In his first major education speech as a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama affirmed his support of teachers unions. “I believe in collective bargaining, and I believe that any time you’re talking about wages, workers have to be at the table,”  he said in a July 2007 speech to the National Education Association (NEA).

Less than two years later, in his first major education address as president, delivered to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in March 2009, Obama explicitly backed paying teachers for performance, a reform the unions vehemently oppose. “Too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay.”

Behind this seeming contradiction on performance pay is a complex set of political and policy strategies. Obama and his team are caught in the narrow channel between two important Democratic constituencies: establishment organizations that are opposed to performance pay and the increasingly prominent education-reform crowd that generally supports it. And while the administration appreciates the merits of differentiated teacher pay, this is but one of many teacher-quality policies it hopes to change.

The public record reveals how the administration has navigated these shoals, setting a new course for the federal government’s role in the reform of teacher pay. As senator and president, Obama has made known his education-reform commitments and hesitations in speeches to both unions and business groups. The inclinations of his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, are evident from actions he took while serving as head of the Chicago public school system. Finally, the administration’s handling of two prominent federal programs, the Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) and the Race to the Top (RTT), offers important clues to the strategic thinking at work.

My analysis of this history has led me to two conclusions. First, though the administration’s apparent tentativeness on performance pay can be partially explained by its deference to organized labor, a larger factor is its interest in creating a new and comprehensive framework for advancing teacher quality. Second, the administration’s strategy for generating change through a combination of incentives, collaboration, and optional reforms did not initially bear much fruit for performance pay, but it may reap benefits over the long term, both for performance pay and for other teacher-quality issues.

Developing a Position

In Senator Obama’s 2007 speech to the NEA, he gave an establishment-friendly interpretation of recent education-reform events. He called No Child Left Behind “one of the emptiest slogans in politics” that amounted to “fill[ing] in a few bubbles on a standardized test.” He vigorously supported an active role for unions in education and said that teacher salaries should be raised across the board.

But he also said that schools should be open to paying more to teachers in tough-to-staff subjects, to those who take on additional work, and to those helping students excel academically.

Politically, this equivocation was savvy: he buttressed his liberal bona fides while nodding toward reform. But it also foreshadowed the challenges his administration would face in trying to run the performance-pay gauntlet by staying in the middle of the road.

In the speech, he attempted to reconcile his support for both sides by arguing that differentiated-pay programs should move forward but that they should be created in collaboration with teachers, not imposed on them, and that such programs should never be based on “some arbitrary test score.”

This raised difficult questions: How do you fairly implement a differentiated-pay plan without empirical measures of student performance, and what if organized labor refuses to accept performance pay at all? The first question would eventually be addressed diplomatically by his education secretary; the second lingers on to this day.

One year later, with the election drawing near, Obama again spoke at the annual meeting of the NEA. He was in no position at this time to reveal how the circle was to be squared. In fact, passages specifically related to compensation were either unusually clumsy or cleverly delusive. He said superb teachers should be rewarded through “better pay across the board.” One spectacularly oblique sentence left muddled whether a teacher should be rewarded for learning new professional skills or raising student achievement and whether that reward should be praise or compensation. He was, however, firm that pay systems should be developed with, not imposed on, teachers.

After entering the White House, President Obama felt less need to dissemble on the subject. In his March 2009 speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he intimated that his administration would not only support retention bonuses and additional compensation for teaching in hard-to-staff schools and subjects, but also pay increments for those able to measurably influence academic growth. “Good teachers will be rewarded with more money for improved student achievement.”

Left undecided, however, were the role of the standardized “bubble” tests and the implications of union opposition.

Secretary Duncan refined the administration’s position before the NEA in July 2009. Billed as a “challenge” to the union to “think differently” about job security, evaluations, and more, the speech also revealed that the administration was beginning to think holistically about the policies affecting the teaching profession.

Duncan began by acknowledging the wide distribution of teacher effectiveness. Current practices, the secretary argued, unfortunately treat “all teachers lik e interchangeable widgets.”

To gain a better understanding of variations in teacher quality and then make use of this information, we need improved teacher evaluation systems, Duncan argued. Those currently in place are “deeply flawed.”

Then Duncan opened the door to the use of empirical measures of student achievement in teacher evaluations and therefore, presumably, in teacher pay and other personnel decisions. While acknowledging that today’s “tests are far from perfect” and that “the complex, nuanced work of teaching” can’t be fairly measured by “a simple multiple choice exam,” the secretary defended the use of test scores.

Though they “alone should never drive evaluation, compensation, or tenure decisions…to remove student achievement entirely from evaluation is illogical and indefensible.” Duncan was beginning to sketch a new framework for teacher policies, one that integrated student performance data, teacher evaluations, and a range of personnel decisions, including compensation. In time, this shift would prove to be consequential.

But Duncan also echoed his boss’s deference to labor. “The president and I have both said repeatedly that we are not going to impose reform but rather work with teachers, principals, and unions to find what works.” This hedge would also prove consequential.

A good deal can be learned about both the roots and implications of the Obama administration’s evolving position on performance pay from Arne Duncan’s experience with the federal Teacher Incentive Fund (TIF) in Chicago (see sidebar) and the administration’s efforts to fund and reform the program since 2009.

The Teacher Incentive Fund

Since 2006, the federal government has funded a small program to support differentiated compensation, the Teacher Incentive Fund. Developed by the Bush administration, TIF provides funding on a competitive basis to states and districts that implement performance-pay programs for teachers and/or principals in high-need schools.

In its first years, TIF had several strikes against it. It was a new program during a period of domestic budget austerity. It sought to advance what was still a politically contentious policy. And it was advocated by an unpopular administration facing a Congress controlled by the opposition party. Accordingly, Congress never fully embraced TIF during the Bush years, and that administration’s annual budget requests (ranging from $100 to $500 million) were never fully funded. Appropriations were generally just under $100 million each year, a relatively small amount for a federal education program.

The Obama administration could have taken the knife to this Bush-era initiative as it has with the school voucher program in Washington, D.C. Instead, it sought to expand TIF by both seeking increased funding and embedding it in a newly proposed, larger program tentatively called the “Teacher and Leader Innovation Fund” (TLIF).

The 2009 federal stimulus package, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA), provided TIF with an additional $200 million (on top of its $100 million regular appropriation for that year).

Coming on the heels of the ARRA was the administration’s 2010 budget request, in which the Obama team proposed nearly $487 million for TIF, more than the Bush administration had requested since the program’s inaugural year in 2006. Congress proved receptive, providing $400 million, by far the program’s largest regular annual appropriation.

In its FY2011 request, the first real opportunity for the administration to put its full mark on the federal budget (since the 2010 proposal went to Congress shortly after Obama was sworn into office), the U.S. Department of Education sought to significantly change TIF by including its priorities in the new, broader TLIF program. The $950 million request was approximately double the previous year’s.

According to administration documents, if created, TLIF would support the expansive category of state and district efforts to develop “innovative approaches to human capital systems.” Though differentiated pay would be a core component of the program, TLIF would also support efforts to increase the number of effective teachers, more fairly distribute high-quality teachers among differently resourced schools, improve educator-preparation programs, develop additional professional opportunities for effective teachers, strengthen evaluation systems, remove ineffective teachers from the classroom, improve professional development, and support school turnaround efforts.

So what is to be made of the Obama administration’s initial embrace of TIF and subsequent inclusion of many of its objectives into the TLIF proposal? What does this tell us more broadly about the administration’s views on and intentions for performance pay?

Two different interpretations seem plausible. The first is a political explanation. By supporting TIF, both the Bush-era version and even more so the amended TLIF version, the administration can keep one foot in the reform camp and another in the establishment camp.

Even the original TIF program allows for a wide array of approaches to differentiated pay, some of which opponents find easier to swallow than others, like those that reward all adults in a school rather than just the teachers who measurably increase student performance. TIF also permits grantees to apply program funds to a range of more traditional activities, such as professional development and data collection. This list of less controversial activities would grow under the proposed TLIF initiative. Both programs are optional, so no district or state is required to differentiate pay. Finally, since the program is directed toward high-need districts and schools, most of which have collective bargaining agreements, a state’s or district’s participation in the program ordinarily means that organized labor was involved in crafting the new arrangements. The administration can claim the mantle of reform while standing by its pledge that reform will not be forced on teachers and their unions.

A second interpretation is that the administration is attempting to develop a new, comprehensive federal approach to improving teaching, one that combines student performance data, teacher evaluations, and a host of personnel decisions. The roots of this approach can be seen in Secretary Duncan’s TIF experience in Chicago and in his 2009 NEA speech.

This interpretation is supported by TIF draft regulations released by the education department in early 2010. Among other things, the agency sought to require grantees to measure student growth and use these data in robust teacher evaluations, which would then be aligned with professional development. Language in the administration’s 2011 budget description of the new TLIF implied that TIF was too myopic, treating performance pay as a discrete activity when, instead, policy should reflect the “interconnectedness” of compensation reform and other teacher issues. TLIF, according to the budget document, recognized that it is “important to think of [these issues] in a coherent, integrated way.”

So which interpretation better explains the Obama administration’s approach? Support for both can be found in the administration’s signature program, the Race to the Top.

Race to the Top

Included within the ARRA’s nearly $800 billion in spending was the largest competitive grant program in U.S. Department of Education history, the $4.35 billion Race to the Top (RTT).

The official RTT application was a blend of reform and deference to the establishment. The four major ARRA reform categories—data use; standards and assessments; failing schools; and teacher quality—served as its backbone. But the administration added a good bit of muscle. States would earn points for having in place each of the 12 data elements required by the federal America COMPETES Act. They’d be rewarded for having policies authorizing aggressive interventions for failing schools. They’d be significantly penalized for lacking a charter school law. And they’d be barred from even applying if they had “data firewalls” preventing student performance information from being tied to individual teachers.

But states also earned significant points for crafting plans that earned the blessing of their school districts and unions. In a number of cases, those who scored state applications gave extra weight to stakeholder “buy-in” by subtracting points from proposals that lacked the support of these groups.

Though Duncan would later downplay the importance of consensus, when Delaware and Tennessee were announced as the only first-round winners the secretary emphasized that these two states stood apart in their ability to develop strong proposals that also had broad support. In fact, the most hotly debated RTT question in the spring of 2010 was how states would address the tension between reform and union buy-in in their second-round applications.

RTT and Performance Pay

At first glance it is striking, even startling, how small a role performance pay played in round one of Race to the Top. The application has six main sections: one for each of the four ARRA reforms; an introductory section largely dedicated to buy-in issues and previous reform successes; and a final catchall section.

The fourth section (D), “Great Teachers and Leaders,” contains the most points of the six (138 out of 500, or 28 percent). It is broken into five subsections, one of which is titled “Improving teacher and principal effectiveness based on performance.” This comprises four sub-subsections, including “Using evaluations to inform key decisions.” That is broken into four sub-sub-subsections, one of which includes performance pay. Performance pay is one of three elements in this area, along with promotion and retention.

In other words, in the Race to the Top, performance pay is a sub-sub-sub-subsection.

Were a peer reviewer to score by the book, a state without a performance-pay plan would lose just over 2 points out of 500. By comparison, a state without a charter law would lose 32 points.

The most straightforward interpretation is that the administration capitulated to performance-pay opponents. But this analysis seems incomplete, even unfair. Had pleasing the establishment been the administration’s priority, it might simply have kept performance pay out of the application altogether.

In fact, subsection (D)(2) offers compelling evidence for the alternative interpretation. It asks states to measure student growth and to tie these results to individual teachers. It also asks states to develop annual teacher evaluations and include student growth as a component of each teacher’s official assessment. Finally, it asks them to use these evaluations to inform a number of personnel decisions, such as tenure, removal, and compensation.

The Obama administration appears to be offering a new—not to mention tight and rational—framework for improving the teaching profession. However, consistent with the administration’s nonconfrontational method for advancing reform, the new framework is optional. Since RTT is a competitive grant program, no state is forced to participate; states uncomfortable with the framework are free to disregard it.

It is too soon to tell whether this new framework will lead to better student outcomes. But it is not too soon to test the administration’s theory of action for bringing about change. Did the Race to the Top’s use of financial incentives, rewards for collaboration, and optional reforms lead to progress in performance pay and other policies that affect the teaching profession?

State Race to the Top Applications

In the first round, 40 states and the District of Columbia submitted Race to the Top applications. To test the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s approach, I reviewed each application’s (D)(2) section. Figure 1 illustrates how many proposals include an affirmative response to the nine questions embedded in the RTT framework. Will the state…

1.  measure student academic growth?

2.  conduct annual teacher evaluations?

3.  include student growth in teacher evaluations?

4.  use teacher evaluations to inform professional development decisions?

5.  use teacher evaluations to offer additional professional opportunities?

6.  use teacher evaluations to inform compensation decisions (performance pay)?

7.  use teacher evaluations to inform tenure decisions?

8.  use teacher evaluations when considering promotions?

9.  use teacher evaluations to inform termination decisions?

Of the 41 entrants, 39 have systems in place to measure student growth, are building such systems, or have committed to building them. Most states (32) also agreed to conduct annual teacher evaluations. In some cases, this represents a major shift in policy; for example, under current practices, tenured teachers in Hawaii are evaluated only once every five years.

Only about half of the states (21) agreed to include measures of student growth in teacher evaluations. Several committed to having 50 percent or more of each teacher’s evaluation composed of such data. A number of states, however, simply ignored this matter in their applications or only committed to forming a stakeholder committee to discuss it.

Almost all states (34) committed to using evaluations to determine which teachers need which types of professional development. But states were far less likely to commit to using evaluations to make tougher personnel decisions. Only nine were willing to link teacher evaluations to processes for terminating the lowest-performing teachers.

