Podcast: Peter Meyer interviews John White two days before White takes over as the new superintendent of schools in New Orleans.

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A 35-year-old former teacher, John White headed to New Orleans in late April to become superintendent of the Big Easy’s Recovery School District (RSD), quite an accomplishment for such a young man. But, with his bags barely unpacked, he found himself nominated by Governor Bobby Jindal to be interim chief of all of Louisiana’s public schools (thanks to the sudden resignation of Paul Pastorek, who had recruited White), in addition to running RSD. Newspapers claimed that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was calling members of the state’s school board, praising White as “an extraordinary leader [who is] committed to reform and is a great asset to the state.” Is your head spinning?

John White’s wasn’t. He told the press that he was flattered by Jindal’s offer, that he had come to the Bayou State to run the New Orleans schools, but if they wanted him in Baton Rouge, he’d be glad to help out. Cool. Calm. Collected.

“I’ve got more gray hair than I should at my age,” he says, smiling, during our interview in a first-floor chancellor’s conference room at New York City’s education department headquarters just a few days before he left for New Orleans. Tall, boyish, soft-spoken, White is cordial, even gracious, but never flip. When I ask if we should wave to the mayor, whose “bull pen” office windows were visible from where we sat, he responds that such proximity to the mayor is “a beacon for accountability and the priority that this mayor has placed on public education.” Accountability is a word White frequently used during our talk.

Where did this rising education star come from? The short answer is Teach For America (TFA). He is one of a growing list of wunderkind school leaders produced by this moon shot idea of Princeton University student Wendy Kopp (20 years ago) to put smart college grads in the nation’s worst schools. White, son of a lawyer and “private wealth advisor” father and television journalist mother, grew up in Washington, D.C., and attended the prestigious private St. Albans School, where he learned, he says, “that education starts with relationships between adults and students and among students, who then reinforce the high expectations that are held for them.” But he never thought of being a teacher. In fact, there was a time in high school when he wanted to be a naval officer. As he looks back, he says he was attracted to the military’s “faith to mission, the commitment to excellence because of the deep understanding that they cannot fail.”

Instead of the military (his younger brother and only sibling did become a naval officer), White entered the University of Virginia (UVA), where he majored in English and was aiming at journalism for a career until he discovered an interview of William Faulkner, who had taught at the school, describing Ike McCaslin, protagonist in Go Down, Moses. “There are three kinds of people in the world,” he recalls Faulkner saying. “And I’m paraphrasing. There are people who don’t know there’s a problem. There are people who know there’s a problem and choose not to do anything about it. And then there are people who know there’s a problem and say, I’m going to do something about it. And the power of reading that one night on my couch in my apartment in Charlottesville, Virginia, knowing that it had been spoken only half a mile from where I was living, and amidst this incredibly complex book and this incredibly complex writer and man, but the simplicity of that call literally was a life-changing moment for me. The next day I applied to Teach For America.” And he never looked back.

Into the Crucible

TFA sent White to Jersey City, to 3,000-student Dickinson High School, overlooking the Holland Tunnel, where he taught English for three years and learned that “there are a lot of challenges and we shouldn’t kid ourselves. The school itself was not organized to serve every child. It’s a huge school. Kids come and go. They oftentimes come and go without ever having formed a strong relationship with the adults who are supposed to serve them.” White met “heroic educators who were saving lives,” and he saw quickly “what an impact one teacher could make, and I thought, what an extraordinary thing it would be if we started creating groups of teachers and even schools and school systems that were doing this kind of thing.”

He gives TFA credit for “keeping me in the mission…. We all know each other,” he says of fellow alums like Michelle Rhee (Washington, D.C.’s superintendent at age 38) and Cami Anderson (who took over Newark’s troubled district at age 39), and “those are people who have fueled my commitment just as I hope that I fuel theirs.” After his teaching stint, White went to work for TFA in its New Jersey region coaching and mentoring the new recruits. He was then sent to Chicago to do the same thing. While there he met Arne Duncan. “I count Arne as a friend and advisor and mentor,” he says. “And he once told me, ‘If you want to lead and you want to lead change, just go find a place where it’s happening. Go find a school system where it’s happening and go do it.’”

From the Big Apple to the Big Easy

That was 2006 and the happening place was New York City, where Joel Klein was four years into remaking the nation’s largest public school system. Klein immediately offered White a job on his portfolio planning team, which meant leading the process of closing bad schools and creating new ones, one of the bull’s-eye issues in the massive system’s turnaround efforts. “I was part of the team that was catalyzing change at a very rapid pace,” says White.

Several years later, when Pastorek called and invited him to audition to take over for veteran reform educator Paul Vallas, who was bound for the private sector, White was running the district’s Division of Talent, Labor and Innovation. One of the most important parts of the job was overseeing the Innovation Zone, a network of nearly 100 New York City schools focused on using technology as a catalyst to personalize education. “We wanted to organize schools around the needs of individual kids,” he says. “And I want to emphasize that last point. I think that it’s a question of providing an individual education for each child, which doesn’t mean education isolation, but one where literally every child is having a program daily that is tailored to his or her specific needs.”

As a UVA graduate, White is keenly aware of the groundbreaking work of E. D. Hirsch, who taught at UVA for several decades and is the intellectual godfather of the modern standards-based curricular movement. “Part of the challenge,” says White, “has been a standards-based education that has for too long meant that we don’t differentiate, whereas a child-centered education has meant that we, for too long, don’t hold children to standards.” White believes that “we can marry those two things…. You don’t water down the common core standards; in fact, you adopt them and you implement them.” He knows that technology is no silver bullet, but White believes it will help bring school systems “to where student progress is not being determined by whether he or she sits in a seat for 54 hours or 108 hours, but is instead seeing what each child is capable of achieving in the common core.”

His three years in the classroom at Dickinson High gives White a firm grasp of these fundamental teaching challenges, including trying to teach the same content to a room of children where the proficiency spread may be two to three grade levels. “It is, of course, every teacher’s goal to bring every child to a place of proficiency. On the other hand, we also need to make sure that we’re not holding children back from achieving something beyond proficiency…. Similarly, if a child is just really behind, limiting their education in that subject to 50 minutes makes absolutely no sense.” Part of the problem with the current system, says White, is that “the schedule and the curriculum are organized around a time-based, space-based model.” Technology will help teachers meet children at their level and “move them to mastery.”

White knows that the challenges of running New Orleans’s 70 Recovery District schools are great, despite Paul Vallas’s amazing progress in rebuilding a system that most educators agreed was among the worst in the nation before Hurricane Katrina destroyed more than 80 percent of its 127 schoolhouses (see “New Schools in New Orleans,” features, Spring 2011).

“I think there are three critical challenges in New Orleans,” says White. “One, a system that has moved from tremendous problems to providing an adequate education for many kids still needs to provide a great education for all kids. Two, serving all children, including our hardest-to-serve kids: kids who are over-age, kids with severe learning needs, kids who have been out of school, kids who are moving back. Three, doing it in a way that understands the needs of family, of community, and of parents—that’s critical to being successful.”

A Leader and a Partner

New York—if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere—is certainly a great training ground for meeting and overcoming challenges. And White has the energy and intelligence and grit of a reformer. But as he sees it, the keys to success in the New Orleans RSD, where 37 of the 70 schools are charters, will be “communicating with parents” his “deep belief that parents need to be a partner in education,” that “they need to understand the options for their kids, and the need to make the best choice possible for their kids, knowing what the likely outcome is going to be.”

His responsibility “as a leader,” he says, is “to share information about the opportunities and the constraints that you’re facing. You need to be honest with people about what you can do and what you can’t do. You need to give them a rationale for why you’re doing what you are doing. You need to hear their opinion of the proposal. You need to consider it and you need to be honest with them when you come to a decision…. It’s when we either make promises that we can’t or don’t intend to keep, when we hide from people, when we don’t face the brutal facts, that’s when you know you’re not qualified to be a leader.”

And the one brutal fact that drives this young education reformer is that “without a great education system for all our children, we simply will not be the nation that we imagine ourselves to be.”

Peter Meyer, former news editor at Life magazine, is currently senior policy fellow with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and contributing editor at Education Next.

Kansas’s judicially grounded regime of equitable school spending recently led to a most peculiar federal case, Petrella v. Brownback, in which parents from a wealthy suburban Kansas City school district, Shawnee Mission, sued for permission to raise their property taxes so that they could spend more on education. The case is striking both for its facts and for the plaintiffs’ far-reaching claims.

Like some other states, such as Vermont and Texas, Kansas has responded to school finance litigation by limiting how much school districts can spend. Following a 1991 trial court decision in Mock v. State invalidating an existing plan, the legislature under a state judge’s supervision enacted a sweeping reform that met his standards for equity yet made a concession to wealthier districts with provision for a local-option budget. The state would provide a base level of funding per pupil but allowed districts to levy additional local taxes up to a cap of 25 percent of their base. By 2010 the cap had risen to 30 percent or, with approval of district voters, 31 percent.

In the wake of the recent economic downturn, the state reduced its base payment to all districts. Noting Shawnee Mission’s nearly $20 million in budget cuts over two years and plans for school closures, the plaintiffs asked the court to enjoin the local cap.

The plaintiffs asserted that the cap violates several constitutional guarantees. Citing Supreme Court decisions in Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), which held that the liberty guaranteed in the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause includes a right of parents to control the education of their children, the plaintiffs charged that the local cap infringes on that right. As well, by forbidding additional taxes it limits their right to use their property as they wish. Still more inventive, they invoked the First Amendment right of assembly, saying that the cap prevents voters from expressing their collective wishes at the ballot box. These violations together, they contended, constitute a denial of equal protection of the law.

In the 2008–09 school year, at $4,701, Shawnee Mission was 265th out of 296 districts in state funding, receiving $2,643 less per pupil than the average. At $12,174 per pupil, the district’s spending was almost $500 below the state average. That a rich district could perversely become poor is explained by the fact that the base amount provided by the state is subject to complicated weighted increases that favor sparsely populated western and urban eastern districts while disfavoring suburban eastern ones such as Shawnee Mission. The local cap prevents districts from closing the difference.

In making their novel legal claims, which they summarized with the phrase “collective political freedoms,” the plaintiffs were assisted by high-powered legal talent from Kansas City’s Shook, Hardy & Bacon, famous for cutting its teeth in defense of cigarette makers; Washington, D.C.’s boutique firm Massey & Gail; and Harvard Law School’s Laurence Tribe, who as special consultant to Massey & Gail signed the district’s brief. This talent, however, could not secure a favorable decision. In March 2011, U.S. District Court Judge John Lungstrum dismissed the case. The school district, as an entity of the state, he said, has no right to tax beyond what the state allows. Nor could the local cap be severed from the rest of the school funding statute. Striking it down would require striking down the entire school finance structure, an option Judge Lungstrum was unwilling to entertain.

The parents have said that they will appeal. But if the local cap cannot be severed, federal courts will likely remain reluctant to wade into the state’s school funding choices. Given the problems generated in Kansas and elsewhere by school finance litigation, federal judges might reasonably doubt whether courts are suitable venues for resolving such disputes. Late in 2010, 63 Kansas districts, including Kansas City, filed a class action against the state charging that it is violating the state constitution by failing to fund schools adequately. It remains to be seen whether the Kansas courts will embrace one more round of battle in a state with a long history of finance litigation and growing signs of legislative resistance, including a revived interest among the Republican majority in amending the state constitution to discourage future school-finance litigation.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs. Martha Derthick is professor emerita of government at the University of Virginia.

My son Richard has the chutzpah of Hank Greenberg, the greatest Jewish baseball player of all time. So, soon after we moved to Florida, Richard tried out for the baseball team at Tallahassee’s Leon High, even though he didn’t go to school there!

Richard was considered a home schooler at the time, but “hybrid schooler” would have been more accurate: He took classes from an online provider, a small private school, and a performing arts program.

Richard made the team, and by midseason lots of new baseball buddies were hanging around our house on weekends. Soon we discovered that Richard wasn’t the only “hybrid student” on the ball club that year. Leon’s first baseman spent his mornings taking online courses through the Florida Virtual School, the knuckleball pitcher was taking a “dual enrollment” English class through the community college, and the left-handed pro prospect had enrolled in a financial management course at a local college (in case he was drafted).

Moreover, one of Leon’s outfielders had figured out an ingenious way to get a music education few families could afford out of pocket. This kid took mostly music classes at Leon by day and then several online courses at night and during the summer. He ended up being a four-time All-State musician and getting a college offer from Juilliard.

When I first encountered all these hybrid students, I figured there must be something in the water at Leon High. But I came to realize that many of these unconventional schooling options were the by-product of reforms former governor Jeb Bush had initiated, especially the creation of the Florida Virtual School.

The rise of hybrid schooling bodes well for students whose needs, gifts, interests, and learning styles do not align with the factory school model of the 20th century, and for parents who know that no school can maximize the potential of every child every year in every way. (There is a Magic School Bus, but no magic school.)

Customized education is good for all kids and not just for academic reasons. Several years ago, Richard entered a local talent competition structured much like American Idol. Different singers would perform at big community gatherings and then people would vote for the ones they considered the best. Richard kept advancing week after week, until on the night of the finals, one of the organizers took me aside and said, “I don’t get it. You guys just moved here a year or so ago, and yet Richard seems to have a really strong base of support.”

As Richard’s proud papa, I wanted to tell this guy, “Of course, Richard’s got lots of support—he’s the best one.” But I knew what this guy was getting at, so I explained, “See that guy over there? That’s Richard’s drama teacher at Young Actors Theatre. He gets all his thespian friends to vote for Richard.” Then I said, “See that family over there? They know Richard from baseball. Those kids over there took classes with Richard at the classical Christian school. The college students way back there know Richard from Young Life youth ministry. And those kids over there are in the AP classes Richard is taking at Leon.”

The contest organizer realized that Richard’s social network was far larger than he’d expected. What I marveled at was how diverse his friendship network was. Gay. Straight. Christian. Non-Christian. Jocks. Thespians. Nerds. Cool kids. Richard’s friends reflect the diversity of his hybrid-schooling life.

Now, I’m not so naive as to think that hybrid schooling will eradicate high school cliques or classroom bullying. But customized schooling can offer kids a far richer, and more varied, social experience than they might otherwise get. And when you add these social benefits to the educational advantages of customized schooling, you can see why I’m glad that Jeb Bush and other reformers had the Hank Greenberg–like chutzpah to change the way that Florida does education.

William Mattox is a resident fellow at the James Madison Institute in Tallahassee, Florida.

An unabridged version of this paper is available here.

On August 17, 2011 Paul Peterson discussed the findings of this study in a free online webinar. An archived recording of this webinar can be found here.

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At a time of persistent unemployment, especially among the less skilled, many wonder whether our schools are adequately preparing students for the 21st-century global economy. Despite high unemployment rates, firms are experiencing shortages of educated workers, outsourcing professional-level work to workers abroad, and competing for the limited number of employment visas set aside for highly skilled immigrants. As President Barack Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union address, “We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.”

