It is widely believed that a good principal is the key to a successful school. No Child Left Behind encouraged the replacement of the principal in persistently low-performing schools, and the Obama administration has made this a requirement for schools undergoing federally funded turnarounds. Foundations have invested millions over the past decade in New Leaders for New Schools, an organization that recruits nontraditional principal candidates and prepares them for the challenges of school leadership. And the recently launched George W. Bush Institute is making the principalship a focus of its activities. Yet until very recently there was little rigorous research demonstrating the importance of principal quality for student outcomes, much less the specific practices that cause some principals to be more successful than others. As is often the case in education policy discussions, we have relied on anecdotes instead.

This study provides new evidence on the importance of school leadership by estimating individual principals’ contributions to growth in student achievement. Our approach is quite similar to studies that measure teachers’ “value added” to student achievement, except that the calculation is applied to the entire school. Specifically, we measure how average gains in achievement, adjusted for individual student and school characteristics, differ across principals—both in different schools and in the same school at different points in time. From this, we are able to determine how much effectiveness varies from one principal to the next.

Our results indicate that highly effective principals raise the achievement of a typical student in their schools by between two and seven months of learning in a single school year; ineffective principals lower achievement by the same amount. These impacts are somewhat smaller than those associated with having a highly effective teacher. But teachers have a direct impact on only those students in their classroom; differences in principal quality affect all students in a given school. We also investigate one widely discussed mechanism through which principals affect student achievement: the management of teacher transitions. Importantly, because high teacher turnover can be associated with both improvement and decline in the quality of instruction, the amount of turnover on its own provides little insight into the wisdom of a principal’s personnel decisions. We confirm, however, that teachers who leave schools with the most-successful principals are much more likely to have been among the less-effective teachers in their school than teachers leaving schools run by less-successful principals. The final component of our analysis considers the dynamics of the principal labor market, comparing the effectiveness of principals who move on to those who stay in their initial schools. Constrained by salary inertia and the historical absence of good performance measures, the principal labor market does not appear to weed out those principals who are least successful in raising student achievement. This is especially true in schools serving disadvantaged students. This is troubling, as the demands of leading such schools, including the need to attract and retain high-quality teachers despite less desirable working conditions, may amplify the importance of having an effective leader.

The Texas Database

Our analysis relies on administrative data constructed as part of the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) Texas Schools Project. Working with the Texas Education Agency (TEA), this project has combined different data sources to create matched data sets of students, teachers, and principals over many school years. The data include all Texas publicschool teachers, administrators, staff, and students in each year, permitting accurate descriptions of the schools led by each principal.

The Public Education Information Management System (PEIMS), TEA’s statewide database, reports key demographic data, including race, ethnicity, and gender for students and school personnel, as well as student eligibility for subsidized lunch (a standard indicator of poverty). PEIMS also contains detailed annual information on teacher and administrator experience, salary, education, class size, grade, population served, and subject. Importantly, this database can be merged with information on student achievement by school, grade, and year. Beginning in 1993, Texas schools have administered the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) each spring to eligible students in grades 3 through 8. Our analysis therefore focuses on principals in elementary and middle schools, for whom it is possible to develop performance measures.

The personnel data combine time as a teacher and as an administrator into total experience, so it is not possible to measure tenure as a principal accurately for those who became a principal prior to the initial year of our data (the 1990–91 school year). We therefore concentrate on the years from 1995 to 2001. Over this period, we are able to observe 7,420 individual principals and make use of 28,147 annual principal observations.

Measuring Principal Quality

The fundamental challenge to measuring the impact of school leaders is separating their contributions from the many other factors that drive student achievement. For example, a school that serves largely affluent families may create the illusion that it has a great principal, when family backgrounds are the key cause of high achievement. Alternatively, a school that serves disadvantaged students may appear to be doing poorly but in fact have a great principal who is producing better outcomes than any other principal would.

Our basic value-added model measures the effectiveness of a principal by examining the extent to which math achievement in a school is higher or lower than would be expected based on the characteristics of students in that school, including their achievement in the prior year. Put another way, it examines whether some schools have higher achievement than other schools that serve similar students and attributes that achievement difference to the principal. This approach is very similar to that employed in studies that measure teacher quality using databases tracking the performance of individual students over time.

The main concern with this approach is that there may be unmeasured factors that affect school performance. Our data contain only basic information on student background characteristics, such as gender, race or ethnicity, and eligibility for subsidized lunch. As a result, we cannot control for more nuanced measures of students and their families, such as motivation or wealth. We are, however, able to control for students’ test scores from the previous year, which may well capture a lot of the characteristics that we cannot measure directly. Moreover, there are also school factors not under the direct control of the school, including the quality of teachers inherited by the principal. Below we describe alternative approaches to isolating the contributions of the current principal.

In estimating principal effectiveness, we want to minimize the influence of specific circumstances and look at the underlying stable differences in impacts. This issue is important because a principal’s impact may vary with tenure in a school. A principal’s impact on the quality of the teaching staff (whether negative or positive), for example, probably increases over time as the share of teachers who were hired on her watch rises. To account for any differences in effectiveness that are related to tenure as a principal in a given school, we begin our analysis by focusing on data from the first three years a principal leads a school.

This first analysis indicates that the standard deviation of principal effectiveness is 0.21 standard deviations of test scores (see Table 1). This is a very large figure, perhaps unbelievably large, implying that a principal at the 75th percentile of this effectiveness measure shows average achievement gains of 0.11 standard deviations (relative to the average principal), while one at the 25th percentile shows average losses of 0.15 standard deviations. These differences are even more pronounced in high-poverty schools, for which the gap between the 25th and 75th percentile principal is more than one-third of a standard deviation. On average across all schools, the impact of having a principal 1 standard deviation more effective than the average principal is as much as seven additional months of learning in a single academic year.

As noted above, this initial estimate of the variability in principal effectiveness may partly reflect differences in school characteristics that are not under the principal’s control, such as the quality of the school building, or decisions made by district administrators as well as unmeasured parental influences. As a result, it may overestimate the amount of influence principals actually have.

We begin to address this issue by measuring principal effectiveness based only on comparisons of within-school differences in student achievement growth over time. In simplest terms, we compare average student achievement gains in the same school under different principals. This method eliminates the influence of any student, school, or neighborhood characteristics that do not change over time. Its main drawback is that it ignores all differences in principal effectiveness between schools, potentially underestimating the amount of variation in principal quality. For example, if each school tends to attract principals who are similar in quality whenever it searches for a new principal, this approach will understate the true extent of variation in principal effectiveness.

We conduct this second analysis using all of the principals in our data, not just those in their first three years leading a school, because the numbers of schools with two principals observed in their first three years is quite small. (Note that re-doing the prior analysis using data on all principals does not significantly alter the results presented above.) Restricting the analysis to comparisons within schools, however, cuts our estimate of the variation in principal effectiveness in half. Even this reduced estimate is substantial, however, indicating that a 1-standard-deviation increase in principal effectiveness raises school average achievement by slightly more than 0.10 standard deviations. This impact is roughly comparable to that observed for variations in teacher effectiveness in studies that use the same kinds of within-school comparisons.

Our first two methods involved estimating effectiveness measures for individual principals and then calculating the standard deviation of those measures. Although any unmeasured school factors that are unrelated to principal quality would not bias these results, such factors would inflate our estimates of the variation in principal quality based on these approaches. We therefore employ a third approach that gauges the amount of variation in principal effectiveness directly by measuring the additional fluctuation in school average achievement gains when a new principal assumes leadership, as compared to typical fluctuations from year to year.

Focusing on the additional variation in school average achievement gains around principal transitions reduces the magnitude of the estimates. Nonetheless, the results remain educationally significant: a 1-standard-deviation increase in principal quality translates into roughly 0.05 standard deviations in average student achievement gains, or nearly  quality between schools and again ignores any tendency for a given school to attract principals of similar quality over time, suggesting that it likely understates principals’ actual impact.

Teacher Turnover

The results presented so far rely on indirect measures of principal impact, namely, student learning gains during a principal’s tenure in a school. The data do not include any observations about what a principal actually does, or fails to do, to improve learning. We now turn to an analysis of the interactions of principals with teaching staff, which bears directly on a number of current policy debates.

A primary channel through which principals can be expected to improve the quality of education is by raising the quality of teachers, either by improving the instruction provided by existing teachers or through teacher transitions that improve the caliber of the school’s workforce. Teacher turnover per se has received considerable policy attention, largely because of the well-documented difficulties that new teachers experience. The potential benefits of reducing turnover nonetheless hinge on the effectiveness of both entering and exiting teachers.

We expect highly rated principals to be more successful both at retaining effective teachers and at moving out less-effective ones. Less highly rated principals may be less successful in raising the quality of their teaching staffs, either because they are less skilled in evaluating teacher quality, place less emphasis on teacher effectiveness in personnel decisions, or are less successful in creating an environment that attracts and retains better teachers. Although better principals may also attract and hire more-effective teachers, the absence of reliable quality measures for new teachers and the fact that many principals have little control over new hires lead us to focus specifically on turnover.

Unfortunately, our data do not contain direct information on personnel decisions that would enable us to separate voluntary and involuntary transitions, and existing evidence suggests that teachers rather than principals initiate the majority of transitions. In addition, the Texas data do not match students to individual teachers, meaning that we must draw inferences about teacher effectiveness from average information across an entire grade.

With detailed information on teacher effectiveness and transitions, we could investigate whether better principals are more likely to dismiss the least-effective teachers and reduce the likelihood that the more-effective teachers depart voluntarily. In the absence of such information, however, we focus on the relationship within schools between the share of teachers that exits each grade and the average value-added to student achievement in the grade. We examine how this varies with our measures of principal quality based on student achievement gains. For example, in a school where 5th-grade students learn more than 4th-grade students, we would expect a good principal to make more changes to the 4th-grade teaching staff.

The results of this analysis confirm that the relationship between higher teacher turnover and lower average valueadded in a given grade is stronger as principal quality rises. This pattern of results is consistent with the theory that management of teacher quality is an important pathway through which principals affect school quality. The fact that less-effective teachers are more likely to leave schools run by highly effective principals also validates our measure of principal quality. If our measure was just capturing random noise in the data rather than information about true principal quality, we would not expect it to be related to teacher quality and turnover.