Sixteen states committed to performance-pay plans. But only five states proposed what could be considered strong plans (Arizona, Delaware, Florida, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C.). Notably, Florida required all LEAs (local educational agencies) participating in the state’s application to make student achievement growth the most significant component of compensation, ahead of years of experience and academic degrees.

Two plans could be considered of moderate strength. Minnesota planned to expand its “Q Comp” program, but nearly all details were to be negotiated at the local level between unions and districts, raising questions about the ultimate impact of the plan. In Georgia, participating districts agreed to adopt ill-defined step increases for high-performing teachers.

The remaining nine performance-pay plans were of dubious seriousness. In several applications, including Oklahoma’s and West Virginia’s, the state promised to create a bonus pool but made district participation optional, so it is possible that no teacher would receive extra pay based on merit. In Massachusetts, 1 percent of the state’s districts would pilot a locally determined, yet-to be-defined, differentiated compensation plan. In Idaho, all employees of schools in the top three quartiles of statewide student growth would receive small bonuses, meaning half of the state’s below-average schools would get schoolwide bonuses.

Before choosing Delaware and Tennessee as the first round winners, the education department identified 16 finalists. Figure 2 shows how committed the group was to key components of the new teacher-effectiveness framework.

So far, RTT has not had a revolutionary impact on performance pay. This seems to raise questions about the administration’s belief that large federal financial incentives will lead states to embrace controversial reforms. The limited use of student-performance data in teacher evaluations offers further evidence for this point. Although states, in order to apply, had to remove data firewalls, only half of applying states took the critically important but optional next step: actually making student growth a part of evaluations.

An additional data point calls into question another component of the administration’s theory of action—that major reform can be brought about through collaboration with unions. As noted above, five applicants proposed strong performance-pay plans. South Carolina has no teachers unions. Washington, D.C.’s proposal received no union support. In Florida and Arizona, 8 and 21 percent of local teachers unions, respectively, supported the state’s plan. Only Delaware was able to both craft a strong performance-pay plan and earn broad union support (100 percent).

A Solid Footing

Several factors have diluted the administration’s work on performance pay. First, Duncan, as a general rule, prefers to make reform optional, using incentives to alter behavior. Second, the secretary appears to be more interested in changing the teaching profession broadly than in advancing the narrower issue of performance pay. Third, and most important, the president and secretary remain committed to securing union support for change, reform “with” labor not “to” labor. RTT winner Tennessee made alternative compensation systems completely optional for districts and required that, before a local performance-pay plan is implemented, it receive the blessing of the local union.

But it may still be the case that, in the long term, the administration’s efforts will have a profound positive impact on performance pay. A few states were willing to consider performance pay to an extent that they hadn’t before. And while giving unions a great deal of power in negotiations about differentiated pay will severely limit the number and strength of plans adopted, it might help ensure the strength and sustainability of the few plans that do emerge. Finally, by encouraging states to measure student growth, embed student learning in annual teacher evaluations, and use evaluations to inform a range of personnel decisions, the administration has laid the foundation for performance-pay plans in the future.

The Obama administration, if nothing else, has changed the politics of performance pay. No longer can it be assumed that leading Democrats will oppose efforts to financially compensate high-performing teachers.

On January 19, 2013, in other words, we’ll be able to ask of a Democratic administration a once inconceivable set of questions. How many billions did it spend on performance pay? How many new state-level performance-pay plans did it bring about? Did its activities cause unions to drop their reflexive opposition? Is performance pay now widely viewed as one part of an integrated teacher policy framework?

Depending on the answers to these questions, performance pay and the new teacher framework—not turnarounds, a reauthorized ESEA, or another higher profile issue—may be the Obama administration’s most important education legacy.

Andy Smarick, a former U.S. deputy assistant secretary of education, is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Video: Education Next talks with Mike Petrilli.

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The greatest challenge facing America’s schools today isn’t the budget crisis, or standardized testing, or “teacher quality.” It’s the enormous variation in the academic level of students coming into any given classroom. How we  as a country handle this challenge says a lot about our values and priorities, for good and ill. Unfortunately, the issue has become enmeshed in polarizing arguments about race, class, excellence, and equity. What’s needed instead is some honest, frank discussion about the trade-offs associated with any possible solution.

U.S. students are all over the map in terms of achievement (see Figure 1). By the 4th grade, public-school children who score among the top 10 percent of students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) are reading at least six grade levels above those in the bottom 10 percent. For a teacher with both types of students in her classroom, that means trying to challenge kids ready for middle-school work while at the same time helping others to decode. Even differences between students at the 25th and at the 75th percentiles are huge—at least three grade levels. So if you’re a teacher, how the heck do you deal with that?

In the old days, “ability grouping” and tracking provided the answer: you’d break your students into reading groups, with the bluebirds in one corner, tackling advanced materials at warp speed, and the redbirds in another, slowly making their way through basic texts. Likewise for mathematics. And in middle and high school, you’d continue this approach with separate tracks: “challenge” or “honors” for the top kids, “regular” or “on-level” for the average ones, and “remedial” for the slowest. Teachers could target their instruction to the level of the group or the class, and since similar students were clustered together, few kids were bored or totally left behind.

Then came the attack on tracking. A flurry of books in the 1970s and 1980s argued that confining youngsters to lower tracks hurt their self-esteem and life chances, and was elitist and racist to boot. Jeanne Oakes’s 1985 opus, Keeping Track, was particularly effective in sparking an anti-tracking movement that swept through the nation’s schools.

According to Brookings Institution scholar Tom Loveless, this advocacy led to fundamental changes at breakneck speed. In a report for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute last year, he wrote,

An eighth grader in the early 1990s attended middle schools offering at least two distinct tracks in [each of] English language arts, history, and science. Mathematics courses were organized into three or more tracks. The eighth grader of 2008, however, attended schools with much less tracking. English language arts, history, and science are essentially detracked, i.e., schools typically offer a single course that serves students at every level of achievement and ability. Mathematics usually features two tracks, often algebra and a course for students not yet ready for algebra.

One of the reasons that detracking advocates claimed so many victories is that they painted their pet reform as a strategy in which everybody wins. Oakes and others insisted that detracking would help the lowest-performing students (who would enjoy better teachers, a more challenging level of instruction, and exposure to their higher-achieving peers) while not hurting top students. But by the mid-1990s, researchers started to compile evidence that this happy outcome was just wishful thinking.

In 1995, scholars Dominic Brewer, Daniel Rees, and Laura Argys analyzed test-score results for high-school students in tracked and detracked classrooms, and found benefits of tracking for advanced students. They wrote in the Kappan magazine, “The conventional wisdom on which detracking policy is often based—that students in low-track classes (who are drawn disproportionately from poor families and from minority groups) are hurt by tracking while others are largely unaffected—is simply not supported by very strong evidence.”

And this was before the policy incentives shifted sharply to prioritize low-achieving students. In another study for the Fordham Institute, Loveless found a clear pattern in the late 1990s when states adopted accountability regimes: the performance of the lowest decile of students shot up, while the achievement of the top 10 percent of students stagnated. That’s not surprising; these accountability systems, like No Child Left Behind (NCLB) in 2002, pushed schools to get more students over a low performance bar. They provided few incentives to accelerate the academic growth of students at the top.

This dynamic might have been most pernicious for minority students. Earlier this year, an Indiana University study found that the “Excellence Gap,” the racial achievement gap at NAEP’s advanced level, widened during the NCLB era. One possible explanation is that high-achieving minority students are likely to attend schools with lots of low-achieving students, and their teachers are focused on helping children who are far behind rather than those ready to accelerate ahead.

The Power of Peers

The attack on tracking also claimed an innocent bystander: ability grouping, which became suspect in many circles, too. Yet in recent years, the “peer effects” literature has shown the benefits of grouping students of similar abilities together. One clever study, by economists Scott Imberman, Adriana Kugler, and Bruce Sacerdote, looked at the fallout from Hurricanes Rita and Katrina. They wanted to know what happened when students who were evacuated from New Orleans ended up in schools in Houston. They found that the arrival of low-achieving evacuees dragged down the average performance of the Houston students and had a particularly negative impact on high-achieving Houston kids. Meanwhile, high-achieving evacuees had a positive effect on local students. As Bruce Sacerdote told me, “The high-achieving kids seemed to be the most sensitive. They do particularly well by having high-achieving peers. And they are particularly harmed by low-achieving peers.” He added, “I’ve become a believer in tracking.”

In 2006, Caroline Hoxby and Gretchen Weingarth examined the Wake County (North Carolina) Public School System. For the better part of two decades, the district, in and around Raleigh, had been reassigning numbers of students to new schools every year in order to keep its schools racially and socioeconomically balanced. That created thousands of natural experiments in which the composition of classrooms changed dramatically, and randomly, and that, in turn, provided Hoxby and Weingarth an opportunity to investigate the impact of these changes on student achievement.

They found evidence for what they called the “boutique model” of peer effects, “a model in which students do best when the environment is made to cater to their type.” When school reassignments resulted in the arrival of students with either very low or very high achievement, this boosted the test scores of other students with very low or very high achievement, probably because it created a critical mass of students at the same achievement level, and schools could better focus attention on their particular needs.

Does that mean students should be sharply sequestered by ability? Not exactly. Here’s how Hoxby and Weingarth put it in their conclusion: “Our evidence does not suggest that complete segregation of people, by types, is optimal. This is because (a) people do appear to benefit from interacting with peers of a higher type and (b) people who are themselves high types appear to receive sufficient benefit from interacting with peers a bit below them that there is little reason to isolate them completely. What our evidence does suggest is that efforts to create interactions between lower and higher types ought to maintain continuity of types.”

In other words, a little bit of variation is okay. But when the gap is too wide—say, six grade levels in reading—nobody wins.

Enter Differentiated Instruction

So if grouping all students together leads to pernicious effects, but divvying kids up by ability is politically unacceptable, what’s the alternative? The ed-school world has an answer: “differentiated instruction.” The notion is that one teacher instructs a diverse group of kids, but manages to reach each one at precisely the appropriate level. The idea, according to Carol Tomlinson of the University of Virginia (UVA), is to “shake up what goes on in the classroom so that students have multiple options for taking in information, making sense of ideas, and expressing what they learn.” Ideally, instruction is customized at the individual student level. Every child receives a unique curriculum that meets that individual’s exact needs. A teacher might even make specialized homework assignments, or provide the specific one-on-one help that a particular kid requires.

If you think that sounds hard to do, you’re not alone. I asked Holly Hertberg-Davis, who studied under Tomlinson and is now her colleague at UVA, if differentiated instruction was too good to be true. Can teachers actually pull it off? “My belief is that some teachers can but not all teachers can,” she answered.

Hertberg-Davis worked with Tomlinson on a large study of differentiated instruction. Teachers were provided with extensive professional development and ongoing coaching. Three years later the researchers wanted to know if the program had an impact on student learning. But they were stumped. “We couldn’t answer the question,” Hertberg-Davis told me, “because no one was actually differentiating.”

Teachers admit to being flummoxed by this approach. In a 2008 national survey commissioned by the Fordham Institute, more than 8 in 10 teachers said differentiated instruction was “very” or “somewhat” difficult to implement. Even ed-school professors are skeptical. A 2010 national random survey of teacher educators asked them the same question and got the same result: more than 8 in 10 said differentiated instruction was very or somewhat difficult to implement.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I was curious to see differentiated instruction in action, so I visited my local elementary school in Takoma Park, Maryland. Piney Branch Elementary serves an incredibly diverse group of 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, from the children of übereducated white and black middle-class families, to poor immigrant children from Latin America, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, to low-income African American kids.

I sat down with the school’s principal, Bertram “Mr. G.” Generlette, who has the friendly, laid-back manner of his native Antigua. I cut right to the chase. I’m wondering if I’d be making a mistake to send my son to a school like Piney Branch. Is it going to slow him down if his classmates are several years behind or still learning the language? (Of course, not all poor or minority children are low-achieving, nor are all white students high-achieving. Still, achievement gaps being what they are, the range of academic diversity does tend to be larger at schools with lots of racial and social diversity.)

It was pretty obvious that Mr. G. had heard these questions before, particularly from white folks like me. I asked him if that was the case. “Parents come in, yes,” he told me. “They are new to the neighborhood. Or their child is in kindergarten, or they are moving from private school. After a few minutes, you get the idea.” However, he said with a sly grin, “they very rarely ask the question directly.”

But he wasn’t afraid to answer me directly. “We are committed to diversity,” he started. “It’s a lens through which we see everything. We look at test scores. How are students overall? And how are different groups doing? It’s easy to see. Our white students are performing high. What can we do to keep pushing that performance up? For African American and Hispanic students, what can we do to make gains?”

Since Mr. G.’s arrival five years ago, the percentage of African American 5th graders passing the state reading test is way up, from 55 to 91 percent. For Hispanic children, it’s up from 46 to 74 percent. It’s true that scores statewide have also risen, but not nearly to the same degree.

And there’s no evidence that white students have done any worse over this time. In fact, they are performing better than ever. Before Mr. G. arrived, 33 percent of white 5th graders reached the advanced level on the state math test; in 2009, twice as many did. In fact, Piney Branch white students outscore the white kids at virtually every other Montgomery County school.

What’s his secret? Was he grouping students “homogeneously,” so all the high-achieving kids learned together, and the slower kids got extra help?

“There’s no such thing as a homogenous group,” Mr. G. shot back. “One kid is a homogeneous group. As soon as you bring another student in, you have differences. The question is: how do you capitalize on the differences?”

Well, that sounds OK in theory. But come on, Mr. G., how are you going to make sure my kid doesn’t get slowed down?

“My job as a principal is to let my parents know that your child will get the services they need,” he answered patiently. “We are going to make sure that every child is getting pushed to a maximum level. That’s my commitment.”