The challenge is particularly great in math, science, and engineering. According to Internet entrepreneur Vinton Cerf, “America simply is not producing enough of our own innovators, and the cause is twofold—a deteriorating K–12 education system and a national culture that does not emphasize the importance of education and the value of engineering and science.” To address the issue, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Education Coalition was formed in 2006 to “raise awareness in Congress, the Administration, and other organizations about the critical role that STEM education plays in enabling the U.S. to remain the economic and technological leader of the global marketplace.” Tales of shortages of educated talent appear regularly in the media. According to a CBS News report, 22 percent of American businesses say they are ready to hire if they can find people with the right skills. As one factory owner put it, “It’s hard to fill these jobs because they require people who are good at math, good with their hands, and willing to work on a factory floor.” According to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, of the 30 occupations projected to grow the most rapidly over the next decade, nearly half are professional jobs that require at least a college degree. On the basis of these projections, McKinsey’s Global Institute estimates that over the next few years there will be a gap of nearly 2 million workers with the necessary analytical and technical skills.

In this paper we view the proficiency of U.S. students from a global perspective. Although we provide information on performances in both reading and mathematics, our emphasis is on student proficiency in mathematics, the subject many feel to be of greatest concern.

Student Proficiency on NAEP

At one time it was left to teachers and administrators to decide exactly what level of math proficiency should be expected of students. But, increasingly, states, and the federal government itself, have established proficiency levels that students are asked to reach. A national proficiency standard was set by the board that governs the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), which is administered by the U.S. Department of Education and generally known as the nation’s report card.

In 2007, just 32 percent of 8th graders in public and private schools in the United States performed at or above the NAEP proficiency standard in mathematics, and 31 percent performed at or above that level in reading. When more than two-thirds of students fail to reach a proficiency bar, it raises serious questions. Are U.S. schools failing to teach their students adequately? Or has NAEP set its proficiency bar at a level beyond the normal reach of a student in 8th grade?

One way of tackling such questions is to take an international perspective. Are other countries able to lift a higher percentage—or even a majority—of their students to or above the NAEP proficiency bar? Another approach is to look at differences among states. What percentage of students in each state is performing at a proficient level? How does each state compare to students in other countries?

In this article, we report results from our second study of student achievement in global perspective conducted for Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance (PEPG). In our 2010 PEPG report, we compared the percentage of U.S. public and private school students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 who were performing at the advanced level in mathematics with rates of similar performance among their peers around the world (see “Teaching Math to the Talented,” features, Winter 2011). The current study continues this work by reporting proficiency rates in both mathematics and reading for the most recent cohort for which data are available, the high-school graduating Class of 2011.

Comparing U.S. Students with Peers in Other Countries

If the NAEP exams are the nation’s report card, the world’s report card is assembled by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which administers the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) to representative samples of 15-year-old students in 65 of the world’s school systems (which, to simplify the presentation, we shall refer to as countries; Hong Kong, Macao, and Shanghai are not independent nations but are nonetheless included in PISA reports). Since its launch in 2000, the PISA test has emerged as the yardstick by which countries measure changes in their performance over time and the level of their performance relative to that of other countries.

Since the United States participates in the PISA examinations, it is possible to make direct comparisons between the average performance of U.S. students and that of their peers elsewhere. But to compare the percentages of students deemed proficient in math or reading, one must ascertain the PISA equivalent of the NAEP standard of proficiency. To obtain that information, we perform a crosswalk between NAEP and PISA. The crosswalk is made possible by the fact that representative (but separate) samples of the high-school graduating Class of 2011 took the NAEP and PISA math and reading examinations. NAEP tests were taken in 2007 when the Class of 2011 was in 8th grade and PISA tested 15-year-olds in 2009, most of whom are members of the Class of 2011. Given that NAEP identified 32 percent of U.S. 8th-grade students as proficient in math, the PISA equivalent is estimated by calculating the minimum score reached by the top-performing 32 percent of U.S. students participating in the 2009 PISA test. (See methodological sidebar for further details.)

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Methodological Approach
In the United States, in 2007, the share of 8th-grade students identified as proficient on the NAEP math examination was 32.192 percent. The minimum math score on the PISA examination obtained in 2009 by the highest-performing 32.192 percent of all U.S. students was estimated to be 530.7. To cover a broad content area while ensuring that testing time does not become excessive, the tests employ matrix sampling. No student takes the entire test, and scores are aggregated across students. Results are thus estimates of performance obtained by averaging five plausible values, as PISA and NAEP administrators recommend.

Comparable numbers for the other categories are as follows:

Reading proficiency: 31.223 percent of U.S. students are proficient on the NAEP, which corresponds to 550.4 on PISA.

Advanced math: 6.998 percent of U.S. students scored at the advanced level on the NAEP, which corresponds to 623.2 on PISA.

Advanced reading: 2.767 percent of U.S. students scored at the advanced level on the NAEP, which corresponds to 678.1 on PISA.

What It Means to Be Proficient

According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which administers NAEP, the determination of proficiency in any given subject at a particular grade level “was the result of a comprehensive national process [which took into account]…what hundreds of educators, curriculum experts, policymakers, and members of the general public thought the assessment should test. After the completion of the framework, the NAEP [subject] Committee worked with measurement specialists to create the assessment questions and scoring criteria.” In other words, NAEP’s concept of proficiency is not based on any objective criterion, but reflects a consensus on what should be known by students who have reached a certain educational stage. NAEP says that 8th graders, if proficient, “understand the connections between fractions, percents, decimals, and other mathematical topics such as algebra and functions.”

PISA does not set a proficiency standard. Instead, it sets different levels of performance, ranging from one (the lowest) to six (the highest). A student who is at the proficiency level in math set by NAEP performs moderately above proficiency  level three on the PISA. (See sidebar for a statement of the 8th-grade proficiency standard and sample questions from PISA and NAEP that proficient students are expected to pass.)

Crossing the Proficiency Bar

Given that definition of math proficiency, U.S. students in the Class of 2011, with a 32 percent proficiency rate, came in 32nd among the nations that participated in PISA. Performance levels among the countries ranked 23rd to 31st are not significantly different from that of the U.S. in a statistical sense, yet 22 countries do significantly outperform the United States in the share of students reaching the proficiency level in math. Six countries plus Shanghai and Hong Kong had majorities of students performing at least at the proficiency level, while the United States had less than one-third. For example, 58 percent of Korean students and 56 percent of Finnish students performed at or above a proficient level. Other countries in which a majority—or near majority—of students performed at or above the proficiency level included Switzerland, Japan, Canada, and the Netherlands. Many other nations also had math proficiency rates well above that of the United States, including Germany (45 percent), Australia (44 percent), and France (39 percent). Figure 1 presents a detailed listing of the scores of all participating countries as well as the performance of the individual states within the United States.

Shanghai topped the list with a 75 percent math proficiency rate, well over twice the 32 percent rate of the United States. However, Shanghai students are from a prosperous metropolitan area within China, so their performance is more appropriately compared to Massachusetts and Minnesota, which are similarly favored and are the top performers among the U.S. states. When this comparison is made, Shanghai still performs at a distinctly higher level. Only a little more than half (51 percent) of Massachusetts students are proficient in math, while Minnesota, the runner-up state, has a math proficiency rate of just 43 percent.

Only four additional states—Vermont, North Dakota, New Jersey, and Kansas—have a math proficiency rate above 40 percent. Some of the country’s largest and richest states score below the average for the United States as a whole, including New York (30 percent), Missouri (30 percent), Michigan (29 percent), Florida (27 percent), and California (24 percent).

Proficiency in Reading

According to NAEP, students proficient in reading “should be able to make and support inferences about a text, connect parts of a text, and analyze text features.” According to PISA, students at level four, a level of performance set very close to the NAEP proficiency level, should be “capable of difficult reading tasks, such as locating embedded information, construing meaning from nuances of languages critically evaluating a text.” (See sidebar for more specific definitions and sample questions.)

The U.S. proficiency rate in reading, at 31 percent, compares reasonably well to those of most European countries other than Finland. It takes 17th place among the nations of the world, and only the top 10 countries on PISA outperform the United States by a statistically significant amount. In Korea, 47 percent of the students are proficient in reading. Other countries that outrank the United States include Finland (46 percent), Singapore,  New Zealand, and Japan (42 percent), Canada (41 percent), Australia (38 percent), and Belgium (37 percent).

Within the United States, Massachusetts is again the leader, with 43 percent of 8th-grade students performing at the NAEP proficiency level in reading. Shanghai students perform at a higher level, however, with 56 percent of its young people proficient in reading. Within the United States, Vermont is a close second to its neighbor to the south, with 42 percent proficiency. New Jersey and Montana come next, both with 39 percent of the students identified as proficient in reading. The District of Columbia, the nation’s worst, are at the level achieved in Turkey and Bulgaria, while the one-eighth of our students living in California are similar to those in Slovakia and Spain. (See Figure 2 for the international ranking of all states.)

Ethnic Groups

The percentage proficient in the United States varies considerably among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. While 42 percent of white students were identified as proficient in math, only 11 percent of African American students, 15 percent of Hispanic students, and 16 percent of Native Americans were so identified. Fifty percent of students with an ethnic background from Asia and the Pacific Islands, however, were proficient in math, placing them at a level comparable to students in Belgium, Canada, and Japan.

In reading, 40 percent of white students and 41 percent of those from Asia and the Pacific Islands were identified as proficient. Only 13 percent of African American students, 5 percent of Hispanic students, and 18 percent of Native American students were so identified.

Given the disparate performances among students from various cultural backgrounds, it may be worth inquiring as to whether differences between the United States and other countries are due to the presence of a substantial minority population within the United States. To examine that question, we compare U.S. white students to all students in other countries. We do this not because we think this is the right comparison, but simply to consider the oft-expressed claim that education problems in the United States are confined to certain segments within the minority community.

While the 42 percent math efficiency rate for U.S. white students is considerably higher than that of African American and Hispanic students, they are still surpassed by all students in 16 other countries. White students in the United States trail well behind all students in Korea, Japan, Finland, Germany, Belgium, and Canada.

White students in Massachusetts outperform their peers in other states; 58 percent are at or above the math proficiency level. Maryland, New Jersey, and Texas are the other states in which a majority of white students is proficient in math. Given recent school-related political conflicts in Wisconsin, it is of interest that only 42 percent of that state’s white students are proficient in math, a rate no better than the nation as a whole.  (Results for all states are presented in the unabridged version of the paper.)

In reading, the picture looks better. As we mentioned above, only 40 percent of white students are proficient, but that proficiency rate would place the United States at 9th in the world. Its proficiency rate does not differ significantly (in a statistical sense) from that for all students in Canada, Japan, and New Zealand, but white students trail in reading by a significant margin all students in Shanghai, Korea, Finland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. In no state is a majority of white students proficient, although Massachusetts comes close with a 49 percent rate. The four states with the next highest levels of reading proficiency among white students are New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, and Colorado.

Are the Proficiency Standards the Same for Math as for Reading?

Has NAEP set a lower proficiency standard in math than in reading? If so, is the math standard too low or the reading bar too high?

At first glance it would seem that the standard is set at pretty much the same level. After all, 32 percent of U.S. students are deemed proficient in math and 31 percent are deemed proficient in reading.

But that coincidence is quite misleading. When compared to peers abroad, the U.S. Class of 2011 performed respectably in reading, trailing only 10 other nations by a statistically significant amount. Admittedly, the U.S. trails Korea by 16 percentage points, but it’s only 10 percentage points behind Canada. Meanwhile, U.S. performance in math significantly trails that of 22 countries. Korean performance is 26 percentage points higher than that of the United States, while Canadian performance is 18 percentage points higher. Judged by international standards, U.S. 8th graders are clearly doing worse in math than in reading, despite the fact that NAEP reports similar percentages proficient in the two subjects.

A direct comparison of NAEP’s proficiency standard with PISA’s proficiency levels three and four also indicates that a lower NAEP bar has been set in math than in reading. To meet NAEP’s standards currently, one needs to perform near the fourth level on PISA’s reading exam, but only modestly above the third level on its math exam.

Clearly, the experts set an 8th-grade math proficiency standard at a level lower than the one set in reading. Perhaps this is an indication that American society as a whole, including the experts who design NAEP standards, set lower expectations for students in math than in reading. If so, it is a sign that low performance in mathematics within the United States may be deeply rooted in the nation’s culture. Those who are setting the common core standards under discussion might well take note of this.

Of course, it could be argued that the math proficiency standard is correct but the reading standard has been set too high. In no country in the world does a majority of the students reach the NAEP proficiency bar set in 8th-grade reading.

What Does It Mean?

Many have concluded that the productivity of the U.S. economy could be greatly enhanced if a higher percentage of U.S. students were proficient in mathematics. As Michael Brown, Nobel Prize winner in medicine, has declared, “If America is to maintain our high standard of living, we must continue to innovate…. Math and science are the engines of innovation. With these engines we can lead the world.”

But others have argued that the overall past success of the U.S. economy suggests that high-school math performance is not that critical for sustained growth in economic productivity. After all, U.S. students trailed their peers in the very first international survey undertaken nearly 50 years ago. That is the wrong message to take away however. Other factors contributed to the relatively high rate of growth in economic productivity during the last half of the 20th century, including the openness of the country’s markets, respect for property rights, low levels of political corruption, and limited intrusion of government into the operations of the marketplace. The United States, moreover, has always benefited from the in-migration of talent from abroad.

Furthermore, the United States has historically had far higher levels of educational attainment than other countries, with many more students graduating from high school, continuing on to college, and earning an advanced degree. It appears that in the past the country made up for low quality in elementary and high school by educating students for longer periods of time.

As we proceed into the 21st century, none of these factors remains as favorable to the United States. While other countries are lifting restrictions on market operations, the opposite has been occurring within the United States. The U.S. has also placed sharp limits on the numbers of talented workers that can be legally admitted into the country. Our higher education system, though still perceived to be the best in the world, is recruiting an ever-increasing proportion of its faculty and students from outside the country. Meanwhile, educational attainment rates among U.S. citizens now trail the industrial-world average.

Even if some of these trends can be reversed, that hardly gainsays the desirability of enhancing the mathematical skills of the U.S. student population, especially at a time when the nation’s growth in productivity is badly trailing growth rates in China, India, Brazil, and many smaller Asian countries. Eric Hanushek and Ludger Woessmann have shown elsewhere that student performance on international tests such as those we consider here is closely related to long-term economic growth (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008). Assuming past economic patterns continue, the country could enjoy a remarkable increment in its annual GDP growth per capita by enhancing the math proficiency of U.S. students. Increasing the percentage of proficient students to the levels attained in Canada and Korea would increase the annual U.S. growth rate by 0.9 percentage points and 1.3 percentage points, respectively. Since current average annual growth rates hover between 2 and 3 percentage points, that increment would lift growth rates by between 30 and 50 percent.

When translated into dollar terms, these magnitudes become staggering. If one calculates these percentage increases as national income projections over an 80-year period (providing for a 20-year delay before any school reform is completed and the newly proficient students begin their working careers), a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests gains of nothing less than $75 trillion over the period. That averages out to around a trillion dollars a year. Even if you tweak these numbers a bit in one direction or another to account for various uncertainties, you reach the same bottom line: Those who say that student math performance does not matter are clearly wrong.