Principal Transitions and Quality

Along with teacher turnover, instability of leadership is often cited as an impediment to improving high-poverty and low-performing schools. Consistent with these concerns, we find that Texas schools with a high proportion of low-income students are more likely to have first-year principals and less likely to have principals who have been at the school at least six years than those serving a less-disadvantaged population. Sorting schools by initial achievement rather than poverty level produces even larger differences (see Figure 1). The proportion of principals in their first year leading a school is roughly 40 percent higher in schools in the bottom quartile of average prior achievement than in schools in the top quartile; the proportion of principals that have been at their current school at least six years is roughly 50 percent higher in schools with higherachieving students.

Yet the import of leadership turnover also depends on whether highor low-quality personnel are leaving, something prior research has been unable to address. We therefore examine whether the likelihood that a principal leaves following the third year in a school varies with her effectiveness and with the share of low-income students in the school. We observe principals making a variety of career decisions: remaining in the same school as principal, becoming a principal at another school in the same district, becoming a principal in another district, moving into a central office position, or exiting the public schools entirely. We divide principals into four equal-sized groups based on estimates of their effectiveness using the first of the three methods described above. We also limit the data to include only principals with fewer than 25 years of total experience in order to minimize complications introduced by the decision to retire.

Our results confirm that the least-effective principals are least likely to remain in their current position and most likely to leave the public schools entirely. With the exception of the schools with the lowest poverty level, however, there is not a consistent relationship between the likelihood of remaining on as principal and principal quality (see Figure 2). In high-poverty schools, for example, principals in the middle two quartiles of effectiveness are substantially more likely to remain than those in the bottom quarter. The most effective principals are more likely to remain in the same position than those in the bottom quartile, but are considerably more likely to move on than those in the middle of the quality distribution.

Another result emerging from this analysis that is troubling from a policy perspective is the frequency with which low-performing principals move to principal positions at other schools. This trend is particularly striking in high-poverty schools, where more than 12 percent of poor performers annually make such a move. In contrast, less than 7 percent of the poorest performers in more-affluent schools become principals at other schools. This may reflect the fact that it is challenging in high-poverty schools to separate the effects of school circumstances from the quality of the principal, leading district administrators to give principals from high-poverty schools a chance at a different school.

The simple conclusion, nonetheless, is that the operation of the principal labor market does not appear to screen out the least-effective principals. Instead, they frequently move to different schools, perhaps reflecting the bargain necessary to move out an ineffective leader in a public-sector organization. Potentially, this is where the superintendent enters the picture. Making good decisions on the retention and assignment of principals may be among the distinguishing characteristics of successful superintendents, a possibility that warrants additional study.

Conclusions

The role of principals in fostering student learning is an important facet of education policy discussions. Strong leadership is viewed as especially important for revitalization of failing schools. To date, however, this discussion has been largely uninformed by systematic analysis of principals’ impact on student outcomes.

Determining the impact of principals on learning is a particularly difficult analytical problem. Nevertheless, even the most conservative of our three methodological approaches suggests substantial variation in principal effectiveness: a principal in the top 16 percent of the quality distribution will produce annual student gains that are 0.05 standard deviations higher than an average principal for all students in their school.

There are many channels through which principals influence school quality, although the precise mechanisms likely vary across districts with the regulatory and institutional structures that define principal authority. Because all principals participate in personnel decisions, we have focused on the composition of teacher turnover. For the best principals, the rate of teacher turnover is highest in grades in which teachers are least effective, supporting the belief that improvement in teacher effectiveness provides an important channel through which principals can raise the quality of education.

Finally, patterns of principal transitions indicate that it is the least and most effective who tend to leave schools, suggesting some combination of push and pull factors. This pattern is particularly pronounced in high-poverty schools. It is also worrisome that a substantial share of the ineffective principals in high-poverty schools takes principal positions in other schools and districts. Clearly, much more needs to be learned about the dynamics of the principal labor market. For student outcomes, greater emphasis on the selection and retention of high-quality principals would appear to have a very high payoff.

Gregory F. Branch is program manager at the University of Texas at Dallas Education Research Center. Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Steven G. Rivkin is professor of economics at University of Illinois at Chicago.

In 2008, president-elect Barack Obama declared that preparing the nation for the “21st-century economy” required making “math and science education a national priority.” He later signed legislation that provided incentives for states to adopt common standards intended to increase curricular rigor in these and other subjects. Encouraging more students to take advanced classes seems laudable, but concerns have arisen about the ability of many students to complete such course work successfully.

Students in urban high schools are of particular concern. Populated predominantly by low-income and minority students, these schools struggle with two related problems. First, many students do not earn passing grades in early courses that are thought to be prerequisites for more-advanced subjects. Second, students are at high risk of failing to earn their high school diplomas at all. In fact, only 65 percent of black and Hispanic students graduate high school, with little evidence that the graduation gap between them and white students has changed in the last few decades. One theory for these low high-school completion rates is that failures in early courses, such as algebra, interfere with subsequent course work, placing students on a path that makes graduation quite difficult.

One increasingly popular approach to improving students’ math skills is “algebra for all,” which encourages more students to take algebra and at earlier ages. The best study of this approach, using evidence from Charlotte, North Carolina (see “Solving America’s Math Problem,” features, Winter 2013), shows that pushing students into course work for which they are ill prepared actually harms their subsequent academic achievement. A potentially promising alternative, and one we focus on here, is “double-dose” algebra, in which struggling students are given twice as much instructional time as they would normally receive. The best study of this approach, by Takako Nomi and Elaine Allensworth, examined the short-term impact of such a policy in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), where double-dose algebra was implemented in 2003. Under that policy, students scoring below the national median on the 8th-grade math exam were required to take two periods of algebra a day during 9th grade instead of one, with the second class providing support and extra practice. Students placed in the extra classes thus received substantially more algebra instruction than other students. Nomi and Allensworth reported no improvement in 9th-grade algebra failure rates as a result of this intervention, a disappointing result for CPS. The time frame of their study did not, however, allow them to explore longer-run outcomes of even greater importance to students, parents, and policymakers.

Our study extends this work to examine the impact of CPS’s double-dose algebra policy on such longer-run outcomes as advanced math course work and performance, ACT scores, high-school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates. Using data that track students from 8th grade through college enrollment, we analyze the effect of this innovative policy by comparing the outcomes for students just above and just below the double-dose threshold. These two groups of students are nearly identical in terms of academic skills and other characteristics, but differ in the extent to which they were exposed to this new approach to algebra. Comparing the two groups thus provides unusually rigorous evidence on the policy’s impact.

We find positive and substantial longer-run impacts of double-dose algebra on college entrance exam scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates, suggesting that the policy had significant benefits that were not easily observable in the first couple of years of its existence. The benefits of double-dose algebra were largest for students with decent math skills but below-average reading skills, perhaps because the intervention focused on written expression of mathematical concepts.

Double-Dose Algebra

Since the late 1990s, Chicago Public Schools has been attempting to increase the rigor of student course work and prepare students for college entrance. Starting with students entering high school in the fall of 1997, CPS eliminated lower-level and remedial courses so that all first-time freshmen would enroll in algebra in 9th grade, geometry in 10th grade, and algebra II or trigonometry in 11th grade. Soon after, it became apparent to CPS officials that many students were unable to master the new curriculum, resulting in very low passing rates in 9th-grade algebra. The cause of this high failure rate was thought to lie largely with the poor math skills with which students entered high school.

In response to the low passing rates, CPS launched the double-dose algebra policy for all students entering high school in the fall of 2003. Instead of reinstating the traditional remedial courses from previous years, CPS required enrollment in two periods of algebra for all first-time 9th graders testing below the national median on the math portion of the 8th-grade Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (ITBS). Students enrolled for two math credits, a full-year regular algebra class plus a full-year algebra support class. Prior to the double-dose policy, algebra curricula varied considerably across CPS high schools, due to the decentralized nature of the district. With the new policy, CPS offered teachers of double-dose algebra two specific curricula called Agile Mind and Cognitive Tutor, stand-alone lesson plans they could use, and three professional development workshops each year, where teachers were given suggestions about how to take advantage of the extra instructional time.

Though it is difficult to know precisely what occurred in these extra classes, students assigned to double-dose algebra reported more frequently writing sentences to show how they solved a math problem; explaining how they solved a problem to the class; writing math problems for other students to figure out; discussing possible solutions with other students; and applying math to situations in life outside of school. The additional time spent building verbal and analytical skills may have conferred benefits in subjects other than math.

CPS also strongly advised schools to schedule their algebra support courses in three specific ways. First, double-dose algebra students should have the same teacher for their two periods of algebra. Second, the two algebra periods should be offered consecutively. Third, double-dose students should take the algebra support class with the same students who are in their regular algebra class. Most schools followed these recommendations in the initial year. In the second year, schools began to object to the scheduling difficulties of assigning the same teacher to both periods, so CPS removed that recommendation.

The policy we study had many components. Assignment to double-dose algebra doubled the amount of instructional time and exposed students to the curricula and activities discussed above. The recommendation that students take the two classes with the same set of peers increased tracking by skill level. All of these factors were likely to, if anything, improve student outcomes. We will also show, however, that the increased tracking by skill placed double-dose students among substantially lower-skilled classmates than non-double-dose students, which could have hurt student outcomes. Our results will capture the net impact of all of these factors.

Data

Our analysis focuses on the first two cohorts of students subject to the double-dose algebra policy, those entering high school in the fall of 2003 and in the fall of 2004. These two cohorts included more than 41,000 students overall. Our primary results are based on the 11,507 students with 8th-grade math test scores within 10 percentile points of the cutoff used to assign students to double-dose algebra.

As discussed above, the implementation of the policy differed somewhat between the two cohorts. For the 2003 cohort, 80 percent of double-dose students had the same teacher for both courses, 72 percent took the two courses consecutively, and rates of overlap between the two classes’ rosters exceeded 90 percent. For the 2004 cohort, only 54 percent of double-dose students had the same teacher for both courses, and only 48 percent took the two courses consecutively. Overlap between the rosters remained, however, close to 90 percent. We find that the policy’s impacts were similar for the two cohorts, so we combine them for the purpose of presenting our results.