And that’s when I was introduced to the incredibly nuanced and elaborate efforts that Piney Branch makes to differentiate instruction, challenge every child, and avoid any appearance of segregated classrooms.

So how do they do it? First, every homeroom has a mixed group of students: the kids are assigned to make sure that every class represents the diversity of the school in terms of achievement level, race, class, etc. Then, during the 90-minute reading block, students spend much of their time in small groups appropriate for their reading level. (Redbirds and bluebirds are back!) However, in the new lingo of differentiated instruction, the staff works hard to make sure these groups are fluid—a child in a slower reading group can get bumped up to a faster one once progress is made.

For math, on the other hand, students are split up into homogeneous classrooms. All the advanced math kids are in one classroom, the middle students in another, and the struggling kids in a third. This means shuffling the kids from one room to another (a process that can be quite time-consuming for elementary school kids). But it allows the highest-performing kids to sprint ahead; one of the school’s 3rd-grade math classes, for example, is tackling the district’s 5th-grade math curriculum. (Because of large achievement gaps at the school, these math classes are more racially and socioeconomically homogeneous than the student population as a whole.)

The rest of the time—when kids are learning science or social studies or taking “specials” like art and music—they are back in their heterogeneous classrooms. Even then, however, teachers work to “differentiate instruction,” which often means separating the kids back into homogeneous groups again, and offering more challenging, extended assignments to the higher-achieving students.

It sounds like some sort of elaborate Kabuki dance to me, but it appears to succeed on several counts. All kids spend most of the day getting challenged at their level, and no one ever sits in a classroom that’s entirely segregated by race or class.

Reading War

Test scores indicate that the strategy is working, too, but that doesn’t mean all parents have been thrilled. Three years ago, Mr. G. told me, a group of white parents pushed to get the school to move to homogeneous classrooms for reading as well as math. “Parents felt that the only way to get kids to read at a high level was to have other kids around them who read at a high level,” he explained. (That didn’t sound so unreasonable to me.) “We had a lot of meetings. The staff overwhelmingly supported the diverse approach, the heterogeneous approach. That was good for me as an administrator because the staff was behind me.”

I tracked down one of the “troublemaker” parents. Her name is Sue Katz Miller and she personifies much of what makes Takoma Park great: she’s smart, she’s an activist, and she’s committed to helping make the city a welcoming community for families of all incomes and backgrounds. (A neighbor of mine called her “a force of nature.”) A former Newsweek reporter and now a regular columnist for The Takoma Voice, she spent two years as PTA president at Piney Branch and is an enthusiastic booster of the school and its diversity. “My kids have both benefited enormously from being in a Piney Branch social milieu,” she told me.

But the reading decision still sticks in her craw. “Why is it OK,” she asked, “to have homogeneous grouping in math and not have it in reading? The answer you get is: well, we can’t do both, they would be switching classes all the time, it would be like middle school and they won’t be able to handle it…. It’s a huge disservice to the kids who are ready for rigor in the humanities and are not math kids. It’s bizarre. We’ve said we’re going to accommodate kids in math but not in reading. It’s completely insane as far as I’m concerned. It makes me angry.”

She lost that battle, but Mr. G. and his teachers didn’t ignore the parents’ concerns, either. He went out and found reading programs suitable for advanced students, like William and Mary, Junior Great Books, and Jacob’s Ladder. He trained his teachers on these programs, ensuring that the students in the top reading groups would be challenged with difficult material. (The teachers loved it.) He tried hard to live up to his promise to push all students as far as they could go.

Competing for Kids

Mr. G. and Piney Branch face some healthy competition. Montgomery County offers a half-dozen “Centers for the Highly Gifted,” magnet schools that are designed for supersmart kids and located in elementary buildings throughout the district. Pine Crest, just a few miles away from Piney Branch, hosts one such center, and an increasing number of Piney Branch 3rd graders were testing into it for 4th and 5th grades.

A year ago, 25 Piney Branch kids were accepted—more than any other elementary school in the district. If they all took up the offer, Mr. G. said, “That’s a teacher walking out of my building.”

So in 2009–10, in cooperation with the district, Piney Branch launched a pilot program to bring the “Highly Gifted Center” curriculum into its classrooms. This wasn’t easy; there wasn’t a curriculum, per se, at the centers. Teachers had the freedom to do what they wanted. So the district helped the teachers put down on paper everything they were doing in the classroom.

Mr. G. arranged to have a 4th-grade and a 5th-grade teacher trained on the Highly Gifted approach, and formed a “cluster group” of gifted students in their classrooms. This means that, in one classroom in each of these grades, there are 12 or so gifted students, along with another 12 or so “on-level” kids. While they are taught together some of the day, they are frequently broken into small groups, so the gifted kids can learn together at an accelerated pace.

Pulling this off takes an energetic and gifted educator; 4th-grade teacher Folakemi Mosadomi, who has the gifted group in her classroom, appears to fit the bill perfectly. Now in her 5th year of teaching (all of them at Piney Branch under Mr. G.), Ms. M. acknowledged that differentiating instruction in this way requires “extensive planning and training,” not to mention someone who is well-organized and creative. But even that’s not always enough.

In the first year of the pilot, she had four different reading groups in one classroom, from kids still learning English to the highly gifted students. “I went from sounding out the ‘A’ sound with one group, to talking to another group about how the Exxon Valdez oil spill was like the Battle of Normandy.” That range was simply too much for one teacher to handle—remember Caroline Hoxby’s finding about “continuity of types?”—so the next year she had just two groups: the gifted students, and the next level down. “Now it’s easier to do more with both groups of students together,” she told me.

And the strategy seems to be working in one important way: last year, about half of the gifted children chose to stay at Piney Branch.

Fragile Compromise

So with a well-trained and dedicated staff, and lots of support, “differentiated instruction” can be brought to life. But even at Piney Branch, which benefits from the vast resources of a huge, affluent school system in Montgomery County, Maryland, it sure seems rickety, held with lots of duct tape and chewing gum, and subject to collapse without just the right staff and parent support.

If the school community placed its highest value on pushing all kids to achieve their full potential, including its high-achieving students, it would probably organize its classrooms differently. It would embrace “ability grouping” and homogenous classrooms wholeheartedly, and would skip all the gymnastics required to keep classes academically, racially, and socioeconomically diverse throughout the day. But Piney Branch understandably seeks to balance its concerns for academic growth with its interest in maintaining an integrated environment, so this uneasy compromise is probably the best it can do.

Piney Branch and Ms. M. might be able to pull it off. But how many Piney Branches and Ms. M.’s are there?

Technology may someday alleviate the need for such compromises. With the advent of powerful online learning tools, such as those on display in New York City’s School of One, students might be able to receive instruction that’s truly individualized to their own needs—differentiation on steroids.

Perhaps. But until that time, our schools will have to wrestle with the age-old tension between “excellence” and “equity.” And that tension will be resolved one homogeneous or heterogeneous classroom at a time.

Michael J. Petrilli is executive editor of Education Next, research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a vice president at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He is working on a book for parents considering diverse public schools like Piney Branch.

An unabridged version of this article is available here.

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Programs that enable students to attend private schools, including both vouchers and scholarships funded with tax credits, have become increasingly common in recent years. This study examines the impact of the nation’s largest private school scholarship program on the performance of students who remain in the public schools. The Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC) was signed into law in 2001 and opened to students from low-income families in the 2002–03 school year. FTC provides corporations with tax credits for donations they make to scholarship funding organizations, the nonprofits that determine student eligibility for the program and issue scholarships. Corporations can receive dollar-for-dollar tax credits for up to 75 percent of their total state tax obligation each year.

 

Although little noticed, tax credit scholarship programs now send many more low-income students to private schools than do traditional school voucher programs. More than 104,000 students nationwide attended private schools through tax credit programs in the 2008–09 school year, while only 60,000 students used private school vouchers. Scholarship programs similar to Florida’s now operate in several states, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Indiana, and are being considered in Maryland and New Jersey. The Florida program is set to expand dramatically in the coming years (see sidebar), making evidence of its consequences all the more timely.

Expanding Scholarship Opportunities

In April 2010, Florida governor Charlie Crist signed into law SB 2126, which expanded both funding and eligibility for the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program (FTC). Funding for the program had been capped at $118 million. Under the new rules, as much as $140 million in corporate tax liabilities and insurance premiums may be applied to the program in the 2011 budget year. If the scholarship program remains successful, the funding cap may rise by as much as 25 percent per year. The legislation also loosened the eligibility rules to include children from families with incomes up to 230 percent of the poverty level.

During the 2009–10 school, nearly 29,000 children attended more than 1,000 private schools across the state with FTC scholarships worth between $3,950 and $4,100. Three-quarters of participating students are black or Hispanic; 60 percent are from single-parent homes. With expanded access, the program could grow to include 70,000 students by 2015. The scholarship amount may increase to as much as 80 percent of the state’s per-pupil expenditure, currently $6,866, enabling many more families to afford private school tuition.

SB 2126 also increased accountability for participating private schools. The state had already required FTC scholarship students to participate in standardized testing using a nationally normed exam chosen by each private school; a study commissioned by the Florida Department of Education found that, in 2007–08, their academic gains were similar to students nationally across all income levels and to similar Florida students who remained in public schools. To make the latter comparison, the study compared program applicants who were barely eligible to those who had incomes just above the eligibility threshold. Under the new rules, private schools with 30 or more FTC scholarship students must release to the public gain scores on standardized tests for those students. The legislation expanding the FTC program passed both the House and Senate with strong bipartisan support.

One popular argument for expanding private school choice is that public schools will improve their own performance when faced with competition for students. Because state school funding is tied to student enrollment, losing students to private schools means losing revenue. The threat of losing students to private schools may give schools greater incentive to cultivate parental satisfaction by operating more efficiently and improving the outcomes valued by students and parents. Alternatively, private school vouchers and scholarships may have unintended negative effects on public schools: they may draw away the most involved families from public schools, community monitoring of those schools may diminish, and schools may reduce the effort they put into educating students.

It is notoriously difficult to gauge the competitive effects of private schools on public school performance. Private schools may be disproportionately located in communities with low-quality public schools, causing the relationship between private school competition and public school performance to appear weaker than it actually is. If, however, private schools are located in areas where citizens care a lot about educational quality, the relationship will appear stronger than it truly is.

This study takes advantage of the introduction of the FTC to provide new evidence on the effects of increased competition on student achievement in public schools. Before the program began in 2002, roughly 11 percent of students in Florida were enrolled in private schools. FTC targeted students from low-income families, only 5 percent of whom had been attending private schools.

We examine whether students in schools that face a greater threat of losing students to private schools as a result of the introduction of tax-credit funded scholarships improve their test scores more than do students in schools that face less-pronounced threats. We find that they do, and that this improvement occurs before any students have actually used a scholarship to switch schools. In other words, it occurs from the threat of competition alone.

Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program

In order to be eligible for an FTC scholarship, students must meet the income guidelines (until recently, family incomes below 185 percent of the federal poverty line for new applicants) and either must have attended a Florida public school for the full school year before program entry or be entering kindergarten or first grade. With the exception of these early-grade private school students, students already attending private schools in Florida are not eligible for first-time scholarships. Students who enter a private school on a scholarship are eligible to retain their scholarships in future years, so long as their family income remains within the stated limits (until recent changes, below 200 percent of the federal poverty line).

Scholarships need not cover all of the costs of attending private schools, and parents are free to send their children to any private school regardless of the share of tuition and fees the scholarship covers. The scholarship is quite generous; it covers approximately 90 percent of tuition and fees at a typical religious elementary school in Florida and two-thirds of tuition and fees at a typical religious high school. As a result, the program greatly increased the accessibility of private schools to low-income families. In the first year, some 15,585 scholarships were awarded, increasing the number of low-income students attending private schools by more than 50 percent. For the 2009–10 school year, the FTC program awarded scholarships to 28,927 students (see Figure 1).

Data

Our analysis draws on several data sources. The Florida Department of Education’s Education Data Warehouse provides test scores from the Florida Comprehensive Achievement Test (FCAT) and demographic characteristics for all students in the public schools. We use test-score data from the 1999–2000 school year through 2006–07. Students classified as learning disabled were excluded from the analysis, as they are eligible for a more generous voucher through the McKay Scholarship Program, and the FTC program should therefore have had no effect on schools’ efforts to retain these students (see “The Case for Special Education Vouchers,” features, Winter 2010).

The Florida Department of Education publishes public and private school addresses, including latitude and longitude information for the public schools. The address information was geocoded to generate measures of the pressure that public schools face from private competitors. We first limited our attention to the 92 percent of public school students in the state attending schools with a private competitor within a five-mile radius. Because it is not obvious how best to gauge the amount of competition faced by the remaining schools, we constructed four different measures:

• Distance: the crow’s-flight distance between the physical addresses of each public school and the nearest private competitor. A private school qualifies as a competitor to a public school if it serves any of the grades taught in that public school.

• Density: the number of private competitors within a five-mile radius of the public school.

• Diversity: the number of different types of private schools within a five-mile radius of the public school. To generate this measure, we first identified 10 distinct types of private schools, defined by their stated religious (or secular) affiliation.

• Concentration: an index of how varied the private school competitors are for a given public school, based on the counts of different types of schools within a five-mile radius.

The distance and density measures gauge whether easier access to a private school of any type increased the competitive pressure on public schools when the new policy lowered the effective cost of attending private school for eligible students. The diversity and concentration measures capture the variety of options available to students; public schools in areas with more varied options should feel more competitive pressure in the wake of the policy change.

