Although critics have said teachers were not involved, she says expert teachers marked up drafts with red pens, and the authors of the standards agreed to most of their changes. “Every time I turned the page I thought, my God, this is how I teach, it really was,” she says. “Critical thinking skills, collaborate on problem solving, create, design, give me evidence of, give me your opinion and tell me why I should believe you, and organize a project.”

But she fears that standardized tests will not include those skills and that they’ll be eliminated from the curriculum. “Do we think they’re going to get this right without adult supervision?” she asked the audience in Austin. “Noooooo,” the crowd responded.

“If you see that there is no change in high-stakes testing; no change in obsessive test prep; no change in labeling students, teachers, and schools by that standardized test score, you’ll know that they don’t really care about higher-level, critical thinking skills, and that it was all just a PR ploy.”

She urged her colleagues to resist. Assessments, she said, have their place. They should be used to guide instruction rather than to judge performance.

“It’s up to us to insist they get it right and to call them out when they get it wrong,” she said.

Fiery Rhetoric

Eskelsen García portrays teachers as hardworking heroes who are under attack by wealthy, implacable, money-hungry foes. “The folks in this room are putting battle gear on,” she said later. “They are fearless warriors.”

The words conjure up the image of an industrial union, proudly defending labor against the predations of distant bosses. But it does little to help rebrand the NEA as an advocate for professionalism, children, and learning, which Eskelsen García says she favors.

To help bolster the professional image, Van Roekel persuaded the union’s representative assembly to dun members $3 apiece annually over 10 years to amass a $60 million Great Public Schools Fund the union could invest in the ideas of NEA members. He has promoted a partnership with Teach Plus, the organization whose goal is to respond to the desire of teachers to take on broader leadership roles in their schools and districts. Under his leadership, the NEA formed another partnership to identify promising teacher leaders and train them to help their peers become leaders as well.

Eskelsen García worked closely with Van Roekel on those initiatives.

But what Eskelsen García really thinks is needed is systemic change in how teachers are recruited, trained, hired, mentored, evaluated, tenured, and helped to improve. Finland, she says, offers a good model.

There, she says, it is more difficult to enter the college of education than it is to get into law school, and teachers need to earn a master’s degree before they’re allowed to lead a classroom. But nothing will change, she says, unless teachers become advocates for their profession. “We’re absolutely sure that without not just the voices but the actions, the hands-on advocacy that the practitioners bring, policymakers are going to get it wrong again.”

A Strong Offense and a Stronger Defense

Eskelsen García and Van Roekel say the union needs to have both a good offense, which includes efforts to improve student outcomes and support teachers, and a good defense. The goal of the defense is to block state initiatives that would weaken the union as well as to preserve the victories the NEA has made in the past.

The NEA’s budget for defense is far greater than the budget for offense. Indeed, despite protestations that the NEA is being outgunned politically, it is perennially among the nation’s top spenders on lobbying and election campaigns. For the year ending September 2013, the NEA spent $45 million on lobbying and another $85 million on gifts, grants, and contributions. In most states, the NEA’s affiliates are widely regarded as the most politically potent forces shaping state laws and policies.

“Goal No. 1 is really to play defense to make sure conditions under which teachers teach and kids learn are the best they can be,” says James Testerman, who heads the NEA’s organizing operation. “We want to make sure those things that attract and retain good teachers are in place. Competitive wages, competitive health care, a reasonable workload and…advocate at the same time for what needs to be in place for students to be successful.”

The defensive effort also includes campaigns to fight legislation, such as the successful 2007 campaign in Utah to overturn a state law promoting vouchers for online schools, and the campaign in Ohio to reverse a law that took away most collective-bargaining rights from public-sector unions.

One place the NEA lost, despite forming a broad coalition of allies, was in Wisconsin. The defeat forced the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association (MTEA), which had a reputation as one of the most radical in the country, to change. The MTEA is now working with the Milwaukee Public Schools to implement a new teacher-evaluation process, implement common core standards, and provide training for substitute teachers.

Still, in an interview in her office, Eskelsen García said the unions are far less powerful than they were in their heyday in the 1970s and 1980s.

But, she acknowledged, that may be for the best.

“When you feel like you don’t need anybody’s help and you’ll just do it on your own, you just talk to yourselves about what it is we need out there,” she said. “You forget to ask parents what is it they’re looking for for their kids, and you forget to ask taxpayers what they think is a good investment of their tax dollars.”