Longitudinal data from CPS enable us to track students from 8th grade through college enrollment. These data include demographic information, detailed high-school transcripts, numerous standardized test scores, and graduation and college enrollment information. We include in our analysis all students who entered 9th grade for the first time in the fall of 2003 or 2004, who had valid 8th-grade math test scores, and who enrolled in freshman algebra in a high school in which at least one classroom of students was assigned to double-dose algebra. These CPS students were primarily from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and minority groups. About 90 percent were black or Hispanic, and 20 percent received special education services. The average CPS student scored at approximately the 45th percentile (a little below average) on the nationally normed exam used to determine which students were required to take double-dose algebra.

We focus on two sets of student outcomes. The first set measures students’ academic achievement and includes grades, course work, and standardized test scores. For example, our data include pass rates for algebra and higher-level math courses and students’ scores on the ACT (a college-entrance exam). The second set captures educational attainment, including high school graduation and college enrollment rates. We consider students to be high school graduates if they received a regular CPS diploma within five years of starting high school. About 50 percent of CPS students in our data graduated high school within four years, with another 5 percent graduating in the fifth year. College enrollment is measured using data on CPS high-school graduates from the National Student Clearinghouse. We count students as college matriculants if they enrolled in college by October 1 of the fifth year after starting high school. Only 28 percent of students in our data both graduated from a CPS high school and enrolled in college within this time frame. Of these college matriculants, 46 percent enrolled in two-year colleges and 54 percent enrolled in four-year colleges.

Method

Given the substantial differences between students who were and were not assigned to double-dose algebra, simply comparing their later outcomes would likely produce misleading evidence on the policy’s impact. To eliminate this bias, we take advantage of the fact that students scoring below the 50th percentile on the 8th-grade ITBS math test were supposed to enroll in double-dose algebra. This rule allows us to isolate the impact of double-dose algebra by comparing the outcomes of students who scored just below the cutoff to those who scored just above the cutoff. These two groups of students were very similar—their scores differed by a tiny amount—but only one group was required to take double-dose algebra. And there were no differences in the outcomes of students scoring just below and above the assignment cutoff among earlier cohorts of CPS students, suggesting that any differences we identify can be attributed to the policy.

Overall, 55 percent of CPS students scored below the 50th percentile and thus should have been assigned to double-dose algebra, but only 42 percent were actually assigned to the support class. In addition, some students took double-dose algebra, even though they scored above the cutoff on the exam. As a result, the difference in double-dose assignment rates between students just below the cutoff and students just above the cutoff was about 40 percentage points—not 100 percentage points, as would be the case if the rule were followed without exceptions. We adjust our results to reflect the fact that some above-threshold students were double-dosed and some who scored below the threshold were not. Our results should therefore be interpreted as the effect of taking double-dose algebra among students who took it because they scored below the cutoff—not for some other reason, such as a desire for additional instruction in math.

Before turning to our results on student outcomes, we first examine how the double-dose algebra policy changed students’ freshman-year experiences. Students assigned to double-dose algebra obviously spent more class periods learning math. The second class did not replace core academic courses in English, social studies, or science; it did replace other courses, such as fine arts and foreign languages. The net result was a small increase in the total number of courses taken freshman year.

Students in the double-dose classes were also more likely to be grouped with classmates of similar academic skill. Assignment to double-dose decreased the average achievement of a student’s classmates by more than 19 percentile points, and increased the size of regular algebra classes by 2.4 students. Doubling instructional time in math by replacing other course work thus increased tracking by ability and class size.

Results

Double-dosing had an immediate impact on student performance in algebra, increasing the proportion of students earning at least a B by 9.4 percentage points, or more than 65 percent. It did not have a significant impact on passing rates in 9th-grade algebra, however, or in geometry (usually taken the next year). Double-dosed students were, however, substantially more likely to pass trigonometry, a course typically taken in 11th grade. The mean GPA across all math courses taken after freshman year increased by 0.14 grade points on a 4.0 scale.

As a whole, these results imply that the double-dose policy greatly improved freshman algebra grades for the higher-achieving double-dosed students, but had relatively little impact on passing rates for the lower-achieving students. The latter fact is one of the primary reasons that CPS has continued to refine its algebra instruction policy. There is, however, some evidence of improved passing rates and GPAs in later math courses, suggesting the possibility of benefits beyond 9th grade.

Though course work and grades matter for students’ academic trajectories, the subjective nature of course grading suggests that standardized tests may be a better measure of the impact of double-dosing on math skill. We do not find consistent evidence of impacts on student performance on the preliminary ACT (called PLAN) exam taken in the fall of 10th grade, but we do find impacts on the 11th-grade PLAN (see Figure 1). On that exam, double-dosing was found to increase algebra scores by 0.15 standard deviations and overall math scores by 0.16 standard deviations. Perhaps more importantly, a nearly identical effect is seen on the math portion of the ACT (taken in the spring of 11th grade), with double-dose algebra raising scores by 0.15 standard deviations on an exam used by many colleges as part of the admissions process. This is equivalent to closing roughly 15 percent of the black-white gap in ACT scores.

These results from standardized tests suggest that double-dosed students experienced few, if any, short-run achievement gains but did experience larger gains that persisted at least two years after the end of double-dose classes. Did these gains translate into improved educational attainment? We find that they did, with double-dosing increasing four- and five-year high-school graduation rates by 8.7 and 7.9 percentage points, respectively, a 17 percent improvement (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 also shows that double-dosed students were 8.6 percentage points more likely to enroll in college within five years of starting high school, a nearly 30 percent increase over the base college enrollment rate of 29 percent. Nearly all of this increase comes from enrollment in two-year colleges, with more than half of that resulting from part-time enrollment in such colleges. Given the relatively low academic skills and high poverty rates of double-dosed CPS students, it is unsurprising that double-dosing improved college enrollment rates at relatively inexpensive and nonselective two-year postsecondary institutions.

It is important to note that many of these results are much stronger for students with weaker reading skills, as measured by their 8th-grade reading scores. For example, double-dosing raised the ACT scores of students with below-average reading scores by 0.22 standard deviations but raised above-average readers’ ACT scores by only 0.09 standard deviations. The overall impact of double-dosing on college enrollment is almost entirely due to its 13-percentage-point impact on below-average readers (see Figure 3). This unexpected pattern may reflect the intervention’s focus on reading and writing skills in the context of learning algebra.

Finally, we consider the possibility that the increased focus on algebra at the expense of other course work may have affected achievement in other subjects. We find strong evidence that rather than harming achievement in reading and science, double-dosing had positive effects across the board. Double-dosed students scored nearly 0.20 standard deviations higher on the verbal portion of the ACT, were substantially more likely to pass chemistry classes usually taken in 10th or 11th grade, and earned modestly higher GPAs across all of their nonmath classes in the years after 9th grade. In other words, the skills gained in double-dose algebra seem to have helped students in other subjects and in subsequent years.

Conclusion

Our study provides the first evidence of positive and substantial long-run impacts of intensive math instruction on college entrance exam scores, high school graduation rates, and college enrollment rates. We also show that the intervention was most successful for students with relatively high math skills but relatively low reading skills. Although the intervention was not particularly effective for the average affected student, the fact that it improved high school graduation and college enrollment rates for even a subset of low-performing and at-risk students is extraordinarily promising when targeted at the appropriate students. In this case, those were students with only moderately low math skills but below-average reading skills.

This double-dose strategy has become an increasingly popular way to aid students struggling in mathematics. Today, nearly half of large urban districts in the United States report double math instruction as the most common form of support for students with lower skills. The central concern of urban school districts is that algebra may be a gateway for later academic success, so early high-school failure in math may have large effects on subsequent academic achievement and graduation rates. With the current policy environment calling for “algebra for all” in 9th grade or earlier, effective and proactive intervention is particularly critical for those who lack foundational mathematical skills. A successful early intervention may be the best way to boost students’ long-term academic success.

Kalena Cortes is assistant professor at the Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University. Joshua Goodman is assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Takako Nomi is assistant professor of education at St. Louis University.

The enthusiasm for digital learning is contagious. More than 2 million K‒12 students are enrolled in online courses today, and research firm Ambient Insight projects that figure will hit 10 million by 2014. Will today’s wave of technology inexorably change the face of schooling, or must we first alter policy? Chester Finn, Jr., president of the Fordham Institute and editor of Education Reform for the Digital Era, and Michael Horn, executive director of education at the Innosight Institute, agree that for digital learning to realize its transformational promise, policy changes are imperative. Finn argues that these changes require a full rethinking of the education reform agenda, whereas Horn asserts that a piecemeal approach may be the wiser, more strategic course.

Chester E. Finn, Jr.: First, We Need a Brand New K-12 System

Michael B. Horn: As Digital Learning Draws New Users, Transformation Will Occur

Complete survey results available here.

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In the following essays, we identify some of the key findings from the sixth annual Education Next-PEPG Survey, a nationally representative sample of U.S. citizens interviewed during April and May of 2012 (for survey methodology, see sidebar). Highlights include

• the Republican tilt of the education views of independents

• the especially high marks that Hispanics give their public schools

• strong support among the general public for using test-score information to hold teachers accountable

• lower confidence in teachers than has previously been reported

• the public’s (and teachers’) growing uneasiness with teachers unions

• the shaky foundations of public support for increased spending

• majority support for a broad range of school choice initiatives.

In addition to the views of the public as a whole, in this year’s survey special attention is paid to Hispanics, African Americans, parents, and teachers, all of whom were oversampled in order to obtain a sufficient number of observations. And in an effort to assess the sensitivity of respondents’ opinions to information and question wording, we embedded in this survey, as we have done in previous ones, various experiments. Responses to all questions are posted on our website, www.educationnext.org.

Independents lean Republican in their views of teachers unions and school spending—and support private school choice.

With Barack Obama and Mitt Romney running neck and neck, the nation’s eyes are trained on independent voters, who will likely decide the presidential election. And in the days leading up to the national conventions, education policy, though hardly at the top of the public agenda, did assume a more prominent role in both campaigns. Which candidate is best positioned to use education to bring undecided voters into the fold? The answer may be surprising.

Just one-third of independents report that President Obama has done an “excellent” or “good” job of handling education issues, while the rest assign him a “fair” or “poor” rating. And on the education policy issues that most clearly divide the parties—the role of teachers unions and support for school spending—the views of independents hew closer to those of Republicans than of Democrats. Moreover, independents are more supportive than members of either party of expanding private school choice for disadvantaged students, the centerpiece of Governor Romney’s proposals for K–12 education reform.