Methods

In order to determine the effect of scholarship-induced private school competition on public school performance, we examine whether students in schools that face a greater threat of losing students to private schools as a result of the introduction of tax-credit funded scholarships improve their test scores more than do students in schools that face a less-pronounced threat. Specifically, we look to see whether test scores showed greater improvement in the wake of the new policy for students attending public schools with more (or more varied) nearby private options that suddenly became more affordable for low-income students than did scores for students attending schools with fewer (or less varied) potential competitors.

This analysis is possible because of the considerable variation in potential competition faced by schools across the state of Florida. Prior to the introduction of the program, some communities in Florida had a much richer and more diverse set of private school options than did other communities. The overall share of low-income students attending private schools ranged from 1.4 percent in Punta Gorda to 7.9 percent in the Melbourne-Titusville-Cocoa-Palm Bay area. More importantly, by our measures, the amount of competition that specific public schools faced on the eve of the program also varied widely. Our density measure, for example, ranges from one private school within five miles to 60. The average Florida public school had roughly 14 private schools nearby, but more than 30 percent of schools had fewer than 2 or more than 30.

We isolate the effect of competition introduced by the program by comparing the performance of each school’s students to the performance of its students the year before the program was enacted. When making these comparisons, we take into account student characteristics that are associated with test scores, including gender and race/ethnicity, English-language-learner status, and eligibility for free or reduced-price lunch.

We also control for some characteristics of schools that could affect the degree of competitive pressure. Most importantly, we control for the letter grades that schools received from the state’s accountability system; schools with lower grades may feel particular pressure to increase their scores to avoid accountability sanctions, independent of the effects of the FTC program. We also control for the percentage of the school’s student body that was eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, as only these students were eligible for FTC scholarships.

There are three main ways in which a program that expands access to private schools could affect public school performance. Public schools could react to private school competition by altering their policies, practices, or effort; this is the direct competitive effect. Such a program could also affect public schools by changing the mix of students who attend them. A third possibility is that, so long as only a few students leave a public school with scholarships, the program could have effects on resources. Resource effects could be either negative (as total state aid decreases with the loss of students), or positive (as per-pupil resources might actually increase following small losses of students, due to the indivisibility of classroom teachers). We can eliminate the possibility of student-body composition and resource effects by concentrating solely on the FTC program’s effects during the 2001–02 school year, after the program’s announcement but before students could actually leave the public schools with a scholarship. During this academic year, students in the public schools were applying for private school scholarships for the following year.

Results

We find that all four measures of competition (distance, density, diversity, and concentration) are positively related to student performance on state math and reading tests. (Because we obtained similar results looking at performance in each subject separately, we focus our discussion on the average score across both subjects.) Each of our competition measures uses different units. We therefore report the estimated effects of a one standard deviation increase in the amount of competition faced by a given public school by each measure.

For every 1.1 miles closer to the nearest private school, public school math and reading performance increases by 1.5 percent of a standard deviation in the first year following the announcement of the scholarship program. Likewise, having 12 additional private schools nearby boosts public school test scores by almost 3 percent of a standard deviation. The presence of two additional types of private schools nearby raises test scores by about 2 percent of a standard deviation. Finally, an increase of one standard deviation in the concentration of private schools nearby is associated with an increase of about 1 percent of a standard deviation in test scores.

Although these effects are relatively small, they consistently indicate a positive relationship between private school competition and student performance in the public schools, even before any students leave for the private sector. That is, these results provide evidence that public schools responded to the increased threat of losing students to the private schools. The fact that we obtain quite similar results regardless of the specific measure used makes us confident that the findings are not driven by other factors that might distinguish public schools facing more or less competition based on a given measure. Indeed, in ongoing work we have also considered measures of competition based on the number of available slots in nearby private schools and on the number of nearby churches, and again find very similar results.

Moreover, it is important to recognize that the results reported above represent lower-bound estimates of the effects of competition on public school performance. They are based only on comparisons of schools with different levels of competition. If all public schools improved their performance in response to the scholarship program, this improvement would not be detected by our analysis.

One might expect that some public schools have a greater incentive to respond to potential competition associated with the availability of private school scholarships for low-income students than others. We consider two major reasons schools may face different incentives to react to competitive pressure. First, elementary and middle schools may have more of an incentive to respond to competitive pressure than high schools because the scholarships cover a greater share of private school tuition and fees in the early grades than they do in the high school years. Although the differences in the share covered might not matter for higher-income families, for many low-income families the difference in out-of-pocket expenses between an elementary or middle school and a high school is likely to be significant. Knowing this, public high schools might not react as strongly to competition from a private school scholarship program as would public elementary and middle schools. Consistent with this hypothesis, we find that the effect of competition is more than twice as large for elementary and middle schools as it is for high schools (see Figure 2).

Second, public schools that stand to lose the largest amounts of revenue if many of their scholarship-eligible students leave may be more responsive than those schools less likely to lose large amounts of revenue. All public schools may experience resource effects as a consequence of losing students to private schools through a scholarship program. However, those that are on the margin of receiving federal Title I aid have the largest incentive to retain students from low-income families. These federal resources, which average more than $500 per pupil, are directed to school districts, which then allocate them to the elementary and middle schools that low-income students attend. We find that public schools that are likely to receive Title I aid in the next year if they retain their low-income students, but not if they don’t, tend to improve disproportionately in the year following the program announcement, whereas schools whose Title I aid is unlikely to change respond much less noticeably or not at all.

We also investigate whether the estimated effects of the scholarship program persist in later years. After the first year of the analysis, resource and composition effects may occur as students who receive scholarships leave the public schools for private schools. We find that the effects of the voucher program grow stronger over time (see Figure 3), resulting perhaps from increased knowledge of the program, which might contribute to greater competitive pressure, or from the advent of composition and resource effects. While it is difficult to disentangle the reasons for this strengthening over time of the program’s estimated effects, these findings nonetheless suggest that our first-year results may understate the positive effect of the FTC program on public school performance

Conclusion

Our results indicate that the increased competitive pressure public schools faced following the introduction of Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship Program led to general improvements in their performance. Both expanded access to private school options and greater variety of options that students have in terms of the religious (or secular) affiliations of private schools are positively associated with public-school students’ test scores following the introduction of the FTC program. The gains occur immediately, before any students leave the public schools with a scholarship, implying that competitive threats are responsible for at least some of the estimated effects. And the gains appear to be much more pronounced in the schools most at risk to lose students (elementary and middle schools, where the cost of private school attendance with a scholarship is much lower) and in the schools that are on the margin of Title I funding.

To be sure, our study has several limitations. First, our measures of competition reflect the state of the private school market in 2001, before private schools had a chance to respond to the FTC scholarship program. Although that ensures that the competition measure is not itself affected by postpolicy test scores, it does give a less accurate view of the competitive pressures faced by schools in subsequent years.

Second, our study is based on data from a single state. It is possible that the dynamics between competitive pressures and public-school students’ test scores are systematically different in Florida than they are in the rest of the nation. In particular, more than 90 percent of Florida’s students live in the state’s top 20 most populous metropolitan areas. In states with a greater share of the population in rural areas, the effects of a scholarship program may not exert the same degree of competitive pressure on public schools. It may also be the case that Florida’s diverse range of private school options and accompanying greater competition among the private schools limit the study’s generalizability. Nonetheless, our results indicate that private school competition, brought about by the creation of scholarships for students from low-income families, is likely to have positive effects on the performance of traditional public schools.

David Figlio is professor of education, social policy and economics at Northwestern University and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Cassandra M.D. Hart is a doctoral student in the Department of Human Development and Social Policy at Northwestern University.

Terry Driscoll, executive director of information systems at Lubbock Independent School District, says he’s hardwired to resist government intrusion. And when the Texas Education Agency (TEA), along with the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, came to town to talk about improvements to the state’s data system, he first wondered whether they even knew what they were talking about. But with the recession taking a bite out of his district’s own data initiatives, Driscoll was ready to listen. Now, almost a year later, Lubbock has become the first test site for a different type of state data system, one that aims to move districts from collecting data solely for accountability to collecting it to improve schools.

The darling of reformers, data have clear potential to help educators make better decisions. But however much they are touted, most data initiatives remain far from realizing their potential. Historically, the collection of data has been top-down, designed almost exclusively to show compliance with state and federal regulations. And while the amount of data collected continues to grow—Texas school districts respond to 104 data collections by the state each year, costing the districts in excess of $300 million—their quality and usefulness are questionable. Thus many state data systems function as de facto data morgues, used more often in autopsies of failed programs than to help educators and policymakers improve existing ones.

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that while Texas is data-rich, it is still information-poor. A 2008 TEA study found it likely that some state data are erroneous, even if the same data are accurate in the district systems. It also found that districts must constantly reformat their data to meet state requirements, adding to the cost and to the opportunity for introducing errors.

More important, once districts submit data, they receive little if anything of instructional value in return. Much of the information the state collects, such as the number of 7th graders eligible for Title I funds at a particular school, governs the flow of dollars, but it is not on its own useful for improving school operations or performance. Other data, such as Lubbock’s results on state assessments, could be useful. But that information arrives at the district office late each summer on computer disks, and it must be integrated with the district’s own system for storing student information, along with a third system that houses interim assessment results. By the time school personnel are able to compile reports for teachers, the information is “already cold,” says Kelly Trlica, Lubbock’s chief academic officer.

Because of experiences like Lubbock’s, when it came time to update the state’s 25-year-old data system, officials decided to make some big changes. Instead of gathering a group of technicians in Austin, state education officials talked to 2,200 educators and administrators across the state about the data they needed. Overwhelmingly, they said that the information had to be directly accessible to and relevant for educators. Middle-school teachers, for example, need access to special education identifications, test results, and other information to create appropriate instructional groupings and interventions. And they need that information well before school starts. Principals, for their part, want data to evaluate the many instructional software and intervention programs that are purchased each year. Moreover, frequent educator use is an important means of preventing, or catching and correcting, data errors. If those people closest to the data—teachers—are actually using the data, they will update class rosters and other student information on a regular basis.

To enable schools, districts, and state officials to more easily share and use data, the TEA is developing a more flexible information-system platform. The platform will offer smaller districts a shared, state-sponsored student-information system. It will also make it easy for districts with existing systems to connect to a new data platform that will serve as the hub for district-specific data, feeding relevant student, classroom, and campus information directly to educators and enabling seamless reporting of compliance data to the state. For example, the district might enter attendance data just once. That information would then be available to teachers and counselors, in real time and in dashboard formats, where it would flag students with potential problems. That same attendance data would be automatically reformatted for easy transmission to the state. If successful, the new system will not only reduce costs and streamline the existing accountability process, but will also equip educators with relevant information they can use to help their students.

Building a student-centric system that serves the diverse needs of the state’s 1,235 local education agencies, which range from districts with fewer than 500 students to those with more than 150,000, will not be easy. But this year, educators in Lubbock’s five high schools are getting a start. They will be the first to test-drive the early-warning dashboard, a tool that provides easy access to student attendance, assessment, and credit attainment records, as well as other data that will allow educators to quickly identify potential dropouts and get them back on track.

More than 160 educators are serving as advisors to ensure the system delivers what teachers need. And, true to the spirit of TEA’s new open approach, the public can read the specifications, make recommendations, and watch the system unfold at www.texasstudentdatasystem.org.

Bill Tucker is managing director of Education Sector.

Americans know the nation’s schools are not doing well. According to results from the 2010 EdNext-PEPG Survey released in this issue (“Meeting of the Minds”), only 18 percent think the schools deserve an “A” or a “B,” while 25 percent assign them either a “D” or an “F.” These are the worst grades the U. S. public has given its schools since it was first asked to grade them back in 1981.

Americans tend to think their local elementary and middle schools are much better than those of the nation as a whole. The problems with schools, people seem to believe, are found somewhere else: Schools are dreadful in the inner city, perhaps, or in other parts of the country, maybe. My local schools are just fine.

On some measures, they may be right. Yet schools across the country fall short when it comes to challenging the best and brightest. In this issue’s cover story (“Teaching the Talented”), my colleagues and I find that schools in 29 countries are doing a better job of lifting students to the highest level of accomplishment in math than are schools in the United States.

In honor of W. E. B. Du Bois, I like to refer to the students who can reach the highest levels of accomplishment as the “talented tenth.” Du Bois, renowned scholar, activist, and founder of the NAACP, believed it would take a small group with exceptional talent to lift his fellow African Americans out of poverty into the mainstream of American society. His vision has been proven more right than wrong by the many outstanding black scholars, educators, entrepreneurs, musicians, and community leaders.

Du Bois’s insight applies as much to countries as to ethnic minorities. It takes some portion of the total community who have exceptional talent to sustain an increasingly productive national economy. That portion is not fixed at 10 percent, however. The percentage of a generation who are of high accomplishment can be as little as 1 percent or as high as 25 percent. It depends very much upon how they are educated.

Unfortunately, the United States educates only a little more than 6 percent of its students to an advanced level in math according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a small percentage when compared to the proportion in many other countries that score at a comparable level on the international PISA test. The countries that do better spread from just north of the 49th parallel (Canada) across Europe (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) to nations crossed by the Arctic Circle (Finland, Iceland, and Sweden) to the farthest reaches of Asia (Taiwan, Korea, and Japan) to just short of the South Pole (Australia and New Zealand).

Some people blame the state of the American school on a rising immigrant population or the black-white education gap. But the picture does not change much when one looks only at white students (only 8 percent of whom score at the advanced level) or at those who have a parent with a college degree, only 10 percent of whom are advanced. Even for these more-advantaged groups, achievement in math is well below what many other countries are doing for all of their students, regardless of ethnicity or parental education.

Countries with good schools become more productive and watch their economies grow, while those with poor schools eventually pay the price. If the United States is ever to pay off its vast and rising public debt, as well as the growing deficits in its teacher pension accounts, it will have to fix not only the nation’s schools but local ones, too.