Given the integration of the world economy, a global perspective is needed for assessing the performance of U.S. schools, districts, and states. High-school graduates in each and every state compete for jobs with graduates from all over the world. Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering and president emeritus at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has warned, “America faces many challenges…but the enemy I fear most is complacency. We are about to be hit by the full force of global competition. If we continue to ignore the obvious task at hand while others beat us at our own game, our children and grandchildren will pay the price. We must now establish a sense of urgency.”

Paul E. Peterson is the director of Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. Ludger Woessmann is professor of economics at the University of Munich. Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. Carlos X. Lastra-Anadón is a research fellow at the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. An unabridged version of this paper is available here.

Education Next talks with Robert M. Costrell,  Michael Podgursky, and Christian E. Weller

Teacher benefits, once a sleepy question primarily of interest to actuaries, have become a flash point in the education debate. With individual states on the hook for tens or hundreds of millions in unfunded pension and health insurance obligations, state leaders are trying to determine the severity of the situation and the appropriate response. In this forum, Robert Costrell of the University of Arkansas and Mike Podgursky of the University of Missouri argue that the situation is critical, but offer an opportunity for overdue reform, while Christian Weller of the University of Massachusetts-Boston argues that measured steps will put teacher pensions on sound footing.

Education Next: How bad is the teacher pension crisis?

Christian Weller: The states’ fiscal crisis necessitates that they address pension underfunding. Underfunding means that pension assets are lower than liabilities, or those benefits promised to beneficiaries. The underfunding often seems staggering. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, for instance, estimated the gap at more than $700 billion in 2009. The aggregate underfunding reflects the money that states will need to come up with over several decades. But the CRR also estimates that an additional 2 percent of payroll would cover the expected shortfall, making the problem manageable without ruining governments.

States can take a balanced approach to managing pension underfunding that fits their particular circumstances. Thirty-nine states reduced benefits, increased contributions, or both between 2001 and 2009, according to the Pew Center on the States. The exact combination of benefit and tax changes depends on several factors, including public employees’ Social Security coverage, current benefits and contributions, and states’ human resource needs. States still want to make sure that their benefits allow them to hire the most-effective employees.

Robert Costrell and Michael Podgursky:

Indeed, educator pension systems are becoming increasingly expensive and, in many states, are seriously underfunded (see “Teacher Retirement Benefits,” research, Spring 2009). One major source of this problem is the massive increase in benefits from several decades of legislative enhancements. The key to understanding this is the concept of “pension wealth,” the current dollar value of the expected stream of future benefits, in other words, the cash value of a retiree’s annuity. Pension wealth encompasses both the annual pension payment and, importantly, the number of years it is collected.

The two solid curves in Figure 1 show pension wealth for a typical Missouri teacher in 1975 and today. Each curve is calculated under the current salary schedule for teachers in the state capital, so the growth represents only pension rule changes. The bottom curve shows that under 1975 rules a teacher entering at age 25 would have accrued just under $400,000 in pension wealth by age 55. Today, the same teacher would have accrued pension wealth of just under $900,000 by the same age. Not surprisingly, these enhancements have come at a substantial cost: Combined contributions for teachers and districts increased from 16 to 29 percent of salary over this period. However, even this is inadequate; the portion of salary required to pay for pension wealth accruals of current teachers and to pay off the unfunded liability is 31.3 percent.

EN: What steps should states take to address the crisis?

RC & MP: Given concerns about cost and long-term sustainability, a number of states have cut benefits, usually for new teachers, and others are considering doing so. However, in making these changes, policymakers should carefully consider their labor market effects. Some of the proposed cuts reproduce, and even exacerbate, undesirable features of current systems. These shortcomings stem from a fundamental flaw: the failure to tie benefits to contributions. Thus the fix must expose and eliminate the gaps between the two. Below are three recommendations for reforming teacher pensions:

1. Report the gaps between contributions and pension wealth. In many respects, current defined benefit (DB) pension plans for teachers are opaque. Teachers rarely know what their plan is worth. By contrast, holders of 403(b) or 401(k) accounts typically know exactly what their account is worth at any point in time. To provide the same transparency for teachers, plans should not only disclose the projected annual pension payment, they should also report pension wealth. For comparison, the plan should disclose the cumulative value of contributions, both the employee’s and the employer’s, along with accumulated returns. In this way, each educator could see how the value of her accrued benefits compares with the value of the contributions. In the typical teacher pension plan, these are going to be very different numbers. Early in a teacher’s career, the value of the contributions will far exceed pension wealth, whereas for more senior teachers, the reverse is true. The dotted line in Figure 1 illustrates this point. It represents the cumulative value of contributions that is fiscally equivalent to the current pension plan, showing that the cumulative value of pension contributions exceeds pension wealth until age 50. However, between ages 50 and 62 pension wealth is typically well in excess of contributions. Not surprisingly, this is when the vast majority of full-career teachers choose to retire.

2. Close the gaps between contributions and pension wealth. To make pensions more equitable and effective tools for staffing schools, we propose that retirement benefits paid to any teacher should be tied to the lifetime contributions made by or for that teacher. If $300,000 has been contributed on behalf of a teacher (including accumulated returns), then the cash value of an annuity provided to this teacher should also be $300,000.

Unfortunately, as we have seen, this fundamental principle is routinely violated in teacher plans. The gap (positive or negative) between the value of benefits and contributions is rarely considered in plan design. Instead, legislatures tinker with complex and arbitrary pension rules, such as the calculation of final average salary (how many years included, what counts as “salary”), the annual service “multiplier,” and the eligibility rules to receive the pension (“rule of 80,” “25-and-out,” etc.). Since these benefit rules are not tied to contributions, legislatures have, over the years, enhanced them, without regard to equity or efficiency, and often without adequate funding. These complex rules also encourage “gaming” by educators and districts in order to increase the gap between benefits and contributions.

Our analysis shows that current systems typically result in very large implicit transfers from young teachers working short spells to “long termers,” who work full careers in the same system (see “Golden Handcuffs,” research, Winter 2010). In our view, a teacher who works 10 years or 30 years should accrue pension wealth roughly equivalent to total pension contributions (with accumulated returns). Thus, in Figure 1, the pension wealth curve would coincide with the contributions curve depicted, for a fiscally equivalent plan, or with a lower curve if costs are to be reduced.

In addition to improving equity, tying benefits to contributions would have important workforce benefits. First, it would provide rational incentives for retirement versus continued work. Each year, an educator would accrue pension wealth in a smooth and transparent way, providing a steady addition to the annual salary she is earning. This would generate neutral incentives to work or retire based on individual preferences and effectiveness. That is not the case with current systems. In our own work, we have shown sharp “peaks and valleys” in pension wealth accrual, which distort incentives for retirement (see “Peaks, Cliffs, and Valleys,” features, Winter 2008). Some years (e.g., at 25 or 30 years of service) yield increases in pension wealth that are several times the teacher’s salary. This provides a huge incentive to stay on the job until that pension “spike,” regardless of classroom effectiveness. There is no economic rationale for favoring one year of work over another in this way. Nor should an additional year of work reduce pension wealth (net of employee contributions), as is the case in current teacher plans after a certain point, often at relatively young ages. This penalizes good teachers who wish to stay.

Tying benefits to contributions would also eliminate the massive penalties for mobility in current systems. It is well understood in the private sector that in order to recruit and retain talented young employees it is necessary to provide portable retirement benefits. This is accomplished by defined contribution (DC) or cash balance (CB) plans that vest immediately or nearly so. Current teacher plans typically have 5- and even 10-year vesting. Our research finds that even for vested educators, the loss in pension wealth for those who split a teaching career between two traditional plans is massive. In a system where benefits are tied to the cumulative value of contributions, it does not matter whether contributions have all been made in one or many jobs: Penalties for mobility are eliminated.

3. There is more than one way to do it right—and to do it wrong. We favor CB plans. These are a form of defined benefit plans that generate individual retirement accounts in bookkeeping form within the pension fund. They are funded by contributions from employer and employee just like most current teacher plans and carry an investment return guaranteed by the employer. Such plans resemble a DC plan, but without transferring investment risk or asset management to the teacher. They are transparent, offer smooth wealth accrual, and are readily turned into annuities at retirement, like traditional teacher plans. However, no one year of retirement is favored over any other. Large private employers such as IBM have converted to such plans, as have a few public employers. The TIAA guaranteed-return plans that are common in higher education are similar in operation. They have provided retirement security for generations of college professors, who often spread careers over multiple institutions.

By contrast, Illinois is a cautionary example of how not to reform teacher pensions. Illinois recently implemented a two-tiered plan, placing teachers hired after January 1, 2011, in the second tier. Tier 2 teachers make identical contributions (9.4 percent) as their Tier 1 colleagues, but take a drastic cut in pension wealth accrual over their work lives, as shown in Figure 2. The Tier 2 plan retains the same basic structure while raising the retirement age. This exacerbates the back-loading and mobility penalties, and widens the gaps between benefits and contributions. A new teacher entering the Illinois plan at age 25 will accrue no pension wealth, net of employee contributions, until age 51. This is not an attractive offer for young, mobile teachers. Indeed, the Tier 2 package is not actually a net “benefit” for entering teachers, since the teacher contributions are nearly double the cost of the average benefit they accrue; the rest is basically a tax to pay for benefits accrued but not funded, by previous cohorts of teachers.

As states grapple with the current pension crisis, a window of opportunity is open to implement more modern and strategic plans, or to make matters worse. Fundamental reforms are needed to fix these broken systems. Systems should first be required to report the gaps between benefits and contributions for all members. Then, as a matter of equity and efficiency, the plans should be restructured to close these gaps by tying benefits to contributions. This would give young teachers their fair share of the retirement benefit pie and rationalize the retirement incentives for all teachers.

CW: States can take a number of steps to alleviate the pension crisis:

1. Spread the pain of addressing underfunding, if adjustments are unavoidable. Changes to pension plans generally only apply to new hires. State constitutions and courts typically hold already-earned benefits and future not-yet-earned benefits for existing employees and beneficiaries inviolate. This protection is also occasionally applied to employee contributions. Governments cannot reduce benefits and raise contributions for current employees, even if they want to. Hence, adjustments fall disproportionately on new hires.

Private-sector pension benefits also enjoy substantial protections, but to a lesser degree than public-sector benefits. The Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974 protects from reductions benefits that have already been earned, but it does not protect future benefits not yet earned. Private-sector employers can thus lower future benefits when a crisis requires a drastic change.

States should change their public benefit protections to permit adjustments to be distributed across a broader range of employees, if such adjustments become necessary. States could guarantee already-earned benefits but not those not yet earned, as the private sector does. States could also ease older employees’ distress about potential benefit changes by allowing future benefit reductions only for employees under a certain age.

There are several advantages to this approach: Current beneficiaries would remain fully protected, already-earned benefits could not be taken away, and older employees would receive the retirement benefits that they had earned. Arbitrary divisions in younger employees’ compensation arising from whether they were hired before or after the benefit change went into effect would also be eliminated.

2. Prevent underfunding in the future. The current underfunding resulted from massive stock and real-estate market declines. Public pensions were prudently managed before the crisis, as Jeff Wenger and Christian Weller have demonstrated elsewhere.

But many governments did not contribute as much as necessary to their pension funds, making them vulnerable in a crisis. The problems of pensions are more a result of low employer contributions than poor pension management. Governments often avoided paying the full amount of what was necessary to cover benefits earned in a given year. Even in 2011, Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) considers the state’s contributions to its pension plan an optional expense. Governments, as employers, have exacerbated, and continue to exacerbate, their pension plans’ financial challenges.

One solution is to make governments pay the necessary amount to their pension plans. States could set a floor under employer pension contributions. The employer contributions could never fall to zero, commonly known as “taking a contribution holiday,” and employer contributions could never fall below the “floor” rate. DB pensions would receive money more regularly than is currently the case and thus underfunding would become less likely, particularly during a crisis.

If they set a floor for employer pension contributions, states would simultaneously have to change the rules that govern pension funding. Strong financial market performance could easily translate into overfunded pensions, which is desirable, since it means that DB pensions are prepared for a rainy day, such as the recent crisis. But overfunded plans could feed appetites for benefit improvements or contribution cuts, unless the law states that better benefits and lower contributions could only be considered if a DB pension has a minimum buffer for emergencies. Weller and Baker (2005) suggest a buffer of 20 percent of liabilities, which could be even smaller for state DB pension plans, since states cannot go bankrupt.

3. Beware of unintended consequences with alternative benefits. The wrong changes could have serious adverse effects. This would be the case if states also changed their retirement plans from DB pensions to an alternative design, particularly defined contribution (DC) savings accounts such as 403(b) plans, but also a cash balance plan. Cash balance plans look like DC plans to employees but operate like a DB pension for employers. Employers offer a guaranteed rate of return on current and past contributions to a cash balance plan and take the risk of higher contributions if the actual rate of return falls below the promised one.

Alternative benefits are less efficient than DB pensions. First, the average teacher effectiveness will likely decrease, as much higher employee turnover will easily offset any potential effectiveness gains. Second, alternative benefits come with substantial costs.

One unproven assertion about alternative benefits is that they would result in greater teacher effectiveness. Alternative retirement benefits are attractive to their proponents because these benefits would offer more compensation earlier in a teacher’s career and promote turnover later in a teacher’s career relative to a DB pension. Higher compensation earlier would attract to the profession people who could potentially become more-effective teachers, while fewer financial incentives to stay would supposedly lead ineffective teachers to leave earlier than they otherwise would.

The literature on teacher effectiveness and employee turnover associated with benefits shows that average teacher effectiveness will likely decline with alternative benefits. Higher early compensation will offer only a small incentive for promising though untested teachers to enter the profession. And the link between teacher pay and student achievement has been shown to be tentative at best. Since a benefit change would only marginally increase beginning teachers’ compensation, any initial bump in overall instructional effectiveness would be both fleeting and faint, if it exists at all. Any small initial improvement in teacher effectiveness will be quickly offset by higher turnover among more-experienced teachers. Experienced teachers who leave will be replaced by inexperienced teachers, who will need time to build their classroom skills. Small turnover increases can quickly offset small productivity gains to ultimately lower average teacher quality. The literature, in fact, shows that we can expect substantial increases in turnover with a switch to DC and cash balance plans from DB pensions so that higher turnover will eliminate any possible gains from higher initial compensation. We estimate, for instance, that the chance of worsening teacher effectiveness is about 60 percent with a cash balance plan and 70 percent with a DC plan under optimistic assumptions that favor alternative benefit designs based on the existing long-standing literature on pensions and turnover and the much smaller literature on initial compensation and teacher effectiveness.

Teacher turnover can be expected to increase with alternative benefits because employees will understand that their economic security is less well protected with a DC or cash balance plan than with a DB pension. National opinion polls routinely find very strong support for DB pensions, as individuals who do not like risk prefer to have some income guarantees for themselves and their families when they retire, become disabled, or pass away. Fewer income guarantees, or insurance, lead people to leave employment more quickly than they otherwise would. Thus, under these circumstances, teacher turnover would increase and average teacher effectiveness would fall.