Whereas 25 percent of respondents to the EdNext-PEPG survey report that they are Republicans and 34 percent say that they are Democrats, fully 41 percent claim no affiliation with either major party. Of this group, 52 percent claim that they lean Democratic, while just 40 percent lean Republican. On key education issues, however, these independents express views that better align with Republicans.

No single education issue divides Republicans and Democrats more sharply than the role of teachers unions (see Figure 1). Seventy-one percent of Republicans report that the teachers unions have a generally negative effect on schools, as compared to just 29 percent of Democrats. Though independents come down in between, a majority of them (56 percent) agree with Republicans that unions have a negative effect.

Republican and Democratic voters also diverge in their preferences on school spending and teacher salaries. Figure 2 shows that when not provided with information about current spending levels, 79 percent of Democrats say that spending on public schools in their local district should increase, as compared with 50 percent of Republicans. Among independents, 57 percent support increased spending, again placing them closer to Republicans in their view of the issue. And when respondents are informed about current spending levels, the gap between Republicans and independents vanishes: 39 percent of both groups support spending increases, compared to just 51 percent of Democrats.

The same pattern holds for teacher salaries: when respondents are not provided with information about current salary levels, 60 percent of independents support increasing teacher salaries, placing them closer to Republicans (54 percent of whom support increases) than to Democrats (75 percent). Providing information on current teacher salaries in their state reduces support for salary increases among independents to 34 percent—exactly the same as among Republicans. Information also shrinks the share of Democrats supporting salary increases to 41 percent.

Governor Romney has made the expansion of school choice for disadvantaged students central to his campaign, calling for the expansion of the Washington, D.C., voucher program and for allowing low-income and special education students to use federal funds to enroll in private schools. It is perhaps surprising, then, to find that Republicans are less supportive of this concept than are Democrats (see Figure 3). Just 42 percent of Republicans express support for the idea, compared to 52 percent of Democrats. Voucher support among independents appears to be as high as (or greater than) it is among Democrats, at 54 percent.

Hispanics like public schools but not all union demands in contract negotiations.

Increasingly, both the Republican and Democratic parties have sought ways to court Hispanics. Though they lean Democratic—63 percent of Hispanic adults approve of the way President Barack Obama is handling his job as president—they are not as blue as is the African American community, 92 percent of whom give Obama a thumbs-up.

Those seeking the Hispanic vote in 2012 should know that education is an issue that resonates with the Latino community. Almost 60 percent of those we surveyed say they are “very” or “quite a bit” interested in education issues, as compared to less than 40 percent of African American and white voters.

On many topics—including school vouchers, charter schools, digital learning, student and school accountability, common core standards, and teacher recruitment and retention policies—the views of Hispanic adults do not differ noticeably from those of either whites or African Americans.

But in certain domains—estimates of school costs and school quality, support for teachers unions, teacher tenure, and teacher pensions—the views of Hispanics differ rather substantially. Their judgment of the American school is generous, perhaps because they compare public schools in the United States to much less effective institutions in Mexico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. They also underestimate the costs of running public schools, though they revise their thinking rather substantially about the merits of spending increases once they learn the facts. They are less supportive of unions and union demands than are African Americans.

Nearly 40 percent of Hispanic adults give the nation’s public schools a grade of an “A” or a “B” on the traditional scale used to evaluate schools (see Figure 4). When asked about the public schools in their community, no less than 55 percent give such favorable assessments. By comparison, whites and African Americans express significantly less enthusiasm about the nation’s schools. Less than 20 percent of whites and African Americans accord the nation’s schools an “A” or a “B,” and only around 40 percent give the schools in their community one of these two top grades.

Hispanic respondents think American students perform better academically than is actually the case. American 15-year-olds ranked no better than 25th among the 34 developed democracies participating in the latest round of international tests. Yet nearly 45 percent of Hispanics say student math performance in the United States ranks among the top 15 countries in the world in math. Only 30 percent of white and African American respondents place the United States that high.

Hispanic respondents also think the public schools cost a lot less than they actually do. While annual per-pupil expenditures run around $12,500, Hispanics, on average, estimate their cost at less than $5,000. Whites and African Americans estimate the costs to be more than $7,000.

The same goes for teacher salaries, which average about $56,000 a year. On average, Hispanics think teachers are paid little more than $25,000 a year; blacks, on average, think they are paid around $30,000 a year; and whites estimate salaries at $35,000.

When told just how much schools cost, however, Hispanic respondents adjust their thinking quite dramatically. When informed about actual per-pupil expenditures, Hispanics’ support for higher taxes to fund spending increases drops from 46 percent to 25 percent. When given the actual amount teachers receive, their support for higher salaries plummets nearly in half—from over 60 percent to little more than 30 percent.

Although learning the truth about costs and salaries has a similar impact on white opinion, African Americans remain more committed to higher spending. Thirty-seven percent of African Americans favor higher taxes, even when told how much is currently being spent, only a slight dip from the 42 percent favorable when that information is withheld. When given the facts about teacher salaries, African American support for higher salaries drops 20 percentage points—from 74 percent to 54 percent.

Like other ethnic groups, Hispanics do not appear especially sympathetic to teachers union demands in collective bargaining negotiations. Sixty-two percent of Hispanic adults think teachers should pay 20 percent of their pension and health care costs, as do 56 percent of African Americans.

By an overwhelming margin (87 percent), Hispanic respondents favor proposals to condition teacher tenure on their students’ making adequate progress on state tests. Whites and African Americans also favor such proposals but not to the same degree (75 percent and 80 percent, respectively). When it comes to whether teachers unions are playing a more positive or a more negative role in their local community, Hispanic adults come out in the middle—at 59 percent in support, they are more supportive than whites (45 percent) but less supportive than African Americans (75 percent).

Use test scores for evaluations, says the public (but not the teachers).

Teachers have long been paid primarily on the basis of their academic credentials and years of experience, creating in most parts of the country a lockstep pay scale that does not account for a teacher’s classroom performance. This approach is often justified on the grounds that it precludes favoritism on the part of principals, school board members, and other administrative officials.

As teacher effectiveness has become an increasingly visible policy issue, standard approaches to salary and tenure decisions are undergoing substantial change. More than 20 states now require that student test-score gains be used in key personnel decisions, often including tenure and salary determinations. Four states go so far as to prohibit a teacher from receiving a top rating if students do not exceed a certain level of accomplishment, while another 10 require that achievement gains constitute at least 50 percent of each teacher’s evaluation.

Is the public onboard with these changes? And what do teachers think about them? To find out, we randomly divided those interviewed into two groups (see Figure 5). The first group was given a stark choice: How much weight should be given to test scores and how much should be given to principal recommendations?

Given this simple dichotomy, the public says test-score gains should be given more than half the weight (62 percent) in making salary and tenure decisions. Teachers, by contrast, are prepared to place only a quarter of the weight (24 percent) on this information, with the other three-fourths of the weight being given to principal recommendations.

The second half of the sample was asked a more complex question, which required giving weights to test scores and evaluations from four different sources: principals, parents, students, and fellow teachers.

When the question was posed this way, the public and the teachers once again disagree. The public would place about one-third of the weight (32 percent) on test scores, but teachers would assign them less than one-fifth (19 percent). Conversely, teachers would give principal recommendations nearly half the weight (44 percent), while the public would give their recommendations less than one-quarter (23 percent).

Perhaps surprisingly, teachers are unenthusiastic about being evaluated by their fellow teachers. Like the rest of the public, they divide up the remaining weight more or less equally among the three remaining sources of evidence (students, parents, and fellow teachers).

An even bigger gap between teachers and the public emerges on the desirability of releasing information about teacher performance to the public at large. In both New York City and Los Angeles, newspapers have published such information, provoking an outcry among teachers, who felt their privacy had been invaded. When we asked respondents about this as a general practice, 78 percent of the public expresses support, compared to just 33 percent of teachers (see Figure 6).

When given the option of expressing neutrality on the issue (as another randomly chosen half of the sample was), 60 percent of the public still says it supports the publication of information about teacher performance, while only 13 percent is opposed, the remaining 27 percent taking the neutral position. Teacher opinion is almost the mirror image. Fifty-four percent oppose making information on test-score impacts publicly available, 30 percent express support, with the remaining 16 percent not taking a clear position either way.

Are teachers unions undermining teacher popularity?

Teachers have long held a cherished place in American popular culture. In such films as Blackboard Jungle, Stand and Deliver, and Dead Poets Society, Hollywood has highlighted the power of teachers to utterly transform the lives of their students.

But is this now changing? Are Waiting for Superman, Bad Teacher, and Won’t Back Down (forthcoming “A Takeover Tale,” cultured, Winter 2013) harbingers of a new, more skeptical depiction of teachers? At first, it would seem that public trust in teachers is widespread. When we asked half of the respondents in our survey whether they “have trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools,” no less than 72 percent say “yes” (see Figure 7). This is almost exactly what Phi Delta Kappan (PDK), a publication sympathetic to teachers unions, found in its 2012 poll and about the same as in PDK polls in previous years.

When we expand the possible response categories, however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Only 4 percent of the American public has “complete” trust and confidence in teachers, and just 38 percent has “a lot” of trust and confidence in them. Meanwhile, 49 percent has “some” trust and confidence, and 9 percent has “little” trust and confidence. In other words, 58 percent of those surveyed express less than “a lot of trust and confidence” in the teaching force.

Since this is the first time the public has been asked to break its assessment of teachers into four categories, we cannot document any trends over time. But we do know that public opinion toward teachers unions—and teachers’ opinions of them, too—has turned in a negative direction. The portion who thinks that teachers unions have had a positive effect on their local schools has dropped by 7 percentage points over the past year. Among teachers, the downward shift is no less than 16 percentage points.

In this year’s survey, as we have done in the past, we asked the following question: “Some people say teachers unions are a stumbling block to school reform. Others say that unions fight for better schools and better teachers. What is your opinion? Do you think teachers unions have a generally positive view on your local schools, or do you think they have a generally negative effect?” Respondents could choose among five options: very positive, somewhat positive, neither positive nor negative, somewhat negative, and very negative.

In our polls from 2009 to 2011, we saw little change in public opinion. Around 40 percent of respondents took the neutral position, saying that unions had neither a positive nor a negative impact. The remainder were divided almost evenly, with the negative share just barely exceeding the positive.

This year, however, the teachers unions lost ground. While 41 percent of the public still takes the neutral position, the portion with a positive view of unions dropped 7 percentage points in the last year, from 29 percent to 22 percent.