— Paul E. Peterson

“Caught in the hurricane of hormones,” the Toronto Star began a 2008 story about students in the Canadian capital’s middle schools. Suspended “between childhood and the adult world, pre-teens have been called the toughest to teach.”

“The Bermuda triangle of education,” former Louisiana superintendent Cecil Picard once termed middle schools. “Hormones are flying all over the place.”

Indeed, you can’t touch middle school without hearing about “raging hormones.”

Says Diane Ross, a middle-school teacher for 17 years and for 13 more a teacher of education courses for licensure in Ohio, “If you are the warm, nurturing, motherly, grandmotherly type, you are made for early childhood education. If you love math or science or English, then you are the high school type. If you love bungee jumping, then you are the middle school type.”

Even in professional journals you catch the drift of “middle-school madness.” Mayhem in the Middle was a particularly provocative study by Cheri Pierson Yecke published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute in 2005. American middle schools have become the places “where academic achievement goes to die,” wrote Yecke.

Hyperbole? Or sad reality? Sometime last year, while walking the hallway of my school district’s middle school, I was pulled aside by one of our veteran teachers, who seemed agitated. I was more than happy to chat. I had known this teacher for years. Let’s call her Miss Devoted: she is dedicated and hardworking, respected by her peers, liked by parents and teachers, one of those “good” teachers that parents lobby to have their children assigned to.

I mentioned that I was coming from a meeting with the literacy consultant, who had shown me her improvement strategy on a fold-out sheet with red arrows and circles that, I said, “looked like battle plans for the invasion of Normandy.”

Miss Devoted rolled her eyes. “I understand,” she said. “The progressives keep doing the same thing over and over, just calling it by different names.

“All I’m doing is going to meetings, filling out forms, getting training. My kids are struggling with substitute teachers.”

Here was a bright and talented teacher in a school that had failed to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), the infamous benchmark of the equally infamous 2002 No Child Left Behind law, for four consecutive years. That meant that nearly half of the school’s 600 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders were failing to make grade-level in English and in math. Further, only 10 percent of the school’s African American 8th graders (who made up 30 percent of the total) could pass the state’s rudimentary math exams.

Thus, a swarm of state education department consultants had descended on the school.

“Why won’t they just let me teach?” Miss Devoted asked, clearly frustrated.

By all accounts, middle schools are a weak link in the chain of public education. Is it the churn of ill-conceived attempts at reform that’s causing all the problems? Is it just hormones? Or is it the way in which we configure our grades? For most of the last 30 years, districts have opted to put “tweens” in a separate place, away from little tots and apart from the big kids. Middle schools typically serve grades 5–8 or 6–8. But do our quasi-mad preadolescents belong on an island—think Lord of the Flies—or in a big family, where even raging hormones can be mitigated by elders and self-esteem bolstered by little ones?

Parents and educators have begun abandoning the middle school for K–8 configurations, and new research suggests that grade configuration does matter: when this age group is gathered by the hundreds and educated separately, both behavior and learning suffer.

How Middle Schools Came to Be

Notwithstanding all the despairing headlines middle schools seem to provoke, the more interesting story may be how they became, in relatively few years and with hardly any solid research evidence to support the idea, “one of the largest and most comprehensive efforts at educational reorganization in the history of American public schooling,” as middle-school researchers Paul George and Lynn Oldaker put it in 1985.

The core idea is generally traced to a speech given by William Alexander at a conference for school administrators at Cornell University in 1963. At that time, the dominant organizational structure of American schools was K–8 or K–6 and junior high, a two-year “bridge” to high school conceived in the early 20th century. In fact, the conference topic was “The Dynamic Junior High School,” which was then at its peak, with more than 7,000 such schools in the U.S.

Alexander, then chairman of the department of education at George Peabody College for Teachers in Nashville, was assigned the keynote address but he could find no “dynamism.” He struggled over his speech, according to Jessica Hodge in a 1978 profile in Kappa Delta Pi. Thanks to a delayed flight on his way to Cornell, the professor got “the time he needed to outline a new focus and organization for the school ‘between’ the elementary and high school.” That was, as history notes, the middle school. Too many junior highs had merely appended high-school practices on to the 7th and 8th grades, said Alexander, and so the bridge had become simply “a vestibule added at the front door of the high school.” The schools, he suggested, had lost touch with the developmental needs of the preadolescent student.

Alexander told the gathered educators that these young students had their own needs, which were not being met in the junior high, including “more of the freedom of movement,” “more appropriate health and physical education, more chances to participate in planning and managing their own activities, more resources for help on their problems of growing up, and more opportunities to explore new interests and to develop new aspirations.” And he then set out what, given the subsequent battles, was his most dubious claim, that these students needed “exploratory experiences” rather than “greater emphasis [on] the academic subjects.”

Alexander was reacting to that era’s academic scare—Sputnik and its gremlins—and bemoaning the fact that greater emphasis on math, science, and “more homework” meant for many students “less time and energy for the fine arts, for homemaking and industrial arts, and for such special interests as dramatics, journalism, musical performance, scouting, camping, outside jobs, and general reading.”

 

 

The Me Generation Meets the Psychological Society

Alexander struck a nerve. “The content of his Cornell address would forever alter the nature of education at the middle level,” concluded Hodge. “Educators and citizens were receptive to creating schools that respond to the needs of young people.”

In a few short years, middle schoolers would go from Growing Up Forgotten, the title of a 1977 report by the Ford Foundation, to being what David Hough, then director of the Institute for School Improvement at Missouri State University and managing editor of the Middle Grades Research Journal, described as “studied, researched, and analyzed with a greater degree of exuberance and sophistication than ever before.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, many social and political institutions began to be viewed through the prism of psychiatry and sociology and so, in schools, through the personal psyches of individual students. Middle schools, brand new, were the blank slates for the child-centered, social-environment pedagogues. And what better population of student to study and nurture than, as education journalist Linda Perlstein puts it, youngsters whose “bodies and psyches morph through the most radical changes since infancy, leaving them torn between anxiety and ardor, dependence and autonomy, conformity and rebellion.”

It was a perfect storm for creating psychosocial-enrichment holding pens for preadolescent children: middle schools.

March of the Mediocracy

“Holding pen” is a harsh phrase, but it is not surprising that it slipped into the middle-school lexicon as the focus on preadolescent emotional development seemed to overwhelm the academics. By 1989, when President George H. W. Bush and the nation’s governors met in Charlottesville, Virginia, for the heralded education summit, that worm was beginning to turn. Academic mediocrity was not a hard case to make, since middle-school proponents had given, at best, lip service to academics almost from the inception of the model.

“I don’t know if it was deliberate or not,” recalls Trish Williams, executive director of EdSource, a California nonprofit, “but I know that when my kids were in middle school, one of the best in California, one of the teachers told me that her job was to just hold them and keep them safe until they get through puberty. So there has been a philosophy in middle school which deemphasized academic outcomes….”

As Hough noted in 1991, their popularity was “linked to programmatic characteristics…not to student outcome measures.”

The editors of Phi Delta Kappan recognized early signs of trouble when they devoted a special issue to middle schools in 1997 and noted an abundance of “observational studies,” but “little quantitative information to satisfy the demands of thoughtful practitioners and policymakers for assessment of those efforts.” They pointed out that what quantitative work there was attested to “the intellectual underdevelopment of too many young adolescents,” noting that only 28 percent of 8th graders nationally scored at or above the “proficient” level in reading in 1994. Indeed, it was beginning to be apparent that middle schools were doing little to help educate children academically.

In the 1995 Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), students who had yet to enter middle school fared better than those who had nearly completed those grades. U.S. 4th graders scored 12th among 26 countries in math while 8th graders ranked 18th. “These statistics about young adolescents’ poor academic performance suggest that many middle-grades schools are failing to enable the majority of their students to achieve at anywhere near adequate levels,” noted the Phi Delta Kappan editors.

Nothing much has changed since then. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) show the middle-school lacunae. While U.S. 4th graders increased their NAEP math scale scores by 24 points between 1978 and 2008, 8th graders improved by 17 points during the same period. And while 4th-grade readers improved by 10 points during a similar period, the nation’s 8th graders improved by just 4 points. Middle schools seem to be dampening the modest improvements being made by our primary schools.

Lightning struck when Yecke published her middle-school broadsides, The War Against Excellence (2003) and, two years later, Mayhem in the Middle. Those reports caught the No Child Left Behind wave perfectly, presenting a searing condemnation of middle schools’ failures to educate a large swath of children. “The middle school movement advances the notion that academic achievement should take a back seat to such ends as self-exploration, socialization, and group learning,” says Yecke in Mayhem.

Sure, Some Middle Schools Work

There is no doubt that some middle schools are working. Unfortunately, the answer to the “what works” question is an elusive one. Veteran middle-school educators John Lounsbury and Gordon Vars, for instance, claim that “when the tenets of the [middle school] concept are implemented fully over time, student achievement and development increase markedly.” In a 2003 story for the Middle School Journal, they argue that there is “hard evidence that the middle school does in fact work,” but they don’t supply that evidence. Instead, we are treated to empathetic descriptions of “legions of genuinely good teachers both touching lives and successfully teaching skills and content in hundreds of middle schools” and hear the complaint that “most of the mandated assessments being used to determine students’ attainment of the standards focus heavily on recall of facts, one of the lowest forms of thinking.” Or, “Is it too extreme an exaggeration to suggest that high-stakes testing may be lobotomizing an entire generation of young people?”

Ironically, the middle schools that we know “work” are those that eschew the tenets of middle schoolism. Charter schools like the Young Women’s Leadership School and those operated by the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), and private networks like the NativityMiguel schools—several dozen of which serve low-income, inner-city students—have proven that proper pedagogy and academic focus can overcome the developmental challenges of preadolescence. A recent study of 22 KIPP middle schools found “significant” gap-closing results in math and reading achievement at about half of the schools. The Mathematica Policy Research report found that, after three years in the schools, students showed gains in math equal to 1.2 years of extra instruction and in reading almost a full extra year of improvement compared to outcomes for students in schools with similar demographics. The “effects are pretty striking and impressive,” Brian Gill of Mathematica told Education Week.

The latest evidence of middle-school potential is a study from EdSource released in February 2010. “Gaining Ground in the Middle Grades: Why Some Schools Do Better” is, says Trish Williams, “the largest study of middle grades education ever conducted.”

Under the guidance of Williams and Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, a group of researchers from EdSource and Stanford looked into the “black box” of middle-school performance to analyze how district and school policies and practices are linked to higher student performance. Controlling for student background, they studied 303 middle schools and compared 200,000 student scores on California’s standardized tests in mathematics and English to responses to school practices surveys provided by 303 principals, 3,752 English and math teachers, and 157 superintendents.

“Our findings were surprising in their consistency,” the report concludes. The 44 higher-performing schools (those with average school-wide math and English test scores a full standard deviation above the mean) “create a shared, school-wide intense focus on the improvement of student outcomes,” it says. Those high-performing schools did things like “set measurable goals on standards based tests and benchmark tests across all proficiency levels, grades, and subjects”; create school missions that were “future oriented,” with curricula and instruction designed to prepare students to succeed in a rigorous high-school curriculum; include improvement of student outcomes “as part of the evaluation of the superintendent, the principal, and the teachers”; and communicate to parents and students “their responsibility as well for student learning, including parent contracts, turning in homework, attending class, and asking for help when needed.”

The EdSource study findings echo many of the principles espoused by successful “no excuses” charter schools like KIPP. But do we really want more middle schools, when only a very small portion of them will have what it takes to succeed?

 

Grade Configuration May Matter

The trends suggest that grade configuration matters to at least some parents and educators, who decided some time ago that separately configured schools for preadolescents are not the best way to go. Even KIPP, which has primarily served grades 5–8, began in 2006 a strategy of siting its schools in pre-K–12 “clusters.” Of KIPP’s current roster of 99 schools, 60 are stand-alone middle schools; the rest are Pre-K–4 elementary (24) and 9–12 high schools (15). “When we start in fifth grade, we’re starting in the fourth quarter, down by a touchdown, and the two-minute warning has been given,” KIPP co-founder Mike Feinberg was fond of saying about running middle schools. “Every second counts, and there’s no margin for error.” With the new emphasis on clustering, he says, “we’re still down by a touchdown,” but it’s the first quarter.

Though the 6–8 middle school remains the dominant school configuration for the age group (roughly, ages 11 to 14), a countertrend has been building for much of the last decade. How many separate middle schools remain today? The numbers are not easy to pin down. Hough, now dean of the education school at Missouri State, has been tracking middle schools for 20 years and says their numbers peaked in 2005 with just over 9,000 across the United States. And he cites data from the National Center for Education Statistics that puts the number for the 2007–08 school year at 8,500. Hough says that “the trend is definitely away from stand-alone middle schools” and estimates there will be fewer than 7,950 when the 2010 data are in. The number of “elemiddle” schools, the new term for K–8 schools, has jumped from 4,000 nationwide to just under 7,000 in the last 10 years, says Hough. Cleveland has closed all 16 of its middle schools, re-opening most as K–8 schools. Philadelphia has closed 21 of its 46 middle schools since 2002. Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Maryland are all rethinking the 5–8 and 6–8 school configurations, says Hough, and cities such as Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Portland (Oregon), and Baltimore have already moved away from 6–8 middle schools.

Veteran New York educator Kathleen Cashin, a regional superintendent in the city’s sprawling system, explained the trend away from middle schools six years ago, before it was a trend, when she told the New York Times that parents “were clamoring” for a return to K–8 schools. “It’s an elementary-like nurturing environment,” she said. “Because children are older doesn’t mean they don’t need that nurturing care of a loving, caring adult. I have found the attendance is better, almost always. The violence is less, the younger kids defuse the older and the academics are at least as good if not better.”