Private-sector employers without DB pensions often use other tools to mirror the human resource effects, i.e., long tenure of skilled workers, of DB pensions, exactly because they are worried about turnover. Employers in the field of information technology, especially, offer, for instance, stock options and stock grants to recruit and retain skilled workers for long periods of time. States simply cannot offer these benefits and hence have no way to lower turnover among effective employees.

Alternative benefits also cost more. First, DB pensions would have to operate with a finite investment horizon, increasingly moving money to secure, low-return assets so that lower investment earnings would lend less of a helping hand to pay for benefits. Second, employers may have to cover any underfunding more quickly for closed plans than for ongoing ones, raising employer contributions. Third, higher turnover increases cost due to more recruitment and training of new hires. Fourth, there are substantial transition costs. Older employees will continue to earn DB pensions, they will earn more benefits as they stay longer on the job, and there will be more long-term employees under the DB pension, raising the cost per employee of the DB pension. New employees, in comparison, would be more prevalent in the new plan, earn initially higher benefits than with a DB pension, and thus raise costs relative to a DB pension. These transition costs would last for about four decades and could average 1 percent of payroll for many years, even if the costs of retirement benefits are the same before and after the transition. Fifth, DC plans offer fewer insurance benefits than DB pensions. The insurance exists largely because employees who happen to live through a prolonged period of prosperity share some of their gains with less fortunate employees. Researchers at the National Institute on Retirement Security estimated in 2008 that the loss of insurance features meant that each dollar invested in a DC plan generated 46 percent less in retirement benefits than a dollar invested in a DB pension. Finally, there are higher administrative costs due to a large number of small accounts, especially in DC plans, and increased movement of money between retirement plans.

The two states that have switched from DB pensions to DC plans, West Virginia and Alaska, had severe cases of buyers’ remorse. West Virginia eventually switched back to a DB plan for their teachers in 2008, and Alaska’s policymakers have been investigating the possibility of making a similar reversal.

The lessons from the evidence are clear: States can manage the financial challenges of their pension plans. The proposal to use the current crisis as an opportunity to switch retirement plans, though, will leave states with a much less efficient compensation system. The average effectiveness of teachers will likely drop, and costs will go up substantially. States will be better off managing the financial problems of their DB pensions by putting mechanisms in place that will prevent future underfunding instead of engaging in costly retirement-plan experiments that offer no benefits.

EN: What, then, are the main areas of disagreement?

RC & MP: We disagree on structure. We argue that benefits should be tied to contributions. Professor Weller believes this would have adverse consequences.

Weller assumes a shift to CB or DC would raise annual exits at all ages by a hefty rate, between 22 and 220 percent, according to his recent but as yet unpublished paper on which his efficiency claim is based. Thus, the share of novice teachers in the workforce would rise and average effectiveness would fall. However, the 22 percent estimate is drawn from a 1993 paper by Allen, Clark, and McDermed that compares private-sector workers “covered by a company retirement plan” to those who were not covered by any plan, so there are no implications for CB or DC. The 220 percent assumption is drawn from a 1996 paper by Even and MacPherson that actually shows no difference in quit rates between DB and DC.

Economic theory suggests mixed effects of CB on teacher quit rates, raising them for mid-career teachers who would otherwise hang on for early retirement and lowering them for late-career teachers, otherwise driven out by negative accrual. It might also lower quit rates for young teachers, since they accrue more pension wealth under CB than under current plans. This mixed pattern is supported by Costrell and McGee’s findings, in their 2010 peer-reviewed econometric study of teacher response to pension wealth accrual. Their simulation of a shift to CB, based on their behavioral estimates, found a slight rise in average teacher tenure, not a large fall.

Turning to transition costs, Weller claims that new plans raise costs on old plans by forcing changes in investment strategy or amortization schedules. However, pension plans often introduce new “tiers” without these effects, as new and old funds are commingled. Introducing CB as a new tier would be no different.

Weller’s simulation of transition costs, also from his unpublished paper, makes a different argument. He claims costs will rise for decades because entering cohorts have a different time pattern of pension wealth accrual than previous cohorts. But the time pattern is irrelevant here. Each cohort’s cost is the present value of its lifetime accruals, however they are distributed. Costs cannot rise unless some cohort enjoys higher benefits and, hence, higher lifetime accruals of pension wealth. Yet Weller assumes each cohort accrues the same pension wealth—10.25 percent of the cohort’s lifetime payroll. That is the cohort’s “normal cost,” the contributions required to fund the cohort’s lifetime benefits and accruals. The system’s required contributions are a blend of each cohort’s normal costs, but these are the same, 10.25 percent for each cohort. Thus, the system’s contributions are unchanged, and there are no transition costs.

Costs and contributions would fall if benefits were cut, as Weller recommends. Indeed, they would fall more quickly under his reasonable proposal to cut normal costs of current teachers, as a matter of equity between generations. However, we also favor equity for mobile young teachers, who will continue to receive benefits worth far less than contributions, absent fundamental reform.

CW: The evidence shows that defined benefit pensions work for education. Professors Costrell and Podgursky do not address the fact that both employers and employees prefer defined benefit pensions over other retirement benefits.

The vast majority of states underwent pension reforms in the past decade to address the financial challenges of pension underfunding and none abandoned their defined benefit pensions. And private-sector employers in key growth industries, such as information technology and banking, offer either defined benefit pensions or other forms of deferred compensation, such as stock options, to their employees to mimic the retention benefits of pensions when pensions are absent. A substantial literature both develops the theory and shows the supporting evidence for the efficacy of deferred compensation as a retention and recruitment tool for skilled employees. There is a clear economic rationale for deferred compensation, since it allows employers to recoup the investments made in hiring and training skilled employees, such as teachers.

Teachers equally prefer pensions. Opinion polls routinely show a preference for defined benefit pensions, even among younger employees. And when teachers (and other public employees) have been given a choice between defined benefit pensions and defined contribution plans, the vast majority typically chooses the defined benefit pension plan. The evidence contradicts Professors Costrell and Podgursky’s key assertion that alternative plans that offer more immediate compensation are more attractive to younger teachers.

Finally, transition costs from a defined benefit pension to a cash balance plan would quickly drain public coffers. There would be a growing concentration of more-experienced teachers under the defined benefit pension that favors more-experienced teachers and a high concentration of inexperienced teachers under a cash balance plan that favors inexperienced teachers. A long-standing literature has regularly shown that DB pensions substantially reduce turnover compared to other retirement benefits, suggesting that a benefit switch will increase turnover.

The increase in turnover will raise costs and pose the threat of lower average effectiveness, as my own simulations for a switch from DB pensions to cash balance plans show. The costs are predictable and substantial, while any benefits are highly uncertain and likely nonexistent.

Photos: Additional images of Performance Learning Centers (PLCs) in Hampton and Richmond, Virginia.

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Eighteen-year-old Tyriq Jones was fairly blunt about the mess he had gotten himself into before transferring to the Hampton, Virginia, online school where I approached him one chilly day this spring. “I got in trouble. I was playing around. I got backed up” in high school, he said. He had failed three classes in his junior year and, faced with the prospect of repeating a year, probably would have dropped out instead, he told me. “I didn’t want that kind of pressure.”

People who deal with at-risk teenagers say dropping out is not an event; it’s a process. Youngsters miss school and get “backed up” in class, so they miss more school because they’re bewildered or embarrassed, and fall further behind. Seeing few ways to recover, “they just silently drop out,” said Richard Firth, who showed me around the Hampton school and two others in Richmond that are using online learning to derail the cycle.

In the three years the 75-seat Hampton Performance Learning Center has been open, it claims to have graduated 91 students. There’s a waiting list for admission, so the school opened a second shift, which also is near capacity. Sherri Pritchard, the school’s social-studies “learning facilitator”—there are no teachers and no principal here—said 95 percent of her online students pass Virginia’s end-of-course history test, which would put them well ahead of both the Hampton school district’s and state’s pass rates.

And Tyriq: He has only a C average after a year at the Hampton PLC, he said, but he graduated in June—on time—and plans to enlist in the Army, his goal all along.

The New Alternative

Online K–12 education made its appearance in the mid-1990s, largely as a resource for bright students who had no access to accelerated classes. It moved next into core high-school courses where districts found themselves with teacher shortages—math, science, foreign languages—and has been growing bumptiously, and in a dozen directions, ever since.

The International Association for K–12 Online Learning, which goes by the acronym iNACOL, estimates that 82 percent of school districts now offer at least one online course. Thirty-two states have virtual schools where online offerings range from one class to an entire high-school curriculum, according to an annual report on online learning published by the Evergreen Education Group, a Colorado consultancy. At the Florida Virtual School alone, students collectively took 220,000 classes online in 2009–10 (see “Florida’s Online Option,” features, Summer 2009). Twenty-six states have at least one full-time online school, and perhaps 225,000 youngsters were full-time online students this year, says John Watson, editor of the Evergreen report.

Two of the fastest-growing trends in online education converge in the Performance Learning Center project, which is why I called Communities in Schools, a nonprofit dropout-prevention program that devised the model in Georgia in 2002.

The PLCs call themselves an alternative to traditional schools and distance themselves from the credit-recovery factories that many districts have opened to boost their graduation rates ahead of state and federal sanctions. (Indeed, a few PLC students enroll for the chance to accelerate.) But the schools do offer struggling kids like Tyriq a chance to make up courses they failed in traditional teacher-student classrooms, which puts them at the nexus of a national debate. States are raising their graduation standards, but returning kids to the classroom for a second attempt at algebra often is counterproductive—Why should we suppose they’ll understand equations any better the second time around?—and gobbles up teacher time.

The second trend is the “blended” approach, combining online learning with a teacher-led classroom (see “Future Schools,” features, Summer 2011). Most instruction is online in the PLC model, but a teacher-coach is there to answer questions, direct projects, and keep kids on track.

Communities in Schools linked those two trends with the small-school idea and has expanded the project to seven states and 33 schools. PLCs have only four or five classrooms, four or five teachers, and fewer than 100 students. Teachers are district employees who are paid the district scale and apply for their jobs. Kids remain part of their home schools, which has raised graduation statistics for those schools and generated buy-in from their administrators.

PLCs generally receive the same per-pupil funding as  traditional schools. Their biggest expense, after salaries, goes to licensing fees for the online curriculum, which Richard Firth, the Virginia PLC director, put at about $35,000 a year per school. Start-up costs for computers, teacher training, and to carve new schools out of old facilities can be a showstopper for financially pressed school districts. Richmond, which is building its first new high school in 40 years, plans to include some multipurpose rooms that could be used for a future PLC.

The only outside funding comes from Communities in Schools, which pays the salary of a services coordinator, who links youngsters with housing, day-care, medical, and other service providers and helps them plan what they do after graduation. The services coordinator at the Richmond career-center PLC keeps a closet of baby clothes in her office for students whose own children can attend Head Start or day care downstairs.

Almost disarmingly, the PLCs reach out to youngsters that schools typically find the most troublesome. Sherman Curl, the academic coordinator—i.e., principal—at the Adult Career Development Center PLC in Richmond, handed me a brochure describing the students for whom the PLC is a good fit. Kids with “poor attendance,” “excessive tardiness,” “academic failure,” “apathy,” “social issues,” low motivation, and such “challenges to success” as pregnancy and poverty, it read.

In a summary of its 2009–10 academic year, Virginia’s Communities in Schools reported that one-third of the students at its four PLCs were at least two years behind in academic credits when they arrived. They were a year or two older than their conventional-school peers and, in the previous year, averaged six suspensions and 24 absences each at their former schools. Several youngsters told me they’d fallen in with the wrong crowd at their old schools, or they felt bullied and isolated. “I started messing up,” a chatty 18-year-old named Chelsie Saunders told me at the Hampton PLC, which is housed in a modern teen center, complete with pool tables, a basketball court, a coffee bar, and an airy television lounge with leather sofas.

“These are kids who never made it in a comprehensive school,” said Wes Hamner, the academic coordinator at the Richmond Technical Center PLC, which occupies one floor of a sprawling trades-training campus in Richmond’s industrial district.

For all that, the three PLCs I visited were remarkably quiet and orderly: There wasn’t much chatter about what kids were learning, but there wasn’t any catcalling, hallway scuffling, or acting out in class, either. Hamner pointed out that there’s no security at his school and that the lockers don’t even have locks. Teachers sat in the back or in a corner of the classrooms, while students sat at computers, wearing headsets.

Teaching to the Student

At Hampton, I asked Pritchard, the social-studies facilitator, how she knew what her students were doing, so she opened a dashboard on her computer. It showed that on computer 3, a student was working on a U.S. history unit, or “module,” on civil rights. The teenager on computer 6 was working on a module on imperialism for the same course, and the student on computer 7 was doing a review and practice test on the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Most PLCs, including those in Virginia, use NovaNET, an online curriculum that is marketed by Pearson Education Inc. The program tests a student at the end of each lesson, module, and course, and lets those who pass their tests with at least an 80 percent move on. For those who don’t pass, the computer singles out the content they seemed not to understand, reteaches it, and retests.

Kids like the immediate feedback, Katherine Fox, the academic coordinator at Hampton, told me: “It’s difficult for them to wait for success. Kids want to move on.” A mop-haired boy named Michael told me that he used to obsess over test questions at his conventional school and couldn’t force himself to move ahead. The NovaNET practice tests and make-up tests relieved him of that anxiety, he said, as he pulled certificates from his backpack to show that he had completed two business classes, oceanography, and biology. “No one gets left behind here,” he said.

Back on Pritchard’s dashboard, meanwhile, I could see that the student on computer 1 was using an open-source educational website called SAS Curriculum Pathways to research voting rights for the government class, while the student on computer 2 was researching Appomattox on SAS for history class. Most Hampton PLC computers can access only NovaNET; the few that can access SAS can’t go any further than research sites to which SAS provides a link.

At the career center PLC in Richmond, which is housed on the top floor of a 1920s-era school built for the city’s elite black students, science facilitator Patricia Sessions showed me more. A “pacing sheet,” a sort of minimum speed limit set by the state education department, suggested that teachers should expect to devote three weeks to a unit on biochemical processes, part of the biology curriculum. But when Sessions opened the computer file of a student named Trish, it showed that Trish had finished the unit in a week. She’d spent 26 minutes on an online lesson about atoms and molecules, and got a 90 on the test. She’d spent an hour on the properties-of-water lesson and another hour on acids and bases, and got 80 on both.

Teachers told me that most NovaNET courses are comparable to textbook-based courses in length and content—a comeback to critics who talk of watered-down curricula at alternative schools—but that many students move through them more quickly, and often finish high school a semester early. “I’m constantly working rather than waiting,” explained a tattooed girl named Shaina at the Richmond Tech school.

Pritchard told me that she started the school year with students grouped largely by subject—say, geography in one period, government in another. But as the year went on, and students progressed at different speeds, classes became more diverse. In any class period now, she could have youngsters working on either semester of any of four subjects.