The drop is even greater, in both magnitude and significance, among our nationally representative sample of teachers. At a time when, according to education journalist and union watchdog Mike Antonucci, the National Education Association has lost 150,000 members over the past two years, and projects to lose 200,000 more members by 2014, teacher discontent appears to be rising. Whereas 58 percent of teachers had a positive view of unions in 2011, only 43 percent do so in 2012. Meanwhile, the percentage of teachers holding negative views of unions nearly doubled during this period, from 17 percent to 32 percent.

But when that same question was posed in either/or terms to the public as a whole, respondents split down the middle: 51 percent say unions had a negative impact, while 49 percent say their effect was positive. Teachers, meanwhile, offered a more positive assessment. When forced to choose between just two options, 71 percent of teachers claim that unions are a force for good, whereas 29 percent see them as a stumbling block to reform.

Support for school spending is shaky.

With the U.S. economy trying to crawl back to recovery, an unemployment rate above 8 percent, and state and local governments facing the prospect of insolvency, many school districts have found it necessary to cut expenditures and personnel. In California, the cities of Stockton and San Bernardino have declared bankruptcy. In Michigan, the financially bankrupt Muskegon schools have been handed over to a for-profit charter organization. Cuts in arts programs and extracurricular activities are becoming commonplace. Nationwide, the number of school employees has drifted downward by as much as 5 percent in the past few years.

Still, the American public continues to support increasing spending on local public schools. Or at least it appears to do so (see Figure 8). Sixty-three percent of the general public says it prefers an increase in school expenditures in the local district, well up from levels in 2007 when only 51 percent of the public called for expenditure increases. Not surprisingly, teachers are even more enthusiastic about increasing expenditures, 68 percent of whom like the idea.

When one investigates the issue just a bit further, however, fractures can be detected in the public’s willingness to spend more on public schools. Though most Americans still offer their support for spending increases in the abstract, their enthusiasm ebbs rather substantially when the taxes needed to pay for the increased expenditures are broached and when information about actual expenditures and salaries is provided.

Part of the explanation for this is the widespread ignorance on the part of the general public about just how much already is spent on public schools. When asked to estimate per-pupil expenditure in their district, Americans guess that expenditures are about $6,500 annually, when in fact they are around $12,500. That is only a slightly better set of estimates than the ones given in 2009, when Americans thought $4,231 was being spent per pupil and the reality was closer to $10,000 (see “Educating the Public,” features, Summer 2009).

When respondents are told the correct figure, support for spending on public schools shifts sharply downward. Support for increased spending on our standard question drops by 20 percentage points, a much bigger drop than what was observed in 2009, when support for increased spending fell only 8 percentage points (from 46 percent to 38 percent).

In another sign of less-than-wholehearted support for an education spending spree, only 35 percent of the public says taxes should increase to fund the schools. Support drops by another 11 percentage points—to just 24 percent—when those interviewed were first told how much was currently being spent.

Teachers, who stand to benefit from increased expenditure, remain committed to more spending when told the realities of the expenditure situation in their district. Their support slips only 8 percentage points from the high of 68 percent when no information is supplied about current expenditures. But even teachers are 17 percentage points less likely to support higher taxes to fund increases in education spending.

When the subject turns from per-pupil expenditures to teacher salaries, the same pattern emerges (see Figure 9). When asked without any accompanying information, nearly two out of three Americans think that teacher salaries should go up. Among teachers, support for a salary boost registers at no less than 85 percent.

As they do on per-pupil expenditures, however, Americans hold markedly inaccurate views about actual teacher salaries. When asked to hazard a guess, Americans estimate that public school teachers in their states receive, on average, about $36,000 in salary annually. The true figure, even without accounting for benefits, pensions, and the like, sits at about $56,000 nationwide.

Support for higher salaries plummets, however, when Americans are told how much teachers actually make in their states. Of those given the facts, only 36 percent favor an increase, which amounts to a whopping 28-percentage-point decline from the 64 percent favoring an increase when no information is supplied.

When teachers were given accurate information about salary levels in their state, their support slips by only 10 percentage points, probably because they are thinking about their own paycheck. Also, they have a better sense of teacher salaries in their state than the public has, estimating them to be about $44,000 annually.

Is public support for charters really that much higher than for vouchers and tax credits?

As a policy reform, school choice shows no signs of slowing. The number of states with school-voucher and tax-credit programs has escalated since 2010, the number of students attending charter schools climbs steadily year by year, and new technologies for online learning are being promoted by a cascade of new entrepreneurs.

The contours of elite debate about school choice, however, are not replicated in the larger public. While charter schools and digital learning are thought to be the safest choice options for political elites to promote, tax credits are even more popular than charters, and vouchers, the most controversial proposal, also command the support of half the population when the idea is posed in an inviting way.

Vouchers and tax credits. When it comes to school vouchers, apparent levels of public support turn on the wording of the question. For the past two years, PDK has asked whether respondents “favor or oppose allowing students and parents to choose a private school to attend at public expense.” Even with the rather loaded “at public expense” phrasing, PDK reported that support shifted upward from 34 percent to 44 percent between 2011 and 2012.

If one asks the question in a more inviting manner, as we have, support jumps further still (see Figure 10). Told about a proposal “that would give low-income families with children in public schools a wider choice, by allowing them to enroll their children in private schools instead, with government helping to pay the tuition,” 50 percent of the American public comes out in support and 50 percent expresses opposition.

Still, support for vouchers does not match public willingness to back tax credits, even though most economists think the difference between vouchers and tax credits more a matter of style than substance. Nearly three-fourths (72 percent) of the public favors a “tax credit for individual and corporate donations that pay for scholarships to help low-income parents send their children to private schools.” We find little evidence that support for tax credits has changed significantly since 2011.

Charters. Figure 11 shows that when given a choice of supporting or opposing charter schools, 62 percent of the public says it favors ”the formation of charter schools,” nearly identical to what PDK finds (66 percent favoring ”the idea of charter schools”). Support for charters, however, is softer than it might seem. When respondents are given the opportunity to take a neutral position that neither supports nor opposes charters, no less than 41 percent choose that option. Among the remainder, the split is nearly three to one in favor of charters.

Meanwhile, public knowledge about charters remains as impoverished as ever. As our survey did two years ago, we asked respondents a variety of factual questions: whether charter schools can hold religious services, charge tuition, receive more or less per-pupil funding than traditional public schools, and are legally obligated to admit students randomly when oversubscribed. We found little change in the level of public information over the past two years. Large percentages of respondents still say they don’t know the answers to these questions. Among those who hazard a guess, they are as likely to give the wrong answer as the correct one. Although teachers do a better job of accurately identifying the characteristics of charter schools, even a majority of teachers get many of the answers wrong or say they don’t know.

Online education. As major universities—Harvard, Stanford, MIT, and others—are joining community colleges and state universities in a nationwide dash toward online learning in higher education, many states are exploring ways of incorporating new digital technologies into secondary schools.

A substantial share of both the public and the teaching force seems ready to consider the expansion of online learning. When asked if high school students should be allowed to take “approved classes either online or in school,” opinion splits down the middle, with a bare majority (53 percent to 47 percent) favoring the idea. Teachers are more enthusiastic, among whom no less than 61 percent feel students should be given an online option.

The public, however, is not equally enthusiastic about all uses of the online tool, nor is support for the idea gaining strength. The most popular uses are for rural education and advanced course taking. Fifty-eight percent of those surveyed think students in rural areas should have online opportunities, with only 14 percent opposing the idea. That is down modestly from the 64 percent who supported this use in 2008. Similar percentages of support and opposition are expressed for advanced courses taken online for college credit. But once again, levels of support have slipped since 2008 (from 68 percent to 57 percent in 2012).

Less popular are online courses for dropouts and home schoolers. Only 44 percent favor, and 30 percent oppose, using public funding to help dropouts take courses online. Many home schoolers find online courses to be a valuable tool, but the public remains dubious. Only 28 percent favors public funding for such uses, and 38 percent opposes it. Those percentages have not changed materially since 2008.

William G. Howell is professor of American politics at the University of Chicago. Martin R. West is assistant professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and deputy director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance. Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

 

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

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

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

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

Decades of Hand Wringing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Improvement in High School

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

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

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

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

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Algebra Initiative

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Policy Implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010
By Charles Murray
Crown Forum, 2012, $27.00; 407 pages.

As reviewed by Nathan Glazer

On the publication of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote, “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book as important this year…,” but after an initial flurry of reviews and critiques, no further attention has been given. Yet it tells a story about a radical change in American society in the past 50 years that seems to have passed notice, whether popular or scholarly. We have heard a good deal about the increasing inequality in earnings and wealth, but Murray focuses on another and perhaps more vital aspect of inequality, an increasing difference in social behavior between an upper middle class and a lower middle and working class, with potentially enormous consequences for American society.

Murray’s earlier books—Losing Ground in 1984, on welfare policy, and The Bell Curve (with Richard Herrnstein) in 1994, on the significance of differences in intelligence as measured by intelligence tests—aroused controversy, because, implicitly or explicitly, they focused attention on black Americans, who play a disproportionate role in welfare policy, and as a group score lower than whites on IQ tests. Seeing the title Coming Apart, one might think he is again alluding to black-white difference, which is after all the great apartness in American history. But this book limits itself to white America. And what he tells us seems to have passed the notice of most sociologists writing on American society.

According to Murray, there has been a collapse in four key areas over the last 50 years of traditional and expected behavior in a good part of white America, the working class, as it once was called, the lower class, as it may be called. Murray contrasts whites who have less than a high school education and work in blue-collar, service, and low-level white-collar occupations, with whites who have a college education or more and work as professionals or managers. He calls the first group “Fishtown,” after a real neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been the subject of a number of books, and the second “Belmont,” drawing the name from the real Belmont, Massachusetts, a town adjacent to Cambridge. The contrasts that make up a good part of the book, despite reference to two localities, are of statistical assemblages, drawn from the census. Following Murray, I will refer to them as Fishtown and Belmont, dropping the quotation marks.

The two groups were quite similar in 1960 in what Murray calls the “founding virtues”: getting married and having children in wedlock; work (Murray calls it “industriousness”); honesty, revealed in statistics in crime and imprisonment; and religiosity. But by 2010 things had changed. A 10 percent difference between Belmont and Fishtown in marriage rates in 1960 expanded to a 35 percent difference in 2010. In the census that year, only “48 percent of prime-age whites in Fishtown were married, compared to 84 percent in 1969.” Related disparities arose in births out of marriage and in children living with a single parent—not much change in Belmont, a great change in Fishtown: almost 30 percent of white births are now nonmarital, up from just a few percent in 1960.