This sums up much of what I heard from parents I spoke with about middle schools, even as some educators remained reluctant to acknowledge the possible importance of grade configuration. Meanwhile, parents are voting with their feet, and reformers can draw on recent research that offers little support for the stand-alone middle-school model.

Researchers Confirm What Parents Know

First, from North Carolina comes evidence that separating middle-school children from the other grades may exacerbate behavioral problems. “Is there a ‘best’ grade configuration for schools that serve early adolescents?” ask researchers Philip Cook, Robert MacCoun, Clara Muschkin, and Jacob Vigdor in a 2008 study in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.

The “conventional wisdom” on grade configuration, Cook and colleagues say, “has changed several times over the past century,” as we have seen. To see what impact configuration may be having today, they studied public schools in North Carolina, which has “led the national trend of incorporating sixth grade” into their middle-school program. In 1999–2000, more than 90 percent of the Tar Heel State’s 379 middle schools served grades 6–8. By comparing the grade 6 cohorts that were not in a separate middle school to those that were, the researchers found some remarkable results: “students who attend middle school in sixth grade are twice as likely to be disciplined relative to their counterparts in elementary school.” They found that the behavioral problems of these middle-school 6th graders “persist beyond the sixth grade year” and that “exposing sixth graders to older peers has persistent negative consequences on their academic trajectories.”

The results of the Cook et al. research complement those of Kelly Bedard and Chau Do, whose 2005 study of national data  found that moving 6th graders to middle school resulted in a 1 to 3 percent decline in on-time high-school graduation rates. Bedard and Do conclude that the decrease in graduation rates of middle schoolers is “a surprising result for a program with the stated aim of aiding less able students.” Given the oft-studied economic impacts associated with graduation rates, e.g., lifetime earnings, unemployment, and incarceration rates, “the negative economic implications of less on-time high school completion may be far reaching and multifaceted.”

Perhaps the most telling research about the impact of middle-school grade configuration is a recent study of New York City middle schools by Jonah Rockoff and Benjamin Lockwood (see “Stuck in the Middle,” research, Fall 2010). The Columbia Business School researchers studied the impacts of grade configuration on learning and concluded that “middle schools are not the best way to educate students” in districts like New York City. In fact, they argue that “students who enter public middle schools in New York City fall behind their peers in K–8 schools.” The effects are large, present for both math and English, and evident for girls as well as boys. And perhaps most troubling, “students with lower initial levels of academic achievement fare especially poorly in middle school.”

Like the Cook research on behavior, the Rockoff and Lockwood study finds that the negative achievement effect on children who moved into middle school “persists at least through 8th grade, the highest grade for which we could obtain test scores.”

The one caveat Rockoff made about this research is the effect of school size. “In New York City all the buildings are roughly the same size, which means that a 6–8 school and K–8 school have the same number of students,” says Rockoff. It may make “a very big difference” if you have 250 kids in a 6th grade (which is what you typically have in a 6–8 school) rather than 80 (which is what you might have in a K–8 school). “Imagine if you’re in a K–8 school, you have 900 kids across nine grades, and one out of every ten 6th to 8th graders is making trouble. So you have 30 troublemakers in the school. Now, imagine a middle school with 900 kids but only three grades, 300 per grade. They have 90 troublemakers in the school instead of 30.”

Needless to say, that makes teaching—and learning—far more difficult.

Peter Meyer is a former news editor at Life magazine and senior visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

Video: Paul Peterson and Marty West discuss the study.
An unabridged version of this article is available here.

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In Vancouver last winter, the United States proved its competitive spirit by winning more medals—gold, silver, and bronze—at the Winter Olympic Games than any other country, although the German member of our research team insists on pointing out that Canada and Germany both won more gold medals than the United States. But if there is some dispute about which Olympic medals to count, there is no question about American math performance: the United States does not deserve even a paper medal.

Maintaining our productivity as a nation depends importantly on developing a highly qualified cadre of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and other professionals. To realize that objective requires a system of schooling that produces students with advanced math and science skills. To see how well schools in the United States do at producing high-achieving math students, we compared the percentage of U.S. students in the high-school graduating Class of 2009 with advanced skills in mathematics to percentages of similarly high achievers in other countries.

Unfortunately, we found that the percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished in math is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. No fewer than 30 of the 56 other countries that participated in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) math test, including most of the world’s industrialized nations, had a larger percentage of students who scored at the international equivalent of the advanced level on our own National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Moreover, while the percentage of students scoring at the advanced level on NAEP varies considerably among the 50 states, not even the best state does well in international comparison. A 2005 report from the National Academy of Sciences, Rising Above the Gathering Storm, succinctly put the issue into perspective: “Although many people assume that the United States will always be a world leader in science and technology, this may not continue to be the case inasmuch as great minds and ideas exist throughout the world.”

The Demand for High Achievers

The gap between the burgeoning business demand for a highly accomplished workforce and a lagging education system has steadily widened. Even as the United States was struggling with a near 10 percent unemployment rate in the summer of 2010, businesses complained that they could not find workers with needed skills. New York Times writer Motoko Rich explained, “The problem…is a mismatch between the kind of skilled workers needed and the ranks of the unemployed.”

Skill shortages have severe consequences for a nation’s overall productivity. Two of the authors of this report have shown elsewhere that countries with students who perform at higher levels in math and science show larger rates of increase in economic productivity than do otherwise similar countries with lower-performing students (see “Education and Economic Growth,” research, Spring 2008).

Public discourse has tended to focus on the need to address low achievement, particularly among disadvantaged students. Both federal funding and the accountability elements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) have stressed the importance of bringing every student up to a minimum level of proficiency. As great as this need may be, there is no less need to lift more students, no matter their socioeconomic background, to high levels of educational accomplishment. In 2006, the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Coalition was formed 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 for the 21st Century.” In the words of a National Academy of Sciences report that jump-started the coalition’s formation, the nation needs to “increase” its “talent pool by improving K–12 science and mathematics education.”

A Focus on Math

We give special attention to math performance because math appears to be the subject in which accomplishment in secondary school is particularly significant for both an individual’s and a country’s economic well-being. Existing research, though not conclusive, indicates that math skills better predict future earnings and other economic outcomes than other skills learned in high school. The American Diploma Project estimates that “in 62 percent of American jobs over the next 10 years, entry-level workers will need to be proficient in algebra, geometry, data interpretation, probability and statistics.”

There is also a technical reason for focusing our analysis on math. This subject is particularly well suited to rigorous comparisons across countries and cultures. There is a fairly clear international consensus on the math concepts and techniques that need to be mastered and on the order in which those concepts should be introduced into the curriculum. The knowledge to be learned remains the same regardless of the dominant language spoken in a culture.

Data and Methodology

Our analysis relies on test-score information from NAEP and PISA. NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, is often called the nation’s report card. It is a large, nationally representative assessment of student performance in public and private schools in mathematics, reading, and science that has been administered periodically since the early 1970s to U.S. students in 4th grade and 8th grade, and at the age of 17. PISA, the Program for International Student Assessment, is an internationally standardized assessment of student performance in mathematics, science, and reading established by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). It was administered in 2000, 2003, and 2006 to representative samples of 15-year-olds in all 30 OECD countries (which include the most developed countries of the world) as well as in many others.

We focus on performance of the international equivalent of the U.S. high-school graduating Class of 2009 at the time when this population was in the equivalent of U.S. grades 8 and 9. NAEP was administered to U.S. 8th graders in 2005, while PISA 2006 was given one year later to students at the age of 15, the year at which most American students are in 9th grade.

In 2005, NAEP tested representative samples of 8th-grade public and private school students in each of the 50 states in math, science, and reading. For each state, NAEP 2005 calculates the percentage of students who meet a set of achievement standards: a “basic” level, a “proficient” level, and an “advanced” level of achievement. The focus of this report is the top performers, the percentage of students NAEP found at the advanced level of achievement (subsequently referred to as “advanced”).

Only 6.04 percent of the students in the United States in 8th grade in 2005 scored at the advanced level in math on the NAEP. Some critics feel that the standard set by the NAEP governing board is excessively stringent. However, the 2007 Trends in International Math and Science Study (TIMSS 2007), another international test that has been administered to students throughout the world, appears to have set a standard very similar to NAEP 2005, as only 6 percent of U.S. 8th graders scored at the advanced level on that test as well.

We use the NAEP 2005 advanced standard to compare U.S. performance with that in other countries. Because U.S. students took both NAEP 2005 and PISA 2006, it is possible to find the score on PISA that is tantamount to scoring at the advanced level on NAEP, i.e., the score that will yield the same percentage of students as the percentage of U. S. students who scored at the advanced level on the NAEP.

A score on PISA 2006 of 617.1 points is equivalent to the lowest score attained by anyone in the top 6.04 percent of U.S. students in the Class of 2009. (The PISA assessment has an average score of 500 among OECD students and a standard deviation of 100.) It is assumed that both NAEP and PISA tests randomly select questions from a common universe of mathematics knowledge. Given that assumption, it may be further assumed that students who scored similarly on the two exams will have similar math knowledge, i.e., students who scored 617.1 points or better on the PISA test would have been identified at the advanced level had they taken the NAEP math test. Inasmuch as a score of 617.1 points is more than one standard deviation above the average student score on the PISA, it is clear that a group of highly accomplished students has been isolated. (For more methodological details, see sidebar.)

We start with the national share of 8th-grade U.S. public and private school students (most of whom are 14 years of age) who reach the advanced level in math on NAEP 2005: 6.04 percent. These students are assumed to be part of the cohort of 15-year-olds who participated in PISA 2006 one year later. Thus, using the PISA 2006 microdata, we can calculate the PISA math test score at which the 93.96th percentile (100.00 – 6.04) of the U.S. student population performs. All PISA calculations use the PISA sampling weights to yield nationally representative estimates. The PISA scaling methodology returns student performance estimates through a range of five plausible values, which are random draws from the estimated probability distribution for a student’s underlying performance. We perform our analysis separately for each of the five plausible values provided by PISA 2006. We then average these results. Based on these calculations, we estimate the PISA score at which the 93.96th percentile of the U.S. student population performs to be 617.1 PISA points.

Next, we calculate from the PISA microdata the share of students reaching this cutoff point for each country participating in the PISA 2006 test. This provides an estimate of the share of students in each PISA country who reach the equivalent of the advanced level in 8th-grade math on NAEP 2005. The share of students who reach the advanced level in 8th-grade math in each U.S. state is taken from NAEP 2005. For information on the statistical significance of differences among jurisdictions, see the unabridged version of this study, available here.

Because representative samples of student performance on NAEP 2005 are available for each state, it is possible to compare the percentages of students in the Class of 2009 who were at the advanced level for each state to the percentage of equally skilled students in countries from around the globe.

In short, linking the scores of the Class of 2009 on NAEP 2005 and PISA 2006 provides us with the opportunity to assess from an international vantage point how well the country as well as individual states in the United States are doing at lifting students to high levels of accomplishment.

U. S. Math Performance in World Perspective

We begin with an overall assessment of the relative percentages of young adults in the United States and other countries who have reached a very high level of mathematics achievement. It is frequently noted that the United States has a very heterogeneous population, with large numbers of immigrants. Such a diverse population, with students coming to school with varying preparation, may handicap U.S. performance relative to that of other countries. For this reason, we also examine two U.S. subgroups conventionally thought to have better preparation for school—white students and students from families where at least one parent is reported to have received a college degree—and compare the percentages of high-achieving students among them to the (total) populations abroad.

Overall results. The percentage of students in the U.S. Class of 2009 who were highly accomplished is well below that of most countries with which the United States generally compares itself. While just 6 percent of U.S. students earned at least 617.1 points on the PISA 2006 exam, 28 percent of Taiwanese students did. (See Figure 1 for these results as well as for the international rank of each U.S. state.)

It is not only Taiwan that did much, much better than the United States. At least 20 percent of students in Hong Kong, Korea, and Finland were similarly highly accomplished. Twelve other countries had more than twice the percentage of advanced students as the United States: in order of math excellence, they are Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Liechtenstein, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Japan, Canada, Macao-China, Australia, Germany, and Austria.

The remaining countries that educate a greater proportion of their students to a high level are Slovenia, Denmark, Iceland, France, Estonia, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the Slovak Republic, Luxembourg, Hungary, Poland, Norway, Ireland and Lithuania.

The 30-country list includes virtually all the advanced industrialized nations of the world. The only OECD countries producing a smaller percentage of advanced math students than the United States are Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and Mexico. The performance levels of students in Spain and Italy are statistically indistinguishable from those of students in the United States, as are those of students in Latvia, which has subsequently joined the OECD.

State-level performance. The percentage of students scoring at the advanced level varies among the 50 states. Massachusetts, with over 11 percent of its students at the advanced level, does better than any other state, but its performance trails that of 14 countries. Its students’ achievement level is similar to that of Germany and France. Minnesota, with more than 10 percent of its students at the advanced level, ranks second among the 50 states, but it trails 16 countries and performs at the level attained by Slovenia and Denmark. New York and Texas each have a percentage of students scoring at the advanced level that is roughly comparable to the United States as a whole, Lithuania, and the Russian Federation.

Just 4.5 percent of the students in the Silicon Valley state of California are performing at a high level, a percentage roughly comparable to that of Portugal. The lowest-ranking states—West Virginia, New Mexico, and Mississippi—have a smaller percentage of the highest-performing students than Serbia or Uruguay, although they do edge out Romania, Brazil, and Kyrgyzstan.

In short, the percentages of high-achieving students in the United States—and in most of its individual states—are shockingly below those of many of the world’s leading industrialized nations. Results for many states are at a level equal to those of third-world countries. (Click the image below for an interactive map providing specific information for each state.)