As students finish courses, they can move to another classroom to work on courses they may find slower going. If they earn enough credits to graduate before the school year is over, the services coordinator steers them to mentorships, trade training, or jobs. Sessions, who was playing Mendelssohn in her otherwise-silent classroom as her students worked, said she started the year with 20 kids in her afternoon class and was down to 8 by late March.

All that movement precludes lectures or class discussions. Teachers told me that anywhere from 60 to 90 percent of the work in their classrooms is done online, with work sheets, projects, one-on-one meetings, and, for seniors, a research report and presentation accounting for the rest. The walls of Pritchard’s classroom were ringed with poster-board projects on the Zhou Dynasty, the Battle of Fort Fisher, and the roles of the secretary of defense and the U.S. Department of Education, among others. It wasn’t AP material, perhaps, but it showed persistence and attention to detail that are not always common in city schools. Last year, the whole school read the same book, Facing the Lion, and used it as a springboard for cross-disciplinary studies.

The students I talked with said they didn’t miss discussions or were self-aware enough to know that lectures didn’t fit their learning style. “I wouldn’t be listening anyway,” Tyriq told me; “I’m not a person to talk,” said another 18-year-old named Dashawn. Instead, kids said they liked the anonymity and independence of working online. “I like being in my own bubble,” Chelsie Saunders told me in Hampton: “I don’t like waiting on people” on some lessons and “I don’t worry about people getting frustrated with me” for working slowly on others.

A Promising Start

The PLCs take youngsters who have at least attempted 9th grade, plus a few overage 8th graders. But most kids arrive in 10th or 11th grade when they realize they’re not on track to graduate. For admission, they must score at an 8th-grade level on standardized reading and math tests (the Richmond Tech PLC raised that to 9th grade because it had so many applicants), pass an interview, and sign an achievement contract that also commits them to attend a daily meeting called Morning Motivation. Each gets a learning plan that plots an individual path to graduation and then to a trade program, a job, or college.

Yvonne Brandon, superintendent of Richmond City Schools, expressed enthusiasm for online learning when we spoke. “We have to transform our ideas of what learning looks like,” she said. But PLC staffers told me that the districts sometimes struggle to understand them. Grade levels, quarterly grades, GPAs, and the academic calendar are fuzzy at a move-at-your-own-pace school: Youngsters told me how many credits they had, not whether they were juniors or seniors.

Students graduate when they earn the state-mandated 22 credits, but they can’t receive diplomas until spring. Firth, the Virginia PLC director, said he recently learned that some of those graduates-without-diplomas were being counted as absent by the district because, well, they weren’t in school. “We’re so outside the box and education is so inside the box,” Hamner sighed.

The data on online education are still pretty equivocal. There are no data on what kind of student performs best in an online class, although everyone I talked with assumed it probably was the independent achiever, because that kind of student performs well in any setting. There are few quality measures, although Michael Horn, executive director for education at the Innosight Institute, a Mountain View, California, think tank, points out that we don’t know how to measure quality in face-to-face classes, either.

Barbara Means of SRI International, a research institute in Menlo Park, California, told me that much of the ambiguity is because state data systems aren’t set up to compare online learners to in-class learners. They don’t record which students taking the state’s standardized math tests completed them at the end of an online course, for example, and which took them after a face-to-face class. Most states don’t keep student-level data, so researchers also can’t compare similar students at a full-time virtual school and those in a full-time conventional one.

Means reviewed 12 years of literature on online learning and said that from the limited data they presented she concluded that “there wasn’t much difference” in the educational outcomes of kids who studied online and those who studied in a classroom. That suggests that schools should consider some other reason if they’re thinking of shifting curriculum or students online, she said: Perhaps it’s cheaper or there are social benefits, like making school more flexible for working students or for those with infants.

Means also surveyed the literature comparing outcomes at traditional schools to outcomes at schools that blended face-to-face and online teaching. Youngsters in the blended environments, with a teacher and technology, did “significantly better,” she said. But that may be because blended schools offered youngsters more learning time, more content, or perhaps both, rather than because of the different approach to teaching.

Credit-recovery and online programs have been accused of low standards and a weak-tea curriculum, anything to get kids into the graduation statistics, critics contend. But the PLCs insist on the rigor of their program because it’s based on a general-education curriculum, not a credit-recovery curriculum. PLC students take the same state tests as their traditional-school peers. And computer testing on NovaNET and other online curricula prevents social promotion or the intervention of soft-hearted administrators. “We legally graduate kids; I don’t do them any favors,” said Wes Hamner at Richmond Tech PLC.

In a report on the 2009–10 school year, the project says that, nationally, its students improved their scores in all four core subjects compared to their performance in their home school the year before—by from 6 to 11 percentage points—and that 96 percent of the students classified as seniors at the beginning of the school year graduated. For a project that works with potential dropouts, that’s hugely impressive, but there has been little outside research on the PLCs that would confirm that.

The results at the Virginia PLCs are equally ambiguous. In 2009–10, the 432 youngsters who attended the four schools arrived with D averages in math, English, science, and social studies, and, except for math—which was still stuck in the basement—raised them to a C. But the averages include the 30 percent of kids who dropped out, switched to a GED program, or left for some other reason, probably lowering the grades.

The PLCs also reported that 96 percent of their students passed Virginia’s end-of-course algebra exams, 97 percent passed reading, 90 percent passed biology, and 100 percent passed writing. That would put the PLCs ahead of state averages in all four subjects. (The results say a lot about Virginia’s learning standards: Is it really possible that only 6 percent of the state’s 400,000 high schoolers failed reading and 6 percent failed Algebra I last year?) The scores of PLC students are included in the results of their home schools, which makes them difficult to verify. The PLCs also don’t accept English-language learners, kids with discipline problems or most disabilities, or those with elementary-level reading and math abilities, as other public schools must, which muddies the comparison.

Still, more than one-third of the youngsters who started at the Virginia PLCs in fall 2009 graduated in 2010, including 68 students who headed to two- or four-year colleges, the Virginia project reported.

When I spoke with Chelsie Saunders in Hampton in early spring, she laid out a career path that included community college, university, and then a career in teaching or nursing. “Honestly, if it wasn’t for here, I wouldn’t graduate,” she told me. When I checked back in June, she had.

June Kronholz is a former Wall Street Journal foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter, and currently a contributing editor at Education Next.

Complete survey results available here.

Education Next readers took this survey as well. See how their responses compared.

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Public education has rarely been far from the national headlines over the past year. Efforts to limit teachers’ collective-bargaining rights led to mass protests in several states. The enactment of voucher programs renewed the debate over the role of private school choice in American education. Meanwhile, the first significant bud­get cuts in recent memory forced public school districts to tighten their belts in unprecedented ways. The Obama administration has encouraged a nationwide effort to develop common school standards. And let’s not forget Waiting for “Superman,” the high-profile documentary whose poignant portrayal of the charter-school admissions process, coupled with a critique of union power in public schools, was expected to have a significant impact on national opinion.

But how have Americans actually responded to these developments? Have they grown more supportive of the current direction of school reform, or are there instead signs of a backlash? And how do the views of teachers compare to those of the public at large?

These are among the questions we explore in this, the fifth-annual Education Next–PEPG Survey, which interviewed a nationally representative sample of some 2,600 American citizens during April and May of 2011 (see sidebar for survey methodology). In addition to the views of the public as a whole, we pay special attention in this year’s survey to two potentially influential types of participants in school politics: the affluent and teachers. To our knowledge, this is the first survey of a nationally representative sample of affluent Americans, defined as college graduates who are in the top income decile in their state. This is the third year we have surveyed a nationally representative sample of teachers, defined as full-time teachers currently working in public schools. Both the affluent and teachers pay more attention to public education and participate more actively in school politics than the general public, making their views worthy of close scrutiny (see sidebar).

Teachers and the Affluent: Paying Attention, Participating, and Holding Opinions

A highly decentralized, democratic system of education affords all sorts of opportunities for average citizens to weigh in on public schools. Through votes, school board meetings, petition drives, and direct advo­cacy, all citizens, at least in principle, can influence public education.

Principle and practice, however, often part ways. That all citizens can influence public education is not to say that all citizens do so. Generations of political science research confirm that higher-income and, especially, better-educated citizens are orders of magnitude more likely to partici­pate in politics. And recent evidence demonstrates that teachers are far more likely to vote in school board elections than is the general public.

In our own survey, 37 percent of the American public claims to pay either “a great deal” or “quite a bit” of attention to issues involving education, while 54 percent of the affluent and an overwhelming 84 percent of teachers do so.

Public opinion surveys routinely overstate the levels of turnout in elections. Hence, it is difficult to know what to make of the absolute numbers of any particular group that reports voting. By comparing across groups, though, we can generate reasonable estimates of the relative tendency of people to vote. When we do, we find further evidence of the high rates of political participation among both the affluent and teachers. Compared to the American public at large, members of the affluent group are 16 percentage points more likely to report having voted. Teachers are fully 18 percentage points more likely to report having done so.

These two groups also are more likely to pronounce a clear view about the quality of schools and the value of different education reforms. The percentage that selects the “don’t know” or “neither support nor oppose” categories is almost always larger for the general public than for either the affluent or teachers.

Our findings reveal more stability than change in public opinion over the five years since the Education Next–PEPG survey began, suggesting that the momentous policy develop­ments of the past year were not caused by—nor have they yet produced—broad changes in popular views. The one exception to that generalization is a significant turnaround in support for school vouchers, which until this year had been in decline.

The views of the affluent resemble those of the general pub­lic, except that the affluent are more likely to hold strong opin­ions and even larger percentages support the positions taken by a plurality of the general public. However, the well-to-do are more skeptical of online learning. They also hold the public schools in their own community in comparatively high regard, perhaps because they have better access to good public schools.

Teacher opinion often diverges from that of both the afflu­ent and the general public. Teachers are much more likely to give schools high marks; on many issues, a majority of teachers takes the side opposite to that of the larger public, revealing tensions between what Americans overall think is best and what employees within the education industry prefer.

Teacher Rights and Policies

Wisconsin’s curtailment of the collective bar­gaining rights of teachers and other public employees was undoubtedly the top education news story of early 2011. In protest, teachers called in sick in droves, union members crowded the state capitol, and Democratic senators refused to attend legislative sessions. President Obama supported the protests, while Republi­can leaders lent their support to the embattled Wisconsin governor. Similar issues involving union rights and teacher prerogatives percolated in other states as well, including Indiana, Ten­nessee, Ohio, and even Massachusetts.

What was the public response? Are the opin­ions of teachers and the public converging or diverging? The short answer: Public opinion on issues involving teacher rights and prerogatives has remained essentially unchanged, but teach­ers’ opinions are diverging on key issues.

Teachers Unions. When asked whether teachers unions have a generally positive or negative effect on the nation’s public schools, 33 percent of the public gives a negative response, virtually unchanged from the 31 percent and 33 percent who perceived a negative impact in 2009 and 2010, respectively (see Figure 1). The share perceiving a positive union impact on schools hardly budged, changing only from 28 percent in 2009 to 29 percent in 2011. A siz­able plurality of 38 percent continues to hold a neutral position, suggesting that the debate over the role of teachers unions is hardly over. The views about teachers unions held by the affluent are more negative, with no less than 56 percent saying unions have a negative impact on their schools.

Among teachers themselves, opinion is moving in pre­cisely the opposite direction from that of the public at large. Only 17 percent now say that unions have a negative impact on the nation’s schools, down from 25 percent in 2010. Fifty-eight percent think they have a positive impact, up from 51 percent the previous year.

Teacher Tenure. Opposition to teacher tenure edged upward, but not to a significant degree. Between 2009 and 2010, those opposed to tenure shifted slightly from 45 percent to 47 percent, and in 2011 that percentage again ticked upward to 49 percent. Moreover, tenure supporters slipped from 25 percent in prior years to 20 percent in 2011. Unless the trend continues in future years, not much should be made of these small shifts. Among the affluent, opposition to tenure was much greater—no less than 67 percent. Meanwhile, teachers like tenure more than ever. Fifty-three percent now say they support tenure, up from 48 percent a year ago.

If tenure is to be given at all, the public thinks it should be based on demonstrated success in raising student perfor­mance on state tests. Those who say tenure should be based on student academic progress increased from 49 percent to 55 percent between 2010 and 2011. The well-to-do also like the idea, with 61 percent giving it their support. Teachers, how­ever, were far less enthusiastic about the idea, only 30 percent giving it a favorable nod.

Merit Pay. The issue of merit pay made national news in 2010 when then Florida governor Charlie Crist vetoed a controversial bill requiring that teachers statewide be paid based on their classroom performance. Although Crist’s veto brought him favor with the state’s teachers unions, his successor signed similar legislation in 2011. Meanwhile, states and districts around the nation continue to experi­ment with new models of teacher compensation.

The public tends to favor merit pay, and recent developments have not altered that fact in one direction or another. A near majority (47 percent) of the American public favors paying teachers, in part, based on the academic progress of their students on state tests, about the same percentage as in 2007. Only 27 percent of the public opposes the idea, with the balance undecided. Affluent respondents were only mod­estly more likely (52 percent) to favor merit pay. The idea remains anathema to teachers, however, with only 18 percent in favor, and 72 percent opposed (see Figure 2). Despite the Obama adminis­tration’s continued efforts to build sup­port for merit pay among teachers, the vast majority remains unconvinced.

Teacher Compensation. If teach­ers and the public disagree on many things, the public nonetheless wants to pay teachers well. Fifty-five percent of the public thinks salaries should increase, virtually the same percent­age that voiced that opinion two years ago. Support for higher teacher salaries among the affluent is slightly higher (59 percent). Those who do not favor increases think salaries should remain at current levels. Only 7 percent of the public as a whole thinks teacher salaries should be cut. Needless to say, salary increases for teachers is hardly an issue among teachers themselves. Eighty-two percent of them give the proposal their wholehearted support (see Figure 3).

Support drops, however, when those surveyed are told how much the average teacher in their state is currently paid. It falls to 43 percent, although a majority (52 percent) of the well-to-do still favors a salary increase. Learning the actual sal­ary levels had little impact on the think­ing of teachers themselves, over three-quarters (76 percent) of whom continue to back the idea.

When Americans are asked to choose between increasing teacher salaries and reducing class sizes, they regularly select the latter option. Even when they are told that “reducing average class sizes by three students would cost roughly the same amount as increasing teacher salaries by $10,000,” 44 percent of Ameri­cans select class-size reduction, whereas 28 percent select increasing teacher salaries. The affluent have similar views. By contrast, roughly equal numbers of teachers would choose salary increases as would choose class-size reduction.

Of course, teacher remuneration goes well beyond sala­ries. On average, teachers enjoy considerably larger pension benefits and health-care packages than do comparable profes­sionals in the private sector, a point of contention in recent policy debates. In April 2011, for example, Ohio enacted leg­islation requiring all public employees, including teachers, to contribute at least 15 percent of the cost of their health-care benefits. Yet the battle over the issue is far from over: The Ohio Education Association recently collected a one-time assessment of $54 from each of the state’s teachers, raising $5 million to advocate for the law’s repeal.