On work, Murray notes the great increase in the percentage of the population on disability payments, from under 1 to more than 5 percent of the labor force, and the growth in the number of prime-age males who are not in the labor force, contrasted with almost all in the labor force in 1960. On chart after chart reporting work behavior, we find stability in Belmont, with almost all males at work, a striking contrast to the large absence from the labor force, willed or unwilled, in Fishtown.

Although the scandal of mass imprisonment of blacks has begun to receive wide attention, Murray strikingly notes a fivefold increase in Fishtown prisoners, by definition all white, with no increase from the infinitesimal level of imprisonment in Belmont. The decline in religious behavior, measured by questions in surveys on attendance at services, has been similar in Fishtown and Belmont, but beginning from a higher level of disengagement in Fishtown.

These four indices to Murray are “the founding virtues” of “the American project”—also his term. They support that extensive civic engagement that astonished early visitors to the American democracy. But Murray reports that civic engagement has also declined in Fishtown, along with the founding virtues. Note the minimal act of voting in a presidential election: considerable stability over time, with more than 90 percent voting in Belmont, but a drop from 70 to 51 percent voting between 1968 and 1988 in Fishtown, with a modest rise in 2008. Murray labels one section “The Collapse of the Possibility of Community,” taking from political scientists Francis Fukuyame and Edward Banfield the importance of trust for a healthy community, and showing from longitudinal surveys its reduction, far greater in Fishtown than in Belmont. The statement “People can generally be trusted” elicited the agreement of more than 75 percent in Belmont in 1970, contrasted with 45 percent in Fishtown. In 2010, 60 percent in Belmont still concurred, but Fishtown was down to 20 percent.

Murray thus draws a picture of Fishtown, working-class America, supplemented by ethnographic reports on the real Fishtown, that is not far short of the “underclass” that was so widely discussed 30 years ago, when it was thought that white working-class America was in good shape.

But while Murray describes this as a decline in “virtue,” might it be a decline driven by the huge changes in the economy during this period, specifically, the decrease in good union-wage-paying manufacturing jobs? And are we not back to the more familiar issue of a growing economic inequality as responsible for these and other changes? Murray rejects in advance this criticism of his analysis. He somewhat complacently points to jobs that are still available (janitorial, cleaning office buildings), which, he asserts, even at the minimal wage should enable marriage and raising children. The interactions among employment possibilities and earnings, and marriage and responsible childbearing, are complex, and are not to be resolved in Murray’s book—or in this review.

While the major focus of the book, and the news in it, is what has happened in Fishtown, Belmont has also changed greatly in 50 years, if not in the four virtues and civic behavior: Belmont, Murray argues, and in particular its higher levels (graduates from more elite colleges), has withdrawn from contact with the rest of American society. The two classes were once much closer: in residence, in work, in schooling, in culture. They are now much more separate. Murray emphasizes in particular the degree to which the better educated and professional have concentrated in certain neighborhoods, and how opportunities for the upper middle class of college-goers to interact with and know neighbors of lower classes have declined. The American democratic project is endangered by this growing separation, which Murray demonstrates both statistically and anecdotally.

And what is to be done? Murray is a libertarian, and he certainly has nothing to suggest for government’s role. He does urge Belmont to celebrate and argue for the founding virtues in whatever way it can, and here perhaps there is a role for education, too: Murray quotes from McGuffey’s Readers, whose passing he notes with regret. He has nothing additional to say about the public schools, which do play a part in the shaping of children and must have had some role in creating the great divide he describes. But if Belmont should resist the plague, as he would name it, of nonjudgmentalism, in which almost any kind of behavior is excused and understood, should not the public school also resist the prevailing nonjudgmentalism and try to restore some of the moral authoritativeness practiced in the past and that we see today in many successful charter schools? Would that help change the behavior of Fishtown and bring it closer to the norms of 1960?

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

The gentrification of many of our big cities is providing a once-in-a-generation opportunity to create a large number of racially and socioeconomically integrated schools. “White flight in reverse” means that, for the first time in 40 years, school integration is logistically feasible in urban America, and without the mandatory busing that derailed earlier efforts. But to capitalize on this opportunity, urban schools that currently serve a predominantly poor and minority population must find a way to attract and retain the gentrifiers—mostly white, upper-middle-class, highly educated parents. That’s easier said than done, because the schools these newcomers find in their gentrifying neighborhoods often embrace practices that they find off-putting and difficult to accept.

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

Culture Clash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different Sensibilities

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

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

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

Principals Matter

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

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

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

Power and Protocol

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

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

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

Navigating Diversity

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

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

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

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

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

In February 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama visited Capital City Public Charter School in northwest Washington, D.C. They were greeted at the front entrance of the school by 5th-grade students and given a brief tour before taking a seat in the library to read The Moon Over Star to a group of 2nd graders.

This was the First Family’s first official public-school visit, just a few short weeks after President Obama was sworn into office. Obama’s enthusiastic support for charter schools was one of the things that set him apart from his Democratic predecessors and marked him as a “pro-reform” Democrat.

Even accounting for the usual political exaggeration, the president seemed pretty impressed by what he saw: “The outstanding work that’s being done here…is an example of how all our schools should be,” said Obama. “I’ve asked Arne Duncan to…make sure that we’re reforming our schools, that we’re rewarding innovation the way that it’s taking place here.”

Little noticed at the time, the school the White House chose for the visit wasn’t exactly a typical urban charter. Based on the Expeditionary Learning model and begun by a group of parents in 2000, Capital City is located in an ethnically and socioeconomically diverse part of northwest Washington, rather than in a high-poverty area. It recruits a mix of black, Latino, and white families, in contrast to the homogeneous groups of low-income minority students urban charters generally serve. Last but not least, its teaching approach is designed to work with both advanced and struggling students, and intended to foster abstract skills like creativity, depth of thought, and problem solving, rather than focusing on remediation and basic reading and math skills.

Fueled by a confluence of interests among urban parents, progressive educators, and school reform refugees, a small but growing handful of diverse charter schools like Capital City has sprouted up in big cities over the past decade: others are High Tech High in San Diego; E. L. Haynes in Washington, D.C.; Larchmont Charter School and Citizens of the World Prep in Los Angeles; Summit in Northern California; the five-school Denver School of Science and Technology (DSST) network; Community Roots, Brooklyn Prospect Charter School, and Upper West Success Academy in New York City; and Bricolage Academy, planned for New Orleans (see sidebar, page 33).

These schools attract children of city workers, project residents, New York Times reporters, and government officials, and simultaneously attempt to address the weaknesses of “no-excuses” charter schools, progressive education, and school segregation: “Usually in the places that are all about accountability it doesn’t feel like there is a ton of learning going on as the primary outcome,” says Josh Densen, a former KIPP teacher who is set to open Bricolage Academy next year. “In schools where it’s all about learning, discovery, and projects and teamwork, there seems to me to be an absence of or a reluctance to have any kind of accountability.”

While it is too soon to say whether they are effective over time or at scale, these diverse charter schools are revealing themselves to be popular, controversial, and—not surprisingly—complicated to operate.

Diversity at Community Roots

On a sunny fall afternoon, a group of 5th graders at Community Roots in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, looked over a short passage about the Montgomery bus boycott, practicing how to find extra information in captions and headlines. Some were struggling to get started or needed a review of the basic concepts from one of the two teachers in the room. Others zoomed ahead and were encouraged to think about more advanced ideas like inference and themes. Some had on fashionable ankle boots, while others wore threadbare T-shirts. Their names ranged from Gabe to Ilios to Amira to Bella.

Created in 2005, Community Roots is housed on the third floor of P.S. 67, Dorsey Elementary School, which is surrounded by a church, a post office, and the sprawling Ingersoll Gardens housing project. Its students come from some of the highest and lowest income brackets in the city, range from gifted to severely behind, and are largely taught together in the same classrooms. The student body is 38 percent black, 31 percent white, 12 percent multiracial, and 6 percent Hispanic. Forty-four percent qualify for free lunch. Almost 20 percent receive special education services.

Teachers use many of the same methods and materials you’d see in traditional charters: math manipulatives, relentlessly positive reinforcement, claps and countdowns to help with transitions from one activity to another, walls covered with concepts and procedures. But there are some obvious differences: two teachers are assigned full-time to each classroom, one of them certified in special education, to make sure every student is getting the help (or the push) he or she needs. The school offers physical therapy along with a social studies–oriented curriculum. While the atmosphere is informal, the teachers are deadly serious about helping every kid, including the numerous special-education students, learn.

“We try to provide access to the content of the lesson on as many different levels as possible,” says David Moisl, a 2nd-grade teacher. “On an average day, I think we’re getting to all the kids.” Reaching everyone, and knitting parents and students into a community, doesn’t end at the classroom door. Community Roots schedules play dates—for parents. Four times a year, mixed-income groups of parents in each class get together, either at the park or in one of their homes or on some sort of field trip.

“It doesn’t mean they’re all going to be best friends,” says one parent who helps promote the get-togethers. “There’s this acceptance the more they get to know each other, real understanding that we’re all different, learn differently, play differently, and that’s OK.”

Engaging the Middle Class

Looking back, the reasons that schools like Capital City and Community Roots are being created and attracting flocks of parents seem obvious: a mix of idealism, desperation, and pent-up frustration with the pace of improvement and the focus on a fixed set of interventions.

By the time the First Family visited Capital City in early 2009, No Child Left Behind was already seven years old, long overdue for an update. A series of highly touted reform ideas—small schools, alternative certification, “no-excuses” charter schools, higher academic standards, and better accountability for teachers and administrators—had helped but not yet transformed the nation’s $600 billion, 50-million-student elementary and secondary education system.

“It’s about time that we get a new surge of energy in the ed reform movement,” says Todd Sutler, who until recently taught at Community Roots. “There needs to be something fresh.”

In the meantime, some traditional educators who have long derided charter schools started to come around to the notion that charter autonomy was an extremely useful thing. “I think that this [charter] model is the only model that can be principled and serve the needs of kids,” says Tony Monfiletto, a progressive educator who cofounded the Amy Biehl Charter High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico. “You have to have the autonomy.”