White students. The overall news is sobering. Some might try to comfort themselves by saying the problem is limited to large numbers of students from immigrant families, or to African American students and others who have suffered from discrimination. For example, the statement by the STEM Coalition that we “encourage more of our best and brightest students, especially those from underrepresented or disadvantaged groups, to study in STEM fields” suggests that the challenges are concentrated in nonwhite segments of the U.S. population.

Without denying that the paucity of high-achieving students within minority populations is a serious issue, let us consider the performance of white students for whom the case of discrimination cannot easily be made. Twenty-four countries have a larger percentage of highly accomplished students than the 8 percent achieving at that level among the U.S. white student population in the Class of 2009. Looking at just white students places the U.S. at a level equivalent to what all students are achieving in the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Poland. Seven percent of California’s white students are advanced, roughly the percentage for all Lithuanian students.

Children of parents with college degrees. Another possibility is that schools help students reach levels of high accomplishment if parents are providing the necessary support. To explore this possibility, we assumed that students who reported that at least one parent had graduated from college were likely to be given the kind of support that is needed for many to reach high levels of achievement. Approximately 45 percent of all U.S. students reported that at least one parent had a college degree.

The portion of students in the Class of 2009 with a college-graduate parent who are performing at the advanced level is 10.3 percent. When compared to all students in the other PISA countries, this advantaged segment of the U.S. population was outranked by students in 16 other countries. Nine percent of Illinois students with a college-educated parent scored at the advanced level, a percentage comparable to all students in France and the United Kingdom. The percentage of highly accomplished students from college-educated families in Rhode Island is just short of 6 percent, the same percentage for all students in Spain, Italy, and Latvia.

The Previous Rosy Gloss

Many casual observers may be surprised by our findings, as two previous, highly publicized studies have suggested that—even though improvement was possible—the U.S. was doing all right. This was the picture from two reports issued by Gary Phillips of the American Institutes for Research, who compared the average performance in math of 8th-grade students in each of the 50 states with the average scores of 8th-grade students in other countries. These comparisons used methods that are similar to ours to relate 2007 NAEP performance for U.S. students to both TIMSS 2003 and TIMSS 2007. His findings are more favorable to the United States than those shown by our analyses. While our study using the PISA data shows U.S. student performance in math to be below 30 other countries, Phillips found the average U.S. student to be performing better than all but 14 other countries in his 2007 report and all but 8 countries in his 2009 report. (Oddly, the 2007 report takes a much more buoyant perspective than the 2009 report, though the data suggest otherwise.) Phillips also finds that individual states do much better vis-à-vis other countries than we report.

Why do two studies that seem to be employing generally similar methodologies produce such strikingly different results?

The answer to that puzzle is actually quite simple and has little to do with the fact that Phillips compares average student performance while our study focuses on advanced students: many OECD countries, including those that had a high percentage of high-achieving students, participated in PISA 2006 (upon which our analysis is based) but did not participate in either TIMSS 2003 or TIMSS 2007, the two surveys included in the Phillips studies. In fact, 19 countries that outscored the U.S. on the PISA 2006 test did not participate in TIMSS 2003, and 22 higher-scoring countries did not participate in TIMSS 2007. As a report by the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics has explained, “Differences in the set of countries that participate in an assessment can affect how well the United States appears to do internationally when results are released.”

Put starkly, if one drops from a survey countries such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, and New Zealand, and includes instead such countries as Botswana, Ghana, Iran, and Lebanon, the average international performance will drop, and the United States will look better relative to the countries with which it is being compared.

Did NCLB shift the focus away from the best and the brightest?

Some attribute the comparatively small percentages of students performing at the advanced level to the focus of the 2002 federal accountability statute, No Child Left Behind, on the educational needs of very low performing students. That law mandates that every student be brought up to the level a state deems proficient, a standard that most states set well below NAEP’s proficient standard, to say nothing of the advanced level that is the focus of this report.

In order to comply with the federal law, some assert, schools are concentrating all available resources on the educationally deprived, leaving advanced students to fend for themselves. If so, then we should see a decline in the percentage of students performing at NAEP’s advanced level subsequent to the passage of the 2002 federal law. In mathematics, however, the opposite has happened. The percentage performing at the advanced level was only 3.7 percent in 1996 and 4.7 percent in the year 2000. But the percentage performing at an advanced level climbed steadily to the 7.9 percent attained in 2009.

Perhaps NCLB’s passage in 2002 dampened the prior rate of growth in the achievement of high-performing students. To ascertain whether that was the case, we compared the rate of change in the NAEP math scores of the top 10 percent of all 8th graders between 1990 and 2003 (before NCLB was fully implemented) with the rate of change after NCLB had become effective law. Between 1990 and 2003, the scores of students at the 90th percentile rose from 307 to 321, an increment of 14 points, or a growth rate of 1.0 points a year. Between 2003 and 2009, the shift upward for the 90th percentile was another 8 points, or a change of 1.3 points a year. Our results are confirmed by a more detailed study of NCLB’s impact on high-performing students conducted by economists Brian Jacob and Thomas Dee.

In short, the incapacity of American schools to bring students up to the highest level of accomplishment in mathematics is much more deepseated than anything induced by recent federal legislation.

Conclusions

The economic and technological demand for a talented, well-educated, highly skilled population has never been greater. Not only must everyday workers have a set of technical skills surpassing those needed in the past, but a cadre of highly talented professionals trained to the highest level of accomplishment is needed to foster innovation and growth. In the words of President Barack Obama, “Whether it’s improving our health or harnessing clean energy, protecting our security or succeeding in the global economy, our future depends on reaffirming America’s role as the world’s engine of scientific discovery and technological innovation. And that leadership tomorrow depends on how we educate our students today, especially in math, science, technology, and engineering.”

Unfortunately, the United States trails other industrialized countries in bringing a large proportion of its students up to the highest levels of accomplishment. This is not a story of some states doing well but being dragged down by states that perform poorly. Nor is it a story of immigrant or disadvantaged or minority students hiding the strong performance of better-prepared students. Comparatively small percentages of white students are high achievers. Only a small proportion of the children of our college-educated population is equipped to compete with students in a majority of OECD countries.

Major policy initiatives within the United States have in recent years focused on the educational needs of low-performing students. Such efforts deserve commendation, but they can leave the impression that there is no similar need to enhance the education of those students the STEM coalition has called “the best and brightest.” Yet, with rapidly advancing technologies in an increasingly integrated world economy, no one doubts the extraordinary importance of highly accomplished professionals.

Admittedly, the United States could simply ignore the needs of its own young people and continue to import highly skilled scientists and engineers who were prepared by better-performing schools abroad. But even such a heartless, irresponsible strategy relies on both the nature of immigration policies and the absence of better opportunities abroad, two things on which we might not want the future to depend. It seems much more prudent to encourage the most capable of our own people to reach high levels of academic accomplishment.

Eric A. Hanushek is senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. 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.

In March 2010, to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s and Chancellor Joel Klein’s chagrin, a New York State trial judge stopped the planned closure of 19 chronically failing schools in New York City. As a result, 19 demonstrably dreadful schools will remain open for at least another school year.  Yet the case and its aftermath show that school districts can, with sufficient effort and creativity, partially maneuver around such judicially imposed obstacles.

Klein, who has sought to close underperforming schools as part of his effort to improve the lagging district, had announced that he would seek to both close the schools in December of 2009 and to recycle some of the facilities as charter schools. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) attempted to manufacture a political controversy over the closures by renting 50 buses to transport protestors to hearings before the city’s Panel for Educational Policy. In the final hearing, which lasted nine hours, the panel approved Klein’s recommendations. The UFT promptly sued and was joined by the local branch of the NAACP, which claimed, despite the dreadful education that the schools inflicted on pupils, that children’s rights had not been considered.

The lawsuit centered on the state legislature’s 2009 revision and reauthorization of mayoral control of the school district. The revised law set out the conditions that the city must follow when closing or significantly changing the use of a school. The requirement under dispute is that the city must provide an “educational impact statement” (EIS) for each school slated for closure. The UFT claimed that the city’s impact statements were insufficient. Naturally, the city thought that it had provided the requisite information, including the budgetary implications, effects on administrators and teachers, and the schools’ progress reports and graduation rates.

Judge Joan Lobis sided with the union. While admitting that “the statute does not specify the information that an EIS should include,” she nevertheless ruled that the city’s impact statements contained “boilerplate” and insufficient details. Significantly, Lobis’s ruling failed to explain what information the city would need to provide to satisfy the law. The city appealed but fared no better. In July, an appellate court, echoing Judge Lobis, ruled that the city had failed to meet its obligations by providing only “obvious” information.

While the city vowed to eventually close all 19 schools, Klein appears to have found a less controversial, if still partial and delayed, route around this judicial roadblock. The city announced in June, prior to the appellate ruling, that it was going to “transform” 11 of the district’s schools and dramatically overhaul or close 23 others under a $300 million federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Eight of those 23 were on the original list of schools the district wanted to shutter. Under the grant program, the options for the 23 schools are established by the federal Department of Education. The district can impose one of three plans: turnaround, restart, or closure. The turnaround plan requires firing the principal and at least 50 percent of the teachers. The restart plan replaces the district school with a charter school. The closure plan’s consequences are self-evident. These reforms, though, will not be implemented until the 2011–12 school year. The transformation model, reserved for the 11 “least-worst” schools, involves replacing the principal, bringing in more support services, and making curricular changes. Opposing these measures would put the teachers union in an uncomfortable position since it would mean rejecting the federal money. So far the UFT has not announced plans to sue in the event that the district chooses to close or restart any schools, the two most likely options for the schools previously slated for closure.

In addition to sidestepping litigation, this grant program has helped the city convince the teachers union to accept a limited form of performance pay for teachers. Schools scheduled for transformation will be able to hire teachers with two new designations, master teacher and turnaround teacher. Teachers at both levels will receive 30 percent more in their base salary. To receive this designation a teacher must have demonstrated the ability to raise student test scores.

Since students in 19 schools will be subjected to at least one more year of educational mediocrity, this outcome is hardly optimal. But the city’s response shows that school districts and their long-suffering students do not have to be completely victimized by litigation.

Joshua Dunn is associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado–Colorado Springs.

Presidents at least as far back as Bill Clinton have made attendance a priority of their school-reform efforts, in part because of the social costs of youngsters not attending. There’s a direct line from truancy to juvenile crime, gang membership, and drug use, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. There’s an equally direct line from truancy to dropping out of school, and from there to increased incidences of teen pregnancy, poor health, and dependency on welfare.

The patio of my local coffee bar in Washington, D.C., is as good a place to think about truancy as any other. A high school with 1,500 students is two blocks away; a middle school with 900 students is a block beyond that.

Between 9:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. every school day, two police officers in a white Ford van sweep the neighborhood. Armed with a gun and dressed in blue fatigues, a curly-haired officer hops out of the van, marches through the coffee shop, glances into a shoe store next door, peers down the subway escalator, hikes to a bus stop, and then retraces her steps to take in a drugstore and a Best Buy.

Typically, the two-officer patrol, one of seven full-time truancy patrols in D.C., picks up four or five youngsters at lunchtime and returns them to their schools. Another four or five “runners” take off, knowing that the officers aren’t allowed to give chase into the neighborhood’s busy streets.

As the officer makes her way through my Starbucks, some youngsters produce cell phones with parents on the other end to corroborate excuses. Others hand over school-issued passes. A few flash identity cards from Maryland schools. The D.C. officers haven’t any authority over youngsters from across the state line, a mile away; as it turns out, Maryland police haven’t much authority, either. By the end of the school year, D.C.’s truancy officers are on familiar terms with a circle of regulars. “You got your hair cut,” one officer remarked to a girl named Ashley, who produced a pass that gave no explanation for her absence from school.

Next, she checked the ID of a Maryland 9th grader named Clyde, who explained that he had missed so much school already it wasn’t worth attending for finals. How do you get away with skipping school, I asked the boy, who wore a Metallica ski cap despite the warm weather. “I just do,” Clyde said. And what do your parents say, I persisted. “They can’t force me to go to school,” he said.

School is the center of social life for most youngsters. It’s the necessary step to a good job and income, a message these kids have been hearing since kindergarten. Taxpayers spend almost $600 billion a year on public education, an average of more than $10,000 per student.

So, why are so many kids willing to dodge traffic, hide out in shoe stores, and risk apprehension by an armed officer to skip school?

Counting Kids

States and school districts vary in how they define truancy, which means that nationwide truancy statistics don’t exist. In Maryland, a truant is someone who has 18 unexcused absences per semester. In Texas, it’s 10 unexcused absences within six months. In Florida, it’s 15 in 90 calendar days.

Complicating any attempt to compare statistics are divergent state compulsory-education laws. In D.C., youngsters must attend school until age 18, in Maryland until age 16, and in Pennsylvania until 17.

No Child Left Behind lets states use attendance as an additional indicator of adequate yearly progress, and 37 states do that. But attendance is measured differently from truancy: Attendance is a daily average, and a few youngsters with perfect attendance can hide the absences of those who stay away for days at a time. Attendance tends to hover at about 95 percent in most state reports.

Where states do report truancy, the numbers are staggering. California reported that 24 percent of its 6.2 million public school children, some 1.5 million kids, were truant (missing more than 30 minutes of instruction without an excuse at least three times) in 2008–09. Wisconsin disclosed that 15.4 percent of its high-school students were truant (absent without an acceptable excuse for part or all of five or more days during a semester) in 2008–09, including 62 percent of its African American students.

The New School calculated that 24 percent of New York City’s 350,000 high schoolers had 38 or more absences in 2007–08 (the report didn’t distinguish between excused and unexcused absences). Washington, D.C., reported that in 2008–09, 20 percent of its students were truant, that is, absent 15 days without an excuse. But the district also said that it missed counting about 10 percent of its youngsters, so the true number could be higher.