It is of interest, then, that the American public tends to look favorably on a proposal that would require teachers “to pay from their salaries 20 percent of the cost of their health care and pension benefits, with the government cov­ering the remainder.” By a nearly two-to-one margin, the American public favors this policy. The margin of support is even larger among the affluent, a majority of whom back this requirement. Teachers overwhelmingly reject this cost-cutting measure, with opponents outnumbering supporters more than two to one.

Teacher Certification. In most states, teachers must take approximately 30 hours of instruction at a school of education before they may be certified as a teacher. A substantial body of research demonstrates that such instruction does not translate into higher student performance. And the American public seems to have caught on. A plu­rality of Americans supports (42 percent, while 31 percent oppose) allowing principals to “hire col­lege graduates who they believe will be effective in the classroom even if they do not have formal teaching credentials.” As for the affluent, no less than 61 percent support the relaxation of teacher hiring requirements. Existing teachers, by contrast, steadfastly oppose the practice, perhaps because virtually all of them underwent the formal credential­ing process. Fully 60 percent of teachers object to the idea of prin­cipals being allowed to hire col­lege graduates who do not have formal teaching credentials, and only 28 percent support it.

All in all, the Wisconsin controversy seems to have con­tributed to a divergence of opinion between teachers and the general public. The biggest changes in opinion took place within the teaching profession, which moved further away from the views of the public at large. The public, and espe­cially the affluent, nonetheless want to pay teachers more.

 

 

School Choice

A strong case can be made that 2010 and 2011 were among the very best years school choice has yet enjoyed. The number of students in charter schools grew to 1.7 million, and several states raised caps on the number of charter schools that will be permitted to open in the future. Indiana, Ohio, Florida, Ari­zona, and New Mexico all passed voucher legislation of one kind or another, and Congress restored the federal school-voucher program it had previously shut down in Washington, D.C. What has been the public’s response?

Vouchers. Opinion on vouchers varies, depending on how the question is posed. We therefore randomly assigned respondents to two groups, one of which was asked a question that might be termed “voucher-friendly” in that it emphasizes giving a choice to parents. The other half was asked a question that might be termed “voucher-unfriendly” in that it empha­sizes students going to private school at public expense. Not surprisingly, members of the public are more likely to say they like vouchers (47 percent) if asked the first question than if asked the second (39 percent). (See Figure 4 for the wording of the questions and the pattern of responses to each.)

There is little scientific basis for deciding which of these questions is the “right” one to ask. Instead of focusing on the number obtained by either ques­tion, therefore, it often is more informative to look at differences between groups and changes that take place over time.

Viewed in these ways, three facts stand out. First, support for vouchers increased by 8 per­centage points between 2010 and 2011. This was the largest shift of public opinion over the course of the past year. If the public debate altered anything, it was regard­ing this specific topic. That the change in opinion is registered by responses to both questions leads one to conclude that the sur­vey identified a genuine political development. Second, the afflu­ent express more opposition to vouchers than the general pub­lic. The level of opposition is 12 percentage points higher in response to one version of the question and 4 percent­age points higher on the other. Third, teachers are the least enthusiastic about vouchers. Although their opinions, like those of the general public, shifted in a favorable direction in 2011, teachers are still as much as 25 percentage points more opposed to vouchers than is the public as a whole.

Tax Credits. Public opinion on other school-choice issues remains stable. When it comes to tax credits for education expenses for families attending either public or private schools, a majority is in favor, and opposition is less than 20 percent. Almost the same can be said for the more common approach of offering tax credits for individual or corporate donations to scholarship programs. On both items, though, little change is detected from previous years. Nor do either the affluent or teachers think much differently.

Charter Schools. When asked about charters, 43 percent of the American public comes out in support, hardly differ­ent from the percentage that did so in 2010 (see Figure 5). The most common response, though, continues to be “nei­ther support nor oppose.” When one segment of respondents was asked to choose between “support,” “oppose,” and “don’t know,” a similar proportion selected ”don’t know” as had selected “neither support nor oppose,” again suggesting that Americans either do not understand what charter schools are or have not made up their minds about them (see “Edu­cating the Public,” features, Summer 2009). These findings are all the more remarkable given that charter schools are now two decades in the making, and in just the last year they have received substantial media attention, been the subject of a major documentary, and enjoyed the endorsement of leaders of both political parties, including key members of the Obama administration.

The affluent are especially likely to favor charter schools, with 64 percent offering their endorsement. Interestingly, the biggest jump in support for charters seems to have taken place among teachers. Those favoring the idea increased from 39 percent to 45 percent over the past year, while opposition remained unchanged.

Single-Sex Schools. Once pervasive in American educa­tion, gender-specific public schools were until quite recently a vanishing species. The notion of educating boys and girls separately, however, received a boost in 2006 with the pub­lication of new federal regulations clarifying the legal status of single-sex schools and classrooms. The National Associa­tion for Single Sex Public Education reports that 524 pub­lic schools now offer students opportunities for single-sex education, including 103 in which students have all of their educational activities in a gender-specific setting.

Thirty-four percent of Americans support proposals that would give “parents the option of sending their child to an all-boys or all-girls school,” while only 23 percent are opposed. Opinion has not changed since the same question was last posed back in 2009. Interestingly, the well-to-do are even more favorably disposed to the idea, with no less than 47 percent giving it their support. Teachers, too, like the idea. Given the widespread support for providing families a single-sex option, it is surprising no politician has made this issue an election platform component.

Grading Public Schools

Last year we reported that the public’s evaluations of the nation’s public schools had reached an all-time low. Only 18 percent of the public was willing to give the schools an A or a B, while 27 percent said they deserved no better than a D or an F. Those evaluations were decidedly lower than the grades given by those asked by the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll earlier in the decade, and even lower than the percentage reported by Education Next in 2007 (when only 22 percent gave their schools top marks).

Happily, in 2011, evaluations of public schools have ticked upward ever so modestly, with 22 percent again willing to give their schools an A or B, though 25 percent of those evaluations are still handing out either a D or F. The affluent are by far the toughest graders, with only 15 percent of them giving the nation’s schools the highest marks. Teachers, by contrast, are much more generous in their evaluations, with 37 percent saying that the nation’s schools deserve an A or B (see Figure 6).

The portrait of public satisfaction changes dramatically, however, if one inquires about Americans’ local public schools. No less than 46 percent of those surveyed give their community schools an A or a B, a slightly higher percentage than in 2007 (43 percent). The affluent, as critical as they are of the nation’s schools, are more content with their local schools than the public at large: 54 percent say their local schools deserve one of the two high grades. Teachers espe­cially like their own community’s schools, with 64 percent of them giving out an A or a B.

Spending on Public Schools

For the United States economy, the past three years have been hard times: The country has yet to recover fully from the recession that began in 2008. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent, salary increases are hard to come by, and public treasuries are steeped in debt. The stimulus package of 2009 provided a short-term revenue fix for school districts, but those dollars, at best, barely offset sharp declines from local tax revenues. In the spring of 2011, when this survey was administered, no one thought it would be easy for school districts to balance their budgets. Under the circumstances, it would not be surprising if the public concluded that cutbacks in school expenditures were appropriate.

Not so. When the public was asked whether govern­ment funding for public schools in their district should increase, decrease, or stay the same, 59 percent selected the first option, only slightly less than the 63 percent that gave that opinion in 2010, and dramatically more than in 2009 (46 percent). Affluent respondents were less willing to spend more for their district schools, but even among them a clear majority (52 percent) preferred an increase in expenditures.

A segment of those surveyed were asked the same ques­tion except that they were first told the level of per-pupil expenditure in their community, which averaged $12,300 for the respondents in our sample. For every subgroup con­sidered, this single piece of information dampened public enthusiasm for increased spending. Support for more spend­ing fell from 59 percent to 46 percent of those surveyed. Among the well-to-do, the level of support dropped dramati­cally, from 52 percent to 36 percent. Among teachers, sup­port for expenditure increases fell even more sharply—from 71 percent to 53 percent (see Figure 7).

When asked about the possibility of raising taxes to fund public schools, support for greater spending dropped further still. Only 28 percent of Americans believe that local taxes to support public schools should be increased, while over half believe that they should stay the same, and 16 percent believe that they should decrease. The views of the affluent do not differ notably from the public as a whole and even among teachers only 42 percent support higher taxes.

Digital Learning

Online education has become a growth industry, as a rapidly increasing number of high school and college students are taking some of their courses over the Internet. Some, includ­ing Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christian­sen, have gone so far as to predict that half of all high school courses will be taken online within a decade.

A year ago such projections seemed plausible, as public support for learning over the Internet jumped 10 points, to a total 52 percent, from where it had been the previous year. But if online learning is going to sweep the country, that percentage needs to continue to climb, and in 2011, support slipped modestly to 47 percent. Twenty-six percent of Ameri­cans now say they are opposed, up 3 percentage points over 2010 (see Figure 8).

Contrary to the standard image of the educated well-to-do as the first to adopt new technologies, the affluent were somewhat less supportive of the idea than the public as a whole. In fact, the affluent were evenly divided, with opposition as high as 43 per­cent. Nearly half (49 percent) of teachers also expressed approval, although that percentage was down by 6 percent from 2010.

In short, there are signs that support for online learning is reaching a political plateau, and important segments of the population—teachers and the affluent—are resistant to the idea. Yet, when respondents were asked about their own children, high levels of sup­port for online education are observed across the American public. A majority of Ameri­cans overall, and roughly two in three teach­ers, expresses a willingness to have one of their children take “some academic courses” in high school over the Internet.

School and Student Accountability

Nine years after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, the public’s appetite for stan­dardized tests appears undiminished. More than two in three Americans believe that the federal government should “continue to require that all students be tested in math and reading each year in grades 3–8 and once in high school,” whereas less than 10 percent actually oppose this requirement. Roughly three in four affluent respondents sup­port the regular administration of tests, as do similar shares of African Americans and Hispanics. Only among teachers does there appear a nontrivial segment of the population that opposes existing testing practices. Even so, majorities of teachers support annual testing of lower-school students and a single test for high school students.

Breaking from existing law, however, Americans support the creation of a single national test in both reading and math. Under No Child Left Behind, each state develops its own test and benchmarks for determining student proficiency. Solid pluralities of both the general public and all subgroups, how­ever, believe that there should be one test and one standard for all students across the country. Roughly one in five, by contrast, supports different tests and standards in different states. A paltry number of respondents think that all state and federal tests should be abolished.

Just as Americans support tying teacher pay to student performance on standardized tests, so too do they want students’ eligibility to be promoted from one grade to the next and to graduate from high school to depend on dem­onstrated success on tests. Fully 70 percent of Americans support a requirement that students pass an exam before being eligible to move on to the next grade. Another 72 percent support a requirement that students pass an exam before being allowed to receive a high school diploma. Sup­port for student accountability, moreover, runs deep across all the subgroups we analyze, including teachers. Sixty per­cent of teachers support the idea of tying grade promotion to test performance, while 66 percent support high school graduation exams, even as these same teachers overwhelm­ing oppose the idea of linking their own remuneration to student test scores.

That Americans want students to be tested, however, does not mean that they are convinced that current test­ing provides accurate information about school quality. Indeed, only 7 percent of Americans claim that their state’s standardized test provides “excellent” informa­tion about the schools in their state, and only 34 percent claim that it provides “good” information. Forty-seven percent, however, believe that the test provides either “fair” or “poor” information. With just one exception, all of the subgroups follow national trends on this question. As their responses to other questions about testing might indicate, teachers hold standardized tests in the lowest regard. Only one in four teachers claims that the state’s standardized tests offer excellent or good information about the quality of schools, compared to the 69 percent who believe that the information is either fair or poor.

Conflicts with Teachers Likely to Persist

We have discussed only a few highlights from this year’s survey. The reader can glean much more information by taking a careful look at the survey questions and responses, available on the Education Next web site. Here we draw only three broad conclusions:

On many questions of education policy, opinion has not changed materially over the past year, despite the headline news coming from Wisconsin and elsewhere. We are not the first to have documented stability in the policy posi­tions taken by members of the American public. Only when external events require a rethinking of their position are they inclined to alter their views. For that reason, we find it to be of some significance that over the course of the past year the public has become much more supportive of school vouchers.

On most questions of public policy, differences between the affluent and the public at large are on the margins. In no case did we find the well-to-do favoring a policy that the general public opposed. Instead, those with ample resources tend to be even more supportive of the positions that were taken by a plurality of the public. Our data do not allow us to discern whether the affluent are leading or following public opinion more generally, but the findings do suggest a general synchronization of viewpoints. Still, it is the case the affluent are more skeptical of online learn­ing and more satisfied with their local schools than is the general public.

Finally, we find that a majority of teachers often takes posi­tions contrary to those of a plurality of both the public and the affluent on key issues such as teachers unions, the rights and prerogatives of teachers, and school vouchers. Plainly, the battles over school reform are far from over.

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.

Thus far, 2011 has been a good year for private school choice. The Supreme Court reversed a lower-court decision that was about to shut down the Arizona tax-credit program. President Obama signed into law a bill that revived the District of Columbia voucher program his Democratic friends had struck down two years earlier. In 36 states, 52 voucher and tax credit bills are in the legislative hopper, and some may be on the verge of passage, says Robert Enlow of the Foundation for Educational Choice. Indiana, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Oklahoma have either opened the door to greater choice or seem poised to do so.

Of course, state courts have yet to weigh in on all the new legislation, and in the past they have proved an even greater obstacle than state legislatures. But in the court of public opinion, vouchers are waging something of a comeback, according to results from the Education Next-PEPG Survey released in this issue.

In the past, our annual poll has been nothing but “Bad News Bears” for vouchers. Over the four years between 2007 and 2010, support for vouchers slipped from 45 percent to 31 percent among those who were asked whether they favored or opposed “a proposal…that would use government funds to pay the tuition of low-income students who choose to attend private schools.” Those expressing opposition to such a proposal increased from 34 percent to 43 percent over that period of time. Each year, the news got worse for voucher enthusiasts. It seemed as if Milton Friedman’s idea was going the way of the buggy whip.

But in 2011, voucher support among the general public revived noticeably. Thirty-nine percent now say they support vouchers, an 8-percentage-point reversal from the 31 percent support the idea received just a year ago. Opposition to vouchers slipped by 5 percentage points.

The news from the Education Next poll had become so bad we were accused of asking an unfriendly voucher question (it referenced the “use” of “government funds to pay the tuition”), so we agreed to split our respondents into two equivalent groups and ask the second group a “friendly” voucher question instead: “A proposal has been made 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.” The idea conveyed by the two questions is essentially the same, but the wording—“wider choice,” “government helping”—is more positive than the wording in the “unfriendly” question. When the question is posed in a friendlier manner, vouchers, even on their darkest day (2010), gathered support from another 8 percent, with 39 percent in favor and just 32 percent opposed.

So which question tells us the truth about public opinion? Both, probably, if you look at trends over time rather than at the percentage in any given year. When the public was asked the friendly question in 2011, support for vouchers climbed to 47 percent, 8 percent over the previous year, the same amount of gain revealed by the unfriendly question.