In urban areas especially, the supply of good schools hasn’t nearly kept pace with the demand, and the old standbys for middle-class parents (moving or paying private school tuition) have become less viable options in a “down” economy going through a housing crisis. Magnet schools, once a core strategy for retaining middle-class parents and promoting school integration, have dwindled to just 2,000, according to the National Association of Magnet Schools. Just 80 districts and charter school networks are actively promoting integration, according to a 2011 report from the Century Foundation’s Richard Kahlenberg.

Here and there, a few school-reform advocates began to realize that diverse charter schools might be a way to engage middle-class parents, and that focusing exclusively on high-poverty minority communities was an understandable but flawed strategy.

“Is this when things start to really change?” asks a Brooklyn mother of three who has been working in education for nearly 20 years, “When upper-middle-class charter parents start bragging to their friends?”

No Easy Feat

A newly created charter school with a focus on diversity has the flexibility and responsiveness that comes with charter status. Its parents know what they are getting into from the start. There’s no “gentrification gap” during which a neighborhood school is losing its poverty funding but doesn’t yet have enrichment grants (and, typically, parent contributions) to make up the difference (see “The Elephant in the Classroom,” features, Winter 2013). They’re schools that educators can imagine spending an entire career at, or even sending their own kids to. And, at the best moments, being in a public school classroom of kids with diverse backgrounds and skill levels is delightful and unnerving, a busy kitchen humming during the dinner rush, a blur of individual activities brought together only momentarily before splitting apart again.

But creating a successful, truly diverse charter school is enormously difficult to pull off, a daily and weekly high-wire act that only the most determined educators are confident or foolish enough to try. The wide range of abilities and backgrounds creates obvious challenges: “the kids who know about therapods, and the kids who can’t pronounce the word ‘dinosaur,’” said an Upper West science teacher. Careful design, highly skilled teaching, and a degree of compromise among teachers and parents who come from different cultures and professional backgrounds are all required.

Indeed, the list of strategies applied is a long one: frequent online assessments to diagnose and direct students to the appropriate activity; open-ended assignments allowing kids of varying skill levels to engage at their own levels; coteaching in which two teachers share responsibility for a group of kids; and looping, in which teachers follow kids from one grade to the next.

“Everybody likes diversity until it comes to the ramifications,” says Daniel Rubenstein, cofounder of Brooklyn Prospect, a middle and high school now in its fourth year.

In one Brooklyn Prospect classroom, the English teacher makes as many of her lessons open-ended as she can and coteaches half of her classes with a special education teacher. She also offers additional uncredited projects called “Seekers” so that kids who want to can go faster without disadvantaging kids still working on basic skills. The kids who volunteer to do more aren’t always the kids with the stronger academic backgrounds. “That is the really cool thing,” says the teacher. “You think you know who’s going to ask to do the extra assignment, but then you’re wrong.”

At their worst, classes at diverse charters feel choppy and fragmented, like a PowerPoint presentation with too many slides or a TV show with too many unrelated strands of plot, leaving advanced kids bored and struggling kids feeling anxious. Teachers are trying to reach too many kids too quickly. Classrooms may exhibit the features of progressive education—the projects, the integrated curriculum—but lack the rigor and attention required to keep fast kids humming and slow kids engaged.

“You can’t just put a heterogeneous population together and think it’s going to work,” notes Summit founder Diane Tavenner, speaking generally. “That’s why most schools are tracked.”

Maintaining the Mix

When TFA Los Angeles executive director Brian Johnson first walked into Larchmont Charter School, he realized that he’d never seen a school like it before.

Begun in 2005 and expanded in 2008, Larchmont was created by Hollywood and Hancock Park parents who lamented the lack of quality and diversity at local elementary schools and wanted an alternative to private education. The educational philosophy is constructivist, which means lots of small-group instruction, projects, and integration of subjects traditionally taught in isolation. Classes are small. There is a teaching garden. There are lots of readers’ and writers’ workshops.

Accustomed to working almost exclusively in high-poverty schools in far-off neighborhoods, Johnson was attracted by the idea of doing something in his own community and getting involved in an approach that he described as “strategically important to the reform movement.”

When Johnson left TFA and joined Larchmont as its executive director, however, the school was facing a challenge experienced by many diverse charter schools: the annual admissions lottery was being flooded by white, relatively well-off parents, creating the danger that the school would lose the socioeconomic and racial diversity it was created to promote.

The strategies that diverse charters adopt to promote and protect diversity vary. Some, like Larchmont, implement lottery priority systems designed to give at-risk students a better chance of acceptance even if they apply in smaller numbers. Larchmont’s at-risk priority increased the percentage of poor kids from a low of 29 percent up to 42 percent. Schools now using various kinds of weighted priority systems include Brooklyn Prospect, DSST, Upper West Success, and Community Roots.

Other schools, including Capital City and Summit Prep, maintain diversity through aggressive recruitment efforts: school visits, knocking on doors, distributing flyers. The 2009 Obama visit to Capital City led to a spike in applications (1,500 for 100 spots in 2011), but still there was no weighted lottery. Even after the surge of interest following its 2010 Waiting for Superman appearance, Summit Prep continues to operate without lottery priorities.

There are lots of reasons to avoid weighted lotteries, which have to comport with underlying city and state requirements (and stand up to a potential legal challenge). Adopting a weighted lottery or priority system also means giving up a chance at federal charter-school start-up funding, which is limited to schools with a single lottery. Most immediately, weighted lotteries and priorities create the possibility for mistrust.

“There are plenty of people who already doubt what we’re doing,” says Summit founder Diane Tavenner. “We don’t want to give them any more reasons to be confused.”

Critical Backlash

In September 2011, Success Academy opened its newest location inside an Upper West Side Manhattan high-school building, marking the first attempt by an established charter network to try its hand at the diverse model. Dubbed “Upper West,” the school’s students wear orange-and-blue uniforms complete with jumpers and clip-on ties, just like at the other locations. There is absolutely no talking in the hall. But there’s also chess, time to play with wooden blocks, outside recess, and daily science class. The model is, according to Success Academy officials, “Parochial on the outside, progressive on the inside.”

In one 1st-grade classroom, red-haired Maddie sat next to Mohawked Taquan. Scraggly-haired Alex read on the carpet while little Mariella filled out her reading log. The grown-ups who come to pick up the children at the end of the day include parents, older siblings, and nannies.

Success Academy plans to operate 40 schools in total, and its expansion into middle-class neighborhoods—the Upper West Side last year, Brooklyn this year—has pushed concerns into overdrive. Charter schools have long been accused of perpetuating racial isolation, relying on uncertified teachers, and not serving their fair share of special education and English language learners. Now the concerns center around white, middle-class kids and the schools they are leaving to attend charters.

”Why not use that same money to try to turn some of Brooklyn’s less-popular elementary schools into institutions that…attract parents from across the socioeconomic spectrum?” wrote a Brooklyn parent opposed to Success Academy’s expansion.

This argument resonates with many middle-class parents, who clutch to their hope to win admission to a “good” district school, no matter how unlikely that may be. Many also have political objections to nonunion charters. They often lack personal familiarity with charter schools, and they’re unused to hearing that their neighborhood schools aren’t succeeding.

“Middle-class communities don’t want to be told that the options they have are not good enough,” notes Success Academy’s Jenny Sedlis. “There’s an unwillingness to accept the fact that their schools are just not excellent.”

These concerns can increasingly be seen in the mainstream media. Recent accounts have tended to emphasize the downsides of diverse charter schools, and the controversy. Bloomberg News profiled a charter school in affluent Los Altos, California, accused of failing to serve its fair share of bilingual and special education students. The LA Weekly revealed a short-lived initiative to give wealthy parents spots at Larchmont by rotating them through the board (whose members get a priority for admission).

Some critics worry that schools that appeal to middle-class parents can’t effectively serve kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. Only a few diverse charter schools, like Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley Prep, have been able to attract middle-class families without using progressive elements, either superficially to help promote diversity or structurally as part of the core pedagogical vision. Research has generally shown that racially and socioeconomically diverse schools can help low-income, low-skill students improve their academics. But a 2010 U.S. Department of Education charter-school study found that suburban charters, presumably with progressive elements, performed less well than comparable district schools.

What’s Next?

Brooklyn’s Community Roots has been approved to expand into middle school this fall and considers its new lottery priority a success: roughly 600 families applied for a kindergarten class of 50. Los Angeles–based Citizens of the World has been approved to open a school in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, along with two Brooklyn Success Academy schools. Brooklyn Prospect is moving to a new, permanent home and enrolling its first class of 9th graders.

The Obama administration has issued new priorities for its charter-school grant program, among them support for schools that “promote diversity in their student bodies, including racial and ethnic diversity, or avoid racial isolation.”

Education philanthropies have finally started to take diverse charters seriously, too. Among the first to receive funding was DSST, whose head, Bill Kurtz, pushed for several years to be funded and viewed like any other successful charter-management organization. According to Kurtz, funders including Walton, Charter School Growth Fund, and NewSchools Venture Fund now support diverse charters at some level.

“What is the [charter] movement going to do for the 98 percent of American kids who aren’t going to our schools?” asks Kurtz, who previously headed a traditional charter in Newark, New Jersey. “People who come to DSST are often asking, ‘What’s next?’”

Alexander Russo is a freelance education writer and blogger who lives in New York City. An expanded version of this article will appear in his next book, School of Politics.

What do a successful teacher and a wealthy grocery-store owner have in common? This sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but the answer is simple. Both are familiar, even if they don’t know it, with “technical successes” and “technical failures.” Aiming to maximize his sales, our grocer puts staples such as milk, eggs, and bread at the back of the store, as his customers may pick up other items while looking for the staples. Placing the staples at the back of the store is a “technical success,” while placing them at the front constitutes a “technical failure.” In the classroom, a technical success arises when a teacher prepares her students to succeed, and a technical failure exists when she sets them up to fail.

Students need a learning environment that encourages success, but how can a teacher create such a place? In thinking about this question, I explored how the physical layout of my classroom, our academic schedule, and my behavior in class affected my students’ ability to succeed. I also investigated how teachers around me set their students up for success or failure.