Even a simple calculation suggests that adds up to a bad deal for taxpayers. If 20 percent of D.C.’s 46,000 students miss 15 days each, that’s the equivalent of 766 full school years. The U.S. Census Bureau calculates that the D.C. schools spent an average of $14,594 per pupil in 2007–08. That adds up to $11 million spent by the district on no-shows.

California, like six other states, funds its schools based on average daily attendance rather than on the once-a-year or once-a-semester headcount that many states and Washington, D.C., use. Some 16 percent of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 272,000 students were truant in 2008–09. That means the district lost at least 130,000 student days of funding.

State and federal data indicate that truants tend overwhelmingly to be African American and Hispanic. About as many girls as boys are truant. Almost half live in single-parent households, and about one-third live in poverty. Truancy spikes at about age 15, when most youngsters enter 9th grade and the less-supportive atmosphere of high school.

Diane Groomes, an assistant Washington, D.C., chief of police, whose responsibilities include the truancy patrol, said she is noticing that truants are getting younger. This year, her officers picked up more 12-year-olds than in the past, and even a growing number of 10- and 11-year-olds. Why? “Unfortunately, they’re growing up fast,” she ventured.

What’s the Problem?

Back at my coffee shop, I fell into conversation with a 10th grader who said her name was Devora. She had a school pass to keep a medical appointment, although she seemed to be settling into her patio chair for the day. Devora had big plans to study political science or philosophy in college, but she admitted she was absent “a lot,” and she put the blame on—how’s that?—her high school.

“If classes showed more relevance to life—not equations and stuff,” she might attend, she said. A chemistry teacher “yells a lot,” she added. A math teacher has “missed more school than I have. We don’t learn anything.” An English teacher is assigning “3rd-grade work.” Kids “feel trapped in school. The only thing on their mind is they want to get out.”

I read Devora’s indictment to Edward Deci and AnneMarie Conley, who study achievement motivation—Deci at the University of Rochester and Conley at the University of California, Irvine—and they knew all about it.

Deci, a psychologist, co-authored self-determination theory, which holds that we’re motivated to complete a task when we feel we’re competent to do the work, have autonomy in how we go about it, and feel some “relatedness” to the situation; we have friendly teammates or a supportive boss, for example. For lots of kids, school offers none of that, Deci says, and waves of school reforms are only making things worse, he adds.

“Kids know if they can’t do the work. They’re attuned to ‘these people are pushing me around.’ They know if teachers are relating to them in a warm kind of way or a demeaning kind of way,” Deci told me.

Middle schools, desperate to keep order in a hothouse of surging hormones, slap on tighter rules at the very time that kids crave more independence. They also tend to be larger and have many more students per grade than elementary school (see “The Middle School Mess,” features). Kids can have a tough time finding a caring adult or a circle of friends in a big school, and the pressure on teachers to boost achievement may add to that lack of relatedness. “When teachers get pressured on accountability, they get more authoritarian with kids. What kids need is autonomy and support, not control,” Deci said.

Conley, an education professor, studies expectancy-value theory, which doesn’t contradict Deci but says that we’re also motivated by what we expect to get out of a task: what do I gain vs. what do I give up by going to class, for example? Most kids see a social cost in playing hooky: They’d miss being with friends, their peers would think less of them, or they’d suffer a wound to their self-image.

But the calculation comes out differently for other kids. Going to school may mean they can’t hang out at the mall or use drugs. They might miss some serendipitous fun with truant friends or could lose some of their cool, if being truant is cool among their peers.

One morning near the end of the school year, I sat in on a string of meetings between students at Francis Scott Key middle school in Silver Spring, Maryland, and a group of adults—a family-court judge, a district attorney, a school social worker—who are part of a truancy project sponsored by the University of Baltimore School of Law.

At one point, the mentors congratulated a chubby 7th grader for his improved attendance and asked him to explain his success. The boy said his family couldn’t afford to pay for cable television any more. “I get bored so I do my homework and go to bed” instead of staying up late and missing school the next day, he added. What would he do if the family got cable again, Montgomery County judge Joan Ryon asked, hoping for lightning to strike. “I’d probably do the same thing again,” he said.

“Costs really matter,” Conley said when I told her the story. School and homework cost TV time, and that’s a price some kids won’t pay.

Who’s to Blame?

While the kids were telling me that truancy is a result of dysfunction in the schools, adults were telling me that it’s the result of dysfunction in the home. Both are probably right.

In late June, I sat in a Montgomery County courtroom, just outside Washington, D.C., as two criminal misdemeanor cases were called against three parents for failing to send their children to school. The first case was against 30-year-old Stephanie Terrell and Alexander Norris, who spoke up only to correct the court’s misimpression that he had fathered all eight of Terrell’s children or that he lived with the family. He did neither.

Attendance records showed that Terrell and Norris’s oldest child, a middle schooler, missed 14 percent of his school days in September 2009, 45 percent in October, 50 percent in November, and 71 percent in December. Four siblings did no better: two missed half of November, when the family was homeless; a third missed 44 percent; and a fourth missed 94 percent because he lacked immunizations.

Montgomery County had clearly tried to help. The schools scheduled parent-teacher conferences, home visits and, finally, three Truancy Review Board hearings, where a panel of school and social workers hoped to get Terrell and Norris to sign an attendance contract (the couple skipped two of the hearings). Social services found the family a seven-bedroom house, and produced a grant to send the children to summer camps so Terrell could attend a job-training program. “She really does want these children to go to school. She’s just overwhelmed,” Terrell’s lawyer told the judge.

Minutes later, the court called the case of Mayra Yesenia Argueta, a worried-looking woman, dressed for work, who explained that she awoke her 14-year-old daughter for school before hurrying off to her job. The state’s attorney said the girl didn’t show up.

Judge Stephen Johnson, visibly saddened by the Terrell-Norris case, admonished all three parents on the importance of education for their kids. “They need it as much as food and clothing,” he told Terrell and Norris, who—oh, the irony—works in an elementary school. But Johnson has few tools to deal with these parents, and he seemed to admit it.

He put Terrell and Norris on probation so the court can monitor their children’s school attenda nce. Court supervision is “a big stick…that’s all it is,” he told them. “Do the best you can,” he told Argueta, as he put her case on hold for six months while ordering her to see that her daughter attends summer school, the same girl who had failed to attend so much of the regular school year.

Truancy laws generally target parents because, the reasoning goes, they have violated the state’s attendance laws by not getting their kids to school. Educational neglect, the legal term in many jurisdictions, is a misdemeanor that generally carries the threat of jail time and a fine. But enforcement is typically lax: Washington, D.C., is one of only three or four cities with dedicated truancy patrols. Other jurisdictions depend on beat patrols or the occasional citywide sweep. Prosecutions are rare because schools see truancy as an issue for social services rather than the courts.

Under Maryland law, police can’t pick up truants, even to return them to school, because it is the parents who are committing the offense. Montgomery County counted 5,000 “habitual truants” between 2005 and 2010, but prosecuted the parents of just 55 of them. Sentences are minimal—10 days in jail and a $50 fine in Montgomery County—and penalties are seldom imposed. What judge is going to risk sending children into foster care while their mother cools her heels in jail?

The courts generally deal with the truants themselves only when children who already are under its jurisdiction fail to go to school: Attendance is usually a condition of probation for young offenders. The courts also can declare a child to be “in need of supervision” for missing school. But in inner cities, truancy takes a backseat to serious offenses. Some 3,752 juvenile cases were filed in D.C.’s family court in 2009, including four rapes and three armed robberies by children aged 10 to 12. The 135 child-in-need-of-supervision petitions seem almost trivial by comparison.

A few states that have aggressively enforced truancy laws have come to regret it. In 1995, Washington State passed a law that, among other things, required schools to file court actions when youngsters have seven unexcused absences in a month or 10 in a year. Students face up to seven days in juvenile hall and parents are subject to fines. The law overwhelmed the courts: 15,000 truants went to court in 2005. Lawmakers now are trying to amend the law to make truancy reporting discretionary.

School districts often have elaborate protocols for dealing with truancy. An automated call system in Fairfax County, Virginia, made 625,014 calls to parents about attendance issues between July and May, or almost four per Fairfax student. In D.C., an automated call notifies parents whose kids were absent that day and, for high schoolers, which class periods they missed. A teacher calls or sends a letter after a third unexcused absence. After the fifth absence, the school dispatches a certified letter asking for a parent conference.

After the 10th absence, the school attendance committee is convened to devise an intervention. After 20 absences, the city’s social-service agency is called in and, after 25 absences, the case is referred to family court. If the truancy patrol picks up a youngster, the process fast-forwards to the 5th day, the certified letter and parent conference.

But that all supposes that youngsters don’t erase telephone messages or destroy letters, and that they don’t slip out the back door of the school after attendance is taken. “It’s one thing to say we’re getting kids back in school; it’s another thing to know they’re back in class,” said Curtis Watkins, the director of LifeSTARTS, which works with youngsters in two Washington, D.C., middle schools. His counselors check classrooms three times a day to be sure that students who are targeted by the program are still in class.

It also supposes that parents want to and can get their children to school. Hedy Chang, who heads a research project called Attendance Counts, has calculated that children living in homes without enough food missed two days more than better-fed kids, children whose mothers are unemployed missed two more days than those whose moms had jobs, children whose mothers had less than a high-school education missed 1.5 more days, and those whose mothers are in poor health missed two days more.

Chang’s research was on kindergartners, but it would also seem to apply to older children. At the Francis Scott Key middle school meeting, the mentors told a 7th grader who had been tardy 58 times in three months that her attendance hadn’t improved enough for her to graduate from the program and receive the promised reward, an MP3 player. The girl shrank sullenly into her hooded sweatshirt and said she’d been “too tired” to come to school one day the previous week because she had had to watch a three-year-old niece who “screamed all night long.”

On other weeks, the girl had explained that another family had moved into the house and disrupted things, that she was tired because boys came around to visit her at night, and that her mother takes medication for a chronic illness and can’t awaken herself to get the girl off to school.

Truancy is never the problem, school staffers, social workers, prosecutors, and police officers told me over and over. Truancy is the symptom.

Promising Efforts

When Mel Riddile took over as principal of Fairfax County’s J. E. B. Stuart High School in 1997, he said, average daily attendance for the year was 89 percent, which means there were 19 absences per student. Within three years, Riddile says, average daily attendance was up to 96 percent. There were some easy victories: early on, Riddile linked a computer to Stuart’s phone system, which made autodial wake-up calls to youngsters with the worst attendance records. One youngster thanked him, Riddile said: No one had ever cared whether he came to school.

But mostly, cutting truancy was a hard slog. Some Stuart parents from Central America and the Middle East weren’t interested in having their daughters complete school. Teacher absenteeism was high, Riddile said, which seemed to some kids to validate their own absences (the daily absentee rate for teachers nationwide is about 5 percent, according to some studies, compared to about 1.7 percent for private-sector workers).

Riddile, now associate director of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, held parent conferences aimed at forging “partnerships” with families. He referred 70 youngsters to court for child-in-need-of-supervision hearings: That was enough to jolt all but 12 into coming to school. And to avoid diffusing staff energy, he kept his focus on just two or three outcomes. They’re reflected in the name Riddile chose for his reform efforts: RAGS, for Reading Plus Attendance Means Better Grades and a Safer School.

The challenge is even harder in tumultuous inner-city schools, although no-excuses charters seem to be making headway. KIPP DC says that from 3 to 8 percent of the students in the five grade schools that it operated last year had 15 or more unexcused absences, the D.C. definition of truancy. KIPP operated just one high school, and it enrolled only 9th graders, which likely skewed the truancy rate downward compared to the city’s district schools. But KIPP also takes a tough stand. Parents and students sign an attendance contract during a lengthy home visit. Kids can be dropped from the rolls after 20 unexcused absences, and a handful have been, says Irene Holtzman, the director of accountability, although the school is “still willing to have a conversation” with youngsters who pile up more absences.

Sick days require a doctor’s note at KIPP. Social workers provide wake-up calls, go-to-bed calls, and bus passes, if necessary, as well as the occasional McDonald’s lunch as a reward for good attendance. “It’s helpful to frame expectations up front,” Holtzman adds.

What to Do?

A generation of school reforms has aimed at making school a place that youngsters should want to be. Districts are slowly breaking up megaschools and weeding out teachers—hopefully the yellers and those missing in action that Devora complains about. They’re adding dual-enrollment programs that allow high-school youngsters to take some college classes. A few are setting graduation requirements that are based on learning rather than “seat time,” and that could move youngsters through high school more quickly. Fairfax County, like many districts, no longer flunks a youngster for missing class if he otherwise earns a passing grade.

But critics also say that the No Child Left Behind focus on testing has narrowed and standardized curricula, and discouraged teachers from experimenting with lesson plans that do more than get kids past a test. Deci proposes a vast reform of all this reform in an effort to motivate kids. Abandon standardized testing and curricula to give teachers and students more autonomy, he says. Create more small schools where youngsters can develop relationships with teachers and peers. Individualize instruction so it accommodates youngsters who are behind and challenges those who want to race ahead.

Conley proposes finding out what kids feel they give up by being in school. “We can’t just tell them to go to school; we have to increase the costs of not going to school,” she says.

Those costs already seem extraordinarily high to taxpayers, employers, the police, the schools, social workers, college admissions officers, and most parents. Truancy seems a dumb choice and a lousy bargain to us. Still, on a spring afternoon at Starbucks, teenaged customers were sitting with me in the sun.

June Kronholz is a former foreign correspondent, bureau chief, and education reporter for the Wall Street Journal. She lives in Washington, D.C.