So both questions show an 8 percent turnaround for vouchers. Rather than continuing to head downhill, vouchers are the “comeback kid.” We suspect vouchers gained in public favor because Republicans are in a better position to promote the idea, just as Obama’s opposition to vouchers had probably induced the slide in support between 2008 and 2010. In 2011, the shoe switched feet.

— Paul E. Peterson

Podcast: Paul Peterson and Chester Finn discuss education policy and the Republican candidates (and probable candidates) for president.

Readers Poll: Vote for the presidential candidate you think would be best for K-12 education.

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Two months before his 2008 election, Barack Obama addressed a roomful of Ohio public school teachers, praising their long hours and talking about his daughters’ starting 2nd and 5th grade. It was a typical Democratic education speech, with vows of support for early childhood education, for building up programs that help students from “the day they’re born until the day they graduate from college.”

Then Obama departed from the usual feel-good talking points. He touted competition, charter schools, and school choice. “I believe in public schools, but I also believe in fostering competition within the public schools,” he said. “And that’s why, as president, I’ll double the funding for responsible charter schools.”

That wasn’t an applause line, for sure, but it did serve another purpose: to position the candidate as a different kind of Democrat, one willing to embrace ideas from across the aisle and push back against his own teachers union base. It also put Republicans on notice: Obama wouldn’t be bashful about encroaching on their territory on education.

Two and a half years later, Republicans are still trying to figure out how to respond to Obama, a Democratic president with education reform bona fides. To date, the most prominent leaders of the GOP have either been mute on the topic of education or heaped praise on the president. Indiana governor Mitch Daniels lauded the Obama administration and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a speech he made in April 2011: “We need to prepare our young people with the highest possible preparation wherever they come from, wherever they are headed,” he said. “[Duncan] is the nation’s champion, along with the president he serves, of that ideal.”

As the winter primaries get closer, don’t expect much more of that.

The One That Got Away

Republicans began this election season in search of a candidate and a message. The May withdrawal of Mitch Daniels from the Republican primary race left the GOP without one of its most visible education leaders. The Midwestern governor had become a darling among education reformers for making school choice and quality teaching his top priorities.

In his final State of the State speech in Indianapolis, Daniels said that if he did nothing else in 2011, he wanted to “hitch his legacy” to education reform. Watching from the audience that day were students on waiting lists to get into various charter schools. He urged state lawmakers to create a voucher program that would allow kids to use public dollars for private school tuition. He talked for 30 minutes about improving teacher quality. And by the end of the legislative session, he got just about everything he wanted in a school reform plan: expansion of charter schools, private school vouchers, and college scholarships for students who graduate high school early.

But after flirting with a presidential run, Daniels bowed out, leaving to those still in the running the task of building a GOP education platform.

The Race Is On

After a slow start, the Republican field is finally starting to take shape. Former governors Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty have announced their election bids, and former GOP house speaker Newt Gingrich is also running. As of June 2011, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum had entered the race. Republicans await announcements from Sarah Palin and Texas governor Rick Perry.

In staking out platforms in the coming months for what will likely be a feisty GOP primary, Republicans face two quandaries regarding education policy: They need to distinguish their positions from Obama’s centrist education reforms, and they need to win over the Republican base, fueled by some Tea Party energy, that will push for the U.S. Department of Education to be dismantled altogether.

Former education secretary Margaret Spellings says gaining ground may not be easy, but it has been done before: by George W. Bush, her former boss.

“I commend President Obama for adopting the GOP playbook and building on the groundwork that we’ve laid,” said Spellings, currently a consultant in Washington, D.C. “It’s time for us to develop some new material that pushes even further.”

If Republicans want an advantage, Spellings argues, they need to push choice and the hold-schools-accountable platform because “that’s safe territory for Republicans of all stripes,” she said. “Unite Republicans by talking about the kind of public policy that ties very closely to accountability.”

One likely Republican target is school spending. Days after entering office, President Obama signed into law the sweeping stimulus bill, which included a $100 billion bailout of the K–12 system. A year later, the smaller “edujobs” bill pumped another $10 billion into the schools. While this money was ostensibly linked to reform via the Race to the Top, there’s very little to show for this huge influx of federal funds. Most studies show that it merely saved teachers’ jobs, or kicked layoffs down the road a year or two. In lots of places where layoffs were not on the table, it allowed school districts to give teachers raises, at a time when America suffered through the worst unemployment crisis in a generation.

By pointing at the fat in the education system, GOP candidates could argue, as Governor Pawlenty did in 2007, that American schools are “costing us a lot of money and it’s costing them their future.”

Expect to see the candidates applaud governors in New Jersey, Wisconsin, and Ohio, who took on collective bargaining rights and insisted that money is best used to reward good teaching for the children’s sake.

“We have built a system…that cares more about the feelings of adults than the future of children,” said New Jersey Republican governor Chris Christie, widely expected to run for president in 2016, at the American Enterprise Institute earlier this year. “Tell me, where else is there a profession with no reward for excellence and no penalty for failure?”

In a 2011 speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Romney berated Obama for failed economic policies, saying afterward that he’s “seen the failure of liberal answers before…liberal education policies fail our children today because they put pensions and privileges for the union bosses above our kids.”

Defining the Federal Role

A candidate like Romney or Pawlenty is still going to have to explain to the Republican base why they’re not going to shutter the U.S. Department of Education. During the 2010 midterm elections, Tea Party Senate and House candidates across the country promised on the campaign trail that they would shut down the U.S. Department of Education and hand control over to state governments. Many of them are now members of Congress.

A related issue is where to land on the “Common Core” standards, a set of expectations in reading and math developed by the nation’s governors and state superintendents, but viewed by many conservatives as a federal plot to take over the schools.

“Post-Obamacare, post–Dodd-Frank, in the Tea Party world, Republicans aren’t interested anymore in a robust federal role in education,” said a senior GOP Capitol Hill staffer, who could not be named because he is not authorized to talk to the media. “Bush liked it and talked about it, fine. Now that he’s not there hitting us over the head with it, we’ll move to empower and trust state and local officials to make decisions.”

The Candidates

No matter who else enters the race, it is unlikely a newcomer will have a ready-made education platform. Romney, Bachmann, Pawlenty, Perry, and Gingrich have all, in their careers, been outspoken on key issues of education policy. It’s worth considering what each of these (potential) candidates might do, were he or she to become the nation’s 45th president.

MITT ROMNEY, like many Republican leaders in the 1990s, called for abolishing the U.S. Department of Education.

Once he became governor of Massachusetts, Romney plotted out a more sophisticated education platform. He pushed school choice when a Democratic-controlled state legislature was moving away from it, and extolled the virtues of No Child Left Behind.

“I’ve taken a position where, once upon a time, I said I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education…. That’s very popular with the base,” Romney said at a 2007 Republican debate in South Carolina. “As I’ve been a governor and seen the impact that the federal government can have holding down the interest of the teachers unions and instead putting the interests of the kids and the parents and the teachers first, I see that the Department of Education can actually make a difference.”

As governor, Romney proposed education reform measures that lifted the state cap on charter schools and gave principals more power to get rid of ineffective teachers.

In his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness, he darkly warns about American students’ low achievement in reading and writing. He writes that money does not play a pivotal role in education quality and achievement, perhaps a harbinger that Romney’s education-reform platform wouldn’t include new money, as Obama’s plan did.

“The average amount spent per pupil, adjusted for inflation, rose by 73 percent between 1980 and 2005, and the average class size was reduced by 18 percent,” he wrote. “But during that same period, the educational performance of our children has hardly budged. Why not?”

In Massachusetts, Romney defended statewide graduation requirement tests, which started during his first year as governor in 2003. When one mayor declared he would dole out diplomas even to students who didn’t pass the tests, Romney threatened to withhold state dollars.

He also defended English immersion after visiting a Boston school where many students enrolled in bilingual classes had actually been born in the United States.

If Romney talks education in the next year, he will blend the importance of accountability and of governing with a stick if needed. He is widely credited for raising test scores. In his third year as governor, 4th and 8th graders scored first in the country in math and English (see Figure 1).

It was in education that MICHELE BACHMANN got her political sea legs. Disappointed in the school work brought home by her foster kids attending public school, the now Minnesota congresswoman decided to get involved because the school system didn’t have an “academic foundation,” according to Bloomberg News.

She started a charter school in the early 1990s, but abruptly resigned from its board—along with other board members—after the school district accused the charter of teaching religion in its classrooms.

In 1999, Bachmann ran for Stillwater school board with a platform to dump Minnesota’s “Profile of Learning,” the state’s graduation standards. It is the only race the three-term congresswoman has ever lost.

Under a Bachmann presidency, expect the U.S. Department of Education to be all but shuttered. In 2004, she authored legislation that would remove Minnesota from the requirements of No Child Left Behind. (It didn’t pass.) In a 2009 letter to constituents posted on her website, Bachmann wrote, “I entered politics because I want to give my children the incredible educational experience I received from public schools as a student. No Child Left Behind must be repealed and control of our education returned to the local level.”

As his eight years as Minnesota’s governor wore on, TIM PAWLENTY’s push against the teachers union grew stronger and more publicly divisive.

Shortly after his election in 2002, in an impromptu speech to business leaders, Pawlenty called for tying teacher pay to performance and bringing up the state’s standards. He also urged state lawmakers to authorize the use of a transparent growth model to see how well schools are really doing to improve student achievement. Yet, maybe because teachers union officials were in the audience, Pawlenty carefully parsed tenure, saying, “Seniority can remain a big factor, maybe even the main factor, in setting pay scales,” according to news reports.

The speech underscored Pawlenty’s sometimes mixed message to unions throughout his tenure: I’ll try to work with you. That is until you don’t work with me.

In 2005, Pawlenty passed a Minnesota-wide teacher pay-for-performance plan called “Q Comp,” which rewards teachers based on evaluations. Though passed by the state legislature, the plan gave school districts and charter schools the choice of whether to participate and allows a district to collectively bargain a pay agreement that looks at professional development, teacher evaluation, and an alternative salary schedule.

When federal Race to the Top dollars became available, Pawlenty launched a statewide charter school initiative and moved to hone math and science instruction in schools. Still, Minnesota lost out, most notably because the application lacked support from the teachers union. Like all states, Minnesota had an opportunity to go for the second round of grants, but Pawlenty drew a line in the sand, saying he would only apply again if the union, and Democrats in the state legislature, agreed to more reforms.

At the time, Pawlenty also dialed up the rhetoric. The timing may have been personally fortuitous: He had declared he wasn’t seeking another gubernatorial term in Minnesota and was flirting with a presidential run. It was good press: He was out there staking pitch-perfect positions on education reform.

“If they [the teachers unions] don’t buy in and aren’t partners in change, it’s not going to work,” Pawlenty said at a United Negro College Fund event in February of 2010. “We have to constructively and gently, or maybe not so gently, nudge them toward change.”

Texas Governor RICK PERRY, if he runs,  is likely to use his own state’s successes to argue that the federal government should dramatically downsize in education.

While Perry has been outspoken against the Common Core, he and his education commissioner have pulled the quality of Texas tests up to a level respected among education reformers. Test scores among kids of all racial and ethnic backgrounds are higher in Texas than in Wisconsin, for example, which has fewer students qualifying for free- and reduced-price lunch.

Though Perry will probably make this point on the campaign trail, he’s not likely to promise to take over the nation’s schools.  On the contrary, he’ll likely pick up on his recent call to repeal No Child Left Behind and let states take charge of their education systems. In his book released last year, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, Perry argues that Washington has taken power away from states. At a speech in November in Washington, Perry took aim at two of former President Bush’s signature accomplishments, No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit program, saying they were examples of areas in which Washington need not be.

“Those are both big government but more importantly, they were Washington-centric,” he told the Dallas Morning News. “One size does not fit all, unless you’re talking tube socks.”

Since the start of his career teaching college in Georgia, former GOP House Speaker NEWT GINGRICH has cast education among the nation’s most important domestic policy problems.

His views have developed through the years: In 1983, when the hallmark “A Nation at Risk” was released, Gingrich, a member of Congress at the time, traveled the country holding town hall meetings. He criticized American schools as “no more than holding pens for our children.” In the 1990s, he called for the abolition of the U.S. Department of Education and opposed direct government loans to students.

In 2001, he authored a report that called the failure of math and science education among the greatest threats to national security, “greater than any conceivable war,” he said.

Then in 2008 and 2009, his political ambitions on hiatus, Gingrich joined some odd bedfellows, among them civil rights activist Al Sharpton and former Democratic Colorado governor and Los Angeles schools chancellor Roy Romer, in a yearlong initiative to push education reform nationwide.

“I’m prepared to work side by side with every American who is committing to putting children first,” he said in 2009 in a White House press conference, before praising President Obama for “showing courage” in pushing unions against charter school caps. “Not talking about it for 26 more years…. We could literally have the finest learning in the world if we were to systematically apply the things that work.”

He continued, “I think we need to move forward from No Child Left Behind towards getting every American ahead.”

But how we move toward providing each child with an appropriate education is the question.  The Republican candidates all stress accountability and favor school choice, though they prefer leaving the federal government out of education policy decisions.  Most of them emphasize reforms to enhance teacher quality, and they question the influence of teachers unions.  They support high standards, if delegated to the states to devise and enforce.  What they all have in common is a belief that education needs deep reform that goes beyond anything Democrats have proposed.

Allison Sherry is Washington, D.C., bureau chief for the Denver Post.

Podcast: Eric Hanushek and Marty West discuss this and another study that look at teacher dismissals.

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If principals have the authority to dismiss teachers, will they dismiss the less effective ones, or will they instead make perverse decisions by letting the good teachers go? Evidence from low-stakes surveys suggests that principals are able to identify the most and least effective teachers in their schools, as measured by their impact on student achievement (see “When Principals Rate Teachers,” research, Spring 2006). But would that ability influence their dismissal decisions?

On this topic, debate has been vigorous but research almost nil, in good part because teachers with tenure are not easily dismissed and principals take on that task only if they have a strong backbone or face an extremely urgent situation, or both. In some instances, however, principals have considerable latitude when it comes to dismissing teachers who have not been in service long enough to have earned tenure.

One such situation developed in Chicago in July 2004 when the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers Union signed a new collective-bargaining agreement that gave principals the flexibility to dismiss probationary (nontenured) teachers beginning in the 2004–05 school year for any reason and without the documentation and hearing process that is typically required for dismissals in other districts. Since CPS provided information that allowed me to link information on CPS teacher dismissals to several measures of teacher performance, I was able to study whether principals exercise their authority wisely. The procedures were fairly straightforward. By comparing the characteristics of dismissed versus nondismissed probationary teachers within the same school and year, I was able to determine just how much weight school administrators place on a variety of teacher characteristics, including their performance in the classroom.

I find that principals in Chicago do exercise their authority in  sensible ways. Principals are more likely to dismiss teachers who are frequently absent and who have previously received poor evaluations. They dismiss elementary school teachers who are less effective in raising student achievement. Principals are also less likely to dismiss teachers who attended competitive undergraduate colleges. It is interesting to note that dismissed teachers who were subsequently hired by a different school are much more likely than other first-year teachers in their new school to be dismissed again.