Just as a store owner must lay out his store for maximum sales, a teacher must set up her classroom as an effective learning environment. The structure may vary with the teacher’s style of teaching and her students’ needs. A teacher who typically introduces a lesson and then instructs the students to work individually might arrange desks in a “U” shape. The teacher can present a topic with minimal distractions and easily monitor students while they work independently. Students with diverse academic abilities might warrant “clustered” or “grouped” seating instead. Seating students in heterogeneous groups maximizes the learning environment: weaker students see how stronger students learn and approach problems, while stronger students gain a deeper understanding of the subject by teaching it to others, creating a “technical success.”

It is important to think not only about where students’ desks are located, but also about what’s on top of them. Does one student always color on his desk? Maybe he focuses better while doodling. I can help him out by covering his desk with oversized paper and replacing it when necessary. Who knows, maybe he will grow up to be a famous illustrator.

Classroom practices should provide students with the path of least resistance to academic success. Facilitating students’ cooperation, independence, and ability to focus is the key. Consider common technical failures in the classroom, such as asking students to “think hard” right after lunch or recess or to listen quietly when they have a lot of energy. A teacher faced with these challenges can allow students to read independently or write in a journal after lunch or play an educational game that the students can get excited about.

A teacher concerned about students who finish assignments early can create a “must do/may do” chart. This chart can be student-specific or for the whole class, but the idea is that students complete “must do” activities before beginning those in the “may do” column. Students take responsibility for their own learning and time management. Most important, it prevents the technical failure of students who complete their work early and sit idle or, worse, distract students who are still working.

Imagine that we are reviewing last night’s homework assignment and I ask, “Who has the answer to problem number two?” Several hands go up. I call on a student, who asks to go to the bathroom, effectively stopping the lesson. Or I call on one student for the answer and several others shout out, “He stole my answer!” These students may be left so frustrated that they find it difficult to focus. To avoid these technical failures, at the beginning of the year I teach my students a few basic signs in American Sign Language (ASL). If students want to go to the bathroom, they show me the sign, and I silently respond with “yes” or “no.” Likewise, students sign “me too” when they weren’t called on but want to demonstrate that they knew the answer. I acknowledge them verbally or with a thumbs-up. As a result, these students feel good. The use of ASL effectively eliminates student-initiated distractions, a clear technical success.

Rebecca Friedman teaches elementary-school and college students in Baltimore, Maryland. Chavi Abramson studies education at Thomas Edison University.

Digital learning is more than the latest addition to education reformers’ to-do lists, filed along with teacher evaluations, charter schools, tenure reform, academic standards, and all the rest. It’s fundamentally different: for it to fulfill its enormous potential will require a wholesale reshaping of the reform agenda itself, particularly in the realms of school finance and governance.

American education has the potential to be modernized and accelerated by “digital learning.” Indeed, truly boosting student achievement—as well as individualizing instruction and creating quality options for children and families among, within, and beyond schools—will depend to a considerable extent on how deftly our K–12 system can exploit this potential, in both its pure form (“full-time online instruction”) and various “blended” combinations of digital and brick-and-mortar-based instruction.

Making the most of these remarkable opportunities, however, hinges on our willingness to alter a host of ingrained practices. We dare not settle for patching a bumpy, twisty country lane. We need to build a smooth new road—and bank the curves.

There are more such obstacles than one might think, and every one of them will prove hard to overcome, because they are deeply carved into our traditional K–12 system and regarded as valuable protections or benefits by education’s innumerable factions, bureaucracies, and interest groups.

Nothing on today’s familiar reform agenda can get this job done. That is to say, mounting serious efforts to overcome the obstacles means reshaping that agenda, even redefining what we mean by “education reform.”

The barriers take three forms.

First and most familiar are self-absorbed and self-serving groups that do their utmost either to capture the potential of technology to advance their own interests or to shackle it in ways that keep it from messing with those interests.

Second, also familiar but showing up here in new ways, are issues of organizational capacity within our public-education system, a system that has enormous difficulty accommodating and assimilating change, and the more wrenching the change the greater the difficulty.

Third—and newest, most perplexing, most fundamental, and thus hardest to tackle—are the core governance and financing structures of our K–12 system itself. Though we’ve begun to recognize these as major impediments to important reforms within today’s brick-and-mortar world, they turn out to be even more constraining—and damaging—to education in the online realm.

Let us take these up in turn.

Self-centered Interest Groups

The many adult interest groups that live off our public-education system are already doing their best to co-opt digital learning for their own ends, and to ensure that nobody uses it to threaten their power, membership, or revenue base. Two such groups are especially powerful players in the politics and policies of public education.

First are local districts and their school boards, vigorously represented by the National School Boards Association (NSBA). This crowd would stifle the openness and global reach of digital learning in the name of district empowerment and local monopoly. According to NSBA’s Ann Flynn (its director of education technology), online learning “should be something that school districts can control.”

Yet leaving districts and their boards in charge of digital instruction will retard innovation, entrepreneurship, collaboration, and smart competition. It will raise costs; undermine efficiency; block rich instructional options; restrict school choice and parental influence; and strengthen the hand of other interest groups, including but not limited to already too-powerful teachers unions.

For wherever one finds school districts and boards, one finds unions equally determined to prevent digital learning from shrinking their ranks or weakening their power bases. In many places, they have secured legislation limiting the scope of digital learning or have to counter its growth. In California, for example, the state teachers union’s model contract requires that,

No employee shall be displaced because of distance learning or other educational technology. The use of distance education technology shall not be used to reduce, eliminate, or consolidate faculty positions within the district.

Elsewhere, unions have ensured that class-size limits nonsensically apply to online schools. Their imperative to maintain membership and dues trumps any interest they may have in easing and strengthening the teacher’s job with technology’s help.

Organizational Capacity

Over the past 50 years, the student-teacher ratio in America’s K–12 schools has dropped from 27:1 to 15:1. When all the nonteaching pay stubs are added, we find more than 3 million teachers and umpteen more “support staff” working in what today is America’s second-largest industry. Yet education’s bulked-up employment has barely touched overall student achievement. Instead, it has contributed to the bureaucratization and routinization of the K–12 enterprise, buttressing its rigid procedures, internal fiefdoms, and culture of compliance rather than fostering innovation, much less transformation.

Our current system is laden with input regulations like textbook mandates, certification requirements, and notches on teachers’ professional-development belts. None of these has been proven to advance student achievement (and some have actually been shown to hinder it). In the digital-learning era, these become even more dangerous tokens of “quality,” as they work to hamper innovation.

But it’s not just bloated personnel ranks and ineffective quality-control metrics that have held the system back. Reformers share in the blame, thanks to their habit of layering new policies upon old and shoving program after program into the current educational frame rather than replacing outmoded initiatives. With that layering, of course, has come the education system’s addiction to cash and its assumption that nothing can be done differently without additional resources.

In fact, it should cost taxpayers fewer dollars to educate each pupil in the online world. According to a recent analysis by the Parthenon Group, full-time virtual schooling currently costs, on average, about $3,600 less per pupil than its traditional counterpart. The potential savings associated with “blended learning” are smaller but far from negligible.

Fundamental Structural Flaws

Two nearly universal and largely taken-for-granted structural arrangements in American public education pose huge impediments to the success of digital learning. Yet this education revolution cannot occur under the customary arrangements for financing schools nor within our current governance system.

Consider, first, how we fund education: financing programs and bureaucratic structures via rigid and formulaic distribution, not paying for students or schools, much less for learning. This antiquated system stymies innovation and makes precious little sense in an era when students should be able to direct resources to the education providers of their choice.

It doesn’t have to be this way. As Paul Hill, founder of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, has pointed out, we can leapfrog our system of school finance to truly fund education, not institutions; move money as students move; and pay for unconventional forms of instruction. This model would offer parents a choice of whole-school providers while also affording them a limited amount of “pocket money” with which to purchase variegated tutoring or enrichment programs, from advanced math classes to piano lessons. Hill writes that “this would allow some public funds to flow to new and innovative programs…. Yet parents could not be led into making choices that compromised their children’s core instruction.”

Now consider our agricultural-era devotion to “local control” of public education and ask how can this possibly work well—indeed, what does it even mean?—when the delivery system itself is unbound by district, municipal, or even state borders? Who is really “in charge” when students assemble their education from multiple providers based in many locations, some likely on the other side of the planet? Digital learning, like digital communications, lives on the Internet—often “in the cloud”—and knows no natural geographic or political boundaries. Sure, it can be inhibited by totalitarian regimes that fear web sites and communications that may loosen their grip. When left to flourish in the marketplace, however, digital learning will yield innovation, competition (affecting content, quality, delivery mechanisms, and price), and eventually economic efficiencies. And those benefits will—and ought to—spread without regard to municipal boundaries.

To be sure, public officials have an obligation to exert curricular quality control, for which they in turn are accountable to voters and taxpayers, and they must safeguard minors from “virtual menaces.” But that is not the same as putting traditional districts in charge of digital learning, as our current governance arrangement presupposes. A good case could be made for national governance of online learning, but, at the very least, this is something states should take charge of. They can provide the scale necessary to support research and development, to allow for flexible programming, and to extend the reach of top-notch teachers.

Whew! Reshape the financing and governance of public education? On top of reimagining human-resource arrangements for teachers and improving quality control? Yes, it’s a tall order and a major reformulation of America’s education-reform agenda. It doesn’t erase the need for rigorous standards, tough accountability, vastly improved data systems, better teacher evaluations (and training, etc.), stronger school leaders, the right of families to choose schools, and much else that reformers have been struggling to bring about. But it says, in effect, that far more needs to be done to bring U.S. public education into the modern era.

A Cautionary Tale

Unconvinced? The charter school saga is a precedent worth recalling. In the early days, anticharter forces mangled the legislation, even as advocates agreed to compromises that they later came to regret. Thus nearly half the states cap their charter programs. Others force charters to operate under extant union contracts. Some restrict charter-authorizing powers to districts, a classic case of empowering foxes to look after chickens. Almost nowhere are charters properly funded. In many places, they also remain shackled by myriad regulations.

We’ve seen how these co-optations and compromises have weakened the realization of chartering’s potential. If this happens to digital learning, too, the loss will be still greater. For while charters (perhaps due to the constraints they’ve faced!) remain a smallish subset of “different” schools that operate alongside the traditional system, digital learning has the potential to alter the system fundamentally and irreversibly. It’s no sideshow. It isn’t even the center ring. It’s the circus tent itself.

Chester E. Finn, Jr. is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

This article is part of a forum on whether digital learning can transform education. For another take, please see “As Digital Learning Draws New Users, Transformation Will Occur,” by Michael Horn