She said the union has to come up with good ideas as alternatives to the policies it does not like.

“Shame on us all if all we do is tell you why that it is the wrong answer,” she said. “I’m a good teacher because I can design something that works for real kids. Why can’t I put that to work as a union leader…and say, here’s a better system and it all needs to be integrated, and work together on it. Why isn’t that union work?”

Throughout her career as a union leader, Eskelsen García has been willing to speak to people who disagree with her about ways to improve the quality of education. At a 2010 forum in Washington, she told the audience, “I will listen to your ideas and maybe you’ll listen to my ideas. I will work with you. I have to make this work more than you do. My colleagues and I have more skin in this game than anyone outside the children.”

Richard Lee Colvin is a former Los Angeles Times reporter and editor who has been writing about education for nearly 30 years. He is based in Washington, D.C. 

A couple of years back, I taught a delightful young lady whom I will call “Sandra.” She was a student in my Collaborative Team Teaching class, a section of 10th-grade English taught simultaneously by me—the English teacher—and a special education teacher, and comprising both special education and general education students. Sandra was one of the former; although she could read reasonably well, her writing was completely incomprehensible, and her understanding of high-level or abstract concepts was quite limited. Her Individualized Education Program (IEP) revealed a low IQ and a host of diagnosed learning disabilities (and left out some undiagnosed ones, I suspect).

Is it strange to say that, despite this, she was a great student? Though her comments on literature were generally more factual or summary than analytical, Sandra showed far more willingness to participate in class discussions and group work than some of her peers with more “innate” ability. She had discrete skills and interests—fashion, for one, as well as graphic arts and music—which she was eager to apply in her schoolwork. She was sensitive, eager to please, and scrupulously honest: she never once gave me an excuse for not completing an assignment (while her peers favored lengthy tall tales for these occasions, beginning with, “Well, what had happened was…”).

During Sandra’s senior year, the school was offered the chance to grant a few students a diploma through Career Development and Occupational Studies (CDOS), a Career and Technical Education (CTE) program in which students work in an internship or apprenticeship setting outside of school, with the principal’s approval. Every teacher agreed that Sandra was an obvious candidate, and she soon began to shadow a cosmetology professional after school. It was an excellent placement: Sandra was interested in the skills she was learning and would have something “in place” that could enable her to support herself come graduation.

Our school, however, would effectively receive a penalty for this placement, in the opportunity cost of earning no “points” on our progress report. Points are only awarded for students who earn a Regents diploma—by passing five Regents exams (a near-impossible outcome for Sandra) and obtaining 44 credits—the benchmark for “college readiness.” Despite the fact that Sandra would still be required to pass all her core courses, graduating with the same number of credits as her peers, and would have a leg up on productive employment after high school, our school could receive no points from her CDOS diploma.

Though the Common Core State Standards, the content guidelines for Sandra’s and her peers’ courses, claim to promote “college and career readiness,” the career part seems like mere lip service; the nationwide dearth of trade and vocational programs for students is evidence to that. Underlying the college-for-all bias is the fallacy that only kids like Sandra, with limited academic ability, could benefit from trade or vocational education—thus, such a track is looked down upon (as though having options for kids like Sandra weren’t in itself important). In fact, students with a range of abilities would gain if their schools offered opportunities that deviated from the traditional college-prep trajectory. Even “college-ready” students seek other options—because college is too expensive, because college doesn’t provide enough job security in the current economy, or because four years of highly academic coursework is simply not appealing. And to me, that’s fine; schools should only be pushing toward college students who are intellectually and emotionally ready to do the work that a bachelor’s degree entails.

We owe it to all students, including Sandra—who, if 90 percent of life is showing up, most assuredly deserves the “A”—to offer a broader menu of education options at the high school level. Since 2003, New York City has opened 28 schools that supposedly offer career or technical training, a good start, but not sufficient, and too poorly publicized for most students even to be aware of them. CTE is not some passé initiative of the 20th century and often includes rigorous training. Our students deserve the chance to engage in the full range of occupations and, moreover, to build fulfilling professional lives on their own terms.

Ilana Garon teaches English in a New York City high school and is author of “Why Do Only White People Get Abducted by Aliens?”: Teaching lessons from the Bronx (Skyhorse Publishing, 2013).