These results suggest that other school districts could possibly improve student achievement if they adopted policies similar to those applied in Chicago. To be clear, however, the analysis presented in this paper does not seek to evaluate the educational impact of this new policy. Instead, it uses the existence of the policy, in conjunction with detailed data on teachers and principals, to provide descriptive evidence on the relationship between the exercise of dismissal authority and teacher effectiveness.

Teacher Dismissals in Chicago

As in many public school districts, teacher layoffs and dismissals in CPS are highly regulated. Prior to 2004, virtually no teachers—not even probationary teachers—were dismissed for cause in CPS. Of course, it is likely that some teachers who switched schools or left CPS entirely were informally “counseled out” by school administrators. But it was impossible to distinguish these “involuntary” separations from truly voluntary attrition.

This situation changed with the signing of a new collective-bargaining agreement in 2004. Each February, principals are able to log into a district computer system that has a list of all of the probationary teachers in their school (i.e., those who have been teaching for fewer than five consecutive years during the period of my analysis). The principal can then check one of two boxes: renew or nonrenew. Although principals are required to provide district officials with at least one reason for the nonrenewal decision, they are not required to justify or explain their decision and they do not need to provide teachers with this reason. If a principal chooses nonrenew, the teacher may reapply to positions in other Chicago public schools. However, nonrenewed teachers are not guaranteed another job in CPS. The ease with which administrators can dismiss a probationary teacher, with a simple “click” of a button, is noteworthy. This policy change made Chicago the only large school district in the country to provide principals with this degree of flexibility over personnel decisions. Already since the conclusion of the analysis period for this study (2005 through 2007), this flexibility has diminished in several ways. For example, the probationary period has been reduced from 4 to 3 years, and principals who choose to nonrenew a teacher now must have conducted at least one formal observation of the teacher prior to nonrenewal.

Data

The data for my study of this policy change come from several sources. Teacher personnel files provide information on teacher background, current assignment, and, for probationary teachers, whether or not they were renewed. I supplement this with information on school demographics, principal characteristics from personnel files, and student test-score information.

I examine dismissal among probationary teachers in CPS in three consecutive school years: 2004–05, 2005–06, and 2006–07. The sample excludes individuals who were employed by the central office, including speech pathologists, nurses, counselors, and teachers working in administrative or professional development capacities. Moreover, I exclude teachers in a handful of “alternative” schools that serve severely disabled students or other special populations, as well as teachers on leave or who were employed less than half time. For a small number of teachers who taught subjects such as art or music in multiple schools, I include only the observation in the school that is listed as their “primary” appointment. The final sample consists of 16,246 elementary school teachers and 7,764 high school teachers spread across 588 schools.

Measures of Teacher Quality

This analysis incorporates three proxies for teacher performance. First, I use teacher absences because they are well measured, are easy to interpret, and impose substantial nonfinancial and financial costs on the school. The second measure is the formal performance rating that the principal gave the teacher in prior years. Traditionally, principals rate teachers every one to three years (depending on the tenure status of the teacher) on a four-point scale that indicates superior, excellent, satisfactory, or unsatisfactory performance. While there are no high stakes associated with these ratings (virtually no teachers receive an unsatisfactory rating), there is considerable variation across teachers in the top rating categories, and they arguably provide a sense of how the principal views the teacher. The third measure is a value-added estimate of teacher effectiveness. This measure is meant to capture the extent to which each teacher contributes to student achievement growth from one year to the next, as measured by the standardized tests taken by students in CPS. While this is an objective and direct measure of one important dimension of teacher effectiveness, only a fraction of teachers work in grades and subjects in which students take standardized tests. It is not possible to calculate value-added measures for many teachers in our sample, including teachers in grade 2 or below, most teachers in grades 10 or above, and any teacher in a noncore subject. Unlike some school districts, Chicago traditionally has not maintained reliable data linking teachers to classrooms, particularly at the elementary level. Working with CPS officials, however, I was able to obtain such links for a limited sample of teachers and years, thus allowing me to create value-added measures for part of my sample.

Methods

The primary goal of my analysis is to determine which teacher, principal, and school characteristics are associated with the likelihood that a teacher will be dismissed. I first compare the probability that a teacher is dismissed across schools and years in order to discern any differences related to school characteristics. Then to examine the influence of teacher characteristics on the likelihood of dismissal, I compare teachers within the same year and school to account for unobserved school-level factors that might be correlated with teacher characteristics and the probability of dismissal.

A concern with this approach is that if the analysis fails to include a teacher characteristic that a) principals consider in the dismissal decision and b) is correlated with one of the included variables, the estimate for the included characteristic may be biased. One potentially important variant of this concern involves the supply of teachers. If it is more difficult to find qualified teachers in certain subjects or grade levels, then the principal may be less likely to dismiss teachers in these areas. To the extent that teachers in harder-to-staff areas are concentrated among particular demographic groups, or tend to graduate from particular institutions, the results for these teacher characteristics could be misleading. Also, schools fund teachers from a variety of revenue streams, and it may be difficult for principals to reallocate positions across funds. For this reason, if a school experiences a decline in a particular revenue fund, the principal may be more inclined to dismiss teachers funded by this source.

To address these concerns, I account in all analyses for the teacher’s program area (for example, regular education grades 1 to 3, regular education grades 4 to 8, secondary math, secondary science, bilingual education, vocational education, etc.) and for the revenue source from which each teacher position is funded.

Of course, it is still possible that my results concerning specific teacher characteristics suffer from a standard omitted variable bias. For example, it may be the case that high rates of absenteeism are associated with a bad attitude or shirking in other dimensions, and it is these factors, rather than the absences per se, that the principal is reacting to in dismissing teachers with more absences. In this case, one may not be able to say anything definitive about principal views regarding teacher absenteeism itself, but rather about behaviors and characteristics associated with absenteeism, all of which presumably speak to performance in some form or another.

Dismissal Policy Impact

Each year under the new policy, roughly 11 percent of probationary teachers were dismissed, despite the fact that more than one-third of schools did not dismiss any teachers. The numbers of teachers who were nonrenewed in any given year likely overstates the impact of the policy because a number of young teachers would likely have left CPS in the absence of the policy, either voluntarily or due to subtle “encouragement” on the part of the principals. If the dismissal policy merely formalized previously informal dismissals, however, then one would not necessarily expect to find a substantial change in separations.

Comparing dismissal rates before and after implementation of the new policy provides insight on this issue. In the three years prior to the introduction of the policy, roughly 10 to 15 percent of first-year probationary teachers left CPS and an additional 4 percent moved to a different CPS school. In the years after the policy was in place, the corresponding rates were roughly 18 and 10 percent, respectively. Comparing the year immediately prior to establishment of the policy (2004) with the first two years of the policy’s implementation (2005 and 2006), it appears that the separation rate increased by roughly 9 percentage points (see Figure 1). In contrast, there was virtually no change among more-experienced teachers (i.e., those with 6 to 15 years of experience), who were not subject to the policy. The dismissal policy therefore appears to have had at least a modest impact on the number of teacher separations, although the impact is not as large as the overall nonrenewal numbers would suggest.

It is worth noting that more than half of the dismissed teachers were rehired the following year by another school in the district. For example, 50.6 percent and 56.4 percent of first-year probationary elementary and high school teachers, respectively, who were dismissed in spring 2005 were rehired by a CPS school in the fall. At least some of the dismissals under the policy were the result of position cuts, in which case the teacher’s former principal may have provided the teacher with a good recommendation; it is therefore not surprising that some fraction of dismissed teachers were rehired. It is also likely that some fraction of teachers dismissed due to poor performance were also rehired by other CPS schools.

Which school and principal characteristics are related to dismissal? In both elementary and secondary schools, principals in the district’s larger schools dismissed a smaller fraction of probationary teachers. In elementary schools, higher student achievement at the school is associated with a smaller fraction of probationary teachers being dismissed. Among high schools, however, schools with higher-achieving students dismissed a larger fraction of their probationary teachers. Principals who attended more competitive colleges and principals who were older dismissed a smaller proportion of teachers in both elementary and high schools. Male high-school principals dismissed a significantly smaller percentage of their teachers, while principal gender did not play as important a role at the elementary level. Finally, principals new to the building dismissed a substantially larger fraction of teachers in elementary schools, but not in high schools.

Teacher Characteristics

Turning to the characteristics of individual teachers, I find that prior-year principal evaluations and current-year teacher absences both influence the likelihood of dismissal (see Figure 2). Teachers who were rated satisfactory in the prior academic year were 22.1 percentage points more likely to be nonrenewed than teachers in the same school who were rated superior. Teachers rated excellent were 4.3 percentage points more likely to be dismissed than those rated superior. Given an average dismissal rate of roughly 11 percent, these results suggest that teacher performance as reflected in prior evaluations is strongly associated with dismissal. Teachers who were absent 11 to 20 times between September and March of the current year were also 11.3 percentage points more likely to be nonrenewed than their colleagues who were never absent. Teachers absent 6 to 10 days were 3.5 percentage points more likely to be dismissed.

The results also indicate that principals value teachers with stronger educational backgrounds as measured by college quality. For example, a teacher who attended a highly competitive college (with a Barron’s ranking of four) is nearly 3 percentage points (roughly 15 percent) less likely to be dismissed than a teacher who attended a least-competitive (unrated) college. On the other hand, on average, principals do not seem to value certification exam performance or advanced degrees, at least after taking into account the other available measures of teacher performance.

Interestingly, probationary teachers who were dismissed from another school in the prior year, and rehired by the current school, are substantially more likely to be dismissed a second time. For example, elementary school teachers who were dismissed from another school in the prior year were 4.9 percentage points (about 45 percent) more likely to be let go relative to first-year teachers in the school. In high school, previously dismissed teachers were 13.4 percentage points (more than 130 percent) more likely to be dismissed than first-year teachers. These results suggest that many of the initial nonrenewal decisions were not idiosyncratic, stemming from a particularly bad match, or based on temporary difficulties experienced by the teacher. Rather, they suggest that, at least in many cases, the initial nonrenewal decision reflected a concern with the teacher’s general productivity.

These results provide evidence that principals consider some measures of teacher performance and qualifications in making their dismissal decisions. To the extent that one views student achievement as the primary outcome of interest, however, one should directly assess how a teacher’s ability to improve student achievement influences the likelihood of dismissal. I provide some evidence on this issue by focusing on the relationship between teacher value-added and dismissal for the subsample of 803 elementary school and 1,134 high school teachers for which value-added measures are available.

For elementary schools, a one-standard-deviation increase in teacher value-added is associated with a 7.1-percentage-point (over 100 percent) decrease in the likelihood of dismissal (see Figure 3). In contrast, I find that teacher value-added has zero association with dismissal among the sample of 9th-grade core-subject teachers in high schools. One possible reason for the difference across grade levels is that the assessment used for the 9th-grade value-added measure is the PLAN test, which is given in the fall of a student’s 10th-grade year. PLAN is developed by ACT and is not tightly linked to any particular curriculum. Hence, because of both the timing of the exam and its content, the 9th-grade value-added measures may not capture teacher effectiveness as well as the elementary value-added measures.

Do Principals Discriminate?

One potential concern about policies like Chicago’s that provide principals with greater discretion in personnel decisions is that principals would dismiss teachers capriciously or on the basis of criteria unrelated to performance. Indeed, I find that several teacher demographics, including age, gender, and race, are associated with the likelihood of dismissal, even after controlling for the measures of teacher performance and qualifications described above. Principals are 3.8 percentage points more likely to dismiss male teachers than female teachers, an effect of more than 25 percent given the baseline dismissal rate of 10 to 12 percent. Principals are considerably more likely to dismiss older teachers. For example, teachers 36 to 50 years of age are 4 percentage points (33 percent) more likely to be dismissed than teachers age 22 to 28. The relatively small number of probationary teachers over age 50 is 10 percentage points (nearly 100 percent) more likely to face dismissal than their youngest counterparts. And black teachers are 2.1 percentage points less likely to be dismissed than their colleagues.

While these results raise some concerns, it would be incorrect to conclude on the basis of this evidence alone that principals in Chicago were acting in a discriminatory manner. The analysis reported here cannot control for many direct measures of teacher qualities that principals could legitimately consider in making a dismissal decision (e.g., energy, enthusiasm, ability to relate to children, familiarity with the best instructional practices). Moreover, the sample selection introduced by nonrandom hiring may lead to biased estimates of the relationship between dismissal and any easily observable, predetermined teacher characteristic such as age or gender. If, for example, male teachers were less productive on average than female teachers (or even if the principal believed this to be the case), then the marginal male teacher who was hired must be more attractive on some other, likely unobservable, dimension relative to the marginal female teacher hired.

In order to shed light on the issue of principal discrimination, I examine whether principals are more likely to dismiss teachers of a different gender, age, or race from their own. Although principals are no more likely to dismiss a teacher of the opposite gender, they are somewhat more likely to dismiss teachers of a different race. While these patterns could indicate discrimination, it is possible that they are explained by other factors. Given the widespread belief that same-race role models are crucial for low-income students, it would not be surprising if principals took into account the composition of their student body when making dismissal decisions. Indeed, insofar as prior research has demonstrated that, all else equal, students learn more when taught by a teacher of the same race, this might be a legitimate determination on the part of the principal. My results provide support for this hypothesis. I find that as the fraction of students in the school that share the race of the teacher rises, the likelihood that the teacher will be dismissed declines. Specifically, an increase of 50 percentage points in the fraction of students who share the teacher’s race decreases the likelihood that the teacher will be dismissed by slightly more than 1 percentage point, or 10 percent. More importantly, the evidence that principals are more likely to dismiss a teacher of a different race becomes statistically insignificant after controlling for this variable.

Finally, I find evidence that younger principals are more likely to dismiss older teachers than they are to dismiss younger teachers. There are no obvious explanations for this pattern, although one might speculate that younger principals may value different characteristics in a teacher than older principals. Regardless, this pattern does seem to warrant further exploration.

Conclusions

By comparing the characteristics of dismissed versus nondismissed probationary teachers within the same school and year, the analysis presented above provides a unique source of evidence on which teacher characteristics principals value most highly. I find that principals do consider teacher performance in determining which teachers to dismiss. Principals are significantly more likely to dismiss teachers who are frequently absent and who have received unsatisfactory evaluations in the past. Perhaps most telling, elementary school teachers who were dismissed had significantly lower impacts on student achievement in prior years than their peers who were not dismissed.

These results suggest that reforms along the lines of the Chicago policy could improve student achievement by providing principals with the tools to manage the quality of personnel in their classrooms. It should be noted, however, that many principals—including those in some of the worst-performing schools in the district—did not dismiss any teachers despite the new policy. The apparent reluctance of some Chicago principals to utilize the additional flexibility granted under the new contract may indicate that issues such as teacher supply and/or social norms governing employment relations are more important factors than policymakers have realized.

 

Brian Jacob is professor of education policy and economics at the University of Michigan. This article is based on a study that is forthcoming in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis.